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Comment by yapyap | Hacker News Reader

I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.

As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.

and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”

I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.

At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years

View on HN

“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.

Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.

The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.

If you tried to steelman woke, what would fall under it?

Conscious of the effects of structural racism.

if the movement stopped at the level of consciousness, then there wouldn't have been as much backlash. It went way beyond consciousness. You are admonished if you aren't actively anti-racist.

I guess a person could be pro-racist, neutral on racism, or anti-racist. Is there another category I'm missing?

Simply not racist. Anti-racist means racist in reverse.

It does not mean that at all.

You can't be neutral against racists if you believe your lack of action is tacit approval.

>Is there another category I'm missing?

"Not racist", i.e. what was in the 90s called "colourblind".

If you describe yourself this way nowadays, and hold to and espouse those principles - not taking race into consideration when making decisions; considering people a priori to have equal moral worth regardless of race, etc. - self-identified "anti-racist" people will call you "racist". This has happened to me on many occasions. It is nonsense, of course. But sometimes they have social power. It's functionally what happened when I was banned from the Python Discourse forum, except they went a step further and claimed (utterly groundlessly) that I was accusing them of "reverse racism" (a term which I do not use, and which I view as an invention of self-identified "progressives" to strawman the views of those opposed to them) in taking other moderation actions against me.

> It's functionally what happened when I was banned from the Python Discourse forum, except they went a step further and claimed (utterly groundlessly)

Are we suppose to pick who to agree with (you or the mods) merely based on tribalistic priors? You didn't post any documentation, there's no way for anyone to fact check whether or not the mods are actually acting in bad faith, or whether or not you were unjustly banned.

>there's no way for anyone to fact check

I've talked about it before. I came to HN because of the Tim Peters suspension, which was related to my situation. I have archives of my related post content (since much of it got deleted) on my blog. Regardless, the burden of proof would be on them to establish that I made any such accusations (the fact of those accusations is clear: https://discuss.python.org/t/im-leaving-too/58408/11 ).

Generally speaking, most people on the left talk about a certain number of ideas. For example, many on the left believe strongly in trans rights. They believe that trans rights are either being actively limited or are actively under threat by people they believe are trying to either get rid of them or force them back into the shadows.

So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs.

People on the left generally do not believe strongly that “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”. They point to the many moral panics, bigoted movements, and real harm done to certain groups in history and do not believe that what some call “open discussion” has historically always led to the least harm.

People on the left generally do not believe that all discussion needs to be censored or tightly controlled. Rather, they view certain beliefs and viewpoints as actively harmful because they spread harmful beliefs about particular demographics. They believe that political discussion can, and does, go beyond what is useful or helpful sometimes.

> “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”

Generally the people saying that really mean "more (listening to what I say) leads to (what I believe) beliefs".

> So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs.

They should probably educate themselves by listening to what she says about women's rights then. Maybe then they'd understand her perspective and her principles.

That would be much, much better than what they actually did: call her a cunt and wish death and rape upon her. Which really is not the most convincing of counterarguments.

It just means being awake with regards to your position in society and privileges. Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications.

The problem, of course, is that "Awareness and acknowledgement of the true nature of society" can be interpreted to mean a thousand different things, some of which are more accurate and actionable than others.

Right. The original meaning was just "politically aware", the same basic metaphor as the "Wide-Awakes" in the Civil War era. If you go back far enough you found it sometimes used in the "wake up sheeple" sense (i.e. referring to a conspiracy mindset). But it's basically never been the self-appellation of a political or cultural movement; essentially everyone who uses it that way is deriving it from critical right-wing discourse.

> Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications.

This has always struck me as a fatal messaging problem. When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.

The real problem isn't that [men / white people] may indirectly get propped-up when others are artificially held down -- it's that people are being held down. The current (and disastrous) progressive messaging often sounds like "we want to hold you down, too".

> When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group...

That's one possible interpretation, yes. Not everything works that way, though. Gay people getting married didn't take anything away from me. As the meme goes, "it's not pie".

Gay marriage succeeded as a movement long before the issue of wokeness came to the fore (with the BLM movement). If you actually read the positions of the thought leaders of the latter movement (people like Ta-Nehisi Coates) the argument is exactly what liberal, white, and right-wing people are afraid of:

The Case for Reparations [1]

People are right to react with vigour to these sorts of large-scale redistribution plans. This is a design of the far-left in academia that has its roots in the communist movements of the early 20th century in Europe and Russia, whose worst excesses led to the deportation and execution of millions of Kulaks in the Soviet Union [2].

You might call this a slippery slope argument but the historical precedent was exactly that: a slippery slope where society slid all the way to the bottom. Once enough people have convinced themselves that it is good and right to use the political process to take property away from a group they consider to be their enemies, there is no limit to the amount of destruction they can achieve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Reparations

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

> Gay marriage succeeded as a movement

It's still illegal in half the world https://www.hrc.org/resources/marriage-equality-around-the-w...

Illegal in well more than half: the UN has 193 members and same-sex marriage is only fully legal in 36 of them, which is less than 20%.

If you look at a map of the world, it is only really a thing in Europe, the Americas and Australia/New Zealand. The only country in Asia with it is Taiwan, which is largely unrecognised and contains less than 0.5% of Asia's population. In Africa, only South Africa–arguably Africa's most Westernised country, and less than 5% of Africa's population. In the Middle East, only Israel – like South Africa, very much the "odd one out" in its neighbourhood – and Israel only recognises same-sex marriages performed overseas, they aren't legal in the country itself.

Not only is it only legal in less than 20% of the world's countries, countries in which it is legal are only around 20% of the world's population

One of the arguments against gay marriage, back in the day, was that gay marriage would somehow take away from straight marriage. It was a pretty vague argument and I never really heard a coherent articulation of it, but a lot of people repeated it.

>When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.

It's also radically different from what "privileged" originally means.

In an apolitical context, to have a privilege is to be consciously treated specially, in highly specific and well understood ways; this is because you have done something specific to earn it; and it's mutually understood that this is not an entitlement and it can be revoked at any time if you violate what's expected of you.

Whereas, in the modern sense, to "be privileged" is to be unconsciously treated specially, in vague and nebulous ways, because of nothing you did but rather because of facts of who you are and what you look like; this is just because life isn't fair; and the only way to fix the problem (if you see it as one) is (supposedly) to enact sweeping social change that will indirectly take it away from you.

I'm totally fine with recognizing that other groups of people might struggle more than me, and maybe we should try to help them. I.e. setting up a free tutoring program in inner city schools is a good example.

I'm not fine with my hard work being dismissed because of my sex, ethnicity, or whatever other 'privileges' I had. When I see someone online speak about privileges, it's often being used as a cudgel to silence someone. It wears away at my empathy.

Perfectly reasonable as long as you maintain the mantra "Is this actually a widespread social problem, or is it people being shitty on the Internet?"

Look, I completely agree, but let's not make it totally one-sided, okay?

F.ex. I regularly have a problem with the cookie-cutter (and utterly meaningless) "advice" of many privileged HN programmers saying "Never had to look for a job" when I told them I am a senior who struggles to find a job currently. Never maintained a network, never had relations that last with former colleagues, never had college buddies etc. As far removes as the classic successful USA dev as I can be really.

Yet these people still think their advice applies and is actually worth anything.

Back on your topic, I don't want to silence them but I want to tell them that their severely filter-bubble-limited take is not very interesting, or even at all helpful.

It's really the same as the topic of this thread as well. Privileged people exist and their takes can still be useful, however, their usefulness can be limited. And again, from where I am standing, I would not want to ever silence you. I only want to make you aware of your bias. We all have them. All "sides" of any debate have bias but hey, that's a completely different (and much bigger) topic.

I find it belittling when they dismiss the power of individual agency.

Posters on this site and elsewhere often assume anti-victimhood messages imply the speaker is a member a privileged class. They assume the speaker's identity based on the ideology they perceive. At the same time they're claiming a moral high ground and chiding their perceived opponent's lack of empathy.

The Baron Von Munchausen, pull yourself up by the bootstraps is especially relevant if you lack privilege. Yet, the would be saviors will assume that I'm not sufficiently aware of my own condition when I mention it. Where's the empathy in that? What could be less empathetic than incorrectly presuming someone's identity and telling them what is the highest social good for their actual identity? Empathy for the individual is dismissed in lieu of talking points about categorical identity.

And there's the rub. You feel like your hard work is dismissed. To be honest, that's a framing problem. I think you misunderstand what people are saying.

Take me as an example: I'm in a very enviable and privileged position. I worked really hard for it. But if someone were to tell me "you're privileged", I don't get my feelings hurt.

I recognize that 1) someone else working 10 times as hard as me still would be extremely unlikely to get where I'm at if they were from another group. 2) If I were in a disadvantaged group, all the hard work I have put in is unlikely to have been enough. 3) Therefore, the fact I'm sitting here, no matter how hard I worked, is ALSO very much down to luck.

The first time I thought about it in those terms, my ego took a hit. It is an uncomfortable upending of the way I used to see the world and my place in it. But it is nonetheless true. Trust me, I am not trying to dismiss your hard work, but make you see it in its true context.

And after some time thinking about this I have a much greater respect for those that struggle as hard as, or harder than, me because they don't have the privileges I was born with.

> I recognize that 1) someone else working 10 times as hard as me still would be extremely unlikely to get where I'm at if they were from another group. 2) If I were in a disadvantaged group, all the hard work I have put in is unlikely to have been enough.

These are massive, hand-wavey statements based on assumptions with no basis. 10 times? Really? Flip your skin colour and add 10x the hard work and you would still be worse off?

I completely agree with point #3, that we are all hugely lucky (and unlucky) in many many many visible and less visible (and, hey, invisible) ways.

I haven't sat down and quantified the difference, no. But it doesn't matter if the number is 2x, 10x, or 100x. The point remains the exact same: to not get personally offended when people point out our privilege. They are not, and have never been, dismissing the work we have done to get where we are. But put in an accurate context, we are perhaps not makers of our own success quite to the degree we once imagined.

My interpretation is something like:

Step 1 - recognising an advantage e.g. "I am straight/white/Asian/tall/short/whatever".

Step 2 - recognising that it's unearned "I didn't choose it, I was just born that way".

Step 3 - is to hold the belief that because it's unearned that no advantage should be assigned to it, we cannot claim that it's preferable, etc.

To me, what it means to be woke requires the belief in step 3.

That's what makes it a kind of funny insult word, because it's logically unworkable and runs counter to well, literally the entire world. It feels like the kind of classic autistic technical gotcha.

If you're stronger and faster you don't get eaten by the tiger. If you're more attractive you get the better mate. At the end of the day it's just like, you know, grow up, deal with it.

> Step 3 - is to hold the belief that because it's unearned that no advantage should be assigned to it, we cannot claim that it's preferable, etc.

This is simply a statement against being prejudiced (racist or sexist). We never needed a new concept or word if thats all "woke" meant.

> That's what makes it a kind of funny insult word, because it's logically unworkable and runs counter to well, literally the entire world.

You're completely misunderstanding what someone means when they use "woke" as an insult. I agree with PG here - as an insult, its basically the same as calling someone a prude / prig.

In context, imagine a statement like this: "Ugh shut up woke people, yes - I know you hate kevin spacey. I don't care right now. He's still an incredible actor and American Beauty is still a masterpiece. Shut up. I'm trying to enjoy the movie."

You can replace "woke people" there with "prude" in that statement and the meaning is unchanged. Essentially, I think there's two separate things: First, being against discrimination in all its forms and second: being really annoying about it. Its that second part - the annoying puritanical finger wagging that people are referring to when they hate on "woke people".

When did "Asian" start become an advantage? Since the introduction of Hart–Celler Act?

When people noticed the good sociopolitical outcomes they've been getting. This is part of how we ended up in the situation where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... could happen (Harvard's actions were intended as "affirmative").

If wokeism remained a personal awakening I don’t think there would be much push back. It’s the virtue signaling and holier than thou judgment people don’t like.

An ideology that highlights the existence of, questions, and probably seeks to undermine a number of current social hierarchies, and power structures.

Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum.

> Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum.

And/or where one falls in the social hierarchy and power structures.

Another interesting perspective on this idea:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...

He also has one titled "of course you know what woke means" that really drives the point.

It's worth keeping mind here that, far from being a right-wing cable-news status-quo apologist or whatever (to put together some assorted contentless booing I noticed upthread), Freddie de Boer is a self-described "Marxist of an old-school variety" with substantial left-wing cred (and meeting a bunch of the stereotypes, such as holding a PhD in English). I don't agree with him on everything, but I absolutely see his view on how leftism has become corrupted in the current day in the US.

It's poisoning the Canadian discourse, too, and I hate it, and have been hating it since approximately 2012. (I saw signs earlier, but didn't recognize them.) I used to vote for the NDP, but now I don't vote at all - the Jack Layton and Ed Broadbent types I remember are gone (literally, in those two cases); now I mainly see people who seem to think that your rights and your value as a person depend on your identity (just, you know, in a way opposed to the historical norm).

> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.

As someone who most folks would indentify as “liberal”, I use this term to describe a very small but vocal group of so-called progressives who are a problem for the liberal cause writ large.

> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.

This is a prime example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been indignantly corrected by so-called progressives when speaking about “Latine” — note that this term is what many/most Spanish speakers (at least ones who aren’t eyeballs deep in “woke” circles) are more likely to use when they don’t want to use “Latino”.

Latinx is one of those white liberal made-up things (of many), and the language police enforcement is off-putting and shows an incredible lack boundaries.

“Woke” ideals resonate well with a narrow group of “progressives”/liberals, but the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public, including but definitely not limited to conservative extremists.

If you want to see some realpolitik on this issue, note how AOC learned (via Pelosi) to get in line with votes and messaging when it mattered even while endorsing progressive/liberal/woke ideologies.

And what did AOC get in return?

> And what did AOC get in return?

We probably won’t know for a long time.

> the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public

I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here - what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation? The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.

> I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here

I never labeled myself as a liberal, I just said that most folks would put me into that category.

I definitely have some beliefs that do not toe the party line of either side of the American divide.

> what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation?

PG just wrote an entire essay on this exact topic, and that essay is what we are commenting on.

I more or less agree with pg’s stance.

> The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.

In your reply, you’ve given me a purity test and then indirectly labeled me as an ignorant member of “the other”.

This is exactly the type of behavior that gives “progressives” and “liberals” a bad reputation, even though most liberals (and many progressives) don’t engage with this sort of rhetorical style.

There are much more constructive ways to have these conversations, and I wish that folks (on both sides, fwiw) would commit to trying to take the more constructive paths.

If there are any specific points about my post that you would like me to clarify or address, I will be happy to do so.

> I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here - what is the "woke" agenda

Well partly it's this exact kind of self righteous language policing.

> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.

Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.

The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left".

Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".

When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people.

1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)

2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes

It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.

> not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group

The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem.

Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push.

For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.

Well said, thank you for this.

> It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.

The reactionaries to “woke” ideas know that (2) is a small number of vocal people and yet they still wrap the anchor around the necks of both (1) and (2). Same strategy for “communism”, “socialism”, “groomers”, “Hamas apologists”, etc. It’s convenient to do this and say all Democrats (or all non-Republicans, or non-MAGA, etc) are painted with this broad brush.

What your comment misses is that the “morality police” has always existed and currently exists along different poles than in the recent past. When I grew up, the social conservatives / incredibly religious were the ones trying to bully people into moral positions. Now, we still have those people (old groups like Family Research Council and new groups like Moms For Liberty) are doing the same thing, but aren’t getting flak from the “anti-wokeness” crowd. Bad faith actors all around.

Exactly. Anyone with any reading comprehension (and honesty) can tell that PG conflates being woke with acting woke early on for exactly this purpose. He also talks a lot about polarization as though it's entirely the "woke mob's" fault, about moralizing without mentioning evangelicals, about "enforcers" without mentioning MAGA paramilitaries, etc. It's all very disingenuous, even for him.

As a non American I don't see MAGA policing online or in tech companies, but I see a lot of woke. So while the things you talk about might be local problem to USA, the woke problem is something USA exports to the entire globe, so it seems like woke has much more power than maga and thus is a bigger problem.

There was a period of time on Musk's X where an internal filter would instaban anyone who wrote the letters "CIS" together.

That period of time is now. That filter is still active.

It isn't:

https://x.com/search?q=cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live

"Cisgender" is a technical/scientific term. The slur is "cis" alone.

That's irrelevant because "cis" isn't blocked either:

https://x.com/search?q=cis&src=typed_query&f=live

Dare say something anti-Trump on X and you'll see massive MAGA policing. As a specific example see the responses to this: https://x.com/Aaronsmith333/status/1876813647625810407

MAGA is a nationalist movement, so obviously it doesn't apply to the whole globe, but each country (in the West and elsewhere) have their own nationalist movements.

I'm from Denmark, and we were first-movers in Europe on "anti-wokeness" since our election in 2003 (before the term existed). Interestingly, as Europe has moved more to the right in recent years, the wave has been quietly receding a bit here.

Other countries outside of the North Atlantic West also have intense nationalist and "anti-woke" movements (Duterte, Bolsonaro, Milei, Putin, etc.) which do their own anti-woke policing, sometimes literally, through law.

In general, my feeling is that the main actual threat to free speech globally is nationalist "anti-woke" movements.

I e met many people in group 2 though. Many of them have legitimate political and economic power. You can’t just brush them off as insignificant.

Agree that group 1 is far larger but it doesn’t take many negative experience to sour the way someone feels about a political ideology.

> Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.

We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first before there's any discussion worth a damn. As best I can tell it just means "any behavior coming from young people I don't like as a cable news viewer". Frankly, I'm at the point where if someone uses the word non-ironically I just write the speaker off as not seriously trying to communicate. Use your words! Describe specific behavior. People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.

TFA spends the first 7-8 paragraphs defining "woke", even a dedicated callout to a concise definition:

  > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

That's a pretty subjective definition. We're back where we started.

Helpfully he spends most of the article elaborating on what he means by "aggressively performative".

So, not such a "concise definition".

[flagged]

It either has a concise definition that actually defines the term or it doesn't. I leave it to the anti-woke to tell me which it is, and I'm still waiting.

"It has a concise definition!"

moments later

"It took a whole article to explain!!!"

Also entertaining - the idea that racism has an uncontested definition.

I think any definition of a contested term is going to end up having a longer explanation (See this whole discussion as a proof-by-example).

It seems like a reasonably concise definition to me. It's reasonable to disagree with the definition of course, but to merely dismiss it as not concise is both incorrect and not useful because it lacks specific criticisms.

You understand as well as anyone that something is either a definition of a term, or it isn't. I'm simply pointing to someone who says "This is a concise definition," and then pointing out that, no, if the definition isn't complete, it isn't a concise definition. And that's fine, we just need to acknowledge that the way people use "woke" is a shorthand for something else, in this case I'd characterize it as the pseudointellectual wet fish flopping of a billionaire struggling to blame someone, anyone, for the world being bad, when he's had outsized control and influence over it for the entirety of his career.

But I acknowledge people may disagree with this.

what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.

Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?

Well b/c of the "focus on social justice" clause. I'd definitely agree though that both parties are way too "aggressively performative".

Well, I wonder what he thinks non-performative social justice looks like. The civil rights movement was certainly performative (as is all protest) and that's basically the only narrative we were offered growing up for how to affect social change.

> Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

I also think there's a pretty big difference between keyboard jockeying / speech policing, and putting yourself in physical danger by physically confronting racists who'd lynch you if there weren't cameras around.

So what is the point here.

That woke people should be resorting to physical violence to further their cause.

Doesn't seem productive or healthy for society.

No that's not the point.

While we're on the subject: I'm having difficulty squaring this part of his essay with history as I understand it.

> "The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power."

That's both literally incorrect (we shouldn't consider the Black Panthers or the ACLU "student movements") and seems ignorant of the real power those organizations had (their agitation led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act).

The same tactics were used against them at the time, too.

As an example, see this old anti-MLK comic; it certainly sounds quite familiar: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/s6ll2c/a...

> Well, I wonder what he thinks non-performative social justice looks like.

It looks like the boring job of actually writing policy. Here in Australia, I've run into several people who work for the government helping to draft policy and things. Eg, one friend works for my state's government helping draft energy policy to fight climate change.

Its tedious and boring, and entirely thankless. But its incredibly important. Its well and good for protesters to send a clear message to the government that the people want change. Its another thing entirely to actually negotiate how those changes will happen on the ground.

How do you improve mental health services? How do you balance the needs of the economy today with the needs of future generations? Its difficult stuff.

>what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.

>In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.

>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

>Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?

He doesn't even point fingers on this matter, but the social justice angle is the evident answer to that.

Calling it performative (aka "virtue signaling") is either mind reading or casting aspersion without evidence.

I don't know what you want. Most of the article is spent elaborating on what that means and providing examples of it.

> Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

> The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so.

Why does he want it to be done quietly? The only way democracy can work is that you convince others of your ideas. Seems like he doesn't want certain ideas to be advocated for at all, go work on them if you want but shut up about it.

Because loudly attacking individuals for not being in complete agreement with your views is rarely effective?

Even more so when some of your views are not widely seen as an agreed upon social norm.

Also, I didn't see anything arguing for this in the article in the first place.

> Because loudly attacking individuals for not being in complete agreement with your views is rarely effective

It's worked wonders for Donald Trump.

If someone makes a racist or homophobic statement and is confronted about it, there is a good chance that he will perceive it as aggressive. Even if the confrontation is controlled.

And if you can't quickly find a racist comment to confront but you still really want the confrontation? That's when we get debates about blacklist or master vs mainline.

Last time I looked, the anti "cargo cult" article was still on the front page...

> Most of the article is spent elaborating on what that means and providing examples of it.

More like starting with existing conclusions and working backwards from them. Even in the example you quote, Graham begs the question of "woke" and "politically correct" being equivalent and works backwards from that assumption - in the process incorrectly pinning the origins of political correctness on university social science / humanities programs and the hippie kids being hired into them in the 70's (never mind the multiple-centuries-long history of the political right policing speech and expression in service of the exact opposite of the intellectual pursuits universities foster; apparently that doesn't count as "political correctness" because reasons).

"aggressively" and "performative" already contain a judgement. The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".

The whole article is an opinion piece that is judging a group of people. I don't think most people would agree with your definition.

And besides, the definition of "woke" is a secondary issue anyway, the article's purpose isn't to propose a definition of woke, it's to judge and criticize people who behave a certain way, and he's done an adequate job IMO of describing the behaviors he's criticizing.

> The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".

The actual meaning of "wokeness" is that it has several different meanings. For instancee, the first could be what you outlined:

1. an "awareness of the existence of social injustice"

And another, equally valid one (that comes about from the reaction to people who embraced the first meaning and proceeded to behave obnoxiously and gain lots of attention) is:

2. the obnoxious and doctrinaire enforcement of the values of the "social justice" subculture on the wider population through bullying tactics (e.g. social media pile ons)

etc.

Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent (usually by the left, as they have more access prestigious institutions, but language is language and no authority can suppress new words and new senses of existing words).

> Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent

I think the thought process is that there was a word and it had a positive meaning. It was then used in a negative way to delegitimize an opponent. So I think some people feel like the word is stolen or still being purposely miss used. For better or worse that is not how language works, in general new meanings can be attached to words and at least in my experience the majority of people using woke negatively are not trying to miss use the word.

"Wokeness" itself implies taking some form of (performative) action. You can be aware of social injustice existing and not be "woke", in my opinion at least.

