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If you are like everyone else on the Internet, your immediate response is "Whoever is saying that is obviously a racisty racist who loves racism! I can't believe he literally used the 'I'm not racist, but...' line in those exact words! The old INRB! I've got to get home as fast as I can to write about this on my blog and tell everyone I really met one of those people!"
If you've trained yourself to knee-jerk whenever you hear certain buzzwords, you're probably being intellectually dishonest.
"Intellectually dishonest" is a great buzzword. If you care more about playing according to some conversational rulebook than furthering the development of a just society you really have your priorities in line. It's a literal appeal to authority and it immediately allows you to write off the entire line of argument standing behind it.
> If you care more about playing according to some conversational rulebook than furthering the development of a just society you really have your priorities in line.
This is an adorable fallacy, but it's also the kind of thing that would get fixed in a freshman-level philosophy seminar. If you think that you're furthering the development of a just society by ignoring any dissenting opinions, you're not likely to accomplish much.
>I feel like every single term in social justice terminology has a totally unobjectionable and obviously important meaning – and then is actually used a completely different way.
The closest analogy I can think of is those religious people who say “God is just another word for the order and beauty in the Universe” – and then later pray to God to smite their enemies. And if you criticize them for doing the latter, they say “But God just means there is order and beauty in the universe, surely you’re not objecting to that?”
>The result is that people can accuse people of “privilege” or “mansplaining” no matter what they do, and then when people criticize the concept of “privilege” they retreat back to “but ‘privilege’ just means you’re interrupting women in a women-only safe space. Surely no one can object to criticizing people who do that?”
>…even though I get accused of “privilege” for writing things on my blog, even though there’s no possible way that could be “interrupting” or “in a women only safe space”.
>When you bring this up, people just deny they’re doing it and call you paranoid.
>When you record examples of yourself and others getting accused of privilege or mansplaining, and show people the list, and point out that exactly zero percent of them are anything remotely related to “interrupting women in a women-only safe space” and one hundred percent are “making a correct argument that somebody wants to shut down”, then your interlocutor can just say “You’re deliberately only engaging with straw-man feminists who don’t represent the strongest part of the movement, you can’t hold me responsible for what they do” and continue to insist that anyone who is upset by the uses of the word “privilege” just doesn’t understand that it’s wrong to interrupt women in safe spaces.
>I have yet to find a good way around this tactic.
