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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#791

Post by soheil »

Loocid wrote: post #712
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.

He claims to be anti-censorship, yet he can't see Twitter is just as censored as it used to be because it aligns with his world view now. The same as the Left used to be blind to Right censorship. Maybe he should try tweeting "cis". "pro-breaking-the-rules attitude" come on. He's aligning himself with the most conservative and powerful people in the world right now. How is that a rule breaking attitude?

You can be aligned on 99% of things and still be a rule breaker. Additionally it matters a lot how big and societally ingrained the rules that you're breaking are.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#793

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

enragedcacti wrote: post #493
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…

Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"

Graham is fairly explicit that the civil rights movement wasn't priggish in the way he criticizes. He basically develops the thesis that such priggishness arises as a side effect of any ideology when it becomes sufficiently dominant, and it's worth opposing the priggishness, independent of the merits of the dominant ideology in question.

There's a big difference between these two things

* Berkeley's Free Speech Movement: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO

* "Free speech is a disease and we are the cure", from the sidebar of /r/ShitRedditSays: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#796

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

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…

You're using a definition of "censorship" which is so broad as to be meaningless. By your definition, when I upvote a comment on Hacker News, that's "censorship" because it makes other comments in the thread a bit less prominent.

>Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.

Censorship isn't the only way to prevent the rise of bad ideas. For example: "the solution to bad speech is more speech"

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#797

Post by ineedaj0b »

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…

You don't meet many christian who say they love being religious, love feeling religious, and doing religious things.

They say they love god and his spirit.

Woke is correct, it'a just not the word you want me to use.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#800

Post by jayd16 »

The origin of woke is not the alt-right's pejorative, nor the thing being lampooned.

It used to mean the more literal "open your eyes." As in, pay attention to the propaganda/scam/traps that you face every day.

Ironically, (or perhaps intentionally) it's been completely co-opted to the point that it's impossible to advise others to "stay woke."

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