I think people are over-analysing this issue here at HN.
It is far better for upper class to ensure that people discuss and focus on issues like gender and skin colour than the class differences. Hence, they ensured that this is the issue plebs would hear all over on the media and shift their attention from class divides to gender and skin colour.
These two paragraphs from
Glen greenwald are my favorite and very relevant to your post:
“But they [GCHQ] want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”
Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.“
This causality claim seems like a real stretch. If Glen is just providing opinion, I will say that all the LGBT people I know (friends and internet personalities) are skeptical of a lot of pinkwashing and in fact many make fun of corps doing so. During this years pride my twitter timeline was filled with people laughing at how stupid and backwards it all was when corps like Raytheon and Axon pinkwashed their logos.
It’s a strongly expressed opinion that isn’t necessarily supported by evidence. Do you know of any statistical or anecdotal evidence? I personally don’t know anyone who changed their opinion of GCHQ for better because of their support of LGBT. I don’t agree that it’s so easy to draw such conclusions and exclaim “sure they spy on us but look at their flamboyant support of social justice”.
To give you the perfect example, I think all the types of people who were protesting (100% correctly) at the Occupy Wall Street movements have been completely neutered and neutralised with this woke movement in corporations.
These bankers and banks basically destroyed the american dream like no other person/corporation in history, they did more damage to minorities than any "white oppressor", yet they've basically been forgotten because activists types feel like they can make a difference by introducing trans issues into corporations.
No, you didn't. The same crooked billionaires are syphoning off even more cash, not to mention the government is now printing money for them to socialise their losses.
I have to congratulate these corporations, it's been the perfect divide and conquer tactic. Almost everyone's forgotten the 2008 crises, who caused it, and what damage it did.
Name one person who has decided banks are no longer to blame for 2008 because rainbow flags.
The Occupy movement failed because sitting in tents complaining about systems almost invariably fails, and people aren't as angry about a deep recession caused by subprime mortgage lending because it's 13 years later and the deep recession we experienced most recently wasn't caused by anything at all to do with the banking system.
Some overlapping but largely different groups, with different priorities and strategies had more success in making a difference; perhaps not a difference you care for but a difference. Rather than wonder if certain groups of "woke" activists were better at organising and picking their goals, and can be learned from, you accuse them of "neutralising" unrelated causes you feel closer to, as if it's impossible for any activist to be opposed to homophobia and Goldman Sachs, and spend your message board days railing against "woke" activism instead of corrupt bankers.
It's the perfect divide and be conquered tactic, and you can guarantee nobody appreciates your argument that the real reason billionaires got away with crookedness is some trans activists had a bit of success more than crooked billionaires.
Parties are coalitions of voters. A lot of the anti-Wall Street populists are rural or working class whites who may have regressive views on social issues. As the Democratic Party moved to the left on social issues since 2010, it has replaced those working class white voters with high income professionals, including most of Wall Street.
Remember, in 2009, Democrats held both Senate seats in West Virginia. Now, those working class white states have all flipped Republican. Biden’s 2020 run failed to recover Obama’s 2008 support in the Midwest. He won the presidency thanks to vote Reagan suburbs around Atlanta and Phoenix going Democrat. (My traditionally red Maryland county went +14 for Biden but +30 for Larry Hogan, during a blue wave. It voted for both Romney and McCain.) You can’t have a meaningfully left party when your marginal voters are socially liberal Republicans.
The people who camped out in Zuccoti Park in NYC during Occupy Wall Street were not rural whites.
I don't really understand the point you're trying to make here. It doesn't take a social scientist to figure out what's going on in West Virginia. West Virginia is East Wyoming. It's overwhelmingly white, has no urban centers, and is starkly less educated than Iowa (itself a heavy lift for the Democratic party). Your point is what? That the parties have polarized on education? Yes, I think we've priced that in now.
The last Democratic Presidential candidate who took West Virginia was Bill Clinton. There were still Dixiecrats in the party when he won it. It's a red state; in fact, it's the second reddest state in the union. Even Alabama sends a Democrat to the House. Not WV. Capito slaughtered Swearengin in 2020 i in every county in the state.
What that tells us about Democratic attitudes towards banks is precisely zero. Get rid of Republic Senate votes in the south and we'd have broken up the major investment banks (I don't think that would have been a good thing).
> Thee people who camped out in Zuccoti Park in NYC during Occupy Wall Street were not rural whites.
Rural whites don’t protest. But the group of people who oppose Wall Street and the WTO and private equity are rural whites and young urbanites. If you’re trying to build a coalition to oppose those things those are the people you need to pull together (which Obama did in 2008). A study showed that over half the people who fit the profile of a “Trump Republican” (versus a Romney Republican) actually voted Democrat before 2016.
> I don't really understand the point you're trying to make here.
By moving to the left on social issues Democrats make a deliberate choice to abandon parts of their coalition opposed to fighting wealth inequality—including racial wealth inequality—and replace them with groups that benefit from and perpetuate it.
Put differently, the people who actually control the levels of systemic racism, i.e. structural economic and social disparities, have a tremendous interest in keeping minorities focused on the individual racist attitudes of rural and working class white people.
The major economic debate in the Democratic party right now is whether we should retain a dovish full-employment Fed chair or replace him with a dovish full-employment Fed chair who will also drastically ratchet up banking regulations.
This is the most economically left Democratic party we have had since Roosevelt. It's far to the left of Obama's. And Clinton, no wokescold himself, served two terms with a Democratic party that deliberately tacked to the right on economics without giving up anything to wokeism. I don't think this analysis holds together.
I get what you're trying to say, that there's a tradeoff between cultural issues and economic issues. My problem is that you haven't provided evidence that the tradeoff exists or is meaningful.
The left i remember from the 90’s and early 2000’s would have been skeptical of huge corporations suppressing political dissent and providing political training at work, for example. They aren’t skeptical now because the corporations are “on their side” on the issues they now consider most important. Issues that conveniently don’t threaten corporate power in any way.
What? The statement doesn’t make any claims about GCHQ except that they take morally reprehensible actions like spying on people, scanning emails, etc. Is the idea that GCHQ (a spy agency) spies on people a claim that requires evidence?
Greenwald is claiming that people are becoming less opposed to GCHQ’s spying due to their support for social issues like LGBT rights. I am asking whether there is any evidence to support that.
Not sure about GCHQ, but in the US there is a stark left/right divide in support for intelligence agencies. Notably, if you could find similar polls from 2003, the polarization would be almost completely inverted.
> the polarization would be almost completely inverted
And how are you going to go about proving causation between pinkwashing and support for intelligence agencies? Do you think maybe the Trump/Qanon rhetoric around the FBI/CIA/Deepstate might have had something to do with republicans opinion shift? (your own link alludes to that)
It's just PR. Companies do this too, not just government agencies. You can say that PR doesn't work, but if done properly should at least generate some amount of goodwill.
I mean, if PR didn't work, why would any organization spend money to do it?
It’s convenient that under wokeness, the real bad guys are my white in laws in rural Oregon and not the white people “doing the work” in Wall Street and SV.
I'll give you Wall Street, but SV is very much a target of this Neo-Maoist craziness. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of interesting problems wrt. how to improve diversity and equity in the industry, but politicized catchphrases like "there's no such thing as meritocracy" (a prime example of Orwellian duckspeak if there ever was one) are not conducive to this goal.
Well, if there's truly no such thing as meritocracy according to whichever tech company said that, I'd love if they could hire my disabled younger brother who never completed his degree for an engineering role! He can work remotely.
Have you read the New York Times or watched CNN or MSNBC in the last five years? Rural and working class white people ("deplorables") have replaced Wall Street as the enemy.
It's of course in-character for the New York Times to punch down. That's the same thing they did when Wall Street was full of Rockefeller Republicans while rural and working class white people voted Democrat. The only thing that's changed is the moral failings assigned to them.
>Have you read the New York Times or watched CNN or MSNBC in the last five years? Rural and working class white people ("deplorables")
I have, but I'm not a frequent reader so I must have missed the issues where "Rural and working class white people" were being called "deplorables". Can you link me to some of those articles?
> so not "Rural and working class white people", unless you think those attributes are fundamentally a part of being "Rural and working class white".
No, but the New York Times does, insofar as it’s constantly calling all Trump voters white supremacists. (Clinton was gracious, she called only “half” of Trump supporters “deplorables.”)
More to the point, whatever the personal moral shortcomings of rural white Trump voters, they don’t have any power. The media smoothly segues from talking about systemic racism to talking about the personal prejudices of individual Trump voters. But the people who control the systems are woke. The Black-white wealth gap results from folks on Wall Street who read Robin Di Angelo, not folks in Lincoln City, OR who don’t want her ideas taught in their elementary schools.
Wokeness is a white hedge fund manager putting his arm around a white Wal-Mart greeter and admitting that white people are the reason for persistent racial wealth gaps (but at least he’s “doing the work”).
Voting for someone is power every citizen has. That’s a very attenuated power that doesn’t give people meaningful power over other people.
You want to talk about racial wealth inequality? Rural white Trump voters don’t have any power over that, Wall Street and Silicon Valley do.
You want to talk about police in American cities shooting unarmed Black men? Trump supporters in rural Minnesota had no say over the Minneapolis police department that employed Derek Chauvin, or the mayor that supervised him.
You want to talk about lack of education and opportunities? Who has control over the schools in Wilmington, DE, where I used to live? Not Trump voters in rural Delaware. Who destroyed the port city’s economy, creating concentrated Black poverty downtown, by shipping Pennsylvania manufacturing jobs up the river over to China? It wasn’t rural white people.
Whatever the condemnable personal prejudices of these people, they have little power to actually hurt Black and brown people as a whole group.
Yes. Race/gender/sexuality are classes that are fighting to be respected and co-exist. This is an upper class dream. They need to be abolished. My graduate degree is in Equity Studies from the late 90s. I was trained to write what is called "critical race studies" curriculum. We did not call it that - we called it critical theory. My work was on class intervention, specifically being working class in the Academy. My advisor, the late great Roger Simon (who was also born working class) told me there was one book on this subject and it was anecdotal. I was further told that there would be no future for me in the academy if I pursued this.
How does this work, practically? Do the owners of media corporations call up their reports and say “hey, focus on gender issues, stop those wealth inequality articles?”
It would presumably be much like scientific research. Nobody tells you what to study, but Philip Morris isn’t going to bankroll you if you’re studying what makes tobacco addicting. Similarly, Media Corp enthusiastically sends an army of reporters to cover racial issues, yet just doesn’t happen to assign anyone to investigate corruption in the press.
Corporate ad-spend funds the woke stories. Apple doesn't want to buy iPhone ads for stories about how Apple has 300,000 Chinese working for $3 an hour making iPhones that sell for over $1000 (with a gross profit margin exceeding 50%) while minorities in the USA can't find work that pays rent.
No, mega corporations who own media corporations (Comcast, AT&T, Disney, ect) hire people like Jeff Zucker to run the network and ensure the focus is on race and gender issues and avoid wealth inequality and corporate pillaging articles.
Sort of. They make sure the GMs or Chief Editors understand the agenda or what not to write about. Otherwise, it's selection bias. The people they elevate into editorial power are true believers of the agenda they want to support.
Ex 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4sNoKJqj7k Skip past the hype, the key phrase from the GM (paraphrased) "Sometimes it's not about the viewer, it's about what your CEO reads"
Ex 2: Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow are both examples promoting someone who is a true believer of an agenda being promoted and given a big platform to expound those views. This is why the elite doesn't have to coerce key public figures; those public figures can only get in that position if they are loyal to the agenda.
>“Corporate wokeism I believe is the product of self-interest intermingled with the appearance of pursuing social justice,” says Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive and author of “Woke, Inc.”. He argues that Big Tech pursues corporate wokeism because appearing to embrace social justice suits such firms’ commercial interests—both in terms of recruitment and appeal to their customers. It performs allegiance to identity politics while simultaneously rejecting the left’s critique of capitalism. “A lot of Big Tech has agreed to bend to the progressive left,” he says, but “they effectively expect that the new left look the other way when it comes to leaving their monopoly power.”
It's both. I agree that currently the Biggest Problem is the 1% vs the 99%. However you also can't sweep racism, sexism, and gender identity under the rug either, because a lot of the 99%, particularly in rural areas, are indeed heavily to blame for their being backward and opposed to equality in racism/sexism/sexual orientation issue. Try being a gay couple and being open about it a typical rural brick and mortar store. I've experienced it with my girlfriend (she's a POC) in rural areas just going road trips which we love. You definitely get looks and unfriendly faces. Of course you do your best to ignore them but it does make me simmer sometime.
W.E.B. DuBois detailed this not long after it started happening during Reconstruction over 100 years ago when he wrote "Black Reconstruction in the South".
This is correct with the caveat that there's no "they" there.
Or like people say, there's identity politics and then there's actual politics.
Or yet another way of putting it is that class differences trump fake differences in the real world but academia and the media focus on fake differences.
Hierarchies and social strata exist and persist over centuries. The problem of economic inequality is a tough nut to crack. We have pretended to ourselves that there is decent social mobility and that economic inequality is not too bad. But it's bad, so – hey – let's focus on non-issues of race and gender and whatnot.
Some call "wokeness" radical egalitarianism – enlightenment ideals taken to their breaking point and beyond. People urge us to focus on reaching some utopian ideal of equality of outcomes. Better to focus on reducing economic inequalities. But entrenched interests will not share the pot without being forced to, I believe.
This is the defining struggle of our era – of every era really. The struggle between those who have access to opportunity and wealth and those that barely do.
It's a lie that we've had a bunch of popular revolutions. We've never truly had one. A landed aristocracy and merchant class has held sway over us all (systemically) from feudal and aristocratic times down through to this era of nation states – be they communist or capitalist, doesn't matter.
The main problem is wokeness gives some people political leverage they wouldn't otherwise have, and it's hard to fire them even if they are shitty at work. That's a real problem.
The main problem with wokeness is it creates a bunch of divisions in the population into smaller and smaller sections which are "incompatible." which means that concerted efforts between the bottom 70% are seriously diluted because very few people are interested in coordinating between these lines.
Not to mention it's a prolific and constant distraction from real topics of interest, and is at best superficial, and identity issues can be drummed up infinitely. But it generates user interaction, and inundates them, and dissolves community. These are all big wins for those at the top, whether they're aware of it or not. Personally I like to assume that it's automatic, user interaction whether sympathetic or indignant is sells, inundation is the nature of the medium, the dissolution of community is just an aside.
It’s common to see people spout some version of “How dare any group try to maximize it’s leverage!” With an implicit that I am not part of. People leverage a wide range of subtle interactions to their advantage. From shared national, ethnic, religious, or even educational background to good looks and height. It’s easy to point to any of them as being unacceptable. However, while they can be minimized, I don’t think this stuff is going away.
What’s interesting is the knock on effects as these interactions get internalized into culture. Working out to maximize attractiveness, especially while networking, just becomes part of climbing the corporate ladder.
This is true I suspect, but as siblings have noted, it doesn't require reifying the "upper class" as some decision making entity that is doing this on purpose. It's just that discrete sectors of the "left" push both social-identity based and class-based critiques of inequality. Both of these get broad pushback from the political right, but identity-based inequality remediation is generally acceptable to business interests, who are far less likely to care and may even largely be socially liberal, cosmopolitan, and urbane. Start trying to remove class distinctions and alleviate economic inequality, on the other hand, and now you're a threat both to the political right and to business interests that otherwise don't give a crap about politics.
Maybe somewhat ironically, though economic leftism or at least Marxism certainly started in academia (Marx himself being a scholar), as far as I know, the recent push for wokeness and the term "woke" itself arose originally from AAVE in the 1930s and became popular more recently thanks to Black Twitter. It did not come from academia, and it doesn't seem like the form it has taken in academia is anywhere near what the original proponents had in mind.
Lead Belly was singing "stay woke" back in 1938 and he was not talking about intersectionality and transgenderism.
It’s not really a conspiracy as it doesn’t need to be centralized. Class resentment articles don’t get traction with upper class media gatekeepers but white guilt does. So the market produces what the gatekeepers want.
It's especially ironic since "upper class media" are far whiter than many other industries. Yet somehow, they're never expected to undergo the Maoist self-criticism and struggle sessions they demand from others.
Is "white" really even a race? There's a lot of distinct people in Europe. Are Spaniards, Portugese, Italians "white" are Slavs "white"? Scottish or Irish? Germans? Where do we draw the line of distinction? Or are we just going off skin color?
Actually, there is no such thing as human races from a scientific perspective. Applying the biological concept of race to humans is already racist.
FWIW, here in Germany/Austria the word “race“ (= “Rasse“) is more or less taboo and you would get strange looks asking someone about their race. It always bewilders me how the concept of race is still a thing in the US when it's really just about skin color.
Unfortunately this aspect is missing from the discussions about race in the US. You can be born and raised in a poor family in Italy but after moving to the US you will be immediately recognized as a privileged white oppressor.
Officially the US census defines "White" as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa" [0]
However, the "Middle East, or North Africa" part seems rather disputed in American culture. Some Americans are happy to view the Middle Eastern and North African people (MENA for short) as "White", and some MENA Americans are happy to identify as "White". Other Americans disagree that MENA people count as "White", and some MENA Americans disagree with the application of the "White" label to themselves. [1]
The US Census Bureau proposed to add a separate MENA racial category to the 2020 US Census, [2] but later dropped the proposal, allegedly due to political pressure from the Trump administration [3]
Another issue is the status of Hispanic people. Approximately 65% of all Hispanic/Latino people in the US identify as "White" (that's what they put down on their Census forms), but I know from discussions I've had with Americans on this topic that some of them don't actually perceive "White"-identified Hispanic/Latino people as "White". And many US sources, e.g [4], claim that the US will become "minority white" around 2045; that is only true if one excludes "White Hispanics" from the category "White" – if one includes "White Hispanics" as "White", the US will likely still be majority "White" by the end of this century – but this just shows how even in official contexts "White Hispanics" are often not considered "really White".
Many other countries sidestep these kinds of issues by officially avoiding putting people into broad racial categories, and focusing instead on narrower ethnicity/nationality/ancestry categories (Nigerian, Mexican, Argentine, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Iranian, Indian, Arab, Jewish, Kurdish, Tibetan, etc). But, viewing human diversity as coarse rather than fine-grained groups is deeply entrenched in American culture, and seems in the last few years to have become even more emphasised than it was in the past, so it appears unlikely that America will follow the example of any of these other countries any time soon.
This was, quite ironically, often missed by critics of feminism. They would say: What do you mean, a secret conspiracy by all men in a smoke-filled room to keep all women down? As if there was no such thing as incentives and soft power.
In fairness, they were probably trying to elicit a more detailed description of the nebulous “patriarchy” that seems to be behind every social ill in the eyes of the feminist.
I do enjoy CNN anchors lecturing and belittling middle America from Martha's Vineyard. It's some sick fetish of mine. Equipped with the latest air pod pros and Zoom they don't have to leave their beach front properties.
It's just a shift from older, less flexible values like family, church etc to the more open minded approach, "do as you like".
Nothing wrong with people having tattoos everywhere, green or violet hair, non conformist clothing and views. Let them be, let them express and find themselves.
I am the shave every day suit kinda guy and will remain so, but if someone chooses to be different or wants to complain about new woke culture values , fine by me.
There's not more or less trans and gay people these days, they are just more visible and have a voice, as they won't be burned at a stake anymore, metaphorically speaking.
Unfortunately this laissez fair approach is the exact opposite of modern wokeness. It’s their way or it’s attacks and cancellation. If you’re an oppressor class you have almost no way to be forgiven.
The easiest way to show this is just ask some woke stars on their views of libertarianism, which is literally to let everyone be themselves.
Indeed. The woke are experts at placing people into endless categories and determining which is “good” or “bad”. Which are the “oppressors” and the “victims”. Listen to their rhetoric, it is pretty much the opposite of live and let live.
One of the more ridiculous ideas to come out of this is that “everything is a human construct”. For example, it appears to be a woke idea that mathematics, science is some human (more specifically, white) invention and we should explore “alternative mathematics” or “alternative science”. Perhaps a new (and most importantly less oppressive) scientific method is right around the corner.
Like a long forgotten music video that you talked about with all your friends, most of these ideas will end up with no relevance and are completely meaningless. Wokeness is primarily an attention-seeking social phenomenon where influencers can tell you the new hot woke which you can mention later to impress your friends or get a date.
Just because your bubble exposes you to the craziest people doesn't mean they represent any majority. It's easy to see those screenshots of people being completely unreasonable, but the truth is most people who are "woke" aren't anything like that.
We see the world through the lens of social media optimised to make us angry at other groups of people.
Most of the people I know are queer and extremely leftist, and they're all massively annoyed at some of the bullshit performative wokeness we see. It's only a very very small minority of people who actually behave like that.
It's like what the linked article mentions with only 4% of people actually caring about the use of latinx. You get angry at people pushing for this and think progressives are stupid, but actual progressives are also annoyed at it because they know it's going to be used as an excuse to make their communities look stupid.
Idk what's a good conclusion on all this but I'd just say, keep in mind that extreme stuff you see online is usually not reflective of any sizeable amount of people
I agree with you, that the majority are not like this. The trouble is the people setting agendas in culture generally, mostly the media, are basically the extreme woke types you say are the minority.
And these people actually have power, as journalists, film directors, etc. they do set the talking points.
So I think it’s completely fair to react to this in a negative way, because it is actually happening.
It would be great if the normal woke minority would reject these people and stand up against them and say they are too extreme, but they don’t.
> For example, it appears to be a woke idea that mathematics, science is some human (more specifically, white) invention and we should explore “alternative mathematics” or “alternative science”.
Do you have a source for this? I’ve never heard of either of these terms, the closest being the “alternative facts” of one of Trump’s press secretaries.
> School district leaders in Seattle, Washington recently released a proposal to incorporate ethnic studies in the mathematics curriculum at all levels from kindergarten through grade 12. This initiative is part of an ongoing redesign of the district’s entire core subject curricula based on identity politics. The plan will be reviewed and voted on by the school board before the next academic year.
> Published by an Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee (ESAC), the new math curriculum is based on four major themes. These do not include, as one might think, numerical literacy, logic and problem-solving, or reasoning by analogy. Instead, the framework for K-12 will be Origins, Identity, and Agency, identified as “the ways in which we view ourselves as mathematicians”; Power and Oppression, based on the “disenfranchisement” of “people and communities of color”; History of Resistance and Liberation, the “stories, places and people who helped liberate people and communities of color using math, engineering and technology”; and Reflection and Action, urging young people to identify “mathematicians of color” and empower “their identities as mathematicians.”
A fine way to keep the poor poor is teaching them to identify as victims and not learn math. There are always bad ideas that need to be exposed for what they are.
While not necessarily being “woke”, any research tradition that identifies with post-positivism [1] tends to reject the traditional scientific method and proposes new ways to reach “scientific truth”.
There are many post-positivist research traditions in many fields that you will be able to look up and read more about if you are interested in specific citations and authors that do this kind of work.
Which part of their FAQ intro do you disagree with?
> For decades, America’s schools have tried and failed to close gaps on math test scores between White students and students of color. That’s not because math discriminates by race, and it’s not because some groups of students are inherently more suited to math. It’s because we give students of color and students from lower-income families the least access to critical resources, from the most qualified teachers to the best technology to the most advanced courses. And it’s because instructional materials and practices—even good ones—are influenced by culture and perspective.
> When we think narrowly about teaching math, we create barriers for students; we allow them to fall into the trap of thinking they’re “not a math person.” But the truth is we can all be “math people.” The goal of “A Pathway to Equitable Mathematics Instruction” is to engage as many students as possible in not just solving math problems but understanding math concepts so they can apply them across a wide range of real-world applications. Math problems, of course, have correct answers. But students can arrive at the right answer without understanding the bigger concept or they can have an “aha” moment when they see why they got an answer wrong.
> The toolkit was written by educators, and it doesn’t tell teachers how to do their job—it asks them to think about how they do it. For example, when we ask students to show their work, we should think about how and why. The point should be to have a dialogue about their process and their learning, not require every student to follow the exact same path to the right answer. A child of immigrants might have learned a different way to solve a problem because that’s how their parents were taught where they grew up. If we just tell that student their way is the wrong way, we risk turning them off to math for life. If we take the opportunity to explore why there are different ways to approach the same problem, it can be a learning moment for the entire class
Don't be fooled, this faux-"equitable" stuff is not new. It's been tried for literally decades. And much like other "Woke" ideas like the whole Latinx stuff, it's ridiculously condescending towards the very people it supposedly ought to help.
"This tool provides teachers an opportunity to examine their actions, beliefs, and values around teaching mathematics. The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture (Jones and Okun 2001; dismantling Racism 2016) with respect to math. Building on the framework, teachers engage with critical praxis in order to shift their instructional beliefs and practices towards antiracist math education. By centering antiracism, we model how to be antiracist math educators with accountability."
So the burden of proof is on those who doubt that indoctrinating math teachers with critical race theory improves the teaching of math?
That sounds a bit unfair, especially considering that anyone who would seriously try to provide such evidence would probably commit a career suicide, by being called a racist and cancelled.
I just took a skim through the material. The only objectionable thing was couching it in heavily racial or equitable terms, but the bulk of the work is really just trying to look for opportunities to improve pedagogy. The content itself is pretty vanilla and is discussing methods of pedagogy that are pretty old (at first glance it does not seem meaningfully different from the Montessori method and other approaches like “couching math in everyday examples” is an old idea).
The difference is in the results. At the end of the day, children taught by the Montessori method were proficient in reading, writing and math. Today proficiency levels are plunging at the same time that the focus on "education" is being shifted heavily towards "diversity and equity".
I've seen a number of attacks on sites like Equitable Math. The criticisms I've seen seem to fall into several categories (this may not be exhaustive):
* "Math should always have one answer and this idea that there could be different ways of doing things is evil and will corrupt our youth. Objective = one answer." Ugh. As a mathematician this is the one I hate the most. This is what led Pythagoreans to campaign against irrational numbers, some Catholics to campaign against imaginary numbers, some folks to react against distributions/generalized derivatives/generalized functions in analysis. The whole point of math, the whole creativity and beauty and opportunity for innovation, is to see how you can break the rules!! Hyperbolic and spherical geometry are not tools of the DeViL!!! Nor are they woke. David Brooks, get a frikkin education [1].
* "You shouldn't talk about race in math because math is objective." Math is a human activity, humans are embedded in society. Brown vs Board was decided within my parents' lifetime. Racial segregation was the official policy of many educational institutions for most of US history and students will come with different educational histories. When you're teaching, you want to connect with students and you want to trace the intellectual history of the topic. It is more intellectually honest to acknowledge the unfairness of history than pretend it doesn't exist, and for students to understand the intertwined evolution of mathematics and technology they must understand historical context as well. When you're trying to motivate kids, especially, role models and stories from history and today can be useful, which is why ET Bell published Men of Mathematics [2] which inspired folks like Freeman Dyson, and we today include Power in Numbers by Talithia Williams, Mathematically Gifted and Black
at https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/, Lathisms at https://www.lathisms.org/, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora at https://www.mathad.com/home, and more. There's not much point in dwelling on race/gender/sexuality, but intentional censorship (pretending Alan Turing wasn't gay, pretending Elbert Frank Cox had equal employment opportunities) is deeply dishonest.
* "Math should not be a tool for social justice." Um, what should it be? As I wrote in my other comment on this thread, everything is a tool. Math is a tool for justice, for oppression, for carpentry, for art, for software design, for computer games, for gerrymandering and anti-gerrymandering. As a mathematician I just want everyone to have access to this tool, rather than only some people! The idea that education can help people and society better them/itselves is not new. Check out the work of Bob Moses during the Civil Rights Movement [3]. It's a good read as everyone in America agrees the Civil Rights Movement was Good but many of those people believe "wokeness" is Bad -- because the concept of wokeness is also a tool used for many purposes. The argument is just over how people get to use this tool and who gets to use it.
While I agree with your narrative, it also seems like a perfect straw man. It seems like the world has gone crazy, but via the web we're exposed to every crazy thing.
I don't know how to reconcile these two things. There are surely people stuck in environments for whom it completely describes their experience. But like the wokeness narratives themselves, there are also going to be people facing adversity for other reasons who end up misattributing their difficulties to "wokeness".
Perhaps it's just the same social bullying behavior there has always been, but couched in new criteria. Perhaps these new terms are just foreign to us (eg we're used to school bullying in terms of who plays football), and the overall situation is actually getting better. Or perhaps not.
I think in order to discuss it with the weight of a societal problem, there at least needs to be some measurable framework and resulting data showing effects and trends. To do otherwise is just stoking the identity politics dumpster fire.
Not denying the use of a straw man or some humor to illustrate my point.
Like any movement, I’m sure there are some valid points being made. And like any movement, this one appeals to some legit human needs: significance, connection, contribution, etc.
I think my main beef with wokeism is how disempowering it ends up being to an individual subscriber. The ideas being perpetuated (I am a victim, I am an oppressor but will now be a white savior) are useless and counterproductive in the real world.
The very sad and unfortunate thing is that some naive people are tying up their whole identities with this crap just to feel validated or connected to some group. No judgement, we all need those things. My concern is that they will end up figuring out way too late that internet points don’t pay the rent.
The underlying question is how big this "movement" is, or whether it's been blown out of proportion by the opposing political team, who benefits from the bogeyman.
So yes, your criticism of wokeism is valid. The question is how relevant it is. You mention "some naive people". Yes, in a highly connected world of 8 billion people, some people are doing literally anything. The question is whether there is enough of a new trend to make for an actual concern, or whether it's being blown out of proportion and context. This matters because opposition to wokeness seems to be its own strain of identity politics.
Unfortunately “let everyone be themselves” is very far from modern libertarianism in practice. “Libertarian” has become a label for people who want to argue in bad faith for conservative positions while claiming to not be conservative or republican. Ask almost anybody that claims to be libertarian if they support the eradication of state/national borders, freedom to carry out an abortion at any stage of pregnancy or any other idea that runs counter to current republican talking points and you’ll quickly see through the facade of their libertarian label.
I have had many debates with libertarians over the decades and have yet to meet one who believes in either practice or theory to "literally to let everyone be themselves".
Libertarianism fails really hard in situations where you have a lot more overall prosperity if you limit everybody. Libertarianism misses these opportunities because of its blindness to anything but individual freedoms. In economic terms it mostly refuses to deal with the tragedy of the commons. And it likes to pretend negative externalities don't exist, or that the most free markets would make negative externalities magically disappear.
Let's get concrete with a real life example.
Air pollution will very likely shorten my life by a couple of years (if the science is to be believed). A very moderate libertarian might be willing to discuss preventative regulations, but the vast majority of libertarians' response is "oh well, you can only sue after the damage has been done". Which puts the entire burden on the victim and after preventable damage has already been done. It's too late.
It's far cheaper and more effective for me to support a government that stops them from damaging my health and stops them from inteferring with my freedom to breath clean air. The complaint from libertarians is that I'm interfering with their freedoms using the threat of government force. Damn right I am! Because the only thing that has worked over the decades to clean up the air I breath is government regulations interferring with the freedoms of car manufactures, and the freedoms of consumers to buy and operate excessively polluting vehicles. Along with government interference in other polluting industries. Government inference 1, free markets 0. If I could find viable candidates who would intefere and regulate at a much faster pace, they would get my vote. Because it increases a freedom I deeply value.
Libertarianism would be a lot more interesting if the libertarians I talk to were actually interested in my freedoms and priorities (which are often collective freedoms to enjoy a shared resource) instead of only being interested in maximizing individual freedoms and their own priorities.
As far as asking "woke stars on their views of libertarianism" can you give examples and sources?
You would do well to talk to minarchists, who are libertarians who believe in small governments that only perform a role of setting regulations and enforcing them, rather than governments being active market participants
I've talked to a few minarchists and I remember them being against almost all regulations and only supporting court systems, the military, and other institutions that could be corrupted if privately owned. This article seems to support my memory of those debates.
Minarchy as described in that article would do a very poor job of regulating negative externalities and the criticisms I made in my parent post still apply. I know it's a big world our there and I could probably find a minarchist or even a libertarian who has a reasonable take on regulation of negative externalities, but so far I've been consistently disappointed. And it's not like it's tough to find debates around these subjects.
From my experience, what libertarians really want is freedom for themselves. They do not actually care how their actions affect others.
For example, I’ve yet to meet a libertarian who cares about their carbon emissions, even though that affects everybody else via climate change. Same goes for coronavirus - they don’t care if they spread the disease to others, but they feel like it’s oppression if they have to wear a mask.
And the same goes for trampling on the feelings of others, or passively accepting that they’ve been given huge advantages over others in society. They feel like they should be able to do anything short of actually stealing from or hurting others physically, and don’t consider the subtle ways they impact others in society.
> For example, I’ve yet to meet a libertarian who cares about their carbon emissions
Something tells me you’ve yet to a meet a libertarian at all. Being held accountable for your pollution of others’ property is a tenant of libertarianism.
> Same goes for coronavirus - they don’t care if they spread the disease to others
This sounds quite the opposite of libertarianism. Hurting/killing others isn’t part of the ideology.
It sounds like you’re just describing people who don’t understand science, which has nothing to do with libertarianism.
> Being held accountable for your pollution of others’ property is a tenant of libertarianism
The air we share and breath isn't "others' property" though is it?
Like the parent commenter, I've also met and debated many libertarians over the past couple of decades. I've yet to meet one who cares in the least bit about polluting the air I breath. Or if they do claim to care they offer solutions that history has proven to not work: just remove every last regulation and the magic of free markets will make abuse magically disappear. When the opposite is true. The very worst air pollution happened when there were no regulations.
> The air we share and breath isn't "others' property" though is it?
It is. It can be modeled as shared property. Libertarianism does not imply you don’t believe in commons.
> I've yet to meet one who cares in the least bit about polluting the air I breath.
Well allowing pollution is a violation of property rights. So again, it sounds like you’re just debating people who don’t believe in pollution. You encounter anti-science regardless of market regulation ideology.
> just remove every last regulation and the magic of free markets will make abuse magically disappear. When the opposite is true.
No, a libertarian solution to this problem would be something like cap and trade. Use the government to enforce the protection of the air and then allow the free market for carbon credits to find the best solution.
> The very worst air pollution happened when there were no regulations.
Well China has terrible air pollution and far more regulations than the US. The government regulating every aspect of life is irrelevant if the government isn’t regulating the right things. Some of the worst atrocities in the last couple of centuries were done at the direction of a government authority.
It's already shared property by its very nature, so I'm not sure what the extra step of it being "modeled" as that does. But sure, let's do it. Can you explain how my air would no longer be polluted using this model? Or how pollution would at the very least be significantly reduced on a year by year basis until it is no longer polluted?
> Use the government to enforce
Wait, a libertarian asking for government regulations and enforcement? Not the libertarians I talk to. Unless they are very very moderate in their libertarian views. All the libertarians I talk to are against government regulations. They want free markets and insist that it's regulations cause all the problems and prevent free markets from functioning properly.
I also think that calling cap and trade a market solution is disingenuous. The important part of it is the cap. It does all the heavy lifting of achieving the actual goal of reducing carbon emissions. A cap without the trade would achieve the goal, although possibly would be politically unpopular. Trade without the cap would be meaningless.
So at very best its a hybrid solution. And not one that I'm against. Markets are good at some things. But without the cap itself, markets would do almost nothing to improve the situation. Or they would start when it's already far too late.
But the point is that I'm not libertarian and I think cap and trade is a reasonable approach. So do many people. So we are really talking about a very moderate libertarian stance in the case of cap and trade. Because again, the important part of it is the regulation part.
> Well China has terrible air pollution and far more regulations than the US.
How many regulations does China have compared to the US and what's your source?
When you look at a city like Beijing for example, the air pollution was so bad because you had literally millions of people individually burning coal for their personal heat. Personal and individual liberty at work.
When they banned heating coal (along with other measures), PM2.5 levels went from 89.5µg/m³ to 58µg/m³, a reduction of about 35%. Very quick and effective. Not very popular, but for everyone who values the freedom to breath clean air it was a quick and significant accomplishment that benefited everyone by limiting everyone These are the kinds of liberties that libertarianism fails hard at achieving. Because of the part where you have to limit everyone in one area to achieve an overall shared liberty in another area.
> if the government isn’t regulating the right things
Who determines what the right things are?
> Some of the worst atrocities in the last couple of centuries were done at the direction of a government authority.
That's the spirit! Exactly the kind of arguments I've heard from libertarians when they insist that regulations are the wrong approach and we must just trust that free markets will somehow sort it all out.
There’s a difference between the libertarian fantasy of personal responsibility and the reality that many people do not behave with the best interest of others in mind.
If you are unaware of how resistant self-described “libertarians” are to wearing masks, taking vaccines, or reducing their carbon emissions, then you are the one who is ignorant.
If you want to say that those people are not true libertarians, fine, but I don’t see how you can pretend that relying on personal responsibility is actually effective.
Rand Paul is also a self-described libertarian and I would guess gets far more attention than you do. He was recently banned from YouTube for his videos about masks. And he still will not accept the scientific consensus about climate change. Seriously disturbing stuff. So yeah, it's not exactly just lazy to associate anti-science stuff with libertarians when that association is both real and comes from popular folks who reach a lot of people.
But sincerely thanks for being a better person than some of the libertarians that have a bigger audience. I appreciate you being super careful about your carbon emissions. I am curious though - do you simply leave carbon emissions to personal choice and hope that everyone is as respectful of our shared resources as you are?
The ACLU supported the rights of neo nazis to protest in a Jewish neighborhood. While not strictly a libertarian organisation, that is exactly the attitude. And libertarians would support that too. The rights of others to be free just like myself. It’s not selfish in any way.
And you should read up about why the aclu did this, they say some very relevant things to today.
This doesn’t contradict my point. Yes, libertarians believe everybody should have the same freedoms, and that’s commendable. But like I was saying, they often stop short of caring how their actions affect others, and that is inherently selfish.
Assuming I were part of an identity group such as Judaism, this would mean parades of people who want to murder me and my family being welcome outside my door to shout for hours of their intent, with no possibility of relief. sign me up for libertarianism!
AFAIK The core is freedom, i.e. a lack of coercion of any kind.
If, to be yourself, you need to claim someone else property, then Libertrarians would say it goes against the core principles of liberty, because to execute this claim you exercise coertion.
But as long as you do not exert coercion on no one else, you're free to be yourself anyway you like.
In practice, it means lack of government coercion because that's the easiest kind to oppose. Weaken government too much, and other forms of coercion will come to the fore. Changing that would require changing human nature though, so most libertarians prefer to turn a blind eye to it.
I'm not sure why you think government is easier to oppose. Or what it has to do with the core principles of Libertarianism.
In any case, of cause, the reality is much more complicated, if there is a dispute over property rights or a form of coercion you go to court to decide who is right and who is wrong. Libertarianism is not anarchism.
At the same time, in spite of all the complications of the real world, there is a clear difference in ideology between libertarianism and social democracy, for example. And one can claim the difference stems from the core principle where the two worldviews differ in certain values.
Ah yes, the one form of coercion libertarians endorse - via the courts. I'm just not even going to address all the reasons that can't work and/or just changes the details of coercion. Others have done so, more or less eloquently, zillions of times. It always falls on intentionally deaf ears. Good day.
Property rights themselves depends on the use of coercion to deny others access and use.
It's a core inconsistency of right-libertarianism that the artificial creation of property rights are taken as an exception that is elevated to something almost holy.
But because of the coercive nature of property rights, there isn't a country on earth that doesn't have huge carveouts to reduce their applicability. Ranging from zoning, to regulations of what you can do on your land to access rights and easements.
Some more than others. E.g. in Norway where I grew up, a private property owner can't deny you access to walk through forests or other non-urban land, nor can they deny you the right to forage or camp, as long as you're a certain distance from dwellings, as such restrictions have always been seen as undue restrictions on the liberties of the public to the point where it was for a long time the only uncodified area of Norwegian law, as it was seen as so inherently obvious it didn't need to be. Sweden has similar rights in their constitution.
But left-libertarians reject property rights entirely because they see it as entirely incompatible with liberty to apply coercion to exercise a claim of land at all by denying others access.
There nothing "freedom" about some sole family owning the only water supply generation after generation or whatever dystopian scenario that libertarianism likely would bring about. In practice it's just a dismantling of democracy in favour of feudalistic power through wealth and property.
The origin of libertarianism is Dejacque, who considered Proudhon of "property is theft" fame to be a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian" for not going far enough.
He was an anarcho-communist and the first publisher of libertarian political texts.
Right-wing libertarianism is about a century younger, and e.g. people like Rothbard very intentionally tried to find common ground between what he saw as the anti-authoritarian parts of the left and the right, but was largely rebuffed by the left, where left-libertarians, many of whom are anarchists, saw the right-libertarian obsession with property rights as fundamentally incompatible with the goal of maximising liberty.
> Right-wing libertarianism is about a century younger
How can you make this claim when Frederick Bastiat was a contemporary of Dejacque's? Many of today's leading libertarian-minded thinkers (Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, etc.) consider Bastiat core to their beliefs and you can hear Bastiat's writings echoed in their works.
I can make this claim because Dejacque was the first to use the term to describe an ideology (here is the very first use [1], and here's a page on Dejacque's newspaper Le Libertaire[2]), and because when the term was introduced into right-wing anti-authoritarianism it was with explicit knowledge that it was co-opting the term as it had then been used for a century by the left.
Libertarianism as such was founded as a rejection of "moderate" anarchism, and a more extensive rejection of authority than that of Proudhon, along with an absolute rejection of property rights as oppressive.
That he was later adopted by some right-wing libertarians does not mean he invented libertarianism. Many people toyed with similar ideas. Dejacque was the person who gave it a name and promoted it as an explicit ideology.
You'll also not that Bastiat did not take things nearly as far as Dejacque did. E.g. Bastiat argued in Justice and Fraternity even for limited state provided welfare, so he did not even go as far as many right-libertarians. But whatever the size, he argues for a state, not the total dismantling of the state, which was the origin of libertarianism.
As such, Bastiat looks libertarian to right-libertarians because they took left-wing libertarianism and gutted the commitment to liberty of Dejacque to add in state restrictions on liberty to enable property, and in doing so shifted the ideology far to the right. But he's far less libertarian by its original definition than e.g. an anarchist like Proudhon. To left-libertarians he's just another statist.
Bastiat was a so-called right-wing libertarian in all but name only. Rothbard borrowed very liberally from Bastiat (no pun intended).
I don't recall reading anything like state provided welfare in Justice and Fraternity. It has been a very long time since I've read it, but that sounds antithetical to some of his other writings which I've re-read more recently. I would be curious to see the specific passage.
To my knowledge, communal arrangements (like Dejacque seemingly favors) have not proven practical outside of relatively small communities.
If it's not evident, the conception and enforcement of private property writ large is established by governmental coercion. Thus monopolization really only occurs through that force, and is also the predominate competitor for monopolization.
You've got a silly proconception that mankind is endemically neurotic. Virtually every interaction you make throughout the day is self-organized, I'd conjecture the vast majority of it is done without direct, indirect, or conditioned coercion, and unsupervised. Multiply this by 7bn. That is to say that most all hierarchical authority isn't even preventative, and is almost exclusively reactionary, which further extends into reasoning that the "order" promised by the institutions is largely illusory outside of the directives offered, which could just as well be derived through any other system.
Libertarianism upholds the same principles of individual liberties. Libertarianism is also the closest thing to what's called liberalism internationally. In the US, liberalism was renamed to libertarianism.
You'd have to be using these terms in a non-standard way, for that to be true. Some common forms of libertarianism are under the umbrella of liberalism, or part of its family, if you like, but they are not identical.
Classical liberalism is a retrospective name for one thread of liberalism. It does not—and this is important—encompass all liberals before some date, but one branch, influenced by a set of thinkers and writers who are also counted among the influences of other branches. It has its own wikipedia page:
One point that may make the distinction clear is that in this sentence, from the article you linked: "During the mid-20th century, many with Old Right or classical liberal beliefs began to describe themselves as libertarians." The "Old Right" were opponents of Roosevelt, who himself sits at the base of the branch of what the "Liberalism" entry calls "Modern Liberalism"—but both are under the tent of liberalism, as were others then and earlier whose views did not line up with libertarianism.
Liberalism was not renamed libertarianism, even just in the US, and that's certainly not what's meant by liberalism internationally.
It's not the same, but it's probably the closest thing, because European liberals are advocates of less taxes, less government regulation and intervention, less welfare state, and in general oppose any kind of socialism and Keynesian economic policies. It's quite opposite of what 'liberals' in the US advocate for, when it comes to government role and economic policies.
'Liberalism' as used when refering to Democratic Party policies in the US, is generally refered as social democracy or social liberalism in Europe.
What's euphemistic about my phrasing? A deal isn't a coercive act. Having a metaphorical gun to one's head to practice labor is.
In your view, is it acceptable that the USDA can dictate the prices of one's crops or put liens on someone's farm land for producing food in manner that isn't produced according to government dictates? Do you think that's the same as coming to an agreement with an equal on certain terms, even if one isn't necessarily happy with all of them?
