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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#571

Post by zug_zug »

soheil wrote: post #371

Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten. I don't think what pg is saying is anything new, he's always had the same sentiment around anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian/mob and pro-breaking-the-rules attitude. It's called "hacker" news for a reason.

shrug Well I've been on HN for about 20 years, and I'm not anti-pg (he's about 50/50 by my accounting). I'm also anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian, anti-mob.

But he missed the mark here. It feels like he published a first-draft without getting any dissenting takes on one of the biggest hot-button topics on the web. I (or a million other people) would have been happy to read a draft of this and explain that he'd create offense and confusion with his... attempt to explain the history of priggishness around social justice based on his lived experience... if that's really what this is supposed to be.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#572

Post by int_19h »

Leary wrote: post #59

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 parallels between the "original sin" in Christian theology and "... privilege" in social justice discourse are pretty obvious.

I also find it rather amusing that the social justice movement tends to be so US-centric - i.e. focusing on the issues that are specific to or manifest most strongly in US, and then projecting that focus outwards, sometimes to the point of cultural intrusiveness (like that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US).

At the same time many people sincerely believe that US is not just a bad country - I'm fine with this as a matter of subjective judgment, and share some of it even - but that it's particularly bad in a way that no other country is. It's almost as if someone took American exceptionalism and flipped the sign. Which kinda makes me wonder if that is really what's happening here.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#573

Post by archagon »

soheil wrote: post #371

Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten. I don't think what pg is saying is anything new, he's always had the same sentiment around anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian/mob and pro-breaking-the-rules attitude. It's called "hacker" news for a reason.

This is simply bad writing. And it's also quite offensive given the origin (and ultimate conservative perversion) of the term "woke."

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#574

Post by m3kw9 »

woke wasn't bad in the beginning, but it became more powerful than needed and that power was abused. When you get people to rename universities and streets you grew up intimately with, it's very annoying.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#575

Post by hyeonwho4 »

zug_zug wrote: post #421

Spending too much time in the richest, most tolerant counties in the country can make you forget that we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage. 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 da…

> we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage

1. Who cares? Those colleges are private entities and presumably this admissions discrimination means they cannot receive Federalor state funds. If admitting gay students goes against their religious beliefs, then the rest of us benefit from having the people they reject.

2. It is not up to us to tell other families who they can and can't marry, or what they can or can't think. Let the bigots be bigots in their bigoted bubble, as long as they don't hurt anyone outside it. (If their children wish to leave the bubble, we should protect and support them privately.)

3. A cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl is homicide, independent of anyone's beliefs.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#576

Post by peppertree »

If it takes a felon winning an election for you to come out and write this then you are a coward. Where were these deep thoughts when BLM was blocking public roads and emergency services. I'm impartial to both sides simply making an observation.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#577

Post by int_19h »

djur wrote: post #84
rhelz wrote: post #5

From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]" Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying u…

The antiwoke crusaders are just as intent on moralizing and language policing as the worst of their opponents, and in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech and academic inquiry. To the extent that Graham and his fellow travelers in tech believe in freedom of expression, they've picked dangerous allies.

Much like "woke" isn't really a single coherent entity, neither is "antiwoke". E.g. Bill Maher is notoriously anti-woke, but I haven't heard him demanding language policing. The part of it that does is the same people who have always done it, i.e. social conservatives - for whom it is literally a part of their platform and has always been that.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#579

Post by nirava »

As an extreme outsider (and mostly emotionally uninvested) to this whole scene, and having read a few of the most popular articles, I've always taken Paul Graham to be an intelligent and articulate person. This article is has made me really reevaluate my judgement.

I'm open to thinking about and discussing the points he is raising, but his arguments and the presentation feel weird and flimsy. Lots of anecdata, cherry-picked history, bad arguments propped up by debatable ideas presented as facts. And weird, almost sociopathic lack of empathy (eg: the 2020 "a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video" event)?

I mean, sure aggressive policing of speech and performance in social media is somewhat dumb, but any normal mind should be able to look behind the overreaction and realise that the underlying issues raised are valid and pressing.

Is article is just a performance piece in preparation for the incoming regime?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#580

Post by rat87 »

sedatk wrote: post #337
thomassmith65 wrote: post #289

The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power. I don't know what Graham thinks 'political correctness' would have looked like in the 1960s – most Americans still thought women's lib was a joke, many Americans were fighting to preserve segregation, and nobody had heard of such a thing as a gay rights m…

Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.

I don't think its accurate to describe the AfD as right wing. Far right or possibly fascist
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