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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Paul Graham is out today with an essay about the origins of woke. There's nothing in the essay that's particularly new. Did he know about Richard Hanania's book? Did Hanania know that perhaps his book would be better as an essay?

In any case, I think the better topic would be this:

How did wokeness die?

Of course, wokeness isn't dead. Far from it. But the vibe shift is real, and I think it's pretty fair to say that wokeness did peak in 2020/21 and is in serious retreat now. Paul Graham kinda glosses over the reason for its decline, saying:

How does this kind of cycle ever end? Eventually it leads to disaster, and people start to say enough is enough. The excesses of 2020 made a lot of people say that.

But I'm not sure this really explains it. As the social movement known as wokeness gained power, it was able to get more and more people placed into high-ranking positions. Governments, universities, and big corporations all have what are essentially commissars who are given high-paying jobs to enforce orthodoxy. At first, wokeness was just true believers. But pretty soon it gained adherents who did it for practical reasons – they put their pronouns in their bios because their jobs literally depended on it. It seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. Once woke people get more power, they make demands which include hiring even more woke people, giving them more power, etc... Anyone who speaks out is banished from the organization.

There's no limiting principle here. Other social movements, like Christianity, grew and grew until they took over essentially all institutions. Why couldn't wokeness do the same?

Here's my attempt at an explanation.

Wokeness is ultimately like cancer. It grows but it can not thrive because it destroys the institutions it corrupts. Scott talked about how whales should in theory get cancer more readily than smaller animals. A blue whale has 3,000 times as many cells as a human. Each one could theoretically become cancerous. So why aren't blue whales riddled with cancer at a rate 3,000 times that of humans?

Scott's theory: cancer cells are unstable, and the cancer cells themselves get cancer, preventing the malignancy from growing. It's a rare cancer that grows quickly but is stable enough to not implode.

I can't comment on the accuracy of this biological model, but as an analogy for social movements it works well. Early Christianity grew without limit because it was fruitful. Wokeness died because it was toxic. Today, the left is famous for its circular firing squads in which people are excommunicated for the smallest breaches of orthodoxy. Ultimately, this was its fatal flaw. It couldn't coordinate action against its enemies because it was so obsessed with killing its own.

One factor going unnoticed: the 4chan generation of conservatives entering adult fruition. This involves 100k+ (1 million even?) American teens who went from liberal-libertarians to hardcore infographic-clad conservatives somewhere between ‘12 and ‘15. This generation is now 25-31 and influencing things. Their influence extended to the Red Scare Podcast subculture which extends even to some celebrities (Timothy Chalamet and Aubrey Plaza having familiarity). This cohort was kept in an online meritocratic containment zone where persuasion (memes) were of exclusive clout, and then they were released into the wild with their memetic infections and immunities.

So there’s Musk, but then there’s also an element of progressive memes losing persuasion due to a longterm culture cohort shift. Then it’s also news media losing influence.

A podcast I listen to described anons archiving court transcripts from the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK as 'monks preserving scriptures during the dark ages'.

Just like how the woke college kids grew up and into positions of power, now the edgy memelords of yesteryear are growing up and entering the workforce too.

What you mention is a weakness of the movement, but the biggest reason I can see for why it's in retreat is the boring "Elon Musk spent $100,000,000,000 to damage it, and actually managed to hit something important".

Paul Graham is out today with an essay about the origins of woke.

Not even one mention of either OWS or the Tea Party?

But pretty soon it gained adherents who did it for practical reasons – they put their pronouns in their bios because their jobs literally depended on it. It seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. Once woke people get more power, they make demands which include hiring even more woke people, giving them more power, etc... Anyone who speaks out is banished from the organization.

There's no limiting principle here. Other social movements, like Christianity, grew and grew until they took over essentially all institutions. Why couldn't wokeness do the same?

There is another limiting principle -- once everyone puts pronouns in their bios then it's no longer a signal. Despite the true believers trying to up the ante with ever-more-Stalins, they eventually get outnumbered by folks that are just backing the winning team. The slogans remain at the surface level only, it's hollowed from within.

Then the wind blows the other way and they're just as willing to follow something else. That's why these things don't change at all until they change all of a sudden -- it's a common knowledge problem.

Elaborate theories about institutions and cancers have far less explanatory power than the fact that once it gets known that you can be hired by appearing woke, those that appear woke aren't necessarily so. And once hired (and once they hire someone that hires someone) there is no longer much leverage against them.

Wokeness was a particular expression of the politics of the Coalition of the Ascendant logic.

I first remember encountering this logic from Michael Moore in his abysmal Dude Where's my Country? circa 2004:

Just for once, wouldn’t it be nice to win, especially considering how liberal most Americans are? It’s time to start thinking outside the tiny box that exists in our minds. For starters, let’s stop believing the president has to be a white guy. White guys are a shrinking minority in this country—making up just 38 percent of voters. Plus, as I’ve pointed out before, all the Democrats who’ve won the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt (with the exception of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide in 1964) have won by losing the white male vote. They won by getting an overwhelming number of white women and black and Hispanic men and women to vote for them.

If the Democrats would stop watering down their beliefs to appeal to all the dumb white guys out there, they’d win. Women of all colors are 53 percent of the electorate. Black and Hispanic men make up nearly 8 percent of the vote. That means that women and these minority men represent about 60 percent of the entire nation, an overwhelming majority and a powerful winning combination.

This was the core Democratic logic from the Obama era to today. The POC coalition concept, that everyone other than White Men naturally had similar interests. That White Men held such a large proportion of the pie that splitting up those spoils, once captured, among blacks/women/gays/jews?/hispanics would be so profitable as to mask any conflicts between those groups.

This logic mostly held through the second Obama term, and the wars of the first Trump term were about trying to preserve and expand it.

The Biden era saw the coalition fracture.

Israel did a lot of work. Biden's vast incompetence did a lot. The pursuit of ever more baroque goals did a lot.

But largely, the logic of the coalition just ran out, in that their ability to expand the power of all coalition members by seizing power from white men ran out. Choices started to need to be made, between blacks and asians, between gays and women, between immigrants and the native born underclass. This always existed at some level, the famous anecdote about Shulamith Firestone:

“They laughed at us,” Freeman recalled. “The chair said, ‘Move on, little girl. We have more important issues to talk about here than women’s problems.’ And then he reached out and literally patted Shulie on the head.” Soon afterward, Firestone and Freeman convened Westside, the first radical-feminist group in Chicago. Yet many of the women in Westside, and its successor, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, thought that the concerns of the male-dominated New Left should take priority. Naomi Weisstein, then a young neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, recalled, “The first thing the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union did was vote to give half our money to the Black Panthers.” Firestone, who had no interest in what she called “Ladies’ Auxiliaries of the Left,” united a faction that called itself, simply, the feminists.

But they've come to a head in recent years. Consider racial conflicts on campuses. When 90% of students at elite colleges were white, and the leaders all male, it made more sense for ascendant Asians and Blacks to try to expand their numbers and power from that reservoir of whites than it did to fight each other. Now that whites are down to 34% of Harvard students, and many of those are some form of Jewish or gay or other semi-protected status anyway, minorities have to fight each other for influence and power.

This is a great insight.

I'd just like to comment about incredibly WEIRD white people are.

Moore, a fat stupid white guy, thinks that the problem with the world is that there are too many fat, stupid white guys in charge.

Pretty much no other cultural group other than northern Europeans think like this. The pro-outgroup bias is insane.

Pretty much no other cultural group other than northern Europeans think like this. The pro-outgroup bias is insane.

This is such an odd meme online. The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth. I recall seeing a nice little chart passed around from a study "Proving" that liberal whites are unique compared to other ethnic groups in America...without even trying to break down those ethnic groups by politics.

Moore is just another Charlie Manson type racist, who assumes that he is different from everyone else and special and will be spared in Helter Skelter. He can't defeat the Republicans he hates himself, but he can enlist the blacks and the women to do it for him, and at the end of the process the grateful blacks and women will turn to Moore for leadership.

The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth.

I think most of these either aren't about the same subgroups of each category (some Africans prefer European institutions, others want to kill the Boer) or they're about the fargroup part, not about the ingroup part.

Christopher Hitchens on Michael Moore:

The laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all those qualities.

Of course, wokeness isn't dead. Far from it. But the vibe shift is real, and I think it's pretty fair to say that wokeness did peak in 2020/21 and is in serious retreat now.

I would not hold my breath, yet. Wokeness thrived under the first Trump presidency, and I would not discount his ability to energize his enemies again.

I think if wokeness will get a second wind it will look quite different, see Tea Party and MAGA. If I had to take a swipe at how it might be different I could see there being a luddite/anti-tech angle. I think you can already see some seeds with phrases like 'tech bro'. Plus it's fertile ground for anyone with grievances or misgivings about the negative cultural impacts of social media, as well as the economic impacts of increasing automation.

If I had to take a swipe at how it might be different I could see there being a luddite/anti-tech angle.

I find this highly dubious. As others have noted, wokeness is in many ways a product of tech, and social media specifically, and a number of their issues — most notably around transgender — require the magnifying effect of the internet and media to maintain relevance.

It does seem contradictory and self-defeating, but so does much of the progressive orthodoxy. Regardless what I am positing is anti-tech rhetoric and maybe something performative like restricting phone use to strictly utilitarian ends, not full blown ludditism.

Wokeness flourished when it was viewed as the inevitable stymied by a fraud, the will of the changing demographic majority-minority populace frustrated by the last gasp of white rage. That framing allowed white progressives to lead black progressive (women) by the nose, trotting out blacks as shields to block criticism of wokeness. The minority support of trump upends this entire argument, making it clear that wokeness was not supporting the preferences of the inevitable majority.

There are plenty of other reasons, in particular ZIRP ending and the fact that DEI policies neither improved bottom line nor stopped activist screeching. Nevertheless the vanguardist progressives have lost their colors. They have no leg to stand on, and barring a cogent minority voice emerging from a massive race scandal, wokeism has lost its merit.

I'd argue that wokeness flourishes when it boils the proverbial frog, which is markedly the thing they haven't been doing in the past ten years or so.

