421–430 of 1001 posts
Yes it's a teeny tiny little bit of a shame that a college president had to step down for raising a fair academic question. It is not half as important as when a cop shoots a black person dead for dating with a white girl.
If anything, this is a useful looking glass into the minds of people who love to complain about language policing and think "censorship" is our biggest social problem.
No, in almost every usage I've seen it's people objecting to the actual social justice. There is a massive wave of reaction breaking right now. To posit that it's just (or mostly) about some annoying attitudes is absurd. This kind of strength of feeling you can only get from people feeling actually threatened – which is pretty pathetic when you pick out what the actual policies and demands of the accused "woke" are – very mild progressiveness. A desire to go a little way to redress the balance. It's a lot less than I'd favour!
I 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 book "American Nations", whose basic idea is that the US + Canada is composed of 12 cultural "nations", also observes that the Puritans were rather intolerant. The Puritan culture influenced what he calls "Yankeedom" (New England west to Minnesota) and the "Left Coast", which was settled by Yankee shipping. My impression is that these two areas are the most "woke"; it seems that Puritan intolerance casts a long s…
He seems close to misunderstanding a pivotal thing, but glosses over it:
[Priggish] was not the original meaning of woke,
but it's rarely used in the original sense now.
Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
Instead of going out into the world and quietly
helping members of marginalized groups, the
politically correct focused on getting people in
trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
I mean, I have certainly done both. There really isn't a conflict there.
Another, similar false dichotomy:
The danger of these rules was not just that
they created land mines for the unwary, but that
their elaborateness made them an effective
substitute for virtue.
It's the kind of sentence that sounds good if you don't think about it -- because of course doing good things is better than simply making rules -- but this is such an amateurish and false dichotomy.
This is about as sensical as saying that we shouldn't have code review, or coding standards, we should just focus on writing code in our own personal little vision of what good code is. Yes we should write "good code" on an individual basis, and yes we should (as a team working on a project together) have standards and reviews. If a particular team member is contributing zero code and doing nothing but toxic reviews, sure, that is a problem but that is a problem with that individual and not some kind of inherent paradox.
Some things can only be effectively tackled with both individual effort and community/systemic effort. If you feel that things like racism, sexism, etc do not fall into that category... well, I strongly disagree, but I wish people would simply say that directly than ranting and raving about this bogeyman of modern "wokeness" that is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- a mindbendingly nonspecific term. Talk ideals and policies.
> 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…
they’re not negroes, they’re colored they’re not colored, they’re African-American they’re not African-American, they’re black they’re not black, they’re Black they’re not Black, they’re People of Color they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like