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

[karaddin]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

There are people in Wales and Ireland people may disagree with this, even today, as well as those you pointed out in the former Empire's other colonies.

 

There's a reason I put as many qualifiers in it as I did, but possibly still missed one. As I'm talking about the modern awareness, the part about being people of color was meant to indicate that the group is not seen as white from the modern perspective. I'm less educated on the shitty things that were done to the Welsh than I am the Irish, the latter of which seems like it was used to "beta test" some of the awful colonial shit then implemented around the world.

But both Welsh and Irish are, for the most part, seen as white people by the modern anglosphere. The difficulties that remain are different to the way that the US and Canada continue to treat Indigenous Americans, and Australia treats Indigenous Australians. 

[karaddin]

22 hours ago, Fury Resurrected said:

Just like the pipeline discussion in the politics thread, nobody wants to discuss the impacts to indigenous people, only to businesses and future generations and Canadians and Michigan voters. Out of sight, out of mind.

Just wanted to confirm that it's not just you who read that discussion that way. It's amazing how popular raw numbers utilitarianism becomes when the people who will be negatively impacted are a group people feel comfortable ignoring while jumping up and down about the well being of those they do care about.

[Heartofice]

47 minutes ago, Zorral said:

There are people in Wales and Ireland people may disagree with this, even today, as well as those you pointed out in the former Empire's other colonies.

 

Damn you Longshanks! 

[kiko]

Not wanting to criticize anyone here in this thread. But the original claim of the thread starter was that all the fight for (can I say that?) interests of specific minority groups is a distraction from what @Arakan claims is the main fight which is social equality and justice for the oppressed masses. Yet here after 9 pages we discuss about semantics, the history of offensive words and who's podcast is not thoroughly progressive because they ignore important letters. This is certainly important - not denying that. But it obviously is distraction to the supposed all encompassing solution of all those social issues.

 

[Zorral]

55 minutes ago, karaddin said:

the Irish, the latter of which seems like it was used to "beta test" some of the awful colonial shit then implemented around the world.

In Slavery Studies it is widely agreed that everything the Empire did in Ireland, beginning at least by the end of the 13th century, but particularly in the 16th-17th centuries, were the prototypes for the colonial and slavery centuries -- and even later, as in the 19th century the way Canada and the now independent US treated the Irish refugees from the famine.

[Arakan]

4 minutes ago, kiko said:

Not wanting to criticize anyone here in this thread. But the original claim of the thread starter was that all the fight for (can I say that?) interests of specific minority groups is a distraction from what @Arakan claims is the main fight which is social equality and justice for the oppressed masses. Yet here after 9 pages we discuss about semantics, the history of offensive words and who's podcast is not thoroughly progressive because they ignore important letters. This is certainly important - not denying that. But it obviously is distraction to the supposed all encompassing solution of all those social issues.

 

This is exactly one of my major issues. We live in the socially most aware time ever (thanks to social media) yet wealth distribution or better wealth inequality had reached a high point in the last 100 years. The stats are all out there. We are reaching crisis point. We have seen in it with the vaccine distribution worldwide as one example. 
 

The economic and financial elite have discovered virtue signaling as a very cheap tool to deflect. It costs them nothing and the system as such continues. The system as such is intrinsically broken. 

People like LeBron James are a big part of the problem. Emotionally I can understand why many grassroots BLM supporter don’t speak out against him but it harms the movement. With his China stance LBJ made it very clear that actually he doesn’t give a single shit about the fight against oppression of minorities as such. For him it’s important that „his“ group doesn’t belong to the oppressed anymore but he is contend with the oppressor system as such. LBJ undermines the integrity of the movement. Of course he speaks only for himself in principle but then actually not due to the reach of his voice. 

[DanteGabriel]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Its difficult to fail to see the irony that the main reaction to an article that talks about the discomfort people feel from the negative social consequences from using the wrong word, is to call out that someone in it used the wrong word.

And what consequences did you suffer for using the wrong word? Have you been cancelled? Had your life ruined by a vengeful mob of woke people? Is your name going to be added to that "cancelled people" site? Or did someone just ask you to stop using the word and the discussion moved on?
 

