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Mar 14, 2022Edited
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>Basically, we pushed Putin to take the actions he is pursuing

No, we absolutely didn't. Putin has has imperislistic ambitions from day one and was always going to use whatever excuse is handy to him to justify it. Did we "push" Putin to annex crimea and arm terrorists in eastern Ukraine too?

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Mar 10, 2022
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" stop trying to ban teachers from even mentioning racism or queer issues in class"

Which will get your school run into the ground and downgraded by Ofsted, because you're supposed to be teaching geography and instead you're getting the kids to talk about their privilege:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/mar/07/ofsted-downgrades-american-school-in-london-over-focus-on-social-justice

"The Ofsted report, published on the school’s website, found much to praise about the school with its first-class resources and well-qualified teachers. The inspectors said the school, which teaches four- to 18-year-olds, has high expectations and “gives strong importance to equality and inclusion”.

The report added: “Sometimes, however, teaching places much more weight on the school’s approach to social justice than on learning subject-specific knowledge and skills.”

In lower-school social studies, inspectors pointed out that pupils “spend much time repeatedly considering identity (including analysing their own characteristics) rather than learning, for example, geographical knowledge”.

The teaching of middle-school humanities, including English, also led to a focus on social issues rather than subject knowledge and skills, the report said, leaving some pupils feeling underprepared for the next stage of their schooling."

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Mar 10, 2022
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Mar 10, 2022
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>If CRT is taught almost nowhere, then there should be no problem in banning it, right?

That would be true if the ban is written narrowly enough to *only* ban CRT, rather than banning any mention of bad things that happened to black people in the past. Sadly, we don't live in that world.

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Mar 10, 2022
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I'm entitled to at least as much hyperbole as the rest of the people in this thread. But if you insist, I could revise it to "banning teaching anything that might make a student feel uncomfortable" and then note that many students might feel uncomfortable to know that their country did some pretty shitty things to black people.

Or perhaps "requiring teachers to teach multiple perspectives on controversial issues, like the Holocaust," which was another gem to come out of the Texas CRT law.

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When government employees engage in pervasive racism to students while on the job, their parent's governmental representatives grow understandably concerned about those government employees.

You may think it's an overreaction, but most of the student's parents probably think it's an underreaction and not likely to result in much actual effect beyond making government school employees a little more careful in how obvious they are about their previously blatant racism.

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Mar 10, 2022
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And how many decades has it been since that happened in the United States, compared to teachers singling out kids for being white as having something inherently wrong with them, and requiring students to dwell on their imagined racial identities?

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Mar 10, 2022
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The replies in this thread make no sense:

OP: The problem with CRT bans is that they're so broad they cover a teaching basic facts about black history.

Reply: Yeah, but teachers are telling students to check their privilege and we have to ban that.

OP: They aren't just banning that, the bans are broad enough to cover basic history.

Reply: Yeah, but teachers are racist against white people so we need to ban that.

<repeat a dozen times in different branches of the thread>

Even if you believe that current teaching is a complete disaster and that harsh laws restricting teachers are the only way to stop the tides of SJ, the laws that are being passed are not the answer because *the laws are badly written.* They will result in perfect ordinary non-woke teachers who just want to teach what happened in America in the 1960s getting sued or fired. Badly written laws are a bad thing regardless of whether you agree with the intent.

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Some of us have also requested (see just above, 3 hours ago) examples/links/citations to a specific law which is "so broad they cover a teaching basic facts about black history." so that we can evaluate the law itself directly.

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Where's your evidence?

Also, it's extremely rich to complain about facts not being allowed to be taught when this is one of the central pillars of the woke agenda

"Badly written laws are a bad thing regardless of whether you agree with the intent."

Wokeists are introducing bad laws on an almost daily basis. We either fight back, or act as noble pacifists who allow ourselves to be beaten up. Not fighting back, even in a bad faith way, is self-destructive.

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"which for the most part they don't need to because as it turns out CRT is taught almost nowhere."

Do you have a preferred terminology for distinguishing between "Actual" CRT, and stuff that is strongly influenced by CRT and was called CRT before "the right" started using the term CRT?

I mean stuff like this: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teachers-unions-vow-to-defend-members-in-critical-race-theory-fight/2021/07

>One such measure, introduced by the NEA’s board of directors, said the nation’s largest teachers’ union will support and lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, **critical race theory**, and ethnic … studies curriculum in pre-K-12 and higher education.” The measure is part of a larger $675,000 effort to “eradicate institutional racism” in public schools.<

Later they removed the phrase from the effort, leaving something of a "serial numbers filed off" feel.

The name got poisoned-by-association when, IIRC, Chris Rufo started bandying it about, so we end up in this situation where (over-generalizations incoming) "the left" denies CRT exists outside of an obscure and obscurantist legal theory, and "the right" calls everything CRT. The truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle but there's no acceptable name to capture what that questionable middle ground is.

>"far more insidiously"

It's fair complain about what you see as injustice, but things hardly get *less* insidious than legislation. Maybe there's some questions to just how prosecutors and courts will interpret the wording, and that's troublesome, but the text is all out there. It's not like whisper networks.

