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How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

economist.com

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Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#261

Post by spats1990 »

luckylion wrote: post #213
spats1990 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I tend to think "woke" as a sneer word is just the new "PC/politically correct" as a sneer word. Corporations wouldn't be engaging in this kind of token support for progressive issues if they did not believe such issues were broadly popular. Such organizations rarely do anything for free. The token support is a reflection of something in the culture. Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through o…

> Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public. But that's the thing: a lot of the woke stuff isn't publicly supported. Latinos don't care for "Latinx" [1]. Enforcing more gender-speech in Germany has decreased the support in the gener…

On the first point, a ~recent (2020) poll suggests most Latino people don't even know that "Latinx" is a word. Your post contradicts itself somewhat there. It says "the media are going crazy" over "woke stuff", but seems to make the assumption that "Latinx" is being actively pushed on Latino people, which seems like it isn't true--since if it were, far more of them would actually know it was a word. I suspect the prevalence of "Latinx" in the media is largely due to its being held up so frequently as an example of the putative derangements of wokeness (there are several examples of this in this thread). https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-08-11/...

On the second point, I simply don't know enough about the specifics of that debate, and I can't read German.

I remain convinced that corporations specifically show token support for social-progressive issues because they see some benefit to it; that is, they see some amount of broad support for these ideas in society.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#262

Post by jhgb »

burntoutfire wrote: post #136
timonoko wrote: post #112

More weird is that Merican Wokeness is replacing *ness in other countries. Finnish has only one personal pronoun for all sexes, but Woke Finns add American Pronouns to their twitter pages.

People have adopted burgers, coca-cola, Hollywood movies etc. from The Current Dominant Culture, why wouldn't they parrot things like woke pronouns.

> why wouldn't they parrot things like woke pronouns

Because different languages have different pronouns. You don't adopt function words into your language the same way you can adopt content words (unless you're, for example, code switching, but even then you don't switch for a single function word).

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#263

Post by foldr »

comodore_ wrote: post #215
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #201

I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender. Just like we don't have Asianas and Asianos, and we can simply say Asians. It makes less sense to add an s to Latin because Latins refers to something completely different already. Language is constantly changing. As long as references…

> Just like we don't have Asianas and Asianos, and we can simply say Asians. south americans. your comment is the embodiment of the hola, my Latinx friends meme.

Most Latinos in the US are of Mexican origin. Mexico is not in South America.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#264

Post by systemvoltage »

geewee wrote: post #190
Epa095 wrote: post #149

This is one of those articles which kind of pretends to be neutral, but are still so oppinionated that I don't know if I ended up smarter or dumber after reading it :-/

I agree. The author obviously considers "wokeness" stupid as hell, but hides with the thinnest veneer of neutrality.

There is more to the article besides ad-hominem attacks on the author.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#265

Post by CapricornNoble »

hn-is-life wrote: post #239

Labelling people based on sexuality, gender identity, race, religion is just… arbitrary. Why not label people based on their IQ? If I knew people’s IQ I would simply ignore everyone below mine and only talk to my peers. “Hello, I’m John. I’m IQ140” “Hi John, I’m Mohammed, I’m IQ145” Instatnt friendship. “Hello John, I’m Peter, IQ90.” “bye Peter” I think sorting and discriminating on IQ is the only way to build some f…

>>>I think sorting and discriminating on IQ is the only way to build some form of cohesive society.

IQ, and for other men, testosterone levels.

John / IQ140 / 300ng/dl: Peter / IQ90 / 300ng/dl: Tyrone / IQ105 / 1100ng/dl: <--- Take detailed notes when he explains how to get Instagram models to pay you, after seducing them in a grocery store. Disregard his opinion on global military strategy.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#266

Post by joconde »

mopsi wrote: post #250
joconde wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative explanation: there have always been as many transgender kids, but they hid it because they knew they'd get bullied by everyone, including their own parents.

But that's not the whole story. Kids are also very malleable, open to peer pressure and easily assume identities that earn them acceptance by their peers.

Exactly. Transphobia often leads to trauma after getting ostracized by one's peers. I've never seen evidence of "wokeness" being nearly as nasty. You don't get bullied or singled out for not being trans.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#267

Post by inglor_cz »

TameAntelope wrote: post #110
Barrin92 wrote: post #7

I'm glad that the Economist points out at the end that 'wokeness' has become a favorite of business, and the reason is pretty obvious, as a movement it's self-defeating because all identitarian politics eventually ends in infighting, with its subjective, choice and preference based worldview it's actually ill-equipped to move anything. It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and t…

I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to. I don't think the problem of racism and sexism (two classic "woke" topics) are "Left" problems, which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't see ideas about how to deal with them coming from everyone, beyond a straight denial they exist, or that it's actually the fault of the folks expe…

I think the spectral signature of wokeness is that affluent white people whose knowledge of racial discrimination is at most anecdotal and second hand started treating racism as The Problem whose solution must get almost absolute priority, even at a cost of traditional civil liberties or putting other things (healthcare?) on the backburner.

It looks like a weird neurotic guilt attack that is probably counterproductive to any future common prosperity. Pushing "Latinx" on Hispanics and discriminatory quotas on Asian students is almost guaranteed to generate some weird backlash. Import of the same ideas to Europe whose racial dynamics is absolutely different (black people from Africa sail here on their own and "we"* mostly want to stop this movement, so pretty much the opposite of American slave history) is almost guaranteed to wake up some old demons.

* Of course there is not a uniform opinion on this among 400 million people, but the last five years have been spent tightening borders, not opening them, and even some lefty parties like Danish Social Democrats joined in.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#268

Post by narrator »

SunlightEdge wrote: post #109

On a related point, what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK and USA for example. Is this because we can identify these conditions much better now? Maybe. I don't have the background to say for sure. There is a real fear in society though that woke schools of thought are a harmful influence t…

If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole here, break your brain, probably ruin your career and seriously damage your ability to interact with woke culture ever again, you can listen to an interview with the author of the book, "The Transgender Industrial Complex" in which the author alleges with copious documentation that the transgender movement is complete astroturf.

He did deep research to discover where the transgender movement came from and the enormous amounts private foundations spent on astroturfing thousands of organizations, academic researchers that cite each other and cultural influencers to jumpstart the movement:

https://myth20c.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/the-transgender-ind...

I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us. It's like we're just cattle in the matrix being programmed from above. It almost makes the real world seem magical.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#269

Post by hnarn »

mopsi wrote: post #250
joconde wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative explanation: there have always been as many transgender kids, but they hid it because they knew they'd get bullied by everyone, including their own parents.

But that's not the whole story. Kids are also very malleable, open to peer pressure and easily assume identities that earn them acceptance by their peers.

While this is technically true I think one should be careful to insinuate that this is an underlying cause. I don't think most people would say the same about homosexuality for example. It's just a more elaborate way of saying "it's a phase".

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#270

Post by hnarn »

scollet wrote: post #246
SunlightEdge wrote: post #109

On a related point, what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK and USA for example. Is this because we can identify these conditions much better now? Maybe. I don't have the background to say for sure. There is a real fear in society though that woke schools of thought are a harmful influence t…

What's your actual goal with this comment?

FUD
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