Quote

The other irony being that it’s a bunch of social progressives trying to argue that political correctness isn’t a problem after seeing an article that says social progressives don’t think political correctness is a problem but everyone else does.

As others have pointed out, the study is difficult to draw a lot of real conclusions from the fact that large majorities of most populations agree with the statement that "political correctness is a problem in this country." How big a problem? How much does it impact someone's daily life? Is the idea of being shamed for using the wrong word as traumatic as being pulled over for having dark skin in a nice car, or having multiple state governments try to legislate which bathrooms are lawful for trans people to use?

What is political correctness asking for? That people use preferred words to refer to other people? How did that become such a bogeyman that it's been a convenient cudgel for conservatives for two generations now? The loathing for the idea seems wildly out of proportion to what political correctness asks for, because the out of control PC monster has become an easy caricature, to use the same word you did.

I don't deny that sometimes a progressive or person of color will react unkindly or unreasonably to a person using the wrong word. I wish everybody could be kinder and more patient. But I am not sure every person who receives even mild and polite correction responds well or is open to admitting fault. Americans, especially white Americans, just don't like being corrected. I don't think that itself is unique to Americans, but I think it's worse with us. There is a rich melange of hyper-individuality, distrust of intellectuals, and conviction of our own national virtue that does this.

White American also society tends to distrust or disfavor things that benefit the non-white. I don't think it's something specific to white people, that's just how any power group reacts to threats to its own supremacy. Frankly speaking, white Americans have, until recently, been able to live pretty oblivious lives where they never had to change their behavior for the benefit of marginalized people, or even consider what it was like to be out of power. It was always other people that adapted to suit them. Correcting people's language to refer to marginalized populations offends that sense of order. The merest taste of the kind of injustice that marginalized people suffer every day is apparently enough to make some over-privileged people compare themselves to Jews in the Holocaust or slaves in the antebellum South.

The idea of political correctness as some scourge on society has been built up as a bogeyman by entrenched elites, same as with "cancel culture." This thread in fact feels like a continuation of past cancel culture threads. I don't doubt that there are some progressives who are unreasonable or unkind in their attempts to correct people. Progressives are flawed humans just like the everyone else. But if it happens a lot, if there are a lot of wild-eyed progressives publicly shaming people who make an innocent mistake, I haven't seen as much video evidence of that as I have seen of, say, ignorant people being openly racist or cops brutalizing innocent people. Do the victims of political correctness run amok not have access to camera phones or something?

This idea that there is a rash of people having their lives negatively impacted for making an innocent mistake in word choice seems to be a panic out of proportion to how often it happens and how severe it is. To hear some people talk, it's like there's some liberal secret police force out there just waiting to pounce on the unwary and destroy their lives. I'm more afraid of being bankrupted by out of control health care costs than I am of being shamed by someone for using the wrong word, but maybe I'm just an out of touch liberal.

 

Quote

Nope sorry thats not my point at all, and maybe the problem is that you keep running conversations through that lens.

The whole reason I posted that link was to demonstrate that its often not minorities themselves who view themselves as social progressives or woke, it really is more likely to be rich white people. Claiming to be able to speak for an entire group is pretty insulting to that group actually, as everyone has their own opinion. Its why you often have black conservatives called race traitors or worse, because they do not have the 'correct' opinions based on the colour of their skin.

I think trying to draw too many conclusions from a vague poll question is building a house on shaky ground. People may not consider themselves "progressive" but seem to like things that progressives are nominally for: equal rights for all, equal treatment before the law for all, and a socioeconomic system that isn't rigged. But the cultural bias against the people who advocate for those positions, enabled by media conglomerates owned by the very beneficiaries of the unjust system, clouds that.

Sure, out of touch wealthy progressives exist. But the study referred to in your article identifies education level is as much an indicator of attitude to political correctness as well. Are educated people just indoctrinated by the social engineering of liberal college professors? That's what some wealthy elites would like people to believe. Or are people who went to college more likely to have learned critical thinking skills and interacted with a more diverse group of people and learned to see a larger subset of humanity as real people?

I don't know who is claiming so speak for an entire group, nor do I know who is calling black conservatives race traitors. If I point out that Candace Owens once won a discrimination lawsuit against her high school for failing to protect her from racist abuse, and now has turned against the same kind of laws that benefited her before, is that unfair?