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One way to think of it is that the original CRT is just in law schools, but the stuff filtering out is heretical offshoots of CRT made by dumber people. https://zermatist.medium.com/on-pretentious-rhetoric-bf034a25bd41

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>(And don't start with complaints of "guilt by association"; we're responding to post that described anyone who had a humane reaction to George Floyd's death as "woke")

This is a childish use of loaded language.

Is it "humane" to propose policies like defunding police? What if it's just, you know, wrong? Am I supposed to support policies that would cause serious harm in order to be "humane"?

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I've missed you, Deiseach.

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Very kind of you to say so, though do you mean in the sense of "I thought that rash had gone away"? 😁

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If public schools in California were found to have teachers that worked Christianity into every lesson, no matter how unrelated, and the school boards and teachers unions weren't doing anything about it, would you have a problem with the California legislature banning the practice?

As a conservative that believes religion and faith are good, I am still committed to the principle that neither belongs in a public school* outside of neutral discussion of the historical significance (such as in the appropriate history or literature class). Public schools* act on behalf of the government, ie all of society, and as such should not be taking sides on inter-society social issues. As such, what public schools* teach isn't speech, at least as far as 'freedom of speech' goes. What students say should be speech, as long as the school is committed to facially neutral rules designed to balance individual rights with the need to teach.

* - (at least, below the university level, which is what 'academia' should actually be. Academia should have a separate commitment to freedom of research by professors, with the caveat that what is published by professors doesn't represent the government.)

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Mar 10, 2022
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I tend to agree, but I expect that will be the responds regardless of whether it makes sense.

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Maybe precomit to a definition of intolerable policy that's worth going berserker over (and then follow through when necessary), but mostly stick the Fabian thing and build whisper networks.

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Possibly, but remember that wokeness starts from victimhood, claiming that it is a virtue. They already have a victim complex.

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That's a weird definition of wokeness. I don't have a good definition, but it certainly doesn't involve claiming that being a victim is a virtue.

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The woke wish to reward victims, because they are virtuous and deserving.

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The woke wish to rectify harms done to victims, because that's what any conception of justice does for those that the conception of justice sincerely sees as "victims."

If I steal your car, you're the victim of my action. If the police catch me, give you your car back, and make me pay you restitution, they are "rewarding the victim." Did they do this because they think you're "virtuous and deserving?"

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True, but the wish is selective on the group level. I've heard dozens of people (not media cherry picked, but personal conversations) say that destruction during protests was a good thing because it advanced the cause and peaceful protests were ignored by the media. People who saw their businesses destroyed don't register as 'victims.' It's this bias that's problematic.

Wokeness has a strong leveling aspect where only certain groups are allowed to be considered victims deserving of justice.

The notion of 'virtue' seems like an individualist notion that is a strawman when applied to collectivist models. Wokeness views disparate group outcomes as evidence of systemic failure. Virtue is a concept applied to individuals. It doesn't enter into the Woke model.

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Right--the disagreement is about who counts as "victims" and what counts as "injustice."

I also had these conversations during the protests, and strongly disagreed with the variously blasé or approving attitude a lot of people took toward violence and property destruction. But even here, I don't think that this is the attitude that makes "wokeness" unique.

Many people, for instance, would say that if the Ukrainian military destroys some buildings in the process of stopping the Russian invasion, they've acted appropriately and the harms to the owners of those buildings are relatively unimportant forms of victimization. In other words, we'd accept the concept that some kinds of harm constitute acceptable collateral damage. One thing that circulated a lot during the protests was a statement by a Minneapolis store owner whose store was destroyed, who basically said "If it stops the racial violence in this country, let it all burn." Many (including myself) would see this as an appropriate attitude toward the loss of personal property during the proper conduct of a just war.

Where I (and I assume you) differ with the woke people who favored or didn't mind property destruction during the protests was that I didn't see the protests as something similar to a just war. I saw them as justified protests raising an important issue to a basically legitimate government. And I don't see destroying property as acceptable conduct in that context.

My sense of what makes "woke" ideology distinctive is really two things: the first, as you point out, is an emphasis on social inequality between groups or social categories, especially around race, gender, and sexuality. Seeing these inequalities as more important means justifying more extreme countermeasures. The other is seeing democratic liberal states and liberal social norms as illegitimate or less legitimate. Everything else, it seems to me, follows from those two beliefs.

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> Wokeness has a strong leveling aspect where only certain groups are allowed to be considered victims deserving of justice.

They also don't give a fuck if individuals are poor. Opiate-destroyed miners in Appalachia? Doesn't matter, Bill Gates is rich.

Favouring blacks in med school admissions helps blacks who are already doing ok as shown by being able to apply to med school, it doesn't repair broken inner city families, etc.

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In some cases, money was collected for black-owned businesses, but not others.

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I think wokeness is more than the weird way they define victims and oppressors via increasingly imaginary offenses.

1. There's more tribalism to it than regular justice. I don't think mugger-victims see themselves as a tribe engaged in a struggle with the mugger-tribe. And there's no attempt to especially glorify the history of mugger-victims with a history month or whatever. Memes about mugger-victim martyrs and hagiographies seem much rarer than the same about victims of alleged racism.

