I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.
As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left".
Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people.
1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
> not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group
The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem.
Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push.
For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.
FTA:
> There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.
But who will morality police the morality police? (Paul Graham of course!)
Jokes aside, the difference between the 1) and 2) is the difference between progressivism and wokeism. But I think many here – as well as the article – miss the point by aiming squarely at 'noisy' humanities students, and not at the governments and corporations that leveraged their movements into this realm of the purely performative. That's not to say that there isn't scope for government and corporate interventions that actually make positive change to social justice outcomes. And there's also some merit to both online and meatspace activism causing many bad actors to consider their behavior (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, excessive force by law enforcement, wrongful incarcerations/executions).
That is a source of a lot of conflict. Some take "woke" policies as they are, a policy that people should be more inclusive etc. pp., and those that evaluate such policies for their most likely effects, like further discrimination. The conclusions would vary widely, even if you might formally agree on common values.
> e.g., Harvey Weinstein
Must, like him or not, had a counter example to that where vanity disallowed necessary police work because many feared the PR outcome, while the scope is a thousand times that of Weinstein. Investigations were very likely stunted because of that.
> like further discrimination
People who perceive themselves as losing rights will always be angry at losing their privileges. Growing up white in Brazil was great for the most part: police never stopped me, I got away of many speeding tickets just because I looked like a “good kid”, and so on. My non-white friends never had it that easy. One was charged with drug trafficking because the combined amount of pot he and his white friend were carrying went over the limit a single one could be carrying before being considered a dealer. Of course the police assumed it was the less Caucasian (in reality, it was the other guy who went to buy the pot from his dealer). Even though the white friend stated half the pot was his, the case went to trial.
I don't think you can reframe that in a way if you introduce policies that treat people differently. And I don't believe people feel they lose rights as long as they are treated equally.
As I said, rulebook of toxic middle management. Treat people differently and they fight among themselves and you don't have them on their back. Simple workplace dynamic, even if not intuitive.
That's not a joke. This piece is so ridiculously tone deaf precisely because it lacks any hint of self-awareness that exactly the same performative priggishness is normal for the right - with the difference that it's aggressively economically self-serving, often irrational and sometimes anti-scientific, rather than simply annoying.
IMO the priggishness is baked into American culture, which is descended from cranky puritans and literally defined itself as the most moral (police) force in the world after genociding the original inhabitants of the continent and setting up a culture for billionaires that leaves even qualified and talented workers increasingly insecure about housing and health care.
In reality "woke" has been a hugely convenient way for the US establishment to confine the Left to a ghetto of minority interests, especially about sexuality. Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)
So now we have anti-woke for the wannabe intellectuals, and Q for the useful idiots.
Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference, raw milk drinkers, and the spread of lunatic propaganda about vaccinations and climate science.
A side note, but I had no idea raw milk was a right political signaling in the US. Coming from a Swedish perspective, raw milk is a question about how tight the health control is in the dairy industry. I have always find it an "interesting" approach that in Sweden we have a very much scorched earth approach to dealing with any case where farm animals has any human-transmittable problems. If a test fail you kill all the cows in that farm, possible his neighbors farm stock too if they are too close, and the farmers get "just enough" money to restart the farm. Raw milk does still carry a bit higher risk for young children, women during pregnancy, and the elderly, so there is a recommendation against drinking it for those groups. Sellers also need to register in a special registry if they sell raw milk, and they get extra attention from inspectors.
For those not in the high risk groups, it just an choice based on personal taste. It seems a bit funny that the reason why it is allowed to be sold is directly related to the heavy regulation that enforces such high amount of testing (and strict consequences), so that the product is generally safe regardless of added pasteurization.
> A side note, but I had no idea raw milk was a right political signaling in the US.
It isn't really. It was a short-lived joke that the left didn't realize was a joke, started pushing themselves and gave it new life, but it's still mostly just a joke.
Not so sure about this…raw milk was absolutely a thing in the community I grew up in (ultra conservative, ultra religious, anti-vax, anti-regulation).
I don’t think most people were aware of this until it made the rounds on social media, but even if some people are joking, it’s a real thing.
Like a lot of things, it was a joke until people who were not in on the joke started adopting it seriously, and then it somehow kind of merged under the broad "conservative-adjacent" political umbrella. Just like anti-vaxxers, anti-public schoolers, flat earthers, QAnon, and so on. They start out as tongue in cheek jokes, then a few people start saying "Wait, I believe this!" and inevitably they're welcomed into the funny farm with open arms.
And these jokes started back in the 80s?
I think you may have this a bit backwards and there’s some conflation going on between real social phenomena and people who find those phenomena too ridiculous to believe and decide to make jokes about it.
I can assure you the basis for the home schoolers, anti-vaxxers, and raw milk consumers wasn’t some joke. They came from disgraced scientists, church leaders, quack doctors, etc.
I’m not saying there has never in history been a joke that directly led to a conspiracy theory or social movement, but the history of many of these things is pretty well documented and several of the categories you mentioned have origins in the 70s/80s.
While I personally think the sale of raw milk is fine as long as adequate monitoring, audits and warning labels are in place, this was very much a serious political phenomenon and I’m not sure how you missed it
> (The Iowa vote broke almost perfectly along party lines with nearly all Republicans in favor and only a handful of Democrats defecting to their side.) And it’s not just in Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-ri...
> A side note, but I had no idea raw milk was a right political signaling in the US
Remember a lot of people who are “proudly white” always mention lactose tolerance. They also carry tiki torches.
> the same performative priggishness is normal for the right
Priggishness means self-righteous, performative morality. Can you give an example of this that is normal for US right-wingers? They certainly have plenty of daft ideas (e.g. anti-vax), but I haven't seen right-wingers being priggish about them. Priggish would be positioning themselves as superior people for living in an unvaccinated neighborhood or working for an anti-vax employer, or proclaiming that they will not date a vaccinated person, or vaccinating their baby in secret while posting the opposite on social media, or cancelling a public figure who gets outed as vaccinated, etc.
> Priggishness means self-righteous, performative morality. Can you give an example of this that is normal for US right-wingers?
The first that sprung to mind:
> An update by the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom recently released preliminary data stating, "between January 1 and August 31, 2023, OIF reported 695 attempts to censor library materials and services and documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles - a 20% increase from the same reporting period in 2022." Many of the book titles targeted were BIPOC and LGBT groups. The book bans are largely the result of laws passed in Republican-led states.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_S...
Can't excessive anti wokeness be a form of priggishness.
What if someone says "that was sexist" and let's assume it was. Then, complaining that s/he who said it, is too woke, can itself be priggishness? The morally right thing, in that community, might be to be anti woke.
> Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)
There is a definitely a new discourse gaining traction post-Luigi that the polarization between left and right has been used as a distraction to the ever widening disparity in wealth, and the receding quality of life in the West.
> Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference
I've no insights into the specific nature of PG's outrage, but I imagine some in the SV entrepreneurial bubble might be concerned with how effective activists can be at ruining financial ledgers using boycotts and the like. Such power wielded by the plebs can be concerning, especially when businesses need to stay solvent, so it is indeed best to keep a lid on it.
There’s also the perception the Trump administration will be a pay-to-play game and anyone who doesn’t show signs of alignment will be prevented from participating in decision-making, industry incentives, government contracts and so on.
I don’t think there is any sensible person on the planet that hasn’t noticed that.
> anyone who doesn’t show signs of alignment will be prevented from participating in decision-making, industry incentives, government contracts
Is that why Tesla, the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles wasn't allowed to attend the electric vehicle summit?
It might be because Tesla has been blocking its workers from unionising so that they can defend their rights.
> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture.
The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.
That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.
I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".
>it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r
I still have to remind myself that this refers to the racial slur and not an intellectual one. One of the funniest moments of 2024 for me was watching an episode of the wan show where linus admitted he'd used 'the hard r' in the past. His co host (Lucas?) was visibly taken aback. Like, color drained from his face. As linus goes on about how *tard used to be acceptable when he was younger you see it slowly dawn on Lucas that Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means and the relief that his boss isn't some sort of avowed racist is palpable.
> Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means
I don't either. What does it mean?
I've never heard the term as a New Zealander (perhaps not in right social circles though).
From first search:
The n-word pronounced with the final ‘r’ sound, as opposed to a softer pronunciation that often omits this sound
Over the decades, the n-word has evolved, with the softer version being reclaimed by some within the Black community as a term of endearment or camaraderie. However, the “hard R” variation remains a symbol of hate and discrimination.
Yeah, this practice isn't in NZ.
Why try and use that context for judgment when a more appropriate one exists?
Because I'm guessing the term "hard-R" only makes sense in some socioeconomic US accents. As an outsider I can't have an opinion.
My comment explains what the word means from the point of view of someone outside the states, and gives enough context for a non-native English speaker to understand the term. The subtleties of English are hard even for those with English as a mother tongue.
From the Wikipedia article:
Among certain speakers, like some in the northeastern coastal and southern United States,[6][2] rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic /r/ is deleted depending on an array of social factors,[7] such as being more correlated in the 21st century with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, particular ethnic identities, and informal speaking contexts."Nigga" as used in songs etc. vs the full N-word.
TIL
Where is the “r”?
Simple wikipedia seems like a good source to explain this
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger
> However, in the late 20th century, the word was seen as a hurtful racial slur in English. It was called hate speech. "Nigger" was seen as very offensive to say or hear which caused many to not use the word at all. They instead called the word "The N-Word". It is said with a "hard R", because the word ends in 'er' instead of 'a', as in the word "nigga".
So -a is more polite than -er?
Really?
I mean rap songs and movies have both, as far as I can tell they are used interchangeably.
Any chance the distinction existed long time ago and now it does not anymore? (Im not from US)
> as far as I can tell they are used interchangeably.
They are not.
> Any chance the distinction existed long time ago"
What is "long time ago"? This stuff isn't exactly gone.
You really need to realize that American slavery really wasn't that long ago. It was only 1975 when the last survivor of American slavery died. Generational effects last and the reverberations of years of oppression still reverb very, very loudly today.
Say either on the streets of the US and you will find the intellectual distinction much softer than someone’s fist.
It was explained to me that it was an attempt for some in the black culture to "take back," that word in an attempt to declaw it by swapping out the -er for an -a and using it colloqually rather than insultingly. Other people in the black culture think that word shouldn't be used at all, hard R or not, because it is so historically disparaging. I tend to agree with the latter.
I always wondered why that word had such negative connotation over other pejoratives. I believe it was Maya Angelou who said, paraphrasing, "it's so hurtful because it was the last word people heard before the noose tightened around their neck."
Some dark stuff.
Its in the Spanish word for black, it is taboo enough that people generally don't write it.
Linus thought "hard r" meant "retarded", when it actually means "nigger" (a really really bad slur, as opposed to soft-r, "nigga"). It was funny when everyone realized he didn't mean what they thought he meant.
> It was funny when everyone realized he didn't mean what they thought he meant.
this very much illustrates that blacklisting (sic) words leads to nothing but confusion, not mutual understanding to each other's speech, let alone understanding each other's position. is it what social justice warriors want to bring about general compassionating with?
Agreed, using a word is very different from mentioning it, and mentions being banned along with usage is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Denylisting*
Here's a link to the hard r clip https://youtu.be/MFDiuBomSuY
> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex.
Wow that's not my memory of the 90s at all. We're talking about the decade when Loveline with Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla was a popular MTV show?
Loveline, the show that wasn't allowed to air before 11pm EST due to the same Christian sensibilities, yes.
Cable has always pushed the boundaries a bit.
I remember pearl clutching over The Simpsons in the early 90s, to the point where Bush Sr. got involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors
My mom was a teacher around that time, the school instructed her to stay on guard against kids who were watching the show
"hard-r"?
I've lived in the South all my life, worked with blacks and whites, gone to college and this HN post is the first time I've seen/heard the expression "hard-r".
I now believe "hard-r" is regional slang, since it appears to be (at least) a west-coast expression [the Linus recording convinced me] but rare in the South.
> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity.
I read the entire article hoping it would acknowledge that the rightwing moral majority invented, or at least popularized, much of the behavior the article decries. For example, I went in expecting it to touch on the rights version of newspeak and cancel culture (see Freedom Fries and the Dixie Chicks for memorable examples).
It was strangely silent in that regard.
But he is talking about the phenomenon at large and Christians are literally the first example he gives:
>In Victorian England it was Christian virtue
He even references what you talk about later:
>One big contributing factor in the rise of political correctness was the lack of other things to be morally pure about. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
He does contrast what he calls "wokeness" with a sort of Christian prudishness ("prig") several times, and even says that it's the same sort of person responsible. However, both sides are not treated equally throughout the text.
For example, he talks about the impact of the Bud Light thing on Anheuser Busch, but he doesn't acknowledge that the backlash was itself a perfect example of cancel culture.
Your mob and my mob are both mobs, but he paints one angry mob as righteous pushback and the other as priggish busybodies.
Regardless, it was a well formed piece that caused me to think. I just think the argument would have been more compelling if it had been offered from a more neutral frame.
This. I mean, he says that comedy defeated political correctness on the years up to 2000, but then entirely omits what happened in comedy immediately afterwards.
Love a bit of no-holds-barred 00's comedy.. well, some of it.. but I don't think anyone should find it surprising that there was a cultural backlash.
"You can offend anyone as long as you offend everyone" was the rule of the day, which failed to account for some having much thicker skins than others.
It's also worth noting that up until about 2008, free speech was broadly identified with progressive/Left views not conservative/Right. I'm not sure when or why exactly the right lost interest in censoring sex and violence in the media, but they quietly let that drop just around the time the left became more censorious.
Now for me personally, the kind of populist-conservative that hangs out with strippers whilst pursuing abortion bans is the worst kind of hypocrite, but I guess for a lot of people it's something more like wish-fulfilment.
> I'm not sure when or why exactly the right lost interest in censoring sex and violence in the media
It didn't stop. Republicans have been passing laws requiring identification to access pornography and as a result pornhub is blocked in 16 states currently.
> PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone
That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part:
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad.
> Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.
Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?
PG says
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
> I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
Is that really your charitable reading of the part you quoted?
In my mind, a charitable reading would be that he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be. I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.
It is a divisive topic already, we would all be better off trying to understand as well as we can before replying.
> I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.
I think it is a weakness of the article that PG does not address this directly. He dis say that racism is
> Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be
So if someone only uses woke to mean "being aware of and attentive to important social issues" it is easy for the to wake away with the impression that PG painted their concerns as overblown.
If I was PG's editor I would suggest replacing 'woke' with prig here for clarity.
My charitable reading is that he believes the concept of wokeness is a bigger problem than racism. I feel that's wrong on its face, but an actual point-by-point (indeed, line-by-line) retort to this essay would be exhausting and ultimately pointless.
To whit, he repeatedly brushes aside the concept of hostile work environment, in particular professors making their students feel uncomfortable, as if its just a question of one person making their equal feel uncomfortable due to a simple disagreement. This is a dramatic misread of why a professor (who is by definition in a position of power over the student, and such power may well include the career and profession of the student, even ignoring the sexual overtones, which are all-too-common as well) needs to be aware of and avoid hostile environments. Like, a woman who constantly hears from her math professor how s/he thinks women are bad at math will likely not be super-psyched to continue with math coursework. I would certainly leave a company if a manager was constantly insulting whatever group of people I was born into, and they pay me to be there. If I'm paying thousands of dollars a semester, the least the professor can do is stay in their lane.
That's five sentences to retort 2 more-or-less throwaway statements. The entire essay is stacked with stuff like that.
And its all pointless because odds are, instead of changing any minds, or even engaging with what I've said, the anti-woke types will just vote it down.
I think that wokeness is increasing racism. The woke people tend to throw around "-isms" a lot. It is sometimes enough to not be on the extreme left-wing view to be called "racist", or even "Nazi" immediately. Especially on platforms like Reddit. I've been very left-wing in my youth myself, which - in retrospect - happened mostly through indoctrination in school. I doubt that I ever turned very much into the other direction, and I see myself very much in the middle with most topics.
My personal philosophy for most topics is to find out what the extremes are, then look at what the middle between these would be, and then call that the ideal.
On Reddit, that philosophy is enough to be called "racist" and "Nazi". Trying to start a proper discussion to (in-)validate any of my - in my opinion - rational points was met with "I don't talk to Nazis!" several times. Mind you, I never even talked about race or anything similar and most times not even about culture. I basically formulated my starting points, added some facts, and was ready to discuss. There were very few discussions that really took place and I have even changed my opinion on several topics based on these discussions. But in the last few years, even these few discussions became less and less. I can only remember one discussion in the last two years that I had with a left-wing person (a teacher from Africa) and I only got this far because our kids were playing with each other. Based on what she told me, I am pretty sure that I would not have the chance for that discussion under other circumstances. She even thanked me for that conversation and told me, that she could not remember the last time that she could talk so open to anyone. I don't know if she realized that she told me how she categorized every negative feedback about her as "racist" half an hour earlier. Strangely, the more to the left a person is leaning, the less they like to discuss nowadays. I find that very strange and also not helpful to their case. If I have two parties where one of them likes to discuss and argue, while the other one directly calls anyone with a slightly different opinion a swear-word, I tend to sympathize more with the party that likes to speak with me. I've yet to encounter a really right-wing extremist that is actually racist. I know that they exist, and I have a friend who was in one of these groups when he was young, but I never had anyone tell me directly that they find any specific ethnicity inferior to others or something in that regard. Well, except for members of a certain religion, but I don't want to start that topic here.
Btw., I am German, and I associate the word "Nazi" with war, racism, and industrial-scale mass murder. But today it is enough to say "I don't like how the immigration into Europe is handled, and I think we should reduce the amount of illegal immigration" to be called a racist and even a Nazi. Ffs, I've seen people in high ranks calling people "racist" because their products were criticized. It had nothing to do with race or anything like that, only with the quality of the product, but they still throw that word around as if everything was just based on race. And if people say that everything and everybody is racist, they at some point start believing that themselves.
Nowadays, you really have to be careful if you criticize anyone's work if they are part of any minority. What's even more ridiculous, most times it's not even the person themselves, but some other person who has their "everyone is racist" opinion, and they will start attacking everyone who dares to critique anyone belonging to any kind of minority. That leads to "toxic positivity", where no-one dares to call out any BS. And that leads to bad products being created. Just look at some of the films and games that have been produced in the last few years. Concord is a good example of something that is the result of this "woke" culture.
This is bad in so many ways. If you hire people by how good they fit into their role, the heritage of the applicant must not be a factor. If the pool of applications does not fit the overall demographic, that is not the fault of the recruiting company. If a company obviously discriminates against anyone, they should be held accountable. That is what I call the balanced solution.
But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive. Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results. You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session. And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway. That only creates further resentments.
The greatest success I have seen in the fight against racism was not seeing color. We should be color-blind and treat everyone equally. For a time, that worked great. Today, the heritage, gender, color of skin and even sexuality are things that have to be acknowledged, recognized and valued. I've only seen bad results coming out of this and nothing positive.
Oh, and about the part of the professors making their students "feel uncomfortable"; Of course, if a professor says something like "Women belong in the kitchen anyway", or any really sexist or racist stuff, that behavior is not okay, and they should face consequences for that. Only making someone "feel uncomfortable" is not enough, though. To learn, you have to be told if you are wrong. Feedback can't just be positive, and it doesn't help anyone to be wrapped in cotton candy for their whole education. That's what leads to the aforementioned "toxic positivity".
About my last point, I strongly recommend this podcast. One part dedicated to this is timestamped, but I recommend listening to the whole thing. It's really good and it explains a lot about our behavior. https://youtu.be/R6xbXOp7wDA?si=MCF3hfZxe9NmzJ-b&t=4724
> And that leads to bad products being created. Just look at some of the films and games that have been produced in the last few years. Concord is a good example of something that is the result of this "woke" culture.
I didn't play Concord and only saw Sony are shutting it down shortly after release due to poor sales. The reviews I saw were about uninteresting gameplay and characters. What exactly was "woke" about it?
> But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive. Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results. You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session. And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway. That only creates further resentments.
I agree, forcing specific percents of people is counterproductive. It would be good if it happened naturally, but it didn't for a variety of reasons (some of them various -isms, like hiring managers with biases, poor schooling outcomes or directions due to bad locations/prejudices; some of them more widely cultural, religious, personal). But are you aware of any place where there are actually forced distributions of people to hire? I'm aware of multiple efforts to level the playing field at the hiring stage, including by the European Comission (on men/women equality). But they're all about goals, with extremely explicit caveats that the best candidate should be picked, but if two candidates are equal, the less represented one should be preferred to add diversity. Diversity in a business or public facing organisation is good for them due to a wider representation of ideas and lived experiences. Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.
About Concord: There is a lot of discussion about why Concord failed. Some say that the price was too high. But at the same time, games with the same or even higher prices sold just fine. Then there is the argument that the genre of hero shooters is just over-saturated. This is also not true. Look at Deadlock, which (AFAIK) is still in a closed playtest phase and currently has a five-figure player count according to SteamDB. Or Marvel Rivals, which currently has > 270,000 players online. One "non-woke" mistake they made was the marketing. Apparently, very few people even heard about that game before it was cancelled. Then, there is the awful character design. No one in their right mind could call that design good. That's where that toxic positivity comes to mind. That is probably the most criticized thing about that game. If you research how that happened, you might find things like these: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1d85lr9/con...
And that's what really pisses off the average guy. It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues. The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men. So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience. But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner. Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this. Here, the consequences were quite spectacular. The average gamer who plays hero shooters wants to have their escapism in games and be the great hero that they can't be in real life. This game did not provide that. There are also games that are openly about specific statements, and they openly communicate that. They are also usually niche products because of that because - like I said - the average gamer wants escapism from games.
An example where that's done better is Baldur's Gate 3. The overall game is great, but you also have all the relationship options you might like. I learned that the hard way, when I accidentally broke my carefully created romance between my male avatar and a female party member. I was just being friendly to another male party member, which directly started a gay romance with him. In this case, I would have preferred an option to select the sexual preferences before that happens, but it's nothing that makes the game bad.
> Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.
Well, that doesn't look like you are really open to any discussion on this, since you're dismissing anything that's said about this as "nonsense" and you are calling anyone who brings up the examples you just mentioned "right-wing crisis actors" by default. That's not how you discuss this. You bring up your position and already define any other perspective as invalid. But maybe I am wrong, and you are actually willing to change my mind. So, what do you say about this video? It's less than 1.5 minutes and I think it is a good example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghBAcxEMzM
What I'm understanding you saying re: Concord is that the game was poorly marketed, had bad character designs, and also one of the developers made some ill-considered tweets 4 years before the release of this game.
Absolutely, that one dev has some weird opinions. But if those opinions are/were core to the game design, and done on purpose, then the marketing also failed to get that point across.
There's also something sort of funny about digging up 4-year-old tweets and saying "see, this is what cancel culture looks like in action".
Speaking to the concept of "DEI hires", the implication is always that the person in that role is only there because they met some quota. The reality of affirmative action was that frequently, you could never get into that role, regardless of qualifications, if you had the wrong skin color. And that wasn't just like a backroom sort of thing. There are countless examples of explicitly racist policies in the US prior to 1964. But the funny thing is, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it became illegal to hire based on race in either direction. "DEI Hire" affirmative actions are explicitly illegal, and it would be an easy case to win if you thought you lost the job to a less-qualified "DEI" candidate. Indeed, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that racial quotas (of any stripe, but especially "hire more minorities") are illegal.
