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„Woke Culture“ is a child of Neo-liberal capitalism


Arakan

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Eh I don't think this is a cancel culture thread, didn't we have one of those? As much as it is acknowledging that there is a strain of woke politics that has a disdain for the working class. Another thing is just using language that people actually speak, to quote noted colonizer and Republican operative, Jamese Carville "wokeness is a problem and we all know it" You can only effect change if you actually hold power.

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9 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Don't forget Roseann Barr, who was so badly canceled after mere accusations of racism that Vice ran a feature on her.

Right so somebody was convicted for tweeting a joke about blowing up an airport, Rosanne’s career is over, you didn’t really find that most of those people on that site hadn’t been cancelled and you did admit that you celebrated Andy Ngo getting his head smashed in... so what’s your point?

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1 minute ago, Darzin said:

Eh I don't think this is a cancel culture thread, didn't we have one of those? As much as it is acknowledging that there is a strain of woke politics that has a disdain for the working class. Another thing is just using language that people actually speak, to quote noted colonizer and Republican operative, Jamese Carville "wokeness is a problem and we all know it" You can only effect change if you actually hold power.

I'm confused. Isn't James Carville an example of a nominally leftist elite with contempt for the working class? When he was working for Bill Clinton and the Paula Jones accusations came out, he dismissed them as the result of someone dangling a dollar bill in a trailer park, or something to that effect.

 

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26 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I almost thought that this topic was going to be about how misuse of the word "woke" is a shabby but effective ploy for white elites to villainize the very people they've been shitting on for centuries. Like how wealthy people who have stacked the economic deck on their favor will refer to attempts to increase their taxes as "class warfare." Or how the gatekeepers and beneficiaries of systemic racism will whine about the "race card" when those iniquities are pointed out.

So @Arakan you did sort of stumble into a hornet's nest by starting off by condemning "woke" culture. You may not be a colonizer but you've adopted their use of the word and your post somewhat echoes the Fox News attack angle that the biggest problem in the world is "woke" people complaining about injustice. Which, to me, seems counterproductive to the causes you espouse.

Unfortunately the rest of what I've seen from your argument on this is incoherent or poorly reasoned. I don't even know where to start. It does seem like you are trying to tar a whole group of people with the "intolerant leftists run amok" trope, which is another common tactic of the entrenched power structures.

I also don't think much of your post that says you were being provocative to inspire real discussion. That also seems counterproductive to me. You can't complain about the provoked reactions you got after doing something you said yourself was meant to provoke.

What happened to that one professor of yours sounds terrible. But -- forgive me for questioning your account -- I've seen a very common pattern where people use the injustice visited upon one innocent by the "woke mob" as an excuse to condemn everyone who may travel in the same political direction. And in some cases, the issues of great injustice inflicted by the woke mob are not as clear-cut as they seem. Complicating details are omitted or glossed over. There was a time in a previous "cancel culture" thread where HoI linked a site that purported to list dozens of innocents who were unjustly "cancelled" for one little mistake. When I dug a little deeper into a handful of individual cases, most of them turned out to have a lot more complicated histories than just "this person said something innocuous and the intolerant left destroyed their life." Almost the entire time I have been aware of HoI's posting, he has been trying to sell the "intolerant leftists are ruining people's lives for nothing" narrative.

I don't deny that there are some left-leaning people out there who are as dogmatic and vicious as people on the right. I know that there are, in fact, innocent people who have suffered blowback from unthinking social media mobs who claim to hold liberal or leftist beliefs. I just am not convinced it's as big a problem as the "cancel culture" panic paints it to be, and it's certainly not behavior that's exclusive to the left.

So forgive my skepticism of your angle, especially if it relies on a single example of injustice visited upon someone you know. For all that conservatives like to decry "oppression Olympics," they sure do like to spin individual cases into indictments of everyone who disagrees with them.

 

 

Thank you for your reply. I admit that I was angry about what happened to my former professor which triggered this thread. She did not deserve such attacks. I was also insofar blind that the lived reality in the US is a different where I live. As I said before: all humans have the same intrinsic value for me. No group shall be oppressed by others. One world, one people so to speak. I don’t believe in races, for me that’s a social construct but the US believes in them. My thinking is: the more you put people into different categories the more tools you give the elite to rule. The ultra-capitalist system as such as another hierarchical system is the core problem for me. And segmenting society into different groups makes us not see the forest for the trees. 
 

