Comment by armchairhacker

6 days ago

> People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue.

You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker.

There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist.

When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them.

It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.