The problem appears to be with performativeness specifically. Because it is performative, it is superficial, and that's bad.

What this post is hilariously doing is policing what is considered superficial humanity and what is not.

Let's be woke but really mean it lads, then the conservatives will be with us!

> We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first

Incidentally, this has been a major part of the post-election discussion about it.

I agree that the term has become diluted to a point that it's lost most meaning, and in many cases it means "behaviors and opinions I disagree with".

I think it mostly means some combination of: morality police, people against "wrongspeak", holier-than-thou attitudes, white people advocating for topics they don't understand, and in general a kind of tribal behavior that "others" people who don't fully buy into the entire spectrum of ideas this group is selling, i.e. they treat their beliefs as absolutely true, and anyone who questions them or wants to debate them are automatically othered.

> People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.

I agree and disagree. The media landscape has had a major hand in shaping the discussion, and social media has validated the worst fears of the people working themselves into a tizzy. e.g. if someone supports trans rights but has concerns about minors receiving certain surgeries and wants to discuss those concerns, they're put in the same category as transphobes who wish real harm on other people. Depending on where they raise these topics, they'll automatically be blocked and/or put on lists of transphobic people.

Discussions that actually focus on something material, concrete or substantial are derailed by collective community behaviors that refuse to engage with the concrete and substantial.

It's a sad state of affairs for public discourse, and figuring out how to de-escalate the conversation and somehow return to substantive good-faith conversations might be the most important problem of the century.

Mostly means or what it’s become to mean? I was on a college campus in 2002 and the word typically painted a picture. Someone who was hyperaware of real or perceived injustices and was likely to have incense burning in their rooms. The people who I thought were “woke” would have agreed with me. Down to the incense in a lot of cases.

The right is notoriously great at hijacking words terms/words and flipping them into something nefarious. Or sometimes that exact opposite like they did turning the well supported by all Estate Tax into the conservative hating death tax.

Now woke has morphed into this weird thing. A clapback insult for the insecure to justify their insistence at exclusion of one kind or another.

Oh, absolutely what it has come to mean over time. But what it has come to mean is ultimately what matters at the moment I think. The term has evolved, and I think that's a big reason there's so much polarization and disagreement about what it means.

Some subset of people understands the "true" meaning of the word, and the set of ideas originally associated with it. I suspect the majority of people are more likely to use it in the sense it has evolved into.

Some kind of separation needs to happen. The underlying ideals and ideas vs. the tactics people employ in bringing them about. If someone's MO is to judge/shame people, exert their moral superiority over others, and see the people around them in absolute terms, that set of behavior is particularly harmful to the underlying goals. It presents itself as the "truest" form of support for the goal and the only right way to go about achieving it. But it uses coercion/manipulation to take advantage of people's fear of public shaming and the consequences of "getting cancelled" which tends to ensure silence from people who see themselves as more pragmatic but not interested in getting labeled with "them" for raising questions about reasonable things.

I agree that when people use it now, it's less about anything substantive and entirely about what people feel the word has come to mean. Not sure how, but we need to fundamentally change the conversation.

The essay touches on something that I think explains that, though. Disputing an actual specific allegedly-woke idea requires one to confess their heresy specifically, so as the essay says, it's not smart to confess directly to holding a specific heretical opinion.

Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency, as Black author John McWhorter argues. He gets called all kinds of nasty things for speaking that opinion, and he's Black! On the other hand, it's harder to "cancel" or accuse someone of absolute racism (or race traitor-hood) if they say "I don't think the woke mindset is helping, and I think there are better ways to help Black communities."

So that's why imho the word "woke" is a popular tool among those who don't like the various components of it, which are much, much easier to enumerate than those on the Left incredulously pretend. It's basically just:

1. The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with, and that society should punish those who spoke those ideas.

2. Ideologies about race and generational guilt which basically boil down to "the whole world would be much better off if all Europeans had mysteriously vanished 1500 years ago and we wish that had happened."

3. Ideologies that have to do with gender, which I dare not even elaborate on, because of how heretical all but one opinion on that subject is.

> ... and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency

Well, first we could start by having a discussion of whether or not it is actually true that "they are being told they are always victims with very little agency".

Now, if that were in fact true, we could go on to talk about how we might reduce that harm, and one part of that might involve saying that less.

But then again, were that not true, then we could pretty much discard the person's objections and move on to something that is actually happening.

I read and respect McWhorter, but I don't think that (a) he's right about everything or that (b) your one line summary characterizes his position accurately.

I'll reply separately to your attempted summary.

1. No, this is not the point at all. The actual view that you're referring to is that sometimes people are in fact harmed by verbal behavior and cultural phenomena, that we should recognize that, and when possible and appropriate seek to mitigate it. That doesn't mean punishment or book-banning (ideas which come from those most often associated with being anti-woke) but rather a willingness to examine reality through the eyes of people other than ourselves and above all to be kind.

2. No, that is also not the point at all. The actual view is that there has been, at least within the world once controlled by various European powers since somewhere in the range of 1200-1500, a wilful ignorance and downplaying of the horrors created by the colonialism perpetrated by those European powers.

3. Since you don't elaborate, it's hard to respond to this. But I will note that the recognition that gender and sex are not the same thing goes back many decades, if not centuries; that gender roles and sexuality have not been even remotely close to fixed across the time and space in which human civilization has existed; that the response from people who declaim the "woke" approach is so often summarizable as "I don't like it and other people should lead more miserable lives because I think so".

There also seems to be a willful ignorance of the horrors created by the Aztec, Qing, and Songhai powers (among others) before Europeans arrived in force. I won't attempt to defend or excuse the crimes against humanity committed by European colonial powers, but focusing on them seems particularly myopic. We can educate people about the history of that period but to what end? Assigning blame for the current state of affairs to dead people doesn't actually solve any problems today. The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us.

> The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us. I think a distinction should be made between revisiting history (in a bid to understand how we got where we are now), and assigning blame.

I'm not sure how we can move forward without some degree of empathy; "Yes, you got the short end of the stick, but how about if we try such and such to ameliorate the impact of the past on your present".

I don't think you are advocating sweeping the past under the rug, I'm just saying that telling a person who is still feeling the sting of a perceived slight (real or imagined) is unlikely to result in moving forward.

Sure, but do you see one of the primary reasons why there is such ignorance? Because to acknowledge that there were (or are) great, powerful, complex, sophisticated, organized cultures in parts of the world before European colonization happened undercuts one of the central myths that European colonization has wanted to tell about itself - that it, and it alone, was responsible for bring all those attributes to the parts of the world it touched.

Our ignorance of the cultures (positive and negative) in parts of the world where colonization did not happen is motivated by something less pernicious - people are parochial, and European culture in particular took a fairly strong stance that despite knowledge of the civilizations along (e.g.) the silk road, they were of no particular significance since they didn't have (Jesus|Bach|Newton|Galileo|etc.)

You ask "to what end?" I would say the end has multiple components. One is that history rhymes and so if you want to understand the future better, understanding the past better will often help with that. Another is that cultures themselves carry the past forward for amazingly long periods - the English have still not really abandoned the Norman conquest of 1066 as a socio-structural signifier even though it was nearly 1000 years ago. The Hopi still have many stories of things that occured in their world 600-1200 years. If these historical stories are inaccurate, a culture is doing itself no favors carrying them forward. And similarly, a culture that carries such a story as a tale about injustice is not done any favors by being told "ah, fuhgedaboutit".

>Because to acknowledge that there were (or are) great, powerful, complex, sophisticated, organized cultures in parts of the world before European colonization happened undercuts one of the central myths that European colonization has wanted to tell about itself - that it, and it alone, was responsible for bring all those attributes to the parts of the world it touched.

What? The Rennaisance that grew birth to the Modern West was an intentional attempt to revive and surpass the ideals of Old Rome and Greece. When they excavated the Pyramids, many in the West took to adopting parts of Egyptian Culture for legitimacy, the Washington Monument being one prime example. Imperial China was seen as stagnant, but they certainly were respected as highly civilized and organized. What special qualities they gave themselves were their flexibility, rationality and technological superiority, which is not entirely wrong in the battlefield.

This "central myth" you are saying Europeans told themselves sounds more like a fictional strawman to attack and is contradictory, especially in the context of OP's point towards the attitudes held by the people currently attacking Western ideals, not defending it. It's not really refuting the point either that the world pre-1945 was a brutal place, and EVERYBODY was trying to conquer and dominate each other, it was just the West was the strongest of them all and won at the end.

That's why if you solely focus on the West as opposed to understanding the general context of the world at the time and critiquing equally those other culture, it calls into question whether one really cares about these shared ideals of anti-imperialism or if it's just an excuse for nationalist grievances that they weren't on the dominating side. And you know, in Turkey, in China, in India, that kind of mindset very much is the case. It's not that imperialism was bad, it was only bad because it happened to them. For those they conquered, it was glorious event to be valorized.

The renaissance and colonialism have an interesting, complex relationship with each other. As do the veneration and fetishization of dead civilizations vs. conceptions about contemporaneous ones. So sure, elements of the renaissance may have venerated "Egyptian Culture", but there were very few signs of it having any respect for contemporary Egyptian culture.

The myth is "we bought civilization to places that didn't have it". And that is absolutely a lie. There is a second myth that is particularly applicable in the Americas, which is that Europeans discovered a land that God intended them to have dominion over (essentially ignoring or belittling the existing civilization that was here). Neither of these are fictional strawmen - they are real and documented positions found through the writings of European explorers and American settlers and leaders.

It remains puzzling to me why settler colonialism (the dominant, though not only form of European expansionism) was not common in either the pre-1492 Americas or in Asia. The cultures/civilizations there certainly were expansionary but rarely seemed to feel the need to replace existing populations with their own. Whatever the reasons, the results are wildly different.

Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures.

> Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures

Some cultures have known that things are not binary for a very long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)

That's orthogonal to my statement. They still recognize that male hijra are not women. Nobody in history has said "I would like a wife to start a family, I will go find a nice hijra", and if they did, they were quickly disabused of the viability of that plan.

It's not orthogonal because you made no attempt to make it clear whether were you were talking about sex or gender, which are not the same.

Being "a wife to start a family" requires a person with female sex, and is typically associated with female gender. But that association is not required, and has not been so across all human cultures and all time.

Men are adult human males. Women are adult human females. If you want to talk about the social roles that men and women occupy, you should use the appropriate words, which are not "men" and "women".

What words would they be?

FWIW, I try to use "male/males" to refer to sex, and "man/men" to refer to gender, since AFAICT, there are no terms that clearly refer to gender.

"mascs" and "femmes" are ones that I have seen used.

"men" and "women" should not have their meaning diluted. They already have the meaning of "male" and "female".

We dilute, pervert, change, invert, transform and reshape the meaning of words all the time, throughout history and across languages. I don't see anything special about the words we use to describe sex and gender.

We can change "war" to mean "peace", "freedom" to mean "slavery", "ignorance" to mean "strength", and "man" to mean "woman". We shouldn't, though. Some meanings are worth preserving, because they have deep legal implications.

Realizing that the sex classifications (male, female, intersex etc) are only tangentially related to gender roles seems to me to be about the most basic concession to reality that one could make in these times.

What constitutes the gender role of "a man" or "a woman" is fluid, not well defined, and subject to change. What constitutes "femininity" and "masculinity" is also fluid, not well defined, and subject to change.

Even if sex was a binary (which it isn't, but it's not a terrible argument to say that it is close enough to one for many purposes), when it comes to gender we all exist in a multi-dimensional space with so many variations on so many themes. Insisting that gender is binary is so harmful, even to people who consider themselves as being at one or other end of that binary. It's fine that there are people who fully embody a particular Victorian-era notion of masculine and feminine (or any other one, really), but the vast majority of us are nowhere near that simple. Insisting that gender comes in only two forms, and has no fluidity to it hurts all of us.

> Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims

> The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with

You seem to be arguing that Black people are harmed by being exposed to ideas about victimhood, and then ridiculing the idea that being exposed to ideas can be harmful.

No, they're arguing that society should punish those who spoke those ideas, where "those ideas" is whatever terminally online leftists are whinging about at the moment (i.e. a bar that is way too low for the proposed repercussions).

But I think you already know that and went with the selective quote anyway.

> But I think you already know that and went with the selective quote anyway.

Whenever I see someone try to pull bad-faith arguing like that, I just immediately bail.

Another fan-favorite of that cohort is incessant demands of proof.

> Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)

You're making the assumption that most of that isn't performative nonsense that in reality doesn't help anything.

Also known as slacktivism.

It got to the point where I would see pronouns and flags and URLs to DEI policies (Click here to stop racism now! Really?) in people's email signatures that I would immediately assume they were insincere and phony.

One person I knew had "LGBTQ Ally" in their professional signature. It's one step removed from writing I HAVE GAY FRIENDS and frankly I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins to proclaim their allegiance. None of this has place in a professional setting.

Why a weird, distorted take. People who put “LGBTQ Ally” in their signatures aren’t being phony. They have friends or family who are LGBTQ, and being visible is one way to support them. If it’s unprofessional to be an ally to LGBTQ friends and family then it is easy for hateful folks to claim it’s unprofessional to even be LGBTQ. Why does it offend you so much for someone to say “I support my gay friends”?

It doesn't offend me.

Picture going into a restaurant, and before the hostess seats you she says "I'd like to remind you that I love black people".

That's out of place it is. It doesn't offend anyone, it's just an odd thing to say. You may not perceive it so if you're inside the bubble.

I think what you're not getting is that there are lots of places in rural America that are violently queerphobic. Queer people are targets of hate crimes. There's a mainstream religion and political party in America that's tiptoeing around rhetoric of eradication of queer people.

So yeah, it can't be assumed businesses are queer friendly because lots of American Christians and conservatives would prefer queer people dead, or at least back in the closet.

> Picture going into a restaurant, and before the hostess seats you she says "I'd like to remind you that I love black people".

I’ve gone into a restaurant and had the hostess tell me they don’t serve gay people.

So I think it can be very contextually relevant for the hostess to say they’re an ally.

What holes you like or don't like and what you got in between your legs should be completely irrelevant at a restaurant and not something the waitress or waiter should have any interest in.

Google Maps allows you declare your allegiance. You can mark a business as LGBTQ+ friendly (why should I have to declare that and it not just be assumed?).

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/addi...

You can also declare a business as "woman owned/led"

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/empo...

and "black owned"

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21348990/google-black-own...

So, I'm very visibly queer and from the south. I have always been appreciative of gestures like this or in the parent comment - because it is not a safe thing there to assume that people would be accepting.

I suggest you try steel-manning this. Imagine that the people who want these things have rational reasons for wanting them. What might they be?

> why should I have to declare that and it not just be assumed?

That’s an easy question with an easy answer.

Because it can’t be assumed. Because there are people (who own businesses) who are not friendly to LGBTQ+ people. And people (such as LGBTQ people) may want to find or avoid certain places.

Is a good-faith interpretation of such a signal that it would be some sort of silly performative measure?

https://www.queerty.com/wyoming-bar-calls-murder-gay-people-...

Thank you for posting this. For those who didn't click through, its an article headlined "Wyoming bar calls for murder of gay people as “cure for AIDS” and are selling it as merch", and shows a picture of the bar's horrifically bigoted t-shirt.

People who dismiss labels like "LGBTQ-friendly" as "performative moralism" (to use the term Paul Graham used multiple times in his article) have clearly never had their very existence threatened on a frequent basis simply because of who they are.

This stuff has always seemed deeply wrong to me, as someone that actually believed in the values I was told were right and proper.

Pronouns are pretty useful when you have a lot of Chinese and Indian coworkers and don't know what to call them by their names. People from HK tend to give themselves English names, but mainland Chinese I know don't.

Of course that's not their original purpose and they aren't very fit for their original purpose. (it's to include trans people, but trans women don't want you to ask what their pronouns are, they want to be addressed like women.)

> they want to be addressed like women

Yes but how are you supposed to know if an obvious male in 'feminine' type attire wants to be referred to as she/her unless you ask? Could just be a man with a niche fashion sense. See e.g. Grayson Perry.

> I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins

did you know LGBT were explicitly targeted in the holocaust? You know about the holocaust, right? You are aware that 1940s Germany is when and where the holocaust happened, right?

> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture.

The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.

That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.

I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".

> PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone

That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part:

> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.

It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad.

> Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.

Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?

PG says

>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.

What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.

> I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.

Is that really your charitable reading of the part you quoted?

In my mind, a charitable reading would be that he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be. I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.

It is a divisive topic already, we would all be better off trying to understand as well as we can before replying.

> he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be

Who is "the woke"? How big do they think big is? How does PG know what this nebulous group all agrees upon? How big of an issue does he think it is, as far as actions to be taken? Is "the woke" just anyone who disagrees with him here?

Not specifying any meaning makes it literally a meaningless, divisive (us vs. them), dismissive statement on racism at best, and at worst, rhetoric to baselessly paint my opponent as more extreme than myself, because I am of course precisely the correct amount of reasonable.

A rebuttal in similar style would be "racism is actually a problem larger than thought by those who think it isn't", which you may notice is also meaningless and dismissive.

Pretty much all of that is answered if you actually read the article.

I just read the article, and I can conclusively say that no, he does not explain how big a problem racism actually is, he claims that its all humanities professors and students (my experience as a physics and engineering student prior to 2015 suggests otherwise), nor does he explain why he is such an expert on what "the woke" all believe.

What he does do is explain at length how unfair it is that offenses he considers minor are now grounds for termination. See one of my other comments for details about why professors need to be particularly aware of the hostile environment they can create by dint of being in a position of considerable power over their students.

> I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.

I think it is a weakness of the article that PG does not address this directly. He dis say that racism is

> Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be

So if someone only uses woke to mean "being aware of and attentive to important social issues" it is easy for the to wake away with the impression that PG painted their concerns as overblown.

If I was PG's editor I would suggest replacing 'woke' with prig here for clarity.

My charitable reading is that he believes the concept of wokeness is a bigger problem than racism. I feel that's wrong on its face, but an actual point-by-point (indeed, line-by-line) retort to this essay would be exhausting and ultimately pointless.

To whit, he repeatedly brushes aside the concept of hostile work environment, in particular professors making their students feel uncomfortable, as if its just a question of one person making their equal feel uncomfortable due to a simple disagreement. This is a dramatic misread of why a professor (who is by definition in a position of power over the student, and such power may well include the career and profession of the student, even ignoring the sexual overtones, which are all-too-common as well) needs to be aware of and avoid hostile environments. Like, a woman who constantly hears from her math professor how s/he thinks women are bad at math will likely not be super-psyched to continue with math coursework. I would certainly leave a company if a manager was constantly insulting whatever group of people I was born into, and they pay me to be there. If I'm paying thousands of dollars a semester, the least the professor can do is stay in their lane.

That's five sentences to retort 2 more-or-less throwaway statements. The entire essay is stacked with stuff like that.

And its all pointless because odds are, instead of changing any minds, or even engaging with what I've said, the anti-woke types will just vote it down.

I think that wokeness is increasing racism. The woke people tend to throw around "-isms" a lot. It is sometimes enough to not be on the extreme left-wing view to be called "racist", or even "Nazi" immediately. Especially on platforms like Reddit. I've been very left-wing in my youth myself, which - in retrospect - happened mostly through indoctrination in school. I doubt that I ever turned very much into the other direction, and I see myself very much in the middle with most topics.

My personal philosophy for most topics is to find out what the extremes are, then look at what the middle between these would be, and then call that the ideal.

On Reddit, that philosophy is enough to be called "racist" and "Nazi". Trying to start a proper discussion to (in-)validate any of my - in my opinion - rational points was met with "I don't talk to Nazis!" several times. Mind you, I never even talked about race or anything similar and most times not even about culture. I basically formulated my starting points, added some facts, and was ready to discuss. There were very few discussions that really took place and I have even changed my opinion on several topics based on these discussions. But in the last few years, even these few discussions became less and less. I can only remember one discussion in the last two years that I had with a left-wing person (a teacher from Africa) and I only got this far because our kids were playing with each other. Based on what she told me, I am pretty sure that I would not have the chance for that discussion under other circumstances. She even thanked me for that conversation and told me, that she could not remember the last time that she could talk so open to anyone. I don't know if she realized that she told me how she categorized every negative feedback about her as "racist" half an hour earlier. Strangely, the more to the left a person is leaning, the less they like to discuss nowadays. I find that very strange and also not helpful to their case. If I have two parties where one of them likes to discuss and argue, while the other one directly calls anyone with a slightly different opinion a swear-word, I tend to sympathize more with the party that likes to speak with me. I've yet to encounter a really right-wing extremist that is actually racist. I know that they exist, and I have a friend who was in one of these groups when he was young, but I never had anyone tell me directly that they find any specific ethnicity inferior to others or something in that regard. Well, except for members of a certain religion, but I don't want to start that topic here.

Btw., I am German, and I associate the word "Nazi" with war, racism, and industrial-scale mass murder. But today it is enough to say "I don't like how the immigration into Europe is handled, and I think we should reduce the amount of illegal immigration" to be called a racist and even a Nazi. Ffs, I've seen people in high ranks calling people "racist" because their products were criticized. It had nothing to do with race or anything like that, only with the quality of the product, but they still throw that word around as if everything was just based on race. And if people say that everything and everybody is racist, they at some point start believing that themselves.

Nowadays, you really have to be careful if you criticize anyone's work if they are part of any minority. What's even more ridiculous, most times it's not even the person themselves, but some other person who has their "everyone is racist" opinion, and they will start attacking everyone who dares to critique anyone belonging to any kind of minority. That leads to "toxic positivity", where no-one dares to call out any BS. And that leads to bad products being created. Just look at some of the films and games that have been produced in the last few years. Concord is a good example of something that is the result of this "woke" culture.

This is bad in so many ways. If you hire people by how good they fit into their role, the heritage of the applicant must not be a factor. If the pool of applications does not fit the overall demographic, that is not the fault of the recruiting company. If a company obviously discriminates against anyone, they should be held accountable. That is what I call the balanced solution.

But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive. Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results. You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session. And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway. That only creates further resentments.

The greatest success I have seen in the fight against racism was not seeing color. We should be color-blind and treat everyone equally. For a time, that worked great. Today, the heritage, gender, color of skin and even sexuality are things that have to be acknowledged, recognized and valued. I've only seen bad results coming out of this and nothing positive.

Oh, and about the part of the professors making their students "feel uncomfortable"; Of course, if a professor says something like "Women belong in the kitchen anyway", or any really sexist or racist stuff, that behavior is not okay, and they should face consequences for that. Only making someone "feel uncomfortable" is not enough, though. To learn, you have to be told if you are wrong. Feedback can't just be positive, and it doesn't help anyone to be wrapped in cotton candy for their whole education. That's what leads to the aforementioned "toxic positivity".

About my last point, I strongly recommend this podcast. One part dedicated to this is timestamped, but I recommend listening to the whole thing. It's really good and it explains a lot about our behavior. https://youtu.be/R6xbXOp7wDA?si=MCF3hfZxe9NmzJ-b&t=4724

Buddy, if wokeness is making you a racist then you were always a racist especially within the US context where families have endured 100s of years of generational racism. You’re not making any sense

> And that leads to bad products being created. Just look at some of the films and games that have been produced in the last few years. Concord is a good example of something that is the result of this "woke" culture.

I didn't play Concord and only saw Sony are shutting it down shortly after release due to poor sales. The reviews I saw were about uninteresting gameplay and characters. What exactly was "woke" about it?

