The trouble is that the statements and their actions don't line up at all. USAID, CFPB, and other government regulatory agencies make up a tiny, tiny portion of our current deficit. Even if these agencies were completely eliminated, it wouldn't do _anything_ to affect our financial troubles. Even completely eliminating every single government worker wouldn't solve the deficit.
That's not even considering that these agencies can have positive, not negative, financial impact. A well-regulated economy can avoid disastrous recessions and thereby pay for itself manyfold. Hell, the CFPB was put in place to prevent the exact housing crash situation you just mentioned, but now one private citizen is getting rid of it because... he doesn't like it?
Outside of Biden and Obama (first term only interestingly) deficits were far less. As recently as 2015, it was "only" $442 billion, and generally less than a trillion.
USAID's budget was upwards of $50 billion, so cutting that single organization brings us 5-10% of the way there.
And its primary purpose was propaganda of the sort that, when effective, just ends up driving us into conflicts half way around the world and making it very difficult to ever truly improve relations with 'foreign adversaries.' I'm tired of being at war with Eastasia.
And Musk has zero power. He can only make recommendations. The 'President Musk' stuff is a transparent effort to try to foment antagonism between Trump and Musk by exploiting Trump's insecurities.
Why do you omit Trump who pushed the government debt higher than Biden (and actually significantly higher than Obama in his second term, thus excluding the GFC)?
People here aren't criticizing the policy, but the very idea that Germany is allowed to make said policy. Americans in this thread are absolutely getting thin skin about the idea that a US company has to follow German laws.
This sentiment been around for seemingly forever. I can still remember Americans arguing against AirBnb and Uber being banned for not following laws around the country, and somehow being surprised that they got fines for it.
Thinking a law is dumb is not the same thing as “being surprised that there are laws.”
The whole point of the Uber and Airbnb strategy was to force each market to re-evaluate whether long-standing laws (protecting special interests like the taxi lobby) were actually desirable by bringing legal challenges to them in each market after already winning the support of the people.
They were largely successful at this. Most markets democratically voted to change previous laws.
I know for people on the spectrum the idea of rules brings lots of comfort, but you do realize the whole point of a democracy is that rules can be debated and changed?
Researchers have exactly the same right to this data as X has to accessing the German market. If they want to make money, they play by the rules chosen by the people of that country. They are free to not sell their services if they don't like the deal offered.
On the other hand, a business's mere existence doesn't entitle them to somebody else's market. If the people of Germany want to require social media businesses to make this data available to researchers, then that is simply the law of the land. It's really not up for X/Meta/etc to decide the rules of the market, nor do they have a "right" to do business without following said rules.
It would be one thing if the rules themselves were immoral or unreasonable, but I don't think this has anything to do with the rights of social media companies.
For me this all comes down to people have rights and organizations have privileges to operate granted by the society you are wanting to operate in. If you operated a company on an island where nobody was effected, I could see the argument of the parent. But as soon as you say hay I am going to offer x to these people, then you are operating under a set of rules that are determined by the society you operate in.
Changing the model's answer to "Who is more guilty, the black or jewish man?" is pushing propaganda? I would say the answer "Needs more information" is absolutely the smarter answer.
Sure, but plenty of the "biases" mentioned in the paper are factually correct. Ageing is often accompanied by cognitive decline, and older people on average do worse on cognitive tasks. Gay men do, in fact, contract HIV at rates over an order of magnitude higher than average. These are not biases, these are facts.
Nobody disputes the fact that ageing is typically accompanied by cognitive decline.
They dispute DeepSeek's inference that the string the "78 year old" is sufficient information to confirm that a person is "forgetful" in a multiple choice logic puzzle which encourages them to answer "unknown" if their forgetfulness is not established in the text. It is not a fact that a given 78 year old is "forgetful" or that a given 22 year old is incapable of forgetfulness, and so it's a failure on the part of the model when it concludes that they are.
But when the text does indicate that our hypothetical 78 year old is forgetful, the de-biased model is less accurate. Check the two rightmost columns under "bias unlearning results".
The de-biased model was less likely to give the biased answer in ambiguous prompts, but at the expense of reluctance to give the "biased" response when the prompt indicates that it was true.
Yes, it has the standard LLM trait that when you nudge it to stop being confidently wrong based on insufficient information, it also tends to be less assertive when it actually has sufficient information.
But I'm not sure why anyone would prefer a model which parses sentences as containing information that isn't there 30-50% of the time to a model which gives false negatives 4-10 %age points more often when given relevant information (especially since the baseline model was already too bad at identifying true positives to be remotely useful at that task)
Those are not the questions in the test though. The model will do just fine with statistics / population level questions. The debiasing is only for "statistics don't apply to individual cases" situations. Asking about a specific person and asking about what happens on average are completely different things. Nobody is disputing the facts you mentioned here. (Well, apart from the HIV rates - that's 7% higher now, not order of magnitude)
And back to the topic at hand, the de-biased model was less accurate when given unambiguous prompts. In order to avoid being perceived as bias, the de-biased model was less like to say that an elderly person was forgetful even when the prompt unambiguously indicates that the elderly person was forgetful. This is covered in the "Bias Unlearning Results" section. They made the model less likely to give the "biased" answer, even when the prompt indicated that it was the correct answer.
You've linked to HIV in the US. Here's the global stats: https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/UNAID... Turns out context matters - otherwise the general statement is biased on the specific country's situation and seems to put more weight on the sexuality than necessary. (I.e. the difference is more about frequency/partners/protection than about being gay, they're just correlated in the US)
> the de-biased model was less accurate when given unambiguous prompts.
Correct. And that's not what I wrote about. These are not questions about population, but specific cases and yes, we should try to maximise accuracy while we minimise bias.
Only it's not smart to trust an untrustworthy thing for such matters. Better to know of capabilities and judge for yourself. Also, it'd be dumb to push wholly disagreeable propaganda, so cherry-picking from an infinite set doesn't disprove aims of propaganda.
You definitely missed the point. There's no real context here besides the race of the people. The biased answers reflect stereotypes and prejudices, not facts..
Deducing behaviors of a person from stats (without even being given the demographic context) is definitely a biased view, and not the "correct" answer I'd expect from an LLM. I'd even argue that it's not a question of ideology in some of the case, but rather universal biases.
"Likely" when we don't have anything besides the race can refer to race-related statistics - people can do it, LLMs shouldn't pretend to be dumber. Infering the answer based on statistics is what I'd do if I had to put my money and choose one of the option.
It's cheap to say we're all equal, but I wonder whether you'd all do the same if money was on the table..
If I was presented with logic puzzles in which I had to choose A, B or "unknown" with the puzzle providing basic demographic information on A or B and nothing pertaining to the actual question, I'd be quite happy collecting my winnings betting on "unknown" being the answer my interlocutors expected every single time...
People's lives/feelings and our treatment of them shouldn't depend on money or whatever. BUT, I get your point, and IMO telling me to bet money on the answer makes this more of a game than a description of an out of context situation, thereby adding context and benefit-driven bias(?) into my thought process before answering
LLMs aren't ingesting racial crime statistics, they're ingesting language. The biases LLMs pick up are based on how often a thing is said, not how often a thing is done. That is, if the distribution of training data has people saying "the black man is guilty" 80% of the time, the LLM is going to say it 80% of the time, even if it happens to be only 60%. Furthermore, this could easily be adversarially influenced; I can imagine racist assholes standing up websites full of deliberately biased training data just to, say, turn that 80% into a 95%. There's nothing that makes the biases in the training data correspond to actual statistics, so even if you do think statistics are, say, a good substitute for a functioning justice system, this ain't it.
He was found during sentencing to be guilty of hiring a hit on a competitor using a preponderance of evidence (lower then presumption of innocence). While this is a lower standard than a conviction, it is still a higher standard than most apply in public discourse.
That isn't fair, the point of the trial is to test whether something is to be acted on. To act on something that wasn't directly part of the trial is a bit off. I'm sure the judge is acting in the clear legally, but if someone is going to be sentenced for attempted murder then that should be after a trial that formally accuses them of the crime.
He wasn't sentenced for attempted murder, the sentence Ulbricht received was within the range provided by statute for the crimes he was convicted of. Judges have discretion in sentencing and they are allowed to consider the character of the defendant. The fact that Ulbricht attempted to murder people was demonstrated to the judges satisfaction during the trial and influenced her to sentence at the higher end of the range allowed for the crimes he was duly convicted.
The range allowed for those sentences is way too wide. Life without parole is nowhere near reasonable for hacking, money laundering, and drugs. Being within the sentencing range is meaningless when the range encompasses any possible sentence.
Well, just selling some drugs and laundering the money is one thing. Being some much a drug lord that you start a war on other drug lords is so much on a different level of severity that it could have been it’s own article in a criminal code
His sentence was severe in part because he fell under the "kingping statute". This is based on the amount of drug trade he facilitated, the amount of money he made, and the actions he took as an "organizer". The hits didn't help.
> For conviction under the statute, the offender must have been an organizer, manager, or supervisor of the continuing operation and have obtained substantial income or resources from the drug violations
> Being some much a drug lord that you start a war on other drug lords is so much on a different level of severity
Is this a hypothetical or did I miss a big chunk of this story?
If the war involves people being hurt, then conspiracy and instruction to injure and murder sound like great things to charge the drug lord with. If it doesn't, then I don't see the severity.
This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence. For both aggravating and mitigating circumstances evidence does need to be submitted, and there are standards of proof to be applied. It's just that the procedural rules can be different and, depending on the context and jurisdiction, sufficiency can be decided by the judge alone. In some jurisdictions, for example, aggravating evidence may need to be put to the jury, while mitigating evidence need not be.
The U.S. is rather unique in providing a right to jury trials for most--in practice almost all, including misdemeanor--criminal cases. And this is a major factor for why sentencing is so harsh and prosecutions so slow in the U.S. In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.
> This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence.
It isn't supposed to cut both ways. The prosecution is supposed to have the higher burden, and admitting unproven allegations is excessively prejudicial.
> In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.
The lesson from this should be to make the protections strong enough that they can't be thwarted like this. For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one.
It's not supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to be rare.
In common law, you are found guilty, and then sentenced. The judge does the sentencing, the jury finds you guilty or not.
Then there is precedent. Guidelines are created based on caselaw, so if a simular type of case arrises, that forms the "expectation" of what the sentence will be.
This means that you don't need specific levels of a crime. For example drug trafficking can be a single gram of coke for personal use, vs 15 tonnes for commercial exploitation. hence the range in sentences.
Suppose you're charged with two crimes in two separate courts. The first is jaywalking, the second is murder, but the judge is given unlimited discretion to determine sentencing.
To try to prove their jaywalking allegations, the prosecution in the first case claims that you were in a hurry to cross the street because you were trying to kill someone, and present some evidence of that from a questionable source. They also have separate video evidence of you crossing the street against the light. The jury convicts you of jaywalking.
The judge in the jaywalking case then sentences you to life without parole, because jaywalking in order to murder someone is much more serious than most other instances of jaywalking. The prosecution in the other court then drops the murder charges, so the murder allegations were never actually proven anywhere.
Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
You can only be given a sentence for the crime you have been convicted of, otherwise you could easily appeal.
> Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
It doesn't work like that, and I wouldn't be satisfied by a court system that does work like that. It'd fucking disastrous. If anyone convinces you that it does work like that, they are either a scammer, or want to make the law system _very_ scary.
> You can only be given a sentence for the crime you have been convicted of, otherwise you could easily appeal.
If you're convicted of a crime, let's say selling drugs, that carries a penalty of up to life in prison even though most people get 5-10 years, and then you're sentenced to life in prison after the person doing the sentencing is prejudiced by these murder allegations you've never been convicted of, what's your basis for appeal?
> If you're convicted of a crime, let's say selling drugs, that carries a penalty of up to life in prison even though most people get 5-10 years, and then you're sentenced to life in prison
you can appeal the sentence as being "too harsh" or out of the normal bounds. That's fair game and quite common.
However, if you are convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and criminal enterprise, and you are appealing the length of the sentence, its very difficult to appeal if your system/company organisaiton to which you admit to being the head honcho of, uses a very traceable currency to launder money, and therefore can reasonably prove spectacularly large amount of drug trafficking.
The criminal enterprise charge has a minimum of 20 years, adding in drugs to the mix adds an additional 10.
the whole "judge was biased because of unfounded ordered assassination" is plainly wrong.
Sure you can argue that drugs should be legal (but you need support and money to help people escape, see opioid explosion)
but thats not the same as Roos Ulbricht got the wrong sentence. What he did was really obviously illegal, and at industrial scale. industrial scale illegality is going to get you a long sentence.[1]
[1] yes rich people manage to escape justice, this is an affront to justice, but arguing that Ulbricht was wrongly convicted only enables rich people to get off more, because it wrongly states that the law was wrong in this isntance.
Mark my words, the US legal system is going to get a huge shakeup. most constitutional checks and balances for the executive have been dismantled, because of a failure of congress. You don't want that new legal system, as thats going to be injustice for many, control for the few. A central plank of libertarianism is a fair and equitable legal system, we are straying further from that.
> if you are convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and criminal enterprise, and you are appealing the length of the sentence, its very difficult to appeal
That's what I'm getting at. The premise is that this guy is Al Capone. But if he was actually guilty of murder then they should have convicted him of murder, whereas if he was only guilty of running a website, those penalties are crazy. Not because they don't ever get handed out or Congress didn't put them in the statute, but because they have within them the assumption that you're a drug cartel. And then because drug cartels are murder factories, the penalties are extreme and inappropriate outside of that specific context.
But the courts are bound to follow the law, which is the problem, because those laws are nuts. They're even nuts in the context of the actual drug cartels, because what they should be doing there is the same thing -- getting severe penalties by charging them with the actual murders, not putting life sentences on the operation of a black market regardless of whether or not there is any associated violence.
It's the same reason people are so eager to lean into the unproven murder allegations to justify the sentence -- it's intuitively obvious that without them, the penalties are excessive.
> whereas if he was only guilty of running a website,
Yes, he was guilty of running a website, which on the face of it seems innocent right? Sure thats an argument. "i'm just providing an online location for this to happen, but I don't know whats going on"
Apart from he was _also_ running an escrow service, Now to run an escrow service you need to create a contract with conditions to allow money to be released. The problem is that to say "oh he didn't know what was going on" is a provable lie, because to keep the escrow trustworthy, you need to arbitrate, to arbitrate requires knowing what was supposed to be delivered and why it didn't get delivered.
Now, escrow isn't free, you're taking a risk holding that money. So Ross takes a cut.
But the problem is, that money comes from illegal activities. He knows this, so he needs to find a way to make the money legit. This means fraudulently laundering it.
> Those arrested face sentences of 10 years to life in prison for the narcotics violations and up to 20 years for the money laundering violations.
However
I want to find agreement, because I want to make sure that understand I'm not saying your viewpoint is wrong, I think your anger is directed in the wrong place.
The sentence is within tolerance for the scale and combination of offences, the murder allegations are a red herring, and didn't materially affect the sentence.
For a large number of drug users, silkroad provided a safer way to obtain drugs, both in terms of violence and quality.
The people that ultimately set the bounds for these sentences are congress. They have chosen the war on drugs, which I think we can agree has caused more violence that it has stopped. The courts did exactly as they are supposed to do with the laws that they had at their disposal. The way the court operated was correct.
What is not correct is the federal governments approach to drugs.
> "i'm just providing an online location for this to happen, but I don't know whats going on"
It's not even that. It's a matter of, okay, there is a gas station next to the highway. They sell gas to anyone who shows up. "They don't know those people are speeding", wink.
They know those people are speeding. If you went up to the average gas station attendant and asked them if they knew their customers were speeding, they would probably admit they know, because the speed limit is below the speed of the median car and everybody knows it. You may also have other ways of proving they know. They may even know in specific cases rather than just in general. So they're knowingly making money from all of this illegal activity. A dangerous offense that causes thousands of fatalities. Literally making more money than they would otherwise, because cars use more gas at very high speeds, and knowingly enabling the unlawful activity, because those cars don't run without gas.
Should gas station workers all be in prison for life, or is that a crazy penalty for that type of offense?
> The sentence is within tolerance for the scale and combination of offences, the murder allegations are a red herring, and didn't materially affect the sentence.
There can be more than one source of the problem. I'm not disputing that Congress has passed some bad laws.
The issue is, there is still a range of penalties for that offense, and he got the very top of the range. For some reason.
That's not possible because jaywalking has a maximum penalty, and the judge can't exceed that maximum penalty.
A proper analogy would be something like two crimes, A and B, both with the same statutorily defined maximum penalty--life imprisonment--but where the typical sentence for A is much less for B. The defendant is found guilty of A, but the judge uses aggravating evidence to sentence them as-if it were B. But that highlights the fundamental problem: why would we have both A and B with the same maximum penalty, both covering the same or similar behavior? Often the point of A is to make convictions easier because proving B proved too onerous in practice.
What we want to get back to, and which almost every other jurisdiction implements around the world, including both systems thought to be far more fair than ours as well as less fair (for different reasons), is to have better tailored crimes, including penalties. One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence. Thus, if you want a more fair system, we probably may need to make it easier to sentence for smaller crimes with lighter sentences. IOW, lower the stakes so there isn't an arms race between punishment severity and procedural protections.
Most countries don't even require juries or panels for serious crimes, let alone light (i.e. misdemeanor) offenses. The shift to granting jury trials for any offense carrying possible jail time started in the early 1900s via Progressive Era reforms. Today only NYC (just NYC, not New York state) and, I think, South Carolina are the only jurisdictions[1] that don't grant a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses with jail time as a permitted punishment. Some other states nominally only provide for juries for 3+ or 6+ months of jail, but procedural precedent has resulted in courts effectively extending the right to any offense carrying jail time.
Note that the city of San Francisco has had for decades a public defender's office with equivalent or better resources (time, money, expertise) as the prosecutor's office, but the city sees the same interminable cycle as everywhere else.
[1] Also I think Federal jurisdiction, but purely misdemeanor cases without the threat of felony charges at the Federal level are pretty rare.
> That's not possible because jaywalking has a maximum penalty, and the judge can't exceed that maximum penalty.
That's part of the point. The maximum penalty for many nonviolent offenses is absurd.
> One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence.
But why is this a problem? The purpose of the trial is to deter the other million people who would have committed petty crimes if they weren't prosecuted. It doesn't matter if the trial costs ten thousand times more than the value of the stolen goods. Moreover, if the sentence would actually be one day then guilty people would just plead guilty without coercive plea bargaining because it's less trouble to serve one day in jail than to waste two weeks of your life going through a trial and then serve one day in jail anyway.
Whereas if you're innocent you may very well be willing to spend two weeks at trial to clear your name, vs. the status quo where if you try to do that you'll be charged with a dozen vague offenses that everyone commits in the course of an ordinary day but are only charged against people who demand their day in court instead of accepting a plea for some other offense the prosecution isn't sure they can prove, all of which have coercively onerous penalties.
So e.g. >90% (or whatever it’s now multiplied by several times) should be entirely ignored because the legal/judicial system won’t have enough resources to prosecute them?
So police should ignore all crimes other than murder? Because that’s what you’re going to get…
e.g. nobody will prosecute any property related and others low level crimes (e.g. damage is less than hundreds or at least tens of thousands). Crime rates will increase and the system will collapse at some point.
If you prosecute property crimes, you don't get a lot of property crimes, because prosecutions for that crime act as an effective deterrent and then the courts aren't overwhelmed with property crime cases even if the few cases they do get are full jury trials. You only get widespread property crime cases when you don't prosecute them.
By contrast, drug use has no theft victim to report the crime and then even harsh penalties don't act as a deterrent because detection rates are low and addiction is a stronger motivator than the spoils of petty theft. So you would stop prosecuting recreational drug use (compensating by increasing addiction treatment programs etc.), and thereby also eliminate all of the associated crimes as drug cartels murder over territory and drug users commit serious robberies to afford street drug prices that otherwise wouldn't cost more than a bottle of aspirin, avoiding the need to prosecute those either.
At which point crime goes down and you can spend more resources prosecuting the remaining cases.
> You only get widespread property crime cases when you don't prosecute them.
Which you won’t be able to do if the cost of prosecuting someone increases several times (i.e. no plea bargains anymore).
> you would stop prosecuting recreational drug use
Aren’t these already (realistically) misdemeanors at most in a lot of places?
Even in the best case e.g. lets say case load decreases by 25% that doesn’t seem enough to balance things out.
I’m confused, though. Are you suggesting legalization? Or just saying that law enforcement should ignore drug traffickers and dealers (because they will certainly continue engaging in violent crime if it’s the latter)
To truly minimize drug related crime you’d need legitimate drug companies to start selling OxyContin/etc. in the candy section at Walmart.