Re: that video, I see that as less of a policy fail and more of a marketing fail. Like, everybody producing that video understood that as "when a firefighter, ANY firefighter, is physically carrying somebody out of an actual fire, a great number of things have already gone VERY wrong, and being a racist prick about the exact race/gender/etc while a rescue is underway is severely missing the point". But nobody bothered to run that in front of somebody who wasn't adjusted to how firefighters see the world.
Firefighters' physical exams are notoriously physically demanding, because the consequences of not measuring up are pretty dire. And yet I know several female firefighters.
> Well, that doesn't look like you are really open to any discussion on this, since you're dismissing anything that's said about this as "nonsense" and you are calling anyone who brings up the examples you just mentioned "right-wing crisis actors" by default
I'm calling the nonsense claims nonsense.
> So, what do you say about this video? It's less than 1.5 minutes and I think it is a good example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghBAcxEMzM
It's a good example of grifting, yes. We have an ad by the LA fire department where a high positioned person at it talks about diversity. Considering the high amounts of incidents between police and minorities, and high distrust of officials, having the fire department be diverse and representative of the population it serves is a good idea, no? That being said, that must happen with regards to what their job is. No point in hiring someone who can't do the job. And you'll notice that in the ad (or at least the cut this youtuber has chosen to use for engagement, who knows if it's representative or not) the person doesn't say they'll hire anyone or will have a quota. There's a very dumb and aggressive attempt at a dismissal/joke/I don't even know what about a potentially sexist reaction to the above ("can she carry me"). I personally trust the fire department or medic will be able to do their job regardless of their gender or skin colour or whatever. If they're indeed hiring incompetent people because of quotas or any other reason I'd want to know, but neither the ad, nor the youtuber make that claim.
So yes, thank you for illustrating my point. There's a bunch of outrage about "DEI" and quotas and what not, but when you look at the substance, it's nothing.
> And that's what really pisses off the average guy. It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues. The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men. So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience. But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner.
While it's true that that's the main demographic, maybe game publishers are trying to add others as well? Increase their target demographic if you will.
> Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this
You're mixing a lead's personal opinion with what the game's options are. I personally don't consider the characters being ugly to be a game stopper (and I'm not alone, I don't think anyone complained about Travis looking like he did in GTAV), but I can see how that can be a problem for some.
Buddy, if wokeness is making you a racist then you were always a racist especially within the US context where families have endured 100s of years of generational racism. You’re not making any sense
Wokeness means awareness of things like racism, the functional purpose of complaining about wokeness is to rollback anti-racist policy and social norms. Whether or not PG is a useful idiot or a thought leader on this subject would be a homework assignment for the class.
Wokeness means an elaborate holier-than-thou pecking order among affluent people, allowing them not to do anything of substance at all, because they already reached secular salvation by using the right words ceremoniously.
It reminds me of the deeply corrupt late Medieval church. A reformation is long overdue.
> he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be
Who is "the woke"? How big do they think big is? How does PG know what this nebulous group all agrees upon? How big of an issue does he think it is, as far as actions to be taken? Is "the woke" just anyone who disagrees with him here?
Not specifying any meaning makes it literally a meaningless, divisive (us vs. them), dismissive statement on racism at best, and at worst, rhetoric to baselessly paint my opponent as more extreme than myself, because I am of course precisely the correct amount of reasonable.
A rebuttal in similar style would be "racism is actually a problem larger than thought by those who think it isn't", which you may notice is also meaningless and dismissive.
Pretty much all of that is answered if you actually read the article.
I just read the article, and I can conclusively say that no, he does not explain how big a problem racism actually is, he claims that its all humanities professors and students (my experience as a physics and engineering student prior to 2015 suggests otherwise), nor does he explain why he is such an expert on what "the woke" all believe.
What he does do is explain at length how unfair it is that offenses he considers minor are now grounds for termination. See one of my other comments for details about why professors need to be particularly aware of the hostile environment they can create by dint of being in a position of considerable power over their students.
I don't think anyone reading this article would conclude that PG believes racism is a bigger problem than wokism. Which wildly diminishes the actual real-world impact of racism and wildly exaggerates the actual real world impact of wokism.
Your interpretation is the exact problem. How many times do people need to say it? Racism is bad, what else there to say? Because he did not say it multiple times throughout the essay we are going to label him though and suggest and at the same time conclude that the thinks wokism is worse than racism. Sheesh that’s a great imagination.
He spends 4500+ words talking about how bad wokism is (mostly complaining about how some people are complaining about language), and all of maybe 100 words acknowledging racism, and even then uses some of those to say it isn't as bad as the woke think. If you were writing an essay opposing a solution to a problem you really believed to be a terrible problem, wouldn't you take a little more time on why the solution was counter-productive, and maybe offer some alternatives?
The actual real world impact of wokism is that the left-leaning part of the elite is distracted into performative games outdoing one another in verbal righteousness, instead of actually doing something for the people, which should be the defining part of being left.
Woke is all rituals, no substance. If anyone profits off it, it is highly educated individuals that belong to the visible minorities = precisely the people that don't need so much support.
Woke is deeply uninterested in actual problems of the poor non-academic population. High cost of living? Food deserts? Meh. That doesn't register on the high-brow radars.
>The actual real world impact of wokism is that the left-leaning part of the elite is distracted into performative games outdoing one another in verbal righteousness...
Is that really the only real-world impact? Is there no value in examining the link between how we refer to people and how we treat them? What about the affirmative action aspects of wokism---is there some impact there?
If you define woke as only the people performing meaningless rituals, then of course you're going to dismiss wokeness. But not all of it is meaningless ritual, affirmative action has created real change. And I would argue that efforts to take pejorative terms out of language are worthwhile, even if some people get overly academic about it.
I concluded that PG thinks we as a society should stop wasting an enormous amount of resources on performative activities solely designed to appease (and in some cases enrich) a very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population.
That's very achievable and beneficial to society overall imo.
> designed to appease (and in some cases enrich) a very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population.
Note that the people enriched here aren't the poor minorities, it are the self proclaimed leaders of these movements that gets high positions in governments and companies and thus enrich themselves.
There is no value in making those grifters richer, even though there is value in helping poor people.
Which performative activities, though, for which very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population? Have you seen Musk's or Zuck's antics lately? Condemning the lesser offender(s) can gain favor with the greater, but it's useless for making any real point. Who's being performative now?
Is it an "enormous amount of resources"? How do you think it compares to the amount of resources historically put into racism, including all the waste and lost opportunity costs?
In my experience, most people complaining about wokism are projecting their own annoyance at language policing into some kind of massive social problem. But I'm open-minded, and if you have a good argument that the resources put into wokism far outweigh the losses from racism, I'm happy to listen. PG's essay makes no effort to present that argument.
It is used against you. Occupy wallstreet was dead instantaneously when people suggested skin color to be relevant for speakers. This follows a text book example of toxic middle management. That supposedly affluent students, especially those in antropology related studies don't understand these political dynamics is a problem itself.
Some people in higher positions in many companies quickly understood it. And there it will also be used against you. If you aren't in on it that is.
Of course the impact is massive, it is a source of the success of many populist political leaders because people believe the intellectual left has abandoned them. And I am not sure if that is incorrect in the first place.
This isn't wokeism vs. racism, that is a wrong axiom in the first place.
> Is it an "enormous amount of resources"?
Compared to the value provided, I would say so.
> How do you think it compares to the amount of resources historically put into racism, including all the waste and lost opportunity costs?
Over all of human history? Obviously less. No idea why that's relevant. Wasting resources on performative activities or worse isn't going to correct a wrong that occured 200 years ago, or 50 years ago.
> In my experience, most people complaining about wokism are projecting their own annoyance at language policing into some kind of massive social problem. But I'm open-minded, and if you have a good argument that the resources put into wokism far outweigh the losses from racism, I'm happy to listen. PG's essay makes no effort to present that argument.
It was the entire point of his essay imo. We're being distracted from important matters and actual improvements by people who want to play oppression Olympics to the benefit of no one other than them.
So your point isn't so much that language policing costs a lot, it's that it doesn't provide any value. But what if it does? What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior? Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights? What about slurs against gays, or Jews? Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?
Language policing is a form of control used by totalitarian regimes. If you are seeing changes they will be short lived after the controlled gets tired of the controllers forcing a particular outcome. It happens time and time again. It’s like we don’t even learn from history anymore.
> So your point isn't so much that language policing costs a lot, it's that it doesn't provide any value.
That's not my point. I think they're both true.
> But what if it does?
Why are corporations dropping it as soon as it became socially acceptable to do so if it is providing value to them?
What value is yelling at people who don't include their pronouns in their bio providing to society? What about education consultants who have a stated goal of assuring equal outcomes for all students (this happened in my very large, progressive district and parents lost their minds)?
> What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior?
There are much more effective and efficient ways to accomplish this than what the people in question are doing if that's the case.
> Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights?
Not particularly
> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?
Not particularly
> Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?
Feel free to share any evidence you have, I'm open to hearing about it
>> Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights?
>Not particularly
>> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?
>Not particularly
Honestly, if you're having a hard time seeing the harm that ethnic and racial slurs do, particularly from public officials or community leaders, you're not going to understand any of this.
This is the second time you've reframed a question you asked to present my response in an inaccurate light, presumably because you weren't able to move to your next talking point from my actual response. This might work on people who don't notice it, but it's extremely dishonest and unproductive.
Ethnic and racial slurs are harmful. Adding social stigma to specific words just causes the people who would use them to use different terms if they care about the stigma, and the change does very little to contribute to equal rights.
>Ethnic and racial slurs are harmful.
Agreed.
>Adding social stigma to specific words just causes the people who would use them to use different terms if they care about the stigma, and the change does very little to contribute to equal rights.
So your hypothesis here is that people just switch slurs. But is that really true? It's not easy to get a new word into the general vocabulary. Sure, a small group of people could agree to a substitute for the n-word. But when they used it in public, most people wouldn't have any idea what they were talking about. Which means the slur wouldn't have the same impact as if they'd used the slur everyone knows.
I didn't reframe, but I did draw a logical conclusion that may seem opaque if you haven't thought it through. You acknowledge that ethnic slurs are harmful, but you don't see the link between equal rights and how people are referred to by those in power. Do you see the contradiction there? You're imagining a world where leaders can use the n-word without reproach, yet people of color are treated equally by society. That just isn't plausible.
> So your hypothesis here is that people just switch slurs. But is that really true? It's not easy to get a new word into the general vocabulary. Sure, a small group of people could agree to a substitute for the n-word. But when they used it in public, most people wouldn't have any idea what they were talking about. Which means the slur wouldn't have the same impact as if they'd used the slur everyone knows.
Yes, that is my "hypothesis", having a basic familiarity with history where this has happened repeatedly. It's obviously not that hard to get a word into general usage, and it's also not a mystery when someone is attempting to insult you even if you aren't familiar with the word in the moment.
> I didn't reframe, but I did draw a logical conclusion that may seem opaque if you haven't thought it through.
You asked a question, then changed the phrasing of that question in your next question. I would say that failing to ask the question you actually meant to ask (which is a generous reading of our discussion) is indicative of failing to think things through.
Again, your behavior has been consistently antagonistic and obnoxious (the comment above is another example).
> You acknowledge that ethnic slurs are harmful
Yes
> but you don't see the link between equal rights and how people are referred to by those in power.
Never said anything close to that.
> Do you see the contradiction there?
I get that you'd like it if I said what you are claiming as that could be contradictory and you could expand on that while asking leading questions and contributing little else, but I didn't and frankly have no interest in continuing a conversation with an insufferable prig.
> You're imagining a world where leaders can use the n-word without reproach, yet people of color are treated equally by society.
No I'm not. Go have your imaginary conversation elsewhere.
How is this exchange imaginary? It's right above, five comments up:
>> Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights?
>Not particularly
>> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?
>Not particularly
How else should someone interpret your response, other than as stating that you don't see any connection between ethnic slurs and equal rights? If you misspoke, or I'm somehow misinterpreting, maybe you should elaborate, if only for the sake of others coming across this thread.
> Why are corporations dropping it as soon as it became socially acceptable to do so if it is providing value to them?
Goalposts are moving quite a bit here. Companies are dropping some affirmative action, but I don’t see anyone dropping things such as pronouns or unisex restrooms, vegetarian/halal/kosher meal options, and so on.
I don't think I'm moving the goalposts. Things like accessible restrooms and additional food choices are good and meaningful improvements. They aren't being dropped because they add value to people's lives for little to no cost.
It seems like the pronoun push has passed (the performative part about chastising people for not wearing a pin or updating an email signature, not correctly using someone's preferred pronouns), but I'm also largely removed from the portion of society that cares a lot about at it at the moment.
I believe PG's essay is intentionally trying to separate the two, and nothing you mentioned as remaining would be considered affirmative action (which largely would fall under what PG is criticizing imo).
> the performative part about chastising people for not wearing a pin or updating an email signature
I'm sorry, but I can't recall a single time it actually happened. Expressing support is important, but I never heard of it being mandatory. And since pronouns are a big part of someone's identity, I'd say one should try to get them right, especially now that most of us made it easy to do (mine are he/him, BTW).
> I'm sorry, but I can't recall a single time it actually happened. Expressing support is important, but I never heard of it being mandatory.
I'm sorry, but it does happen. I've personally experienced it and witnessed it.
> And since pronouns are a big part of someone's identity, I'd say one should try to get them right, especially now that most of us made it easy to do (mine are he/him, BTW).
We should absolutely get it right, but they are not a big part of everyone's identity, which is a point missed by the people who feel it is an extremely large part of theirs and want everyone to know about it.
Pronouns are not a big part of any cis person’s identity because everything matches their identity. Trans people need to affirm their gender against what nature and society afforded them since they were born. It’s inconsiderate to ignore that.
That's their problem to deal with. And as we have seen repeatedly demonstrated in recent years, calling a male "she" is more likely to encourage him to violate women's boundaries and to give this an air of acceptability. This is why it's important not to accede to "preferred pronoun" requests, as it becomes a slippery slope to the erosion of women's rights.
Language policing costs a lot, but its invisible since its the cost of everyone updating themselves and spending time rethinking what to say. That is worth many billions of dollars in lost time, and since its a moving target like we see with other words constantly getting updated it will never stop, its an ongoing cost we constantly pay for this.
>Language policing costs a lot, but its invisible since its the cost of everyone updating themselves and spending time rethinking what to say.
How often do you think the average person actually has to change their language? It seems like it would be a pretty tiny fraction for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of circumstances. On the other hand, if you're a professor of history or a public official, it probably does cost some of your time. But in those cases, doesn't it also provide value?
Not sure how frequently you create a new Git repo but every time I do I am given some weird moralizing thing about the branch name.
Is the same true of other forms of manners, table behaviour say, or are they actually encoding something useful and pro-social?
My guess is, if I'd had to learn to use a knife and fork and typical Western table manners at 35, it'd remain a small stone in my shoe for life.
Which is to say, not using certain language might always grind our gears a little. I notice it, certainly don't always use the words my brain first reaches for, but not so much as to bug me. There's so much other self-censorship that we automate subconsciously or almost, it's not a big deal.
For younger people? It's no deal at all, they have no more use for the R word than you or I do in some obsolete 19th century racial slur.
> For younger people? It's no deal at all, they have no more use for the R word than you or I do in some obsolete 19th century racial slur.
That's because they replaced the r word with autistic, which I presume will be the a word in about 20 years and some other term will be used to describe autism.
They describe quite different phenomena, both in terms of the actual state of being and how they're deployed as a slur? "autistic" seems to be more like "nerd" used to be a slur (but also sometime identity badge) before the rise of SV billionaires.
I've never heard "autistic" applied to anything other than people (and possibly animals, for humour) for example, in the way the r word was used as a stronger version of "dumb".
Anyway, I think people having to be a little careful with their words is a small price to pay to breaking the linguistic and stereotypical link between people with learning difficulties, Downs etc. and dumb, annoying situations.
It's called spelling a word because words are spells, which is why it's ok to place some of them off-limits.
> They describe quite different phenomena, both in terms of the actual state of being and how they're deployed as a slur? "autistic" seems to be more like "nerd" used to be a slur (but also sometime identity badge) before the rise of SV billionaires.
Not what I'm talking about at all. Teens in the US use autistic in the exact same way the r word was used 20 - 30 years ago. It's an insult that is a stronger version of dumb.
> I've never heard "autistic" applied to anything other than people (and possibly animals, for humour) for example, in the way the r word was used as a stronger version of "dumb".
You're just not exposed to it then. Which is fine, but doesn't mean it isn't commonplace. I am guessing you don't live in the US based on your spelling of humour, which would be one explanation of why you aren't tuned into this.
> Anyway, I think people having to be a little careful with their words is a small price to pay to breaking the linguistic and stereotypical link between people with learning difficulties, Downs etc. and dumb, annoying situations.
People being considerate is good. But banning specific words doesn't accomplish what most of the word police claims it will.
> It's called spelling a word because words are spells, which is why it's ok to place some of them off-limits.
Very cute; not very persuasive.
> Not what I'm talking about at all. Teens in the US use autistic in the exact same way the r word was used 20 - 30 years ago. It's an insult that is a stronger version of dumb.
Well that's... <searches mental Rolodex> the actions of a bunch of people with the intellect of a grape, the empathy of a stale French fry, and the collective odour of a sack of dead badgers.
(See how much more fun this whole insult business is with just a little more effort?)
> You're just not exposed to it then. Which is fine, but doesn't mean it isn't commonplace. I am guessing you don't live in the US based on your spelling of humour, which would be one explanation of why you aren't tuned into this.
Yep. I'm in the UK. Have teenage kids, if I caught them using autistic in that way, they could say goodbye to wifi access for a month.
> People being considerate is good. But banning specific words doesn't accomplish what most of the word police claims it will.
Eventually it does, or helps to at least, but over a much longer timeframe. Generations, realistically - many middle-aged people don't have the mental plasticity to absorb big shifts in how race, gender, sex, sexuality are addressed.
Changing minds takes a lot longer than changing manners, but the latter can make a positive difference in the meantime.
> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.
Yes, but this is also the part that glues together the larger coalition of people left of center. Racially segregated affinity groups and affirmative action are the thing that AOC and Jamie Dimon can agree on.
A 2022 poll showed that something like 20% of Biden 2020 voters would pick Liz Cheney in a three-way race with Trump. The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives who are willing to put up with woke stuff. Including Paul Graham himself.
If Fetterman comes out and says we are going to ban racially segregated affinity groups, and the compromise is he’ll raise my taxes to pay for more healthcare services, I’d vote for that. But my experience with the last 10 years is that team blue never raised my taxes but did recruit my daughter into a “BIPOC” group. The policy is what it does, as they say.
> The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives
Dependent on them for what, exactly?
For votes: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-premise-poll-li... (“Among Democratic voters, Biden leads Cheney 61% to 39%.”).
My historically red county in Maryland went 55-41 for Harris, but 55-43 for Larry Hogan. It’s full of woke Romney 2012 voters.
Behind so many anti-lefty beliefs, there’s simply a man feeling like he lost control of some specific woman :(
Seriously, it’s quite a pattern!
To the contrary she’s red pilled. The ordeal has forced her to think about race and she’s responded by developing a strong Bangladeshi identity as a coping mechanism.
But I don’t need a 12 year old who tells me that “affirmative action is morally wrong” and yells at me about not knowing how to cook curry. I want her to have the post-racial upbringing I did as a 1990s kid.
> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to [...]
That's precisely the point: the function of the word "inclusive" mentioned in TFA, or several related like "diversity" was twisted for the purpose of waging culture war. (E.g. Biden had some "most diverse" team somewere, and it meant 0% men, didn't it.) The purpose of the culture war was to drop entire chain of thought not aligned with current heresy.
Google ngrams says Woke began climbing mid 90s, steep increase since 2005 [1].
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=woke&year_star...
I see the problem you identify with people's behaviour and agree with the noisiness of people you refer to as group two - people who aren’t thinking deeply about what they are saying have a lot of freedom to shoot their mouth off. To be very clear, I see your comment as a sincere attempt to articulate and respond to a problem, most discussion of woke isn’t. While I do want to offer just one olive branch to people upset about woke, that yes - annoying people really are annoying, self-righteous twits truly are unbearable - but when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them. There are idiots everywhere – even the smartest of us are part-time idiots, stupidity is just the background noise we have to talk over, rabbiting on about woke usually seems to part strategic tantrum to avoid real discussion and part real tantrum.
I think I’m looking for a way to distil the ideas you’ve expressed into a response I can use when someone complains about woke : `that sounds quite annoying, but let’s discuss the idea not the idiot`
> when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them
I think you may be right here, but I think it's also worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.
What I see is that a lot of "woke" starts with the assumption that the audience is bad, then tries to work backwards to prove it
Of course discussions about selfishness, hypocrisy and cruelty are going to infuriate people when you start from the assumption that the people you are talking to are the ones who are selfish cruel hypocrites
Next time you see someone make a comment about "straight cis white men" (or any demographic, but this one comes up a lot), replace it with "selfish cruel hypocrites", that probably would give you a good idea why that demographic reacts poorly to the message
I'm the white cis male with grey hair, but in my n of one experience I have encountered very few situations in which not taking the bait on the first provocation, showing a bit of empathy and respect didn't quickly get the same empathy and respect in return.
> worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.
I agree with this, it's not nice to be dehumanised or disrespected, it's awful. I saw someone speak recently who dipped into this kind of broad anti-male language to get a sneering laugh from the crowd more than once. With friends, with people who matter deeply to me, I'd want to speak to them about the petty provocation in their choice of language, but right now, I still think that following down the path of chasing down that language in public is a dead end, because a person speaking in that way is scratching for a fight, probably not a productive fight but a let the fury out fight. There may be a legitimate reason for that fury but I don't want to be the bucket it gets poured into. I am up for a sincere difficult conversations about real problems, and usually people pick that up and respond accordingly. Most people aren't sociopaths, and can't resist reciprocating sincere empathy and respect.
I’m going to add a caveat here : people reciprocating respect is my personal, subjective experience, I don’t believe everybody gets this same treatment. I think people who look like me, who are used to at least a tiny bit of status - the pool from which must of the upset about woke is coming - we generally get respect reciprocated. When we don’t get treated with respect it’s a bit of a shock. I think reflecting on how unpleasant it is to be treated poorly, what a frequent experience it is for some people and how it might affect them is the way to go.
Now imagine that is what you mostly hear "straight cis white men" are "selfish cruel hypocrites" over and over again.
Where are you hearing this over and over again?
Are you seeking this out or consuming algorithmic media that sends it to you to make you mad and get you hooked?
I'm in that demographic and do not recognize this at all. From my perspective this sounds paranoid bordering on mental illness.
Notice how you tried to force your opinion by insinuating that the person feeling this way is mentally ill? A large chunk of the comments in this thread are saying that’s part of the problem.
Everything can look like mental illness if you look hard enough.
We are recreating the "not all men" argument here, except hyper-specialized to "not all straight white cis men."
And so, in the spirit of that argument, sure, maybe not all straight white cis men are a problem, but ENOUGH of us are that we should be paying attention to see if we're unknowingly part of the problem, or even better if we can help at all to improve things.
