"Woke" - what does it really mean?

[Raja]

8 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

 just that talking in absolutes will necessarily cause different kinds of victims.

I just haven't seen posters in these threads talking in those absolutes - it's a straw man. The poster has put together this caricature where they are the only ones who can see the nuance in things whereas the rest of us are walking around talking in absolutes about everyone and every thing till we're blue in the face ( spoiler alert, this has never been true)

[James Arryn]

1 minute ago, Raja said:

I just haven't seen posters in these threads talking in those absolutes - it's a straw man. The poster has put together this caricature where they are the only ones who can see the nuance in things whereas the rest of us are walking around talking in absolutes about everyone and every thing till we're blue in the face ( spoiler alert, this has never been true)

Oh, I might have misunderstood the context, I didn’t think it was about the dialogue in here, but was thinking in terms of societal/legal procedures. Sorry for my unnecessary and as it happens unhelpful ‘clarification’. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

@James Arryn in the us thread you asked if it was wokeness made using gay less common as an insult.

It’s usually a mark of progress  when bigotry has to be spread through euphemisms and implications, and downplaying .

It can be annoying to deal with but alarming when the liberal pretenses is dropped and the bigotry is more blunt.

You know lIke dropping the idea of immigrants being bad because of the reactionary views of the immigrants to they’re bad because globalist plot to replace white people.

Edited April 14 by Varysblackfyre321

[Tywin et al.]

Try not to be an asshole and consider why other people are hurting.

There, I saved you thousands of pages from most scriptures. And then jackasses come along and fuck it all up. 

[Madame deVenoge]

4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I was briefly sucked into that several years ago.  It’s compelling (initially) because if feels like you are defending a marginalized group… women… but it is ultimately wrong.  As I was wrong because it discounts and minimizes the abuse suffered by an even more marginalized community.  Those who are transgender.

People should have the right to live their lives as they see fit regardless of how “society” may perceive their individuality.  So long as they aren’t hurting anyone else… which I recognize as the lie that is told by the right to make those in the LGBTQ community see “scary”.  

Let people live their lives.  It isn’t a hard concept.  That said I do think “woke” has become for the right their carte blache word for anything they dislike.

I completely agree with this. “Woke” has become the carte blanche for anything with which the Right disagrees.

I honestly don’t deeply care about trans or other gender issues. Sorry. I’m all about people living their best lives, but I’m too fucking busy to raise a flag for a marginalized group to which I do not belong. That said, no one should fuck with anyone who is different. I’m different. I spent 20 years in the corporate world pretending I didn’t have a kid, because 20 years ago, having a kid as a cisgender white woman was a liability - and it probably still is. So, I get what it means to hide one’s personal life. I had to hide for 20 years.

I don’t know why people give a shit about personal lives, while in a work environment.

ETA - also, btw, @Ser Scot A Ellison - did anyone on Facebook actually forgive you for your moment of non-wokeness? There are many “friends” whom I lost over the time on FB because I didn’t toe their line on “healthcare for all.” Those were people I’d known for 20 years. I know you faced some issues similarly with the gender thing, thanks to someone who “outed” you for daring to “like” a TERF group when you didn’t even know what a TERF was.

They had it in for you, just like they had it in for me.

Edited April 14 by Chataya de Fleury

[Varysblackfyre321]

6 hours ago, A wilding said:

And didn't this whole thing get started off by Liz Truss calling high taxes "woke"?

Huh she actually did.
When she stubs her toe she goes “Fucking wokeness.”

 

[TheLastWolf]

Ones I've met, hyper sensitive SJW itching to get offended so that they can show off their righteousness and promote intolerant (intolerable too) toxic cancel culture 

[mcbigski]

6 hours ago, mormont said:

Let me sum the argument up:

 

That's precisely the first thing I thought of when I read the thread title.  I suspect you're seeing Humpty as the 'woke' usage critics, for lack of a better term, where as to me that's exactly what the self identified woke would say in response to criticism.  Nothing means anything any more.  

But hey, once society breaks down entirely, we're going to have a totally rad post capitalist future.  For the few of us that don't starve to death.

[Madame deVenoge]

15 minutes ago, TheLastWolf said:

Ones I've met, hyper sensitive SJW itching to get offended so that they can show off their righteousness and promote intolerant (intolerable too) toxic cancel culture 

Oh, yeah, the self-righteous prigs. They exist.

Like the white man who has never lived in Georgia, much less visited here, who tells me, who has lived in Georgia for 30 years, allllll about the “voter suppression” in Georgia.

