Patterns.
That word, rhythm.
Toutette’s Syndrome is deeply connected to perception and habit. As people with TS we get “trapped by patterns” and the cognitive signals associated with those patterns stand out in our minds like neon lights. The tics are physical or verbal patterns, OCDs are perceptual and behavioral patterns [1] and I have seen some papers discuss how tics and compulsions seem to “blend” in TS [2]. I’ve come across all sorts of interesting examples. I know a coach that uses his most friendly coaching-related general exclamations of excitement in other social contexts, every social context (it’s very endearing). Or an acquaintance that had to pull out little bits of hair and eat them (Trichotillomania). Using my historical role-model Dr. Samuel Johnson shows some very interesting patterns [3]:
… while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth; sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, ‘Too, too, too.’ All this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile. Generally when he had concluded a period, in the course of a dispute, by which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a whale.
I myself have a great many physical, perceptual and behavioral habits. I sit in ways that make my body “feel busy”. I clear my nose and puff air through it a lot. I have to push the car lock button on the key remote twice until I hear the horn beep even thought I know it’s locked after the first one because I can hear the mechanism go and see that it’s locked and many more. Our habits systems are very sensitive and when we perceive a pattern it can become a perceptual habit.
It’s in my language. Think about that. The system you and I use to turn otherwise meaningless lines and compressed air molecules into information that can soothe, aid or insult. Of course there will be habits in my perception and sensation of language.
[Think of all of that as me stapled to him everywhere, dragging one another along as we struggle over what we should do and what we want to do. Kind of like that big bad guy that Riddick battled at the end of the second movie.]
I wish I could put into words what I see in human language. No not language, symbology. In a way that is what this blog is all about. Patterns that I see all over the place that stand out like neon lights. It’s not that they are patterns that only I can see, that would be bullshit. Anyone can see the things I see and if I can’t talk about them I’m not worth listening to. This is a matter of how things in perception are emphasized relative to other things as a matter of emotion and instinct. In text. In collections of behaviors. In art. In just about every part of human experience where we put information there is this raw, searing thing of both ecstasy and agony. A little slice of something human. This modified Pluchik wheel is the closest thing I can think of that might represent the things that stand out in my perception. I see fear, and obsess over how aggression and sex is expressed in a social context. Withdraw and advance. Fight or flight. I’m not sure how to work the sex in quite yet.
OCDs related to TS often seem related to aggression, violence, sex and social rules [17]. A paper discussing “emotional impairments” in TS when expression were rapidly presented failed to note that their revealed data TS subjects have enhanced perception of fear, and noted they were most confused by surprise [18].
The pattern of avoidance.
I’ve been avoiding new entries because I’ve been looking for people experienced with research into Tourette’s Syndrome or people involved in TS activism to give me some constructive criticism on my blog. It’s one of those things that…
[…We Just Have To Do]
For some reason no one has accepted the request and at some point I need to actually start writing. The people I have talked to seem oddly hesitant and some part of me is curious, but I’ve been keeping those ideas out of assumptions as best as I can (good and bad) and just filing them away as hypotheses. My mind is extremely strategic about social issues from a lifetime of that thing I mentioned up there. Some of that is related to scrupulosity [4], the “religion” or “social rules” OCD. I just can’t stop paying attention to what/why people do things and what/why I should do.
Now that I’m finally trying to put something in here I have the question of what to write about? I’ve been avoiding the blog in different ways for different reasons for around a year now, or probably more like 2 4-6 month blocks (I can be bad about estimating time). First it was the amount of time it took to get used to the idea of actually doing this. Since my social emotions are different that involved lots of paranoia about social aspects. After six months of letting ideas boil around in the back of my head I came up with those blog defining posts that give a broad view of what I want to write about. Creating those posts was like running barbed wire with random spots of pure pleasure through my mind. I think they will be a work in progress for a while and will stay longer posts.