The study cited in that article says the "exhausted majority" think the nation is too polarized and that political divisions have grown too hot. I agree! But I don't think it was progressives who did that. It's always been in the interests of wealthy elites to divide the working and middle classes on economic and racial lines. A college professor who espouses socialist beliefs is an out of touch egghead corrupting the youth, but a born-wealthy thieving billionaire is a hero and a man of the people. The person buying a steak with an EBT card is more of a drain on society than an oligarch who evaded millions in taxes. The immigrant who is picking fruit for a pittance of a wage is a bigger problem than the people growing wealthy off their labor. And now the activist who protests against injustice is a bigger threat than the injustice itself.

It wasn't progressives who divided the American electorate against each other (which is not to say that progressives never behave divisively). The right wing has been manufacturing social division for ages, by scapegoating and demonizing marginalized populations. Black people are violent and aggressive! Central American immigrants are both stealing American jobs and draining the social safety net! LGBTQ+ people living their lives in the open will turn your kid gay! Supporting women's access to abortion makes you a baby killer! But asking someone to stop using a slur is a deadly, shameful transgression?

Now that marginalized groups have more of a voice and get their issues taken a little more seriously, it seems like an assault on all the prerogatives of comfortable white Americans who never had to consider how shitty it was to be outside of the power group. That's the core of the debate over the existence of and acknowledgement of privilege. It's an easy resentment to tap into, and the right wing has mastered it. And progressives who speak against that social order are the real problem?

This seems to be one of the key takeaways of the study the article cited, about the "exhausted majority": "They are frustrated with the status quo and the conduct of American politics and public debate. They overwhelmingly believe that the American government is rigged to serve the rich and influential, and they want things to change."

American public debate is pretty fucked up, I agree. I actually totally agree with you that the attention-based economy is a big part of the problem. In another life I designed massively multiplayer online games, so I know exactly what you meant when you said incentive structures are all fucked up. Social media and media companies thrive on attention and engagement, and the easiest way to engagement is to appeal to fear and resentment. I worked at a respected news organization for a few years, and the economic mandate to chase clicks was a real issue in the newsroom.

Everybody seems to agree that the government is rigged to serve the rich and that things can't continue as they are, but progressives who are the loudest about injustice are the problem? The wealthy and powerful have long used social issues to turn people against each other. Carrying water for the moral panics over cancel culture and political correctness does not help.

[Lord Varys]

On 5/7/2021 at 1:11 PM, Arakan said:

Wrt Greta Thunberg: when she sailed to NY on a multi-Million Dollar ship to make a point while the crew to bring the ship back to Europe was flown in, she lost me. Just another upper class person with self-righteousness issues.

You do realize that she was just hitchhiking, right? She wasn't responsible for how the guy she was riding with settled things, just as you have no say in the matter what a person you hitchhike with does with or puts into his/her car.

And, in general - the entire criticism of the climate justice movement along the lines of them consisting mainly of a certain social group is just a very transparent conservative/right-wing attempt to discredit it and distract from the issues at hand. The validity of (scientific) arguments do not depend on who makes them.

And with a rather complex question like climate change it is not all that surprising that mainy people with interest in and access to proper scientific education are interested in those things to the point that they end up expressing their displeasure on the streets.

[Fury Resurrected]

5 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

For what it’s worth, I don’t know if it’s a nationality thing (or even what nationality you are) but I’m from the UK and have never heard of this being offensive. Googling the term provides a list of groups at the top using this term explicitly, then the Wikipedia entry which pulls out the quote “Native Americans, also known as (the term in question)”, then we have the ‘People also ask’ section, under the question “Is this term correct” it pulls out a quote from a website named after the term; “In the United States, Native American has been widely used but is falling out of favour with some groups, and the terms (The Term In Question) or Indigenous American are preferred by many Native people”.

If you find it offensive that totally fine and I won’t use it, but from the google search (and I understand that googling a term might lean toward sites that use it openly, kinda by definition, but it’s on the Wikipedia page) it’s hard to back up that anyone using it in a paper must have an ‘explicit agenda’ against racial sensitivity. Harder still that it can be directly compared to ‘n*gro’, at least as the wider community understands it.  

