It's political correctness gone mad!
The Origins of Wokeness
161–170 of 1001 posts
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#162if you're going to talk about history, it really helps to ground your narrative in real people, events, or statements. This all comes off as a history of vibes, and I don't remember the same vibes at all (maybe because I wasn't on twitter).
When pg does make contact with reality, it mostly doesn't even support his narrative. He mentions the George Floyd protests and the MeToo movement/Weinstein - by any measure real social justice issues where the perpetrators deserved condemnation!
He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#163[flagged]
Did we read the same article? It seems like a pretty coherent and plausible explanation for the current state of political correctness.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#164The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe... It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
To be fair, he does say the above, which is close enough. The problem with asking "what if they're right" is that there's no single formulation of beliefs shared universally by such large and diverse group, so you can't consider whether they are right or not, only whether each individual expression is.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#165I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus da…
The difference here is people are trying to address people’s actual life experiences instead of something they believe based on faith.
Or so they believe
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#166I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus da…
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Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#167I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people. As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead. and then on the other side it feels like…
> the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that
CPG Grey’s co-dependent memes video comes to mind [1].
Each group defines wokeness (and defines how other groups define it) to maximise outrage. To the extent there is a mind virus it’s in using the term at all. (Which is where I appreciate Graham bringing the term prig into the discussion.)
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#168> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles. To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine th…
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Swastika use in Germany is heavily regulated. It is certainly not free to use symbol.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#169[flagged]
Could you expand on why this article makes you believe his mind has "become filled with mush."
What points is he making (if you consider him to be making clear points), how do you think those points are flawed, etc..
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#170> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles. To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine th…
Having the principle of "words become bad because bad people use them" is stupid because you cede power to bad people. But really, its not a principle at all, its just a dumb cultural signaling, ie. "I'm not like those uneducated hicks".