Hopefully in another couple decades we can revisit this topic, only specialized down another couple adjectives. =)
Cis white male covers a very broad spectrum of people from very different economic, ethnic and social backgrounds.
Labelling an entire race (noting caveat above) of people as problematic is not a traditional progressive worldview and in my opinion that this view is being promoted in modern progressive politics has contributed to a large proportion of traditional progressives feeling politically stranded.
It also makes people like me completely shut down any reasonable discourse. Focus on specific behaviors and don’t try to solve racism with more racism.
> We are recreating the "not all men" argument here, except hyper-specialized to "not all straight white cis men."
We absolutely are.
I think that in itself is the problem, you dont need to be cis, white or male to be the problem, its just a group that is the target of choice.
Targeting straight white men this way isnt going to be the solution to the problem, especially those that are the problem. I don't have a good solution to this but pouncing on a large group for the actions of a few isnt a great idea.
If they want to radicalize a group, this is a great way to go about it.
Hi, permanent victim.
> I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them
Epictetus said, "Don't explain your philosophy, embody it."
People are doing exactly that.
They're welcoming historically marginalized groups into their workplaces, their families, their communities. Every day they treat others with basic respect.
It makes some people so mad that they crawl the internet for examples of these people "going too far". They'll bring up examples from other continents to get that angry fix. They'll misconstrue them in the worst possible light and pass it on telephone style till it's unrecognizable. And if they don't find any they'll make them up. They'll sometimes pretend to be the people they hate and propose stupid things to make themselves angry.
I've seen the latter happen in comments here where one reactionary sarcastically suggests something ridiculous and another one takes it seriously and gets angry at it.
Currently online lesbians are being blamed for forest fires. Which is only a minor update on the classic religious claim of "hurricanes caused by being tolerant of gays".
So I don't think you can escape this just by not being "woke" and "annoying".
> They're welcoming historically marginalized groups
So humans then?
Because all humans have been marginalized at some point in history. Even the language you're using is an example of the problem, since it insinuates that some groups of people were marginalized and some people were not. If you really wanted to embody the values of compassion and selflessness, it wouldn't be contingent on the physical traits or background of the person in question.
Woke ideas also collide with general humanism. "I don't see color" is an example here.
But the ideas of humanism are better and woke people often dislike that their ideas get rejected. Still, people were made fun off on TV for expressing "old" humanistic ideas in favor of idpol. I don't think that some woke ideas fly very high on an intellectual level so that too much discussion would not even be necessary. Not that the criticism is taken seriously if you have your dogma at hand.
There are well known dynamics that even putting people in camp blue or red creates conflict. Woke ignores these dynamics completely, but did further ideas of that kind to the letter. Current conflicts are further empiric evidence that some assumptions do indeed hold.
> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
> 2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
Who are you talking about? It seems to me that you are using very general and broad language so avoid having to defend any specific points. Who exactly shamed you and for what? Give some examples. Who exactly are you paraphrasing with "that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive"? For the record, my experience of left-wing politics (two decades+) is very different from yours and I haven't noticed the phenomena you speak of. In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam.
That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.
You are using quotation marks so you must be paraphrasing someone, right? If so can you give some examples of this phenomena?
> That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.
There are whole ragebait youtube channels that disagree.
> In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam. That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.
Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. And yet my experience is the exact opposite. If the "divergent ideas" are e.g. "everyone who voted for Trump is an evil nazi" vs "everyone who voted for Trump is just stupid", I'll grant that those two ideas will be entertained and debated. But if the idea falls anywhere outside the accepted orthodoxy, for instance "maybe people who voted for Trump were well informed and had good reason to do so", that idea is not tolerated at all.
Granted I live in Seattle, which is probably home to a disproportionate number of more extreme progressives.
> Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective.
I guess the difference is that I actually hang out with left-wing people and have been doing so for decades, whereas you base your opinions on rage bait news and internet interactions? You may think Trump voters are well-informed and you may think the moon is made of cheese. In both cases there are mountains of evidence to the contrary. I don't know what being wrong has to do with tolerance.
> Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
You're making the assumption that most of that isn't performative nonsense that in reality doesn't help anything.
Also known as slacktivism.
It got to the point where I would see pronouns and flags and URLs to DEI policies (Click here to stop racism now! Really?) in people's email signatures that I would immediately assume they were insincere and phony.
One person I knew had "LGBTQ Ally" in their professional signature. It's one step removed from writing I HAVE GAY FRIENDS and frankly I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins to proclaim their allegiance. None of this has place in a professional setting.
Google Maps allows you declare your allegiance. You can mark a business as LGBTQ+ friendly (why should I have to declare that and it not just be assumed?).
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/addi...
You can also declare a business as "woman owned/led"
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/empo...
and "black owned"
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21348990/google-black-own...
So, I'm very visibly queer and from the south. I have always been appreciative of gestures like this or in the parent comment - because it is not a safe thing there to assume that people would be accepting.
I suggest you try steel-manning this. Imagine that the people who want these things have rational reasons for wanting them. What might they be?
> why should I have to declare that and it not just be assumed?
That’s an easy question with an easy answer.
Because it can’t be assumed. Because there are people (who own businesses) who are not friendly to LGBTQ+ people. And people (such as LGBTQ people) may want to find or avoid certain places.
Is a good-faith interpretation of such a signal that it would be some sort of silly performative measure?
This stuff has always seemed deeply wrong to me, as someone that actually believed in the values I was told were right and proper.
Pronouns are pretty useful when you have a lot of Chinese and Indian coworkers and don't know what to call them by their names. People from HK tend to give themselves English names, but mainland Chinese I know don't.
Of course that's not their original purpose and they aren't very fit for their original purpose. (it's to include trans people, but trans women don't want you to ask what their pronouns are, they want to be addressed like women.)
> they want to be addressed like women
Yes but how are you supposed to know if an obvious male in 'feminine' type attire wants to be referred to as she/her unless you ask? Could just be a man with a niche fashion sense. See e.g. Grayson Perry.
> I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins
did you know LGBT were explicitly targeted in the holocaust? You know about the holocaust, right? You are aware that 1940s Germany is when and where the holocaust happened, right?
Why a weird, distorted take. People who put “LGBTQ Ally” in their signatures aren’t being phony. They have friends or family who are LGBTQ, and being visible is one way to support them. If it’s unprofessional to be an ally to LGBTQ friends and family then it is easy for hateful folks to claim it’s unprofessional to even be LGBTQ. Why does it offend you so much for someone to say “I support my gay friends”?
It doesn't offend me.
Picture going into a restaurant, and before the hostess seats you she says "I'd like to remind you that I love black people".
That's out of place it is. It doesn't offend anyone, it's just an odd thing to say. You may not perceive it so if you're inside the bubble.
> Picture going into a restaurant, and before the hostess seats you she says "I'd like to remind you that I love black people".
I’ve gone into a restaurant and had the hostess tell me they don’t serve gay people.
So I think it can be very contextually relevant for the hostess to say they’re an ally.
What holes you like or don't like and what you got in between your legs should be completely irrelevant at a restaurant and not something the waitress or waiter should have any interest in.
I think what you're not getting is that there are lots of places in rural America that are violently queerphobic. Queer people are targets of hate crimes. There's a mainstream religion and political party in America that's tiptoeing around rhetoric of eradication of queer people.
So yeah, it can't be assumed businesses are queer friendly because lots of American Christians and conservatives would prefer queer people dead, or at least back in the closet.
> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas
No, it really is about specific ideas. I’ll discuss four:
1) Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition with common cause and shared interests. This goes back to the 1990s with the “rainbow coalition.” A lot of the way the left talks to minorities, and various things like affinity groups arise out of this idea that non-whites will bring about left-liberal changes to society. Also the antagonistic way many on the left talk about whites. But most non-whites don’t think of themselves that way, as we saw in the election.
2) Because of (1), many in the left believe in permissive approaches to policing and immigration because of the disproportionate effects of those policies on black and Hispanic people. But the public wants more policing and less immigration, including black and Hispanic people.
3) Many on the left believe in treating people of different races different to remedy past race-based harms. But the public doesn’t like this—even California voted overwhelmingly against repealing the state ban on affirmative action.
4) Related to the above, there’s a general belief on the left that, in any given issue, policy should cater to the “most marginalized.” When confronted with the burdens to the average person, their reaction is to either (a) deny such costs and accuse the other part of various “isms” and “phobias,” or (b) assert that the average person must bear the cost.
> Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition
What percentage of what group is “many on the left”? This does not sound plausible to me.
Enough to normalize "white men are evil" statements, otherwise such people would get reprimanded and shunned by the other people on the left for being racists and sexists but as is they are still welcomed with open arms.
“White men are evil” does not turn everyone else into a “cohesive political coalition”.
The political coalition there is "people of color" - the point of this was to fight anti-black racism by making a unified group containing them and everyone else who was "not white". This is an improvement over the previous system where groups like Italians/Irish became white by being anti-black. (or were thought to have)
Activists then forgot this was the point and changed the name to "BIPOC" to de-emphasize half the "POC" group (the ones who aren't "BI"), but the whole point was to keep them in the group.
I think the notion of a “BIPOC coalition” has many angles. Many black political thinkers and academics focus on a black/white binary, and extending the concept of “black” to “people of color” was natural. This was also appealing to white democrats, whose coalition with black people is heavily focused on fighting purported racism and discrimination in return for loyal democratic voting.
Couple that with the prospect of America becoming a majority non-white, it’s easy to see why the broader left of center embraced the rhetoric and policies they did over the last decade—e.g. reframing policy issues like immigration and policing in racial justice terms.
The problem is that “white racism” as a lens for understanding America—widely shared by modern liberals—is a poor tool for understanding Latinos and Asians.
I understand what you think you are seeing and that you are probably not alone in this. But you haven’t managed to convince me that there is a «cohesive coalition». I think people who believe that this is what they see may have gotten a bit carried away.
I isn’t a cohesive coalition. I think leaders and activists in the left think there is one. Because the leading DNC chair candidate says stuff like this: https://x.com/benwikler/status/1878205257789960435 (“As DNC Chair, our leadership team will lift up our full coalition—with Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran, and Disability representation.”).
It’s certainly consistent with the belief that non-whites have political common cause with other non-whites against whites.
Enough that “BIPOC” is a thing that even my retired immigrant parents have heard of.
TIL, and I consider myself pretty far left
What you call "the left" is part of the public, but you make it sound like it is not. You also make it sound like the public has a coherent opinion, which I don't think it has.
Do you mean majority when you say public? Do you think what the majority thinks should be done (mob rule)?
Re: 3 ... the level of misunderstanding about what affirmative action is and means is so wide and so deep that "the public doesn't like this" is more or less an information-free observation. Most of the public has only a strawman in place when it comes to understanding affirmative action, and sure, if the strawman was accurate, most of the people who do support it would drop their support.
Its more common for proponents to obscure what affirmative action actually is. The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular and the magnitude of the affirmative action effect is much larger than popularly known.
Here's the Harvard data from the somewhat recent SCOTUS trial: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/222325/202...
Asians in the top academic decile are half as likely as African Americans in the 5th decile to be accepted. I highly doubt exposing Americans to this data would make them more favorable to affirmative action– the very opposite is more likely.
> The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular
When stated by opponents seeking to strawman it, certainly.
But:
"when faced with multiple equally qualified candidates for a position, it is permissble and perhaps even desirable to use demographic factors such as race or gender to select among them"
generally doesn't get much opposition. It's not absolutely impossible that this is a steelman version of affirmative action, but it's also the one I grew up hearing from the actual proponents of the concept.
We all heard that but it was never really true and was the camel's nose under the tent. "Equally qualified" is meaningless given how interview processes work in the tech industry: you keep interviewing until you find the first person that passes the bar and then make an offer. Holding offers back in the hope that someone more demographically attractive comes along is a bad policy that results in lost candidates who get tired of the BS, but is a natural consequence of this definition of affirmative action.
Regardless it took only a few years for what I heard to go from "we should use gender/race as a tie breaker" to "our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call. And that's inevitable because the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions. The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was, which results in people being targeted and fired for -isms of whatever kind.
So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
>"our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call.
I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
> the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions
That doesn't seem to be the case for other problems. I don't see what makes this problem special so there can be no push back on extreme solutions.
> The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was
What about using non-extreme steps to try to mitigate the issue.
> So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
Idiots is a word that originated in ancient Greek and was used for the people who did not care about the matters of the Polis. Everybody is born an idiot until they participate in public matters. That costs (time and effort to familiarize yourself). In that sense maybe the people you are talking about are idiots...
I guess it must not violate the law as the last president vowed that men would be ineligible and he would only select a woman: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/15/politics/joe-biden-woman-...
> I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
It is illegal for jobs in USA, but not for university student spots. Trump has said he will make that illegal though, so it might change and become illegal like in most of the world.
It isn't legal for individual university spots either.
What a university can do, or any form of corporation in the USA can do, is to announce goals to have its body be made up in roughly the same was as the general population, according to some demographic metrics.
So you can't say "student #68 must be female"; you can say "we are aiming for a 50/50 male/female student body" and then take steps to get there.
It is illegal in the US but the law isn't enforced when men are on the losing end. As someone else points out, the POTUS himself violated this law openly and in public. Because everyone knows that and because feminists agitate constantly for female-biased hiring, it's been effectively decriminalized.
It’s actually the other way around. Most people like “affirmative action” when you use that term. But most people dislike it when you ask whether race should be considered in college admissions or hiring decisions: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans...
“In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity.”
The Pew survey did not find that most people like "affirmative action":
> Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.
It was a preceding Gallup poll that found the result you're thinking of:
> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.
The disconnect between this sort of response with the one you cited at the end of your comment just serves to underline my point about the public's lack of clear understanding of what "affirmative action" means (and they cannot be entirely blamed for this, since in the culture, it has come to mean different things).
Institutions like Harvard will (for the foreseeable future) always have vastly more fully qualified applications than they can accept. The concept of affirmative action was originally intended by its proponents to be used only when tie-breaking between equally qualified candidates. Harvard and the other Ivies have this situation in extremis. The idea was that when faced with the question "well, we have 26 people all fully qualified, how are to pick between them?" that using race was a legitimate choice as long as the racial demographics of the institution did not match those of the overall population. They have (for a while) used gender in a similar way, and arguably could use favorite ice cream flavor if they chose, because the candidates are all qualified to be selected.
There was never a suggestion that "affirmative action" meant selecting less qualified candidates because of their racial status. However, the conservative right has claimed that this is what affirmative action really means in the world, and this idea has been broadly picked up by the media and public at large. Whether there is actually any evidence that this has happened on a significant scale is not something I've seen adequately addressed. From what I have read, including the Harvard case, I'd say it was much more an unfounded grievance on the part of people who felt they had a right to be admitted or hired than what actually happens. I could be wrong.
The polls have asked the question in different ways and get similar results. In particular, they have asked whether people support race being used as a factor in admissions decisions, and overwhelmingly they do not: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans... (“In the December 2022 survey, for example, 82% of U.S. adults said colleges should not consider race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept, while only 17% said colleges should take this into account.”) That’s exactly what’s happening, and people don’t like it.
And people see that this framing of “breaking ties between qualified candidates” concept is merely wordplay. Harvard doesn’t say “everyone above a particular academic index score is ‘equally qualified’ and there’s no difference above that line.” According to the SFFA data, Asian and white students in the 10th decile of academic index score are 5-6 times as likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 5th decile (who have virtually no chance). But black and Hispanic students in the 5th decile are as likely or more likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 9th and 10th deciles. Thus, Harvard uses race to admit less qualified students—as measured by the very metric Harvard has established to measure qualifications.
Most people intuitively understand this without the explanation. They intuitively understand that grades and test scores establish a sliding scale of more or less qualified candidates.
What is race? When a student is applying for college, are they free to check whichever box they think will maximize their chance of admission or are there specific, objective criteria to which they must adhere?
They certainly are.
Of course, should they be admitted and it is realized that they abused the definitions of race that society uses to group and classify people in some egregious way, they may face consequences for that.
And sure, I'm entirely sympathetic to the scientific observation that race is a myth, but in the actual USA, in actual 2024, basic physiological features like skin color, face shape, voice tone, hair texture will result in you receiving different treatment in many contexts. Whatever triggers such different treatment is what defines race on the ground (ignoring the equivalent set of things related to sex/gender).
Skull measurements perhaps?
You’ve just proven the point of the author you’re responding to. The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”. But there are endless folks who are mad about someone being mean to them once who won’t shut up about how the “woke left” is destroying social cohesion. Just because some people are obnoxious doesn’t mean you’re under the thumb of a conspiracy to shut you up. Sheesh.
> The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”.
They are (or were throughout the 2010s), but they have a way of talking about it where they do it, but then claim it doesn't exist if anyone tries to give a name to it. So "wokeness isn't real" is a popular way to say "wokeness is real and I think it's good". Sometimes this is called Voldemorting.
I personally think it's good but also think it's real.
> They are (or were throughout the 2010s)
More thoroughly:
* The online left was using terms like "social justice warrior" to describe themselves in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Some of them even used alternate terms to try and fit their kind of activism closer, one I remember being "social justice paladin".
* The first big round of backlash turned SJW into an insult in the mid 2010s, so they rebranded themselves as "woke".
* As the backlash grew, "woke" was also turned into an insult.
* DEI was the most recent rebranding, but since that describes actions instead of the people doing the actions there wasn't really a way to turn it directly into an insult, and "progressive" isn't zing-y enough to catch on, so "woke" stuck.
It's called the Motte and Bailey fallacy
We just call it not bring racist. We also used phrases like stay woke long before 2010 and conservative whining.
>We just call it not bring racist.
No, you do not. I know this because when I advocate for actually not being racist, members of your group call me racist for it.
I am the one who seeks policies that do not take a person's race into consideration when making decisions where race is clearly a priori irrelevant. That is what it means not to be racist.
Your group is the one that insists that doing so is necessary to achieve a moral outcome.
> It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
The reactionaries to “woke” ideas know that (2) is a small number of vocal people and yet they still wrap the anchor around the necks of both (1) and (2). Same strategy for “communism”, “socialism”, “groomers”, “Hamas apologists”, etc. It’s convenient to do this and say all Democrats (or all non-Republicans, or non-MAGA, etc) are painted with this broad brush.
What your comment misses is that the “morality police” has always existed and currently exists along different poles than in the recent past. When I grew up, the social conservatives / incredibly religious were the ones trying to bully people into moral positions. Now, we still have those people (old groups like Family Research Council and new groups like Moms For Liberty) are doing the same thing, but aren’t getting flak from the “anti-wokeness” crowd. Bad faith actors all around.
I e met many people in group 2 though. Many of them have legitimate political and economic power. You can’t just brush them off as insignificant.
Agree that group 1 is far larger but it doesn’t take many negative experience to sour the way someone feels about a political ideology.
Exactly. Anyone with any reading comprehension (and honesty) can tell that PG conflates being woke with acting woke early on for exactly this purpose. He also talks a lot about polarization as though it's entirely the "woke mob's" fault, about moralizing without mentioning evangelicals, about "enforcers" without mentioning MAGA paramilitaries, etc. It's all very disingenuous, even for him.
As a non American I don't see MAGA policing online or in tech companies, but I see a lot of woke. So while the things you talk about might be local problem to USA, the woke problem is something USA exports to the entire globe, so it seems like woke has much more power than maga and thus is a bigger problem.
Dare say something anti-Trump on X and you'll see massive MAGA policing. As a specific example see the responses to this: https://x.com/Aaronsmith333/status/1876813647625810407
MAGA is a nationalist movement, so obviously it doesn't apply to the whole globe, but each country (in the West and elsewhere) have their own nationalist movements.
I'm from Denmark, and we were first-movers in Europe on "anti-wokeness" since our election in 2003 (before the term existed). Interestingly, as Europe has moved more to the right in recent years, the wave has been quietly receding a bit here.
Other countries outside of the North Atlantic West also have intense nationalist and "anti-woke" movements (Duterte, Bolsonaro, Milei, Putin, etc.) which do their own anti-woke policing, sometimes literally, through law.
In general, my feeling is that the main actual threat to free speech globally is nationalist "anti-woke" movements.
There was a period of time on Musk's X where an internal filter would instaban anyone who wrote the letters "CIS" together.
That period of time is now. That filter is still active.
"Cisgender" is a technical/scientific term. The slur is "cis" alone.
That's irrelevant because "cis" isn't blocked either:
> Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first before there's any discussion worth a damn. As best I can tell it just means "any behavior coming from young people I don't like as a cable news viewer". Frankly, I'm at the point where if someone uses the word non-ironically I just write the speaker off as not seriously trying to communicate. Use your words! Describe specific behavior. People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
> We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first
Incidentally, this has been a major part of the post-election discussion about it.
I agree that the term has become diluted to a point that it's lost most meaning, and in many cases it means "behaviors and opinions I disagree with".
I think it mostly means some combination of: morality police, people against "wrongspeak", holier-than-thou attitudes, white people advocating for topics they don't understand, and in general a kind of tribal behavior that "others" people who don't fully buy into the entire spectrum of ideas this group is selling, i.e. they treat their beliefs as absolutely true, and anyone who questions them or wants to debate them are automatically othered.
> People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
I agree and disagree. The media landscape has had a major hand in shaping the discussion, and social media has validated the worst fears of the people working themselves into a tizzy. e.g. if someone supports trans rights but has concerns about minors receiving certain surgeries and wants to discuss those concerns, they're put in the same category as transphobes who wish real harm on other people. Depending on where they raise these topics, they'll automatically be blocked and/or put on lists of transphobic people.
Discussions that actually focus on something material, concrete or substantial are derailed by collective community behaviors that refuse to engage with the concrete and substantial.
It's a sad state of affairs for public discourse, and figuring out how to de-escalate the conversation and somehow return to substantive good-faith conversations might be the most important problem of the century.
Mostly means or what it’s become to mean? I was on a college campus in 2002 and the word typically painted a picture. Someone who was hyperaware of real or perceived injustices and was likely to have incense burning in their rooms. The people who I thought were “woke” would have agreed with me. Down to the incense in a lot of cases.
The right is notoriously great at hijacking words terms/words and flipping them into something nefarious. Or sometimes that exact opposite like they did turning the well supported by all Estate Tax into the conservative hating death tax.
Now woke has morphed into this weird thing. A clapback insult for the insecure to justify their insistence at exclusion of one kind or another.
Oh, absolutely what it has come to mean over time. But what it has come to mean is ultimately what matters at the moment I think. The term has evolved, and I think that's a big reason there's so much polarization and disagreement about what it means.
Some subset of people understands the "true" meaning of the word, and the set of ideas originally associated with it. I suspect the majority of people are more likely to use it in the sense it has evolved into.
Some kind of separation needs to happen. The underlying ideals and ideas vs. the tactics people employ in bringing them about. If someone's MO is to judge/shame people, exert their moral superiority over others, and see the people around them in absolute terms, that set of behavior is particularly harmful to the underlying goals. It presents itself as the "truest" form of support for the goal and the only right way to go about achieving it. But it uses coercion/manipulation to take advantage of people's fear of public shaming and the consequences of "getting cancelled" which tends to ensure silence from people who see themselves as more pragmatic but not interested in getting labeled with "them" for raising questions about reasonable things.
I agree that when people use it now, it's less about anything substantive and entirely about what people feel the word has come to mean. Not sure how, but we need to fundamentally change the conversation.
