You know, I fucking hate political correctness.
"The problem with lyrics stems from a primitive belief in this country that there are certain words in our language that will corrupt you instantaneously the moment they are uttered into the atmosphere. I mean, come on. Let's be reasonable about this. I mean, that's like animism, you know? I mean, it's so stupid that an idea like that persists in an industrial society. And because of these attitudes and because people have spent money to build agencies to make sure that there's this whole hierarchy of people waiting for these magic words to occur on the airwaves. They're just, y'know, they're hovering - you can't see 'em but they're all around here, you know? They're - they've got snipers up in all these things up here that shoot a mask over your mouth if you say anything. They have 'em in radio stations, they have 'em in all television stations, they have 'em everywhere." -Frank Zappa
Back in the old days, political correctness was the domain of conservatives. It really is funny how that completely fucking flip-flopped. SJWs lack the self-awareness to realize that they sound exactly like little moral watchdog grandmas from back in the day. There's a great article on this from six years back.
Pretty much all this crap comes from the idea that fiction is more than just entertainment. SJWs have this notion that fiction strongly affects our belief systems, and therefore, we should strive to create fiction that depicts an ideal future in the hopes that a utopia will materialize as a result, or something along those lines. There's actually a word for this sort of thinking, and it's called didacticism. This debate over whether or not prose and narrative fiction should be art for the sake of art, or whether or not it should instruct people and coach them on their values is older than dirt.
I'll let Edgar Allan Poe explain, since he thought didacticism was trash:
SJWs will whine and complain that everything is intrinsically political, you know? In their conception of the cosmos, even the refusal to make a political statement is, in itself, a political statement. If you were to write a story about the life and times of a Zen rock garden, I'm sure you could find an SJW critic who was willing to assign each stone their own race and gender. So, that's the first rule of SJW club. Everything has to be political. Everything is a political statement, no matter what. There's no such thing as art for the sake of artistic freedom, or narrative for the sake of narrative consistency.
In SJW-land, everything in a story is merely a reflection of the author's intentions. If a story contains a positive depiction of a character who's a bigot, then the author is a bigot. If a story contains a positive depiction of a character who's a fascist, then the author is a fascist. If a story contains a bunch of orcs that kidnap and rape fair maidens, then that means the author tacitly supports rape or is depicting a stereotypical version of swarthy barbarian hordes through the lens of colonialism or something. They have this kind of weird, superstitious idea that not only are authors incapable of depicting anything that goes against their belief system or personal experiences, but that the values expressed in fiction are a form of thought contagion.
You see where this is going? If you're a pacifist, then according to an SJW, you can't write about war. If you're white, you can't write about what it's like to be black. If you're a man, you can't write about the experiences of women, and so on and so forth. Basically, SJWs not only assume that people are so shallow that they believe literally every single thing they read, fictional or not, they also assume that people are incapable of imagining experiences that they've never had, or entertaining thoughts that they disagree with. They never really follow that logic to its conclusion, however. If a white person can't write about what it's like to be black, or a man can't write about what it's like to be a woman, then how can Tolkien write about what it's like to live in Middle-earth, given that he'd never actually lived there, because it doesn't exist? "Lived experiences" aren't necessary if someone has a little thing called an imagination.
SJWs have this very reductive idea of narrative as an art form where they view each narrative device and each trope as being intrinsically divisible into "good germs" and "bad germs", and this is where it really starts to get into magical thinking. When an SJW writes a story and they include some trope or another, they generally include it in the hope that it will teach the audience some form of moral lesson. Or, more to the point, the reason why people like Neil Druckmann write characters like Abby is because they hope that by some miracle, the simple fact of them writing this character will cause people like Abby to spontaneously appear in real life.
It's not even about role models. They just want their fantasies to come true, by osmosis. This is also why they dislike politically-incorrect things in fiction, like bigotry, gendered violence, et cetera, because those are "bad germs" and the more of those we have in fiction, the more those things will spontaneously appear in reality, apparently. This is what SJWs mean when they say "narratives do not exist in a void". What they mean to say is that we're all impressionable children and we copy every single thing we see in fictional contexts.