> But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive. Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results. You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session. And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway. That only creates further resentments.

I agree, forcing specific percents of people is counterproductive. It would be good if it happened naturally, but it didn't for a variety of reasons (some of them various -isms, like hiring managers with biases, poor schooling outcomes or directions due to bad locations/prejudices; some of them more widely cultural, religious, personal). But are you aware of any place where there are actually forced distributions of people to hire? I'm aware of multiple efforts to level the playing field at the hiring stage, including by the European Comission (on men/women equality). But they're all about goals, with extremely explicit caveats that the best candidate should be picked, but if two candidates are equal, the less represented one should be preferred to add diversity. Diversity in a business or public facing organisation is good for them due to a wider representation of ideas and lived experiences. Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.

About Concord: There is a lot of discussion about why Concord failed. Some say that the price was too high. But at the same time, games with the same or even higher prices sold just fine. Then there is the argument that the genre of hero shooters is just over-saturated. This is also not true. Look at Deadlock, which (AFAIK) is still in a closed playtest phase and currently has a five-figure player count according to SteamDB. Or Marvel Rivals, which currently has > 270,000 players online. One "non-woke" mistake they made was the marketing. Apparently, very few people even heard about that game before it was cancelled. Then, there is the awful character design. No one in their right mind could call that design good. That's where that toxic positivity comes to mind. That is probably the most criticized thing about that game. If you research how that happened, you might find things like these: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1d85lr9/con...

And that's what really pisses off the average guy. It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues. The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men. So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience. But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner. Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this. Here, the consequences were quite spectacular. The average gamer who plays hero shooters wants to have their escapism in games and be the great hero that they can't be in real life. This game did not provide that. There are also games that are openly about specific statements, and they openly communicate that. They are also usually niche products because of that because - like I said - the average gamer wants escapism from games.

An example where that's done better is Baldur's Gate 3. The overall game is great, but you also have all the relationship options you might like. I learned that the hard way, when I accidentally broke my carefully created romance between my male avatar and a female party member. I was just being friendly to another male party member, which directly started a gay romance with him. In this case, I would have preferred an option to select the sexual preferences before that happens, but it's nothing that makes the game bad.

> Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.

Well, that doesn't look like you are really open to any discussion on this, since you're dismissing anything that's said about this as "nonsense" and you are calling anyone who brings up the examples you just mentioned "right-wing crisis actors" by default. That's not how you discuss this. You bring up your position and already define any other perspective as invalid. But maybe I am wrong, and you are actually willing to change my mind. So, what do you say about this video? It's less than 1.5 minutes and I think it is a good example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghBAcxEMzM

> Well, that doesn't look like you are really open to any discussion on this, since you're dismissing anything that's said about this as "nonsense" and you are calling anyone who brings up the examples you just mentioned "right-wing crisis actors" by default

I'm calling the nonsense claims nonsense.

> So, what do you say about this video? It's less than 1.5 minutes and I think it is a good example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghBAcxEMzM

It's a good example of grifting, yes. We have an ad by the LA fire department where a high positioned person at it talks about diversity. Considering the high amounts of incidents between police and minorities, and high distrust of officials, having the fire department be diverse and representative of the population it serves is a good idea, no? That being said, that must happen with regards to what their job is. No point in hiring someone who can't do the job. And you'll notice that in the ad (or at least the cut this youtuber has chosen to use for engagement, who knows if it's representative or not) the person doesn't say they'll hire anyone or will have a quota. There's a very dumb and aggressive attempt at a dismissal/joke/I don't even know what about a potentially sexist reaction to the above ("can she carry me"). I personally trust the fire department or medic will be able to do their job regardless of their gender or skin colour or whatever. If they're indeed hiring incompetent people because of quotas or any other reason I'd want to know, but neither the ad, nor the youtuber make that claim.

So yes, thank you for illustrating my point. There's a bunch of outrage about "DEI" and quotas and what not, but when you look at the substance, it's nothing.

> And that's what really pisses off the average guy. It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues. The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men. So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience. But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner.

While it's true that that's the main demographic, maybe game publishers are trying to add others as well? Increase their target demographic if you will.

> Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this

You're mixing a lead's personal opinion with what the game's options are. I personally don't consider the characters being ugly to be a game stopper (and I'm not alone, I don't think anyone complained about Travis looking like he did in GTAV), but I can see how that can be a problem for some.

What I'm understanding you saying re: Concord is that the game was poorly marketed, had bad character designs, and also one of the developers made some ill-considered tweets 4 years before the release of this game.

Absolutely, that one dev has some weird opinions. But if those opinions are/were core to the game design, and done on purpose, then the marketing also failed to get that point across.

There's also something sort of funny about digging up 4-year-old tweets and saying "see, this is what cancel culture looks like in action".

Speaking to the concept of "DEI hires", the implication is always that the person in that role is only there because they met some quota. The reality of affirmative action was that frequently, you could never get into that role, regardless of qualifications, if you had the wrong skin color. And that wasn't just like a backroom sort of thing. There are countless examples of explicitly racist policies in the US prior to 1964. But the funny thing is, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it became illegal to hire based on race in either direction. "DEI Hire" affirmative actions are explicitly illegal, and it would be an easy case to win if you thought you lost the job to a less-qualified "DEI" candidate. Indeed, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that racial quotas (of any stripe, but especially "hire more minorities") are illegal.

Re: that video, I see that as less of a policy fail and more of a marketing fail. Like, everybody producing that video understood that as "when a firefighter, ANY firefighter, is physically carrying somebody out of an actual fire, a great number of things have already gone VERY wrong, and being a racist prick about the exact race/gender/etc while a rescue is underway is severely missing the point". But nobody bothered to run that in front of somebody who wasn't adjusted to how firefighters see the world.

Firefighters' physical exams are notoriously physically demanding, because the consequences of not measuring up are pretty dire. And yet I know several female firefighters.

> Concord is that the game was poorly marketed, had bad character designs, and also one of the developers made some ill-considered tweets 4 years before the release of this game.

You almost got it. Not "some developer made some ill-considered tweets 4 years ago", but the Lead Character Designer. That is the person who is responsible for the whole character design concept. And because you're so focused on the Tweet being from was 4 years ago: That game did not magically appear a few months ago. 4 Years ago, it was deep in development and that person was already very publicly apparent about their opinion regarding the main target audience. The characters in question were being formed at that time.

And it was also the first hit I got on Google with my search query. It's not that I dug really deep. It was literally the first result I got.

People like these are what the average guy calls "woke" nowadays. This person has a very toxic agenda and is still put in a lead position for a project with a budget that - according to some sources - may have been up to 400 Million USD. And that is an example on what is considered problematic regarding the DEI topic. If you think that this is not a problem and not even a part of the reason why games like these fail; fine. Then we agree to disagree on this point. You could also look at the game "Dustborn", if you want something that you could find in the glossary next to "woke game". I don't even know what to say about that mess. But that game at least was openly marketed for it's woke target audience.

> Indeed, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that racial quotas (of any stripe, but especially "hire more minorities") are illegal. I don't like this Dave Rubin guy, but this video sums it up pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwjREOWtm0

In the comments, you can find plenty of people who tell their own stories matching the one told in the video. So, this apparently does happen. People see that and they're angry. Normal, simple people see that. Some of them, who were neutral before, now look at these minorities with distrust. That's what I mean when I say that these practices sometimes increase racism in the end. That's normal human behavior. If you say those things and are called "racist" in response, that doesn't help. Instead of a proper discussion and trying to find solutions on how equality can be reached without creating these issues at the same time, people need to get together and find solutions. Calling each other swear words and continuing as planned does not help, but worsens it.

> that video, I see that as less of a policy fail and more of a marketing fail. Like, everybody producing that video understood that as "when a firefighter, ANY firefighter, is physically carrying somebody out of an actual fire, a great number of things have already gone VERY wrong, and being a racist prick about the exact race/gender/etc while a rescue is underway is severely missing the point". Wow. I have to admit that I did not manage to get to that train of thought. So, they created a narrative that people care how their rescuers look like, and then they call the people in their story "racist pricks"? How often does this happen that somebody complains about who they were rescued by? I haven't heard that before. So either you know of some of these cases - in that case, please enlighten me. Or are you already conditioned to see racism everywhere, even in made up stories? Honestly, how did you manage to interpret racism into that video?

That is precisely the problem that I mean. People call out an obviously bad video. Instead of saying: "Oh boy, they messed up there. Let's see how we can fix that." the people criticizing it are being called "racist prigs". That will surely improve the situation! Well, shit. If that's how people "discuss" things nowadays, society is really doomed.

The only thing that I know average people complain about is when anyone considers lowering the criteria for physically demanding jobs specifically for women. And that is precisely what this question is about. "Is that woman able to carry a man out of a burning house?". If the answer is "Yes, she has to meet the same physical requirements as the men", then that is the answer that should make everyone happy. To answer "It's his fault to get into a fire anyway" is the worst answer anyone could give. And this went through numerous hands before it was published. So either no one involved realized that this spot could be a bad idea, or there was toxic positivity involved again. Things like these push people further apart when we should be working together. But, I forgot. Nowadays, one also gets called a "racist" for listing biological facts like "women have different bone structure, average muscle mass and hormone levels than men".

Yeah, I can't see why the average person would have anything against the woke people.

Wokeness means awareness of things like racism, the functional purpose of complaining about wokeness is to rollback anti-racist policy and social norms. Whether or not PG is a useful idiot or a thought leader on this subject would be a homework assignment for the class.

Wokeness means an elaborate holier-than-thou pecking order among affluent people, allowing them not to do anything of substance at all, because they already reached secular salvation by using the right words ceremoniously.

It reminds me of the deeply corrupt late Medieval church. A reformation is long overdue.

I don't think anyone reading this article would conclude that PG believes racism is a bigger problem than wokism. Which wildly diminishes the actual real-world impact of racism and wildly exaggerates the actual real world impact of wokism.

Your interpretation is the exact problem. How many times do people need to say it? Racism is bad, what else there to say? Because he did not say it multiple times throughout the essay we are going to label him though and suggest and at the same time conclude that the thinks wokism is worse than racism. Sheesh that’s a great imagination.

He spends 4500+ words talking about how bad wokism is (mostly complaining about how some people are complaining about language), and all of maybe 100 words acknowledging racism, and even then uses some of those to say it isn't as bad as the woke think. If you were writing an essay opposing a solution to a problem you really believed to be a terrible problem, wouldn't you take a little more time on why the solution was counter-productive, and maybe offer some alternatives?

Was the title The Origins of Racism? You are manufacturing an issue.

So wokism has nothing to do with racism? Don't be ridiculous. You are ducking an issue.

Clearly our views don’t align but I also don’t think anyone is ducking an issue. Racism is wrong but perhaps “wokism” makes it to be a lot worse of a problem than it really is. The article was not a history of racism or how to solve it. If anyone is moving the goal post it’s you. I will accept that we probably cannot come to terms but happy to discuss.

My point was that if you knew nothing about racism or wokism, you'd conclude from the article that wokism was a huge problem and racism a relatively minor one. Which may or may not be PG's actual opinion, but that's the clear impression that the article makes.

I personally find it preposterous that language policing by universities and social media sites (and virtually all of his criticism is about that aspect of wokism, and not affirmative action) is somehow worse than systematically jailing millions of people and denying them economic opportunities out of bigotry. But even if you think it is, the article doesn't even attempt to make that case. He just notes in a throwaway line that "Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one." (Emphasis mine.) And that's about it on how bad racism is vs how bad woke is.

The actual real world impact of wokism is that the left-leaning part of the elite is distracted into performative games outdoing one another in verbal righteousness, instead of actually doing something for the people, which should be the defining part of being left.

Woke is all rituals, no substance. If anyone profits off it, it is highly educated individuals that belong to the visible minorities = precisely the people that don't need so much support.

Woke is deeply uninterested in actual problems of the poor non-academic population. High cost of living? Food deserts? Meh. That doesn't register on the high-brow radars.

>The actual real world impact of wokism is that the left-leaning part of the elite is distracted into performative games outdoing one another in verbal righteousness...

Is that really the only real-world impact? Is there no value in examining the link between how we refer to people and how we treat them? What about the affirmative action aspects of wokism---is there some impact there?

If you define woke as only the people performing meaningless rituals, then of course you're going to dismiss wokeness. But not all of it is meaningless ritual, affirmative action has created real change. And I would argue that efforts to take pejorative terms out of language are worthwhile, even if some people get overly academic about it.

> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex.

Wow that's not my memory of the 90s at all. We're talking about the decade when Loveline with Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla was a popular MTV show?

Cable has always pushed the boundaries a bit.

I remember pearl clutching over The Simpsons in the early 90s, to the point where Bush Sr. got involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors

My mom was a teacher around that time, the school instructed her to stay on guard against kids who were watching the show

Loveline, the show that wasn't allowed to air before 11pm EST due to the same Christian sensibilities, yes.

>it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r

I still have to remind myself that this refers to the racial slur and not an intellectual one. One of the funniest moments of 2024 for me was watching an episode of the wan show where linus admitted he'd used 'the hard r' in the past. His co host (Lucas?) was visibly taken aback. Like, color drained from his face. As linus goes on about how *tard used to be acceptable when he was younger you see it slowly dawn on Lucas that Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means and the relief that his boss isn't some sort of avowed racist is palpable.

> Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means

I don't either. What does it mean?

"Nigga" as used in songs etc. vs the full N-word.

Where is the “r”?

Simple wikipedia seems like a good source to explain this

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger

> However, in the late 20th century, the word was seen as a hurtful racial slur in English. It was called hate speech. "Nigger" was seen as very offensive to say or hear which caused many to not use the word at all. They instead called the word "The N-Word". It is said with a "hard R", because the word ends in 'er' instead of 'a', as in the word "nigga".

So -a is more polite than -er?

Really?

I mean rap songs and movies have both, as far as I can tell they are used interchangeably.

Any chance the distinction existed long time ago and now it does not anymore? (Im not from US)

Say either on the streets of the US and you will find the intellectual distinction much softer than someone’s fist.

It was explained to me that it was an attempt for some in the black culture to "take back," that word in an attempt to declaw it by swapping out the -er for an -a and using it colloqually rather than insultingly. Other people in the black culture think that word shouldn't be used at all, hard R or not, because it is so historically disparaging. I tend to agree with the latter.

I always wondered why that word had such negative connotation over other pejoratives. I believe it was Maya Angelou who said, paraphrasing, "it's so hurtful because it was the last word people heard before the noose tightened around their neck."

Some dark stuff.

> as far as I can tell they are used interchangeably.

They are not.

> Any chance the distinction existed long time ago"

What is "long time ago"? This stuff isn't exactly gone.

You really need to realize that American slavery really wasn't that long ago. It was only 1975 when the last survivor of American slavery died. Generational effects last and the reverberations of years of oppression still reverb very, very loudly today.

Its in the Spanish word for black, it is taboo enough that people generally don't write it.

TIL

Linus thought "hard r" meant "retarded", when it actually means "nigger" (a really really bad slur, as opposed to soft-r, "nigga"). It was funny when everyone realized he didn't mean what they thought he meant.

> It was funny when everyone realized he didn't mean what they thought he meant.

this very much illustrates that blacklisting (sic) words leads to nothing but confusion, not mutual understanding to each other's speech, let alone understanding each other's position. is it what social justice warriors want to bring about general compassionating with?

Agreed, using a word is very different from mentioning it, and mentions being banned along with usage is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Denylisting*

I've never heard the term as a New Zealander (perhaps not in right social circles though).

From first search:

  The n-word pronounced with the final ‘r’ sound, as opposed to a softer pronunciation that often omits this sound

  Over the decades, the n-word has evolved, with the softer version being reclaimed by some within the Black community as a term of endearment or camaraderie. However, the “hard R” variation remains a symbol of hate and discrimination.

A fecking weird distinction given that it depends on your accent. Hard-r is rhotic and here in NZ I think we mostly are non-rhotic and don't pronounce the r at the end of words: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English

Yeah, this practice isn't in NZ.

Why try and use that context for judgment when a more appropriate one exists?

Because I'm guessing the term "hard-R" only makes sense in some sociolinguistic US accents. As an outsider I can't really have an opinion. As an NZer I can say that unfortunately we sometimes get judged according to US language rules in some contexts - so the rules affect us so it sometimes helps me to know US practice.

My comment explains what hard-R means from the point of view of someone outside the states, and gives enough context for a non-native English speaker to understand the term. The subtleties of English are hard even for those with English as a mother tongue.

From the Wikipedia article:

  Among certain speakers, like some in the northeastern coastal and southern United States,[6][2] rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic /r/ is deleted depending on an array of social factors,[7] such as being more correlated in the 21st century with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, particular ethnic identities, and informal speaking contexts.

> As an NZer I can say that unfortunately we sometimes get judged according to US language rules in some contexts

I knew an American who, on his first visit to NZ, described how much he enjoyed eating kiwis to his horrified hosts. Of course he meant the Chinese gooseberry, which in US grocery stores is labeled a “kiwi”.

https://youtu.be/_jEBh1VtdT0?si=6wv2yJdTC31L1QQP

I think this video might help

Here's a link to the hard r clip https://youtu.be/MFDiuBomSuY

> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity.

I read the entire article hoping it would acknowledge that the rightwing moral majority invented, or at least popularized, much of the behavior the article decries. For example, I went in expecting it to touch on the rights version of newspeak and cancel culture (see Freedom Fries and the Dixie Chicks for memorable examples).

It was strangely silent in that regard.

But he is talking about the phenomenon at large and Christians are literally the first example he gives:

>In Victorian England it was Christian virtue

He even references what you talk about later:

>One big contributing factor in the rise of political correctness was the lack of other things to be morally pure about. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.

He does contrast what he calls "wokeness" with a sort of Christian prudishness ("prig") several times, and even says that it's the same sort of person responsible. However, both sides are not treated equally throughout the text.

For example, he talks about the impact of the Bud Light thing on Anheuser Busch, but he doesn't acknowledge that the backlash was itself a perfect example of cancel culture.

Your mob and my mob are both mobs, but he paints one angry mob as righteous pushback and the other as priggish busybodies.

Regardless, it was a well formed piece that caused me to think. I just think the argument would have been more compelling if it had been offered from a more neutral frame.

This. I mean, he says that comedy defeated political correctness on the years up to 2000, but then entirely omits what happened in comedy immediately afterwards.

Love a bit of no-holds-barred 00's comedy.. well, some of it.. but I don't think anyone should find it surprising that there was a cultural backlash.

"You can offend anyone as long as you offend everyone" was the rule of the day, which failed to account for some having much thicker skins than others.

It's also worth noting that up until about 2008, free speech was broadly identified with progressive/Left views not conservative/Right. I'm not sure when or why exactly the right lost interest in censoring sex and violence in the media, but they quietly let that drop just around the time the left became more censorious.

Now for me personally, the kind of populist-conservative that hangs out with strippers whilst pursuing abortion bans is the worst kind of hypocrite, but I guess for a lot of people it's something more like wish-fulfilment.

> I'm not sure when or why exactly the right lost interest in censoring sex and violence in the media

It didn't stop. Republicans have been passing laws requiring identification to access pornography and as a result pornhub is blocked in 16 states currently.

https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025

> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.

Yes, but this is also the part that glues together the larger coalition of people left of center. Racially segregated affinity groups and affirmative action are the thing that AOC and Jamie Dimon can agree on.

A 2022 poll showed that something like 20% of Biden 2020 voters would pick Liz Cheney in a three-way race with Trump. The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives who are willing to put up with woke stuff. Including Paul Graham himself.

If Fetterman comes out and says we are going to ban racially segregated affinity groups, and the compromise is he’ll raise my taxes to pay for more healthcare services, I’d vote for that. But my experience with the last 10 years is that team blue never raised my taxes but did recruit my daughter into a “BIPOC” group. The policy is what it does, as they say.

> The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives

Dependent on them for what, exactly?

For votes: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-premise-poll-li... (“Among Democratic voters, Biden leads Cheney 61% to 39%.”).

My historically red county in Maryland went 55-41 for Harris, but 55-43 for Larry Hogan. It’s full of woke Romney 2012 voters.

Behind so many anti-lefty beliefs, there’s simply a man feeling like he lost control of some specific woman :(

Seriously, it’s quite a pattern!

To the contrary she’s red pilled. The ordeal has forced her to think about race and she’s responded by developing a strong Bangladeshi identity as a coping mechanism.

But I don’t need a 12 year old who tells me that “affirmative action is morally wrong” and yells at me about not knowing how to cook curry. I want her to have the post-racial upbringing I did as a 1990s kid.

> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to [...]

That's precisely the point: the function of the word "inclusive" mentioned in TFA, or several related like "diversity" was twisted for the purpose of waging culture war. (E.g. Biden had some "most diverse" team somewere, and it meant 0% men, didn't it.) The purpose of the culture war was to drop entire chain of thought not aligned with current heresy.

"hard-r"?

I've lived in the South all my life, worked with blacks and whites, gone to college and this HN post is the first time I've seen/heard the expression "hard-r".

I now believe "hard-r" is regional slang, since it appears to be (at least) a west-coast expression [the Linus recording convinced me] but rare in the South.

I see the problem you identify with people's behaviour and agree with the noisiness of people you refer to as group two - people who aren’t thinking deeply about what they are saying have a lot of freedom to shoot their mouth off. To be very clear, I see your comment as a sincere attempt to articulate and respond to a problem, most discussion of woke isn’t. While I do want to offer just one olive branch to people upset about woke, that yes - annoying people really are annoying, self-righteous twits truly are unbearable - but when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them. There are idiots everywhere – even the smartest of us are part-time idiots, stupidity is just the background noise we have to talk over, rabbiting on about woke usually seems to part strategic tantrum to avoid real discussion and part real tantrum.

I think I’m looking for a way to distil the ideas you’ve expressed into a response I can use when someone complains about woke : `that sounds quite annoying, but let’s discuss the idea not the idiot`

> when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them

I think you may be right here, but I think it's also worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.

What I see is that a lot of "woke" starts with the assumption that the audience is bad, then tries to work backwards to prove it

Of course discussions about selfishness, hypocrisy and cruelty are going to infuriate people when you start from the assumption that the people you are talking to are the ones who are selfish cruel hypocrites

Next time you see someone make a comment about "straight cis white men" (or any demographic, but this one comes up a lot), replace it with "selfish cruel hypocrites", that probably would give you a good idea why that demographic reacts poorly to the message

Now imagine that is what you mostly hear "straight cis white men" are "selfish cruel hypocrites" over and over again.

We are recreating the "not all men" argument here, except hyper-specialized to "not all straight white cis men."

And so, in the spirit of that argument, sure, maybe not all straight white cis men are a problem, but ENOUGH of us are that we should be paying attention to see if we're unknowingly part of the problem, or even better if we can help at all to improve things.

Hopefully in another couple decades we can revisit this topic, only specialized down another couple adjectives. =)

> We are recreating the "not all men" argument here, except hyper-specialized to "not all straight white cis men."

We absolutely are.

I think that in itself is the problem, you dont need to be cis, white or male to be the problem, its just a group that is the target of choice.

Targeting straight white men this way isnt going to be the solution to the problem, especially those that are the problem. I don't have a good solution to this but pouncing on a large group for the actions of a few isnt a great idea.

If they want to radicalize a group, this is a great way to go about it.

