“The anti social justice (SJW) bro wants to have his chocolate cake and eat it. He will accept your hurt and shame and anger only if you argue for it, and make a dance of facts and point so view, because that way he can rebut you. That is the crux: as long as he can rebut you. Because if he cannot rebut you, it means the matter moves to a higher level: introspection, empathy, shame, none of these useful feelings for the guy who wants to be the coolest in the room, a pundit, an archivist, a logic doctor.
Through rebuttal of your feelings- and he can say “hurt” like it is the most pathetic state anyone can experience- he keeps you dancing long enough that he can ignore his own stake. He cannot, after all, be complicit in something that he is too smart, too decent, too progressive to be associated with. He will not see that his rebuttal is complicity.
He speaks the language of social justice but hates the language people have found to implement it in their communities: privilege is a meaningless buzzword, triggered means “butthurt”, being offended means you can’t take a joke. If you can’t take a joke, you’re lame, because the anti SJW bro’s role model is the stand up comic who can offend all he wants and be applauded for it. This is the anti SJW bro’s dream: to satirise the world with a snarl on his face, stand there and take the piss on people who lose their chill. He sometimes imagines he could do stand up. Rigjt now he’ll settle for being a contrarian Internet troll.
The anti SJW wants to debate with you. He loves debate, that faultless system of precision, logic and posh latin ways to call people stupid. Because when it comes to debate, everything is rebuttable. He will pull any perspective out of the air to stay on the opposite side of your anger: in debate you are not allowed to be angry, you are not allowed to shout, or act out. You must argue for your pain, in order that he may argue either that he, “personally”, has nothing to do with it or that your pain is not the issue. He will forestall all present indignation for his argument that we should live like his utopian future when everyone has dropped their identity politics, live in a perfect mass of sameness and mutual respect. This is so he can be on the right side of history while being on the wrong side of power.
And being on the wrong side of power is his ticket to oppression: he wants in, he has margin envy. Most of all, the anti SJW bro just wishes everyone could be like him: chill, civil, rational, with a black sense of humour and a cynical take on everything. Coolest dude in the room, remember? The kind of person you want at the bar to explain current affairs to you over a bourbon, who can surprise you with a perspective you’ve never heard before, crafted in the comfy slow fire of never actually having to reckon with lame shit like discrimination, racism (he will ask you: “can you define racism?” so he can show you that on the spectrum of possible definitions, he lies on the “oh but that’s fine” end), violence, disenfranchisement (he will put this in scare quotes because really, aren’t we ~all~ disenfranchised?).
The anti SJW bro hates social justice warriors so much for reasons he cannot quite articulate in public, so he claims he is pissed with how their brand of politics is diluting discourse and activism, a position he picked up from the Internet somewhere. He will make ludicrous, grand gestures in this department as long as it keeps the outrage quiet, or helps him undercut the noise. Because something is stirred in the air when so many people are “offended”. And the air, these spiritual reverberations, this deep knowledge of complicity, fear of being called a sham, a hypocrite, these are the things that are harder to talk about. It’s a lot easier to call it a butt hurt mob of illiberally liberal SJW scum.”
– Joel