2. There's less respect for due process and freedom of speech.

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Another way to frame that tribalism: Wokeness is more inclined to follow Lenin's formulation of "who, whom".

Wokeness has a quasi-Leninist conception of class enemies and class allies, except they're not defined in terms of class but in terms of intersectionality. Those who lack these intersectional credentials must demonstrate their loyalty with redoubled efforts or be assumed to be traitors. And even then the way they demonstrate this loyalty is frequently annoying and must be subject to rebuke: e.g. that recent article from a female black historian complaining about white people being *too* enthusiastic about wanting to discuss Black History Month.

You could probably tie this into a larger thread: the politicization of everything. The old academic left-liberalism sharply contrasted with Wokeism in its delight over shades of gray and a spirit of intellectual curiosity. If you were weirdly obsessed with some period of Western history, your moral character wasn't really questioned for simply trying to understand and describe it in an accurate and neutral manner -- indeed, such an effort could be a mark of virtue.

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> I don't think mugger-victims see themselves as a tribe engaged in a struggle with the mugger-tribe.

On the other hand, I do think that this is observable. Coming from a non-US perspective, we often see all kinds of underprivileged groups being disproportionally engaged in property crime and muggings, and there being a social struggle between them and the "respectable middle class" (i.e. "mugger-victim tribe"). Those groups sometimes are ethnic or immigrant minorities, but in more homogenous places they would be just subcultures, perhaps distinguishable by clothing, slang, tattoos, piercings, habits, etc - not a racial/national/etc separation but still a distinct "tribe" whom every person from the "respectable tribe" would shun as "definitely not one of us", would support all kinds of sanctioning and othering, and in cases of violent conflict would definitely glorify the member of the "respectable tribe" fighting the "criminal subculture".

And looking from outside towards USA, I do seem to recall reading about USA events that very much seem like a representation of a struggle like that - it seems that some communities glorified e.g. George Zimmerman as something like "martyr for the anti-mugger tribe", and when I read about American people justifying George Floyd's murder, their core argument seemed to be "he's from the 'mugger-tribe' so that's an expected, justified part of the struggle against them".

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I agree with 2, but am not sure if I agree with 1.

You're right that mugging victims, for the most part, don't identify as a group or tribe, and don't ask to have their history celebrated or acknowledged. That's partially because being a mugging victim is pretty random. Mugging victims don't often have mugging victim parents and mugging victim friends, and so don't really have any "history" as a group.

It's also because mainstream society takes muggings fairly seriously and tries to immediately address the harm caused by mugging. When that's not true--for instance, New York in the 80s, crime victims absolutely start seeing themselves as a class or a tribe, elevating heroes (i.e. Berhnard Goetz, Curtis Silwa), and demanding respect and redress from the rest of society.

So, I think that demanding redress for a history of victimization and demanding respect as a group may be a fairly standard response to belonging to an identifiable group that feels that it has been repeatedly victimized without redress.

That said, I do think that because wokeness has an expansive definition of harms and an expansive sense of appropriate redress, there's a tendency of people in "woke" circles to try to attach themselves to harms or victimization in order to gain standing. But even there, I'm not sure how unique this is--Curtis Silwa faked subway attacks to gain clout for the Guardian Angels and apparently lied about having been kidnapped.

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When I looked it up 5 or 10 years ago, there were 2 or 3 memorials to crime victims in general in the U.S.. I think they were in places where cops tend to live, such as Long Island.

There were also memorials to victims of specific crimes. For example, although the governor of Massachusetts not too many years ago dedicated a memorial for Sacco & Vanzetti, there is also a memorial to their two victims on the spot of their armored car robbery.

In general, it is considered in poor taste by journalists to remember crime victims as a class.

On the other hand, true crime stories involving specific victims are very popular, and popular fiction, such as Batman movies, is much concerned with crime and its victims.

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"The woke wish to rectify harms done to victims, because that's what any conception of justice does."

You are wrong. The normal Western concept of "Justice" is to judge individuals as culpable based on their own actions, and to restore individual victims according to their individual injuries caused by those specific wrongful actions.

Woke "social justice" is the opposite -- it's about class-based victimhood and retribution. The "Bourgeoisie" or the "Kulaks" are class enemies of the people so must be punished. Current wokesters just substitute "white males" as the designated class enemy.

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More precisely, woke is about group-based victimhood. They don't use social class as a group (except in passing as lip service) because they themselves belong to the upper social classes, and therefore to do so would be arguing against their own class based interests.

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And it is absolutely explicit about this. There is a lot written in academia about "the inadequacy of individual rights" and the like.

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Yes. In almost *any* discussion where the victim and the perpetrator are clearly established and then discussed, the discussants (more or less rightly) treat the victim as relatively virtuous and deserving and the perpetrator as relatively indecent and undeserving. The frame or window of the discussion is typically only how great the relative distance.

Discussions which explicitly try to invalidate or flip this framing are mostly either implicitly trying to swap victim and perpetrator status, or moot the distinction entirely.

That being said, I agree that wokeness is more complex and top comment is reductive (if we assume it's a definition).

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I basically agree with you, but I'd quibble in the following way.

