Everyone who says “it’s not in the interest of corporations to harm workers and customers” hasn’t heard of history or cost benefit analysis. Mass industrial slaughter (companies letting workers die because it’s more expensive to enforce safety standards) has killed thousands. The collapse of the Rana Plaza is an example, and Grenfell tower.
triangle shirtwaist factory as well
The Iroquois Theater fire killed over 600 people due to the theater’s failure to employ basic fire safety precautions to cut costs and make things more convenient for the theater. Same with the Coconut Grove fire, which killed almost 500 people.
Part of the reason why SJ tends to think its conclusions are the only ones has to do with how it frames dissent. Check out this constantly mutating phrase, which I’ve seen restated more ways than I can count: “No, Becky, I can’t just be friends with people who disagree about whether people like me should live.”
It makes some sense, to classify disagreements about favorite ice cream differently from disagreements about genocide. And yeah, I think it provides a real reason not to keep members of the alt-right as friends just because you could have fine discussions about ice cream. But SJ also loves to make another move: the elevation of symbolic, discursive, or abstract harms to actual ones.
The examples are numerous: abusive ships -> promote real abuse, not using a preferred pronouns -> othering -> the high rate of suicide in trans people. And the maddening part is that I think all of those “->”s can be replaced with “cause” without actually harming the truth value of the sentence. But SJ never asks, “how strong is that causal linkage” or “how often does it occur.” The question bores it. Someone out there somewhere has had a conversation where their Reylo shipper friend failed to notice the signs of abuse in the first party’s relationship because they read so much romanticized abuse and got a little blurry on which parts of that kinda romance are unacceptable in the real world.*
But these are often rare occurrences and their contributions are minor. SJ doesn’t care. Symbolic harms lead to real ones, and “how often” and “how directly” aren’t worth examining because establishing those facts would take research and time and science and falsifiability. That’s a lot of work just to get to the real purpose of your thinkpiece and no one has time to wait for the gears of study to turn when there are Takes to write!
So suddenly, a whole lot of disagreements about discursive, symbolic, and microaggressive matters aren’t disagreements about minor things but are, by the Transmutative Power of Promoting Abstract Harms to Lethal Ones, disagreements about life and death (so often phrased “disagreements about whether people like me should live” just to make the argument extra-personal).
And so it goes with dissent: there is no minor dissent within SJ, there is only callousness-verging-on-lethal-intent.
*I have a whole extra chunk of thoughts on how SJ’s “what about the children” re: abusive shipping has everything to do with imagining children as perfectly impressionable blank slates as a way of inflating the numbers on how often these causal chains follow.
Oh my god, this is exactly it.
I can’t be friends with someone who literally wants me dead. I can be friends with someone who holds false beliefs about gay or disabled people, because it’s possible to hold hair raisingly terrible beliefs and believe you are being good and kind in doing so.
Conflating these two things is a bad idea.
If you mean “I have personal boundaries,” just say that. It’s a perfectly cromulent sentence.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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