Meanwhile, I’ve volunteered with the state Democratic Party and been a Democratic-party affiliated official poll watcher (never saw anything suspicious; tried to make friends with the Republican poll-watcher lady, but she got bored and left early) and womaned the phone banks for the official voter hotline, again on behalf of the Democratic Party, and helped a lot of  people ascertain that yes, their vote was counted. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

27 minutes ago, TheLastWolf said:

Ones I've met, hyper sensitive SJW itching to get offended so that they can show off their righteousness and promote intolerant (intolerable too) toxic cancel culture 

Is it woke to oppose sodomy laws?

Also do you think recognizing manmade climate change is a thing is woke?

Edited April 14 by Varysblackfyre321

[Darzin]

I pretty much agree with leftist and Marxist Freddie Deboer that it's a name yourself or you will be named type situation and that of course everyone knows what woke means, there is just a lot of benefit to pretending you don't.

Spoiler

As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term “woke” myself, not without qualification or quotation marks. It’s too much of a culture war pinball and now deemed too pejorative to be useful. I much, much prefer the term “social justice politics” to refer to the school of politics that is typically referred to as woke, out of a desire to be neutral in terminology. However: there is such a school of politics, it’s absurd that so many people pretend not to know what woke means, and the problem could be easily solved if people who support woke politics would adopt a name for others to use. No to woke, no to identity politics, no to political correctness, fine: PICK SOMETHING. The fact that they steadfastly refuse to do so is a function of their feeling that they shouldn’t have to do politics like everyone else. But they do. And their resistance to doing politics is why, three years after a supposed “reckoning,” nothing has really changed. (If there’s no such thing as the social justice politics movement, who made the protests and unrest of 2020 happen? The fucking Democrats?)

The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal,” “fascist,” “conservative,” or “moderate.” And I just don’t think that’s true.

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

Woke is defined by several consistent attributes. Woke is

Academic - the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities. Central to woke discourse is the substitution of older and less complicated versions of socially liberal perspectives with more willfully complex academic versions. So civil rights are out, “anti-racism” is in. Community is out, intersectionality is in. Equality is out, equity is in. Homelessness is out, unhousedness is in. Sexism is out, misogyny is in. Advantage is out, privilege is in. Whenever there’s an opportunity to introduce an alternative concept that’s been wrung through academia’s weird machinery, that opportunity is taken. This has the advantage of making political engagement available only to a priestly caste that has enjoyed the benefits of elite university education; like all political movements, the woke political movement is captured by the urge to occupy elevated status within it.

Immaterial - woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real. Woke politics are famously obsessive about language, developing literal language policies that are endlessly long and exacting. Utterances are mined for potential offense with pitiless focus, such that statements that were entirely anodyne a few years ago become unspeakable today. Being politically pure is seen as a matter of speaking correctly rather than of acting morally. The woke fixation on language and symbol makes sense when you realize that the developers of the ideology are almost entirely people whose profession involves the immaterial and the symbolic - professors, writers, reporters, artists, pundits. They retreat to the linguistic because they feel that words are their only source of power. Consider two recent events: the Academy Awards giving Oscars to many people of color and Michigan repealing its right-to-work law. The latter will have vastly greater positive consequences for actually-existing American people of color than the former, and yet the former has been vastly better publicized. This is a direct consequence of the incentive structure of woke politics.

Structural in analysis, individual in action - the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions. Sometimes the problems are misdiagnosed or exaggerated, but the structural focus is beneficial. Curiously, though, the woke approach to solutions to politics is relentlessly individualistic. Rather than calling for true mass movements (which you cannot create without the moderation and compromise the social justice set tends to abhor), woke politics typically treats all political struggle as a matter of the individual mastering themselves and behaving correctly. The fundamental unit of politics is not the masses but the enlightened person, in the social justice mindset, and the enlightened person is one who has attained a state of moral cleanliness, particularly as expressed in language. The structural problems (such as racism) are represented as fundamentally combated with individual moral correctness (such as articulated in White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which argues that racism is combated by white people interrogating their souls rather than with policy). The only real political project is the struggle against the self; the only real political victory is the mastery of one’s thoughts. The distinction between the effective political actor and the morally hygienic thinker is collapsed. You combat homophobia by being gay-affirming. You combat misogyny by respecting women. You combat all social ills by relentlessly fixating on your own position in society and feeling bad about it. Nothing political can escape the gravity of personal psychodrama and no solutions exist but cleansing the self.