I quote myself:
 

43 minutes ago, Arakan said:

To fight for ones fair share in an unjust system without fighting the unjust system as a whole is useless and pure hypocrisy It is simply shifting justice/injustice from one group to another. One either fights for justice for all or justice for no one. 
 

Fighting for justice for one‘s own or one specific group while at the same time accepting or even supporting injustice for another group (LBJ in case of China, progressive celebrities who produce their fashion collections with exploitative work in poor countries) destroys any legitimacy and integrity. 

The ultra-capitalist system as such is unjust for me. So anyone who fights against a partial injustice while at the same time still supporting the Overall system has no integrity for me. 

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4 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I'm confused. Isn't James Carville an example of a nominally leftist elite with contempt for the working class? 

Probably, I just whish democrats wouldn't say the quiet part out loud. They should do what Reoublicans do and run on the popular platitudes then enact whatever they want. Rejecting things like Joe Rogan's endorsement before you've done anything is just cutting off your nose to spite your face.

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1 hour ago, Arakan said:

Don’t you see the hypocrisy of rich people with all possibilities in life telling poor people how to properly live? It’s condescending and it is blind towards the reality. You know I would love that everyone drives a PEV but guess what? Billions of people simply cannot afford it. 

You know, I keep seeing criticism like this and every time I wonder how poor is enough to be allowed to say that we have to change our lifestyle to some degree. I myself am privileged. I may have never owned a car and flew in a plane only twice in my entire life, but I was never really poor and was able to pursue a Master's degree in part thanks to the money my father was making. I could easily do a trip somewhere now with the money I've been saving up for a home of my own, in fact I have occasionally been regretful that I didn't see much of the world. That makes me part of the 'educated elite' I guess that is decried as the core Green voter. And indeed I share the opinion that flying is far too cheap right now and in order to adjust it to its immense environmental impact we should make it as costly as it was in the 70s, turning it into a special event instead of a casual annual entitlement. Meanwhile I am also saying we should massively expand the rail network and make it an attractive and cheap alternative. Am I allowed to say that? Am I myself too privileged to have these positions? Similarly am I not allowed to ask for the end of combustion engines? Am I not allowed to say that we should improve the comfort and availability of public transport both in urban as well as in rural areas in a multipronged approach that makes use of different engine types for different utilities?

And I didn't interact with the example of your professor because like others have posted, it is ludicrous to condemn everyone identifying as left, socially or economically (which are two different branches of policy, but 'the right' doesn't seem to care, it's all scary and all the same) for the acts of some zealous armchair trolls. Not to mention that I also disagree with the idea of stating arbitrary caps on gender-stereotyped professional interests as that doesn't help anyone. I rate the societal impact on that extremely high since everyone gets their images of certain professions from somewhere, be it family, media and certain role models. And that societal impact is highly malleable.

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22 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Thank you for your reply. I admit that I was angry about what happened to my former professor which triggered this thread. She did not deserve such attacks. I was also insofar blind that the lived reality in the US is a different where I live. As I said before: all humans have the same intrinsic value for me. No group shall be oppressed by others. One world, one people so to speak. I don’t believe in races, for me that’s a social construct but the US believes in them. My thinking is: the more you put people into different categories the more tools you give the elite to rule. The ultra-capitalist system as such as another hierarchical system is the core problem for me. And segmenting society into different groups makes us not see the forest for the trees. 
 

I quote myself:
 

 

Look, I share your same distrust and loathing of hypercapitalism. I am just not sure Greta Thunberg is an example of elites trying to tell poor people how to live. She has pretty plainly been focusing her efforts on corporate pollution and government policies that enable it. I may have missed something but I don't think you've acknowledged that you may have mischaracterized her.

She was also, at the time of her advocacy, a kid who was in horror of the world that shitty greedy adults are leaving behind. She has a perfect claim to be aggrieved, even if she wasn't born poor, dark-skinned, and oppressed.

If you think she's gotten an undeserved amount of attention because she was a nice little white girl, where previous activists have been ignored, that's not her fault, but the fault of a rotten media ecosystem and entrenched attitudes about whose complaints are worth listening to.

It'd be great if we could have a truly colorblind society where no one is oppressed. How do we get there? You have to tear down systemically racist and classist structures, which actually involves acknowledging that skin color or economic background are pretty universal sources of oppression. If people who want justice are just supposed to ignore those factors, it just helps the people who are already atop those structures.