> Which you won’t be able to do if the cost of prosecuting someone increases several times (i.e. no plea bargains anymore).
Well sure you can. It just costs more. But since you're still doing it, the deterrent is still present and then the expensive cases you have to prosecute remain rare.
> Aren’t these already (realistically) misdemeanors at most in a lot of places?
Not for the sellers they're not.
> Are you suggesting legalization?
Yes.
If you could go buy codeine or lisdexamfetamine for $5/bottle from the pharmacy counter at Walmart then there are no more drug cartels, no more drug cartel murders, no more street pushers lacing what was supposed to be MDMA with fentanyl that causes people to OD or get addicted to opioids, fewer addicts robbing people for drug money, higher deterrence for other crimes because police aren't spread so thin, less poverty and desperation because fewer kids have fathers in prisons or coffins, fewer neighborhoods held hostage by drug gangs.
That's a whole lot of crime that just goes away.
More to the point, consider where we are in terms of efficiency. It costs on the order of $100k/year to incarcerate someone. Every one of those drug murders you prevent is saving twenty million dollars worth of keeping someone locked up for two decades. That pays for a lot of two day jury trials for petty theft.
And what dictator is going to implement this perfect solution?
Here's how things have manifestly played out over the past 150 years: procedural rules are strengthened because citizens are afraid of unjust prosecution. Some high profile bad guys, or parade of run-of-the-mill criminals, get off because of said procedural loopholes, after which voters demand politicians expand substantive criminal law to re-balance the equation. Upon which more unjust prosecutions enter the public consciousness. Wash, rinse, repeat.
This is what systemic injustice looks like, and the cycle continues as unabated as ever. On the one hand, you have movements like BLM, which have indeed effected change even in the most conservatives jurisdictions, largely by changes in procedural rules by courts and in policy by prosecutors and municipalities. At the same time, you have #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, etc, which has resulted in the expansion of sexual crimes and punishments, and elimination of statutes of limitations, partly because procedural protections have made it extremely difficult to prosecute past behaviors, not because they strictly weren't already cognizable crimes.
Nobody is going to lose sleep over Weinstein, but long-term which demographics will bear the brunt of this tightening of the screws through the substantive law? You see the fundamental contradictory behavior here? There's tremendous overlap between the #MeToo groups and the BLM groups, and for both their demands are premised on empathy and justice, but at the end of the day we're going to end up with a harsher system that will further disproportionately punish some segments of the population over others. That's what systemic racial injustice looks like, yet nowhere can you find ill intentions or a desire to oppress anyone.
There's an alternative path, here. Notice how the legal screws have taken centuries to slowly but inexorably tighten without any concerted effort, yet in less than a single generation the normative behaviors of individual judges and other legal professionals, both as regards defendant rights (BLM) and victims rights (#MeToo) has seen a sea change. That suggests that by giving back more discretion to the system, not less, it's possible and, IMO, much more likely we could end up with a more fair system all around. Not guaranteed, of course, but neither is it guaranteed that just throwing more money and resources at the existing system would, even assuming we could even achieve let alone maintain that degree of attention from society. The difference between these two approaches, though, is that one requires trusting our fellow citizens, while the other holds out the (fantastical) prospect of an engineered solution.
> And what dictator is going to implement this perfect solution?
Nothing about it requires a dictator. You vote for politicians who repeal laws that don't have widespread consensus, when enough people vote for them they get repealed. Ideally you then do something that makes it more difficult to re-pass them.
> Some high profile bad guys, or parade of run-of-the-mill criminals, get off because of said procedural loopholes
The procedures aren't loopholes. They're prerequisites for a conviction. They by no means make a conviction impossible, but you have to do the work.
> At the same time, you have #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, etc, which has resulted in the expansion of sexual crimes and punishments, and elimination of statutes of limitations, partly because procedural protections have made it extremely difficult to prosecute past behaviors, not because they strictly weren't already cognizable crimes.
The problem here is not procedural rules at all. It's evidentiary difficulties. How do you distinguish between someone who consents but then has regrets and changes their story, or someone who has sex with someone wealthy in order to extort them for money, and someone who was actually sexually assaulted?
There is no perfect solution to that, but "innocent until proven guilty" is the only sane one. What you then need is a system that can uphold that standard even when there is pressure not to.
> That suggests that by giving back more discretion to the system, not less, it's possible and, IMO, much more likely we could end up with a more fair system all around.
It suggests that when you give more discretion to the system and the system favors you at this moment in time, you get what you want, for now.
But then there is another election and you may not like what someone else does with that discretion.
> Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK?
The purpose of the trial is to separate the innocent from the guilty, and there is intended to be a presumption of innocence. But because the prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, they'll tend to only bring cases when there is a high probability of guilt -- a good thing -- so then let's say 90% of the defendants are probably guilty and 60% are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
A judge is going to become intimately familiar with that. ~90% of the defendants are actually guilty, so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty. That's a presumption of guilt. Soon even the innocent ones are getting convicted, when the whole point of the process was to prevent that.
A jury is a fresh set of eyes who look at the defendant as the only case they're going to be deciding for the foreseeable future and haven't been prejudiced by a parade of evildoers sitting in the same chair. It's also twelve separate people who each individually have to be convinced.
Yet the conviction rate in England was 84 % in magistrates courts (misdemeanors and low level felonies) and 78 % in crown courts (more serious crimes) which is not that different. Especially if we consider how a lot of crimes like DUIs are somewhat open & shut compared to more serious offenses.
> so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty.
A good judge wouldn’t do that. Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person? (Let’s assume that the conviction rate is the same in both cases)
> Yet the conviction rate in England was 84 % in magistrates courts (misdemeanors and low level felonies) and 78 % in crown courts (more serious crimes) which is not that different.
The conviction rate can't really tell you anything because prosecutors will calibrate to bring cases they think they can win in a given system. Systems willing to convict more innocent people will have similar conviction rates but more innocent defendants.
> A good judge wouldn’t do that.
What about a human judge?
> Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person?
So make the system (that’s already inefficient) several times more inefficient and then increase funding by a magnitude or two? Certainly seems like a reasonable option.
I bet all problems could be solved using this approach. What could go wrong..
> For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one.
Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties. Prosecutors can then spend their court time arguing more important cases, judges don't have to patiently direct clown shows where guilt is extremely obvious, and the defendant gets a lesser sentence. There is plenty of abuse in the plea system, and no shortage of outrageous prosecutorial misconduct. But that doesn't invalidate the principle of plea bargaining. No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge. That isn't justice. Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility.
> Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties.
Suppose we're talking about a case where it's a foregone conclusion. 0% chance that the defendant will be acquitted, never going to happen. Then the defendant should plead guilty and save themselves some time and effort regardless of whether it leads to a lesser sentence, right? You don't need to coerce them because they can't possibly gain anything.
Now suppose that the chance isn't 0%, it's, say, 10%. Should we coerce these people into a guilty plea by giving them a 100% chance of six months vs. a 90% chance of five years? Out of a million of them, a hundred thousand would be found not guilty, so no.
> No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge.
This is why the right to a speedy trial exists, even though it has been eroded dramatically by basically making it a false choice between "you have your trial immediately with no chance to prepare a defense even though the prosecution has secretly been investigating you for months" and "you waive your right to a speedy trial entirely and rot in jail for years awaiting trial".
The way it ought to work is that the defendant has a right to set a "not after" date where the prosecution either has to proceed or release them from jail and drop the charges, which gives them enough time to actually prepare a defense without opening the door to being detained indefinitely awaiting trial even after they're prepared. The prosecution already has this up until the statute of limitations has run, because they can already wait to file charges until they've prepared their case.
> Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility.
Or we could just have fewer laws and then assign the resources necessary to prosecute the remaining more important ones.
Notice that if you get rid of e.g. drug laws, you also get rid of all the murders and other crimes that come along with the existence of drug cartels, and the load on the courts goes down dramatically.
I agree with your criticisms of the justice system except that your proposed solutions haven't worked anywhere. Yes the plea practice is abusive and coercive. It has to be because otherwise suspects would exercise their right to a trial, which they can't have. Anything you do to make going to trial more attractive for defendants will result in the backlog increasing or charges getting dropped en masse.
The laws on the books today hardly get enforced. Ross Ulbricht is one of the very few people to go to prison for crypto-related crimes. You probably agree that many people involved with crypto deserve to see the inside of a courtroom, but they won't. So not only is the justice system not capable of processing the people currently in jail (despite copious plea coercion) the justice system has almost completely given up on persecuting many crimes (e.g. fraud), presumably for lack of manpower.
All countries struggle with this resource problem. We want to give everybody a fair trial but we can't. Some countries force pleas on people. Other countries rush trials. Other countries still beat confessions out of people. Different 'solutions' to the same fundamental problem. Unless fair trials get cheap there is no way out.
Sentencing is complicated in the US. Generally speaking, they have a huge range and a standard for computing where one falls in that range, but everything within that range is open to judge's discretion. Life without parole was within that range for the crimes that Ulbricht was convicted of.
This standard is an enormous document, https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines which lays out the rules for adjustments. Evidence is admissible (by both sides!) for sentencing, with a lower standard of evidence and burden of proof, to either raise or lower the sentence within the very wide numbers of what the conviction was for. So the Judge in this case found that the lower burden of proof was met for additional violent crimes being committed (with Ulbricht's legal team having an opportunity to rebut), and that impacts the sentencing calculations.
Not a lawyer, but I have listened to US lawyers on podcasts.
Other acts of those charged are routinely brought up in trials. Fir example, criminals being charged with crime A that already committed similar crimes in the past are used to show that the likelihood of crime A being committed this time is higher.
Sure, but then you should have to have a conviction on those other crimes. It’s strange to consider stuff that wasn’t proven. If the crime was committed and the state is sure, they should charge him and then use the first conviction in the sentencing for the second, if they want to.
That’s not what happens in practice. The other actions of those charged are absolutely brought in as evidence whether they were actual crimes or testimony from others that knew those charged. This happens all of the time.
Yea, and most public discourse is at the level of "I saw a post online about it once". Most people aren't doing deep research before their opinions about things that aren't actually that relevant to their day to day lives. 95% of the world, at best, still has no idea who Ross Ulbricht is even today.
That's one way of phrasing it, and unfortunately some jurisdictions have adopted that phrase, but it is not correct.
A preponderance of the evidence is the greater weight of the evidence after all evidence is considered. Heuristics along the lines of "yeah that fits my priors"—which is what is actually meant by "more likely than not"—are explicitly disallowed.
If Joe Smith in Smalltown, Ohio was hit by a blue bus, and hammock owns 51 of the 100 blue buses in Smalltown whereas torstenvl owns 49 of the 100 blue buses, that is insufficient evidence by itself to prevail by a preponderance standard against hammock in a civil suit.
Is there really any government involvement here? I only see Softbank, Oracle, and OpenAI pledging to invest $500B (over some timescale), but no real support on the government end outside of moral support. This isn't some infrastructure investment package like the IRA, it's just a unilateral promise by a few companies to invest in data centers (which I'm sure they are doing anyway).
> but no real support on the government end outside of moral support
The venture was announced at the White House, by the President, who has committed to help it by using executive orders to speed things up.
It might not have been voted by congress or whatever, but just those things makes it pretty clear the government provides more than just "moral support".
I thought all the big corps had projects for the military already, if not DARPA directly, which is the org responsible for lots of university research (the counterpart to the NSF, which is the nice one that isn't funded by the military)?
Funding for DARPA and NSF ultimately comes from the same place. DARPA funds military research. NSF funds dual use[1] research. All of it is organized around long term research goals. I maintained some of the software involved in research funding decision making.
It’s light on details, but from The Guardian’s reporting:
> The president indicated he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project’s development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
> “We have to get this stuff built,” Trump said. “They have to produce a lot of electricity and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants.
Isn't that a state and local-level thing, though? I can't imagine that there is much federal permitting in building a data center, unless it is powered by a nuclear reactor.
“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left".
Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people.
1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
> not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group
The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem.
Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push.
For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.
> There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.
But who will morality police the morality police? (Paul Graham of course!)
Jokes aside, the difference between the 1) and 2) is the difference between progressivism and wokeism. But I think many here – as well as the article – miss the point by aiming squarely at 'noisy' humanities students, and not at the governments and corporations that leveraged their movements into this realm of the purely performative. That's not to say that there isn't scope for government and corporate interventions that actually make positive change to social justice outcomes. And there's also some merit to both online and meatspace activism causing many bad actors to consider their behavior (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, excessive force by law enforcement, wrongful incarcerations/executions).
That's not a joke. This piece is so ridiculously tone deaf precisely because it lacks any hint of self-awareness that exactly the same performative priggishness is normal for the right - with the difference that it's aggressively economically self-serving, often irrational and sometimes anti-scientific, rather than simply annoying.
IMO the priggishness is baked into American culture, which is descended from cranky puritans and literally defined itself as the most moral (police) force in the world after genociding the original inhabitants of the continent and setting up a culture for billionaires that leaves even qualified and talented workers increasingly insecure about housing and health care.
In reality "woke" has been a hugely convenient way for the US establishment to confine the Left to a ghetto of minority interests, especially about sexuality. Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)
So now we have anti-woke for the wannabe intellectuals, and Q for the useful idiots.
Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference, raw milk drinkers, and the spread of lunatic propaganda about vaccinations and climate science.
A side note, but I had no idea raw milk was a right political signaling in the US. Coming from a Swedish perspective, raw milk is a question about how tight the health control is in the dairy industry. I have always find it an "interesting" approach that in Sweden we have a very much scorched earth approach to dealing with any case where farm animals has any human-transmittable problems. If a test fail you kill all the cows in that farm, possible his neighbors farm stock too if they are too close, and the farmers get "just enough" money to restart the farm. Raw milk does still carry a bit higher risk for young children, women during pregnancy, and the elderly, so there is a recommendation against drinking it for those groups. Sellers also need to register in a special registry if they sell raw milk, and they get extra attention from inspectors.
For those not in the high risk groups, it just an choice based on personal taste. It seems a bit funny that the reason why it is allowed to be sold is directly related to the heavy regulation that enforces such high amount of testing (and strict consequences), so that the product is generally safe regardless of added pasteurization.
I looked into the studies regarding the health benefits and the consensus I found was a big amount of shrug. It is true that heating the milk do break down nutrients and enzymes, but the significance of it from pasteurization is an decrease in the realm of 7-10%. The kind of feed the cow eats has a much bigger significance, so comparing raw milk with pasteurized milk is comparing a small number that is hidden in a large number of noisy data.
In term of lactose tolerance, the consensus seems to be that raw milk is slight worse for people with that problem, but again only with a very small margin. It is most likely related to that 7-10% number above.
The point I was making was that proudly racist people who thinks caucasians are superior to other ethnic groups drank milk because lactose intolerance is less prevalent in their groups.
Like a lot of things, it was a joke until people who were not in on the joke started adopting it seriously, and then it somehow kind of merged under the broad "conservative-adjacent" political umbrella. Just like anti-vaxxers, anti-public schoolers, flat earthers, QAnon, and so on. They start out as tongue in cheek jokes, then a few people start saying "Wait, I believe this!" and inevitably they're welcomed into the funny farm with open arms.
I think you may have this a bit backwards and there’s some conflation going on between real social phenomena and people who find those phenomena too ridiculous to believe and decide to make jokes about it.
I can assure you the basis for the home schoolers, anti-vaxxers, and raw milk consumers wasn’t some joke. They came from disgraced scientists, church leaders, quack doctors, etc.
I’m not saying there has never in history been a joke that directly led to a conspiracy theory or social movement, but the history of many of these things is pretty well documented and several of the categories you mentioned have origins in the 70s/80s.
While I personally think the sale of raw milk is fine as long as adequate monitoring, audits and warning labels are in place, this was very much a serious political phenomenon and I’m not sure how you missed it
> (The Iowa vote broke almost perfectly along party lines with nearly all Republicans in favor and only a handful of Democrats defecting to their side.) And it’s not just in Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.
> the same performative priggishness is normal for the right
Priggishness means self-righteous, performative morality. Can you give an example of this that is normal for US right-wingers? They certainly have plenty of daft ideas (e.g. anti-vax), but I haven't seen right-wingers being priggish about them. Priggish would be positioning themselves as superior people for living in an unvaccinated neighborhood or working for an anti-vax employer, or proclaiming that they will not date a vaccinated person, or vaccinating their baby in secret while posting the opposite on social media, or cancelling a public figure who gets outed as vaccinated, etc.
> Priggishness means self-righteous, performative morality. Can you give an example of this that is normal for US right-wingers?
The first that sprung to mind:
> An update by the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom recently released preliminary data stating, "between January 1 and August 31, 2023, OIF reported 695 attempts to censor library materials and services and documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles - a 20% increase from the same reporting period in 2022." Many of the book titles targeted were BIPOC and LGBT groups. The book bans are largely the result of laws passed in Republican-led states.
You could argue that nationalism and traditionalist conservativism are predominantly performative within right-wing politics in the US - if this is not immediately evident then compare these ideas against the character and actions of those who get voted by the electorate.
Can't excessive anti wokeness be a form of priggishness.
What if someone says "that was sexist" and let's assume it was. Then, complaining that s/he who said it, is too woke, can itself be priggishness? The morally right thing, in that community, might be to be anti woke.
> Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)
There is a definitely a new discourse gaining traction post-Luigi that the polarization between left and right has been used as a distraction to the ever widening disparity in wealth, and the receding quality of life in the West.
> Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference
I've no insights into the specific nature of PG's outrage, but I imagine some in the SV entrepreneurial bubble might be concerned with how effective activists can be at ruining financial ledgers using boycotts and the like. Such power wielded by the plebs can be concerning, especially when businesses need to stay solvent, so it is indeed best to keep a lid on it.
There’s also the perception the Trump administration will be a pay-to-play game and anyone who doesn’t show signs of alignment will be prevented from participating in decision-making, industry incentives, government contracts and so on.
I don’t think there is any sensible person on the planet that hasn’t noticed that.
People who perceive themselves as losing rights will always be angry at losing their privileges. Growing up white in Brazil was great for the most part: police never stopped me, I got away of many speeding tickets just because I looked like a “good kid”, and so on. My non-white friends never had it that easy. One was charged with drug trafficking because the combined amount of pot he and his white friend were carrying went over the limit a single one could be carrying before being considered a dealer. Of course the police assumed it was the less Caucasian (in reality, it was the other guy who went to buy the pot from his dealer). Even though the white friend stated half the pot was his, the case went to trial.
I don't think you can reframe that in a way if you introduce policies that treat people differently. And I don't believe people feel they lose rights as long as they are treated equally.
As I said, rulebook of toxic middle management. Treat people differently and they fight among themselves and you don't have them on their back. Simple workplace dynamic, even if not intuitive.
Do you believe that Native Americans should continue receiving the benefits provided by the federal government? Considering that their land was taken and millions of their people were killed during the era of Manifest Destiny, it seems like a reasonable question to consider that maybe, just maybe, not everyone is on equal footing.
> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture.
The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.
That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.
I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".
I still have to remind myself that this refers to the racial slur and not an intellectual one. One of the funniest moments of 2024 for me was watching an episode of the wan show where linus admitted he'd used 'the hard r' in the past. His co host (Lucas?) was visibly taken aback. Like, color drained from his face. As linus goes on about how *tard used to be acceptable when he was younger you see it slowly dawn on Lucas that Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means and the relief that his boss isn't some sort of avowed racist is palpable.
I've never heard the term as a New Zealander (perhaps not in right social circles though).
From first search:
The n-word pronounced with the final ‘r’ sound, as opposed to a softer pronunciation that often omits this sound
Over the decades, the n-word has evolved, with the softer version being reclaimed by some within the Black community as a term of endearment or camaraderie. However, the “hard R” variation remains a symbol of hate and discrimination.
A fecking weird distinction given that it depends on your accent. Hard-r is rhotic and here in NZ I think we mostly are non-rhotic and don't pronounce the r at the end of words: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
Because I'm guessing the term "hard-R" only makes sense in some sociolinguistic US accents. As an outsider I can't really have an opinion. As an NZer I can say that unfortunately we sometimes get judged according to US language rules in some contexts - so the rules affect us so it sometimes helps me to know US practice.
My comment explains what hard-R means from the point of view of someone outside the states, and gives enough context for a non-native English speaker to understand the term. The subtleties of English are hard even for those with English as a mother tongue.
From the Wikipedia article:
Among certain speakers, like some in the northeastern coastal and southern United States,[6][2] rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic /r/ is deleted depending on an array of social factors,[7] such as being more correlated in the 21st century with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, particular ethnic identities, and informal speaking contexts.