But I need to write more. The second 4-6 months or so was spent trying to get people to help me with some general impressions of my writing and realizing that I had to rethink what blogging is. My intentions were to start giving summaries of papers so that other people could get interested in what I see in journal articles. But that leads to a couple of posts a month, so perhaps those will be longer writing projects like the summary of the meaning of a collection of reviews on TS to give an easily understandable explanation of all the terms and concepts. So I’m going to try to commit to two posts a week so that I get practice.
[I think my reach can exceed our grasp a little too often.]
Today I will give a sort of summary of some of the things I have been thinking about and we will see what happens from here. This is a big post because frankly I have a lot of emotion built up that needs expressing. Once I get some of this out my posts will hopefully get more manageable. I can’t help it that every sensitive issue has little threads that lead to other things. It’s an inherent part of the whole thing.
And of course…
[…the first post is about insults and insulting characterizations. Predictable.]
The Beast and the Machine.
I tend to play a kind of mental chess with society and social issues. The number of moves, the number of categories the moves are in and other things that I try to predict and mentally model depends on the intensity, subject and context. That’s just what you do when you have something like TS.
[Probably all of us watch all of you carefully and think hard about what to do. I suspect a psychopath with TS is a terrifying thing.]
A lifetime of doing that has created an interesting set of filters that I use to interact with the world. The ones related to the internet alone are things I really want to put into words. For example I can see dominance behaviors and other expressions of emotion at high resolution in text. When you see what people do in those ways for long enough you start to notice patterns in what individuals and groups do. Eventually you want to know if anyone else sees the same patterns because I’m a social primate like the rest of you.
[Higher resolution in social emotional perception seems to affect the number of objects we can experience in our internal simulation both in abstract and in reality. We tend to feel social emotions very powerfully so we prefer a smaller number of closer friends, social situations with clear emotional rules, social situations where we have studied and experienced the rules very well and other similar things. Sensory hypersensitivity [5] is an issue here and that relates to the Things We Perceive and the Things We Feel About Perception (apologies if you have synesthesia, unless that was fun). So we spend a lot of time trying to experience many kinds of social situations and many kinds of people. It’s a genuine survival instinct. Not all of the things I look at are pleasant. In fact we tend to emphasize the study of those less plesent things very closely. I tend to see words as little beads on a string where each bead is a shell of hierarchically organized emotional connections [6] that we then have to cross reference with current established meanings, and not a little bit of local highly contextualized meanings.]
It can get a little overwhelming. Political dog-whistles [7] and trauma triggers [8] are everywhere, and I often have to remind myself that not all of human language is supposed to be in those two categories.
Does this look a little crazy to you? These are impressions of how complicated the sensations I get from language are. I turned a sentence from a random document into symbolism. “The reputation side is utterly correct in their concerns.” Good/bad, intensity, object identity, object relations, actions, modifiers and more are things I can sense in relation to emotions and instincts. Yeah, it’s a rush.
My mind is always trying to find ways of categorizing human social behavior so that the things I come up with are as useful as the lists of logical fallacies. Logical fallacies [9] are a kind of form of human social conflict in a manner analogous to forms of human martial arts [10], and there are subforms. I can see what people do with fallacies in a more neutral way that is pure human social conflict with as much bias as I can find scraped off. Logical fallacies are a part of how we fight over ideas and concepts with emotions when trying to direct the attention of another person, a group or both simultaneously. When I see fallacious reasoning being used (the summation of the patterns of individual logical fallacies in action) I see something very much like the form of combat called grappling [11].
[Interestingly our brother consistently won grappling matches at Camp Pendelton where marines train. Why yes I wonder if that has implications on my interest and ability in wrestling with words.]
Instead of limbs, joints and whole body being used with force and torque, you have objects and meanings being manipulated with emotion and instinct. There are positive and negative emotions in there, of many intensities connected to many objects and people-objects. All to convince a person, and especially an audience, by plucking at social emotions.
There is structure in social conflict, and it’s so fascinating. I especially find insults and insulting characterizations fascinating so I guess I do have an “obsessional kind of copralalia” even thought I don’t personally feel the urge to swear or insult. A recent example involves a social controversy over what are called dictionary atheists [12] (link to a post by the person who came up with the term).
Dictionary atheists, versus social justice warriors. Patterns in the chaos.