Well, I watched Terminator 2, but I didn't morph my mimetic polyalloy hands into blades and start stabbing people, and I watched Aliens and I didn't try sticking a facehugger on somebody and impregnating them with a chestburster to smuggle a Xenomorph off LV-426, and I watched American History X and I never curbstomped an African-American to death. Funny how that works.
See also, Dan Olson and the Thermian Argument, if you can stand to listen to this soy-addled moron speak for more than a minute.
Harold Bloom had to contend with Proto-SJW ass-monkeys back in the 70s and 80s, and he coined the term "School of Resentment" to describe them. Very fitting, if you ask me.
Back then, you had all these pseudo-Marxist morons going around, just like today, lamenting that the most treasured authors were people like Shakespeare and Goethe, who they denigrated as "dead white men", and they were trying to promote authors who wrote stuff in Swahili or whatever as an alternative.
And today, just like back then, they're the same preachy morons pushing the same stupid propaganda in place of actual artistic merit.
Most SJWs are, ironically, white, affluent, and college-educated. Whenever you confront them and suggest they were indoctrinated by their college professors in this nonsense, they always wheedle and prevaricate and try and claim that they came by their ideology rightly. Well, you know what? Google Trends shows otherwise.
This is what the term Social Justice looks like, since 2004:
It's like a heartbeat. The spikes coincide perfectly with the start of every semester.
And, just like the Proto-SJWs of the early 19th century who pestered Edgar Allan Poe with their didacticism, they're mostly concentrated in states full of prancing simps, like Vermont and Massachusetts.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
"The problem with lyrics stems from a primitive belief in this country that there are certain words in our language that will corrupt you instantaneously the moment they are uttered into the atmosphere. I mean, come on. Let's be reasonable about this. I mean, that's like animism, you know? I mean, it's so stupid that an idea like that persists in an industrial society. And because of these attitudes and because people have spent money to build agencies to make sure that there's this whole hierarchy of people waiting for these magic words to occur on the airwaves. They're just, y'know, they're hovering - you can't see 'em but they're all around here, you know? They're - they've got snipers up in all these things up here that shoot a mask over your mouth if you say anything. They have 'em in radio stations, they have 'em in all television stations, they have 'em everywhere." -Frank Zappa
Back in the old days, political correctness was the domain of conservatives. It really is funny how that completely fucking flip-flopped. SJWs lack the self-awareness to realize that they sound exactly like little moral watchdog grandmas from back in the day. There's a great article on this from six years back.
When I told them that at the fag-end of the last millennium I had spent my student days arguing against the very ideas they were now spouting — against the claim that gangsta rap turned black men into murderers or that Tarantino flicks made teens go wild and criminal — not so much as a flicker of reflection crossed their faces. ‘Back then, the people who were making those censorious, misanthropic arguments about culture determining behaviour weren’t youngsters like you,’ I said. ‘They were older, more conservative people, with blue rinses.’ A moment’s silence. Then one of the Stepfords piped up. ‘Maybe those people were right,’ he said. My mind filled with a vision of Mary Whitehouse cackling to herself in some corner of the cosmos.
Pretty much all this crap comes from the idea that fiction is more than just entertainment. SJWs have this notion that fiction strongly affects our belief systems, and therefore, we should strive to create fiction that depicts an ideal future in the hopes that a utopia will materialize as a result, or something along those lines. There's actually a word for this sort of thinking, and it's called didacticism. This debate over whether or not prose and narrative fiction should be art for the sake of art, or whether or not it should instruct people and coach them on their values is older than dirt.
I'll let Edgar Allan Poe explain, since he thought didacticism was trash:
It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially, have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force:—but the simple fact is, that, would we permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
SJWs will whine and complain that everything is intrinsically political, you know? In their conception of the cosmos, even the refusal to make a political statement is, in itself, a political statement. If you were to write a story about the life and times of a Zen rock garden, I'm sure you could find an SJW critic who was willing to assign each stone their own race and gender. So, that's the first rule of SJW club. Everything has to be political. Everything is a political statement, no matter what. There's no such thing as art for the sake of artistic freedom, or narrative for the sake of narrative consistency.
