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What appearance and demographics if you would you mind sharing? I'm a straight white, relatively tall, big blonde/red bearded white man and I've never perceived anything like that. The default assumption is anyone here is Blue as far as I can tell. (Which is an issue but a slightly different one, I think)
Now as soon as I open my mouth its clear I'm British not American and that often surprises people. And when I do talk about my history and my family being essentially rednecks it surprises them more because they seem to have the idea all Europeans are quasi-communists.
I'll PM you for opsec reasons but for others who might be reading it's not too dissimilar.
I'm amenable to the idea that the problem is in medicine specifically, since one of the biggest issues as far as I can tell is that conservatives are "known" to not be tolerant, and "tolerance" is a core and required part of being a physician. If you are assumed to be intolerant...well your license should be taken away (at least from the academia side of medicine, and as long as you aren't bringing in enough money that you are immune haha (this is how surgeons save themselves)).
The left seems to have no conception of the idea that they may be intolerant in general or have areas in which they are intolerant, or that some right leaning people (classically: good Christians) can be very tolerant.
Even when arguing with my own family members, some of whom are elected officials or otherwise deeply intwined with the Democratic Party I get a lot of "I don't understand, you are so kind and tolerant with your patients but not when we talk about politics." Admittedly some of it is "intolerant" but most of what I say is just...not woke.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there seems to be an assumption that certain good attributes are definitionally associated with woke politics and the greater left as far as some are concerned, and some of that drifts into beliefs of competence and descriptions of such. Likewise bad attributes can never apply to team blue.
I think that is just a failure state of all belief systems, like when I came "out" as an atheist, I heard a lot of "but you're a good person, how can you want to be an atheist" and the like, and many Christians say they don't think atheists can be moral people at all. That is basically the same argument you are getting.
If I think my values are good (and I must otherwise I would not hold them) then someone holding different, especially opposite values must be bad, otherwise they would hold my values instead. It's a failure state, I would agree, but a very common one. I elected not to reveal I was an atheist when I moved to a small Red town to avoid that exact scenario.
It's more of a problem for you because your industry is by the sound of it very Blue and one where we expect people to actually care. If you are pattern matched to a group that is seen to care about (for example) gay people less, then it doesn't take much of a push to expect you to treat some people worse than others. Because historically some people in your grouping have treated gay people badly. Even if of course, you personally would not.
Everyone wants to think they are good, therefore anyone who disagrees is at that the very least not good and at the worst actually bad. This is exacerbated by tribal politics and can grow from even small disagreements. See my own homeland where even two sects of Christians ended up murdering and discriminating against each other, even though to any outside view their differences in religion are much smaller than their similarities. Even though both their faiths say do not murder. They can rationalize it away, because they're bad Fenians or bad Prods.
I think the greater problem is not that identity politics is filled with lack of introspection and hypocrisy, those are not new inventions.
Over the last several thousand years society has developed an insufficient but ultimately extant immune system for dealing with overreach by religions. That's an infectious memeplex that leads to lack of introspection and hypocrisy and all kinds of bad outcomes. We are reasonably good at dealing with that.
Marxism and Cultural Marxism though.... we haven't figured that out yet. We've seen what happens with communists every time, and it still has major proponents. Woke stuff is similar and we seem to have a completely absent immune system to it.
Downstream of that is the Rs lashing out with immense fury and toppling everything they can when they finally have a chance to strike back in the slightest.
While I do think medicine is probably worse than academia in general, I've also had a number of conversations with people in academia who thought anti-whiteness or whatever was overblown and what was happening was that they were drinking the koolaid, doing well and not realizing the ladder had been kicked over behind them, not used to thinking of the possibility of discrimination being aimed at them, and so on. I've also met people who it seemed to not be happening for them at all. It is tricky because both exist.
I don't think this is exactly true really. There are still large swathes of America who haven't rejected the older infectious memeplexes in your terminology. Wokeness is a reaction to that memeplex and is part of the antibody response to further your analogy, it's actually part of the dealing with the overreach. That those antibodies continue to attack the infection is exactly what they should do (from the point of view of the antibody). The infection is perhaps contained somewhat but it isn't from the point of view of an immune response actually eradicated. It's not even really like shingles in that is dormant. It's still actively influencing the host.
And this is where the analogy breaks I think, because it's not possible for wokeness to "win" completely. At some point it will push too far and ebb. That may or may not be already starting to happen. And whatever immune response forms to fight that, will rise and then push too far, then ebb and so on and so forth.
Would it be better to have a kind of symbiosis instead of this push and pull mechanic? Probably, but I don't really see a path to that.
I hope so!
In any case what I wanted to make clear is that the experience some people have had with academia is so terrible that no level of alarmism is an exaggeration. Your corner (and in fact many or most corners) may be reasonable but a large enough chunk of it is not reasonable that it causes real problems and for those of us who have seen it - .....well burning everything to the ground doesn't sound terribly unreasonable.
That's fair! But if it is many or most corners that are reasonable, then presumably it makes sense for people in those corners to oppose you burning down the whole thing, even if they don't think you should be treated the way you are.
If it's 80% bad and 20% good that is one thing overall but if it is 20% bad and 80% good then that is entirely another. Whether you're in the bad or good part it's hard to tell which overall world we are actually living in.
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If we're going by this analogy, I'd say it's far more accurate to say that wokeness is a sort of autoimmune disease on the antibody that's making the antibodies less effective while also taking up the resources that the original infection would've taken up. Like, the principles that make the antibodies effective against the religious memeplex are being actively destroyed by wokeness, and though it's also attacking traditional religious memes, it's doing so by replacing it with progressive religious memes. It's clearly not the antibodies, but STRONGER, it's something else entirely that looks very similar to the original infection that the antibodies are attacking, but with the right signal proteins or whatever that causes the original antibodies to welcome them.
Sure I can see that as being a workable analogy. We could probably argue about how much is positive or negative, but I can absolutely see there are at least some negative parts. A mutation of the antibodies which means it attacks not only what it is supposed to attack but also other parts of the body maybe.
Like, even if you have an auto-immune disease, your immune system is still doing some useful things, it's just also attacking your gut or brain or whatever.
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