Posted on 03/05/2015 9:21:15 AM PST by Yashcheritsiy
In modern America, we face an enemy which is implacable in its desire to subvert, overthrow, and destroy our traditional American way of life. This enemy goes by many names – the Left-wing, progressives, political correctness, cultural Marxists – but one name which they have applied to themselves seems to best sum up what their intentions are: “social justice warriors.” These people refer to themselves this way because they believe it is their purpose in life to crusade against the “evils” that they think pervade America – “racism, sexism, homophobia, intolerance” and all the rest. The practical effect of all of this is that they end up harassing, assaulting, and otherwise trying to make life miserable for millions of normal, everyday Americans who simply want nothing more than to live how they want to live without some overweening, pencil-necked ninnies intruding and to trying to coerce them into certain behaviors and opinions.
This is why it is so delicious when one of these intrusive, self-appointed guardians of social justice finds herself receiving a richly deserved comeuppance for her efforts.
The instance to which I am referring can be read about here, you will need to scroll down about two-thirds of the way to the portion about “Hank” and Adria Richards. To briefly sum it up, “Hank” (not his real name) is a computer technology developer, and Adria is (theoretically, at least) one as well. They met, to the extent to which this term can be used, at a conference in California in 2013. “Hank” and a friend, apparently bored by the proceedings, because to crack wise with each other, making jokes about big “dongles” and “forking repos.” Adria, sitting in front of them, chose to become offended by these jokes, took their picture, and then publicized it on her Twitter account. Except she didn’t talk about a couple of guys making juvenile jokes – she chose to cast it as two evil white men presenting a clear and present danger of raping her, right there in the middle of the conference. Hence, she chose to turn it into a classic “social justice warrior” scenario – she, a self-described Jewish black woman, chose to try to create an incident in which she could initiate a social justice conflict between herself and two individuals ranking lower in the sociopolitical hierarchy. In other words, she was simply being an old fashioned bully of the kind that populates the “social justice warrior” circles.
Her own statements in the interviews serve to show what a soulless sociopath this woman really is.
She sought to publicly humiliate a man she had never met before, and who wasn’t even talking to her, and who likely didn’t even know she existed until he noticed her taking his picture. She sought to have this man punished for essentially saying things she didn’t like. She believes to this day that she was fully justified in getting a man with a family to support fired from his job for saying those things she didn’t like. When asked if she felt bad about getting him fired from his job, she said,
“He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different…I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”
She continues to assert the ridiculously laughable claim that she felt she was in “danger,” and that she feared that “Hank” and his friend might rape and/or kill her right there in the middle of a technology conference, and that nobody would have done a thing about it, since they were all white guys who presumably approve of that sort of thing.
That sort of thinking, this sort of a response, indicates that Adria Richards is a sociopath, someone so divorced from reality that she cannot even function in normal civil society. She can’t interact with other people in normal and reasonable ways that don’t involve her being the center of all attention. She seems not only unwilling, but unable to take responsibility for her own actions, or to even understand that such responsibility should be taken. She lives in a bizarro world where she is the one who has “compassion, empathy, morals, and ethics” to guide her daily life choices, even as she invents rape fantasies to justify destroying the life of another human being.
Which it is why it is so eminently satisfying to see her lose the conflict. As you will note from the article, “Hank” was hired by another technology company almost immediately afterward. Adria, on the other hand, remains bitter and unemployed, at least so far as the time the article was written. To top it off, she became the target of a rather nasty campaign of internet hatred for several months on end.
Normally, I would feel at least a twinge of compassion for someone facing such a circumstance in her life, even if it was her own fault. But in this case, I can’t help but feel that she deserves everything she got, even if some of the pushback was distasteful.
See, what we need to understand about “social justice conflicts” of the sort initiated by Adria Richards is that they are all about power. What Adria Richards did to “Hank” was to try to assert the power of her “preferred status” as a minority female over “Hank,” a dreaded and despised white male. “Hank” and his friend were having a private conversation, one which she was not a part of. Perhaps it was a bit tasteless, but it was their conversation, not hers and theirs together. She chose to force herself into the situation. She chose to make a nuisance of herself, and did so specifically so she could exercise her “black Jewish female “ power of getting white men fired whenever she jolly well chooses to do so.
Sorry lady, but my sympathy bucket has all run dry.
But we should note the salient fact of this matter – “Hank” won the conflict, at least in the long run. That is something with very little precedent in recent years. Or, perhaps to be more specific, the conflict was won FOR “Hank,” since he himself made the cardinal error of apologizing for something for which he was not really at fault. It was won by thousands of people who finally decided they were going to oppose a social justice warrior trying to ply her trade. The exertion of pressure worked in the opposite direction this time around – and it was because a bunch of people finally decided they were going to stand up and be counted. And yes, maybe the way some of them went about this doesn’t suit our refined sensibilities, but it nevertheless shows that when the mass of regular, everyday people choose to stand up against the SJWs, we win, and they lose.