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1 hour ago, DMC said:

I feel like this got..liked a lot, but not emphasized nearly enough.  The title of this thread is preposterously inaccurate, "wokeness" was initially an attempt to give a voice to the voiceless.  Primarily from black and LGTBQIA+ communities.  Just because it was bastardized and weaponized by the usual fuckwads doesn't change that - and it certainly doesn't make it a "child" of "neoliberal capitalism."  I mean that just smacks of horseshit said by someone who didn't know jack shit about any of the terms involved and is competing for a special level of stupid. 

Wokeness meant accountability for systemic racism, etc, that's all.  It's every bit as "communitarian" as Michael Sandel - who apparently is also getting mentioned in this thread.  So it appears some of you also were forced to read Michael Sandel.  I am very sorry to all. 

As I recall originally it wasn't even that, it was simply being aware of systematic injustice.

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12 minutes ago, Darzin said:

Probably, I just whish democrats wouldn't say the quiet part out loud. They should do what Reoublicans do and run on the popular platitudes then enact whatever they want. Rejecting things like Joe Rogan's endorsement before you've done anything is just cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I think you will find plenty of people who say that Democrats run on platitudes and then don't follow up. I have a long list of complaints about the party.

But I don't get this fixation on Joe Rogan. He's an ass and a boob who exploits his platform to spread harmful bullshit and then cries "but I'm just an entertainer!" when called out. Is he supposed to be an example of the "poor" that Democrats should appeal to? Is his audience also the poor that Democrats are missing? It's funny how often "poor" or "working class" who have been "left behind" and ignored means uneducated race-resentful white men, and never seems to apply to non-white people, especially women, who are a disproportionate part of the "essential workers" that make the economy run for the enrichment of elites but don't get supported by policies that will actually help them, and who are beaten down or victimized when they protest the unequal burden that has been put on them.

 

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3 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I think you will find plenty of people who say that Democrats run on platitudes and then don't follow up. I have a long list of complaints about the party.

But I don't get this fixation on Joe Rogan. He's an ass and a boob who exploits his platform to spread harmful bullshit and then cries "but I'm just an entertainer!" when called out. Is he supposed to be an example of the "poor" that Democrats should appeal to? Is his audience also the poor that Democrats are missing?  It's funny how often "poor" or "working class" who have been "left behind" and ignored means uneducated race-resentful white men, 

 

I guess he's just someone whose politics are essentially liberal, but is unacceptable because he doesn't fit the right aesthetic. 

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4 minutes ago, Darzin said:

I guess he's just someone whose politics are essentially liberal, but is unacceptable because he doesn't fit the right aesthetic. 

"Essentially" seems to be doing a lot of work in that sentence. I don't know what Joe Rogan's politics are beyond "I like things that give me license to spread bullshit without consequence." Is he a liberal because he said nice things about Bernie Sanders once?

Saying he's been deemed unacceptable because of his "aesthetic" is a pretty reductive take. He normalizes and amplifies real harm. Like his buddy relationship with Alex Jones.

If Joe Rogan is "essentially" liberal, then it seems he'd be a great example of Arakan's complaint -- a hypocritical, harmful elite.

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33 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Don't forget Roseann Barr, who was so badly canceled after mere accusations of racism that Vice ran a feature on her.

How is Barr going to survive with only tens of millions of dollars?

We’ve come become so woke that now perceived bomb threats are too politically incorrect.

To be clear it should be acknowledged the “woke mob unjustifiably going after someone” scenario does happen and should be acknowledged and condemned for when it is.

A YouTuber whose pretty progressive in most respects Lindsey Ellis did a video on her own cancellation. 

But way more often than it should it’s just as a boogeyman and a cover towards suffering in any way for bigotry displayed.

 

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9 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

"Essentially" seems to be doing a lot of work in that sentence. I don't know what Joe Rogan's politics are beyond "I like things that give me license to spread bullshit without consequence." Is he a liberal because he said nice things about Bernie Sanders once?

Saying he's been deemed unacceptable because of his "aesthetic" is a pretty reductive take. He normalizes and amplifies real harm. Like his buddy relationship with Alex Jones.

If Joe Rogan is "essentially" liberal, then it seems he'd be a great example of Arakan's complaint -- a hypocritical, harmful elite.

One can be socially liberal and economically right-wing.

Rogen appears to be that.