I’m an atheist and right now our community is in the middle of a genuine political schism. It seems odd to use the word because no one is getting killed, but the definition fits so why the fuck not? Who started it is irrelevant to it’s objective existence for the purposes of this post. Both sides will have an “Oh yeah!?! But your side did X and Y!!!” because social conflict is always a circular thing no matter who is right. Both sides want to win no matter who is right and both sides will pull the emotional tools and weapons that they have prepared to keep the conflict going round and round until someone wins. Getting to the bottom of any fact statement you encounter will often require following citation trails. Social conflict is often exhausting.
[But some of us feel the same amused emotions attached to the word “drama” in things that are not drama at all, and are in fact quite serious. This results in intense interest in social conflict and the attendant suffering and often brutal jubilation (face it, some people even think schadenfreude is bad, it’s goodness is just very context sensitive). This instinct is a tool to be used carefully, I am compatible with existing as a social predator. Some otherwise kind and normal examples of us have the urge to insult in specific ways from the disembodied urges for real reasons.]
But both sides are not correct about reality. Someone is correct, or at least more correct. So I am always looking for patterns. The pattern that ripples around the term [Dictionary Atheist] in hypothetical proper noun form is an interesting one. Here is the pattern that I see, other people may see other things and that is fair since it is a relatively new term and we will fight over it because we fight with it. I’ll compare it with another recently invented term in contrast, Social Justice Warrior because the two terms are both interesting to me and I might as well do two insulting characterizations for the fun of it.
Dictionary Atheist
If I had to define the category of behaviors that contained a dictionary atheist I would say that they are a person who avoids ideas or examples connected to a word by pointing out the “strict definition”.
[Naturally this needs it’s own most general term eventually.]
This is a bad habit because words have multiple definitions and language only works because words are connected to other words. Let me describe the most general features in some more detail.
*Dictionary atheist is an insulting characterization, a pejorative.
*A dictionary atheist is a thing that can only exist in a social context. Person A calls person B a dictionary atheist because they bring up the dictionary definition of atheist in response to something person A says about atheism.
*The term is applied to a person who brings up the dictionary definition of the word atheist when some other person suggests that the atheist community should do something or make something a priority. These “somethings” have been moral and/or ethical priorities for the atheist community, actions that the group should take, and problems that the groups should address (probably other things too).
*The person using the definition is using it to criticize the connection of the previous “somethings” to atheists.
There are some posts by Greta Christina and PZ Myers discussing their take on dictionary atheists at the end and in-text. Since this is a relatively new term people are fighting over it right now so situations where it gets used are often heated. You don’t have to read everything or anything since my perceptions are the point (It’s my blog after all), but there is little replacement for watching the actual conversations that produce the terms if you want to see if you agree. “Atheists Don’t Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing” [13] basically uses the dictionary definition to weaken a connection between the atheist community and social justice. In “There Is No Atheist Movement”: Why I’m Officially Done With Dictionary Atheism [14] Greta Christina expresses well the repeated responses to shitty problems in the atheist community with appeals to atheism all by it’s lonesome and no reality context (and includes a great analogy to the LGBT movement).
The comments are especially useful because you get some discussion from lots of perspectives.
The reason that this term is a pejorative is because what a dictionary atheist does is waste time and fill the conversation/argument space with useless noise, thus rationally annoying the shit out of many people. There are things connected to intense emotions to be discussed and they are screwing around ([not really “screwing around”, there is a strategic value in the behavior. see below]). The definition of the word atheist has absolutely nothing to do with what an atheist should do in a social context. Figuring out what an atheist should do requires other concepts to be attached to the concept of atheist. Words are merely proxies for concepts and atheists don’t need to be reminded of that concept, it’s fucking insulting and anyone wasting my time like that is not acting like a social ally.
The thing that the person calling another dictionary atheist is trying to talk about, are concepts unified with the atheist community by reality. Things like:
*The life experiences that made someone an atheist.
*The life experiences that are currently relevant to people living as atheists.
*The things that need to be done to end suffering and promote well-being among people currently living as atheists.