The difference in practice is that someone can walk away from a deal, but no one can walk away from the government.
>Why would you otherwise feel the need to rephrase it and are still unable to explain the practical difference?
Because your "definition" implies a lack of agency in an agreement between contracting parties. That is a practical difference and one that was noted in my last sentence which you either didn't read or avoided addressing. To quote: "The difference in practice is that someone can walk away from a deal, but no one can walk away from the government".
>Yes, and for the masses without property? I think I hinted at indirect coercion by "to feed yourself".
I read your statement as implying the usual anti-libertarian argument: property is coercion. I thought that the "to feed yourself" line was a throwaway example of a "limited" freedom "granted" by a property owner made to support your mistaken thesis that a top-down structure exists between individual parties freely engaging in a deal. My approach was to explain how property owners can't grant freedoms, as people have their freedoms or trade them for expedience, and that this top-down structure has, in the past and the present, implicitly and explicitly been practiced by government. I couldn't have read your statement in the way you implied simply because I've never conceived of any such claim being made seriously that choosing to feed oneself, whether one owns property or not, is evidence and a product of force. But now that you've made that clear, I can only say that it's ridiculous.
>and I have no interests in going off into some USDA tangent.
The USDA is not a tangent. It's an example of my point that someone without the ability to decide what do with his own property is better defined as coerced under your original phrasing. It's also a counterpoint to your claim that my point is a euphemistic rephrasing of yours.
Just so I follow, do you recognize the existence indirect coercion by necessities (which very well could be the result of private property creating artificial scarcity) at all?
Because if you do I have no idea how you can come to the idea that one can just "walk away".
> The USDA is not a tangent
It is, you're switching the topic to be about government, and a contemporary setting, instead of continuing on the topic of a private property owner and a hypothetical libertarian society.
Libertarians seem to have a bad habit of using unnecessarily convoluted language.
"Artificial" scarcity, even of so-called necessities, is not indirect coercion so long as it's the choice of the property owner. No one is entitled to the provisions or labor of another because of lack or need. If someone decides it's not in his interest to distribute the fruits of his labor, that's his right.
And yes, people can walk away. Human beings have being walking away for tens of thousands of years. You don't need to read libertarian literature to know the phrase "vote with your feet".
A government with a monopoly on force and enforcement of contracts is as much a feature of a libertarian society as it is in a contemporary one, and so the comparison involving the USDA is germane. The contention is one of degree and nature involvement. A private property owner in a libertarian society must still follow the law to the extent that such laws don't violate his rights.
> so long as it's the choice of the property owner.
and there you have it. why libertarianism in it's propertarianism form has nothing to do with freedom and all to do with giving power to the property owners.
> And yes, people can walk away.
You surely can't believe that people can just walk away from their only source of income?
There's always metaphorical gun to everyone's head, in that you die without air, food, and water.
The coercive act is hidden by giving you a choice on who to deal with, but the coercision is still there in that you're forced to make a deal with some property owner. There's no choice to not make a deal with the cartel
A postscript on voluntary slavery. I am on record on numerous occasions in support of voluntary slavery; some other libertarians support me on this issue as well. See Andersson, 2007; Block, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007A, 2007B, 2009A, 2009B; Lester, 2000; Nozick, 1974, pp. 58, 283, 331; Philmore, 1982; Steiner, 1994, pp. 232.
No- that private property rights are consistent with the libertarian quote above because it's voluntary.
You can argue what truly voluntarily slavery would look like in a modern world, but involuntary chattel slavery is what conflicts with principles of private property.
I'd argue things like athletes signing away future percentages of potential earnings (which was a fairly popular idea until the current NCAA name and likeness rules changed) would be one potential version.
the core value of libertarianism is that the strong will dominate the weak, meaning a pure libertarian society would feature widespread slavery as a primary feature.
> the core value of libertarianism is that the strong will dominate the weak, meaning a pure libertarian society would feature widespread slavery as a primary feature.
No it’s not, it’s freedom from being coerced into doing things. Quite literally the opposite of slavery.
Who protects that freedom ? Suppose i own the police, because they are of course privatized and owned by unelected entities (me). I can tell them to arrest you or whatever just because I feel like it. Because there is no state providing justice, if you are not yourself powerful or well liked, I don't see where you'd get any recourse. Someone else can easily give you the only choice of indentured servitude for protection and this is not at all a novel pattern in human societies, it goes on all the time.
A core weakness in libertarianism is the cornerstone assumption that everyone will play by the rules, and offers no remedy for those that violate those rules. Which pretty much ignores human behavior going through history (and personal experience, for anyone who has had to do a group assignment).
Yes. Any time there is a power vacuum, there are strongmen waiting to step in and grab that power. As terrible as democracy is, we haven't yet invented anything better to keep the strongmen at bay. So the libertarians will have to live under the rules that society dictates, and here we are.
Where does domination in your example come from exactly? To dominate requires the initiation of force or coercion. Slavery is a primary feature of a state that violates rights, not one that enshrines them.
The only "safe guard" libertarianism brings to the table here is that a person must sign on the dotted line first. Not exactly rock solid when you also allow and encourages the inevitable concentration of wealth through private property at the same time.
Your safeguard is the choice to act or not act. That's a feature of a free individual. Not a bug. Choices don't become invalid or "wrong" because some people have been wildly successful with theirs while others haven't.
What exactly makes wealth such a sticking point in these arguments against libertarianism? It's not considered wrong to be "too" intelligent, or "too" handsome, or "too" strong. But for some reason using these qualities and abilities to obtain money, supposedly in excess of some "moral number" like $1B, results in being "too" wealthy and thus "wrong". Wealth and private property are a representation of value earned through choices made. I would think that one would want more value in his life not less. In a free market, value is generated by choosing to vote with one's dollar, gold bar, or bitcoin. Private property is NOT coercion. Coercion implies you own nothing and owe everything.
An agreement under coercion, direct or indirect, can't be reduced into some intentionally sterile and neutral "choice" without any context. When someone try to do that, it suggests that one is uncomfortable with that fact and prefer to rationalize it.
Either one has the agency to make and agree to a contract or one does not. There is no in-between. If one holds that every agreement is either directly or indirectly coercive, then we come to the conclusion that no normal human being is ever free. That the only people who truly have choices are clairvoyants and that the rest are as unqualified and naive as children. Obviously, I reject that.
While choice is not without context, that context is individually determined by the one's interests and rational faculties. One doesn't know what he doesn't know. However a person still has the freedom to to take a calculated risk if he deems the payoff worth it. That a person doesn't need to know everything to exercise his agency is what demonstrates choice exists and is not simply the rationalization that you claim it is.
As far as ownership is concerned, why in your view is that direct or indirect coercion? Why is buying or owning something force?
> If one holds that every agreement is either directly or indirectly coercive
You've made weird deductions and extrapolated on top of that then you reject that caricature you've created. That has never been stated.
It would be helpful if we can try to keep this in plain English.
> Either one has the agency to make and agree to a contract or one does not
People can have both agency and still use that agency into making an indirectly coerced "choice". The fact remain that it's coerced, and thus not particularly free as in freedom.
Right wing libertarianism obsesses over property rights. The original left wing libertarianism rejects property rights as incompatible with maximising liberty.
Dejacque, the father or libertarianism criticised Proudhon, the father of anarchism for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal but not libertarian", but strongly supported his infamous "property is theft".
It's part of why I like to bring it up. It's a toss-up whether it makes people really upset, make them refuse to accept it, or get them to learn something new, but occasionally it makes people think critically about how property rights relate to liberty.
Incidentally I think everyone should read Dejacque's open letter to Proudhon [1], irrespective of their political views - it's just one of the most poetically written political texts I've read (and his first use of the term libertarianism). Also somewhat relevant to the discussion here as an early example of a form of wokeness - Dejacque criticising an ally on the left for not going far enough in throwing off the social order Proudhon was ostensibly challenging by failing to stand up equally for women.
Big L Libertarians in the US go hard on Austrian economics. As a result, if you ask Americans what they think of libertarianism (as you suggest), they’ll mostly be thinking about adherents to Mises & Cato.
Some, even most, of the goals of that movement are commendable, with the exception of the more idealistic goals such as equality of outcome. What I find worrying, however, are the tactics that are used to accomplish those goals. I find it hard to understand how people do not see how discriminating against other people because of their views is not the right approach to solve discrimination.
I was recently thinking about why I was so annoyed at wokism, and was trying to figure out what annoyed me about a movement that shares many of my values. I realized exactly what you mention, that equality of outcome leads to what is basically good old discrimination, except the group that's discriminated against is different now.
At some level, I'm disappointed that we've progressed so much in the last few decades, but all the effort was in the direction of keeping discrimination going, instead of trying to end it completely. Yes, many people have a disadvantage due to centuries of discrimination, but I don't see equality of outcome as being the way forward towards an equal society in the long run.
Do you have a few concrete examples of large groups strongly advocating for equality of outcomes?
I’ve had discussions about “equality” with folks aligned across the political spectrum, and most everyone agrees they want equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. I’m confused about who or what group is speaking about people desiring equality of outcome.
And discriminating against other people because of their views - what if their view is, “group A of people, who didn’t do anything to belong to group A, shouldn’t exist or have the same rights as group B?”
Ibram X. Kendi: Any disparity in group outcomes is proof of a deeply flawed and malicious system. The darling of American academia and corporate. You can either have equality of opportunity and accept that the outcomes will be disparate, or have equality of (group) outcome. You can't have both. Your friends have not thought through the consequences of the current dominant ideology.
Can equality of opportunity at individual level coexist with equality or outcome at group level? This is indeed a reasonable question to ask. Upvoted.
We might imagine that humans are akin to gas molecules and human groups are ideal gases, thus an ideal gas law of sorts holds for humans, PV = nRT. There is brownian motion at individual level, but we expect that, statistically, all ideal gases / human groups to have the exact same macro properties. And perhaps if we hard subscribe to rational choice theory (a popular theory among American economists with deep roots in The Enlightenment) we might imagine that indeed humans are atomized undistinguishable gas molecules, pushed around randomly by the vagaries of fate and character.
Alas, there are other ways for matter to organize. Witness the bewildering diversity of minerals out there. 'The Smithsonian's mineral and gem collection [...] consists of approximately 350,000 mineral specimens and 10,000 gems'. As soon as we allow for some degree of matter / social cohesion, the ideal gas / human group law is blown to the smithereens.
I'll let you ponder whether hard atomized rational choice theory is a reasonable assumption when it comes to human groups. Or whether it is a reasonable goal to aspire to.
Or that black domination in sports is due to bias against whites and black people should be limited in sports so white people can have a fair chance? It seems even woke people recognize that this difference is probably not just cultural bias?
Ibram X. Kendi is one person. You can find individuals who espouse any view you want. The question is are there any large groups actually pushing for this. Though the parent didn't, I would s/large/mainstream/ because the internet makes it easy to find large groups of people talking about any old topic.
So what is the large group he leads? Or are you saying anyone that has listened to what he had to say, e.g. people who've read his columns or taken his classes or colleagues, are part of his "group"?
Your second statement does not follow from the first.
Sure, in some abstract world, but to make that claim about Kendi, you have to ignore what he has written and said, and most of what has been written about him.
“Dr. Kendi strives to be a hardcore antiracist”
“In 2020, The Root 100 listed him as the seventh most influential African American between the ages of 25 and 45 and the most influential college professor.”
We know what his goals are, and we know that he is independently regarded as extremely influential. He is de facto leading people towards his goals.
What isn’t clear is why you’d try to claim otherwise. He certainly wouldn’t.
> Willful ignorance occurs when individuals realize at some level of consciousness that their beliefs are probably false, or when they refuse to attend to information that would establish their falsity.
> In contrast to this sort of willful ignorance, self-deception occurs when individuals believe false things with complete conviction.
We are all subject to these kinds of cognitive biases. The best we can hope is to learn some of our own and try to avoid them. Likely we will fail most of the time :(
> Willful ignorance occurs when individuals realize at some level of consciousness that their beliefs are probably false, or when they refuse to attend to information that would establish their falsity.
It’s not always clear what is willful ignorance, and what is a rhetorical device.
This goes in both directions, though, and it's a problem with modern internet-fueled politics and discourse. No one truly speaks for a group in many cases, but nonetheless a group can be seen to have a certain character and set of values. Surely amorphous groups cannot be beyond criticism?
In other words, a subjective opinion is being asked that anyone can disagree with and similar to "cancel culture", we're just going to pretend this does not exist.
Any outcome that diverges from the percent population means the institution is racist. This is literally the foundation of woke culture
1) More blacks are incarcerated than their representation in the population. Therefore the justice/police system is racist and must be abolished (BLM)
2) Minorities cant get loans in proportion to their representation in the population therefore the financial system is racist and must be abolished. Banking must be taken over by the govt
>3) Minorities cannot achieve the same scores in math and science
No.
Nice try but I don't buy it. I'll entertain the idea, "if you ruin early education along racial lines you produce disparity of outcomes and this is racist", but I'm not going to sit still for "minorities cannot achieve the same scores in math and science", and especially not for framing it like that's the fundamental issue and what to DO about it is the only concern. That axiom is busted, fake, made up by self-justifying racists… and racist, yes.
Charitably: 3) (Some) minorities are not achieving the same scores in math and science, therefore math and science are racist and must be abolished.
Something to consider: as the 'abolish math and science' movement grows in influence, especially in public schools, students of lower means are likely to fall further behind their more affluent peers, whose parents afford private schooling and tutoring.
It is in the strategic interest of this country, both from an internal cohesion POV and from an international competitiveness POV, to encourage excellence in STEM, across race and class lines. Consider that the voices ready to raise 'racism' at every slight opportunity are actually making it harder to achieve this goal.
The word being used nowadays is "equity", and it's everywhere. Almost every large institution is pushing this. It explicitly means equal outcomes, not equal opportunities.
It does mean equality of outcomes among the people who use the word:
"Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. Nov 5, 2020"
I think people generally know enough to argue/speak in favor of equality of opportunity, but many of the actions appear to be “of outcome”.
In many cases, you can take a view (and craft an argument) that a particular action is one or the other, depending on whether or not you agree with it.
Take admission standards for colleges. Some colleges (at least as I understand it) are requiring higher SAT scores for Asians than other groups to consider students to be equally likely to be admitted. If you agree that’s good policy, you’re likely to argue that this represents increasing access to higher education for underrepresented non-Asian groups and therefore is an equality of opportunity measure. If you oppose it, you argue that those SAT scores represent a measure of the students’ demonstrated scholastic ability (an outcome at that point in time) and that perturbing those results is being done in an attempt to equalize these outcomes. (The truth is that it’s almost surely a mix of both.)
I do not think it is a mix of both. It is an equality of outcome pushed because the solution to equality of opportunity is considered too expensive (massive wealth transfers that may or may not be able to fix broken homes/families/communities).
Opportunities compound, so they will lead to wide gaps in outcomes, so I do not see any solution other than to reduce the income/wealth gap to reduce that inevitable gap in opportunity of outcome.
Aren't many groups advocating for quotas? In France, it's a thing now to try to always have as much women as men in groups, especially those with high prestige (government, board of directors, etc). I don't know if it's precisely a few groups advocating for it, but it's now a thing most people expect. That's for me an example of equality of outcomes and not of oppurtunity.
In France, there is a national gender equality rule (enacted in 2013) that states that no more than 60% of new appointments to management positions in public service should go to one sex.
Though bringing more female representation and thereby creating gender parity in employment served as the impetus, this rule was broken in Paris in 2018 when 69% of jobs went to women under the mayor's (Anne Hidalgo) purview. This led to a fine of €90,000 against the Paris government.
Both the mayor and deputy mayor (Audrey Pulvar) publicly expressed happiness, pride, and a sense of honor at having been fined for breaking the rule. In 2019, the fine was subsequently dropped.
So here we have an interesting example of aiming for equality of outcome. What makes it interesting is that when the results led to inequality in favor of one particular side, it was actually championed and seen as progress.
Until 1945 (later?) women didn't have the vote in France, so I think a situation where one local government has 69% women is very clearly progress. I seriously doubt that women make a majority of civil servants in general.
When women are overrepresented in every prestigious sector, I think it'll be worth having a rethink about policies like this. Until then, it seems a bit ridiculous - and I say this as a man. If you're a man, and you're not an idiot, you've doubtless noticed a ton of incidents where your gender has helped you advance socially or professionally. You can't just overnight shuck of centuries of history. Quotas are a simple way of trying to push back on that.
62% of civil servants are women in France. Civil servants are 20% of the employed people in France. Civil servants used to have lots of advantages over people working in the private sectors. These days these advantages are being slowly eroded, but some are still here. Stability is a big one. So that 69% is not progress at all, it's just the usual. The goal of these policies is already to get more men in the sector. Especially for civil servants, you should try to have a workforce that's representative of the population. Source of my statistics: https://www.fonction-publique.gouv.fr/legalite-professionnel....
> If you're a man, and you're not an idiot, you've doubtless noticed a ton of incidents where your gender has helped you advance socially or professionally.
I don't think that's the case for everyone. Maybe that's because I'm young? But I haven't noticed much if any discrimination against women firsthand. Even around me, it's very rare to hear stories like that.
> You can't just overnight shuck of centuries of history.
I think you can. Culture erodes very fast when the people that enforced it are no longer around. We had two world war with Germany, and I don't know anyone that has any ressentment against the Germans. I think part of it is because most of the people from that time period are not around anymore, or are now very old. If someone said that he dislikes Germans because of the world wars, everyone would think that person is very weird. As another example, rights of LGBT have been moving very fast these last ~10 years.
I think it's very important to recognize that even if we are far from perfect, lots of improvements have already been and continue to be made. We should use this as an inspiration to know that what we're doing isn't useless or for the future generation, and that we can improve the life of people right now.
A friend of mine applied to VMWare a year or two ago. They were asking him all sorts of questions about various disabilities; are you deaf? Do you use a wheelchair, etc..
The recruiter told him directly that they were looking for people with disabilities to fill their quota of people with disabilities, necessary because it was a government position. So we're definitely out of the game of recruiting based on merit in at least some government spots, and instead focused on unrelated favoritism.
I find that very difficult to believe, as it’s very illegal to ask about disabilities during hiring. VMware as a large company with many lawyers and hr people would of course know the rules so I’d be shocked if this story is true.
Laws are not the same everywhere in the world. In France we have disabilities quotas, so it makes sense to ask about them during hiring. I also think suing someone because they didn't hire you is less of a thing.
You generally don't have to ask a person if they're deaf. Unless you mean it was part of the application/submission process? It sounds like a greatly exaggerated version of the truth, which is this:
The actual requirement for government contractors is that they cannot require someone to disclose disability information, but they must give the applicant the opportunity to do so.
Because roughly 10% of the workforce has a disability, and it was found that government contractors appeared to discriminate against people with disabilities that were otherwise qualified for the work. So, large contractors became obligated to have a less-than-representative 7% of their workforce pulled from a pool of candidates with disabilities.
I'm not sure quota systems like this are the best way to handle the problem. However, this approach is hardly the death knell for merit-based hiring.
From I first encountered rules surrounding this, it has always been seen as a workaround to create the incentives to change sexism elsewhere.
E.g if boards are required to put women in place, it creates an organizational incentive to improve the conditions so more women gets the training and promotions and mentoring that makes then suitable for those board positions, and also takes away an ability to avoid hiring qualified women.
I don't know if anyone that see those rules as desirable in and of themselves.
how do you equalize opportunity of, say, getting accepted to medical school without a previous equalization in the outcome of passing the MCAT, or attaining the competitive GPA required for a qualified (or is that now equal-ified?) applicant?
It does seem that the "equality of outcome" criticism mostly is coming from spaces inhabited and informed by people like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager. From what I have seen it is mostly used as a strawman because, as you mentioned, I too have not really seen anyone seriously arguing for equality of outcomes (if anyone has examples, please share).
The tactics were probably forged in the underground while it was not wise to speak openly about it, always with the law or society breathing down their necks, so I am not surprised the tactics aren't the cleanest or most innocent.
Once this gets enough traction, it might get plenty of followers.
If my kid would come home with half green, half pink hair, we would have to sit down and find the origin for that, I would not be very amused.
But same applies if my kids would bully other kids for any reason.
What would you suggest that wasn’t tried before? Conversations, education, peaceful protests, etc. None worked as well as this.
If someone is punching you in the face every single day, and nothing you try that’s non violent works, but suddenly you get results when you push back, wouldn’t you employ that method? Sure, it hurts the person punching you, but they were punching you.
Well a good first step would be to accept that societal changes take time to develop. We have made huge progress in areas such as women's rights. Asian immigrants, which were severely discriminated against in the past, have achieved tremendous upward mobility in our society. There are many other areas in which our society has progressed. All of this progress has occurred without any of the radical discrimatory tactics that are used today.
> We have made huge progress in areas such as women's rights.
And suffragettes put bombs in mailboxes and threw their bodies under horses. 2nd wave feminists were far more "anti-man" than modern feminists (there aren't too many political lesbians nowadays). The "peaceful protest" that people recall so fondly rarely was so peaceful but is instead used as a cudgel to resist all change today by claiming that activists aren't "doing it right".
In the UK, you can see a dramatic change in the response to suffrage activism after these sorts of things started. Decades of calm requests went nowhere.
Those bombings didn’t result in votes for women at all.
> The campaign was halted at the outbreak of war in August 1914 without having brought about votes for women, as suffragettes pledged to pause their campaigning to aid the nation's war effort.
> The extent to which suffragette militancy contributed to the eventual enfranchisement of women in 1918 has been debated by historians, although the consensus of historical opinion is that the militant campaign was not effective.
> We have made huge progress in areas such as women's rights.
In the U.S. there is still a major fight for women's reproductive rights, with frequent backsliding (TX is the most extreme recent example).
> All of this progress has occurred without any of the radical discrimatory tactics that are used today.
Every step toward restoring human rights to marginalized groups has been labeled radical (because technically it is radical compared to the status quo) and must come at the expense of some privilege that others hold. Privilege, however, is not a human right and therefore not something inherently worthy of protection.
That isn't about women's rights. One side argues it is about womens rights, that abortion is merely a medical procedure.
The other side argues that the fetus (usually called "unborn") have independent heartbeats and unique DNA, and as such have their own right to life. That is why they use the term "pro-life".
If it really were about children's rights, then they would also be all for supporting families economically and putting resources into education. But they do not. The most probable explanation is still control over female reproduction.
This conversation could be a whole lot less acrimonious if we were to acknowledge the core conservative position: the intact nuclear family is the primary locus of children's rights.
Because that represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the conservatives' view of what a "right" is. Social welfare programs are a necessary intrusion upon the rights of the taxpayers to the fruit of their labor, and the specific balance that they have chosen isn't to your liking.
Ask, talk to, or overhear any of the people in texas who support the bill, and not one of them will give a damn about, or even consider as an issue, "control over female reproduction". That is your concern, not theirs.
I would agree with that. You only slip and evade so many punches before you strike back.
Many of these things took a lot of effort.
Examples were suffrage in Switzerland, only approved in 1971(by male voters).
Sounds crazy, the UK suffragettes got their way between WW1 and WW2, it's pretty shameful that Some anti homosexuality laws have been passed after that.
The same conservative outlets who point fingers at the Talibans for killing homosexuals have been on the anti gay train when it was convenient.
The Dutch simplified the most useful rule in the 17th century: "live and let live", it was codified into (maritime) law.
We have a system that cannot accommodate all views and opinions, but if we gonna call it democracy, at least the minorities should not be discriminated on.
But yeah, a bullies freedom of speech and someone with green hair crossing paths will cause some potential friction. If not right there on the spot, people will vent online.
Case in point, there's this guy Nick Szabo , intelligent person, but damn his Twitter feed and contributions make you wonder if he dresses up as a klansman in the nights.
Switzerland still has conscription for men only, so it's arguably still a sexist society (against men).
What's interesting is that men's suffrage was often justified by conscription: that people shouldn't be sent to fight wars they didn't have a say in. But then women got suffrage without having to be conscripted on the basis of equality, while only men still got conscripted. Not a great deal for men!
Yes I agree, odd interpretation, might be even perverse to a degree, as it only applied to maritime law and was probably abused to engage in slave trade, they could always claim they never killed a slave.
What you’re describing seems to be ordinary, popular liberal values. Wokeness regresses toward segregation and race essentialism.
For example, a white Dane is unfit to translate the work of a Black poet because a white person cannot understand the experiences of a black person—the difference between any white person and any black person in the 21st century are far greater than the 21st century Dane and the 15th century Shakespeare whom the Dane regularly translates without controversy.
Or similarly, a school board decides that an eminently qualified white man is unfit to volunteer because he can’t possibly empathize with the experiences of minorities.
Or the woke demande to dispense of standardized tests because these tests only judge us according to “white” strengths (literacy, reason, etc) which blacks or other minorities don’t possess. https://mobile.twitter.com/JamaalBowmanNY/status/13765200627...
Part of me doubts that it's a permanent shift. There was a hippie movement in the 60s and 70s in the US, but conservatives are still going strong 50 years later.
I think it's permanent, it will just change shape and be less radical.
The hippies are still a bit hippies deep down inside, and their main objective has been achieved. People know they can be hippies and it will be fine.
I am more unsure as to why subcultures have been ostracized in the first place if they do no harm to others.
When I lived in a huge city for the first time, i realized how unimportant all that was, I got to speak to all kinds of people, name any -ism, I have spoken to them, and they have all been nice folks.
Of course. Steve Jobs dropped acid, went to India and didn’t bath. He also stole ideas from others, screamed at people who disagreed and drove his employees like slaves and became a billionaire.
With regard to certain egalitarian principles, yes.
Silence is violence when there's a concerted effort to normalize unjustified hierarchy through cultural peer pressure. Whether it's 'let's all make rape jokes, also rapists aren't actually bad', or 'let's put up statues of slavers waaaaay after the war they were in, because slavers aren't actually bad', part of the purpose of such social pressure is to stifle anybody who's inclined to object.
The intensity with which people demand their right to performatively line up with bad things they claim they are not, right then, themselves, actually doing, tells me something about those people. I'm deeply not interested in exploring hypotheticals through which people might claim they want to dress up as a Nazi without actually being one, and deeply not impressed with the argument, "You're cruelly trying to punish me for BEING a Nazi, but I am only DRESSED as one, so you're morally obligated to be silent and let me do my own thing!"
'Woke' is illiberal. A lot of the ideas behind it attack liberalism as they see at enabling the status quo as opposed to action for change.
Edit: Why are people down voting me? Critical theories are very open about their critique of liberalism and rationality? And how they've led to lack of change. It's not some weird conspiracy.
I personally think it's not worth it to abandon liberal ideas. As suddenly you validate a lot of illiberal politics. It allows for authoritarianism. I can't stand inconsistencies.
People are downvoting you because they don't trust that your argument is in good faith. It's a foundational argument for manipulatively moving goalposts, and sketchy as far as redefining commonly accepted words. No, 'woke' and 'liberal' don't make sense to paint as opposite ideologies, much less set up straw-men for trying to plant the idea that 'woke is abandoning liberal ideas, you wouldn't do THAT, would you?'
And that is why you're earning downvotes :)
This is honestly a great HN thread for wilfully burning karma in fires of brigading. I know my own interaction with it, is in the full knowledge that if I do correctly identify and explore ideas, I'll be massively downvoted for sheerly tactical and ideological reasons. You could hardly have a thread less conducive to the stated aims of HN discussion.
I wouldn't say they're opposite. But I would say they're ok in abandoning liberal ideals in order achieve their goals. I.E Mob justice, "positive" discrimination, silence is violence, ostracization of people who dare think differently, etc etc
But if you don't take liberal ideas seriously, suddenly you validate authoritarian tactics. The only difference then is that it's ok to use authoritarian tactics just as long as they push my ideas, and not yours. If you don't like authoritarian tactics that right wing people use, you can't use authoritarian tactics to promote left ideas without being a massive hypocrite. Either using authoritarian tactics is ok or it isn't.
Most atrocities in the world come from the authoritarian parts of politics regardless of where you are on the left/right spectrum. My ideas are the right way, and I'm going enforce it using law, mob justice and violence. As opposed to liberalism where diversity of thought is welcomed.
Modern wokism is actually defined by illiberalism. It's very much about what you are not allowed to do. Not dressing like X, not using Y things, not saying Z, not getting a place at uni or a job due to having the wrong skin color, etc.
Some of those Xes, Ys, and Zs are actually good points and it's good the people who were talking about it all along have a voice now. Just because some people, usually not those actually affected, go overboard or talk over the people they're trying to help doesn't invalidate the concerns.
It's actually good that, now, I understand the big ol generic "Indian" with a war bonnet painted in the school gym when I was a kid was a misrepresentation and misuse of sacred, hard-earned symbols. It's good that I know whose land those pipelines cut across now. It's good that I understand spirit animals are a sacred, private thing, not something to bandy about or declare for every fleeting interest on Twitter. It's good that I know naming certain evils is kind of a jerk move to do in a crowd of people who believe in them.
I, nor you, have an obligation to honor or respect anyone's beliefs. We have the limited rights to dismiss, criticize, adopt, etc any belief/creed/etc. The limits are prohibiting or restricting others, including original inventors of belief , from doing same except in support of 2nd limitation. Which is, doing harm.
Many want that to be absolute no harm. I strongly disagree that "hurt feelings" and "uncomfortableness" are worthy levels of harm.
If people had respected the right of people to practice and believe as they wish, there would be no problem, but now their cultures are in tatters after centuries of violence and forced reeducation, and they're trying to protect what's left. The current situation is the result of people not believing what you said, in the past or present.
You speak in abstract terms of rights and privileges. This is the actual, real situation. There are real human consequences to treating endangered indigenous cultures as something to repackage and transform for the benefit of people outside those cultures.
Keep that in mind as you debate abstract ideas with "society," whatever that is.
You say those things are “good”, but you offer no evidence of why. How does chastising people for having a “spirit animal” on Twitter help the indigenous people?
> It's good that I understand spirit animals are a sacred, private thing, not something to bandy about or declare for every fleeting interest on Twitter.
What about if their tattoos are swastikas or nooses, and the "non-conformist" views are antithetical with the ideals of "wokeness"? They're "doing as they like", so let them express and find themselves, right?
No. This is what critical theory (such as critical race theory) touches on: the obvious fact that social pressure can be applied not only through the letter of law, but also the context of what people can be compelled to tolerate in ordinary daily life.
If people constantly joke around about rape, it's clearly not meant to be that big of a crime, plus it's on people's minds as a possible thing to do.
If it's normal to go around presented with swastikas and nooses but not normal to react angrily to such messaging, then those things and Nazism and lynching are culturally acceptable regardless of the letter of the law, which will be next on the list to bring up to speed with what the cultural messaging is saying.
If it's normal to go around seeing giant expensive statues of slavers put up, not during a conflict but many years later when black civil rights are becoming a thing, then those slavers are the real heroes regardless of what the laws say… and the laws will follow along as soon as it's convenient to do so.
It's always projection. The fear of Critical Theory is real and not unjustified. That sort of societal-context thinking is how Nazis, slavers and racists have historically got what THEY wanted, so it stands to reason they'd recognize it right away when it's used against them.
- "the more open minded ... as long as it's open to what I like and closed to what I don't"
- "do as you like as long as I approve"
And I'm not speaking to you-- But rather extrapolating these as they represent the fake tolerance of the anti-traditional neomarxists-- SJWs who typically exhibit substantial fascist traits
* --> See those downvotes? Point proven :) The hypocrisy of those who claim tolerance of different perspectives *
Unfortunately the lolbertarian approach overlooks the fact that you live in a civilization composed of others humans, and that the collective mental health of said humans can very quickly impact your day to day life.
So you, as an individual, have a vested interest in participating in social trends/resisting social normalization of beliefs that harm your way of life.
Say you enjoy the pub, it is in your interest to resist a social movement banning alcohol (or immigration from countries where these views are common).
> Many of psychology's concepts have undergone semantic shifts in recent years. These conceptual changes follow a consistent trend. Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena. The concepts of abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice are examined to illustrate these historical changes. In each case, the concept's boundary has stretched and its meaning has dilated. A variety of explanations for this pattern of “concept creep” are considered and its implications are explored. I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. Its implications are ambivalent, however. Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.
The full article has a bit more nuance. It points out that intolerance to minor forms of harm has both pros and cons.
> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm
Or maybe once you've weaponized a concept, it's tempting to use it as much as you can.
When being a nerd stopped being shameful and started being cool, all the cool kids started calling themselves nerds for liking Avengers and Harry Potter - why wouldn't you claim the social points that are just lying around?
And when you live in a society that rewards victimhood, when calling someone a bully gives you power over them - of course people will jump at any chance to call themselves a victim.
> This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena.... Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.
Also the dilution in the "downward" direction denies the people with the original, more-serious issues the vocabulary to deal with their unique problems and will eventually engender skepticism in large parts of the general public (e.g. if "abuse" expands to encompass extremely common experiences, saying "I was a abused" ceases to have much meaning, and you end up with nonsense like "Were you just abused, or were use abused abused?").
And in the meantime it creates injustices in the other direction, e.g. when Julian Assange is accused of "rape" which the public understands to mean a particular very serious thing, but Sweden uses a definition that encompasses much more than that very serious thing. Meanwhile a thousand articles are published containing his name and the word "rape" together in the headline.
We need a separate word for leering, groping, fondling, sex with dubious consent, and violently beating someone during penetration without consent.
Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault short of murder since it included every possible form of assault.
Today it's moved to fondling and people are trying to make it include leering. Using the same legal punishments for something that is clearly different makes very little sense and normalizes rape in the long term.
Funny how you are getting downvoted, I can guess the thinking behind it.
But you are right. The way rape is being treated now is like saying an accidental traffic accident manslaughter should be punished like a serial killer. It’s just not the same and it’s not fair.
This in no way makes groping or leering acceptable. But it’s still completely different to violent rape penetrative assault.
> Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault
No, it did not. That's why you find courts always charged offenders for multiple different crimes when they are carried out together: rape, assault, kidnapping, life threats...
It's much clearer in German. Rape = Vergewaltigung. It contains gewalt = violence. Stuff like "rape by deception" as a court ruled in Israel because a Jewish Israeli woman had sex with a man she though to be Jewish but wasn't shouldn't be considered rape (I'd argue being the wrong ethnicity while having consensual sex shouldn't be a crime at all).
Now we have rape and we also have rape rape, like, the real rape.
And quantitatively speaking, surely there is some amount of money, which when lost in divorce, is tantamount to the original definition of rape.
(That is, a thought experiment whereby a person might decide a certain amount of money is worth the allowance/aversion of rape of the said bargainer-- such a threshold is different for each person but arguably represents an approximation of a financial quantification of rape-- which, perhaps that amount of money, when lost in divorce, can thereby arguably be considered financial rape)
Especially given that in public health administration, life and health is quantified in monetary terms.
I have noticed this with “victim blaming”. I understood it to refer fairly specifically to sexual assault victims being blamed for “asking for it” by wearing a skirt or whatever.
Now I see it being used in relationship advice subreddits and agony aunt columns to basically mean “don’t dare disagree with me” when someone decides that they were the victim in some some dispute.
> Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.
See syllogisms. Technically a battle against "whiteness" is not the same as a battle against "white". But in practice the syllogism makes the two indifferentiable.
> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda.
I don't feel comfortable with anyone using the term "liberal moral agenda" unironically because of culture-specific connotations: for starters, it's a very US-specific phrase which will have attached meanings that would be lost or misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with how the term "liberal" specifically relates to US political discourse - and the hugely negative (to downright toxic) connotations attached to the label "liberal moral agenda" by the reactionary right-wing - which all make conversations like these impossible to have.
One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allowed to refer to power, and pathologize expressions that are offensive to it. Liberals have all these rules about how you are allowed to describe liberals—the idea that we should observe similar courtesies when describing the “reactionary right-wing” as you pejoratively put it is, naturally, absurd.
So even an anodyne description like “liberal moral agenda” of what is objectively a moral agenda informed by liberal priorities becomes verboten, simply because it allows its adversaries to vocalize their opposition to it. Depriving the opposition of their own vocabulary and replacing it with one of your making is a classic move—anyone who fails to update their dictionary marks themselves as an enemy.
Someone is indeed making conversation impossible to have, but whose fault is that, exactly?
It definitely seems as though specifying your preferred gender pronouns is no longer optional. This is required "in solidarity". Being an otherwise progressive person, I don't feel great about this and how quickly it happened.
Id recommend getting outside of your social circle/geo a bit more. I’ve never once experienced this in Denver, and have only ever seen gender pronouns be a thing on linkedin.
As a teacher, I face the same situation. My roster says “Christine” but the student sets their name to “Chris” in the CMS and has traditionally masculine features, dress, and haircut. Do I go with “he” or “she”? Best to get pronouns out of the way during an introduction and dissipate the awkwardness.
Sometimes I wonder if people who have the biggest issue with displaying pronouns don’t meet a lot of new people, especially new trans people. Displaying pronouns makes the process so much easier and less awkward!
But why not just say if a person is a man or a woman, why does it have to be pronouns. When I see pronouns, I then assume they believe in an ideology where people can actually change sex and basic reality is denied. Where people can simply declare the reality they want, and force others to play along. Why does everyone have to play along with this ideology, aka, the pronoun game.
To clarify: you’re ok with the words “man” and “woman”, but not “he”, “him”, “she” and “her”? I think you need to work on that, because you seem to be projecting a lot for something that really doesn’t matter.
That's your fault, not the fault of the concept of pronouns. In the thread above, teachers and people working in international companies both explained benefits to having pronouns listed that have nothing to do with gender expression. So, your assumption is flawed.
Secondly, let's consider your terminology: "Basic reality"; "force others to play along"; "pronoun game". Consider this scenario:
You: "Hi, are you Matthew?"
Matthew: "Yes, but actually I prefer Matt, could you call me Matt?"
Do you:
A: "Sure, no problem. Hey Matt, Joe said we should discuss Project Foobar, etc"
B: "No. Your name is Matthew, this is basic reality. Why are you forcing me to play along with your PREFERRED NAME GAME?"
I think we all know the answer to this question.
How is this different from: A new coworker starts on your team named Chris. They seem to have some masculine features but they also have long hair, are wearing makeup and a dress. But you are pretty sure they were born male.
You: "Hey, let's organize Chris's Welcome Lunch. Does anyone know his food preference?"
Your coworker: "Actually their pronouns are she/her."
Do you
A: "Sure, does anyone know her food preference?"
B: See B above.
If you think the situations are completely different, here's a third scenario. Chris is a butch woman with short hair, not a transgender person.
You: "Hey, let's organize Chris's Welcome Lunch. Does anyone know his food preference?"
Your coworker: "Actually, Chris is a woman."
What's the difference? Why is your opinion on gender expression, transgender "ideology", chromosomes, or anything else of the sort matter at all?
This is just basic human socialization 101. Treat people like they ask you to be treated in situations where there is no extra cost to you. That's it. It requires no more difference or effort to remember than in any other social circumstance separate from pronouns.
Appendix:
Yes, I am aware of the extreme exceptions. I'm sure you can find me some angry tweets from trans people who overreacted to some situation or another. But let's remember the context. People are angry because the basic human decency I described above is NOT offered to them. So yes, there are misunderstandings and chips on shoulders. But we don't need to base policy or perspective of opinions based on extreme outliers on twitter.
I actually believe I am God. So please address me as “My Lord” or “My Saviour”. If you don’t then you are clearly a violent oppressor of mentally alternative individuals. Crazy people are people too you know and deserve the same respect and non-violence as the next guy/girl/entity/abstract/mutation/…
There are some key differences that this and the "attack helicopter" memers miss.
There are people who believe they are God (There are people who believe htey are Attack Helicopters, I'm sure). But they are very few and far between. We ignore them, we marginalize them. Or, best case, we treat them.
Now, I'm not trying to open the pandora's box on the medical community's perspective on transgenderism. We can have this conversation after, but I am deliberately focusing on pronouns for a start.
Because when it comes to pronouns, in English-language society, we DO treat people based on gendered pronouns - male and female ones. Basically 100% of our time, 50% one, 50% the other.
So a person who is asking to be addressed as "My saviour" is asking for unique preferential treatment that you are likely not offering anyone else in life.
A person who is asking to be addressed as the gender pronouns of the other gender is asking to be treated the same way that you already treat 50% of the people you encounter, just to be re-categorized. And that's not a big ask because in the VAST Majority of cases you encounter, that person will already be presenting MOSTLY as the gender that they are asking to be treated as.
Now, you might say that being asked to be treated as a different gender than you are born is just as unusual as being asked to be treated as a God. But we don't even need to get into the statistics of prevalence to recognize that the numbers are not relevant. You already have to go through life learning 1) people's names, 2) people's nicknames, 3) people's gender when they are ambiguous or deliberately provocative. This is common metadata you remember about people.
Part of existing in society is learning other human's social characteristics, and incorporating them into how you interact with them. Pronouns are not meaningfully different.
I feel triggered by your disagreement. People who believe they are God is clearly a minority. And therefore deserve special treatment. I might be a God but I have feelings too you know.
I sure am glad that I wrote a well considered nuanced response and tried to come up with helpful analogies for our debate, only to get trolled back in response.
Sadly it's not a surprising experience for me anymore dealing with people that argue against progress.
Its probably also good for people with gender identity within the traditional binary who have names that don’t have obvious and correct gender loading in the culture of the individuals who might be addressing them. (Even if there are photos in profiles, people can also have androgynous or non-gender-stereotypical appearance without trans or nonbinary identity.)
This is a legitimate issue, and I'm not even the political/social-justice type.
(I don't mean the company forcing putting pronouns in your username, but for trans/non-binary people to put it in their profile name)
Had an instance at a job once where someone joined, I spoke with them and they were really nice + helpful. Maybe 2 months later, I went looking for them and they didn't seem to be at the company anymore.
Turns out they had changed their username to another gender along with profile pic, now used a different pronoun.
I felt like an ass when I read back to intros and learned that they didn't prefer the pronouns their name/pic implied when they joined. Quite literally "assumed their gender" and they never corrected me about it. Hope it didn't bug them, but it probably did.
I've heard from more than one transgendered person that passed that they felt that it outs them as transgendered to go around labeling pronouns.
Many people, including those who are not transgendered, are also uncomfortable with being forced to hyper-identify with their gender. For many their gender is just a small aspect of them, and especially in a professional context where their gender has no role being forced to put on a gender-show feels sexually invasive.
Oh I'm totally against forced pronoun labeling, if you read my other reply in this thread.
I'm just saying that the general concept of it if you're trans/non-binary (and WANT a particular pronoun used) is helpful for people who otherwise wouldn't know.
I think it's become commonplace enough that people don't jump to the conclusion you're trans/non-binary if you put a pronoun next to your username.
> Many people, including those who are not transgendered, are also uncomfortable with being forced to hyper-identify with their gender.
Preaching to the choir, my partner is intergender but biologically female/female-presenting. I like to think I have at least some degree of understanding.
If everyone shared their pronouns than trans people wouldn't be singled out. Besides, the primary beneficiaries are trans people who don't "pass", including nonbinary people like myself for whom "passing" is an invalid concept.
Listing your pronouns isn't hyper-identifying with your gender, it is merely identifying your pronouns so that other people don't get them wrong. Gender is complex territory that goes much deeper than pronouns.
It's a motivation people have, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it could achieve that goal. Another perspective is that bringing gender to the front and center will cause people to question the gender of people they're interacting with in situations where its completely irrelevant.
>> It definitely seems as though specifying your preferred gender pronouns is no longer optional. This is required "in solidarity". Being an otherwise progressive person, I don't feel great about this and how quickly it happened.
> Id recommend getting outside of your social circle/geo a bit more. I’ve never once experienced this in Denver, and have only ever seen gender pronouns be a thing on linkedin.
I've started to see them in email signatures at work, but only in situations where such specification was entirely unnecessary. Though most cases have consistent enough formatting that there may be some corporate-standard signature template that has it now.
I would love to have more pronouns in signatures. I cannot count the times I used Google picture search to figure out the gender of students from cultures I am not well educated about (Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Vietnamese ...). Many foreign students adopted a western name to mitigate such problems. Yikes!
The western name thing is all about pronunciation.
It also helps when you realize all other personal information on a candidate might be redacted, except for a name.
It predates the current cultural climate by decades.
> in situations where such specification was entirely unnecessary
Doing it in situations where such specification is entirely unnecessary is precisely how you normalize it not being weird.
If the only people that had listed pronouns were ones that needed it, it would "other" them, and make pronoun preferences WEIRD and UNUSUAL.
If we recognize that even before the cultural mainstream of transness, EVERYONE already had preferred pronouns (just the ones that happen to match their gender), then we can normalize it.
I’ve experienced that when I went to a LGBT students event with my partner at their university, though that’s an environment where one might expect that to happen.
In my US company, we've been strongly encouraged to use pronouns on our very first day of work (actually, even before that).
I consider myself progressive as well. If this helps with inclusion, I'm glad to use them. But it brings a mccarthysm vibe that makes me uncomfortable and slightly worried.