The minority support of trump upends this entire argument, making it clear that wokeness was not supporting the preferences of the inevitable majority.

Unfortunately, my view from the ground here in blue country is that people are extremely resistant to absorbing this particular truth, no matter how many numbers are thrown at them.

An adversary that doesn't learn from their mistakes is a godsend.

Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument? Democrats needed to be more woke, promise more DEI positions, legally enshrine black representation, force a ceasefire on Israel (but not Hamas). If the dems did that, then the army of disappointed minority socialists would feel welcome in the now sufficiently progressive democrats?

Sounds just like the DSA meetings I attended in college. Rooms full of white (literal) autists and their racial adjacents (asian autists, latino autists, tranny autists, black autists, white progressives) theorycrafting about the hidden socialists eager for the revolution. In your neck of deep blue county are there people of working class values there, or is it primarily class aspirants?

Yup. I heard someone railing against moderate candidates in CA because "look we sent a SF moderate to run for President and it didn't work".

Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument?

Nothing succeeds like success. Nuking the legislative filibuster to make Puerto Rico and DC states, or otherwise passing big reforms that actually do things (not just the IRA with its patronage handouts that aren't even getting spent because of restrictive rules) make you look successful. Whinging and begging for table scraps from a dissident faction of the enemy party (let alone a dissident faction which contains your own party's biggest boogeymen circa 10 years ago) makes you look weak and desperate.

Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument?

I live in a deep blue enclave of a blood red region, and what I saw is that yes, she did alienate left wing voters by not running hard to the left. Her prosecutorial history in California and her stance on Gaza were both highly unpopular among the University set.

She simultaneously alienated centrists and and squishy Republicans by running too hard to the left, but on different topics. Trans stuff, DEI, and gun laws all came up when talking to people outside the boundary.

It seems like she was uniquely bad at activating her base, but also rallied her opposition.

Did they stay home instead of voting? And were they in significant enough numbers to move the needle were they to turn out? I have very lefty friends telling me that supporting Gaza would have won Harris Michigan and North Carolina (I don't understand this one) for (((reasons -ok jew hate))), and that defund the police backlash will blow over once the social programs start driving down crime, winning over Pennsylvania and Geoegia. In their view this would have given her the popular vote by increasing turnout across the blue strongholds, and flipped the key battleground states. This seems too deep in the woods for me as an external observer, but at the very least it seems that my lefty pals have retreated deeper into their shaky mottes, even as more normies are ok talking openly about how theres too many ugly dudes in dresses talking shit about kids.

I haven't really pressed, but I get the impression that a significant number of them didn't actually go out and vote. They all talked like they didn't want to participate in a Harris win, but assumed it was fait accompli.

Democrats needed to be more woke, promise more DEI positions, legally enshrine black representation, force a ceasefire on Israel (but not Hamas).

Be different from Biden in some tangible way, at least.

It is noteworthy that many hn comments are not amused:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682305

HackerNews is mostly captured now unfortunately.

So perhaps someone can answer: are they TRULY captured, true believers in the cause, or are they engaged in a social signalling game, everyone hiding their power level in public for fear of social sanction.

My till-recent theory of mind is particularly uncharitable: young men pretend to be progressive to impress young women. Yet I have met single young graduate men who, unprompted, stated their commitment to inclusive work practices at business meetings. Like they say it before the beginning of their presentation decks which will feature some black woman in a hard hat all the time, even though their solutions are pure leetcode deskbound shit. Its like true believers reciting the shahada. What gives?

So perhaps someone can answer: are they TRULY captured, true believers in the cause, or are they engaged in a social signalling game, everyone hiding their power level in public for fear of social sanction.

There are plenty of true believers in the tech world, and they sound like that.

Well, the tech industry runs on autists and a good fraction of them are MtF now.

There are certainly true believers, but there are also fair weather friends and ideologies of convenience.

There's a whole lot of voldemorting there. Claiming you can't say woke since it "doesn't mean anything" or is "just a boogeyman at this point".

Before I start, I think we need to make it clear that by "woke" we mean a certain kind of racial and sexual politics rooted in the idea of recognizing oppression. It's a broad definition, but it's important that we distinguish woke politics from typical left-wing politics than have been around for decades, as a lot of right-wing detractors have lumped these policies together in an attempt at discrediting them. So, by my definition, simply arguing for stricter environmental regulations for the normal reasons isn't woke. Arguing for stricter environmental regulations because of the disproportionate impact of air pollution on communities of color is.

That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes. One only has to look at the history of the movement to get a feel for how unpopular it really was among Democrats. It started around 2012 in the wake of the Trayvon Martin scandal, but it didn't really have any appreciable influence on Obama's reelection campaign. The late Obama administration made a few changes regarding sexual assault on campus, trans people in the military, and the like, and while woke ideas were gaining greater prominence, the work "woke" wasn't even in the public consciousness yet.

That wouldn't happen until the 2016 primary season got into full swing in the summer of 2015, by which point a number of blacks killed at the hands of police led to riots and other expressions of outrage. But while these things were gaining media prominence, they hadn't coalesced into any real policy proposals. The 2016 Democratic primary was supposed to be a coronation of Hillary Clinton, whose style was straight out of the 1990s, but was met with a challenge by Bernie Sanders, whose ideas were more out of the 1960s. The woke set tried to glom onto Sanders as, being far to the left of Hillary, he seemed to have the most promise, but his ideas centered more around class and economic inequality than identity politics. He would occasionally give a nod to his new compatriots, but it was never a central part of his platform. In any event, he lost the nomination.

After Trump won the presidency, woke politics gained increasing prominence in the media, and would seem to be the future of the Democratic party. Yet the 2020 primary field, despite being the largest in recent memory, failed to produce a single credible woke candidate. The wokest was probably Kirsten Gillebrand, who identified herself as a “white woman of privilege” and promised to reach out to “white women in the suburbs who voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is.” Yet her campaign never got any traction and she was done by the end of summer, 2019. Beto O'Rourke's woke credentials didn't run as deep as Gillebrand's as he tried to unseat Ted Cruz in 2018 as a pragmatic centrist, but his presidential run saw him embrace wokeness in an attempt to distinguish himself. He too floundered, and dropped out in November. Kamala Harris actually had the best run of the woke candidates, but this is subject to some qualifications. First, her wokeness wasn't explicit; you had to squint to see it. Second, though she did get some momentum—in contrast to the other two, who got none—she couldn't sustain it and had to drop out in December.

What about the candidates who actually made it to the primaries? There was Sanders, who had more concessions to the progressive left but didn't really change who he was. There was Liz Warren, the darling of the woke media types. She was basically running a Sanders-lite campaign that had a few nods to racial and gender politics but was nonetheless centered around inequality and corruption. There was Mike Bloomberg, a former Republican and Independent who was nobody's idea of woke and who nobody voted for anyway. There were Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, clearly vying for the centrist lane. And there was Joe Biden, ultimate winner of the nomination and the election, who was also running as a centrist. He was woke in the sense that he was the only candidate who could get a significant amount of black votes, but in this sense he seemed more like a throwback to Bill Clinton than the vanguard of racial politics. And as woke rhetoric heated up during the summer of 2020, he would take positions explicitly contrary to the worst woke excesses.

So there we were. In 2019, as wokeness was nearing its peak, the Democratic field could not support a single woke candidate. Liz Warren, the wokest candidate in the eventual primary field, did miserably. The eventual nominee didn't embrace it during primary season and didn't turn to it in the general, even as its public prominence was peaking. The most prominent advocates of wokeism in the political arena were The Squad, a group of lefty representatives from safe districts. While they got a lot of media attention, they were essentially freshmen who didn't hold any leadership positions and didn't have any real influence. The most prominent piece of legislation they produced was the Green New Deal draft, a document so widely ridiculed that most Democrats disowned it as an overenthusiastic preliminary draft b some plucky kids that was never meant to see the light of day, let alone become a serious proposal.

The biggest political successes of wokeness were in local governments in heavily left-leaning areas, particularly on the West Coast. But these are local governments, and for all the press their policies got, they never impacted more than a very small percentage of the total population. It's telling that when people are discussing the effects of woke culture it almost always comes down to a few things that don't really mean anything. For instance, I have yet to read a critique of wokeness that doesn't mention pronouns in email signatures. But what does this really mean? As much as conservatives would like to view it as a symbol of capitulation to radical ideology, it's really just the cheapest, lowest-effort thing a company can do to make it look like they're changing the status quo.

Which leads us to the biggest changes corporations made: DEI initiatives. Were these merely symbolic? Yes, in the sense that they aren't anything other than a spinoff of the HR department into something that sounds more impressive.But what did they actually do? Mostly investigate discrimination claims that HR would have to investigate anyway. Wed to this was the implementation of various training programs meant to counter this, which is why companies were spending large sums having people like Robin D'Angelo speak at all-hands meetings on Zoom. But the rise, and subsequent downfall, of these initiatives wasn't merely symbolic, or necessarily borne out of a sincere desire to combat racism, or sexism, or whatever.

No, they were borne out of the belief that there was a growing zeitgeist that would make them subject to additional liability for employment discrimination. So, in order to show juries that you're Taking Discrimination Seriously, you have additional trainings and a dedicated DEI staff and prompt investigation of complaints. But aside from the investigation of complaints, this additional stuff doesn't do much. Employment discrimination suits ended up being based on the same boring grounds they were before wokeness became prominent. Very few attorneys were willing to file suits based on microaggressions or implicit bias or whatever, and those who did couldn't find willing juries. And even if there was a jury willing to entertain these notions, few of them would reconsider because of some bullshit training the supervisor attended a year earlier. Now that it's clear that shit like that isn't going to play they can move the discrimination investigations back to HR where they belong and get rid of all the trainings that don't accomplish anything useful.

This is a large underplaying of DEI/Woke, particularly within corporate HR, and within the Biden administration proper. He may have run as a centrist, he governed as a wokist. Media kept calling him centrist of course. Perhaps even attacking him from the left as he invited naked gays to the White House.

