Definition of the day (WARNING: will probably annoy my liberal friends)

It happens that today my favorite football columnist published, in the middle of his column about the past weekend in the NFL, a long passage about how important it is for well-off Christians to be "concerned for the poor" and to be willing to sacrifice their own financial well-being and vote for an increased minimum wage. (He appears completely unaware that those of us who oppose the minimum wage do so not so that we can keep our own costs down, but precisely because we are concerned for the poor and know that the personal prices imposed by the minimum wage fall upon precisely the poorest and most economically disadvantaged; but perhaps he was simply constrained by space and could not express his argument to its full advantage.) But that's by the by; what struck me is that he ended with an appeal to "social justice."

Now, for a cynic like me looking at the consequences of "social justice" policies, it's a long-standing joke that the linguistic function of the adjective "social" is the negation of the noun modified. "Social security" is nothing I'd bet a plugged nickel on; "social studies" are the realm of football coaches in high school and quite shamelessly intellectually lazy and unprofessional academics at universities; and most things proposed in the name of "social justice" are in fact I think quite nakedly unjust. Does Easterbrooke realize how emotionally loaded that term is, and how very much the opposite effect it has on many of us than he intends? Probably; he's a sharp guy, after all. And in the end it's just a football column.

At any rate, on the same day the TMQ did his social justice rant, Kathy the Relapsed Catholic did her own rant, this one about what she perceives as the bankruptcy of progressive thought as embodied in the extremely stuck-in-the-past Catholic New Times. It's hardly fair for her to take her dysfunctional former employer as a proxy for the progressive movement as a whole, but I did like her definition of "social justice":

"'Social justice' is the endless concoction by incompetent people of unworkable solutions to imaginary problems."

And now if Jim and Ghost Dansing and Arnie (whom I really truly haven't forgotten) and fellow progressives want to relieve their emotions by riffing on the incompetence of a certain world leader of non-progressive foreign policy leanings...well, that's what a comment section is for.