Social Justice Warriors: Signs of Operant Conditioning

Social justice warrior rationale in Madison, Wisconsin.

Madison Common Council Meeting
Madison, Wisconsin
July 2, 2019

SUBJECT OF DISCUSSION: Whether to accept or reject the Madison’s School Boards proposed contract for School Resource Officers (SRO’s)

Public Speaker: Nick Puetz – Speaking against the proposed SRO contract

Video Timeline: 2:10:30 – 2:14:26

“In 2017 the UW Madison organization’s center on Wisconsin strategy released a scathing report outlining Wisconsin’s enormous racial disparities in poverty, employment, education and incarceration. This report cites 2014 statistics from the US Bureau of Justice in which Wisconsin faced a gross incarceration and disparity of 11.5 black prisoners for every one white prisoner, at the time being the second highest racial incarceration disparity in the United States. Since then things have gotten worse and in 2018 the state bar of Wisconsin discussed the current state of mass incarceration in Wisconsin saying, “while states from coast to coast and from the south to the rust belt have undertaken major initiatives to reduce prison populations and patterns of racial disparity, Wisconsin has not”. Instead Wisconsin’s prison population is accelerating upward reaching and expected to surpass the highest historical numbers and matched by rising budgets and proposals for a new prison, on top of an annual operating expenses in excess of one billion dollars.

Despite Wisconsin’s population being around 7% black over 40% of Wisconsin prisoners are black. The outlook for Dane County, the county in which Madison is located, is even more grim. Nearly 50% of Dane County prisoners are black while representing only about 5% to 7% of the county population. Milwaukee and Dane County are consistently ranked among the worst places in the country to live and raise a family when existing as a black, brown or indigenous person of color.

I moved to Madison in 2016, seeing not only the enormous amount of houses adorned with “everyone is welcome” and “black lives matter” yard signs struck me as odd that such a progressive slate of city counselors and county supervisors would produce such an egregious and plainly racist material condition and existence for people of color in this county. But I’m a little less naive now and so I see that reproduction and maintenance of anti-black carceral disparities is not performed merely through individual acts of racism by officers or school faculty but inextricably bound to the structural finality of bureaucratic functions and to those in positions of structural power who see no other way than to continue within the scope of what’s been going on in this country for 400 years just under different labels over the decades.

At the end of the day police officers have one tool, a threat of institutionalization. This takes form in citations and arrests. They say when you’re a hammer every problem looks like a nail. I think we can extrapolate and say that when you’re a cop every person looks like a problem to be solved with incarceration.

Agreeing to this contract sends a clear message that we as a city intend to criminalize the emotions and indiscretions of youth sentencing young people to a lifetime of interactions with institutions that will leave them unable to find employment and housing and therefore no access to healthcare, education and proper nutrition. When we know this and coupled with the racial incarceration disparities especially gross in this city, and this county, it means that we are perpetuating what Michelle Alexander calls the new Jim Crow. This is the face of white supremacy and anti-blackness in the age of mass incarceration.

The mundanity of business as usual passing motions and funding for small bits and pieces here and there which together weave a fabric of segregated systems of social and economic political control predicated on the supremacy of whiteness. This system predates all of us but by voting for this bit, each little bit of legislation we give more power to those structures of anti-blackness and white supremacy which allow these racial disparities to exist. To say you support racial inclusion where you think black lives matter has little currency when you vote on material reproduction of structures of anti-blackness and white supremacy. It makes you culpable and the perpetuation of white supremacy whether it hurts your feelings to be told that or not.

Do not vote for this SRO contract.”

Nick Puetz July 2, 2019

I transcribed that speech myself so please let me know if you notice errors that need correcting.

“Wisconsin faced a gross incarceration and disparity of 11.5 black prisoners for every one white prisoner” “Despite Wisconsin’s population being around 7% black over 40% of Wisconsin prisoners are black.” “Nearly 50% of Dane County prisoners are black while representing only about 5% to 7% of the county population.”

Nick Puetz July 2, 2019

When it comes to race, social justice warriors seem to expect equality in outcomes regardless of ANY facts.

“Agreeing to this contract sends a clear message that we as a city intend to criminalize the emotions and indiscretions of youth sentencing young people to a lifetime of interactions with institutions that will leave them unable to find employment and housing and therefore no access to healthcare, education and proper nutrition.”

