Why we shouldn't protect teenagers from controversial issues in fiction
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I appreciate this "rule" that the author holds. I think there really are two sides to these kinds of controversial issues - parents who don't fully understand the appeal, and teens who don't fully understand the danger - and the best way to show both sides is to tell it like it is.
Unfortunately, since in fiction the author has full reign over the plot, lazier (or else ignorant) authors who may not fully understand both sides might simply reward or punish characters regardless of any realistic criteria. If I tried to write such a book, I would fall into the "ignorant" category, biased not only by my limited experience but also by my natural desire to reward characters more like myself, regardless of whether their actions merit it.
Exploring the two sides of an issue (or three or four) should be done "away" from the book. We should confront those ideas with the real world and everything else we know. The author has no obligation to present those ideas fairly or truthfully. [1]
Parents should tech their kids to think critically, to accept that anything can be wrong or misleading. They should always evaluate what they learned and gather their own conclusions.
[1] And writing about X doesn't mean the author subscribes to X.
Teenagers are perfectly capable of handling adult topics if they have the support of adults to help them grasp the entirety of it all. Keeping them insulated in a bubble, away from the real world, just means they'll get to experience it all at once, alone, without support, when they finally venture out of the house as young adults.
And we usually haven't, but there have always been voices against, either the "save the children" crowd or something else.
(and yes, today SJWs are part of the problem)
..and for good reason. The mindset is arational and immune to basic logic and discourse. It's like trying to convince a deeply religious person that their God doesn't exist - it doesn't work that way.
Few who value rationality think they are irrational; few who value good think they are evil. It's always the other person who is irrational or evil. A human being arational is actually a ridiculous concept. There is no person who isn't reasonable in some way.
The question is: how do you react when the data contradicts your hypotheses? How do you react when it is shown that the arguments you base your views on are fallacious? The SJW position is to dismiss empiricism and rationality instead of changing their views.
I already covered that. Empirical evidence can only be obtained by experience. It is very important to science that experiments are reproducible, which means that the results of the experiment can be observed independently. Observation is experience.
> The question is: how do you react when the data contradicts your hypotheses? How do you react when it is shown that the arguments you base your views on are fallacious?
Do you really think i would answer that with "i ignore that information!!1!". Other people label an "SJW" with these incriminations.
> The SJW position is to dismiss empiricism and rationality instead of changing their views.
There is no such thing as "The SJW position". No one holds this position. As i said, other people claim that "SJW"s are irrational and reject empirical evidence. It is a word used to smear people by grouping them together in a category of "bad". There is no "SJW" manifesto or association of "SJW"s.
Everyone takes in data, evaluates it, and changes their beliefs based on it. This is the basis of intelligence. However, we take shortcuts. Everyone takes shortcuts. Even in professional science, no one reruns every experiment and verifies for themself through direct observation the results. That would take too long. The basis of social intelligence is evaluating proxies for direct observational evidence, i.e. experience.
What people who use the term "SJW" mean when they use it is that someone evaluated the same indirect data in a different way from them, and this led to a disagreement and they are convinced that there is no way anyone could disagree with them.
This is a pointless conversation.
A group of people sharing a number of beliefs and behaviors need not be centrally organized or hold all of the same beliefs or all of the same behaviors in order to be correctly reasoned about as a group.
Here's an example of such a group: "Anti-vaxxers". People who think, despite all evidence to the contrary, that vaccines are harmful to human life. They parrot misinformation, refuse to engage with good faith criticism, and worse, foster an actual public health crisis because they won't get the shots and won't let their kids.
The individual beliefs aren't always identical, or even coherent. Some think the vaccines are a government population control program. Some think that the science isn't in yet. Some think that because their friend's friend's cousin's dad's son had a bad reaction, that they're all harmful. (This addresses the "direct observational evidence" you mentioned, I think.)
We still reason about those people as a group based on their actions: Refusing to be vaccinated, refusing to have their kids vaccinated. Should we stop doing so in some attempt to preserve some notion of philosophical/empirical purity, some notion of not offending these people, or should we address the health problem and call the willful ignorance what it is?
