I'm obviously annoyed by SJWism but in engaging with it enough to understand it, it has changed me.

I watch things from the Before Times and am shocked by them.

Heathers was a bitter satire of high school culture and had a hyperbolic portrayal of football player rapists.

And yet there was also a casualness in the way it showed a Heather being raped in a cow field while Veronica and JD saunter off that blows one's mind today.

I've mentioned before that police torture was a regular funny joke in police comedies in a way that clearly normalized it. (Prison rape still is a punchline.)

And of course what one sees today that few noticed then was the total whiteness of nearly everything that wasn't entirely black or involving a wealthy white man adopting a developmentally stunted black child. Incredible that there were two such shows!

I don't obviously think the way to deal with them is by erasing them or adding warning labels on them. But I do see why people who don't want the ideas of the past transmitted would be tempted to stop them.

I listened a lot to songs like Brown Sugar and Stray Cat Blues in high school. Not that hard to see why one wouldn't want this to be recapitulated in new generations.

Here's a missive from the Before Times:

So my most generous, optimistic take on SJWism is 1.) diversifcation was always going to happen as demogrpahics changed. 2.) there was always going to be a cultural lag as incumbents from the a much more white generation hung around

3.) the process of succession would be messy and awkward, and would necessarily entail some bloodletting, and a lot of injustice even as 4.) many arrogant and complacents sons of bitches like Weinstein would be humbled and brought to heel as they should

5.) eventually a new mutually acceptable equilibrium would establish itself as insurgents are integrated into a revised mainstream, 6.) the things that were good about the past would end razed along with the bad.

Don't know if that's how it will work in practice -- there are certainly very determined people tirelessly working to ensure that the baby is drowned while much of the bathwater is retained. But maybe we do actually have some say in this and can shape the final outcome.

One reason to suspect we won't ever reach a stable equilbrium is that we have a large vested interest in a professionalized activist class that derives its living from the existence of new causes, which thus requires the manufacture of new moral crises requiring them

The industry is overwhelmingly female, but because “74 percent cis women” (trans are 0.5 percent of the population), “89 percent non-disabled”, and “81 percent straight” (twice the rate of general population), there is “no progress on diversity.”
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/82284-new-lee-and-low-survey-shows-no-progress-on-diversity-in-publishing.html

This constant manufacture of new grounds for confected grievance even has already had the reductio ad absurdum point. So for any stable equilbrium to be met, we will have to generate the will and the means to say: Enough.

Completely agree with those who see in attacks on science, objectivity, and reason an existential danger. 1. Worth remembering there have been other such attacks before, though, beginning with the Romantic movement,

Though there is something uniquely pernicious about the way the new attack is institutionalizied within and adjacent to scientific institutions. Basically all the invented activist fields surrounding science without actually being science

Is the institutional home of the shock troops of this movement that will at some point simply have to be rejected tout court. Whether anyone can muster the nerve to do it is a very consequential question.