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Why do SJW's exist? what happened during the 2010s to make the sjw movement cancerous?

Parents constantly telling their kids they are special and letting them have whatever they want and never punishing them feels that anyone not kissing their ass is oppressing them. Really, I think people like this have always existed, just that the internet now gives them a breadbox to stand on.

It isn't a new thing.

Look into the history of PETA, or other youth movements which are became radical/extremist.
Kids who are extremly extrovert. Seeking for attention and build up an ideology from half-truths and slogans. Gather gullible people arround themself, and pathologically try to justify they lies (because of the fear from being alone)

I'm not sure about that i worded my thoughts clearly for you guys.
But the point is that sjw movements and ideologies aren't new things.
They were here before, and they died off.

I think it has to do with mob mentality in some cases. I could be wrong, but it seems like one person believes something to be right, then another then more and soon you have a whole group of supporters

Or something like that anyway

people with similar societal views are finding other people through the means of the internet, post-modernism and constant re-evaluations of social structures are also important factors. Critiques of standing social structures are always controversial so that's why so many nerds get their panties in a bunch when SJWs speak their mind.

lol at all these narrow-minded answers. read a book or two.

To give you an unbiased view, when someone believes they are doing the right thing, they tend to be more passionate about it. When they feel as though something is against them or what they believe in they react passionately. This is the case with just about anything. But in the case of sjw's they are for causes that are progressive in nature.

SJWs are extremists who think they're in the right, (similar to cringeworthy diehard Atheists out there.) They believe that their ideology is rebellious of the traditional standards and that somehow makes them right. Scrutinize extremist Anti-SJWs in there too and you'd see they're not so different and actually have something in common: These are people who see the world in a very simplistic way: black and white; you're either right, or wrong. Both SJWs and self-proclaimed Anti-SJWs spend a lot of their time in their respective circlejerks and echo chambers where they all share the same opinions and beliefs. These two groups are so poor at absorbing foreign notions and different perspectives they end up bickering when they bump into each other. For some reason, both sides are so dogmatic to their beliefs, that disagreeing with them a little bit angers them. people proudly wearing the title Anti-SJW have a hard time fathoming that some 'SJWs' don't want all video game heroines to be wearing burkhas. SJWs will immediately call you out as homophobic if you dislike a certain same-sex ship.

I think the problem is that everyone is too damn emotional. Picking sides, calling a person friend or foe based on how much their opinion matches up with yours, as if there's no middle way, no synthesis, no agreement to be made. Both sides have basically ended up creating strawmen of each other to 'defeat' in their respective places and I think that says a lot about what they know.

Ok lest clarify something: SJW stands for "Social Justice Warrior". Nobody in this thread mentioned this and its pretty dumb to do that. We all assume Sjws are this evil sort of people but no they're not, what you guys are referring to are EXTREMIST not Sjws. SJWS are people who fight for Social justice for everyone, just the only ones you think about are the ones you heard about. Next time actually research this shit before generalizing .

Are you sure?
As a social worker i never seen or heard about sjws doing something noteworthy. Working for social justice somehow just stop at bitching and belittle people on tumblr for them. If it is how you fight for justice, then thank you i dont want to take part on it.

Tumblr is not the only place for that, again do some research on it instead of tumblr and random pic you found on the internet.

In addition to this: What does "SJW" even define nowadays? The definition of "SJW" has been twisted in such a way by opponents of the movement, that currently its definition seems to equal "people who disagree with me."

I repeat again: I didn't find any noteworthy activity, program, project, study or curriculum under "social justice warrior" identity wich are take actions against the current social problems.
If there was any sane people who consider him or her self as sjw they already drop it.

My experience is that, the helping professions didn't recognize "these" people. Or atleast the european social professions.

