The importance of rejection

esr explains why it is vital to categorically reject the premises and principles of the SJW shriekers:

Whenever I see screaming, hate-filled behavior… the important part never turns out to be whatever principles the screamer claims to be advocating. Those are just window-dressing for the bullying, the dominance games, and the rage.

You cannot ameliorate the behavior of people like that by accepting their premises and arguing within them; they’ll just pocket your concessions and attack again, seeking increasingly abject submission. In one-on-one relationships this is called “emotional abuse”, and like abusers they are all about control of you while claiming to be about anything but.

Third-wave feminism, “social justice” and “anti-racism” are rotten with this. Some of the principles, considered in isolation, would be noble; but they don’t stay noble in the minds of a rage mob.

The good news is that, like emotional abusers, they only have the power over you that you allow them. Liberation begins with recognizing the abuse for what it is. It continues by entirely rejecting their attempts at manipulation. This means rejecting their terminology, their core concepts, their framing, and their attempts to jam you into a “victim” or “oppressor” identity that denies your lived experience.

The identity-jamming part maradydd clearly gets; the most eloquent sections of her writing are those in which she (rightly) rejects feminist attempts to jam her into a victim identity. But I don’t think she quite gets how thoroughly you have to reject the rest of the SJW pitch in order not to enable their abuse.

This is the challenge of #GamerGate and Blue SF and Hacker culture and the Androsphere, to say nothing of a myriad of other singular interest groups. We are opposed to precisely the same thing, precisely the same phenomenon, sometimes even the very same individuals, and yet, because we don’t share interests, we tend not to recognize that we share the same enemy. We have the numbers, and yet we fail to ally and support each other cross-interest because most gamers couldn’t care less about fiction and most fiction readers are not hard core gamers.