Saturday, November 18, 2017

Post number 2


Some people can write something once a month or twice a month and it's pure gold. Everything they say is amazing and all the thoughtfulness and research they put into thing is obvious even if you disagree with the things they say. This doesn't just go for writing but for all kinds of content creation. Some of my favorite youtubers and podcasters don't put out content on a weekly basis and the stuff they produce is outstanding.

That's not how I work. I have a weird need to put out content on an almost constant basis. Some of it is good, some great, and some of it is way less than good. For instance, my writing. I used to be not bad at writing and I put out semi regular content back when this blog was called something else and before I deleted everything because I disagreed with nearly all of it. I'm sure that you can find archives of it somewhere. As they say, nothing on the internet is ever truly gone. The content isn't something that I worry about. My point is that even back when my content was what I would now consider garbage, I felt a need to put something out into the world on a very regular basis.

I am only moderately creative. Many people have large imaginations and can expound on a particular subject for many pages. That's not me, either. I have very specific ideas and I'm pretty decent at getting them going. I've often considered myself more of a doer than a planner or thinker. Some of those things go together sometimes. I plan out my podcast every two weeks and then I carry out that plan but my ideas rarely go beyond something that I can personally do or something that I can work with my immediate circle of friends and family to accomplish.

The one major exception to this was the conference that I planned (with much help) and executed in 2016. I was a one off, random idea that we just sort of ran with. Now, however, knowing the various potential roadblocks and stall points that one can face with a conference I'm stagnating and having a lot of difficulty planning and executing another one. There are a lot more people involved this time around too and we don't have a wealthy benefactor helping to fund us like we did last time. I've said it before that I'd take the financial risk if I think the community wants another conference in Saskatchewan but I'm simply unable to do it with my current status.

That said, I'm not entirely sure the community wants another conference. The social justice split seems a death knell for any real success in conference organizing unless you have a populace that is quite a bit higher than we have here. Our success would rely on people being willing to travel. This is is unlikely because of the temper tantrum that many people seem to have regarding social justice. To be clear, I'm on the side of social justice and I think that skeptics who interject their views on it without accepting consensus views from sociology, social psychology, and political science are on the wrong side, but that's not what I mean when I say temper tantrums.

I did an interview with a person with whom I disagree. I thought it went fine. In my podcast commentary, I did my best to fact check the claims they made. I spoke about points of disagreement and I made it very clear that I just disagreed with them and still valued them as a person. They chose to take that as a personal attack and they unfriended me. I proceeded to block them because even as they were unfriending me they decided they needed to get the last word in and insult me in an angry message that doubled down on our disagreements and turned things personal. This was a person who just a short time earlier told me that the reason they couldn't communicate with "sjws" was because they took everything so personally. This is the kind of temper tantrum I mean.

This is the kind of temper tantrum that says, "I won't change and you can't make me. If you try to convince me I'm wrong I will insult you and then abandon you". This is what I see from people regarding social justice. They've been aptly named, Status Quo Warriors. Frankly, I don't want to have a conference with people like this attending. People who argue against identity politics without realizing that they are always engaging in them. People who ignore consensus views among experts whenever it suits them. People who believe that the world cannot get better and that we shouldn't even try to change it.

How do you even negotiate with people who don't see any injustice in the world besides the injustice that affects them?

I hope that we can get enough support from our community to get our next conference off the ground but if we can't then I think it's because of the anti-social justice sentiment and their temper tantrums.

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