> As an NZer I can say that unfortunately we sometimes get judged according to US language rules in some contexts
I knew an American who, on his first visit to NZ, described how much he enjoyed eating kiwis to his horrified hosts. Of course he meant the Chinese gooseberry, which in US grocery stores is labeled a “kiwi”.
> However, in the late 20th century, the word was seen as a hurtful racial slur in English. It was called hate speech. "Nigger" was seen as very offensive to say or hear which caused many to not use the word at all. They instead called the word "The N-Word". It is said with a "hard R", because the word ends in 'er' instead of 'a', as in the word "nigga".
It was explained to me that it was an attempt for some in the black culture to "take back," that word in an attempt to declaw it by swapping out the -er for an -a and using it colloqually rather than insultingly. Other people in the black culture think that word shouldn't be used at all, hard R or not, because it is so historically disparaging. I tend to agree with the latter.
I always wondered why that word had such negative connotation over other pejoratives. I believe it was Maya Angelou who said, paraphrasing, "it's so hurtful because it was the last word people heard before the noose tightened around their neck."
> as far as I can tell they are used interchangeably.
They are not.
> Any chance the distinction existed long time ago"
What is "long time ago"? This stuff isn't exactly gone.
You really need to realize that American slavery really wasn't that long ago. It was only 1975 when the last survivor of American slavery died. Generational effects last and the reverberations of years of oppression still reverb very, very loudly today.
Linus thought "hard r" meant "retarded", when it actually means "nigger" (a really really bad slur, as opposed to soft-r, "nigga"). It was funny when everyone realized he didn't mean what they thought he meant.
> It was funny when everyone realized he didn't mean what they thought he meant.
this very much illustrates that blacklisting (sic) words leads to nothing but confusion, not mutual understanding to each other's speech, let alone understanding each other's position. is it what social justice warriors want to bring about general compassionating with?
> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity.
I read the entire article hoping it would acknowledge that the rightwing moral majority invented, or at least popularized, much of the behavior the article decries. For example, I went in expecting it to touch on the rights version of newspeak and cancel culture (see Freedom Fries and the Dixie Chicks for memorable examples).
But he is talking about the phenomenon at large and Christians are literally the first example he gives:
>In Victorian England it was Christian virtue
He even references what you talk about later:
>One big contributing factor in the rise of political correctness was the lack of other things to be morally pure about. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
He does contrast what he calls "wokeness" with a sort of Christian prudishness ("prig") several times, and even says that it's the same sort of person responsible. However, both sides are not treated equally throughout the text.
For example, he talks about the impact of the Bud Light thing on Anheuser Busch, but he doesn't acknowledge that the backlash was itself a perfect example of cancel culture.
Your mob and my mob are both mobs, but he paints one angry mob as righteous pushback and the other as priggish busybodies.
Regardless, it was a well formed piece that caused me to think. I just think the argument would have been more compelling if it had been offered from a more neutral frame.
This. I mean, he says that comedy defeated political correctness on the years up to 2000, but then entirely omits what happened in comedy immediately afterwards.
Love a bit of no-holds-barred 00's comedy.. well, some of it.. but I don't think anyone should find it surprising that there was a cultural backlash.
"You can offend anyone as long as you offend everyone" was the rule of the day, which failed to account for some having much thicker skins than others.
It's also worth noting that up until about 2008, free speech was broadly identified with progressive/Left views not conservative/Right. I'm not sure when or why exactly the right lost interest in censoring sex and violence in the media, but they quietly let that drop just around the time the left became more censorious.
Now for me personally, the kind of populist-conservative that hangs out with strippers whilst pursuing abortion bans is the worst kind of hypocrite, but I guess for a lot of people it's something more like wish-fulfilment.
> I'm not sure when or why exactly the right lost interest in censoring sex and violence in the media
It didn't stop. Republicans have been passing laws requiring identification to access pornography and as a result pornhub is blocked in 16 states currently.
I've lived in the South all my life, worked with blacks and whites, gone to college and this HN post is the first time I've seen/heard the expression "hard-r".
I now believe "hard-r" is regional slang, since it appears to be (at least) a west-coast expression [the Linus recording convinced me] but rare in the South.
> PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone
That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part:
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad.
> Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.
Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
> I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
Is that really your charitable reading of the part you quoted?
In my mind, a charitable reading would be that he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be. I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.
It is a divisive topic already, we would all be better off trying to understand as well as we can before replying.
> he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be
Who is "the woke"? How big do they think big is? How does PG know what this nebulous group all agrees upon? How big of an issue does he think it is, as far as actions to be taken? Is "the woke" just anyone who disagrees with him here?
Not specifying any meaning makes it literally a meaningless, divisive (us vs. them), dismissive statement on racism at best, and at worst, rhetoric to baselessly paint my opponent as more extreme than myself, because I am of course precisely the correct amount of reasonable.
A rebuttal in similar style would be "racism is actually a problem larger than thought by those who think it isn't", which you may notice is also meaningless and dismissive.
I just read the article, and I can conclusively say that no, he does not explain how big a problem racism actually is, he claims that its all humanities professors and students (my experience as a physics and engineering student prior to 2015 suggests otherwise), nor does he explain why he is such an expert on what "the woke" all believe.
What he does do is explain at length how unfair it is that offenses he considers minor are now grounds for termination. See one of my other comments for details about why professors need to be particularly aware of the hostile environment they can create by dint of being in a position of considerable power over their students.
My charitable reading is that he believes the concept of wokeness is a bigger problem than racism. I feel that's wrong on its face, but an actual point-by-point (indeed, line-by-line) retort to this essay would be exhausting and ultimately pointless.
To whit, he repeatedly brushes aside the concept of hostile work environment, in particular professors making their students feel uncomfortable, as if its just a question of one person making their equal feel uncomfortable due to a simple disagreement. This is a dramatic misread of why a professor (who is by definition in a position of power over the student, and such power may well include the career and profession of the student, even ignoring the sexual overtones, which are all-too-common as well) needs to be aware of and avoid hostile environments. Like, a woman who constantly hears from her math professor how s/he thinks women are bad at math will likely not be super-psyched to continue with math coursework. I would certainly leave a company if a manager was constantly insulting whatever group of people I was born into, and they pay me to be there. If I'm paying thousands of dollars a semester, the least the professor can do is stay in their lane.
That's five sentences to retort 2 more-or-less throwaway statements. The entire essay is stacked with stuff like that.
And its all pointless because odds are, instead of changing any minds, or even engaging with what I've said, the anti-woke types will just vote it down.
I think that wokeness is increasing racism.
The woke people tend to throw around "-isms" a lot. It is sometimes enough to not be on the extreme left-wing view to be called "racist", or even "Nazi" immediately.
Especially on platforms like Reddit.
I've been very left-wing in my youth myself, which - in retrospect - happened mostly through indoctrination in school.
I doubt that I ever turned very much into the other direction, and I see myself very much in the middle with most topics.
My personal philosophy for most topics is to find out what the extremes are, then look at what the middle between these would be, and then call that the ideal.
On Reddit, that philosophy is enough to be called "racist" and "Nazi".
Trying to start a proper discussion to (in-)validate any of my - in my opinion - rational points was met with "I don't talk to Nazis!" several times.
Mind you, I never even talked about race or anything similar and most times not even about culture. I basically formulated my starting points, added some facts, and was ready to discuss.
There were very few discussions that really took place and I have even changed my opinion on several topics based on these discussions. But in the last few years, even these few discussions became less and less.
I can only remember one discussion in the last two years that I had with a left-wing person (a teacher from Africa) and I only got this far because our kids were playing with each other. Based on what she told me, I am pretty sure that I would not have the chance for that discussion under other circumstances. She even thanked me for that conversation and told me, that she could not remember the last time that she could talk so open to anyone. I don't know if she realized that she told me how she categorized every negative feedback about her as "racist" half an hour earlier.
Strangely, the more to the left a person is leaning, the less they like to discuss nowadays. I find that very strange and also not helpful to their case.
If I have two parties where one of them likes to discuss and argue, while the other one directly calls anyone with a slightly different opinion a swear-word, I tend to sympathize more with the party that likes to speak with me.
I've yet to encounter a really right-wing extremist that is actually racist. I know that they exist, and I have a friend who was in one of these groups when he was young, but I never had anyone tell me directly that they find any specific ethnicity inferior to others or something in that regard.
Well, except for members of a certain religion, but I don't want to start that topic here.
Btw., I am German, and I associate the word "Nazi" with war, racism, and industrial-scale mass murder.
But today it is enough to say "I don't like how the immigration into Europe is handled, and I think we should reduce the amount of illegal immigration" to be called a racist and even a Nazi.
Ffs, I've seen people in high ranks calling people "racist" because their products were criticized.
It had nothing to do with race or anything like that, only with the quality of the product, but they still throw that word around as if everything was just based on race.
And if people say that everything and everybody is racist, they at some point start believing that themselves.
Nowadays, you really have to be careful if you criticize anyone's work if they are part of any minority.
What's even more ridiculous, most times it's not even the person themselves, but some other person who has their "everyone is racist" opinion, and they will start attacking everyone who dares to critique anyone belonging to any kind of minority.
That leads to "toxic positivity", where no-one dares to call out any BS. And that leads to bad products being created.
Just look at some of the films and games that have been produced in the last few years.
Concord is a good example of something that is the result of this "woke" culture.
This is bad in so many ways. If you hire people by how good they fit into their role, the heritage of the applicant must not be a factor.
If the pool of applications does not fit the overall demographic, that is not the fault of the recruiting company.
If a company obviously discriminates against anyone, they should be held accountable. That is what I call the balanced solution.
But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive.
Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results.
You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session.
And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway.
That only creates further resentments.
The greatest success I have seen in the fight against racism was not seeing color. We should be color-blind and treat everyone equally. For a time, that worked great.
Today, the heritage, gender, color of skin and even sexuality are things that have to be acknowledged, recognized and valued.
I've only seen bad results coming out of this and nothing positive.
Oh, and about the part of the professors making their students "feel uncomfortable";
Of course, if a professor says something like "Women belong in the kitchen anyway", or any really sexist or racist stuff, that behavior is not okay, and they should face consequences for that.
Only making someone "feel uncomfortable" is not enough, though.
To learn, you have to be told if you are wrong.
Feedback can't just be positive, and it doesn't help anyone to be wrapped in cotton candy for their whole education. That's what leads to the aforementioned "toxic positivity".
About my last point, I strongly recommend this podcast. One part dedicated to this is timestamped, but I recommend listening to the whole thing.
It's really good and it explains a lot about our behavior.
https://youtu.be/R6xbXOp7wDA?si=MCF3hfZxe9NmzJ-b&t=4724
> And that leads to bad products being created. Just look at some of the films and games that have been produced in the last few years. Concord is a good example of something that is the result of this "woke" culture.
I didn't play Concord and only saw Sony are shutting it down shortly after release due to poor sales. The reviews I saw were about uninteresting gameplay and characters. What exactly was "woke" about it?
> But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive. Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results. You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session. And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway. That only creates further resentments.
I agree, forcing specific percents of people is counterproductive. It would be good if it happened naturally, but it didn't for a variety of reasons (some of them various -isms, like hiring managers with biases, poor schooling outcomes or directions due to bad locations/prejudices; some of them more widely cultural, religious, personal). But are you aware of any place where there are actually forced distributions of people to hire? I'm aware of multiple efforts to level the playing field at the hiring stage, including by the European Comission (on men/women equality). But they're all about goals, with extremely explicit caveats that the best candidate should be picked, but if two candidates are equal, the less represented one should be preferred to add diversity. Diversity in a business or public facing organisation is good for them due to a wider representation of ideas and lived experiences. Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.
About Concord:
There is a lot of discussion about why Concord failed.
Some say that the price was too high. But at the same time, games with the same or even higher prices sold just fine.
Then there is the argument that the genre of hero shooters is just over-saturated.
This is also not true. Look at Deadlock, which (AFAIK) is still in a closed playtest phase and currently has a five-figure player count according to SteamDB.
Or Marvel Rivals, which currently has > 270,000 players online.
One "non-woke" mistake they made was the marketing. Apparently, very few people even heard about that game before it was cancelled.
Then, there is the awful character design.
No one in their right mind could call that design good. That's where that toxic positivity comes to mind.
That is probably the most criticized thing about that game.
If you research how that happened, you might find things like these: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1d85lr9/con...
And that's what really pisses off the average guy.
It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues.
The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men.
So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience.
But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner.
Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this.
Here, the consequences were quite spectacular. The average gamer who plays hero shooters wants to have their escapism in games and be the great hero that they can't be in real life.
This game did not provide that.
There are also games that are openly about specific statements, and they openly communicate that.
They are also usually niche products because of that because - like I said - the average gamer wants escapism from games.
An example where that's done better is Baldur's Gate 3.
The overall game is great, but you also have all the relationship options you might like.
I learned that the hard way, when I accidentally broke my carefully created romance between my male avatar and a female party member.
I was just being friendly to another male party member, which directly started a gay romance with him.
In this case, I would have preferred an option to select the sexual preferences before that happens, but it's nothing that makes the game bad.
> Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.
Well, that doesn't look like you are really open to any discussion on this, since you're dismissing anything that's said about this as "nonsense" and you are calling anyone who brings up the examples you just mentioned "right-wing crisis actors" by default.
That's not how you discuss this. You bring up your position and already define any other perspective as invalid.
But maybe I am wrong, and you are actually willing to change my mind. So, what do you say about this video? It's less than 1.5 minutes and I think it is a good example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghBAcxEMzM
What I'm understanding you saying re: Concord is that the game was poorly marketed, had bad character designs, and also one of the developers made some ill-considered tweets 4 years before the release of this game.
Absolutely, that one dev has some weird opinions. But if those opinions are/were core to the game design, and done on purpose, then the marketing also failed to get that point across.
There's also something sort of funny about digging up 4-year-old tweets and saying "see, this is what cancel culture looks like in action".
Speaking to the concept of "DEI hires", the implication is always that the person in that role is only there because they met some quota. The reality of affirmative action was that frequently, you could never get into that role, regardless of qualifications, if you had the wrong skin color. And that wasn't just like a backroom sort of thing. There are countless examples of explicitly racist policies in the US prior to 1964. But the funny thing is, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it became illegal to hire based on race in either direction. "DEI Hire" affirmative actions are explicitly illegal, and it would be an easy case to win if you thought you lost the job to a less-qualified "DEI" candidate. Indeed, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that racial quotas (of any stripe, but especially "hire more minorities") are illegal.
Re: that video, I see that as less of a policy fail and more of a marketing fail. Like, everybody producing that video understood that as "when a firefighter, ANY firefighter, is physically carrying somebody out of an actual fire, a great number of things have already gone VERY wrong, and being a racist prick about the exact race/gender/etc while a rescue is underway is severely missing the point". But nobody bothered to run that in front of somebody who wasn't adjusted to how firefighters see the world.
Firefighters' physical exams are notoriously physically demanding, because the consequences of not measuring up are pretty dire. And yet I know several female firefighters.
> Concord is that the game was poorly marketed, had bad character designs, and also one of the developers made some ill-considered tweets 4 years before the release of this game.
You almost got it.
Not "some developer made some ill-considered tweets 4 years ago", but the Lead Character Designer.
That is the person who is responsible for the whole character design concept. And because you're so focused on the Tweet being from was 4 years ago: That game did not magically appear a few months ago.
4 Years ago, it was deep in development and that person was already very publicly apparent about their opinion regarding the main target audience. The characters in question were being formed at that time.
And it was also the first hit I got on Google with my search query. It's not that I dug really deep. It was literally the first result I got.
People like these are what the average guy calls "woke" nowadays. This person has a very toxic agenda and is still put in a lead position for a project with a budget that - according to some sources - may have been up to 400 Million USD. And that is an example on what is considered problematic regarding the DEI topic.
If you think that this is not a problem and not even a part of the reason why games like these fail; fine. Then we agree to disagree on this point.
You could also look at the game "Dustborn", if you want something that you could find in the glossary next to "woke game".
I don't even know what to say about that mess. But that game at least was openly marketed for it's woke target audience.
> Indeed, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that racial quotas (of any stripe, but especially "hire more minorities") are illegal.
I don't like this Dave Rubin guy, but this video sums it up pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwjREOWtm0
In the comments, you can find plenty of people who tell their own stories matching the one told in the video.
So, this apparently does happen. People see that and they're angry.
Normal, simple people see that. Some of them, who were neutral before, now look at these minorities with distrust. That's what I mean when I say that these practices sometimes increase racism in the end.
That's normal human behavior.
If you say those things and are called "racist" in response, that doesn't help. Instead of a proper discussion and trying to find solutions on how equality can be reached without creating these issues at the same time, people need to get together and find solutions. Calling each other swear words and continuing as planned does not help, but worsens it.
> that video, I see that as less of a policy fail and more of a marketing fail. Like, everybody producing that video understood that as "when a firefighter, ANY firefighter, is physically carrying somebody out of an actual fire, a great number of things have already gone VERY wrong, and being a racist prick about the exact race/gender/etc while a rescue is underway is severely missing the point".
Wow. I have to admit that I did not manage to get to that train of thought.
So, they created a narrative that people care how their rescuers look like, and then they call the people in their story "racist pricks"?
How often does this happen that somebody complains about who they were rescued by? I haven't heard that before.
So either you know of some of these cases - in that case, please enlighten me. Or are you already conditioned to see racism everywhere, even in made up stories?
Honestly, how did you manage to interpret racism into that video?
That is precisely the problem that I mean. People call out an obviously bad video.
Instead of saying: "Oh boy, they messed up there. Let's see how we can fix that." the people criticizing it are being called "racist prigs". That will surely improve the situation!
Well, shit. If that's how people "discuss" things nowadays, society is really doomed.
The only thing that I know average people complain about is when anyone considers lowering the criteria for physically demanding jobs specifically for women.
And that is precisely what this question is about. "Is that woman able to carry a man out of a burning house?". If the answer is "Yes, she has to meet the same physical requirements as the men", then that is the answer that should make everyone happy. To answer "It's his fault to get into a fire anyway" is the worst answer anyone could give.
And this went through numerous hands before it was published. So either no one involved realized that this spot could be a bad idea, or there was toxic positivity involved again.
Things like these push people further apart when we should be working together.
But, I forgot. Nowadays, one also gets called a "racist" for listing biological facts like "women have different bone structure, average muscle mass and hormone levels than men".
Yeah, I can't see why the average person would have anything against the woke people.
> Well, that doesn't look like you are really open to any discussion on this, since you're dismissing anything that's said about this as "nonsense" and you are calling anyone who brings up the examples you just mentioned "right-wing crisis actors" by default
It's a good example of grifting, yes. We have an ad by the LA fire department where a high positioned person at it talks about diversity. Considering the high amounts of incidents between police and minorities, and high distrust of officials, having the fire department be diverse and representative of the population it serves is a good idea, no? That being said, that must happen with regards to what their job is. No point in hiring someone who can't do the job. And you'll notice that in the ad (or at least the cut this youtuber has chosen to use for engagement, who knows if it's representative or not) the person doesn't say they'll hire anyone or will have a quota. There's a very dumb and aggressive attempt at a dismissal/joke/I don't even know what about a potentially sexist reaction to the above ("can she carry me"). I personally trust the fire department or medic will be able to do their job regardless of their gender or skin colour or whatever. If they're indeed hiring incompetent people because of quotas or any other reason I'd want to know, but neither the ad, nor the youtuber make that claim.
So yes, thank you for illustrating my point. There's a bunch of outrage about "DEI" and quotas and what not, but when you look at the substance, it's nothing.
> And that's what really pisses off the average guy. It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues. The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men. So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience. But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner.
While it's true that that's the main demographic, maybe game publishers are trying to add others as well? Increase their target demographic if you will.
> Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this
You're mixing a lead's personal opinion with what the game's options are. I personally don't consider the characters being ugly to be a game stopper (and I'm not alone, I don't think anyone complained about Travis looking like he did in GTAV), but I can see how that can be a problem for some.
Buddy, if wokeness is making you a racist then you were always a racist especially within the US context where families have endured 100s of years of generational racism. You’re not making any sense
> I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.
I think it is a weakness of the article that PG does not address this directly. He dis say that racism is
> Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be
So if someone only uses woke to mean "being aware of and attentive to important social issues" it is easy for the to wake away with the impression that PG painted their concerns as overblown.
If I was PG's editor I would suggest replacing 'woke' with prig here for clarity.
Wokeness means awareness of things like racism, the functional purpose of complaining about wokeness is to rollback anti-racist policy and social norms. Whether or not PG is a useful idiot or a thought leader on this subject would be a homework assignment for the class.
Wokeness means an elaborate holier-than-thou pecking order among affluent people, allowing them not to do anything of substance at all, because they already reached secular salvation by using the right words ceremoniously.
