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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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First, see who uses the word Woke. It is used by anti-Woke types to categorize practices and beliefs employed by upper class residents and aspirants to effect resource transfer from social actors that are not themselves sufficiently engaged in these practices and beliefs.

Said practices and beliefs are:

  • categorical groupings are nonoverlapping (blackness is totally separate from whiteness)
  • a categorical groupings declaration of its own outcomes are irredutable (blacks are incarcerated at higher rates than whites due to racism and not crime commitment rates)
  • unequal outcome is due only to the actions of the party which had the more positive outcomes (whites doing better than blacks is entirely due to whites which grants whites hyperagency),
  • that these categorical groupings should actually have equal outcomes (blacks being statistically equal to whites in outcomes is a first order state of reality)
  • that it is the responsibility of the agentic power to effect change on themselves to equalize the outcomes (reality is being stymied by whites so whites must take active action to assert the reality of black equality).
  • the dominance of one categorical party is defined by who the losing categorical party presents as the winner (whites are the active power keeping blacks down, not arabs funding janjaweed militias or indian H1Bs flooding jobs or asian cars destroying Detroit: the sole cause of all black woe is the white)
  • intersectionality means that the disparities suffered by other categorical groupings is concurrent and thus contributes to net disparities (white oppression of blacks is different from white oppression of latinos and thus whites are doubly agentic for disparate outcomes, and doubly responsible by transitive property)

What results is that one party can declare themselves whole and distinct from another, define its own outcomes for itself and who is responsible for it, and demand the responsible party be the one to change in order to redress the disparity. Principally, it gives license to a a party to declare its own aggrievement and thus its place in the queue for restitution.

No one actually calls themselves Woke since 2022, but instead there still is an assertion that the above principles are inalienable states of reality. Go to MSNBC, Slate, Salon, and see how it is constantly asserted that whites are responsible for the poor state of blacks, even when whites do not claim any ownership or do anything to effect black failure. And wokeness, by being definitionally nebulous, allowed everyone to label themselves as such when trendy and shed it when not.

The defitional warfare employed by anti-Woke vs the 'woke' is precisely because the 'woke' party has shed its names multiple times as the logical incongruities of the various principles get associated with a concrete term, exposing the inability of the stated principles to mesh together in reality even without active actions by the opposition these principles define themselves against. Woke was previously Social Justice, which was previously Political Correctness. Given that being Woke has fallen out of favor so rapidly all the practitioners are now claiming they never advocated woke policies, yet in observed reality there is endless proof of the presence of DEI corporate policies, thinkpieces about lesbians being transphobic for not giving blowjobs etc from the early 2010still early 2020s.

Wokism is externalizing responsibility by fiat, and appropriating high valence moral principles to effect desired outcomes. What ends up happening is not that everything turns out to truly be racism), but that racism becomes so nebulously redefined that it does not matter anymore. If everything is racist, nothing is racist. Woke crybullying started reaching a stop when everything was being declared fascist, and more practitioners started realizing people were getting increasingly alright with being called as such.