I'm Fab (he/him/his, or in German er/seiner/ihm/ihn/ sein/seine/seines/seiner/seinem/seinen/seins/sich/ der/dessen/dem/den/ dieser/dieses/diesem/diesen/ jener/jenes/jenem/jenen/derjenige/etc.)
My wife is a history professor at a major university. Literally in the belly of the beast as far the reactionaries are concerned. Specifying gender pronouns there remains optional, for both students and faculty. Many people do it willingly but it is not universal.
If a company asked this I would put "gavinray [I don't give a flying fuck what you call me]".
Happy to use other people's pronouns if it makes them happy, it really makes no difference to me, and clearly it's a big deal to some people so I've no problem obliging.
But if you ask for something this stupid, company-wide, IMO you're due what you ask for.
Because there's my pronoun. Call me he/she/they, or a goddamn Attack Helicopter, I really don't care.
I have had to go out of my way to break the habitual "Hey guys" -> "Hey all/Hey folks" though, and I don't find that one unreasonable.
I think you're missing the point a bit, but I understand why one would. The point of asking everyone to label their pronouns isn't some sense of hollow solidarity for trans people, it's so that trans people can be given the decency and space to label their pronouns in a way that isn't ostracizing and isolating.
Yes, you don't care what pronouns people use for you. You're privileged in that you've never struggled with gender and gender identity in a society that shames and ridicules you for it. Giving people space to be themselves (in a very basic human-rights sort of way) shouldn't be narrowly dismissed as stupid and "a big deal to some people".
Here's what I mean: Let's assume you are male (gavin). That means that in professional settings when people refer to you they would say "he".
What happens if one person - just one coworker - kept referring to you as "she". "Yes, I'm working on her (Gavin's) pull request".
I simply don't believe that you wouldn't notice it or wonder what's going on.
Oh sure, maybe it wouldn't BOTHER you, but it would STAND OUT. It would come up.
And if there were no political agenda behind you saying you don't mind being an attack helicopter, you might ask "Why do you keep saying she/her? I'm a man"
Now let's raise this up a notch. What if you asked this person why they keep calling you she/her - when they are the only ones, and it stands out, and their answer was "Because fuck you, that's why. I don't care what your pronouns actually are. I'm deliberately trying to choose the opposite to bother you. Is it working?"
Hmmm...you could ignore that. You probably would. I believe that you have enough confidence and security to just ignore that. But it's fucking weird, and needlessly hostile, no? You would wonder what you did to earn this hostility and if the person is going to question your motivations/actions, sabotage you professionally, or generally be an enemy.
THIS IS WHAT TRANS PEOPLE FACE. If you are transgender, trying to transition, but you are making all the steps (hormones, surgery, makeup, social expression, clothing), but you are not quite passing, and ask your coworkers to use your PREFERRED pronouns, and MOST do (which they will), but one fucking asshole Bob deliberately doesn't and says "NO. You are born male. So I will use your male pronouns.", that is exactly the same level of hostility and unprofessionalism.
People (including myself, a cis hetero male) put pronouns in their public profiles to normalize it so that it's not just trans people that have to face the burden of having to ask for their preferred pronouns.
When you put "i don't give a flying fuck what you call me" as your pronoun, you are not just mocking their struggle, you are giving a strong signal that you are going to be Fucking Asshole Bob to any trans person that approaches you and asks you to use their preferred pronouns.
I think it depends to some extent on one's dialect of English–and that includes regional and subcultural dialects, as opposed to merely national variants. If one grows up in a region/subculture in which its use in a gender-neutral way is common, it is natural and automatic to view some uses of it as gender-neutral. If one grows up in a region/subculture in which gender-neutral use of the term is rare, viewing it as gender-neutral is much less natural and automatic.
It is also worth pointing out while sometimes its plural uses can be perceived and intended as gender-neutral (especially vocative plural uses), singular uses are almost always gender-specific, and even many plural uses are gender-specific too. A person who says "hey guys" is quite possibly intending it in a gender-neutral way; if the same person were to say "most guys are like that", that plural use is obviously talking about males only
The fact that the term is still gender-specific in many contexts, even among speakers and listeners who sometimes use and understand it in a gender-neutral way, leads some people to consciously choose to reject it as a gender-neutral term – sometimes even people who may have grown up with its gender-neutral use
The only place I have really seen this take off is on US headquartered social media sites (I live in Australia) that have added pronouns as an optional field.
It's definitely optional. I have yet to have anyone in real life try and pull me up over it, except for my 11 year old daughter. If a virtue signaller tried to give me a hard time about it, they can "talk to the hand".
This is not something I or anyone I know wants enforced by policy or "if you know what's good for you." It's nice and helps normalize the practice for people who need that acceptance, and it stands out in a good way, but the lack of stated preference isn't a negative indicator.
Now, when someone flips out on me because I default to they/them in text when someone has no stated preference and there's no way to tell, that's a negative indicator. It's clear they have a preference and refuse to state it just to be difficult. But it's a rare occurrence.
Where does it feel like it's no longer optional? I don't see your preferred pronouns here just for example. In all of my social circles the overwhelming opinion expressed by progressives is that not specifying your pronouns is as valid a preference as any other. I've even seen that specifically stated in diversity and inclusion training. Making people feel like they have to specify pronouns is the opposite of being inclusive and progressive so I'm glad I've never come across this.
Specifically I meant specifying your own preferred gender pronouns in certain contexts. When enough of your peers do it, it feels downright strange to not do it even if you don't imagine anyone would have any problem deducing your gender and you wouldn't feel offended if they did happen to use the wrong gender for you. Of course it is completely fine for people to share preferred prounouns. But as pg has said the problem is with the things you not allowed to say, or alternately the things you are required to say and/or do.
Being required to, say, share drinking fountains or pools with people of another race should not be compared to this. One is about allowing people to co-exist with you, the other is about complying with a strongly encouraged communal display of ideology. There are obvious comparisons to make but you can use your imagination about what those are.
Sounds like you're describing the word "Negro" as a [scapegoat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat): it was cast as a symbol of evil so that it could be canceled as such.
I guess that's a way to see the basic tension there: some folks might argue that using scapegoats can help society move on, while others might object on the basis that the goat wasn't actually evil.
Alternatively, we can see switching away from the word "Negro" as a rebranding effort, to retire prior literature and reduce historical associations.
Either way.. I guess that what can seem weird about such social-engineering maneuvers is that they don't make any sense if we assume that people are ideal logical-thinkers; mechanically, they're more like side-channel attacks or emotional manipulation. And.. I guess folks might vary in how agreeable they might find well-intentioned emotional-manipulation.
> some folks might argue that using scapegoats can help society move on, while others might object [...]
Right, but in this particular instance what actually happened is that we just moved on by building consensus around a new paradigm. No one uses the word anymore, and nothing awful happened.
Therefore I argue that similar hand wringing about gender pronouns is going to turn out equally bland. It's fine. Just relax. Society isn't falling apart, you're just being socially awkward. And in fifty years everyone will think the antiwoke conservatives were just being ridiculous.
Eh.. do you have your astrological-signs on your profiles? If not, why not add them in solidarity with those who are deeply emotionally invested in seeing the world through that lens? Not only would it help them feel validated, knowing your astrological-sign would help them better understand you and know how to interact with you.
At the same time.. not everyone wants to have to play along. A lot of new identity-trends emerge (and reemerge over time and in different places), giving adherents ways to self-conceptualize who they are as well as rules for how to interact with others. Some trends get really popular and can get a lot of true-believers, while others don't really get into them.
Can you understand how both sides feel? This is, can you understand both what it'd feel like to be someone deeply invested in the latest trend in spirituality, and can you likewise understand what it'd feel like to want to give the latest trend in spirituality a pass?
If this is the first trend you've seen, then it may seem like this big, huge thing that everyone should adopt. But you ask about 50-years from now? ..that's a long time for a trend to remain relevant, even if you're currently in a sub-culture that's super into it.
Fredrick Douglass appears to have liked the term "Negro" [1]:
> The form of the negro —[I use the term
negro, precisely in the sense that you use the term Anglo Saxon; and I believe, too, that the former
will one day be as illustrious as the latter] [...]
Would you happen to recall where you may've seen Douglass complaining about it?
I think it might have been that one of the great thinkers of nineteenth century abolitionism weighed in on exactly this subject and had something relevant to say? I mean... it's not like he was quoting someone on reddit here.
Legitimately who cares? It's not like you have to sacrifice anything by just saying you'd like to be called he or whatever. It's an incredibly easy thing to do.
I'm glad that the Economist points out at the end that 'wokeness' has become a favorite of business, and the reason is pretty obvious, as a movement it's self-defeating because all identitarian politics eventually ends in infighting, with its subjective, choice and preference based worldview it's actually ill-equipped to move anything.
It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it.
It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace.
I agree, and I'm concerned about the divide and conquer-type of impact it's having in societal discourse. This effect seems way too convenient (and beneficial) for the ruling class, and in that respect, I'm afraid academia may be inadvertantly working against the common interest of the working classes by pushing these worldviews.
You've nailed it. Analysis of social movements often doesn't take the intent of the ruling class into account nearly enough, and for good reason - part of their program is to deflect attention away from themselves and make it look organic.
Goldman Sachs is happy to sponsor floats for the gay pride parade (which incidentally is by now a huge commercial opportunity anyways), they were far less happy about the Occupy Wallstreet movement.
Why would anyone imagine or posit without sources that there is definitely a connection between these two movements? (In other words -- that an entity would be hypocritical for not supporting both)
It just illustrates that if your definition of "radical left" is people super concerned with identity politics, pronouns, dead naming, gay rights and so on, then this is a very convenient and non threatening definition to the rich and powerful. In contrast the people that marched on the opening of the new European Central Bank in Frankfurt and had paramilitary skirmishes in the morning are far less amendable to corporate sponsorship and feel good diversity and inclusion messaging, such as modifying your corporate logo to feature the rainbow flag.
They literally and figuratively want to burn down / destroy the capitalist system, which is a far more dangerous leftist position than demanding a carbon tax or "breaking the glass ceiling", diversity training etc., which only make sense if you take the capitalist system for granted.
Let's take another company then. Say McDonalds. They probably have gay people. They probably have homophobes. They probably have pro-capitalists and anti-capitalists.
He already said -the ruling class. The specific names aren't irrelevant since they change regularly...but the dynamic (divide and conquer) doesn't appear to.
Sure, but as soon as you start naming names, it's pretty obvious that a lot of the people proposing alternative pronouns that don't really catch on or making claims about their workplace are little-known ordinary middle class people without any real power, and some of the people declaring "war on woke" own media empires and sit in parliaments. Which places a different complexion on the "divide and conquer"...
Occupy Wall Street died when infected with identitarians.
Unions, as weak and pathetic as they are, become a whole lot more interested in pronouns, systemic racism and illegal immigration than fighting for a decent wage and decent working conditions for their paying members.
Politically, there is no more discourse on behalf of the poor or working classes, only for identitarian version thereof. With the obvious effect that the shunned identities naturally don't support erst left wing policies that exclude them on identity marker basis.
Wokeness is a huge win for the ruling class. Divide and conquer at its best.
Unions have been on the decline for decades going back to the deregulatory and anti-labor policies of Neo liberal governments and that probably has a lot more to do with the problem than pronouns
It doesn't work like that. The people in power find people with an agenda that suits their agenda (woke identity politics that divide any populist movement). Then they elevate those people to places of more power or reach or status. This comes in the forms of grants, promotions, publications, and opening doors (making connections).
You don't need to convince or coerce people to fit your agenda. You simply find them and elevate them.
Tavistok Institute, other tax exempt foundations used as cover for agendas by the oligarchs, etc.
For a more concrete example of this type of influence, I often refer to the Norman Dodd interview. Norman Dodd was the chief investigator for the 1953 Special Committe on Tax Exempt Foundations (aka the Reece Committee). During his investigation he sent a research assistant Catherine Casey to analyze the minutes of the foundations. Apparently Norman thought she would be good to send because she was not sympathetic to the investigation, and was generally defensive of the tax exempt foundations. After actually spot-reading the minutes though, apparently it shook her so badly that she was never able to return to practicing law, and Carroll Reece had to tuck her away in a job at the FTC, and Norman Dodd says she ultimately lost her mind as a result of what she discovered. (sorry for my poorly done quick transcription)
"... finally of course the war is over. At that time their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914 when WW1 broke out. And they arrive at that point, they come to the conclusion that to prevent a reversion we must control education in the United States, and they realize that's a pretty big task. To them it is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller foundation, with a suggestion that; that portion of education which could be considered domestic, be handled by the Rockefeller foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the endowment, and they then decide that the key to the success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American history, so they approach four of the then most prominent teachers of American history in the country, people like Charles and Mary Bird. Their suggestion to them is will they alter the manner in which they present this subject and they get turned down flat. So they then decide it is necessary for them to do as they say, "build our own stable of historians". And then they approach the Gugenheim foundation which specializes in fellowships, and say "when we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American history, and we feel they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say so?" and the answer is yes. So under that condition, eventually they assemble 20, and they take this 20 potential teachers of American history, to London, and there they are briefed into what is expected of them, when as and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. That group of 20 historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association, and towards the end of the 1920's, the endowment grants to the American Historical Assocation, 400,000 for a study of our history in a manner which points to, what can this country look forward to in the future. That culminates in a 7 volume book study, the last volume of which is of course in essence a summary of the contents of the other 6, and the essence of the last volume is "The future of this country belongs to collectivism adminsitered with characteristic American efficiency."..."
So what I posit is that "wokeism", more than just a divide and conquer tool, is something that enables the further shifting of the overton window over time towards collectivism.
Now understand that the very article itself eminates from a publication with heavy connections to this same kind of subtle influence and control. I find it quite fascinating when viewing sources like the Economist with this sort of scrutiny the kind of insight that can be elucidated simply by trying to understand what they aren't saying and what they are trying to hide, or how they are trying to influence things.
It's called recuperation and it doesn't even require nefarious intent.
These days anti-capitalism is literally sold as a commodity. Anti-consumerism has become a consumer identity. While this helps deradicalization by diverting the radical energy away from actual causes towards consumption, it also tends to make a good profit.
The problem isn't the worldviews. The problem is that you can't fight capitalism through consumption. You can't fight hierarchies by acting within the system of hierarchy, you have to step outside.
As an example, the Black Panthers (not the Marvel movie) not only offered social programs and free food in Black communities, they also built coalitions with other racial groups who tried to do the same in their communities. While at a glance acting only within their racial lines (i.e. racial identity politics) they actively worked against racial division through mutual solidarity.
Solidarity across divisions is important, but it can only work if you acknowledge the existence of the divisions and the power imbalances these divisions reinforce.
As an example in the negative, unions in the early 20th century US often failed because they rejected Black workers who then had no other economical option but to become scabs when white unionized workers went on strike (because they didn't get any of the union benefits and had no union covering their backs if they had joined the strike).
There's a widespread misconception these days that "left solidarity" means that all members of "the left" have to be equally "woke". They all have to believe in exactly the one leftist ideology you think is best, they all have to treat all marginalized groups exactly the way you think they must be treated and so on. This is where the leftist memes of the circular firing squad and purity spirals come from. THIS is harmful and divisive.
However the answer is not to "not be woke". The answer is to better embrace pragmatic alliances and understand that you can have a shared struggle even if it doesn't perfectly overlap. There's a place for close-nit communities but "the left" is not a clubhouse.
As another final example, there's a famous incident in the UK (recently portrayed in the movie "Pride") where gay activists joined striking coal miners because both groups were facing violent opposition from the police. The collaboration helped foster class consciousness in the gay activists and queer acceptance among the coal miners. They didn't become one cohesive ideologically perfect group but their solidarity made them more powerful in their shared struggle than either group would have been on their own.
You, i like you. I did not know about the Union stuff nor the movie "Pride", so thank you. You are saying what i've been trying to say, staying factual and mesured.
I think people have vastly different work situations and that helps drive the divide. "Woke" ideas are just not that intimidating if you trust your boss and have a sensible employer. Other places it could seem much more of a threat to you personally. This difference in experience is less explicit than in the past when workplaces were more political places. Management can act benevolent whilst subtly gaslighting their people.
I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to.
I don't think the problem of racism and sexism (two classic "woke" topics) are "Left" problems, which is why it strikes me as odd that I don't see ideas about how to deal with them coming from everyone, beyond a straight denial they exist, or that it's actually the fault of the folks experiencing the discrimination somehow.
I think the spectral signature of wokeness is that affluent white people whose knowledge of racial discrimination is at most anecdotal and second hand started treating racism as The Problem whose solution must get almost absolute priority, even at a cost of traditional civil liberties or putting other things (healthcare?) on the backburner.
It looks like a weird neurotic guilt attack that is probably counterproductive to any future common prosperity. Pushing "Latinx" on Hispanics and discriminatory quotas on Asian students is almost guaranteed to generate some weird backlash. Import of the same ideas to Europe whose racial dynamics is absolutely different (black people from Africa sail here on their own and "we"* mostly want to stop this movement, so pretty much the opposite of American slave history) is almost guaranteed to wake up some old demons.
* Of course there is not a uniform opinion on this among 400 million people, but the last five years have been spent tightening borders, not opening them, and even some lefty parties like Danish Social Democrats joined in.
Yet it's really unsurprising that a number of affluent people love to talk about race, gender, environment, and many other topic except wealth inequality.
> I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to.
The obvious solution is meritocracy and race/sex blindness. That's the world I wish to live in - non-discrimination & equality of opportunity, not "positive" discrimination (it's always positive for someone) and (enforced) equality of outcome. But the Woke Left has been quite hostile to those concepts recently...
Edit: added "Woke" before "Left" because presumably there's other (liberal) Left that would support meritocracy.
This is something I genuinely am curious about: how do you get equality of opportunity without first getting equality of outcome in a system where money opens doors and inheritance exists? Just-freed black people started with nothing when white slave owners had farms to pass onto their children. If (I think it is) obvious that wealth provides more opportunity, there’s no way for black people to ever have equal opportunity as the original white population.
(Edit: this isn’t to say I agree with equal outcome. I think there’s a lot of nonsense stuff in that sphere. But I’ve never myself been able to answer how to consider how to make equality of opportunity happen if we started from an unequal space and inheritance exists which persists inequality.)
This is wrong on so many levels but I don't blame you as it's the false narrative that's most pervasive in most media.
First of all, "starts with nothing" isn't specific to black population. Many (most?) immigrants also start with nothing, yet often outperform locals (including whites) (the important question that almost noone is asking, is why?). Among those are Nigerians, so clearly "because they're not black" isn't the correct answer.
Your question already contains the "correct" (IMO) answer, which is: help poor people. To the extent that poverty correlates to being black (or any other categorical characteristic), both solutions are equivalent, except that mine is (1) non-discriminatory (e.g. it helps white homeless people as well), (2) self-correcting (when "racial equality of outcome" is reached and poverty is no longer correlated with skin color, my solution will continue to do "good"), and (3) non-wasteful (why would society spend any amount of resources helping e.g. Obama's daughters, who are by "inheritance" (of political connections) some of the most privileged people on this planet?).
Edit: I might have been too focused on the "race" part of your comment. If you're wondering about inherited inequality in general, well, yeah, that's one of the paradoxes of meritocracy & similar concepts, e.g. assortative mating - the end (stable) state is a society ruled by the (hereditary) "intelligent" class. But I think that's unlikely to happen naturally because there seems to be quite a lot of genetic variation in intelligence (and other traits our society treats as "superior", e.g. height, beauty, etc.); if anything, that's more likely to happen because of genetic manipulation/embryo selection, which doesn't exactly require a meritocratic society...
There is no such thing as equality of outcome. There will always be hierarchies. We can shift the core currency from $$$ to political favor or even ritualized victimhood, but we can't eliminate hierarchies. Remember the Soviet nomenklatura:
> Members of the so-called nomenklatura , numbering perhaps a million, have special holiday retreats, access to special medical facilities and--most resented by ordinary Russians--access to special stores that sell imported and Soviet-made goods that are simply not available in the regular stores. Many also have cars and chauffeurs.
> As a practical matter, the privileges are hereditary, since children of the elite have an inside track on admission to the top universities--graduation from which guarantees them good jobs and a place on the nomenklatura list.
Furthermore, 'inequality of outcome' is often times a good thing. We all want a good plumber, a good surgeon, a good baker, a good teacher, a good farmer, a good engineer, either as a service provider or a colleague. Having an 'equality of outcome' system where randoms are promoted to 'good plumber' by fiat in practice makes plumbing dysfunctional. See the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Which leaves open some hard problems:
* Competency leaning hierarchies, vs. power leaning hierarchies.
* Low gini hierarchies vs. high gini hierarchies.
* Low skill societies vs high skill societies.
* Skill acquisition. Help broad swaths of the population acquire proficiency in useful $skill.
Note that in practice equality of outcome systems have been successful only in flattening hierarchies by essentially bulldozing them into the ground, bringing everyone down (other than the new hierarchy leaders) into material, spiritual and skill poverty.
Hold on hold on. This comment presupposes that blacks have ways been disadvantaged. That's not true at all. Before the civil rights movement of the 60s, black incomes were increasing at a faster rate than whites and were on track to surpass the white income. Blacks even had more kids born within wedlock. The ghettoization of the African American community is a recent development. For most of the post bellum period, African Americans were on a swift upward trajectory. They were much like Asians today, who also often started with nothing in this country (due to currency export restrictions) and whose education achievement and incomes surpass whites...
Indeed poor black immigrants to this country do extremely well also.
All this is detailed extensively in the vision of the anointed by Thomas sowell (an accomplished black man from this era)
A core problem is what this means. A lot of people insist that we previously lived in a meritocracy and that things like admissions tests are pure representations of this meritocracy, so that moving away from these systems is an attack on a purely level playing field of meritocracy.
But we don't all agree with this. The same people who you criticize do not agree that we have achieved equality of opportunity. Not even close. For a very clear example, we see wealth opening huge numbers of doors for people regardless of actual merit, either through access to training, or access to connections, or as a backstop that enables people to take risks.
What you consider hostility to these concepts, other people think are essential to achieving these concepts.
Noone (sensible) is claiming that any system is a meritocracy. "Meritocracy" is just an ideal, like "equality", "fairness", or "airplanes not crashing", and it's unlikely we'll ever achieve this ideal, but that doesn't make it not worth fighting for.
So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.
If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).
I agree that "wealth" is a problem, but the answer is having more objective measures, not less.
> So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.
This is where we disagree dramatically. And this is why it is so frustrating to have people tell me that I "hate excellence" for supporting policy changes. By holding this assumption it enables you to both
1. Hold that meritocracy is an ideal
2. Conclude that people pushing for changes must oppose meritocracy
But I simply do not agree. To me, admissions exams are like the Leetcode interviews that people decry here. The test something, but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.
> If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).
I am involved in local politics to change the admissions program for a public magnet school. "Woke" activists proposed a merit lottery, a system where all students who met a minimum GPA and math-level requirement could be entered into a random lottery for admissions. This was criticized by opponents for being "anti-meritocratic" and even "racist against asians".
The eventually enacted policy maintains a "holistic" application, which does not consider race but does include these other topics. This received precisely the same criticism from opponents. Activists on the "woke" side preferred the merit lottery to this outcome.
So what I see here is that activists, at least in the situations that I am personally involved in, do support things like the abolishment of extracurricular activities in admissions systems.
Without more information about the specific case, it's impossible to determine which side was actually supporting meritocracy and which was simply promoting their political cause disguised as meritocracy.
What was the minimum GPA? Who can apply? Are admissions limited to a geographical area or not? Who determines the GPA? If the answer is "teachers", how easily can that be gamed? Why not a similar but much more objective and harder to game system, e.g. admissions exam followed by a random selection above a, say, 80% cutoff point (e.g. first narrow the pool with an exam, then halve it again randomly)?
> but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.
This assertion is AFAIK quite nebulous. SATs and similar tests are correlated with IQ and with probability someone finishes university and with later life outcomes. Some say that high school GPA are better predictors, which might be true, but the real question is, how easy are they to game? A metric is only really useful if it doesn't change substantially when it becomes a goal. You might disagree regarding SATs (there's quite some disagreement and proper research into this topic is both hard and very politicised) but whatever other solutions you're proposing, should first be assessed based on how subjective (easy to manipulate/game) they are.
Same thing as Leetcode interviews, really. Everyone knows they suck, noone has come up with anything better yet.
3.5 GPA and enrollment in Algebra I in 8th grade. Admissions are geographical because the school is a public school in Fairfax County, though students from neighboring counties can apply and attend.
Of course GPA isn’t flawless. You’ll find that activists also seek to solve pipeline problems at lower grades. But this is a rapid retreat from “an objective measure is obviously better” to “this specific measure is better than proposed alternatives.”
Using exam score cutoffs was discussed. Generally, people prefer gpa to exams because there isn’t the same explicit cottage industry of exam prep (yes, private tutoring obviously exists) and it includes a wider range of material than what is included on the test. Exam score cutoffs was also deemed unacceptable and similarly called racist and destructive by the same opponents of the proposed policy.
Having thought about this a while longer, I've changed my mind.
I don't really see any purpose in randomization, except anti-meritocracy pro-diversity. It is potentially excusable at the edges to account for the inherent noise of measurement (i.e. is 3.4 GPA really that different from 3.6 GPA) but there's no real reason that someone with 4 GPA shouldn't have a greater shot at admission than someone with 3.5 GPA.
Of course, if your distrust in GPA is so great that you oppose even that, then... what even the point of GPA in the first place? We should be working towards improving the metrics, not eliminating them.
But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."
> But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."
We are discussing high school education admissions right now. The kids being evaluated are 13. What is schooling for? Do admissions exist to make sure that some unqualified kid never gets access to a strong education? That conservative approach can make sense for life-or-death interactions like surgery, but nobody dies if a "less qualified" kid is sent to TJ (actually, since suicide rates have increased as the school has gotten more competitive, it might actually save lives).
GPA measures several things at the same time. It most explicitly measures what you have done. But in admissions we want some measure of future potential. This is not aligned perfectly with what somebody has done in the past. Were we to change grading to a continuous evaluation of future potential then I'd be much more accepting of a stricter hierarchy in admissions, but I am extremely skeptical that such a metric would be achievable without introducing tremendous biases.
My GPA in middle school was about a 4.0. But when I review my life, the reason it was so high included many many things that were unrelated to my future potential as a student.
We can also take a step back and consider why we even have limited-access accelerated education in the first place. GMU is just down the street. Even discussing the idea of opening up accelerated education to anybody who wants it is also considered being "an enemy of excellence" by opponents.
Finally, your note about surgeons and nurses is interesting, given the history. Prior to understanding of germ theory, it would have been preferable to be operated on by a nurse. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it clearly demonstrates how widespread understanding of "merit" can actually be totally broken.
I think we share a lot of frustrations regarding the present state of the education system, but I still don't understand exactly what part randomisation is supposed to solve (except your anecdotal point about suicides, which I would easily counter with equally anecdotal or suicide rates might increase further as you'd be adding stress of randomisation on top of stress of performance). It appears to me that a lot of the problems you highlight would actually be solved with more/better metrics (including SATs / IQ tests, as these predict future performance).
I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling). For example, I always excelled at (and was interested in) math (other subjects, like physics and chemistry, I just excelled at but wasn't that interested in), so I think both I (individually, in future earnings) and the society (collectively, in future value/invention/...) would benefit tremendously if I was given harder math classes at an earlier age. There's a lot of kids like me, and in other subjects as well. But this would require better metrics and identifying such students earlier (even without any rate-limiting, simply to identify talent and steer it in the right direction).
Randomization expands access to qualified students who cannot access the same preparatory material or have divergent mental behaviors that do not hinder their ability to learn but do impact their ability to take tests.
The recent admitted class for TJ has seen absolutely enormous increases in the population of economically disadvantaged students as well as students on the autism spectrum or with other neuroatypical situations.
It therefore (in my mind) provides a more just system of allocation limited access to accelerated education, while we live in a world with such limited access.
> I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling).
My experience has been that promoting these policies receives even greater criticisms that me and my friends are racists who hate excellence. It is ridiculous to me that FCPS has a gated system for accelerated learning when there is a commuter-focused college right there. But if I go to school board meetings and suggest that we take resources and allocate them for this purpose, I'm called an "asian-hater".
My family saw a similar thing happen to them many years ago. The local GT programs were drawing students only from a select few (almost entirely white) schools and it turned out that a lot of this was due to how students were identified as candidates. My parents sought to change things, which did not deny any access to white students but instead expanded access and funding so that simply more people had access to accelerated education and... my parents were called "white traitors" by neighbors.
This is why I get so worked up about this stuff when people claim that support for a particular form of admissions exam is by definition support for promoting merit or promoting excellence.
A "Merit lottery" is a half measure when a true lottery is the least discriminatory way to go about things. Every position within society should just be to do a true lottery everywhere such an idea can be applied.
Water treatment plant workers? President? Honors program students? All of these roles are subject to countless forms of discrimination against people for lacking intelligence, lacking the right identity, lacking educational attainment, lacking all sorts of things.
What I tire of this "faux egalitarian, faux equality of opportunity, meritocracy" stuff which almost invariably discriminates against the less intelligent while trying to establish equality over an arbitrary list of attributes such as race or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation which have been deemed to be especially important, whereas discrimination against the lazy and unintelligent is taken for granted as righteous, and discrimination against the unattractive and short is tolerable. This is in spite of the fact people are born lazy, stupid, short, and ugly, and this will never change.
Thus the only two resolutions I see to the problem are simply thus. Kill absolutely everybody, thus establishing perfect equity and equality. The other solution is to use lotteries absolutely everywhere except for perhaps a special class of lottery runners (an unfortunate meritocracy), in dating, in work, in schooling, that made it so that everybodies outcomes in life was absolutely arbitrary, and thus equal and equitable.
Ideas like merit lottery are very interesting and worthy of consideration on rational, liberal, universalist grounds, some of which you've hinted at here.
Sadly, when they are promoted on the grounds of obtuse academic wokeness or identity politics, people instinctively infer that the real goal of such policies is to hand out undeserved benefits to minorities at the expense of a legitimate meritocracy.
We've heard, and continue to hear, vastly, vastly more about the identity politics grounds than the more worthy ones, and in my observation, that's not entirely or even mostly the fault of the critics of merit lottery. It took me years to find any sustained, serious public promotion of the good reasons to do these things.
Instead, what made headlines was garbage like "I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group [Asians] owns admission to these [selective] schools" from the NYC school chancellor. A clear attitude that all racial groups are entitled to proportional representation in selective schools regardless of performance.
Carranza got lots of support for his attitude, including from a majority of the NYC city council. So I question the idea that the identity politics angle is all being drummed up from the ether by the media, and I'm frankly suspicious when people are so eager to downplay this obvious and very influential phenomenon. If people want to tolerate it for coalitional reasons, sure whatever, but let's not pretend it isn't happening.
The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another. This creates a competition for local resources, including demands on police time and attention. This competition reporduces racism, in that it is very hard not to have racism when "looking out for one's own" is a racial matter.
What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures.
It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".
> What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands.
That’s because “Wokeism” doesn’t exist. Being “woke”, was never a descriptor of a politics but of the state of being aware of and engaged in social and political issues affecting a disadvantaged (originally, specifically Black American) community. It’s now morphed into a label assigned by outside group to anyone whose politics the speakers disagrees with for being too focussed, or focussed in the wrong way, on identity issues. So, yes, there is no coherent material program of Wokeism, because Wokeism isn’t a thing.
Now, within the broad mass that any user of the term labels “Wokeism”, there are many groups that have within them extensive, coherent lists of material demands,
Wokeism has come to refer to a type of (basically religious) revival which is happening across the western middle class. it sometimes includes a political project of 'equality'.
Whether you like the term or not, it is very hard to simply deny the revolution in identity construction currently taking place.
Watch the latest CIA advert which emphasises neauvox-oppressed identity markers over. It emphases how the CIA allows you to 'be yourself' qua how you are a member of an oppressed group.
Whatever you want to call /that/, this is what
I am talking about.
Sure, I was just clarifying what GP wrote as the reply seemed to have missed/not understood a key nuance.
Also providing a little context to what I assumed was meant by “material demands”, based on the quote from GP below.
> The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another.
The conservative approach to racism would be to equalize opportunity (to the extent the government is allowed
to) and replace the instincts that lead to racism with strong civic nationalism and then wait a very very long time, which is a solution that acknowledges that social change takes a long time.
You claim this is denial, but that's a biased reframing of the stated solution. This is a potential solution, but is not acceptable to the 'woke'
TLDR: Actually address the fundamental problems (spoiler: sexism and racism are not the fundamental problems, they are aggravating factors) that allow sexism and racism to cause issues for disadvantaged groups.
Most of the discussions around systemic racism and sexism fundamentally boil down to the topic either poverty or violence from police.
Poverty:
Specific groups are over-represented in the impoverished population, sometimes across generations. We, correctly, have identified systemic bias as an contributing factor to these trends.
Imagine a hypothetical society where the means of comfort (good food, safe and adequate housing, new clothing, entertainment, etc...) are available to people that need them, regardless of whether or not one is employed. Now ask yourself, would racism and sexism have the same bite that it currently has? If one's ability to live comfortably is not based on systemic bias, one would be disingenuous if they said "yes".
Life gets a lot easier when one can ignore shitty racists and sexists without fear of losing their means of survival. It would be nice if racists and sexists didn't exist, but if everyone had the means to ignore them without fear of repercussions, that's almost as good.
Violence from police:
A few observations from the last few years of police violence and the BLM movement:
-There is a large portion of shitty individuals within
various police forces that enjoy victimizing victimizable individuals
-Racialized groups are more victimizable than the average
-Police violence, although concentrated against minorities, also victimizes everyone to some degree, regardless of race or gender.
What practical solutions have come out of all of the years of outrage and protests? Instead of using "master/slave" software terminology, my company now encourages "leader/follower", while all of management is patting its back for "fighting systemic racism". Huh?
Here are some actual practical solutions to this issue:
-federally-mandated body cameras for all overt police officers that are always-on, and record to multiple external and publicly-viewable archives
-police review bodies with actual teeth to punish criminality amongst police officer
-a legal mechanism to permanently bar an individual from any kind of policing, country-wide
-removing "verbal evidence from a trusted officer" as admissible evidence in court
"Wokeness" is just yet another socially-acceptable form of discrimination, where us commoners have been pitted against each other playing some stupid "privilege points" game based on physical appearance. It's divisive, and is not actually moving us towards a healthier society. We should be looking towards our government to solve the actual issues that are aggravated by (and not caused by) sexism and racism.
In the case of violence-based examples above, the hypothetical society doesn't address the issue of past harm (decades or centuries of a disadvantaged position in society).
It also doesn't address non-economic forms of harm (like media underrepresentation, leadership underrepresentation, etc.)
If you ignore the American political spectrum for a hot minute and get down to the core of it, a practical definition of "left" and "right" is "no hierarchy" vs "hierarchy". This holds true in economics as well as social issues:
Racism is a system of hierarchy where one race is inherently good and normal and others are deviations from that, or at least every race is good or bad in some ways and there is an implied value judgement in every assertion about them. Not every person doing a racism necessarily fully commits to racial pseudoscience but if pressed they'll have to justify their conceptions by citing them. Racial mixing of course is unacceptable as it goes against this order and since the racial social castes are a natural order, any attempt to overcome them is bad and anyone making it further than their kind is expected to should either be celebrated for their excellence (and everyone else be held to their standard to demonstrate their insufficiency) or be viewed with suspicion because they probably cheated or got handouts.
Sexism is a sexual hierarchy with women being one way, men another and everyone who doesn't neatly fit into either category being deviant and a troublemaker. It's not so much about one sex being better at all things than the other, much like racism, but about there being a natural order and everything being well as long as people follow it.
Economic right wing thought posits that there is a natural order in that poverty is largely a failure of the individual and can be overcome with sheer will so wealth is the just spoils of success and personal quality and charity is the only acceptable form of welfare because it is for the wealthy to decide how to allocate their deserved riches.
This is also why right-wing people have recently picked up the term "Marxist" (or even "Neomarxist") to describe not just socialists but also progressives in general, even when they lean economically more right-wing than left.
The question of how you align within that spectrum is mostly a question of whether you think a natural order exists and/or should be enforced in each of these dimensions (and there are probably more). Most Democrats don't want to abolish private ownership, they just want more regulations to shift some of the wealth to the lower classes, i.e. balance out the hierarchy rather than getting rid of it. They are however more likely to be opposed to the idea of a natural order in social questions.
> practical definition of "left" and "right" is "no hierarchy" vs "hierarchy"
Absolutely not: it's the left that's usually the favor of giving more power to the most oppressive and monopolic hierarchy there is, the government, while the right is fighting to dismantle it.
I guess by "the left" you mean Democrats? They're mostly liberals, not leftists, and want to maintain the hierarchies but ease some of the most obvious impacts through regulations.
The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.
If you understand left-right as Democrat-Republican, your view doesn't hold true either. Republicans generally want to void labor protections, reduce taxes, cut social welfare and lift environmental regulations, but they also always want to increase the military, intelligence and police budgets. Republicans also tend to want the state to enforce their idea of morality, e.g. by prohibiting (secular or non-Christian) same-sex marriages, criminalizing abortion or restricting sex education and access to contraceptives. They want to enforce what they see as the natural order through punishment whereas "the left" wants to counteract it through support. Prison abolitionists tend to be on the left, not the right.
The government isn't hierarchy. The government is an institution that interacts with hierarchy. As are large corporations for that matter. Reducing the government budget and shifting more economic power to corporations doesn't reduce hierarchies, it only takes power from elected officials to unelected shareholders.
If you believe in an unregulated free market capitalism, you literally support the hierarchy of the market and you believe in a natural order. Or to put it in words that feel less icky if you think of yourself as an anarcho-capitalist: that people should vote with their dollars on what goods and services should thrive or fail.
If you believe money is power and you believe it's good and natural for some people to have many orders of magnitude more money than other people, you believe in a natural order. This is what leftists call a hierarchy and leftists don't like it.
Note: I'm not saying leftists don't want a big government. I'm saying leftists (even outside anarchism) want to get rid of the state. They just disagree on how to get there. And for reformists that answer usually involves using the state one way or another.
> The idea that "left means more government" is also very ahistorical and feels uniquely like a product of modern American political discourse. The origin of the left-right distinction is literally the abolition of feudalism, i.e. replacing a fixed hierarchy by birthright with egalitarian democratic elections. By 1776 standards the founding fathers were left-wing radicals. The right would have literally defended the Crown.
Look at how many Black Americans supported the Loyalist side. Many of the American Founding Fathers were slave owners and supported the continuation of slavery. The British Empire promised freedom to American slaves who supported the Empire, and it mostly delivered on that promise. Both sides were very racist, if judged by contemporary standards, but I think there is a decent argument to be made that the racism of the British was on the whole a lot milder than that of the Americans.
The British Empire, including what is now Canada, officially abolished slavery in 1833; the United States would not finally abolish it for another 30+ years. (And it took a bloody civil war for America to do it; the Empire’s abolition of slavery was largely peaceful.) But in actual fact, slavery was de facto rendered legally unenforceable in most of (what is now) Canada by a series of court decisions in the 1790s, so in practice slavery was abolished in Canada over 60 years prior to its abolition in the US.
While there was widespread social discrimination against Black people in 19th and 20th century Canada, it was generally much milder than in much of the United States. The British and Canadian legal systems generally accepted the theoretical legal equality of all citizens regardless of race, even though it often failed to enforce that theoretical equality in practice; by contrast, the legal systems of many American states contained explicit discrimination against Black citizens.
Lynching was a great scourge on American history, of which Black people were the disproportionate (but not exclusive) victims. Many Americans defended lynching as a form of democracy. Judges, law enforcement and prosecutors in the US were very sensitive to public opinion – in part due to their widespread direct election – and were often loathe to properly investigate, prosecute and convict lynching cases if public opinion appeared to approve of the act. Likewise, many American jurors believed that it was appropriate for them to defer to public opinion in deciding cases, and return "not guilty" verdicts in popularly approved lynchings even when the evidence clearly pointed to guilt.
By contrast, the British Empire strongly objected to people taking the law into their own hands, and would-be lynchers in Canada faced far greater odds of successful prosecution for murder (and its then near-mandatory death penalty) than in the US. British culture–including among politicians, law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and jurors–prioritised upholding the rule of law over popular opinion to a much greater extent than American culture did. Due to this cultural difference, lynching was extremely rare in Canadian history – a mere handful of isolated incidents, compared to many thousands in the US.
So, who were the "egalitarians" and "left-wing radicals" in the American Revolution? I think we should seriously consider the possibility that the American Revolution was in fact a reactionary right-wing movement, widely supported by slave owners who lived in fear that the British Empire might forcibly liberate their slaves, and not really a "left-wing" one.
Black Americans weren't loyalists because they believed in the divine right of kings, though. I'm not sure why you've decided to spend the majority of your reply on explaining why the American revolution was bad for Black people to address an off-hand comment.
Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism, which is literally a system of hierarchy and the belief that the system is both natural and good (e.g. the "white man's burden" ideology that slavery is good for the slaves because they're unfit to survive on their own).
You won't find any political movement that neatly fits into the "left-right" spectrum. In retrospect even the often lauded direct democracy of ancient Greece was deeply undemocratic because it was restricted by its very narrow definition of citizenship. Under scientific racism Black slaves were barely considered human and even if you only consider white people the US still didn't let women vote until the suffragettes fought for it and won.
My point wasn't that the founding fathers should be considered leftists. My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
As feudalism became less relevant, the meaning began to shift by becoming more generalized. I'm not arguing about morality here but definitions. The 18th century definition of left and right was almost entirely about royalty and the aristocracy. The generalized definition I summarized evolved considerably later.
> Black Americans weren't loyalists because they believed in the divine right of kings, though.
White loyalists didn’t believe in the Divine Right of Kings either. That ideology was promoted by the Catholic King James II, who was overthrown in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The Hanoverian monarchy (to which George III belonged) was ideologically opposed to it because if true it would mean the 1688 revolution was illegitimate, and hence Hanoverian rule of Britain would be illegitimate too. The main supporters of Divine Right of Kings were Catholics and the Jacobite rebels in Ireland and Scotland, not Protestant supporters of the British government. In fact, some Jacobites supported the American Revolution - such as Hugh Mercer.
> Chattel slavery was directly tied to scientific racism,
The Atlantic slave trade was already well underway when the theory of “scientific racism” was first being developed. And it didn’t become widely popular until the mid-19th century, by which time slavery was approaching its end. It was a post hoc rationalisation for chattel slavery, not a cause.
> My point was that the original historical definition of leftism was opposition to the king of France during the French revolution because that's how the seating happened to be arranged in the National Assembly in 1789 (notably before the American revolution, but close enough to make the point).
The French Revolution was (in part) a revolution against the “Divine Right of Kings”, but the American Revolution wasn’t, since the British had already rejected that ideology in the revolution of 1688. If you define “leftism” as merely rejecting that then both sides in the American Revolutionary War were “leftist”, and the British Empire was a “leftist” empire
Lenin was a political opportunist and Stalin most likely faked Lenin's will to appoint himself after his death. The Bolsheviks also murdered/incarcerated plenty of leftists and disempowered the pre-existing worker coops and trade unions through centralization.
Anarchists, syndicalists and other leftists were literally building decentralized structures before the Bolsheviks swooped in and decided the public would need decades of ideological education before it could be trusted to make any decisions about their lives and "helpfully" started making the decisions for them. It doesn't help that many of the leftists outside Russia who were critical of Bolshevism were murdered by German paramilitaries and later more indirectly by the USSR while trying to fight fascism in Spain.
Saying you have a good understanding what "left" is because you were born in the USSR is like saying you have a good understanding of what pasta is because you've been eating Yum Yum noodles for a decade.
Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Proudhon? Bookchin? There is a wide range of leftist thought outside the very narrow niche within Marxist-Leninist-Maoism that still uncritically defends the USSR.
You try to explain the consequences of communism with "few bad apples"; well, at least it's not a "no true scottsman", I have to give credit for that. However, there have been so many cases of leftists coming to power and building a state, and the only one I know that didn't end is tragedy was Israel — and even it resulted in financial crisis and eventual move to capitalism.
Of course, it's opportunists and sociopaths who come to power. You're absolutely right about that. But it would be silly to explain all these outcomes as fault of particular individuals, even if they are at fault. It's the principles behind the system itself, which make it vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Essentially, the problem is with this: every kind of leftism makes moral behaviour nor a matter of personal choice and responsibility, but something mandated by the state or a quasi-state organisation. This sounds very good in theory, especially for the people who are sensitive to the wrongs of the world. But in practice, it makes those organisations infallible and creates in their place a perfect vessel for said opportunists and sociopaths.
State power is like The Ring from LOTR. It's very seductive to use it for good, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. It should be not used, but destroyed.
You do know that anarchist ideology is literally defined by the opposition to states and state-lile structures, right?