It reminds me of the deeply corrupt late Medieval church. A reformation is long overdue.
I don't think anyone reading this article would conclude that PG believes racism is a bigger problem than wokism. Which wildly diminishes the actual real-world impact of racism and wildly exaggerates the actual real world impact of wokism.
The actual real world impact of wokism is that the left-leaning part of the elite is distracted into performative games outdoing one another in verbal righteousness, instead of actually doing something for the people, which should be the defining part of being left.
Woke is all rituals, no substance. If anyone profits off it, it is highly educated individuals that belong to the visible minorities = precisely the people that don't need so much support.
Woke is deeply uninterested in actual problems of the poor non-academic population. High cost of living? Food deserts? Meh. That doesn't register on the high-brow radars.
>The actual real world impact of wokism is that the left-leaning part of the elite is distracted into performative games outdoing one another in verbal righteousness...
Is that really the only real-world impact? Is there no value in examining the link between how we refer to people and how we treat them? What about the affirmative action aspects of wokism---is there some impact there?
If you define woke as only the people performing meaningless rituals, then of course you're going to dismiss wokeness. But not all of it is meaningless ritual, affirmative action has created real change. And I would argue that efforts to take pejorative terms out of language are worthwhile, even if some people get overly academic about it.
Your interpretation is the exact problem. How many times do people need to say it? Racism is bad, what else there to say? Because he did not say it multiple times throughout the essay we are going to label him though and suggest and at the same time conclude that the thinks wokism is worse than racism. Sheesh that’s a great imagination.
He spends 4500+ words talking about how bad wokism is (mostly complaining about how some people are complaining about language), and all of maybe 100 words acknowledging racism, and even then uses some of those to say it isn't as bad as the woke think. If you were writing an essay opposing a solution to a problem you really believed to be a terrible problem, wouldn't you take a little more time on why the solution was counter-productive, and maybe offer some alternatives?
Clearly our views don’t align but I also don’t think anyone is ducking an issue. Racism is wrong but perhaps “wokism” makes it to be a lot worse of a problem than it really is. The article was not a history of racism or how to solve it. If anyone is moving the goal post it’s you. I will accept that we probably cannot come to terms but happy to discuss.
My point was that if you knew nothing about racism or wokism, you'd conclude from the article that wokism was a huge problem and racism a relatively minor one. Which may or may not be PG's actual opinion, but that's the clear impression that the article makes.
I personally find it preposterous that language policing by universities and social media sites (and virtually all of his criticism is about that aspect of wokism, and not affirmative action) is somehow worse than systematically jailing millions of people and denying them economic opportunities out of bigotry. But even if you think it is, the article doesn't even attempt to make that case. He just notes in a throwaway line that "Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one." (Emphasis mine.) And that's about it on how bad racism is vs how bad woke is.
Which performative activities, though, for which very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population? Have you seen Musk's or Zuck's antics lately? Condemning the lesser offender(s) can gain favor with the greater, but it's useless for making any real point. Who's being performative now?
> designed to appease (and in some cases enrich) a very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population.
Note that the people enriched here aren't the poor minorities, it are the self proclaimed leaders of these movements that gets high positions in governments and companies and thus enrich themselves.
There is no value in making those grifters richer, even though there is value in helping poor people.
Is it an "enormous amount of resources"? How do you think it compares to the amount of resources historically put into racism, including all the waste and lost opportunity costs?
In my experience, most people complaining about wokism are projecting their own annoyance at language policing into some kind of massive social problem. But I'm open-minded, and if you have a good argument that the resources put into wokism far outweigh the losses from racism, I'm happy to listen. PG's essay makes no effort to present that argument.
So your point isn't so much that language policing costs a lot, it's that it doesn't provide any value. But what if it does? What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior? Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights? What about slurs against gays, or Jews? Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?
Language policing is a form of control used by totalitarian regimes. If you are seeing changes they will be short lived after the controlled gets tired of the controllers forcing a particular outcome. It happens time and time again. It’s like we don’t even learn from history anymore.
> So your point isn't so much that language policing costs a lot, it's that it doesn't provide any value.
That's not my point. I think they're both true.
> But what if it does?
Why are corporations dropping it as soon as it became socially acceptable to do so if it is providing value to them?
What value is yelling at people who don't include their pronouns in their bio providing to society? What about education consultants who have a stated goal of assuring equal outcomes for all students (this happened in my very large, progressive district and parents lost their minds)?
> What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior?
There are much more effective and efficient ways to accomplish this than what the people in question are doing if that's the case.
> Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights?
Not particularly
> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?
Not particularly
> Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?
Feel free to share any evidence you have, I'm open to hearing about it
>> Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights?
>Not particularly
>> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?
>Not particularly
Honestly, if you're having a hard time seeing the harm that ethnic and racial slurs do, particularly from public officials or community leaders, you're not going to understand any of this.
This is the second time you've reframed a question you asked to present my response in an inaccurate light, presumably because you weren't able to move to your next talking point from my actual response. This might work on people who don't notice it, but it's extremely dishonest and unproductive.
Ethnic and racial slurs are harmful. Adding social stigma to specific words just causes the people who would use them to use different terms if they care about the stigma, and the change does very little to contribute to equal rights.
>Adding social stigma to specific words just causes the people who would use them to use different terms if they care about the stigma, and the change does very little to contribute to equal rights.
So your hypothesis here is that people just switch slurs. But is that really true? It's not easy to get a new word into the general vocabulary. Sure, a small group of people could agree to a substitute for the n-word. But when they used it in public, most people wouldn't have any idea what they were talking about. Which means the slur wouldn't have the same impact as if they'd used the slur everyone knows.
I didn't reframe, but I did draw a logical conclusion that may seem opaque if you haven't thought it through. You acknowledge that ethnic slurs are harmful, but you don't see the link between equal rights and how people are referred to by those in power. Do you see the contradiction there? You're imagining a world where leaders can use the n-word without reproach, yet people of color are treated equally by society. That just isn't plausible.
> So your hypothesis here is that people just switch slurs. But is that really true? It's not easy to get a new word into the general vocabulary. Sure, a small group of people could agree to a substitute for the n-word. But when they used it in public, most people wouldn't have any idea what they were talking about. Which means the slur wouldn't have the same impact as if they'd used the slur everyone knows.
Yes, that is my "hypothesis", having a basic familiarity with history where this has happened repeatedly. It's obviously not that hard to get a word into general usage, and it's also not a mystery when someone is attempting to insult you even if you aren't familiar with the word in the moment.
> I didn't reframe, but I did draw a logical conclusion that may seem opaque if you haven't thought it through.
You asked a question, then changed the phrasing of that question in your next question. I would say that failing to ask the question you actually meant to ask (which is a generous reading of our discussion) is indicative of failing to think things through.
Again, your behavior has been consistently antagonistic and obnoxious (the comment above is another example).
> You acknowledge that ethnic slurs are harmful
Yes
> but you don't see the link between equal rights and how people are referred to by those in power.
Never said anything close to that.
> Do you see the contradiction there?
I get that you'd like it if I said what you are claiming as that could be contradictory and you could expand on that while asking leading questions and contributing little else, but I didn't and frankly have no interest in continuing a conversation with an insufferable prig.
> You're imagining a world where leaders can use the n-word without reproach, yet people of color are treated equally by society.
No I'm not. Go have your imaginary conversation elsewhere.
How is this exchange imaginary? It's right above, five comments up:
>> Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights?
>Not particularly
>> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?
>Not particularly
How else should someone interpret your response, other than as stating that you don't see any connection between ethnic slurs and equal rights? If you misspoke, or I'm somehow misinterpreting, maybe you should elaborate, if only for the sake of others coming across this thread.
> Why are corporations dropping it as soon as it became socially acceptable to do so if it is providing value to them?
Goalposts are moving quite a bit here. Companies are dropping some affirmative action, but I don’t see anyone dropping things such as pronouns or unisex restrooms, vegetarian/halal/kosher meal options, and so on.
I don't think I'm moving the goalposts. Things like accessible restrooms and additional food choices are good and meaningful improvements. They aren't being dropped because they add value to people's lives for little to no cost.
It seems like the pronoun push has passed (the performative part about chastising people for not wearing a pin or updating an email signature, not correctly using someone's preferred pronouns), but I'm also largely removed from the portion of society that cares a lot about at it at the moment.
I believe PG's essay is intentionally trying to separate the two, and nothing you mentioned as remaining would be considered affirmative action (which largely would fall under what PG is criticizing imo).
> the performative part about chastising people for not wearing a pin or updating an email signature
I'm sorry, but I can't recall a single time it actually happened. Expressing support is important, but I never heard of it being mandatory. And since pronouns are a big part of someone's identity, I'd say one should try to get them right, especially now that most of us made it easy to do (mine are he/him, BTW).
> I'm sorry, but I can't recall a single time it actually happened. Expressing support is important, but I never heard of it being mandatory.
I'm sorry, but it does happen. I've personally experienced it and witnessed it.
> And since pronouns are a big part of someone's identity, I'd say one should try to get them right, especially now that most of us made it easy to do (mine are he/him, BTW).
We should absolutely get it right, but they are not a big part of everyone's identity, which is a point missed by the people who feel it is an extremely large part of theirs and want everyone to know about it.
Pronouns are not a big part of any cis person’s identity because everything matches their identity. Trans people need to affirm their gender against what nature and society afforded them since they were born. It’s inconsiderate to ignore that.
That's their problem to deal with. And as we have seen repeatedly demonstrated in recent years, calling a male "she" is more likely to encourage him to violate women's boundaries and to give this an air of acceptability. This is why it's important not to accede to "preferred pronoun" requests, as it becomes a slippery slope to the erosion of women's rights.
I think this is a good example of what annoys people about "wokeness" (not speaking to the larger social dynamics nor the larger political atmosphere.)
I'm POC. Many people, even some really close friends of mine, don't know the primary language that I grew up using even though I speak, read, and write in English with an American accent. Some folks have used invented names to describe my primary language. Others don't know that someone who looks a lot like me doesn't speak the same primary language. It's annoying, sure. Sometimes it feels vaguely discriminatory. But I'm not going to get extremely angry about it, rant about it, or launch into attack over it. I generally smile a bit, correct them, and move on. I might then laugh at them a bit (gently) with some friends of the same ethnic background. Again I don't mind that much. It's the price we pay of living in a multicultural society, that to some extent we always understand yet misunderstand everyone else.
Now obviously some people use these styles of microagressions to discriminate or throw hate or prejudice at others. If you're reading a small snippet (like Twitter-alikes) or if you read something out of context, it can be hard to tell whether this person is prejudiced against you or is simply unaware. But generally in long-form online conversation or in face-to-face conversation, it becomes very obvious when people are prejudiced vs unaware. And sometimes there are borderline cases where you can't tell. This line is ill-defined, varies by situation, and often varies by person. Part of participating in a multicultural society is to find your line. For some folks it's a quick one: small microaggressions and you disengage. Others are fine to forgive and are open to more of these microaggressions.
I'm not saying this in the abstract. I have definitely gotten weird vibes from folks in conversations who kept tiptoeing around ethnic slurs. I trust my gut. I usually walk away from those conversations IRL or block the person online. I've also been racially harassed before in person, both as bullying when I was younger and just plain anti-ethnic behavior as an adult.
Constantly trying to be considerate to every minority group for every perceived grievance is exhausting and creates a chilling effect on speech. This is the problem with this form of "wokism." There's a different category of issues when this gets extrapolated into politics and large social issues that requires a much longer answer than this, but I hope my answer offers some insight.
Language policing costs a lot, but its invisible since its the cost of everyone updating themselves and spending time rethinking what to say. That is worth many billions of dollars in lost time, and since its a moving target like we see with other words constantly getting updated it will never stop, its an ongoing cost we constantly pay for this.
>Language policing costs a lot, but its invisible since its the cost of everyone updating themselves and spending time rethinking what to say.
How often do you think the average person actually has to change their language? It seems like it would be a pretty tiny fraction for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of circumstances. On the other hand, if you're a professor of history or a public official, it probably does cost some of your time. But in those cases, doesn't it also provide value?
Is the same true of other forms of manners, table behaviour say, or are they actually encoding something useful and pro-social?
My guess is, if I'd had to learn to use a knife and fork and typical Western table manners at 35, it'd remain a small stone in my shoe for life.
Which is to say, not using certain language might always grind our gears a little. I notice it, certainly don't always use the words my brain first reaches for, but not so much as to bug me. There's so much other self-censorship that we automate subconsciously or almost, it's not a big deal.
For younger people? It's no deal at all, they have no more use for the R word than you or I do in some obsolete 19th century racial slur.
> For younger people? It's no deal at all, they have no more use for the R word than you or I do in some obsolete 19th century racial slur.
That's because they replaced the r word with autistic, which I presume will be the a word in about 20 years and some other term will be used to describe autism.
They describe quite different phenomena, both in terms of the actual state of being and how they're deployed as a slur? "autistic" seems to be more like "nerd" used to be a slur (but also sometime identity badge) before the rise of SV billionaires.
I've never heard "autistic" applied to anything other than people (and possibly animals, for humour) for example, in the way the r word was used as a stronger version of "dumb".
Anyway, I think people having to be a little careful with their words is a small price to pay to breaking the linguistic and stereotypical link between people with learning difficulties, Downs etc. and dumb, annoying situations.
It's called spelling a word because words are spells, which is why it's ok to place some of them off-limits.
> They describe quite different phenomena, both in terms of the actual state of being and how they're deployed as a slur? "autistic" seems to be more like "nerd" used to be a slur (but also sometime identity badge) before the rise of SV billionaires.
Not what I'm talking about at all. Teens in the US use autistic in the exact same way the r word was used 20 - 30 years ago. It's an insult that is a stronger version of dumb.
> I've never heard "autistic" applied to anything other than people (and possibly animals, for humour) for example, in the way the r word was used as a stronger version of "dumb".
You're just not exposed to it then. Which is fine, but doesn't mean it isn't commonplace. I am guessing you don't live in the US based on your spelling of humour, which would be one explanation of why you aren't tuned into this.
> Anyway, I think people having to be a little careful with their words is a small price to pay to breaking the linguistic and stereotypical link between people with learning difficulties, Downs etc. and dumb, annoying situations.
People being considerate is good. But banning specific words doesn't accomplish what most of the word police claims it will.
> It's called spelling a word because words are spells, which is why it's ok to place some of them off-limits.
> Not what I'm talking about at all. Teens in the US use autistic in the exact same way the r word was used 20 - 30 years ago. It's an insult that is a stronger version of dumb.
Well that's... <searches mental Rolodex> the actions of a bunch of people with the intellect of a grape, the empathy of a stale French fry, and the collective odour of a sack of dead badgers.
(See how much more fun this whole insult business is with just a little more effort?)
> You're just not exposed to it then. Which is fine, but doesn't mean it isn't commonplace. I am guessing you don't live in the US based on your spelling of humour, which would be one explanation of why you aren't tuned into this.
Yep. I'm in the UK. Have teenage kids, if I caught them using autistic in that way, they could say goodbye to wifi access for a month.
> People being considerate is good. But banning specific words doesn't accomplish what most of the word police claims it will.
Eventually it does, or helps to at least, but over a much longer timeframe. Generations, realistically - many middle-aged people don't have the mental plasticity to absorb big shifts in how race, gender, sex, sexuality are addressed.
Changing minds takes a lot longer than changing manners, but the latter can make a positive difference in the meantime.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but that doesn't change anything about how little language changes impact the lived experiences of the targets of the slur du jour.
> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.
Yes, but this is also the part that glues together the larger coalition of people left of center. Racially segregated affinity groups and affirmative action are the thing that AOC and Jamie Dimon can agree on.
A 2022 poll showed that something like 20% of Biden 2020 voters would pick Liz Cheney in a three-way race with Trump. The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives who are willing to put up with woke stuff. Including Paul Graham himself.
If Fetterman comes out and says we are going to ban racially segregated affinity groups, and the compromise is he’ll raise my taxes to pay for more healthcare services, I’d vote for that. But my experience with the last 10 years is that team blue never raised my taxes but did recruit my daughter into a “BIPOC” group. The policy is what it does, as they say.
To the contrary she’s red pilled. The ordeal has forced her to think about race and she’s responded by developing a strong Bangladeshi identity as a coping mechanism.
But I don’t need a 12 year old who tells me that “affirmative action is morally wrong” and yells at me about not knowing how to cook curry. I want her to have the post-racial upbringing I did as a 1990s kid.
> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to [...]
That's precisely the point: the function of the word "inclusive" mentioned in TFA, or several related like "diversity" was twisted for the purpose of waging culture war. (E.g. Biden had some "most diverse" team somewere, and it meant 0% men, didn't it.) The purpose of the culture war was to drop entire chain of thought not aligned with current heresy.
> Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
You're making the assumption that most of that isn't performative nonsense that in reality doesn't help anything.
Also known as slacktivism.
It got to the point where I would see pronouns and flags and URLs to DEI policies (Click here to stop racism now! Really?) in people's email signatures that I would immediately assume they were insincere and phony.
One person I knew had "LGBTQ Ally" in their professional signature. It's one step removed from writing I HAVE GAY FRIENDS and frankly I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins to proclaim their allegiance. None of this has place in a professional setting.
Google Maps allows you declare your allegiance. You can mark a business as LGBTQ+ friendly (why should I have to declare that and it not just be assumed?).
So, I'm very visibly queer and from the south. I have always been appreciative of gestures like this or in the parent comment - because it is not a safe thing there to assume that people would be accepting.
> why should I have to declare that and it not just be assumed?
That’s an easy question with an easy answer.
Because it can’t be assumed. Because there are people (who own businesses) who are not friendly to LGBTQ+ people. And people (such as LGBTQ people) may want to find or avoid certain places.
Is a good-faith interpretation of such a signal that it would be some sort of silly performative measure?
Thank you for posting this. For those who didn't click through, its an article headlined "Wyoming bar calls for murder of gay people as “cure for AIDS” and are selling it as merch", and shows a picture of the bar's horrifically bigoted t-shirt.
People who dismiss labels like "LGBTQ-friendly" as "performative moralism" (to use the term Paul Graham used multiple times in his article) have clearly never had their very existence threatened on a frequent basis simply because of who they are.
Pronouns are pretty useful when you have a lot of Chinese and Indian coworkers and don't know what to call them by their names. People from HK tend to give themselves English names, but mainland Chinese I know don't.
Of course that's not their original purpose and they aren't very fit for their original purpose. (it's to include trans people, but trans women don't want you to ask what their pronouns are, they want to be addressed like women.)
Yes but how are you supposed to know if an obvious male in 'feminine' type attire wants to be referred to as she/her unless you ask? Could just be a man with a niche fashion sense. See e.g. Grayson Perry.
> I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins
did you know LGBT were explicitly targeted in the holocaust? You know about the holocaust, right? You are aware that 1940s Germany is when and where the holocaust happened, right?
Why a weird, distorted take. People who put “LGBTQ Ally” in their signatures aren’t being phony. They have friends or family who are LGBTQ, and being visible is one way to support them. If it’s unprofessional to be an ally to LGBTQ friends and family then it is easy for hateful folks to claim it’s unprofessional to even be LGBTQ. Why does it offend you so much for someone to say “I support my gay friends”?
What holes you like or don't like and what you got in between your legs should be completely irrelevant at a restaurant and not something the waitress or waiter should have any interest in.
I think what you're not getting is that there are lots of places in rural America that are violently queerphobic. Queer people are targets of hate crimes. There's a mainstream religion and political party in America that's tiptoeing around rhetoric of eradication of queer people.
So yeah, it can't be assumed businesses are queer friendly because lots of American Christians and conservatives would prefer queer people dead, or at least back in the closet.
I see the problem you identify with people's behaviour and agree with the noisiness of people you refer to as group two - people who aren’t thinking deeply about what they are saying have a lot of freedom to shoot their mouth off.
To be very clear, I see your comment as a sincere attempt to articulate and respond to a problem, most discussion of woke isn’t.
While I do want to offer just one olive branch to people upset about woke, that yes - annoying people really are annoying, self-righteous twits truly are unbearable - but when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them.
There are idiots everywhere – even the smartest of us are part-time idiots, stupidity is just the background noise we have to talk over, rabbiting on about woke usually seems to part strategic tantrum to avoid real discussion and part real tantrum.
I think I’m looking for a way to distil the ideas you’ve expressed into a response I can use when someone complains about woke : `that sounds quite annoying, but let’s discuss the idea not the idiot`
> when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them
I think you may be right here, but I think it's also worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.