No, it is exactly analogous to n*gro. There are plenty of African American organizations (the UNCF for example) who were named in a time when that was the acceptable term. The same is true for “Indian”. Both are words that the groups never chose for themselves but were chosen by white people for them. In the case of calling indigenous person “Indians” it came from the fact that Christopher Columbus was such a giant flaming dumbass he thought he’d arrived in India, and along with murdering and enslaving the people he found upon arrival, just continued to call them that when he realized this was not India because we are subhuman anyway so who cares. Why in the hell would it NOT be offensive to use a word the father of North American genocide used mistakenly for an entire race of people that actually is many individual nations and cultures? It isn’t difficult to understand it and those who do not are being too lazy to think about it.

[Arakan]

26 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

The wealthy and powerful have long used social issues to turn people against each other. Carrying water for the moral panics over cancel culture and political correctness does not help.

Dante, my friend. ALWAYS. I mean I get fucking sick when I nowadays see „socially progressive“ ads from Amazon of all companies. It’s sickening. Or Biden, the justice warrior who had no problem to buy into that WMD bullshit back in 2002. No accountability whatsoever. 

The neoliberal ultracapitalist system as such (with predecessor ideologies like predestination belief of the calvinists/puritans) is the root cause. It’s an ultra-hierarchical system with no mercy to the „losers“, it’s „winning“ at all cost, destroyer of any communal spirit. I mean even oldschool European capitalists thought it went too far :)). This system will always create an underclass and outcasts. History is full of examples. The US elite of the 1700s/1800s knew that they needed the white underclass on their side so they used racism as their tool to create outcasts. So even the poorest White person at least always had someone below him. What the Southern „lords“ basically did, was copying the old European feudal society with some twists. The role of the unfree serfs of Continental Europe/Russia was given to the Black population and other minorities. The old model was dying out in Europe (except Russia) thanks to Enlightenment and the after effects of the French Revolution but the Southern lords basically re-enacted Europe 1500. 

As you know, I am not American and I do know that many good people live in that country, the majority actually, but the US is the epicenter of the global neoliberal turbocapitalist ideology and there is no accountability whatsoever. Nothing. I hope that people like AOC can change things up. I am not sure. I hope. 

[Arakan]

4 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

You do realize that she was just hitchhiking, right? She wasn't responsible for how the guy she was riding with settled things, just as you have no say in the matter what a person you hitchhike with does with or puts into his/her car.

And, in general - the entire criticism of the climate justice movement along the lines of them consisting mainly of a certain social group is just a very transparent conservative/right-wing attempt to discredit it and distract from the issues at hand. The validity of (scientific) arguments do not depend on who makes them.

And with a rather complex question like climate change it is not all that surprising that mainy people with interest in and access to proper scientific education are interested in those things to the point that they end up expressing their displeasure on the streets.

Please read my statement from a few days ago. 

[Fury Resurrected]

3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Yeah, if I was the CEO of CNN I think it would have taken less than five minutes from hearing that comment to having his desk cleaned out, and every A bloc the next day would have led with a repudiation of his comments followed by inviting guests to explain why his comments were so terrible for educational purposes.

That's a bit unfair. Like Warren, I'm a white person from middle America who was told they had a distant ancestor who was Native American. She embraced it without really understanding it, but it's not like she was doing it in some nefarious way. 

It’s not. It is a huge pervasive problem in native people’s lives that people with power to solve problems we face see being indigenous as a white person with less than 1/16 native ancestry going around “embracing” it. If nobody in your family practices the culture actively or has faced the discrimination involved with being indigenous- you know you are not native and have no right to say you are. White people are most of the “native” people that get seen and heard and it deplatforms actual native people.

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Can you comment on my experience of googling it? That the museum in DC is named after that term, that the Wikipedia entry uses it openly?

 

Not really, since I'm as European as you, but I'd suggest that a museum in the capital city of the colonialist force that destoryed their culture is not necessarily a neutral arbiter.
It's also fair to say as Ran noted that some Native Americans prefer the old term, for various reasons which I'm not really qualified to go into (I heard some of them from my dad who's visited native communities in the US and Canada several times, but it's second-hand knowledge and I have no idea how widespread the attitude is), but as others have said just taking the word of those in a minority who allow you to use a word is a dangerous game.