Emotionalist - “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics. In woke circles, political problems are regularly diagnosed as a matter of the wrong emotions being inspired in someone. Someone feeling “invalid” is no longer an irrelevant matter of personal psychology best left to a therapist but instead a political problem to be solved, and anyone who provoked that feeling is someone who has committed a political crime no matter what the context or pretext. Good political action makes people feel better. To the extent that material victories like feeding the hungry are celebrated, they are celebrated because they inspire good feelings rather than solve corporeal problems. The famous woke antipathy towards the concept of civil liberties and personal freedoms stems from the triumph of emotions; things like rights are no match for the claims of any individual of psychic distress. Economic, legal, and political inequality are all relevant only to the extent that they make people from minority identities sad. The fixation on emotions fits snugly in the assumption of the individual as the basic unit of politics. It also ensures that woke politics assume the possibility of a frictionless universe in which everyone feels good all the time.

Fatalistic - woke politics tend towards extreme fatalism regarding solutions and the possibility of gradual positive political change. Institutions are all corrupt and bigoted, so institutions cannot prompt change. Most people are irredeemably racist, and so the masses cannot create a just society. Constructive police reform is inherently and irrevocably impossible, so the only response to police violence is police abolition, no matter that we can’t actually achieve police abolition. Everything and everyone is presumed to be unapologetically bigoted until proven otherwise. Problems can’t be solved gradually through small steps over time, but only through revolutionary change, which itself will inevitably be blocked by the white-cis-male power structure. Everything sucks all the time, which incidentally justifies yelling all the time for people who enjoy yelling. The purpose of politics is not to sacrifice in the pursuit of change but to occupy the position of eternal Cassandra, someone who identifies the evil but never stops it.

Insistent that all political questions are easy - woke people speak and act as though there are no hard political questions and no such thing as a moral dilemma. Everything is obvious if you’ve only done the reading and done the work, which woke people assure you they did long ago. If you don’t know what the right thing to do or say is, it’s only because you aren’t really dedicated; if you think you’ve hit upon a real dilemma of conflicting but legitimate concerns, you’re simply lacking in education and wisdom. It’s funny, actually, that you don’t know the exact right thing to think, right now. I’m actually laughing.

Possessed of belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed - what was assumed by Bertrand Russel to be obviously misguided is now assumed to be true without evaluation: virtue is not just common among the oppressed, virtue is a function of oppression. The correlation between virtue and oppression is one.

Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all” - this one is unforgivable.

I could go on. And some will disagree with this or that. But whether you think this is an accurate portrayal of the kind of politics that became dominant in progressive circles in the last 10-12 years, something happened. Something changed. Of course something changed! I find it so, so bizarre that people still insist that nothing much changed in progressive discourse or politics in that time period. Go back and read stuff that was getting published in liberal outlets in 2010 and tell me it’s the same.

Now whether you agree with his definition or Heartofice's definition in the other thread is not really relevant something changed something is happening to our politics, and we need to be able to talk about it which requires names and language。 I agree woke is often used as a catchphrase by right wingers for everything they don't like but it's at least as defined as terms like Alt right and incel which get thrown around in prestigious publications all the time. 

I don't think you can say that woke is just being "a good person" or "opposing racism" because the policies around this are different then they were before and it's the policies that matter as much as the goal. Using terms like this makes as much sense as defining communism as "people who follow ration economics" it's a platitude that means nothing because it's the policies implemented to achieve these goals that matter. Woke is an imprecise  and dare I say problematic term, but until the people who support these policies name themselves they will continue to be named. 

Edited April 14 by Darzin

[Madame deVenoge]

4 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Is it woke to oppose sodomy laws?

Also do you think recognizing manmade climate change is a thing is woke?

Bro - read my posts above, please, for examples of hypersensitive SJW bull crap.

No one is saying sodomy laws should come back into fashion. No one is saying that climate change isn’t real.

What we are talking about is the intolerance of a few on the left who say it is my way or the highway, when contemplating any social issue.

People have burned friends who have been friends for 20+ years over slight differences in thinking that have no impact on their own personal lives. Or, yeah, major differences in thinking but no one is in a position to do anything about it (say, universal healthcare).

[TheLastWolf]

32 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Is it woke to oppose sodomy laws?

Also do you think recognizing manmade climate change is a thing is woke?

Those are done by any rational individual. Don't need labels or tags such as wokeness. Acting on it is better than marching endlessly.

The other day there was this woman saying math is racist, 2+2 can equal 5 and so on.

Orwellian

[Varysblackfyre321]

6 hours ago, Raja said:

I can't fathom using 'believe victims'

The children know their gender is a bit disconcerting too.