What I see is that a lot of "woke" starts with the assumption that the audience is bad, then tries to work backwards to prove it
Of course discussions about selfishness, hypocrisy and cruelty are going to infuriate people when you start from the assumption that the people you are talking to are the ones who are selfish cruel hypocrites
Next time you see someone make a comment about "straight cis white men" (or any demographic, but this one comes up a lot), replace it with "selfish cruel hypocrites", that probably would give you a good idea why that demographic reacts poorly to the message
Notice how you tried to force your opinion by insinuating that the person feeling this way is mentally ill? A large chunk of the comments in this thread are saying that’s part of the problem.
We are recreating the "not all men" argument here, except hyper-specialized to "not all straight white cis men."
And so, in the spirit of that argument, sure, maybe not all straight white cis men are a problem, but ENOUGH of us are that we should be paying attention to see if we're unknowingly part of the problem, or even better if we can help at all to improve things.
Hopefully in another couple decades we can revisit this topic, only specialized down another couple adjectives. =)
Cis white male covers a very broad spectrum of people from very different economic, ethnic and social backgrounds.
Labelling an entire race (noting caveat above) of people as problematic is not a traditional progressive worldview and in my opinion that this view is being promoted in modern progressive politics has contributed to a large proportion of traditional progressives feeling politically stranded.
It also makes people like me completely shut down any reasonable discourse. Focus on specific behaviors and don’t try to solve racism with more racism.
> We are recreating the "not all men" argument here, except hyper-specialized to "not all straight white cis men."
We absolutely are.
I think that in itself is the problem, you dont need to be cis, white or male to be the problem, its just a group that is the target of choice.
Targeting straight white men this way isnt going to be the solution to the problem, especially those that are the problem. I don't have a good solution to this but pouncing on a large group for the actions of a few isnt a great idea.
If they want to radicalize a group, this is a great way to go about it.
Not all men is a sensible argument because it condemns generalization, a foundational principle of humanism.
There is no spirit of argument, your axioms are lacking. Either you can form an argument without generalization or it is very weak. That is mostly the gist of the criticism of contemporary progressive arguments.
Especially on the topic of racism it is paramount to stay precise in your wording and especially if your own policies circle around changes in language.
And if your argument gets the basics wrong, you should not wonder about any headwind and no, these arguments cannot form a revisited civil rights movement.
I'm the white cis male with grey hair, but in my n of one experience I have encountered very few situations in which not taking the bait on the first provocation, showing a bit of empathy and respect didn't quickly get the same empathy and respect in return.
> worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.
I agree with this, it's not nice to be dehumanised or disrespected, it's awful. I saw someone speak recently who dipped into this kind of broad anti-male language to get a sneering laugh from the crowd more than once. With friends, with people who matter deeply to me, I'd want to speak to them about the petty provocation in their choice of language, but right now, I still think that following down the path of chasing down that language in public is a dead end, because a person speaking in that way is scratching for a fight, probably not a productive fight but a let the fury out fight. There may be a legitimate reason for that fury but I don't want to be the bucket it gets poured into. I am up for a sincere difficult conversations about real problems, and usually people pick that up and respond accordingly. Most people aren't sociopaths, and can't resist reciprocating sincere empathy and respect.
I’m going to add a caveat here : people reciprocating respect is my personal, subjective experience, I don’t believe everybody gets this same treatment. I think people who look like me, who are used to at least a tiny bit of status - the pool from which must of the upset about woke is coming - we generally get respect reciprocated. When we don’t get treated with respect it’s a bit of a shock. I think reflecting on how unpleasant it is to be treated poorly, what a frequent experience it is for some people and how it might affect them is the way to go.
They're welcoming historically marginalized groups into their workplaces, their families, their communities. Every day they treat others with basic respect.
It makes some people so mad that they crawl the internet for examples of these people "going too far". They'll bring up examples from other continents to get that angry fix. They'll misconstrue them in the worst possible light and pass it on telephone style till it's unrecognizable. And if they don't find any they'll make them up. They'll sometimes pretend to be the people they hate and propose stupid things to make themselves angry.
I've seen the latter happen in comments here where one reactionary sarcastically suggests something ridiculous and another one takes it seriously and gets angry at it.
Currently online lesbians are being blamed for forest fires. Which is only a minor update on the classic religious claim of "hurricanes caused by being tolerant of gays".
So I don't think you can escape this just by not being "woke" and "annoying".
> They're welcoming historically marginalized groups
So humans then?
Because all humans have been marginalized at some point in history. Even the language you're using is an example of the problem, since it insinuates that some groups of people were marginalized and some people were not. If you really wanted to embody the values of compassion and selflessness, it wouldn't be contingent on the physical traits or background of the person in question.
Woke ideas also collide with general humanism. "I don't see color" is an example here.
But the ideas of humanism are better and woke people often dislike that their ideas get rejected. Still, people were made fun off on TV for expressing "old" humanistic ideas in favor of idpol. I don't think that some woke ideas fly very high on an intellectual level so that too much discussion would not even be necessary. Not that the criticism is taken seriously if you have your dogma at hand.
There are well known dynamics that even putting people in camp blue or red creates conflict. Woke ignores these dynamics completely, but did further ideas of that kind to the letter. Current conflicts are further empiric evidence that some assumptions do indeed hold.
You’ve just proven the point of the author you’re responding to. The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”. But there are endless folks who are mad about someone being mean to them once who won’t shut up about how the “woke left” is destroying social cohesion. Just because some people are obnoxious doesn’t mean you’re under the thumb of a conspiracy to shut you up. Sheesh.
They are (or were throughout the 2010s), but they have a way of talking about it where they do it, but then claim it doesn't exist if anyone tries to give a name to it. So "wokeness isn't real" is a popular way to say "wokeness is real and I think it's good". Sometimes this is called Voldemorting.
I personally think it's good but also think it's real.
* The online left was using terms like "social justice warrior" to describe themselves in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Some of them even used alternate terms to try and fit their kind of activism closer, one I remember being "social justice paladin".
* The first big round of backlash turned SJW into an insult in the mid 2010s, so they rebranded themselves as "woke".
* As the backlash grew, "woke" was also turned into an insult.
* DEI was the most recent rebranding, but since that describes actions instead of the people doing the actions there wasn't really a way to turn it directly into an insult, and "progressive" isn't zing-y enough to catch on, so "woke" stuck.
No, you do not. I know this because when I advocate for actually not being racist, members of your group call me racist for it.
I am the one who seeks policies that do not take a person's race into consideration when making decisions where race is clearly a priori irrelevant. That is what it means not to be racist.
Your group is the one that insists that doing so is necessary to achieve a moral outcome.
> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas
No, it really is about specific ideas. I’ll discuss four:
1) Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition with common cause and shared interests. This goes back to the 1990s with the “rainbow coalition.” A lot of the way the left talks to minorities, and various things like affinity groups arise out of this idea that non-whites will bring about left-liberal changes to society. Also the antagonistic way many on the left talk about whites. But most non-whites don’t think of themselves that way, as we saw in the election.
2) Because of (1), many in the left believe in permissive approaches to policing and immigration because of the disproportionate effects of those policies on black and Hispanic people. But the public wants more policing and less immigration, including black and Hispanic people.
3) Many on the left believe in treating people of different races different to remedy past race-based harms. But the public doesn’t like this—even California voted overwhelmingly against repealing the state ban on affirmative action.
4) Related to the above, there’s a general belief on the left that, in any given issue, policy should cater to the “most marginalized.” When confronted with the burdens to the average person, their reaction is to either (a) deny such costs and accuse the other part of various “isms” and “phobias,” or (b) assert that the average person must bear the cost.
Enough to normalize "white men are evil" statements, otherwise such people would get reprimanded and shunned by the other people on the left for being racists and sexists but as is they are still welcomed with open arms.
The political coalition there is "people of color" - the point of this was to fight anti-black racism by making a unified group containing them and everyone else who was "not white". This is an improvement over the previous system where groups like Italians/Irish became white by being anti-black. (or were thought to have)
Activists then forgot this was the point and changed the name to "BIPOC" to de-emphasize half the "POC" group (the ones who aren't "BI"), but the whole point was to keep them in the group.
I think the notion of a “BIPOC coalition” has many angles. Many black political thinkers and academics focus on a black/white binary, and extending the concept of “black” to “people of color” was natural. This was also appealing to white democrats, whose coalition with black people is heavily focused on fighting purported racism and discrimination in return for loyal democratic voting.
Couple that with the prospect of America becoming a majority non-white, it’s easy to see why the broader left of center embraced the rhetoric and policies they did over the last decade—e.g. reframing policy issues like immigration and policing in racial justice terms.
The problem is that “white racism” as a lens for understanding America—widely shared by modern liberals—is a poor tool for understanding Latinos and Asians.
I understand what you think you are seeing and that you are probably not alone in this. But you haven’t managed to convince me that there is a «cohesive coalition». I think people who believe that this is what they see may have gotten a bit carried away.
I isn’t a cohesive coalition. I think leaders and activists in the left think there is one. Because the leading DNC chair candidate says stuff like this: https://x.com/benwikler/status/1878205257789960435 (“As DNC Chair, our leadership team will lift up our full coalition—with Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran, and Disability representation.”).
Re: 3 ... the level of misunderstanding about what affirmative action is and means is so wide and so deep that "the public doesn't like this" is more or less an information-free observation. Most of the public has only a strawman in place when it comes to understanding affirmative action, and sure, if the strawman was accurate, most of the people who do support it would drop their support.
Its more common for proponents to obscure what affirmative action actually is. The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular and the magnitude of the affirmative action effect is much larger than popularly known.
Asians in the top academic decile are half as likely as African Americans in the 5th decile to be accepted. I highly doubt exposing Americans to this data would make them more favorable to affirmative action– the very opposite is more likely.
> The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular
When stated by opponents seeking to strawman it, certainly.
But:
"when faced with multiple equally qualified candidates for a position, it is permissble and perhaps even desirable to use demographic factors such as race or gender to select among them"
generally doesn't get much opposition. It's not absolutely impossible that this is a steelman version of affirmative action, but it's also the one I grew up hearing from the actual proponents of the concept.
We all heard that but it was never really true and was the camel's nose under the tent. "Equally qualified" is meaningless given how interview processes work in the tech industry: you keep interviewing until you find the first person that passes the bar and then make an offer. Holding offers back in the hope that someone more demographically attractive comes along is a bad policy that results in lost candidates who get tired of the BS, but is a natural consequence of this definition of affirmative action.
Regardless it took only a few years for what I heard to go from "we should use gender/race as a tie breaker" to "our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call. And that's inevitable because the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions. The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was, which results in people being targeted and fired for -isms of whatever kind.
So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
>"our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call.
I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
> the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions
That doesn't seem to be the case for other problems. I don't see what makes this problem special so there can be no push back on extreme solutions.
> The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was
What about using non-extreme steps to try to mitigate the issue.
> So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
Idiots is a word that originated in ancient Greek and was used for the people who did not care about the matters of the Polis. Everybody is born an idiot until they participate in public matters. That costs (time and effort to familiarize yourself).
In that sense maybe the people you are talking about are idiots...
Is that comparable though? It's not an open job position with requirements listed that anybody can apply for.
I don't know how that works in the US, but according to wikipedia the president can nominate a person and a majority vote in both houses of congress can confirm that.
It's not like the best candidate wins...this is politics...
> I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
It is illegal for jobs in USA, but not for university student spots. Trump has said he will make that illegal though, so it might change and become illegal like in most of the world.
It isn't legal for individual university spots either.
What a university can do, or any form of corporation in the USA can do, is to announce goals to have its body be made up in roughly the same was as the general population, according to some demographic metrics.
So you can't say "student #68 must be female"; you can say "we are aiming for a 50/50 male/female student body" and then take steps to get there.
It is illegal in the US but the law isn't enforced when men are on the losing end. As someone else points out, the POTUS himself violated this law openly and in public. Because everyone knows that and because feminists agitate constantly for female-biased hiring, it's been effectively decriminalized.
It’s actually the other way around. Most people like “affirmative action” when you use that term. But most people dislike it when you ask whether race should be considered in college admissions or hiring decisions: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans...
“In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity.”
The Pew survey did not find that most people like "affirmative action":
> Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.
It was a preceding Gallup poll that found the result you're thinking of:
> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.
The disconnect between this sort of response with the one you cited at the end of your comment just serves to underline my point about the public's lack of clear understanding of what "affirmative action" means (and they cannot be entirely blamed for this, since in the culture, it has come to mean different things).
Institutions like Harvard will (for the foreseeable future) always have vastly more fully qualified applications than they can accept. The concept of affirmative action was originally intended by its proponents to be used only when tie-breaking between equally qualified candidates. Harvard and the other Ivies have this situation in extremis. The idea was that when faced with the question "well, we have 26 people all fully qualified, how are to pick between them?" that using race was a legitimate choice as long as the racial demographics of the institution did not match those of the overall population. They have (for a while) used gender in a similar way, and arguably could use favorite ice cream flavor if they chose, because the candidates are all qualified to be selected.
There was never a suggestion that "affirmative action" meant selecting less qualified candidates because of their racial status. However, the conservative right has claimed that this is what affirmative action really means in the world, and this idea has been broadly picked up by the media and public at large. Whether there is actually any evidence that this has happened on a significant scale is not something I've seen adequately addressed. From what I have read, including the Harvard case, I'd say it was much more an unfounded grievance on the part of people who felt they had a right to be admitted or hired than what actually happens. I could be wrong.
The polls have asked the question in different ways and get similar results. In particular, they have asked whether people support race being used as a factor in admissions decisions, and overwhelmingly they do not: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans... (“In the December 2022 survey, for example, 82% of U.S. adults said colleges should not consider race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept, while only 17% said colleges should take this into account.”) That’s exactly what’s happening, and people don’t like it.
And people see that this framing of “breaking ties between qualified candidates” concept is merely wordplay. Harvard doesn’t say “everyone above a particular academic index score is ‘equally qualified’ and there’s no difference above that line.” According to the SFFA data, Asian and white students in the 10th decile of academic index score are 5-6 times as likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 5th decile (who have virtually no chance). But black and Hispanic students in the 5th decile are as likely or more likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 9th and 10th deciles. Thus, Harvard uses race to admit less qualified students—as measured by the very metric Harvard has established to measure qualifications.
Most people intuitively understand this without the explanation. They intuitively understand that grades and test scores establish a sliding scale of more or less qualified candidates.
What is race? When a student is applying for college, are they free to check whichever box they think will maximize their chance of admission or are there specific, objective criteria to which they must adhere?
Of course, should they be admitted and it is realized that they abused the definitions of race that society uses to group and classify people in some egregious way, they may face consequences for that.
And sure, I'm entirely sympathetic to the scientific observation that race is a myth, but in the actual USA, in actual 2024, basic physiological features like skin color, face shape, voice tone, hair texture will result in you receiving different treatment in many contexts. Whatever triggers such different treatment is what defines race on the ground (ignoring the equivalent set of things related to sex/gender).
What you call "the left" is part of the public, but you make it sound like it is not.
You also make it sound like the public has a coherent opinion, which I don't think it has.
Do you mean majority when you say public? Do you think what the majority thinks should be done (mob rule)?
Wokeness is like veganism: for every person talking about being vegan you will find 10 guys who complain about vegans, typically unprompted, while eating meat. I had a work collegue who would complain every meal about vegans, although there wasn't a single vegan at the table.
Wokeness is the comparable, I teach at a liberal art university, there are probably few places more "woke" than this. Even here if I count there is probably a 10:1 ratio of "people complaining about woke" vs "people demanding a woke thing".
The feeling that others are judging you from a high horse is a very strong force, even if they aren't judging you at all. And strong forces can be used to manipulate people into making choices against their interest .
There's a key difference though: while vegans are generally proud of being vegan, it's very hard now to find anyone who will admit to being woke or even that a single one of their beliefs is woke. It was only in fashion for a brief period and is now distinctly out of fashion. It's kind of similar to being a hipster—a lot of people get called hipsters, but no one has self-identified as one since probably the early 2010s.
This makes discussions like these inherently slippery and circular. While it's clear that many people do actually hold beliefs that their critics would characterize as woke (as evidenced by real-world impact like master branches being renamed, indigenous land statements, and DEI quotas), they're never going to voluntarily accept a label that has been turned into a pejorative.
This is another observation that doesn't match with my lived reality. The vegans I got to know as such¹ mostly had one moment where they mentioned it: when someone offered them something non-vegan.
Some of them did even mention it only after a meat eater asked them why they are not eating $X.
As mentioned in my live I met only one vegan that smugly and unprompted talked about veganism. And they were the type who would talk that way about literally every topic.
I am generally careful with stories like that. "Trans bathrooms" is another one of those. My institute has non-gendered bathrooms for the past century, mainly for space reasons. And that never was a problem.
If you love meat, but understand the ethical argument behind not eating it, wouldn't it be practical if vegans were smug assholes that you don't have to listen to? That is why some people want them to fulfill that cliché — I am more interested in the truth, especially the truth that has an impact on my direct life.
¹: There ought to be a number of people everybody met, who are vegans, but you don't know they are, because they did not mention it. E.g. my bands drummer (a old punk) is vegan and it took me two years to figure that one out.
Being proud of something doesn’t mean you talk about it unprompted all the time.
I have several friends who are vegan. My point is that they don’t deny it–if you ask them, they’re happy to say “yeah, I’m vegan.”
But people who believe in things that are widely considered woke, like changing ‘master’ branches to ‘main’, usually will deny that they are woke or that they want to change the name for that reason. They’ll tell you it’s about common decency or not offending others and that it has nothing to do with wokeness.
I am one of those who changed master to main. It is exactly two letters less to type the name is IMO more self explainatory than master. So even if we excluded any historic background why the verbiage of master/slave might be considered problematic id still prefer main.
Now is this a (main) hill I have to die on? Totally not. Do I have very strong opinions on this? Nope. Does it cost me a lot? Nope. As I said, I have to type less, and as a teacher explaining that the main branch is the main branch is easier than explaining that master means it is the main branch and explaining where master comes from electronics etc.
"Woke" people for the most part are like me: not adamant social justice worriors whose ardent opinions have to be defended till the last drop of blood, but people who are like "meh, why not, doesn't cost me a thing and maybe it is only right". And that is the polar opposite of what the political right wing and their whole billionaire-funded propaganda machine likes to paint people whoe make choices like that as.
Now I don't say people with strong opinions on these issues don't exist, because there do. But they are the minority. But taking vocal minorities and declaring them the representatives of the majority seems to be a trend these days.
The motivation was not to be more self-explanatory or type less though. Let's be real.
I hear you... you go along with it because the zealots who do feel strongly are aggressive and it's easier to concede the point than face backlash, even if you object to (or are indifferent to) the language-policing. I've switched to 'main' as well, so I get it. pg's essay discusses this:
> Most people are afraid of impropriety; they're never exactly sure what the social rules are or which ones they might be breaking. Especially if the rules change rapidly. And since most people already worry that they might be breaking rules they don't know about, if you tell them they're breaking a rule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially if multiple people tell them. Which in turn is a recipe for exponential growth. Zealots invent some new impropriety to avoid. The first people to adopt it are fellow zealots, eager for new ways to signal their virtue. If there are enough of these, the initial group of zealots is followed by a much larger group, motivated by fear. They're not trying to signal virtue; they're just trying to avoid getting in trouble.
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All I'm saying I guess is let's not pretend that the subject of the essay isn't a real thing. Just because no one self-identifies as 'woke' doesn't mean the ideology doesn't exist—call it whatever you want, but the phenomenon is real and it's had tangible influence on our culture, including in tech.
I agree the hipster comparison is interesting. No one really wanted to be called a hipster either, but you knew who they were. I know I quit identifying as one some time in the late 00s, before the backlash really went mainstream.
The tangent about the hipster trend is interesting. Having grown up in a rural village during the 00s I heard about hipsters long before I ever saw a person who would even remotely fit the cliché.
During that time actual cliché hipsters existed as was apparent (via the internet), but more important to my own life was another aspect: it was a kind of catchall term for people who didn't fit neatly into the usual known groups (Punks, Skaters, Metalheads, Ravers, Emos, ..) or did their own thing. I was connected to my local art scene, most of which have been called hipsters without actually being or remotely looking like hipsters.
Hipster was a degorative for: "Oh you think you're different". The thing was I didn't only think that, I was different. Probably most people on this website here were different from the average person during their teens.
You don't just eat vegan, you are a vegan. The thing to recognize is that these boxes exist to make themselves feel superior. So they put the people whose behavior and existence induces cognitive dissonance into their world view into boxes and pat themselves on their backs whenever they can convince themselves they spotted a marker that proves the person opposite is part of that box.
