Ok, I'll bite: What's an "SJW"?

Is it "Steam Just Wins" ?

It's an insulting term promulgated by one side that prefers to divide and conquer, instead of understanding differences and negotiating a compromise. It has become permission to ignore whatever the person so labeled has said.

Social Justice Warrior

Although there are more that 320,000,000 folks in this United States of America, and you might think that reaching a compromise and moving forward would be impossible, that's what happened for a over couple hundred years.

It used to be easier.

Brian

I will respond with a more nuanced, neutral outline of how the term has been used:

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior

Then see (warning: strong language):
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define. ... %20Warrior

In a fashion similar to the manner in which both "liberal" and "conservative" have become terms increasingly disavowed by their "believers" because of the negative associations and connotations of the most extreme members that have served to tarnish the terms, the term "SJW" has also been very effectively turned into a pejorative thanks to critics being easily able to tie the term to those "progressives" demanding confiscation and redistribution of wealth, socialist forms of government, etc. rather than simply equality of human rights, etc. There exists a great deal of room to argue who is really exploiting "divide and conquer" and "tribalism" tactics in the multitude of political debates in question.

The concept of the perpetually offended SJW was satirized--quite effectively, in my opinion--on Fox's "Family Guy" just the other weekend (warning: bleeped language):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__l6alNQsnI

Well that's a fascinating exercise in projection, and something with the unmistakably acrid odor of bovine excrement.

The term is applied with merit, to people that insist on making thoroughly unrelated topics into exercises into contrived indignities that they think that they can then use to dominate and control and silence others with.

In this case, the offender first attempted to direct the thread into some racial "virtue-signalling" and having been confronted-then attempted to not only contrive indignity over the the use of the word "rape" according to a tertiary, but accepted use of the word-but to attempt to make a bizarre imputation of diminution or endorsement of sexual assault (as an aside, I know Mr. Mowbray personally, and the charge is absurd) as a consequence of the use of the word. She thought as a female, she could assert a superior claim as judge and jury on any and all use of the word, insisting that some "rules" were broken-but as I pointed out-it's not a crime that is only perpetrated against women-and with her ridiculous claim of fractured in plain sight-then she accused others of being angry and insulting her.

As an aside some social justice warriors wear the term with pride; but Trigglypuff Jr. can take her act somewhere else, because the SJW's are the ones that are divisive. I give you Taiyesha Baker as an example.

For a couple hundred years, we had free speech, and there were no special little snowflakes demanding "safe spaces".

Oh by the way; the idea that all answers are the result of compromise is a logical fallacy known as argumentum ad temperantiam or the "argument to moderation" fallacy.

Can we now go back to talking about trains, without the word police parsing every syllable for imaginary offenses?

Well spoken!

But I'm afraid in the long run you can't go "back" to trains (metaphorical a sort of "safe space"...) if you do not deal with the big elephant in the room. It is the now prevailing hypocrisy we have to overcome by decency as Ben Shapiro might have said. If you can't adress the core of the problem now, you may lose more than two derricks in the end.

I of course have no idea what trigglypuff is (I vagely heard about "big red" and "Milo") but I found a short clip explaining SJWs,

"The Times They Are A-Changing" - Social Justice. Don't click if you are a snowflake.

Ironically enough, at the european side, these people want us to use more trains so they do have more space on the Autobahn. Other approach, same hypocrisy. Even the pro-car orientated conservatives here do not deny the need for a functonal RR infrastructure. On the other hand, the NIMBYS and some extreme environmentalists are a growing threat to museum RRs, at least one of which having been forced to reduce their schedule to six months due to bats overwintering in tunnels, which had been no problem all the decades before.

We all are now one against seven billion "judges" if we now say someting in public - and thanks to SJWs, there will always be someone "offended", as we have experienced in this thread.

Probably museum RRs should discuss strategies to keep trains running rather offline.

SJW's: Stay off the tracks!

Mike

The scariest thing was the immediate call for the moderators to remove the "offending" message. That's positively Orwellian... if the Ministry of Truth makes the evidence disappear, we are left with nothing to discuss.

Here is how bad censorship has gotten anymore. A few days ago a local channel near me decided to play the classic Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles. The editing to not insult anyone made in it destroyed the film to the point the station had their website crashed with complaints.

Back to the original topic of "what we are up against," another perpetual issue the railway preservation community faces is introducing young blood. As a high school student, I can name about four or five other people in the entirety of out approximately 2,000 student school that hold any interest in railroading. Of them, half are only interested in modelling. What we need to address is keeping children interested past the "Thomas phase" which could supply future volunteers. While Thomas can get children interested and pay bills for many railroads, if fuels the misconceptions of teens and adults that this is all there is to railroading and that the railroad industry is outdated and irrelevant. I'm also a student at a tech school for diesel technology where we mostly work on trucks, though we focus on other applications for diesel engines. When asked about future plans, I mentioned railroads and everybody instantly dismissed it as though railroads have no place in the economy and accomplish nothing. As I tried to explain the workings of a modern railroad, everyone honestly thought I was stringing them a line of crap. I'm sure this is a problem elsewhere, but how we address it I can not tell. The fact is unless we fix public ignorance, we're going to have serious problems down the road.

My experience with outsiders especially youth is that they inherently believe railroad preservation is full of (if I may say) autistic toddlers who like to play with their big metal toys. I don't blame them for this perception and certainly the average railfan doesn't help clear this falsehood. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood with a balanced mix of individuals. Unfortunately when I would tell them that I volunteered at a museum they would often reply with "ohh that's just a white thing" quickly losing interest. That said I seriously feel there are people in recent years who are solely against the hobby (Politicians, NIMBYS, Activists) because of its key demographic makeup. It would not surprise me.