Any discussion where the victim and perpetrator are clearly established will treat the perpetrator's actions as indecent and underserving. They don't typically treat the victim as any more decent or deserving than they were before being victimized.

In other words, we establish that "car theft" is an indecent action, and that "car thieves" don't deserve the cars they steal. But we don't tend to assume that people who have their cars stolen are thus more decent or more deserving than are people who didn't have their cars stolen, or that they're any more decent or deserving than they were before having their cars stolen. If I give them their car back, it's not rewarding them for their virtue, it's rectifying a specific injustice (and we'd see giving the car back as just even if the person who's car was stolen isn't a very nice person).

Similarly, if I say that person A racially discriminated against person B, I am saying that person A is doing something unvirtuous and indecent, but I'm not saying that being a victim of racism is virtuous. If I say that person B should be compensated for the harm done to them by person A, I'm not trying to reward person A for their virtue, I'm trying to rectify harm done to them by person B. Their general character or moral standing isn't really relevant.

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its an old philosophical concept = Slave morality

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Does it involve seeing victimhood as a source of status? My not very well informed impression is there is an element of "more oppressed than thee" in woke culture.

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> I don't have a good definition, but it certainly doesn't involve claiming that being a victim is a virtue.

I think it does. I think that being a cult of victimhood is at the heart of wokeness: the idea that if you're a member of an accredited victim group (e.g. blacks, women, gays, tans, Muslims, etc) then thereby you become a virtuous person and other people are morally obliged to be on your side.

E.g. George Floyd became a woke saint because he was murdered by the police.

If being a victim isn't virtuous in wokeness, why did Jussie Smollett fake a hate crime against himself?

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I think that describing being a victim as virtuous is importing a very different value system, and fails to describe how social justice works.

Being a victim is being deserving of care. This isn't the same thing as virtue.

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I suspect the conceptual distinctions between "being deserving of care" and "being virtuous" that, say, Aristotle might have drawn are collapsing. These days, there are mostly just good people vs. bad people, and what more do you need to know?

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I wouldn't say you've entirely wrong, but I think think there's a distinction on the Social Justice side between victims deserving of care and people supporting Social Justice who are deserving of praise.

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What are you "waking up" to if not to some oppressor?

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"punching down" is a woke concept. Let's not use the enemy's language.

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If you've decided they're the enemy, you've already decided to make this problem worse. You destroy your enemies. You crush them, you humiliate them, and sometimes you kill them. Do you want to do this to (other side of whatever fence you use to define "woke"?) Are you willing to pick up a gun and spill blood into the streets over this? Because that's the choice you're making by calling them an enemy. If two halves of the US are each other's enemies, the US will stop existing. Yes, that's the choice all those people on the other side who are calling you an enemy are doing to, and I tell them the same thing. We need de-escalation.

And "punching down" is a decency concept phrased in woke language. Do you believe it's virtuous to mock a crippled person for being in a wheelchair? Do you think it's a neutral action? Or do you think it's an inherently mean-spirited action that can be ameliorated based on the circumstance (e.g. if the crippled person is nasty and mean-spirited themselves, there's likely more of a sense of karma if someone calls them names)?

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There's a couple ways to read these kinds of situations. Like, for a lot of people, me included, pretending the other side isn't an enemy is pretty much just laying down and letting them shoot you in the back of the head. Because in your model, where proclaiming the other side an enemy leads to bloodshed, it doesn't *stop it* from happening if I pretend it's not.

It's surprisingly often in rationalism that I'm told something that basically boils down to "winning is for the other guys. Send them birthday cards and ignore all the tanks near alsace".

The second paragraph is what the woke say punching down is when they are snuggled up in the motte. But out on the bailey, the direction "down" just means "the direction I am, and they aren't; I'm allowed to hit them, you see". Again, the ask here is that I *let them hit me for free*. And again I'm mystified as to why I'd lose on purpose and default surrender.

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I'm not saying "surrender", I'm saying that thinking of this as a war will end in it being an ACTUAL war. Like, with guns, and bombs, and knives, and people dying. I am NOT saying one side bears exclusive guilt here, I am saying that I don't want The Troubles x 50, and I'm going to guess that you don't want that either. Like the old saying about marriage goes- no matter how big the fight gets, at the end of the day you're still going to have to live with each other. At the end of the day, all the "woke libtards" and "alt-right CHUDS" are going to have to live in the same country, go to the same schools, etc, and adopting a siege mindset where anything short of total tribal loyalty is seen... exactly as you see it, not only ends extremely badly, but also is how we got to this exact position to begin with.

I'll admit it's not an easy place to come down from, but right now both the Woke and the Anti-Woke seem to be playing a game of Chicken to see who'll be the first to veer away from outright advocating and carrying out the mass murder of the other side, and someone's going to have to give or else everyone loses- especially people like me who are dirty filthy evil doubleplusungood fence-sitting traitors who refuse to pick either side (aka most Americans).

The Woke can say "punching down" is anything they want, I just want to register that basic human decency is, in fact, good, and shouldn't be thrown out because it's an obstacle to Winning. That's the definition of Moloch- dehumanize not only your enemy, but yourself, because it's "more efficient".