The essay touches on something that I think explains that, though. Disputing an actual specific allegedly-woke idea requires one to confess their heresy specifically, so as the essay says, it's not smart to confess directly to holding a specific heretical opinion.
Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency, as Black author John McWhorter argues. He gets called all kinds of nasty things for speaking that opinion, and he's Black! On the other hand, it's harder to "cancel" or accuse someone of absolute racism (or race traitor-hood) if they say "I don't think the woke mindset is helping, and I think there are better ways to help Black communities."
So that's why imho the word "woke" is a popular tool among those who don't like the various components of it, which are much, much easier to enumerate than those on the Left incredulously pretend. It's basically just:
1. The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with, and that society should punish those who spoke those ideas.
2. Ideologies about race and generational guilt which basically boil down to "the whole world would be much better off if all Europeans had mysteriously vanished 1500 years ago and we wish that had happened."
3. Ideologies that have to do with gender, which I dare not even elaborate on, because of how heretical all but one opinion on that subject is.
> Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims
> The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with
You seem to be arguing that Black people are harmed by being exposed to ideas about victimhood, and then ridiculing the idea that being exposed to ideas can be harmful.
No, they're arguing that society should punish those who spoke those ideas, where "those ideas" is whatever terminally online leftists are whinging about at the moment (i.e. a bar that is way too low for the proposed repercussions).
But I think you already know that and went with the selective quote anyway.
> But I think you already know that and went with the selective quote anyway.
Whenever I see someone try to pull bad-faith arguing like that, I just immediately bail.
Another fan-favorite of that cohort is incessant demands of proof.
> ... and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency
Well, first we could start by having a discussion of whether or not it is actually true that "they are being told they are always victims with very little agency".
Now, if that were in fact true, we could go on to talk about how we might reduce that harm, and one part of that might involve saying that less.
But then again, were that not true, then we could pretty much discard the person's objections and move on to something that is actually happening.
I read and respect McWhorter, but I don't think that (a) he's right about everything or that (b) your one line summary characterizes his position accurately.
I'll reply separately to your attempted summary.
1. No, this is not the point at all. The actual view that you're referring to is that sometimes people are in fact harmed by verbal behavior and cultural phenomena, that we should recognize that, and when possible and appropriate seek to mitigate it. That doesn't mean punishment or book-banning (ideas which come from those most often associated with being anti-woke) but rather a willingness to examine reality through the eyes of people other than ourselves and above all to be kind.
2. No, that is also not the point at all. The actual view is that there has been, at least within the world once controlled by various European powers since somewhere in the range of 1200-1500, a wilful ignorance and downplaying of the horrors created by the colonialism perpetrated by those European powers.
3. Since you don't elaborate, it's hard to respond to this. But I will note that the recognition that gender and sex are not the same thing goes back many decades, if not centuries; that gender roles and sexuality have not been even remotely close to fixed across the time and space in which human civilization has existed; that the response from people who declaim the "woke" approach is so often summarizable as "I don't like it and other people should lead more miserable lives because I think so".
Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures.
Realizing that the sex classifications (male, female, intersex etc) are only tangentially related to gender roles seems to me to be about the most basic concession to reality that one could make in these times.
What constitutes the gender role of "a man" or "a woman" is fluid, not well defined, and subject to change. What constitutes "femininity" and "masculinity" is also fluid, not well defined, and subject to change.
Even if sex was a binary (which it isn't, but it's not a terrible argument to say that it is close enough to one for many purposes), when it comes to gender we all exist in a multi-dimensional space with so many variations on so many themes. Insisting that gender is binary is so harmful, even to people who consider themselves as being at one or other end of that binary. It's fine that there are people who fully embody a particular Victorian-era notion of masculine and feminine (or any other one, really), but the vast majority of us are nowhere near that simple. Insisting that gender comes in only two forms, and has no fluidity to it hurts all of us.
> Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures
Some cultures have known that things are not binary for a very long time:
That's orthogonal to my statement. They still recognize that male hijra are not women. Nobody in history has said "I would like a wife to start a family, I will go find a nice hijra", and if they did, they were quickly disabused of the viability of that plan.
It's not orthogonal because you made no attempt to make it clear whether were you were talking about sex or gender, which are not the same.
Being "a wife to start a family" requires a person with female sex, and is typically associated with female gender. But that association is not required, and has not been so across all human cultures and all time.
Men are adult human males. Women are adult human females. If you want to talk about the social roles that men and women occupy, you should use the appropriate words, which are not "men" and "women".
There also seems to be a willful ignorance of the horrors created by the Aztec, Qing, and Songhai powers (among others) before Europeans arrived in force. I won't attempt to defend or excuse the crimes against humanity committed by European colonial powers, but focusing on them seems particularly myopic. We can educate people about the history of that period but to what end? Assigning blame for the current state of affairs to dead people doesn't actually solve any problems today. The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us.
Sure, but do you see one of the primary reasons why there is such ignorance? Because to acknowledge that there were (or are) great, powerful, complex, sophisticated, organized cultures in parts of the world before European colonization happened undercuts one of the central myths that European colonization has wanted to tell about itself - that it, and it alone, was responsible for bring all those attributes to the parts of the world it touched.
Our ignorance of the cultures (positive and negative) in parts of the world where colonization did not happen is motivated by something less pernicious - people are parochial, and European culture in particular took a fairly strong stance that despite knowledge of the civilizations along (e.g.) the silk road, they were of no particular significance since they didn't have (Jesus|Bach|Newton|Galileo|etc.)
You ask "to what end?" I would say the end has multiple components. One is that history rhymes and so if you want to understand the future better, understanding the past better will often help with that. Another is that cultures themselves carry the past forward for amazingly long periods - the English have still not really abandoned the Norman conquest of 1066 as a socio-structural signifier even though it was nearly 1000 years ago. The Hopi still have many stories of things that occured in their world 600-1200 years. If these historical stories are inaccurate, a culture is doing itself no favors carrying them forward. And similarly, a culture that carries such a story as a tale about injustice is not done any favors by being told "ah, fuhgedaboutit".
>Because to acknowledge that there were (or are) great, powerful, complex, sophisticated, organized cultures in parts of the world before European colonization happened undercuts one of the central myths that European colonization has wanted to tell about itself - that it, and it alone, was responsible for bring all those attributes to the parts of the world it touched.
What? The Rennaisance that grew birth to the Modern West was an intentional attempt to revive and surpass the ideals of Old Rome and Greece. When they excavated the Pyramids, many in the West took to adopting parts of Egyptian Culture for legitimacy, the Washington Monument being one prime example. Imperial China was seen as stagnant, but they certainly were respected as highly civilized and organized. What special qualities they gave themselves were their flexibility, rationality and technological superiority, which is not entirely wrong in the battlefield.
This "central myth" you are saying Europeans told themselves sounds more like a fictional strawman to attack and is contradictory, especially in the context of OP's point towards the attitudes held by the people currently attacking Western ideals, not defending it. It's not really refuting the point either that the world pre-1945 was a brutal place, and EVERYBODY was trying to conquer and dominate each other, it was just the West was the strongest of them all and won at the end.
That's why if you solely focus on the West as opposed to understanding the general context of the world at the time and critiquing equally those other culture, it calls into question whether one really cares about these shared ideals of anti-imperialism or if it's just an excuse for nationalist grievances that they weren't on the dominating side. And you know, in Turkey, in China, in India, that kind of mindset very much is the case. It's not that imperialism was bad, it was only bad because it happened to them. For those they conquered, it was glorious event to be valorized.
> The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us. I think a distinction should be made between revisiting history (in a bid to understand how we got where we are now), and assigning blame.
I'm not sure how we can move forward without some degree of empathy; "Yes, you got the short end of the stick, but how about if we try such and such to ameliorate the impact of the past on your present".
I don't think you are advocating sweeping the past under the rug, I'm just saying that telling a person who is still feeling the sting of a perceived slight (real or imagined) is unlikely to result in moving forward.
TFA spends the first 7-8 paragraphs defining "woke", even a dedicated callout to a concise definition:
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.Calling it performative (aka "virtue signaling") is either mind reading or casting aspersion without evidence.
I don't know what you want. Most of the article is spent elaborating on what that means and providing examples of it.
> Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
> The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so.
If someone makes a racist or homophobic statement and is confronted about it, there is a good chance that he will perceive it as aggressive. Even if the confrontation is controlled.
And if you can't quickly find a racist comment to confront but you still really want the confrontation? That's when we get debates about blacklist or master vs mainline.
Last time I looked, the anti "cargo cult" article was still on the front page...
> Most of the article is spent elaborating on what that means and providing examples of it.
More like starting with existing conclusions and working backwards from them. Even in the example you quote, Graham begs the question of "woke" and "politically correct" being equivalent and works backwards from that assumption - in the process incorrectly pinning the origins of political correctness on university social science / humanities programs and the hippie kids being hired into them in the 70's (never mind the multiple-centuries-long history of the political right policing speech and expression in service of the exact opposite of the intellectual pursuits universities foster; apparently that doesn't count as "political correctness" because reasons).
Why does he want it to be done quietly? The only way democracy can work is that you convince others of your ideas. Seems like he doesn't want certain ideas to be advocated for at all, go work on them if you want but shut up about it.
Because loudly attacking individuals for not being in complete agreement with your views is rarely effective?
Even more so when some of your views are not widely seen as an agreed upon social norm.
Also, I didn't see anything arguing for this in the article in the first place.
> Because loudly attacking individuals for not being in complete agreement with your views is rarely effective
It's worked wonders for Donald Trump.
"aggressively" and "performative" already contain a judgement. The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".
"Wokeness" itself implies taking some form of (performative) action. You can be aware of social injustice existing and not be "woke", in my opinion at least.
The whole article is an opinion piece that is judging a group of people. I don't think most people would agree with your definition.
And besides, the definition of "woke" is a secondary issue anyway, the article's purpose isn't to propose a definition of woke, it's to judge and criticize people who behave a certain way, and he's done an adequate job IMO of describing the behaviors he's criticizing.
> The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".
The actual meaning of "wokeness" is that it has several different meanings. For instancee, the first could be what you outlined:
1. an "awareness of the existence of social injustice"
And another, equally valid one (that comes about from the reaction to people who embraced the first meaning and proceeded to behave obnoxiously and gain lots of attention) is:
2. the obnoxious and doctrinaire enforcement of the values of the "social justice" subculture on the wider population through bullying tactics (e.g. social media pile ons)
etc.
Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent (usually by the left, as they have more access prestigious institutions, but language is language and no authority can suppress new words and new senses of existing words).
> Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent
I think the thought process is that there was a word and it had a positive meaning. It was then used in a negative way to delegitimize an opponent. So I think some people feel like the word is stolen or still being purposely miss used. For better or worse that is not how language works, in general new meanings can be attached to words and at least in my experience the majority of people using woke negatively are not trying to miss use the word.
That's a pretty subjective definition. We're back where we started.
Helpfully he spends most of the article elaborating on what he means by "aggressively performative".
So, not such a "concise definition".
I think any definition of a contested term is going to end up having a longer explanation (See this whole discussion as a proof-by-example).
It seems like a reasonably concise definition to me. It's reasonable to disagree with the definition of course, but to merely dismiss it as not concise is both incorrect and not useful because it lacks specific criticisms.
You understand as well as anyone that something is either a definition of a term, or it isn't. I'm simply pointing to someone who says "This is a concise definition," and then pointing out that, no, if the definition isn't complete, it isn't a concise definition. And that's fine, we just need to acknowledge that the way people use "woke" is a shorthand for something else, in this case I'd characterize it as the pseudointellectual wet fish flopping of a billionaire struggling to blame someone, anyone, for the world being bad, when he's had outsized control and influence over it for the entirety of his career.
But I acknowledge people may disagree with this.
[flagged]
It either has a concise definition that actually defines the term or it doesn't. I leave it to the anti-woke to tell me which it is, and I'm still waiting.
"It has a concise definition!"
moments later
"It took a whole article to explain!!!"
Also entertaining - the idea that racism has an uncontested definition.
The problem appears to be with performativeness specifically. Because it is performative, it is superficial, and that's bad.
What this post is hilariously doing is policing what is considered superficial humanity and what is not.
Let's be woke but really mean it lads, then the conservatives will be with us!
what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.
Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?
Well b/c of the "focus on social justice" clause. I'd definitely agree though that both parties are way too "aggressively performative".
Well, I wonder what he thinks non-performative social justice looks like. The civil rights movement was certainly performative (as is all protest) and that's basically the only narrative we were offered growing up for how to affect social change.
> Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
I also think there's a pretty big difference between keyboard jockeying / speech policing, and putting yourself in physical danger by physically confronting racists who'd lynch you if there weren't cameras around.
So what is the point here.
That woke people should be resorting to physical violence to further their cause.
Doesn't seem productive or healthy for society.
No that's not the point.
> Well, I wonder what he thinks non-performative social justice looks like.
It looks like the boring job of actually writing policy. Here in Australia, I've run into several people who work for the government helping to draft policy and things. Eg, one friend works for my state's government helping draft energy policy to fight climate change.
Its tedious and boring, and entirely thankless. But its incredibly important. Its well and good for protesters to send a clear message to the government that the people want change. Its another thing entirely to actually negotiate how those changes will happen on the ground.
How do you improve mental health services? How do you balance the needs of the economy today with the needs of future generations? Its difficult stuff.
While we're on the subject: I'm having difficulty squaring this part of his essay with history as I understand it.
> "The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power."
That's both literally incorrect (we shouldn't consider the Black Panthers or the ACLU "student movements") and seems ignorant of the real power those organizations had (their agitation led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act).
The same tactics were used against them at the time, too.
As an example, see this old anti-MLK comic; it certainly sounds quite familiar: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/s6ll2c/a...
>what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.
>In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
>Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?
He doesn't even point fingers on this matter, but the social justice angle is the evident answer to that.
Wokeness is like veganism: for every person talking about being vegan you will find 10 guys who complain about vegans, typically unprompted, while eating meat. I had a work collegue who would complain every meal about vegans, although there wasn't a single vegan at the table.
Wokeness is the comparable, I teach at a liberal art university, there are probably few places more "woke" than this. Even here if I count there is probably a 10:1 ratio of "people complaining about woke" vs "people demanding a woke thing".
The feeling that others are judging you from a high horse is a very strong force, even if they aren't judging you at all. And strong forces can be used to manipulate people into making choices against their interest .
There's a key difference though: while vegans are generally proud of being vegan, it's very hard now to find anyone who will admit to being woke or even that a single one of their beliefs is woke. It was only in fashion for a brief period and is now distinctly out of fashion. It's kind of similar to being a hipster—a lot of people get called hipsters, but no one has self-identified as one since probably the early 2010s.
This makes discussions like these inherently slippery and circular. While it's clear that many people do actually hold beliefs that their critics would characterize as woke (as evidenced by real-world impact like master branches being renamed, indigenous land statements, and DEI quotas), they're never going to voluntarily accept a label that has been turned into a pejorative.
I agree the hipster comparison is interesting. No one really wanted to be called a hipster either, but you knew who they were. I know I quit identifying as one some time in the late 00s, before the backlash really went mainstream.
The tangent about the hipster trend is interesting. Having grown up in a rural village during the 00s I heard about hipsters long before I ever saw a person who would even remotely fit the cliché.
During that time actual cliché hipsters existed as was apparent (via the internet), but more important to my own life was another aspect: it was a kind of catchall term for people who didn't fit neatly into the usual known groups (Punks, Skaters, Metalheads, Ravers, Emos, ..) or did their own thing. I was connected to my local art scene, most of which have been called hipsters without actually being or remotely looking like hipsters.
Hipster was a degorative for: "Oh you think you're different". The thing was I didn't only think that, I was different. Probably most people on this website here were different from the average person during their teens.
You don't just eat vegan, you are a vegan. The thing to recognize is that these boxes exist to make themselves feel superior. So they put the people whose behavior and existence induces cognitive dissonance into their world view into boxes and pat themselves on their backs whenever they can convince themselves they spotted a marker that proves the person opposite is part of that box.
And before there is a misunderstanding: the boxes can work both ways. People within a box can hate on those outside of it and vice versa — and both feel superior to the other. The point is that people ascribe certain attributes to the boxes and use it to paint simplistic pictures of the world around them, precisely because it makes them feel better. Made a certain food choice? Congrats, idiots now think you're smug.
And I am not even vegan. I just try to look past the boxes as life is much more nuanced and much richer behind them.
Or before that, yuppies. YUP simply stood for the very neutral "Young Urban Professional" but "yuppies" somehow became a slur and nobody wanted to self-identify.
This is another observation that doesn't match with my lived reality. The vegans I got to know as such¹ mostly had one moment where they mentioned it: when someone offered them something non-vegan.
Some of them did even mention it only after a meat eater asked them why they are not eating $X.
As mentioned in my live I met only one vegan that smugly and unprompted talked about veganism. And they were the type who would talk that way about literally every topic.
I am generally careful with stories like that. "Trans bathrooms" is another one of those. My institute has non-gendered bathrooms for the past century, mainly for space reasons. And that never was a problem.
If you love meat, but understand the ethical argument behind not eating it, wouldn't it be practical if vegans were smug assholes that you don't have to listen to? That is why some people want them to fulfill that cliché — I am more interested in the truth, especially the truth that has an impact on my direct life.
¹: There ought to be a number of people everybody met, who are vegans, but you don't know they are, because they did not mention it. E.g. my bands drummer (a old punk) is vegan and it took me two years to figure that one out.
Being proud of something doesn’t mean you talk about it unprompted all the time.
I have several friends who are vegan. My point is that they don’t deny it–if you ask them, they’re happy to say “yeah, I’m vegan.”
But people who believe in things that are widely considered woke, like changing ‘master’ branches to ‘main’, usually will deny that they are woke or that they want to change the name for that reason. They’ll tell you it’s about common decency or not offending others and that it has nothing to do with wokeness.
I am one of those who changed master to main. It is exactly two letters less to type the name is IMO more self explainatory than master. So even if we excluded any historic background why the verbiage of master/slave might be considered problematic id still prefer main.
Now is this a (main) hill I have to die on? Totally not. Do I have very strong opinions on this? Nope. Does it cost me a lot? Nope. As I said, I have to type less, and as a teacher explaining that the main branch is the main branch is easier than explaining that master means it is the main branch and explaining where master comes from electronics etc.
"Woke" people for the most part are like me: not adamant social justice worriors whose ardent opinions have to be defended till the last drop of blood, but people who are like "meh, why not, doesn't cost me a thing and maybe it is only right". And that is the polar opposite of what the political right wing and their whole billionaire-funded propaganda machine likes to paint people whoe make choices like that as.
Now I don't say people with strong opinions on these issues don't exist, because there do. But they are the minority. But taking vocal minorities and declaring them the representatives of the majority seems to be a trend these days.
The motivation was not to be more self-explanatory or type less though. Let's be real.
I hear you... you go along with it because the zealots who do feel strongly are aggressive and it's easier to concede the point than face backlash, even if you object to (or are indifferent to) the language-policing. I've switched to 'main' as well, so I get it. pg's essay discusses this:
> Most people are afraid of impropriety; they're never exactly sure what the social rules are or which ones they might be breaking. Especially if the rules change rapidly. And since most people already worry that they might be breaking rules they don't know about, if you tell them they're breaking a rule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially if multiple people tell them. Which in turn is a recipe for exponential growth. Zealots invent some new impropriety to avoid. The first people to adopt it are fellow zealots, eager for new ways to signal their virtue. If there are enough of these, the initial group of zealots is followed by a much larger group, motivated by fear. They're not trying to signal virtue; they're just trying to avoid getting in trouble.
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All I'm saying I guess is let's not pretend that the subject of the essay isn't a real thing. Just because no one self-identifies as 'woke' doesn't mean the ideology doesn't exist—call it whatever you want, but the phenomenon is real and it's had tangible influence on our culture, including in tech.
Because 1 in 10 (for examples) vegans are calling meat eaters as cruel murderers. And that becomes the image of vegans because they are the noisy ones.
There might be some survivorship bias at play here, as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one. Those who eat in peace and leave others alone are not memorable - same goes for antivegans.
> as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one
You never eat lunch with colleagues? Never eat dinner with family and their significant others?
It is very hard to hide that you are a vegan.
Theees a comment on the exact same subject I found interesting yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682623
Yeah? That is what some meaties keep telling me too — but personally I have only met one such vegan in my life and they were obviously deeply troubled by other things as well. All others merely kept to themselves and only talked about it when someone else prompted them. And that someone else was often a meaty with a: "Oh you are a vegan? Now explain THIS".
I don't know about you, but I don't give a damn about made up problems that aren't part of my life. Don't get me wrong, I can totally imagine smug vegans. I just made the observation that 99 percent of the ones I met would receive a disservice if I went under the assumption that "all vegans are smug assholes".
Similarily my assumption for meat eaters isn't that all of them are assholes. But I observed there are people who are so triggered by the mere thought of vegans existing, they can't stop talking about it or demanding from any supposed vegan that they explajn themselves — so the exact thing they claim vegans do.
(footnote: I am not vegan myself)
> there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
This perception is a constant cause of concern for the actual left, and it's created by liberal politicians attempting to co-opt the movement, because it represents a huge part of their disenfranchised base.
In today's reality:
- left: socialist, progressive policies and in favor of fixing the system from the ground up. Election reform and the dissolution of failed establishments find support here (i.e. "too big to fail" was capital B "Bad"). An actual leftist today would say that Trump is awful, but also that Obama probably did more damage to us in the long term. We have not had a leftist in power in any surviving generation.
- liberal: most of the democratic party. Biden's a lib, so was hillary. Liberal voters (somehow) believe that the current system can (and should) be saved by incrementalism. My take is that mostly, liberal politicians are pulling a fast one and just wanna keep that campaign money flowing, which is why you get a lot of talk about campaign finance reform and no action whatsoever. Liberals are terrified of ranked-choice, and economically look a whole lot like conservatives (we used to call this neoconservative or neoliberal but the distinction has become very indistinct).
There's overlap in demographic between the leftist and the liberal - so liberal politicians have frequently used the "jangling keys method" and pushed stuff like wokeness real hard when they're trying to distract from the fact that they're taking money from JPMorgan and Shell Oil. Hillary was one of the worst - refusing point-blank to talk about banking as a real problem while accusing all her detractors of being "Bernie Bros" - which was really just a hamfisted smokescreen to try and turn the party against itself (this ended predictably).
To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.
I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing. Problem is, we've been divided by wedge issues (some of which are truly relevant, like the climate) that make it impossible to form a coalition to accomplish actual reform. This was done on purpose.
Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual. At the risk of being accused of being 'woke' - i'd ask that the two terms (left and liberal) don't get further confused. It muddies the conversation in ways that are destructive.
> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.
I was at a house party once here in Australia, and a Canadian friend got frustrated at me. "It sounds like you believe in policy X, but also policy Y! I don't get it! What are you, left or right?". And I responded by asking what policies X and Y have to do with each other at all? Why should your stance on war and fracking be correlated? Or have anything to do with your opinion about gun control, abortion rights, racism or free speech?
I'm not convinced "actual leftism" has any well accepted meaning. Liberalism has a clear meaning. But "leftism" / "rightism"? They both seem like kinda arbitrary grab bags of policy ideas to me. Why not a pro-war & pro-fracking democrat?
