Woke at Work: Why tech firms are trying to run away from politics and failing

Ignoring is not the same thing as supporting, no matter how many times you repeat the mantra.

Ok, interesting to hear

Personally I think I like blind job applications (ie where the name, ethnicity, gender, age etc of the job applicants is held unknown for the interviewers, as long as possible), which it seems to me that you like too

> I'm gay, and for me equality was people no longer caring which gender I was attracted to. I wanted that level of normality - where my orientation just no longer mattered - where I no longer needed a separate support community just to exist, where I no longer needed to fear someone finding out I was different than others, that was supposed to be the goal, wasn't it?

I thought so too. This hits on the crux of problem for me: the continually and arbitrarily moving goal posts.

The thing is, people like me never did care. When I was in school it was a thing to call people/things "gay" as a sign of disapproval, but as soon as I became an adult I stopped that and actually met some gay people, some of which became friends. But ultimately I've always felt the same way about all private matters: it's none of my business and I just don't care. Hell, I don't even have the spare brain capacity to care. I just can't do it.

One of the arguments that used to be made about being gay is that it's not a choice. I never found this a convincing argument. In my view, I don't care whether it's a choice or not. It's still your choice to make. So I think I was progressive even back then.

But now it's changed. It's no longer about not caring but, rather, people like me should care, for some reason. I get that if this was a human rights or civil liberties issue, but it's not. We're past that. So why, then, is "gay pride" a thing, if not to push what should be a private issue into people's faces? Why is it in the workplace? You don't have sex at work so why do I need to know that you're gay? How does that help achieve our goals?

Not caring is now demonised. The goal posts just keep moving. If there were concrete issues that haven't been considered then I'm all ears. But I really don't hear them. It's just "you must acknowledge that I'm different!" while I just keep saying "I don't care!" like I always have done.

There are serious problems in the world. There is crime, corruption, poverty and illness. There are people living in fear every day. There are people living in pain every day. But the most pressing issue is that some people don't like that our language has gendered pronouns? Life is not fair. Nobody ever said it was. At some point we all have to learn to just deal with it.

>neo-marxist orthodoxy

This is one my main gripes with conservatives right now. You go to any of the places you congregate and alongside the more reasonable scepticism towards woke culture, there’s this constant talk of the rise of “neo-marxism”

I have seen zero evidence for this. None

Besides very basic issues like minimum wage, on the whole, the new left does not care about economics. There’s the occasional “bad capitalism bad” meme or tweet, but that’s the extent of it

This whole neomarxism shit just seems like a confluence of:

1. it’s bait to conservatives, so it gets attention

2. If you don’t like BLM etc, it’s much easier to just label them as marxists, rather than actually dismantle their flimsy ideology

3. it’s probably partially a reaction to the media calling Trump a fascist

In conclusion, it’s convenient for a lot of the right to confuse identity politics with marxism, and it puts me off because it’s lazy and ignorant

this kind of captures my problem with the current progressive politics. It’s all about signalling that you’re in a support of all manner of identities, unless that identity is working class, or unemployed

It’s extremely convenient for the neo-liberal elite. They get to sit back and continually rip us all off economically, while the generation that would normally be fighting it is busy fighting an invisible “institutional racism”. The people in power are not racist. Not specifically anyway. They’re just greedy. Often, because of past racism, or just coincidence, that greed disproportionately affects minorities. But the issue is greed and corruption and an improperly regulated society. It is not the invisible racist man, or microaggressions.

These issues still matter, and there’s absolutely a place for social justice politics, but it’s much much less important than economic justice