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What I'm saying is, it's an actual war. They are taking 100% of the ground they can within what they think they can do; they aren't confused about us (us being: anybody who isn't who they define their team as) being the enemy. They take jobs when they can; they demand you swear fealty and adopt special language to show you will bow when called on.

But within that concept, somehow they aren't shooting anybody.

Now, there's five potential ways this goes:

1. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can; they aren't unclear about this. But I don't shoot them, I work within the rules to resist them, and lose but don't go to arms.

2. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can, but now instead of working inside of the rules I either pre-commit to going to arms if I lose or just go to arms immediately.

3. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can, I resist them, I win, and THEY go to arms.

4. I don't admit they are enemies and they just win by default because I'm pretending they are nice and reasonable even though they keep telling me they aren't.

Rationalists are very disproportionately likely to say that 4. is the only option, that we need to lay down and take our licks and pretend the other guys are nice.

But note that 1-3 exist, and out of those both 1 and 3 are good, moral options. But even if they weren't AND I planned on laying down and taking my beating, it still doesn't change the fact that they are my enemies, if they are, the same way appeasing does not in fact change the fact that some people would reallly like a second-hand country of France.

I'd think of this argument a lot differently if it seemed like you were arguing that it wasn't in fact a war, or they weren't in fact enemies. Like we might disagree, that's whatever. But not wanting a war and ignoring an actual war for that reason doesn't stop the war, it just means you lose faster.

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"It's an actual war"

No, it isn't. You are using hyperbolic language. I've personally seen the remains of "actual war". It makes student protests, or even riots, look like a frolic in a field.

If you want this to be an ACTUAL war, though, please go ahead and keep deciding that every person you're ideologically opposed to is a mindless psychopath who must be crushed and cast out of society just like they do. Keep your foot flat on the pedal, they'll surely swerve first.

I think both sides here consist of small cores of people who are terminally ideological to the point of hating life and loving death and a bunch of people who have been tricked into listening to those people. Those are the ACTUAL sides here: normal people and those who hate life and love death, whether that takes the form of Terminal Woke or Terminal Anti-Woke. The latter win when they get the former to kill each other, and the former win when they ignore the latter, because the latter are actually very small and weak and can only cause damage beyond a tantrum with a gun when they convince other people that loving death and hating life is Just and Noble or Stunning and Brave or Based and Redpilled or whatever other banner those ghouls will eventually hoist next.

In summary- I hope every person on both sides who sees this as a total war and a whole half of the country as their irreconcilable enemies chokes on their own frothing spittle and spares the rest of us the mass deaths they crave. A pox on both your houses. Consider me the general of the Army of People With Actual Problems In Their Lives declaring war on both of your camps.

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"What I'm saying is, it's an actual war."

No, actually, it's not.

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I used to be kind of a big right wing influencer, once upon a time, but I guess I've shifted back towards the center and become more chill now, thanks to Scott.

I don't think anyone is ever going to left-wing-death-squad you [99% confidence]. Metaculus predicts only a 3% chance of a second US civil war by 2031 ( https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6179/second-us-civil-war-before-2031/ ) and even that number is probably inflated by a minority who doom scroll too much.

I recommend to everybody on all sides who has a lot of anxiety about politics to just take some weeks off of social media, news, and any other sources of outrage porn. Just live life. Life is good.

Nobody is coming for you except a few obese radicals who wanna tattle to your employer for writing unwoke things on the internet. And even in that worst case scenario there are plenty of other jobs and plenty of ways to make a living as your own boss. I've been my own boss for almost 6 years now. It's great. Office space was one of my favorite movies. Peter's character arc totally resonates with me. Fortunately I found something that pays a lot better than construction.

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I'm using the word "enemy" as hyperbole, I suppose. I don't believe there will be a civil war here. My chief political opponents are the social conservatives on the left (the woke) and the right (mostly bible-thumpers).

Because there's no clear divisions in the culture wars, (would I side with conservatives? Hell no. Would I side with progressives? Hell no.) I don't see how we would end up choosing sides for an actual war.

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I'm glad to hear you essentially agree with me, but sadly the effective lines in the Culture Wars are Right-Wing Death Cult and Left-Wing Death Cult, and they both assign the vast numbers of people who are NOT in the Death Cults membership in the other camp.

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What makes you think 'punching down' vs 'punching up' is a useful distinction?

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Mar 11, 2022
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When I am punched, I am a representative of the lowest potential individual.

When I punch you, you are a representative of the highest potential individual.

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As with all such contests, in this strategy the person with whom the fight is being picked is irrelevant. The point is what observers of the fight think; and the target observers appear to be the anti-woke and the neutrals who don't think that way.

Further, the opponent doubling down is traditionally (though not necessarily correctly) viewed as desirable - the idea is that if they double down hard enough it will alienate the observers.

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The idea that "punching down is bad" is *itself* part of the whole victim-complex ideology, though, a component of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic. Effectively a way of saying "it's okay when we do it".

If you read any pre-20th century satire, for instance (satire being a common victim of this attitude) you'll see that the barbs are directed at human weakness and folly *wherever* they're found. If a beggar has character flaws, mercilessly mock the beggar.

