SJWs and NPCs

Although it's difficult to find the hardest hit among those on the Left who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome and its many offshoots (e.g., Kavanaugh Derangement Syndrome), social justice warriors (SJWs) certainly percolate to or near the top of the list. Champions of extreme political correctness, SJWs are prima facie evidence of posturing progressivism. The journey of most SJWs begins on a college campus, where they adopt a combination of identity politics, intolerance toward other political positions and ideas (the recent case of Kanye West comes to mind), and a growing certainty that they occupy a higher moral plain. They believe in "activism" in all things, even though they rarely follow up with concrete and workable solutions for the real and imagined problems they identify. Their mantra almost always identifies a "victim" who can be saved by a combination of rigid rules of behavior, the destruction of the victim's "oppressor," and big intrusive government.

In an amusing take on SJWs. Brandon Morse compares them to NPCs in the gamer world. For those unfamiliar with the acronym, NPC or "non-player characters" are created by a game designers, coded into the game to perform specific functions with predictable characteristics, and react in predictable ways to outside stimuli, normally provided by a human gamer. Morse describes SJWs this way:

SJW’s aren’t known for their individualism. All of their beliefs seem to be uniform no matter which college or protest you go to. Even if you bring the facts that debunk their beliefs, they can’t or won’t deviate from “their truth.” They think what they’re told with seemingly no capacity for critical analysis, and once their dialogue tree runs out on a certain subject they either clam up or being shouting a phrase over and over again like “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “HEY HEY HO HO (insert thing) HAS GOT TO GO,” or “NO JUSTICE NO PEACE!”

You get the idea.

This is awfully reminiscent of the way NPC’s interact with gamers in the virtual world. Outside the bounds of what the programmers gave them, the NPC’s aren’t capable of doing much else. Talk to one enough and eventually, they’ll run out of things to say, and begin repeating the same phrase over and over again. They even made a joke about it in the Jumanji sequel.

SJWs get their programming from a variety of left wing sources and execute it flawlessly. Other than the stimuli they're programmed to recognize, they have trouble processing new data that runs counter to their programming. Their response and actions are of the algorithmic kind—often tedious and always predictable.

Gamers are working hard on machine learning techniques that will provide NPCs with a veneer of intelligence. But if you probe a bit, NPCs will remain kind of empty.

The Left has worked hard to develop an army of SJWs and have given them the necessary talking points to provide them with a veneer of intelligence. But if you probe a bit, SJWs exhibit the same emptiness as NPCs in the gamer world.

Morse concludes with this:

While I’m in full belief that even SJWs have the capacity for rational and critical thought, the fact that they choose not to employ it, even in the face of brutal facts, earns them the label of NPC. If your entire identity revolves around the superficial, and your entire belief system revolves around instructions from someone else, then you’re about as good as a computer program. If you won’t engage in civil debate, and instead scream tired phrases at people when you run out of things to say, then there’s no person there, just a shell that somebody else is speaking through.

As a guy who has written his share of code and also written more than a few books on the subject, I have to agree.

UPDATE (10/20/2018):
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Apparently, the NPC meme is going viral across social media and SJWs have been triggered by it. Facebook, for instance, is now censoring the use of the meme. It appears that SJWs don't like to be mocked but are perfectly willing to mock anyone or anything that opposes their world view. Poor babies :(