Kamala has either the #1 or #2 most left voting record in the Senate.
> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.
Those are both good because they fight off fascism. There's nothing leftist about letting someone be genocided by Russians.
> I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing.
This is a demonstration of "horseshoe theory". Most of these are wrong! Inflation is not "out of control" but has already been fixed. The US economy is the best it's ever been and people are mad about it because they think they saw it was bad on the news!
The real correct opinion is that American elites are good and the voters are bad.
> Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual.
This is the classic indicator that you're a teenager and have an emotional need to appear above everything. They couldn't be more different. Only one of them wants your wife to die in childbirth.
I agree that wokeness is a big problem on the serious left. It was analyzed in high-profile leftist's Norman Finkelstein's "I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom".
Many point it's from the professional/managerial/bureaucratic class, which never was into free speech to begin with. Take pg's mention of the Soviet Union. That's actually a country where that class overthrew the capitalists to become the ruling class. (They were called "The New Class" there. In countries like the US, they're above workers but subordinate to capitalists.)
And all this is a useful distraction: criticizing wokies distracts from the structure of power that leads to homelessness and working your one (1) life away under some boss. Which is ridiculous in the 21st century.
Well said, thank you for this.
Sounds exhausting to live with a perceived boogeyman of problems versus seeking real problems.
Personally, I am surprised. This is a pretty unique article from a usually articulate thinker that leaves out significant details like: (1) the term originated by folks who recognize there can be structural inequality embedded in policy which, for some inequalities, has been described as structural racism since the 1970s; (2) the term got hijacked by political propaganda machines to circumspectly throw out working policies and other elements of progressive political points in the retrenchment regarding the term.
There really isn't any more detail to be had unless to sanewash the political propaganda's claims.
Another interesting perspective on this idea:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...
It's worth keeping mind here that, far from being a right-wing cable-news status-quo apologist or whatever (to put together some assorted contentless booing I noticed upthread), Freddie de Boer is a self-described "Marxist of an old-school variety" with substantial left-wing cred (and meeting a bunch of the stereotypes, such as holding a PhD in English). I don't agree with him on everything, but I absolutely see his view on how leftism has become corrupted in the current day in the US.
It's poisoning the Canadian discourse, too, and I hate it, and have been hating it since approximately 2012. (I saw signs earlier, but didn't recognize them.) I used to vote for the NDP, but now I don't vote at all - the Jack Layton and Ed Broadbent types I remember are gone (literally, in those two cases); now I mainly see people who seem to think that your rights and your value as a person depend on your identity (just, you know, in a way opposed to the historical norm).
He also has one titled "of course you know what woke means" that really drives the point.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
It was not just a small group of people. Almost all progressive Democratic politicians started working that word into all their speeches to virtue signal and most centrists also fell in line too. CEOs started saying it in company meetings and we were subjected to HR trainings that noted we should say LatinX to be inclusive of trans people, among many other performative rules.
I've been through numerous yearly HR trainings and not once has the term "LatinX" appeared in one. I also highly doubt that even a significant minority, let alone "almost all", progressive Democratic politicians have ever used the term at all. Latinos themselves have rather squarely rejected "LatinX" on the basis of it being nigh-unpronounceable and entirely disconnected from how Spanish/Portuguese words actually work.
GitLab announced in 2020 they were making a focus on hiring Latinx directors: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/06/16/our-journey-to-a-di...
Interesting. I have seen that in official HR training.
Sadly, Latinx is still used all over the place. Google turns up 94,800 instances of "latinx community" just in the past year:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22latinx+community%22&tbs=q...
In fact, when I query for results and specify date ranges for each year (using Tools > Any time > Custom range), I get:
2018: 4,410 results
2019: 7,070 results
2020: 15,900 results
2021: 17,500 results
2022: 21,000 results
2023: 34,300 results
2024: 88,600 results
Google Trends doesn't show a clear decline either: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...
Ah, statistics again. Wow, massive numbers. What happens if you add the terms latino and latina?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...
Right, it barely moves above the zero line.
I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the strongest interpretation (what you're doing here). Several commenters here have asked why his article has been flagged, and I must say that if it was posted as a comment, it should certainly be flagged because of its flagrant violations of the site guidelines.
I certainly wouldn't be inclined to call him a prig, but he's certainly set himself up for exactly that denunciation with his specific framing of the conversation.
He says 'And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.'. What's wrong with sneering at performativeness?
I wish there was a book or website with such patterns and examples written down for all.
It takes a certain linguistic skill to convey the sleight of hand in display in such maneuvers. But once you're grasped it, you can easily spot it and almost predict what the next set of actions is going to be.
As an aside this applies to a wide variety of places like corporate settings, negotiations, sales meetings, city council meetings to mention a few so its generally useful to know.
That book exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right
It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic.
In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender.
Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly.
Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media.
There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here.
Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.
> By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
There are left-wing critics of "Woke", see for example the African-American Marxist Adolph L Reed Jr – https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...
If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman
Or, consider that the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International published a review of the sitcom Abbott Elementary, which includes the line "In fact, in its treatment of Jacob’s wokeness, Abbott Elementary refreshingly mocks the suffocating trend of racialism in American culture" – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html
Similarly, read their review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html – in which they largely express agreement with his criticisms of the progressive "woke" ideology, but simultaneously condemn him for making those criticisms from a pro-capitalist instead of anti-capitalist perspective
And see the socialist publication Jacobin's approving review of the philosopher Susan Neiman's book Left Is Not Woke, which attacks "wokeness" from an explicitly left-wing perspective: https://jacobin.com/2024/07/wokeness-left-ideology-neiman-re...
> If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman
Except, no. A concept can be multiple things at once, we are complex thinking beings.
Woke is all at the same time:
1) what it arose as—a left-of-center terminology, to some extent in-group language, describing certain values.
2) sincere adoption and practice of those values
3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values.
4) A combination of 2 and 3, where those agreeing with 2 has no problem with 3 because the end result can be beneficial: who cares if Intel comes from a place of sincerity if their hiring policies make it easier for qualified minorities to get a food in the door?
5) Anything and everything the far right doesn't agree with, including 1 through 4 but also much more that isn't remotely related. DEI? "Woke." Climate change? "Woke." 15-minute cities? Believe it or not, also "Woke".
> 2) sincere adoption and practice of those values
> 3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values.
That’s not what most “anti-woke Marxists” are saying though. They aren’t saying that the “woke” have fundamentally the right values but are just adopting them insincerely or performatively. They are pointing to a much deeper dispute.
The basic divide: which is more fundamental, class-based oppression or non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc)? The former is the traditional/orthodox Marxist answer, whereas Reed/etc use the word “woke” to refer to the second answer. By contrast a right-wing approach would say neither, rejecting framing society as fundamentally oppressive.
I see. I have indeed seen a handful of comments espousing those views through the years, but they're few and far between.
To me the "class-only" framing is rather old fashioned, and often voiced by those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege so I'm not surprised they feel protective towards the classic framing.
I see much more use in thinking about the class struggle intersectionally, in part because I think it's more accurate to how the world works, but also that by understanding the different experiences of groups within the working class we can build broader, stronger and better alliances. Two cents' worth from me, anyway.
> To me the "class-only" framing is rather old fashioned, and often voiced by those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege so I'm not surprised they feel protective towards the classic framing.
Reed/etc argue that it is the other way around. From his perspective:
“Woke”: the problem with billionaires is that they are (almost) all white cisheterosexual males. The solution is to have more diversity in billionaires: more BIPOC billionaires, more women billionaires, more LGBT billionaires, etc
orthodox Marxist: the problem with billionaires is that they exist. The solution is to abolish their class existence by confiscating their wealth and power
And the same applies when we replace “billionaires” with “CEOs/board members with multimillion dollar salaries”, “McKinsey consultants”, and so on
Which “left-wing” take is more appealing to the board of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc? Obviously the ”woke”: “woke” is just asking the existing upper class to add some new BIPOC/female/LGBT members, but they can keep most of their $$$$ and power. Orthodox Marxism is a radical threat to their entire way of life
So from Reed’s perspective, “Woke” is the viewpoint of “those at the top of the pecking order—whom one might say have some privilege”, his own is true opposition to privilege
> I see much more use in thinking about the class struggle intersectionally, in part because I think it's more accurate to how the world works, but also that by understanding the different experiences of groups within the working class we can build broader, stronger and better alliances.
Reed argues that the biggest oppression the Black working class faces is not being Black it is being working class, and that having more Black billionaires/CEOs/board-members and more Black Ivy League graduates isn’t doing anything to stop the oppression of the Black working class, it is just replacing some of the White-on-Black oppression with Black-on-Black oppression. Also, he argues that prioritising racial/gender/sexuality oppression over class oppression helps to divide the working class, distract them from the true causes of their oppression, drive many of them into the arms of the Right (such as Trump), and ultimately serves the cause of sustaining the capitalist system rather than overthrowing it
Disclaimer: I’m not saying I personally agree with what Reed is saying, I’m just trying to express his point of view as fairly and clearly as I can. I do think he’s worth listening to even if one doesn’t agree with him
I'm not in great disagreement with that argument you put forward on behalf of Reed. I'd just say that the many causes of social justice go far beyond who gets to sit at the table with the other capital owners. I'm not so interested in C-suite representation as how discrimination compounds for those belonging to overlapping minorities within the working class. Don't know what Reed says about that, but it's in such a space I believe progressive polices have done and will do a lot of good.
> I'm not so interested in C-suite representation as how discrimination compounds for those belonging to overlapping minorities within the working class. Don't know what Reed says about that, but it's in such a space I believe progressive polices have done and will do a lot of good.
Have you read his defence of Rachel Dolezal? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal...
It doesn't directly address the question you are asking, but maybe it will give you some idea how he would answer it
The left doesn’t talk about “wokeness” but it certainly does talk about the individual policies that fall under that rubric. The right uses the label “woke” for the same reason the left uses the term “capitalism.” There’s a bunch of ideas and policies that stem from similar ideological premises and it’s perfectly fine to group them together under labels.
For example, Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There’s also race conscious hiring and promotion decisions. They are all ideologically related and add up to something quite significant.
>Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC.
There's also that ungodly garish universal "pride" flag that they can't stop adding new decorations to, even though a) the original rainbow flag was already definitionally inclusive of everyone; b) issues of racial discrimination and issues of discrimination around sexual or gender-based conduct or identity have nothing to do with each other; c) last I checked, the groups they're trying to pull together under this umbrella - group by group, rather than under a general unifying principle - often don't get along very well with each other.
Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.
"Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet.
You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there.
But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike.
It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness.
I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty.
And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.
I don't know if you've read it, but an essay published in 1944 by George Orwell titled What is Fascism? encapsulates your points.
> Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend.
Individual terms are not the only victims of the linguistic tank tread mangling words into meaninglessness. "Paradox of tolerance", for instance, is the Internet age's "fire in a theater". The phrase has gained currency in the mid-2010s as a rhetorical bludgeon to dismiss the speaker's critics and shame those who don't subscribe to the speaker's incoherent definition of "the intolerant". It's usage has no bearing to, and even contradicts, the author's purpose in coining it.
Kamala Harris: "Stay woke"[0][1]
I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US.
I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.
From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.
The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.
It's already being replaced by "DEI". I hear my more conservative coworkers spitting the term with a "hard R" these days.
> Before woke, there was "PC"
iow, you cant say expletives on radio/tv, cant have gay characters on tv, games can't have violence, don't say x in public etc etc...
i've always assumed it was people on the left/progressives pushing against all that, is that wrong?
By the time I gained political sentience, PC referred to perceived limits on speech and conduct that went at the expense of current or historically marginalized groups.
All these things have been derided as "politically correct" in my lifetime (and therefore a bad things): "You can't make a joke these days", i.e. you will get an earful if you make sexist, homophobic or racist jokes. "You can't give a woman a compliment these days", i.e. you can't engage in wanton sexual harassment. "Education is too politically correct these days", i.e. schools teach a history curriculum that recognizes and is critical of imperialism, racism and the like.
In my 30-odd years of life I don't recall it ever being used in the way you describe, but it could predate me.
> PC referred to perceived limits on speech and conduct that went at the expense of current or historically marginalized groups.
thanks for replying, i appreciate it!
I think your understanding is wrong although my experience with the term PC started in the early/mid 1980s and I don't know much about its use before that. What you're describing is more like "don't ask - don't tell" and "parental advisory" labels.
Typically, PC is associated with attempts to de-marginalize groups that are historically disadvantaged due to structural discrimination. To me the canonical PC is always spelling "women" as "womyn", to avoid using a term that contains the word "man", as a way to push back against perceived patriarchal naming/language systems.
interesting, thanks for the thoughtful reply
i guess i had a different understanding to a lot of people, appreciate the reply
You are 100% correct. The conservatives disagreeing with you (and downvoting you) are either willfully ignorant about their own history of "political correctness" or else were under a rock (or perhaps weren't alive yet) during the heyday of McCarthyism and the still-ongoing legacy thereof.
Now, when the tables are turning and companies would rather appeal to the progressive-leaning majorities than the ever-shrinking conservative minority, all of a sudden conservatives are eager to pretend that they've been the champions of the First Amendment all along (never mind that the First Amendment never applied to private platforms/businesses choosing with whom to do business).
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
You speak about it in the past tense but it's still very much a real thing. Just last week I was listening to an Ed Zitron podcast and one of the (many, many) ads was for a podcast that featured "latinX voices".
If you tried to steelman woke, what would fall under it?
It just means being awake with regards to your position in society and privileges. Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications.
The problem, of course, is that "Awareness and acknowledgement of the true nature of society" can be interpreted to mean a thousand different things, some of which are more accurate and actionable than others.
> Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications.
This has always struck me as a fatal messaging problem. When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.
The real problem isn't that [men / white people] may indirectly get propped-up when others are artificially held down -- it's that people are being held down. The current (and disastrous) progressive messaging often sounds like "we want to hold you down, too".
> When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group...
That's one possible interpretation, yes. Not everything works that way, though. Gay people getting married didn't take anything away from me. As the meme goes, "it's not pie".
One of the arguments against gay marriage, back in the day, was that gay marriage would somehow take away from straight marriage. It was a pretty vague argument and I never really heard a coherent articulation of it, but a lot of people repeated it.
Gay marriage succeeded as a movement long before the issue of wokeness came to the fore (with the BLM movement). If you actually read the positions of the thought leaders of the latter movement (people like Ta-Nehisi Coates) the argument is exactly what liberal, white, and right-wing people are afraid of:
The Case for Reparations [1]
People are right to react with vigour to these sorts of large-scale redistribution plans. This is a design of the far-left in academia that has its roots in the communist movements of the early 20th century in Europe and Russia, whose worst excesses led to the deportation and execution of millions of Kulaks in the Soviet Union [2].
You might call this a slippery slope argument but the historical precedent was exactly that: a slippery slope where society slid all the way to the bottom. Once enough people have convinced themselves that it is good and right to use the political process to take property away from a group they consider to be their enemies, there is no limit to the amount of destruction they can achieve.
> Gay marriage succeeded as a movement
It's still illegal in half the world https://www.hrc.org/resources/marriage-equality-around-the-w...
Illegal in well more than half: the UN has 193 members and same-sex marriage is only fully legal in 36 of them, which is less than 20%.
If you look at a map of the world, it is only really a thing in Europe, the Americas and Australia/New Zealand. The only country in Asia with it is Taiwan, which is largely unrecognised and contains less than 0.5% of Asia's population. In Africa, only South Africa–arguably Africa's most Westernised country, and less than 5% of Africa's population. In the Middle East, only Israel – like South Africa, very much the "odd one out" in its neighbourhood – and Israel only recognises same-sex marriages performed overseas, they aren't legal in the country itself.
Not only is it only legal in less than 20% of the world's countries, countries in which it is legal are only around 20% of the world's population
>When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.
It's also radically different from what "privileged" originally means.
In an apolitical context, to have a privilege is to be consciously treated specially, in highly specific and well understood ways; this is because you have done something specific to earn it; and it's mutually understood that this is not an entitlement and it can be revoked at any time if you violate what's expected of you.
Whereas, in the modern sense, to "be privileged" is to be unconsciously treated specially, in vague and nebulous ways, because of nothing you did but rather because of facts of who you are and what you look like; this is just because life isn't fair; and the only way to fix the problem (if you see it as one) is (supposedly) to enact sweeping social change that will indirectly take it away from you.
I'm totally fine with recognizing that other groups of people might struggle more than me, and maybe we should try to help them. I.e. setting up a free tutoring program in inner city schools is a good example.
I'm not fine with my hard work being dismissed because of my sex, ethnicity, or whatever other 'privileges' I had. When I see someone online speak about privileges, it's often being used as a cudgel to silence someone. It wears away at my empathy.
And there's the rub. You feel like your hard work is dismissed. To be honest, that's a framing problem. I think you misunderstand what people are saying.
Take me as an example: I'm in a very enviable and privileged position. I worked really hard for it. But if someone were to tell me "you're privileged", I don't get my feelings hurt.
I recognize that 1) someone else working 10 times as hard as me still would be extremely unlikely to get where I'm at if they were from another group. 2) If I were in a disadvantaged group, all the hard work I have put in is unlikely to have been enough. 3) Therefore, the fact I'm sitting here, no matter how hard I worked, is ALSO very much down to luck.
The first time I thought about it in those terms, my ego took a hit. It is an uncomfortable upending of the way I used to see the world and my place in it. But it is nonetheless true. Trust me, I am not trying to dismiss your hard work, but make you see it in its true context.
And after some time thinking about this I have a much greater respect for those that struggle as hard as, or harder than, me because they don't have the privileges I was born with.
I find it belittling when they dismiss the power of individual agency.
Posters on this site and elsewhere often assume anti-victimhood messages imply the speaker is a member a privileged class. They assume the speaker's identity based on the ideology they perceive. At the same time they're claiming a moral high ground and chiding their perceived opponent's lack of empathy.
The Baron Von Munchausen, pull yourself up by the bootstraps is especially relevant if you lack privilege. Yet, the would be saviors will assume that I'm not sufficiently aware of my own condition when I mention it. Where's the empathy in that? What could be less empathetic than incorrectly presuming someone's identity and telling them what is the highest social good for their actual identity? Empathy for the individual is dismissed in lieu of talking points about categorical identity.
Look, I completely agree, but let's not make it totally one-sided, okay?
F.ex. I regularly have a problem with the cookie-cutter (and utterly meaningless) "advice" of many privileged HN programmers saying "Never had to look for a job" when I told them I am a senior who struggles to find a job currently. Never maintained a network, never had relations that last with former colleagues, never had college buddies etc. As far removes as the classic successful USA dev as I can be really.
Yet these people still think their advice applies and is actually worth anything.
Back on your topic, I don't want to silence them but I want to tell them that their severely filter-bubble-limited take is not very interesting, or even at all helpful.
It's really the same as the topic of this thread as well. Privileged people exist and their takes can still be useful, however, their usefulness can be limited. And again, from where I am standing, I would not want to ever silence you. I only want to make you aware of your bias. We all have them. All "sides" of any debate have bias but hey, that's a completely different (and much bigger) topic.
Perfectly reasonable as long as you maintain the mantra "Is this actually a widespread social problem, or is it people being shitty on the Internet?"
My interpretation is something like:
Step 1 - recognising an advantage e.g. "I am straight/white/Asian/tall/short/whatever".
Step 2 - recognising that it's unearned "I didn't choose it, I was just born that way".
Step 3 - is to hold the belief that because it's unearned that no advantage should be assigned to it, we cannot claim that it's preferable, etc.
To me, what it means to be woke requires the belief in step 3.
That's what makes it a kind of funny insult word, because it's logically unworkable and runs counter to well, literally the entire world. It feels like the kind of classic autistic technical gotcha.
If you're stronger and faster you don't get eaten by the tiger. If you're more attractive you get the better mate. At the end of the day it's just like, you know, grow up, deal with it.
> Step 3 - is to hold the belief that because it's unearned that no advantage should be assigned to it, we cannot claim that it's preferable, etc.
This is simply a statement against being prejudiced (racist or sexist). We never needed a new concept or word if thats all "woke" meant.
> That's what makes it a kind of funny insult word, because it's logically unworkable and runs counter to well, literally the entire world.
You're completely misunderstanding what someone means when they use "woke" as an insult. I agree with PG here - as an insult, its basically the same as calling someone a prude / prig.
In context, imagine a statement like this: "Ugh shut up woke people, yes - I know you hate kevin spacey. I don't care right now. He's still an incredible actor and American Beauty is still a masterpiece. Shut up. I'm trying to enjoy the movie."
You can replace "woke people" there with "prude" in that statement and the meaning is unchanged. Essentially, I think there's two separate things: First, being against discrimination in all its forms and second: being really annoying about it. Its that second part - the annoying puritanical finger wagging that people are referring to when they hate on "woke people".
When did "Asian" start become an advantage? Since the introduction of Hart–Celler Act?
When people noticed the good sociopolitical outcomes they've been getting. This is part of how we ended up in the situation where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... could happen (Harvard's actions were intended as "affirmative").
Right. The original meaning was just "politically aware", the same basic metaphor as the "Wide-Awakes" in the Civil War era. If you go back far enough you found it sometimes used in the "wake up sheeple" sense (i.e. referring to a conspiracy mindset). But it's basically never been the self-appellation of a political or cultural movement; essentially everyone who uses it that way is deriving it from critical right-wing discourse.
If wokeism remained a personal awakening I don’t think there would be much push back. It’s the virtue signaling and holier than thou judgment people don’t like.
Generally speaking, most people on the left talk about a certain number of ideas. For example, many on the left believe strongly in trans rights. They believe that trans rights are either being actively limited or are actively under threat by people they believe are trying to either get rid of them or force them back into the shadows.
So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs.
People on the left generally do not believe strongly that “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”. They point to the many moral panics, bigoted movements, and real harm done to certain groups in history and do not believe that what some call “open discussion” has historically always led to the least harm.
People on the left generally do not believe that all discussion needs to be censored or tightly controlled. Rather, they view certain beliefs and viewpoints as actively harmful because they spread harmful beliefs about particular demographics. They believe that political discussion can, and does, go beyond what is useful or helpful sometimes.
> “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”
Generally the people saying that really mean "more (listening to what I say) leads to (what I believe) beliefs".
Conscious of the effects of structural racism.
if the movement stopped at the level of consciousness, then there wouldn't have been as much backlash. It went way beyond consciousness. You are admonished if you aren't actively anti-racist.
I guess a person could be pro-racist, neutral on racism, or anti-racist. Is there another category I'm missing?
>Is there another category I'm missing?
"Not racist", i.e. what was in the 90s called "colourblind".
If you describe yourself this way nowadays, and hold to and espouse those principles - not taking race into consideration when making decisions; considering people a priori to have equal moral worth regardless of race, etc. - self-identified "anti-racist" people will call you "racist". This has happened to me on many occasions. It is nonsense, of course. But sometimes they have social power. It's functionally what happened when I was banned from the Python Discourse forum, except they went a step further and claimed (utterly groundlessly) that I was accusing them of "reverse racism" (a term which I do not use, and which I view as an invention of self-identified "progressives" to strawman the views of those opposed to them) in taking other moderation actions against me.
