
Social Justice, Ideological Hijackings, and Ideological Security - proveanegative
http://thefutureprimaeval.net/socjus-and-ideological-security/?
======
kelseydh
Wikipedia is actually falling victim to this. Some articles now show
noticeable bias (e.g. compare the "Men's Rights 'movement'" article to
"Women's Rights"). On many pages, particularly gender related articles, there
is a band of aggressive editors who will fight reasonable efforts to balance
the tone of articles. Outside contributors who try to improve these pages will
get dogpiled on. Unless you are an expert at wiki-lawyering, you won't survive
even a couple edits before you are banned or restricted from editing. They
enforce/investigate multiple accounts, VPN & proxy usage vigorously, so once
you are out, you are effectively purged.

If you are ambitious and make edits similar to what others have tried (often
because all of them are trying to fix the same biased statement), expect to be
accused of being a "sockpuppet" or of being a "meatpuppet." If that fails, you
will be accused of "tendentious editing". Of course responding to these
accusations takes extraordinary amounts of time -- which is the point. These
tactics are used (very successfully) to reduce people's resolve to contribute
or fix biased articles.

Wikipedia's ideological hijacking is a serious problem and arguably represents
the biggest threat to Wikipedia's longterm legitimacy. Those engaging in
ideological hijackings have (very rightly) realized that if they can define
what is written about a movement on Wikipedia, they can control what society
thinks about it.

~~~
tptacek
There is a real, documented, historically significant movement for women's
rights --- most notably, suffrage. The same isn't true of "men's rights", and
the fact that you'd make that comparison is, I think, extremely telling.

~~~
redthrowaway
This comes across as an effort to shut down discussion via ad hominem. I'm
sure that you didn't mean it as such, but "the fact that you _x_ is telling"
is a pretty commonly used rhetorical tool to impugn a counterpart without
actually saying anything substantive.

~~~
pessimizer
What it was is a short comment implying the poster of creating a false
equivalence between the women's rights movement and the men's rights movement.
What it seems like to you has no relation to it's content.

------
zamalek
Things I've noticed about this discussion:

* The vast majority of participants in this discussion are extremists. Both sides. No matter their claims. No matter their organizations. No matter their cause. There is rife misogyny _and_ misandry to be had. Nobody knows why they are fighting so they fight over genitalia.

* Participants on both sides are just as vile as the other. Have anti-GG been harassed? Yes. Have GG been harassed? Yes. On equal terms of severity. _There are a few sane participants but they tend to be quieter and also seem to be taking a step back from it all._

* Out of "real-life" people these thought patterns seem to be a minority - they are just making a lot of noise and drama on the internet. I've challenged people with both sides of the discussion in "real-life" and was met with disbelief.

* Social justice (anti-GG term) within the argument is not social justice. Ethics and egalitarianism (GG terms) within the argument also do not hold their true meaning.

None of these people are worth getting involved with. Just stay away from this
whole discussion. It doesn't matter how liberal you are or how well-
intentioned you are: someone is going to find your weakness and provoke you.

Let Reddit burn. Really. It's just a website. It doesn't matter. Whoever wins
the war will simply be the rulers of an empty kingdom.

Edit: glad the post was flag-killed.

~~~
pessimizer
Are you complaining that the anarchists seem extreme?

This entire discussion is ahistorical. Anarchists have murdered dozens of
policemen, dozens of bosses, an American president and dozens of elected
officials, and _dozens of people for what they said_ all over the world.
Anarchism is not about a fantasy of organizing society after the zombie
apocalypse, it's a body of thought with a few hundred years of tradition.
Feminism is central to that tradition.

Gamergate is some bizarre internet misogynist media panic from last year.

~~~
zamalek
> Are you complaining that the anarchists seem extreme?

Not complaining about anarchists at all. I'm fairly uneducated about their
beliefs but I have come to understand that they are not completely
unreasonable.

> Gamergate is some bizarre internet misogynist media panic from last year.

It's this that's spilling over into every discussion that I'm talking about.
The origin of the anarcha-feminists on Reddit is most likely GG backlash.
There is concern on that website that anti-GG extremists are taking over and
it looks like /r/anarchism is yet another subreddit in the crosshairs; it's
yet another completely unrelated discussion getting dragged into this internet
misogyny/misandry.

My advice to you is: if you really care about anarchism then let /r/anarchy
burn. Just leave. I don't care if you go to Voat. I don't care if you start
your own website. I don't care if you leave the internet. Just abandon ship
and rid yourself of this argument. You can't win because your opponent is not
interested in a decisive outcome: your opponent is interested in noise and
harassment.

~~~
pessimizer
You're mistaking me for an internet anarchist. I don't know anything about
reddit, or much about anarchist discussion on the internet.

