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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   18694 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Hmm. Can you remind me of the point being made here? You're trying to differentiate neoliberal as an exonym from woke because people accept the label neoliberal but not woke? If that's the case then suppose nothing at all changes about the population, you still have people who believe and espouse every bit of this cluster's beliefs but refuse to accept any label. These neoliberals were highly related, constantly quoting each other and repeating each other's arguments. When you met someone who was in favor of one of these policies you knew with a 95% chance they'd support all the other policies but they just insisted there was no legitimate way to refer to their memeplex. What would you do then? Until we can square that circle I'm not sure what the point of the comparison is or even what your point is. If woke isn't meaningful then what can I call the highly correlated cluster of beliefs?

The point is that unlike terms such as "woke" or "fascist", "neoliberal" label is more likely to accurately describe the person being mentioned than the first two. This is despite the "neoliberal" label being an exonym, and the reason for this is that it was widely adopted as a term by the people being described by it. This isn't really happening with "woke", especially now.

I think something more descriptive such as "social justice warriors", "DEI proponents" or "applied intersectionality" would be much more apt. It also is more likely to be used by those people to describe themselves.

On the level of criticism of your definition of neoliberal I think you have some sneer phrases baked in. Few like to be associated with the phrase "trickle down" preferring something like supply side policies. "Too big to fail" also has some negative connotations. A neoliberal would say it was a policy failure to let banks become too big to fail but bailouts were still the prudent option given the circumstances, truncating it to that is ignoring important parts of their understanding of the events and their real concern for moral hazard. Neoliberal tends to approximately map to neoclassical economics, basically Adam Smith but with modern economic modeling.

I think this is a very prescient critique and you are correct, "trickle down" and "too big to fail" are indeed sneer terms. Your alternative of "supply side" are not just less loaded, but are also more descriptive in an academic sense. I'm not sure if there is an alternative term outside of the longer summary of that neoliberal position that you described above--but your point stands.

his isn't really happening with "woke", especially now.

This is patently false. You could spend a few seconds and go to wiki page for Woke to see that unlike neoliberalism, woke as a term was used since 2010 as

Beginning in the 2010s, it came to be used by activists themselves to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBTQ rights.

You have a photo of United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development holding the T-Shirt "stay Woke". Also from the top of my head I remember a story of how Elon Musk discovered Stay Woke T-Shirts after he took over Twitter. The reason why woke was used by activists is that it actually relates to concept of critical consciousness, meaning that this person is awoken to various injustuces especially related to race, sex, sexuality, gender, body types etc. It perfectly encapsulates what the ideology is about.

Paradoxically changing history and usurping power of how words are defined is one of the hallmarks of the ideology. As an example after DEI god a bad rap, many people just rename themselves to something like belonging or community management. I do not see a reason why anybody should tolerate this. People know what woke is as a general term, there is no need to stop using the term just because woke people want to make a PR rebranding. For instance given your example, please stop using the term neoliberalism, it is just a slur. Just use a new term such as promoting prosperity.

I think something more descriptive such as "social justice warriors", "DEI proponents" or "applied intersectionality" would be much more apt. It also is more likely to be used by those people to describe themselves.

I guess I have some problems with these as alternatives. Of them only really SJW selects the whole of the blob and I think it'd have the same problem of being rejected as a label by many that it fits if for no other reason that it's a kind of silly formulation. I don't know how long you've been aware of this particular naming dispute but there was a move to call them social justice activists which I'm happy to use but never really got wide adoption. I suspect because it's a mouthful.

The problem, I think, is that this blob intentionally wants to resist being named because it wants to assert its contentious beliefs as normal, the null hypothesis of ideologies. This is a very privileged and powerful position to be in. It lets them stake out radical positions and if those positions prove disastrous it doesn't taint the rest of the ideology. They don't want the failure of things like "defund the police", a sentiment widely shared by adherents of this blob, to color people's perception on the other ideas they propose.

I guess my question for you is do you deny the existence of this blob entirely? As in do you deny that there is a large contingent of people on the left that are bought into nearly every radical left leaning position including but not limited to:

  • anti-racism( as expressed by Kendi and including race concious policy)
  • climate doomerism
  • anti-western and anti-US in particular geopolitical positions (broadly can be expected to take whichever side of any conflict that is lest aligned with the west)
  • intersectional and privileged based understandings of race and gender,
  • anti-capitalism economics ( this is a big one and expresses itself and many ways)
  • acab or at least substantially anti-police beliefs
  • suspicious of free speech
  • LGBTQ activism

If you point to a person with this perspective on any one of these issues I would bet they have something like a 95% chance to believe in every other. That's really seems like a group that I should be able to easily point to.

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