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These people were always GOING to have a victim complex, and now that the nonsense has moved out of universities and into the real world where peoples bank accounts are being frozen, it isn’t punching down in any meaningful way to go all out against wokeness

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These people were always GOING to have a victim complex, and now that the nonsense has moved out of universities and into the real world where peoples bank accounts are being frozen, it isn’t punching down in any meaningful way to go all out against wokeness

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I feel like it really depends on the academic’s personality. You have to be high in disagreeableness and enjoy conflict somewhat to successfully pull off the Berserker strategy. And you have to be generally agreeable and thought of as a non-troublemaker to execute the Fabian strategy.

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I think this is the best advice.

Also just because you can't be fired doesn't mean they can't make you want to quit. This academic's will to continue on is now the weakest link in this strategy. So they should choose what fits them, and choose what they think they can continue to do for many years.

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NY Telephone wanted my father to move to the Westchester office. He refused, noting that we had family on the Island, the kids were in school, had friends, etc. They gave him NO WORK for an entire year. He survived, and we didn't move.

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Right! (Ball successfully returned into the court of Scott and the Academician. :^)

I will observe that Jordan Peterson left academia because he was hurting any students he had. Being a pariah, working with him was a black mark against the student. Finally the message I got from the Canadian truckers, was that if you don't control the narrative, then your message will be formed by those who do control it.

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> if you don't control the narrative, then your message will be formed by those who do control it.

This. It doesn't matter what you do and why; it will be described as something else done for a different reason.

So maybe the step one would be to put your "elevator pitch" on youtube? Like, not more than five minutes, otherwise in this era of instant gratification no one will watch it.

Not sure about step two, though. Or maybe you should just make funny anti-woke memes.

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+1. I couldn't run the Fabian strategy if I tried, and berserking is fun. I know people who are the opposite.

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Great point. As I was reading the descriptions I was thinking "wow, it would be great to be a Berserker," while at the same time knowing that I'm just not cut out for it emotionally. I'd have to go Fabian pretty much every time. Darned high agreeableness causes me no end of trouble!

Of course the dilemma is: what if this group (Scott's subscribers) concludes by virtue of reasoned argument that Berserker is the most effective approach and Fabian is mostly ineffectual?

Time to practise enjoying being disliked, I suppose.

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I'm surprised more people aren't harping on this. If you have two choices, one of which will surely make your life miserable, it seems like a Bad Idea to go that route if there is literally any other way to run your life and do good. As a very strong rule of thumb, I don't think we should be encouraging people to make irreversible decisions with excruciating consequences for themselves.

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This was my thought too. Which life do you want to live?

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This was going to be my comment as well. I think it really helps when we stick our necks out that something natural in us guides us to want to do that. It may be because we're the kind of person who likes to pick fights -- I don't mean that entirely negatively, more as being someone who likes to be a campaigner and public leader and all that implies. It may be because the person feels so strongly about the one issue that's arisen (yoga classes being cancelled) that it provides fuel for them to overcome their dislike of being a campaigner/leader (in my experience, that can be quite costly for that person, even if maybe they feel it's worth the cost -- one needs to at least account for the cost).

I don't see it being successful for people to pick a strategy abstracted from local conditions and their own tendencies and then force themselves to pursue it as a general matter. That's a recipe for a lot of unproductive "shoulds" in a person's head. Particularly when they have another job to do -- ie, being a campaigner isn't their full-time job.

Whenever we're asking ourselves about a course of action, I find it helpful to ask "what do I want guiding me in this choice?" Fear? An abstract idea? A dearly-held value? Recognition of where my ingredients can be best put to use? The kind of role I enjoy playing? My own natural sense of motivation? It's a lot easier if we're not swimming against our own tide in taking on a big commitment.

There are so many ways to be of use and it's a delusion to imagine that there's an exact right way one can choose in advance of events. That's a kind of black and white thinking that's not really responsive to how reality unfolds.

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I came here to say this too. Really depends on the asker’s personality re what he will do, not necessarily what he “should” do.

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Having spent most of my life as a classical liberal/libertarian academic, I strongly agree. There is no best way of changing the world in your desired direction, only a best way for you. That applies more broadly than to this particular question.

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Exactly this. The article clearly lays out that neither strategy is a clear winner. So the academic should do what comes naturally to their personality. Any other choice may be more effective in the short term but will cause fatigue and burnout in the long term.

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Gosh, I am out of touch. This post feels like reading the last book of Harry Potter without having read anything else. Maybe I should be using Twitter to keep up with the conversation online. Who I am kidding, I'm too lazy for that.

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Mar 10, 2022
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What a segue. I'm an instant fan.

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This post made me think about to the filter bubble / shadow universe post Scott made a while back. I have no idea what it's like in Scott's world, coming from my shadow universe:

At work: one of the managers likes to find something offensive to say every day just to get a reaction.

My dad, a normally very grounded guy, talked to me in a straight face about aliens the other day, and my brother and sister-in-law don't go to church because they believe in aliens.

My wife used to believe Nancy Pelosi went to China to meet with their leaders and arrange how COVID would be released. It was all part of Democrats plan to steal the election. I don't think she believes that anymore, but she still thinks they stole the election. She also, however, believes strongly in vaccines (going to school to become a nurse, she was a MA) and we both have our booster. Neither of us wear a mask at the grocery store but some people still do.