The basic health and well-being of a community matters so like it or not things that are afflicting society at a basic level are atheist issues too. The basic well-being of community always matters all of the time. Think of it an an upkeep cost that a society always has to pay or it regrets it at some point. So sexual harassment matters, sexism matters, racism matters, homophobia matters, transphobia matters, ablism matters. All of the things society at large is fighting over right now matters. If you bring up something as pathetic as the definition of what unifies our community in response to a social issue you are acting like an asshole as far as I am concerned and I will act accordingly.
[Dictionary atheism is a strategy, not an argument. Since it appeals to what we all have in common while weakening a suggested connection and making no attempt to argue against the connection it’s use is entirely in opposition with no effort.]
Social Justice Warrior
Social justice warrior (SJW) is another new term that society is battling with. I need to get some more potential for bias out of the way to be fair. SJW is supposed to be an insulting characterization but honestly I just can’t bring myself to feel it based on my experience of it. I’ve only had someone apply the word to something I posted and not to myself so far. I posted this comedy routine by Aamer Rahman that discusses the issue of “reverse racism” and someone described it as looking like “that SJW shit” and literally nothing else. I’ve seen it applied to other people many times.
[Regardless of what it is supposed to mean We have to be honest about the reality of what We see. SJW is useless unless you are deciding to dismiss a person on an emotional level or are going to fail to actually address anything anyone is actually saying. The term is basically tailor-made to preserve the status quo and even prevent social justice that people using the term might actually want to see addressed, but since those people are already the more dominant social class that is just an extra layer of strategy.]
In the sources at the end is the entry for Social Justice Warrior by poopem at Urban Dictionary [15], and something in the section on Social Justice at Wikipedia [16]. Given the ever-changing nature of the internet and the newness of the term I will paste these definitions at the end of this post. They are there for completeness and can be ignored unless you want to investigate anything. I find it very fascinating that the sources for the Wikipedia section seem to be supportive of social justice warriors on a casual glance. I may write more about that later.
If I had to define the most general category of behavior that SJW is meant to describe it would be a person who is struggling for social justice by particular means that make the effort illegitimate. The Urban Dictionary definition lists these as characteristics that render a person an SJW:
*Repeated and forceful style.
*Lack of reasoning or logic.
*Lack of genuine concern for the social group needing justice.
*Making statements of fact or presenting information from social leaders without actually engaging with anyone with respect to arguments about perceived facts and information.
*Concern for social standing among peers and superiors instead of engaging with anyone with respect to arguments about perceived facts and information.
*Aggressive tactics meant to win via pack attacks.
*The use of certain internet communities (Livejournal and Tumblr) with the implication that this makes a person an SJW.
*Doing activism online.
While the term describes a person who behaves a certain way, functionally people use the term in order to mentally shut down when it comes to struggling for a social justice issue. When you contrast Dictionary Atheist with Social Justice Warrior some interesting things become apparent.
Dictionary atheist is specific and substantive and SJW is general, subjective and associated with some fallacies. A dictionary atheist does a single defined thing, they bring up the strict defining concept that unifies a community and a contrast/contradiction against a potential a community connection with it. SJW has characteristics that apply to virtually every emotionally sensitive political topic and includes a heaping quantity of bad reasoning in how it seems to get used. The P.Z. Myers Is a Dishonest Social Justice Warrior Who Doesn’t Know What ‘Atheism’ Means by Michael Luciano and the other articles by him and PZ Meyers are again good sources here.
You will always find people who are repeated and forceful. This is a matter of signal-boosting and emotion being expressed proportional to what a person feels and is a human neutral. Repetition makes things stick in memory more and/or is used to basically bash what you are saying against a person(s) in a dominance display.
You will always find people with reasoning and logic problems who participate in such conflicts. It’s a genuine human problem and this post is one way I’m trying to deal with it.
You will always find people who are willing to use another group of people for their own sociopolitical purposes. Anyone in a social group with multiple factions will want help from allies and there are good and bad ways of doing that.
