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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?

#461

Post by kongin »

tablespoon wrote: post #85
wisty wrote: post #25

See "concept creep" - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-08154-001 Abstract: > Many of psychology's concepts have undergone semantic shifts in recent years. These conceptual changes follow a consistent trend. Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizont…

> This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena.... Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood. Also the dilution in the "downward" dire…

It already happened with rape.

We need a separate word for leering, groping, fondling, sex with dubious consent, and violently beating someone during penetration without consent.

Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault short of murder since it included every possible form of assault.

Today it's moved to fondling and people are trying to make it include leering. Using the same legal punishments for something that is clearly different makes very little sense and normalizes rape in the long term.

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

#462

Post by ggggoz »

p0d wrote: post #340

As a christian I believe in mercy and grace. And yes, many of us 'believers' have not practised what we preached. Many of us do try however not to be hypocrites. Here's my question. Where is mercy and grace in the midst of wokeness? I want you to believe my christian message but I will not force you to do so. I don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what I believe. I don't want you to lose your job beca…

Is there an example you have in mind? That is, an example of a dissenting view point being treated ruthlessly?

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

#463

Post by ggggoz »

kortilla wrote: post #458
lemmsjid wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer to your question is actually answered in your first paragraph. In the same way that you believe all Christians shouldn’t be judged by those who haven’t “practiced what they’ve preached”, consider that your understanding of “woke” people might be tainted by the fact that whatever media you are consuming might be focusing on the ones who also don’t practice what they preach. In other words, any movem…

But the core principles of being woke require ruthlessness (“silence is violence”, etc).

What are the core principles of being woke?

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

#464

Post by jefftk »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #137
chmod775 wrote: post #6

Fundamentally languages have been evolving in a reductive manner, which is why adding syllables to terms like in "Latino/Latina -> Latin-x -> Latinx+" won't last. People will quickly eschew these terms for things that are easier to pronounce. There's no malice in this - just a natural evolution of language towards efficiency. As such its an endless cycle: new stuff is introduced to everyday language then reduced to s…

Gendered nouns are kind of silly and antiquated when you think about it though, and many languages have a neuter gender too (e.g. German). The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language. English doesn't have gendered nouns, but we do have gendered pronouns, which not all languages have. Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns, which is why you'll often he…

> The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.

That's not what I've seen. "Latinx" isn't pronouncable in Spanish. The actual attempt to introduce a neutral gender uses the suffix -e. For example "les estudiantes ruidoses" or "mis amigues".

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

#465

Post by anuvrat1 »

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?

Let me help, Someone gets into a new school, he finds someone relatable that someone introduces him to a group of people who faces the same or similar issues like he does.

They grow up and when financially independent go through surgeries, hormone therapy etc. and come out as LGBTQ.

Should this be questionable?

If yes then, How do the majority of kids who are interested in programming/computers become software engineers? should be too.

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

#466

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

tomp wrote: post #223
TameAntelope wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to. The obvious solution is meritocracy and race/sex blindness. That's the world I wish to live in - non-discrimination & equality of opportunity, not "positive" discrimination (it's always positive for someone ) and (enforced) equality of outcome. But the Woke Left has been quite hostile t…

This is something I genuinely am curious about: how do you get equality of opportunity without first getting equality of outcome in a system where money opens doors and inheritance exists? Just-freed black people started with nothing when white slave owners had farms to pass onto their children. If (I think it is) obvious that wealth provides more opportunity, there’s no way for black people to ever have equal opportunity as the original white population.

(Edit: this isn’t to say I agree with equal outcome. I think there’s a lot of nonsense stuff in that sphere. But I’ve never myself been able to answer how to consider how to make equality of opportunity happen if we started from an unequal space and inheritance exists which persists inequality.)

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

#467

Post by plexman »

ggggoz wrote: post #463
kortilla wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the core principles of being woke require ruthlessness (“silence is violence”, etc).

What are the core principles of being woke?

No idea, but i love McWhorter ideas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDlmSn3aGYU

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

#468

Post by vidarh »

Jommi wrote: post #446
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.

How does adding pronouns really affect your life at all? Seems quite a small thing to get annoyed about, especially if it ends up helping someone else.

Speaking as someone who has my pronouns on my Twitter page, the main purpose is to keep those who get bothered by it away, especially because it should be such a little thing that those that manage to get worked up over it are not people I'm interested in spending time on.

I have no problem being on friendly terms with people who think it's a bit silly of me to have them there. But people who are so offended they don't want to follow me? Good riddance.

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

#470

Post by jefftk »

buu700 wrote: post #44
dragontamer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been trying to change gender terms forever. It's nothing recent. I recall discussions about the use of the non gendered pronoun 'e' years ago. To replace she vs he.

I remember learning about Spivak pronouns from (I believe) reddit some time in the late 00s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun As far as I'm aware, the motivation behind this had nothing to do with social justice for trans people, but more as a potential alternative to the awkward/ambiguous singular they. (Or at least that's how I would've interpreted it back then, having been a teenager with no real conce…

> a potential alternative to the awkward/ambiguous singular they

Spivak pronouns go back a very long way, though they were most popularized in the early '80s by Spivak using them in technical documentation. The popularity of singular they as a general purpose pronoun is much more recent.

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