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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   33806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I had to think about this hypothetical person for a moment. Although arguably a tender-minded leftist who is also libertarian is as far as 70.53 degrees off from the woke by basic trigonometry, this is only true if you presume each axis is of equal importance. In practice the left-right axis is far more salient than the others, which will diminish this person's ideological separation from the woke crowd enough that they'd likely fit in pretty well. Currently wokeness isn't a fringe movement - it's captured a large degree of public support, and has enough power to have (for example) made it standard procedure for us to have to fill in the "What pronouns does your child use?" blank in the doctor's office at Small Town Red Tribe USA. In practice this hypothetical person is likely to support the woke package, they'll just balk at some of the details, such as shutting down people's right to speak. Ultimately going to say "No, I don't really think of this person as woke," but it's more because I think it's OK for Canadians to get mad when you call them American, and because despite my anti-wokeness, I'm also rather woke-adjacent. If I were a Trump/Musk/Whatever supporter on the other side of the map, I'd still dislike and oppose the hell out of this person (and probably me as well).

I appreciate this response. The reason why I asked is because that hypothetical person is more or less me. I've been a libertarian most of my adult life, but have found myself drifting leftward the last 8 or so years, as the culture war has picked up. Accelerating this has been overt social conservatives, like Dave Smith have been masquerading as libertarian (something about Hoppeian sunset towns does not sit will with me and is at odds with libertarianism, you know?). I think having equality and similar results between racial groups is a good ideal, but believe that meritocracy is important and do not agree with many of the means to achieve this put forward by progressives. It seemingly does not matter, as I now am considered woke by some family members, despite them not being able to define "woke" in a coherent way. I think you are correct, it does seem in today's zeitgeist, social alignment seems to be more important than economic alignment.

I think the woke make a good case against fairness and in favor of racism, in just the same way that the real live National Socialists of the 1940s made a very good case against the principles of German fascism. Looking from one to the other, I can't help but think maybe none of those principles matter, or all of them matter, and really most people are too quick to think they know things when Socrates has been telling us all along he's the wisest because he knows nothing.

What specific mechanism do you think the "woke" make in favor of racism specifically? Is it their lack of ability to actually solve for their main issue, or is it something else? What has been proposed by people like Ibram X. Kendi is genuine racism itself, and does not even shy away from calling it as such. For example, the only antidote to racism is racism, the only antidote to discrimination is yet more discrimination...

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