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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#691

Post by moshegramovsky »

throw101010qwe wrote: post #377

This is a politically charged discussion but I think it demonstrates some of the problem. Left arguments, just like the right, devolve into a theme of you are with us or a racist. There is no middle ground. I am no longer in the Bay Area but I still remember one of the depressing defining moments of this during the BLM protests. Shop owners would throw up signs that literally would say “We are minority owned, please…

Let me share the perspective I have as a member of a class of people that have been subject to racism for thousands of years, including enslavement, arbitrary murder, and systematic mass murder. Please forgive me, but being quiet didn't seem to work so far.

At least hundreds of thousands of polite, quiet, reasonable, assimilated urban Jews were murdered in the holocaust. It is deeply wrong that African Americans and other minorities or mentally ill people live in a world where the police can be every bit as dangerous as the gestapo. I feel like it's wrong that millions of women have been murdered simply for not doing something a man wanted. Millions or billions of women aren't treated as if they have the same value as men.

Please look at the bully pulpit standing against us. Most of the power in American society is concentrated in the hands of a very few white men. How loud do you think someone has to be when they have to stand against the megaphone of society? When someone needs to stand up against trillions of dollars in wealth?

Pretty loud as it turns out!

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#692

Post by johnnyanmac »

asdasdsddd wrote: post #170
Ukv wrote: post #38

> 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".

No one ever said the average person is smart.

It only works because we're in a society of judging people the moment we see them. Mimicking the language of "bad people" will get that association. I don't think we'll ever truly "fix" that.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#693

Post by TexanFeller »

cmdli wrote: post #210
yapyap wrote: post #99

I 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…

“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017. Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints…

> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.

It was not just a small group of people. Almost all progressive Democratic politicians started working that word into all their speeches to virtue signal and most centrists also fell in line too. CEOs started saying it in company meetings and we were subjected to HR trainings that noted we should say LatinX to be inclusive of trans people, among many other performative rules.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#694

Post by moshegramovsky »

hyeonwho4 wrote: post #575
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 te…

Right, but the problem is that consequences for a cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl don't seem to be the same as the consequences for homicide.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#695

Post by ZeroGravitas »

> The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it

What did they do that was "An aggressively performative focus on social justice."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Light_boycott

Seems like they did a branded tie in with a celebrity who was trans?

Would it be woke to have an advert with a black, Jewish, female, immigrant, albino, gay, Chinese or Hispanic celebrity?

I kind of feel like it would have been at some point in the past.

Is there a list somewhere of what kinds of celebrity is "politically correct" these days so that corporations trying to advertise beer can avoid these accusations?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#696

Post by latexr »

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.

> Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten.

Frankly, I find it more concerning that anyone thinks HN should be pro Paul Graham by default. He should be judged by his ideas, not who he is.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#697

Post by moshegramovsky »

krosaen wrote: post #31

His accounting for what attracts people to wokeness is incomplete. Certainly there are prigs in the mix, but for most, I think it's that wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously. The challenge, then, is how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously without also folding that effort into an ideology with vague expansive de…

What attracted me to it is the idea that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. are forms of bullying that are definitively antisocial. At its core, it should be about stopping bullying at the level of individuals, society, and institutions.

And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#699

Post by TwoFerMaggie »

Animats wrote: post #653

In the US, both the Left and the Right have been taken over by their more fringe elements. For now, the Right has won. Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups. Too few votes. (See Sex i…

> Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population.

I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.

The difference is that corporate media is often very comfortable boosting ideas such as racial justice, but not class consciousness.

Left strategy appears to be terrible is imo because neither party is left wing. There is simply no place in the current political landscape for a labor party/wing to address the issue for the big fraction of the population you mentioned. The republicans pretends to address it, the (majority) democrats dance around it.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#700

Post by bsimpson »

techfeathers wrote: post #672

I don’t disagree with his definition, not disagree that it’s a problem, but it’s still feels a bit to anti-Wokey in that he calls out things that he just disagrees with. #metoo brought down some terrible people who did terrible things, I don’t think you should call metoo in and of itself woke, not overly moralistic to be mad about sexual assault, there should be some nuance there. He also calls Bud Light woke for… ac…

There are degrees of good and bad in all of it.

Harvey Weinstein preyed on people. Louis CK consensually engaged in his kink with people who later said they didn't mean to consent but were embarrassed because they wanted to curry his favor. Aziz Ansari went on a bad date, and she gossiped to someone who wanted to write a hit piece.

PG says wokeness peaked with George Floyd. Surely there was priggish stupidity that came from Black Lives Matter (like banning "blacklist" as if it had racial connotations), but what happened to George Floyd was legitimately fucked up.

I'm looking forward to a day when these ideas can be openly discussed. It's not that everything done in the name of woke was bad, it's that wokeness is a dogma that silences discussion. People whisper in cafeterias "hey, can I tell you what I really think," but nobody wants to say "the emperor has no clothes" when your wellbeing depends on it. In the last decade in tech, part of your job was paying lip service to inclusivity. If you date in SF or NY, you'll notice a bonkers number of people still signal a trendy virtue in their profiles, usually BLM/ACAB or Free Palestine/watermelon.

If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma, you'll end up with a bunch of people performing for the dogma, because they need access to those essentials.

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