> It's functionally what happened when I was banned from the Python Discourse forum, except they went a step further and claimed (utterly groundlessly)
Are we suppose to pick who to agree with (you or the mods) merely based on tribalistic priors? You didn't post any documentation, there's no way for anyone to fact check whether or not the mods are actually acting in bad faith, or whether or not you were unjustly banned.
>there's no way for anyone to fact check
I've talked about it before. I came to HN because of the Tim Peters suspension, which was related to my situation. I have archives of my related post content (since much of it got deleted) on my blog. Regardless, the burden of proof would be on them to establish that I made any such accusations (the fact of those accusations is clear: https://discuss.python.org/t/im-leaving-too/58408/11 ).
You can't be neutral against racists if you believe your lack of action is tacit approval.
Simply not racist. Anti-racist means racist in reverse.
It does not mean that at all.
An ideology that highlights the existence of, questions, and probably seeks to undermine a number of current social hierarchies, and power structures.
Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum.
> Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum.
And/or where one falls in the social hierarchy and power structures.
You don't meet many christian who say they love being religious, love feeling religious, and doing religious things.
They say they love god and his spirit.
Woke is correct, it'a just not the word you want me to use.
Even Obama is not a fan of "woke" culture and calls it out for the hollow vapid gotcha politics that it is: https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM
It's the ultimate irony that this post is doing the exact same thing it is accusing another group of, with the only distinction being that there is no "term" attached to it.
I suppose the US politics have gone so bonkers that the left actually uses the term "conservative right" pejoratively in the same way that the right uses "woke" to describe the left.
In which case this scenario is so childishly insane that the only sane choice is to reject it all outright and focus inward.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
As someone who most folks would indentify as “liberal”, I use this term to describe a very small but vocal group of so-called progressives who are a problem for the liberal cause writ large.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
This is a prime example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been indignantly corrected by so-called progressives when speaking about “Latine” — note that this term is what many/most Spanish speakers (at least ones who aren’t eyeballs deep in “woke” circles) are more likely to use when they don’t want to use “Latino”.
Latinx is one of those white liberal made-up things (of many), and the language police enforcement is off-putting and shows an incredible lack boundaries.
“Woke” ideals resonate well with a narrow group of “progressives”/liberals, but the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public, including but definitely not limited to conservative extremists.
If you want to see some realpolitik on this issue, note how AOC learned (via Pelosi) to get in line with votes and messaging when it mattered even while endorsing progressive/liberal/woke ideologies.
And what did AOC get in return?
> And what did AOC get in return?
We probably won’t know for a long time.
> the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public
I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here - what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation? The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.
> I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here
I never labeled myself as a liberal, I just said that most folks would put me into that category.
I definitely have some beliefs that do not toe the party line of either side of the American divide.
> what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation?
PG just wrote an entire essay on this exact topic, and that essay is what we are commenting on.
I more or less agree with pg’s stance.
> The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.
In your reply, you’ve given me a purity test and then indirectly labeled me as an ignorant member of “the other”.
This is exactly the type of behavior that gives “progressives” and “liberals” a bad reputation, even though most liberals (and many progressives) don’t engage with this sort of rhetorical style.
There are much more constructive ways to have these conversations, and I wish that folks (on both sides, fwiw) would commit to trying to take the more constructive paths.
If there are any specific points about my post that you would like me to clarify or address, I will be happy to do so.
> I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here - what is the "woke" agenda
Well partly it's this exact kind of self righteous language policing.
"Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum."
Yes this is very common on the left too. Really common actually.
>a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left.
The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology
Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it.
>The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
Here's CNN Business casually repeatedly using the term in 2021: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversit...
More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally.
For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".)
Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.)
Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.)
It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation).
And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... )
Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses
Yes, it is an ingenious sort of strawman.
In its prior usage, to be "woke" meant to be informed, alert, and to resist being bullied or easily duped into relinquishing one's rights to object, to defend oneself, and to dissent.
In this sense -- I note with some irony -- Jordan Peterson was "woke" when he would not allow his students to coerce him into using terms of address that he rejected.
Now the usage on the "Right" in US politics in particular uses "woke" to mean hypocritical or superficial assertions, positions, and policies that serve a dubious objective or prove to have no foundation in facts -- especially if these are the opponents' views.
Flinging these accusations of hypocrisy and delusional policy-making has become more important than defending democracy itself. Herein lies the masterstroke of the messaging. Using the term "woke" to attack supposedly "woke" opponents has become a memetic (viral) behaviour that has completely devoured political and public discourse.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left.
Even if true, so what? People are still pushing it.
The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years
It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion.
Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.
The left put everything under the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. That's the idea that disgusts lots of moderates. The idea came from Leninism, but nonetheless is considered woke as fuck. So, no it's not necessarily a boogeyman, unless you throw out anything you don't like from the bucket of woke (and vice versa).
Oh, CRT is also woke as fuck, unless you believe it's the right framework.
> The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
I agree that the number of proponents of something like "LatinX", or "biological males playing women's sports" are far, far outnumbered by the people who aren't supporters of those things. But the issue is that the people who are supporters tend to be extremely vocal and generally in positions of power or better able to influence those who are, whether thats in corporate or academic administration settings. As such the small number of "woke" individuals are having outsized effects on society and culture, and the backlash is in response to the magnitude of that influence, rather than the number of people pushing for it.
Who are these super woke people in power exactly? F500 CEOs? Politicians? Who are you talking about because I don’t see it.
Hollywood, mainstream media, academia, most big tech, ...
You know mainstream media is Foxnews (the largest viewership by far) and Joe Rogan, right? Those two command the largest share of mainstream viewership.
Or are you referring to 1990s definition of mainstream media that isn't mainstream and is irrelevant?
Professors, judges, lawyers, journalists, politicians, tech moderators, probably anything in the arts or education. On reddit and bluesky you can get banned for having the median voter's opinion on gender norms and immigration.
You're right. It's really lazy to use the term at this point as there isn't a shared meaning assigned to it. It's mostly used as a pejorative by the right at this point, but it's original meaning was very different and indicated a positive attribute. Whenever I'm in a conversation with someone who uses the word, I stop them and ask them to define what they're talking about. Usually they end up with something vague that boils down to "stuff I don't like".
You are dismissing the issue by implying it is a right wing thing.
Obama is using the term and criticising people who do it in this clip. I in no way consider him to be right wing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
At this point is probably not meant as 5 years ago. But even 5 years ago the meaning of the word had shifted away from the original meaning.
Not too mention Bill Maher who is also firmly on the left.
He isn't though.
He represents his own distorted view of reality that's increasingly disconnected at a classiest level
Firmly? Come on
He is absolutely not. He’s a science denier and routinely has anti vaxxers on without pushing back on their ideas
You’re never gonna believe this but the hippie granola left were the original antivaxxers. The first places where you started hearing about measles outbreaks in the US were all affluent left leaning communities with a strong granola contingent, like Santa Monica, California.
You’re never going to believe this but those people are no longer on the left. Its passed them by
That is kind of the point Paul is making in his essay. The most progressive people are pushing an ever evolving definition of what it means to be racist or anti-science or a bigot.
This is why Trump won. People got tired of being told they were a bigot if they expressed any concerns that were not inline with the most recent trends of progressivism.
> That is kind of the point Paul is making in his essay. The most progressive people are pushing an ever evolving definition of what it means to be racist or anti-science or a bigot.
This isn't what progressives are doing as much as it's what conservatives characterize it as what progressives are doing.
> This is why Trump won. People got tired of being told they were a bigot if they expressed any concerns that were not inline with the most recent trends of progressivism.
This isn't why Trump won, data we have access to shows that.
Just read the threads here. People are specifically saying Obama's criticism of Woke are no longer valid because the word has changed. But Paul is using the same definition that Obama used.
Is is the progressives who have decided unilaterally that woke is now a pejorative that racists use to demonize progressives and doesn't mean what it used to mean 5 years ago.
Obama isn't progressive!
He's not using the progressive definition, hes using the conservative one, just like PG is. Both are wrong in this aspect.
>Is is the progressives who have decided unilaterally that woke is now a pejorative that racists use to demonize progressives and doesn't mean what it used to mean 5 years ago.
this is incorrect. I welcome you providing some sort of "proof" otherwise?
Just look up the history of the word on wikipedia. You think a right wing person got edit access to that page and added the most recent change?
Yeah. If the left (and the democratic party more generally) throws out all the "anti-woke" people, there won't be many people left.
You'd lose Obama, Bill Maher, Joe Rogan (yes really.), Stephen Fry, Bernie Sanders, and on and on it goes.
I hate puritanical finger wagging. I think most people feel the same way. That has nothing to do with my political opinions on other topics, like abortion, gun control and so on.
I think the left in the US makes a massive strategic error by claiming that everyone who doesn't like "woke" is right wing. The right wing is delighted to have all of those voters.
I liked PG's attempts to define the perjorative form of "wokeness". I was disappointed that the rest of the essay didn't serve the discourse much.
What I was really hoping for was focused analysis on how to make social media more useful to the earnest helpers instead of the "loud prigs". That would have made for an interesting discussion here.
The problem is that he thinks he solves the problem by bringing 'prig' into the conversation and in reality he just paints a broad swath of people with a broad brush. A lot of folks who are in the "earnest helpers" category are also categorized by the right as "woke". That's the problem with the word right now, it can go all over the place.
"Prig" is in the eye of the beholder. What about when the "prigs" were right? I'm sure the Quakers were seen as "prigs" by the southern slaveholders/traders. The Quakers were early to the abolition party and their opposition to slavery was based on religious zeal which made them seem like "prigs" to the people in the South who's whole society and economy was built on slavery. But we now consider the Quakers were right and the slaveholders wrong. MLK was viewed as a "prig" by many southern whites for interfering in their racism. But MLK was right.
I agree. The essay seems to assume there are clean lines separating the "good ones" from the "bad ones". It's very reductionist.
Step one is to stop the handwringing over who’s “woke”. Paul is committing every sin he claims the “woke” people are doing by obsessing over what words other people are saying instead of trying to solve actual problems.
Just because "you know it when you see it" doesn't mean you don't understand it or don't have something coherent in mind.
As a non-american, reading the definition of woke I dont know what to think
If woke means progressive and politically conscious then the opposite is what, uninformed,thoughtless.
So people say they rather be ignorant than conscious?
Sometimes I think people are not actually fully conscious and tend to behave like primitive animals and they are hating everything because reverting to hate is a primitive animalistic trait that requires little thinking or consciousness.
Or its a racist thing because woke has roots in black culture?
I would advise you to ignore yapyap's definitions.
Paul Graham has defined woke in the best way I have read so far, and it is in the article we are discussing about:
Woke: An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
(Performed by a self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.)
Originally, people meant that you were inclusive and caring about all people. Except, you know, those hateful people on the right. Because fuck them. (I'm not even kidding. This is how they really felt, somehow.)
But then "the right" got ahold of the term and used it to mean the people above who went above and beyond and were actually being harmful instead of helpful, in the name of "being woke".
Personally, I think the pejorative term is a lot more accurate, especially for most people who consider themselves "woke". They drink their own koolaid and believe what they're doing is helpful, and can't see the divide that they are causing.
Of course, there are a ton of trolls (who are also probably on "the right") that use it to cause the divide as well.
So in the end, it ends up just being a way for jerks on both sides to rile each other up, instead of actually helping anyone.
> Originally, people meant that you were inclusive and caring about all people. Except, you know, those hateful people on the right. Because fuck them. (I'm not even kidding. This is how they really felt, somehow.)
Surely you have evidence for this claim that would counter all the other evidence that disputes it?
Your definition doesn't even stand up to the first paragraph on Wikipedia
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke - https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/woke-meani... - https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/06/06/what-doe...
If you're reading "stay woke" and understand it to me "fuck people we don't like" then I'm not sure what reading comprehension program to recommend.
The irony of all of this is that if you boil down the concept of 'wokeness' to simply looking past the status quo, then a lot of the things that are currently labelled 'woke' are in fact anything but. It transcends the political spectrum and simply becomes a cudgel for shit you don't like but can't explain why.
Gay marriage? It's legal, therefore status quo. Making gay marriage illegal again? Not status quo, therefore woke.
Abortion? If it's legal and you want to make it illegal, that's also changing the status quo. Woke.
Immigration? Status quo is to hire employees who are citizens or resident. Laying them off in favour of H1B workers? Woke AF.
Roe v Wade and the Chevron Doctrine? Those were status quo for decades! How woke of the Supreme Court to reverse those decisions after so many years.
Of course in each of these cases the policy is actually regressive as it reverts society back to the point before the original policies were implemented, and to that extent the argument falls apart: none of that actually seems 'woke'. Except...the people who agree with all of the above would see it as progressive towards their own aims, so it pretty much is 'woke' for them, especially as they believe their own morals to be superior (and traditionally backed by religion).
>that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
If you're going to be reductive with someone's argument, at least use the entire argument.
If we do, IDK how you can say woke is just oppositional positions when that wasn't the idea OP proposed.
Because it's actually just a verbal cudgel used by the right for things they don't like. Religious groups especially have all sorts of arbitrary rules for which words you can use to talk about them, and if you use the wrong words they'll absolutely cancel you - up to and including murder.
That is the entire argument though, it's just that the parent's idea is based on their own morality when, in fact, there is more than one morality in play. Flipping it on its head shows that it's not really about 'wokeness', which might as well be a thought terminating cliché at this point.
Here is another part of the parent's post which I alluded to:
> the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
This is why it's ironic. Two sides of the same coin: one group of righteous people claims moral superiority over another group of infidels, and vice-versa.
It's the Spidermen pointing at themselves meme. These conflicting beliefs can reasonably co-exist (as they always have done), so who stands to gain from treating them as mutually exclusive (there can only be one?)?
> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless? Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy? What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable? Is that empathy? Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassio...
While "Empathy for the homeless" can situationally mean talking nicely about them, it also means stopping, blocking, and undoing directly terrible actions against the homeless.
Bulldozing peoples' stuff is in fact pretty bad. Having laws against giving money to people is in fact pretty bad. Putting hostile architecture everywhere is in fact pretty bad. People make decisions, over and over again, to not just hurt homeless people, but also hurt the people trying to help homeless people.
Stopping people from doing that is called "empathy for the homeless". It's called that because saying and feeling bad things about people is part of the process of hurting them. It's how people agree who is and isn't okay to hurt. By stopping group efforts to make things worse, you only have to worry about random individuals trying to make things worse for other random individuals. Which is unstoppable but untargeted.
Sounds nice and virtuous... until you remember there exist gangs of homeless people who mug law-abiding citizens, retreat into the structures that you want defended from demolishing, and cry victim when people want to stop their crimes. Not to mention they use the said structures as a hub to distribute drugs to the local community of teenagers.
You see, the problem with every such discussion is the lack of nuance and the willingness to demonize e.g. parents who want their kids to be safe in their neighborhoods.
What you call lack of empathy for the homeless is, in some instances, the concern and actions of the said parents.
So do these parents truly lack empathy, how do you think? Or they say "no matter what hand life dealt you, please just stay away from my kids"?
What's your opinion?
If people are mugging, they should be arrested. I see no need for the other laws.
And if they use abandoned / derelict buildings to group up and start their "operations"? Removing those is a nice first step.
So, should we bulldoze homes in case they house thieves?
I specifically said abandoned / derelict. Shall I point you at the wiki page of a "straw man argument"?
I'm not interested in policing thought crimes,just real ones.
And I also mentioned those. Not sure what your goal is here.
Your dislike of "gangs of homeless people" existing shouldn't be directed at the homeless people, but the gangs. In an area where black communities have high crime rates, the answer wouldn't be to go after black people, but address the crime directly. I don't see why this should any different.
I heard police officers say that lot of homeless people are doing some sort of crime.
It's not an oppression to read statistics. It's a good first step in trying to fix stuff.
God help us; the vagrants are doing some sorts of crime. And reading statistics on this stuff? Hah! The police don't even report crime statistics:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rate...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was a guest in communities where people said they had problems with homeless people on a regular basis.
You are free to not believe it. I for the moment believe my eyes and ears.
Of course that shit happens on a constant basis and it's silly of you to think that my position isn't that shit happens.
Think about it like this: if you had no food, were starving, and the only way to eat for the night is to steal something, wouldn't you do it to? Or are you going to allow yourself to literally die because you're afraid to commit a crime? Nah. You will want to live.
I was once held up at gunpoint by three folk who stole my wallet, keys, phone, etc. Over the next 48 hours or so I watched the phone bill logs to see where they were calling. Hospital and HIV clinic were on the list. I asked the main dude why he was robbing me and he responded, "Man, we're just trying to live."
Grow some empathy for your fellow man.
No, I will not. I was in desperate situations as well, managed to crawl out without robbing anyone.
Again, believe what makes you feel good. I am looking out for myself because I was only backstabbed all my life and I am not far from a desperate situation again... in my 40s and with a supposedly prestigious profession (programmer) but almost nobody is hiring.
My empathy only resulted in my money and literal health going toward people who don't appreciate it. Nobody ever worked for my cause. Ever. Not once.
You are a classic victim of a filter bubble. "Worked out for me, must work out for everyone". No, in fact it does not work for most.
I hope you never experience homelessness or addiction, but if you do, I hope it humbles you.
You can stop replying now, in case you haven't noticed. Especially after using roundabout ways of insulting. Not interested.
Wasn't meant as an insult, but I'll admit it wasn't kind. It came from a genuine interest in seeing you grow as a person, despite what you might think. To say I've been down on my dumps a few times in the past is an understatement, so I understand. The way I read your post is that you, yourself, are effectively insulting people close to me, including friends and family. It's hard for me not to perceive it as naive dehumanism.
If I may -- please try spending some time at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen, or just volunteer your time to help others. Try to have conversations with people who are affected by homelessness and addiction to understand their struggles. People warm up to genuine curiosity and I think you'll find that there's so much more love out there than you give humanity credit for.
Cheers.
Since you are persisting, OK, point by point.
> It came from a genuine interest in seeing you grow as a person, despite what you might think
This is your mistake here, to think I need to grow further. I did. I got to the other end you were scared to explore. I understood that kindness will only get you killed in a back-alley if you kept practicing it.
Purely mathematically, it's a function with a limit. This is the part you refuse to see.
You are the one who both needs to grow as a person and sharpen his analytical skills.
This is what I meant by saying you use roundabout ways of insulting.
> The way I read your post is that you, yourself, are effectively insulting people close to me, including friends and family. It's hard for me not to perceive it as naive dehumanism.
Fair to see it that way. I do not mean offense in particular, I simply don't mince words. To me you are hopelessly idealistic and don't live in the real world. Seeing homeless people struggling to make ends meet? Witnessing soup kitchens?
Brother, I've seen much worse than this but unlike you I didn't quickly get to parade it in the hopes of coming across as kinder than your discussion partner. I'll save the gross details of everything I witnessed for myself. Was not the topic here anyway.
So OK, I don't object to you thinking I am insulting. Was not the original intent but I am aware it does come across aggressive. I am simply old enough to stop caring and write like ChatGPT, that's all.
...Plus I am not from the USA. Here's one strong clue why we are so much... not alike.
> People warm up to genuine curiosity and I think you'll find that there's so much more love out there than you give humanity credit for.
That I never denied and never will. I was talking about the scum; the people who don't want to fight their way out of the dump. They love the dump, and they see you and me as free money, free clothes, free phones, and will never change. Yes, they never will change, you read that right. I've been among those people. Lived around them.
So maybe you are the one who got sidetracked and believed I am some stupido who loves to generalize. That's on you however, not on me.
I know there are people who genuinely want to come back to society and, here is the part where you will not believe me and will be convinced I am only saying it to "win" -- I helped three of them do it. The gratitude I got was that they became even better off than me and spat on me. :)
So yeah, cheers indeed. I'll go drink a glass of wine for humanity's inevitable downfall. Shame I won't live long enough to witness it, I'd laugh and even help accelerate it if I could.
> Sounds nice and virtuous... until you remember there exist gangs of homeless people who mug law-abiding citizens, retreat into the structures that you want defended from demolishing, and cry victim when people want to stop their crimes. Not to mention they use the said structures as a hub to distribute drugs to the local community of teenagers.
There are folks who are not homeless who participate in criminal enterprise.
It's unlikely that a successful criminal is homeless, as doing crime successfully generally leaves you with money.
Like wage theft.
> So do these parents truly lack empathy, how do you think? Or they say "no matter what hand life dealt you, please just stay away from my kids"? > > What's your opinion?
Yes, some parents let the empathetic part of their brain that covers people not in their family die. "Fuck you, I got mine" is a popular mentality amongst those who believe in bootstrap and american excepptionalism.
I am not noticing any response of my questions.
If I was a parent, I absolutely would support "bulldozing people's stuff" if I know for a fact those people there mugged my kid (or those of my neighbors). Call it exceptionalism if you like -- watching out for each other is necessary for a healthy society.
Those people in the "facilities" made their choice. I didn't force them to mug my kid. They did it on their own free volition.
Life dealt them a bad hand and they felt they had no choice? I can sympathize. I know a thing or two about being dealt bad cards (and many other people know it too). But, well, as far as I am aware, unemployment benefits and programs for re-qualification and re-entering the workforce exist. Again, they chose crime instead of trying to re-integrate.
You have to draw the line somewhere. Sympathy and tolerance should be limited and finite.
>I am not noticing any response of my questions.
Then reread my previous reply as I directly answered two of your questions.
>If I was a parent, I absolutely would support "bulldozing people's stuff" if I know for a fact those people there mugged my kid (or those of my neighbors). Call it exceptionalism if you like -- watching out for each other is necessary for a healthy society.
Supporting actions out of retribution with no concern of the underlying problem means you don't actually care about your child, you care about being perceived as caring about your child.
Watching out for others is good and necessary, but in now what is "bulldozing peoples stuff" a real form of watching out for others.
>Those people in the "facilities" made their choice. I didn't force them to mug my kid. They did it on their own free volition.
Violence is already illegal. I am not sure what value you or any one gains by "otherising" a boogeyman rather than addressing the issues that cause violence.
>Life dealt them a bad hand and they felt they had no choice?
"Don't judge me by the choices I have made until you understand the choices I had to pick from" is a great quote that comes to mind. I can't speak for folks in specific cases but in general we have a good understanding of the reasons folks do crime.
https://www.alliant.edu/blog/why-do-people-commit-crimes
> I can sympathize.
Can you, honestly? Your comment suggests otherwise.
>But, well, as far as I am aware, unemployment benefits and programs for re-qualification and re-entering the workforce exist. Again, they chose crime instead of trying to re-integrate.
Both myopic and under-informed on that particular subject.
Being employed often requires paperwork to prove employment. With no house how does one securely maintain paperwork? Same for housing. Same for driving. Systems we setup are done so in a way that punishes those with housing instability more so than others with a support network.
>You have to draw the line somewhere. Sympathy and tolerance should be limited and finite.
Sure, the paradox of tolerance is a thing. However I don't believe you have fully investigated your own position and how you ended up with the view points that you have.
Saying things like "well I did it, others should too" is very much "fuck you, I got mine" mentality, which is unhelpful in building a safe, just, and functional society.
> Supporting actions out of retribution
Not retribution. Justice. Mugging / robbing people of valuables is illegal.
> Watching out for others is good and necessary, but in now what is "bulldozing peoples stuff" a real form of watching out for others.
I am losing patience with you. You blame me for not reading while you are not doing it yourself. I said those abandoned / derelict buildings were used as "bases" / "operation centers" if you will. Sigh.
