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>We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.

I suppose they are not doing it for your feeling's sake. They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.

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> on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.

I'd love to see some demographics around this. When I lived in the bay area, most of my friends were part of this woke / "activist" community. I had some friends who disagreed, but mostly they were terrified to say so for fear of the mob.

Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.

I don't know how you'd measure, but I'd love to see stats on what percentage of the communities in different cities hold this political stance. Is it growing or shrinking? Is it widespread in the west, or is it mostly just a bay area / portland / NY phenomenon - with small satellite groups in other countries?

From my subjective and anecdotal perception as someone who interacts with people from many countries, it looks mostly like an US thing at the moment.

The problem is that most of the West tends to imitate cultural and political trends that originate in the US. And this is already being imitated. In most other countries we are not yet seeing a war to the extent we see in the US, but the American situation could be the canary in the coal mine.

My theory is that because the US has been shifting right for decades, parts of the US leftwing has to some extent resigned itself to thought policing and arguing semantics instead of fighting for actual policy changes. When you can't fix the big problems, find some small problem that you can focus on instead. If the US had a leftwing party that occasionally got in power (instead of a two-party system with a centrist and a rightwing party) then lefties would probably spend their effort on making that happen instead.

> instead of a two-party system with a centrist and a rightwing party

LOL no

You have a moderate right and a far right party by now.

Even in 2016, an analysis between Hillary Clinton and Theresa May showed some of Clinton's views were to the right to those of May.

Seems not even in the US things are as clear-cut as it seems: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...

Fascinating, thank you!

First and foremost, it is a disproportionately loud group in terms of the media, small or not. This is the important issue.

> Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.

It's going to be funny a few years down the road when the trend comes to Australia before they actually notice.

Here's Australia taking the piss out of woke:

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/why-are-you-like-this

I don't know if iView works overseas, but I think the show is on Netflix too.

Think pendulums reacting to their perceptions of each other, maybe.

I work with a Canadian team but American parent company. We see what they are going through and it is definitely different. I think our version of equality is just working together as peers and respecting each other, there is no performative or ablutionary aspect.

For the record, I think parent co. is genuine and seems very diverse too. Views are my own yada yada.

This isn’t a real thing. It’s an artificial nonsense of social media. It’s nonsense for two reasons:

1a. The number of valid participants is low. It is easy to feel powerful sitting comfortably hidden in your parent’s basement behind a keyboard craving attention and direction. Misery loves company and when such people band together their numbers can appear large compared to something like a real world gathering of persons in a physical space. But it’s not real people in a real space, because that takes considerably greater effort.

1b. The numbers also appear artificially inflated because there is a low effort of repetition, which can appear as false participation, spam, trolling, denial of service.

2. There isn’t any real investment in most of this. Most of the motivation are bored people looking for inspiration to be emotionally concerned. They will point where the carrot leads. That isn’t a movement. A real movement features numerous participants willing to make a personal investment like those criminals that stormed the capital.

When the woke mob hinders the very minority it's supposed to care about, it starts a vicious circle and nothing changes for the best

They've immense power over corporations. It's a flex. It doesn't have to make any sense or to be connected in any way to the people it is allegedly helping.

Insisting to help people is quite insulting, actually. Empowerment means you voice your own grievances. It doesn't mean recruit an army of armchair activists to do it for you.

One have to be careful to not generalize their power, since I hear this a lot. It is strictly restricted to the "cultural sphere", just like a lot of politics itself. It is all about managing affections, not actions. Woke is performative radicalism.

Or to put it this way, if the "woke mob" decided to protest capitalism or even higher/stricter taxes, do you think that anything would change? Probably not, because production for profit it still at the core of every corp while at the same time the woke crowd has a limited understanding of capitalism to begin with (as can be seen by the claims that capitalism is by necessity based on racism). It is the worst of both worlds.

It's not for helping minorities. It's for helping the PMC stay on top, by making rules that only people who grew up in the right class and went to the right schools will be able to follow, cloaking that function in a nominal reason for those rules that's unimpeachable. And it does that very well.

> It's for helping the PMC stay on top

You mean the professional-managerial class? Or something else?

Yes, pretty sure that this is a reference to the professional-managerial class. It's a common refrain on the populist left/"dirtbag left" that identity politics are often dishonest class warfare. (I agree.)

If you save the downtrodden you can't be the saviors of the downtrodden because the downtrodden don't need saving.

