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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

I think this comment is perhaps evidence that we can all read whatever we choose into any sentence.

Particularly since "woke" is starting to become slippery, like "cancel culture" , "the left" and "political correctness," so that it no longer really has a definition (certainly not its original definition) beyond a general pejorative and fear trigger.

I suspect that's just the nature of language though as there are plenty of other definitions that are in flux. Here's one that isn't controversial: "cringe". Cringe is whatever you cringe at according to your own subjective reaction. If people can't agree on general concepts though, good luck having any kind of a productive discourse.

Well, indeed. I'm just old barely enough to remember the 90–2000s debate about "political correctness," and one of the things I find most fascinating about the discussion of "wokeism" is how completely indistinguishable it is from the discussion of "political correctness".

My impression (just an impression) is that the "woke" (or whatever label you want to put on in) stuff is much wider spread and much longer-lived than "political correctness" was.

Political correctness didn't get much traction outside of universities. "Woke" has.

Until they latched onto Woke, the talking heads on the Right were still using PC as a pejorative. That was only a few years ago. PC never went completely away but flowed in and out of fashion like the tide.

The problem with the term "woke", is that it's almost an entirely subjective term. Not everyone shares the same moral tenets, let alone opinions, and there are many kinds of injustices in the world. The more it gets used, the more confusing it is to identify what kind of "wokeism" people are talking about. It's as if it's used to express political outrage, without expressing what people are particularly outraged about...

It’s a word whose origins are in mid-20th century American Black culture, so it’s an instinctively effective boogeyman to a certain generation of white Americans who subconsciously want things to be back a certain way.

Right, because all white Americans are racist! Subconsciously! Gee, I wonder on which side of the woke debate you fall?

Has it ever occurred to you that the certainty with which you express your views actually comes across as very arrogant and plainly racist, and turns people against your way of thinking?

Try debating with rational arguments, not by calling those who disagree with you racists.

If you don’t want to sound like a racist, then don’t make an argument that revolves around the word “woke” without even defining what it means to you. Seems pretty easy, right?

Nobody called you a racist but judging how you immediately and angrily internalized it that way, if the shoe fits....

It was clearly broad enough to me to always be true. When cars first started outpacing horses there were many concerns raised/rhetoric about how going that fast couldn’t ever be safe. And I’m reminded of the many “Twilight Zones” or Star Trek episodes with similar themes.

So probably to be meaningful this would look like all the technological advancements society could make but don’t. Like if the highway systems had been proposed and gone unfunded-as an easier hypothetical to illustrate the point.

I'd argue that a lot of highwat building in the US did a massive disservice to the population (maintenance debt, pollution, unsustainable city planning, neglect of public transportation) and listening to early objectors might have mitigated some of these.

But they were labled as crazy moralists whatever their opinion was. Arguing with the pace and direction of progress is not the same as being anti progress, but for some parties it pays that it's perceived as such....

Fascinating that there is no way to read the flagged comment. What did it say?

Go to your settings and turn on 'showdead'.

Thank you.

Really, the comment is underwhelming. Seems silly to hide it after it's grey already and annotated with all kinds of warnings.

It's to discourage particularly crappy comments from starting pointless discussions. You can't reply to flagged comments but in this case the repliers were faster than the flaggers. It's always better to flag flamemaking comments than to reply to them.

You can set "showdead" in your profile settings to "Yes" to view flagged comments.

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