You will often find people who simply quote authorities, make assertions of fact or dump information and refuse to explain why it supports them or other ways of engaging on the topic. It’s a general human thing to simply opine without reason, logic or evidence or drop an impressive looking thing to try to wow or intimidate people.
Increasing the social complexity a bit you will often find that some people in a social conflict are willing to attack individuals as a group. This is general predatory behavior that is as natural as murder ([heh, “murder” of crows…]) and would be neutral but society has decided that murder is not something we like and many forms of socially predatory behavior are losing their neutrality in similar fashion.
Every group of humans has ways of organizing that group and internal rank and currency for earning respect is always part of it. You can’t have specialists within a group without that.
As for fallacious reasoning there is nothing inherently problematic about doing activism online, in fact the internet may grow into quite the blender for chopping up bad politics. How much of human history has included simple text in social conflict? Are arguments being made with words and symbols or spoken? Then it might be legitimate.
The last bit of fallacious reasoning is the assumption that being connected to a community makes an argument a problem. Criticism of a person for contributing to a community with problematic behavior is one thing, but that does not automatically make a particular expression of social justice a problem.
In the end Social Justice Warrior seems to apply to any expression that seeks to make society more just. You could in principle apply it to people who think the tax system is messed up. You could apply it to people who want to stop circumcision. You could apply to people who think that the way that divorces, child support and alimony are currently done is bad. You could apply it to people who want to fight for people who have been falsely accused of rape. In principle.
But is Social Justice Warrior being applied to all kinds of social justice advocates? No. It’s being selectively used by people to oppose expressions of social justice that tend to be associated with the political left like areas related to feminism, gender and race. Every expression of SJW that I have seen coincides with the person using the term mentally shutting down with respect to the expression of social justice that they don’t like. The term originated among people who are already higher up on the social pecking order and since it is a thing that one feels about the social justice of another it can in principle lock us into the status quo, if it were not for the fact that the people higher up on the pecking order will be working to get more power as they raise up SJW like it’s a shield.
So how does PZ’s response to Luciano look when considering the definition of SJW? Luciano complains of:
*Lack of honesty via emotionally intense misrepresentation.
*Illegitimate co-opting of a community.
*Attempts to alter the definition of atheism.
First I have to point out that PZ did conflate “…New Atheists are being denounced for supposedly failing to embrace liberal causes such as diversity and equality.” with “Why, the weird ideas of diversity and equality.” It would not be accurate to break equality and diversity from the whole set that Luciano presented and was an irrational thing to post. Luciano seems to think PZ should get a “Social Justice Warrior” where a simple characterization (even an insulting one) related to that irrationality would do.
But the other two are sheer bullshit and frankly Luciano would fit the definition of SJW better given that article.
Lack of genuine concern for the community. You can’t illegitimately co-opt the atheist community unless you tried to gather people based on something that is absent from the community. Since it is a community that formed not because of what it believed, but because of what it is opposing and does not believe in, there are going to be many people there for many reasons. That is all fair game for organization and many issues being complained of are reasons for why people left religion (especially among women and LGBT+). The social justice topics people are bringing up happen to be problems that are in a great many communities but that does not preclude organizing by atheists around those issues. It’s still an atheist community issue.
[Don’t even get me started on the people trying to say there is no atheist community. Those are some really dumb fuckers. This is at least a little complicated.]
Why should creationism be privileged over social factors that cause sexual abuse and harassment that are in both the atheist community and religious communities? You can’t even get to fighting creationism without attaching other things to the word atheist. Appealing to the dictionary in a criticism of a proposed social connection is a funny thing for a supposed advocate of social justice to be doing and illogical as a criticism. PZ is not changing the definition of atheism, he is attaching that word to other words to form sentences so that concepts can be connected regarding real-world issues in the atheist community.
Luciano has a strong interest in keeping atheist and social justice separate despite real world problems that require attaching words to atheist. I’m interested in the reasons for that interest. I think the “social” part of SJW is more important to the term than rationality with respect to the reason why it was chosen, instead of some other term for irrationality. If SJW actually has any utility it matches Luciano far better. Fortunately I can choose to not give a fuck if someone uses it. It functionally allows people to ignore the substance that another person is expressing, like the way that Luciano ignored PZ’s main topic about how we will need to talk about what beliefs we do have as a community.