There are many wonderful archives of historical anarchist thought on the
internet, making sources that were really difficult or impossible to find when
I was young (before the internet) available to everyone in a few keystrokes.

Gamergate is completely insignificant, but positive in that the ensuing media
panic exposed people to how difficult it is to be a woman or a minority on the
internet.

------
Einstalbert
He mentions a subreddit dedicated to no rules slowly but surely being taken
over by the same kinds of rules lawyer-ing they were trying to escape.

I am so, so glad he mentioned this, because I have seen it happen to two, mid-
way three, communities online where these exact societal issues work together
only up until they really start to get to know one another, at which point
they realize they're at odds. Sometimes it's a clear schism, but the ones that
hurt the most are those that remain but are quite clearly forever changed in
the favor of one side. It's almost as if they treat it as vindication and
banishing a group of people for differences in opinion is, as I said,
typically the antithesis of these groups.

My guess is that every online community suffers this sort of breakdown and
reinvention if it lasts for more than a few years, but that social justice and
other more "modern" ideologies are just the latest and most visible / tracked
step in the greater phenomenon.

The internet brought us together, we struggle with that fact every day! :)

~~~
venomsnake
This is worth a read. It is GG centrist, but explains quite good the cultural
war that is waging right now.

[http://popehat.com/2014/10/21/gamer-gate-three-stages-to-
obi...](http://popehat.com/2014/10/21/gamer-gate-three-stages-to-obit/)

~~~
rmc
So LGBT people, and women are now the powerful people in society, as part of a
1,000 year culture struggle? What next, blame the Jews?

~~~
venomsnake
No. They are just the banners. Oh they are skillful at faking outrage on
twitter. And sadly a lot of people with otherwise functioning brains think
that for reasons unknown twitter is important and take cues. Sad state of
affairs.

------
leoc
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

~~~
kelseydh
That was a really, really good read. It's worth highlighting the section where
they describe the four conditions where unstructured groups grow effective:

1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like
putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that
basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and
when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their
actions and make plans for future activity.

2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure
that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely
different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group
where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity
among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually
misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions
differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and
judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone
else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated.
Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out
conflicts no one ever thought would arise.

3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to
everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the
relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people
practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to
say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases
geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group
participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions.
Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact
composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the
task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the
different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.

4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able
to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one
person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become
interchangeable parts.

\----

You could actually apply a lot of these principles to software teams,
particularly the need for open communication between everyone. When I see
projects not doing this I often find their effectiveness drop too.

------
mafribe
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

------
rmc
To quote from
[https://lobste.rs/s/ovabwi/social_justice_ideological_hijack...](https://lobste.rs/s/ovabwi/social_justice_ideological_hijackings_and_ideological_security/comments/vaypqt#c_vaypqt)
:

> This author seems like a calm, unbiased source for social-justice issues.
> Here is an article where they compare the rise of Napoleon in France, Hitler
> and communism in Germany, and gay marriage in the US:
> [http://thefutureprimaeval.net/we-support-diversity-and-
> equal...](http://thefutureprimaeval.net/we-support-diversity-and-equality/)

> Nothing sensational to see here, move along
> [http://thefutureprimaeval.net/content/images/2015/06/yck7qK7...](http://thefutureprimaeval.net/content/images/2015/06/yck7qK7cE.png)

~~~
convexfunction
I don't interpret the comparison there as "these are all equally bad" (I bet
the author would endorse Napoleon's rise to power, in fact), but more as "this
is what sudden changes in preference falsification equilibria backed by
authority look like".

------
venomsnake
>and started banning and deleting the comments of the "trolls" who were making
/r/anarchism an "unsafe and unwelcoming" space for women.

The best way to stick it to the man is to become him ...

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
There are a lot of terrible opinions on that person's blog.

------
pessimizer
There is no anarchism without feminism. Complaining about anarchists focusing
on social justice is like complaining about water being wet.

I'd recommend reading books instead of reddit. The author must have
accidentally made a left turn on the way to /r/libertarianism.

~~~
forgottenpass
Define your terms please.

No anarchism without gender equality (feminism) seems like a reasonable enough
point to have in a conversation about anarchism. It's conspicuously asserted
and disagreed with more than the surface level point would warrant. All signs
suggest this statement is in reality a loaded social signal.

No anarchism without the amero-centric slice of a 21st century political
movement and all it's associated baggage? Ah, now we've got something
bananastown enough to start the purported internet fights.

So, I'll repeat, define your terms please. And are your definitions the ones
everybody in the conversation w/r/t r/anarchism in specific, and anarchism in
general, understand to be in use?

~~~
pessimizer
> No anarchism without the amero-centric slice of a 21st century political
> movement and all it's associated baggage?

I don't know what this is referring to, and I don't understand your question.
Defining the real world conditions that would lead to or constitute "gender
equality" is the root of the discussion.