I don't bring up COVID with most people because most of the people I know are on the COVID conspiracy spectrum, but we have a few friends on the other far side, who wanted to have a party in the winter cold but wouldn't let anyone go inside their house for fear of exposure.

I think it's just a totally different memetic environment around here, especially among our church friends, and probably Facebook at the time too.

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Do you remember what the title of the post about the shadow universes / filter bubbles was?

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I will go look for it.

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"

There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.

"

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I'm currently reading China Mieville's The City & the City about two cities occupying the same space at the same time, with strictly enforced separation to the point of "not seeing" the other cars on the street, and have been wondering what allegory they are going for. Your Scott quote above captures the mood perfectly.

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There was a Philip Jose Farmer science fiction book called "Dayworld" in which, because of overpopulation, people spend six days a week in suspended animation and each "day" is basically a seperate society that exists parallel to but barely interacts with each other day.

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With respect to Incurian, "Different Worlds" sounds like it's a better match for Azatol's description.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/

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+1. I spent most of the pandemic in western Michigan for family reasons and returned to NYC last November. Whiplash!

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Mar 10, 2022
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This is an underrepresented and very helpful point of view. The use of "code-switching" is particularly interesting; are there any specific examples besides the COVID protocols that you've seen or specific vocabulary/actions that you use?

It seems to me that a good way for people to more successfully adopt general policies is to think of how they would apply in the opposite political context. E.g. if "speech has consequences, tough luck" is the response to conservative pleas for intellectual tolerance on campus, would that also apply to, say, Biden voters in rural Pennsylvania who get treated poorly by their Trump-voting neighbors?

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You don't have to go as far as rural Pennsylvania - that contradiction is literally happening on the very same college campuses. The same universities that claim conservative professors just have to suck it up are the ones banning speech that could make students uncomfortable and therefore feel "unsafe".

This contradiction is not at all surprising, and whenever people bring this kind of thing up, it's kind of like "no shit, have you been living under a rock?" It reminds me of the top comment on this post. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/senate-democrats-use-the-jim-crow

Tribes are never and have never been consistent about general principles like civility, freedom of speech, etc - the only thing they are consistent with is tribal allegiance. So of course the left aren't consistent when students have "safe spaces" but conservatives are told that they are SOL - but they are consistent with supporting the in-group and opposing the out-group. That's the one thing tribes will always be consistent about.

It does seem like the left is currently worse about this than the right. I haven't heard of many conservatives seriously arguing for censorship of leftists - most actually support free speech for all. But it's arguable that that's just because conservatives aren't in a position where their demands for censorship of the left would actually be answered (since tech companies and the media are so far to the left), so it's kind of pointless to even attempt it. If conservatives ran tech platforms and media companies, they would likely be censoring as well, albeit less-so than the leftists are currently.

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I don't understand this point: isn't anti-crt and don't say gay basically trying to intentionally conflate anything potentially challenging of right-leaning ideals as dangerous woke rhetoric? I'm not convinced that the book burning/banning has suddenly stopped from the right, nor will it. I think we have a tendency to see a cultural shift as necessitating an absolute reversal of roles. I don't think anarchism is any more corporatist/statist now than it was in 1980 (at least any form that hadn't been co-opted by the alt-right). Calls for civility and decorum are still coming from the folks who claim the world is controlled by a zionist conspiracy.

Maybe I'm in a vastly different bubble but I'm in a huge metro on the west coast and I doubt we're in a woke dystopia.

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I am faintly hesitant to head back into the office after two years of WFH for this reason. We have been using various online tools to communicate and the discussions on there tend to be to the woke end of the spectrum. People have even started adding their pronouns to their usernames which makes me shake my head in amused pity.

I am pretty sure that most of my colleagues have middling political opinions, but it is also possible that there has been some sort of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers" type event and they will all be completely insufferable in person.

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Maybe wokeness peaks at different times in different places, and the Bay Area is avant-garde so it peaked there first and now is declining. There are definitely places where wokeness never reached hegemony yet (and maybe never will because they were vicariously immunized by watching the overreach in other places), but those places aren't the major cities that steer American culture (New York, Los Angeles, SF)

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"my brother and sister-in-law don't go to church because they believe in aliens" ... can you join the dots for me here? I can't imagine what connection there would be between whether or not you believe in aliens and whether or not you go to church.

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I can't connect the dots either. I guess they think God was only supposed to make humans so if aliens exist that's discrediting religion?

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I think a lot of it comes down to the core story of Christianity - God creates humans, humans sin, God comes to earth and dies for their sins. That's not incompatible with the idea of extraterrestrial life, but it does raise a lot of odd questions. ("Did aliens sin, did Jesus die for the sins of aliens, etc.")

The idea that humans are unique/special isn't an *essential* aspect of Christianity, but it's a very strongly linked philosophical view.