These are some of the patterns that I see. One term with reasonable justification and one that I have yet to see a decent justification for. I’ll be the first to admit that having a neurological condition involved in language processes and an oppositional psychology is a funny thing to be used as an argument from authority, it’s all kinds of arrogant. But someone needs to start figuring out how different shapes of mind can lead to different human specializations with more detail and I’m willing and able to explain anything in here. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But an idea can not be challenged unless put up for challenge.
Sources
Sources related to the use of “dictionary atheist” in a logical order.
“There Is No Atheist Movement”: Why I’m Officially Done With Dictionary Atheism by Greta Christina
This is a recent discussion of the term and people it’s applied to.
Next is a series of four articles/posts by PZ Myers and Michael Luciano going back and forth (in order) around the inclusion of social justice into the atheist community.
Atheists Don’t Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing by Michael Luciano
Sunday Sacrilege: The Responsible Atheist by PZ Myers
P.Z. Myers Is a Dishonest Social Justice Warrior Who Doesn’t Know What ‘Atheism’ Means by Michael Luciano
Michael Luciano makes me laugh by PZ Myers
Urban dictionary: Social Justice Warrior
A pejorative term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet, often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation. A social justice warrior, or SJW, does not necessarily strongly believe all that they say, or even care about the groups they are fighting on behalf of. They typically repeat points from whoever is the most popular blogger or commenter of the moment, hoping that they will “get SJ points” and become popular in return. They are very sure to adopt stances that are “correct” in their social circle.
The SJW’s favorite activity of all is to dogpile. Their favorite websites to frequent are Livejournal and Tumblr. They do not have relevant favorite real-world places, because SJWs are primarily civil rights activists only online.
#1:A social justice warrior reads an essay about a form of internal misogyny where women and girls insult stereotypical feminine activities and characteristics in order to boost themselves over other women.
The SJW absorbs this and later complains in response to a Huffington Post article about a 10-year-old feminist’s letter, because the 10-year-old called the color pink “prissy”.
#2:Commnter: “I don’t like getting manicures. It’s too prissy.”
SJW: “Oh my god, how fucking dare you use that word, you disgusting sexist piece of shit!”
by poopem April 21, 2011
Wikipedia: Social Justice Warrior
Note: I include the embedded links present in the wikipedia entry.
I am not accepting or rejecting any particular source but only choosing easily accessible descriptions of current terms. I may check these out in more detail as a separate topic as this post is about my impressions of the use of the term.
The term “social justice warrior” has been used to describe people who work for social justice issues, often “claiming a moral authority” and “questioning the motives and moral integrity of those they oppose”.[61]
In Internet culture, the term has been used as a pejorative for someone campaigning against things they perceive to be instances of racism, sexism, homophobia, or other social injustice. Frequently initialized as “SJW”, it is used to accuse opponents of sanctimony,[62] to insinuate pretense,[63][64] as a pejorative,[65][66][67] and as a general shorthand for a person believed to be overreacting to social issues.[68][69]
61: Dixon E Southworth (13 March 2001). “A vision for the next century – government without corruption” (PDF). Retrieved 28 November 2014. “Finally, this paper describes a new social justice warrior, who attacks existing social norms and programs to achieve greater social justice and advance social goals not readily accepted by the general public. [..] Subjected to close scrutiny and often acts of violence because of their high profile, these new warriors are also very often accused of corruption, sometimes legitimately and sometimes not.” (p.1.) “These new social justice warriors separate themselves from the crowd by publicly exercising the right to free speech in order to right the social wrongs. […] Often claiming a moral authority as they speak, these warriors question the motives and moral integrity of those they oppose.” (p.13)
62: Hill, Max (17 November 2014). “In Defence of Social Justice Warriors”. The Peak. SJWs are generally young, white, and spend their time on social media condemning those who fail to live up to their own moral and ethical standards.
