TL;DR - need to vent. SJWs can drive you crazy. Reading their "logic" is like eating swiss cheese: all you get are the holes in it.

Hey guys. So I was reading salon.com over lunch today. I only read it because I find its useful to stay up to date on what other people are thinking, even those people I disagree with. I found something that so annoyed me, but its not for the reasons you think. Check this out:

https://archive.is/BAiKk

Its a professor going on about how Donald Trump is winning the GOP because of hate and backwardness. Here's the deal, just glancing at her "tag-line" and what do we see:

Brittney Cooper is a contributing writer at Salon, and teaches Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers

Yup, an african American, female, gender and woman's studies/Africana studies professor. We've hit the gender/racial quota in gender/racial subject matter hiring final jeopardy. Congratulations, Rutgers, you've just gained +10 SJW karma, insulated yourself for critics, and helped to maintain your funding.

Read the article, though, it is utterly incomprehensible academic-speak. A professor I once had told me "people who write that way don't know how to communicate clearly, so they use big words to cover up their lack of thinking skills" Someone that verbose would never make it in corporate America, only academia hires people like that.

Some of her points aren't actually that wrong. The trouble is that there are people in the country who have very real concerns. They don't know the world you come from, just like you don't know the world they come from. Neither of you has the frame of reference for the other. The more you shoot angry fire at their side, and the more you demonize them, the harder they are going to push and to fight against you. You're just entrenching them in their position. Your anger and your stats? I might find some of the stats convincing, but the whole point of this, and the trump candidacy is not based on stats. You told them that their problem was their fear, and you want to sway them away from an emotion with stats and anger? You're not helping, you're only making them more afraid. You're only helping Trump (which I think is your hope all along. A trump nomination guarantees a Clinton win in the general). Complaining, essentially, about "stupid people who back Trump" is like "gamers are dead": it doesn't go away just because you don't understand it.

She offers no real answers to serious problems, only empty platitudes to things like "we do not need the kind of political leadership that acts like ignoring problems will make them go away." Well, no shit Sherlock, you think? Did you figure that out by yourself, or did you have help? We need "good political leadership", yeah, and if I had a billion dollars, I'd be a billionaire. Way the state the obvious possibility.

Ultimately, my biggest issue with her article was two-fold, first:

slightly racist uncle who vocalizes outmoded views at the dinner table

There was an article about moral fashion a long while back that indicated to figure out if people would support or cringe at your morality in the here and now (i.e., to figure out if you are "on the right side of history") a good exercise is to look at what you believe and see if that's the same as what the overwhelming majority of human history believed. Donald Trump is a racist, no doubt there, and he's unqualified to be president, I agree with that too, but just because his views are "outmoded" doesn't mean he's on the wrong side of history (although he probably is). History is full of people temporarily believing something, and then, changing their mind back to the old belief a generation later. Beliefs don't flow in a linear direction, from more conservative to more liberal.

Second, and worse:

But his brash and unapologetic political incorrectness bespeaks comfort, a seeming return to normalcy for those Americans who believe that progress and change are happening too fast

Its the words "happening too fast" that really caught my eye. You want to know the difference between intellectuals who think about things, but never do anything useful, versus intellectuals who create value for society and leaders who must make tough choices?

I learned the difference when I was very young. I learned it by watching Star Trek: TNG. I learned it from the episode "first contact". Minister Krola (Played by the immortal John Cleese) feels his planet's science program is moving too fast. Contact with aliens, warp drive, many people are scared. Chancellor Durkin doesn't say "well, those people who think we're moving too fast don't count because they're brash and politically incorrect". He decides Picard and the enterprise must leave, because his people are not yet ready for what the Federation represents, and that his people need time and training.

This is obviously not a solution that works when you're dealing with one group of people, versus another group, but the Chancellor's answer wasn't a full speed ahead we've got to drag our people up kicking and screaming. A leader has to balance the wishes and desires of his people and make the best choices, a columnists and a professor only needs worry about her personal identity politics. Trump may be horrible, but I do not believe he is in the way you think he is.