921–930 of 1001 posts
This is pretty much a canonical example of what does not belong on HN. A dumb topic, and then on top of that a dumb take on that dumb topic.
Agreed. A dumb topic, with dumb people discussing at length.
> 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…
> gained racist connotations This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem. What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was…
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2014/05/rupaul_s-_tran...
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…
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…
Before that it was "social justice warrior", before that it was "political correctness". It's just a drumbeat of demonization.
https://theonion.com/woke-conservatives-define-what-it-means...
My favourite is number 5.
One interesting subtext to where tech philosophy is landing in all this is that it will be the downfalll of America if woke ideas are promoted, and it will similarly be the downfall of America if racists/sexists/etc can’t practice free speech.
- Media featuring women who aren't exclusively an attractive love interest or a very minor character
- Media featuring non-white or non-heterosexual people in major roles
I find it difficult to have any rational discussion of this topic because it always gets drowned out by overwhelming racism and sexism. You can't talk about overcorrection or virtue signalling without an army of angry white guys present who watch hours of "(some guy) DESTROYS wokeness with FACTS and LOGIC" on youtube every day.
That said, compared to disinformation and identity politics, this is a non-issue. It's a convenient topic to focus the anger and time of straight white men so they don't notice how billionaires and opportunistic politicians are taking their futures away while pretending to care about "free speech". This will have huge consequences not just for victims of racism and sexism, but literally everyone who isn't filthy rich.
This seems like extraordinarily weak writing with very little backings or substantial evidence to the claims. That in itself would be fine - if presented as opinion - but this has an air of a historical biography of the actual lineage of the term. This is anything but.
If this is the case it's interesting to see how each different tech figure expresses this fealty.