And yes, it's still a term in common use but lots of what are now considered unacceptable slurs were once in common use. It's not a conversation that's permeated the wider culture as much as others, in part because the people in question are so sidelined and repressed. It's also just a complicated conversation.

But yeah, in the original post I didn't say 'must cause offence' I said 'might' for a reason. It's not a... settled issue, I guess you could say, but while it's not permeated popular culture, it's certainly a loud enough controversy that anyone paying enough attention to Native American issues to have an opinion worth noting (and I'm not saying mine is, but you did ask :P) must know that at least potentially someone will find it out of order.

But in any case Fury is laying out the reasons why it's offensive far better than I can and we'd do well to listen.

[Arakan]

4 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

It’s not. It is a huge pervasive problem in native people’s lives that people with power to solve problems we face see being indigenous as a white person with less than 1/16 native ancestry going around “embracing” it. If nobody in your family practices the culture actively or has faced the discrimination involved with being indigenous- you know you are not native and have no right to say you are. White people are most of the “native” people that get seen and heard and it deplatforms actual native people.

What she does is basically virtue signaling. Which I hate and you seemingly too. 

[Lord Varys]

7 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Please read my statement from a few days ago. 

Oh, okay, sorry. I wanted to add that I didn't read the entire thread yet, but failed to do so.

[Fury Resurrected]

1 minute ago, Arakan said:

What she does is basically virtue signaling. Which I hate and you seemingly too. 

No I don’t. What I hate is redfacing. I hate that she can pretend to be of my culture and that that caused me to have to see an actual fucking President call her the name of a sexually trafficked indigenous child as a slur against her pretended race which is my actual race on TV over and over and over. And I hate that it allows people like you to assume that I agree with your opinion that asks indigenous people to shut up about our concerns when I DO NOT

[Ran]

10 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

Why in the hell would it NOT be offensive to use a word the father of North American genocide used mistakenly for an entire race of people that actually is many individual nations and cultures?

Then what of all the American Indians who call themselves American Indians today? 

They exist. They should not be erased because you disagree with them as to whether they should feel offended or not.

I offered a generous interpretation of why you put forward the unilateral view that it was obvious that American Indian is offensive. Let me put forward the less generous view: that you are a person with an agenda, namely pushing forward your view of how labels should be used as being the correct usage.

[Arakan]

I mean the problem I have with rich people fighting for „social justice“ or progressive topics is that I never can be sure if they do it out of vanity to feed their narcissism and to feed their pockets or if they fight the fight out of integrity. Friedrich Engels came from a rich capitalist family but he fought against his own class. He has integrity. The same for Che Guevara who could have lived an upper class life in Argentina but chose to die in Bolivia. 

It’s easy for rich people to support Green activism when it costs them nothing or they have no problem to afford it. For the Greens in Germany Gasoline can’t be expensive enough. I understand, easy when you have a good income and even easier when you have a company car. Not so easy when you work for minimum wage. Perspectives people, perspectives.  

[Fury Resurrected]

7 minutes ago, Ran said:

Then what of all the American Indians who call themselves American Indians today? 

They exist. They should not be erased because you disagree with them as to whether they should feel offended or not.

I offered a generous interpretation of why you put forward the unilateral view that it was obvious that American Indian is offensive. Let me put forward the less generous view: that you are a person with an agenda, namely pushing forward your view of how labels should be used as being the correct usage.

There are also a few remaining African Americans and organizations who still use the term n*gro. The visibility of native issues is unfortunately many years behind the visibility of African American issues due to the fact that there are so few of us. But you’ll just have to trust me I guess as someone who comes from an entire family of the people you are talking about and is very active in indigenous rights issues that this is a pretty settled debate however like all debates some people are super old and it’s no less disputed than antiquated terms for other races are. And indeed it still has some slang indications where it’s okay for in group members to identify with and not for outsiders to cal in much the same was as other terms you could think of (but in that context it is used as ndn)

 

Also, you cited a dude who has been dead for years.

[Arakan]

8 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Oh, okay, sorry. I wanted to add that I didn't read the entire thread yet, but failed to do so.

No problem. As said I support the environment movement as such, or better their objectives, and Greta is a person of integrity.