Cis white male covers a very broad spectrum of people from very different economic, ethnic and social backgrounds.

Labelling an entire race (noting caveat above) of people as problematic is not a traditional progressive worldview and in my opinion that this view is being promoted in modern progressive politics has contributed to a large proportion of traditional progressives feeling politically stranded.

It also makes people like me completely shut down any reasonable discourse. Focus on specific behaviors and don’t try to solve racism with more racism.

Not all men is a sensible argument because it condemns generalization, a foundational principle of humanism.

There is no spirit of argument, your axioms are lacking. Either you can form an argument without generalization or it is very weak. That is mostly the gist of the criticism of contemporary progressive arguments.

Especially on the topic of racism it is paramount to stay precise in your wording and especially if your own policies circle around changes in language.

And if your argument gets the basics wrong, you should not wonder about any headwind and no, these arguments cannot form a revisited civil rights movement.

Where are you hearing this over and over again?

Are you seeking this out or consuming algorithmic media that sends it to you to make you mad and get you hooked?

I'm in that demographic and do not recognize this at all. From my perspective this sounds paranoid bordering on mental illness.

Everything can look like mental illness if you look hard enough.

Notice how you tried to force your opinion by insinuating that the person feeling this way is mentally ill? A large chunk of the comments in this thread are saying that’s part of the problem.

This tactic is so common that its no longer effective. It is water off a ducks back.

I think that a lot of people see their own flaws in others, they assume that everyone else has the same perspective or is damaged.

There is little point to putting thought into a responses because of how twisted their view is.

Others can try, I work on more productive things.

Hi, permanent victim.

Hi assumption.

I'm the white cis male with grey hair, but in my n of one experience I have encountered very few situations in which not taking the bait on the first provocation, showing a bit of empathy and respect didn't quickly get the same empathy and respect in return.

> worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.

I agree with this, it's not nice to be dehumanised or disrespected, it's awful. I saw someone speak recently who dipped into this kind of broad anti-male language to get a sneering laugh from the crowd more than once. With friends, with people who matter deeply to me, I'd want to speak to them about the petty provocation in their choice of language, but right now, I still think that following down the path of chasing down that language in public is a dead end, because a person speaking in that way is scratching for a fight, probably not a productive fight but a let the fury out fight. There may be a legitimate reason for that fury but I don't want to be the bucket it gets poured into. I am up for a sincere difficult conversations about real problems, and usually people pick that up and respond accordingly. Most people aren't sociopaths, and can't resist reciprocating sincere empathy and respect.

I’m going to add a caveat here : people reciprocating respect is my personal, subjective experience, I don’t believe everybody gets this same treatment. I think people who look like me, who are used to at least a tiny bit of status - the pool from which must of the upset about woke is coming - we generally get respect reciprocated. When we don’t get treated with respect it’s a bit of a shock. I think reflecting on how unpleasant it is to be treated poorly, what a frequent experience it is for some people and how it might affect them is the way to go.

> I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them

Epictetus said, "Don't explain your philosophy, embody it."

People are doing exactly that.

They're welcoming historically marginalized groups into their workplaces, their families, their communities. Every day they treat others with basic respect.

It makes some people so mad that they crawl the internet for examples of these people "going too far". They'll bring up examples from other continents to get that angry fix. They'll misconstrue them in the worst possible light and pass it on telephone style till it's unrecognizable. And if they don't find any they'll make them up. They'll sometimes pretend to be the people they hate and propose stupid things to make themselves angry.

I've seen the latter happen in comments here where one reactionary sarcastically suggests something ridiculous and another one takes it seriously and gets angry at it.

Currently online lesbians are being blamed for forest fires. Which is only a minor update on the classic religious claim of "hurricanes caused by being tolerant of gays".

So I don't think you can escape this just by not being "woke" and "annoying".

> They're welcoming historically marginalized groups

So humans then?

Because all humans have been marginalized at some point in history. Even the language you're using is an example of the problem, since it insinuates that some groups of people were marginalized and some people were not. If you really wanted to embody the values of compassion and selflessness, it wouldn't be contingent on the physical traits or background of the person in question.

Woke ideas also collide with general humanism. "I don't see color" is an example here.

But the ideas of humanism are better and woke people often dislike that their ideas get rejected. Still, people were made fun off on TV for expressing "old" humanistic ideas in favor of idpol. I don't think that some woke ideas fly very high on an intellectual level so that too much discussion would not even be necessary. Not that the criticism is taken seriously if you have your dogma at hand.

There are well known dynamics that even putting people in camp blue or red creates conflict. Woke ignores these dynamics completely, but did further ideas of that kind to the letter. Current conflicts are further empiric evidence that some assumptions do indeed hold.

You’ve just proven the point of the author you’re responding to. The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”. But there are endless folks who are mad about someone being mean to them once who won’t shut up about how the “woke left” is destroying social cohesion. Just because some people are obnoxious doesn’t mean you’re under the thumb of a conspiracy to shut you up. Sheesh.

> The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”.

They are (or were throughout the 2010s), but they have a way of talking about it where they do it, but then claim it doesn't exist if anyone tries to give a name to it. So "wokeness isn't real" is a popular way to say "wokeness is real and I think it's good". Sometimes this is called Voldemorting.

I personally think it's good but also think it's real.

We just call it not bring racist. We also used phrases like stay woke long before 2010 and conservative whining.

>We just call it not bring racist.

No, you do not. I know this because when I advocate for actually not being racist, members of your group call me racist for it.

I am the one who seeks policies that do not take a person's race into consideration when making decisions where race is clearly a priori irrelevant. That is what it means not to be racist.

Your group is the one that insists that doing so is necessary to achieve a moral outcome.

It's called the Motte and Bailey fallacy

> They are (or were throughout the 2010s)

More thoroughly:

* The online left was using terms like "social justice warrior" to describe themselves in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Some of them even used alternate terms to try and fit their kind of activism closer, one I remember being "social justice paladin".

* The first big round of backlash turned SJW into an insult in the mid 2010s, so they rebranded themselves as "woke".

* As the backlash grew, "woke" was also turned into an insult.

* DEI was the most recent rebranding, but since that describes actions instead of the people doing the actions there wasn't really a way to turn it directly into an insult, and "progressive" isn't zing-y enough to catch on, so "woke" stuck.

Nah, those were always right wing smears used to bully people. There's no rebranding. Bullying through online trolling goes through meme fads.

> there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.

This perception is a constant cause of concern for the actual left, and it's created by liberal politicians attempting to co-opt the movement, because it represents a huge part of their disenfranchised base.

In today's reality:

- left: socialist, progressive policies and in favor of fixing the system from the ground up. Election reform and the dissolution of failed establishments find support here (i.e. "too big to fail" was capital B "Bad"). An actual leftist today would say that Trump is awful, but also that Obama probably did more damage to us in the long term. We have not had a leftist in power in any surviving generation.

- liberal: most of the democratic party. Biden's a lib, so was hillary. Liberal voters (somehow) believe that the current system can (and should) be saved by incrementalism. My take is that mostly, liberal politicians are pulling a fast one and just wanna keep that campaign money flowing, which is why you get a lot of talk about campaign finance reform and no action whatsoever. Liberals are terrified of ranked-choice, and economically look a whole lot like conservatives (we used to call this neoconservative or neoliberal but the distinction has become very indistinct).

There's overlap in demographic between the leftist and the liberal - so liberal politicians have frequently used the "jangling keys method" and pushed stuff like wokeness real hard when they're trying to distract from the fact that they're taking money from JPMorgan and Shell Oil. Hillary was one of the worst - refusing point-blank to talk about banking as a real problem while accusing all her detractors of being "Bernie Bros" - which was really just a hamfisted smokescreen to try and turn the party against itself (this ended predictably).

To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.

I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing. Problem is, we've been divided by wedge issues (some of which are truly relevant, like the climate) that make it impossible to form a coalition to accomplish actual reform. This was done on purpose.

Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual. At the risk of being accused of being 'woke' - i'd ask that the two terms (left and liberal) don't get further confused. It muddies the conversation in ways that are destructive.

Kamala has either the #1 or #2 most left voting record in the Senate.

> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.

Those are both good because they fight off fascism. There's nothing leftist about letting someone be genocided by Russians.

> I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing.

This is a demonstration of "horseshoe theory". Most of these are wrong! Inflation is not "out of control" but has already been fixed. The US economy is the best it's ever been and people are mad about it because they think they saw it was bad on the news!

The real correct opinion is that American elites are good and the voters are bad.

> Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual.

This is the classic indicator that you're a teenager and have an emotional need to appear above everything. They couldn't be more different. Only one of them wants your wife to die in childbirth.

> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.

I was at a house party once here in Australia, and a Canadian friend got frustrated at me. "It sounds like you believe in policy X, but also policy Y! I don't get it! What are you, left or right?". And I responded by asking what policies X and Y have to do with each other at all? Why should your stance on war and fracking be correlated? Or have anything to do with your opinion about gun control, abortion rights, racism or free speech?

I'm not convinced "actual leftism" has any well accepted meaning. Liberalism has a clear meaning. But "leftism" / "rightism"? They both seem like kinda arbitrary grab bags of policy ideas to me. Why not a pro-war & pro-fracking democrat?

> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas

No, it really is about specific ideas. I’ll discuss four:

1) Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition with common cause and shared interests. This goes back to the 1990s with the “rainbow coalition.” A lot of the way the left talks to minorities, and various things like affinity groups arise out of this idea that non-whites will bring about left-liberal changes to society. Also the antagonistic way many on the left talk about whites. But most non-whites don’t think of themselves that way, as we saw in the election.

2) Because of (1), many in the left believe in permissive approaches to policing and immigration because of the disproportionate effects of those policies on black and Hispanic people. But the public wants more policing and less immigration, including black and Hispanic people.

3) Many on the left believe in treating people of different races different to remedy past race-based harms. But the public doesn’t like this—even California voted overwhelmingly against repealing the state ban on affirmative action.

4) Related to the above, there’s a general belief on the left that, in any given issue, policy should cater to the “most marginalized.” When confronted with the burdens to the average person, their reaction is to either (a) deny such costs and accuse the other part of various “isms” and “phobias,” or (b) assert that the average person must bear the cost.

> Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition

What percentage of what group is “many on the left”? This does not sound plausible to me.

Enough to normalize "white men are evil" statements, otherwise such people would get reprimanded and shunned by the other people on the left for being racists and sexists but as is they are still welcomed with open arms.

“White men are evil” does not turn everyone else into a “cohesive political coalition”.

It’s certainly consistent with the belief that non-whites have political common cause with other non-whites against whites.

The political coalition there is "people of color" - the point of this was to fight anti-black racism by making a unified group containing them and everyone else who was "not white". This is an improvement over the previous system where groups like Italians/Irish became white by being anti-black. (or were thought to have)

Activists then forgot this was the point and changed the name to "BIPOC" to de-emphasize half the "POC" group (the ones who aren't "BI"), but the whole point was to keep them in the group.

I think the notion of a “BIPOC coalition” has many angles. Many black political thinkers and academics focus on a black/white binary, and extending the concept of “black” to “people of color” was natural. This was also appealing to white democrats, whose coalition with black people is heavily focused on fighting purported racism and discrimination in return for loyal democratic voting.

Couple that with the prospect of America becoming a majority non-white, it’s easy to see why the broader left of center embraced the rhetoric and policies they did over the last decade—e.g. reframing policy issues like immigration and policing in racial justice terms.

The problem is that “white racism” as a lens for understanding America—widely shared by modern liberals—is a poor tool for understanding Latinos and Asians.

I understand what you think you are seeing and that you are probably not alone in this. But you haven’t managed to convince me that there is a «cohesive coalition». I think people who believe that this is what they see may have gotten a bit carried away.

I isn’t a cohesive coalition. I think leaders and activists in the left think there is one. Because the leading DNC chair candidate says stuff like this: https://x.com/benwikler/status/1878205257789960435 (“As DNC Chair, our leadership team will lift up our full coalition—with Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran, and Disability representation.”).

Enough that “BIPOC” is a thing that even my retired immigrant parents have heard of.

TIL, and I consider myself pretty far left

Re: 3 ... the level of misunderstanding about what affirmative action is and means is so wide and so deep that "the public doesn't like this" is more or less an information-free observation. Most of the public has only a strawman in place when it comes to understanding affirmative action, and sure, if the strawman was accurate, most of the people who do support it would drop their support.

Its more common for proponents to obscure what affirmative action actually is. The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular and the magnitude of the affirmative action effect is much larger than popularly known.

Here's the Harvard data from the somewhat recent SCOTUS trial: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/222325/202...

Asians in the top academic decile are half as likely as African Americans in the 5th decile to be accepted. I highly doubt exposing Americans to this data would make them more favorable to affirmative action– the very opposite is more likely.

> The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular

When stated by opponents seeking to strawman it, certainly.

But:

"when faced with multiple equally qualified candidates for a position, it is permissble and perhaps even desirable to use demographic factors such as race or gender to select among them"

generally doesn't get much opposition. It's not absolutely impossible that this is a steelman version of affirmative action, but it's also the one I grew up hearing from the actual proponents of the concept.

We all heard that but it was never really true and was the camel's nose under the tent. "Equally qualified" is meaningless given how interview processes work in the tech industry: you keep interviewing until you find the first person that passes the bar and then make an offer. Holding offers back in the hope that someone more demographically attractive comes along is a bad policy that results in lost candidates who get tired of the BS, but is a natural consequence of this definition of affirmative action.

Regardless it took only a few years for what I heard to go from "we should use gender/race as a tie breaker" to "our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call. And that's inevitable because the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions. The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was, which results in people being targeted and fired for -isms of whatever kind.

So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.

>"our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call.

I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?

> the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions

That doesn't seem to be the case for other problems. I don't see what makes this problem special so there can be no push back on extreme solutions.

> The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was

What about using non-extreme steps to try to mitigate the issue.

> So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.

Idiots is a word that originated in ancient Greek and was used for the people who did not care about the matters of the Polis. Everybody is born an idiot until they participate in public matters. That costs (time and effort to familiarize yourself). In that sense maybe the people you are talking about are idiots...

I guess it must not violate the law as the last president vowed that men would be ineligible and he would only select a woman: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/15/politics/joe-biden-woman-...

Is that comparable though? It's not an open job position with requirements listed that anybody can apply for. I don't know how that works in the US, but according to wikipedia the president can nominate a person and a majority vote in both houses of congress can confirm that. It's not like the best candidate wins...this is politics...

> I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?

It is illegal for jobs in USA, but not for university student spots. Trump has said he will make that illegal though, so it might change and become illegal like in most of the world.

It isn't legal for individual university spots either.

What a university can do, or any form of corporation in the USA can do, is to announce goals to have its body be made up in roughly the same was as the general population, according to some demographic metrics.

So you can't say "student #68 must be female"; you can say "we are aiming for a 50/50 male/female student body" and then take steps to get there.

It is illegal in the US but the law isn't enforced when men are on the losing end. As someone else points out, the POTUS himself violated this law openly and in public. Because everyone knows that and because feminists agitate constantly for female-biased hiring, it's been effectively decriminalized.

It’s actually the other way around. Most people like “affirmative action” when you use that term. But most people dislike it when you ask whether race should be considered in college admissions or hiring decisions: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans...

“In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity.”

The Pew survey did not find that most people like "affirmative action":

> Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.

It was a preceding Gallup poll that found the result you're thinking of:

> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.

The disconnect between this sort of response with the one you cited at the end of your comment just serves to underline my point about the public's lack of clear understanding of what "affirmative action" means (and they cannot be entirely blamed for this, since in the culture, it has come to mean different things).

Institutions like Harvard will (for the foreseeable future) always have vastly more fully qualified applications than they can accept. The concept of affirmative action was originally intended by its proponents to be used only when tie-breaking between equally qualified candidates. Harvard and the other Ivies have this situation in extremis. The idea was that when faced with the question "well, we have 26 people all fully qualified, how are to pick between them?" that using race was a legitimate choice as long as the racial demographics of the institution did not match those of the overall population. They have (for a while) used gender in a similar way, and arguably could use favorite ice cream flavor if they chose, because the candidates are all qualified to be selected.

There was never a suggestion that "affirmative action" meant selecting less qualified candidates because of their racial status. However, the conservative right has claimed that this is what affirmative action really means in the world, and this idea has been broadly picked up by the media and public at large. Whether there is actually any evidence that this has happened on a significant scale is not something I've seen adequately addressed. From what I have read, including the Harvard case, I'd say it was much more an unfounded grievance on the part of people who felt they had a right to be admitted or hired than what actually happens. I could be wrong.

The polls have asked the question in different ways and get similar results. In particular, they have asked whether people support race being used as a factor in admissions decisions, and overwhelmingly they do not: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans... (“In the December 2022 survey, for example, 82% of U.S. adults said colleges should not consider race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept, while only 17% said colleges should take this into account.”) That’s exactly what’s happening, and people don’t like it.

And people see that this framing of “breaking ties between qualified candidates” concept is merely wordplay. Harvard doesn’t say “everyone above a particular academic index score is ‘equally qualified’ and there’s no difference above that line.” According to the SFFA data, Asian and white students in the 10th decile of academic index score are 5-6 times as likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 5th decile (who have virtually no chance). But black and Hispanic students in the 5th decile are as likely or more likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 9th and 10th deciles. Thus, Harvard uses race to admit less qualified students—as measured by the very metric Harvard has established to measure qualifications.

Most people intuitively understand this without the explanation. They intuitively understand that grades and test scores establish a sliding scale of more or less qualified candidates.

What is race? When a student is applying for college, are they free to check whichever box they think will maximize their chance of admission or are there specific, objective criteria to which they must adhere?

Skull measurements perhaps?

They certainly are.

Of course, should they be admitted and it is realized that they abused the definitions of race that society uses to group and classify people in some egregious way, they may face consequences for that.

And sure, I'm entirely sympathetic to the scientific observation that race is a myth, but in the actual USA, in actual 2024, basic physiological features like skin color, face shape, voice tone, hair texture will result in you receiving different treatment in many contexts. Whatever triggers such different treatment is what defines race on the ground (ignoring the equivalent set of things related to sex/gender).

What you call "the left" is part of the public, but you make it sound like it is not. You also make it sound like the public has a coherent opinion, which I don't think it has.

Do you mean majority when you say public? Do you think what the majority thinks should be done (mob rule)?

Wokeness is like veganism: for every person talking about being vegan you will find 10 guys who complain about vegans, typically unprompted, while eating meat. I had a work collegue who would complain every meal about vegans, although there wasn't a single vegan at the table.

Wokeness is the comparable, I teach at a liberal art university, there are probably few places more "woke" than this. Even here if I count there is probably a 10:1 ratio of "people complaining about woke" vs "people demanding a woke thing".

The feeling that others are judging you from a high horse is a very strong force, even if they aren't judging you at all. And strong forces can be used to manipulate people into making choices against their interest .

Because 1 in 10 (for examples) vegans are calling meat eaters as cruel murderers. And that becomes the image of vegans because they are the noisy ones.

There might be some survivorship bias at play here, as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one. Those who eat in peace and leave others alone are not memorable - same goes for antivegans.

Theees a comment on the exact same subject I found interesting yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682623

> as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one

You never eat lunch with colleagues? Never eat dinner with family and their significant others?

It is very hard to hide that you are a vegan.

Yeah? That is what some meaties keep telling me too — but personally I have only met one such vegan in my life and they were obviously deeply troubled by other things as well. All others merely kept to themselves and only talked about it when someone else prompted them. And that someone else was often a meaty with a: "Oh you are a vegan? Now explain THIS".

I don't know about you, but I don't give a damn about made up problems that aren't part of my life. Don't get me wrong, I can totally imagine smug vegans. I just made the observation that 99 percent of the ones I met would receive a disservice if I went under the assumption that "all vegans are smug assholes".

Similarily my assumption for meat eaters isn't that all of them are assholes. But I observed there are people who are so triggered by the mere thought of vegans existing, they can't stop talking about it or demanding from any supposed vegan that they explajn themselves — so the exact thing they claim vegans do.

(footnote: I am not vegan myself)

There's a key difference though: while vegans are generally proud of being vegan, it's very hard now to find anyone who will admit to being woke or even that a single one of their beliefs is woke. It was only in fashion for a brief period and is now distinctly out of fashion. It's kind of similar to being a hipster—a lot of people get called hipsters, but no one has self-identified as one since probably the early 2010s.

This makes discussions like these inherently slippery and circular. While it's clear that many people do actually hold beliefs that their critics would characterize as woke (as evidenced by real-world impact like master branches being renamed, indigenous land statements, and DEI quotas), they're never going to voluntarily accept a label that has been turned into a pejorative.

I agree the hipster comparison is interesting. No one really wanted to be called a hipster either, but you knew who they were. I know I quit identifying as one some time in the late 00s, before the backlash really went mainstream.

The tangent about the hipster trend is interesting. Having grown up in a rural village during the 00s I heard about hipsters long before I ever saw a person who would even remotely fit the cliché.

During that time actual cliché hipsters existed as was apparent (via the internet), but more important to my own life was another aspect: it was a kind of catchall term for people who didn't fit neatly into the usual known groups (Punks, Skaters, Metalheads, Ravers, Emos, ..) or did their own thing. I was connected to my local art scene, most of which have been called hipsters without actually being or remotely looking like hipsters.

Hipster was a degorative for: "Oh you think you're different". The thing was I didn't only think that, I was different. Probably most people on this website here were different from the average person during their teens.

You don't just eat vegan, you are a vegan. The thing to recognize is that these boxes exist to make themselves feel superior. So they put the people whose behavior and existence induces cognitive dissonance into their world view into boxes and pat themselves on their backs whenever they can convince themselves they spotted a marker that proves the person opposite is part of that box.

And before there is a misunderstanding: the boxes can work both ways. People within a box can hate on those outside of it and vice versa — and both feel superior to the other. The point is that people ascribe certain attributes to the boxes and use it to paint simplistic pictures of the world around them, precisely because it makes them feel better. Made a certain food choice? Congrats, idiots now think you're smug.

And I am not even vegan. I just try to look past the boxes as life is much more nuanced and much richer behind them.

Or before that, yuppies. YUP simply stood for the very neutral "Young Urban Professional" but "yuppies" somehow became a slur and nobody wanted to self-identify.

IME (Australia), the U was "upwardly-mobile" which I always took to mean someone ambitious, who dressed "for the job they want, rather than the job they have".

Also in Australia, by my recollection, Yuppie was a slur from the outset, there was no initial neutral period: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFOfd1QTW54

This is another observation that doesn't match with my lived reality. The vegans I got to know as such¹ mostly had one moment where they mentioned it: when someone offered them something non-vegan.

Some of them did even mention it only after a meat eater asked them why they are not eating $X.

As mentioned in my live I met only one vegan that smugly and unprompted talked about veganism. And they were the type who would talk that way about literally every topic.

I am generally careful with stories like that. "Trans bathrooms" is another one of those. My institute has non-gendered bathrooms for the past century, mainly for space reasons. And that never was a problem.

If you love meat, but understand the ethical argument behind not eating it, wouldn't it be practical if vegans were smug assholes that you don't have to listen to? That is why some people want them to fulfill that cliché — I am more interested in the truth, especially the truth that has an impact on my direct life.

¹: There ought to be a number of people everybody met, who are vegans, but you don't know they are, because they did not mention it. E.g. my bands drummer (a old punk) is vegan and it took me two years to figure that one out.

