social justice movement

Article

social justice movement is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 09, 2021 and September 22, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “the social justice movement pioneered a much angrier, more radical, more in-your-face style of identity politics”; “the social justice movement had been the dominant intellectual paradigm”; “most of the money for the Social Justice movement today”. It most often appears alongside Amazon, Bernie Sanders, Ezra Klein.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 09, 2021
  • Last seen: September 22, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

February 09, 2021 · Original source
(my own model here is that the social justice movement pioneered a much angrier, more radical, more in-your-face style of identity politics, and the conservative movement scrambled to figure out how to fight fire with fire despite a big handicap - conservative identity politics based on white, male, etc identity are understandably taboo. They flailed around for a while, mostly failed, and are now experimenting with how far anger can go as a substitute for a coherent philosophy. Needless to say, this isn’t how Klein thinks about any this.)
May 10, 2021 · Original source
In 2014, armed with this model, I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. For the previous few years, the social justice movement had been the dominant intellectual paradigm in online spaces (and increasingly offline too). The movement had started with the same people who start all trends - starving bohemian artists, poor people on the fringes of society, hip college kids. Beginning around 2008 it spread like wildfire among all the most popular and clued-in people I knew - all my favorite slightly contrarian bloggers, all the most interesting people at my college. But by 2014, it was starting to get embarrassing. We'd already seen the beginnings of "woke capitalism", where Wal-Mart or Amazon or whoever would put their corporate logos in rainbow colors for gay pride day and then everyone would praise them and talk about how they were striking a bold blow against the entrenched forces of the kyriarchy. Hillary Clinton, 25-year-contender for America's least cool person, was giving speeches about male privilege and rape culture. The Instagram pages of the hippest, most counterculture people in the country sounded exactly the same as the lectures corporate consultants gave at mandatory educational workshops. According to Bell's theory there was no way this was a stable situation.
We tend to conflate feminism and anti-racism under the general heading of "social justice", but this blinds us to important details. From about 2011 to 2014, the Internet was obsessed with gender, with race on the back burner. 2014 to 2016 was a sort of transition period, and after that the Internet became obsessed with race, with gender almost forgotten.
Its death did not mark the triumph of its arch-enemy, religion. People were just as atheist as before, maybe more so. They just all suddenly agreed it was stupid to talk about it and anybody who did was a fedora-wearing euphoric loser. I argued that it had been felled by social justice, which was a sort of Liberal Ideology 2.0, filling the same social role New Atheism, only better. Most atheists jumped ship to join the winning team - "this atheism blog is now a feminism blog" was kind of the unofficial slogan of the 2015 blogosphere - and thus was the empire forged.
September 22, 2022 · Original source
The simple and effective answer is to increase estate taxes. Anybody who tries to get a social-justice movement to focus on any mechanism of wealth distribution other than estate taxes, is probably funded by somebody trying to distract people from imposing higher estate taxes. I'm pretty sure that most of the money for the Social Justice movement today comes from large foundations like the Ford, Hewlett, Packard, Rockefeller, and Kellogg Foundations, which are usually run by people connected to the family in question, with its enormous inherited estate.