So how if woke stuff never polls over 60% in California are there pride flags in classrooms in Galveston, TX, entire wings of hospitals dedicated to choppping off 12 year olds penises and breasts in Nashville, TN, and admissions departments giving scholarships to Black Lesbian 'B' students with a 24 ACT and stumbling over themselves to keep out a 4.0 White Dude with a 35, in Gainsville, FL?

The phenomenon is that so many people in the mainstream refuse to have enemies to their left. This meant moderates never critiqued the extreme leftists until they had already been expunged (as we have seen at basically all mainstream media organizations, most are to the left of Elizabeth Warren). So only institutions subject to market pressures (and most big business and all education has been shielded from these recently) and anonymous voting were able to resist wokism for the longest time.

Now perhaps we have gotten to an inflection point where the insanity of it is exposed. But again, perhaps not, perhaps it is merely a speedbump, the wokists certainly will not stop trying, and few will be reformed.

So how if woke stuff never polls over 60% in California are there pride flags in classrooms in Galveston, TX, entire wings of hospitals dedicated to choppping off 12 year olds penises and breasts in Nashville, TN, and admissions departments giving scholarships to Black Lesbian 'B' students with a 24 ACT and stumbling over themselves to keep out a 4.0 White Dude with a 35, in Gainsville, FL?

The fact that you have to resort to obvious hyperbole proves my point.

  • -13

Which part of it is obvious hyperbole? I see maybe some exaggeration in details (like, maybe child trans surgery dept does not take entire wing but shares it with other surgical needs) but which part is supposed to be obvious here?

It's hyperbolic in the implication. Yes, I'm sure you can find some classroom in Galveston with a Pride flag in it, but the existence of one isn't necessarily an indication that this is a widespread phenomenon, any more than a British flag in a classroom in Des Moines is evidence of widespread Anglophilia. the fact that Vanderbilt has a trans surgery center that may have, at one time, performed an operation on a minor is a far cry from them having an entire wing at the hospital dedicated to pediatric trans surgeries. And just because one particular person was admitted to the University of Florida doesn't mean that they've gone full DEI. If they're really stumbling over themselves to keep out highly-qualified white dudes then it doesn't explain how they continue to make up a large percentage of the student body. And it really doesn't explain why the proportion of black students has been trending downward for over a decade, to the point that it's only half of what it was in 2010.

but the existence of one isn't necessarily an indication that this is a widespread phenomenon

But it is. I mean, I don't know specifically about Galveston, but I am aware about dozens of cases without even trying to look for any, just because of how saturated the scene is with this phenomenon. Maybe out of all classrooms the ones with Pride flags are still a minority, but I remember a time where it wasn't a thing at all. Now it's not only a thing, it's a common thing that is not surprising anymore. Some like it, some hate it, but nobody is surprised "how could it happen?!" - everybody knows how it happens.

that Vanderbilt has a trans surgery center that may have, at one time, performed an operation on a minor

You know perfectly well that minor transition surgery is not "one time" thing, there are people that specialize in it, publicize in it and it happened thousands of times. This is not adequately described as "may have, at one time", and I think you know it as well as I do, so what exactly are you doing here trying to present something that is true not only as fiction, but as "obvious" fiction as if everybody should have subscribed on the notion of pretending it does not exist? I mean I can get a person that thinks it's a good thing, it helps children, it cures them from terrible mental illness - I think they are horribly mistaken, but at least they have a consistent position to stand on. But saying something that is known to be true to be obviously false? What's that?

just because one particular person was admitted to the University of Florida doesn't mean that they've gone full DEI.

Again, we know that DEI is well beyond one particular person, with whole departments being allocated to this and rules explicitly known to be modified to satisfy it, and people are being forced to submit their positions in support of DEI as a condition of employment and promotion. Again, these are widely known facts, how it is "obvious" that it doesn't happen?

If they're really stumbling over themselves to keep out highly-qualified white dudes then it doesn't explain how they continue to make up a large percentage of the student body.

Very simple - there are a lot of highly-qualified white dudes (especially when you count Asian dudes as white, which colleges already do) and not a lot of even barely qualified idpol approved candidates. If the group supplies to many qualified candidates (like Asians) they get automatically demoted from the preferred list. So if they want those sweet parent money and student loans to roll in, they need to accept some white dudes. That said, Harvard has been fighting for over a hundred years to get the Jewish student percentage under 12% or so, and I've read recently that they emerged victorious. So if there's a will, there's a way. What again remains unexplained is how these well known facts are "obvious" exaggeration?

No, it doesn't. Even if there aren't entire hospital wings devoted to transgender surgeries, or if it's just one wing of one hospital, or whatever it is that makes it hyperbole, the amount by which the trans issue has been pushed over the past decade is insane. I'll remind you it was trans activists themselves who swore up and down that no one is doing irreversible procedures on minors, as they were penetrating ze cabinets of the Biden administration to hatch a conspiracy to abolish age limits on irreversible gender procedures.

That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.

Well, it did get the FAA to blatantly enable people to cheat in order to fix the racial admission ratio of traffic controllers.

And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.

Citing something that was implemented between 2009 and 2014 is hardly evidence of the woke explosion having influenced anything.

And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.

This is based on the assumption that "defund the police" and other movements led to a conscious effort to decrease policing that resulted in a higher murder rate. But the increase in murder rate happened everywhere, and to much the same degree. I haven't seen any study that's attempted to grade cities based on how enthusiastic they were about implementing police reform and looking at how the murder rates responded. Hell, Dallas and Miami had Republican mayors and still couldn't avoid the crime increase, so I doubt that this phenomenon was solely driven by policy decisions. Until someone actually takes a look at this, it's nothing more than conjecture.

Dallas has a Republican mayor, but that’s because he switched parties after being elected as a democrat(this is reasonably common in Texas politics, but a Dallas mayor is unusually high profile for it). The Republican didn’t win the election and every other elected official is a democrat.

Preliminary:

  • Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.
  • In the Anglo-American sphere, it has tended to grow, not in a straight line, but in a saw-tooth pattern -- three steps to the left, one to the right. During the 1960s and early 70s we went three steps to the left on race communism, then there was a bit of a movement rightward during the 1990s. We went another three steps to the left from 2012 to 2021, and now there is a bit of a movement back to the right. However, we are still a long way to returning to the status quo of 2010.

it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.

Nuts.

  • The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.
  • The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).

And if you say, "this is mainly a problem of the blue cities" -- well, I don't accept "just move to the reservation the suburb bro" as a cost-less mitigation. "Just give up on your ability to hold on to the central nodes and your ability to coordinate easily." The cities becoming less habitable for white, family-oriented, traditional families is a huge defeat.

  • The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.
  • The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.
  • The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"
  • The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.
  • Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.

Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.

I'm not playing this game. Sure, you can trace the roots of any political or intellectual movement back hundreds of years or even further. But that's not what anyone is talking about when they mean "woke". I've been in enough online discussions to recognize that this is just an entree to claiming that Marbury v. Madison / The 14th Amendment / Women's Suffrage / The Progressive Era / The New Deal / The Civil Rights Act / any number of other things is the moment the true spirit of the founding was lost and America started to go to hell in a handbasket, but I'm not buying it, not least of which because most of the people complaining about wokeness aren't buying it either. Not least of which because a colorblind society a la Dr. King was anathama to a large enough segment of the population as to be a progressive idea for the time but is the essence of anti-woke ideology today.

The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.

I've been hearing complaints about the alleged intrusion of wokeness into the elementary school curriculum for years, but there's been a paucity of concrete evidence. It's never anything that anyone's kids are bringing home, but what they heard is going on at a school district that's close enough to seem familiar but not so close that there's a good chance of actually knowing anyone whose kids go there. I'd expect that in this era of cell phone cameras and social media that the people who are outraged over this would have no problem coming up with examples of worksheets, reading materials, etc. that is supposedly indoctrinating our children, but somehow the only things I've ever seen produced are copypasta obtained from Google Images.

As to why kids aren't reading the classics of American literature anymore, my cousin, an elementary school teacher, gave me the answer, and it's more boring than some communist plot to make every story about black people. Basically, the so-called "curriculum experts" who decide these things came to the conclusion that the reading material needed to be specially tailored so that conformed to the precise reading level that was expected of the children and contained all the necessary vocabulary words but not any that were too hard. The result was that none of the existing children's literature filled all of the specific requirements, so they essentially had to commission a lot of stuff that did.

Anyway, this isn't a new thing. I was in elementary school in the early 1990s, and while we read some of these books, it was always apart from the standard curriculum. In any event, most of the stuff (like Charlotte's Web, for instance) involved all animal characters, so I'm not sure what was supposed to have especially inspired me as a young white boy. the stuff we actually read from the provided textbooks had no shortage of multicultural influence, so I'm not going to chalk up the mere existence of stories that center around black characters and traditions to some woke mind-virus.

The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).

If you're going to jettison statistics in favor of vibes, you also have to consider how much the narrative contributes to those vibes. When I was writing the entry on the South Side for my Pittsburgh series, I discussed the increased perception that the South Side was unsafe, a perception that wasn't really supported by the statistics. At first, I thought that maybe the perception was being influenced by high-profile shootings that made the news. But I was surprised to find a similar number of high-profile shootings in 2014 as in 2022. The difference was that in 2014, there was no narrative about how the South Side was becoming increasingly unsafe in the wake of a post-pandemic crime wave. With the overall crime rate having gone down the previous few years, there was no reason to believe that anything was out of the ordinary, so the shootings were reported on, chalked up to bad dudes hanging around nuisance bars after-hours, and quickly forgotten about.

In 2021 and 2022, after a summer of protests, rising crime rates, and being told that police were at the end of their rope, a similar number of instances caused the widespread perception that the South Side was unsafe, at least late at night on weekends, and it accordingly prompted various police strike forces and visits from the mayor. Never mind that the crime rate in the neighborhood was roughly similar to 2014, including the number of shootings that made the news. Now it was dangerous when it wasn't before. Are people really responding to increased risk of crime victimization, or to a conservative narrative that says woke policies are sending our cities to hell in a handbasket?

The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.