In SJW-land, everything in a story is merely a reflection of the author's intentions. If a story contains a positive depiction of a character who's a bigot, then the author is a bigot. If a story contains a positive depiction of a character who's a fascist, then the author is a fascist. If a story contains a bunch of orcs that kidnap and rape fair maidens, then that means the author tacitly supports rape or is depicting a stereotypical version of swarthy barbarian hordes through the lens of colonialism or something. They have this kind of weird, superstitious idea that not only are authors incapable of depicting anything that goes against their belief system or personal experiences, but that the values expressed in fiction are a form of thought contagion.
You see where this is going? If you're a pacifist, then according to an SJW, you can't write about war. If you're white, you can't write about what it's like to be black. If you're a man, you can't write about the experiences of women, and so on and so forth. Basically, SJWs not only assume that people are so shallow that they believe literally every single thing they read, fictional or not, they also assume that people are incapable of imagining experiences that they've never had, or entertaining thoughts that they disagree with. They never really follow that logic to its conclusion, however. If a white person can't write about what it's like to be black, or a man can't write about what it's like to be a woman, then how can Tolkien write about what it's like to live in Middle-earth, given that he'd never actually lived there, because it doesn't exist? "Lived experiences" aren't necessary if someone has a little thing called an imagination.
SJWs have this very reductive idea of narrative as an art form where they view each narrative device and each trope as being intrinsically divisible into "good germs" and "bad germs", and this is where it really starts to get into magical thinking. When an SJW writes a story and they include some trope or another, they generally include it in the hope that it will teach the audience some form of moral lesson. Or, more to the point, the reason why people like Neil Druckmann write characters like Abby is because they hope that by some miracle, the simple fact of them writing this character will cause people like Abby to spontaneously appear in real life.
It's not even about role models. They just want their fantasies to come true, by osmosis. This is also why they dislike politically-incorrect things in fiction, like bigotry, gendered violence, et cetera, because those are "bad germs" and the more of those we have in fiction, the more those things will spontaneously appear in reality, apparently. This is what SJWs mean when they say "narratives do not exist in a void". What they mean to say is that we're all impressionable children and we copy every single thing we see in fictional contexts.
Well, I watched Terminator 2, but I didn't morph my mimetic polyalloy hands into blades and start stabbing people, and I watched Aliens and I didn't try sticking a facehugger on somebody and impregnating them with a chestburster to smuggle a Xenomorph off LV-426, and I watched American History X and I never curbstomped an African-American to death. Funny how that works.
See also, Dan Olson and the Thermian Argument, if you can stand to listen to this soy-addled moron speak for more than a minute.
Harold Bloom had to contend with Proto-SJW ass-monkeys back in the 70s and 80s, and he coined the term "School of Resentment" to describe them. Very fitting, if you ask me.
When, however, over the course of the 1980s a younger generation of professors aligned the humanities with identity politics (“No more Dead White Males!”), he couldn’t stand it. He called them the School of Resentment, a judgment derived from Nietzsche that attributed the values of the race-class-gender critics to the envy and anger of the mediocre when in the presence of greatness. They had replaced Emerson on the syllabus with a second-rate feminist novelist, he implied, because they couldn’t stand the fact of unequal talents in the world.
Back then, you had all these pseudo-Marxist morons going around, just like today, lamenting that the most treasured authors were people like Shakespeare and Goethe, who they denigrated as "dead white men", and they were trying to promote authors who wrote stuff in Swahili or whatever as an alternative.
And today, just like back then, they're the same preachy morons pushing the same stupid propaganda in place of actual artistic merit.
Most SJWs are, ironically, white, affluent, and college-educated. Whenever you confront them and suggest they were indoctrinated by their college professors in this nonsense, they always wheedle and prevaricate and try and claim that they came by their ideology rightly. Well, you know what? Google Trends shows otherwise.
This is what the term Social Justice looks like, since 2004:
It's like a heartbeat. The spikes coincide perfectly with the start of every semester.
And, just like the Proto-SJWs of the early 19th century who pestered Edgar Allan Poe with their didacticism, they're mostly concentrated in states full of prancing simps, like Vermont and Massachusetts.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.