He was against the stimulus checks when he was under impression that they would go to people who lost their jobs during the pandemic.

 

 

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Joe Rogan generally supports  the need for greater social spending for the nation’s poor and working class, opposes war and militarism, supports drug legalization, is strongly pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights, and if you break it down is pretty much a liberal on standard political debates. That is why he endorsed Bernie and talked on favorable terms with Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang whose signature issue was the universal basic income. I don't think the fact he is personally friendly with Alex Jones while calling him a nut on his show outweighs that.

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1 minute ago, Darzin said:

Joe Rogan generally supports  the need for greater social spending for the nation’s poor and working class, opposes war and militarism, supports drug legalization, is strongly pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights, and if you break it down is pretty much a liberal on standard political debates. That is why he endorsed Bernie and talked on favorable terms with Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang whose signature issue was the universal basic income. I don't think the fact he is personally friendly with Alex Jones while calling him a nut on his show outweighs that.

Why are you yelling?

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I think the parents of dead kids who've been called part of a hoax and persecuted by Alex Jones and his audience, whom Rogan has indeed amplified and normalized, would disagree about what outweighs what.

I couldn't be friends with a person who does that, let alone invite him on my podcast to expand his audience. Fuck Jones, fuck Rogan, and honestly, fuck anyone who minimalizes the harm they have both done.

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3 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Why are you yelling?

Derp.

1 minute ago, DanteGabriel said:

I think the parents of dead kids who've been called part of a hoax and persecuted by Alex Jones and his audience, whom Rogan has indeed amplified and normalized, would disagree about what outweighs what.

Fair enough.

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5 hours ago, Arakan said:

This professor has been working to get more girls into tech fields for more than 20 years. The first semester share of Girls in mechanical engineering is currently 14%. For electrical engineering it’s 12%. Overall engineering increased from 19% in 1998 to 25% in 2019. All you gave was a buzz word. Intrinsic sexism. I guess this professor knows better than you. And you cannot force someone to study or work something against his or her will. 

 

 

This, and the professor's argument, ignores retention and the issues of work culture. Tech and Engineering jobs, though changing, still have a long ways to go to fully integrate diversity and inclusion. More women and minorities studying Tech/Eng and then recruited/hired into those jobs haven't moved the needle as much as one would expect because of the work culture. My company - on it's face is very open and progressive - discovered that we have a high turnover rate for women and minorities because of this.

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1 hour ago, Arakan said:

 

To fight for ones fair share in an unjust system without fighting the unjust system as a whole is useless and pure hypocrisy It is simply shifting justice/injustice from one group to another. One either fights for justice for all or justice for no one. 
 

Fighting for justice for one‘s own or one specific group while at the same time accepting or even supporting injustice for another group (LBJ in case of China, progressive celebrities who produce their fashion collections with exploitative work in poor countries) destroys any legitimacy and integrity. 
 

Attacks of underprivileged people (like my Afghan professor) by privileged people, especially when done with a moral stance, is not acceptable for me. 

 

Thing is no-one's really going to argue with you on those basic positions. The problems came when like some of us have said you, instead of talking about separating those causes from those people, lumped the cause and the people together and dismissed all of it. And like DG says, you stumbled into a lot of right-wing talking points about left-wing causes. That's why all the backlash: you appear to have wanted to make a topic ultimately saying 'virtue-signalling hypocrites are bad' but made no discrimination about who is genuinely virtue-signalling or not. It's not really about Greta or 'woke', those are just the most obvious symptoms of a problem that permeated your original arguments from the ground up: there was no room in what you posted for actual activism.  

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1 hour ago, Darzin said:

Eh I don't think this is a cancel culture thread, didn't we have one of those? As much as it is acknowledging that there is a strain of woke politics that has a disdain for the working class. Another thing is just using language that people actually speak, to quote noted colonizer and Republican operative, Jamese Carville "wokeness is a problem and we all know it" You can only effect change if you actually hold power.

On the article; I can’t say I entirely disagree with it.

Some terms and phrases are going to turn more people off than our worth winning over.

ACAB is a really shitty slogan. Defund the police is a really shitty rallying cry.

 They sound extreme and not in way that’s appealing to the majority of people.

But it’s necessary to hold some degree of promise in exchange for power before handing it over.

The Democrats core strength comes from its ability to appeal to different groups across America  from race, to sexuality to religion, etc etc. 

 

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