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Interestingly, CS Lewis wrote about the possibility of aliens in one of his essays, and didn't even seemed phased by the prospect, and discussed the possibility that intelligent aliens may not be 'fallen creatures' like humans, and thus have no need for salvation. I think the Catholic Church also has a position on how we should regard aliens should they be discovered. In general mainstream Christianity seems nonchalant about the theological implications of aliens, though I can see why that might seem intuitively surprising (I'm not Christian, so don't this as apologetics, but I was surprised myself at how unbothered Christian thinkers seemed to be by aliens).

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Yeah, I'm not surprised - the theological questions of aliens aren't insurmountable, they just require a bit of creativity, so it's not surprising that CS Lewis, who had no shortage of creativity, was particularly not phased by them.

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More(Strikethrough more, replace with "also") interestingly, Mark Twain also wrote about Christ dying, many times, to save many alien worlds. "Captain Stormfields's visit to heaven" or something.

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I mean, if you believe in directed panspermia ("aliens made Earth life and/or humans"), then either you believe Christianity is a Chinese-whispers version of the truth or it's wrong.

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I remember reading some woke stuff 7 years ago, but I don't where they hang out anymore.

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The use of "wokeness" here as a catch-all term for anything related to social justice, as if it were a single force to be supported or opposed, feels really lazy and indiscriminate to me. There was a lot of reaction after George Floyd was killed, because a man was slowly murdered on camera while onlookers couldn't do anything about it, and that's horrible. Lots of people reacted in lots of ways, some of which seem wholly appropriate to me (protesting police brutality and lack of accountability), some of which were foolishly utopian but you can see where they were coming from (defund the police), and some of which were the kind of ridiculous symbolic gestures that get rightly derided as "woke" (renaming the "master" branch of version control systems to "main") - it was not nearly as simple as "wokeness got stronger".

Any serious attempt to deal with the genuine problem of dysfunctional "woke" ideology has to deal with the fact that a lot of people are trying to create a better world, and you don't _want_ to push back against that - you want to push the discourse sideways, so that that effort is directed in a healthier way.

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I think this is a bit unfair. There's clearly been a general trend over the last decade or so that distinguishes current "woke social justice" from the social justice that preceded it. That trend is difficult to distill exactly, and "woke" is definitely a simplistic shorthand. But my guess is that Scott is assuming (reasonably imho) that most of his audience shares his understanding of "woke" as a shorthand.

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Yes, linguistically we could say that 'social justice' is a political position, 'woke' is a performative social status game

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That's rather begging the question. People who self identify as 'woke' would almost certainly not agree that they are taking part in a performative social status game, or at least not with the implication of inauthenticity which is a toxic non-argument that seems to get thrown around a lot in these kinds of debates.

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Performative social status games are mostly not conscious at all. Human navigation by mimicry is a feature not a bug. Ref Henrich/ Hanson/ BJ Campbell etc

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But what is the purpose of you claiming that someone is taking part in a performative social status game? If everyone is doing that unconsciously anyway, then it's a contentless assertion. I take it actually as a toxic claim that they are being inauthentic, and that their claims can be ignored.

It's quite possible that they are unconsciously taking part in a performative social status game, and it's also possible that anyone making that claim is too. It's relevance to the substantial topic under discussion is zero. In practice when people say this, they're not making a sociological analysis, they're making a cheap, illogical attack on their argumentation partner.

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I agree that trying to dismiss woke people by saying they are *just* status-seeking is a discursively toxic move. But there is a cluster of behaviours among some social-justice oriented people which seems to play no other role than securing public affirmation from other social-justice-y people, i.e. "Wow, good job, you're so woke!" (e.g., banning yoga club b/c cultural appropriation). It seems to me like when people say they are anti-woke, what they mean is they are against this kind of behaviour. So, internal to anti-woke communities, using "wokeness" to refer to this kind of tendency seems natural. Of course this could create problems & poison the well of discourse between wokes and anti-wokes, but at least it's not a total idler wheel.

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Relatively few people continue to self-identify as 'woke' once the term was adopted by their outgroup, but there doesn't seem to be a commonly-agreed-on replacement term, either (as Freddie deBoer opined in "just tell what I'm supposed to call this thing." The linguistic treadmill is running full steam on this vague nameless thing that everyone seems confident exists.

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They won't get a good answer for a long time, either. I still don't know what a hippie is/was. I know what lots of people say they are/were, but mostly those descriptions don't match anyone I knew, and I lived in Berkeley during the 1960's/70's. "Long haired freak" at least had identifiable correlations with people I knew.

The thing is, "hippie" was popularized by a gossip columnist. It took off as a phrase among lots of people who didn't know anybody that it described, so they let their imaginations fill in the details. I think that something similar occurred with "woke", though it was probably an internet talk board.

My guess is that currently "woke" predominantly means "someone whose politics I don't like" and that it tends to be used among right-wingers. (I'm not going to call them conservatives, because they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids. So that's not conserving.)

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>"Long haired freak" at least had identifiable correlations with people I knew.

LOL! I was once gifted a "long-haired freaks need not apply" sign when I grew my hair out.

>(I'm not going to call them conservatives, because they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids. So that's not conserving.)

Thank you for this consideration and clarity!

I get annoyed with that kind of abuse of the phrase "conservative," and I do appreciate this.

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>they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids.

Note: This is essentially a textbook definition of a reactionary.

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