Just out of curiosity, I checked the demographics of Harvard. The class of 2010 is roughly similar to the class of 2023. The biggest gains for blacks in university admissions overall seemed to happen in the 1980s. But this is also concurrent with the biggest gains made by Asians. Not only did this change happen in the pre-woke era, it happened at a time when blacks made huge gains in closing the high school graduation rate gap. It's no surprise that the percentage of blacks in a certain college will increase at a time when the college-eligible black population is also increasing.

The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.

Fundamentally? I can't speak to any changes that have happened since I was there in the early 2000s, but I'd bet they're nothing compared to the changes made in the 1960s, prior to which men couldn't even get into women's dorms and people had to sign in and out, or since the 1940s, when you add to that the fact that the overall college population was 75% male, and all-girl's schools were much more prominent than they are today, meaning that if you went to a big college like Ohio State or Notre Dame, you probably weren't dating any fellow students.

The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"

Hispanics were 5% of the US population in 1970, 6% in 1980, 8% in 1990, 12.5% in 2000, 16% in 2010, and 19% in 2020. The demographics seem to be changing at about the same clip as they have for decades. As an aside, this is why people who are anti-immigration are often accused of being racist. the official explanations range between worrying about them taking American jobs (if you assume they work), and leeching off of the welfare state (assuming they don't work), which at least are credible economic concerns. But here you make it sound like the real concern is demographic, which is as much as most Trump critics suspect.

The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.

If this really happened then Mr. Magire was a fool to not take the statement to an attorney. If Google was actually using minority hiring quotas then they would have settled for a pretty penny to avoid discovery and the attendant publicity. Even the all-in DEI grifter employment law firms around here are quick to warn that DEI is not affirmative action and that private companies need to focus their efforts on recruiting and "fostering an inclusive atmosphere" and steer clear of anything that could be construed as a Title VII violation. I'd be surprised if a company that can afford the kind of attorneys Google can would be this stupid about the whole thing. And who are these unqualified black senior executives I keep hearing so much about?

Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.

School systems encouraging this kind of trans-affirmation or whatever you want to call it isn't so much a symptom of woke ideology as it is of administrators who are spineless when it comes to discipline. I hear it from high school teachers and parents in several districts that administrators are loathe to discipline all but the most troublesome students, because the parents all think their own kids are angels and can't be inconvenienced by after-school detentions or suspension. The teachers are basically told to stand down; they can send the kid to the principal, but he just comes back without punishment. The result is that bullying is rampant, and the bullied kids end up going trans because it at least gives them leverage over the teacher that they didn't have before. And this isn't happening in highly-rated PMC school districts in the suburbs; it may be happening in urban areas, but the stories I'm hearing come from rural parts of the rust belt where the parents in question aren't voting for Kamala Harris.

I know you put a lot more effort into the rest of your post, but..

worksheets, reading materials, etc. that is supposedly indoctrinating our children

Reading this paragraph knowing that you have been here for awhile is something else! I have questions. What do you think of Critical Theory and do you believe it has impacted K-12 curriculum in a significant way?

Second question, what do you think of this toolkit for teachers and would you accept it as evidence for the kind of "woke" people are talking about? There is an FAQ page so you don't have to download the materials. The first 'stride' has 30 mentions of 'praxis' and 41 mentions of 'critical'.

If you are interested in seeing what kind of crack pot lunatics contributed to this, you can find them in this PDF. In case you don't want to check that, then it is meant to demonstrate that this was developed, propagated, and adopted by real educators-- in addition to goof balls.

Equitable Math is not applied in every school across the country. It is (or was) applied in deep blue urban cities such as Seattle. Critical Theory has impacted K-12 curriculums across the country in a major way. As you've identified, it enters other areas of K-12 like tracking or student discipline.

I hear it from high school teachers and parents in several districts that administrators are loathe to discipline all but the most troublesome students, because the parents all think their own kids are angels and can't be inconvenienced by after-school detentions or suspension.

Parents hate it, teachers hate it, yet the trend toward more relaxed discipline just kept growing. I guess a policy like minimize suspensions at great cost could theoretically be implemented at the behest the 5% of parents with troublesome kids. They may have gained outsized influence on discipline policy at schools in the last 20 years. I'm not sure how. They didn't seem to have that large of an influence 20 years ago. Maybe such policies are justified with commonly accepted ideas like equity which are related to other ideas in education. I'm open to other theories.

Education has to be one of the most difficult positions to argue against the pervasiveness of woke. Educators are some of the bluest of the blue. Their counterparts in academia are sometimes so blue they're red. Your average teacher in South Carolina is a normal person who wants to learn kids and probably doesn't want to turn them gay. Still, much of school is indoctrination. The indoctrination many kids get today is more woke than it was in 1990. Usually not to excess, depending on tolerance, due to the normalness of average teachers. Directionally, without a doubt.

What do you think of Critical Theory and do you believe it has impacted K-12 curriculum in a significant way?

I'm not a fan of it personally, but I haven't seen evidence that it has affected the curriculum of the average school in any significant way. I've heard a lot of accusations that it has, but there's a difference between news reports and actual substance to the allegations. I don't doubt that critical theory is part of school curriculum somewhere, but I also don't doubt that there's some district or classroom that's teaching a far-right version of American History. The question is whether this is something the average student in the average suburban district is being taught, and while I've heard plenty of rumors, none of those have been substantiated with any evidence. Pulling something off the internet may be evidence that it exists, but it isn't evidence that it exists where people say it does, let alone that it's the dominant method of instruction.

Second question, what do you think of this toolkit for teachers and would you accept it as evidence for the kind of "woke" people are talking about?

Having downloaded some of the modules and looked at the FAQ, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. It uses a lot of cringeworthy language to explain how math instruction is secretly racist, but when you drill down to the core of what it's saying and, more importantly, what it's actually recommending, there isn't really anything objectionable in it. The idea that different students may benefit from different instruction styles isn't exactly a new idea, and the changes they're proposing aren't even that substantive. It reminds me of the whole Ebonics debate from 30 years ago. The media made it sound like students were going to be instructed in jive talk and given English tests based on different grammar, when the reality was that they wanted to do additional instruction relating formal English concepts to the vernacular the kids were already speaking. If what the documents are recommending was quietly slipped into the curriculum without all the woke verbiage few people would even notice, let alone care.

For example, you don't consider this image to be A) objectionable to teach to children B) reasonably deduced to have derived from the Critical Theory framework? If those are the definitions of bad stuffs, because you made your teaching unit have to define 'white supremacy', welp, you probably shouldn't be sanctioned by the state.

The Oregon Department of Education distributed this to math teachers as an opt-in program to use. To my recollection.

The media made it sound like students were going to be instructed in jive talk and given English tests based on different grammar, when the reality was that they wanted to do additional instruction relating formal English concepts to the vernacular the kids were already speaking.

Couched in language and vernaculur, and actual concepts, of a Critical Theory framework. You're really stuck on how the media reports on things. The media is dishonest all the time. I believe it would be possible to make teaching doctrines without teaching kids bad ideas, or ideas derived from bad ideas, such as those in the image.

I bet in 1990 the "give everyone extra attention" doctrine wouldn't be couched in such language or concepts. Thus, this is one piece of evidence, for one state, that teaching became more 'woke' in some (at least) marginal respect, no? Saying it's not as bad as it looks is not the same as saying it's not a real thing. We should limit the number of indoctrinations into, what I consider, goop.

To do so, I ask* the state not sanction such ideas be taught or be near the indoctrination pathways. At least not those funded by tax dollars. This is a reasonable position. It is not media hysterics. If you don't consider this inserting a certain political valence into education, then what does that look like to you? "Children must don their Ushankas and praise Stalin" on pg. 3?

*Again, apologies for derailing.

I would consider that both objectionable to teach to children and derived from a critical race theory framework. That's irrelevant, though, because what you linked to wasn't intended to be taught to children. Your screenshot was part of an explanatory note at the very beginning of the first module explaining that certain terms in the materials would be italicized in reference to concepts put forth in another publication. It wasn't even explained in detail, and it certainly wasn't intended as a handout or something to be taught to middle school kids as part of the curriculum.

You're really stuck on how the media reports on things. The media is dishonest all the time.

Because this is how most people hear about this stuff. Very little of what is reported to me on this comes from an actual student, parent, or teacher. It comes from people with no connection to the education system responding to media reports and to a lesser extent, rumors based on media reports. Hence the inability to produce any classroom materials as evidence supporting their assertions. If there weren't any media coverage about CRT in schools it's unlikely that very many complaints would arise from people who discovered it organically, given how unobjectionable most of these proposals are once you strip away all the woke bullshit.

I bet in 1990 the "give everyone extra attention" doctrine wouldn't be couched in such language or concepts. Thus, this is one piece of evidence, for one state, that teaching became more 'woke' in some (at least) marginal respect, no? Saying it's not as bad as it looks is not the same as saying it's not a real thing. We should limit the number of indoctrinations into, what I consider, goop.

The entire point of my post is that, for all the discussion of various woke concepts, precious little of it has made it into actual policy. The fact that people are citing to documents that are long on bullshit and short on actual substance is only further evidence of that. If I really had to I could probably justify the entire Trump policy platform using woke CRT language, but it wouldn't really say anything about the underlying policies. All the use of this excess verbiage does is provide evidence of the thought-process of the people writing the documents, but I'm not arguing that there aren't important people who think this way; I'm arguing that this kind of thought hasn't been pervasive enough to result in objectionable policies.

It wasn't even explained in detail, and it certainly wasn't intended as a handout or something to be taught to middle school kids as part of the curriculum.....

No, it's not considered as a handout to children. It's a teacher's module created for teachers to learn to instruct on maths.

It wasn't even explained in detail

What am I missing here? White supremacy is a central focus of this introductory module. That's why it is defined and given ample space. Pages 4-7, 8-12, etc. It's mentioned 54 times. This is explicit in its aims.

Some of it is mild injection of ideas couched in the gobblygook. Which I may have accepted with an eye roll if it existed by itself. Other parts I find insidious. I will vehemently disagree that children (or educators) should be taught to model the world in such a manner. I don't think it's necessary or good. It's ideological.