It seems odd to tar specifically anti-statists with wanting to create a state. Anarchy being literally the antonym of hierarchy, statism is the complete antithesis of anti-authoritarian left-wing politics.
You're thinking of Stalinist/Leninist authoritarian communism, which certainly doesn't encompass all of left-wing ideology, only a niche.
When Stalin came to power, one of the first things he did was too purge all the anarchists and other non-authoritarian socialists. Thus most leftists despise Stalin and what he did. Mao, too.
Yeah, I think that was the intended reading of that reply given the obviously similar phrasing.
However there's a word for anti-authoritarian leftists. We're called anarchists. Not all leftists are anarchists and not all leftists are anti-authoritarian. Even authoritarian leftists (or "statists") generally believe in the end goal being the ideal of a stateless, classless society.
Statists just tend to believe the only way to get there is with an intermediary socialist state established through a communist revolution and led by a vanguard party who directs the economic, social and philosophical evolution of the people towards bringing about communism. The differences between those groups are largely about what that intermediary state should look like and at what point it can be dissolved.
Some of the aspirationally communist states of the 20th century justified their continued existence with communism having to be rolled out globally simultaneously for it to b successful. Some instead argued that what they had achieved was "real socialism", heavily implying that's as good as it gets and any critics were utopian idealists who'd rather tear down the local optimum in the hope of an unachievable ideal. The USSR opened its markets and collapsed under the dual load of its bureaucrat aristocracy and capitalist oligarchs, China pivoted to Dengism to contain their "capitalist experiments" with the promise of a greater good coming from the temporary toleration of exploitation.
But for anarchists (and mutualists, who fall somewhere between anarchism and statism) the biggest problem tends to be that they usually either start out or end up surrounded by nation states with standing armies who want none of their nonsense.
The most promising approach seems to be dual power, i.e. building anarchist structures[0] within existing states through cooperation and solidarity so that when they inevitably collapse in the future, the people can fall back on those structures as an alternative to just reasserting the old (hierarchical) power structures.
[0]: To preempt the obvious joke: contrary to the portrayal of "anarchy" in most media today, anarchists don't believe in no organizations, just no hierarchical power structures, i.e. usually they agree with consent-driven forms of bottom-up organizing. The one exception tend to be egoists (see Stirner), but most anarchists try to ignore them because they're weird.
That article goes directly from people complaining about discrimination to Mao's Great Leap Forward, but it seems like wanting to be treated with a reasonable level of dignity at work is unlike causing a major famine that kills millions of people. Politics leads to ideological thinking which generates mostly garbage.
Heh. If you replaced “leftist movements” with “human movements” then I’d be with you. Witness the ever developing criteria for identifying and excising “RINOs” from the Trump movement. Find any decently sized organization with humans in it, and you will find a subset of its members actively attempting to identify and excise inpure members. The fallacy you are demonstrating is the notion that such behavior is relegated to a particular other group, as though ostracizing behavior doesn’t predate the very concept of “left” vs “right”.
Nothing. You are just on a forum that is populated mostly by people on the left of the political spectrum in the US, and you alluded to fact that contradicts their current moral panic about the danger of "Nazi" groups in the US. And, yes, they are much rarer.
> But aren't neo Nazi's fringe and rarer than wokies?
Depends on your definition. They may be rare if you only include self-identified Nazis. However, if you expand that to include members of the Far Right and general White Surpemacists then they're not only not fringe but they become as mainstream as Hannity, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and all of the Q-anon grifters.
White supremacists -as in people who believe most of the same thing as actual literal nazis, are by no means rare these days.
But if you mean people traipsing around in black SS uniforms then sure yeah those guys are rare, sure.
> White supremacists -as in people who believe most of the same thing as actual literal nazis, are by no means rare these days
The conflation of white supremacism and naziism is pretty much entirely political maneuvering. They believe very different things about the state, forms of government, gay people, culture, land use and many other things. Not to mention that only a small number of people termed white supremacists actually are (it conflates believing in racial differences (which are often not just white>everything) with believing in racial segregation with believing that the "white" ethnic group will form a better society),
No, this is known alt-right maneuvering, consistent with Nazi doctrine. You can replace that with 'fascist' if you like :)
Fussing about debatey details while repeatedly planting the desired concepts and trying to get anything you can, conceded so you can place a marker and push further, is very Nazi. It's foundational alt-right strategy, along the lines of 'hiding your power level'. This is not mysterious.
The reason it looks like that to you, is because fascists believe nothing… but power (and that only they should hold power, forever: it's not a thing to be shared or handed back and forth). So anything might be claimed, but outside the practical seizing of power, nothing matters.
This is VERY common. Hence people's concern about the matter.
I think all reasonable beings should care about describing things accurately and not conflating different things. For instance, arguments against one of them might not hold against another.
Note that this is far from just a blue tribe thing, it's pretty universal across all politics around the world to deliberately conflate the views of your stupidest enemies and your smartest.
Pretty scary that believing in racial segregation is no longer a fringe belief. In any case, you can’t tell me with a straight face that white people who believe in segregation, in the US, envision a society where there is no power imbalance between ethnic groups. These people want white people to be in charge, which is what white supremacy means in practice.
> Depends on the people. Some would just want the USA split into a few smaller countries.
That doesn’t mean they don’t still want White America in charge; moving a group out of the bounds of the state [0] doesn’t suddenly mean there is no power dynamic, as such dynamics are evident between states.
[0] in the international sense, not in the US-domestic sense
>Some would just want the USA split into a few smaller countries.
"Just" strikes me as an inappropriate adverb to use in this context. You are talking about splitting up the US into racially segregated states. Even in a bizarre hypothetical where this was somehow done with the best of intentions (lol), the amount of chaos and human suffering it would cause is almost impossible to imagine.
This sort of utterly insane belief should not be "pretty fringe". It should be virtually non-existent, in a reasonably sane and healthy society.
It's a real sea change in our culture that racial segregation is now openly considered or even advocated on relatively mainstream forums such as HN. That some of the people in question might not meet some overly pedantic definition of 'white supremacist' is hardly any consolation.
The far right has never taken its own ideology seriously – it's all a means to an end. They tie sympathetic intellectuals up in knots trying to parse and categorize the finer gradations of racist nonsense, and then do whatever they hell they want once they're in power.
> The far right has never taken its own ideology seriously – it's all a means to an end. They tie sympathetic intellectuals up in knots trying to parse and categorize the finer gradations of racist nonsense,
This really doesn't match my experience given how much time they spend arguing/discussing amongst themselves.
Perhaps then you can point me to an intellectually coherent defense of the idea that the US should be split up into racially segregated ethnostates.
Bickering and infighting hardly constitute evidence that intellectually serious work is being done in good faith. The far right has no more use for its 'useful idiots' once it attains power than the Communist party did for its pet intellectuals.
They take their political project seriously, but you won’t find an intellectually serious defense of far right ideology because they are simply not interested in doing that. I am not sure why people are so keen to provide cover for these people by keeping up the pretense that they have some kind of coherent political ideology that can be rationally debated. No-one who is nuts enough to advocate for racially segregated ethnostates within the USA is in that category.
And defunding the police isn't nuts? It's not like the Woke left makes much more sense. Since when is a coherent political ideology a precondition to anything?
Well if everything is about racist white oppressors and colored victims, it could follow that some white people will want a country of their own where they don't have to oppress anyone or be called racist just for being white?
In online arguments I've seen people use definitions ranging all the way from "members of the National Socialist Worker's Party of 1930s and 1940s Germany" to "literally anyone talking in a loud voice" but the most practical distinction between run of the mill fascists and nazis I've seen is that nazis are fascists who also believe in the Jewish conspiracy - which describes a lot more people than most people unaware of far-right memes would probably think.
Of course that leaves the question of how you define fascism, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
I'd loosely define 'fascism' as 'rule through sheer power by the deserving, over those who don't deserve power or self-rule'. The basic concept is, not everybody deserves to rule. Some people deserve to rule, and others have to BE ruled against their wishes, forever.
Maximum observed 'forever' seems to be under a decade, once the full fascism kicks in and is unavoidable. I don't believe fascism is sustainable, and what we see as 'woke' is a typical reaction to these attempts at rule. (Yes, I'm suggesting that power structures lean more towards fascism than they used to, and that this creates 'woke' as a reaction to this pressure)
I'd loosely define 'Nazi' as 'fascist with specific focus on seizing power through propaganda, media, and politics, particularly with use of anything that's new media'. In the 30s and 40s, of course, this was radio. There had always been massed political rallies (though the use of epic film propaganda was also new, as there'd be no Riefenstahl without the existence of film) but there hadn't been broadcast radio. Generalized, 'Nazi' means fascism plus modern media, and I'd be comfortable focusing that down a little to specify the media's used to rally 'the people' against enemies, specifically internal enemies in an ill-defined way.
Rallying people against 'woke' through coordinated use of social media is EXACTLY Nazi, in technique.
To an extent left and right are asymmetrical---leftist groups tend to be groups organized around being leftist as their main purpose, while "rightist" groups (churches, police unions, gun enthusiasts) tend to be rightist incidentally. Neo Nazis feel like the exception that proves the rule.
The quakers are today so small as to be completely irrelevant. And the existence of the quakers proves the commenters points that right wing groups tend to be right wing only incidentally. They have another main purpose. He gives churches as an example. People go to church for religion. Coincidentally, many of them also happen to be conservative. That there are churches where this is not true only emphasizes this point that right wing groups tend to form incidentally.
Maybe we need a new definition for these extreme groups? I've always found using left and right to describe authoritarian hellscapes to be a little off...
And to be honest I've always found using left and right when viewed from an American perspective to not work either. In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
Well to be a conservative in america (ie, to want to conserve american forma of constitutionalism) is to be a Europeans leftist, because the American constitution is a left wing document when seen through the eyes of European politics.
You can look at the political compass the Libertarians are always using. Then you learn that Stalin is a left-authoritarian and Hitler is a right-authoritarian and the lesson is that all authoritarianism is a hellscape.
But even that is just a toy model. If Alice is pro-choice and anti-gun, those are in opposite quadrants. If Bob is the exact opposite, do we say that they're both in the middle, even though they disagree on everything?
> In my country the furthest "right" mainstream party would sit a mile to the left of your democrats while the republicans would be considered "extreme right" bordering on illegal.
The thing about the US is that the federal government is a kleptocracy, so both parties never actually do the things they say they're going to do.
If you judge the Democrats by what they say, they're pretty far to the left. But then they don't do that.
If you judge the Republicans by what they say, they're pretty far to the right. But then they don't do that.
People who want to claim that the country is far to the right then point to what the Democrats actually do and what the Republicans say they want to do. But, for example, the US has government spending as a percentage of GDP in line with the Netherlands or Australia and not dramatically less than the UK or Germany. If you take all the law books full of regulations in the US and put them on a scale, not many countries could match them. If you go back to the political compass, it's maybe more authoritarian than some of Western Europe -- certainly more people are in prison -- but left vs. right? By what objective measure?
It's not government spending as an absolute number, it's who - specifically which class - benefits from the money.
It's the difference between building useful infrastructure and giving a huge handout to a billionaire who is already one of the richest people on the planet.
The US generally leans authoritarian, and bullying at all levels is endemic. That includes the nominal "left", although the far right in the US tends to be far worse. Because while the US left is irrational about a few things, the US far right is hopelessly irrational about almost everything - and armed with it.
Yours is a well-written comment and I'd give it more than one upvote if I could. I wonder if the reality of Democrats' rather strong indifference to progressive economics and meaningful reform--and the GOP spending taxpayer dollars like a drunken sailor--rubs some folks the wrong way.
> The idea that Nazis are right-wing is also kind of a modern conceit.
No, its not. I mean, except in the sense that Nazi’s are generally considered part of modern history and thus any description of them could be described as a “modern conceit”.
> When FDR was President the Democrats were the party of the Klan. Does that mean the New Deal is a right-wing program, or that the KKK is a left-wing organization?
No. It means that US parties of the time leading up to the New Deal were more strongly regional than consistently ideological (the Democratic Party had very different Northern and Southern constituencies and ideologies even before the New Deal coalition), and that the New Deal itself was the trigger for the largest, longest partisan realignment (or one of the two, though the other one was arguably only possible because the New Deal realignment was still shaking out) in US history, which only finally settled down after the secondary Civil Rights realignment to a fairly stable divisions – with a clear ideological left/right configuration – in the 1990s.
> Or maybe politics can’t be divided perfectly along a one dimensional axis
It can’t, but that doesn’t mean that any of the well-known axes of politicis don’t have things, including modern and historical political parties, that clearly fit on one side. The Nazis being one that fits clearly on the right (also, the authoritarian.)
It's not at all a modern conceit. Hitler gained power with the support of the right wing parties. Von Papen, who ensured Hitler got the chancellorship was linked to Zentrum, a right wing party that was the forerunner of Germany's current right wing CDU. The only party to vote against Hitler in the Reichstag were the social democrats (because KPD had been banned).
NSDAP had an economically left, socially right opposition originally (the Strasserists), but those who hadn't been expelled already were arrested or murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
Meanwhile Hitler was repeatedly praised by right wing commentators and papers and seen as an enemy by the left.
To spread the fiction that the Nazis we're not seen as right wing at the time is offensive, and simply not supported by the facts.
The NSDAP was about as left-wing as Tucker Carlson.
There seems to be an ahistorical reading popular with especially Americans today that because the NSDAP called itself a "worker party" and had some left-sounding campaign promises (though mostly in the 1920s) it was a "left-wing party".
Germany had been a monarchy until the end of the first world war. "Right wing" in Weimar Germany meant "monarchist", not "free market". The monarchy was overthrown by a left-wing coalition that rapidly split into the more centrist SPD (anti-monarchists who just wanted a free republic but not challenge the social hierarchy itself) and the various socialist tendencies (anarchists, Trotskyists, Marxists, Bolsheviks, etc). The SPD also famously allowed the (monarchist and right-wing) Freikorps to kill one of the most influential socialist groups. That's all before the NSDAP was even a thing.
The NSDAP started out as a fairly uninteresting nationalist workers' party. It went through several iterations and multiple names that increasingly brought a focus on nationalism and a hyperfixation on an imagined betrayal by the leftists causing the defeat in the Great War that ultimately became part of the Jewish conspiracy theory and the idea of Cultural Bolshevism (which you may know as "Cultural Marxism"). To the NSDAP the clear enemy were the communists, the Bolshevists, but in general "the left" including the SPD. They continued using leftist rhetoric in some of their material for a while because it worked but much like Tucker Carlson ranting about coastal elites and big corporations their answer wasn't to dismantle capitalism or tax the rich.
In the end, the NSDAP heavily vilified the communist DKP and the left-wing SPD as well as the "international Jewish bankers" (who in their mind unlike the "good, German bankers" were a nomadic people in a profession they turned parasitic by extracting the wealth from the German people and bringing it outside the nation - so to them it wasn't capitalism itself that was the problem or even banking). The right-wing conservatives liked this and even pardoned Hitler after his failed coup because they thought they could use the NSDAP to crack down on the still growing socialist movements and prevent a second communist revolution like in Russia. The Enabling Act was signed by the Christian conservative "center party". The plan worked, though not quite as intended. They did however crack down on unions and many of the first people sent to the camps were socialists and queers. They also nearly invented the idea of "public-private partnerships" although they wouldn't have called them that.
Party politics change over time and thinking that "the left" must always have been what the Democrats do and "the right" what the GOP does is not only extremely centric to American history but also ignores that even today the US political spectrum has more than two parties (not to mention the vast differences between local chapters) and none of the parties can or could ever be neatly summed up as "left" or "right".
EDIT: Before someone feels like they have to point this out: yes, the SA in particular (the security volunteers of the Nazis who went on to become their paramilitary street gang) had some people with actually somewhat leftist ideas in them and some members of the NSDAP were openly gay. Upon rising to power however the NSDAP purged (i.e. murdered) most of these people. But even the "leftist" ideas tended to be hypernationalist and be tainted by their social views (e.g. eugenics, anti-Semitism, Aryanism and homophobia). This is in part why most leftists today reject any "red-brown alliance" out of principle.
EDIT2: Since some people are prone to misunderstand points made in lengthy replies: I'm not saying Tucker Carlson or the GOP would have agreed with the NSDAP. I'm saying neither Tucker Carlson, the GOP nor the NSDAP are or were left-wing and that leftist populist rhetoric can be found in right-wing politics to this day so judging the NSDAP by a small subset of its rhetoric is historically illiterate.
No, not because of that, but they where a threat to the NSDAP.
They feared a strong democracy the most and had to take a stand against the 2nd strongest party the SPD. It was like in the USSR not about left or right, but about having 100% power in one party/person.
> The idea that Nazis are right-wing is also kind of a modern conceit
This is absurd. Not only the nazi mindset fits squarely into all the far-right / ultranationalist ideas, but the nazi party even made an alliance with the fascist party in Italy.
Conservatives moved to the Republican party by the sixties. Look up Strom Thurman for example.
The Nazis had help from the left at their inception, but murdered them later to gain approval from finance and law enforcement grous to consolidate power. Look up the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazis that accomplished everything we're decidedly right-wing, despite recent attempts to reverse that impression.
> Conservatives moved to the Republican party by the sixties. Look up Strom Thurman for example.
The primary thing that happened in the 60s was that the Democrats stopped opposing the Civil Rights Act. The Republicans didn't start opposing it then, they voted for it, and it passed. It was the process of racism losing the support of both parties when it used to have one.
Strom Thurmond was a racist, butthurt that the Democrats finally betrayed him. His constituents kept reelecting him and the US only has one other party.
The problem with the narrative that the parties switched places is that most of their policies didn't change. When Strom Thurmond switched parties, Democrats didn't go from supporting the New Deal to opposing it. They didn't switch from pro-life to pro-choice or vice versa. Their policies are much the same as they were when they were the party of the Klan.
Which implies that racism and left vs. right are independent.
> The problem with the narrative that the parties switched places is that most of their policies didn’t change. When Strom Thurmond switched parties, Democrats didn’t go from supporting the New Deal to opposing it.
To the extent there was a switch, it was between the pre-New Deal alignment and the alignment after the end of the double (New Deal and Civil Rights) realignments, Thurmond was from a constituency that was with the Democrats before either realignment and that left with the Civil Rights realignment.
> Their policies are much the same as they were when they were the party of the Klan.
Their politics on racial issues aren’t the same as before the Civil Rights realignment, and their policies on economic issues and the role of the federal government outside of race aren’t the same as before the New Deal realignment; those two realignments overlapped, as the New Deal realignment hadn’t finished shaking out when the Civil Rights realignment (which itself took almost exactly 30 years to settle out after the usually-cited 1964 kickoff) started. Note that the rumblings of the Civil Rights realignment, while usually timed to 1964, were evident earlier, but no one else was welcoming the disaffected Democrats until after 1964, and the tension was very much with the new people and ideas being brought in due to the New Deal realignment.
> Their politics on racial issues aren’t the same as before the Civil Rights realignment
Residential zoning in the US came out of racism. Restrict multi-family zoning to keep black people out of white neighborhoods. Then use that to create separate school districts for rich suburban white kids and poor urban black kids and maintain de facto segregation after de jure segregation was made unconstitutional.
Predominantly Democrats control the high population density areas where these policies are relevant and it's still ongoing.
Today Democrats promote the construction of abortion clinics and subsidizing the procedure. Before they promoted the construction of abortion clinics for the explicitly stated purpose of encouraging black women to get abortions. It's a changed in the stated justification but it's not actually a policy change.
I think at this point a lot of modern Democrats don't even realize what the intended purpose of these policies was, because they don't like to talk about that for obvious reasons, but they're still the party's policies.
Republicans didn't have kkk members sitting in congress in the 21st century. Democrats did.
We can say they changed their ways til the cows come home but the democrats never extend such mercy to other politicians (for example, franken was expelled for much less than byrd)
The Nazis murdered all of the leftists in their party. Using the word "socialist" in the name as a marketing tool does not make them leftist in any sense at all.
>if you have a right/left clock Hitler stays at 11:59 and Stalin at 00:01
Stalin is so "left" that he's touches shoulder with extreme "right". Stalin and Hitler where so extreme that you cannot talk about right or left (hence the 2 minute difference)
Having a wiki page is not usually a good proxy for academic consensus, especially for a controversial topic and especially when "Criticism" is a big chunk of the article.
My "proof" is the fact that every academic I know in history, sociology, and political science laughs whenever the topic is brought up. This is across institutions.
No, I think you missed the point, it’s not a comparison today and the past, but in the past.
In the 1930’s the Democrats were the party of segregationists (clearly not a left wing position), but also the party of FDR expansion of social programs (clearly a left wing position).
There is a two part explanation. First parties are coalitions, and the segregationists might or might not have been the same people pushing the social programs. Secondly the parties in the US were much less aligned on ideological grounds at that time than they are now. Today the Republican Party is almost entirely conservative and the Democratic Party liberal, but back then the parties were much more mixed.
Bismark, a far right monarchist, introduced the first universal healthcare insurance system as a result of a combination of fear of the left and christian morality. The notion that government spending is unique to the left is a modern US conceit.
In Europe a significant proportion of the right are Christian democrats of various flavours who consider some degree of state welfare to be moral duty, and/or other non-free market conservatives, to the point where the US style right are considered extremists many places.
> It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and twitter threads but it does very little to affect material relations and power structures, so it's if anything the Left and not anyone else who should be concerned with it.
Are you sure? It feels like it has a much stronger influence, at least in Western Europe.
The influence exerted is usually orthogonal to the traditional goal of improving the conditions of the working class. Instead identity politics focuses on a platform of "more POC female dictators" rather than one that actually fights to make a material difference in people's lives.
It also destroys any form of class consciousness, replacing it with one based on race. The white middle class get the catharsis of flagellating themselves but the people struggling to pay rent or working two jobs are understandably defensive when you try to tell them how privileged they are.
I agree completely. It reminds me of when German trade unions found out that their members are much more conservative than their apparatchiks and their response was "we'll teach them" and they pressed full force ahead, predictably losing 20% of their members in the past 20 years.
Inflation is much higher than wage increases, rent is exploding in the cities while jobs are being migrated into the cities, but thank god we have committees for identifying more and more absurd diversions and divisions.
Identitarian does not mean what you think it means. In fact, it's basically the exact opposite. I also have no idea what you mean when you say it has no ability to change anything. Are you talking about identity politics? Politics that specifically aim to better the position of people in certain subgroups? Because there are many political movements that have been wildly successful in doing that, women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage, the LGBTQ movement. There's a lot of politics based on group identity that has been successful.
I don’t think these movements have been based on identity but rather the concept of lacking something. This group lacks X, thus we should seek to give them X. But X does not necessarily equal the identity.
What I find heartbreaking in all this identity issue is the ever-increasing number of dimensions. Simple math shows that at about 20 or so there’s going to be about one gender identity per person or two. Which is absolutely correct as all people are unique and beautiful in their own ways. But instead of being able to freely move across the spectrum that is being a “man” or a “woman”, each person would be locked in their own tiny identity. And, as we see, crossing the identity barriers is hard for many many reasons. I can’t see this increasing happiness of people. Everyone is or should be looking for their identity for most of their lives, creating additional barriers on this journey is unlikely to be beneficial.
>Identitarian does not mean what you think it means.
From context it should be clear that I'm talking about identarianism in the literal sense of the term (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism), not the European right-wing political movement that confusingly shares the same label.
>women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage
the keyword in those movements is 'suffrage' and 'civil' not 'man' or 'woman'. The reason they were successful is because they were republican movements. Women's suffrage wasn't about women with a capital W having a sort of privileged identity, it was about the opposite, women being treated like equal citizens. Identity politics is the opposite, it is the creation of separate, distinct, protected spaces for groups of people based on some set of features.
Rather than gaining access to the commons, aspiring to universal values which was the goal of desegregation in the civil rights era, women's rights and so forth, identity politics seeks to carve out virtual spaces that are only even understandable if you share said identity. The notion of the a citizen proper goes out of the window.
And the gay rights movement is a good example of that shift, whereas historically it was focused on access to civil rights, nowadays you have clashes between different queer groups. Which part do we include, are TERFS reationary? Are asexuals queer? There is at least half a dozen fronts in this war already about who deserves to be part of the rainbow label.
>> "It's always surprising to me that this seems to be such a Conservative topic of concern who if anything should be glad that it occupies so much mindspace."
I think most people who self-ID as conservative really believe what they claim to believe about wanting to work with people who have other views to make a better world where they don't have to worry so much.
There are people within their own spheres who encourage their fears because they know it's a distraction. A lot of them do seem to be wising up to it, but only because the firestarters overplayed their hand. The people who once persuaded people to see this as some majority, overwhelming force did so by sounding more reasonable than the people they complained about.
Once the agitators went off the deep end, I think most people are reasonable enough to see it for what it is even if the realization takes a while to propagate past the scripts people have developed in a half decade or so getting mad online about it.
A similar thing happened on "my" side when people started to catch on to all the plainclothes cops in protests trying to turn them into riots.
> TSR/WotC laughed off the right's assault on D&D during the "Dark Dungeons" era when they tried associating it with Satanism.
Well, there was a period of many years when WotC stopped printing the creature type "Demon" out of deference to that assault.
(And if I recall correctly, TSR replaced the terms "devil" and "demon" with "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri". I don't know whether they had yet been bought out by WotC.)
And let’s be honest:
The “satanic panic” had no basis in fact. The idea that role playing gamers were going to do actual magic (or even think they were doing magic) is clearly nonsense.
But if you use human ethnicities as the basis for your games monsters… yeah, that’s a real problem.
It doesn’t mean you have to ban D&D, but it does mean it should address those issues.
Same with rock music. I don’t care if bands write about demons and wizards, but maybe try not to objectify women so much.
“squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”
Again, not saying we have to “cancel” Tolkien, but we should be aware of the issues and do better in future.
Same register as the vastly more mediatized Atlantic slave trade. This raises a fundamental question: Is it possible to mend centuries of abject & violent abuse across racial lines, where the most common interaction with members of the other racial group was through a slaver's whip. Not sure that 'do better' scolding, especially if inconsistently applied, is sufficient.
If you go to YouTube via a CGNAT with all cookies cleared you'll always get one or two top suggestions with extremely well endowed women in the thumbnail.
That is the woke Google who delivers what everybody wants to see. But it is easier to go after the nerds because they are "icky".
This is the reality right now. Dictatorships and Juntas arise if enough voters (nerds in this case) are apathetic.
The totalitarian (and corporate) Steering Councils that pop up in some OSS projects are rarely elected by a majority. Nasty politicians and the mentally ill apply and get 30% of the votes. The rest of the voters do not apply or care enough to vote them out.
Historically, even Hitler never had a majority in an election. He got total power by the enabling act:
Fundamentally languages have been evolving in a reductive manner, which is why adding syllables to terms like in "Latino/Latina -> Latin-x -> Latinx+" won't last. People will quickly eschew these terms for things that are easier to pronounce.
There's no malice in this - just a natural evolution of language towards efficiency.
As such its an endless cycle: new stuff is introduced to everyday language then reduced to something simpler - often using words that fell out of use, shadowing them with new meaning.
It's quite possible the new word for "Latinx+", whatever it is, will simply be considered genderless - if societal pressure manages to displace the old terms.
I speak Spanish and frequently talk to native speakers from all over Latin America, given that I use Spanish in my job and have a number of Latin friends. I’ve still yet to meet a native speaker who likes “Latinx”, although I did hear one on the radio once. (A college student).
Gendered nouns are kind of silly and antiquated when you think about it though, and many languages have a neuter gender too (e.g. German). The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.
English doesn't have gendered nouns, but we do have gendered pronouns, which not all languages have. Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns, which is why you'll often hear native Chinese speakers accidentally refer to a woman in English as "he".
Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.
Intentionally changing language isn't unprecedented either: in the 1970s, feminists successfully introduced "Ms." as a female equivalent to "Mr." to denote a woman who may or may not be married, (instead of Miss and Mrs.).
Ultimately, most language evolution is driven by young people: they're bending their native tongue to better describe their world. And that's a good thing. Language is supposed to be fluid and dynamic. We shouldn't be constraining our thoughts to a static unchanging language invented by our ancestors to describe their world that no longer exists. It's a tool meant to serve us, we're not meant to limit ourselves to it.
> The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.
This isn’t true. The term is enormously unpopular with latinos, only 3% use it. The entire spanish language uses gendered nouns, and unlike german has no neuter. The term may have originated with puerto rican academics but it is mostly used by English speakers.
> The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.
That's not what I've seen. "Latinx" isn't pronouncable in Spanish. The actual attempt to introduce a neutral gender uses the suffix -e. For example "les estudiantes ruidoses" or "mis amigues".
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown.
I can understand why 'they' is chosen as a way to introduce neutrality of gender but it pains me that this also introduces of ambiguity of plurality. We _really_ need a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. We're lucky that our first and second-person pronouns and our plural pronouns by fluke of language evolution just happen to already be gender neutral. It's just this last one -- third-person singular -- that is causing all this discussion, political fights, and newspaper column inches. It seems absurd to me when we could just call each other ze/zim (or whatever, the actual word doesn't really matter) and call it a day. If it turns out that the only way we can shut up about pronouns is to sacrifice 'they', then I guess that's an acceptable loss. But it does feel like all we need is a tiny tweak of the language to iron out this wrinkle by introducing something new (or taking one from another language, if that's more palatable).
It's worth bearing in mind that singular-they is almost as old as plural-they in usage. I think it's more likely we can settle into an existing valid usage (that spent a while being argued against by style guides in the 19th century) than gain acceptance on something completely new.
> We're lucky that our first and second-person pronouns and our plural pronouns by fluke of language evolution just happen to already be gender neutral.
Is it "a fluke"? You generally know a lot about the first and second person in a conversation. You know yourself and you see who you're talking to. There's no need for more precision for the first or second person. When trying to point to a specific individual other than one of the two interlocutors, however, finer distinctions help. That doesn't seem like "a fluke" to me. That actually seems to make quite a lot of sense.
> I can understand why 'they' is chosen as a way to introduce neutrality of gender but it pains me that this also introduces of ambiguity of plurality.
Me too, deeply, but I've solved this: What we need to do is update plural they/them/theirs to theys/thems/theirses.
There are suggestions for neutral pronouns in English but in my experience they get even more resistance than they/them for being ridiculous/fake/made up/not real/etc. xyr/xym or ve/vem of zir/zem are all things I’ve seen ridiculed.
Somewhat similar, here in Scotland we often say "youse" to mean "you and those with you", or "youse two" to mean "you two".
A similar concept exists in Mandarin Chinese, where "ni3" means "you" and "ni3men" to mean "you and those with you", but there is also "ta1" as a gender-neutral, singular "they" (that is, he/she), and "ta1men" as a gender-neutral, plural "they".
> The "X" suffix is an attempt by younger Spanish speakers to introduce a neuter gender to their native language.
Did it really come from native Spanish speakers or is it an exonym? It is not the preferred term for the vast majority of Hispanic people even in the US.[1]
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun
A Comedy of Errors (William Shakespeare, c.1594), Act 4, Scene 3:
> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend
Singular 'they' even when the gender is known has been popular in the English language for hundreds of years. Even longer than singular 'you'.
>> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend
> Singular 'they' even when the gender is known has been popular in the English language for hundreds of years. Even longer than singular 'you'.
It seems to me that the negation qualifies your Shakespeare example for OED's explanation of "I. 2. Often used in reference to a singular noun made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex (= ‘he or she’)." That is distinct from a reference to a single, specific individual, which using "they" as a singular gender-non-specific pronoun with unrestricted usage would necessarily include (things like "Peter said *they wanted some tea"). Presumably this is what was meant by GP.
> Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns, which is why you'll often hear native Chinese speakers accidentally refer to a woman in English as "he".
This is interesting because I've heard this explanation before from an international student. You still have 他/he 她/she despite them being pronounced the same, so the gendered pronouns still do exist, but the mistake of switching he/she in conversation is still commonly made.
It's not like Vietnamese where Em ấy or Ẻm (both meaning he/she for someone younger than the speaker) where a genderless pronoun is used, and yet I've seen he/she mixed up a lot less often.
I guess that if you speak Chinese as a first language you're not expecting to need to distinguish between 他 and 她when speaking, so it's harder to remember when speaking a language that has two different pronunciations.
I believe older Chinese used 他as a fever neutral pronoun and using 她 is a fairly recent change to mimic western languages.
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.
It's actually reasonably weird to propose since usages historically mattered. Also that's what gives you collocations, idioms, etc. If you look at grammars of English, you find plenty of examples of similar generalizations that people consistently refuse to make, such as the lack of "I could X" in the sense of "I was able to X", even though though nobody bats an eye at "I couldn't X" in the sense of "I wasn't able to X".
People have been trying to change gender terms forever. It's nothing recent. I recall discussions about the use of the non gendered pronoun 'e' years ago.
In English I’ve understood it is common to use a singular they as a non gendered pronoun. In Swedish the newly introduced hen is in quite widespread use instead of han/hon (he/she).
If that is your concern, just use the noun. “The politician made a statement to the press. The politician was shocked.” Or if that is too inelegant, reformulate the sentence: “The politician expressed his shock to the press.” Or use the verb to carry the information that you are referring to the singular: “They was shocked.”, but I guess that would be painful to read for some native English speakers.
Yeah, but there’s no good solution there. If you use a pronoun that can apply to multiple subjects or objects in a sentence, it will always be ambiguous.
> If you use a pronoun that can apply to multiple subjects or objects in a sentence, it will always be ambiguous.
My point exactly. There's nothing inherently unique about singular "they" in that respect.
Sure, there are certain circumstances in which a gendered pronoun removes ambiguity, just as honorifics or age/social status based pronouns would remove ambiguity in many instances involving multiple male subjects/objects if English used them (like some other languages do), but that really isn't a reason not to use singular "they" with the same degree of care to avoid ambiguity one also has to use "he" and "she".
As far as I'm aware, the motivation behind this had nothing to do with social justice for trans people, but more as a potential alternative to the awkward/ambiguous singular they. (Or at least that's how I would've interpreted it back then, having been a teenager with no real concept of or experience with LGBT issues.)
> a potential alternative to the awkward/ambiguous singular they
Spivak pronouns go back a very long way, though they were most popularized in the early '80s by Spivak using them in technical documentation. The popularity of singular they as a general purpose pronoun is much more recent.
Languages also evolve due to political/social movement pressures. With words taking on new meanings so that the old connotations and slogans can be attached to these new meanings.
The "woke" movement uses the same tactics as religions. Followers try to shame you and offer absolution for your original sin of racism or transphobia. There are different sects of wokeness, similar to denominations in the Christian Church. It's also a form of mob mentality and bullying. Corporations, unsurprisingly, have also jumped on the trend.
I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying but I think there are also many exceptions which would include many academic philosophers, people who vascilate a lot and people really looking for something but not having found it.
Religion minus the formal concept of God. In other words a democratic religion, where the rules have no grounding in an externality, and can change rapidly based on who currently has influence.
I hate the phrase, because people on the other side use it to conflate longstanding serious thought and action on the matters with young naive liberal chatter.
That being said, the easiest way to cut through most of it is to look toward people who have dealt with this sort of thing most of their lives, and "older black professionals" nearly always fit the bill.
There's an unfortunate 'survival of the fittest' bent to this -- i.e. if they're still in the workforce and/or politics, they've already survived a process that harshly punishes people who aren't good at it.
Almost. 5-10 years ago, they would be. In 5-10 years, they will almost certainly universally won't, and that's kind of part of my point; On one hand, yes, our "internal" debates on this type of stuff end up being very public, and as such, people who lean in strong directions become visible.
But also, we tend to collectively adapt much quicker and much better. I'm pretty comfortable claiming that this will be the case based on my own experiences with friends and family. In college, I'd say about half of my black friends were pretty "homophobic" and exactly zero of those same people are still.
Okay... So basically you're claim is to listen to black professionals at some uncertain point in the future at which they'll agree with you? That's very... Woke.
My claim is (at this present time, due to recent historical circumstances, on balance, especially those older and in the professional world) black folks tend to be much wiser and "more adaptable" than their non-black counterparts.
Furthermore, I'll claim that the homophobia et al that you see is actually the process of a people learning to deal with new circumstances (e.g. if you look at black comedy from the 90's, you'll see a lot of stuff that doesn't age well -- BUT that should be recognized as literally the opposite of "problematic" -- what that was was learning and adapting and growth."
More weird is that Merican Wokeness is replacing *ness in other countries. Finnish has only one personal pronoun for all sexes, but Woke Finns add American Pronouns to their twitter pages.
The way “American values” have come to dominate America is upsetting. It used to be a diverse country with very different social geography in different regions. Now it’s mostly strip malls, chain stores and freeways, and most of it looks the same.
> why wouldn't they parrot things like woke pronouns
Because different languages have different pronouns. You don't adopt function words into your language the same way you can adopt content words (unless you're, for example, code switching, but even then you don't switch for a single function word).
It happens, as does grammaticalization, but it takes a looooooong time. And the existence of a large extant written corpus and an educated population (as it is the case today, but wasn't quite the case back then) makes it all the harder. As long as you don't have written language, you can have very disparate regional dialects and language quickly evolving. But the need to communicate across time and space seems to stabilize languages in some respects (just witness the case of English spelling, for example).
(Also, Old Norse was quite a bit closer to Old English than presumably modern English is to some of those languages in question - Finnish, especially.)
Here, If you are aware of new wokeness trends in the US is question of about 3 months until the spanish left and media start parroting the new word, idea or whatever.
The consumed culture is overwhelmingly US based. Netflix, social media... The local shows that happen to succeed, mostly are created due to legal obligations imposed by the goverment. If it were not for that...
An obervation, though, is that the academic underpinnings of the “wokeness trends” you’re describing were very explicitly leveraging modern French philosophers. Don’t pretend Continental thinking did not have a string influence on the situation :). That’s to your first paragraph, I quite share your thoughts on your second one.
Yeah, but french philosophers layed the grounds several decades ago. They're not the ones running the propaganda machine nor pumping out "papers" about this issues nor the ones financing activism over this issues. It's almost 100% american.
I live in the Netherlands and so much of what’s on TV, in cinemas is the games we play are American. It’s really inescapable. I’d easily call America the dominant culture in the west from my experience.
I've been to dozen or so foreign countries, and everywhere I see establishments named in English (or even named "Hold the Door" or "Central Perk" - based on American popculture). Another example - quite suddenly, people in Poland started eating steaks and drinking whiskey - something that just wasn't done even 15 years ago.
Oh and the leading newspapers basically parrot a lot of what they themselves read in New York Times, incl. doing interviews with American book writers or even discussing American racial issues (hard to find an international issue less relevant than that to people on the ground in Poland) etc. That's also partly because most of them don't know say German, French or Italian, so they can't really be influenced by those cultures quite as strongly.
I have a friend in Europe who informed me matter-of-fact that American corporate explicitly asked them to sport pronouns in their social media profiles. Or else I suppose.
Yes. The fact this craziness is actually encouraged by Finnish state media as something normal nowadays is seriously starting to destroy my will to live in this country. Idiots are copying everything that's wrong with America here.
Foot bidding is actually a practice from 14th century China in which men would place bids to see a woman’s foot. The winner would receive a hand painted portrait of the foot.
First, yes, I made a typo and meant to say "foot binding".
The reason I mentioned this is because foot binding originally began as a cultural practice among a small group of people in the 10th century. By the time of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), most social classes were practicing foot binding.
Thus, what I'm trying to say is that the Finns are adopting a cultural practice (pronouns in their twitter bio) as a result of being exposed to another group of people doing it.
The reasons for why they chose to adopt it, though....
How does adding pronouns really affect your life at all? Seems quite a small thing to get annoyed about, especially if it ends up helping someone else.
Speaking as someone who has my pronouns on my Twitter page, the main purpose is to keep those who get bothered by it away, especially because it should be such a little thing that those that manage to get worked up over it are not people I'm interested in spending time on.
I have no problem being on friendly terms with people who think it's a bit silly of me to have them there. But people who are so offended they don't want to follow me? Good riddance.
I tend to see it the opposite way: If it adds fuel, then that is evidence it's not pointless.
If people just disagree and find it silly (and I did myself at one point), then that's their business.
But using someones preferred pronoun is no different from trying to get their name right. It's basic respect and courtesy. That so many people take offence at being asked to show basic respect for others is the reason why so many people who have no personal use for putting our pronouns anywhere increasingly do so, to help normalise it.
People don't need to like that.
But if that's enough to fuel a fire, then let it burn.
Now it’s making the jump to K-12. My second grader is apparently learning how to develop an “identity” around her “skin tone” (according to an email from her teacher). This has had the predictable effect of making my daughter unhappy with her dark skin. Kids are perceptive. Her teacher is making a big deal out of skin tone and how society sees dark skinned people as inferior, and naturally she wonders why society might pervasively believe it if it wasn’t true. (She goes to a progressive, diverse, private school in deep blue Maryland, so she’s not developing this sentiment from the other kids. I went to a very white, quite red Virginia public school 30 years ago and nobody ever told me about brown skin being bad.)
> In early June, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a bill that restricts what teachers can teach in K-12 schools and at public universities, particularly when it comes to sexism and racism. It bans 10 concepts that Republican legislators define as “divisive,” including the idea that “one race or sex is superior to another,” that members of a particular race are inherently inclined to oppress others, and that “the U.S. and Iowa are fundamentally racist or sexist.”
The wording ‘divisive’ in all these laws is interesting. Why is this the operative word here? Banning ‘concepts’ on the grounds that they are ‘divisive’ is some of the one of the most Orwellian language I’ve ever read.
It just seems like laws with the title ‘propagation of divisive concepts prohibited’ will evolve to an even expanding list of thought crime.
This isn’t a comment on how race should be treated and discussed in a classroom.
The word “ban” is Vox’s editorialization. These laws don’t “ban” ideas—they regulate the content of what school boards can include in school curriculums. In a sense these regulate students’ “thoughts” insofar as we expect public schools to teach kids to believe certain things and not other things. But that’s the point of school! Schools inherently must decide between how to teach certain things.
This is a good point. Then again, the ideologies they're fighting as "divisive" have been pushing the position that some ideas can be harmful. So it seems like their own rhetoric is now being used against them, and if they don't like it, maybe they should rethink their own positions on this particular issue.
I went to a decently progressive elementary school, and the kids were absolutely racist by second grade. It'd be nice if we could just ignore race, but that's not reality yet.
Second graders aren’t “racist.” They see color differences, just like they can see if kids are short or tall or skinny or whatever. They are either taught or learn by observation to associate color with other things.
Perhaps their racism was a result of "progressive" schools and parents of kids in those schools seeing everything through a lens of race or other identity markers?
I'm pretty sure it was because kids are assholes. And because it's easy to pick on outsiders. The class had 20 white kids and 3 black ones, obviously they're going to be singled out by the 7 year olds.
Anyway, this was before progressive meant seeing everything through the lens of race, so it definitely wasn't that.
If you tie your identity, your idviduality, your importance to your melanin amount or ethnicity you are racist. You are dividing up humans into "us and them". You are using it to set yourself apart, to make yourself different (which inevitably leads to divisiveness and bigotry because you've divided up humanity) and to stake out a claim of ownership on some part of human culture.
It's not your culture it is our culture. We are all humans. All culture is human culture.
Bigotry will persist for as long as people invest importance and value into ancestral and cultural differences between groups. Whether as a positive (celebrate X culture) or negative (blame Jews).
Obviously, until we view ourselves as united, as one. We will remain divided.
Not going to lie, but that type of education seems like a great way to create a massive bolus of right-leaning kids that reject the ideas forced on them by their parents generation (they always rebel!) that just lead to self-defeating internal dialogue.
Why on earth is this comment here? It has nothing to do with the article or the thread, and it's not the first comment I've seen like this. (The other recent one was a random rant about Tesla self-driving.) Is this comment the product of a bot, maybe? Or is there an HN client application with a bug, appending comments to the wrong place? Just human error?
I dont really get your analogy; thats not the argument being made here. An initial offering industry/mechanism isnt going anywhere, it will just likely gradually shift from IPO to ICO. The reason bankers make absurd fees from IPO's isnt from their due diligence, its from market access. Thats coming to an end.
Parent said in his comment, the teachings made his brown skinned child feel inferior, and he didn't feel this way as a child with the old way of teaching.
Do you think my progressive Maryland school is throwing “skin color is really important in society” while leaving “but all skin colors are equal” out of the discussion?
But we’re dealing with kids who haven’t yet been socialized with the ideal of color blindness, like you and I. At the same time, they don’t take what teachers say at face value.
Teachers say “skin color is really important” and “America is systemically racist against dark skinned people.” Teachers can say “but all skin colors are equal” but that isn’t necessary what kids take away. What do they mean by “equal?” Is it a euphemism, like so many others we use? Is it moral equivalence rather than literal equality? At the same time, teachers are saying people with different skin colors are different—the kids are taught to celebrate their diversity. And why would so many people think people with dark skin are inferior if there wasn’t some truth to that? You can’t tell second graders that skin color is a big deal but also not a big deal.