And before there is a misunderstanding: the boxes can work both ways. People within a box can hate on those outside of it and vice versa — and both feel superior to the other. The point is that people ascribe certain attributes to the boxes and use it to paint simplistic pictures of the world around them, precisely because it makes them feel better. Made a certain food choice? Congrats, idiots now think you're smug.
And I am not even vegan. I just try to look past the boxes as life is much more nuanced and much richer behind them.
Or before that, yuppies. YUP simply stood for the very neutral "Young Urban Professional" but "yuppies" somehow became a slur and nobody wanted to self-identify.
IME (Australia), the U was "upwardly-mobile" which I always took to mean someone ambitious, who dressed "for the job they want, rather than the job they have".
Because 1 in 10 (for examples) vegans are calling meat eaters as cruel murderers. And that becomes the image of vegans because they are the noisy ones.
There might be some survivorship bias at play here, as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one. Those who eat in peace and leave others alone are not memorable - same goes for antivegans.
Yeah? That is what some meaties keep telling me too — but personally I have only met one such vegan in my life and they were obviously deeply troubled by other things as well. All others merely kept to themselves and only talked about it when someone else prompted them. And that someone else was often a meaty with a: "Oh you are a vegan? Now explain THIS".
I don't know about you, but I don't give a damn about made up problems that aren't part of my life. Don't get me wrong, I can totally imagine smug vegans. I just made the observation that 99 percent of the ones I met would receive a disservice if I went under the assumption that "all vegans are smug assholes".
Similarily my assumption for meat eaters isn't that all of them are assholes. But I observed there are people who are so triggered by the mere thought of vegans existing, they can't stop talking about it or demanding from any supposed vegan that they explajn themselves — so the exact thing they claim vegans do.
> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
> 2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
Who are you talking about? It seems to me that you are using very general and broad language so avoid having to defend any specific points. Who exactly shamed you and for what? Give some examples. Who exactly are you paraphrasing with "that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive"? For the record, my experience of left-wing politics (two decades+) is very different from yours and I haven't noticed the phenomena you speak of. In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam.
That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.
You are using quotation marks so you must be paraphrasing someone, right? If so can you give some examples of this phenomena?
> In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam. That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.
Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. And yet my experience is the exact opposite. If the "divergent ideas" are e.g. "everyone who voted for Trump is an evil nazi" vs "everyone who voted for Trump is just stupid", I'll grant that those two ideas will be entertained and debated. But if the idea falls anywhere outside the accepted orthodoxy, for instance "maybe people who voted for Trump were well informed and had good reason to do so", that idea is not tolerated at all.
Granted I live in Seattle, which is probably home to a disproportionate number of more extreme progressives.
> Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective.
I guess the difference is that I actually hang out with left-wing people and have been doing so for decades, whereas you base your opinions on rage bait news and internet interactions? You may think Trump voters are well-informed and you may think the moon is made of cheese. In both cases there are mountains of evidence to the contrary. I don't know what being wrong has to do with tolerance.
Haha, no. You couldn't be more wrong! This is my impression from in person conversations with people I know, mostly in Seattle where I've lived since 2014. There's a bar I'm a regular at, plus a couple hobby groups where I've met most of my local friends. Almost all are left wing, some very left wing, one was even heavily involved in CHAZ/CHOP. I don't engage much in internet commentary, or at all with rage bait outlets.
The rest of your comment proves my point quite nicely though!
> It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
The reactionaries to “woke” ideas know that (2) is a small number of vocal people and yet they still wrap the anchor around the necks of both (1) and (2). Same strategy for “communism”, “socialism”, “groomers”, “Hamas apologists”, etc. It’s convenient to do this and say all Democrats (or all non-Republicans, or non-MAGA, etc) are painted with this broad brush.
What your comment misses is that the “morality police” has always existed and currently exists along different poles than in the recent past. When I grew up, the social conservatives / incredibly religious were the ones trying to bully people into moral positions. Now, we still have those people (old groups like Family Research Council and new groups like Moms For Liberty) are doing the same thing, but aren’t getting flak from the “anti-wokeness” crowd. Bad faith actors all around.
Exactly. Anyone with any reading comprehension (and honesty) can tell that PG conflates being woke with acting woke early on for exactly this purpose. He also talks a lot about polarization as though it's entirely the "woke mob's" fault, about moralizing without mentioning evangelicals, about "enforcers" without mentioning MAGA paramilitaries, etc. It's all very disingenuous, even for him.
As a non American I don't see MAGA policing online or in tech companies, but I see a lot of woke. So while the things you talk about might be local problem to USA, the woke problem is something USA exports to the entire globe, so it seems like woke has much more power than maga and thus is a bigger problem.
MAGA is a nationalist movement, so obviously it doesn't apply to the whole globe, but each country (in the West and elsewhere) have their own nationalist movements.
I'm from Denmark, and we were first-movers in Europe on "anti-wokeness" since our election in 2003 (before the term existed). Interestingly, as Europe has moved more to the right in recent years, the wave has been quietly receding a bit here.
Other countries outside of the North Atlantic West also have intense nationalist and "anti-woke" movements (Duterte, Bolsonaro, Milei, Putin, etc.) which do their own anti-woke policing, sometimes literally, through law.
In general, my feeling is that the main actual threat to free speech globally is nationalist "anti-woke" movements.
> Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first before there's any discussion worth a damn. As best I can tell it just means "any behavior coming from young people I don't like as a cable news viewer". Frankly, I'm at the point where if someone uses the word non-ironically I just write the speaker off as not seriously trying to communicate. Use your words! Describe specific behavior. People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
> We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first
Incidentally, this has been a major part of the post-election discussion about it.
I agree that the term has become diluted to a point that it's lost most meaning, and in many cases it means "behaviors and opinions I disagree with".
I think it mostly means some combination of: morality police, people against "wrongspeak", holier-than-thou attitudes, white people advocating for topics they don't understand, and in general a kind of tribal behavior that "others" people who don't fully buy into the entire spectrum of ideas this group is selling, i.e. they treat their beliefs as absolutely true, and anyone who questions them or wants to debate them are automatically othered.
> People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
I agree and disagree. The media landscape has had a major hand in shaping the discussion, and social media has validated the worst fears of the people working themselves into a tizzy. e.g. if someone supports trans rights but has concerns about minors receiving certain surgeries and wants to discuss those concerns, they're put in the same category as transphobes who wish real harm on other people. Depending on where they raise these topics, they'll automatically be blocked and/or put on lists of transphobic people.
Discussions that actually focus on something material, concrete or substantial are derailed by collective community behaviors that refuse to engage with the concrete and substantial.
It's a sad state of affairs for public discourse, and figuring out how to de-escalate the conversation and somehow return to substantive good-faith conversations might be the most important problem of the century.
Mostly means or what it’s become to mean? I was on a college campus in 2002 and the word typically painted a picture. Someone who was hyperaware of real or perceived injustices and was likely to have incense burning in their rooms. The people who I thought were “woke” would have agreed with me. Down to the incense in a lot of cases.
The right is notoriously great at hijacking words terms/words and flipping them into something nefarious. Or sometimes that exact opposite like they did turning the well supported by all Estate Tax into the conservative hating death tax.
Now woke has morphed into this weird thing. A clapback insult for the insecure to justify their insistence at exclusion of one kind or another.
Oh, absolutely what it has come to mean over time. But what it has come to mean is ultimately what matters at the moment I think. The term has evolved, and I think that's a big reason there's so much polarization and disagreement about what it means.
Some subset of people understands the "true" meaning of the word, and the set of ideas originally associated with it. I suspect the majority of people are more likely to use it in the sense it has evolved into.
Some kind of separation needs to happen. The underlying ideals and ideas vs. the tactics people employ in bringing them about. If someone's MO is to judge/shame people, exert their moral superiority over others, and see the people around them in absolute terms, that set of behavior is particularly harmful to the underlying goals. It presents itself as the "truest" form of support for the goal and the only right way to go about achieving it. But it uses coercion/manipulation to take advantage of people's fear of public shaming and the consequences of "getting cancelled" which tends to ensure silence from people who see themselves as more pragmatic but not interested in getting labeled with "them" for raising questions about reasonable things.
I agree that when people use it now, it's less about anything substantive and entirely about what people feel the word has come to mean. Not sure how, but we need to fundamentally change the conversation.
The essay touches on something that I think explains that, though. Disputing an actual specific allegedly-woke idea requires one to confess their heresy specifically, so as the essay says, it's not smart to confess directly to holding a specific heretical opinion.
Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency, as Black author John McWhorter argues. He gets called all kinds of nasty things for speaking that opinion, and he's Black! On the other hand, it's harder to "cancel" or accuse someone of absolute racism (or race traitor-hood) if they say "I don't think the woke mindset is helping, and I think there are better ways to help Black communities."
So that's why imho the word "woke" is a popular tool among those who don't like the various components of it, which are much, much easier to enumerate than those on the Left incredulously pretend. It's basically just:
1. The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with, and that society should punish those who spoke those ideas.
2. Ideologies about race and generational guilt which basically boil down to "the whole world would be much better off if all Europeans had mysteriously vanished 1500 years ago and we wish that had happened."
3. Ideologies that have to do with gender, which I dare not even elaborate on, because of how heretical all but one opinion on that subject is.
> Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims
> The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with
You seem to be arguing that Black people are harmed by being exposed to ideas about victimhood, and then ridiculing the idea that being exposed to ideas can be harmful.
No, they're arguing that society should punish those who spoke those ideas, where "those ideas" is whatever terminally online leftists are whinging about at the moment (i.e. a bar that is way too low for the proposed repercussions).
But I think you already know that and went with the selective quote anyway.
> ... and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency
Well, first we could start by having a discussion of whether or not it is actually true that "they are being told they are always victims with very little agency".
Now, if that were in fact true, we could go on to talk about how we might reduce that harm, and one part of that might involve saying that less.
But then again, were that not true, then we could pretty much discard the person's objections and move on to something that is actually happening.
I read and respect McWhorter, but I don't think that (a) he's right about everything or that (b) your one line summary characterizes his position accurately.
1. No, this is not the point at all. The actual view that you're referring to is that sometimes people are in fact harmed by verbal behavior and cultural phenomena, that we should recognize that, and when possible and appropriate seek to mitigate it. That doesn't mean punishment or book-banning (ideas which come from those most often associated with being anti-woke) but rather a willingness to examine reality through the eyes of people other than ourselves and above all to be kind.
2. No, that is also not the point at all. The actual view is that there has been, at least within the world once controlled by various European powers since somewhere in the range of 1200-1500, a wilful ignorance and downplaying of the horrors created by the colonialism perpetrated by those European powers.
3. Since you don't elaborate, it's hard to respond to this. But I will note that the recognition that gender and sex are not the same thing goes back many decades, if not centuries; that gender roles and sexuality have not been even remotely close to fixed across the time and space in which human civilization has existed; that the response from people who declaim the "woke" approach is so often summarizable as "I don't like it and other people should lead more miserable lives because I think so".
There also seems to be a willful ignorance of the horrors created by the Aztec, Qing, and Songhai powers (among others) before Europeans arrived in force. I won't attempt to defend or excuse the crimes against humanity committed by European colonial powers, but focusing on them seems particularly myopic. We can educate people about the history of that period but to what end? Assigning blame for the current state of affairs to dead people doesn't actually solve any problems today. The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us.
Sure, but do you see one of the primary reasons why there is such ignorance? Because to acknowledge that there were (or are) great, powerful, complex, sophisticated, organized cultures in parts of the world before European colonization happened undercuts one of the central myths that European colonization has wanted to tell about itself - that it, and it alone, was responsible for bring all those attributes to the parts of the world it touched.
Our ignorance of the cultures (positive and negative) in parts of the world where colonization did not happen is motivated by something less pernicious - people are parochial, and European culture in particular took a fairly strong stance that despite knowledge of the civilizations along (e.g.) the silk road, they were of no particular significance since they didn't have (Jesus|Bach|Newton|Galileo|etc.)
You ask "to what end?" I would say the end has multiple components. One is that history rhymes and so if you want to understand the future better, understanding the past better will often help with that. Another is that cultures themselves carry the past forward for amazingly long periods - the English have still not really abandoned the Norman conquest of 1066 as a socio-structural signifier even though it was nearly 1000 years ago. The Hopi still have many stories of things that occured in their world 600-1200 years. If these historical stories are inaccurate, a culture is doing itself no favors carrying them forward. And similarly, a culture that carries such a story as a tale about injustice is not done any favors by being told "ah, fuhgedaboutit".
>Because to acknowledge that there were (or are) great, powerful, complex, sophisticated, organized cultures in parts of the world before European colonization happened undercuts one of the central myths that European colonization has wanted to tell about itself - that it, and it alone, was responsible for bring all those attributes to the parts of the world it touched.
What? The Rennaisance that grew birth to the Modern West was an intentional attempt to revive and surpass the ideals of Old Rome and Greece. When they excavated the Pyramids, many in the West took to adopting parts of Egyptian Culture for legitimacy, the Washington Monument being one prime example. Imperial China was seen as stagnant, but they certainly were respected as highly civilized and organized. What special qualities they gave themselves were their flexibility, rationality and technological superiority, which is not entirely wrong in the battlefield.
This "central myth" you are saying Europeans told themselves sounds more like a fictional strawman to attack and is contradictory, especially in the context of OP's point towards the attitudes held by the people currently attacking Western ideals, not defending it. It's not really refuting the point either that the world pre-1945 was a brutal place, and EVERYBODY was trying to conquer and dominate each other, it was just the West was the strongest of them all and won at the end.
That's why if you solely focus on the West as opposed to understanding the general context of the world at the time and critiquing equally those other culture, it calls into question whether one really cares about these shared ideals of anti-imperialism or if it's just an excuse for nationalist grievances that they weren't on the dominating side. And you know, in Turkey, in China, in India, that kind of mindset very much is the case. It's not that imperialism was bad, it was only bad because it happened to them. For those they conquered, it was glorious event to be valorized.
The renaissance and colonialism have an interesting, complex relationship with each other. As do the veneration and fetishization of dead civilizations vs. conceptions about contemporaneous ones. So sure, elements of the renaissance may have venerated "Egyptian Culture", but there were very few signs of it having any respect for contemporary Egyptian culture.
The myth is "we bought civilization to places that didn't have it". And that is absolutely a lie. There is a second myth that is particularly applicable in the Americas, which is that Europeans discovered a land that God intended them to have dominion over (essentially ignoring or belittling the existing civilization that was here). Neither of these are fictional strawmen - they are real and documented positions found through the writings of European explorers and American settlers and leaders.
It remains puzzling to me why settler colonialism (the dominant, though not only form of European expansionism) was not common in either the pre-1492 Americas or in Asia. The cultures/civilizations there certainly were expansionary but rarely seemed to feel the need to replace existing populations with their own. Whatever the reasons, the results are wildly different.
> The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us.
I think a distinction should be made between revisiting history (in a bid to understand how we got where we are now), and assigning blame.
I'm not sure how we can move forward without some degree of empathy; "Yes, you got the short end of the stick, but how about if we try such and such to ameliorate the impact of the past on your present".
I don't think you are advocating sweeping the past under the rug, I'm just saying that telling a person who is still feeling the sting of a perceived slight (real or imagined) is unlikely to result in moving forward.
Realizing that the sex classifications (male, female, intersex etc) are only tangentially related to gender roles seems to me to be about the most basic concession to reality that one could make in these times.
What constitutes the gender role of "a man" or "a woman" is fluid, not well defined, and subject to change. What constitutes "femininity" and "masculinity" is also fluid, not well defined, and subject to change.
Even if sex was a binary (which it isn't, but it's not a terrible argument to say that it is close enough to one for many purposes), when it comes to gender we all exist in a multi-dimensional space with so many variations on so many themes. Insisting that gender is binary is so harmful, even to people who consider themselves as being at one or other end of that binary. It's fine that there are people who fully embody a particular Victorian-era notion of masculine and feminine (or any other one, really), but the vast majority of us are nowhere near that simple. Insisting that gender comes in only two forms, and has no fluidity to it hurts all of us.
That's orthogonal to my statement. They still recognize that male hijra are not women. Nobody in history has said "I would like a wife to start a family, I will go find a nice hijra", and if they did, they were quickly disabused of the viability of that plan.
It's not orthogonal because you made no attempt to make it clear whether were you were talking about sex or gender, which are not the same.
Being "a wife to start a family" requires a person with female sex, and is typically associated with female gender. But that association is not required, and has not been so across all human cultures and all time.
Men are adult human males. Women are adult human females. If you want to talk about the social roles that men and women occupy, you should use the appropriate words, which are not "men" and "women".
We dilute, pervert, change, invert, transform and reshape the meaning of words all the time, throughout history and across languages. I don't see anything special about the words we use to describe sex and gender.
We can change "war" to mean "peace", "freedom" to mean "slavery", "ignorance" to mean "strength", and "man" to mean "woman". We shouldn't, though. Some meanings are worth preserving, because they have deep legal implications.
I don't know what you want. Most of the article is spent elaborating on what that means and providing examples of it.
> Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
> The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so.
If someone makes a racist or homophobic statement and is confronted about it, there is a good chance that he will perceive it as aggressive. Even if the confrontation is controlled.
And if you can't quickly find a racist comment to confront but you still really want the confrontation? That's when we get debates about blacklist or master vs mainline.
> Most of the article is spent elaborating on what that means and providing examples of it.
More like starting with existing conclusions and working backwards from them. Even in the example you quote, Graham begs the question of "woke" and "politically correct" being equivalent and works backwards from that assumption - in the process incorrectly pinning the origins of political correctness on university social science / humanities programs and the hippie kids being hired into them in the 70's (never mind the multiple-centuries-long history of the political right policing speech and expression in service of the exact opposite of the intellectual pursuits universities foster; apparently that doesn't count as "political correctness" because reasons).
Why does he want it to be done quietly? The only way democracy can work is that you convince others of your ideas. Seems like he doesn't want certain ideas to be advocated for at all, go work on them if you want but shut up about it.
I think any definition of a contested term is going to end up having a longer explanation (See this whole discussion as a proof-by-example).
It seems like a reasonably concise definition to me. It's reasonable to disagree with the definition of course, but to merely dismiss it as not concise is both incorrect and not useful because it lacks specific criticisms.
You understand as well as anyone that something is either a definition of a term, or it isn't. I'm simply pointing to someone who says "This is a concise definition," and then pointing out that, no, if the definition isn't complete, it isn't a concise definition. And that's fine, we just need to acknowledge that the way people use "woke" is a shorthand for something else, in this case I'd characterize it as the pseudointellectual wet fish flopping of a billionaire struggling to blame someone, anyone, for the world being bad, when he's had outsized control and influence over it for the entirety of his career.
Uh, pg elaborated on his concise definition. "Racism" or "bigotry" also have concise definitions that have a lot of literature written around them supporting the concise definition.
It either has a concise definition that actually defines the term or it doesn't. I leave it to the anti-woke to tell me which it is, and I'm still waiting.
"It has a concise definition!"
moments later
"It took a whole article to explain!!!"
Also entertaining - the idea that racism has an uncontested definition.
"aggressively" and "performative" already contain a judgement. The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".
The whole article is an opinion piece that is judging a group of people. I don't think most people would agree with your definition.
And besides, the definition of "woke" is a secondary issue anyway, the article's purpose isn't to propose a definition of woke, it's to judge and criticize people who behave a certain way, and he's done an adequate job IMO of describing the behaviors he's criticizing.
"Wokeness" itself implies taking some form of (performative) action. You can be aware of social injustice existing and not be "woke", in my opinion at least.
> The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".
The actual meaning of "wokeness" is that it has several different meanings. For instancee, the first could be what you outlined:
1. an "awareness of the existence of social injustice"
And another, equally valid one (that comes about from the reaction to people who embraced the first meaning and proceeded to behave obnoxiously and gain lots of attention) is:
2. the obnoxious and doctrinaire enforcement of the values of the "social justice" subculture on the wider population through bullying tactics (e.g. social media pile ons)
etc.
Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent (usually by the left, as they have more access prestigious institutions, but language is language and no authority can suppress new words and new senses of existing words).
> Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent
I think the thought process is that there was a word and it had a positive meaning. It was then used in a negative way to delegitimize an opponent. So I think some people feel like the word is stolen or still being purposely miss used. For better or worse that is not how language works, in general new meanings can be attached to words and at least in my experience the majority of people using woke negatively are not trying to miss use the word.
what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.
Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?
Well, I wonder what he thinks non-performative social justice looks like. The civil rights movement was certainly performative (as is all protest) and that's basically the only narrative we were offered growing up for how to affect social change.
While we're on the subject: I'm having difficulty squaring this part of his essay with history as I understand it.
> "The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power."
That's both literally incorrect (we shouldn't consider the Black Panthers or the ACLU "student movements") and seems ignorant of the real power those organizations had (their agitation led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act).
> Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
I also think there's a pretty big difference between keyboard jockeying / speech policing, and putting yourself in physical danger by physically confronting racists who'd lynch you if there weren't cameras around.
> Well, I wonder what he thinks non-performative social justice looks like.
It looks like the boring job of actually writing policy. Here in Australia, I've run into several people who work for the government helping to draft policy and things. Eg, one friend works for my state's government helping draft energy policy to fight climate change.
Its tedious and boring, and entirely thankless. But its incredibly important. Its well and good for protesters to send a clear message to the government that the people want change. Its another thing entirely to actually negotiate how those changes will happen on the ground.
How do you improve mental health services? How do you balance the needs of the economy today with the needs of future generations? Its difficult stuff.
>what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.
>In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
>Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?
He doesn't even point fingers on this matter, but the social justice angle is the evident answer to that.
> there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
This perception is a constant cause of concern for the actual left, and it's created by liberal politicians attempting to co-opt the movement, because it represents a huge part of their disenfranchised base.
In today's reality:
- left: socialist, progressive policies and in favor of fixing the system from the ground up. Election reform and the dissolution of failed establishments find support here (i.e. "too big to fail" was capital B "Bad"). An actual leftist today would say that Trump is awful, but also that Obama probably did more damage to us in the long term. We have not had a leftist in power in any surviving generation.
- liberal: most of the democratic party. Biden's a lib, so was hillary. Liberal voters (somehow) believe that the current system can (and should) be saved by incrementalism. My take is that mostly, liberal politicians are pulling a fast one and just wanna keep that campaign money flowing, which is why you get a lot of talk about campaign finance reform and no action whatsoever. Liberals are terrified of ranked-choice, and economically look a whole lot like conservatives (we used to call this neoconservative or neoliberal but the distinction has become very indistinct).
There's overlap in demographic between the leftist and the liberal - so liberal politicians have frequently used the "jangling keys method" and pushed stuff like wokeness real hard when they're trying to distract from the fact that they're taking money from JPMorgan and Shell Oil. Hillary was one of the worst - refusing point-blank to talk about banking as a real problem while accusing all her detractors of being "Bernie Bros" - which was really just a hamfisted smokescreen to try and turn the party against itself (this ended predictably).
To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.
I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing. Problem is, we've been divided by wedge issues (some of which are truly relevant, like the climate) that make it impossible to form a coalition to accomplish actual reform. This was done on purpose.
Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual. At the risk of being accused of being 'woke' - i'd ask that the two terms (left and liberal) don't get further confused. It muddies the conversation in ways that are destructive.
> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.
I was at a house party once here in Australia, and a Canadian friend got frustrated at me. "It sounds like you believe in policy X, but also policy Y! I don't get it! What are you, left or right?". And I responded by asking what policies X and Y have to do with each other at all? Why should your stance on war and fracking be correlated? Or have anything to do with your opinion about gun control, abortion rights, racism or free speech?
I'm not convinced "actual leftism" has any well accepted meaning. Liberalism has a clear meaning. But "leftism" / "rightism"? They both seem like kinda arbitrary grab bags of policy ideas to me. Why not a pro-war & pro-fracking democrat?
Kamala has either the #1 or #2 most left voting record in the Senate.
> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.
Those are both good because they fight off fascism. There's nothing leftist about letting someone be genocided by Russians.
> I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing.
This is a demonstration of "horseshoe theory". Most of these are wrong! Inflation is not "out of control" but has already been fixed. The US economy is the best it's ever been and people are mad about it because they think they saw it was bad on the news!
The real correct opinion is that American elites are good and the voters are bad.
> Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual.
This is the classic indicator that you're a teenager and have an emotional need to appear above everything. They couldn't be more different. Only one of them wants your wife to die in childbirth.
The Berlin Wall was officially called the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart". Russia claims they are fighting in Ukraine to denazify their regime. North Korea is called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
A bit naive to take these self-appointed labels at face value.
Sure but gay rights activists were sincere about gay rights.
AIDS activists like Act Up were genuine about the threat of AIDS.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the civil rights movement were genuinely students committed to nonviolence.
The suffragists genuinely wanted woman's suffrage.
But for anti-fascists, we have jpeg memes calling them fools.
Just like how racists dismissed the civil rights movement, homophobes dismissed gay marriage, people against women voting dismissed suffragists, and people made jokes about AIDS in the 80s, people who dismiss anti fascists are probably... well...
We'd all like to imagine we're August Landmesser - especially those who were driving around with American flag bumper stickers during things like Abu ghraib. The ones who are most fervent about saluting also swear they'd never be heiling. Sure.
There are groups that self-describe as fascist such as National Alliance, American Vanguard or Patriot Front. National Vanguard has careful literature back to 1930s fascism. Search for "National Vanguard History of American National Socialism" it's a lengthy multipart series on why they think they are the true descendents of American fascism. There's also groups like Identity Evropa (now known as AIM) and the base.
There's pro fascist gab, telegram, bitchute, rumble, and parler channels/groups. They make memes about how much they absolutely love fascism and are extremely open and explicit about it.
I've lurked in these groups, gone to their meetings, I've got literature with titles like "why Hitler was right" and "fascism will fix it".
But sure enough there's people who even look at this that are like "well well, people will call school hall monitors fascists" as if it can't actually exist.
This is equivalent to hearing a school child call something gay and then concluding homosexuality couldn't possibly exist.
I mean really now ... knock it off. People aren't that stupid.
(I'm not anti-fascist btw, I'm just anti-bullshit. All the fascist logic I've heard happens to be bullshit but it's the BS I've got a problem with)
It's not about groups labeling themselves as fascist. It's about groups labeling others as fascist.
Trump and the republican party at large has been called a fascist a truckload of times. This alone means "antifa" can take action against an immense swath of the population.
In the exact same way, there are groups that label themselves as communists or hell, even pedophiles, and we should still be wary if the anti-commie or anti-pedo force showed up because you can't trust vigilantes not to be utter morons.
"antifa" isn't an organized group --- it's some loose coalition of people. The few times I've ever seen people who call themselves an antifa action it was against genuine fascist/neo-fascist militia collectives like the oath keepers, 3-percenters, and patriot front.
I know there's some wild imaginations depicting other things but they aren't grounded in reality.
There aren't anarchists marching with face-coverings, helmets, weapons, and tactical gear shouting pronouns to overtake blue cities. The craziest fictions people convince themselves of.
This is probably the most organized group there is: https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/ ... they're pretty focused. The Rose City Nationalists for instance, is a splinter group kicked out of the Proud Boys for being too extreme, similar to how the Black Legion split off from the KKK.
To be clear: the comment I'm replying to is a thinly veiled (if snark can be considered a veil) accusation of the GP being a fascist. This is apparently based on pointing out that groups of people don't always have names that accurately reflect their actions, from an outside view. I don't understand how this is supposed to follow logically.
they've redefined it as "first amendment". Also they've convinced themselves that hypernationalistic fascism was somehow a project of the leftists the fascists rounded up and slaughtered.
It's the same mechanism of imagining an enemy causing the negative consequences of the policies they advocate for.
It's actually the core thing that connects tech startups, conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and fascism - a desire to be guided by the imaginary and construct necessary delusions to deny reality.
Wildest thing is, every now and then, it works out - the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now.
Most of the richest people had to deeply believe in what was, at some time, an irrational fantasy and that taking inadvisable acts of insanity would somehow work out.
You can go to the old Bitcointalk forum. Some people stocked up, for instance, because they thought the American dollar and civilization would collapse in 2012 due to the supposed Mayan apocalypse.
Some bought feverishly in 2016 predicting a communist takeover by Hilary Clinton...
There's many dumb reasons people bought and held.
Think back about what investments you could have done to maximize your income - you'll invariably come up with things like "I should have put my life savings into Tesla before they delivered they're first car instead of $100. Then I should have held on regardless"
or "I should have trusted that Steve Jobs returning to Apple after failing at Next was going to be a legendary turnaround by combining his failed NextStation into a new operating system. Then he'll come out with Apple Newton 2.0 and it will make them one of the most powerful companies in the world"
If I had told you in say, 2004, to take all the high end CRTs being tossed out en masse, put them in a huge barn in the desert and then sell them for thousands each in 20 years, you'd call me nuts.
These are all absurd things that happened.
You can be a stupid fool and still hit it right sometimes.
> There's many dumb reasons people bought and held.
True, but you can readily point to the things they were actually dumb about. Most people, I'd argue, had the simpler reason of "I'm willing to bet this will grow in value over the long term, given that it's finite and it has some advantages over normal money" - and those people ended up being very, very right.
Likewise, even in those "absurd" examples you bring up, there would have been entirely rational reasons to believe them, like
- "Fossil fuels are unsustainable so the automotive market will start to shift toward electric cars; I should invest in electric car companies, even early-stage ones", or
- "I think Unix is the operating system of the future, and Apple taking Unix mainstream by rebranding NeXT will give Microsoft a run for their money", or
- "These CRTs are obsolete, but so are vinyl records and some crazy audiophiles still pay big bucks for those decades later, so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to toss these out"
Even without the benefit of hindsight, those seemingly-crazy bets could have been - and probably were - predicted via entirely rational and intelligent thought processes. Those rational people likely didn't put all their eggs in any one of those baskets, but they didn't do so for Bitcoin, either, and still ended up rich.
> Crypto currency wasn't a new thing. There has been digital currencies going back decades. They had all failed and become worthless.
That didn't make them unreasonable bets. Lots of smart ideas fail to gain traction in spite of being smart ideas, for a variety of reasons. The electric car market (for example) had its share of false starts, too, in the late 19th Century and throughout the entirety of the 20th Century - and yet the people betting on EVs weren't irrational in doing so before the 21st Century, and still weren't irrational to do so afterward. It ain't like the problems with fossil fuels were completely unknown before 2000, after all.
There's been electric car companies and projects since the 1800s - literally hundreds of companies. They all failed at a rate of 100% for over a century.
If you're saying you saw Tesla as a success way before they put out there first car because of some rational eventuality, I don't believe you.
A surprising (?) number of medium-term Bitcoin HODL'ers held because they lost access to their holding during an exchange collapse (Mt Gox etc) and then regained access because of government action. The irony is poetic.
Many people have decided that "woke" means one very specific and unimpeachable thing to them. The term generally means far more than "I support black people having a right to exist". By that definition, even many conservatives would have to label themselves "woke".
And this is at the heart of why the topic is controversial.
I've sat in on a meetings where a central team of copywriters openly shamed engineers for disagreeing about the importance of renaming certain terms that had existed in the software for decades (whitelist/blacklist/master). The engineers in question were Indian, and couldn't have been any further removed from the original context.
To be clear, I'm supportive of efforts to remove racially charged language. But I found the tactics and behaviors associated with that project ridiculous, and challenge the notion that "wokeness" is limited to your definition as written.
I agree that wokeness is a big problem on the serious left. It was analyzed in high-profile leftist's Norman Finkelstein's "I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom".
Many point it's from the professional/managerial/bureaucratic class, which never was into free speech to begin with. Take pg's mention of the Soviet Union. That's actually a country where that class overthrew the capitalists to become the ruling class. (They were called "The New Class" there. In countries like the US, they're above workers but subordinate to capitalists.)
And all this is a useful distraction: criticizing wokies distracts from the structure of power that leads to homelessness and working your one (1) life away under some boss. Which is ridiculous in the 21st century.
Sounds exhausting to live with a perceived boogeyman of problems versus seeking real problems.
Personally, I am surprised. This is a pretty unique article from a usually articulate thinker that leaves out significant details like: (1) the term originated by folks who recognize there can be structural inequality embedded in policy which, for some inequalities, has been described as structural racism since the 1970s; (2) the term got hijacked by political propaganda machines to circumspectly throw out working policies and other elements of progressive political points in the retrenchment regarding the term.
There really isn't any more detail to be had unless to sanewash the political propaganda's claims.
It's worth keeping mind here that, far from being a right-wing cable-news status-quo apologist or whatever (to put together some assorted contentless booing I noticed upthread), Freddie de Boer is a self-described "Marxist of an old-school variety" with substantial left-wing cred (and meeting a bunch of the stereotypes, such as holding a PhD in English). I don't agree with him on everything, but I absolutely see his view on how leftism has become corrupted in the current day in the US.
It's poisoning the Canadian discourse, too, and I hate it, and have been hating it since approximately 2012. (I saw signs earlier, but didn't recognize them.) I used to vote for the NDP, but now I don't vote at all - the Jack Layton and Ed Broadbent types I remember are gone (literally, in those two cases); now I mainly see people who seem to think that your rights and your value as a person depend on your identity (just, you know, in a way opposed to the historical norm).
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
It was not just a small group of people. Almost all progressive Democratic politicians started working that word into all their speeches to virtue signal and most centrists also fell in line too. CEOs started saying it in company meetings and we were subjected to HR trainings that noted we should say LatinX to be inclusive of trans people, among many other performative rules.
I've been through numerous yearly HR trainings and not once has the term "LatinX" appeared in one. I also highly doubt that even a significant minority, let alone "almost all", progressive Democratic politicians have ever used the term at all. Latinos themselves have rather squarely rejected "LatinX" on the basis of it being nigh-unpronounceable and entirely disconnected from how Spanish/Portuguese words actually work.
I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the strongest interpretation (what you're doing here). Several commenters here have asked why his article has been flagged, and I must say that if it was posted as a comment, it should certainly be flagged because of its flagrant violations of the site guidelines.
I certainly wouldn't be inclined to call him a prig, but he's certainly set himself up for exactly that denunciation with his specific framing of the conversation.
> the observed behavior of many self-described feminists might lead you to believe that the definition was "someone who thinks that any dispute between men and women should be resolved in favor of women"
I think there's a broader problem here, where there's a tendency to define all cultures by their most extreme elements and have conversations that are centered around those. This sells, this gets clicks, and it also decimates our theory of mind of others. The left does this, the right does this, centrists do this as well by pretending that what is "extreme" in their culture is unknowable and impossible.
A respectful conversation with someone while holding curiosity can resolve most of the ills of the day. Lots of folks want to tell their story, and they're told that its not safe.
> I think there's a broader problem here, where there's a tendency to define all cultures by their most extreme elements and have conversations that are centered around those. This sells, this gets clicks, and it also decimates our theory of mind of others.
Not only that, corrupt politicians have the incentive to do it to themselves.
You take someone like Pelosi, is she actually a radical? Nope. Is she corrupt? Oh dear, yes. And you could say the same of several prominent Republicans. But if the most prominent criticism of her is that she's corrupt, what defense of it is there? It's indefensible.
Whereas if she pays lip service to some fringe lunatic ideas, that becomes the criticism of her from her opponents, and then the opponents can be accused of racism etc. and nobody is talking about the corruption anymore.
It's impossible to have a respectful conversation with someone who thinks you're inherently responsible for society's ills and/or deserves to be ostracized for failing to maintain constant awareness of their jargon du jour.
The people who claim this is a tiny fraction of the left (it's not the majority, but exactly how tiny it is is not entirely clear) are largely the same people who claim anyone who has a shred of agreement with any far right platform is a Nazi, so I don't have much sympathy for them being painted with a broad brush.
It’s plenty possible. Most of the framing that others put on people’s identities can be eliminated through kind interactions. The question is, do they allow that interaction or are they so afraid that they’ll never let it happen? Or, do they mistake online discourse and conflict as true to real life?
A respectful conversation requires both parties to respect the other. Assuming someone is a racist, homophobe, etc. until proven otherwise doesn't qualify
I don’t know what you mean by the “official” definition of “feminist”. There’s no single authority that decides what an English word means or how it should be used like there is for French (which has the Académie Française).
Perhaps you mean to say the “original” meaning of the word, but language is not static. Meanings change over time and vary from place to place.
I’m not trying to be pedant. Reasonable people can disagree on what being a feminist means, it doesn’t mean one side is automatically correct or another side is cynically acting in bad faith.
You can find one of those definitions in the dictionary and not the other one.
But it's not two people disagreeing about the definition anyway. It's the same person trying to use different definitions in different contexts in order to conflate opposition to an unreasonable position with opposition to a reasonable one.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
You speak about it in the past tense but it's still very much a real thing. Just last week I was listening to an Ed Zitron podcast and one of the (many, many) ads was for a podcast that featured "latinX voices".
I wish there was a book or website with such patterns and examples written down for all.
It takes a certain linguistic skill to convey the sleight of hand in display in such maneuvers. But once you're grasped it, you can easily spot it and almost predict what the next set of actions is going to be.
As an aside this applies to a wide variety of places like corporate settings, negotiations, sales meetings, city council meetings to mention a few so its generally useful to know.
It's the ultimate irony that this post is doing the exact same thing it is accusing another group of, with the only distinction being that there is no "term" attached to it.
I suppose the US politics have gone so bonkers that the left actually uses the term "conservative right" pejoratively in the same way that the right uses "woke" to describe the left.
In which case this scenario is so childishly insane that the only sane choice is to reject it all outright and focus inward.
The left doesn’t talk about “wokeness” but it certainly does talk about the individual policies that fall under that rubric. The right uses the label “woke” for the same reason the left uses the term “capitalism.” There’s a bunch of ideas and policies that stem from similar ideological premises and it’s perfectly fine to group them together under labels.
For example, Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There’s also race conscious hiring and promotion decisions. They are all ideologically related and add up to something quite significant.
>Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC.
There's also that ungodly garish universal "pride" flag that they can't stop adding new decorations to, even though a) the original rainbow flag was already definitionally inclusive of everyone; b) issues of racial discrimination and issues of discrimination around sexual or gender-based conduct or identity have nothing to do with each other; c) last I checked, the groups they're trying to pull together under this umbrella - group by group, rather than under a general unifying principle - often don't get along very well with each other.
It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic.
In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender.
Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly.
Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media.
There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here.
Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.
Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.
"Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet.
You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there.
But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike.
It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness.
I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty.
And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.
I don't know if you've read it, but an essay published in 1944 by George Orwell titled What is Fascism? encapsulates your points.
> Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.
Individual terms are not the only victims of the linguistic tank tread mangling words into meaninglessness. "Paradox of tolerance", for instance, is the Internet age's "fire in a theater". The phrase has gained currency in the mid-2010s as a rhetorical bludgeon to dismiss the speaker's critics and shame those who don't subscribe to the speaker's incoherent definition of "the intolerant". It's usage has no bearing to, and even contradicts, the author's purpose in coining it.
"Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum."
Yes this is very common on the left too. Really common actually.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman
Or, consider that the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International published a review of the sitcom Abbott Elementary, which includes the line "In fact, in its treatment of Jacob’s wokeness, Abbott Elementary refreshingly mocks the suffocating trend of racialism in American culture" – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html
Similarly, read their review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html – in which they largely express agreement with his criticisms of the progressive "woke" ideology, but simultaneously condemn him for making those criticisms from a pro-capitalist instead of anti-capitalist perspective
> If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman
Except, no. A concept can be multiple things at once, we are complex thinking beings.
Woke is all at the same time:
1) what it arose as—a left-of-center terminology, to some extent in-group language, describing certain values.
2) sincere adoption and practice of those values
3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values.
4) A combination of 2 and 3, where those agreeing with 2 has no problem with 3 because the end result can be beneficial: who cares if Intel comes from a place of sincerity if their hiring policies make it easier for qualified minorities to get a food in the door?
5) Anything and everything the far right doesn't agree with, including 1 through 4 but also much more that isn't remotely related. DEI? "Woke." Climate change? "Woke." 15-minute cities? Believe it or not, also "Woke".
> 2) sincere adoption and practice of those values
> 3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values.
That’s not what most “anti-woke Marxists” are saying though. They aren’t saying that the “woke” have fundamentally the right values but are just adopting them insincerely or performatively. They are pointing to a much deeper dispute.
The basic divide: which is more fundamental, class-based oppression or non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc)? The former is the traditional/orthodox Marxist answer, whereas Reed/etc use the word “woke” to refer to the second answer. By contrast a right-wing approach would say neither, rejecting framing society as fundamentally oppressive.
I see. I have indeed seen a handful of comments espousing those views through the years, but they're few and far between.
To me the "class-only" framing is rather old fashioned, and often voiced by those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege so I'm not surprised they feel protective towards the classic framing.
I see much more use in thinking about the class struggle intersectionally, in part because I think it's more accurate to how the world works, but also that by understanding the different experiences of groups within the working class we can build broader, stronger and better alliances. Two cents' worth from me, anyway.
> To me the "class-only" framing is rather old fashioned, and often voiced by those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege so I'm not surprised they feel protective towards the classic framing.