That is the fundamental lesson to be drawn from this story with a happy ending. This is why GamerGate is one of the few targets of SJW aggression that has successfully and consistently pushed back against the attacks. The GamerGaters fight back. They don’t hunker down and hope to ride out the storm without taking too much damage. They got vocal all across the internet. They exerted reverse pressure on the trade magazines that formed much of the zone of conflict. They resisted the efforts by posers like Anita Sarkeesian and her flunkies to impose themselves into their cherished realm.
In short, they refused to yield the moral high ground to the SJWs – and thereby gained a 4GW victory. They did not allow the social justice warriors to control the field – they refuted decisively the false narrative that the SJWs attempted to create that said that gaming is hopelessly “sexist” and needs to be “restructured” to suit the sensibilities of radical feminists, and that everybody thinks so. Everybody doesn’t think so. In fact, very few think so. Most people just want the Fembots to leave them alone. No moral high ground for you, Anita.
And this should raise the question in the rest of our minds – what would happen if the rest of us decided to refuse to grant the SJWs the perceived moral high ground of public opinion elsewhere? What effect would this have on the trend of opinion among the great unwashed masses of low information voters who generally make their political and social decisions on the basis of the majority of what they see online (which may or may not actually be what the majority of people really think)? What would happen if we did something as simple as flooded the comments sections on news articles on hot button issues with our opinions, instead of just saying, “Why bother?” Demotically speaking, those and venues like them online are the battlefield. Considering such activities to be “beneath us” is to yield the ground to the SJWs – because we know that they are out in full force, every time an article about gay marriage or some other SJW cause appears on the web. And that is how the opinions of the great unwashed masses get molded. And that’s how these masses begin to tip the wrong way. And that’s how we end up with a burnt out husk of a nation that used to be the epitome of greatness.
Or put another way, you’d be amazed at how differently the direction of discussion in the comments section of an article about an SJW hot button issue can change, when even a dozen dedicated anti-SJWers jump in and spend an hour subverting the narrative and altering the flow of the conversation.
When SJWers are faced with determined pushback – when the moral weapons of “racism, sexist, homophobia, and intolerance” are blunted by firmly standing on principle – they typically crumble. Knowing this, why aren’t more of us on the traditional Right finding out backbones and push back against them? Does it really work?
Just ask “Hank” and Adria.
Thank you for posting this!
The woman who took the photograph, Adria Richards, soon felt the wrath of the crowd herself. The man responsible for the dongle joke had posted about losing his job on Hacker News, an online forum popular with developers. This led to a backlash from the other end of the political spectrum. So-called men’s rights activists and anonymous trolls bombarded Richards with death threats on Twitter and Facebook. Someone tweeted Richards’s home address along with a photograph of a beheaded woman with duct tape over her mouth. Fearing for her life, she left her home, sleeping on friends’ couches for the remainder of the year.
Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone had launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if Richards was fired. That same day she was publicly let go.
“I cried a lot during this time, journaled and escaped by watching movies,” she later said to me in an email. “SendGrid threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”
If she was offended, she should have complained to the two men, not a million strangers.
There’s an interesting book by William Shetterly, a Communist of all things, criticizing the SJW for assuming guilt-tripping people on status actually corrects the problems of an unequal society.
His book is the first I’ve seen detailing the politization of the science fiction writer’s awards, where writers of top selling books were almost removed for consideration because of their political beliefs regardless of quality of writing. And he points out the incredible hypocrisy for shutting out a female war veteran who wrote military sci-fi (Elizabeth Moon) and Chinese-Thai writer in a mostly white male genre for not toeing an ever increasingly narrow, farther left litmus test.
“How to Make a Social Justice Warrior” by William Shetterly
http://tamarawilhite.hubpages.com/hub/Review-of-the-eBook-How-to-Make-a-Social-Justice-Warrior-by-William-Shetterly
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I have no sympathy whatever if they get a taste of their own medicine. This isn't dialogue, it's war.
4GW?
4th generation warfare?
[“SendGrid threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”].....and really, really stupid.
4th generation warfare?
Yes
I’m sorry, but while the actions of this woman were certainly objectionable (although it was HIS employer that threw him under the bus), I can’t condone the actions of people making death threats, “doxing”, and so on. Not any more than I can condone the actions of the GamerGaters towards Anita Sarkeesian. She (basically) dared to question whether there were enough women involved in the game industry. They responded by attempting (pretty successfully, I would say) to threaten and frighten her, and attempt to ruin her life. This sort of thing just makes so-called men’s rights activists look like a bunch of bitter, twisted losers.
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