Also, the premise isn’t true. I grew up in Virginia when it was a red state. I went to college at Georgia Tech, where most of my classmates were from red parts of the south. But I’ve only ever been called a racial slur twice, both times by homeless people who weren’t white.
Telling brown kids that society is systemically racist against them when it isn’t true does harm. It divides them from their white peers and makes them look for racism where it might not exist.
The TV show “White Lotus” actually has a great take on this. Native Hawaiian girl goes to elite school and visits a Hawaiian resort with her friend’s wealthy white parents. She’s learned CRT education at her college and become woke. She convinces a native Hawaiian hotel worker to ignore his moral compass by telling him to steal her friend’s family’s jewelry because after all white people stolen Hawaii from people like him. He gets arrested and it ruins his life. And she strains her relationship with her white friend, who genuinely cared about her as a person. As the parent of a brown girl the show articulated exactly what I’m afraid of with CRT education.
> Telling brown kids that society is systemically racist against them when it isn’t true does harm.
Is it also harmful to tell them society isn't systematically racist when it is true? I'm not sure 2nd grade is the place for this discussion, but there are lots of pre-existing divisions on race that will affect people's interactions. For me it's worth being aware of them, calling them out, and not perpetuating them. We've just been through massive unrest due to policing disparities, and I would want brown kids who are likely to interact police on their own to be aware of some aspects of it.
“Systemic racism” is itself a woke term that misleadingly imputes prejudice and intent onto basically economic factors. As a brown guy in America, I can expect to make more money, and my kids will have higher income mobility even if I came here in poverty, than whites. I have half the chance of being shot by the police and a third the risk of being incarcerated than white people. I can expect to live longer as a brown man than white women. What does it mean to say American society is “systemically racist” against me and my kids?
It’s not just my kind of brown people either. The incarceration rate for Hispanics is now below that of whites: https://www.slowboring.com/p/hispanic-prison (even though Hispanics are much more likely to be in the 18-35 demographic where incarceration is highest). Studies show Hispanics are converging in terms of income over generations at the same pace as Italians, etc. American Hispanics live as long as white people in Denmark. What does “America is systemically racist” mean for them?
This system of “white supremacy” that holds back all non-white people just doesn’t exist. It’s a myth.
> I have half the chance of being shot by the police and a third the risk of being incarcerated than white people.
This claim completely contradicts every statistic I've seen on the topic. Can you pass along a source for this? It's a significant adjustment to my thinking on this topic if I can cite a source.
If it's the book you link to the end of your comments, I'll have to have it to my reading list.
The seemingly higher rate for hispanics disappears when you adjust for the fact that the median hispanic is 28 and the median white person is 42. (The odds of being shot by the police drop sharply after 35.)
> The dwindling of Hispanic-white disparities is even more remarkable in light of criminal behavior being so heavily concentrated in adolescence and young adulthood,. The median age for Hispanics is 29.8 years versus 43.7 for whites, meaning even in a system free of prejudice that punished solely on the basis of crimes committed, we would expect criminal justice disparities between the populations to be growing, not shrinking.
"Systemic racism" targeted generally at non-white people isn't feature of American society. It's much narrower than that: persistent disparities for Black and indigenous people.
> Telling brown kids that society is systemically racist against them when it isn’t true does harm. It divides them from their white peers and makes them look for racism where it might not exist.
Okay, but it is true. We have the history and numbers to know that.
Perhaps second grade is too young, but omitting this reality from k-12 completely would be as blind as omitting buffer overflow attacks from a course on memory architectures.
Things are as they are because of how they were (and still are).
Not at all. I'm saying all people were not treated as equals, and when they asked about it they weren't given an answer. The school didn't know how to talk about it at all so it didn't.
I think the key part here is "pretend these factors didn't exist at all". I think answering questions when they are raised is very important, and I agree with you that kids are perceptive. On the other hand, they should also be offered a chance to live without thinking about that if it's possible.
For instance that these teachings are racist and racism is a despicable ideology that deserves no serious consideration or even consideration in any form or shape.
> This is the next batch of folks who will be doing your IPO paperwork:
No these are not the next batch of people filling out your IPO... that article you picked is like half a dozen randos attending an optional one time event that from the selective information they gave doesn't even seem to represent progressive views. Then soundbites were taken out of context by a hardline conservative outlet and you were told that this is what the left stands for. Can you honestly tell me that you believe progressives want to mandate that you begin every day chanting "i am tango-unchained and i am racist"?
Back to the article, what did the rest of that conversation look like besides a single screenshot? Is there any context where it might make sense to say "i am racist" without literally wearing a white hood. Maybe those words are being used to capture concepts that are more difficult to explain than firing someone based on the color of their skin or telling your daughter she shouldn't marry outside her race. These aren't dumb people and they made the decision themselves to say these things and I'm sure had good reasons that made sense in the moment.
The professor screenshotted here has like 22 years of legal teaching experience. Don't you think there's a chance he was having an interesting conversation about intellectual concepts and was taken out of context? That article you posted never asked these questions or got the "other side" and asked him to explain himself. Instead we just have quotes from a few conservatives that were offended by the training. It kind of reveals the purpose of this article.
It's fine to have ideological disagreements, but to frame this article as representing a movement let alone a generation of thinking is dishonest and hysterical.
I am brown and I can’t believe what the western countries are doing with going back to racial segregation days. Instead of teaching everyone to work hard snd accomplish hard things, they are being taught that they can’t achieve hard things because the boogeyman is stopping them. Victimhood doesn’t help kids. Even the most successful black and brown people like Lebron James who achieved what they did via working hard know this but they don’t want to teach that to the kids. It’s mind boggling.
Now a days there’s literally no difference between a woke and a racist. Both believe in judging people by their skin color instead of the content of their character.
Racism and actual crime gets conflated, and that is a major problem within America.
If someone is the victim of a crime, it should not matter whether that crime was racially-motivated or not. Serve justice, full stop. Don't feed into racial realism.
Things get really bad when it gets twisted to the point of "who cares about this particular crime, RACISM is the problem!" This leads to injustice because focus is shifted from the real crime to an abstract ideological debate. And it happens all the time.
Racism is a problem when it obstructs justice, whether it's Jim Crow laws that are literally racist, or "woke" media grifting that muddies the water with race realism.
So your response to a person with brown skin say that their experience doesn't matter? Why doesn't it matter because you read that they where lucky or that you experienced something different?
I say it from my own personal experience as a light skinned black person, I've seen how the police laser focus on my dark skinned friends and, I've seen the subtle differences in behavior displayed by white people in their presents.
I suspect that it’s not luck, but rather than the racism that exists in America isn’t directed at brown people generally, but Black people specifically. And while I’m fully supportive of combatting that, I’m not okay with schools telling my brown daughter that she faces systemic racism that she doesn’t. We shouldn’t project the Black American experience and pedagogy designed around that onto all brown people, which is what we’re on the path to doing. It’s not actually true and we should be truthful with our kids. By 2060, 40% of the country will be Hispanic or Asian. Our overall approach to race issues must accommodate their reality as well.
This is one of those articles which kind of pretends to be neutral, but are still so oppinionated that I don't know if I ended up smarter or dumber after reading it :-/
As someone who is very slow to adapt to new language and social trends, I came away disappointed. I was hoping for more explanation of how ideas travel from a small group to the mainstream, but the only explanations given seemed aimed at delegitimizing the ideas themselves. Flame bait is perhaps a little strong but lazy and partisan I agree with.
I try to mention this every time I notice any major publications (WSJ, WaPo, NYT, Economist, Bloomberg, HBR) post basically trash under their main, but especially their "Opinion" channels.
I think they're trying to reckon with their ads business model not succeeding in the online world, so their editors allow these controversial pieces to exist as a means to retain viewership by appealing to some mob anger.
I also want to mention that of all the news agencies, I have consistently not felt this way from anything from the Atlantic, which is the only publication I now subscribe to, because this work is kind of nonsensical.
By the same logic, a far-right person could complain about a "veneer of neutrality" in the mainstream press's coverage of, say, the Proud Boys. But that would be ridiculous.
Some things really are objectively stupid as hell.
I have no opinion on the Proud Boys because I have no access to untainted information on them. But in general you should strongly distrust news orgs talking about anything with political or culture war implications. Every single case I've had personal experience with has had massively misleading coverage.
Is the important issue in the US the enraged far right mob that attacked the Capitol in January, and continues to deny the legitimacy of elections, and plans further violence? Is it the actual COVID pandemic? Is it the science denial that accompanies the pandemic and has people turning to unproven horse-dewormer over proven vaccines? Is it the disinformation engines on social media and their weaponization by global actors? Is it the looming climate catastrophe? Is it right-wing lawmakers attempts to remove women's rights over their own bodies, and limit the right to vote and thereby "manage" democracy?
No, we need to pay our attention to lefty-wokies instead! They're the enemy of the day! Ignore your lying eyes about where these issues are coming from, pretend that there's an issue on the left here instead!
It's a pathetic piece.
And its pathetic that it gets so much traction here.
You're attacking a straw man of your own invention here. The Economist has devoted pages and pages to the Capitol attack, the COVID pandemic, climate change, social media, abortion rights etc.
I find it kind of sad that the US is so polarized that everything (like the Economist) that doesn't fit neatly into Democrat/left vs Republican/right is nonetheless forcibly pigeonholed into one of the two camps, with absurd results like you labeling the Economist -- historically a very liberal/libertarian publication -- some kind of right wing Trojan horse.
I disagree, I stopped because of things that the Economist really were not neutral about, entire arguments that they omitted, things that they decided to paint as one-sided, which were in reality anything but.
Maybe you think they're neutral because they confirm your existing biases? Something to consider.
It's incredibly offensive. They're projecting how English works on gendered nouns onto other language (Spanish) and then getting worked up over it. It's astounding that the people pushing the term don't see the irony.
I have seen some concern about this issue in El Salvador. But "latinx"? Not once. It's unpronounceable in Spanish. You only see the letter X in indigenous place-names like Mexico or Oaxaca, and there it's pronounced kind of like a fricative version of our H, which can't work at the end of the word. I've heard native English speakers say it's pronounced "lah-TINKS", which is so obviously foreign it's painful.
Two solutions I've seen native speakers employ: Sometimes in written language, the @ symbol will be used because it's like an A and an O overlayed ("latin@s"). When speaking, the only thing that could work would be E, "latines", which at least would be pronounceable and would rhyme. Did the idiot who thought of "latinx" think about rhyming? Spanish speakers write poetry and music too.
> But "latinx"? Not once. It's unpronounceable in Spanish. You only see the letter X in indigenous place-names like Mexico or Oaxaca, and there it's pronounced kind of like a fricative version of our H, which can't work at the end of the word. I've heard native English speakers say it's pronounced "lah-TINKS", which is so obviously foreign it's painful.
That's pretty ironic. I never made that connection, though I only have a basic familiarity with Spanish phonetics.
My understanding is that "latinx" is pretty much exclusively a performative English-speaking white liberal thing. It's not very pronounceable in English, either. I've never actually heard it spoken, but mentally I read it as "latin-ex." Personally, I don't think I'd ever even try to use "lah-TINKS," since I'd be afraid it'd be interpreted as an ethnic slur.
This video gives some background to the term, and pronounces it latin-ex: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bs339gW_xqU (I tried to pick a short video without any adverts.)
Also nicely ironic that the language Latin is gendered. So "Latin America" in English is "America latina" in standard Spanish, and Google wants to translate it to "Americae" in Latin ("Americas", plural, feminine gender, nominative case.)
On a related point, what I'm uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west. I understand there's been a massive increase in cases for transmen in the UK and USA for example.
Is this because we can identify these conditions much better now? Maybe. I don't have the background to say for sure.
There is a real fear in society though that woke schools of thought are a harmful influence to the above rise. Again we need to be careful here.
Personally what I do know is that growing up I had for a time quite severe identity issues (not about gender) but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things. There wasn't anyway near this current level of identity politics and wokeness.
I appreciate it's a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people's identities in more. Im so glad I grew up without the internet and could just be, and be a confused kid growing up without labels.
Alternative explanation: there have always been as many transgender kids, but they hid it because they knew they'd get bullied by everyone, including their own parents.
But that's not the whole story. Kids are also very malleable, open to peer pressure and easily assume identities that earn them acceptance by their peers.
While this is technically true I think one should be careful to insinuate that this is an underlying cause. I don't think most people would say the same about homosexuality for example. It's just a more elaborate way of saying "it's a phase".
Saying it's cultural influence doesn't mean it's just a phase. I'm sure most people have life long personality traits that came from cultural influences.
Moreover, even if being gay or trans is just the result of cultural influence doesn't mean we should respect it any less. That said, it's worth asking the question isn't it?
Exactly. Transphobia often leads to trauma after getting ostracized by one's peers. I've never seen evidence of "wokeness" being nearly as nasty. You don't get bullied or singled out for not being trans.
I doubt that. Resonable people recognice that there is a diffrence between a personal preference of who to fuck, and telling others who they should prefer to fuck.
But I don't know that it actually is. There's no “everyone will be fine with this” – implied is a “most people are reasonable”, so it isn't the right form of argument to be a No True Scotsman.
I'm trans and I'd be fine with it and I think of the arguments that it's transphobic as misguided at best, malicious at worst. There seems to be a vocal contigent of transwomen who identify as lesbians who try to argue that a lesbian who is not trans and doesn't want to have sex with a transwoman (even one with male genitalia) is transphobic. This sounds to me like a kind of very, very bad pickup line.
On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.
So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?
I want to start a family in the traditional sense like my parents and grandparents have done before me, so I would be disappointed to find out I was dating a transwoman. Similarly I'd be disappointed to find out if a woman didn't want children or wanted to live a lifestyle incompatible with my own. It isn't going to work out and I'd have to ultimately call it off.
It's not about 'who's at fault' really. It will sooner or later come up and it is better sooner than later for both parties. If I'm dating a woman and she doesn't mention that she already has children, which is a big deal for me, then we're both just wasting our times because that's something I can't compromise on.
I don't know why this even needs to be stated, but violence is not an option in either of these cases.
If you have these preferences then the onus is on you to disclose them. As long as you say "I would like to be in a relationship with someone who can have children with me" on your first date, and not discriminate between e.g. trans women and cis women who can't give birth, it's ok.
I'm a little bit confused. At first you talked about "dating" someone, now you're talking about starting a family. These seem to be different, not necessarily mutually exclusive, but not necessarily identical, goals. Can you explain?
It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".
Sure. Dating is essentially the way we assess a suitable potential partner. The end goal in (hetero) dating essentially boils down to starting a family and this is also implied and assumed unless stated otherwise.
I guess nowadays people also informally call "having casual sex" dating. I'm also not sexually attracted to trans women if that's what you're getting at. We would not even be able to have sex.
Ok, we're on the same page regarding the violence.
I think I’m woke, but it seems obvious to me that everybody has sexual preferences that go way beyond the gender of their partner. Some prefer tall and dark, some prefer petite blondes. Some people prefer big black and beautiful. How can we make moral judgement about people’s sexual preferences?
I guess the alternative would be that you have to be willing to have sex with everybody of your preferred sex? Are there people who actually think this?
Well there's definitely some people who think that, they say as much on their videos. One I watched claimed the only way to get rid of transphobia was for straight people to understand that you don't get to care about what kind of genitals your date has. You ll find out in bed.
And that implies that gay people do not exist. A lesbian who says testicles are gross does not actually have a genetic sexual desire for biological women.
Interesting! Do I lose the ability to chose based on other things, then? Like, I prefer brunettes, would that be permitted, or should I be hair-color blind and just take what I’m given? I know you’re not an advocate for it, just interesting that some people hold this conviction!
Hopefully it doesn’t! Would you like to point out how I imply that trans people are deceptive?
Sure, but my preference for being solely with brunettes is not as strong as my preference for being solely with straight people, so the deception is not equal in its merited response. Perhaps this is bigoted, but I’m sincerely interested in your conviction.
Well, trans is not really a hard factor for attraction. Fully cis-passing trans women exist, even in intimate relationships, and I'd wager not all things that go into that even matter to most people.
Feel free to exclude based on physical criteria common in trans people, be it from masculine features, to larger frames to a set of genitals you're not attracted to, but "trans people" as category is way to broad. Because they can functionally be cis women. Unless you have a breeding fetish I guess.
Insisting on a separate category feels like people are holding on to bioessentialist feeling that trans women must be men, which would make a cis man gay. Pair that with toxic masculinity and you have one of the reasons for violence particularly against trans women.
(I have no personal stake at this, like many trans people I mostly date other trans people, less complicated and your partner has less of a hard time relating to you)
Hey, thanks for taking the time to explain so in depth. I definitely get what you’re saying, and I don’t know that I’ve thought about it like this before (to be fair, I’ve only ever been with my wife, so it isn’t a situation that would ever be relevant, and probably that’s why I haven’t).
I mean, you can decide if it ever goes that far, but trans people do not owe you disclosure about their genitals just like you do not owe your partners your entire medical history.
It's probably still the right thing to do, purely because the trans panic defense is still a thing and it would be unsafe, but I see no moral obligation here.
Do we not owe disclosure of certain things as part of our social contract? I would expect a partner to disclose certain things that are non-obvious, but potentially relevant to a relationship/hookup. But maybe I’m wrong, or painfully backwards. I would like to know, though, if you believe we owe no disclosure at all, prior to an engagement?
If you are not into trans women, the onus is on you to disclose that, not on the trans woman. This is because there is a long history of violence against trans women who disclose it, so as a cis man you need to do your part.
If someone starts a conversation with you and then asks you on a date, you have no obligation to tell them anything.
However if a person driving a Ferrari wearing a 5k suit and a 50k watch asks someone on a date, that person may be under the impression that they are going on a date with a rich person and that they will not be going to McDonald's.
I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with taking your date to McDonald's. Plenty of people love McDonald's. But it is not the same thing and that date may not go well.
No. One of my friend is lesbian and active LGBTQ+ member (pro-bono doctor for the one who needs it in her community now, that's what i mean by active), and she knows i only date biologically born women, her friends knows it, never had any issue with them.
I’m a homosexual man. I’ve been called out by woke friends because I’ve said that generally gay men are not attracted to vaginas. I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.
I have to keep these opinions quiet now because of the negative social backlash I’ve gotten.
I can’t believe we live in times where we have people in the lgbt community who criticize homosexual men as being “genital fetishists” for being attracted to only men of the same sex.
OK, but I'm trans and I'd say your "woke" friends are talking nonsense and I hope that they will all actually wake up and realise what inane nonsense they're talking.
Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?
What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.
Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.
My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.
What kind of backlash do you want to see? If we're talking about arguing with idiots on twitter 24/7 then I don't think most people are prepared to do that.
And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?
I can guarantee that the backlash you got was less about your personal opinion, but for calling a relationship between a cis men and a trans man straight.
It's just a really shitty thing to do, and it's not even accurate. Attraction models do not solely work based on genitals, there's a lot of other characteristics that go into that.
I don't like what GP is saying either; it's sneaking some very judgmental opinions under the umbrella of "they want to force me to have sex with X", which is bad faith.
But you don't know how his argument with his friends went, so it's a little arrogant to tell him "they were probably mad at you because you said X".
The problem is with the generalization, which is present in the entire comment. I can't imagine the original conversation was significantly less abrasive.
Generalization is the problem. It is not accurate to say that all gay relationships require two penises.
It is also wrong to call a lesbian transphobic because she finds testicles unattractive and vaginas attractive. She is entitled to be honest about her sexuality.
I can't believe I need to say this, but there are trans women with vaginas and without testes.
Nobody says you're not allowed to have genital preferences. Chromosome preferences (with everything else equal) however seem legitimately transphobic to me. They're more a rejection of trans people than stemming from a preference in attraction.
You've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. (Indeed this comment is basically a parody of the genre.) That's against the purpose of HN, as anyone who's read the site guidelines should know. Where we draw the line is when an account is using HN primarily for that. Since your account has, I've banned it.
Saying that political thinking, of any stripe, is about power is pretty much a tautology. Similarly, equality and justice are about power relations, so there isn’t the contradiction you seem to believe there either.
Politics is the process of distributing power, and left wing politics aims to distribute power more widely, whereas right wing politics aims to concentrate it.
> Saying that political thinking, of any stripe, is about power is pretty much a tautology.
I never stated that (you did). I merely pointed out the fact that humans are largely hypocrites and duplicitous by nature. ALL interactions between humans is underpinned by power.
In the past, the power grab was explicit, nowadays said power is sought after behind the veneer of "civility" and "niceness".
It is basic human nature that I'm criticising. The left are just as bad as the right - but at least, with the right - you can see them coming, because they are mostly explicit (at least relative to the left).
The left are just as power hungry as the right, but are very well versed in this "we are nice, caring people" act - this is why I (a seeker of the truth - and nothing but the truth), am enjoying their dirty inner workings coming to light.
I don't think that quoting you as below substantially changes the meaning of what you wrote, and seems to very directly say that "the left" is "about power". As I said, this is tautological, but you present it as though it were a concealed truth.
> The left ... was never about equality and justice, it was always ... being about POWER
It feels more than a little reductive to attribute this behaviour to "the left" as a whole, when in fact it is a very small number of people. Perhaps you feel it is appropriate in your own context, but again this is a (common) presentation that purports to dismiss an entire "wing" of political thought, but actually just presents crude stereotypes.
Finally, I think the idea that the right present their attempts at power in a more naked fashion just isn't borne out by the evidence. Right wing policies are frequently presented as being dictated by either reason or common sense (often depending on the audience), and those of their opponents dismissed as unrealistic. This is the same kind of veneer you decry on the left, just a different colour - one that some find more appealing.
> I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.
You're conflating two very different things here: "I would not do this", and "If someone does this they're not really gay".
Attraction doesn't work like this. You're not attracted to chromosomes, you're attracted to femininity.
I could understand if you'd find some to most trans women not attractive, but a categorical exclusion seems transphobic to me.
There are trans women where you really can not tell, even if you're in an intimate relationship. At that point it moves from being a genuine preference to bigotry.
But I can see what you're actually asking: Is anyone going to yell at you because you're not dating them. The answer is no.
Unless you real question was not a question, but more of an implication that something that literally never happens must happen on a grand scale. Damn the woke mob forcing me to fuck trannies!
As a trans person I do not believe in a firm sex/gender distinction. The evidence clearly suggests gender identity (unlike race) has a major biological component.
The David Reimer case is not really "evidence" of anything. At best it's more like a hint or a suggestion. "Evidence" should mean there is a scientific theory and someone conducted an experiment to prove or disprove it and, hey, look at the evidence, it tells us something about the theory. The Reimer case was a complete destruction of a person's life, but it was not perpetrated as an experiment of any kind. Although if I remember correctly the perpetrator did claim he was testing a theory, the unethical and haphazard, disorganised way in which he went about it completely discredits any pretense to science.
So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".
Sure but go spend about 9 minutes around the kubernetes Twittersphere (a group with a large amount of white trans people) and you’ll see very quickly just how nasty it can be in its own way
I don't know if that's true anymore entirely, in a broader context.
(I am sure that trans people far more often have far worse experiences still)
I've heard stories, both online and from my sisters (who live in a pretty woke neighborhood and have a pretty woke circle of friends) about kids and teens who were "criticized" for being "too gender conforming" by "concerned" parents and friends alike. And stories about teens and grownups being ostracized and called names for politely rejecting trans or same sex people flirtations[1].
While I don't think these anecdotes are outright bullying, of course, it shows a certain direction, and it shows certain parental and peer group pressures building up in certain cohorts of society. All this can cause a certain amount of trauma and confusion[0], especially in kids and teens who haven't had a chance to explore and form their personality and identity on their own to a sufficient degree yet, when e.g. you as a kid get a sense that your parents are unhappy about you or when friends and peers call or at least insinuate you are "a bit of a" transphobe or homophobe because your brain is interested in the opposite sex and opposite sex genitalia.
[0] I am NOT saying all trans people are just confused. But I do think that some kids and younger teens are in fact just confused. Well, all kids and teens are constantly confused about everything, that's part of growing up, which is to a great part trial and error and trying to make sense of things and experiences. But this kind of confusion I am talking about relates to the old stories of "My parents wanted a boy and only got me, a girl, so I tried to be as much a boy as I could growing up trying to please them", but with a new slant to it, that might possibly involve hormone therapy at worst.
[1] One more slightly related anecdote, I am directly biased here: When I was like 17 or 18 (still in school, so, long ago), I was at a party and had a guy hit on me. I am a guy myself, but straight. Fine no worries, I told him nicely I am not interested. He (admittedly quite drunk) would then follow me around for some time, trying to convince me with zingers like "only a man knows how to suck another man's cock to perfection, I can show you, follow me!". The following days people would ask me why I "hate gays". What happened after that guy struck out with me is that he went around telling people I am a "gay hater". It took quite some effort to explain myself to people that I in fact do not hate gays and am not "grossed out" by gays, etc, just do not find them to be sexually attractive partners for me personally. I am sure some of my peers still thought I am a rampant homophobe afterwards. The more you defend yourself, the more guilty you look and all that. I am convinced this affected some of my friendships negatively and certainly messed with my mind[2]. I dread to imagine what it's like growing up now in some hyper-woke community, socialized by shit storms and parents and teachers who think math is racist and it's OK to punch "nazis".
[2] One openly bisexual girl from my grade remarked to me "Now you got a glimpse at what it is like for me a lot of the time". True that, only a glimpse, but bad enough for me already.
This. It's amazing what you find in the shadows, in the periphery of our culture, when you simply look. For a long time, we just refused to see what was right in front of us. There's a long tradition of transgenderism, and anthropologists have been writing about it for a while.
If social stigma is no longer an issue, why aren't we seeing transitioning across the entire adult population in equal proportion, and not primarily in children?
Probably because it’s much harder for adults to change their identities.
They have lives, responsibilities and dependants. Unlike children they can’t change their identities on a whim without repercussions, or negative impacts on people they care about.
I imagine that many people would rather ignore their “true” identity, than risk losing a spouse they care about, or disrupting their children’s futures.
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if adults with decades of experiencing living with that stigma would choose differently from young people without those decades of experience.
However there are things appearing such as clustering of cases (for want of a better word) amoung groups of friends. Times did a piece on it a few years back can't find it. Anyway that would suggest that prevalence stats might muddied somewhat.
Makes sense to me that people would be more comfortable coming out of their closets if they have friends who have already blazed the way.
There's also the little detail that people tend to cluster based on interests and personality traits in the first place, so I could see many ending up in the same circles even if none of them were out yet.
Friends tend to be similar -- you are the average of your 5 closest friends and that -- it is true that my ADHD diagnosis came about because a friend was diagnosed. We became a friend group in college because we were all outcasts in high school haha. Turns out for a few of us the root cause of the social outcasting was different brain wiring
A lot of the things they described had a "wait that's a symptom??" reaction. I have since suggested to a couple of friends to get checked for ADHD in a similar manner if they seem like they might be struggling with it. Worst case they're now in the mental healthcare system and have access to a therapist who can figure out what they're struggling with
When you find a good place you tell your mates about it
• People with shared experiences often cluster together in friend groups. (There are autistic friend groups, yet you'd get laughed out of the village for saying “Sally caught autism off her friends”.)
• People tend to come out around people it's safe to come out around.
• Seeing your friends coming out as [whatever] might make you properly consider whether you might also like guys, or Minecraft, or not being a woman.
And they're the same effects in anyone with a socially-frowned-upon interest. Think of the tabletop-RPG-playing “nerds” of yore.
Slightly more morbid take on that: Folks aren't killing themselves thinking they're broken or wrong as often as they would have before treatment was more known/widespread
> On a related point, what I’m uncertain about are the reasons for the increase in transgender kids in the west.
Broad acknowledgement (though there remains some sharp and often violent denial, so while better than the best the current situation isn’t at the limit of this) that gender identity can differ from socially ascribed gender and that such a difference is cause for realigning socially ascribed gender to gender identity means that people whose gender identity differs from their socially ascribed gender both are likely to have:
(1) a framework for understanding the source of their discomfort that would not exist absent the degree of acceptance, and
(2) a license to identify their understanding of the source of their discomfort to others that woud not exist without the degree of acceptance, and
(3) a hope of relief that would not exist without the social norm of realigning ascribed gender to match gender identity.
Naturally, this means that more people aren’t just going to keep quiet and attempt to fit into the box society has assigned them at whatever pain it takes, as would previously have been the case because there was no visible alternative.
> but it was also a time when society encouraged the view of everyone being unique and mysterious and don't put labels on things.
I'm glad, for your sake, that you felt like this about society, but I can assure you that at no time that any living person grew up was it the case; and, particularly, the labels put on those who failed to outwardly conform to gender norms tended to be quite harsh.
> I appreciate it’s a bit of a stretch but in some ways it does feel now in society there is a growing pressure to box people’s identities in more.
Depending on how much your surroundings insist on putting labels and associated limitations based on what is between your legs on you during growing up; the puberty experience of one half of society can be more awful. This may also get reflected in current numbers of transmen vs transwomen. A transition is an extreme decision taken based on an unbearable amount of such psychological pain.
Wondering what started the labeling too though, I’ve also been teached the value of individualism and fended off any label applied to me.. maybe it’s about realizing that most people out there want to apply labels, so a response to their rigid labels is coming up with unlimited new labels.
There was a recent podcast that goes into deep detail of the causes of this phenomenon. How immense social, political, and even legal pressure suppresses those critical to transgender theory.
I understand this might get downvoted and while I agree with the parent I also blame the contraceptive pill, dysregulation of hormone systems (various reasons), environmental toxins and the general malleability of people when it comes to sexuality at very young ages and for reasons we don’t understand. In my father’s generation the vast majority of men by the time they were 25 years old could grown thick beards now I’d say it’s a minority. We should be more curious about where these changes have come from.
There seemingly are some environmental factors out there diluting testosterone levels (certain plastic seem like a risk, for instance), but pubescent boys are not taking contraceptive. That's a weird specific bogeyman to call out.
Don't downplay the influence of interracial mixing in the Americas, where I will perhaps incorrectly assume you live. Large amounts of body hair are not a universal male trait. Europeans and Mediterraneans are much hairier than Native Americans. If your ancestors were mostly on one side of that, then sure, they were hairier. Many of my more distant ancestors had no body hair at all.
You may notice a tradeoff here, as the same sensitivity to DHT in your hair follicles that causes facial hair to proliferate also causes male pattern baldness, and Europeans go bald much more often.
Nope, what you’re doing is totally misrepresenting what I’ve said. I’m saying if there are more effeminate men you’ll have on average more people who are transgender. Myself I can barely grow a beard and have man boobs that I’m trying to get rid of and hardly any body hair (yet my Dad has a full beard and hairy chest, I’m asking why is there this big difference in just one generation) but hopefully I still count as a first class citizen!
Be aware that men are coming under the same pressure on appearance that women have had for decades.
I'm in my 50's, and can remember a time when there wasn't this awareness of men's bodies. While it was admirable to be fit, and women certainly appreciated muscles and a lack of a beer gut, it wasn't seen as that important. Men could be flabby and still seen as physically attractive.
Moobs are normal. Not being able to grow a thick beard is normal. Body hair, or any hair, or not, is normal (I could count the number of hairs on my chest in my 20's and never once considered this to be unusual or in any way affecting my masculinity). I have friends who were balding in their mid-20's and that was normal.
The difference between 30 years ago and now is not in men's bodies. It's in our attitudes to men's bodies.
Men (and women, as always) are being taught to hate our bodies because businesses can profit from that emotion. We are being told that no-one will love us unless we're taller, stronger, hairier. We're being fed images of "perfect" men as aspirational targets that we should aspire to match (and to get there we need to buy a bunch of products, obviously).
We need to learn that all bodies are different, and all are acceptable. It's normal to have flabby bits. If you have to hate something, don't hate your body, hate the people telling you that your body is not good enough.
No, actually testosterone levels have been dropping, sperm counts have been dropping, and American men are vastly more obese and overweight than they were even 50 years ago. That is a change.
Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.
I have never had my testosterone checked. I knew one guy who had has checked, and it was by a female doctor who put him on pills.
I've always wondered where that testosterone level database is?
Maybe they test in the military? I don't know, but would like to know.
I just found a study, but didn't dig into it:
"Travison and his team analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a long-term investigation of aging in about 1,700 Boston-area men. Data from the men were collected for three time intervals: 1987-1989, 1995-1997, and 2002-2004."
I am guessing it is mostly exercise and diet related.
People 50-70 years ago on average lived a very different life style in the US. The fear was that people weren’t getting enough food in the United States and the modern food industry was born and kind of over corrected and now obesity is the problem we are trying to solve.
On top of that I am shocked by how little the average American exercises, and I just don’t mean going to the gym and running, I mean basic, walking and doing something, anything physical.
It’s likely something environmental. Wild animals and even lab animals on strict diets are fatter now than they were in the 70s. A recent article discussed on HN proposed plastics and lithium contamination as two possible culprits.
Diet, sedentary jobs, lack of walkable cities, and (for better or worse) removal of shame culture. If you’ve spent any time in east Asia, you’ll notice that being overweight is strongly looked down upon by society at large. This shaming doesn’t exist in America.
As to shaming, I suspect causation goes the other direction, fat shaming has decreased because the number of fat people has increased.
Looking at the time frame, I don’t think the other things you mention fit either. They just haven’t changed that much since the 70s. And they don’t explain wild and lab animals also being fatter now.
I think you’re right. What about general propensity to obesity (as in genetically, or whatever) being more prevalent?
I know people that eat far worse than me, and do far less than me, but are still far skinnier than me.
>Just watch one of those old “Berlin in the 1920s” or “NYC in the 1970s” videos. You’ll quickly notice the almost complete lack of overweight people.
Being fat in the 80s is being skinny today. It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
> It's uncanny rewatching movies where the fat kid everyone picked on then would be on the average to skinny side today.
The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.
> Forget being transgendered the majority of the US would look barely human to anyone from the 80s.
Being an actual person from the 1980s (70s, in fact) I can say with some confidence that this is not true.
So obesity rates haven’t increased dramatically? If that’s your argument, I’m afraid you’re simply misinformed.
And no, there are plenty of videos of normal people that have nothing to do with “the fashions of the motion picture industry.” Millions of video clips are available right now online.
>The distribution of body types in film (in the 1980s and otherwise) represents the fashions of the motion picture industry, not (except coincidentally) broader society. The relation of that fashion to broader society is very much not consistent.
>>Whenever I bring that up I get someone popping out of the wood work saying that the 80s had heroin chik, unrealistic body expectations and on and on.
>>But the fattest state in 2000 (Mississippi) is skinnier than the skinniest state today (Colorado) [0]. And in 1990 the fattest state (again Mississippi) was half as fat as Colorado is today.
Dear god you can at least read the part of the post where I already answered that point.
Interestingly, the Forbes article you're referencing is partially based on this paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26126... which confirms a link between advertising and voluntary testosterone testing (entirely supporting my point). Men are being targeted by advertising that encourages them to think about their bodies differently.
While I do not disagree with anything you say, you also completely ignore that chemical pollution in our drinking water and food has been shown to cause changes in us.
Instead of completely ignoring their point and just telling them to accept themselves as they are, why should we not also be looking at our environment and asking if it is impacting us?
> Myself I can barely grow a beard and have man boobs that I’m trying to get rid of and hardly any body hair
Do you by chance sit around at a PC all day and get less exercise than you really should? I'm not sure I'd pin this on a biology thing just yet, there's so many things that could cause that
Losing weight and getting exercise gave me all sorts of "manly" traits. Turns out sitting around letting your muscles go to goo can mess with your systems a bunch. I have to shave too often now if anything haha
However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that
> However if we wanted to turn this into a hypothesis our first stumble is that not all gender dysphoric people are overweight, so it's probably not that
Like all the “why are people gay‽”-type nonsense, I also think it's not that – but people are complicated. There is not going to be a single factor for anything, so I don't think that's a valid reason to discard the hypothesis. “There is no real correlation in the first place” would be.
I do four hard weight focused workouts per week of 1.5h each so 6h of exercise. I probably need to address diet, but even so, lots of fresh home cooked meals in there. Maybe need to do more cardio but that tends to set off my SVT. Thanks for asking.
I'm not saying that you said it, I'm saying we can probably rule it out as a hypothesis because there's no correlation that I know of. Admittedly I have never looked into it so only know the people I know
It came up as a thought because you mentioned manboobs, which I have personal experience with hence the rest of my comment, but aside from that my words are my own
I don’t think you’re trying to discuss these things honestly. Are you really saying sexual characteristics aren’t controlled by hormones and these sexual characteristics don’t have any effect on how humans think about their gender?
We all start off genderless until testosterone washes over the male unborn foetus starting some of the gender characteristics like penises and brain changes. I think (it’s hard to tell as you’re so muddled in your thinking) you’re taking the bell curve of differences and how those differences manifest and attempting to make up concrete rules. Statistics doesn’t work that way.
If testosterone is the defining characteristic of being male, I have no idea why trans people born male need take hormones to reduce testosterone levels.
I really don’t get your argument at all. Testosterone and other androgens can increase masculine features. In a purely statistical sense gender and sexual apparatus are heavily correlated, but then I see gender as being more of a spectrum than a binary anyway. I think these things can be influenced by the environment a lot, if you believe you’re a bunch of chemical reactions happening in a biological system how can what we be anything apart from hormones, genetics and culture interacting to express a gender?
If you've never been fit enough to do something like a muscle up then you have no idea what having testosterone feels like.
I'm saying this as a former blob who got fit during covid by accident. You are your body and your body happens to have a mind, not the other way around.
It is equally dangerous to ignore environmental factors. We also know that male fertility is on a sharp decline but don't know why, this may be related and should be investigated.
And we know biphenol/phthalate chemicals mimic estrogen in the body and have been in just about everything for the last couple generations. At least it has to be considered. Hormones
On the other hand, there's no easy way to count the suicides who were closet-trans or just dysphoric without having the words for it. I've now known at least two adults with histories of depression who have transitioned and report being much happier.
Look for stories of people who are post-op or have gone a large portion of their life as trans. Sometimes they end up figuring out it's not for them. In most of those cases, it's not really that they were tricked or coerced, it's just that they get more help than people who do not identify as trans, but after they fully transition it disappears. In some rare cases a young person is pushed by someone.
You see the same thing with people who attempt suicide. People who attempt suicide have better life outcomes in general because they are given more help. Notably suicide is infectious and can trigger copycats.
This doesn't mean I think transexualism is fake -- there's a really interesting nature article where they use ML to identify the sex of brains separate from the body's apparent sex. But there definitely are incentives to ID as trans.
It follows directly from more acceptance of being transgender in society. It is not pleasant to have to sit with gender dysphoria for years - and then when you eventually do treat it, to have to spend thousands undoing changes to your body. Much better to treat it before it becomes a problem.
Anecdotally, in the startup where I worked there was one summer in 2017 when 3 white women (a significant percent of the women in the office at the time) all suddenly came out as non-binary and asked to be called they/them. If that's not some kind of freaky bandwagon thing going on then I don't know what is. It was like a competition to see who could get the most oppression points or something. Now I'm in a different company, with a lot of folks who are pretty clearly biologically female claiming the non-binary identity. Most confusing of all to me are the non-binary people who still self-describe as lesbians. Do they think gender is a thing or not?
I'm expecting a pretty harsh backlash against all this gender politics at some point. I'm not sure when or how it will manifest, but even some of my LGB friends privately tell me they think it's gone too far. For the most part, though, they are too afraid to say anything in public because they don't want to get attacked and possibly lose their jobs over it. It's clear that the gender radicals have wielded online bully tactics to gain full control over the range of acceptable discourse.
LGBT are often portrayed as some kind of monolithic entity in mainstream media, but the reality is that there's a lot of ideological tension in the mix between the cis and trans people. The only place I see these tensions spilling into the open is in the UK, where the LGB Alliance and Stonewall organizations are at odds. Wondering when the same will happen in the US.
Let me lay out the tension for those who may not be familiar. On the one side you have LGB people who mostly say their sexuality is immutable and based on attraction to specific sexes. "Baby, I was born this way" in the words of Lady Gaga. As an example, maybe you're a lesbian which means a woman who is attracted to other women; for most of history this was understood to mean a person of the female sex attracted to another person of the female sex. Meanwhile you have trans activists trying to stretch the meaning of words like "man" and "woman" to the point that they don't really mean anything anymore. Anybody can be a woman if that's how they identify today, which has the effect of broadening what it means to be a lesbian in a way that some lesbians may not agree with. The status quo today is that if you're a lesbian and not willing to include the "female penis" in your sexual orientation, you're at risk of being called a TERF/transphobe. This seems like an irreconcilable difference of views.
Despite what you might think if you've read this far, I do not hate trans people. I have sympathy for them and whatever lack of self-acceptance has led them into their current path. I make an effort to use preferred pronouns and be respectful to those I work with. But I'm also extremely concerned about what the collateral damage to LGB people will be when Republicans capitalize on woke extremism at the ballot box.
Interesting, i think the same is happening in France, a schism between cis and trans of the LGBTQ community.
For what it's worth, i think the gender fight in the media is not worth it for anybody. I dont see an end anytime soon, and i'd rather have gay marriage settle, add counseling in schools for kids who need it, and then maybe the LGBTQ+ community can start fighting this gender fight. Transversal fights are surely worth it (as Fred Hampton and the BPP proved), but i think this one we might want to avoid until we fix the rest.
I’m not sure why there would be a backlash. Why would anybody else care if I identify as male, female, or nonbinary? And frankly, why should I care about what those people think?
In Spain this thing is not quite of the same dimension (even though there's a lot of propaganda being pumped by leftist parties) but I already encountered some cases.
Also, I'm hearing more and more what It would be conservative opinions from the gay people I have more trust with. Which is quite unexpected for me.
> Anecdotally, in the startup where I worked there was one summer in 2017 when 3 white women (a significant percent of the women in the office at the time) all suddenly came out as non-binary and asked to be called they/them. If that's not some kind of freaky bandwagon thing going on then I don't know what is.
Have you considered that they may have been talking about it privately, and decided to come out at the same time to reduce the risk of being singled out for it? I don't see how the timing implies a "bandwagon". It seems obvious that doing that together is less scary than alone.
I think it is just about growing knowledge and acceptance on one side and growing need to demarcate yourself on the other. Everything is a spectrum, right?
I remember ~20 years ago, when I knew nothing of being trans-gender as a concept, and I bearly heard of some people being trans-sexuals.
These days I am fairly on board with the concept of gender as being a role in society you choose to play, that is often informed by your sex, but doesn't have to.
I suspect your last sentence is going to offend some people.
There are a lot of people who don’t feel strongly gendered, I’m one of them, and I suspect you are too from that sentence. Seeing gender as a social role makes sense to us.
However, there are other people who do feel strongly gendered, and for them gender isn’t just a social role but part of their core identity. I suspect at least half of cis folks and nearly all trans folks fit into that group.
It's not a new thing. In some parts of the world at least transgendered women
typically transitioned during their puberty, at 13 or 14. A great source for
this observation is 'Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian
Transgendered Prostitutes' by anthropologist Don Kulick, who followed a group of
trans sex workers in Salvador. Most of them transition from young boys to
teenage sex workers after a sexual encounter with an adult male. From personal
(though anecdotal) experience this is a common pattern in many cultures of the
so-called Global South, if we include in that South East Asia. Basically for
most of the 20th century, most transwomen who transitioned, transitioned in
their puberty and went straight into sex work.
What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in
life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had
children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more
general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not
considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen
in western countries were generally of this later kind.
Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the
number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing
to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition
does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does,
by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave
more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their
identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work
awaited them.
In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman
who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate
to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young
children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than
13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then
going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride.
I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans
women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part
of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they
had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in
Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage
about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim
darkness that was before.
I'm fairly open-minded to a critical take on trans issues, so I gave the linked podcast a listen, and I just want to report back that it's pretty straight-up conspiracy theory thinking. For example, the author of the book notes that it was only two weeks between the SCOTUS gay marriage decision and Caitlyn Jenner's cover on Vanity Fair - saying it was "obviously coordinated". There's talk of "putting pieces together", etc. If you're not conspiracy theory inclined, you can save yourself the trouble.
What you describe as "fascinating" is just a crazy conspiracy theory. The link you give also just throws homosexuality and bisexuality in there as well and while not exactly saying that all those things are "unhealthy for a society" basically alledges this in the first few sentences.
These guys interviewing him are right-wing Christians, who are the only people who would ever interview this guy, as he wouldn't get past the woke filter on just about any other podcast, so you'll just have to accept that they're going to have that point of view to begin with.
The guy has a lot of documentation for where this all came from out of nowhere. I bought the book and it's fascinating how much documentation the guy has on how the whole thing got astroturfed in no time. I don't know how old you are, but before the early 2000s, the only place that I ever encountered "transexuals" was in San Francisco sex clubs. Then all of a sudden, in the span of less than 10 years they're everywhere. How the heck did that all happen? Reading through his research is a really interesting deep dive into how to bootstrap a radical cultural change from scratch.
