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Comments
Actually, I think the hostility ones are well-founded concerns. Like it or not, circumnavigating defensiveness by playing to an audience is both a necessary and age-old skill, and I certainly recall my eyes being opened slowly over time rather than being socially shamed into submission immediately.
If an audience feels as though they're being treated with hostility, then they won't be open to new information. And if someone is trying to change something, then that does require patience, a willingness to teach and the capacity to spin things in a way that one audience or another is going to find easier to digest. It's likely that the hostility of some of the social left has done damage to a number of causes over time where calculation would have served their movements better. Combating an established idea immediately puts one at a disadvantage, too, so scraping together every strength, skill and potential contact at one's disposal is important.
What some people want to do is to shame and bully others into accepting their point of view, which doesn't guarantee any level of understanding and prevents sincere support for whatever cause is in question. Teaching people and being patient with things one finds disagreeable is a much more slow and tedious path to take, but I daresay it's more effective in the long run. And none of this kind of thing ever changes immediately, anyway, so it's better to have a smaller support base that can expand naturally than a larger one that feels shamed into holding a certain opinion.
A counterargument to that would be the Stonewall riots and likely scenarios, that it doesn't matter whether the oppressors are cowed or enlightened as long as they stop oppressing and that they're actually making their opponents understand how it feels like to be constantly put upon from all sides.
Of course, derails are always context-dependent. It's not tone-policing if people jump your butt because you're telling someone to an hero. It's not a but-I-have-an-X-friend-who-disagrees red herring if a member of X group tries to erase the experiences of the rest of the group. "You're too emotional" is perfectly valid to tell someone when they have the clever plan to combine slacktivism with anxiety issues. "But I can sympathize" can be a jumping point for someone to finally get a clue instead of turning it into a clusterfuck of Oppression Olympics that always ends with a fangless 'it's complicated'. One's 'lived experience' expertise on cultural appropriation matters shit all if they don't know that Vikings already had dreadlocks.
Of course, if persuasion is the goal instead of integrity, context-dependency matters not, and bingo cards become just another item in the arsenal of sassy GIFs. But if the debate thus becomes an exercise in persistence, my money isn't on the chronic cases of Weltschermz.
That's all good and moral-sounding, sure, but in the experiences of a lot of people who've been in these discussions a lot, people don't really become more open to new information, whether the debate is hostile or polite. That's part of the point: latching on "hostility" is merely a different way of expressing an underlying unwillingness to engage with ideas presented.
It's not about morality, but about the way people behave. A hostile approach ensures a very small chance of the point coming across, where a non-hostile approach will always almost have a greater rate of success, even if that success rate is highly variable depending on the demographic. When people feel threatened or vulnerable, they latch on to things that bring them comfort, whatever that may be, but usually something that affirms whatever is being threatened. If their ideas are being threatened in a hostile way rather than an open way, then it's almost certain that they'll grasp their comforting ideas harder. Perhaps they'll bear a negative opinion of some lines of argument in the future, too.
Alternatively, if hostility works, we come to the other problem -- people supporting ideas because they've been browbeaten into accepting them by social pressure rather than by moral or intellectual argument.
Most of my political, ethical and economic stances run firmly along the far left of the political spectrum, so in cases like these, I will most often agree with the aggressive individual, group or organisation. However, there are things I don't stand for, and using coercion -- even social coercion -- to force people into particular perspectives is one of those things. No-one should be made to believe or think anything by force, but ought to reach non-discriminatory conclusions through rational thought, good sense and constructive discussion above all. From my perspective, the left has to "win" peaceably, using reason and solidarity as its primary tools. That doesn't mean taking abuse sitting down, but it does mean reacting with patience and intellect when the situation allows for those things.
And in my experience, no left-leaning person of much sense has been created through the browbeating approach, anyway.
Even if some folks don't want to believe new things, one could at least be considerate to the folks who do and don't want feel attacked.
That, too. A hostile approach could end up alienating a receptive person or persons for the sake of ripping a nasty individual a new one.
>left-leaning person of much sense
Do these even exist?
In all seriousness, mono-deprivileged peeps like us probably have another perspective on this than poor, disabled, neuroatypical, Jewish, lesbian PoCs precisely due to being taken more seriously throughout our entire lives.
Imma gonna try dig up some research on this one besides historical anecdotes(estimation: probably works differently for different people, thus all approaches to 'teaching' are valid provided people choose their targets correctly).
Update: too few useful freely available material, but this post cites some literature on the psychological effect of doxxing and mobbing: http://sjwar.blogspot.nl/2012/07/social-mob-justice-outing-of-zathlazip.html
Since some of the side-effects of mobbing seem to breed disabilities, that alone should be enough to not to bother with the worst of callout culture if one is truly intersectional.
... Your point being, Randal?
The Stand, Clerks or Walking Dead?
nvm, i was still commenting on that XKCD strip.
I know this thread has the NSFW tag, but I'll put it under a link to be on the safe side.
On the safe for work side: BOOM HEADSHOT!
Hat tip to Mr. Takei for this one.
> killed to death
So, is this still worth referencing?
(embedded from KYM)
Meanwhile in Poland.
I can't pick just one http://imgur.com/a/Bg6Dw
Some may be NSFW
The "girlfriend" one looks so indignant.
I'm surprised she was able to make this look decent despite the derpy as shit original.
omg i cant figure it out
i shoed this to my math tchr and she didnt no the answer either
this prooves math is uesless
The error is in interchangeably referring to outstanding debt and money in-hand, and adding them as if they were both positive values.
For each $50, you spent 48.50, kept 0.50, and returned 1.00.