Being proud of something doesn’t mean you talk about it unprompted all the time.

I have several friends who are vegan. My point is that they don’t deny it–if you ask them, they’re happy to say “yeah, I’m vegan.”

But people who believe in things that are widely considered woke, like changing ‘master’ branches to ‘main’, usually will deny that they are woke or that they want to change the name for that reason. They’ll tell you it’s about common decency or not offending others and that it has nothing to do with wokeness.

I am one of those who changed master to main. It is exactly two letters less to type the name is IMO more self explainatory than master. So even if we excluded any historic background why the verbiage of master/slave might be considered problematic id still prefer main.

Now is this a (main) hill I have to die on? Totally not. Do I have very strong opinions on this? Nope. Does it cost me a lot? Nope. As I said, I have to type less, and as a teacher explaining that the main branch is the main branch is easier than explaining that master means it is the main branch and explaining where master comes from electronics etc.

"Woke" people for the most part are like me: not adamant social justice worriors whose ardent opinions have to be defended till the last drop of blood, but people who are like "meh, why not, doesn't cost me a thing and maybe it is only right". And that is the polar opposite of what the political right wing and their whole billionaire-funded propaganda machine likes to paint people whoe make choices like that as.

Now I don't say people with strong opinions on these issues don't exist, because there do. But they are the minority. But taking vocal minorities and declaring them the representatives of the majority seems to be a trend these days.

The motivation was not to be more self-explanatory or type less though. Let's be real.

I hear you... you go along with it because the zealots who do feel strongly are aggressive and it's easier to concede the point than face backlash, even if you object to (or are indifferent to) the language-policing. I've switched to 'main' as well, so I get it. pg's essay discusses this:

> Most people are afraid of impropriety; they're never exactly sure what the social rules are or which ones they might be breaking. Especially if the rules change rapidly. And since most people already worry that they might be breaking rules they don't know about, if you tell them they're breaking a rule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially if multiple people tell them. Which in turn is a recipe for exponential growth. Zealots invent some new impropriety to avoid. The first people to adopt it are fellow zealots, eager for new ways to signal their virtue. If there are enough of these, the initial group of zealots is followed by a much larger group, motivated by fear. They're not trying to signal virtue; they're just trying to avoid getting in trouble.

All I'm saying I guess is let's not pretend that the subject of the essay isn't a real thing. Just because no one self-identifies as 'woke' doesn't mean the ideology doesn't exist—call it whatever you want, but the phenomenon is real and it's had tangible influence on our culture, including in tech.

> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".

> 2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes

Who are you talking about? It seems to me that you are using very general and broad language so avoid having to defend any specific points. Who exactly shamed you and for what? Give some examples. Who exactly are you paraphrasing with "that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive"? For the record, my experience of left-wing politics (two decades+) is very different from yours and I haven't noticed the phenomena you speak of. In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam.

That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.

You are using quotation marks so you must be paraphrasing someone, right? If so can you give some examples of this phenomena?

> In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam. That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.

Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. And yet my experience is the exact opposite. If the "divergent ideas" are e.g. "everyone who voted for Trump is an evil nazi" vs "everyone who voted for Trump is just stupid", I'll grant that those two ideas will be entertained and debated. But if the idea falls anywhere outside the accepted orthodoxy, for instance "maybe people who voted for Trump were well informed and had good reason to do so", that idea is not tolerated at all.

Granted I live in Seattle, which is probably home to a disproportionate number of more extreme progressives.

> Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective.

I guess the difference is that I actually hang out with left-wing people and have been doing so for decades, whereas you base your opinions on rage bait news and internet interactions? You may think Trump voters are well-informed and you may think the moon is made of cheese. In both cases there are mountains of evidence to the contrary. I don't know what being wrong has to do with tolerance.

Haha, no. You couldn't be more wrong! This is my impression from in person conversations with people I know, mostly in Seattle where I've lived since 2014. There's a bar I'm a regular at, plus a couple hobby groups where I've met most of my local friends. Almost all are left wing, some very left wing, one was even heavily involved in CHAZ/CHOP. I don't engage much in internet commentary, or at all with rage bait outlets.

The rest of your comment proves my point quite nicely though!

> That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.

There are whole ragebait youtube channels that disagree.

FTA:

> There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.

But who will morality police the morality police? (Paul Graham of course!)

Jokes aside, the difference between the 1) and 2) is the difference between progressivism and wokeism. But I think many here – as well as the article – miss the point by aiming squarely at 'noisy' humanities students, and not at the governments and corporations that leveraged their movements into this realm of the purely performative. That's not to say that there isn't scope for government and corporate interventions that actually make positive change to social justice outcomes. And there's also some merit to both online and meatspace activism causing many bad actors to consider their behavior (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, excessive force by law enforcement, wrongful incarcerations/executions).

That's not a joke. This piece is so ridiculously tone deaf precisely because it lacks any hint of self-awareness that exactly the same performative priggishness is normal for the right - with the difference that it's aggressively economically self-serving, often irrational and sometimes anti-scientific, rather than simply annoying.

IMO the priggishness is baked into American culture, which is descended from cranky puritans and literally defined itself as the most moral (police) force in the world after genociding the original inhabitants of the continent and setting up a culture for billionaires that leaves even qualified and talented workers increasingly insecure about housing and health care.

In reality "woke" has been a hugely convenient way for the US establishment to confine the Left to a ghetto of minority interests, especially about sexuality. Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)

So now we have anti-woke for the wannabe intellectuals, and Q for the useful idiots.

Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference, raw milk drinkers, and the spread of lunatic propaganda about vaccinations and climate science.

> Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)

There is a definitely a new discourse gaining traction post-Luigi that the polarization between left and right has been used as a distraction to the ever widening disparity in wealth, and the receding quality of life in the West.

> Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference

I've no insights into the specific nature of PG's outrage, but I imagine some in the SV entrepreneurial bubble might be concerned with how effective activists can be at ruining financial ledgers using boycotts and the like. Such power wielded by the plebs can be concerning, especially when businesses need to stay solvent, so it is indeed best to keep a lid on it.

There’s also the perception the Trump administration will be a pay-to-play game and anyone who doesn’t show signs of alignment will be prevented from participating in decision-making, industry incentives, government contracts and so on.

I don’t think there is any sensible person on the planet that hasn’t noticed that.

> anyone who doesn’t show signs of alignment will be prevented from participating in decision-making, industry incentives, government contracts

Is that why Tesla, the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles wasn't allowed to attend the electric vehicle summit?

It might be because Tesla has been blocking its workers from unionising so that they can defend their rights.

A side note, but I had no idea raw milk was a right political signaling in the US. Coming from a Swedish perspective, raw milk is a question about how tight the health control is in the dairy industry. I have always find it an "interesting" approach that in Sweden we have a very much scorched earth approach to dealing with any case where farm animals has any human-transmittable problems. If a test fail you kill all the cows in that farm, possible his neighbors farm stock too if they are too close, and the farmers get "just enough" money to restart the farm. Raw milk does still carry a bit higher risk for young children, women during pregnancy, and the elderly, so there is a recommendation against drinking it for those groups. Sellers also need to register in a special registry if they sell raw milk, and they get extra attention from inspectors.

For those not in the high risk groups, it just an choice based on personal taste. It seems a bit funny that the reason why it is allowed to be sold is directly related to the heavy regulation that enforces such high amount of testing (and strict consequences), so that the product is generally safe regardless of added pasteurization.

> A side note, but I had no idea raw milk was a right political signaling in the US

Remember a lot of people who are “proudly white” always mention lactose tolerance. They also carry tiki torches.

I looked into the studies regarding the health benefits and the consensus I found was a big amount of shrug. It is true that heating the milk do break down nutrients and enzymes, but the significance of it from pasteurization is an decrease in the realm of 7-10%. The kind of feed the cow eats has a much bigger significance, so comparing raw milk with pasteurized milk is comparing a small number that is hidden in a large number of noisy data.

In term of lactose tolerance, the consensus seems to be that raw milk is slight worse for people with that problem, but again only with a very small margin. It is most likely related to that 7-10% number above.

The point I was making was that proudly racist people who thinks caucasians are superior to other ethnic groups drank milk because lactose intolerance is less prevalent in their groups.

> the same performative priggishness is normal for the right

Priggishness means self-righteous, performative morality. Can you give an example of this that is normal for US right-wingers? They certainly have plenty of daft ideas (e.g. anti-vax), but I haven't seen right-wingers being priggish about them. Priggish would be positioning themselves as superior people for living in an unvaccinated neighborhood or working for an anti-vax employer, or proclaiming that they will not date a vaccinated person, or vaccinating their baby in secret while posting the opposite on social media, or cancelling a public figure who gets outed as vaccinated, etc.

> Priggishness means self-righteous, performative morality. Can you give an example of this that is normal for US right-wingers?

The first that sprung to mind:

> An update by the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom recently released preliminary data stating, "between January 1 and August 31, 2023, OIF reported 695 attempts to censor library materials and services and documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles - a 20% increase from the same reporting period in 2022." Many of the book titles targeted were BIPOC and LGBT groups. The book bans are largely the result of laws passed in Republican-led states.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_S...

Can't excessive anti wokeness be a form of priggishness.

What if someone says "that was sexist" and let's assume it was. Then, complaining that s/he who said it, is too woke, can itself be priggishness? The morally right thing, in that community, might be to be anti woke.

You could argue that nationalism and traditionalist conservativism are predominantly performative within right-wing politics in the US - if this is not immediately evident then compare these ideas against the character and actions of those who get voted by the electorate.

I agree that wokeness is a big problem on the serious left. It was analyzed in high-profile leftist's Norman Finkelstein's "I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom".

Many point it's from the professional/managerial/bureaucratic class, which never was into free speech to begin with. Take pg's mention of the Soviet Union. That's actually a country where that class overthrew the capitalists to become the ruling class. (They were called "The New Class" there. In countries like the US, they're above workers but subordinate to capitalists.)

And all this is a useful distraction: criticizing wokies distracts from the structure of power that leads to homelessness and working your one (1) life away under some boss. Which is ridiculous in the 21st century.

Google ngrams says Woke began climbing mid 90s, steep increase since 2005 [1].

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=woke&year_star...

> By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

Sounds exhausting to live with a perceived boogeyman of problems versus seeking real problems.

Personally, I am surprised. This is a pretty unique article from a usually articulate thinker that leaves out significant details like: (1) the term originated by folks who recognize there can be structural inequality embedded in policy which, for some inequalities, has been described as structural racism since the 1970s; (2) the term got hijacked by political propaganda machines to circumspectly throw out working policies and other elements of progressive political points in the retrenchment regarding the term.

There really isn't any more detail to be had unless to sanewash the political propaganda's claims.

I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the strongest interpretation (what you're doing here). Several commenters here have asked why his article has been flagged, and I must say that if it was posted as a comment, it should certainly be flagged because of its flagrant violations of the site guidelines.

I certainly wouldn't be inclined to call him a prig, but he's certainly set himself up for exactly that denunciation with his specific framing of the conversation.

He says 'And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.'. What's wrong with sneering at performativeness?

That's the strawman he chose to flog. Indeed, why not hold in contempt people I have defined as contemptible? It's circular reasoning, at best.

It's the ultimate irony that this post is doing the exact same thing it is accusing another group of, with the only distinction being that there is no "term" attached to it.

I suppose the US politics have gone so bonkers that the left actually uses the term "conservative right" pejoratively in the same way that the right uses "woke" to describe the left.

In which case this scenario is so childishly insane that the only sane choice is to reject it all outright and focus inward.

> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.

I agree that the number of proponents of something like "LatinX", or "biological males playing women's sports" are far, far outnumbered by the people who aren't supporters of those things. But the issue is that the people who are supporters tend to be extremely vocal and generally in positions of power or better able to influence those who are, whether thats in corporate or academic administration settings. As such the small number of "woke" individuals are having outsized effects on society and culture, and the backlash is in response to the magnitude of that influence, rather than the number of people pushing for it.

Who are these super woke people in power exactly? F500 CEOs? Politicians? Who are you talking about because I don’t see it.

Hollywood, mainstream media, academia, most big tech, ...

You know mainstream media is Foxnews (the largest viewership by far) and Joe Rogan, right? Those two command the largest share of mainstream viewership.

Or are you referring to 1990s definition of mainstream media that isn't mainstream and is irrelevant?

Professors, judges, lawyers, journalists, politicians, tech moderators, probably anything in the arts or education. On reddit and bluesky you can get banned for having the median voter's opinion on gender norms and immigration.

From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.

The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.

  > Before woke, there was "PC"

forgive me if my understanding is incorrect, but wasn't political correctness something conservatives were pushing (a.k.a mainstream culture)?

iow, you cant say expletives on radio/tv, cant have gay characters on tv, games can't have violence, don't say x in public etc etc...

i've always assumed it was people on the left/progressives pushing against all that, is that wrong?

I think your understanding is wrong although my experience with the term PC started in the early/mid 1980s and I don't know much about its use before that. What you're describing is more like "don't ask - don't tell" and "parental advisory" labels.

Typically, PC is associated with attempts to de-marginalize groups that are historically disadvantaged due to structural discrimination. To me the canonical PC is always spelling "women" as "womyn", to avoid using a term that contains the word "man", as a way to push back against perceived patriarchal naming/language systems.

interesting, thanks for the thoughtful reply

i guess i had a different understanding to a lot of people, appreciate the reply

You are 100% correct. The conservatives disagreeing with you (and downvoting you) are either willfully ignorant about their own history of "political correctness" or else were under a rock (or perhaps weren't alive yet) during the heyday of McCarthyism and the still-ongoing legacy thereof.

Now, when the tables are turning and companies would rather appeal to the progressive-leaning majorities than the ever-shrinking conservative minority, all of a sudden conservatives are eager to pretend that they've been the champions of the First Amendment all along (never mind that the First Amendment never applied to private platforms/businesses choosing with whom to do business).

By the time I gained political sentience, PC referred to perceived limits on speech and conduct that went at the expense of current or historically marginalized groups.

All these things have been derided as "politically correct" in my lifetime (and therefore a bad things): "You can't make a joke these days", i.e. you will get an earful if you make sexist, homophobic or racist jokes. "You can't give a woman a compliment these days", i.e. you can't engage in wanton sexual harassment. "Education is too politically correct these days", i.e. schools teach a history curriculum that recognizes and is critical of imperialism, racism and the like.

In my 30-odd years of life I don't recall it ever being used in the way you describe, but it could predate me.

  > PC referred to perceived limits on speech and conduct that went at the expense of current or historically marginalized groups.

i see, i guess my understanding was different, i alway perceived it as the opposite; pc equaled limits on speech or conduct that went against the majority groups or what they wanted, in my understanding, but it seems that was probably wrong

thanks for replying, i appreciate it!

It's already being replaced by "DEI". I hear my more conservative coworkers spitting the term with a "hard R" these days.

Even Obama is not a fan of "woke" culture and calls it out for the hollow vapid gotcha politics that it is: https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM

Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.

"Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet.

You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there.

But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike.

It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness.

I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty.

And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.

I don't know if you've read it, but an essay published in 1944 by George Orwell titled What is Fascism? encapsulates your points.

> Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.

Individual terms are not the only victims of the linguistic tank tread mangling words into meaninglessness. "Paradox of tolerance", for instance, is the Internet age's "fire in a theater". The phrase has gained currency in the mid-2010s as a rhetorical bludgeon to dismiss the speaker's critics and shame those who don't subscribe to the speaker's incoherent definition of "the intolerant". It's usage has no bearing to, and even contradicts, the author's purpose in coining it.

> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses

Yes, it is an ingenious sort of strawman.

In its prior usage, to be "woke" meant to be informed, alert, and to resist being bullied or easily duped into relinquishing one's rights to object, to defend oneself, and to dissent.

In this sense -- I note with some irony -- Jordan Peterson was "woke" when he would not allow his students to coerce him into using terms of address that he rejected.

Now the usage on the "Right" in US politics in particular uses "woke" to mean hypocritical or superficial assertions, positions, and policies that serve a dubious objective or prove to have no foundation in facts -- especially if these are the opponents' views.

Flinging these accusations of hypocrisy and delusional policy-making has become more important than defending democracy itself. Herein lies the masterstroke of the messaging. Using the term "woke" to attack supposedly "woke" opponents has become a memetic (viral) behaviour that has completely devoured political and public discourse.

"Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum."

Yes this is very common on the left too. Really common actually.

> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.

Even if true, so what? People are still pushing it.

The left doesn’t talk about “wokeness” but it certainly does talk about the individual policies that fall under that rubric. The right uses the label “woke” for the same reason the left uses the term “capitalism.” There’s a bunch of ideas and policies that stem from similar ideological premises and it’s perfectly fine to group them together under labels.

For example, Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There’s also race conscious hiring and promotion decisions. They are all ideologically related and add up to something quite significant.

>Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC.

There's also that ungodly garish universal "pride" flag that they can't stop adding new decorations to, even though a) the original rainbow flag was already definitionally inclusive of everyone; b) issues of racial discrimination and issues of discrimination around sexual or gender-based conduct or identity have nothing to do with each other; c) last I checked, the groups they're trying to pull together under this umbrella - group by group, rather than under a general unifying principle - often don't get along very well with each other.

> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.

You speak about it in the past tense but it's still very much a real thing. Just last week I was listening to an Ed Zitron podcast and one of the (many, many) ads was for a podcast that featured "latinX voices".

The left put everything under the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. That's the idea that disgusts lots of moderates. The idea came from Leninism, but nonetheless is considered woke as fuck. So, no it's not necessarily a boogeyman, unless you throw out anything you don't like from the bucket of woke (and vice versa).

Oh, CRT is also woke as fuck, unless you believe it's the right framework.

It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion.

Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.

The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years

> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.

It was not just a small group of people. Almost all progressive Democratic politicians started working that word into all their speeches to virtue signal and most centrists also fell in line too. CEOs started saying it in company meetings and we were subjected to HR trainings that noted we should say LatinX to be inclusive of trans people, among many other performative rules.

I've been through numerous yearly HR trainings and not once has the term "LatinX" appeared in one. I also highly doubt that even a significant minority, let alone "almost all", progressive Democratic politicians have ever used the term at all. Latinos themselves have rather squarely rejected "LatinX" on the basis of it being nigh-unpronounceable and entirely disconnected from how Spanish/Portuguese words actually work.

Interesting. I have seen that in official HR training.

Sadly, Latinx is still used all over the place. Google turns up 94,800 instances of "latinx community" just in the past year:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22latinx+community%22&tbs=q...

In fact, when I query for results and specify date ranges for each year (using Tools > Any time > Custom range), I get:

    2018: 4,410 results
    2019: 7,070 results
    2020: 15,900 results
    2021: 17,500 results
    2022: 21,000 results
    2023: 34,300 results
    2024: 88,600 results

Yeah, Google probably has a recency bias in its search corpus, but this is still a large amount of recent and ongoing usage.

Google Trends doesn't show a clear decline either: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...

Ah, statistics again. Wow, massive numbers. What happens if you add the terms latino and latina?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...

Right, it barely moves above the zero line.

GitLab announced in 2020 they were making a focus on hiring Latinx directors: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/06/16/our-journey-to-a-di...

You don't meet many christian who say they love being religious, love feeling religious, and doing religious things.

They say they love god and his spirit.

Woke is correct, it'a just not the word you want me to use.

>a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left.

The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology

Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it.

>The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.

Here's CNN Business casually repeatedly using the term in 2021: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversit...

More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally.

For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".)

Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.)

Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.)

It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation).

And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... )

Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.

I wish there was a book or website with such patterns and examples written down for all.

It takes a certain linguistic skill to convey the sleight of hand in display in such maneuvers. But once you're grasped it, you can easily spot it and almost predict what the next set of actions is going to be.

As an aside this applies to a wide variety of places like corporate settings, negotiations, sales meetings, city council meetings to mention a few so its generally useful to know.

That book exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

There are left-wing critics of "Woke", see for example the African-American Marxist Adolph L Reed Jr – https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...

If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman

Or, consider that the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International published a review of the sitcom Abbott Elementary, which includes the line "In fact, in its treatment of Jacob’s wokeness, Abbott Elementary refreshingly mocks the suffocating trend of racialism in American culture" – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html

Similarly, read their review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html – in which they largely express agreement with his criticisms of the progressive "woke" ideology, but simultaneously condemn him for making those criticisms from a pro-capitalist instead of anti-capitalist perspective

And see the socialist publication Jacobin's approving review of the philosopher Susan Neiman's book Left Is Not Woke, which attacks "wokeness" from an explicitly left-wing perspective: https://jacobin.com/2024/07/wokeness-left-ideology-neiman-re...

> If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman

Except, no. A concept can be multiple things at once, we are complex thinking beings.

Woke is all at the same time:

1) what it arose as—a left-of-center terminology, to some extent in-group language, describing certain values.

2) sincere adoption and practice of those values

3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values.

4) A combination of 2 and 3, where those agreeing with 2 has no problem with 3 because the end result can be beneficial: who cares if Intel comes from a place of sincerity if their hiring policies make it easier for qualified minorities to get a food in the door?

5) Anything and everything the far right doesn't agree with, including 1 through 4 but also much more that isn't remotely related. DEI? "Woke." Climate change? "Woke." 15-minute cities? Believe it or not, also "Woke".

> 2) sincere adoption and practice of those values

> 3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values.

That’s not what most “anti-woke Marxists” are saying though. They aren’t saying that the “woke” have fundamentally the right values but are just adopting them insincerely or performatively. They are pointing to a much deeper dispute.

The basic divide: which is more fundamental, class-based oppression or non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc)? The former is the traditional/orthodox Marxist answer, whereas Reed/etc use the word “woke” to refer to the second answer. By contrast a right-wing approach would say neither, rejecting framing society as fundamentally oppressive.

I see. I have indeed seen a handful of comments espousing those views through the years, but they're few and far between.

To me the "class-only" framing is rather old fashioned, and often voiced by those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege so I'm not surprised they feel protective towards the classic framing.

I see much more use in thinking about the class struggle intersectionally, in part because I think it's more accurate to how the world works, but also that by understanding the different experiences of groups within the working class we can build broader, stronger and better alliances. Two cents' worth from me, anyway.

> To me the "class-only" framing is rather old fashioned, and often voiced by those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege so I'm not surprised they feel protective towards the classic framing.

Reed/etc argue that it is the other way around. From his perspective:

“Woke”: the problem with billionaires is that they are (almost) all white cisheterosexual males. The solution is to have more diversity in billionaires: more BIPOC billionaires, more women billionaires, more LGBT billionaires, etc

orthodox Marxist: the problem with billionaires is that they exist. The solution is to abolish their class existence by confiscating their wealth and power

And the same applies when we replace “billionaires” with “CEOs/board members with multimillion dollar salaries”, “McKinsey consultants”, and so on

Which “left-wing” take is more appealing to the board of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc? Obviously the ”woke”: “woke” is just asking the existing upper class to add some new BIPOC/female/LGBT members, but they can keep most of their $$$$ and power. Orthodox Marxism is a radical threat to their entire way of life

So from Reed’s perspective, “Woke” is the viewpoint of “those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege”, his own is true opposition to privilege

> I see much more use in thinking about the class struggle intersectionally, in part because I think it's more accurate to how the world works, but also that by understanding the different experiences of groups within the working class we can build broader, stronger and better alliances.