Using an obviously derogatory term for trans people really doesn't help your point at all. It hints to the possibility that you have a personal belief that sees trans people as unnatural and because of that belief it's easier for you to believe in an outlandish conspiracy theory than simply accepting that the reason for an increase in visible trans people is acceptance by society.
Edit for context since OP has edited his comment without acknowledging it: Where it now says ""transsexuals"" it said "trannies" before.
Not a native speaker here. How come it's supposed to be a derogatory term? I mean, you would say "granny" because "grandmother" is too long. So saying "tranny" instead of "transsexual" makes sense, it even has more syllables.
There's no consistent grammatical rule. Certain words and phrases are obvious warning signs about the speaker, but you have to be somewhat immersed in the culture to notice. Usually the literal meaning of the word / phrase really is an innocent neutral descriptor.
No one ever starts a sentence with "The Jews control" and ends it with "the home owners association on our block and have done a phenomenal job managing it."
No one ever says "The Japs" followed by "have really contributed to our culture in the form of anime".
No one ever says "that n***" followed by "is an inspiration to us all and we are proud to have him in our community."
No one ever uses the word "tranny" followed by something well thought out and respectful of transexual people.
None of these words/phrases have an offensive dictionary meaning, but they are all rightfully associated with offensive speech.
Both are diminutives. The thing with diminutives is that they can show both affection and disrespect.
It's usually the first if referring to familiar people and the second if referring to strangers. Even exactly the same word can cut both ways. "Dear" is affectionate towards family members, calling a coworker "dear" is condescending.
Also, as other posters have said, rule-based logic can only get you so far. It's all in the context.
You're right, I don't take the transexual movement seriously. I edited my language as that's the word they called themselves back in the sex club days and I wouldn't want to hurt someone. In fact, their was a nightclub where you could meet Transexuals in the late 1990s in San Francisco called "Trannyshack" that was pretty obscure back then, but is now hugely famous now that the "transexual" movement has grown into an industry. "Transexuals" are just as big of victims of all this as everyone else and why cause them more trauma by calling them something that offends them. I would call someone walking around in a full body fury costume by whatever they're comfortable with too.
There are plenty of popular rap songs that use what Americans call 'the n-word' quite liberally as an in-group identifier. Use that word in polite conversation and you get labelled, quite rightly, a bigot.
A gay man might jokingly call himself a poof (or one of his straight close friends might in the same vein based on a mutual understanding), but again, you don't use such words in a polite, neutral setting without coming across as a very nasty person.
Some women are trying to reappropriate the word 'slut' from its negative connotations (cf. The Ethical Slut, Easton and Hardy, 2009) and some use it proudly, but again, anyone calling any woman who has an active sex live with more than one lover a slut will be met with derision.
Have you considered that oppression of trans people causes them to hide and the more widespread acceptance of other LGB identities causes trans people to let themselves be more visible in everyday life? Just because you didn't see them before doesn't mean they weren't there.
> I don't know how old you are, but before the early 2000s, the only place that I ever encountered "transexuals" was in San Francisco sex clubs.
The way I remember the pre-2000s there was definitely mention of trans people in popular culture. The big difference is being trans was being treated as the punchline, or otherwise derogatory. (The first example that comes to mind is Tone-Lōc's 'Funky Cold Medina', and also that Aerosmith song https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/desmond-child)
Rofl... Yes - only in San Francisco... Yeah you're obviously either very uneducated or willfully ignorant about global history and culture. In countries and times that weren't dominated by the christian ideas of moral oppression - that lead to criminalization or at a minimum being outcast because of a social stigma and fear of violence of everyone not straight - LGBT were and are a visible part of society - not especially visible because nobody cared about making them especially visible because it was normal and accepted. Now after the first wins against oppression due to activism the right produces this fear and panic of the 'wokeness' to again demonize these people and 'liberals'. It's the new fear of socialists basically - a useful buggyman for reactionaries and religious fundamentalists. I wouldn't even know what woke meant wouldn't I be on social media and being confronted by all this alt-right nonsense troll-posts where they blow up a noname 'dumb woke' liberal strawman-post on a daily basis.
This is fairly obvious if you read fashion magazines. It is presented constantly in the same way that bell-bottoms or skateboarding shoes used to be. Which doesn’t mean that it’s all made up, but it does certainly appear to be amplified by the media.
What's the evidence it's sudden? Everyone cites a single study by Lisa Littman. She didn't ask any trans children. Just their parents. And she selected for parents who didn't accept their children coming out as trans. Children don't tell their parents everything. And parents don't hear things they don't want to sometimes.
Imagine you're afraid to do something. Someone else does it. Nothing too bad happens. Wouldn't it encourage you?
Let me help,
Someone gets into a new school, he finds someone relatable that someone introduces him to a group of people who faces the same or similar issues like he does.
They grow up and when financially independent go through surgeries, hormone therapy etc. and come out as LGBTQ.
Should this be questionable?
If yes then, How do the majority of kids who are interested in programming/computers become software engineers? should be too.
> I think it's fascinating to think that our entire culture could just be made up by a bunch of mischievous billionaires fucking with us.
Not "could" but "is".
That's how media works, if all media agree to say something wrong during some period of time, that will become true. (Example : Aztrazeneca vaccines, masks, ...). And most media belongs to billionaires. The only thing is that they don't belong to the same billionaires and thus don't most of the time push in the same direction which creates some diversity
I'm not saying this is the case here, but media and propaganda are very close things
Transgendered behavior has been recorded for quite some time. Advertising as a trillion dollar business is relatively new. How about applying Occams Razor? The simpler explanation of transgenderism is that the confluence of nature and nurture is as complex as all other biological processes we know about and leads to all sorts of expressions of gender self identification. I know it’s tempting to succumb to the notion that the universe is so orderly that aberrations must be explained by some overarching conspiracy (or godlike behavior), but that does fly in the face of observed behavior.
Every trans person I know knew this about themselves as a young child. They were not "influenced." Many of them had no idea that being trans was possible and thought they were gay, if they knew what that was.
Perhaps it's not that they've been influenced into becoming trans, but that more people than we knew were already trans, but didn't have the confidence to show it because society was so unaccepting?
I think you've got cause and effect mixed up here.
I don't think so man, I think you're being influenced. Paying people to be gay just doesn't make sense. I'm not going seriously argue this with you, you need help.
At no point did they say anyone was being paid to be gay. Only you stated that, twice. They are saying people can be influenced. Take LGBT representation in contemporary media. A casual interpretation would be that nearly 1 out of 4 people are gay, lesbian, etc., since nearly every popular TV show has one or more of these characters. However, when you look at the actual numbers, they tell a much different story.
This is similar to what happened with the 2020 protests around George Floyd. Many people thought, and many still do, that unarmed black men were being hunted by police. Surely hundreds or even thousands a year were being murdered by the police, yet according to the WaPo database of police shootings only 13 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Why do people believe in the myth of endemic police killings? Because the media continues to push that narrative.
Read this USAToday “fact-check” trying to debunk the 13 unarmed black men statistic by saying things like the WaPo database is incomplete and may not show the whole picture, or conflating the number of unarmed black men shot with the percentage of total black men shot, etc. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fac...
Did you just use the sentence “only 13 unarmed black men were shot by police”? That’s still outrageous. For context in the same year the UK police had 13 occasions total where officers fired their weapons, resulting in 3 fatalities. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shoo...)
I said “only” in relation to the myth that hundreds of unarmed black men were being shot by the police. I’m not saying 13 is good, but it’s objectively better than more than 13. There was a poll some months ago, which I can’t find, that asked people with different political beliefs to estimate how many unarmed black men were killed by police in the previous year and the liberal and progressive left had outrageous numbers. These are the same people watching the mainstream media constantly pushing the narrative that it’s open season on black men.
Yes the UK police might be better than the US police. Without knowing how many unarmed men of other ethnicities suffered the same fate (and the frequency of the respective ethnicities), it's a meaningless number. It could be "only 13 unarmed black men" because it isn't unusual for the US police to shoot unarmed men.
On second thoughts, I guess you're right: it doesn't make sense to use the quantifier "only 13" without knowing all the other numbers. This might be trivializing the matter.
Being gay, or bisexual has always been with us, and the author acknowledges that, but the transgender thing as it exists today is what the author is claiming is made up.
Cultures through history had genders we would call transgender.[1]
Your source's references include "How The Jews Of Weimar Germany Ensured The Rise Of National Socialism" and "Plandemic Documentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19".
The "Myth of the 20th Century" is a podcast that is banned on all podcast services because they will interview people on extremely controversial topics. If you play the game of "this person believes X and a crazy person also believes X, therefore they're crazy," then you shouldn't listen to this podcast and just go about your life as you normally would. This is only if you want to deeply question your reality, and possibly ruin your life by becoming aware of things that go against the mainstream.
The vagrant around the corner from me is banned from all stores in the area for his controversial refusal to abide by "no shirt, no shoes, no service". He's extremely not mainstream. You should only listen to him if you want to deeply question your reality and possibly ruin your life by becoming aware of the things that go against the mainstream narrative pushed by the drugstore-industrial complex. Showering every day is a myth pushed by the trillion dollars advertising industry. I consider being banned from places a sign of credibility, and refuse to believe the official story that we were banned for "smelling like shit".
But you at least have to admit that it seriously undercuts the credibility of that site if they engage in every conspiracy theory out there. It's very hard not to simply dismiss somebody else's arguments if they believe that the Holocaust and Covid are just made up. Human attention is limited.
Why would you want to dismiss someone's research because you disagree with one of their premises? Do you automatically assume they've fudged their findings to fit? Because that sounds like source picking as well.
Ockham's razor would suggest that if somebody finds documentaries about flu vaccines containing coronaviruses and a blog post highlighting the Jewishness of all the people it considers guilty of "debasing" Weimar Germany compelling, they are relatively unlikely to have spotted truths everyone else missed involving transgenderism, Davos billionaires and 14th century Jewish practices because of greatness of medical knowledge or lack of bias...
I haven't read the links you posted but from the title it doesn't sound like either of them imply the holocaust or COVID were made up. IMO GP's comment applies doubly here, you're just conditioned to have a kneejerk reaction over any non-mainstream opinion.
The Plandemic "documentary" nonsense alleges that there is a decades-long conspiracy involving Big Pharma, the CDC, Google, climate scientists, John Oliver, and Bill Gates to cause the pandemic in order to benefit from the vaccines. They go on to make other specific allegations. Here's a sample.
1. That Italy's COVID-19 epidemic is linked to influenza vaccines and the presence of coronaviruses in dogs.
2. That SARS-CoV-2 was created "between the North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the Wuhan laboratory.
3. That flu vaccines increase the chance of contracting COVID-19 by 36%.
4. That despite the goal of preventing coronaviruses, flu vaccines contain coronaviruses.
5. That "Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You're getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions."
And more.
Are you conditioned to having a kneejerk reaction when people call out bullshit? Automatically posting a dismissive comment without bothering to read the provided sources sounds like a kneejerk reaction to me.
The United States has legal slavery today (prison labor), and it's hard to see the push to keep schools open during the pandemic as anything other than sacrificing children on the altar of the market.
What do you reckon is the reason for the increase in gay kids in the west after the decriminalization of homosexuality in most western countries? Hint: it's the decriminalization and social acceptance allowing gay people to come out of the closet rather than having to pretend they're straight for fear of consequences.
The kids aren't being transed. I know there are several mostly British authors having extremely loud voices spreading FUD about "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's not even a thing. It's based on a paper that used answers from parents about trans kids. Follow-up research has demonstrated that to the kids it was anything but rapid. You might as well invent a phenomenon of "rapid onset body size" to explain why grandparents will insist "how can you already be so big, it feels like you were a tiny baby only such a short while ago".
You're overthinking this, but to ease your mind: people aren't undergoing HRT and surgery because all the cool kids are doing it. They might experiment with neopronouns and gender identity labels for a bit but there's literally no demonstrable harm in that.
Also if you think identity politics is a new thing: US politicians literally put God on the dollar bills to appeal to Christian conservatives (prior to that the national motto was always "E pluribus unum", not "In God we trust"). We just don't tend to think of things as identity politics when we take the identity for granted.
EDIT: That you see more trans people is a good thing actually. Visibility is the result of social acceptance. And social acceptance is the biggest contributor to reducing suicidality and improving quality of life. Trans people haven't been killing themselves because they're trans, they've been killing themselves because everyone kept telling them they're not. You can't trans a kid any more than you can make them gay.
It's the proper way to treat depression caused by social rejection, which is as I understand it the bulk of the motivation for suicide among trans people.
Your argument would be valid if I didn't qualify the context. I wasn't talking about depression and at no point did I indicate that I was.
Also the proper way to treat depression is to identify the underlying cause, which can be simply rooted in brain chemistry but can also be environmental.
If you're suicidal because your family and social circles reject you for who you are and society in general treats you unfavorably and you are constantly harassed or fetishized by strangers, the problem isn't your brain chemistry.
The question isn't whether or not to treat gender dysphoria as a mental disorder (though in part, of course that is a question too, though one that seems to have been settled) but whether social rejection and harassment are harmful or helpful for trans people. And I'm saying evidence shows it's incredibly harmful and drastically increases suicidality and decreases quality of life (because otherwise social acceptance wouldn't measurably have the opposite effect).
If your concern is health (and mental health) outcomes, not making sure people stick to the gender and presentation they grew up with, the best course of action for trans people seems to be to accept them for who they say they are and make them feel welcome and valid.
There are of course other arguments against accepting trans people but those can be disproven separately and there's no reason to shift the goal posts if we're just talking about suicidality and quality of life.
PS: Of course trans people can also be depressed independently of their transness and in that case they will need to be treated for depression as well. But the specific suicidality rate that is talked about with regard to trans people seems to be evidently linked to their social acceptance, which tracks with other groups. Alan Turing was literally driven to suicide because he was sentenced to chemical castration for not being able to deny being gay.
I'm pretty sure this is the exact opposite of reality though - there have been clinics for trans children in the UK for decades, and one of the main things affecting the availability of treatment is that the number of cases referred to them skyrocketed recently.
No, the parent said that the numbers of trans people have increased. That's not true. The numbers of trans people able to get treatment is the thing that increased. We went from not counting, to counting. So we didn't increase the number of trans people, we just started counting the trans people that always existed.
I'm pretty sure that it's clear that he meant diagnosed cases. Otherwise the text doesn't make sense. You don't ask "Could the reason for more people with X be more people with X?".
That book relies on the concept of ROGD, which is something that doesn't exist. Anybody pushing ROGD, or supporting other people who push ROGD, is anti-science and anti-fact.
You should consider why you feel comfortable pushing something that's obviously bollocks, just because it supports your anti-trans activism.
> Anybody pushing ROGD, or supporting other people who push ROGD, is anti-science and anti-fact.
This is an interesting case [2]. The concept of ROGD was introduced in an article in a scientific journal [1], by an assistant professor in Brown University. Then there was a strong reaction from people from outside the scientific community (blogosphere, activists). Later, there's been scientific debate back and forth [2]. But it is interesting, if people from outside the scientific community can win the public debate and get to decide what is science and what is not.
There have also been strong reactions against ROGD within the scientific community [1]. Like much science, the study has its own share of methodological flaws and biases that should make anyone sensible person the results of the study with skepticism
My reply is the only one which links to a publication which attempts to directly answer OP's question and includes both praise and criticism of said publication.
I think therefore that anyone can judge for themselves whether said publication is "anti-science" or "anti-fact" and your help is not required. I feel perfectly comfortable allowing people to think for themselves, especially since this publication is not obviously bollocks: it was awarded both the Economist and Times book of the year prizes.
Finally, based on what I've seen from the scientific community around politicised topics like this one, any link (especially from US-affiliated organisations) should be by default open to questioning and not unassailable proof. Although given that it's psychology it should probably just be outright ignored for a couple of decades until they manage to form a coherent opinion.
Totally off topic, and I have no strong opinion on the whole transgender and ROGD thing (i learned that acronym from your comment), but:
> anti-science and anti-fact
This combination of words doesn't make sense to me. Science constantly discovers new "facts" that invalidate old "facts". I understand stuff like "the current scientific consensus", but I don't understand how you can call people who question the current scientific consensus on something "anti-fact". Especially in the context of psychology and psychiatry, where lately the facts have been superseding themselves rather rapidly.
Tldr, if you're pro science, shouldn't you by definition be ever so mildly sceptical of facts?
EDIT: note, I'm not trying to attack you personally nor weasel in some alt right talking point. I've seen words like "anti-fact" used a lot lately, I think I understand where it comes from, especially in the context of American hyper-polarized politics. I guess i wrote.my comment hoping to contribute to slightly more constructive language, at least from the sane side of the aisle.
That's not how constructive language is done. You don't improve "hyper-polarized politics" by saying one pole represents sanity and the other the opposite.
I guess, on second thought, there's a place for saying, quietly, among yourselves, "I agree that the opposition is crazy, but it's probably going to be more productive if we engage them like rational people." But that's not a useful public stance.
The question would be, how many people who declare up front that they're transgender are actually medically diagnosed with such condition and how many just jumped on the bandwagon of what is fancy on the internet right now?
Disclaimer - personally, I'm sceptical about the concept and scientific grounds behind transgenderism and I expect my comment to be downvoted.
Preempting downvotes, because you know your comment is not acceptable to the majority, feels like a very cynical device designed to limit that behaviour.
I'd be cautious about referring to what is acceptable to the "majority" and claiming that the concept receives a broad support, as in reality it seems that it's quite the opposite.
one theory is that this is a product of the capital vs labor struggle...as madison wrote, "divide et impera" is how the elite can rule america...wokeness might be considered a divide et impera tactic to turn labor factions against each other, thus empowering elites, i.e., Capital
I think "wokeness" comes not so much from "safetyism" but from a generation who were educated to be critical of their own society. They were raised and educated by ex-hippies, who had successfully critiqued the post-war US. I think this was a pedagogical crime (raising children to be critical). Every generation is supposed to critique its predecessor but teaching critique to children from a young age robbed them of the opportunity to level a critique from their own, unique perspective.
This is why "wokeness" strikes so many as performative: it's desperately trying to recreate the greatest hits of the 20th century protest movements. An example of this is schools having scheduled protests (say, for gun control). Ironically, in this situation, the only genuine protest is to refuse to attend the protest.
This was not my early education experience in an American public school. The history taught to elementary school students circa 2000 was whitewashed to the point of almost being propaganda for American exceptionalism. Yes, later on in my education career I took classes that emphasized critical thinking and deconstructing ideas and texts, and these had a big impact on my worldview. But as a someone on the younger end of the millennial generation, I think collectively we became critical of our society due to the back to back travesties of the Iraq War and the financial crisis (as cliche as that sounds). For me, I have been completely disillusioned to the idea that social progress is inevitable, so I believe it’s well worth learning how to call out regressive ideas and the asymmetrical power structures that exist in our society.
Yes I believe some people take this way too far (and the media capitalizes on this by cherry picking the most egregious examples and using those as a straw man to represent all of left wing thinking), but on the other hand I don’t think we should accept the status quo. On Hackernews, we usually strive to look for better ways to solve problems or to solve problems people didn’t even know they had, so I don’t see why we should accept the organization of society as either a global maximum or as static and immutable. It’s something that should be hacked and improved upon like anything else. As you can tell, my experiences have culminated in my adoption of a liberal worldview (more moderate on a few ideas, radical on a handful) but I can see how different life experiences could lead someone to adopt a different ideology. My biggest frustration currently is the status quo bias of mainstream American thought where we just ignore the existence of inconvenient problems. If you think less government activity will solve a problem, I’m glad to hear you out as long as your argument is in good faith.
> This is why "wokeness" strikes so many as performative
I think part of the reason is many of the talking points I would call "ominous". Take for example the Civil Rights movement or Women's Suffrage. Looking back at them, they had clear goals and clear talking points, you could read their message and see where they were trying to go, what their ultimate goal was.
Wokeness on the other hand does not seem to have the same goals. Take the classic "ending systemic racism" goal. Ok fine, lets end systemic racism, how do we start? Where can we find it? On you see, if you don't know what systemic racism is then you have no hope of solving it. Oh you see, you're white so systemic racism is in you, so it's not a problem that you can solve.
I would say that unlike previous movements, the goal of Wokeness isn't to solve a problem in society, it's a "movement" you join for likes on Instagram, comments on Facebook, and upvotes on Reddit.
It's funny, because when it came to women's suffrage and the later waves of feminism, people would write the exact same thing you did when referring to the patriarchy - willfully misunderstanding, or not even bothering to understand what was being talked about, to ridicule it as "too nebulous" to deal with, or some sort of conspiracy that people were deliberately participating to, in an attempt to dismiss it out of hand as an "attack" - and someone commented as much in this same thread.
I agree that teaching kids to be critical of one sliver of reality, while uncritically absorbing anything from another sliver is a pedagogical crime. What we ought to be teaching is critical thinking.
Kids need to be socialized in the ideas and values that make their civilization successful. Critical thinking is one piece of that, but we focus too much on it in elite environs. We also need to teach kids to tend to the edifice of civilization we’ve built, not just how to tear pieces of it down.
What does it mean for a civilization to be “successful”? The vast majority of our progress has been made off of exploration, slavery and war. The latter fueling the entire tech industry starting with the code cracking computers of WWII and the nuclear holocaust survivable internet. Who is working the mines for the materials in our iPhones, and under what conditions?
It’s worthwhile to teach children the true history of progress and ask if perhaps there isn’t a better way.
It’s almost as if history and humanity is messy, and doesn’t fit into a tidy little box. There has never been a system that was built from the ground up on flawless, utopian principles. The success of our system can be argued in a myriad ways; likewise the failures. I want my kids to understand the greatness of our civilization while doing their part to correct it’s shortcomings. It’s one of my goals, and I hope they take up the mantle.
> We also need to teach kids to tend to the edifice of civilization we’ve built
The truth of that depends entirely on whether that civilization's "success" is something that either can or should be sustained, and that's the assumption that most "woke" people challenge. Very few seek to tear down any part of it without having carefully considered whether it really contributes to long term success.
I agree with your broad outline, but have a very minor quibble with one word: "hippies". I think that, even in the 60s, there was a bit of a distinction to be made between the "hippies" and the "radicals" -- not that there wasn't overlap. My impression is that the "hippies" were less militantly political, borrowed more (superficially) from Eastern religion, were more relaxed, and came in back-to-the-land varieties. They would have scored high on "agreeableness". Their music would have featured strumming guitars.
Whereas the radicals were more academic, more willing to engage in violence, with a variety of aesthetics that, overall, leaned more towards Black Panther berets (the real Panthers, not the superhero), than toward faux-Hindu paraphernalia. They would very much not have scored high on agreeableness. Their music then would have been funk, in the 90s would have been rap, and now is pop which features, not the relaxed strumming of a guitar, but a marching 4/4 (maybe even a snare).
And, in my imagination, the typical "person on the Right" had a tendency to conflate the two.
If you were watching Scooby-Doo, you'd suspect that Scooby and Shaggy were hippies, Velma was a radical, Fred was a little "Right", and Daphne was just a normcore moderate.
Anyway, the split is still with us today. "Mindfulness" and pop-yoga come from the hippies. Ski-/granola-bro is descended from the hippies. #vanlife borrows a ton from them too, including the VW vans (when they can get them). Permaculture comes from the back-to-the-land branches, and, though mostly "liberal", has even now grown its own somewhat "conservative" branches. And you sense a lot of residual "hippyness" throughout California.
Whereas "woke" stuff -- well, we've been talking about it nonstop for the past five years, so I probably don't need to describe it more. Point is, it's not like the hippy-descended stuff of the last paragraph. It's less Stuart Brand, more Focault and Fanon.
And you know -- I said that "red-state" people couldn't distinguish them. But probably low-tier "blue-state" people can't either. Which might explain some of what's going on.
You may have a point. I’ve always seen it as a desperate attempt to be on the right side of history, but there are so few causes of importance left. Of course, with post-modernism and linguistic relativity added to the mix.
Pfft "wokeness" is just the latest label for people who have an investment in the status quo to complain about. Before that it was "political correctness", "hipsters", "hippies", etc. Not saying that there aren't annoying "woke" people (just like in any cohort of 22 yr old grad students there are gonna be some annoying ones who take themselves too seriously), but the pearl clutching is getting ridiculous here. The world isn't black and white, "woke" culture has some good points, for sure includes some amount of "taking it too far", but ultimately is, on the whole, made up of humans who you probably relate to on a personal level more than you don't.
I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender.
Just like we don't have Asianas and Asianos, and we can simply say Asians. It makes less sense to add an s to Latin because Latins refers to something completely different already.
Language is constantly changing. As long as references aren't derogatory and have linguistic purpose (either due to being academically useful to be precise, concise or general, or because they're useful in colloquial speak and new words create a sense of identity), I don't see the big issue. We obviously speak very differently from 50, 100 or 200 years ago, and I'm glad for it for the most part. Not sure why we're so resistant to this particular change.
Removing acronyms because they're racist is obviously silly. But simplifying language is not. Instead of calling the Arts Department 'VAPA' (after Visual and Performing Arts) it's now simply called the 'Arts Department'. That means it should be more easily understood, and more accessible by students or parents who're not privy to navigating school systems to get their kids the best outcomes. We consistently see that certain parents are able to get their kids in the right programs, while other parents are not, and some of that relates to cultural capital which has been well studied. Acronyms probably play an extremely minor role in this cultural capital, but I don't see it as a bad move per se. (calling it racist, is)
Those were two of the key examples the article started with to explain how bad things have gotten, before jumping in how we got to this ostensibly miserable place.
There's some good stuff in the article - particularly around some hypocritical corporate wokeness in the 2nd half of the article - but mostly it comes across as very partisan, completely unwilling to assess the other sides' argument in good faith, and written to convince you of a particular viewpoint. Doesn't seem to fit into what I'm used to from the Economist.
>I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender.
Masculine plural is used as gender neutral for Spanish. Latinos already refers to both genders.
Even fringe social groups that disagree with using the masculine for neutral terms (which are already a huge minority, since grammatical gender is everywhere in Spanish and it doesn't imply anything -a chair is female and a wall is make) Ignore the x. They would use the e for neutral (latine), an @ symbol in writing, or just use the long form (Latinos y Latinas).
The x is an American invention that is unknown in the culture it tries to adapt and also not pronounceable in that language.
> The x is an American invention that is unknown in the culture it tries to adapt
It’s (both “Latinx” and the “-x” to reject the gender binary in Spanish more generally), AFAIK, a Hispanic LGBTQ culture invention, which while originating in the USA, is also used elsewhere (the “-x” ending as an emphatic rejection of the gender binary, not the specific term “Latinx”.) Though its a small minority that use it even in that community.
Its adoption as a generic term for the Hispanic community by large institutions, though, is completely out of line with the community preference.
We who? -e and -@ are both used, sure, but similar studies snd survey to those showing that -x is rarely used in the community show those are even more rare.
Not sure about the culture of Americans with Hispanic heritage, but in actual Spanish countries, at least the ones I have experience with, @ is common (and a bit old), e is somewhat common and x is pretty much unheard of.
English had the word “Latin” which was gender-nonspecific, and meant exactly what Latinx is used for.
It fell out of favor, being replaced with Latino/Latina (used with the same gender rules as in Spanish) specifically because it respected the language and cultured of the people to whom the label was applied.
Recently, some have adopted Latinx in place of Latino as the neutral in semantic gender form (specifically in the Hispanic LGBTQ community, it is one of several forms that small minorities have adopted in part to express identities which specifically reject the gender binary [others include latine and latin@.) While the various forms used for emphatic rejection of the binary do have some uses, the breadth of the use to which many major – mostly institutions have adopted Latinx as a general term for the Hispanic community outside of an LGBTQ context is unwarranted, especially given that it is (1) unnecessarily unpronounceable, (2) awkward in English and Spanish, and most importantly (3) almost entirely rejected by the target community, where the overwhelming majority of the tiny minority even aware of the term reject it, preferring Hispanic (mostly) or Latino (less preferred than Hispanic, but vastly preferred to Latinx) as the generic term, if one must be used.
Latin doesn’t quite mean the same thing as Latino. The former also includes people from Latin Europe; so, for example, a French person is “Latin” but not “Latino”.
>I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender.
I see two issues in Spanish, one in English, and two in general.
The only viable way to read this word in Spanish would be /latinks/, and it's against the language's phonotactics. So if you must replace the gender mark with something else, you'd need to use a vowel (cue to "Latines").
It is not necessary though, simply because grammatical gender is not social gender. There are a thousand ways to conceal the gender of someone in Spanish - refer to "la persona" (always feminine, no matter if you're referring to a man), plurify (the plural will take the masculine for mixed groups), so goes on. Or even, you know, use the default grammatical masculine, like the RAE recommends? Granted the RAE is a bunch of pedants but they're spot on in this case.
In English it sounds even more spurious. There's "Latin" already, why the hell are you adding a gender mark that doesn't exist in the language and then replacing it with yet another?
While this, one of the general issues I see is that we Latin Americans don't really identify ourselves by this sort of catch-all label. We have a bunch of local identities - using an equivalent for "the other side", calling us "Latins" (with -o, -a, -x or whatever) is like talking about the ethnic Germanic culture of Canada, Suriname, Jamaica, USA and Belize, as if they had a lot to do with each other.
The other issue I see is related to the above: who are the people using that word to identify themselves? Dunno about you, but I think they're just a bunch of Americans conflating heritage with identity. Every time I see someone claiming to be "latino" on the internet, I'm almost tempted to say "you are not one of us, stop lying" because of that. It's the same deal as the "Italians" from New York, or the "Irish" from who cares.
> It is not necessary though, simply because grammatical gender is not social gender. There are a thousand ways to conceal the gender of someone in Spanish - refer to "la persona" (always feminine, no matter if you're referring to a man), plurify (the plural will take the masculine for mixed groups), so goes on. Or even, you know, use the default grammatical masculine, like the RAE recommends? Granted the RAE is a bunch of pedants but they're spot on in this case.
I'm wondering, is it the case in Spanish as well that interrogative, negative, and indefinite personal pronouns are grammatically masculine? In those cases you have no other choice in Slavic languages, for example.
Spanish blurs the line between non-personal pronouns and determiners, so two things might happen: either the word "defaults" to the masculine, or it's actually being used as a determiner, with the noun omitted - then it gets the gender of the omitted noun. A bunch of them are also genderless, such as "quién" [who], "cual" [which], etc.
What I mostly meant was that if the verb distinguishes gender (in Slavic languages, this is a feature of the past tense), then these pronouns impart the masculine on the verb. But now that I look at Spanish verb tenses, it's apparently not the case that the past participle in the predicate expresses the gender of the clause subject. If there's a different situation where this could arise, nothing readily comes to my mind.
The past participle is gendered in Spanish. And it works the way I described, even with "genderless" interrogative pronouns - you'll default to the masculine, unless some omitted word "forces" the feminine. Like this:
1) Cual fue dicho? // which [one] was said.MASC
2) Cual fue dicha? // which [one] was said.FEM
3) Que fue dicho? // what was said.MASC
"Dicho/a": past participle of "decir", "to say".
On the first two examples, there are implicit masculine and feminine words respectively, like, dunno... "vocablo" and "palabra" (both are "word".) The third example however doesn't have anything like this, so it's defaulting to the masculine.
In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]?
Ah, apparently I missed (rather embarassingly) that some other auxiliary verbs don't use the participle in the same way that "haber" does.
> In Slavic languages, would something like (2) be allowed for the past tense? That is: an implicit word, "forcing" the past tense to go to the feminine [or neuter]?
No, (2) does not make sense there. The grammatical agreement is between the subject and the predicate (by definition it can't be an agreement with words that aren't even present in the sentence in the first place), and the "who" is masculine here. If I say in Czech, for example, to paraphrase it in English, "Who broke the window?", it's actually "Who broke.MASC the window?" regardless of the answer. I thought this was still preserved in Spanish because as far as I understand it, very much the same thing was possible in Latin as it is in Slavic languages but apparently Spanish ditched this at some point in the past. Interesting.
> I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender.
The problem I see is that Latinos massively overwhelming don't use "Latinx" for themselves. 76% of adult Latinos say they have never even heard of the term "Latinx" [1]. 20% have heard of it but do not use it. Only 3% use it.
Even among younger Latinos, 18-29, less than 50% have heard of it and only 7% use it.
Among the minority of Latinos who are aware of the term only 10% say it is the preferred term. 50% say the preferred term is Hispanic and 31% say Latino is the preferred term.
It seems pretty arrogant to call a group by a word that most people in the group don't even recognize and most that do recognize it do not consider it the correct word for them.
It's more complicated than that when you get to later antiquity and vastly larger geographic scale, but I'm not quite sure how this matters for the early native tribes in Latium.
I doubt they identified as a racial category invented centuries later. They probably thought of themselves as Romans, as opposed to Greeks, Persians, Egyptians or Jews. Skin color wasn't a deciding factor. Regionality and culture were what mattered.
There's nothing really wrong with "Latin Americans" (as far as I can see – I'm not Latino though) but it's just not a very concise or widely used term.
In English, we often use the word Latin with no gender suffix (as in the term Latin Americans). As I understand, Latinx is not an attempt to be gender-neutral but gender-inclusive and language-inclusive (as Latin lacks the gender suffix used in Spanish and Portuguese, and Latino/a excludes French-speaking Haitians).
Hispanic is also gender-neutral, and is probably what most people intend when they say Latin or Latino/a or Latinx. Hispano would be the Spanish word, but has never been a household word in the US. You can find some advocates of Hispanx, but I don't expect it to catch on.
The biggest problem IMO with Latinx is how to pronounce it. The letter X is not pronounced the same in Spanish as it is in English.
The vast majority of Haitians don’t speak French, but if they did, why would “Latino” exclude them? French is a Latin-derived language as much as Spanish and Portuguese are, and “latino” is a substring of the word for “Latin American” in all three languages (Latinoaméricain, in the case of French).
Correct, the majority speak Haitian Creole, though that is a language derived in part from French. I don't want to debate whether Creole-speaking and French-speaking Haitians should be considered Latin, only point out that many people do consider them Latin, since Hispanola is part of Latin America.
French typically uses no suffix for masculine words and a -e suffix for feminine words. I am not a fluent French speaker, nor an expert in French etymology, but it is my understanding that Latino and Latina are words borrowed from Spanish (or arguably from American English), and are not originally French words themselves. Latinoaméricain(e) is also derived from Spanish (latinoamericano).
I'm love learning new things about language, so feel free to teach me something new if I have misunderstood something.
Latinoaméricain is not derived from Spanish; it follows native French conventions for demonyms (e.g. New Zealanders are néozélandais).
The term Latin America (Amérique latine) was in fact often used with the explicit intent of highlighting the cultural similarity between French people and Latin Americans.
From Wikipedia:
There is no universal agreement on the origin of the term Latin America. The concept and term came into being in the nineteenth century, following political independence of countries from Spain and Portugal. It was popularized in 1860s France during the reign of Napoleon III. The term Latin America was a part of its attempt to create a French empire in the Americas.[13] Research has shown that the idea that a part of the Americas has a linguistic and cultural affinity with the Romance cultures as a whole can be traced back to the 1830s, in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a "Latin race", and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe", ultimately overlapping the Latin Church, in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe", "Anglo-Saxon America," and "Slavic Europe."[14]
I disagree that Latinoaméricain follows convention. Most other contracted demonyms in French do not use -o- as a connecting vowel; hyphenation seems to be more common.
In the case of néozélandais, the -o- comes from the Greek neo-. I do not know why neo- is the convention rather than the Latin novo-.
Is -o- is the connecting vowel you would expect to see used with the word Latin? There are other french words that use -o- as the connecting vowel (e.g. démocratique), but those words usually have a Greek origin. Since the word Latin does not have a Greek origin, I would expect the connecting vowel to be -i- as in latinisme.
The origin of Amérique Latine is not necessarily related to the origin of latinoaméricano.
So this thread introduced me to the idea of "latinx" and now I wish I had never heard of it. What a ridiculous concept and a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
How about we get mad about the fact that the top .01% wealthiest people are stripping the country for profits, using the military as a mercenary force to grab other countries oil reserves, and wrecking the climate and leaving us to die, rather than this vacuous culture wars bullshit?
Meanwhile the fed prints trillions and trillions of dollars and shoves it directly into the stock market while millions of people have no health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. The whole economy, long since deindustrialized, is only limping on because as the holder of the world reserve currency we can print unlimited amounts of money- for now. But of course we don’t use that power to build a modern infrastructure or provide free college to the next generation. Oh no. We use it to make sure that asset bubbles are pushed into infinity. Which will only make the inevitable crash all the more devastating.
We have real, actual problems but this wokeness crisis isn’t one of them.
I recommend anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about this type of thing to take a break for a few months in a country that doesn't indulge it, e.g. Russia.
Interesting you mention Russia. The leadership of Russia spends a lot of time thinking about how to denigrate LGBTQ+ folks. Racism is alive and thriving in Russia. They even recently went through the trouble of decriminalizing first time domestic violence. Could you elaborate on why you think a trip to Russia would be useful to [eta:American] progressives?
He did not say progressives, he said " anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about this type of thing", which I interpreted as the conservatives which can't stop talking about this.
This probably isn’t the argument you think it is. Many reactionaries seem have a romanticized view of Russian culture and probably would be fine there.
No, actually they have no idea how Eastern European cultures are, less Russia. They would stick out like a sore thumb, they would be shunned, treated with distance for being foreigners. Being 'christian' wouldnt do literally sh*t.
The only places where they would be getting treated normally would be ironically places with more woke Russians - ie Russian liberals, educated, woke people. Who would not shun others for being foreigners and who would not exhibit automatic/traditional Russian behaviors of suspecting/shunning strangers and being closed to them.
> They would stick out like a sore thumb, they would be shunned, treated with distance for being foreigners. Being 'christian' wouldnt do literally sh*t.
I agree. In fact I think that their religion would only serve to exacerbate things since (unless I'm very wrong) Russians are largely Orthodox Catholics and these people are largely protestant and evangelical
Yep. They have no idea how great the divide in between Orthodox and other branches of Christianity is. Even muslims are more normalized in Orthodox regions since they have been living side by side for ~1000 years. And Protestanism, Evangelicals etc? They are much more 'further out' than these right wingers realize.
As an Eastern European I have friends and coworkers who are educated(PhDs even), but at the same time highly conservative, xenophobic and against wokeness in general.
Some of them even lived and worked abroad, but of course learned nothing from that experience.
Conservative foreigners would feel right at home with this crowd, but they might be surprised how liberal they are comparing to the locals.
Yes, i know that conservatism runs pretty deep in Eastern European culture, and its a behavior model more than a creed or ideology.
The American conservatives would feel 'at home' with such people as you described, however such people would not be accepting them how they seem to think they would.
I'm really suprised, it has spread around the whole western world. There is not enough pushback on the foundational philosophical flaws of this phenomena. The biggest flaw of "wokeness" it doesn't try to combat the human proclivity to treat other groups of people as sub-human if they aren't members of their own the "correct" tribe. A couple of days ago I just took a break of the internet for the simple reason that people are celebrating the death of anti-vaxxers. Poking fun of people that are so desperate and scared when they get sick so they use a drug intended for horses. Very few people say anything against this and those who do are dismissed as "anti-vaxxers". Wokeness doesn't try to combat this phenomena, it tries to stoke it by forming their own tribe and treat everyone outside tribe as idiots and uneducated buffoons. They don't see that they are feeding a psychoological mechanism that partly the basis of the social ills that arise when we treat other people as less than themselves. "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others" - George Orwell.
Well given that they have to redefine terms under new names and to create a newspeak for all of this, it was not long until it had spread unchallenged from the social-sciences classrooms in universities to the workplace and we now see rejected concepts that were left in the past to later resurface under a redefinition under newspeak.
A great way to confuse the general public and push an agenda to create a culture of silencing anyone opposed to view points someone disagrees with.
Plenty of examples in the article if you have already read it.
Example of enforcing this with cancellations:
> Even as students began scouring the words of academics, administrators and fellow students for microaggressions, the oppressive slights embedded in everyday speech, and found them, complacency ruled.
which was later enforced...
> When invited speeches from people such as Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, were cancelled after student activists accused her of complicity in “imperialist and patriarchal systems”
Also...
> James Bennet, who resigned as editorial-page editor of the New York Times after one such row, now works for The Economist; he was not involved in this article.
The 'row' in question [0] lead to the editor's resignation [1] because he defended it.
The only thing new or unique about this supposedly "cancel culture" stuff is that it's liberals making effective use of public moral arguments instead of conservatives.
Well its not me who said this was new, nor did I say it was 'exclusive to liberals' or any particular side of the political spectrum. I just used the examples listed in the article.
Maybe you should direct this to the person who wrote the article at the Economist.
What exactly is the goal of the 'woke' as it pertains to race or gender? If success to them looks like an equal number of white/black/asian/women it's an unreachable goal. According to the 2020 census: 57.8% of Americans are white, 16.3% are hispanic, 12.2% are black, and 5.9% are asian. It seems as plain as day that even if we could remove racism from the equation, it's more likely that whites will make up more share than others. As far as women in tech for example, yes there are very few of them. But is that because we discourage girls from getting into tech or simply because they, as a group naturally gravitate towards other kind of work? Nobody complains that there are too few men in nursing or too many women in nursing (my wife is in a nursing program and it is dominated by female students.) As of 2010, 14.4% of active duty US military personnel are women, 30% are minorities. What exactly is their definition of 'success'? In my mind it's equality of opportunity. I don't care what color your skin is or what gender you are - are you the best candidate from a 'doing the work' perspective. To me that should be the goal.
Their goal is not equality of opportunity, it is equality of outcome. They’ll willingly sacrifice anyone in the top 50% to elevate the lowest of the low, no matter how little they try or deserve it.
This is broadly true in all leftist policy, from higher education to taxation to the way we structure kindergarten. Success, achievement, and work ethic are to be admonished. Leftist pseudomorality establishes the victim as the highest achievable social status, rewarding those who take more from society than give to it.
I'd add to what you said that it's an apparent goal, because it's goal isn't concrete nor fixed. It's an impossible always changing imaginary that always needs more power and more obedience. Everything is about grabbing the power to produce behavioral control to keep them in power.
> They’ll willingly sacrifice anyone in the top 50% to elevate the lowest of the low, no matter how little they try or deserve it.
> This is broadly true in all leftist policy, from higher education to taxation to the way we structure kindergarten. Success, achievement, and work ethic are to be admonished. Leftist pseudomorality establishes the victim as the highest achievable social status, rewarding those who take more from society than give to it.
Maybe you should spend some time away from the news media and consider how we're all being bamboozled by the both parties, "right" and "left". Consider reading freely available "The Three Languages of politics" (summary here: https://quillette.com/2018/08/08/the-three-languages-of-poli... and enlighten yourself as to why the conservatives and progressives can never agree - because they're not talking about the same things.
The democratic and republican parties take advantage of this because once you're talking their language, you'll never be convinced to switch sides. If anything can bring this country down it's both of these parties tearing us apart.
I'm an independent and I've voted for both parties over the years. Don't be a lemming - these two parties are just vying for power, anything the 'little people' like us get is just a side-effect.
For your first question - equal to their share of the population. So blacks should be ~12% of all Harvard students, for example, as opposed to the current 6%.
To begin with, no reasonable person is saying there should be a completely even balance in proportions of race in any field, for exactly the reasons you point out. The problem is that in reality, certain "merit-based" programs such as workplaces or colleges don't also align with the racial demographics of the general public, and it's a discrepancy that should make you ask "why?".
The problem with a blind "merit-based" approach is that it doesn't make any attempt to understand why what we'd expect in a perfectly egalitarian world isn't what we see in reality. Studies on biological differences between race and gender show no or very small differences that can't fully explain these gaps. Other factors, such as a family's wealth, do show significant changes to the opportunities provided to a person during their lives. As it so happens, we can also see (from the US Census data you bring up) that there are wealth and income disparities between race.
And now we're hiring/accepting college students/etc. Of course we want to only hire qualified people, but a disproportionate number of people of certain races were not given the opportunity to get those skills already. So we're stuck in a cycle where the people most likely to succeed are the ones who are already in this cycle of success, often due to their parents having been given those opportunities as well. So in order to actually _meet_ the expectations of racial composition (because as mentioned earlier, perfectly egalitarian expectations would be close to the proportions in the general population), we simply can't turn a colorblind eye to people's race. Breaking the cycle requires attention to be paid to people's race. Merit ignores context.
The hard part about this is that it comes off as saying that you should treat people differently because of their race. And that's pretty much what it is. It would require some level of sacrifice by the privileged, at least temporarily, in order to bring everybody back to equal footing. And humans are not good with things that don't seem fair.
On a different note regarding gender, there is not particularly strong evidence backing the argument that women simply "naturally gravitate towards other kind of work". Studies have shown some psychological differences in preferences of the kind of work, but it doesn't not explain the disparity we see in STEM as a whole. Of course, there are not the same multi-generational explanatory powers behind gender as there are for race, but there are other factors, largely rooted in the ideas that there are both explicit and implicit societal expectations for women that lead them towards other kinds of careers.