Feel free to guide me for evidence, if you know US examples.
I eager to change my point of view!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory#In_social_theory

This is about as close as you can get to capturing the idea of it with brevity:
It's left-wing authoritarian extremism with a particular focus on advancing very broad and rigid standards of racial and gender equality connected to the assumption that there is still intense systematic bias towards white men today even in counties like Great Britain and the United States. In this mindset, emotional security often takes precedence over freedom of expression.
From what I've seen, to say it's used to mean "people who disagree with me" is quite inaccurate. There are many people who detest the SJW attitude and also Fox News-type conservatism (including myself and the vast majority of said people in this website), sometimes even more so. And nobody who knows what words mean would call the people on Fox News Social Justice Warriors.

That's because SJW's don't actually exist as any sort of coherent ideological movement. No one identifies as a SJW. It's a pejorative label that people put on others. If people act in a good way they aren't seen as SJW's and if they do they are. That's why SJW's are associated exclusively with bad things and never with good ones.

Wow, Blubber has the best and most complete answer in this thread. Hidden depths at their finest.

There are probably a ton of factors that play a part in the creation of a SJW.

It could be they were socially rejected by people. and this can lead to them being like "I need to stop people discrimination against people like me" Then they start taking in more and more causes till like everything is a social, political issue.

It could be schooling, some have said their friends who were normal at one point went full SJW after they took some classes in college or high school. These classes could be victimizing people, like telling females that the world hates them and basically brainwashing them.

Its unlikely to ever be just one source that turns someone into an SJW.

They are just one of the extremes of the political spectrum

Yet people proudly boast about being an "Anti-SJW" lol.

Identifying yourself through hate, by hating a movement that technically doesn't even exist. This is golden.

The people we commonly call "social justice warriors" are often people who act like they're trying to push for progressiveness in society, but oftentimes they end up coming across as pretentious people who, instead of trying to promote values such as equality, come off as hypocritical. For example, feminism is NOT inherently bad. However, people who claim to speak for feminism, but yet constantly say things like "kill all men" or basically display sexist attitudes towards males? That is bad, and not what feminism stands for, as feminism wishes for everyone to be treated equally regardless of gender.

I use the term "SJW" because frankly no better alternative exists as a name to refer to "faux/hypocritical progressives." I am frankly annoyed by said "faux progressives" because they often like to do things like try and shoehorn their agendas in places they don't need to be, like trying to force popular media to change the identity of an established character solely for the sake of "faux societal progression," or create problems where one did not exist in the first place ("Shirtstorm," Batgirl variant cover controversy, for example).

They also annoy me because I am someone who is all in favor of progressive attitudes like more rights for LGBT people, an end to sexism in places where sexist attitudes are still present (like various third world nations), and I am in favor of seeing more diverse characters in fictional media, but I do not agree with the ways in which most "SJWs" go about trying to promote THEIR ideas of what "progressiveness" is.

Here is the definition I use and tend to see most often

A Social Justice Warrior is a person who instigates, or try to instigate, debate of social issues that are irrelevant/non-issues, issues that do not exist except within the persons head, or issues that exist, but are over-bloated and not fully understood by the Social Justice Warrior. They tend to use fallacies, hypocrisy, censorship and personal attacks in their arguments and more often then not, refuse to even consider any arguments that counter their own, even when faced with indisputable evidence.

Exactly what Tbone said. SJWs are just a label made to out people whose opinions you think are too liberal. Hardly anyone actually calls themselves an SJW. The term is so broad it's just been destroyed over time by their enemies who lump them all together as if they're this coherent movement that hates them equally when this is hardly ever the case. Since in online debates the word is used in nearly every sentence nowadays it has lost nearly any meaning it might have had initially.

Personally, I might even classify myself as an "SJW" because I often argue and petition for social justice issues online and I find myself agreeing with those labeled as "SJWs" more often than I do with those who call themselves the enemies of these "SJWs" so by how broad the definition is I fit the criteria perfectly. It also helps that I have been called an SJW on more than one occasion in an ad hominem style. Sure I do hate the ones usually known as the more extreme which is usually what people are referring to, but the word is so meaningless at this point it doesn't even really matter. In the end they're just people who fight for what they think is right as Blubber said. If you think something's right and your will is strong you fight until the end.

