How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life? • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by spaniard89277 » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:04 AM UTC

lemmsjid wrote: post #367

_zamorano_ wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaniard here. Here, If you are aware of new wokeness trends in the US is question of about 3 months until the spanish left and media start parroting the new word, idea or whatever. The consumed culture is overwhelmingly US based. Netflix, social media... The local shows that happen to succeed, mostly are created due to legal obligations imposed by the goverment. If it were not for that...

An obervation, though, is that the academic underpinnings of the “wokeness trends” you’re describing were very explicitly leveraging modern French philosophers. Don’t pretend Continental thinking did not have a string influence on the situation :). That’s to your first paragraph, I quite share your thoughts on your second one.

Yeah, but french philosophers layed the grounds several decades ago. They're not the ones running the propaganda machine nor pumping out "papers" about this issues nor the ones financing activism over this issues. It's almost 100% american.

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

#402

Post by corobo » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:04 AM UTC

bennysomething wrote: post #336

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.

However there are things appearing such as clustering of cases (for want of a better word) amoung groups of friends. Times did a piece on it a few years back can't find it. Anyway that would suggest that prevalence stats might muddied somewhat.

Friends tend to be similar -- you are the average of your 5 closest friends and that -- it is true that my ADHD diagnosis came about because a friend was diagnosed. We became a friend group in college because we were all outcasts in high school haha. Turns out for a few of us the root cause of the social outcasting was different brain wiring

A lot of the things they described had a "wait that's a symptom??" reaction. I have since suggested to a couple of friends to get checked for ADHD in a similar manner if they seem like they might be struggling with it. Worst case they're now in the mental healthcare system and have access to a therapist who can figure out what they're struggling with

When you find a good place you tell your mates about it

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

#403

Post by a-saleh » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:05 AM UTC

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…

I think it is just about growing knowledge and acceptance on one side and growing need to demarcate yourself on the other. Everything is a spectrum, right?

I remember ~20 years ago, when I knew nothing of being trans-gender as a concept, and I bearly heard of some people being trans-sexuals.

These days I am fairly on board with the concept of gender as being a role in society you choose to play, that is often informed by your sex, but doesn't have to.

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

#404

Post by jhgb » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:05 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #395

jhgb wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Funnily enough, the words “they” and “them” were adopted into English from a foreign language (Old Norse).

It happens, as does grammaticalization, but it takes a looooooong time. And the existence of a large extant written corpus and an educated population (as it is the case today, but wasn't quite the case back then) makes it all the harder. As long as you don't have written language, you can have very disparate regional dialects and language quickly evolving. But the need to communicate across time and space seems to stabilize languages in some respects (just witness the case of English spelling, for example).

(Also, Old Norse was quite a bit closer to Old English than presumably modern English is to some of those languages in question - Finnish, especially.)

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

#405

Post by pjc50 » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:05 AM UTC

newsclues wrote: post #380

pjc50 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous; I've known people through their transition. It is not a fad. Has everyone forgotten famous hacker Sophie Wilson?

How do you explain groups or clusters of young children suddenly becoming trans?

Misreporting? Statistical accident? Or latent dysphoria that meets a "wait, you can do that, I didn't know it was a possibility" discovery?

Almost every trans person will tell you they were in denial for years. If that period shortens, it will manifest like this.

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

#406

Post by School-Cotton » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:05 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #304

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…

> I don’t really see the big issue with Latinx… Here’s the issue: English had the word “Latin” which was gender-nonspecific, and meant exactly what Latinx is used for. It fell out of favor, being replaced with Latino/Latina (used with the same gender rules as in Spanish) specifically because it respected the language and cultured of the people to whom the label was applied. Recently, some have adopted Latinx in place…

Latin doesn’t quite mean the same thing as Latino. The former also includes people from Latin Europe; so, for example, a French person is “Latin” but not “Latino”.

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

#407

Post by pugz » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:06 AM UTC

eweise wrote: post #117

soared wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Id recommend getting outside of your social circle/geo a bit more. I’ve never once experienced this in Denver, and have only ever seen gender pronouns be a thing on linkedin.

My last job we were all highly encouraged by the CEO to add our preferred pronouns to our profiles. Just another reason I left.

Us too. I found it super useful because I have lots of Chinese coworkers and I have no idea whether to use “he” or “she” based on their name.

Edit: I didn’t see the last bit. Why did it factor into leaving? Were they aggressive about it or something?

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

#408

Post by School-Cotton » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

cout wrote: post #321

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…

In English, we often use the word Latin with no gender suffix (as in the term Latin Americans). As I understand, Latinx is not an attempt to be gender-neutral but gender-inclusive and language-inclusive (as Latin lacks the gender suffix used in Spanish and Portuguese, and Latino/a excludes French-speaking Haitians). Hispanic is also gender-neutral, and is probably what most people intend when they say Latin or Latino…

> Latino/a excludes French-speaking Haitians

The vast majority of Haitians don’t speak French, but if they did, why would “Latino” exclude them? French is a Latin-derived language as much as Spanish and Portuguese are, and “latino” is a substring of the word for “Latin American” in all three languages (Latinoaméricain, in the case of French).

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

#409

Post by Tesl » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:10 AM UTC

narrator wrote: post #302

question000 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I dated a transgender person, were they being paid or something? explain to me what was going on there.

They were being influenced. Influence is real. Advertising is not a trillion dollar business because it doesn't work.

Perhaps it's not that they've been influenced into becoming trans, but that more people than we knew were already trans, but didn't have the confidence to show it because society was so unaccepting?

I think you've got cause and effect mixed up here.

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

#410

Post by Nullabillity » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:10 AM UTC

bennysomething wrote: post #336

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.

However there are things appearing such as clustering of cases (for want of a better word) amoung groups of friends. Times did a piece on it a few years back can't find it. Anyway that would suggest that prevalence stats might muddied somewhat.

Makes sense to me that people would be more comfortable coming out of their closets if they have friends who have already blazed the way.

There's also the little detail that people tend to cluster based on interests and personality traits in the first place, so I could see many ending up in the same circles even if none of them were out yet.