I will be school shopping soon! But have not personally been in one in awhile. Kids, I know. Parents, I know. Teachers, I know. I have been friends with a liberal teacher in a city school for well over a decade until she left the profession in 2023. She is a kind and thoughtful person. She is a true blue believer. I could never envision her with intent to maliciously implant an ideology in children. I also can't imagine she was very careful around sharing ideas she feels are justified by: "reality has a liberal bias", "just being a good person", or that white people X. I can easily imagine her teaching Equitable Math's program in 2018.

My impression, rather than a denial, is that much of this is the flavor of public education propaganda. Celebrate Maya Angelou instead of George Washington. To escape that one needs to spend a lot of money on private school. In my city, at least. There are still good public schools. I know kids attending them. To the extent these schools have a Woke Mind Virus it's fairly mild. What's easier and less expensive is to choose to raise smart children that can identify bullshit. Not everyone is blessed enough to raise such children.

You make a judgment call that all the not-math noise and concepts in my chosen example is unimportant, but I think it's very important. If we replaced the "white supremacy" concepts and definitions with a white supremacy one-- the '14 words', 88, etc -- would you so readily wave off "excess verbiage"? I wouldn't!

A training module for teachers created and endorsed by a number of educators, partnered with numerous California systems, and distributed in Oregon. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive review that I can to the measure the impact of CRT and woke-adjacent concepts in public education. I briefly looked, but mostly found research looking at state-governments legislating away CRT stuff. Education is local, and your experience in NYC will be different than mine in Topeka.

I was hoping that picking, what I consider, an egregious example of teaching materials (err, instructor materials), in use in more than one place would help work out the details, but I think we fundamentally have different tolerance for this type of propaganda. The creators of this programming have very clear ideas of what a child's indoctrination should be.

The "excess verbiage" in our example could have been any number of concepts-- relevant to education or otherwise-- but it's not. It is what it is. Is it everywhere? No, thankfully. However, related ideas contained within it became fairly common in other aspects of life and industry. What am I to surmise?

The entire point of my post is that, for all the discussion of various woke concepts, precious little of it has made it into actual policy. The fact that people are citing to documents that are long on bullshit and short on actual substance is only further evidence of that. If I really had to I could probably justify the entire Trump policy platform using woke CRT language, but it wouldn't really say anything about the underlying policies. All the use of this excess verbiage does is provide evidence of the thought-process of the people writing the documents, but I'm not arguing that there aren't important people who think this way; I'm arguing that this kind of thought hasn't been pervasive enough to result in objectionable policies.

I believe if you look with regards to education you'll find a number of objectionable curriculum and policy changes in major school districts. They may or may not have an effect on your state and local systems and curriculums. I'm of the mind that the years of 2010-2022 we saw major cultural changes in American society. It's why I'm here. Many cases of policy changes in industry, academia, and K-12 education have been brought to this very forums. I do not believe education was immune to the changes.

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That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.

Nationwide riots seem like a pretty concrete result. Turning off law enforcement for a variety of crimes in major metro areas seems like a pretty concrete result. The title 9 fight in university campuses seemed like a fairly concrete result. Logan act prosecutions and the FBI spying on presidential candidates seems like concrete results.

As much as conservatives would like to view it as a symbol of capitulation to radical ideology, it's really just the cheapest, lowest-effort thing a company can do to make it look like they're changing the status quo.

...And if Social Justice encroachment into the business world had ended at pronouns in emails, this would be a valid argument. But it didn't. It expanded into bedrock corporate policies about hiring and firing, and into a metastasizing consultancy empire that existed to divert money from corporate profits to progressive activists. Progressives were injecting an ad hoc private taxation system into the corporate economy, with the threat of significant economic harm to any individual or organization who objected.

It expanded into bedrock corporate policies about hiring and firing, and into a metastasizing consultancy empire that existed to divert money from corporate profits to progressive activists.

Yeah, credit where it's due. The identitarian left fundamentally understands something that the color-blind right does not.

It's not about ideas. It's about who/whom.

Wheres a conservative might seek to enshrine free speech into university bylaws or something, a progressive seeks to get his people into positions of power. Who interprets the laws matters a lot more than what those laws say. This is something that the left intuitively grasps while the right wonders why it keeps losing again, and again.

When the woke make demands, chief among them is high-paying jobs inside institutions. At the extreme, this leads to the belief that certain seats on the Supreme Court "belong" to women or black people.

The Right seems to have figured it out wrt SCOTUS

The right is happy to put women or black people on the court.

But Biden explicitly said he only would appoint a black woman.

The left is explicitly racist in a way the mainstream right is not.

Didn’t Trump say Ginsburg’s seat would go to a woman?

Indeed. To the detriment of the court for many years. Barret is mid.

Arguing for stricter environmental regulations because of the disproportionate impact of air pollution on communities of color is.

IMO there is some reasonable ground for considering "systems of oppression" that I would be willing to not consider "woke". Claiming that slavery or segregation happened, or that women (often) weren't allowed to have certain roles isn't so by itself. I think it also requires a component of looking at those axes in exclusion of others.

Eric Kaufmann defines wokeness as the sacralization of historically disadvantaged identity groups. Sacred in this case means it’s profane to consider tradeoffs in pursuit of these groups’ interests.

On this definition, woke is in retreat. I think people are noticing that tradeoffs do exist thanks largely to the liberation of X. These narratives have still not pierced the MSM veil, but people are aware of Boeing and now LAs DEI failures (regardless of whether they are actually linked to outcomes). People are noticing it is hard to get hired as a white man in a status profession. People are noticing their kids schools teach gender ideology and kids bookstores are full of anti racist baby. Meta took away the men’s tampons. Trump won the vote.

If you look deeper though, the belief that enables the woke policy agenda — the blank slate sameness of mankind and its groups — remains undefeated. Indeed beyond criticism. So long as that bastion remains unconquered, the armies of the left will continue to sally forth to attack western institutions by claiming “disparate impact means injustice”. I was talking to a friend and complaining about diversity quotas. He dismissed it as “probably worth it — after all how many black men work in the city’s CBD?” Such an argument can still not be rebutted in public because the answer remains beyond the pale.

I mean that in its original sense: these ideas are in the wilderness and are so low status you cannot utter them in polite company anywhere. Until the right wins that battle, centrists will take the sides of the woke in all but the most aggressive moves and won’t resist their consolidation of power in institutions. And generational and ethnic replacement will not make this easier over time.

I think wokeness is approaching a local minima sure, but it’s far from dead.

So long as that bastion remains unconquered, the armies of the left will continue to sally forth to attack western institutions by claiming “disparate impact means injustice”. I was talking to a friend and complaining about diversity quotas. He dismissed it as “probably worth it — after all how many black men work in the city’s CBD?” Such an argument can still not be rebutted in public because the answer remains beyond the pale.

Yeah. Sunny Hostin is broadly considered to be a partisan hack and not a particularly smart one, but I felt I was talking crazy pills when I saw people acting like Coleman Hughes schooled her on colorblindness.

I didn't think Hughes was convincing in answering her question: what if a colorblind system ended up with racial inequities?

Hughes doesn't really have a good response because, in practice, it'll play out as it has: when "something special for the Negro" doesn't work something more special will have to be done. Under the inertial theory of racism you clearly didn't act enough on the object to change its path.

It usually doesn't go much better. I remember Yarvin being stymied by Ben Burgis just straight up refusing to grant that there was any reason Scandinavian politics wouldn't work in Haiti. Very little in what I've heard from Burgis impressed me, but he beat Yarvin cause he could state his position and Yarvin was clearly scared to.

This attempt to row back to a colorblindness that doesn't have to answer these questions simply cannot work when it can't deal with this basic challenge besides sputtering platitudes. In fact, precisely because everyone has gotten so good at cataloguing racial progress in the hopes that the various gaps will close and they can get the good news out first. You'll always be subject to the charge that there are clearly places were race has more explanatory power than class

So you have to pick a side: woke or the racists.

(This, I suspect, is why Ayaan Hirsi Ali accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into her heart. Some people seem the problem coming as the right gets more anti-woke and many of the right wingers outside the center just bite the bullet.)

regardless of the underlying issues and whether blank state is true or not as soon as you bring in quotas it changes peoples incentives and may change the equilibrium. if you required quotas for left handed people then if left handed people could coordinate to reduce their personal investment then left handed people would start performing worse in the equilibrium. take a toy example where left-handed people all are able to agree to spend half the time they otherwise would have spent in university studying. if quotas are rigid then they are still going to get same personal output but at a lower personal cost.

the reason for the coordination requirement is because I would expect intra-handness competition between lefties would incentivise people to maintain the same personal investment in the quota system.

Given how large some of the gaps are or were, it's inconceivable that quotas are never going to be better than doing nothing.

Especially if the blank slate is true. Then one can argue for maybe a limited quota system (for a fixed time period) to remedy discrimination, under the assumption that whatever gains are made will continue when the original barrier is smashed and a self-sustaining population of female /minority X is formed and the stereotype threat/unfriendly environment is gone.

Overextension of woke in service of America’s geopolitical goals introduced fatal cognitive dissonance that alienated the most militant core supporters of the ideological movement. The Woke movement has already survived quite a bit cognitive dissonance, but 2022-2023 produced too much.

2022: “The scary paramilitary guy over there? The one wearing the Black Sun T-shirt with the little SS Tottenkopf pin? Oh that’s just Sergeant Kravchenko. He’s woke actually. Yes it is perfectly normal that his friends attend some official funerals in full 1944 Waffen SS uniforms. Ok, his grandfather did shoot an entire village in Poland one time but we’re giving him a medal because those villagers were all communists. Yes we’ve been telling you that fascism is evil and communism is the future since kindergarten, but it just isn’t ok? We need to give them lots and lots of money to help them punch Nazis.”

2023: “Ok yes it’s technically a ethno-state. Ok so there are some theocratic elements too. Yes, some of the people who live there have different sets of legal rights because of their race. Liquidating a ghetto full of brown people is woke, actually. Shut up CHUD, we need to give them more smart bombs and if you say something else I’m calling the campus police! The police beating up student protestors IS woke god damn it!”

Please don’t paraphrase unflatteringly. Specific groups would be better, too. If you’ve got receipts for people saying these things—not just statements you feel are equivalent—bring them! It’ll be appreciated!