I think the whole notion of "SJW" is caught up in a misnomer. The people that get called "SJWs" are usually progressives with an authoritarian bent. Progressive authoritarians exist because most ideologies have an authoritarian faction; that's just how ideology works. The term "social justice warrior" exists because right now on the Internet, it is popular to label people with blanket statements. The term "SJW" reflects less on the person it's being applied to than the person using the term. To call someone an "SJW" is basically to say "I think you're a radical, authoritarian ideologue." But the "I think" part of that thought is just as important as the rest of it. The use of "SJW" indicates that somebody's patience has run out. Just because someone is accused of being radical and authoritarian doesn't mean they actually are.

I think it confuses things to try to categorize SJW as a "movement". It's simply a label. The notion that it's only a negative label may be likely true. I'm wondering if it's the "good" alternative to a troll. Where a troll seeks to instigate for the sake of causing issues, an SJW instigates due to perceived issues (and thereby creates as many issues as a troll does).

The original question asks "why they exist". I'd say probably the same as any issue on the internet, people that have too much time on their hands and have taken up a cause. This one seems unreproachable, so they get a high of "doing the right thing" to go with their timesink. (The truth is probably more that people are being put down as much as they are being defended.)

(I'm new, is there no way to quote inline?) So, I really find that definition quoted above agreeable.

I've thought a lot about this particular question.

SJW's, for the most part, are rooted in innocent enough causes. There are injustices spread through society, after all, and we really truly don't live in an egalitarian world yet (and if you don't believe me, just ask pretty much any blind person not named Stevie Wonder).

I think most people, at heart, are good people, and want to help others that they perceive as disadvantaged, because they want everyone to have an equal opportunity. The problem is, there are already forces that are trying to adjust how those people interpret statistics, and, in some cases, access to the statistics themselves – the SJWs who already exist help convert non-SJWs to their cause.

As such, SJW is a self-fueling machine, which is how it perpetuates itself despite many people dropping out after realizing its true colours.

This manipulation of statistics encourages people to start to look at a situation in a very one dimensional manner, and start to assume that social injustice follows rules (while it does have trends, it is an extremely complex issue). Through oversimplification, it runs rampant.

Finally, the ultimate key to SJW is ready to be set into place – self oppression. As a hierarchy forms based on this over simplification of social justice issues (often called "turning the tables"), individuals will either play their role as servants in the hierarchy (such as male white knights to feminists) or attempt to raise themselves in the hierarchy to obtain more power (self diagnosers, pretending to be transgender, ect.). By manipulating this hierarchy they can gain power over their peers, which leads them to believing that they deserve more, due to their so-called "oppression" (even if they may, in real life, have no such oppression at all).

This forms a rigid hierarchy, which SJWs expect you to abide by – a hierarchy that is far more oppressive than what it supposedly is fighting. They essentially make criminals of those who would normally be on the top because it gives them the power that they believe they don't have in reality.

The obvious problem is that equality cannot be obtained by enforcing a hierarchy.

Now the thing that's important to note is that the term "SJW" is abused a lot. I see a lot of people use it for simply people who disagree on a single point – of course we're going to disagree, we're human and we all have different upbringings. However, while the term is abused, the subculture of SJW most certainly exists and it does persist in extreme leftist circles. It's an excellent example of Horseshoe Theory.

Edit: I am not satisfied with the quality of my post. I guess that's what I get for forum-going past midnight. Hopefully I'm halfway coherent. I suppose I can always delete this post if it's a huge issue.

Well, since I've been on the internet for years upon years, and have always held onto my younger days, here's this "old man's" opinion:
There's two things that can happen.

