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…
How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#522More 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.
The way American values have spread all around the world and started supplanting the native values is upsetting. Everything from commercialism and employment to attitudes towards nakedness and violence.
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#523Earlier 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 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 counterproductiv…
Sometimes it's an unconscious bias, sometimes is attention seeking, sometimes it's a deflection tactic.
E.g. some "affluent white people" might talk all day about discrimination and never touch the painful topic of wealth inequality across the world.
*BUT* this does not invalidates the valuable goals a whole movement.
If you cherry-pick some examples to dismiss a whole movement you are making a strawman.
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#525It definitely seems as though specifying your preferred gender pronouns is no longer optional. This is required "in solidarity". Being an otherwise progressive person, I don't feel great about this and how quickly it happened.
I consider myself progressive as well. If this helps with inclusion, I'm glad to use them. But it brings a mccarthysm vibe that makes me uncomfortable and slightly worried.
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#526As 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…
> Where is mercy and grace in the midst of wokeness? Friend, to be frank, I don't see any way that beliefs in providence and deferred reward can even begin to explain economics. (And I daresay this is by intent.) Consider this definition from the article: > injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled From a clear reading of history and world events, you can see that terrible wrongs h…
Any suggestion to do so runs dangerously close to devolution.
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#527As 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…
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you reckon is the reason for the increase in gay kids in the west after the decriminalization of homosexuality in most western countries? Hint: it's the decriminalization and social acceptance allowing gay people to come out of the closet rather than having to pretend they're straight for fear of consequences. The kids aren't being transed. I know there are several mostly British authors having extremely loud…
> And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality That’s not the proper way to treat depression. No amount of social acceptance will lower the suicide rates of people with mis/untreated depression.
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#529Fundamentally 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…
Did it really come from native Spanish speakers or is it an exonym? It is not the preferred term for the vast majority of Hispanic people even in the US.[1]
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun
A Comedy of Errors (William Shakespeare, c.1594), Act 4, Scene 3:
> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend
Singular 'they' even when the gender is known has been popular in the English language for hundreds of years. Even longer than singular 'you'.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
#530Earlier 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. 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 opport…
> Members of the so-called nomenklatura , numbering perhaps a million, have special holiday retreats, access to special medical facilities and--most resented by ordinary Russians--access to special stores that sell imported and Soviet-made goods that are simply not available in the regular stores. Many also have cars and chauffeurs.
> As a practical matter, the privileges are hereditary, since children of the elite have an inside track on admission to the top universities--graduation from which guarantees them good jobs and a place on the nomenklatura list.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-03-17-me-22368-...
Furthermore, 'inequality of outcome' is often times a good thing. We all want a good plumber, a good surgeon, a good baker, a good teacher, a good farmer, a good engineer, either as a service provider or a colleague. Having an 'equality of outcome' system where randoms are promoted to 'good plumber' by fiat in practice makes plumbing dysfunctional. See the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Which leaves open some hard problems:
* Competency leaning hierarchies, vs. power leaning hierarchies.
* Low gini hierarchies vs. high gini hierarchies.
* Low skill societies vs high skill societies.
* Skill acquisition. Help broad swaths of the population acquire proficiency in useful $skill.
Note that in practice equality of outcome systems have been successful only in flattening hierarchies by essentially bulldozing them into the ground, bringing everyone down (other than the new hierarchy leaders) into material, spiritual and skill poverty.