> The problem is that in reality, certain "merit-based" programs such as workplaces or colleges don't also align with the racial demographics of the general public, and it's a discrepancy that should make you ask "why?".
> Of course we want to only hire qualified people, but a disproportionate number of people of certain races were not given the opportunity to get those skills already.
Like all wicked problems, there are many reasons - not exclusively caused by one group. I'm the son of italian & french immigrants and I grew up in a poor neighborhood with many black/hispanic neighbors. I wasn't poor, I was middle class. In my observation (admittedly a relatively small sample), the differentiator between my peers (white and non-white, poor and not) was the parental emphasis or lack-thereof on education. My parents never made it beyond high school education, but it was assumed I was going to college. The friends (white and non-white) whose parents emphasized education have fared better than those who did not. How do you fix that? We can offer everyone the opportuntity to go get an education, but we can't change the parents' mindset to its importance.
A stable home environment and an emphasis on education at home would do wonders to advance these inequalities. To be clear, I'm not saying it "their fault", but there is plenty of "blame" to go around. Let's give people a living wage. Let's stop treating K-12 school like a babysitting service, etc.
> The hard part about this is that it comes off as saying that you should treat people differently because of their race. And that's pretty much what it is. It would require some level of sacrifice by the privileged, at least temporarily, in order to bring everybody back to equal footing.
Isn’t that what affirmative action was supposed to be? Why stop at race? Why not with other physical attributes? Why not force NBA teams to hire short people, same goes for the NHL with their goalies, modeling companies with short/fat/old/unattractive people? People have attributes that give them advantages $ disadvantages. You can’t make everything fair.
The difference is that the examples you give are intrinsic factors to physical advantages. STEM/academics/work/etc. are extrinsic. Short people are worse at basketball or hockey because their genetics inherently disadvantage them. Underrepresented racial minorities and women are _not_ worse at STEM/academics/work/etc. because their genetics inherently disadvantage them.
> If success to them looks like an equal number of white/black/asian/women it's an unreachable goal
It's not the goal. You've created a strawman and wasted your own time fighting it.
> In my mind it's equality of opportunity. I don't care what color your skin is
That doesn't magically erase that they grew in up in a racist society that does care what color their skin is.
It's insulting to many people of color to hear "I don't care what color your skin is". An appropriate and honest response from a person of color might be "Must be nice. I wouldn't know what that's like because I never had the privilage of not caring what color my skin is". Probably not the great start you were hoping for.
It sounds like you want imagine the starting line was in the same place for every person who arrives to you as a candidate. When in fact some people got to you with a head start. Ignoring the starting line does the opposite of creating equality of opportunity. But ignoring the starting line is far simpler. And even useful for those who benefit from maintaining the status quo.
The best candidate for the work might just be the person who arrives less qualified and slightly behind the winner. Someone who started from far behind and almost caught up. If racism exists outside your interview, then equal opportunity at your interview must take into consideration that someone's race might have put up many obstacles on the long journey that got them to your interview.
Let's do a thought experiment. You're in a room with 57 white people and 12 black people. Those are the numbers you used. 10% of people in the room are racist. Every racist in the room gets to insult every person of the other race one time. Do the math. How many times is each white person insulted? How many times is each black person insulted? Is there "equality of opportunity" for everyone to leave that room and head to a job interview with the same level of self esteem? Multiple that by a lifetime.
If US demographics were in fact 50% white, 50% black, it would make things far easier to understand. Living in a society where race matters and you are hugely outnumbered is something the majority will always have great difficulting in relating to.
By not caring what someone's skin color is, you're passing over candidates who worked far harder to get where they are compared to someone who had fewer obstacles. Of course not every obstacle in life comes from race and some people of color may have even experienced a life of privilage.
So let's take a deaf candidate applying to your job. Like skin color, it's not something they chose nor something they can change. It very likey created obstacles for them in life that you never experienced. Would you treat them the same as non-deaf candidates? Speak to them with your back turned perhaps? Or would you adapt to who they really are?
When I say I don’t care what color a person is, I’m saying their skin color does not affect my decision. Are they the best candidate? I don’t care what got you here. My grandfather was a POW in a German camp in WW2, my grandparents walked over the alps for an opportunity for a better life in France. Nobody gave them a shot just because they had a rough early life. My parents didn’t speak English when they got to this country. Nobody gave them any special treatment. Get to work, show your value.
With regards to the numbers, they are what they are, what exactly is it that you want with respect to that situation? Do you want to get rid of 45 white people so it’s even? Truly - I don’t understand what you’re trying to point out. That life isn’t fair because you aren’t in the “majority?” Welcome to the club - we all have things that we think like is unfair about: I wasn’t born super-rich, I have a 9yo son with an incurable chronic illness that could kill him that we have to manage 24/7. There are something things you can change and others you can’t. I don’t expect the world to change their behavior for my son’s well-being just because he’s not in the majority. I also don’t view it as it as a slight against people with his disease. I wouldn’t want someone to hire him because he’s a type 1 diabetic. I want someone to hire him because he’s the best available candidate.
> When I say I don’t care what color a person is, I’m saying their skin color does not affect my decision.
Their skin color most likely affected their life in profound ways. Why would you want to willingly ignore their actual life experience? Any employer who did that would be missing the actual person and what they bring to the table. A person is not list of qualifications and specifications.
> My grandfather was a POW in a German camp in WW2, my grandparents walked over the alps for an opportunity for a better life in France. Nobody gave them a shot just because they had a rough early life.
You don't know that. You weren't at the job interviews when someone said "this guy crossed the alps just to get a better job, give him a job". I would feel really stupid as an employer if I didn't know the difference between the local lazy guy who has all the skills but wouldn't cross the road to get a job let alone cross the alps vs the guy who needs training but is willing to cross mountains to improve his life. When I interviewed for jobs in Italy some of the interviewers asked me to start at kindergarten. Tough interviews. But by the end they knew a hell of a lot about my life experiences. Why did they bother to spend so much time getting to know me when they could have just given me a simple test to see if I was qualified?
> With regards to the numbers, they are what they are, what exactly is it that you want with respect to that situation? Do you want to get rid of 45 white people so it’s even? Truly - I don’t understand what you’re trying to point out.
I'm trying to point out that minorities have a different life experience from the majority, and it's because of their skin color. It seems like you want to pretend those differences don't exist and that skin color doesn't or shouldn't matter to the people who it affects in negative ways.
> I have a 9yo son with an incurable chronic illness that could kill him that we have to manage 24/7.
It must be a lot of extra responsiblity and stress. I would definitely want to know that if I were your employer so I could make accomodations. Does your employer know this? If so, why did you tell your employer about your son? Why should your life experience and home situation matter at all if it's simply "best qualified"?
> I don’t expect the world to change their behavior for my son’s well-being just because he’s not in the majority.
They already have. It's against the law to not hire him because of his diabetes. Once upon a time it was not against the law. And without the law many employers would take a pass on the extra risk and just hire someone without diabetes. Hopefully you agree that the world changing in the case was an improved world?
> I wouldn’t want someone to hire him because he’s a type 1 diabetic.
I never suggested you should hire someone because of the color of their skin. I suggested that you should care about skin color because if you are hiring people of color, they most likely care about their skin color and how it affected them.
You care about your grandparents story and your son's story enough to tell both of them. Everyone cares about their story. Some people's stories are full of racism and how their skin color affected them.
> I want someone to hire him because he’s the best available candidate.
Your son will not be able to pilot large commercial planes. Or join the military. Even if he is the best candidate. He faces obstacles in life that other people do not face. Without laws, many employers would simply take a pass and avoid the extra cost and risk associated with an employee with a life threatening medical condition. But top employers of today would do the opposite. All else being equal I would hire the person with diabetes. Any time people cross the same finish line but someone had more obstacles to overcome they are very likely the better candidate. Your son's diabetes would affect my decision. And I would care that he has diabetes because he cares about it. "I don't care if you have diabetes" is mediocre interviewing. "Your diabetes won't affect my decision" is mediocre interviewing. If diabetes has affected your son's life, it should affect my decision. I'm sure he'll have stories he is proud of that directly involve diabetes. And other stories that have nothing to do with diabetes. Of course I would want what he's proud of to affect my hiring decision.
As someone who lives in a formerly fascist country and was born in a socialist country that borrowed many fascist tools, I can tell you all one thing: Taking control of the language is a telltale sign of a fascist movement. Whoever tries to control the language automatically stands on the wrong side of history. It is not an accident that the woke movement attacks liberties so vehemently. It is also not an accident that it seems to pile one more extreme demand on top of the other, look how currently feminism gets cleansed, this is just the internal power struggle (think Röhm purge or Trotzkists). Do not make the mistake to think this movement is out there to improve anything for anyone. It is solely a revolutionary movement trying to survive and radicalize until it can get to power.
I don't agree with this fully. The most extensive language reform movement in the last 100 years was by Ataturk in Turkey. I don't think it falls into the above category. I think it is due to some form of idealism, and there are such people at all points along the political spectrum.
Language reform ain't language control. Reforming a language can have negative impact, for sure, but it normally has a positive goal that lies in the language itself: Simplified orthography (latest German reform), reviving a dead language (Hebrew), or simplification of writing (simplified Chinese). And yes I see the irony that this last reform was issued by Mao.
In contrast, language control is about eliminating certain forbidden words, either hoping to eliminate certain facts or thoughts by litery making them unspeakable or by creating rules that every normal person will violate sooner or later, allowing it to denounce everyone when necessary.
It's not that, it's the fact it's an acronym that only certain groups are familiar with. Calling it Visual and Performance Arts is fine, because everyone understands what it means. Calling it VAPA is inferior communication, because it only signals to those already familiar with the acronym, and leaves the rest out.
Instead they now just call it the 'Arts Department', so everyone understands what it means.
For example, if you're a first generation parent, new to the US, not very familiar with English, clean toilets for a living, not very familiar with the school system, have no network of people who work in schools or go to certain programs, and are looking for a good program for your child, then it's easier to navigate information on a website, brochure or banner that says 'Arts Department' than 'VAPA'. These parents may be unaware of the program entirely, and not apply.
Whereas if you're white, your parents go to broadway shows and the NY MOMA, your brother-in-law is superintendent of an arts school whose daughter studies at VAPA, you'll be more likely to know what the acronym stands for, and more likely to navigate the same information (websites, banners, brochures) that say VAPA just fine, and apply for the program.
I'm exaggerating the examples a bit, but the common thread is: language is a tool for communication, acronyms can be complicating and obfuscating factors in communication in certain contexts (in others they're fine), such as marketing school programs to children/parents from all backgrounds. And as (unintended!) outcome they can thereby happen to filter out poor/minority backgrounds, leaving white/majority/rich groups, who get access to these programs. That observed outcome benefits white people (which is why the words 'white supremacy' came in, which I think is wrong as it implies intentionality where there isn't one... instead I think it can better be defined as unintended extremely minor white privilege'.)
Losing the acronym is a simple and potentially useful and also extremely minor step to take, that got dragged into the spotlight as a symbol for anti-'oppression' and anti-'wokeness' from both sides respectively.
This is ridiculous to the point of self-parody coming from the movement that spawned BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, a complete redefinition of the word “privilege“, and which demands the immediate firing and permanent silencing of anyone who has not fully internalized the appropriate “inclusive” language du jour.
Ridiculous how? I don't think you addressed anything in my post. e.g. the notion that simplifying 'VAPA' to 'Arts Department' improves communication, and particularly to certain groups of people who aren't being reached. How is improved communication self-parody? This isn't a law mandating speech, it's an organisation rebranding itself to communicate more clearly what it is.
You do ridicule it by comparing it to use of other acronyms.
I hope you can understand that there's a difference between use of acronyms of an Arts programme of a single school in a local area. These acronyms may be entirely unfamiliar to groups of people that historically have lower-access and that you're trying to reach via communications, and acronyms don't help in this situation, and are also unnecessary.
Versus the use of an acronym that represents about 5-10% of the world population (0.6 billion people), and is used and recognised on a worldwide scale, and is actually one of the major driving forces of communication. Acronyms in this case do help, and actually improve communication. (of course, there is a limit to the logic. And the communities themselves are constantly reevaluating what typology makes most sense, and which acronyms make most sense).
Was there any evidence that the acronyms were a major cause of people not accessing the programs? Did anyone reach out and ask one of these people from "certain communities" about why they weren't making use of the programs? Did anyone actually look at the people using the program and verify that the "certain communities" were even underrepresented to begin with? Did anyone compare the makeup of people in the program after the name change to see if it increased representation?
Or maybe people just took a preconceived notion like "people who clean toilets for a living are probably too dumb to look up what an acronym means" and then made a pointless change that affected nothing and patted themselves on the back for how nice and progressive they are.
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that if you're working (probably multiple) low wage jobs to support your kids, your biggest hurdle to getting them into an Arts program is probably not that it has a confusing acronym.
I agree that referring to something by an acronym and never explaining what it refers to is bad communication. That's why it is a common practice (and basic common sense) to spell out the acronym the first time it's used in a document. If the website for your organization refers to the name by an acronym only and never says what the full name is, that is a terribly designed website and you should fire whoever wrote it. That is the sort of thing you do when you care about communicating clearly. Changing the names of things every 5 minutes as you denounce the previous name as horribly offensive is not about communicating clearly. It's about moral posturing and virtue signalling.
Despite all the flames; there's plenty of actual honest "this is what I think and why" that wouldn't be tolerated elsewhere because its a controversial topic. That's worthy.
It may not be pleasant now, but perhaps its the fertilizer from which some flowers of enlightenment will sprout.
It's The Economist, they're their own platform to support whatever content they want. Banning them from HN will hardly have any impact. It's not like banning a single individual.
The elite have always had a disconnected culture from the masses. Things like a taste for golf or the influence of certain clubs over high levels of government. That isn't unusual. That people from that culture then get to control the rest of a country because someone has to, and it may as well be the elites.
So the cultural disconnect isn't new or a problem. The problem is that this ideology seems to be (1) heavily focused on race and (2) be the most credible home for a resurgence of the ideas that powered the communist disasters of last century.
It is deviant from cultural norms. And that is fine and dandy, elite cultures are always deviant. The problem is this culture looks bad. It has abandoned some excellent ideals of tolerance and liberty.
It is amusing how wokeism not being defined allows it to be just about anything. Gay and trans people have a history of being locked out of most social groups and in all recent history have lower incomes and political influence than most, yet now they are portrayed as elites because of a like to recognition higher learning. Wouldn't it be easier to admit that people confuse you and that makes you upset?
It’s sad that the economist published such a polemical and intellectually dishonest article. One thing that especially stood out was “ And why it embraces reparations-adjacent policies like the creation of a $4bn fund to pay off the debts of only non-white farmers.”
There was a class action lawsuit where the USDA had to pay out tens of thousands of claimants who were discriminated against between 1981-1996. African Americans were discriminated against and were not equitably issued farm loans during this period. However, the majority of African-Americans were unable to get relief through the courts for various reasons (often filing late), not to mention that lawsuits for Hispanic and women farmers never even went ahead.
This seems pretty different than the right’s idea of what reparations are and why they may be harmful. Instead it seems like ensuring that people are compensated for very recent (when compared to something like slavery) losses due to discrimination.
AFAIS, defense of anything is often a coercion, yes. There are millions of subtle situations for court to decide who, on the one hand, exercised his freedom and who, on the other hand, initiated a coertion, who responded to a coercion, and there is a room for interpretation.
Also, the core principle is not a set of laws, it's just a guiding principle. If a court interprets certain possessions of proprties or certain actions as an initiation of coercion on other individuals, than it can judge it unlawful. For example if you place a bomb near someone, or your property blocks an entrance for someone etc... that could be a coercion, AFAIS.
At the same time the core principle is akin to declaration of a constitution and as such it steers the lawmakers and society toward certain direction. But it's not an utopia that aims to describe everything by a single short paragraph.
I have no data or research supporting my opinion.
What I think is happening is this:
Rich countries now allow people to have an abundance of free time and an easy way to connect to like minded peers.
This results in anyone in a "phase" of their life finding a number of other people in a similar "phase" and instead of moving on to the next "phase" they re-enforce each other's current "phase".
As an example, this means a person who would temporarily feel insecure about their "gender" (maybe 1 transgender person in a 1000) and who would normally get to ignore it, now these people are a lot more likely to find support for their current "phase" online and decide to follow through.
What does this say about people?
We are all sheep that find like minded peers to help us conform to our current state of mind.
In the past it was much harder to stray away from "traditional" view of world but now it is much easier and more accessible.
The problem is not with people following through and embracing different view of the world, the problem is that they are now expecting everyone else to "embrace" their new view of the world and themselves.
While it is perfectly valid to expect to be treated equally in the view of the "law", I believe it is equally invalid to force your view of the world onto other people.
Let's be blunt - if I believe I am GOD and control the world, I cannot reasonably expect other people to accept this and conform to my wishes.
The "woke" culture is trying to do the something similar, is is no longer enough to be equal = now "woke" people expect everyone to accept that their "woke" view of the world is valid and whatever other views may exist are irrelevant.
This is, in my opinion, just an immature and narrow minded expectation as the old no-homosexual, no-transgender views that existed in the past.
What you see yourself as right now is your problem and other people can perceive you however they see fit.
We are all most likely just a bunch of assholes anyway so leave everyone else alone and live your life.
Can someone explain what wokeness actually means? I mean the article is full of quotations that are somehow taken out of context, I don't quite understand what this movements principles are, what it wants, what its methods are.
These kinds of social movements always arouse the armchair anthropologist in me. This one in particular, because I think it has to do a lot with the rise of social media.
My theory is, what people might refer to as a "woke discourse" has been going on forever in left and progressive activist spaces, like certain parts of academia, political organizations and so on. Within those subcultures, there has for a long time been a strong emphasis on fairness, which is often enforced through a set of cultural and linguistic tools which have evolved over the years to identify and correct words and actions which fall outside the boundaries of what is considered acceptable or desirable in those communities.
So then came social medial platforms. Now you have forums like Twitter where suddenly everyone's conversations are out in the open. Now instead of pointing out perceived social problems and inequities over a lunch table at Oberlin, members of these subcultures are having that conversation in view of the whole world. And instead of reacting only to their own communities and media environment, they're also responding directly to problematic phrasing from some guy in rural Nebraska which left-wing students at elite universities polished out of their language years ago.
So you have this confluence of a social technology which had been developed for ages, and a communications technology which happened to be a very effective vehicle for what was probably quite a minority viewpoint to have a vastly outsized impact on society.
I actually think this concept of having one big conversation that everyone can be a part of is something we haven't even really began to wrap our arms around, and it will be interesting to see what online discourse looks like in a few decades.
Obviously there is more interest in people expressing their views on this new woke world and how they are or are not ok with it.
From an intellectual point of view no one is ok with woke culture because it does not get everything right.
But that is the nature of trends. The few things that it used to be about was so empirically true but in trend when it’s stretched to every civil fight it loses the central meaning. Now it has become an expression for things that need to change. Used by whatever genre of people are open to its founding culture.
It is interesting. On the one hand, I can see how the previous model could be sightly alienating to anyone who's skin color doesn't obviously map to "Simpsons Yellow". However, whether people pay attention to it or not, the new interface quantifies approval in a way which can be segmented by skin color, which seems kind of odd.
Presumably because yellow should work for everyone. There will always be some people who are offended that a choice exists, even if they don’t plan to take it.
> Do they really have a regular 'illiberal left' column these days?
No, the house style has been to have a short subtitle like that on every article for a long time. Sometimes the subtitle is just the name of the country or region being covered, just as often it's a one-off. Examples from this issue include "China's bad debts", "prostitution in Indonesia", "Venezuela talks", none of which are monthly columns.
I don't understand the issue really. CRT just looks at the role that race has played or plays in shaping our systems and institutions. This goes all the way back to the Constitution, the Three Fifths compromise and the 15th amendment. The Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow are all taught in high school. These are all explicit things that happened and were codified in law.
American history has largely always been about race.
The "upper class" will always use whatever tools are at its disposal to further its own agenda. Doesn't matter what the tools are. The "upper class" has done plenty of Trump band-wagonism, just from evangelical and corporate elite circles. Look back in history: what was Carnegie trying to do with all his libraries? Not pure altruism. What did the "upper class" do with women's lib? Turn women into workers and consumer from whom more profit could be extracted. What has the "upper class" done with concern for the environment? Corporate greenwashing. What has the "upper class" done with religion? Used it for control, from Myanmar and India and Pakistan to the US to the Thirty Years War in the 1600s to Nigeria today.
Just want to keep things in perspective. Everything is a tool when it comes to retention of power: religion, conscience, nature, food. And no one should be fooled. People should all realize the limits of the "support" and strive to do the right thing and treat each other well regardless of those larger forces. Powers & principalities & politics have been discussed since antiquity.
people want to make money, being rude to others often prevents that, “elite” schools teach “elite” students who end up in places of privilege, they then teach or pass those lessons onto their workers. wokensss is really just HR on steroids
Many Millennials now have very high-paying and influential jobs but still hold the very anti-capitalist and anti-billionaire views they had during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
It will be interesting how corporations will react to a new generation of Millennial managers and leaders who seek to undermine capitalism.
Hypocrisy of the highest order. Complain about wealth inequality, while at the same time seek higher paid managerial jobs.
Either your ok with wealth inequality, or start asking for salary to be spread around your team and sub teams.
I'm a liberal market capitalist, I'm ok with wealth inequality. What I can't stand are my peers who seek bonuses, extra salary, and ways to increase profitability but at the same time complain about wealth inequality.
I don't mind old school hippy socialists because they at least follow their own ideas.
I will probably get down voted to hell for saying this but everything the west has seen since and including the fall of the USSR was straight out of the Illuminati playbook.
Isnt it just that HR thinks if people believe they are working towards a greater cause, then they will be more willing to take the 3.2% comp adjustments every year?
It is by design. The viral idea behind intersectionality is that people are easier to manage both as interchangeable representatives of arbitrary group identities, and the consequent alienation and anxiety politically neutralizes them as potential opponents to their managers agenda. The tactic itself practically ancient, and the theory that scales it is just over a century old. It literally exploits social tolerance as weakness the same way that you can manipulate individuals by their agreeableness.
We've got a late stage 3 case of it, with new intersectional groups being added every year, and they iterate to isolate the individual from any coherent belief or relationship beyond an ever shifting narrative of political expediency.
Since the idea is viral, there is no direct confrontation against it other than to isolate the infected until the disease runs its course or they expire, or a chemotherapy approach, which requires an equivalent and improbable amount of co-ordination and viral spread, usually with unacceptable costs. Like the plot of every zombie movie ever, it's a periodic generational plague.
A great example of new intersectional groups is how it's absolutely fine to publish that the unvaxxed are sacrificing our children for their far right beliefs, which until recently was called "the blood libel." A useful self test is, if you're cool with the blood libel, you may already be a zombie. The only question is whether you will self-treat with personal reflection, or join the shuffling mass of the damned in their hunt for brains and thirst for blood.
I don’t understand your overall point. Bringing up anti-vax people the way you did suggests to me that perhaps you have become lost. Being an anti-vax person is objectively foolish and dangerous. We have decades of incontrovertible evidence that vaccines are good. Those who don’t vaccinate are stupid or being duped and led as if they are zombies (to use your parlance).
If this group of people serves as a great example for your point then your position intellectually unsound.
I picked the hard one to challenge reflection on because it was useful. An equivalent blood libel zombie variation is the belief that a global elite is kidnapping children for abuse rings (pizzagate, etc.), but I didn't use that one because it was too close as a proxy for the anti-semitic original. The point is this is an established pattern, where unless you reflect on how you know what you think you know, and why you believe something, you're going to be the subject of a belief, and not a holder of it with agency.
Just to add, when you hear a lie, you shift into a defensive mode where you do not act while you wait for the dissonance to resolve. A big part of this method is to produce lies that will in effect mentally paralyze those who percieve them, and by merely doing nothing as a result, they will not act or coordinate to resist the rest of the liars actions.
A minority of people needs to understand this.
People have ideas less so than it is ideas that have people, and intersectionality as an idea has collected a lot of people.
As a christian I believe in mercy and grace. And yes, many of us 'believers' have not practised what we preached. Many of us do try however not to be hypocrites.
Here's my question. Where is mercy and grace in the midst of wokeness? I want you to believe my christian message but I will not force you to do so. I don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what I believe. I don't want you to lose your job because you don't agree with me. There seems to me to be a ruthlessness to wokeness which I don't understand.
I think the answer to your question is actually answered in your first paragraph. In the same way that you believe all Christians shouldn’t be judged by those who haven’t “practiced what they’ve preached”, consider that your understanding of “woke” people might be tainted by the fact that whatever media you are consuming might be focusing on the ones who also don’t practice what they preach.
In other words, any movement, Christian or “woke”, will have a subset of people who are hypocritical and/or ruthless. It is an easily observed behavior of biased media outlets that they will pay especial attention to the more unsavory outliers of a movement.
I think in some cases silence is violence. For example, the silence of ones witnessing co workers when a woman tries to report being sexually harassed in her workplace. Like if a woman describes witnesses to her being groped by a co worker, and all the witnesses just shrug and say nothing to defend her, that workplace has in effect allowed sexual harassment to occur and condones continued harassment of women.
That being said I do think it’s dumb for putting ones pronouns or whatever. But I think when we paint “wokeness” with this extremely broad brush we’re just doing the same bullshit that we’re accusing “wokeness” of doing.
And dole out the harshest possible sentence, short of physical maiming: unbounded social ostracism. In old times we'd brand undesirables by burning their skin with a hot rod. These days we brand them 'racist' or 'sexist' on the Internet, and rely on the fact that the Internet never forgets and is easily searchable.
I think this will ultimately be Wokeness downfall. The woke turn on themselves for perceived lack of purity to the cause almost as quickly as their adversaries. look at far left movements of the past for example, the french revolution started beheading people that had been for the revolution because they weren't revolutionary enough.
Not sure how that's important. Very often looking from the outside, and particularly at outcomes, is quite sufficient.
I really don't have to understand the core principles of Maoism to be opposed.
I really don't have to understand the core principles of the Khmer Rouge to be opposed.
I really don't have to understand the core principles of Fascism to be opposed.
I really don't have to understand the core principles of Stalinism to be opposed.
What's more, what the core principles are may not be very relevant, because very often the most heinous acts are performed in the service of supposedly very fine "principles". In fact, the more hallowed the principles, the more permission/cover they often give to their followers for the most heinous acts. After all, they are doing this in the name of what is good and righteous.
And of course, this "do you understand X" is typically a deflection, particularly if X does its damn best to obscurantist. And this is often deployed quite tactically.
> What links these developments is a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world. This credo still lacks a definitive name: it is variously known as left-liberal identity politics, social-justice activism or, simply, wokeness. But it has a clear common thread: a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled. These notions were incubated for years in the humanities departments of universities (elite ones in particular), without serious challenge.
We can add to this list: meritocracy, capitalism. Both are considered racist and oppressive.
Tl;dr Woke means being opposed to Western ideals while pretending to uphold those same Western ideals.
You’ve contributed nothing to this discussion except telling people their understanding of the term “woke” is incorrect. Perhaps define what that term is, and how this movement works since you’re implying in your posts you know and others do not.
Ugh, c'mon, this is Fox/CNN-tier. "The Squad" is not especially woke (maybe Ilhan Omar?), except in the minds of Republicans who want something to rail at, and Democrats who want to appeal to "the youth". Like, AOC in particular, the figurehead, is really not especially radical. Neither was Bernie (with whom she was roughly aligned), even if he did absorb and make peace with parts of BLM (actually I respected him for that; it shows he's a peacemaker -- I digress).
As a general rule, you're not going to find a lot of this woke stuff in conventional political channels. You're going to see it more in universities, or from "public intellectuals", and on Twitter.
If we're looking for someone who actually does hold political office and who might fit the bill, Chesa Boudin might be appropriate:
Those don’t say the racist things from the video but they do believe America (the West) is bad. Capitalism is bad. Meritocracy is bad. Freedom of speech is bad, …
Not my worldview.
The west, capitalism and meritocracy are not beyond criticism. Those ideals aren’t perfect and fail millions of people. Self critique is important and after all, aren’t they entitled to exercise their fee speech?
> The west, capitalism and meritocracy are not beyond criticism.
This is a really good example of motte-and-bailey argumentation.
The motte (minimalist position that is uncontroversial and easy to defend) is that the west, capitalism and meritocracy are not beyond criticism. 99.9% of people beleive this.
The bailey (much more controversial position, that is hard to defend but stakes out more territory), is something like this: the west, capitalism and meritocracy are evil and must be destroyed.
- a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism
This is maybe too broad but mostly true. I mean, has the author read like any American history?
- that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination
I’d say this is largely not relevant but the thing people see as this is largely just individuals no longer “playing along” with other folks using terms & language that demean them.
- and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled
Language? No. Privilege? Probably! It’s easy to point out political dynasty privilege or obvious hollywood nepotism but it’s not the only type of privilege that gives some of us a leg up and others of us a massive hill to climb just to get to zero.
> I mean, has the author read like any American history?
They believe that it's the same outside America as well, so American history doesn't matter. E.g. Turks in Germany (who immigrated in the 60ies) don't achieve as much as native Germans after three generations => structural racism. Asian immigrants do quickly achieve as much and more than native Germans => more structural racism, I guess.
Regarding the treatment of Turkish immigrants in Germany, I'd recommend you read "Ganz Unten" (Gunther Wallraff, 1985) which sent shockwaves through Germany when it was published for revealing the racism people liked to pretend wasn't an issue at the time, and leading to many thousands of criminal investigations over the treatment of immigrant labour.
While that was a long time ago, it by no means it fixed the issues.
Though this is undoubtedly good for click-rewarded media, it’s also good for society if it invokes a rejection of the extremists and unsavory outliers both from outside and within the community, whether woke extremists, Christian Taliban, or other.
Unfortunately, I don’t see quite strong enough (for my taste) version of that repudiation (in general across both causes I believe in and ones where I disagree).
It isn’t just the media. Here in Canada, the government literally passed the mathematics curriculum which claimed nonsense like “mathematics is subjective” and “mathematics is colonial”. I emailed them a long rant that I would rather ship my future kids to India for a better education instead of the nonsense they are teaching.
So no, it isn’t just some media. Nor do I follow corporate news.
> An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective. Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline. However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective. Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions. The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education.
After I along with a bunch of others emailed them, they got rid of it. However no one was fired for writing such nonsense, nor did we figure out how such nonsense got through the top officials in the government. Here's the news on them removing it:
Please don't copy and paste the same comment multiple times. That's spamming. People can read the rest of the exchange where I already linked to it (specifically to avoid spamming), along with the link to the original source but not my own comment as you falsely accuse.
You are projecting while accusing me of projecting. As I noted, the reason I put this comment is because you copy pasted your comment. Stop projecting and then accusing me of projecting.
"There's plenty of room for subjective opinion in mathematics. It usually doesn't concern questions of the form Is this true? since we have a good consensus how to recognize an acceptable proof and which assumptions for such a proof you need to state explicitly.
As soon as we move onwards to Is this useful? and Is this interesting?, or even Is this likely to work?, subjectivity hits us in full force. Even in pure mathematics, it's easy to choose a set of axioms and derive consequences from them, but if you want anyone to spend time reading your work, you need to tackle the subjective questions and have an explanation why what you're doing is either useful or interesting, or preferably both.
In applied math, these questions are accompanied by Is this the best way to model such-and-such real-world problem? -- where "best" again comes down to usefulness (does the model answer questions we need to have answered?) and interest (does the model give us any insight about the situation we wouldn't have without it?).
The subjective questions are important in research, but can also arise at more elementary level. The high-school teacher who chooses to devote several lessons to presenting Cardano's method for solving the generic third-degree equation will certainly have to answer his students' questions why this is useful or interesting. Perhaps he has an answer. Perhaps he has an answer that the students don't agree with. In that case, he cannot look for a deductive argument concluding that Cardano's formula is interesting -- he'll have to appeal to emotions, curiosity, all of those fluffy touchy-feely considerations that we need to use to tackle subjective questions."
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1354044/can-math-be....
Exactly. It's selection bias, ruthlessly exploited by people who have their own agenda and therefore an interest in focusing attention on the worst excesses of those who resist (continued) imposition of that agenda.
What might that agenda be? Here's a hint. A certain "shadow docket" decision by the US Supreme Court has been in the news a bit lately. As it turns out, all five of the concurring justices are Catholic, and under pressure (e.g. threats of being denied communion) to decide as they did. That pressure should have been grounds for recusal, but of course none of the five had the decency to do that. Where's the "mercy and grace" in that law? What "woke" group is doing that much harm to that many people's lives?
Selection bias? My province in Ontario literally changed the curriculum for mathematics claiming mathematics is subjective and colonial and all other woke nonsense. You mean to tell me I am not seeing what I am really seeing?
Thank you for providing an example of the selective presentation (exploiting selection bias) I was talking about. Here's the official version of the current Ontario curriculum guidelines, for anyone to read.
There's a bunch of stuff about how the teaching of mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization etc., but that's not the same as mathematics itself being subjective or colonial. (Personally I think even the stuff about teaching is kind of garbage because it's vague and non-actionable, but that's a different discussion.) A cherry-picked, exaggerated description like that is exactly the kind of selective presentation I was talking about. You have received a distorted view, and are now passing that on to others.
> An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective. Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline. However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective. Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions. The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education.
After I along with a bunch of others emailed them, they got rid of it. However no one was fired for writing such nonsense, nor did we figure out how such nonsense got through the top officials in the government. Here's the news on them removing it:
> A cherry-picked, exaggerated description like that is exactly the kind of selective presentation I was talking about. You have received a distorted view, and are now passing that on to others.
Before accusing someone of that, please research the topic.
"However, the content and the context in which it is taught"
I don't know how you interpret that as anything but a commentary on the teaching of mathematics. The excerpt supports my point, not yours. Maybe Ontario should look into their curriculum for reading as well as for mathematics.
> please research the topic
Stop projecting. I posted a link to the original source material before you did, and I interpreted it as a sane person would rather than how the Canadian equivalent of Fox News told people to. That's more diligence than you have shown.
You first accused me of lying about Ontario's "subjective mathematics" announcement. So I showed you how that's exactly what they had:
> An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective. Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline.
thus refuting your "misinformation" claim.
Claiming I am making false accusations while I am literally citing the archive page and the governor's response of why they removed the "subjective" nonsense is plain mental gymnastics. Why don't you simply agree that I was correct since even Doug Ford admits the nonsense was there in the curriculum?
Yet you continue to play partisan politics and then bring up Fox News out of nowhere? I neither follow Fox News, nor do I follow any Canadian equivalent. I don't follow any corporate media.
Please don't bother replying as you seem more interested in ad hominem attacks.
Yes, the document exists. Nobody ever denied that. But no matter how you try to spin it, no matter how many schoolyard-rhetoric tricks you try to apply so you can have the last word, your presentation of it was still cherry-picked and exaggerated at best and that was my original point.
>> don't want you to lose your job because you don't agree with me.
But lots of people want that power. It is within living memory that people could be fired or denied employment based on thier religion. Many today still want thier religion beliefs to be enforced against believers and non-believers alike (abortion, education, marriage, adoption, right to die etc). Not every person of faith is so liberal about the affairs of others. Many call for a return to a past where religious "values" were enforced by the state at the point of a sword.
And most of us agree that it's bad. But most of us somehow don't agree that forcing wokeness on others is bad. Because the woke ones can't possibly imagine being wrong. Theirs is the right way, everyone else are bigots and racists. It's an aggressive religion, a cult even.
Most of us are good, and the few extremists don't represent who we are.
Most of them can't possibly imagine being wrong. They're fanatical cultists.
Here's the problem: These two paragraphs are unrestricted opinions, it's a feeling that anyone could have about anyone, and there's nothing factual about it.
This is a feeling that's not rooted in falsifiable observations, and so, there is nothing that prevents the same thought from applying to any other group of people.
And that's where the symmetry hurts. Maybe they, the other people, maybe they feel the same way about you? That you can't imagine being wrong, that you're fanatical.
Wouldn't that make them hypocrites, for painting all those people with the same brushtroke? For making generalizations about people without bringing anything to support those? Without any desire to see yourself proven wrong?
I think that someone's words would suffuse hypocrisy, were they to neglect disloging the beam in their own eye, before looking for the mote in their brother's eye.
I am condemning Christian fanatics. You are however writing abstract apologetics for woke cultists instead of condemning them. That's the difference between us. No need for all this mental gymnastics imagining that most other people on "my side" are worse than me and on "your side" better than you. At least do your own part.
That’s only the woke people you hear about. I consider myself pretty woke and the only woke thing I could imagine to demand from a workplace is sexual harassment policies with real teeth. (And not a he said she said scenario but Eg. Dont pinch the ass of your direct report against their consent or else you’re out of the door).
I think there are people who take it too far just like there are people who take anything too far. But clearly to me wokeness hasn’t stopped Eg. Blizzard-Activision for all their woke PR so I’m skeptical that wokeness has nearly as much influence as is often implied.
Was'nt sexual harassment recognized as wrong much before this 'woke' thing became popular...
What then did 'woke' bring to the table?
Increased awareness? action without trial? -- even here we have a mixed bag, we want some trial of sorts, otherwise accusations would fly all over.
Those who rail against 'woke' are not railing in favor of the perpetrators in the me-too cases.
In many solutions, there are pros and cons of policies, and quite hard to just nail them.
The rational people among both those who are woke and those opposed -- should identify those that are clearly detrimental to society without equivalent benefits.
One such group - the influence of the college administrators -- comes to mind. This segment is already a major cause of college fees inflation, and now is also identified in bolstering the extreme woke actions. Also, because they are management, they are not going to fix themselves.
This is where external actors need to step in to clean up the mess.
It would be easier to listen to concerns about creeping wokeness if the alleged dangers were actually different and worse than the problems that already exist. In many states people are fired from their jobs for not being conservative, for being lgbt etc. It happens with full knowledge of the state and is completely legal; the media doesn't even bother trying to follow up. Worse than that: our prison system, our overseas military belligerence etc etc. Wokeness? Add it to the list I guess, but the only reason some people spend so much time screeching about it is because they have been lucky to avoid getting nailed by one of the many other long-lived dangers that continue to stalk our society.
It's human nature to ignore the excesses of your own tribe and focus on problems originating across the border, but when it's just pure hypocrisy (another feature of human nature) it's hard to really give a shit. If we were discussing an asteroid hurtling toward the planet I'd like to think we could reach some kind of rough consensus that it is indeed an imminent threat, although my confidence in even this contrived scenario playing out as one might hope has been significantly shaken the more time I spend around large groups of humans. When it comes to trying to mediate the culture war, while real injustices occur on both sides and should punished/prevented, the fact remains that justice is often slow or absent for many, if not most. The truly powerful in our society are conveniently immune from the petty struggles, happy to watch the little people tear each other apart over skin color or religion or anything at all.
You know how woke people say that being silent about racism you see is being complicit in it? Well it goes both ways. My woke-tending friends refuse to express any opinion condemning any of the woke bullshit, never happened even once. I wonder if that's because they agree with all of that bullshit, or if they're afraid of speaking their mind for dear of being labelled a racist by their own peers. End result is the same though.
True that. I was told to shut it at work, and not just in a private 1 on 1, and nobody moved. corportate American and their employees cowardice in action Behind curtains of course. No reporter to come ask. The signs of tyrany are clear.
Yes but their reputation probably wasn’t completely destroyed which allowed them to find another job I would guess. Not the case with this woke outrage thing.
Perhaps, but that's still not something we consider state action. People lose their jobs or reputation all the time, and we don't consider it worthy of redress.
Many people appreciate the American right to refuse service to anyone; this is that same impulse exercised towards racists and bigots.
Time heals most wounds. Although it may feel like their reputation was "completely destroyed", I think many will find that they can get another job, once the immediate thunder and fury blows over.
Gee why does crime happen when we have laws against it!?
Good luck suing a Twitter mob or some activist/student who has no assets but can crowdfund a legal defense fund overnight which they won't need because there will be a line of lawyers wanting to represent them pro bono.
Also riling up a smear campaign does not necessarily rise to the level of defamation. You can get fired for simply having the wrong opinions. I'm sure you have no trouble seeing this as a problem when it's the people you like suffering that. Headline: BLM activist fired from their job for saying woke shit. Much outrage. Oh wait they just need a defamation suit. All good then. Right.
Yes, it happens. It's the nature of an employer / employee relationship; being a BLM activist isn't a protected class, and in only a few states does he have any legal recourse (in California, there's a law against firing a person for political affiliation). We definitely have a system where political activism is something those who have plenty to defend themselves or nothing to lose are best suited to engage in. I wouldn't have recommended to him he do this if he couldn't afford to lose his job.
I think you may have lost the thread though... I was talking about false accusations. Defamation would not help in a case like this one, as truth is always an affirmative defense.
The other point you raise (crowdsourced harassment) is trickier. IIUC, you could sue someone with deep pockets for that... "I heard what I was saying from someone else" is not a defamation defense. But a lot of the mob is bankrupt judgement-proof types.
Defamation isn't the worst of it. There's an ocean of normalcy between wokeness and alt-right, people forget that. It's ok to have different opinions on equity vs equality, on social norms, etc. You're not a racist bigot for not supporting every woke cause, despite what they claim. Yet having the wrong opinions will easily get you fired if you cross some woke activist on twitter or at your workplace / university. This isn't something a lawsuit or a thousand lawsuits can fix. It's the new repressive culture we're heading towards.
I think it's more the same repressive culture we've always been in, but new centers of power have emerged in it. Different people, as a result, are now feeling what was always there.
You could always be fired for doing something embarrassing to your boss (witness the example of the BLM protester who worked at a library and shared a book-burning video). But the "woke" now have enough social / economic clout to cause a big enough stir to shift the window on what's embarrassing to a boss. Whereas in the past, for example, inappropriate activity with a subordinate was swept under the rug "for the good of the corporation" (but having the wrong hairstyle could get you fired), now enough people agree such rug-sweeping shall no longer be tolerated (while hairstyle standards were probably racist) and corporations have reacted to new incentives.
Under the woke philosophy the criterion for deserving forgiveness still exists but is changed. In classical Christian philosophy, forgiveness requires contrition whereas under woke philosophy forgiveness requires powerlessness.
This is often misinterpreted as an absence of forgiveness because no amount of contrition seems to abate the condemnation.
In classical Judeo-Christian philosophy, there is one law for all - regardless of whether the person is poor or rich, and other classifications.
Also, there existed this concept of a re-do -- as in a 'jubilee' - land is returned - and 7 years where the debts are reset etc ( the original of current laws limiting bankruptcies to 7 yrs ). No one in a biblical scenario remained poor because their ancestors slacked off.
Now that those are not in play, one sees a class of people condemned to remain low with no ways of rising up.
While there is progress being made to alleviate these conditions, it is not fast enough. These group ( poor socio-economic) train their guns against the rich.
The rich being smart, use their puppets like the media, etc to create fake outrage - propping up 2 parties which essentially are the same thing with minor differences, drumming up differences based on race, creating new controversies with gender etc.
I think you're redefining things. Since no amount of contrition abates the condemnation, there is an absence of forgiveness. Powerlessness doesn't abate the condemnation either, after all.
Instead, these people who refuse to forgive do so because they feel that forgiveness has been used to excuse abuse (read broadly) and to keep abusers in power. In other words, it's all about power, and forgiveness just doesn't feature.
Worth also noticing that it comes from the USA where justice is punishment and vindication for the victim. It's why victims and their families are invited to be present when a criminal is killed via the death penalty, and ex cons can't vote. Eye for an eye is very American.
Is it old protestant and puritan? Possibly, I'm not sure of the origins.
Even the Soviets thoughts that prisoners could be rehabilitated (in principle), and we can consider the Nordic prison model for a more contemporary example. Even English criminology is more about reform than punishment. Often victims feel sidelined because of this.
American justice in general doesn't have this sense of rehabilitation being more important than vindication. Justice is retribution by the victim on both right and left wings. I posit that this is why the US is struggling with the "woke", it's because the methods and tactics are seen as normal.
> Worth also noticing that it comes from the USA where justice is punishment and vindication for the victim. It's why victims and their families are invited to be present when a criminal is killed via the death penalty, and ex cons can't vote. Eye for an eye is very American.
I hadn't thought of it from that angle, but it fits.
Ironically the people I know that are the most extreme on the social justice spectrum are also the most likely to talk about how justice shouldn't be about revenge and we should focus on rehabilitation wherever possible. Which I agree with (although might have a more skeptical take on how often it's possible). But then it's hilarious to see the same people turn around and post in detail about how some case of sexual assault or racism should be punished vindictively.
Sometimes I at least understand the urge to be emotional in response to a story, other times the desired punishment seems absurdly disproportionate. Regardless, there is a clear ideological conflict with wanting to rehabilitate murderers!
> Powerlessness doesn't abate the condemnation either, after all.
It does when the current majority no longer has a systemic advantage. Essentially it's saying, I don't want you to say you're sorry, I want things to change.