The first is kids.
Remember /r/atheism? Its issue was that a bunch of kids were finding out "hey, I can blaspheme!" So, they turned it into a subreddit filled with that kind of stuff. The kind of stuff an excited kid would spout when they figured out they could swear and get away with it. I heard taking it off the front page made it a lot better by filtering out the kids.
A kid that hears about social issues will, likewise, become a wishy-washy, show-this-to-everyone sort of kid.
They don't mean any trouble, so I don't bring them trouble. I try to explain to them what they're doing wrong. (On that note, please don't try to change the way people speak if you don't have their interests in mind. This just upsets them and makes them double-down. If you're sick of "SJWs," just ignore them unless they walk right into your sphere.)
We're all kids, anyways. Kids that grew up and were told to be adults, so we just walk around pretending like we know what we're doing (well, except for the kids here). The second childhood is just when you give up the charade.
And if you're a literal kid nodding along with this, knock that off. That's how biases happen. You don't get adult points for agreeing with adults.
And on that note, please quit spreading around a bunch of "people get more conservative as they get older" nonsense. Slowbeef and Diabeetus didn't.

The second… Is more disturbing.
The downtrodden.

Transgendered people go through so much crap. They get people shouting at them that they're sick, twisted, manipulating liars every day. When you're in a situation where you encounter that daily, you start to believe it. And then people say "well, if I were in that situation…" as if everyone's had the same experiences as them. If they're not taking the actions you'd take, it's because they don't know or are unable.
So, what do they do? They act crazy and defensive online because they've been driven to that point.

If you're not their friend, just leave those types of "SJWs" alone.

Heck, leave the kids alone, too.
You don't get points for triumphing over confused kids or people less fortunate than you.

I absolutely hate social justice white knight assholes. As a Transgender, Bisexual girl, I do not support how they treat others, especially those they are "defending".

I don't know why SJW exist, but i know what causse them: lack of folic acid in pregnancy.

> Lisa Lombardo
> SJW

Lisa Lombardo is like the Bizarro version of a SJW.

Lombardo isn't an SJW, that's ridiculous. All of her posts are about how SJWs are cancer.

To answer the question in the OP, I think that there are two ways to tackle this:

1. At any point in time, there are trendy movements. Most adherents do believe in what it is they claim to (and if they don't then it's really just because they don't care that much). Progressivism is trendy, and you end up getting a number of young people who parrot things that they don't understand on social media. This isn't just a problem for progressivism (just look at most internet libertarians), but it's pretty much the result of postmodernism. Alan Sokol kind of saw it coming.

2. Despite the fact that what people claim "SJWs" are do actually exist, there aren't that many and their presence is inflated by our inability to distinguish a few social media postings from social trends. SJW is a demonym and, as such, SJWs exist because people claim that they exist. The vast majority the term is used it is used to undermine the opinion of a person who does actually care about social justice issues. This is because those who cry "SJW" are no better educated than the SJWs themselves, and because they have found good company with the /pol/lution and other shitty groups.

ATTENTION.

that's the main thing i see these SJW's want – attention.

they want to look smarter, more noble and enlightened than everyone else. they want people to think they are special.
they want to look like progressive liberals who push human society forward and changing the world.

and they don't care how to get that attention. even if its bad, its still attention, and sometimes they will outright lie and do unspeakable things for the sake of that attention.
even if people hate them it will strengthen their point in their view.

that's at least what i know about the subject, i have seen plenty of this in my country (left wing activists calling anyone who doesn't vote for their party as "racist, ignorant religious twat")

Are there as many SJW's as they say? what percent of the world's population are they?

I think the only reason why certain Conservatives are better than extremist SJW's is because some of the things they say are right (blacks commit a lot of crimes and violent murders, plus, they drag down areas with black people with terrible behavior) but also because they dont label you from the get-go and they nearly always try to use logic and reason first. If SJW's would stop labeling everyone and being so hypersensitive (and being so attention whorish and actually supporting what they say) they would be more palatable for a human being.

I would be tolerant of gays and lesbians, but no special pride parades, and no matter what nationality you are, you go to jail the same, and if you are more violent, you get more time in.