63: North, Anna (29 August 2014). “Why a Video Game Critic Was Forced to Flee Her home”. The New York Times. [citing Vice] ‘For certain segments of the gaming world, she writes, the term refers to “people who, according to Urbandictionary, engage in ‘social justice arguments on the internet … in an effort to raise their own personal reputation.’ In other words, SJWs don’t hold strong principles, but they pretend to.”‘
64: Ringo, Allegra (28 August 2014). “Meet the Female Gamer Mascot Born of Anti-Feminist Internet Drama”. Vice. People who, according to Urban Dictionary, engage in ‘social justice arguments on the internet … in an effort to raise their own personal reputation.’ In other words, SJWs don’t hold strong principles, but they pretend to. The problem is, that’s not a real category of people. It’s simply a way to dismiss anyone who brings up social justice—and often those people are feminists. It’s awfully convenient to have a term at the ready to dismiss women who bring up sexism, as in, ‘You don’t really care. As an SJW, you’re just taking up this cause to make yourself look good!’
65: “Gamers Misogynistic? Some Certainly Are”. Irish Times. 18 October 2014. The term “social justice warrior” GamerGate: A Closer Look At The Controversy Sweeping Video Games(surely a good thing) has been used pejoratively to describe those writers who choose to examine the social and political subtexts of contemporary video games
66: “The Only Guide to Gamergate You Will Ever Need to Read”. The Washington Post. 14 October 2014. Retrieved 22 April 2015. …’SJW,’ for social justice warrior—a kind of shorthand insult for liberals and progressives.
67: Johnson, Eric (10 October 2014). “Understanding the Jargon of Gamergate”. Re/code. Retrieved 22 April 2015. A Social Justice Warrior, or SJW, is any person, female or male, who argues online for political correctness or feminism. ‘Social justice’ may sound like a good thing to many of our readers, but the people who use this term only use it pejoratively.
68: West, Ed (12 November 2014). “Why Social Justice Warriors are losing”. Spectator Blogs. The Spectator. Retrieved 22 April 2015.
69: “In defence of ‘social justice warriors'”. The Peak.
In-text citations
[1] Tourette Syndrome “Plus”, About Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Leslie E. Packer, PhD 2009
[2] Repetitive behaviours in patients with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome: tics, compulsions, or both?
Worbe et al. PLoS One. 2010 Sep 24;5(9)
[3] Hibbert, Christopher , The Personal History of Samuel Johnson, New York: Harper & Row 1971
[4] Scrupulosity. In Wikipedia. Retrieved on 6/5/2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity
[5] Sensory sensitivity to external stimuli in Tourette syndrome patients.
Belluscio et al. Mov Disord. 2011 Dec;26(14):2538-43.
[6] Sciencedaily, Language use is simpler than previously thought, study suggests by Susan Kelley 4/25/2012
[7] Dog-Whistle Politics. In Wikipedia. Retrieved on 6/5/2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
[8] Trauma Trigger. In Wikipedia. Retrieved on 6/5/2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_trigger
[9] List of Fallacies. In Wikipedia. Retrieved on 6/5/2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
[10] Kata (martial arts forms). In Wikipedia. Retrieved on 6/5/2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata
[11] Grappling. Retrieved on 6/5/2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grappling
[12] My lasting contribution to atheism by PZ Myers at the blog Pharyngula
[13] Atheists Don’t Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing by Michael Luciano at The Daily Banter
[14] “There Is No Atheist Movement”: Why I’m Officially Done With Dictionary Atheism by Greta Christina at the blog Greta Christina’s Blog.
[15] Social Justice Warrior. In The Urban Dictionary Retrieved on 6/9/2015 from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=social+justice+warrior
[16] Social Justice: Social Justice Warrior. In Wikipedia retrieved on 6/9/2015 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice#.22Social_Justice_Warriors.22
[17] Movement disorders: Tourette syndrome–beyond swearing and sex?
Robertson 2014. Nat Rev Neurol. 2014 Jan;10(1):6-8.
[18] Rapid Presentation of Emotional Expressions Reveals New Emotional Impairments in Tourette’s Syndrome.
Mermillod et al 2013. Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Apr 24;7:149.
A Demon Speaks 