Ok yes it’s technically a ethno-state. Ok so there are some theocratic elements too. Yes, some of the people who live there have different sets of legal rights because of their race. Liquidating a ghetto full of brown people is woke, actually.

I like the fact that this could be Ukraine too.

Not quite sure who the “brown people” would be in a Ukrainian context though: ethnic minorities/foreigners in the Russian military (or mercenary groups fighting alongside them)? That would make some sense, but they wouldn’t really constitute a “ghetto”

Alternatively, if the intended meaning is “ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine”, I’m not seeing where the “brown” part comes from.

Gypsies. I was referring to pogroms against gypsies. And the restrictions on Russians in parts of the country, albeit not with the brown part.

Just generally, I delight in pointing out that the state Twitter DR says it wants is… Ukraine. A white supremacist ethnonationalist society with a tradcath religious establishment(and that is what the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is) and conservative views about women and gays. And the second best match is probably Israel.

Ask the Shapiro right and the woke are actually the student protestors and that guy that immolated himself for Palestine.

This doesn't take away from your point. Woke as a phenomenon was this alliance between progressive minoritarian interests and establishment institutions where the revolutionary fervor was solely directed at the majority group.

Working for Blackrock, Disney and the CIA could be rationalized as a revolutionary act still, ideology doesn't have to make sense.

What brought it down is that the internal components of the coalition wanted different things. And those things became incompatible.

The US Army didn't get a better war footing from being more inclusive, Disney didn't materialize more interest and sales out of pandering to the margins, and ESG investor funds have long ran out along with ZIRP. All the nice promises that DEI would actually make things perform better could be entertained as luxuries then.

Now that the rubber meets the road, that companies have to perform to get funding, that war is no longer a thing of the past and that sabotage and division aren't affordable luxuries, suddenly the elites no longer like wokeness.

Ask the Shapiro right and the woke are actually the student protestors and that guy that immolated himself for Palestine.

Well yes that’s the problem. Both the true believers and the mercenary government and party apparatchiks considered themselves to be woke. For the last ten years that’s never been a problem, and the two camps have moved in lockstep with regard to domestic policy. But two years ago the international situation exploded in various ways and suddenly there is revealed a number of pretty big gulfs between what the different sub-denominations of woke actually want. And most of the revolutionary zeal is in the true believers, who are got disgusted and are walking away, leaving the befuddled apparatchiks holding the bag.

Wokeness seems like a rebranding of the SJW--remember that? Woke-capitalism is a rebranding of 90s PC culture--the stuff satirized by Dilbert and others. Leftism was weaponized by smartphones and social media, such as for getting people fired, but this predates the use of woke. It thrives because it confers status without having to actually do anything. In the past, activists had to actually engage in activism; now they just list pronouns.

This is my read. In the 1990s it emerged as political correctness, which worked for a while until the term Political Correctness entered the public consciousness, allowing people the criticize the phenomenon instead of the content. You could say “why shouldn’t we be able to say what we really think” instead of “boo, minorities” which allowed respectable people to disapprove of it without being branded as outgroup. Once that happened, it turned out that a lot of people in the main stream didn’t like the idea.

In 2012 it was Social Justice and SJWs. These guys won until people found ways to mock the movement, again, without having to publicly condemn the content of the movement, thus saving face was possible. You can mock the SJW at home in mom’s basement with purple hair scolding you for saying something wrong, or for not being a good enough ally.

Woke is receding because it’s possible again to hate the movement without necessarily hating those the movement is putting forward. And again this makes it appealing to normies who have to be respectable at least in public. Being able to talk about woke scolds and oppose racial and gender set asides without losing your ability to be seen as good by respectable people is the way to the end of wokeness.

It seems to me that really on whole Jered Taylor is sort of right. The key to beating back various forms of progressive politics is to make sure that you have your countermovement be one that normie whites can support publicly without seeming too out of the mainstream and where they won’t be considered racist/sexist/homophobic for saying that out loud.

What is wokeness, specifically?

  • -14

I think this is the canonical response to this line of argument.

"Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand, you don't get to insist that no one talks about your political project and it's weak and pathetic that you think you do"? Or is it "the basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics." Who is "they"?

  • -22

The Cathedral is good reading. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral

Inability to accurately specify "they" is not a gotcha, it is like this by design. Everyone knows that "they" will get you for saying the wrong thing, it doesn't matter who "they" are. You may not be able to name the lawyer who enacts lawfare against you, or the company he's on retainer for, but humans intuitively understand that they are frequently set against a vast, unaccountable memespace egregore that undergoes regular software updates to set itself against others.

The canonical response above is expressing frustration with the inability to accurately name this phenomenon of Cathedral-driven social change, because being able to name it is a weakness. Don't worry too much about social justice- within a few years the Cathedral will start shifting the other way. We're already starting to see signs.

The very beginning of the article define "The Cathedral" as "journalism plus academia". That's pretty specific to me. In fact I scrolled further and found even more specifically "Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post". In your own example, you listed a line of bureaucracy from lawyers to lawfare to companies.

However I am going to assume you are also implying that even if the article is not being specific, your definition of the Cathedral still holds. Your second claim that "everyone knows that "they" will get you" is consensus building. Who is "everyone"? Does that include me?

deBoer provides several examples of the kinds of people who compose "they".

Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up. Emphasis on try.

I am not sure how else "who is 'they'" can be answered (when we're talking about a movement that rejects labels) if we don't describe them by their beliefs. Do you want a list of names or what?

Yes, I'd like a list of names of people you believe are enforcing wokeness.

  • -12

Okay. Off the top of my head, Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are woke. Does that help?

Michael Reinoehl was enforcing wokeness when he murdered a Trump supporter in cold blood on the streets of Portland following a pro-trump demonstration.

His allies were enforcing wokeness when they publicly celebrated their ally's murder later that evening.

Would you agree that these two examples are, in fact, people enforcing wokeness? If not, what would be your disagreement with that framing?

Who is "they"?

The Social Justice set. The people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel. This set believes that they can bypass persuasion ("ordinary politics") and simply compel people to do things their way. Since they are not attempting persuasion, a legible label for their movement or their preferred tactics is completely contrary to their interests, so they actively and vociferously fight any label that starts to gain prominence.

We are talking about a movement that has dominated western politics for the last decade. To the extent that your confusion is in good faith, it is a testament to the effectiveness of this resistance to labels and analysis.

I’m not confused lol, I very much think you are wrong, but in the spirit of debate, I’d like to discuss specifics. Specifically, who is “they” that have dominated “western politics”? Is it the president? The Supreme Court? The circuit courts? The governors? The school boards? The voters? The entire Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of government?

I’ll illustrate an example; when I say “the people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel from a movement that has dominated western politics for a decade”, those people in particular would be Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Ron Desantis, Majorie Taylor Greene, Mike Johnson and Donald Trump, to name a few.

  • -24

I appreciate the effort to debate and ask this question, but the problem is that defining "they" down to actual names is quite an arduous task!

I'll take an example that affected my life last year. My wife taught at a suburban (exurban?) Title I elementary school. Majority-minority classes. It has been a trend for several years, and mentioned above in this thread, that disparate impact policy may have been well intentioned but boiled down to "it's basically impossible to suspend students, even if they're violent." She had one student that needed a great deal of help and had violent outbursts. A violent 2nd grader can't do that much, but he could throw a chair or destroy the room. Policy hamstrings teachers against doing anything. So at least once a week, he'd have an outburst and she'd shuffle the rest of the class out to wait it out.

Nobody argues for "public schools should be held hostage by their worst students, and basically non-functional multiple hours a week," but somehow we get there anyways. I can't point to any individual that wants that. It's the result of a long string of decisions and beliefs, some good and some horrifying, a massive messy web of lawsuit-avoidance and ideological pandering and EdD/PhD overproduction.

Should I name the principal? No, she wasn't too bad and I believe when she said she's hamstrung by the school board (and the feds, Title I!). Should I name the board? Well, I certainly vote against them but they're not the source of the idiocy, they just help enact it. Where does the idea come from upstream of them? I'd love to be able to point at one person whose work could be erased and schools could go back to functioning, but unfortunately that's not the way it works.

the people who think our main problems are caused by Oppressors organizing society to keep the oppressed under their heel

Ibram Kendi, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Robin Diangelo, Sara Rao, Liz Warren, Tema Okun, every person that took any of the aforementioned loons seriously, every journalist that doesn't work for an explicitly right-wing media source, every sociologist, every critical theorist, 80+% of university professors that aren't economists.

The managerial class. Twitter's board as opposed to Twitter's owners. Agents as opposed to principals.

Inspired by in part by Michael Huemer's definition I would rephrase it somewhat more generic along the lines of: all discrepancies of outcome are due to pervasive, systemic biases rooted in unchanging, historically-defined oppressor/oppressed dynamics, and such dynamics outweigh most or all other concerns.

More cynically, "wokeness" is the logical outcome of trying to apply intersectionality to the real world and the result of Christianity-influenced universalist ethics stripped of the supernatural elements, combined with certain common social trends, resulting in acceptably-demonized populations and sanctified, above-reproach populations.

For some examples of your later question of "aggressively performative," land acknowledgements as secular prayers come to mind. Surely the people saying them don't have any faith that they do anything beyond some vague 'raising of awareness' that doesn't actually... you know, repatriate the land or anything.

Anything involving people like Robin Diangelo, Ibram Kendi, Tema Okun, Nicole Hannah-Jones, etc: aggressively performative, actively making the world worse if one attempts anything they say. One would do less damage to the world by simply burning their money in a ritualistic sacrifice. I kind of think that's why audits of BLM vanished from the news cycle so quickly- people did want to treat sending money to scam artists as ritualistic sacrifice, they made a payment on their sin-debt and just wanted to move on.

I fear I am succumbing to a temptation to label anything bad as woke, and related yet good ideas as something else. But that is pretty much my stance on the word: while there are positive contributions to be made to the world in the name of social justice, much of what has happened in the last 10 years has been major, predictable failure modes instead, and that collection of failure modes is "wokeness."

