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Comment by lo_zamoyski | Hacker News Reader

It is currently culturally fashionable to construe things in this manner, so unsurprising. It is humorless and lacks common sense. Reasonably intelligent people understand context. They do not flatten all of reality and reduce everything to their favorite pet paradigm, projecting uncharitably all sorts of weird baggage onto the most innocuous of statements.

So now you can't make a quip about wives unless you also make a quip about husbands (or else generalize it to "persons") though even these are now too restrictive for some. Heaven help you if you dare observe that there are differences between men and women, complementary differences no less, that lead to humorous tensions between them and peculiarities particular to each that surface within their shared lives.

Shall we raise a toast to ourselves, savaged men (and women!)? Humor is dead. And we have killed it.

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Common sense is dead. Certain groups of people lack self and/or social awareness to notice that they've replaced religion with ideology. For example, we criticize religion for shaming many parts of our sexuality "Welcome to church, you're a sexual being and you should be ashamed". Now that's been replaced with "You're a man, you should feel guilty because you're from the oppressor group." etc.

Welcome to Western society, you're privileged and you should be guilty and ashamed.

How did we get here?

I think recognizing one’s privilege is uncoupled from how you choose to feel about it.

For most people it's not

The expression "privilege" itself makes people feel attacked and get defensive. If you say the same exact sentence replacing "privilege" for the definition and it greatly changes how people react to what you say

That's a good point. There's absolutely no reason to feel bad about being privileged. You should be happy! Perhaps spread some of that happiness around, make the world a happier place. Everyone wins.

OK I do think there is an issue with wokeness in society. But, I also think there is a problem with anti-wokeness that can be seen here with people chomping at the bit at the first (poorly attributed) use of "misogyny". Women aren't even mentioned, and the only way I see them/misogyny even entering the equation is if you make the rather odd pair of assumptions that an unhappily married man must: 1) be married to a woman, and 2) be unhappy exclusively as a result of his wife. You could attribute it to the result of the woke hivemind's effects, but you could also very much not! It's effectively an unintentional strawman...

I think there is probably a happy medium of wokeness that can be reached via measured discussion between respectful adults. I think in real life (at least in my experience) people are willing to have those discussions, and are much less polarized and divisive than the internet/cancel culture might have you believe.

Black and white thinking is not correlated with intelligence, just with being human (and perhaps breadth of experience).

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