>What people who use the term "SJW" mean when they use it is that someone evaluated the same indirect data in a different way from them
I can only speak for myself here, but when I use that term, I refer to a brand of authoritarian left-leaning political behavior, one that is hostile to any non-agreement (disagree = blocked), one that actively parrots refuted statistics (wage gap), one that is perfectly okay with hateful behavior as long as it's directed at someone "more advantaged" than them.
In other words, more actions than thoughts - but every action has a motivating thought.
I wasn't thinking of it as meaning that a person is never rational.
It is true that different people value different things, but I think moral realism is important and important to emphasize. (Not that people valuing different things contradicts moral realism at all, or even comes close to doing so, I'm just mentioning this because of connotations and ambiguity and such.)
Perhaps it would be more precise ("well, actually..."?) to say that few who value rationality believe that they are currently behaving irrationally, or, for each of their lines of reasoning, believe that that particular reasoning is not irrational? I would think that most people accept the idea that they are sometimes irrational, though they would likely not be able to point out an example of where they themselves currently hold an irrational belief. (Because, if they could, they would probably not still have the belief? Or maybe they might keep it, but, they might just think that it is an arational belief?)
But this trying to be more precise might not be particularly useful, as it might already be understood by all parties involved, idk.
EDIT: Asking if you think its fair to call somebody names because they don;t have the same beliefs?
Some beliefs are demonstrably harmful.
Would you say, given that you are a person who uses the term "SJW", that the rape of Anita Sarkeesian is an action that you would support, or that a majority of your cohort supports? I really hope you say "no", because otherwise I'm completely wasting my time. But can you not see how a few vocal people in the GG debacle have managed to get everyone who uses the term "SJW" painted with that sort of brush?
There is no conspiracy to commit genocide against white, straight males. The very concept verges on paranoid schizophrenia.
My comments are purely about having civil discourse.
Edit: I ask because as a teacher who's married to a social worker I'm pretty sure we both get up every day and try to improve the lives of people in our community.
Here's my litmus test:
* Do you parrot discredited statistics like the wage gap? (Bad information is self evidently harmful)
* Do you instantly cut off communication with people who do so much as disagree with you? (Fosters an echo chamber, see bad information above)
* Do you publicly label people who disagree with you as words ending in -ist? (Such labels are of questionable value anyways, less so when they don't even apply, and that's before talking about the social consequences)
* Do you try to get people who disagree with you fired? (Nuff said)
* Do you rally your friends to pressure media companies to change/stop making things that offend you? (Harmful to free expression, artistic integrity, and probably the economy)
* Do you use hateful language against people, and then rationalize it as okay because those people are above you in some social hierarchy?
Then you are not a "social justice warrior" or "SJW" and the "harmful" label does not apply.
Maybe we can call those that use such tactics for social justice aims, Social Justice Gators, to clarify things while annoying people in various camps?
Until they choose to label themselves, a certain three letter acronym serves as well as any other and they more or less agree that they are identified by that label themselves by reacting strongly to it.
(Merits of their views aside, am I the only one who finds it deeply ironic that people who freely hand out "X-ist" / "X-ism" labels to others are outraged by being themselves labeled?)
Left-wing extremists? Seems to cover the political movement well enough.
While it relates to positions traditionally associated with the left it seems it detaches from it, and becomes a caricature.
HN do not have a strict policy against such terms, and people don't seems to be voluntarily avoiding them. If the posted had said "white privileged men are part of the problem", would you have had made a similar objection?
HN does have a policy to keep conversation civil, and it's really difficult to see how bandying around terms like this is contributing to being civil.
I realize the SJW bogeyman is en vogue these days, but censorship in the US has a long and sordid history completely without them.
Honestly I doubt that "SJW" would have a problem with e.g. Harry Potter, The Handmaid's Tale and Annie on my Mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challeng...
SJW stands for Social Justice Warrior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior
I learned that when it came to respecting the power of speech, the Emperor had no clothes, and when deemed expedient a public institution would toss out their principles.
Anybody who thinks aggressive movie ratings makes a difference to young people in 2016 shouldn't be considered safe to drive a car.
2% of tax returns are filed by teens accounting for 0% of IRS revenue.
Yes, let's reduce people to their economic value.
Also pocket money.
We're infantalizing everyone now. I was in a law school class (everyone 25+) where the federal judge lecturer called us all "kids." The age of majority seems to have inflated up from 18 to around 27 in America.
there you go. i just lowered myself to your level. ugly.