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I think the "peak woke" line is cope on the center left and right for different reasons. The center-left keep writing these articles as a smokescreen to let their radicals reload, and the people on the right are just deluding themselves that the extremists will give up and/or that the center-left will ever side with them.
Do you have any evidence that wokeness is still peaking, or has not yet peaked in the short to moderate term? I've gotten a lot of pushback from people on this site claiming how ridiculous it is to think wokeness has peaked... yet they kind of just handwave that as an assumption. By contrast, people like Noah have pretty good evidence in articles like this (non paywalled version available here)
I haven't seen any evidence that puberty blocker hormone prescriptions are down or anything of the sort.
Wokeness has lost a lot of battles, particularly in court recently, but that doesn't mean it stopped trying. Its just more land they still need to conquer.
Is there any data on this anywhere? The way you're wording this is a bit sus, making a claim without evidence, but implicitly demanding evidence of a specific kind for any rebuttal.
That is simply an example. But before I would consider wokeness to be in decline I'd like to see good hard data on real world results. Decline in trans prescriptions would be an interesting one; several prestigious colleges admitting 0-1 blacks in their freshman (or 1L law school) classes; several other tech companies following the Musk Model and firing 80% of the employees (the retained being overwhelmingly male and white+asian). Maybe you can think of some more, but those are ones off the top of the head.
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Noah claims that progressives were in favor of immigration primarily, if not only, because Trump was against it, and that the right in general is against immigration on racial grounds. It's hard to take someone seriously after this kind of statement; The left has been very strongly in favor of immigration in general since the 90s, and this has been the case worldwide. The backlash to immigration has likewise happened worldwide, and for near-identical reasons: The number of immigrants were much higher than expected, the strain on the welfare systems, increased crime, etc.
Maybe it's because I'm in academia, but all the extremely woke people here haven't actually changed their opinion, and they haven't actually lost their positions, either. If I read the university newsletter, it's still full of "how to appreciate our diverse gender presentations" and very thin on hard science. If I walk around the campus, it's full of "critical orientation week" advertisements, which is exactly the kind of "critical" you'd expect. The university provides rooms for this week, which ostensibly is against the university, completely free of charge, of course. It's not even very long ago that the university kicked out a right-leaning moderate because "university is not political" and that the university should not "provide resources to political groups".
And this is the core problem imo: If there is a conflict and the right-leaning side is losing, the left will often successfully take away positions up to and including booting them out entirely. If the left loses, they just keep everything they try again after a while. Universities are still de-facto purging themselves of even moderately right-leaning people and promoting quite frankly completely insane people, so long as they are sufficiently far left. Unless we start kicking out far-left cranks the same way we do for the right, I don't see the general trajectory changing much. Sure this or that particular DEI statement gets discontinued, but the next thing is already being implemented.
The relevant line from Noah is here:
This all seems broadly correct to me. The Gallup chart he posts indicates the left really did become much more pro-immigration during Trump's presidency, likely due to thermostatic equilibrium. They're WAY more pro-immigration than, for instance, the 90s as you say. And while not all people who oppose immigration (like me) oppose it on racial grounds, there are many (including on this very site!) who do.
While some schools may still be quite woke, the first derivative on DEI efforts overall is negative. The NYT published a very long hit piece on UMichigan's DEI efforts, for instance. There will still be some schools that are holdouts, but that's to be expected given academia is where wokeness was born and where its staunchest advocates came from.
I think of wokeness today like I think of evangelical Christians in the late '00s or early '10s. They still have some residual power, but they're losing on every front. Your perspective from academia is like someone from a megachurch telling me nothing has changed to evangelicals.
What will it take for you to acknowledge you are wrong about this? People just like you were saying that political correctness had peaked in the 90s, and that it was totally fine to stop noticing it (with the implicit threat that bad things would happen to you if you kept noticing anyway)
Can I quote stats on university hires? The percent of federal "science" grants going to DEI programs? The massive lawsuits against companies and agencies for having basic literacy standards? Is there anything I can say to get you to acknowledge that the giant elephant standing right in front of us isn't getting any smaller?
Ooo, please do. I'd be interested.
I don't think anyone's claiming that SJ is fully or even mostly gone. Certainly, I would tell anyone claiming this to extract head from own anus and take a look around. The claim @Ben___Garrison and @MadMonzer are making is that the six-metre two-tonne croc has lost a few centimetres and a few kilos, and (in BG's case) that the trend will continue. It's definitely still very big.
I would rather say that the croc is retreating back into its cage, which is only mildly reassuring because it has already escaped the cage twice in living memory.
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Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy. I'm not saying it definitely will make a comeback in the next few years - it's no longer got either stealth or an aura of inevitability, and that's a big deal - but it's premature to definitively say it's peaked; I'll believe it's decisively defeated when the SJ party here in Australia (the Greens) either falls below 10% of the vote or recants its hair-raising "let's ban politicians from taking anti-SJ positions" policy (relevant part's on page 5).
The academy is the "high ground" in the sense that a defeated tribe can hide out in the mountains and wage guerilla war until a suitable opportunity arises (like Hilary wanting a way to attack Bernie from the left) - not in the sense that it is the key strategic terrain being fought over. That would be the government and corporate bureaucracies that actually implement cancellations.
A bunch of stupid nominally left-wing politics was defeated in the late 1970's, hid out in the academy for a decade, came out again as 1990's political correctness, lost again, hid out again, and came back as wokestupid in the 2010's. But wokestupid doesn't come out of academia - it comes out of tumblr - the changes from PC to wokestupid are very obviously driven by the need for social media virality. Academia was just a place where a parasite could be kept on life support until a new host turned up. If wokestupid is retreating into academia, it has been defeated (but not destroyed).
No, it's the latter also. As @magic9mushroom points out, it can effectively gatekeep a large number of professions, and it can provide anointed Truth.
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I think we're largely in agreement. I called it the high ground because it's relatively hard to conquer, because as the legible-qualification-providing institution it can fairly-effectively gatekeep a large number of professions with power (i.e. bureaucrats, middle managers, executives, lawyers, and less-directly schoolteachers), and because as the legible-fact-providing institution it's hard to stop listening to it without getting stuck in a whirlpool of insane delusion and losing effectiveness. It is, indeed, not the prize being fought over... but it's a mountain directly overlooking it. Cf. Moldbug: "Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in."
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Wokey-wan Kenobi: It’s over, Elonakin, I have the high ground!
Elonakin Blueskywalker: You underestimate my power!
WK: Don’t try it!
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