Well, if you are succumbing to labeling anything you consider bad as woke and everything else as something else...I don't know how to argue on that except...don't?

If the question is "wokeness is receding", and you define wokeness as "all discrepancies of outcome are due to pervasive, systemic biases rooted in unchanging, historically-defined oppressor/oppressed dynamics, and such dynamics outweigh most or all other concerns", I struggle to see where claims that a discrepancy is due to biased dyanmics and not merit are, in general, going down. Mark Zuckerburg just claimed that the bias he struggles with in his business is because of the overabundance of "feminine energy"; I hardly see that as symptoms of a decline.

  • -18

LOL at your new flair.

I don't know how to argue on that except...don't?

Well, it's a phenomenon that seemingly a large number of people agree exists and is meaningful, but refuses to name itself, works the euphemism treadmill in an attempt that no name sticks for long, every blowhard commentator comes up with a new name to sell their book, etc.

Since I've been told that nobody calls themselves woke anymore since it got treadmilled by the right, I don't think it's such a bad thing to save it as a negative descriptor and hope that a positive descriptor comes along that sticks for more than five minutes for the parts that aren't terrible. It's not an ideal situation, I agree.

If the question is "wokeness is receding"

I was addressing your question of attempting to define it, not addressing OP's question at all.

I don't think it particularly is receding. Even though it's ebbed from the pandemic-induced mass psychosis a lot of the attitudes are sticking around, and we as a society (and even worse, as The West) are not really wrestling with what it actually means to be multicultural, multiethnic liberal democracy.

Mark Zuckerburg just claimed that the bias he struggles with in his business is because of the overabundance of "feminine energy"; I hardly see that as symptoms of a decline.

Yeah, that's what I didn't like about Huemer's definition. Many people have entrenched ideas about what "racist" and "sexist" means, and even when presented with examples of anti-white (or "politically white" like Asians in school admission cases) racism or anti-male sexism, they'll say that it's justified on historic grounds (regardless of the actual people affected).

I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

This isn’t actually a meaningful response. Firstly because it just kicks the can one step up — how you define “social justice”? Secondly, because “performativity” is neither exclusive to wokeness — God knows I’ve seen plenty of conservatives wearing in-your-face Trump memorabilia, putting American flag and/or Thin Blue Line stickers on their trucks, etc. — nor actually the primary issue with wokeness; there are tons of woke NGOs and anonymous woke bureaucrats doing plenty behind the scenes, unheralded, to advance specific causes and to cause material legal and political change. Focusing only on the “performative” stuff actually misses the point and allows those less “performative” actors to continue their work unnoticed and unimpeded.

I agree. I’d say Trump pardoning people who deliberately and illegally entered government property is performative social justice. What economic/political/social opportunity and right is being denied by jailing people who literally broke the law?

Therefore the claim that “wokeness” is on the letdown seems false.

  • -20

They did not illegally enter government property. Just as importantly, American citizens are guaranteed a right to a speedy trial; holding them indefinitely "pre-trial" ("pre" being the Latin for "without," apparently; this is not what I was taught that it meant, but who am I to question my betters?)

Do you believe people who enter a building that the police tell them not to enter are not breaking the law?

  • -16

Hoffmeister said performativity isn't exclusive to wokeness and so you think Trump doing something performative proves wokeness isn't in decline? Huh?

Also your gag doesn't work. You can't use your own perspective to set it up, because it only works if your interlocutor agrees that what you are ironically calling performative social justice is performative social justice for the reasons you state. So you'd have to say 'we'd all agree Trump pardoning Jan 6ers is social justice right? And a presidential pardon is by its nature performative' and go from there.

Edit: clarity

Gag? I'm not going to continue conversation with someone who can't restrain themselves from insulting me.

  • -22

Gag is another word for bit, joke, shtick or witticism. I wasn't insulting you, I was trying to help you be a better arguer. You were calling Trump pardoning Jan 6ers wokeness to highlight the irony and some potential double thought, but to do that well you need to get your debate partner to agree on definitions first, otherwise they might not agree with your terms.

Carrying on in that spirit, you had never said anything to me in the first place, so you could never continue conversation with me - this post is you joining in conversation with me.

Firstly because it just kicks the can one step up — how you define “social justice”?

A set of interlocking theories emerging from the academic field of Sociology that share in common an understanding of society as dominated by oppressor/oppressed dynamics: Feminism (Men/Women), "anti-racism" (whites/non-whites), Queer/QUILTBAG (Heteros/Queers), Labor (workers vs bosses), etc. These theories coordinate support between their adherents and collectively demand a revolutionary otherthrow of existing social structures to achieve "justice". They also consistently fail to achieve any positive end, and then explain away this failure as due to them not having been granted sufficient power and control over Society.

...I'm skeptical that anyone thoughtful, at this late stage, actually believes that "social justice" is a nebulous or poorly-defined concept. It appears to me that the concept is well-defined, and the large majority of the remaining confusion comes from its adherents who perceive legibility to be contrary to their ideological interests, and so actively fight against any attempt to accurately label or describe their actions or organizations.

there are tons of woke NGOs and anonymous woke bureaucrats doing plenty behind the scenes, unheralded, to advance specific causes and to cause material legal and political change.

Unheralded to who? It seems to me that they herald themselves quite a bit to their fellow NGOs and bureaucrats, just not the public at large. They make Powerpoints, and present them. They hold conferences and publish papers and manifestos. They organize and coordinate around the ideology collectively, they capture policy and process, they manipulate procedural outcomes. All of these are social acts, thus prone to performance.

This action is "performative" because it so evidently degenerates into assessment by consensus, not real-world results. The proper practice of anti-racism means securing the approval of the anti-racist community, not the actual reduction of racism in any objectively defined or measured sense. Victory is nothing less or more than the approval of one's peers, and real-world results are entirely ignored.

how do you define "social justice"

Every philosophy department knew how do do it succinctly before the label was banned for being effective: Cultural Marxism. Race/Sex/Gender/etc communism.

The application of moralistic ideas of collective justice and redistribution to the cultural sphere, through the definition of multiple intersecting binaries of oppressors and oppressed classes.

'Performative' is the fig leaf that liberals use to distinguish good theory from bad praxis. In practice, however, it is a nuance without a difference, given that liberalism has no defense against bad actors from the left. We know this to be true because of spectacular tactical victories on part of activists and 'the groups' to impose their views on (charitably) good-meaning and agreeable people.

Let me give you my definition: wokeness is the barely-disguised will to power through the soft and feminine language of slave morality. It exults the weak and marginalized to the height of society, to right historical wrongs. That is the 'social justice' part. The 'woke' part comes from the conspiratorial assertions that the dominant racial group in the West (white, male people) have been systematically keeping the marginalized out of power and that it is fundamentally imbedded into every aspect of society.

This concept is called 'white supremacy.'

Therefore, every effort must be made to make society 'woke', to advantage minorities, ethnic and sexual, within the system to counteract the inherent bias of the institutions. Although this definition will be fiercely contested by its own proponents - they are self-aware enough that the programme is wildly unpopular - one defines things by its outcomes, by its real-world impacts. Definitional word games do not change the fundamental power-seeking, inquisitorial drive of the movement. Individually the elements that compose it may not be novel but it is the combination of these elements that make 'woke' what it is.

What is "feminine language"?

  • -16

https://x.com/BridgetPhetasy/status/1818015936580055118

It can't be demonstrated any better than this. Browbeating people as if they're kindergartners, but doing it passive-aggressively so you can cry and get them in trouble if they talk back to you.
If there are any questions asked, there are obvious right and wrong answers, with the threat of "telling on you" if you give the wrong one.

Soothing, nurturing euphemisms. Environments in which dissent is prohibited and the word of ethnic and sexual minorities must be accepted without question (provided they are orthodox in their opinions) are referred to as "safe spaces". The move to instate an intellectual monoculture in which heretics are shunned and sexual and ethnic minorities are systematically elevated over other groups is referred to as "diversity, equity and inclusion". Maoist struggle sessions are described as "accountability culture". Profoundly unpopular policies such as housing male rapists in women's prisons or performing mastectomies on female teenagers are made more palatable with emotionally manipulative thought-terminating clichés like "protect trans kids". Mastectomies, penectomies, vaginoplasties and hormones are collectively referred to as "gender-affirming care".

I looked up "soothing, nurturing euphemisms" and got "rest your mind," "take a moment," "breathe easy," "unwind," "decompress," "let go," "find your center," "peaceful pause," "quiet time," "soothe your soul," "gentle transition," "calm your nerves," "ease into relaxation," "soft landing," and "tranquil space." If the claim is that men don't use these phrases, I find that dubious.

Additionally, I don't consider definitions of environments, moves and policies to be a part of defining language.

  • -17

If the claim is that men don't use these phrases, I find that dubious.

The only kind of man I can imagine routinely using these phrases is a yoga instructor, therapist or psychiatrist. Unsurprisingly, men represent only 28%, 24% and 21% of those professions, respectively.

When I try to imagine a man regularly using those phrases, what comes to mind is either the kind of modern psychoanalyst that is known to be mostly visited by women, or someone who spends his time nearly exclusively in the company of women.

The first third of the list is somewhat unisex, but the latter two sound like they're straight out of the "female memes" tiktok channel.

You seem to be asking a lot of questions here but not contributing your own thoughts.

What do you think feminine language might be? Can you steelwoman it for us?

I don't think I can successfully steelman an argument if I don't know the OP's argument, but I will try. It'll just be a lot of assumptions, which I'm not a fan of.

The position is that there are two binary expressions of gender, which masculine and feminine, and therefore there are two categories of language corresponding. Additionally, the correct expression of this binary is the Western definition of masculinity and femininity.

This is natural; two completely different species attempting to communicate with eachother naturally will have separate languages, complete with their own vocabulary, grammar, connotations and implications. Since virtually all first world countries are Western, it shows that the Western definition of masculinity and femininity is the most successful, and therefore accurate, definition.

If we follow the examples of the Western definition of masculinity and femininity, then, we can assume what OP means by feminine language is language that is "collective, random, accommodating, passive, vulnerable, emotional, fragile, small, dependent, intuitive, submissive" and "tactful", among others.