Reed argues that the biggest oppression the Black working class faces is not being Black it is being working class, and that having more Black billionaires/CEOs/board-members and more Black Ivy League graduates isn’t doing anything to stop the oppression of the Black working class, it is just replacing some of the White-on-Black oppression with Black-on-Black oppression. Also, he argues that prioritising racial/gender/sexuality oppression over class oppression helps to divide the working class, distract them from the true causes of their oppression, drive many of them into the arms of the Right (such as Trump), and ultimately serves the cause of sustaining the capitalist system rather than overthrowing it

Disclaimer: I’m not saying I personally agree with what Reed is saying, I’m just trying to express his point of view as fairly and clearly as I can. I do think he’s worth listening to even if one doesn’t agree with him

I'm not in great disagreement with that argument you put forward on behalf of Reed. I'd just say that the many causes of social justice go far beyond who gets to sit at the table with the other capital owners. I'm not so interested in C-suite representation as how discrimination compounds for those belonging to overlapping minorities within the working class. Don't know what Reed says about that, but it's in such a space I believe progressive polices have done and will do a lot of good.

> I'm not so interested in C-suite representation as how discrimination compounds for those belonging to overlapping minorities within the working class. Don't know what Reed says about that, but it's in such a space I believe progressive polices have done and will do a lot of good.

Have you read his defence of Rachel Dolezal? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal...

It doesn't directly address the question you are asking, but maybe it will give you some idea how he would answer it

It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic.

In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender.

Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly.

Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media.

There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here.

Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.

Kamala Harris: "Stay woke"[0][1]

[0], https://youtube.com/shorts/emY0ig9LDsc

[1], https://youtu.be/9RH54QmQozY

I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US.

I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.

I have a good enough reason to call those people “woke” instead of calling them “people who believe in a cultural approach that seeks to identify and rectify invisible social inequalities based on genetic attributes like race, sex, and sexual orientation by challenging existing power structures and implementing corrective measures. “

It’s easier.

You're right. It's really lazy to use the term at this point as there isn't a shared meaning assigned to it. It's mostly used as a pejorative by the right at this point, but it's original meaning was very different and indicated a positive attribute. Whenever I'm in a conversation with someone who uses the word, I stop them and ask them to define what they're talking about. Usually they end up with something vague that boils down to "stuff I don't like".

I liked PG's attempts to define the perjorative form of "wokeness". I was disappointed that the rest of the essay didn't serve the discourse much.

What I was really hoping for was focused analysis on how to make social media more useful to the earnest helpers instead of the "loud prigs". That would have made for an interesting discussion here.

The problem is that he thinks he solves the problem by bringing 'prig' into the conversation and in reality he just paints a broad swath of people with a broad brush. A lot of folks who are in the "earnest helpers" category are also categorized by the right as "woke". That's the problem with the word right now, it can go all over the place.

"Prig" is in the eye of the beholder. What about when the "prigs" were right? I'm sure the Quakers were seen as "prigs" by the southern slaveholders/traders. The Quakers were early to the abolition party and their opposition to slavery was based on religious zeal which made them seem like "prigs" to the people in the South who's whole society and economy was built on slavery. But we now consider the Quakers were right and the slaveholders wrong. MLK was viewed as a "prig" by many southern whites for interfering in their racism. But MLK was right.

I agree. The essay seems to assume there are clean lines separating the "good ones" from the "bad ones". It's very reductionist.

Step one is to stop the handwringing over who’s “woke”. Paul is committing every sin he claims the “woke” people are doing by obsessing over what words other people are saying instead of trying to solve actual problems.

You are dismissing the issue by implying it is a right wing thing.

Obama is using the term and criticising people who do it in this clip. I in no way consider him to be right wing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

Not too mention Bill Maher who is also firmly on the left.

Firmly? Come on

Yeah. If the left (and the democratic party more generally) throws out all the "anti-woke" people, there won't be many people left.

You'd lose Obama, Bill Maher, Joe Rogan (yes really.), Stephen Fry, Bernie Sanders, and on and on it goes.

I hate puritanical finger wagging. I think most people feel the same way. That has nothing to do with my political opinions on other topics, like abortion, gun control and so on.

I think the left in the US makes a massive strategic error by claiming that everyone who doesn't like "woke" is right wing. The right wing is delighted to have all of those voters.

He is absolutely not. He’s a science denier and routinely has anti vaxxers on without pushing back on their ideas

You’re never gonna believe this but the hippie granola left were the original antivaxxers. The first places where you started hearing about measles outbreaks in the US were all affluent left leaning communities with a strong granola contingent, like Santa Monica, California.

You’re never going to believe this but those people are no longer on the left. Its passed them by

That is kind of the point Paul is making in his essay. The most progressive people are pushing an ever evolving definition of what it means to be racist or anti-science or a bigot.

This is why Trump won. People got tired of being told they were a bigot if they expressed any concerns that were not inline with the most recent trends of progressivism.

> That is kind of the point Paul is making in his essay. The most progressive people are pushing an ever evolving definition of what it means to be racist or anti-science or a bigot.

This isn't what progressives are doing as much as it's what conservatives characterize it as what progressives are doing.

> This is why Trump won. People got tired of being told they were a bigot if they expressed any concerns that were not inline with the most recent trends of progressivism.

This isn't why Trump won, data we have access to shows that.

Just read the threads here. People are specifically saying Obama's criticism of Woke are no longer valid because the word has changed. But Paul is using the same definition that Obama used.

Is is the progressives who have decided unilaterally that woke is now a pejorative that racists use to demonize progressives and doesn't mean what it used to mean 5 years ago.

Obama isn't progressive!

He's not using the progressive definition, hes using the conservative one, just like PG is. Both are wrong in this aspect.

>Is is the progressives who have decided unilaterally that woke is now a pejorative that racists use to demonize progressives and doesn't mean what it used to mean 5 years ago.

this is incorrect. I welcome you providing some sort of "proof" otherwise?

Just look up the history of the word on wikipedia. You think a right wing person got edit access to that page and added the most recent change?

He isn't though.

He represents his own distorted view of reality that's increasingly disconnected at a classiest level

At this point is probably not meant as 5 years ago. But even 5 years ago the meaning of the word had shifted away from the original meaning.

Just because "you know it when you see it" doesn't mean you don't understand it or don't have something coherent in mind.

As a non-american, reading the definition of woke I dont know what to think

If woke means progressive and politically conscious then the opposite is what, uninformed,thoughtless.

So people say they rather be ignorant than conscious?

Sometimes I think people are not actually fully conscious and tend to behave like primitive animals and they are hating everything because reverting to hate is a primitive animalistic trait that requires little thinking or consciousness.

Or its a racist thing because woke has roots in black culture?

Originally, people meant that you were inclusive and caring about all people. Except, you know, those hateful people on the right. Because fuck them. (I'm not even kidding. This is how they really felt, somehow.)

But then "the right" got ahold of the term and used it to mean the people above who went above and beyond and were actually being harmful instead of helpful, in the name of "being woke".

Personally, I think the pejorative term is a lot more accurate, especially for most people who consider themselves "woke". They drink their own koolaid and believe what they're doing is helpful, and can't see the divide that they are causing.

Of course, there are a ton of trolls (who are also probably on "the right") that use it to cause the divide as well.

So in the end, it ends up just being a way for jerks on both sides to rile each other up, instead of actually helping anyone.

> Originally, people meant that you were inclusive and caring about all people. Except, you know, those hateful people on the right. Because fuck them. (I'm not even kidding. This is how they really felt, somehow.)

Surely you have evidence for this claim that would counter all the other evidence that disputes it?

Your definition doesn't even stand up to the first paragraph on Wikipedia

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke - https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/woke-meani... - https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/06/06/what-doe...

If you're reading "stay woke" and understand it to me "fuck people we don't like" then I'm not sure what reading comprehension program to recommend.

I would advise you to ignore yapyap's definitions.

Paul Graham has defined woke in the best way I have read so far, and it is in the article we are discussing about:

Woke: An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

(Performed by a self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.)

Fair enough. But to be honest, I feel like it should be a positive thing, that was hijacked.

I can understand the original meaning as a way for black people to communicate that they need to be aware of socal issues caused by people who feel superior to them.

Which then was hijacked by the people who cause the social issues so they can use it to act self righteous and superior.

> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.

Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless? Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy? What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable? Is that empathy? Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?

Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.

[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...

I am very sympathetic to the idea that some harm-reduction policies do more to enable drug addiction among the homeless than help them.

But the immigration stuff is just right-wing nonsense. a) We don't have anything like unrestrained immigration, that's propaganda. Obama and Biden both deported more people than any other presidents in history to that point (https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re..., https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-nu...). And b) the percentage of homeless who might compete with a Honduran immigrant for a day-laborer job is a tiny sliver.

On the immigration issue, I'm mostly speaking from personal experience. I think this issue, just like immigration itself, is very regional and doesn't present the same way everywhere. In the town where I live it's now basically impossible to get an entry level job - the competition is fierce[1]. This is a result of a mass influx of foreign students thanks to a local diploma mill. Not surprisingly, the rents and homeless population have increased rapidly over the same period.

[1] https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/massive-lineu...

Your description of capitalism is surprisingly lacking in awareness

While "Empathy for the homeless" can situationally mean talking nicely about them, it also means stopping, blocking, and undoing directly terrible actions against the homeless.

Bulldozing peoples' stuff is in fact pretty bad. Having laws against giving money to people is in fact pretty bad. Putting hostile architecture everywhere is in fact pretty bad. People make decisions, over and over again, to not just hurt homeless people, but also hurt the people trying to help homeless people.

Stopping people from doing that is called "empathy for the homeless". It's called that because saying and feeling bad things about people is part of the process of hurting them. It's how people agree who is and isn't okay to hurt. By stopping group efforts to make things worse, you only have to worry about random individuals trying to make things worse for other random individuals. Which is unstoppable but untargeted.

Sounds nice and virtuous... until you remember there exist gangs of homeless people who mug law-abiding citizens, retreat into the structures that you want defended from demolishing, and cry victim when people want to stop their crimes. Not to mention they use the said structures as a hub to distribute drugs to the local community of teenagers.

You see, the problem with every such discussion is the lack of nuance and the willingness to demonize e.g. parents who want their kids to be safe in their neighborhoods.

What you call lack of empathy for the homeless is, in some instances, the concern and actions of the said parents.

So do these parents truly lack empathy, how do you think? Or they say "no matter what hand life dealt you, please just stay away from my kids"?

What's your opinion?

If people are mugging, they should be arrested. I see no need for the other laws.

And if they use abandoned / derelict buildings to group up and start their "operations"? Removing those is a nice first step.

So, should we bulldoze homes in case they house thieves?

I specifically said abandoned / derelict. Shall I point you at the wiki page of a "straw man argument"?

I'm not interested in policing thought crimes,just real ones.

And I also mentioned those. Not sure what your goal is here.

I read your message as removing abandoned buildings because they might be used as some sort of gang HQ. Either they are doing illegal things and should be put into the legal system, or they aren't.

Your dislike of "gangs of homeless people" existing shouldn't be directed at the homeless people, but the gangs. In an area where black communities have high crime rates, the answer wouldn't be to go after black people, but address the crime directly. I don't see why this should any different.

I heard police officers say that lot of homeless people are doing some sort of crime.

It's not an oppression to read statistics. It's a good first step in trying to fix stuff.

God help us; the vagrants are doing some sorts of crime. And reading statistics on this stuff? Hah! The police don't even report crime statistics:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rate...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was a guest in communities where people said they had problems with homeless people on a regular basis.

You are free to not believe it. I for the moment believe my eyes and ears.

Of course that shit happens on a constant basis and it's silly of you to think that my position isn't that shit happens.

Think about it like this: if you had no food, were starving, and the only way to eat for the night is to steal something, wouldn't you do it to? Or are you going to allow yourself to literally die because you're afraid to commit a crime? Nah. You will want to live.

I was once held up at gunpoint by three folk who stole my wallet, keys, phone, etc. Over the next 48 hours or so I watched the phone bill logs to see where they were calling. Hospital and HIV clinic were on the list. I asked the main dude why he was robbing me and he responded, "Man, we're just trying to live."

Grow some empathy for your fellow man.

No, I will not. I was in desperate situations as well, managed to crawl out without robbing anyone.

Again, believe what makes you feel good. I am looking out for myself because I was only backstabbed all my life and I am not far from a desperate situation again... in my 40s and with a supposedly prestigious profession (programmer) but almost nobody is hiring.

My empathy only resulted in my money and literal health going toward people who don't appreciate it. Nobody ever worked for my cause. Ever. Not once.

You are a classic victim of a filter bubble. "Worked out for me, must work out for everyone". No, in fact it does not work for most.

I hope you never experience homelessness or addiction, but if you do, I hope it humbles you.

You can stop replying now, in case you haven't noticed. Especially after using roundabout ways of insulting. Not interested.

Wasn't meant as an insult, but I'll admit it wasn't kind. It came from a genuine interest in seeing you grow as a person, despite what you might think. To say I've been down on my dumps a few times in the past is an understatement, so I understand. The way I read your post is that you, yourself, are effectively insulting people close to me, including friends and family. It's hard for me not to perceive it as naive dehumanism.

If I may -- please try spending some time at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen, or just volunteer your time to help others. Try to have conversations with people who are affected by homelessness and addiction to understand their struggles. People warm up to genuine curiosity and I think you'll find that there's so much more love out there than you give humanity credit for.

Cheers.

Since you are persisting, OK, point by point.

> It came from a genuine interest in seeing you grow as a person, despite what you might think

This is your mistake here, to think I need to grow further. I did. I got to the other end you were scared to explore. I understood that kindness will only get you killed in a back-alley if you kept practicing it.

Purely mathematically, it's a function with a limit. This is the part you refuse to see.

You are the one who both needs to grow as a person and sharpen his analytical skills.

This is what I meant by saying you use roundabout ways of insulting.

> The way I read your post is that you, yourself, are effectively insulting people close to me, including friends and family. It's hard for me not to perceive it as naive dehumanism.

Fair to see it that way. I do not mean offense in particular, I simply don't mince words. To me you are hopelessly idealistic and don't live in the real world. Seeing homeless people struggling to make ends meet? Witnessing soup kitchens?

Brother, I've seen much worse than this but unlike you I didn't quickly get to parade it in the hopes of coming across as kinder than your discussion partner. I'll save the gross details of everything I witnessed for myself. Was not the topic here anyway.

So OK, I don't object to you thinking I am insulting. Was not the original intent but I am aware it does come across aggressive. I am simply old enough to stop caring and write like ChatGPT, that's all.

...Plus I am not from the USA. Here's one strong clue why we are so much... not alike.

> People warm up to genuine curiosity and I think you'll find that there's so much more love out there than you give humanity credit for.

That I never denied and never will. I was talking about the scum; the people who don't want to fight their way out of the dump. They love the dump, and they see you and me as free money, free clothes, free phones, and will never change. Yes, they never will change, you read that right. I've been among those people. Lived around them.

So maybe you are the one who got sidetracked and believed I am some stupido who loves to generalize. That's on you however, not on me.

I know there are people who genuinely want to come back to society and, here is the part where you will not believe me and will be convinced I am only saying it to "win" -- I helped three of them do it. The gratitude I got was that they became even better off than me and spat on me. :)

So yeah, cheers indeed. I'll go drink a glass of wine for humanity's inevitable downfall. Shame I won't live long enough to witness it, I'd laugh and even help accelerate it if I could.

> Sounds nice and virtuous... until you remember there exist gangs of homeless people who mug law-abiding citizens, retreat into the structures that you want defended from demolishing, and cry victim when people want to stop their crimes. Not to mention they use the said structures as a hub to distribute drugs to the local community of teenagers.

There are folks who are not homeless who participate in criminal enterprise.

It's unlikely that a successful criminal is homeless, as doing crime successfully generally leaves you with money.

Like wage theft.

> So do these parents truly lack empathy, how do you think? Or they say "no matter what hand life dealt you, please just stay away from my kids"? > > What's your opinion?

Yes, some parents let the empathetic part of their brain that covers people not in their family die. "Fuck you, I got mine" is a popular mentality amongst those who believe in bootstrap and american excepptionalism.

My view is that you cannot sacrifice other peoples' lives and belongings, and call it good, without also sacrificing some of your own. It does not actually have to be "an eye for an eye", the sacrifices do not have to be anywhere close to balanced. But willingly hurting other people and paying no price whatsoever cannot possibly be considered good.

> Sounds nice and virtuous Yeah it is. I care about people about as much as it is possible to care about people, because I can't truly separate myself from anyone. If I know someone is happy, I feel like I am happy. If I am aware of someone on death row, I feel like I am on death row. My brain doesn't actually mix up real and imagined sensations, but I lack the ability to hear of something happening to someone and go "that can't happen to me". In some sense, I "am" humanity: I want everyone to be happy and get what they want. I empathize towards trans people and transphobes simultaneously (though ultimately side with trans people). I feel near-completely unable of actually making a difference with anything, but my mind does give me rather strong yanks to "make this war go away" all the time. Though the one exception to all this is people who hurt other people and call it good, especially if they call it "for their own good". I feel quite a lot of rage when I hear about incidents like that.

If you share goals and desires with someone, you are "the same person" as them. You are a "law-abiding citizen". Their successes are your successes, their failures are your failures. You are not the same person as "homeless people". Their successes mean nothing to you. Same with your failures. They are capable of causing problems to you (as all people do), but your desire to retaliate is not limited by the desire to not "cut off your nose to spite your face" that you would have if the cause of the problem was a "law-abiding citizen".

In my understanding of the world, it is not possible to convince you to care about homeless people. The desires of different people are fundamentally not comparable. My desire to stay alive does not outweigh your desire to not stub your toe, and if those desires come into conflict, it does not matter which one wins. (Though as I also consider myself to be you to some extent, I desire both to stay alive and for you to not stub your toe. And you too are probably also "humanity" to some extent, though probably not as strongly as I am. Not that it actually matters beyond simply describing what happens)

I see groups of parents looking out for their kids and feel good. I see groups of homeless people being hurt and feel bad. You go, "I'm defending the lives and non-drugginess of the kids of my community. That makes me a good person". Does it? You are making a decision to help the people you feel closest to at the expense of the people you feel further away from. On one hand, no such decision is better than any other decision. On the other hand, people are being hurt at all.

> My view is that you cannot sacrifice other peoples' lives and belongings

..."Sacrifice" them? They are already marked for demolition but the local powers work with the speed of a glacier. You are starting on the entirely wrong premise, I am not surprised that you drew very wrong conclusions.

> Yeah it is. I care about people about as much as it is possible to care about people, because I can't truly separate myself from anyone.

You mistake me for somebody willing to discuss hugely unrealistically optimistic philosophy for 13-year olds. But I'll entertain you for a few minutes.

I have a lot of sympathy for people in difficult conditions. I was this close to being homeless 3 times in my life due to bad choices borne out of a toxic family and zero opportunities in life.

Yet I never mugged anyone. Never did one thing illegal. Had opportunities, mind you.

I am not special. I am not a unicorn, not a hero, fairly normal guy with maybe a little more brain that allowed him to do programming. Maybe. Or could be entirely average and be just deluding myself. Ego gets us all.

If I can avoid mugging people, everyone can.

I have sympathy for you until you draw a knife and command me to give you my wallet. There the sympathy stops. Unconditionally.

The rest is really your own philosophical diatribe. As said to another sibling comment -- sorry that you have no people to discuss this stuff with but I have moved past it maximum at 22 years old (and I am ashamed of myself because I believe I did it very late even; I'll again say this is stuff for teenagers to figure out).

So no, I am not everyone else and not everyone else is me. I wanted that. Wanted it with all my heart. I am so sick of all of us only looking after each other and -- in the very very best-case scenarios, looking out for a local community -- but it simply never happened. Got back-stabbed hundreds of times, still do to this day every time I "expose my belly", so to speak, without failure. Received true kindness maximum 5 times in my life, one of which was my wife treating me the way she did on our first date, another one was a true friend now passed away, the other 3 were actual work opportunities that I botched due to being bitter and physically exhausted (technically my fault).

That was it. And I am in my 40s. Five times receiving kindness in a lifetime.

Collectivism is a fantasy. And historically proven to not work (i.e. communism, the Japanese society, and others). And now I know you'll latch to those words in the parentheses and ignore everything else. Surprise me by not doing it. :)

So, one diatribe to counter yours. But IMO that topic(s) will lead us nowhere. I smell deep and incompatible clash of values. You live a life that allows you to be an idealist. I don't.

I'm not actually an idealist. I think all humans are more trouble than they are worth, but that isn't actually a good reason to hurt them.

Doing physical violence does not make someone any more of a problem than they already were just by being alive. Is lying to get someone fired any better than beating them up and stealing their car? Of course not. Violence is substrate-independent. If something matters, humans will both use it to hurt others and hurt others to keep them from using it.

Yes, humans are collective. The tricky part is that they are only as collective as they need to be. Humans adaptively adjust how evil they are to take as much as they can without being retaliated against or burning everything down. Mostly. All the hardwired instincts are buggy and outdated, so they often vastly misjudge the situation.

People do in fact do good, mostly when their surroundings are too broken to survive being evil. But quite a lot of people mostly do good most of the time, because evil is so good at destruction that you need an awful lot of good to even come close to counteracting it.

I mostly think of myself as a good person, but I know that unless the local community is really good at keeping people from hurting others, doing good deeds mainly just supports other people doing bad stuff. It is theoretically possible to go an entire life without hurting others or having your works twisted to hurt others, but your descendents will have the same statistical chances of being evil as everyone elses'. (Plus, minds nudge people to cheat and do bad things whenever they can still think of themselves as good. I am not immune to that. I cannot rewrite my mind to remove the rootkits installed by evolution)

> ..."Sacrifice" them? They are already marked for demolition but the local powers work with the speed of a glacier. You are starting on the entirely wrong premise, I am not surprised that you drew very wrong conclusions.

If people have tents filled with whatever they can get their hands on to help them survive, having the police force everyone away so they can destroy everyone's stuff does in fact count as sacrificing their belongings. You are still only focusing on the ways homeless people slight you, and not on the way homeless people are hurt. "How dare they use buildings we aren't using and haven't cared enough to destroy! Something must be done immediately!". But you just ignore police destroying tents and sleeping bags right before winter, like that isn't going to be directly responsible for a lot of people's deaths.

I understand that in this terrible world everyone is drowning, but that isn't an excuse to pull down other people again and again.

Though the sacrifice part is more for things like civil asset forfeiture. If you let the police seize large amounts of cash from people, you shouldn't let the police keep it. In fact, seizing property should decrease the police budget by a small amount, so they only do it when they think it is actually important. If you claim that hurting another person is super important for society to do, you should willingly hurt yourself to show you are selfless in your intentions.

> I have sympathy for you until you draw a knife and command me to give you my wallet. There the sympathy stops. Unconditionally.

I have slightly more sympathy for people who use physical violence than people who hurt in other ways. Or at least I think people overreact to it because it's pretty much the easiest form of evil to detect. If a doctor systematically doesn't actually attempt to diagnose problems reported by women and just tells them to lose weight, they can easily do as much damage as a cannibal serial killer, and be as deserving of death, but it's way harder to tell they are doing it. (And if an organization were to be created to investigate doctors for this, it would either be irrelevant or twisted into a weapon at the expense of its purpose. Nothing that matters can be good)

So do I like everyone? Do I want everyone to die, including me? Am I an optimist? Am I a pessimist? It changes from moment to moment.

