Were social justice warriors responsible for the election outcome?

[TaraJo]

While I do see your point, I'm also kind of monumentally fucking frustrated that we're at this point now where if we don't couch the correct position in nice enough terms, this is somehow justification on its own for rejecting it. "Yeah I did the wrong thing! You were so mean in explaining what the right thing was!" These are the people that rail at PC culture and not being able to say disparaging shit about other groups, why exactly do they need this special treatment to be enticed to even considering a different position? 

There are big communication problems with the messaging on the left, but I think the landscape that conservative political rhetoric is constructing for its side makes it increasingly difficult to effectively deal with them. Bridging this curiously prevalent double standard- where they reserve the right to start shit with us in the interests of not being politically correct, while expecting a certain degree of obeisance to even come to the table of conversation at all- is problematic for a number of reasons, chief among them being that... well, a lot of the big mouthpieces on that side are already apt to take the mere existence of other positions is an anti-them message. That's exactly why we get the war on christmas crap every year, why atheist billboards get vandalized and liberal positions get spun into conspiracy theories about false flags.

Obviously not everyone on the right is like that, in fact I hope the majority aren't, but in voting for Trump what they've told us is that at the very least that shit is not a dealbreaker to them. It does raise the question of how we should be communicating with whatever groups led to this incoming administration, and how we do it without ceding more ground to them in the process.

Yeah, I mean, when it comes to the issues, I think the left is right that there are issues that need to be dealt with.  I mean, black people make up a heavy majority of the prison population.  Women make up 20% of the senate (and that's a comparatively high number).  GLBT people are still likely to suffer from emotional health issues, related in large part to our status as social pariahs.  

But.... how we deliver a message really does matter.

I mean, look at it this way: When I'm on lunch, at work, the break room is really crowded.  If someone is blocking my way to the microwave, I usually just say "Excuse me, I need to get to the microwave."  Generally speaking, they apologize and move for me.  Simple as that, right?  But what do you think would happen if, instead, I said "Get your fat ass out of my way, bitch!"  Well, it probably wouldn't go quite so smoothly for either one of us, despite the fact that I tried to communicate the same message.

It's communication basics here: if you keep delivering a message a certain way and it's never understood the way you want it understood and you never change anything about your message, it's not anyone else's fault that they STILL can't understand what you want them to understand.

But maybe this is just indicative of a larger societal problem: we don't communicate with people outside our niche.  Especially online.  The alt-right talks about feminists and transsexuals and communists and liberals and, sometimes, Jews, but they almost never talk to people in those groups.  Likewise, you go to liberal spaces and they're always talking about racists and misogynists and rapists and conservatives and religious fundamentalists, but none of them ever attempt to interact with people from those groups.  And neither side really does a good job of listening to the other side; the left just calls you a "white male" or a misogynist or racist and dismisses you while the right calls you a cuck or a degenerate and generally belittles you.  It's really frustrating to me, the problem that we're all so adamant that we be heard, but nobody is willing to listen to anyone else.