@Cameron Wolk

My experience with outsiders especially youth is that they inherently believe railroad preservation is full of (if I may say) autistic toddlers who like to play with their big metal toys.

You really have no problem with being so negatively stereotyped?


I don't blame them for this perception and certainly the average railfan doesn't help clear this falsehood.

The problem with this statement is that "railfans", apart from occasionally buying a ticket, aren't "enthusiasts" or "preservationists".


I grew up in a diverse neighborhood with a balanced mix of individuals.


How do you define "diverse" and how do you measure "balanced"?


Unfortunately when I would tell them that I volunteered at a museum they would often reply with "ohh that's just a white thing" quickly losing interest.


And you don't even realize that in a time when the term racism is applied to the most innocuous of things (there was a peer-reviewed paper that asserted pumpkin spice was racist)-you were encountering the genuine article-in the form of attributing something as peculiar to a specific race.

Now let me tell you about a "diverse individual". The late Bill Johnson was from New York and is one of the most fondly remembered train and engine crew members at Steamtown.

He made his living fixing and modifying VW's (the air-cooled variety) and inevitably make the trip West in one of his creations, until he had enough of New York and moved to Georgia-and then made the longer trip North in sputtering VW's. I'm pretty sure his self-made occupation didn't support living in the Hamptons.


I have two very distinct memories of Billy-one being with him on one train where his infectious smile let loose and when I asked him about it-he told me how much he liked the clean, crisp air of the Poconos. Another memory was the last time we spoke before he became ill-at rules class-he pulled me aside and presented his conductor's certificate beaming with glee. He never expected to be able to get it because he was blind in one eye from an injury. He received an accommodation for his disability in the form of a requirement that his crews had to include another crew member with the same craft and territorial qualifications. Unfortunately, he became quite ill with the big C not long after.

Oh yeah. Bill was of African descent-but what made him special was he knew he was an odd duck among other odd ducks-nobody gave a damn that he was black, and he didn't care that most everybody else was white.

If you are waiting for the day when people are going to suddenly understand the interest in trains and railroads and congratulate you for it-forget it. You need to understand that to the rest of the world-you'll be an odd duck.

I'm too damn old to give a damn about what others think about what I do and I judge people as human persons, with each one as unique. If they join in me, great-if they don't I'm not holding it against them.

As for politicians; they are like diapers (location and content) and should be changed frequently for the same reasons. The don't give a damn about anything other than who'll fill their war chests and who'll vote for them.

I've long accepted that I'm different because of this interest--indeed, I'm a general walking anachronism! I've had people tell me I live in the wrong time, and a couple of people tell me I reminded them of their grandfathers--and one lady who said that was all of one year younger than me!

I thought it a great compliment, though my wife, who is one of those female creatures who is sensitive about age, hated it! She happens to be a year and a half older than I am, too.

Having said all that, we DO have to deal with it somehow, otherwise we will be having perpetual troubles with getting customers and public support.

One thing I've done as an individual when people say I know all about railroads (or so it seems to them), is to say we train nuts are like baseball fans--we fill our heads up with statistics and trivia! That brings a smile to about everyone I've mentioned that to.

It is bothersome though when we get insulted by the trail crowd and others, including the politician who called me a Communist when I suggested a light rail line as an alternative to a new road, the idea being to avoid the mistakes of a large city with its sprawl and congestion.

Whether for modern services or heritage and preservation, we have a way to go.

That doesn't seem to have changed much. I suspect I'm a bit older than you - graduated high school in 1970 - and of our student body of over 5,000, there were exactly three students who belonged to the local (not school sponsored) model railroad club. There were likely a few more modelers or railfans that partook the hobby with their dads, but we had no common ground to meet at school.

I actually ran into more people my age when I became active at IRM a few years later, but not many more.

Railway preservation is a very exclusive calling.

One other thing to consider in the rail-vs.-trail business is that the trail people have an important advantage over us--a Federal budget item, money for trail work, something we don't have. One person who is a supporter of both rails and trails is strongly convinced this Federal grant money is a source of a lot of the trail enthusiasm, making the construction of trails seem to be with "free" money (and of course with the abuses that come with it). We have nothing similar for us at all.

There is also the matter that the trail crowd may be running out of usable railroad segments. Although there is a lot of abandoned rail mileage that technically could be or is used for trails, a lot of times it's not ideal from a trail enthusiast's view.

Two examples that come to mind--both from Colorado--are the original route of the Denver & Salt Lake over Rollins Pass (bypassed in 1928 by the Moffat Tunnel), and the Denver, South Park & Pacific line to Alpine. Both are a long way from anywhere, both are in areas with some of the fiercest winter weather you ever saw, and both climb into the sky--over 11,000 feet--on miles and miles of 4%. Who would want to drive and drive to hike or bike up and down miles and miles of 4%?

No, a local shortline railroad is better. . .

"One person who is a supporter of both rails and trails is strongly convinced this Federal grant money is a source of a lot of the trail enthusiasm, making the construction of trails seem to be with "free" money (and of course with the abuses that come with it). We have nothing similar for us at all."


And now we're on to something.

Indeed, and what do we do about it?

There were attempts to cut that in the last budget, but the trail crowd was able to lobby for their money and it stayed in.

In view of that, it has been suggested in other quarters that railroads get some sort of protection, especially if there is any sort of operation on them.

Do you have an alternative that might also be considered, including another assault on trail funding?

There is still the matter of us looking like autistic old guys who play with trains. . .part of the general negative image we must deal with. Do you have any commentary on that?

No right or wrong answers at this point. . .indeed, I'm just looking for answers for anything that might work!