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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#731

Post by gretch »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #456

"Prig" is in the eye of the beholder. What about when the "prigs" were right? I'm sure the Quakers were seen as "prigs" by the southern slaveholders/traders. The Quakers were early to the abolition party and their opposition to slavery was based on religious zeal which made them seem like "prigs" to the people in the South who's whole society and economy was built on slavery. But we now consider the Quakers were righ…

> What about when the "prigs" were right?

I think the big take away is that being right via a lecture doesn't do anything.

If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).

Instead, go out and do something. For example, defer typing up that long comment about how [x] is right and [y] is wrong, volunteer for some community service. Build shelters for people who need it. Offer pro bono services to marginalized groups.

If nothing else, simply live your way of life and out compete the people who were wrong.

But that 1000th internet comment you posted, even if it was "right", it didn't make a single lick of difference. So ask yourself why you really put it up.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#732

Post by rekabis »

coliveira wrote: post #271
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…

Owners of social networks are terrified that they're accountable to society in any way. That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades. Basically they've taken over and are making all the rules.

> That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades.

This is only a tiny part of the reason.

The main reason is that fact-checking works so well against the right, and has almost no benefit for the right.

Why?

Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.

So “fact checking” is an almost useless tool for the right, since it rarely ever contradicts what the left says. And yet, the right can get very severely corrected by fact-checkers with almost everything they say.

Musk and Zuckerberg are killing fact checking because they NEED misinformation to carry the day. Because if we truly understood how badly the Parasite Class were bleeding the Working Class dry just for a few extra thousandths of a percentage point of wealth accumulation, we would all rise up and bring out the guillotines to dispose of them once and for all.

Misinformation is the way they control the working class.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#733

Post by potato3732842 »

bsimpson wrote: post #700
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 ca…

I'm not a fan of Floyd at all. Garner was the far better martyr for that cause.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#736

Post by aprilthird2021 »

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…

Everyone does moral enforcement though. Even this blog post we are commenting about (which I really agree with) is an attempt at moral enforcement. He even prescribes that wholeness be treated like a religion and gives a whole list of scenarios where one should deny the request of a woke person (same as one would a religious person). To constantly keep up this equality among all ideologies requires rules and enforcement of those rules, aka moralizing

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#737

Post by rexpop »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #432

So now we have pg virtue-signalling his fealty to the other old rich white guys. Great. Just great. The only people who use the term "woke" are social conservatives, and those to their right. Everyone else talks about "justice" and "equality" and "awareness". The woke problem is a conservative problem.

Bingo! This accusation is a confession.

And what are people supposed to do about injustice? Resolve it without talking about it?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#738

Post by aprilthird2021 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #260

If you want some critique of the thing PG thinks he's critiquing (which, to parallel what he says about social oppression, is a problem but not of the nature or relative magnitude he thinks it is), but from people who have agendas to oppose social oppression instead of to protect it along with their own wealth and power, you could start with: How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?: Movement building requires a…

Another point, he is very invested in keeping the economy and the widening gap between the rich and everyone else out of it.

One of the big catalysts of wokeness was of course, Occupy Wall St, borne out of the 2008 financial crisis. When the bankers get bailed out and you just go underwater on your mortgage, people start to get upset and want to change things. And organizing yourselves and drilling with lots of rules and getting on the same page with people you don't otherwise have any connection to is paramount when it comes to becoming a large enough, hivemind type group that can bring about collective action. But if he brought that up in this article, people who don't care about 8 genders and fringe social issues might start backing away from the "woke = bad" message

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#739

Post by jshaqaw »

You would think these tech oligarchs might be concerned with some other problem facing th world. This is the only one they seem to care about and much of it just seems like fragile ego.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#740

Post by charlieyu1 »

runlevel1 wrote: post #501

> The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary In real life, these "land mines" don't usually explode unless people think you're stepping on it intentionally. For instance, every time I've accidentally used the wrong pronoun for someone, I've gotten a polite correction, I make a mental note, and everyone moves on. It's just not a big deal. With a large enough audience, there will…

The land mines do explode. Edinson Cavani got three match suspension after saying “Gracias Negrito” on social media to a teammate who just had a good game. And Spanish was his mother language.

The teammate was not offended in any way, but some authorities higher up apparently were.

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