Nick Puetz July 2, 2019

To directly connect the presence of SRO’s in schools as being a root cause of students making bad choices later in life is some serious irrational thinking. Puetz is not the only person that thinks like this, watch the other speakers in the video on this topic, they start at around 1:39:00 on the video and end at around 2:13:00. What these people don’t realize is that just because they can think and say these things does not make these things fact.

First; no one is criminalizing emotions and indiscretions of youth. That statement from Puetz, and others that parrot such exaggerated nonsense, is a shameless and undisguised lie. What is criminalized are actions that are already defined by law to be crimes, such as violent and disruptive behaviors. When social justice warriors irrationally use trumped up emotions as a reason to unethically and immorally rationalize violent or disruptive behaviors then social justice warriors have a serious disconnect from reality and we as a society have a serious problem with the deterioration of common sense and rational thinking.

In the Psychology Today article “Choose Your Actions, Not Your Feelings. We can’t help how we feel, but we can choose how we act.” the author writes,

“Actions are different.  Unlike emotions, they are, or should be, essentially under our control.  (Just as willful application of CBT can influence emotions, behavior driven by strong emotion sometimes feels compulsory, e.g., crying when feeling sad.  However, both of these are exceptions that prove the rule: feelings aren’t chosen, behaviors are.)  Anger or sadness or lust do not, in themselves, compel anyone to do anything.  Our ability and responsibility to exercise choice occurs when deciding to act, not at the point of having the feeling.”

Steven Reidbord M.D.

I repeat; the argument that emotions are being criminalized is a shameless and undisguised LIE! People who actually believe that emotions are being criminalized are a very special kind of stupid, and we all know that…

People are not being arrested because of their emotions,
they are being arrested because of their actions.

Second; there is absolutely nothing trapping youth in this path of lifetime interactions that Puetz describes. These students have choices;

• They can choose to conform to the laws and behaviors that society deems acceptable and, within their abilities, reap the benefits of society.
  
• They can choose to reject the “norms” of society and behave in ways that society deems undesirable or illegal and suffer the consequences of their choices. BREAKING NEWS: Hoards of Anti-Social “Stupid” People Stomp Civility Into Submission!

Humans make choices and all choices have consequences.

What strikes me with the rationale that race-baiting social justice warriors display when they speak about police, is that they attack with one accusation after another dripping with false correlation equals causation insinuations but have no direct evidence to support their arguments and yet they believe their arguments to be absolute irrefutable fact and at the exact same time they refuse to discuss, won’t acknowledge, or blow off as irrelevant the verifiable fact based evidence that the people being incarcerated have been convicted in a court of law for actual crimes they committed.

NEWS FLASH!
People aren’t being convicted and thrown in prison for not being white.

People are not being arrested for not being white.

People are not receiving citations for not being white.

Students/people are violating laws and police are doing their job to confront law breakers and make common sense decisions whether or not to arrest, issue citations, or use the situation as a teaching moment and just issue warnings. All these decisions are based on the the law and the severity of the events. These are all inconvenient facts to social justice warriors that are engaging in tunnel vision race baiting. What we’ve learned from social justice warriors is that once they played the race card, whether was rational to do so or not, they will obsess about it and they cannot, or will not, see beyond their tunnel vision; facts be damned!

It appears to me that social justice warriors have been systematically conditioned for years using some form of invasive operant conditioning.

• First they’ve been conditioned to be obsessed with an emotion button that, when pushed, feeds them a single nugget of emotional virtue signaling “feel-good” stimuli.
  
• Second, they’ve been conditioned that everything outside of that emotion button is a substance that will make them violently ill.

The results of this conditioning is that they choose to push the emotion button as often as possible to get their fix for their emotional virtue signaling “feel-good” stimuli addiction while they completely ignore the intellectually rational common sense nuggets that are freely available in the world around them. These emotionally addicted stupid people are all around us, we’re even electing them to Congress. These are lost souls that might be irretrievably broken with reality.

The evidence is out there that the building blocks of our once more civil society are crumbling and hoards of anti-social “stupid” people are stomping civility into submission.

Featured Image Credit: Screen shot of the speaker quoted.