So, since you no longer come across as a brainless optimist, let's continue.

> I understand that in this terrible world everyone is drowning, but that isn't an excuse to pull down other people again and again.

Absolutely not what I was talking about. My point from which we started was this: if you use those seemingly-innocent structures as a base from which to mount assaults on hard-working people, the gloves must come off. (And I have witnessed this, a number of times.) You are owed no grace from that point and on.

That was it. Nothing else. Everything else you kind of inferred and started going on side quests. Which I found a little sad because again, maybe you have nobody to talk with about those things. But I am the wrong person for that discussion.

I am not here to discuss the most minute of nuances on how much kindness must we give to less privileged people.

My view is fairly straightforward: I pay taxes, I expect that the-powers-above-me must take care of the people less lucky than me and the actual criminals (two separate groups). I owe society nothing more than my time (my only true limited currency so I am already giving it way too damn much!), my health and part of my resources. I give quite enough already. Those who are paid to figure society out -- well, frakkin figure it out already, what are we paying you for?

That's all. I have nothing else to say on this topic and I'll ask you to not raise it further. I am seriously not interested in any other aspects of it.

> I think all humans are more trouble than they are worth, but that isn't actually a good reason to hurt them.

First part: GOOD! 99.99% of all humans deserve nothing more than indifference in the best case scenario. Second part: I am not hurting anyone. I only wish to be left alone. And even that was too much for way too many pieces of crap out there. Hope that clears it up.

> I have slightly more sympathy for people who use physical violence than people who hurt in other ways. Or at least I think people overreact to it because it's pretty much the easiest form of evil to detect.

Again, stuff for 13-year olds, dude. Of course physical violence is the easiest to react to. Of course our instincts are EXTREMELY outdated and inadequate and of course that is the reason for so much evil going on out there?

You want a medal for what I and a company of semi-drunk teenagers figured out one clear night gazing the stars 30 years ago, when most of us didn't even turn 15 y/o yet? :P

All of this is well-known and understood by many IMO.

Nowadays indeed the non-physical violence is more, by several orders of magnitude sadly, and that's partially my original point: normal hard-working people are pressed from all directions and some of us will not tolerate some homeless cretin thinking he'll get away with my phone. Nope. No chance, no but-s, no if-s, no kiddie philosophy about some imagined kindness. Nuh-uh. I'll die with my wallet in my pocket if I have to and I've proven it (I chased away guys who thought me and my wife were easy targets before).

But physical violence is indeed the easy mode, I'll agree on that.

We can't fight back against so much: inflation that is being shoved down our throats because it's the eternal band-aid and the rulers are too lazy and stupid to formulate something better, the new era of us needing new labor protections because as it is currently capitalism is so rampant and unregulated that we absolutely need another Henry Ford not yesterday but like 20 years now, and all the charming effects of globalism that I won't go deeper on (like the leeching migrants in the EU), that most people simply get severely depressed and just coast on life. And are leeched on.

You want a sad story? That is a sad story. Crush people's will so much that they completely disengage and become worker drones. That, my friend, is the actual tragedy, not the hobos whose biggest problem is where can they secure a few glasses of whiskey for the night.

So yeah, the non-physical violence is way too real in this age.

We live in an era of extreme parasitism.

> Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless?

Let's start by changing how we think about housing and shelter from an investment to basic rights.

Or maybe stop criminalizing being poor.

> Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy?

That's not a thing.

>What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable?

Which ones? Some like quality and safety standards add cost short term but save long term.

However SFH rules hurt density, and cause grater strain on infrastructure and resources, while also driving up costs.

> Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?

Medical safe injection sites could be part of the solution. But this requires thinking beyond "drugs are bad mkay"

Investing in diversion and rehab is another good use of resources.

> Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.

But if you can't even say nice words, your brain is so broken that you look at the unhoused with fear or contempt, how will you ever support investment in those same people?

The irony of all of this is that if you boil down the concept of 'wokeness' to simply looking past the status quo, then a lot of the things that are currently labelled 'woke' are in fact anything but. It transcends the political spectrum and simply becomes a cudgel for shit you don't like but can't explain why.

Gay marriage? It's legal, therefore status quo. Making gay marriage illegal again? Not status quo, therefore woke.

Abortion? If it's legal and you want to make it illegal, that's also changing the status quo. Woke.

Immigration? Status quo is to hire employees who are citizens or resident. Laying them off in favour of H1B workers? Woke AF.

Roe v Wade and the Chevron Doctrine? Those were status quo for decades! How woke of the Supreme Court to reverse those decisions after so many years.

Of course in each of these cases the policy is actually regressive as it reverts society back to the point before the original policies were implemented, and to that extent the argument falls apart: none of that actually seems 'woke'. Except...the people who agree with all of the above would see it as progressive towards their own aims, so it pretty much is 'woke' for them, especially as they believe their own morals to be superior (and traditionally backed by religion).

>that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.

If you're going to be reductive with someone's argument, at least use the entire argument.

If we do, IDK how you can say woke is just oppositional positions when that wasn't the idea OP proposed.

Because it's actually just a verbal cudgel used by the right for things they don't like. Religious groups especially have all sorts of arbitrary rules for which words you can use to talk about them, and if you use the wrong words they'll absolutely cancel you - up to and including murder.

That is the entire argument though, it's just that the parent's idea is based on their own morality when, in fact, there is more than one morality in play. Flipping it on its head shows that it's not really about 'wokeness', which might as well be a thought terminating cliché at this point.

Here is another part of the parent's post which I alluded to:

> the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”

This is why it's ironic. Two sides of the same coin: one group of righteous people claims moral superiority over another group of infidels, and vice-versa.

It's the Spidermen pointing at themselves meme. These conflicting beliefs can reasonably co-exist (as they always have done), so who stands to gain from treating them as mutually exclusive (there can only be one?)?

"Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep. Not really a statement about your own behavior so much as an acknowledgement of what other people are doing to you—it just meant you're well-informed.

Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."

Generally the reaction is not to minorities(non-white, is what I am assuming you mean) but to people from outside of a group trying to tell a group what words to use i.e. LatinX.

An aside: If someone who is white is talking to the Spanish speaking community, would they be considered a minority? If so, then the parent premise would hold true.

I mean any kind of minority, although I would generally say "marginalized group" instead of "minority." But this is HN, so trying to stick to more commonly-known terminology :P

I also think the "latinx" thing is overblown and generally used as an "anti-woke" shibboleth by people who want to get mad at something. Literally never seen an Anglophone yelling at a Spanish speaker about it before, only queer Spanish speakers who use it to refer to themselves.

Also worth noting that there have been other variations that predate "latinx" and have seen more widespread usage. There's "latine," and "latin@", although the former is both easier to write and to pronounce.

> Literally never seen an Anglophone yelling at a Spanish speaker about it before, only queer Spanish speakers who use it to refer to themselves.

You and I move in different circles. I was definitely running into "normal" Spanish speakers for the past few years who's awakening experience with "wokeness" was seeing the word "Latinx" on some HR form and being told that the reason was "for Hispanic comfort" ... which every single one of them found gaslighting in the extreme (since none of them liked it, even a little bit).

> seeing the word "Latinx" on some HR form

Yes, very common in job application forms. I don't find it offensive per se, but it makes me wonder if this is the kind of company where bullshit reigns in the workplace.

Ah, HR... and here I thought we were talking about real people! ;)

I've been condescended by (generally well-meaning) corporate diversity initiatives on many occasions, but I think it's hard to take that as a statement about progressive movements in general. Corporate shit tends to be toothless and cringey across the board.

> I think it's hard to take that as a statement about progressive movements in general

True, but remember that many people's experience of any movement will be through an interface that is both lossy and hostile (whether it be government, corporate, clan leadership, what have you). "The effects that this had were well beyond the scope of what we intended" is so old it's in the Old Testament (but there as an answer-in-advance):

> These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.

~ 1 Samuel Chapter 8 via https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%208%...

Yes. I suspect that the term "Latinx" was invented by some gringx.

> Yes. I suspect that the term "Latinx" was invented by some gringx.

[0] suggests otherwise.

[0] https://diversity.sonoma.edu/sites/diversity/files/history_o...

Latinx is a great example of the overreaction. Some people use this term. It was briefly catching on among groups with power, but ultimately never did. But it is spoken about like Harris was saying "latinx" in all of her campaign videos and that people are being fired for using "latino" or "latina" or even "latin."

Ultimately, I think it is important that groups are able to try things and then later determine that they weren't the best idea. Shouldn't this be ceelbrated?

It would indeed be nice if these things were introduced as “let’s try a new thing and then choose to accept or reject it later, based on results”, rather than “we have determined there is only one correct way of thinking about this topic, and if you don’t like it, you’re a Nazi”.

I suppose I would ask where you've seen or heard this sort of ultimatum about Latinx.

Isn't it interesting that your response here is questioning and perhaps dismissive?

If a minority were sharing their perspective about whatever their lived experience was with regards to racism, would you respond this way?

I'll answer that: no, you wouldn't.

Which very quickly lifts the curtain. The movement is not about empathy or understanding. It's about empathy and understanding for people you deem worthy of receiving it.

I really don't understand how this relates.

Maybe that is the problem.

> If a minority were sharing their perspective about whatever their lived experience was with regards to racism, would you respond this way?

If a small group of people told me they actually experienced flight under only human power, no mechanical assistance. Would it be right to take that claim at face value?

I'll answer that: no, it wouldn't.

If you're going to ignore plausibility entirely, then yeah I suppose all statements deserve equal consideration.

However... If it is the case that some stamens are more plausible than others maybe it's an effective heuristic to be skeptical of implausible claims.

The number of people making the claim is not small.

You probably just cut all the people out of your life who disagree with you.

That is the liberal way, these days.

Donald Trump, among the worst presidents the US ever had, won the 2024 election. This kind of nonsense was absolutely a factor.

By definition, a minority group isn't the majority. So it's at least less than half. A non-small amount of people claim the earth is flat.

Does a personal attack make you feel better about yourself, your situation in life?

If that "kind of nonsense" was a factor, show us in the numbers where it made an impact. I got time, don't cop out, cough it up.

Sure, for example, this guy and his paper: https://x.com/mfrmarcel/status/1850899388165693916

“Latinx” is presented uncritically as “inclusive”, and the people who don’t like it are smeared as “queerphobic”.

This is academia at its most tone-deaf and ignorant. If he actually spoke to some Latino people he would quickly discover that the reasons for the backlash have approximately zero to do with “queerphobia”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx

Can you please bridge how your comment "and if you don’t like it, you’re a Nazi" is in any way connected to this tweet about a researcher saying the usage of the phrase "latinx" reduced latino support for Democrats?

Another person is asking basically "why are people so quick to dismiss claims of aggressive wokeness policing" and this is why. Because it is always so much exaggeration about the topic coming from these claims.

That's an egregious misrepresentation. The authors of that paper surveyed Latinos, found that those who disliked the term 'latinx' had moved toward voting for Trump between 2020 and 2024, and that those most likely to move were also most likely to express antipathy toward LGBT people.

You say the academics should have talked to some Latino people, and they did - n = ~2000. Are you saying that they should not have reported their results because you dislike what they imply?

>The authors of that paper surveyed Latinos, found that those who disliked the term 'latinx' had moved toward voting for Trump between 2020 and 2024

It's strange for the author to distinguish "those who dislike the term" from those who don't, considering that the term is overwhelmingly unpopular (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/ho...).

I don't see why. My read of the research paper was that they went looking for correlates to gain some insight into why it's unpopular.

Because the finding is more accurately described like "Latinos[0] moved towards Trump". If that's related to the latinx thing, it might be something like "... in part because they generally resent having this 'latinx' thing pushed on them".

[0] Here in Canada, as far as I can tell "Hispanic" is the accepted term - but it's rare for people to identify that way generically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_origins_of_people_in_Ca...). People here far more often attribute their ethnicity to a specific country of origin rather than to some generic grouping.

I’m saying that he shouldn’t have presented use of “Latinx” as an unalloyed good, and uncritically “inclusive” (a massive assumption which is highly debatable, particularly amongst Latinos), and that his survey questions are very weak at controlling for the explanations that Latinos generally give for disliking the term (pronunciation, erasure of diversity, trendiness, imperial/colonial attitude to language, elitism…).

Concluding that there is no problem with the term and the real problem is “queerphobia” is textbook academic myopia.

See this critique, which the author engages with - unconvincingly: https://x.com/paulnovosad/status/1851994193503359003

> "Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep.

This is distorted history. "Woke" is just the word in a bunch of black dialects for "awake." We just say "are you woke?" instead of "are you awake?"

What happened is at some point some white woman somewhere had a black person explaining their political beliefs to her. It was likely a black person who was working for her (doing her nails, washing her clothes, or serving her food) who she had a faux friendship with and considered a spiritual guru and a connection to the real world and real suffering, in that way white people do (magical negro.) She carried these pearls of wisdom to her white friends, or to her students at the university, or to the nonprofit that she worked at, and it entered into the white lexicon as a magic word.

If a white hippie, in the middle of a righteous rant, said "you've got to stay awake, man..." as many have, it wouldn't have been so exotic and interesting to tell their white friends. Or as useful to get yourself a job as a consultant.

At that point, it became a thing that white people would use to abuse other white people as racists. The sin wasn't calling white people racists, it's that a certain self-selected white elect declared themselves to be not racist, or even anti-racist, in order to attack other white people. And they decided this gave them the right to control how other white people speak. And a government who hates the way people can talk to each other on the internet about what the government is lying about supported them whole-heartedly. Woke policing was an excellent way to use legal means to keep people asleep.

And black people got blamed, as always. Because America is racist. Black people didn't benefit an iota from any of this. Approximately 0.0% of DEI managers are black men. Black people got poorer during the entire period. Now the anti-woke are going to unleash their revenge on black people, and the ex-woke are going to resent black people for not recognizing their sainthood.

> Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."

Meanwhile, the first step of wokeness was to erase black people altogether and replace them with "minorities" and "people of color," as if the only thing important to note about black people is their lack of whiteness. Or, since sexual minorities are included in "minorities", black people now have no problems that can be distinguished from the desires of white upper-middle class transwomen. Wokeness erased slavery and Jim Crow, and all that money that white people inherit, just as much as anti-wokeness did. Now the real crime was that white people weren't feeling the right things, and weren't saying the right things. Complete Caucasian auto-fixation.

The only thing racial about black people's problems is that white people used race as the criterion to enslave. Slavery and Jim Crow were the point, and all of the freebies handed from government to people's white ancestors that weren't given to slaves and ex-slaves, and all of the labor and torture visited on slaves and ex-slaves turned into profit that went into the pockets of white people and was taxed into government coffers. There were blond-haired blue-eyed slaves; the "race" stuff is a white invention, not something they get to act like is an imposition from their ex-property. And that experience is not something that everybody non-white or non-straight gets to steal.

When you’re woke, it’s bad.

But when you’re red-pilled, it’s apparently good?

One thing I wanted to point out: I’ve seen a lot of people on HN and elsewhere allege that moderates or the “right” (in quotes because it is overused as a pejorative label) cannot define what “woke” is. But I disagree, and think most people who complain against this term can easily point to what ideas it represents, and what it means to them. Even if that is not very precise, it is real and meaningful. Enough so that they can find common ground with other people who use the word, even if they aren’t exact matches. The accusation that people can’t define it is itself a tactic meant to undermine the credibility of complaints against it. But is it really any less imprecise than people using broad labels of other kinds (things like liberal or conservative)?

I agree. Wokeness has a very precise meaning: World is divided between oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors are white heterosexual men (white supremacy / heteropatriarchy) everyone else subjugated to them. Institutions, laws are created to perpetuate that power and must be dismantled / subverted via revolution.

Most understand it even if they can’t articulate a definition. Easy to point out when a movie or corporate initiative, behavior is woke.

I'd say it's hard to give a clear-cut, very specific definition of the word. It's also really hard to believe that people can't figure out the meaning given context and such.

It is by no means whatsoever a less defined term than "fascist" and the semantic problem seems missing there.

> I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.

Before that it was "social justice warrior", before that it was "political correctness". It's just a drumbeat of demonization.

https://theonion.com/woke-conservatives-define-what-it-means...

My favourite is number 5.

Woke in is when you don't play there games. Don't wanna join them beating up whoever is at the wrong end of the stick ? Woke.

See a observed phenomena as a result of complex socioeconomic circumstances instead of making a deliriously stupid absolute statements? Woke.

Defend a person that is weaker than you , has a different gender or skin color? Woke.

They are fucking bullies and if you are simple a decent, considerate person your behavior points that out . And like all bullies they hate that.

Well said.

I've long believed that racism, sexism, homophobia are basically forms of bullying. All are antisocial behavior and quite bad for society. I endured near constant bullying for a lot of my early life, as well as sporadic racism.

When I hear the word woke, I think about people who are against this kind of behavior whether its conducted by an individual, a company, a society, or a government. But all the time I wish that people would just call it what is is: bullying.

It would be much more effective than calling people racist or homophobic or sexist.

> the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that

CPG Grey’s co-dependent memes video comes to mind [1].

Each group defines wokeness (and defines how other groups define it) to maximise outrage. To the extent there is a mind virus it’s in using the term at all. (Which is where I appreciate Graham bringing the term prig into the discussion.)

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Sadly, this is where we are in politics. Pick any term that you like to replace the concept and a rival campaign to redefine it will begin. Your vocabulary is just another battleground.

> not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead

[4] The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.

Treating people with respect can sometimes mean learning enough about them to understand a little about what life is like in their shoes. There are a lot of different kinds of people wearing a lot of shoes. Learning about them is a lifelong process. It’s not about learning “a long list of rules” but more “learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.”

I think something a lot of people don't understand is that nobody is entitled to respect. Respect is something that is earned. If someone behaves in ways that you disagree with, you are not obligated to respect that behavior, or the person engaging in that behavior. I think one of the greatest disservices we have done to our young people, for a couple of generations now, is to teach them that everyone is entitled to respect no matter what they do. Just as it is your right to behave however you want in society (within legal limits), it is everyone else's right to judge you for that behavior. The younger generations act as if "judgement" is a dirty word, and that people are committing some sort of grave transgression if they judge you.

Are you suggesting that you think that disrespect is a better default behavior towards others than respect? For example, would you prefer that people respond to your comments disrespectfully until they have seen enough of them to believe you “deserve their respect?”

Edit: if you are saying that it is reasonable that some actions can induce a loss of respect, I agree. Though I firmly believe respect is the default behavior and also that there is a base level of respect that should be accorded to even our worst enemies.

>Are you suggesting that you think that disrespect is a better default behavior towards others than respect?

Not at all, disrespect is something that is earned as well. Personally I behave with courtesy towards all people until they give me a reason to do otherwise. There is a big difference between courtesy and respect. I will say "thank you", hold the door open when someone is coming in behind me, and otherwise treat anyone I don't know with decency and courtesy.

>there is a base level of respect that should be accorded to even our worst enemies.

We'll have to agree to disagree here! When someone has proven themselves to be worthless and not entitled to respect, I feel no obligation to them whatsoever.

> understand a little about what life is like in their shoes.

That's empathy which is a different concept than treating someone with respect.

> learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.

Having knowledge of a breadth of different people's life experiences is also a different concept than respect. The author proposed "treating people with respect" as the minimal normative standard. You seem to be rejecting his proposal of "respect" as insufficient and instead are proposing an alternative which includes empathy and a "lifelong process" of gaining broad knowledge of different lived experiences.

While those are valid things to propose, you're suggesting a meaningfully different standard by expanding on what respect "sometimes means." It's worth highlighting because I interpreted the author's central argument on this point as being "treating people with respect" alone should be sufficient as the minimally acceptable standard. Whether I agree with the author's proposal or not, I understood it to explicitly exclude requiring anything beyond how we treat others.

While this may seem like a minor distinction, it strikes me as central because the concepts of feeling empathy and having a lifelong interest in acquiring cultural knowledge go to our internal thoughts and feelings, whereas the author's proposal limits itself to our external behavior - which I take to be his point.

It'd more useful if you'd been explicitly direct in your response, perhaps something like "Just treating people with respect is not sufficient. Instead, the minimal normative standard should be..." It would be clearer that you disagree substantially with the author and what you're proposing instead. It would also enable a more interesting discussion about whether society should limit itself to judging how we behave toward others vs going further to judging how we think and feel about others internally, regardless of our external behavior.

Knowledge can inform external behavior. When you go to another country, you have to learn the norms of what will be considered disrespectful in that context. In America, for example, somebody waving their middle finger at you will be seen as them intentionally disrespecting you. Not because they necessarily are (maybe they just arrived from Japan and don’t know better yet), but because for people socialized here that is perceived to go along with the intent to disrespect. National borders are not the only cultural borders.

(I accidentally posted my comment before I was finished, so I was still adding another two paragraphs you may not have seen while writing your response.)

> learn the norms of what will be considered disrespectful in that context.

PG said "treating people with respect" which is not the opposite of disrespecting someone. To me, disrespect evokes a different concept, despite containing the same word root. When I say "treat someone with respect" it's not related to the old ideas out of antiquated honor cultures about formal honor or dishonor, where "disrespecting" someone is taken as an offense and affront to their legitimacy.

The modern concept of 'treating with respect' simply means initially engaging with people you don't know yet with a default neutral posture and general assumption of good will and good faith. To me, the opposite wouldn't be overt disrespect or insult but rather treating one kind of person I don't even know yet, any differently than I treat all the other people I don't even know yet. It's equal default treatment vs unequal default treatment.

Personally, if I'm a visitor to a foreign culture, I'm not overly concerned about the risk of accidentally offending someone over some local cultural norm. I've lived around the world immersed in several cultures different than my own and it's never been a problem. My good will, good faith and sincere best efforts have always been sufficient to form new and lasting friendships, even when I've unknowingly committed some unintentional faux pas.

I would say treating others good will, good faith, and sincere best efforts are my definition of respect. My guess is that if in your travels somebody informed you that not taking your shoes off at the door is a faux pas in their culture (perhaps after you accidentally committed that one), you will start taking your shoes off when you go to people’s houses there. It doesn’t have to be about “honor”—maybe that culture is just more germ-conscious. You have just learned something that helps you show respect to people there. The more cultures you encounter the more of these norms you’ll pick up on over time. I’m assuming you consider such learnings to be not overly burdensome. If so, great! We probably don’t disagree on much of substance and maybe mainly word semantics.

A common performative-progressive talking point during the rise of Trump was that we should not try to figure out what's motivating rural white people to support him. Instead, those people need to quiet down, step aside, and make room for lesbian women of color, etc.

So yeah, your philosophy sounds nice. Aggressive performative-progressives sometimes claim to subscribe to it, but their actions tend to differ in practice. See this article for details on this phenomenon: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-wor...

There are many things on which I don’t agree with pg. But I feel he is accurate with describing wokeness as the term is commonly used currently. He doesn’t go into the history of the word in this essay.

You certainly don't use it to mean "those crazy people who are pro interacial marriage" but some do. The woke people supporting trans rights almost certainly don't support macho man randy savage chucking on a dress and that same day competing in the olympics but the characture that supports it is part of the woke mob.

People scoff and think of course I know what woke means, because the people the people they talk to/media they consume have the word at roughly the same level of meaning, not internalising the next more or less extreme group that isn't in their social circle include more or less in the meaning.

These days the word woke might as well serve the same purpose as "If by scotsman..." in that no one will disagree with you unless you get into specifics.