Regardless on one’s feelings towards the idea of if a kid should be allowed to medically or even just socially transition(which there is no hard proof of strong drawbacks), or even having biological sex=gender kids knowing what their gender is isn’t a controversial concept when you think on the implications of the alternative.

 I don’t think it’s controversial to say most boys know they’re boys pretty early on. 

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Bro - read my posts above, please, for examples of hypersensitive SJW bull crap.

I don’t deny there are examples like that and worse ones besides.

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

No one is saying sodomy laws should come back into fashion.

My first instinct was to cite polls showing a large amount of the American public denying climate change and wanting a reinistution of sodomy laws and examples of people using woke to deride the concept of mammade climate change and being anti-sodomy laws.

But upon closer reading I believe I misunderstood.
  were you specifically talking about the discourse in this thread or previous threads?
I should clarify I wasn’t accusing the quoted poster of being a climate denier or a homophobe, more trying to show woke generally works just as well in situations where it can be used against them.

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

What we are talking about is the intolerance of a few on the left who say it is my way or the highway, when contemplating any social issue.

100% agreement on all issues isn’t a reasonable standard sure. Not being in favor of Medicare for all I find disagreeable but not cancelable.
Some expressed takes in my mind can justify/necessitate a more fierce rebuke though. It all depends on the situation, and what’s the opinion. there is nuance.

 

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

People have burned friends who have been friends for 20+ years over slight differences in thinking that have no impact on their own personal lives. Or, yeah, major differences in thinking but no one is in a position to do anything about it (say, universal healthcare).

I disagree with the example but I understand the logic(hopefully) and I sympathize.

39 minutes ago, TheLastWolf said:

Those are done by any rational individual. Don't need labels or tags such as wokeness. Acting on it is better than marching endlessly.

But can you see how others not you, have dubbed the positions I listed as woke?

 

Edited April 14 by Varysblackfyre321

[Varysblackfyre321]

47 minutes ago, TheLastWolf said:

The other day there was this woman saying math is racist, 2+2 can equal 5 and so on.

Orwellian

Are you talking about this lady?

 

Edited April 14 by Varysblackfyre321

[Heartofice]

The disconnect between two meanings of woke seem be that some people still cling to the definition of wokeness as just being about seeing societal injustice and being against it, whereas others who you’d say are ‘anti-woke’ are talking about something different. The UK thread demonstrating how hard it is for some to get their head around that.

The version of wokeness that ‘anti-woke’ people are critical of isn’t the ‘being for social justice’ version, because ‘wokeness’ in actuality only masquerades as progressive but is very much not progressive.

Thats why being ‘anti woke’ doesn’t mean you are against inequality or fighting racism, it just means you don’t like that attitudes and methods of many who are ‘woke’

‘Wokeness’ is mostly about taking the absolute maximalist position on any social position , catastrophising every situation and not tolerating any pushback or dissenting thought which takes a less than maximalist position.

Take the example of young kids questioning their gender. Objectively you could say we don’t know if they know what gender they are, and that there might be some cases where that is the case but others where they don’t, maybe more research needs to be done and take it on a case by case basis.
 

However that position isn’t maximalist enough so if you don’t believe that all children know if they are trans or not then you are for the genocide of all trans people and are essentially the devil himself. That’s the woke mindset. 
 

It’s also because a lot of ‘woke’ people are not really all that interested in solving social problems, but use wokeness as a way of making themselves seem more important and impressive, and gives them an excuse to engage in bullying behaviour while looking like the good guy. 
 

That’s the wokeness there is pushback on. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

7 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Thats why being ‘anti woke’ doesn’t mean you are against inequality or fighting racism, it just means you don’t like that attitudes and methods of many who are ‘woke’

 

[karaddin]

I can't understanding adopting the framing (ie anti-woke/SJW) used by people advocating for ends I disagree with just because some of people that I share a desired end-state with are fuckwits online.

[Varysblackfyre321]

One of the latest moral crusades against woke companies is  Budlight for having a trans woman say she’ll enjoy their beer to celebrate the anniversary since she started transitioning.

To anyone of reasonable character this sounds ludicrous and/or evil.

One thing I didn’t know about  until watching this video is that a lot of reactionary organizations just buy cheaply made products they in bulk and slap a anti-woke label to justify the ludicrous price

Edited April 14 by Varysblackfyre321
Clarification.

[Varysblackfyre321]

12 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I can't understanding adopting the framing (ie anti-woke/SJW) used by people advocating for ends I disagree with just because some of people that I share a desired end-state with are fuckwits online.

Can you clarify please?