I hate this “woke mob” branding, there isn’t one, there are people who care about social issues who are individuals. Some go too far, I agree, but we should aim to treat everyone, no matter what they believe (yes even if you think they are really wrong) with respect rather than pigeon holing all their views in with a group you don’t like.

> people who care about social issues

Translation: people who see an opportunity to debase others for free and put themselves on a pedestal

Update: We call this class of people Mullahs here in Iran. It's been slowly but surely becoming apparent to us that they are somewhat of a societal parasite.

If you look extremely closely at what you just wrote you might see it as slightly ironic.

Edited: removed snark

I actually knew my comment was following essentially the same game-theory as the woke, like almost every single complaint on the internet. The difference in targets' deservability is apparent to me.

Edited: removed snark

Except a lot of those individuals will happily brand you to pigeon hole all your views with a dislikable group, so at this point I think branding them back is fair game.

Okay so now you’re saying you want to get in there and call the other side names just in case. “But but but they started it” is not an argument for anything. I prefer personally to being open to both right wing and left wing ideas and people.

No. I'm saying I don't feel the need to protect any side [+] from being called names. I'm saying people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. That kind of stuff.

[+] note how you just assumed "the other side", and the existence of exactly 2 sides.

These individuals generally share something in common. Whilst I think that "woke mob" may be a bit harsh, arguing that this isn't a group of people (regardless of they themselves think they are a group) is counterproductive. Having a name just makes it easier to talk about this. This isn't about pigeonholing, not any more than labeling people as "far right" or "antifa" is pigeonholing.

But they behave like a mob. The smallest thing can set them off, even them misunderstanding the situation. When they go off, they unashamedly target people's livelihoods. Even if you later have your name cleared, it doesn't undo the damage. The Covington kids are an example that they do behave like a mob.

The alternative interpretation is that they're consciously being malicious.

That goes for literally any group of people though. SJW, Proud Boys, Antifa, Islamic State, Nazis, the CIA, Drug Cartels. They're all made up of individuals, yet I doubt you want to reserve judgement on individual's membership unless you know what exactly they were doing and do believe for most of those.

Some of the nicest people I know work for drug cartels, you really should stop bundling them in with the CIA.

They are the woke mob. Who else ever cared about this? It's the doing of the toxic corporate diversity committees who pull this shit to appear like they're doing something against discrimination without actually making any meaningful changes.

They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.

Another example, Bezos recently banned books critical of transgender from being sold on Amazon. And just like that, everyone forgot about Amazon's brutal suppression of union organising activity in their warehouses. Similarly the rest of Big Tech thinks it can toss out token gestures and placate those who are critical of its business practices.

> avoid being a target of a woke mob

What are they going to do? Stop using GitHub? Good f ing riddance

No, but if GitHub is mentioned in a very angry Twitter thread, and is being targeted by a woke and bored journalist which would write an angry and misdirected article putting the words "racism" and "GitHub" together, is most likely a good enough motivation to avoid a PR disaster

The "woke mob" were chasing them because of the contract with ICE and the police facial recognition stuff that's very profitable and they'd like to continue doing.

The master branch thing was an attempt at misdirection and throwing the mob a bone.

It's a classic PR move. The entire objective was to generate distracting noise.

Policing language is popular among corporations for the same reason oil companies got "woke" about recycling in the 80s:

* It doesn't really change anything and doesn't affect profit margins.

* It affects everybody albeit very lightly and is extemely visible.

* It naturally leads people to shame each other, taking the heat off the corp.

* They can score some progressive points at minimum cost.

Same mechanism, different era.

At some point if things continue to get worse overall, these games wont work because the "woke mob" (not limited to that particular "group", individuals may share the same opinion on such activities, or at least where the most disgruntled overlaps with most capable) will start to realize what you describe and just figure its more effective to target GH infrastructure/employees/family/friends and officers directly, no need for angry tweets (and not strictly related to GH but other corporations that engage in similar services as well).

I read the parent comment to mean that by pro-actively making changes in an effort you avoid the woke buffoons, while completely ignoring the voices of those who ought matter most, you're admitting defeat and in doing so granting the buffoons yet more power.

I'd argue if someone is feigning offense we should call them out on it, not collectively fucking prostrate ourselves.

This whole fiasco just makes me wonder what the hell is going on in the background while we're being distracted by this... surströmming-level red herring.

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