Insightful comment. While some of wokeness involves performative aspects like PG mentioned, it also seems to involve a genuine increase in awareness about injustice, and a desire to do something about it- which is much needed. I’m concerned that this desire to “end wokeness” will throw the baby out with the bathwater, and end us in a situation where it becomes taboo to point out or do anything about injustice.

It’s insane that PG seems to think racism isn’t a very big problem- hard to imagine he is living on the same planet I am.

Idk, he spent a good chunk of the blog post saying that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater

I see it as a clash between people who are instinctually inclined towards philosophical nominalism (woke) and people who are instinctually inclined towards realism (not-woke). Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs lays out the details and the arguments for this way of defining our current culture war here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmPIMg4St4

Anyone using the term woke in 2025 is using the term in bad faith and to create the bogeyman you describe.

It's actually hard to find the time when anyone on the left actually used it. Seems like it was a little under a year and the term was dropped to be more specific actions.

Reading and understanding the article beyond the title, it's just a term that used to be called something else before, and will be called something else in the future. I think you're focusing too much on the actual word, rather than the "movement", which is what pg's article is really about.

The point is that anyone using the term woke is using it in bad faith or if they think they are not using it offensively then it's poorly researched.

So anyone discussing/posting thoughts about "woke" and "wokeness" are using it in bad faith? Would it matter if the person puts a positive or negative spin on it, or are some topics just straight up "no no" to discuss?

Seems like we should aim to critique the content of articles, not just critique the usage of a single word. But you do you.

I think it's okay to refer to the word "woke", but if you use it more than 3 times in your writing, then it's hard to take you seriously.

Why?

Because it's a word that gets people emotional. Getting people emotional is the opposite of what you want to do when you're trying to intellectually dissect something. But it's exactly what you want to do when you're grinding a gear.

It's just like if somebody wrote a piece about trump, but mentioned he was a felon 4+ times, you'd know they weren't writing an unemotional thinkpiece.

> I think it's okay to refer to the word "woke", but if you use it more than 3 times in your writing, then it's hard to take you seriously.

But when the essay is specifically about where "wokeness" comes from and what (pg) understands it to mean, then it has to be OK to use it more than 3 times?

> Because it's a word that gets people emotional. Getting people emotional is the opposite of what you want to do when you're trying to intellectually dissect something

Some terms are so charged that it's virtually impossible to have discussions without any emotional reactions to it. "Woke" seems to be one of those subjects/terms (at least judging by this submission), so if you try to shy away from it just because of that, isn't that a disservice as a whole? We need to be able to discuss and think about hard things too, not just fun and happy stuff.

> It's just like if somebody wrote a piece about trump, but mentioned he was a felon 4+ times, you'd know they weren't writing an unemotional thinkpiece.

But the comparison here would be an article whose purpose is to detailed how Trump is a felon, then obviously it'd make sense that it gets brought up, it's the subject of the text.

I don't think you're discussing in good faith.

I doubt you're truly unaware that everybody saying woke in 2025 unironically is angry and making an insult.

I also don't believe you could read this comment section and think PG didn't get everybody emotional (and mostly confused about his point too), or that he tried very hard not to.

> Anyone using the term woke in 2025 is using the term in bad faith

This was the initial claim. It got me curious how we're supposed to be able to discuss emotionally charged subjects, if you can't bring it up without getting the label "you're doing that in bad faith" slapped on you.

I disagree with most of pg's article, and I'm very left-leaning myself. But I also find it very worthwhile to find a sensible way to disagree with people, even if it's emotional. It's important we're able to understand and see good points no matter the delivery mechanism, or no matter how much we disagree with a person (like me, here with pg who I don't agree with at all, on most matters).

> I doubt you're truly unaware that everybody saying woke in 2025 unironically is angry and making an insult.

This is probably the first article/comment section I read about "wokeness" in at least a couple of years. I'm a left-leaning (European) person far away from American politics, so I am not aware of how the left/right of the US currently use the term. I saw the essay, read through the thing and now I'm here, reading through comments.

> I also don't believe you could read this comment section and think PG didn't get everybody emotional (and mostly confused about his point too), or that he tried very hard not to.

No, I do think he got people emotional, and I don't think he tried or didn't try to make people emotional, it seems to be a very heavy topic for Americans (right or left), so I'd wager it's impossible to discuss it without emotions. Some topics just are like that, and that's not necessarily wrong or bad.

You earn good faith. By being curious, and ensuring that the participants have the freedom to question, push back, and in general, manage the pace of the conversation.

It’s like walking on thin ice, you feel it out slowly, together, in a cooperative and sincere manner.

Its not hard, its just not possible when you dont really care about the other persons.

They know they're being talked about derisively and don't like it. They want to keep doing what they're doing, but they need you to not talk about it, so they can get away with it, so they attack the term. They know exactly what they're doing.

Most ironically, this point can be aptly applied to the post expressing it.

I like this take: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...

I think it's a farce to suggest that no one out there could be accurately described by it (identity politics being more important than class, language policing, etc)

The VP famously used it half a dozen times in this short clip. [1] It was apparently well-known enough of a term that she didn't define it.

IIRC usage didn't really drop off until 2020 or after. That was when conservatives started using the term in a negative way and progressives abandoned it.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53A6wcgbxEM

You obviously didn't read the article. He calls out how virtue signallers quickly change what the rules are around which word are OK.

Here is someone who you may or may not consider to be a far right bad actor explaining what woke is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

Part of the problem here is that while there's a set of social and political attitudes that really do exist, a lot of the people who practice them are very reticent to label themselves, preferring to claim either that they occupy the whole space of compassionate legitimate political practice, or that they have nothing in common with other groups who are (from an outside eye) very similar.

I like Freddie deBoer's 2023 definition, which at least is framed from a left-wing point-of-view rather than the aggressive and weaponised right-wing framing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...

Kamala Harris said everyone should be more woke. Racial inequities were one of the pillars of the Biden Campaign and administration. So yes the Left was still using Woke quite a bit, until Right coopted to make it clear its actually negative

My original understanding of "woke" was similar to what in the 60s they might have called being "turned on". Being awake and seeing the actual reality of things for what they are.

Both characterizations actually mean the same thing and you said it in your description of the person on the left. Because, thinking that a right-wing solution to homelessness 'lacks empathy' and only you have empathy for the homeless is exactly the sort of self-righteousness the right correctly criticizes.

Even before the term "woke" was widespread, I noticed all my conservative friends would prefer to find the most ridiculous liberal woke example and mock it.

Rather than actually discuss policy or anything concrete, because they have nothing to offer.

>As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.

I voted for Kamala, and I don't think this is accurate.

I support having empathy for homeless people. I would love to see a movement focused on actually helping homeless people, by volunteering at soup kitchens and so on.

Wokeness does not seem to be that movement. Insofar as wokeness concerns itself with homeless people, (a) it wants you to refer to them as 'unhoused' instead of homeless, (b) it wants to make sure you don't talk about it when they e.g. sexually assault you: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1845244113249063227

I think this is a fair assumption to make if you haven't been in some of the places where this has been most contentious -- in particular, I think left-wing activist circles, or segments of industry where the workplace has switched from being "apolitical" -- I know that term is contested, but I don't have a better one to use -- to shifting to an overtly social-justice-oriented space.

I've spent the last decade in these environments. My own upbringing and general disposition is left-wing, but the last few years have been stressful and much less productive.

Somebody downthread mentioned how "latinx" was just a small minority of advocates, but we had painful discussions about it, including objections from latino staff, and ended up using it.

Our (obligatory) sexual harassment training switched from a standard legal footing to one that was preceded by a long explanation of the oppressive nature of Europeans.

Group chats moved towards political conversations, and even minor questioning of the (quite sudden) norm shift led to ostracization, with two people, not including me, ultimately leaving the company because they felt uncomfortable with the social pressure.

One senior executive was pushed out because they made a joke about having pronouns in video profiles. We pursued a diverse hiring policy that ended up with patently unsuitable, but diverse, employees including an alcoholic, and someone who had a mental health breakdown in a meeting. Staff would increasingly reach for untouchably political accusations when maneuvering against other individuals at the workplace, accusing them of racism, intolerance, and harassment when there was little evidence that this was going on (none of this was from white males, but between other less privileged groups).

I move in other circles too, academic and professional, and there have been similar dynamics. Not only do I know people who have been "cancelled" (ie lost jobs or opportunities because of public statements that, while politically mainstream, went against local norms), but I also know people who did the cancelling, get cancelled in turn. None of this was about anything demonstrably and objectively offensive; sometimes it was about defending arguably offensive behaviour; sometimes it was just an uncharitable reading of an innocuous comment, taken out of context.

What I would say is that there has been a shifting and narrowing of politically acceptable statements, and a pressure to conform with the consensus in certain kinds of tech work and other high-status societal environments, which I think would make people of Paul Graham's age uncomfortable; he would definitely have seen the "worst" of it. I think part of its spread has been due to it looking, without closer examination, like what you have described. But as someone who was raised by socialists who got there largely by their empathy for others, the degree of cruelty and arbitrary punishment through social sanction has been unusually vicious and hard to bear.

I still feel I can't talk about this except with a few very close friends. This is a throwaway account.

Since 2008, people realized that many systems are entirely broken. This created a large wave of wealth inequality awareness. This is common on both sides of the political spectrum.

At the same time, the left realized that their techniques of debate fail miserably against the monolith of the right, especially after seeing that radicals were rewarded (tea party movement.. all the way to MAGA)

So they are also imitating this pattern.

I know so, because if I dig back enough, I’ll find the comments that predicted this.

The left is radicalizing to match the political capability of republicans.

I wouldn't mind seeing that.

I don't think it was a deliberate attempt to match the debating styles, but I do think it's a natural pattern to exercise power where you find it.

Honestly, I find Paul's description of the process pretty compelling, if not correct in all the details.

In the late 90s and 2000s there was a big thing in hiphop music about “conscious rap”. At first, rappers differentiated themselves from the mainstream by emphasising that they were “conscious” in their lyrics of the harm done by perpetuating stereotypes or promoting dysfunctional lifestyles or failing to challenge systematic oppression. Then it became passé and rappers like Taleb Kweli lamented that they were stuck with this label, which had become a term of derision. Whole thing was like an early run of “woke”.

"Woke" make as much sense as "liberal", "fascist" or "nazi" these days.

There is nothing “bad faith” about appropriating an evocative term to label ideologically connected ideas. It’s like how the left uses the term “capitalism.”

In the last few years, we have seen corporations and universities push for race-conscious hiring and promotion decisions, while schools are putting kids in racially segregated affinity groups. These are obviously ideologically related efforts. It’s perfectly fine for opponents of these efforts to group them together under the label of “woke.”

The only people who could plausibly define 'woke' as 'people who investigate their own values and have empathy' are people who consider themselves woke and are sufficiently under pg's 'prig' definition to believe that is exclusive to them, and sociopaths. What emotionally normal person would say membership of another group is defined by 'basic human decency' and 'thinking about whether their objectives are any good'?

Why and how is labelling unlikable behaviour as woke bad faith. As I understand the right using the term, they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad (one core aspect is prioritising signalling being virtuous over actually improving the world).

Is your complaint that this usage unfairly co-opts the original left usage of the word?

Imagine I wrote an essay on Christianity and based it entirely on the behavior of evangelicals in the South who attend megachurchies (a very vocal minority). Surely you'd expect other Christians (all around the world) who equally claim true usage to object.

I think the similarities to a religion are a strong indication that there's a serious issue

"Anti-woke" itself has become something of a religion itself with no real core principles or guiding ruleset. In opposition to something that is poorly defined

I only used religion as an example, not to set up a false dichotomy. It could be anything people care about - 'love', 'patriotism', 'fairness', 'rule of law' ...

One of those is not like the others...

'success','democracy', 'capitalism', 'free market' what is the correct interpretation of the constitution, who is the GOAT of [insert pursuit] and what qualities do they have to have, 'democracy', 'socialism' ...shall I go on?

> Imagine I wrote an essay on Christianity and based it entirely on the behavior of evangelicals in the South who attend megachurchies (a very vocal minority).

I’d expect you to be published in the New York Times, the Washington Post. If you wrote it a bit longer, the Atlantic. If you wrote it poorly and irrationally, Slate.

TIL all essays ever written are published in one of 4 outlets.

You give them far too much credit. But more importantly, ask yourself who’s really the morality police at this point? The ones screaming “woke” all the time, vowing to strip “woke” people out of positions of power, seem pretty dangerous to me.

> they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad

I disagree that their use is consistent and specific.

Their usage is constant and is malleable enough to encompass "whatever i don't like right now".

Paul makes clear what definition he is using, so let’s discuss that instead of an unbearably boring discussion about which definition of “woke” is the real one.

The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. They are intrinsically linked and cannot be separated.

> Paul Graham > English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

I wonder why a venture capitalist would push this meaning of the word "woke"

</tinfoilhat>

Oh I'm sorry, are we now saying "woke" covers economic class issues like homelessness and poor people, instead of just social issues which both sides have used to suck all the air out of political discussion?

Now that the neoliberals are embarrassed enough to throw out "woke", are we slipping in economic concerns too?

PSA: YOU CAN STILL BE A SELF-RIGHTEOUSLY MORALISTIC PRICK, SO LONG AS IT'S BASED ON ACTUAL TANGIBLE ECONOMIC ISSUES THAT ARE SYSTEMIC AND ACTIONABLE

A friend and I love to send each other examples of ridiculous things being labeled "woke". Lately we are spoiled for choice. British tabloid newspapers are an especially good source.

In his post, pg says "Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it."

What I remember the most from that time period was comedians making jokes about exactly this effect: At some point people started labeling everything they didn't like as "political correctness", and the phrase lost all meaning.

(I don't have particularly strong feelings about pg's essay tbh. I've personally managed to completely ignore political correctness and wokeness without anything bad happening).

You're describing the difference between being inwardly moral and being outwardly a bully.

When people use "woke" in a derogatory fashion they just mean "bully."

Which is why James Lindsay's "woke right" comes across as so incomprehensible. He just means "right wing bullies."

Woke is critical construcivism.

The belief consists of two parts:

1. That truth is socially constructed thus when we see bad things, it means society created these bad things.

2. In order to determine what parts of society to cut-out to make society better, so bad things stop happening, use a critical theory to determine who should be removed from society so it can be more equitable (usually the stand in for good.

Woke normally holds that goodness is when results are equal, and if they are not equal, they have license to adjust them to equal (This is the core argument of Marxism, though woke could be said to be identity or social Marxism rather then just the economic Marxism presented, though in practice class identity was present from the start as well and expanded in practice under Mao).

This is where wokeism falls apart as an ideology: It is outcome driven instead of opportunity driven. Equality becomes the goal regardless of motivation, ambition or merit. Why would the best, or more broadly anyone better than average, participate in such a society? What's their incentive?

When you define woke this way, you ultimately admit that wokeism is just a veneer of identity politics layered over good old-fashioned communism. The problem with communism is that it sounds great, but doesn't work. How many times must it fail before people realize that?

> participate in such a sociehttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsty? What's their incentive?

This has never made sense to me. People don't need an external motivator. People who like to collect things or complete puzzle (including high performers), do so because they like to collect them, not because society rewards them. It generally penalizes them as it's wasted time or capital. Granted, sometimes recognition is a good motivator, but that's fleeting over a non-trivial timeline (like a season) and not specifically tied to society at large (eg the longest running game of Tag).

I don't mind having 'equality' on the basics. I would gladly pay the taxes necessary to ensure my fellow man has access to food, housing, healthcare and maybe a few other things needed to live a life with dignity. I think that's the whole premise behind UBI, and we're going to have to make our peace with it.

There will always be 'incentive' to work and gain more than the very basics. Honestly, given how much of our science has been written by 'gentlemen scholars' who were rich enough to be able to pursue their field without worry of putting food on the table, it may well advance humanity.

But #1 is wrong and #2 is abusive.

There is no such thing as "society", just relationships between individual people. To get a better "society", you need people to act better. However, all of recorded history suggests that people are pretty universally willing to use other people as tools to benefit themselves. (Obviously not everyone does this all the time or to the same amount.) History also makes it clear that passing laws will not work: despite laws against things that are evenly timelessly non-virtuous, like stealing and murder, do not prevent murder and theft. In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.) Even if it does not require a divine gift, certainly the problem has proven intractable up to the present time.

"determine who should be removed from society" is just a scary thought. Who gets to determine that? How can we be sure they are right? What prevents them from using this as a tool to eliminate people that are competitors or whom they simply dislike? In fact, this has a name: "to purge". The Soviet Union under Stalin and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were scary times.

> History also makes it clear that passing laws will not work: despite laws against things that are evenly timelessly non-virtuous, like stealing and murder, do not prevent murder and theft.

They probably reduce it a bit.

> "determine who should be removed from society" is just a scary thought. Who gets to determine that? How can we be sure they are right?

I am extremely socially liberal, but have a very hard time aligning myself with the left because most members of that constituency seem completely incapable of recognizing this. They're so eager to repeat the errors of the leftist policies you list (along with other clearly non leftist examples like the Salem witch trials) that they're a danger to society.

They're zealots and need to be treated accordingly.

> In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.)

It doesn't. Judaism holds that the soul starts out pure, having been made in the image of G-d, and it only becomes impure through wrongdoing. All humans are born with an impulse to do evil, the Yetzer Hara, but we're also created with the power to overcome it. And when we have done evil, we have the ability to atone and return our souls to the pure state they were created in. That happens, for instance, on Yom Kippur.

The context of the verse from Ezekiel is:

> O mortal, when the House of Israel dwelt on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds […] So I poured out My wrath on them […] I scattered them among the nations […] But when they came to those nations, they caused My holy name to be profaned, in that it was said of them, “These are GOD’s people, yet they had to leave their land.” […] Say to the House of Israel: Thus said the Sovereign GOD: Not for your sake will I act, O House of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have caused to be profaned among the nations to which you have come. […] I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified: I will purify you from all your defilement and from all your fetishes. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;" https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.36.17-26

Ezekiel lived during the Babylonian exile. At face value, the text is saying that the people of Israel have been exiled because of their sins, but it makes a prophecy that G-d will cause them to stop sinning and return them to their land. That eventually did happen under Cyrus the Great. This is a constant cycle in the bible: When things are good, the Israelites forget G-d's teachings. Then something bad happens, but G-d redeems the Israelites from their suffering, which leads them to follow G-d again. Then thing get good again, and they start to forget G-d once more...

When it says that G-d will give the house of Israel a new heart, it's not (at face value) saying that individual people will literally receive new spirits (or otherwise be metaphysically transformed). Nor is it saying that G-d will literally sprinkle water on them. These are poetic ways of saying that the house of Israel will stop worshiping idols (etc), the same way that happened many times before in the Torah. You can of course add a layer of exegesis and make it about individual believers today instead of the nation of Israel in Babylonia of the 6th-century BCE. That's fine, the rabbinic tradition does that sort of thing all the time too. But at that point you're firmly in Christian territory and not in the space shared between Judaism and Christianity.

How about removing the bullies from society.

Points one and two are both functionalism, not constructivism. This is Sociology 101. The idea that all parts of society have a function, even the bad parts is not constructionist, it's structualist.

Constructivism would be that we created the idea that they are legitimate social objects (ie: they exist) and two that they have an essential moral characteristic (eg: they're bad).

Marx was a conflict theorist whose main point was that economic structures and social structures are inexorably linked. The point of Capital Vol 1 was that through a series of implications, the difference between exchange value and use value ultimately results in conflict between owners and workers.

Woke-ism is a cult.

There is no generally accepted definition of woke, and that is largely by design to mislead others through well known psychological blindspots (Cialdini), towards inducing others to join collectivism while also inspiring disunity and hate, albeit indirectly.

The movement often couches its perspectives in power dynamics which follows elements common to Maoism and Communism, along with many other similar marxist movements. It also has elements from critical pedagogy (the critical turn), which has origins in Marxist movements.

The mind virus part of it is the same with any belief system that lends itself towards irrational delusion, inducing bitter resentment in individuals and falsely criticizing without any rational framework or basis, often ignoring objective reality for a false narrative.

Woke-ism is a cult of the semi-lucid insane brainwashed children they manage to mislead, who desperately try to poorly grapple with reality, miserably, and bitterly, while dragging everyone else down.

Its rather sad for the individuals who become both victim and perpetrator. There is no cure for insanity, nor the blindness induced.

If you want a rational discussion on this subject matter, I'd suggest checking over James Lindsay's work outing these type of movements. Your description is fairly misinformed.

https://newdiscourses.com/2023/03/workings-of-the-woke-cult/

“ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”

This is accurate. A manifestation of the woke belief system. I see this bigotry all the time online whenever team blue joke about the right.

What Paul Graham misses is the "aggressively performative moralism" that appeared in response to wokeism. For those hungry for attention, it was a very useful enemy. In many ways, the narrative of what it even meant to be "woke" was quickly hijacked and controlled by those opposed to it. Deriding anyone of color in a leadership position as a DEI hire is a good example. None of this was a call for reason or to return to balance. It was an equally performative stunt to cast anything that event hinted at inclusiveness as evil intent.

I think it's much simpler than that. Woke is power, it's a moral position that can be used like a club to force others into a specific line of thinking. While it's basic mission of recognizing discrimination, etc. around us, it morphed into a political and societal weapon to force people and institutions to do certain things, like establishing DEI offices.

I don't think I agree. I think the counterpoint of "woke" is "fascist" or "racist". People on the right call things woke and people on the left call things fascist. But I think the difference in the meaning of these words reveals a lot about who is saying them. For example, woke people are merely self-righteously moralistic but fascists are such a severe threat that we have to end things like free speech, etc. in order to prevent a constant threat to society. That might explain some of this divide.

> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.

> people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”

I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.

People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.

completely agree. The Right uses "woke" as sort of an anti-virtue-signal.

You missed the point of the article completely. Wokeness (as PG defined it, which I would agree is the most commonly used definition today) isn't merely realizing we should be treating people better, it's realizing that people should be treated better and focusing on being a "prig" about completely inconsequential and tangentially relevant concerns as a result of that rather than taking meaningful action.

No. “Anti-woke” people have latched onto the “prig” aspects of social justice because being against what it’s actually about would highlight what they really have a problem with: equality.

If someone says “hey you can’t say the n-word, that’s racist” and someone’s reply is “don’t censor me!” the latter isn’t advocating for freedom of speech, they’re advocating for racism.

Defining what “woke” means in terms of the fake justifications of the “anti-woke” crowd is BS. What people labelled as “woke” want is for people to treat people better. “Anti-woke” doesn’t want that.

>I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.

>People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.

I think this is an example that accurately sums up with most normal, non-partisan people mean when say say "woke". The smug self-righteousness exhibited by those who believe themselves morally superior to others is "woke". The suggestion that somehow you are an asshole if you don't sign on completely and without question to the bizarre social and political agenda of self-appointed word and thought police. The people that you avoid like the plague because they are constantly searching for something to be offended about or some way to chide you about having transgressed against some ever-changing lexicon of acceptable terms and phrases. The people that think the world is neatly divided between "oppressors and the oppressed" and that where you fall on this insurmountable divide is based almost entirely on who your ancestors were or what your skin-tone is rather than anything you've actually done in your life. The people that think they have a monopoly on deciding what is right and wrong, and that they have been appointed the moral arbiters to decide what everyone is allowed to say.

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