In a world where nobody feels like they have enough, I don't blame white individuals for being upset by the claim that they are privileged. And I don't think the answer is to take away all advantages from anybody because that's a race to the bottom. But, I do understand how a black American might eventually get frustrated when people display contrition over, for example, police brutality, but it continues to happen disproportionately.
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding this. What you you mean by 'requires powerlessness'? If I commit a sin against wokeness, how do I demonstrate powerlessness in order to gain forgiveness?
That's exactly it. You don't "demonstrate" powerlessness. The woke left will only be happy when there is actual change and the systematic advantage for the current majority is removed. Which of course will not happen, and even if it did, would result in other unfairnesses and in fact already has. Nobody will ever be satisfied because the fairer things are, the fairer they will need to be.
Still, I understand better now how empty words will do little to soften woke hearts.
Not sure who downvoted you, but I found this to be an incredibly insightful comment. Possibly one that conservative (anti-woke) voices might benefit from hearing. Not that it seems like you were taking a side here.
Under American society it had been deemed adequate to feign contrition to maintain the entrenched power structure, while continuing to engage in the same terrible behavior as before. That's no longer being tolerated.
The practice of Christianity is primarily about repentance. We none of us have full control over our behaviour but we always have the ability to correct our hearts by swallowing our pride and accepting divine forgiveness. And we are obliged to forgive others who have repented.
Wokeness doesn't understand this. It sees people, woke and Christians both, as hypocrites. And we are! This is because it's necessary to advocate ideal moral standards, even the ones we ourselves are incapable of meeting.
However, if someone posts 'hate speech' somewhere this will always be held against them by the woke. So, yes, wokeness does not forgive. There is no mercy.
Even worse, we're supposed to follow the example of forgiving our enemies while they murder us. ("For they know not what they do")
this leads to controversy even among Christians, but the cross is scandalous (Greek skandalon is literally a block that causes stumbling) foolishness when encountered face first.
God acted first, forgave us before we repented, even forgives those who will never repent ("causes rain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous"). But there is judgment, krinomai, discernment of a heart's response to that forgiveness -- God allows us to reject him in the end, and if I ultimately reject the source of life, I die.
> I want you to believe my christian message but I will not force you to do so. I don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what I believe. I don't want you to lose your job because you don't agree with me.
Perhaps that's true. But too many of your fellow faithful do, or at least, want to. Just look at Texas and their recent abortion law for one of many egregious and current examples of "good christians" spreading the "good word".
The ruthlessness is born of centuries of persecution, belittlement, prejudice, and hate. This does not make it justified, but it is a natural consequence of the masses and the natural swing of the social pendulum.
I suspect you very much do understand, but just wish it weren't true, just as the woke and the progressive overlook their own overreach, hate, prejudice and hypocrisies in their plight to right perceived wrongs and pursue some balance of equality and opportunity.
In order to achieve peace and understanding, we must hold ourselves responsible, and our own accountable, and that starts with not being ignorant (willful or otherwise) to the misdeeds of those in each of our own tribes.
Where is there mercy and grace in being unwilling to make an effort to show the utterly minimal respect of e.g. addressing them how they prefer?
There's a ruthlessness to it in large part because of a recognition from many that asking nicely has been met with immense vitriol, anger, even violence in some cases. At some point you stop asking and start demanding.
I can only correct this so many times, so here's my drop into the ocean on this thread:
The paradox of tolerance is that if you're too tolerant to nazis, they might take over everything and you wind up with less tolerance.
It is NOT a get out of jail free card for "you don't have to be tolerant to people that you label as intolerant, in fact terminate them with prejudice". You need a credible threat of the 'bad people' taking over and limiting tolerance for it to hold together.
You're not "correcting" anything. You're misrepresenting the intent to try to reduce the scope of it. Popper did not target just authoritarianism, but intolerance in general.
He's arguing that, sure, being prepared to use force is a last resort, but he's also arguing that the intolerant must be met by arguments and kept in check by public opinion if possible.
I'm sure some extremists would like to use violence against those they deem intolerant, but when discussing "wokeness" most people fall firmly in the camp of using arguments and using the power of public opinion to keep the intolerance in check.
I'm absolutely trying to reduce the scope from what it has become.
It has become, "person I don't like is intolerant, according to me, and hey paradox of tolerance, therefore I will persecute them with no quarter and no decency". Did you see some of the crazy cancellation stories last summer? One guy was ruined for saying "please don't burn down buildings, especially right next to my house": https://reason.com/2021/06/15/daniel-elder-cancel-culture-ch...
If you think you've found a loophole that enables you to be a McCarthyist rooting out evil, you're the bad guy.
You specifically used the word 'ruthlessness', approvingly, and cited the paradox of tolerance as justification.
People are really out there being ruthless, trying to hurt people, and justifying it using your logic. It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.
Ruthlessness does not imply force or hurting people.
It's a strawman because the situation you constructed implied things I'd never suggested and then used those to attack what I said instead of attacking what I actually said.
> It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.
We live in a democratic society. Intolerant ideas, held en masse, have a way of becoming laws. It is worth fighting them, even if they're not wearing swastikas.
No. Just the ones that are most visible in your mind.
And you'd be foolish to assume that cancellation is a thing of the left. What happened to Colin Kaepernick? Or republicans that dared to impeach Trump? McCarthyism? Cancel culture is a tactic that conservatives have used for decades now, only recently adopted by the left.
> "And you'd be foolish to assume that cancellation is a thing of the left. What happened to Colin Kaepernick? Or republicans that dared to impeach Trump? McCarthyism? Cancel culture is a tactic that conservatives have used for decades now, only recently adopted by the left."
Is that an admission that the current left is on the same moral footing than the McCarthyites? All this time, I had hope we'd risen above that but if that is so, it's even more cause for those who identify as liberal to abandon and repudiate the left.
It's exactly the same as McCarthyism. And yeah, we should have risen above it by now, but it has only gotten stronger. But where are liberals going to go? The right is even worse...and they have 3/4 of a century of experience doing it.
The people canceled by antiracists are mostly cultural moderates in liberal spaces, and that will always be true, because that's who they can get. They can't cancel conservatives, they can only make them stronger, so it's cancel well-meaning center-left people, or cancel nobody.
He just barely lost, after getting covid right before the election and looking like a huge fool, while democrats lost seats in the house, underperformed in the senate... no covid, he wins, easily.
If I were a Republican, I'd be congratulating you and handing you as much rope as I had right now. Say defund the police again, please, here's a megaphone, we'll record it for Fox News.
What are some concrete examples of the ruthlessness you mention?
More than a few people that identify as Christian are more than willing to ban abortion, as an example. They could care less about what anyone “believes” but will gladly force others to live as they want. How is that any less ruthless than someone losing their job because they went on a racist tirade and let it end up on Instagram?
Lgtbq+ have a long history of not even being allowed to acknowledge their nature for fear of violence, actual violence. Losing a job due to anti-lgtbq+ views that are expressed and recorded, and nobody forces anybody to express their opinions, just doesn’t seem ruthless in comparison.
I get it that it sends a chilling to those that share those particular ideals but it’s not like they are trying to have civil discourse either.
You say "you" don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what you believe.
Are you fighting against the people you voted for passing those laws? Are you willing
to vote the other side given evidence that the current group is passing un-Christian laws?
If you aren't speaking up for others, then you are complicit in these things you "don't want".
I'm sure many may have heard this quote before:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The back story of Niemöller is quite interesting. He was a Christian pastor who heard the general
message and agreed with the goals of making a better German and having individuals give up some
freedoms to make a better country. However, after a meeting with Hitler, some things became very
clear. 1) He was being spied on and his phone was tapped (remember, he was pro-Nazi and preaching
as such) 2) Hitler didn't care about making Germany better, he just wanted complete and total control
over everyone and everything. After this meeting, he saw the man behind the curtain and started
preaching against the Nazis and was shortly after locked in the camps. The quote from above was from
after the war. He spent the rest of his life recounting how he had failed to life up to his beliefs.
Writing and speaking about (essentially) the slippery slope of in-action so others wouldn't end up
making the same mistakes he did the next time evil returns. Too many people would rather not do this
critical thinking on their own, instead just believing and trusting in others who are "right".
Wokeness is not unique in having people like that. As with any group of significance, there's some included that actively weaponize it. And also many people are new to it. I experienced this first-hand when I was introduces to something that was new and exciting to me, that suddenly everything I did was about that thing, and that I was doing everything to further my experience with it. I feel like some people do that with wokeness too, pushing it as far as they can with this momentum. Which is experienced as ruthlessness from the outside.
I mean critical theories critique liberalism. So it's not just a few people. The movements intellectual basis has a critique of liberalism at its core.
Probably one of the reasons Western Europe diverges from the US, despite the academic scene being similar and even more entrenched, is that the conservative bogeyman in Europe was smaller.
Do you not think there is a difference between 'you should follow my religion' and e.g. 'you should use neutral pronouns to make other people more comfortable?' The later isn't about some fundamental belief, it's really just an extension of a concept that has existed for thousands of years -- politeness
> The later isn't about some fundamental belief, it's really just an extension of a concept that has existed for thousands of years -- politeness
No, it actually is a new, fundamental belief: The belief that it’s okay to assume the worst intent unless others go out of their way to follow all of the correct wokeness rules.
Ironically, assuming the worst intent in cases of ambiguity is quite the opposite of politeness.
For what it’s worth, I’ve made a best effort to use neutral pronouns in my own writing. However, when I read someone else’s writings that use “his” or “her” in a generic statement, I don’t assume the author is being sexist, misogynistic, or impolite. I assume the author was simply making a generic statement.
That’s the difference with the new woke movement: It has been misused and abused as an excuse to assume ill intent in others unless they know and follow all of the right rules.
Since when did "politeness" mean you have to do what other people tell you? If English people demanded that we spell color like "colour" because seeing it without the u made them uncomfortable, the correct response would be to tell them to fuck off. I don't see why it's any different with people demanding their own pronouns
Because when a specific person asks you to refer to them in a particular way, it’s polite to acquiesce. When you call someone something they don’t like, they will respond by not liking you. If someone asks you to refer to them as “they”, and you tell them to “fuck off”, you’re not going to have a good relationship with that person.
Yes, if someone asked me to refer to them as "your royal highness," I'm sure they will not like me if I don't. But generally I don't care if people who go around making demands for special treatment like me or not. This is what the pronoun people do. They end up not well liked because of their attention seeking demands, and then when they notice that no one likes them, they blame it on "bigotry."
People aren't asking you to call them "your royal highness" though. It's typically "he", "she", or "they" 99% of the time, words you already use to refer to people. People are just giving you the right mapping rather than hoping your heuristics get it right. I appreciate this especially in situations when my heuristics fail, and if you meet enough people they fail often enough to create noticeable social friction. As the world becomes more interconnected, this friction is appreciable, and can be alleviated easily by just adding pronouns to the formalities of introducing one's self. When we meet, I already tell you my name. You tell me yours, and I wouldn't presume to just call you whatever I want. It would signal I don't appreciate you or consider you worthy of remembering. The same is true for pronouns. If I tell you I want to be called "they" and you decide you'd rather call me "she", it's the same level of indifference as if I tell you my name is "Sue" and you insist on calling me "Sam."
They aren't asking for special treatment either -- I think everyone in your life appreciates that you refer to them using their personally preferred gender pronouns, rather than ones you might prefer for arbitrary reasons. Go ahead and switch around the pronouns you use with people in your life, and see how those people react. Trans people and non binary people are just asking you to use the pronouns they prefer, the same as everyone asks and expects.
Yes, the difference is the second question is a loaded question, it has already moved the definition of "politeness" to exclude people who don't answer "yes" to that question.
IMHO, it is a more sneaky question than some religious preacher who can easily take "no" for an answer
> I don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what I believe
20th century America has spent years doing exactly this. It's still ongoing in Texas right at the minute. People have been fired for being atheist. Children are send to indoctrination camps for "gay conversion therapy" if they are suspected of homosexuality, a practice which leads some of them to commit suicide.
Rein in your fellow Christians and things might calm down.
I recall a researcher who lost his job for publishing research that violence on black lives by police was only covered by the media when the media understood them as sympathetic victims and so a successful strategy is to intentionally play up the helplessness of being violenced upon as opposed to militant resistance and cooperative resistance. I believe the rage about it at the time was more or less how dare this person try to finger waggle how black people can effectively protest. But the study itself was fairly milquetoast.
David Shor? It seems he was sacked for reducing black grief and anger to nothing more than a bad campaign strategy for the democrats in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It wasn’t a smart thing to tweet, given that he worked for a political org. Should he have been sacked? I don’t know.
Wokeness is essentially a New England Puritan movement with some minor modifications. Even the sources (Ivy Leagues) are the same. If you view it through this lens, the lack of tolerance and crusader zeal becomes very apparent. It is perhaps the exact opposite of libertarianism.
Edit: some Puritan libertarians do not like this comment :)
"Wokeness" (liberal universalism) is actually closely related to libertarianism. It's really just the same Western, individualistic, idealistic, Christian worldview and values applied at different societal scales, generating different conclusions.
Small scale rural (or elite)? These values manifest as libertarianism.
Big scale urban? These values manifest as liberal universalism, or "wokeness".
Not at all. The woke thing is not liberal universalism, because it is actively hostile to any competing ideologies or definitions. That makes it explicitly anti-libertarian.
That's where the "universalism" piece comes from. It's the belief that deep down everyone on the planet is a liberal, and is therefore hostile to other ways of thinking.
Yes, superficially it is very different to libertarianism. But stick a libertarian in a big city for a few years and they will realize how silly libertarianism is (there's too many people for it) and transition into a liberal universalist.
Sorry but I think they are entirely different things with entirely different lineages. Woke comes from the Puritans, (American) libertarians come from the Western frontier.
The western settlers were a quite diverse group. Many came from the South. They certainly didn’t all come from a narrow group in one region of the northeast? This is...basic history.
Have you visited any American school recently? No cross in sight, but plenty of rainbow flags. Not sure about the gunpoint (in both historical and contemporary sides of the argument), but mass conversion it is.
Yes, actually. I live in the heart of downtown Dallas and was a fairly active Pokemon Go player for years, so I traveled all over the city to gyms and raids, many of which were at schools. I don't recall seeing a rainbow flag at any school at all. I do recall seeing them at City Hall and at a Raytheon facility, bizarrely enough. The only thing that stood out about the schools is how many of them had the names of confederate generals that never lived anywhere near Texas and they all seemed to magically acquire these names right as civil rights legislation was being passed in the 60s.
That said, I don't exactly doubt that tolerance and acceptance of gay people is being taught in many places, but I find this quite baffling as something that I am apparently supposed to find troubling and a sign of violent conquest at the illiberal hands of people advocating for tolerance and acceptance of gay people.
That the outcome of the mass conversion has positive aspects is orthogonal to the point that mass conversion is happening.
I'll let you ponder whether donning sexual behavior symbolism at all in kindergarten and elementary school is an appropriate adult behavior. Which is pervasive on the West Coast, possibly Dallas is different.
There are some theological interpretations of this state of affairs that point into the direction of wokeism being a Christian heresy: Christian religion without Christ. I won't go any further because this is sadly radioactive ground.
Plenty of cultures and religions that did the same don’t exist any more. So I don’t think killing heretics and taking their children is a guarantee to success for a religion.
I'm curious whether dukeofdoom's post will be removed. It's an offensive take, to be sure, but I wonder if it's over the line of what hnews is able to tolerate these days.
Jesus, dude. I rather specifically said I'm aware that this is a normal way cultures go out and I'm perfectly happy to be American rather than whatever obscure Native Mexican tribe I'd have been a part of otherwise. And I'm well aware the Aztecs were no better than the Conquistadores.
All I'm asking is everyone here, including you, take a look in the mirror and read some history when you start trying to set your particular tribe up as somehow uniquely charitable and forgiving in contrast to the ultimate tyranny of American college students. You guys are vandalizing this comments section with hysteria around how the "woke" are so uniquely uncharitable to those they deem as ideologically other while showing absolutely no charity to any of the people you're setting up as bogeyman. Where does this cycle end?
Thank you for clarify your position. Even though I replied to your comment, it wasn't an attack on you personally. Sorry if you took it that way. More of a cultural comment and society at large.
Identity politics is a Marxist revolutionary movement. As Lenin pointed out, in the Revolution, morality is subsumed in politics and Revolutionary violence is not actual violence, or rather, it is not immoral. The is no mercy to be shown to anyone who obstructs the Revolution. Phase I of the Revolution is to destroy the values of the "oppressive" preexisting order. Phase II is the realization of the promised Utopia, which of course never happens. We are in the logically necessary nadir of nihilism where no values can claim universality. This could be considered the antithesis of Christianity. The woke are the intellectual vanguard of the Revolution when they are self-conscious of their historical role. Most are simply unwitting foot soldiers pushing this revolution forward like ants, without understanding. Many are simply aspirational elites playing the power game for petty stakes. Some are true believers. If you want to understand what the world looks like when morality is subsumed under politics, consider the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, for which that was a defining feature. The woke are playing a dangerous game, supported by the ruling elites who are thinking they can control this. Are they right? We'll see. There were plenty of elites who thought they could control the revolutionary forces they were harnessing to gain or keep power.
It is anti-Marxist, in that Marxism requires that the whole proletarian class of a society unite, whereas wokism pretty much guarantees that society will be shattered into thousands of mutually suspicious parts.
Can you explain that further? I'm interested in the idea that our understanding of an idea like Marxism can improve the further away we are in time from it. That seems counter-intuitive.
It doesn't seem counter-intuitive to me that understanding improves with time. Quite the opposite. It's odd that you think that. Why wouldn't our understanding deepen with time to reflect, more information, and with the unfolding of events in history to reveal mysteries?
I don't agree that our understanding of ideas improves with time. For example, do we understand the teachings of Jesus better today than someone who heard them first hand?
I would argue no, because we don't have anywhere near the same life experiences as that audience. In addition, all our information has been mediated through the accounts of others with their own biases and every recounting makes it a little bit worse.
With this in mind your statement that someone "has an outdated view of Marxism" sounds odd to me, like someone saying "You have an outdated view of Christianity". Says who? Marx?
This is so ignorant I don't even know what to say to you. If you're interested in learning about the connection and evolution you can look into the Marxist Frankfurt school and its influence on modern identity politics.
Well, Marx famously wrote he himself wasn't a Marxist ("je ne suis pas marxiste"), but putting that aside, Marx was himself a bourgeois intellectual (as were Lenin and Trotsky, Che Guevara, and many other famous revolutionaries). Read Lukas' History and Class Consciousness if you want to understand the relationship between bourgeois intellectuals and Marx's revolutionary politics.
I made no claims for any One True Marxism when I described Identity Politics as "a Marxist revolutionary movement" but I would agree that Identity Politics is consistent with what Marx actually wrote. Consider Marx's third Thesis on Feuerbach:
"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."
The part of society that is "superior to society" is just those bourgeois intellectuals who are able to transcend their place in their own culture, who have a view of History and can execute its logic ("The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."). These are the Revolutionary Vanguard, as Lenin described in What is to Be Done? Moreover, the materialist doctrine forgets, according to Marx, that circumstances are changed by man and "self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice", which i would argue is the essence identity politics and consistent with the centrality of 'homo faber' to all of Marx's philosophy.
To understand Marx, you must understand that, first and foremost, he was a revolutionary. The failure of the actual Marxist revolution to arise from the proles as Marx predicted or to produce the kind of society most people would chose to inhabit (in fact, the opposite, in the form of Bolshevik and Nazi totalitarianism), was instrumental in the thinking of later Marxist theorists, Weimar bourgeoisie though some may have been. I would not count Gramsci as a Weimar bourgeois but he was instrumental in shifting the interpretation of Marxist revolutionary politics to the commanding heights of culture, rather than industry per Lenin. In that, he was 100% predicting the take-over of our education and media systems by revolutionary politics. Gender theory and identity politics are self-professedly Marxist ideologies. There's no real debate about what they think they're about, it's pretty well-documented.
I wonder why you think you have a better claim to interpreting Marx correctly than 150 years of dedicated scholar-activists have been able to do. If you've slogged your way through Kapital vol III, I'm impressed and a bit mystified as to why you might think Marx's important thinking about political economy isn't consistent with identity politics, which, if it's about anything, is about deconstructing the legal and political superstructures that create power. What's more Marxist than that?
I think that there is a hidden assumption, in wokeness. It isn't explicitly stated but it is strongly implied.
That assumption : The WOKE IDEOLOGY is realer than reality. That is to say, it comprises the primary reality and all else (time, space, dogs, cats...) Is secondary.
Thus reality is what we agree it to be. A side-effect of authority, consensus and conversation. If we agree that I am a frog then I am literally a frog.
And it follows that the greatest perversion is to contradict that ideology.
No doubt there are historical examples of something similar.
Where's the mercy and grace in allowing people to engage in terrible behavior without consequences? The ruthlessness was in tolerating serial predatory behavior, and people are finally tired of it.
You can't be seriously using Christians, of all people, as an example of people who don't try to force their views on others.
If your argument is that many don't, well I'd argue the "woke" people you're thinking of are just like the evangelical Christians who are not practicing what they preach.
> Where is mercy and grace in the midst of wokeness?
Friend, to be frank, I don't see any way that beliefs in providence and deferred reward can even begin to explain economics. (And I daresay this is by intent.)
Consider this definition from the article:
> injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled
From a clear reading of history and world events, you can see that terrible wrongs have been mercilessly committed for profit. Today, if it is hard to discuss these problems, it is in part because the topics have been so well buried, and honest discourse is a forgotten social principle, replaced by social media.
There is a significant difference in that woke, like SJW, is for the most part a derogatory term. It would be as if the word "christian" was a word created by athiests specifically to refer to those who did not practice what they preached. Any discussion of the merits of "wokeness" is approaching the subject in a biased and unproductive way.
I would suggest that those you would describe as woke have, on average, just as much belief in the importance of mercy and grace as you do, and would likely believe they have more. The difference is who is seen as worthy of that grace and mercy. Is it grace to allow someone who has made unwanted sexual advances in the workplace a second chance? Or is it mercy to those who were victimized to remove the problem? Obviously this is a crude and simplified example, as examples often are, but it illustrates the point.
> It would be as if the word "christian" was a word created by athiests specifically to refer to those who did not practice what they preached.
May off-topic, but it might be interesting to note that 'christian' was similarly not something the Christians called themselves, but were derisively called that by others as in "followers of Christ or Messiah' alluding to the fact that they followed Jesus who proclaimed himself as messiah but was killed in a pitiful way in their eyes. The Christians actually called themselves "people of The Way"
--
You make a good point that when starting with a derogatory term does not lead to a productive debate. How would the 'woke people' define themselves?
For example, justice is not a new concept. It exists in every society, even the most primitive ones. So, justice as we have it in the US or West, could be seen as derived from English Common Law, which in turn was derived from the Bible's Judeo-Christian origins. Since the times and the culture of the people had changed, the laws itself have evolved.
So, what should 'social justice' bring to the table? Are there opponents of these woke actions that agree with the perpetrators of sexual harassment? If not, why are we debating an area we are in full agreement?
It's a good point, and I did consider noting that at one time this was also true for the word christian. But I think we agree that this is not the case now.
There are several considerations that underpin my own thinking on social justice, but perhaps most relevant here is the concept of competing freedoms. It's easy to say that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, but the debate over hate speech is much more controversial. In the case of personal threats or libel, we do have a history of recognizing that there are potentially competing freedoms at stake when it comes to certain kinds of speech. We can productively disagree on how to balance these freedoms - even at the extremes - but the caricature of wokeness pretends that I don't care about freedom of speech at all, while simultaneously dismissing that there may be competing freedoms worth considering. I personally believe that freedom of speech outweighs the freedom to live unencumbered by impersonal threats and libel - but I also acknowledge the damage that allows, and believe we should consider ways to minimize or compensate for it.
This applies to my example of sexual harassment, but in that case with what I will call "soft freedoms." That is to say, the hypothetical harasser does not have a right to work at that company, and the hypothetical victims do not have a right to not see a particular person. In a perfect world, a reformed harasser could return to work and get a second chance, and those they worked with could feel secure and safe. Given that we do not live in this perfect world, there is a choice in how to balance these soft freedoms. I think we might disagree on where to place this particular line, but probably not by very much. But the "anti-woke" would have you believe that I think that anyone who was accused of the slightest transgression should be fired.
> I also acknowledge the damage that allows, and believe we should consider ways to minimize or compensate for it.
But when the meta-discussion about how to compensate for it gets shut down, then the dialogue simply stops.
No longer is the perpetrator the primary target, but the person who makes a statement questioning some part of it.
Many of those cited in the article are actually on the left, and would generally agree with the broader positions, but now find themselves attacked with no recourse.
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Even in this imperfect world, the harasser can be put on 'probation' to see if there is a 2nd strike, the 'victim' can have additional monitoring... We need to build systems and processes knowing that we have imperfect people who sometimes make unintentional mistakes, or even if it was intentional, we can have systems that ensure that if they claim repentance, it is genuine
> Rest of the world calls it 'manners' or 'civilized behavior'.
Latinax+, Womxn is manners and civilized behavior? In actual civilized countries you'd get confused look or cuckoo sign. This insanity doesn't exist in Europe yet(thank God), but woke idiots are working hard, no worries.
> Because Europe is not US. You cant rail about others, speak hatefully about minorities, immigrants, less harass people who wear masks or other bullsh*t and expect the state not to drag you to court to persecute your ass.
All across Europe some parts of the press are happy to speak hatefully about minorities and immigrants.
I don’t think any of this stuff is prosecuted (or that it should be). At least the French and Spanish examples were widely condemned but I think it says a lot they were published in the first place.
Every single reference you gave either reports outrage or investigations about such actions by any media outlet or persona. Whether any of those investigations or outrage will cause a public prosecutor to carry them into court, is another matter. That is, if a citizen or resident does not carry them to the court first. Barring those who issue apologies for their actions, which mostly happens.
Such stuff should be prosecuted. The state of American society, the delirium that engulfed the segments who were allowed to keep living back in 150 years ago, actual fascists organizing openly with open statements about 'cleansing others' -> Such things show that if you let the extremists do whatever for 'freedom', you end up with a big pile of sh*t in your hands.
That's not an example. And, there has been pretty strong and large persecutions of football clubs for actions which their fans did in the middle of a crowded stadium. FIFA rules - without even justice taking action, FIFA kicks the butt of such clubs whose fans go out of civilized limits.
The fact that you speak about FIFA in a positive light tells me you’ve never seen a football game, let alone been to a football stadium where racist abuse is being hurled. In Italy it’s especially bad, with banana peels being thrown on the pitch to abuse black players. FIFA doesn’t do anything about this. They take a “see no evil” approach to individual instances while professing to “kick out racism”.
You seem to think football is a niche sport in Europe. It’s not. It’s by far the most popular one. If racism is endemic in it, that indicates a wider malaise. Don’t try to excuse it by saying “no only a minority of fans…”
Please, just stop talking on a subject you’re clearly out of your depth on. And please stop this nonsense about racism only existing in America. It’s just not true.
Yeah, definitely i have never been to a football game, let alone have been to a football stadium. Good job divining that out about a random stranger on internet. What a discovery.
And then you moved on to build an entire argument about your false divination, making your arguments totally baseless.
You dont need another person to discuss - you seem to be capable of just making up arguments for the other person. So i wont be replying to your argument since you can continue making arguments and replying to them yourself. Good day.
People on this forum/website might not like it but you're basically dead on. Everyone can see this is what's happening. Outside of this bubble, normal people see it. Our enemies abroad see it. The only people trying to suppress us talking about it are the people trying to inflict it upon us.
Being feminine is not "totally a-ok" for men. Please talk to some men and ask if they enjoy being called feminine. I guarantee you most if not all (Straight) men would hate someone saying they're feminine.
If you don't believe me, flip it around and think about how a woman would feel if someone told them they act like a man. Most would not take kindly to it.
It's unfortunate the top level comment was flagged so I can't check exactly what it said, wasn't it about feminization of _society_, not men?
My point was just that being feminine isn't inherently a bad thing, and also not the right word to describe society being overly sensitive. Not that men should be expected to be feminine or that that would be a good thing.
Femininity can be toxic just like masculinity. Right now we have a society where masculinity is considered toxic and anything feminine is considered good and morally correct. It creates an imbalance, and that was the point of my post.
Lets take mental health for example. If someone has triggers the feminine approach would be to comfort them and try to create an environment where that person isn't exposed to their triggers. The masculine approach would be to tell them to toughen up.
Thing is you need a bit of both. You need to give people some level of support but at the same time exposure to their trigger can help them overcome it in some scenarios. Or in other words "toughen up".
I see masculinity and femininity as a yin and yang type thing.
> Now it's spread to the point that they feel the need to invent words like Latinx just in case a couple of latinos feel left out.
It's worse than that: surveys of actual Hispanic people report support for the word "latinx" in the single-digit percentages. The word is solely about making the moral crusaders themselves feel holier. No actual social problem is solved by shoving this word into our lexicon.
Just another instance of a decade-long line of little examples of petty linguistic tyranny that don't solve any problems but that do make activists feel righteous and help them signal holiness to each other.
Not if you know the person's marital status you don't. In many circles this will be seen as incredibly impolite.
But let's keep screaming at people for saying "guys".
Edit: I can imagine all the refutations coming, but please consider whether you think most people are well-mannered to begin with. The vast majority of us below a certain age are not. If you aren't receiving thank you notes (physical, verbal, text, email all fine) for gifts from said person let's not include them in polite society.
Maybe you're unaware, or maybe you enjoy cognitive dissonance...
But, as a single example of a near endless amount
Prepubescent boys literally used to be called girls in English. Boys were called girls for many centuries before they were ever called anything else. But keep on about the new age "feminization" boogieman.
From the article:
"What links these developments is a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world."
It's moved from academic circles to "regular" middle-to-upper-middle class society for sure. You can argue that they're "elite" in some respects, but at the same time you're looking at an "elite" 30-40% of the population compared to the single-sigit percentage of people who espoused these beliefs 20 years ago.
While you are semantically correct, you're ignoring the actual phenomenon that is being discussed.
Whether or not a literal majority of white, middle-class, left-leaning Americans believe in Critical Race Theory or The Patriarchy is irrelevant. 20 years ago it was only discussed in Academia, whereas now these theories hold a significant influence over many peoples' political, business and social lives.
While I agree that it's no longer confined to Liberal Arts departments, I don't agree that it has influence on many people's lives (although that depends on how we define 'many'.)
Wokeness is generally treated as a joke among virtually every American whose employment is not dependent on 'public opinion', SNL's Levi's Woke Jeans skit is a classic take on that.
I don't know whether politicians are catering to over the top wokeness in order to be all-inclusive for votes, or if they believe (because they let someone else do their homework) that the majority of their constituency demands it.
>Wokeness is generally treated as a joke among virtually every American whose employment is not dependent on 'public opinion'
I'm not American (in case the username didn't give that away!), but I have definitely seen "woke" culture infiltrate into people's lives, especially in the corporate context.
A couple of incidents people I know personally have experienced include a guy being fired after a dumb sexist joke made at height of #metoo (to be fair, he was socially retarded in general) and another guy whose joke email was forcibly retracted by HR for using Christian Imagery in an "Easter Celebration" message (this guy was not socially retarded; school captain in fact).
Compare and contrast to the blue collar guys I know who openly make racist/homophobic jokes to just about everyone.
Point is, maybe amongst the people you know, in the city that you live, "wokeness" is treated as a joke. But in corporate culture in Melbourne (Australian equivalent of Portland, OR), it's this looming, oppressive spectre.
It really comes down to priorities. Are you rich? Then most of your needs are taken care of and you now need to search for something else to divert your attention.
Not rich? Need to worry about your job? Paying bills? Housing? Food? You have not fuckin time to care about anything else than to just survive.
I don't think it's that at all. There are plenty of tradies and other well-off groups without university education that just do not give a shit about this stuff.
> It didn't. It lives entirely in elite society. If you aren't a member of an elite social strata it doesn't impact you and nobody gives a damn.
That seems to be a highly reductive concept you're using for "elite", basically meaning "people you imagine who you don't agree with". What constitutes "elite", to you?
How about the row after row of suburban homes in Livermore with BLM signs? Those are all median income neighborhoods, but I'm guessing you'd call them "elite"?
How about an expensive golf club in Little Rock filled with upper income, mostly white, mostly male players working the local social environment? Not "elite", I'm guessing?
I'll note that the linked article doesn't engage in this kind of tribalism or reductionism, and is actually pretty clear about what it means by things like "woke". That's something you added to the discussion, and I don't think it works well.
>How about the row after row of suburban homes in Livermore with BLM signs? Those are all median income neighborhoods, but I'm guessing you'd call them "elite"?
If your interlocutor is an advanced-level mental gymnast, they will tell you that the people in these suburban homes are simply aping the customs of the so-called "elites", acting as their servants. So yes, "elite" in the post you're replying to really is being used to mean "people you imagine who you don't agree with".
Modern "wokeness" and so called social justice is just another way of tricking ordinary people away from the one issue that matters - wealth distribution. It's much better for the 1% to have wage slaves fighting each other about things like race, gender and culture.
Modern political left in Western world is a disgrace to everything that socialism originally stood for.
> When invited speeches from people such as Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, were cancelled after student activists accused her of complicity in “imperialist and patriarchal systems”, the response was a collective shrug.
This is a straw man. People have been protesting the IMF nonstop since the 90s and I guarantee patriarchy is not the main thing they complain about.
Arguably the entire article is a straw man. Also where is the byline? Who wrote this?
The piece is too dumbed down to really touch on the most interesting aspect of academic identity politics, which is the quite intricate system of post-structuralist theory from which it emerged. The question of why this form of theory osmosed into the public sphere but not some of its competitors did not is more interesting.
Funny how as soon as an idea critical of the US and the mostly white mostly male people who have held power here gains prominence the Economist and its ilk seem to change their tune about the “marketplace of ideas”.
I didn’t know that. It sort of has the effect of sounding like the voice of amorphous global capital is speaking directly to you and also that global capital writes at about the level of a high school senior.
It’s always been in real life. Funny enough, there are some cultural remnants of certain leftists from the 90s/00s where they were the ones railing against “political correctness” in attempt to shock the religious right of the time. The way I see it things have simply reversed as the religious right seemingly lost ground over the past years and progressives became more prominent.
Not applicable. The 'wokeness' in US largely encompasses things like minorities not tolerating being denigrated, debased, harassed anymore. Not even talking about things like nudity in beaches, abortion and other bullsh*t in which US still stays back 150 years in the past in US.
And there is nothing wrong with 'virtue signaling': Decent, civilized behavior should be promoted, and reactionary, backwards behavior should be derided. Otherwise the society cannot find its balance, and ends up promoting reactionaries who openly declare that they want to take the society 200 years back. Like what happened in Texas about abortion, making people snitch on other people for abortion - real big brother stuff.
I would take an extreme woke over the mildest conservative any day. The former doesnt want to take me to 200 years back in time.
Performative virtue signaling, as practiced in the US is wrong IMO. It is aimed at extracting social approval out of like-minded peers without effecting any positive change. Indeed it's getting to the point where _the mere absence_ of virtue signaling behavior draws reprisals and Twitter lynch mobs. Virtue under the barrel of a gun is not virtue at all.
Moreover, negative change is occurring: murders are up nationwide last year due to "abolishing police" in lower income neighborhoods and releasing repeat criminals from jail "on their own recognizance", a dozen times in a row. Black on black violence is a topic that can't even be raised on the left, and yet it affects both blacks and whites disproportionately. Why is that? Because it needs heavy police enforcement to combat it. A gangbanger couldn't care less about your "social worker".
A large part of those blacks and browns are in that woke movement. Bar the evangelist blacks in American south. Who seem to have some kind of stockholm syndrome.
You dont even know what abolishing police means apparently. And yet you have strong opinions about such stuff.
They want to abolish AMERICAN police and bring about European style, civil-service policing. And yeah, for that, you need to abolish the medieval-sheriff-remnant abomination that is the police concept in US.
It seems like this question could be asked at any period of social conflict historically in the West.
How did ideas that were once extremely radical like women's equality in the social sphere (to include holding office and suffrage), desegregation, slavery abolition, and many more work their way from the intelligensia (academics, philosophers) to the masses? How did "Marxism" jump from academia to workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? The fact that businesses are supportive of such causes is somewhat new, but is likely explained by the same forces that lead to the masses embracing these ideas.
Largely, this seems to be the molding of our social sphere by market forces. The northern competitors to the agricultural South found slavery abolition to be inline with their material interests. Likewise, as the industrial revolution shook up familial units and proletarianization of women moved wives into the factories, equality in the social sphere was no longer resisted by structures that had a material basis. Desegregation could assist in curbing a growing black nationalist movement through assimilation and a reduction in direct antagonism. Ideas are often forged in the conflicts and conditions of the day that they arise in.
Had this article been written in the '90s about the "extreme" gay rights movement, or in the '60s about the "woke" Civil Rights Movement, how many would actually stand by their critique a decade later? Businesses seem to understand that showing token support for progressive issues is better for their brand than silence or reactionary opposition to progressivism (which, let's face it, never holds up well for long.) While I doubt any corporate co-option for social issues actually materially benefits those movements, I can't help but find myself even more cynical about the reactionaries complaining about how "extreme" or "woke" their positions are.
Yeah, I tend to think "woke" as a sneer word is just the new "PC/politically correct" as a sneer word.
Corporations wouldn't be engaging in this kind of token support for progressive issues if they did not believe such issues were broadly popular. Such organizations rarely do anything for free. The token support is a reflection of something in the culture.
Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public. So it gets framed as some sort of virus, or as an orgy of cynical virtue signalling. But in order to virtue signal, you need somebody who understands (and ideally even shares) the virtue that is being signalled.
Your entirely reasonable comment being flagged currently is an example of this cognitive dissonance at work.
There are many valid critiques of so-called "wokeness" but most of them come from angles that reactionaries generally dislike.
> Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public.
But that's the thing: a lot of the woke stuff isn't publicly supported. Latinos don't care for "Latinx" [1]. Enforcing more gender-speech in Germany has decreased the support in the general population, also among women. [2]
It's the media that is going crazy over it and really, really wants it. And the politicians are willingly following. The electorate does not.
On the first point, a ~recent (2020) poll suggests most Latino people don't even know that "Latinx" is a word. Your post contradicts itself somewhat there. It says "the media are going crazy" over "woke stuff", but seems to make the assumption that "Latinx" is being actively pushed on Latino people, which seems like it isn't true--since if it were, far more of them would actually know it was a word. I suspect the prevalence of "Latinx" in the media is largely due to its being held up so frequently as an example of the putative derangements of wokeness (there are several examples of this in this thread).
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-08-11/...
On the second point, I simply don't know enough about the specifics of that debate, and I can't read German.
I remain convinced that corporations specifically show token support for social-progressive issues because they see some benefit to it; that is, they see some amount of broad support for these ideas in society.
> It says "the media are going crazy" over "woke stuff", but seems to make the assumption that "Latinx" is being actively pushed on Latino people, which seems like it isn't true--since if it were, far more of them would actually know it was a word.
You might have misunderstood my point. I'm saying the media cares, not the Latinos. They don't care, otherwise they'd be out there saying they want to be called Latinx -- instead, they don't even know that there's a debate. Similarly, most people of most cultures don't care for the concept of cultural appropriation, yet there's a fuzz in the corporate media about it.
Since German has gendered nouns with the male form usually doubling as the neutral form (e.g. teacher = Lehrer, female teacher = Lehrerin), there's been a push by the media, academics and politicians to gender (e.g. to say either Lehrende = "those who teach" or use things like Lehrer_innen which is supposed to also include transsexuals, non-binary and intersex). The public is opposed to it, but the corporate media and politicians are forcing the issue and the opposition gets stronger.
The only group that is split on the issue are those still in education, where indoctrination has become much more severe.
Its interesting that the political spectrum has shifted in the US.
It used to be that the Republican party was economically liberal (by this I mean "less government") and socially conservative (by this I mean "more restrictive".
The Democratic party was the opposite.
This was always a very odd coalition of ideas, as libertarians were quick to point out. The parties should probably be "more government" versus "less government"
Suddenly, over the last few years and once they "won" around issues like gay marriage, it's become apparent that the Democratic party is now socially conservative. The woke movement is really a new breed of "conservative" movement.
The Republican party still seems a bit in shambles, but they may ultimately find themselves coalescing around libertarian ideas.
Although right now it appears both parties are for "more government" and "even more government". (For example immigration under Trump and Biden are similar, both spent massively, etc).
Elite schools could be called meme-labs. The modern hypermediated networked society (social media, texting, video, youtube...) could be called the fertile medium.
And those kids are notorious for failing to wash their hands.
I am not responsible for what my ancestors did, especially if it involved people who are only nominally my ancestors. My family emigrated here in the 1970s and, yet, I'm supposedly responsible for what white southerners did to African slaves a few centuries ago.
I'm sure this is obvious and I'm actually misinterpeting something. Such comments always provoke that response in the Woke. But, in practice, this is what boxing people into identities based on skin color, sexual orientation, and gender does.
From my observations, the most plausible explanation is that it's an organized campaign, augmented by many people unaware of the fact. Not cultural conquest, but sabotage.
Is there anything that didn't eventually jump out of academia into "real life"? If you can control academia you control everything.
I think it's interesting to consider how wokism came to be so prevalent in academia, even if it seems like it should be a small niche. Sociologists should be able to find the roots of that shift, i think a lot of it has to do with increased (and sometimes unjustified) focus on the role of women in academia, and the need to accomodate more immigrants than ever before. There might even be deeper reasons that only Carl Jung could identify.
> “What you’re seeing is Gen Z or young millennials basically engaging in this collective war against the boomers and the Gen Xers who actually run the organisations,” says Antonio García Martínez
I think that's the wrong way to explain it. The case is that GenZ are using the GenXers who are running this institutions to impose their however-fringe opinions on others of their own generation. GenZ do not appear to defy the power structures that were built in academiadecades and decades ago. Things like closed academic publishing or funding allocation have not been overhauled despite the existence of alternatives. Progress in these seems to follow the regular pattern of one funeral at a time
Labelling people based on sexuality, gender identity, race, religion is just… arbitrary. Why not label people based on their IQ? If I knew people’s IQ I would simply ignore everyone below mine and only talk to my peers.
>>>I think sorting and discriminating on IQ is the only way to build some form of cohesive society.
IQ, and for other men, testosterone levels.
John / IQ140 / 300ng/dl: <--- can probably ignore his "dating advice" despite his intellect, but listen to his opinion on webdev frameworks.
Peter / IQ90 / 300ng/dl: <--- Just block him the instant he justifies his OnlyFans subscriptions, or why he thinks Windows 10 is the greatest OS ever.
Tyrone / IQ105 / 1100ng/dl: <--- Take detailed notes when he explains how to get Instagram models to pay you, after seducing them in a grocery store. Disregard his opinion on global military strategy.
a) agreed
b) not really...but there is definitely an aspect of communication that is lost when all voices are reduced to just text on a screen. I can understand how people might want to add objectively-measurable characteristics to online bios and leverage assumptions about lived experience to rapidly assess the relative value of otherwise-seemingly-equal posts.
Why wouldn't Mohammed adopt the same approach and refuse to speak to you?
Also, IQ is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps your innate abilities (and acquired prejudiced) aren't a substitute for following contemporary research on intelligence?
Oh please, that reads like someone's blog post. Contemporary research on intelligence has repeatedly disproven claims of multiple intelligences. People have been trying to claim their existence many times but any form of a multiple intelligence model devised so far provided no improvement over a g-factor/single intelligence model. In case you came up with a multiple intelligence model significantly better than anything we've had so far, congratulations, you might get published.
This thread is filled with an unbelievable amount of vile ignorance and hatred against Trans and Gay people. This is why straight people and non-trans people need to shut up when it comes to those respective topics, because you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.
I wish I could see the faces of the commenters saying this evil hate and ignorance. I bet it’s many immigrants from regressive cultures like in India (considering it’s HN) and basically anywhere but the first world where Gay and Trans people are trampled on and hated and shunned compared to the US. Watch this get banned though because straight liberals only care about “racism”. Straight liberals don’t give a fuck about Gay and Trans people.
The amount of hatred and ignorance in this thread is flat out shocking. The fact that this is all allowed to stay up is disgusting and HN should be ashamed of itself. If this was about racial identities, this thread would become a national news story about how HN allows hordes of racist computer nerds.
But homophobia and transphobia is OK to straights. Fucking disgusting.
This coupled with expectations of corporate "social responsibility" results in some pretty nightmarish possibilities. Politically motivated debanking has already been going on for a while, but that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Years ago my financial adviser tried to sell me on this new index that aggregated a bunch of progressive demands (race/sex quotas, etc). The scope of ambition is pretty astounding, because it is structured to be impossible to satiate. We've all gotten use to seeing some SV company announce the latest party they are shunning, but to distill that down to a financial instrument... it is hard to believe that anyone would advocate for such a thing unless they were an accelerationist actively rooting for social collapse.