Now, seeing as I have seen a fair share of men identifying with the Western definition of masculine and use language that is random, passive, emotional, fragile and tactful, then that language can't be exclusively feminine then. And if there is no exclusivity to the language and both elements can be included with one another, then the definitions of "feminine language" have become so vague as to render the whole notion non-existent.

That's a pretty good steelman, but you are implying motive that isn't necessary. Also there's only the one species, humans. Anyway I can't speak for the op of course, but I determine masculine and feminine language based on the western understanding of the gender binary not because the west is the best (although it is) but because I am in the west. In Japan or Taiwan I use different language, or look stupid when I snort at some guy going on about flowers.

Re the species thing, language is a tool for communicating, and in the west until very recently you had a zeitgeist which allowed people to communicate using shared metaphors and idioms built up over thousands of years of history and stories and memes. The idea that aggressive, direct language is masculine and passive gentle language is feminine is a very old one and has never fully restricted the language of men or women except in certain specific, usually formal instances. That has never made it useless - in fact it has made it more useful, as we can have feminine men and masculine women. Parts of Western society have tried to restrict their members' language, because they believe it is in the best interests of the members to adhere to their gender, but it has never applied to the language as a whole.

Can you give me some examples of what you consider to be aggressively performative economic, political and social rights & opportunities?

  • -12

Why couldn't wokeness do the same?

It still can. What we have now is likely not backlash but eddy. Or a receding wave in an advancing tide. Nearly all those woke people in high-ranking positions are still there. A few of the commissars got fired but a lot did not, and many just got shuffled around. Once the Trump train runs into a roadblock, they'll be ready to capitalize.

Maybe, maybe not. American society needs white men, who still do most of the useful labor. I think it's going to be tough to get that constituency to play ball again, as they did so readily in 2020.

I think it's going to be tough to get that constituency to play ball again, as they did so readily in 2020.

If there is any upside to hustle culture is that it gives men alternatives

They'll either play ball (at least in so far as they keep their mouth shut) or get fired, just as they did in 2014-2019.

We live in a society where white men are far more willing to hit defect than they used to be. And per bud light boycott, a lot of that is aimed specifically at woke.

This ignores that wokeness was only possible because high ranking white men drank the kool-aid. They weren't forced to join the social justice movement. It was a choice.

Even today, the vast majority of people who matter in America are white men. Take a look at Fortune 500 CEOs (84% white men as of 2023).

Yeah, there are still people who cuck out there (see: Mark Cuban), but it's a lot rarer. Eyes have been opened.

Mark Cuban

Early life is a meme for a reason.

This ignores that wokeness was only possible because high ranking white men drank the kool-aid. They weren't forced to join the social justice movement. It was a choice.

I've heard (but cannot confirm) in some cases they drank the kool-aid because it was the only way to avoid being taken down for sexual harassment allegations. But even if not, social justice remains a viable way for high-ranking white men to keep the competition from other white men down.

Wokeness only appealed to a segment of the elites and was unappealing to most non-elites. So wokeness gained power quickly but ran out of steam because it lacked any grassroots support. On the other hand, Christianity started out as a religion of the proletariat and by the time it trickled up to the elite of Roman society it had massive grassroots support. I think that's a key difference.

When you describe it like that it sounds a lot like the Chinese Cultural Revolution: an auto-coup by one faction of the elite weaponizing the militant youth against a rival faction of the elite. It ended pretty quickly when the opposing faction of the elite ended up grabbing power.

Yeah, maybe communism is a better example.

Like wokeness, Communism only had the support of a few elites. Famously, the Bolshevik's "going to the people" initiative failed because the common people actually liked God and empire. Nevertheless, communists took over Russia and ran it for more than 70 years. Once they seized power, the social climbers came on board.

Four years ago, it looked like woke was going the same way – not because of true belief but because it was personally advantageous to be woke (and incredibly dangerous to speak out against it).

incredibly dangerous to speak out against it

Hyperbole much? Surely a contributing factor to the rise of wokeness is the utter spinelessness of most people. It was amazing to see again and again, the woke attacking some man of considerable achievements with no apparent woke beliefs, which would conclude with him delivering an abject groveling apology. Or the university presidents and professors who went along with radicals they clearly didn’t agree with. The grad students who traded ‘DEI statements’ for a job. Or you, reader, who put his pronouns in his profile.

Part of the reason is, you aren’t allowed to call men pussies anymore (in polite company). In the past, those who prostrated themselves in this way would have been shamed “Be a man and say no fuck off when you mean no.“ The taboo-ization of manliness has left society wide open for this kind of agreeable-emotional scam ideology, which reinforces the taboo further. Wokeness is both a cause and a symptom of it.

We used to reproduce sexually, which gave us some genetic diversity. After we all turned ourselves into female clones doing parthenogenesis, we became vulnerable to viruses. But thankfully for us middle class folk, through cultural isolation, some intrepid billionaires and rednecks avoided being gelded, and so the woke virus was ultimately stopped.

Uh no bud, I don't care for the spinelessness of most people either, and your second paragraph is entirely on point but the woke mob were absolutely capable of destroying people's livelihoods if they told them to fuck off - that's how my life got ruined. That's why everyone became fucking spineless, because they watched what happened to the people who said no. And what happened to their families, because it was never confined to just the target. So even your family would start distancing themselves from you, because "some of my colleagues don't feel comfortable coming if you are there".

Who did you tell to fuck off?

My boss. Although tbh I didn’t care for the job. I like taking l long holidays after a few years' work.

the woke mob were absolutely capable of destroying people's livelihoods if they told them to fuck off

I'm not saying they weren't, but like hydro says a lot of people were far more afraid than they realistically had reason to. Also, defending one's ideas is not supposed to be costless. I would prefer to lose out on a job than debase myself with a DEI statement. And that's before any moral implications, because all those who went along were complicit in making other people's lives hell. I'm sorry your life got ruined, that's obviously above and beyond what can be expected of people, but I do think they have a duty to offer resistance when they disagree.

I do think they have a duty to offer resistance when they disagree.

I hope the last decade convinces others you are right, but I've long since lost faith in most of humanity.

What are you talking about? Female clones? Gelding?

"Ending masculinity" in males leaves you with female clones. Metaphorically, you've cut off their balls. This is unpleasant by itself, but there's a double meaning: eunuch is an insult among men, their high pitched voice is a source of ridicule, and they're assumed to have a weak character, especially among ancient authors.

That’s dumb.

Metaphor or not, don’t you think there’s more to womanhood than lack-of-balls?

Yes, there’s also agreeableness, emotionality, conventionality. I don’t really like femininity, especially not in men. Am I allowed to say that, or is only masculinity subject to censure? Men’s personalities have been one-sidedly filed down by three decades of this.

Right, which is why eunuchs are obviously not female clones. Even metaphorically.

Also, only three decades? I was sure you’d go back at least to the Victorians.

More comments

In the past, those who prostrated themselves in this way would have been shamed “Be a man and say no fuck off when you mean no.

If you opposed woke in that way, you would be fired and/or ostracized. It's not that nobody did it; it's that they were canceled for doing so.

There were people who opposed wokeness that way and are still there. Wokeness always had more bark than bite.

The true answer is, of course, somewhere in the middle.

Joe Rogan stood up to wokeness and got away with it. James Damore didn't.

If you have independent power and wealth then you can express heterodox beliefs and get away with it.

But if your power and wealth depends on an institution (such as a government, university, or corporation) then you have to bend the knee or face consequences. Most people are in this group.

On the balance, I don't have a lot of sympathy for @Tree's argument. People have had their kids taken away because of their position on transgender issues. "Just man up" doesn't cut it.

I mostly agree with you- a CEO could not simply say that he has fewer black engineers because HBD. I do think that the power of woke is overstated but, yes, there’s definitely people who are right to fear it. Just want to address this one:

People have had their kids taken away because of their position on transgender issues.

Which people? Jeff Younger lost custody because Texas courts always favor the woman; his position on trans had nothing to do with it. There are probably similar cases, but parents who agree with each other that the correct response to a trans child is ‘no you’re not’ succeed in getting their child to desist.

Perplexity found one. Kudos because this stuff that normally gets buried. Google is not your friend.

https://www.osvnews.com/2024/02/20/catholic-parents-ask-high-court-to-correct-dangerous-precedent-on-parental-rights-trans-identity/

Not only did they lose custody, but they weren't even permitted to talk to their child about their gender. Insane. And this is Indiana, a deep red state.

The Coxes lost custody of the then-16-year-old in 2021. The Indiana Department of Child Services petitioned a Madison County court, alleging that the teen’s physical and mental condition was in danger and that there was a threat of self-harm as a result of the parents’ physical and emotional abuse.

A case manager’s investigation found that the teen had an untreated eating disorder, that A.C.’s parents had pulled the child from school and discontinued therapy, and that A.C. was contemplating self-harm, according to court records. The case manager’s report also found the teen’s mother used vulgar and demeaning language.

The Coxes denied the allegations, and Indiana officials, following an investigation, conceded that they were unsubstantiated.

But the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld the child’s removal from the home, concluding that the arguments over gender identity had contributed to the eating disorder even though agreeing that the Coxes were fit parents. The appellate court upheld a gag order, which it said was allowed under both the state and federal constitutions, over the Coxes imposing their religious views on gender.

“The appeals court left in place a gag order so the parents could not discuss gender with their child other than at family therapy appointments,” Windham said.

According to you, nybbler, there was never anything to be done, it was an unstoppable steamroller, and all rebels would die for nothing. With an attitude like that, it could never have been stopped.

It has not been stopped. There is merely a pause. Perhaps a legit one, possibly a false one to draw out the remaining opposition so they can be crushed in the next push.

It's worth noting that the October Revolution in Russia was in effect a military coup, but led by an organised faction within the lower ranks rather than an ambitious colonel. The core Bolshevik constituency was the Petrograd garrison.

The reason why there wasn't a communist takeover in Germany is mostly that the USPD and Spartakists were unable to organise the soldiers the way the Bolsheviks were, so the German army remained under the effective control of their officers and the Ebert government.

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