> Violence is already illegal. I am not sure what value you or any one gains by "otherising" a boogeyman rather than addressing the issues that cause violence.
...? Seems you just need somebody to talk with because you are just dissecting words here. Glad we at least managed to agree on something super basic like, you know, that what I described homeless people are doing is actually illegal. It's a start.
> Both myopic and under-informed on that particular subject.
Meh. Bye.
My view is that you cannot sacrifice other peoples' lives and belongings, and call it good, without also sacrificing some of your own. It does not actually have to be "an eye for an eye", the sacrifices do not have to be anywhere close to balanced. But willingly hurting other people and paying no price whatsoever cannot possibly be considered good.
> Sounds nice and virtuous Yeah it is. I care about people about as much as it is possible to care about people, because I can't truly separate myself from anyone. If I know someone is happy, I feel like I am happy. If I am aware of someone on death row, I feel like I am on death row. My brain doesn't actually mix up real and imagined sensations, but I lack the ability to hear of something happening to someone and go "that can't happen to me". In some sense, I "am" humanity: I want everyone to be happy and get what they want. I empathize towards trans people and transphobes simultaneously (though ultimately side with trans people). I feel near-completely unable of actually making a difference with anything, but my mind does give me rather strong yanks to "make this war go away" all the time. Though the one exception to all this is people who hurt other people and call it good, especially if they call it "for their own good". I feel quite a lot of rage when I hear about incidents like that.
If you share goals and desires with someone, you are "the same person" as them. You are a "law-abiding citizen". Their successes are your successes, their failures are your failures. You are not the same person as "homeless people". Their successes mean nothing to you. Same with your failures. They are capable of causing problems to you (as all people do), but your desire to retaliate is not limited by the desire to not "cut off your nose to spite your face" that you would have if the cause of the problem was a "law-abiding citizen".
In my understanding of the world, it is not possible to convince you to care about homeless people. The desires of different people are fundamentally not comparable. My desire to stay alive does not outweigh your desire to not stub your toe, and if those desires come into conflict, it does not matter which one wins. (Though as I also consider myself to be you to some extent, I desire both to stay alive and for you to not stub your toe. And you too are probably also "humanity" to some extent, though probably not as strongly as I am. Not that it actually matters beyond simply describing what happens)
I see groups of parents looking out for their kids and feel good. I see groups of homeless people being hurt and feel bad. You go, "I'm defending the lives and non-drugginess of the kids of my community. That makes me a good person". Does it? You are making a decision to help the people you feel closest to at the expense of the people you feel further away from. On one hand, no such decision is better than any other decision. On the other hand, people are being hurt at all.
> My view is that you cannot sacrifice other peoples' lives and belongings
..."Sacrifice" them? They are already marked for demolition but the local powers work with the speed of a glacier. You are starting on the entirely wrong premise, I am not surprised that you drew very wrong conclusions.
> Yeah it is. I care about people about as much as it is possible to care about people, because I can't truly separate myself from anyone.
You mistake me for somebody willing to discuss hugely unrealistically optimistic philosophy for 13-year olds. But I'll entertain you for a few minutes.
I have a lot of sympathy for people in difficult conditions. I was this close to being homeless 3 times in my life due to bad choices borne out of a toxic family and zero opportunities in life.
Yet I never mugged anyone. Never did one thing illegal. Had opportunities, mind you.
I am not special. I am not a unicorn, not a hero, fairly normal guy with maybe a little more brain that allowed him to do programming. Maybe. Or could be entirely average and be just deluding myself. Ego gets us all.
If I can avoid mugging people, everyone can.
I have sympathy for you until you draw a knife and command me to give you my wallet. There the sympathy stops. Unconditionally.
The rest is really your own philosophical diatribe. As said to another sibling comment -- sorry that you have no people to discuss this stuff with but I have moved past it maximum at 22 years old (and I am ashamed of myself because I believe I did it very late even; I'll again say this is stuff for teenagers to figure out).
So no, I am not everyone else and not everyone else is me. I wanted that. Wanted it with all my heart. I am so sick of all of us only looking after each other and -- in the very very best-case scenarios, looking out for a local community -- but it simply never happened. Got back-stabbed hundreds of times, still do to this day every time I "expose my belly", so to speak, without failure. Received true kindness maximum 5 times in my life, one of which was my wife treating me the way she did on our first date, another one was a true friend now passed away, the other 3 were actual work opportunities that I botched due to being bitter and physically exhausted (technically my fault).
That was it. And I am in my 40s. Five times receiving kindness in a lifetime.
Collectivism is a fantasy. And historically proven to not work (i.e. communism, the Japanese society, and others). And now I know you'll latch to those words in the parentheses and ignore everything else. Surprise me by not doing it. :)
So, one diatribe to counter yours. But IMO that topic(s) will lead us nowhere. I smell deep and incompatible clash of values. You live a life that allows you to be an idealist. I don't.
> Ok, I'll bite. What is having empathy for the homeless?
Let's start by changing how we think about housing and shelter from an investment to basic rights.
Or maybe stop criminalizing being poor.
> Is allowing unconstrained immigration to increase competition for entry-level positions empathy?
That's not a thing.
>What about restrictions on construction that make housing completely unaffordable?
Which ones? Some like quality and safety standards add cost short term but save long term.
However SFH rules hurt density, and cause grater strain on infrastructure and resources, while also driving up costs.
> Is leaving the drug-addicted portion of the homeless out on the street to battle their addictions on their own empathy[1]?
Medical safe injection sites could be part of the solution. But this requires thinking beyond "drugs are bad mkay"
Investing in diversion and rehab is another good use of resources.
> Saying nice words (not having disdain) is not the same thing as helping someone.
But if you can't even say nice words, your brain is so broken that you look at the unhoused with fear or contempt, how will you ever support investment in those same people?
I am very sympathetic to the idea that some harm-reduction policies do more to enable drug addiction among the homeless than help them.
But the immigration stuff is just right-wing nonsense. a) We don't have anything like unrestrained immigration, that's propaganda. Obama and Biden both deported more people than any other presidents in history to that point (https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re..., https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-nu...). And b) the percentage of homeless who might compete with a Honduran immigrant for a day-laborer job is a tiny sliver.
On the immigration issue, I'm mostly speaking from personal experience. I think this issue, just like immigration itself, is very regional and doesn't present the same way everywhere. In the town where I live it's now basically impossible to get an entry level job - the competition is fierce[1]. This is a result of a mass influx of foreign students thanks to a local diploma mill. Not surprisingly, the rents and homeless population have increased rapidly over the same period.
[1] https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/massive-lineu...
Your description of capitalism is surprisingly lacking in awareness
> I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.
Before that it was "social justice warrior", before that it was "political correctness". It's just a drumbeat of demonization.
https://theonion.com/woke-conservatives-define-what-it-means...
My favourite is number 5.
"Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep. Not really a statement about your own behavior so much as an acknowledgement of what other people are doing to you—it just meant you're well-informed.
Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Generally the reaction is not to minorities(non-white, is what I am assuming you mean) but to people from outside of a group trying to tell a group what words to use i.e. LatinX.
An aside: If someone who is white is talking to the Spanish speaking community, would they be considered a minority? If so, then the parent premise would hold true.
Latinx is a great example of the overreaction. Some people use this term. It was briefly catching on among groups with power, but ultimately never did. But it is spoken about like Harris was saying "latinx" in all of her campaign videos and that people are being fired for using "latino" or "latina" or even "latin."
Ultimately, I think it is important that groups are able to try things and then later determine that they weren't the best idea. Shouldn't this be ceelbrated?
It would indeed be nice if these things were introduced as “let’s try a new thing and then choose to accept or reject it later, based on results”, rather than “we have determined there is only one correct way of thinking about this topic, and if you don’t like it, you’re a Nazi”.
I suppose I would ask where you've seen or heard this sort of ultimatum about Latinx.
Isn't it interesting that your response here is questioning and perhaps dismissive?
If a minority were sharing their perspective about whatever their lived experience was with regards to racism, would you respond this way?
I'll answer that: no, you wouldn't.
Which very quickly lifts the curtain. The movement is not about empathy or understanding. It's about empathy and understanding for people you deem worthy of receiving it.
> If a minority were sharing their perspective about whatever their lived experience was with regards to racism, would you respond this way?
If a small group of people told me they actually experienced flight under only human power, no mechanical assistance. Would it be right to take that claim at face value?
I'll answer that: no, it wouldn't.
If you're going to ignore plausibility entirely, then yeah I suppose all statements deserve equal consideration.
However... If it is the case that some stamens are more plausible than others maybe it's an effective heuristic to be skeptical of implausible claims.
The number of people making the claim is not small.
You probably just cut all the people out of your life who disagree with you.
That is the liberal way, these days.
Donald Trump, among the worst presidents the US ever had, won the 2024 election. This kind of nonsense was absolutely a factor.
By definition, a minority group isn't the majority. So it's at least less than half. A non-small amount of people claim the earth is flat.
Does a personal attack make you feel better about yourself, your situation in life?
If that "kind of nonsense" was a factor, show us in the numbers where it made an impact. I got time, don't cop out, cough it up.
I really don't understand how this relates.
Maybe that is the problem.
Sure, for example, this guy and his paper: https://x.com/mfrmarcel/status/1850899388165693916
“Latinx” is presented uncritically as “inclusive”, and the people who don’t like it are smeared as “queerphobic”.
This is academia at its most tone-deaf and ignorant. If he actually spoke to some Latino people he would quickly discover that the reasons for the backlash have approximately zero to do with “queerphobia”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
That's an egregious misrepresentation. The authors of that paper surveyed Latinos, found that those who disliked the term 'latinx' had moved toward voting for Trump between 2020 and 2024, and that those most likely to move were also most likely to express antipathy toward LGBT people.
You say the academics should have talked to some Latino people, and they did - n = ~2000. Are you saying that they should not have reported their results because you dislike what they imply?
I’m saying that he shouldn’t have presented use of “Latinx” as an unalloyed good, and uncritically “inclusive” (a massive assumption which is highly debatable, particularly amongst Latinos), and that his survey questions are very weak at controlling for the explanations that Latinos generally give for disliking the term (pronunciation, erasure of diversity, trendiness, imperial/colonial attitude to language, elitism…).
Concluding that there is no problem with the term and the real problem is “queerphobia” is textbook academic myopia.
See this critique, which the author engages with - unconvincingly: https://x.com/paulnovosad/status/1851994193503359003
>The authors of that paper surveyed Latinos, found that those who disliked the term 'latinx' had moved toward voting for Trump between 2020 and 2024
It's strange for the author to distinguish "those who dislike the term" from those who don't, considering that the term is overwhelmingly unpopular (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/ho...).
I don't see why. My read of the research paper was that they went looking for correlates to gain some insight into why it's unpopular.
Can you please bridge how your comment "and if you don’t like it, you’re a Nazi" is in any way connected to this tweet about a researcher saying the usage of the phrase "latinx" reduced latino support for Democrats?
Another person is asking basically "why are people so quick to dismiss claims of aggressive wokeness policing" and this is why. Because it is always so much exaggeration about the topic coming from these claims.
I mean any kind of minority, although I would generally say "marginalized group" instead of "minority." But this is HN, so trying to stick to more commonly-known terminology :P
I also think the "latinx" thing is overblown and generally used as an "anti-woke" shibboleth by people who want to get mad at something. Literally never seen an Anglophone yelling at a Spanish speaker about it before, only queer Spanish speakers who use it to refer to themselves.
Also worth noting that there have been other variations that predate "latinx" and have seen more widespread usage. There's "latine," and "latin@", although the former is both easier to write and to pronounce.
> Literally never seen an Anglophone yelling at a Spanish speaker about it before, only queer Spanish speakers who use it to refer to themselves.
You and I move in different circles. I was definitely running into "normal" Spanish speakers for the past few years who's awakening experience with "wokeness" was seeing the word "Latinx" on some HR form and being told that the reason was "for Hispanic comfort" ... which every single one of them found gaslighting in the extreme (since none of them liked it, even a little bit).
Ah, HR... and here I thought we were talking about real people! ;)
I've been condescended by (generally well-meaning) corporate diversity initiatives on many occasions, but I think it's hard to take that as a statement about progressive movements in general. Corporate shit tends to be toothless and cringey across the board.
> I think it's hard to take that as a statement about progressive movements in general
True, but remember that many people's experience of any movement will be through an interface that is both lossy and hostile (whether it be government, corporate, clan leadership, what have you). "The effects that this had were well beyond the scope of what we intended" is so old it's in the Old Testament (but there as an answer-in-advance):
> These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
~ 1 Samuel Chapter 8 via https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%208%...
> seeing the word "Latinx" on some HR form
Yes, very common in job application forms. I don't find it offensive per se, but it makes me wonder if this is the kind of company where bullshit reigns in the workplace.
Yes. I suspect that the term "Latinx" was invented by some gringx.
> Yes. I suspect that the term "Latinx" was invented by some gringx.
[0] suggests otherwise.
[0] https://diversity.sonoma.edu/sites/diversity/files/history_o...
> "Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep.
This is distorted history. "Woke" is just the word in a bunch of black dialects for "awake." We just say "are you woke?" instead of "are you awake?"
What happened is at some point some white woman somewhere had a black person explaining their political beliefs to her. It was likely a black person who was working for her (doing her nails, washing her clothes, or serving her food) who she had a faux friendship with and considered a spiritual guru and a connection to the real world and real suffering, in that way white people do (magical negro.) She carried these pearls of wisdom to her white friends, or to her students at the university, or to the nonprofit that she worked at, and it entered into the white lexicon as a magic word.
If a white hippie, in the middle of a righteous rant, said "you've got to stay awake, man..." as many have, it wouldn't have been so exotic and interesting to tell their white friends. Or as useful to get yourself a job as a consultant.
At that point, it became a thing that white people would use to abuse other white people as racists. The sin wasn't calling white people racists, it's that a certain self-selected white elect declared themselves to be not racist, or even anti-racist, in order to attack other white people. And they decided this gave them the right to control how other white people speak. And a government who hates the way people can talk to each other on the internet about what the government is lying about supported them whole-heartedly. Woke policing was an excellent way to use legal means to keep people asleep.
And black people got blamed, as always. Because America is racist. Black people didn't benefit an iota from any of this. Approximately 0.0% of DEI managers are black men. Black people got poorer during the entire period. Now the anti-woke are going to unleash their revenge on black people, and the ex-woke are going to resent black people for not recognizing their sainthood.
> Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Meanwhile, the first step of wokeness was to erase black people altogether and replace them with "minorities" and "people of color," as if the only thing important to note about black people is their lack of whiteness. Or, since sexual minorities are included in "minorities", black people now have no problems that can be distinguished from the desires of white upper-middle class transwomen. Wokeness erased slavery and Jim Crow, and all that money that white people inherit, just as much as anti-wokeness did. Now the real crime was that white people weren't feeling the right things, and weren't saying the right things. Complete Caucasian auto-fixation.
The only thing racial about black people's problems is that white people used race as the criterion to enslave. Slavery and Jim Crow were the point, and all of the freebies handed from government to people's white ancestors that weren't given to slaves and ex-slaves, and all of the labor and torture visited on slaves and ex-slaves turned into profit that went into the pockets of white people and was taxed into government coffers. There were blond-haired blue-eyed slaves; the "race" stuff is a white invention, not something they get to act like is an imposition from their ex-property. And that experience is not something that everybody non-white or non-straight gets to steal.
When you’re woke, it’s bad.
But when you’re red-pilled, it’s apparently good?
> the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that
CPG Grey’s co-dependent memes video comes to mind [1].
Each group defines wokeness (and defines how other groups define it) to maximise outrage. To the extent there is a mind virus it’s in using the term at all. (Which is where I appreciate Graham bringing the term prig into the discussion.)
Sadly, this is where we are in politics. Pick any term that you like to replace the concept and a rival campaign to redefine it will begin. Your vocabulary is just another battleground.
I see it as a clash between people who are instinctually inclined towards philosophical nominalism (woke) and people who are instinctually inclined towards realism (not-woke). Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs lays out the details and the arguments for this way of defining our current culture war here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmPIMg4St4
Insightful comment. While some of wokeness involves performative aspects like PG mentioned, it also seems to involve a genuine increase in awareness about injustice, and a desire to do something about it- which is much needed. I’m concerned that this desire to “end wokeness” will throw the baby out with the bathwater, and end us in a situation where it becomes taboo to point out or do anything about injustice.
It’s insane that PG seems to think racism isn’t a very big problem- hard to imagine he is living on the same planet I am.
Idk, he spent a good chunk of the blog post saying that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater
There are many things on which I don’t agree with pg. But I feel he is accurate with describing wokeness as the term is commonly used currently. He doesn’t go into the history of the word in this essay.
You certainly don't use it to mean "those crazy people who are pro interacial marriage" but some do. The woke people supporting trans rights almost certainly don't support macho man randy savage chucking on a dress and that same day competing in the olympics but the characture that supports it is part of the woke mob.
People scoff and think of course I know what woke means, because the people the people they talk to/media they consume have the word at roughly the same level of meaning, not internalising the next more or less extreme group that isn't in their social circle include more or less in the meaning.
These days the word woke might as well serve the same purpose as "If by scotsman..." in that no one will disagree with you unless you get into specifics.
My original understanding of "woke" was similar to what in the 60s they might have called being "turned on". Being awake and seeing the actual reality of things for what they are.
> not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead
[4] The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
Treating people with respect can sometimes mean learning enough about them to understand a little about what life is like in their shoes. There are a lot of different kinds of people wearing a lot of shoes. Learning about them is a lifelong process. It’s not about learning “a long list of rules” but more “learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.”
> understand a little about what life is like in their shoes.
That's empathy which is a different concept than treating someone with respect.
> learning about a lot of kinds of people and their experiences.
Having knowledge of a breadth of different people's life experiences is also a different concept than respect. The author proposed "treating people with respect" as the minimal normative standard. You seem to be rejecting his proposal of "respect" as insufficient and instead are proposing an alternative which includes empathy and a "lifelong process" of gaining broad knowledge of different lived experiences.
While those are valid things to propose, you're suggesting a meaningfully different standard by expanding on what respect "sometimes means." It's worth highlighting because I interpreted the author's central argument on this point as being "treating people with respect" alone should be sufficient as the minimally acceptable standard. Whether I agree with the author's proposal or not, I understood it to explicitly exclude requiring anything beyond how we treat others.
While this may seem like a minor distinction, it strikes me as central because the concepts of feeling empathy and having a lifelong interest in acquiring cultural knowledge go to our internal thoughts and feelings, whereas the author's proposal limits itself to our external behavior - which I take to be his point.
It'd more useful if you'd been explicitly direct in your response, perhaps something like "Just treating people with respect is not sufficient. Instead, the minimal normative standard should be..." It would be clearer that you disagree substantially with the author and what you're proposing instead. It would also enable a more interesting discussion about whether society should limit itself to judging how we behave toward others vs going further to judging how we think and feel about others internally, regardless of our external behavior.
Knowledge can inform external behavior. When you go to another country, you have to learn the norms of what will be considered disrespectful in that context. In America, for example, somebody waving their middle finger at you will be seen as them intentionally disrespecting you. Not because they necessarily are (maybe they just arrived from Japan and don’t know better yet), but because for people socialized here that is perceived to go along with the intent to disrespect. National borders are not the only cultural borders.
(I accidentally posted my comment before I was finished, so I was still adding another two paragraphs you may not have seen while writing your response.)
> learn the norms of what will be considered disrespectful in that context.
PG said "treating people with respect" which is not the opposite of disrespecting someone. To me, disrespect evokes a different concept, despite containing the same word root. When I say "treat someone with respect" it's not related to the old ideas out of antiquated honor cultures about formal honor or dishonor, where "disrespecting" someone is taken as an offense and affront to their legitimacy.
The modern concept of 'treating with respect' simply means initially engaging with people you don't know yet with a default neutral posture and general assumption of good will and good faith. To me, the opposite wouldn't be overt disrespect or insult but rather treating one kind of person I don't even know yet, any differently than I treat all the other people I don't even know yet. It's equal default treatment vs unequal default treatment.
Personally, if I'm a visitor to a foreign culture, I'm not overly concerned about the risk of accidentally offending someone over some local cultural norm. I've lived around the world immersed in several cultures different than my own and it's never been a problem. My good will, good faith and sincere best efforts have always been sufficient to form new and lasting friendships, even when I've unknowingly committed some unintentional faux pas.
I would say treating others good will, good faith, and sincere best efforts are my definition of respect. My guess is that if in your travels somebody informed you that not taking your shoes off at the door is a faux pas in their culture (perhaps after you accidentally committed that one), you will start taking your shoes off when you go to people’s houses there. It doesn’t have to be about “honor”—maybe that culture is just more germ-conscious. You have just learned something that helps you show respect to people there. The more cultures you encounter the more of these norms you’ll pick up on over time. I’m assuming you consider such learnings to be not overly burdensome. If so, great! We probably don’t disagree on much of substance and maybe mainly word semantics.
I think something a lot of people don't understand is that nobody is entitled to respect. Respect is something that is earned. If someone behaves in ways that you disagree with, you are not obligated to respect that behavior, or the person engaging in that behavior. I think one of the greatest disservices we have done to our young people, for a couple of generations now, is to teach them that everyone is entitled to respect no matter what they do. Just as it is your right to behave however you want in society (within legal limits), it is everyone else's right to judge you for that behavior. The younger generations act as if "judgement" is a dirty word, and that people are committing some sort of grave transgression if they judge you.
Are you suggesting that you think that disrespect is a better default behavior towards others than respect? For example, would you prefer that people respond to your comments disrespectfully until they have seen enough of them to believe you “deserve their respect?”
Edit: if you are saying that it is reasonable that some actions can induce a loss of respect, I agree. Though I firmly believe respect is the default behavior and also that there is a base level of respect that should be accorded to even our worst enemies.
>Are you suggesting that you think that disrespect is a better default behavior towards others than respect?
Not at all, disrespect is something that is earned as well. Personally I behave with courtesy towards all people until they give me a reason to do otherwise. There is a big difference between courtesy and respect. I will say "thank you", hold the door open when someone is coming in behind me, and otherwise treat anyone I don't know with decency and courtesy.
>there is a base level of respect that should be accorded to even our worst enemies.
We'll have to agree to disagree here! When someone has proven themselves to be worthless and not entitled to respect, I feel no obligation to them whatsoever.
A common performative-progressive talking point during the rise of Trump was that we should not try to figure out what's motivating rural white people to support him. Instead, those people need to quiet down, step aside, and make room for lesbian women of color, etc.
So yeah, your philosophy sounds nice. Aggressive performative-progressives sometimes claim to subscribe to it, but their actions tend to differ in practice. See this article for details on this phenomenon: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-wor...
>As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
I voted for Kamala, and I don't think this is accurate.
I support having empathy for homeless people. I would love to see a movement focused on actually helping homeless people, by volunteering at soup kitchens and so on.
