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We’ve had several posters trying to get people to define woke in the past couple weeks — is this just the current meme again? It seems like there’s been a large increase in trolls and insincere posters as well.
Paul Graham released an essay "The Origins of Wokeness" a few weeks ago. If you're not familiar, he's one of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and a key person in kicking off the post 2005 tech startup scene. His early 2000s essays were sort of proto-rationalist.
https://www.paulgraham.com/woke.html
He's strongly anti Trump and a prominent figure in the tech scene. I'd guess that essay got enough exposure in the leftwing tech scene that people who were used to saying "woke is just being a good person" suddenly found that they needed better arguments.
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I can't speak for others, but the motivation for me was the constant use of the word "woke" in legacy media and with the incoming administration, with an ever broadening definition of the term. I also heard the word come up quite a bit over the holidays from right leaning family members who had trouble defining what it was other than it was something they didn't care for and wanted gone.
Admittedly, I am somewhere in the no mans land between libertarianism and progressivism, but don't have right leaning friends or family that are particularly thoughtful when it comes to culture war topics. I knew I could get a few good definitions here from those who are a bit more intellectual and y'all delivered. I appreciate the thoughtful responses and the efforts put into them.
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There is no greater troll than baiting out earnest replies on The Motte. Plus, if you ever stop replying to low effort bait posts this can be taken as a sure sign that justice has prevailed. Proof positive that The Motte will crumble under the weight of its many contradictions. Its depravity proven too much to bear for the wicked souls trapped within its walls.
While this small act of sabotage may appear to be a minor disturbance it lays the groundwork for a more virtuous future. Only afterward, comrade, can the real work of the revolution commence.
The point of the motte is to promote interesting conversation. If a troll post manages to be interesting enough to lead to a good conversation, I would say it made a contribution, even if unintentionally.
Thinking someone got the best of us by creating conversation in a place designed to create conversation is odd, a thought that could only occur to someone who thinks in-depth intellectual conversations is unfun. But in fact they are fun, and a troll running with glee about how he "really got us" by giving us a chance to do what we love is like a guy who hands out Harris/Walz fliers and thinks he's campaigning for Trump.
The motte isn't a springboard for political action, just a discussion space. If trolls think they're distracting us from "real politics" by making us talk to each other, I'm just reminded of -- and I rarely use this term -- losers like KulakRevolt, who think they're going to start a race war from their basement. We're not trying to change the world, just trying to change our minds through exposure to new ideas.
I don't like trolls because of their insincerity, but they certainly do serve a purpose sometimes. If they're pathogens, maybe we can think of them as part of the site microbiome.
I agree in theory but there's nothing left to be learned from the 500th round of "what is woke? Also, everyone that calls other people woke is evil, an idiot, or both."
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Are you in favor of the Bare Links Repository?
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This is vacuous. I could believe that trolls never lead to good conversation and I'd still have to assent to this statement!
Trolls lead to bad conversations, except quokkas here tend not to understand that. A conversation can be free of obscenities and obvious insults and still not be "good". I could go onto many forums and post "Star Wars is better than Star Trek" and get 100 responses. That would not be making a contribution.
We probably should gather a couple of responses to "what is woke", put them in a FAQ, and require that all posts about this must specifically acknowledge where they disagree with the FAQ. Otherwise, ban them.
Hard pass. That's how you get 'do the homework, scum' style dickwaving on reddit. Nobody has to engage with OP unless they want to, and sometimes it's enlightening to rediscuss settled subjects. Individual posters may not have thought about it before.
If we were getting hundreds of trolls a day and they were obviously killing the site, it would be different. Thankfully we're not there yet and can still (mostly) afford to keep this place a quokka reservation.
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Seems to be. I assume that the leftist prospiracy is working to muddy the waters on "woke" because it has become a useful cudgel for rightists, which is a pattern that has been repeated for a while now.
I haven't noticed this, myself, but I haven't been able to spend as much time here lately as I used to.
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I figured a lot of people who previously felt extremely secure and sure of themselves have had that upturned by the election of Trump, and now feel defensive, and if they aren't social media users (or don't want to taint their feed) they need to go somewhere they can talk to the other tribe, and there aren't a lot of those left these days.
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