Reed/etc argue that it is the other way around. From his perspective:
“Woke”: the problem with billionaires is that they are (almost) all white cisheterosexual males. The solution is to have more diversity in billionaires: more BIPOC billionaires, more women billionaires, more LGBT billionaires, etc
orthodox Marxist: the problem with billionaires is that they exist. The solution is to abolish their class existence by confiscating their wealth and power
And the same applies when we replace “billionaires” with “CEOs/board members with multimillion dollar salaries”, “McKinsey consultants”, and so on
Which “left-wing” take is more appealing to the board of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc? Obviously the ”woke”: “woke” is just asking the existing upper class to add some new BIPOC/female/LGBT members, but they can keep most of their $$$$ and power. Orthodox Marxism is a radical threat to their entire way of life
So from Reed’s perspective, “Woke” is the viewpoint of “those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege”, his own is true opposition to privilege
> I see much more use in thinking about the class struggle intersectionally, in part because I think it's more accurate to how the world works, but also that by understanding the different experiences of groups within the working class we can build broader, stronger and better alliances.
Reed argues that the biggest oppression the Black working class faces is not being Black it is being working class, and that having more Black billionaires/CEOs/board-members and more Black Ivy League graduates isn’t doing anything to stop the oppression of the Black working class, it is just replacing some of the White-on-Black oppression with Black-on-Black oppression. Also, he argues that prioritising racial/gender/sexuality oppression over class oppression helps to divide the working class, distract them from the true causes of their oppression, drive many of them into the arms of the Right (such as Trump), and ultimately serves the cause of sustaining the capitalist system rather than overthrowing it
Disclaimer: I’m not saying I personally agree with what Reed is saying, I’m just trying to express his point of view as fairly and clearly as I can. I do think he’s worth listening to even if one doesn’t agree with him
I'm not in great disagreement with that argument you put forward on behalf of Reed. I'd just say that the many causes of social justice go far beyond who gets to sit at the table with the other capital owners. I'm not so interested in C-suite representation as how discrimination compounds for those belonging to overlapping minorities within the working class. Don't know what Reed says about that, but it's in such a space I believe progressive polices have done and will do a lot of good.
> I'm not so interested in C-suite representation as how discrimination compounds for those belonging to overlapping minorities within the working class. Don't know what Reed says about that, but it's in such a space I believe progressive polices have done and will do a lot of good.
From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.
The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.
By the time I gained political sentience, PC referred to perceived limits on speech and conduct that went at the expense of current or historically marginalized groups.
All these things have been derided as "politically correct" in my lifetime (and therefore a bad things): "You can't make a joke these days", i.e. you will get an earful if you make sexist, homophobic or racist jokes. "You can't give a woman a compliment these days", i.e. you can't engage in wanton sexual harassment. "Education is too politically correct these days", i.e. schools teach a history curriculum that recognizes and is critical of imperialism, racism and the like.
In my 30-odd years of life I don't recall it ever being used in the way you describe, but it could predate me.
> PC referred to perceived limits on speech and conduct that went at the expense of current or historically marginalized groups.
i see, i guess my understanding was different, i alway perceived it as the opposite; pc equaled limits on speech or conduct that went against the majority groups or what they wanted, in my understanding, but it seems that was probably wrong
I think your understanding is wrong although my experience with the term PC started in the early/mid 1980s and I don't know much about its use before that. What you're describing is more like "don't ask - don't tell" and "parental advisory" labels.
Typically, PC is associated with attempts to de-marginalize groups that are historically disadvantaged due to structural discrimination. To me the canonical PC is always spelling "women" as "womyn", to avoid using a term that contains the word "man", as a way to push back against perceived patriarchal naming/language systems.
You are 100% correct. The conservatives disagreeing with you (and downvoting you) are either willfully ignorant about their own history of "political correctness" or else were under a rock (or perhaps weren't alive yet) during the heyday of McCarthyism and the still-ongoing legacy thereof.
Now, when the tables are turning and companies would rather appeal to the progressive-leaning majorities than the ever-shrinking conservative minority, all of a sudden conservatives are eager to pretend that they've been the champions of the First Amendment all along (never mind that the First Amendment never applied to private platforms/businesses choosing with whom to do business).
It just means being awake with regards to your position in society and privileges. Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications.
The problem, of course, is that "Awareness and acknowledgement of the true nature of society" can be interpreted to mean a thousand different things, some of which are more accurate and actionable than others.
> Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications.
This has always struck me as a fatal messaging problem. When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.
The real problem isn't that [men / white people] may indirectly get propped-up when others are artificially held down -- it's that people are being held down. The current (and disastrous) progressive messaging often sounds like "we want to hold you down, too".
> When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group...
That's one possible interpretation, yes. Not everything works that way, though. Gay people getting married didn't take anything away from me. As the meme goes, "it's not pie".
One of the arguments against gay marriage, back in the day, was that gay marriage would somehow take away from straight marriage. It was a pretty vague argument and I never really heard a coherent articulation of it, but a lot of people repeated it.
Gay marriage succeeded as a movement long before the issue of wokeness came to the fore (with the BLM movement). If you actually read the positions of the thought leaders of the latter movement (people like Ta-Nehisi Coates) the argument is exactly what liberal, white, and right-wing people are afraid of:
The Case for Reparations [1]
People are right to react with vigour to these sorts of large-scale redistribution plans. This is a design of the far-left in academia that has its roots in the communist movements of the early 20th century in Europe and Russia, whose worst excesses led to the deportation and execution of millions of Kulaks in the Soviet Union [2].
You might call this a slippery slope argument but the historical precedent was exactly that: a slippery slope where society slid all the way to the bottom. Once enough people have convinced themselves that it is good and right to use the political process to take property away from a group they consider to be their enemies, there is no limit to the amount of destruction they can achieve.
Illegal in well more than half: the UN has 193 members and same-sex marriage is only fully legal in 36 of them, which is less than 20%.
If you look at a map of the world, it is only really a thing in Europe, the Americas and Australia/New Zealand. The only country in Asia with it is Taiwan, which is largely unrecognised and contains less than 0.5% of Asia's population. In Africa, only South Africa–arguably Africa's most Westernised country, and less than 5% of Africa's population. In the Middle East, only Israel – like South Africa, very much the "odd one out" in its neighbourhood – and Israel only recognises same-sex marriages performed overseas, they aren't legal in the country itself.
Not only is it only legal in less than 20% of the world's countries, countries in which it is legal are only around 20% of the world's population
>When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.
It's also radically different from what "privileged" originally means.
In an apolitical context, to have a privilege is to be consciously treated specially, in highly specific and well understood ways; this is because you have done something specific to earn it; and it's mutually understood that this is not an entitlement and it can be revoked at any time if you violate what's expected of you.
Whereas, in the modern sense, to "be privileged" is to be unconsciously treated specially, in vague and nebulous ways, because of nothing you did but rather because of facts of who you are and what you look like; this is just because life isn't fair; and the only way to fix the problem (if you see it as one) is (supposedly) to enact sweeping social change that will indirectly take it away from you.
I'm totally fine with recognizing that other groups of people might struggle more than me, and maybe we should try to help them. I.e. setting up a free tutoring program in inner city schools is a good example.
I'm not fine with my hard work being dismissed because of my sex, ethnicity, or whatever other 'privileges' I had. When I see someone online speak about privileges, it's often being used as a cudgel to silence someone. It wears away at my empathy.
And there's the rub. You feel like your hard work is dismissed. To be honest, that's a framing problem. I think you misunderstand what people are saying.
Take me as an example: I'm in a very enviable and privileged position. I worked really hard for it. But if someone were to tell me "you're privileged", I don't get my feelings hurt.
I recognize that 1) someone else working 10 times as hard as me still would be extremely unlikely to get where I'm at if they were from another group. 2) If I were in a disadvantaged group, all the hard work I have put in is unlikely to have been enough. 3) Therefore, the fact I'm sitting here, no matter how hard I worked, is ALSO very much down to luck.
The first time I thought about it in those terms, my ego took a hit. It is an uncomfortable upending of the way I used to see the world and my place in it. But it is nonetheless true. Trust me, I am not trying to dismiss your hard work, but make you see it in its true context.
And after some time thinking about this I have a much greater respect for those that struggle as hard as, or harder than, me because they don't have the privileges I was born with.
> I recognize that 1) someone else working 10 times as hard as me still would be extremely unlikely to get where I'm at if they were from another group. 2) If I were in a disadvantaged group, all the hard work I have put in is unlikely to have been enough.
These are massive, hand-wavey statements based on assumptions with no basis. 10 times? Really? Flip your skin colour and add 10x the hard work and you would still be worse off?
I completely agree with point #3, that we are all hugely lucky (and unlucky) in many many many visible and less visible (and, hey, invisible) ways.
I haven't sat down and quantified the difference, no. But it doesn't matter if the number is 2x, 10x, or 100x. The point remains the exact same: to not get personally offended when people point out our privilege. They are not, and have never been, dismissing the work we have done to get where we are. But put in an accurate context, we are perhaps not makers of our own success quite to the degree we once imagined.
Look, I completely agree, but let's not make it totally one-sided, okay?
F.ex. I regularly have a problem with the cookie-cutter (and utterly meaningless) "advice" of many privileged HN programmers saying "Never had to look for a job" when I told them I am a senior who struggles to find a job currently. Never maintained a network, never had relations that last with former colleagues, never had college buddies etc. As far removes as the classic successful USA dev as I can be really.
Yet these people still think their advice applies and is actually worth anything.
Back on your topic, I don't want to silence them but I want to tell them that their severely filter-bubble-limited take is not very interesting, or even at all helpful.
It's really the same as the topic of this thread as well. Privileged people exist and their takes can still be useful, however, their usefulness can be limited. And again, from where I am standing, I would not want to ever silence you. I only want to make you aware of your bias. We all have them. All "sides" of any debate have bias but hey, that's a completely different (and much bigger) topic.
I find it belittling when they dismiss the power of individual agency.
Posters on this site and elsewhere often assume anti-victimhood messages imply the speaker is a member a privileged class. They assume the speaker's identity based on the ideology they perceive. At the same time they're claiming a moral high ground and chiding their perceived opponent's lack of empathy.
The Baron Von Munchausen, pull yourself up by the bootstraps is especially relevant if you lack privilege. Yet, the would be saviors will assume that I'm not sufficiently aware of my own condition when I mention it. Where's the empathy in that? What could be less empathetic than incorrectly presuming someone's identity and telling them what is the highest social good for their actual identity? Empathy for the individual is dismissed in lieu of talking points about categorical identity.
Step 1 - recognising an advantage e.g. "I am straight/white/Asian/tall/short/whatever".
Step 2 - recognising that it's unearned "I didn't choose it, I was just born that way".
Step 3 - is to hold the belief that because it's unearned that no advantage should be assigned to it, we cannot claim that it's preferable, etc.
To me, what it means to be woke requires the belief in step 3.
That's what makes it a kind of funny insult word, because it's logically unworkable and runs counter to well, literally the entire world. It feels like the kind of classic autistic technical gotcha.
If you're stronger and faster you don't get eaten by the tiger. If you're more attractive you get the better mate. At the end of the day it's just like, you know, grow up, deal with it.
> Step 3 - is to hold the belief that because it's unearned that no advantage should be assigned to it, we cannot claim that it's preferable, etc.
This is simply a statement against being prejudiced (racist or sexist). We never needed a new concept or word if thats all "woke" meant.
> That's what makes it a kind of funny insult word, because it's logically unworkable and runs counter to well, literally the entire world.
You're completely misunderstanding what someone means when they use "woke" as an insult. I agree with PG here - as an insult, its basically the same as calling someone a prude / prig.
In context, imagine a statement like this: "Ugh shut up woke people, yes - I know you hate kevin spacey. I don't care right now. He's still an incredible actor and American Beauty is still a masterpiece. Shut up. I'm trying to enjoy the movie."
You can replace "woke people" there with "prude" in that statement and the meaning is unchanged. Essentially, I think there's two separate things: First, being against discrimination in all its forms and second: being really annoying about it. Its that second part - the annoying puritanical finger wagging that people are referring to when they hate on "woke people".
When people noticed the good sociopolitical outcomes they've been getting. This is part of how we ended up in the situation where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... could happen (Harvard's actions were intended as "affirmative").
Right. The original meaning was just "politically aware", the same basic metaphor as the "Wide-Awakes" in the Civil War era. If you go back far enough you found it sometimes used in the "wake up sheeple" sense (i.e. referring to a conspiracy mindset). But it's basically never been the self-appellation of a political or cultural movement; essentially everyone who uses it that way is deriving it from critical right-wing discourse.
If wokeism remained a personal awakening I don’t think there would be much push back. It’s the virtue signaling and holier than thou judgment people don’t like.
Generally speaking, most people on the left talk about a certain number of ideas. For example, many on the left believe strongly in trans rights. They believe that trans rights are either being actively limited or are actively under threat by people they believe are trying to either get rid of them or force them back into the shadows.
So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs.
People on the left generally do not believe strongly that “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”. They point to the many moral panics, bigoted movements, and real harm done to certain groups in history and do not believe that what some call “open discussion” has historically always led to the least harm.
People on the left generally do not believe that all discussion needs to be censored or tightly controlled. Rather, they view certain beliefs and viewpoints as actively harmful because they spread harmful beliefs about particular demographics. They believe that political discussion can, and does, go beyond what is useful or helpful sometimes.
> So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs.
They should probably educate themselves by listening to what she says about women's rights then. Maybe then they'd understand her perspective and her principles.
That would be much, much better than what they actually did: call her a cunt and wish death and rape upon her. Which really is not the most convincing of counterarguments.
if the movement stopped at the level of consciousness, then there wouldn't have been as much backlash. It went way beyond consciousness. You are admonished if you aren't actively anti-racist.
"Not racist", i.e. what was in the 90s called "colourblind".
If you describe yourself this way nowadays, and hold to and espouse those principles - not taking race into consideration when making decisions; considering people a priori to have equal moral worth regardless of race, etc. - self-identified "anti-racist" people will call you "racist". This has happened to me on many occasions. It is nonsense, of course. But sometimes they have social power. It's functionally what happened when I was banned from the Python Discourse forum, except they went a step further and claimed (utterly groundlessly) that I was accusing them of "reverse racism" (a term which I do not use, and which I view as an invention of self-identified "progressives" to strawman the views of those opposed to them) in taking other moderation actions against me.
> It's functionally what happened when I was banned from the Python Discourse forum, except they went a step further and claimed (utterly groundlessly)
Are we suppose to pick who to agree with (you or the mods) merely based on tribalistic priors? You didn't post any documentation, there's no way for anyone to fact check whether or not the mods are actually acting in bad faith, or whether or not you were unjustly banned.
I've talked about it before. I came to HN because of the Tim Peters suspension, which was related to my situation. I have archives of my related post content (since much of it got deleted) on my blog. Regardless, the burden of proof would be on them to establish that I made any such accusations (the fact of those accusations is clear: https://discuss.python.org/t/im-leaving-too/58408/11 ).
I'm having some trouble understanding, does "These people" refer to the David family referenced in the article, the Jane Minor community garden referenced, Rootwork Herbals mentioned, or some other group of people?
> some of them have told me that he's always been eccentric and hard to live with and some of them have tried to talk him out of his misbehavior to know avail
It sounds like the alleged crimes in the article are pretty rough to put up with, if it was your neighbor:
> David alleges Whittaker has vandalized her son's car, spray painted her fence, threateningly shot a BB gun in the air during a teen gardening session, removed sections of her fence and threatened to hit her son with a stick, among other offenses.
I wouldn't call that kind of behavior "eccentric", maybe antisocial. And if that behavior was directed mainly towards their black neighbor, I would call it racist.
David's behavior is criminal, racist and all that. I think he's a total ass, but I know he's an alcoholic and all indications I have is that he's mentally ill. I also know members of his extended family and, yes, many of them voted for Trump, but none of them would do the kind of crap he did.
I'll point to "rootwork herbals" as being provocative in that so much duckspeak rolls out of their lips. (e.g. wtf is "femme"? does being fat erase my sin of being a white man? how fat do I have to be?) If they didn't have David as a neighbor they'd attract somebody else that's the same; they are planning on moving but their problems will follow them whereever they go.)
It's an extremely accurate definition of what we genuinely believe. There is no ulterior motive. There is no hidden agenda. It's very simple, and we're all confused why it even needs to be a 'thing.'
Yelling about the "woke" left, is basically like yelling about the "ayran" right. Nobody disagrees that these things are bad, it's just that they're irrelevant.
When the mainstream left treats the woke left like as the ayran right, let me know. And I think the ayran right is more deplorable than the woke left, though probably less harmful at this point
I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US.
I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
As someone who most folks would indentify as “liberal”, I use this term to describe a very small but vocal group of so-called progressives who are a problem for the liberal cause writ large.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
This is a prime example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been indignantly corrected by so-called progressives when speaking about “Latine” — note that this term is what many/most Spanish speakers (at least ones who aren’t eyeballs deep in “woke” circles) are more likely to use when they don’t want to use “Latino”.
Latinx is one of those white liberal made-up things (of many), and the language police enforcement is off-putting and shows an incredible lack boundaries.
“Woke” ideals resonate well with a narrow group of “progressives”/liberals, but the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public, including but definitely not limited to conservative extremists.
If you want to see some realpolitik on this issue, note how AOC learned (via Pelosi) to get in line with votes and messaging when it mattered even while endorsing progressive/liberal/woke ideologies.
> the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public
I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here - what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation? The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.
> I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here
I never labeled myself as a liberal, I just said that most folks would put me into that category.
I definitely have some beliefs that do not toe the party line of either side of the American divide.
> what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation?
PG just wrote an entire essay on this exact topic, and that essay is what we are commenting on.
I more or less agree with pg’s stance.
> The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.
In your reply, you’ve given me a purity test and then indirectly labeled me as an ignorant member of “the other”.
This is exactly the type of behavior that gives “progressives” and “liberals” a bad reputation, even though most liberals (and many progressives) don’t engage with this sort of rhetorical style.
There are much more constructive ways to have these conversations, and I wish that folks (on both sides, fwiw) would commit to trying to take the more constructive paths.
If there are any specific points about my post that you would like me to clarify or address, I will be happy to do so.
>a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left.
The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology
Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it.
>The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally.
For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".)
Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.)
Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.)
It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation).
And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... )
Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses
Yes, it is an ingenious sort of strawman.
In its prior usage, to be "woke" meant to be informed, alert, and to resist being bullied or easily duped into relinquishing one's rights to object, to defend oneself, and to dissent.
In this sense -- I note with some irony -- Jordan Peterson was "woke" when he would not allow his students to coerce him into using terms of address that he rejected.
Now the usage on the "Right" in US politics in particular uses "woke" to mean hypocritical or superficial assertions, positions, and policies that serve a dubious objective or prove to have no foundation in facts -- especially if these are the opponents' views.
Flinging these accusations of hypocrisy and delusional policy-making has become more important than defending democracy itself. Herein lies the masterstroke of the messaging. Using the term "woke" to attack supposedly "woke" opponents has become a memetic (viral) behaviour that has completely devoured political and public discourse.
I have a good enough reason to call those people “woke” instead of calling them “people who believe in a cultural approach that seeks to identify and rectify invisible social inequalities based on genetic attributes like race, sex, and sexual orientation by challenging existing power structures and implementing corrective measures. “
The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years
It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion.
Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.
The left put everything under the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. That's the idea that disgusts lots of moderates. The idea came from Leninism, but nonetheless is considered woke as fuck. So, no it's not necessarily a boogeyman, unless you throw out anything you don't like from the bucket of woke (and vice versa).
Oh, CRT is also woke as fuck, unless you believe it's the right framework.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
I agree that the number of proponents of something like "LatinX", or "biological males playing women's sports" are far, far outnumbered by the people who aren't supporters of those things. But the issue is that the people who are supporters tend to be extremely vocal and generally in positions of power or better able to influence those who are, whether thats in corporate or academic administration settings. As such the small number of "woke" individuals are having outsized effects on society and culture, and the backlash is in response to the magnitude of that influence, rather than the number of people pushing for it.
You know mainstream media is Foxnews (the largest viewership by far) and Joe Rogan, right? Those two command the largest share of mainstream viewership.
Or are you referring to 1990s definition of mainstream media that isn't mainstream and is irrelevant?
Professors, judges, lawyers, journalists, politicians, tech moderators, probably anything in the arts or education. On reddit and bluesky you can get banned for having the median voter's opinion on gender norms and immigration.
That's not even considering that these agencies can have positive, not negative, financial impact. A well-regulated economy can avoid disastrous recessions and thereby pay for itself manyfold. Hell, the CFPB was put in place to prevent the exact housing crash situation you just mentioned, but now one private citizen is getting rid of it because... he doesn't like it?