All HN points mean is that more people on HN agree with you on a topic than disagree with you, or that you brought something the people here found interesting. They are in no way a proxy for smartness. There are some very intelligent and insightful posts by people with 10 HN points, and some completely dumb posts by people with around 16700 points.
They don't even mean that. There's a (500?) karma threshold for being able to downvote, whereas anyone can upvote.
The first is one who takes social justice to a ludicrous extreme and protests out of convenience (e.g. micro-aggressions on Twitter). The latter is one who is leading an actual fight for social justice (e.g. a lawyer in the UN fighting for women's rights in the Muslim world).
It would be an insult to describe both of these people with the same term, regardless of your political opinions on the term "SJW". In fact, I find that SJWs are usually quite opposed to social justice activists.
The first poster talked about the origin of the word on the far right. The reply then exaggerated that claim into the strawman that everyone who disagrees is far right.
Independent of your political views, you should find this kind of hyperbolic and fallacious argument distasteful in public discourse.
Further note that whether the term “SJW” originated with the far right — it didn’t — is irrelevant to its usefulness or accuracy (genetic fallacy).
The hyperbolic and fallacious arguments are to be found in the first poster’s comments.
To put it another way, regardless of whether you agree with their logic, they've provided you with it: 'SJW' came from the right wing and describes progressives, therefore it is derogatory. If they have the facts wrong, demonstrate that and perhaps they will change their point of view.
The phrase originated in the late 20th century as a neutral or positive term for people engaged in social justice activism.[1] In 2011, when the term first appeared on Twitter, it changed from a primarily positive term to an overwhelmingly negative one
As for your overall point, for an argument to be sound, its propositions have to be true and the logic has to valid. Even if the poster was right about the origin of the term, they failed to support their conclusion; namely that we should stop using the term SJW. Their conclusion wouldn’t follow from their premises even if they were true because the argument is fallacious (genetic fallacy, as I said).
As it happens, they were both factually and logically incorrect, and they papered over the flaws in their reasoning with manipulative rhetoric. To my mind, that’s exactly the sort of discourse that should be called out as harmful to reasonable conversation.
SJW originated as a self-appellation.
In this case, the actual story is about SJWs and their actions, and how their unsoundness has caused injustice.
YMMV, but personally I couldn’t imagine a better term to use in the top level comment.
Obviously none of that will apply to everyone, but hey. Some people juggle geese.
I thought the accepted name for this group of people was SJW. Is this not the case? What do you call this?
On the contrary, there's something very unethical about dealing actual damage to other people's lives based on unverified facts acting purely out of emotion. I believe this is something our society has to outgrow unless we all want the social tensions and aggression to keep on increasing.
Under your point of view. Not everybody must share your views on politics.
I've been nominally protected by these social progressives all my life... yet honestly the most brutal and abusive things ever said to me escaped the lips of a certain subset of woke progressives who are so convinced of peoples vulnerability they can't help but see them as weak. Theres people who develop self-serving savior complexes that spout out progressive buzzwords while not helping anybody but theirselves.
In my personal experience I've had alt-right people who browse /pol/ offer me a drink and apolgize for saying bigoted shit. Have yet to experience an SJW do the same for patronizing me. Can't normalize criticism of progressives though because as the above poster explains, I'm only slowing down social progress that benefits me.
What "critical thinking" was missing? Successful actor claims he was attacked by people wearing MAGA hats. It is unlikely (but not impossible, as shown), that someone with so much to lose would contrive such a scenario, and it's entirely likely that racists/assholes would be wearing MAGA hats (there have been many MAGA hat incidents). There is nothing that triggers any critical fault.
Let's be real -- whether deserved or not, for someone to unironically wear a MAGA hat today is a pretty unique niche.
The other person is being pushed to transparent for pointing out how unfortunate the term "SJW" is, especially on a reasonably enlightened forum like this. I support their statement. That's a statement that people use when speaking to partisans/the converted. It has no place in normal conversation.
It is the weekend though, when the “SIJs” are out in force on HN. My error in not sticking to weekdays.
I assume in their job when they encounter bad code, they don’t git blame and run to that coworker’s cubicle and start hurling insults at them. They likely calmly identify the context before taking action.
It is interesting how frequently the Smollett case comes up, and coincidentally Trump just tweeted about it, from Japan, yet again (claiming that it's a "hate crime" against MAGA wearers, which is uproariously stupid and offensive). All of those mass killer MAGA citers, and countless and growing numbers of hate crimes against minorities, tossed aside because look, this somehow proves all of that untrue. You see the same thing by the incel crowd when a false rape account is found, then it's heralded from the mountaintops as if it invalidates the reality of rapes.
In other words, learn to think for yourself, and chill out on Twitter, at least until you have more information than a 30-seconds news bite. The initial response is usually not much different than what I saw in the Smollett case, so that should be an example that causes everyone to wait before grabbing the pitchforks in the future.
These are smart people, some of which have very high feedback here on HN. It seems to me however that their highly tuned critical thinking skills take a backseat to a desire to be mad about the state of the world, with little regard or accountability to what their words can mean.