Wokeness does not seem to be that movement. Insofar as wokeness concerns itself with homeless people, (a) it wants you to refer to them as 'unhoused' instead of homeless, (b) it wants to make sure you don't talk about it when they e.g. sexually assault you: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1845244113249063227
One thing I wanted to point out: I’ve seen a lot of people on HN and elsewhere allege that moderates or the “right” (in quotes because it is overused as a pejorative label) cannot define what “woke” is. But I disagree, and think most people who complain against this term can easily point to what ideas it represents, and what it means to them. Even if that is not very precise, it is real and meaningful. Enough so that they can find common ground with other people who use the word, even if they aren’t exact matches. The accusation that people can’t define it is itself a tactic meant to undermine the credibility of complaints against it. But is it really any less imprecise than people using broad labels of other kinds (things like liberal or conservative)?
I'd say it's hard to give a clear-cut, very specific definition of the word. It's also really hard to believe that people can't figure out the meaning given context and such.
It is by no means whatsoever a less defined term than "fascist" and the semantic problem seems missing there.
I agree. Wokeness has a very precise meaning: World is divided between oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors are white heterosexual men (white supremacy / heteropatriarchy) everyone else subjugated to them. Institutions, laws are created to perpetuate that power and must be dismantled / subverted via revolution.
Most understand it even if they can’t articulate a definition. Easy to point out when a movie or corporate initiative, behavior is woke.
Anyone using the term woke in 2025 is using the term in bad faith and to create the bogeyman you describe.
It's actually hard to find the time when anyone on the left actually used it. Seems like it was a little under a year and the term was dropped to be more specific actions.
Reading and understanding the article beyond the title, it's just a term that used to be called something else before, and will be called something else in the future. I think you're focusing too much on the actual word, rather than the "movement", which is what pg's article is really about.
The point is that anyone using the term woke is using it in bad faith or if they think they are not using it offensively then it's poorly researched.
Most ironically, this point can be aptly applied to the post expressing it.
So anyone discussing/posting thoughts about "woke" and "wokeness" are using it in bad faith? Would it matter if the person puts a positive or negative spin on it, or are some topics just straight up "no no" to discuss?
Seems like we should aim to critique the content of articles, not just critique the usage of a single word. But you do you.
I think it's okay to refer to the word "woke", but if you use it more than 3 times in your writing, then it's hard to take you seriously.
Why?
Because it's a word that gets people emotional. Getting people emotional is the opposite of what you want to do when you're trying to intellectually dissect something. But it's exactly what you want to do when you're grinding a gear.
It's just like if somebody wrote a piece about trump, but mentioned he was a felon 4+ times, you'd know they weren't writing an unemotional thinkpiece.
> I think it's okay to refer to the word "woke", but if you use it more than 3 times in your writing, then it's hard to take you seriously.
But when the essay is specifically about where "wokeness" comes from and what (pg) understands it to mean, then it has to be OK to use it more than 3 times?
> Because it's a word that gets people emotional. Getting people emotional is the opposite of what you want to do when you're trying to intellectually dissect something
Some terms are so charged that it's virtually impossible to have discussions without any emotional reactions to it. "Woke" seems to be one of those subjects/terms (at least judging by this submission), so if you try to shy away from it just because of that, isn't that a disservice as a whole? We need to be able to discuss and think about hard things too, not just fun and happy stuff.
> It's just like if somebody wrote a piece about trump, but mentioned he was a felon 4+ times, you'd know they weren't writing an unemotional thinkpiece.
But the comparison here would be an article whose purpose is to detailed how Trump is a felon, then obviously it'd make sense that it gets brought up, it's the subject of the text.
I don't think you're discussing in good faith.
I doubt you're truly unaware that everybody saying woke in 2025 unironically is angry and making an insult.
I also don't believe you could read this comment section and think PG didn't get everybody emotional (and mostly confused about his point too), or that he tried very hard not to.
> Anyone using the term woke in 2025 is using the term in bad faith
This was the initial claim. It got me curious how we're supposed to be able to discuss emotionally charged subjects, if you can't bring it up without getting the label "you're doing that in bad faith" slapped on you.
I disagree with most of pg's article, and I'm very left-leaning myself. But I also find it very worthwhile to find a sensible way to disagree with people, even if it's emotional. It's important we're able to understand and see good points no matter the delivery mechanism, or no matter how much we disagree with a person (like me, here with pg who I don't agree with at all, on most matters).
> I doubt you're truly unaware that everybody saying woke in 2025 unironically is angry and making an insult.
This is probably the first article/comment section I read about "wokeness" in at least a couple of years. I'm a left-leaning (European) person far away from American politics, so I am not aware of how the left/right of the US currently use the term. I saw the essay, read through the thing and now I'm here, reading through comments.
> I also don't believe you could read this comment section and think PG didn't get everybody emotional (and mostly confused about his point too), or that he tried very hard not to.
No, I do think he got people emotional, and I don't think he tried or didn't try to make people emotional, it seems to be a very heavy topic for Americans (right or left), so I'd wager it's impossible to discuss it without emotions. Some topics just are like that, and that's not necessarily wrong or bad.
You earn good faith. By being curious, and ensuring that the participants have the freedom to question, push back, and in general, manage the pace of the conversation.
It’s like walking on thin ice, you feel it out slowly, together, in a cooperative and sincere manner.
Its not hard, its just not possible when you dont really care about the other persons.
They know they're being talked about derisively and don't like it. They want to keep doing what they're doing, but they need you to not talk about it, so they can get away with it, so they attack the term. They know exactly what they're doing.
Part of the problem here is that while there's a set of social and political attitudes that really do exist, a lot of the people who practice them are very reticent to label themselves, preferring to claim either that they occupy the whole space of compassionate legitimate political practice, or that they have nothing in common with other groups who are (from an outside eye) very similar.
I like Freddie deBoer's 2023 definition, which at least is framed from a left-wing point-of-view rather than the aggressive and weaponised right-wing framing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
You obviously didn't read the article. He calls out how virtue signallers quickly change what the rules are around which word are OK.
Here is someone who you may or may not consider to be a far right bad actor explaining what woke is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
I like this take: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
I think it's a farce to suggest that no one out there could be accurately described by it (identity politics being more important than class, language policing, etc)
The VP famously used it half a dozen times in this short clip. [1] It was apparently well-known enough of a term that she didn't define it.
IIRC usage didn't really drop off until 2020 or after. That was when conservatives started using the term in a negative way and progressives abandoned it.
Kamala Harris said everyone should be more woke. Racial inequities were one of the pillars of the Biden Campaign and administration. So yes the Left was still using Woke quite a bit, until Right coopted to make it clear its actually negative
In the late 90s and 2000s there was a big thing in hiphop music about “conscious rap”. At first, rappers differentiated themselves from the mainstream by emphasising that they were “conscious” in their lyrics of the harm done by perpetuating stereotypes or promoting dysfunctional lifestyles or failing to challenge systematic oppression. Then it became passé and rappers like Taleb Kweli lamented that they were stuck with this label, which had become a term of derision. Whole thing was like an early run of “woke”.
"Woke" make as much sense as "liberal", "fascist" or "nazi" these days.
Woke in is when you don't play there games. Don't wanna join them beating up whoever is at the wrong end of the stick ? Woke.
See a observed phenomena as a result of complex socioeconomic circumstances instead of making a deliriously stupid absolute statements? Woke.
Defend a person that is weaker than you , has a different gender or skin color? Woke.
They are fucking bullies and if you are simple a decent, considerate person your behavior points that out . And like all bullies they hate that.
Well said.
I've long believed that racism, sexism, homophobia are basically forms of bullying. All are antisocial behavior and quite bad for society. I endured near constant bullying for a lot of my early life, as well as sporadic racism.
When I hear the word woke, I think about people who are against this kind of behavior whether its conducted by an individual, a company, a society, or a government. But all the time I wish that people would just call it what is is: bullying.
It would be much more effective than calling people racist or homophobic or sexist.
There is nothing “bad faith” about appropriating an evocative term to label ideologically connected ideas. It’s like how the left uses the term “capitalism.”
In the last few years, we have seen corporations and universities push for race-conscious hiring and promotion decisions, while schools are putting kids in racially segregated affinity groups. These are obviously ideologically related efforts. It’s perfectly fine for opponents of these efforts to group them together under the label of “woke.”
The only people who could plausibly define 'woke' as 'people who investigate their own values and have empathy' are people who consider themselves woke and are sufficiently under pg's 'prig' definition to believe that is exclusive to them, and sociopaths. What emotionally normal person would say membership of another group is defined by 'basic human decency' and 'thinking about whether their objectives are any good'?
Why and how is labelling unlikable behaviour as woke bad faith. As I understand the right using the term, they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad (one core aspect is prioritising signalling being virtuous over actually improving the world).
Is your complaint that this usage unfairly co-opts the original left usage of the word?
> they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad
I disagree that their use is consistent and specific.
Their usage is constant and is malleable enough to encompass "whatever i don't like right now".
Imagine I wrote an essay on Christianity and based it entirely on the behavior of evangelicals in the South who attend megachurchies (a very vocal minority). Surely you'd expect other Christians (all around the world) who equally claim true usage to object.
> Imagine I wrote an essay on Christianity and based it entirely on the behavior of evangelicals in the South who attend megachurchies (a very vocal minority).
I’d expect you to be published in the New York Times, the Washington Post. If you wrote it a bit longer, the Atlantic. If you wrote it poorly and irrationally, Slate.
TIL all essays ever written are published in one of 4 outlets.
I think the similarities to a religion are a strong indication that there's a serious issue
I only used religion as an example, not to set up a false dichotomy. It could be anything people care about - 'love', 'patriotism', 'fairness', 'rule of law' ...
One of those is not like the others...
'success','democracy', 'capitalism', 'free market' what is the correct interpretation of the constitution, who is the GOAT of [insert pursuit] and what qualities do they have to have, 'democracy', 'socialism' ...shall I go on?
"Anti-woke" itself has become something of a religion itself with no real core principles or guiding ruleset. In opposition to something that is poorly defined
You give them far too much credit. But more importantly, ask yourself who’s really the morality police at this point? The ones screaming “woke” all the time, vowing to strip “woke” people out of positions of power, seem pretty dangerous to me.
I think this is a fair assumption to make if you haven't been in some of the places where this has been most contentious -- in particular, I think left-wing activist circles, or segments of industry where the workplace has switched from being "apolitical" -- I know that term is contested, but I don't have a better one to use -- to shifting to an overtly social-justice-oriented space.
I've spent the last decade in these environments. My own upbringing and general disposition is left-wing, but the last few years have been stressful and much less productive.
Somebody downthread mentioned how "latinx" was just a small minority of advocates, but we had painful discussions about it, including objections from latino staff, and ended up using it.
Our (obligatory) sexual harassment training switched from a standard legal footing to one that was preceded by a long explanation of the oppressive nature of Europeans.
Group chats moved towards political conversations, and even minor questioning of the (quite sudden) norm shift led to ostracization, with two people, not including me, ultimately leaving the company because they felt uncomfortable with the social pressure.
One senior executive was pushed out because they made a joke about having pronouns in video profiles. We pursued a diverse hiring policy that ended up with patently unsuitable, but diverse, employees including an alcoholic, and someone who had a mental health breakdown in a meeting. Staff would increasingly reach for untouchably political accusations when maneuvering against other individuals at the workplace, accusing them of racism, intolerance, and harassment when there was little evidence that this was going on (none of this was from white males, but between other less privileged groups).
I move in other circles too, academic and professional, and there have been similar dynamics. Not only do I know people who have been "cancelled" (ie lost jobs or opportunities because of public statements that, while politically mainstream, went against local norms), but I also know people who did the cancelling, get cancelled in turn. None of this was about anything demonstrably and objectively offensive; sometimes it was about defending arguably offensive behaviour; sometimes it was just an uncharitable reading of an innocuous comment, taken out of context.
What I would say is that there has been a shifting and narrowing of politically acceptable statements, and a pressure to conform with the consensus in certain kinds of tech work and other high-status societal environments, which I think would make people of Paul Graham's age uncomfortable; he would definitely have seen the "worst" of it. I think part of its spread has been due to it looking, without closer examination, like what you have described. But as someone who was raised by socialists who got there largely by their empathy for others, the degree of cruelty and arbitrary punishment through social sanction has been unusually vicious and hard to bear.
I still feel I can't talk about this except with a few very close friends. This is a throwaway account.
Since 2008, people realized that many systems are entirely broken. This created a large wave of wealth inequality awareness. This is common on both sides of the political spectrum.
At the same time, the left realized that their techniques of debate fail miserably against the monolith of the right, especially after seeing that radicals were rewarded (tea party movement.. all the way to MAGA)
So they are also imitating this pattern.
I know so, because if I dig back enough, I’ll find the comments that predicted this.
The left is radicalizing to match the political capability of republicans.
I wouldn't mind seeing that.
I don't think it was a deliberate attempt to match the debating styles, but I do think it's a natural pattern to exercise power where you find it.
Honestly, I find Paul's description of the process pretty compelling, if not correct in all the details.
Paul makes clear what definition he is using, so let’s discuss that instead of an unbearably boring discussion about which definition of “woke” is the real one.
The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. They are intrinsically linked and cannot be separated.
Both characterizations actually mean the same thing and you said it in your description of the person on the left. Because, thinking that a right-wing solution to homelessness 'lacks empathy' and only you have empathy for the homeless is exactly the sort of self-righteousness the right correctly criticizes.
Oh I'm sorry, are we now saying "woke" covers economic class issues like homelessness and poor people, instead of just social issues which both sides have used to suck all the air out of political discussion?
Now that the neoliberals are embarrassed enough to throw out "woke", are we slipping in economic concerns too?
PSA: YOU CAN STILL BE A SELF-RIGHTEOUSLY MORALISTIC PRICK, SO LONG AS IT'S BASED ON ACTUAL TANGIBLE ECONOMIC ISSUES THAT ARE SYSTEMIC AND ACTIONABLE
> Paul Graham > English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist
<tinfoilhat>
I wonder why a venture capitalist would push this meaning of the word "woke"
</tinfoilhat>
A friend and I love to send each other examples of ridiculous things being labeled "woke". Lately we are spoiled for choice. British tabloid newspapers are an especially good source.
In his post, pg says "Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it."
What I remember the most from that time period was comedians making jokes about exactly this effect: At some point people started labeling everything they didn't like as "political correctness", and the phrase lost all meaning.
(I don't have particularly strong feelings about pg's essay tbh. I've personally managed to completely ignore political correctness and wokeness without anything bad happening).
You're describing the difference between being inwardly moral and being outwardly a bully.
When people use "woke" in a derogatory fashion they just mean "bully."
Which is why James Lindsay's "woke right" comes across as so incomprehensible. He just means "right wing bullies."
Woke-ism is a cult.
There is no generally accepted definition of woke, and that is largely by design to mislead others through well known psychological blindspots (Cialdini), towards inducing others to join collectivism while also inspiring disunity and hate, albeit indirectly.
The movement often couches its perspectives in power dynamics which follows elements common to Maoism and Communism, along with many other similar marxist movements. It also has elements from critical pedagogy (the critical turn), which has origins in Marxist movements.
The mind virus part of it is the same with any belief system that lends itself towards irrational delusion, inducing bitter resentment in individuals and falsely criticizing without any rational framework or basis, often ignoring objective reality for a false narrative.
Woke-ism is a cult of the semi-lucid insane brainwashed children they manage to mislead, who desperately try to poorly grapple with reality, miserably, and bitterly, while dragging everyone else down.
Its rather sad for the individuals who become both victim and perpetrator. There is no cure for insanity, nor the blindness induced.
If you want a rational discussion on this subject matter, I'd suggest checking over James Lindsay's work outing these type of movements. Your description is fairly misinformed.
https://newdiscourses.com/2023/03/workings-of-the-woke-cult/
“ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
This is accurate. A manifestation of the woke belief system. I see this bigotry all the time online whenever team blue joke about the right.
> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
> people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.
People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
>I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.
>People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
I think this is an example that accurately sums up with most normal, non-partisan people mean when say say "woke". The smug self-righteousness exhibited by those who believe themselves morally superior to others is "woke". The suggestion that somehow you are an asshole if you don't sign on completely and without question to the bizarre social and political agenda of self-appointed word and thought police. The people that you avoid like the plague because they are constantly searching for something to be offended about or some way to chide you about having transgressed against some ever-changing lexicon of acceptable terms and phrases. The people that think the world is neatly divided between "oppressors and the oppressed" and that where you fall on this insurmountable divide is based almost entirely on who your ancestors were or what your skin-tone is rather than anything you've actually done in your life. The people that think they have a monopoly on deciding what is right and wrong, and that they have been appointed the moral arbiters to decide what everyone is allowed to say.
You missed the point of the article completely. Wokeness (as PG defined it, which I would agree is the most commonly used definition today) isn't merely realizing we should be treating people better, it's realizing that people should be treated better and focusing on being a "prig" about completely inconsequential and tangentially relevant concerns as a result of that rather than taking meaningful action.
completely agree. The Right uses "woke" as sort of an anti-virtue-signal.
Woke is critical construcivism.
The belief consists of two parts:
1. That truth is socially constructed thus when we see bad things, it means society created these bad things.
2. In order to determine what parts of society to cut-out to make society better, so bad things stop happening, use a critical theory to determine who should be removed from society so it can be more equitable (usually the stand in for good.
Woke normally holds that goodness is when results are equal, and if they are not equal, they have license to adjust them to equal (This is the core argument of Marxism, though woke could be said to be identity or social Marxism rather then just the economic Marxism presented, though in practice class identity was present from the start as well and expanded in practice under Mao).
But #1 is wrong and #2 is abusive.
There is no such thing as "society", just relationships between individual people. To get a better "society", you need people to act better. However, all of recorded history suggests that people are pretty universally willing to use other people as tools to benefit themselves. (Obviously not everyone does this all the time or to the same amount.) History also makes it clear that passing laws will not work: despite laws against things that are evenly timelessly non-virtuous, like stealing and murder, do not prevent murder and theft. In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.) Even if it does not require a divine gift, certainly the problem has proven intractable up to the present time.
"determine who should be removed from society" is just a scary thought. Who gets to determine that? How can we be sure they are right? What prevents them from using this as a tool to eliminate people that are competitors or whom they simply dislike? In fact, this has a name: "to purge". The Soviet Union under Stalin and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were scary times.
> History also makes it clear that passing laws will not work: despite laws against things that are evenly timelessly non-virtuous, like stealing and murder, do not prevent murder and theft.
They probably reduce it a bit.
> "determine who should be removed from society" is just a scary thought. Who gets to determine that? How can we be sure they are right?
I am extremely socially liberal, but have a very hard time aligning myself with the left because most members of that constituency seem completely incapable of recognizing this. They're so eager to repeat the errors of the leftist policies you list (along with other clearly non leftist examples like the Salem witch trials) that they're a danger to society.
They're zealots and need to be treated accordingly.
> In fact in Judeo-Christian thinking, to do this requires people receiving a "new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone" from God. (I saw "Judeo-" because the passages is from Ezekiel, which is common to both. I do not know if rabbinical thinking agrees, however.)
It doesn't. Judaism holds that the soul starts out pure, having been made in the image of G-d, and it only becomes impure through wrongdoing. All humans are born with an impulse to do evil, the Yetzer Hara, but we're also created with the power to overcome it. And when we have done evil, we have the ability to atone and return our souls to the pure state they were created in. That happens, for instance, on Yom Kippur.
The context of the verse from Ezekiel is:
> O mortal, when the House of Israel dwelt on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds […] So I poured out My wrath on them […] I scattered them among the nations […] But when they came to those nations, they caused My holy name to be profaned, in that it was said of them, “These are GOD’s people, yet they had to leave their land.” […] Say to the House of Israel: Thus said the Sovereign GOD: Not for your sake will I act, O House of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have caused to be profaned among the nations to which you have come. […] I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you shall be purified: I will purify you from all your defilement and from all your fetishes. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh;" https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.36.17-26
Ezekiel lived during the Babylonian exile. At face value, the text is saying that the people of Israel have been exiled because of their sins, but it makes a prophecy that G-d will cause them to stop sinning and return them to their land. That eventually did happen under Cyrus the Great. This is a constant cycle in the bible: When things are good, the Israelites forget G-d's teachings. Then something bad happens, but G-d redeems the Israelites from their suffering, which leads them to follow G-d again. Then thing get good again, and they start to forget G-d once more...
When it says that G-d will give the house of Israel a new heart, it's not (at face value) saying that individual people will literally receive new spirits (or otherwise be metaphysically transformed). Nor is it saying that G-d will literally sprinkle water on them. These are poetic ways of saying that the house of Israel will stop worshiping idols (etc), the same way that happened many times before in the Torah. You can of course add a layer of exegesis and make it about individual believers today instead of the nation of Israel in Babylonia of the 6th-century BCE. That's fine, the rabbinic tradition does that sort of thing all the time too. But at that point you're firmly in Christian territory and not in the space shared between Judaism and Christianity.
How about removing the bullies from society.
Points one and two are both functionalism, not constructivism. This is Sociology 101. The idea that all parts of society have a function, even the bad parts is not constructionist, it's structualist.
Constructivism would be that we created the idea that they are legitimate social objects (ie: they exist) and two that they have an essential moral characteristic (eg: they're bad).
Marx was a conflict theorist whose main point was that economic structures and social structures are inexorably linked. The point of Capital Vol 1 was that through a series of implications, the difference between exchange value and use value ultimately results in conflict between owners and workers.
This is where wokeism falls apart as an ideology: It is outcome driven instead of opportunity driven. Equality becomes the goal regardless of motivation, ambition or merit. Why would the best, or more broadly anyone better than average, participate in such a society? What's their incentive?
When you define woke this way, you ultimately admit that wokeism is just a veneer of identity politics layered over good old-fashioned communism. The problem with communism is that it sounds great, but doesn't work. How many times must it fail before people realize that?
I don't mind having 'equality' on the basics. I would gladly pay the taxes necessary to ensure my fellow man has access to food, housing, healthcare and maybe a few other things needed to live a life with dignity. I think that's the whole premise behind UBI, and we're going to have to make our peace with it.
There will always be 'incentive' to work and gain more than the very basics. Honestly, given how much of our science has been written by 'gentlemen scholars' who were rich enough to be able to pursue their field without worry of putting food on the table, it may well advance humanity.
> participate in such a sociehttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsty? What's their incentive?
This has never made sense to me. People don't need an external motivator. People who like to collect things or complete puzzle (including high performers), do so because they like to collect them, not because society rewards them. It generally penalizes them as it's wasted time or capital. Granted, sometimes recognition is a good motivator, but that's fleeting over a non-trivial timeline (like a season) and not specifically tied to society at large (eg the longest running game of Tag).
What Paul Graham misses is the "aggressively performative moralism" that appeared in response to wokeism. For those hungry for attention, it was a very useful enemy. In many ways, the narrative of what it even meant to be "woke" was quickly hijacked and controlled by those opposed to it. Deriding anyone of color in a leadership position as a DEI hire is a good example. None of this was a call for reason or to return to balance. It was an equally performative stunt to cast anything that event hinted at inclusiveness as evil intent.
I think it's much simpler than that. Woke is power, it's a moral position that can be used like a club to force others into a specific line of thinking. While it's basic mission of recognizing discrimination, etc. around us, it morphed into a political and societal weapon to force people and institutions to do certain things, like establishing DEI offices.
I don't think I agree. I think the counterpoint of "woke" is "fascist" or "racist". People on the right call things woke and people on the left call things fascist. But I think the difference in the meaning of these words reveals a lot about who is saying them. For example, woke people are merely self-righteously moralistic but fascists are such a severe threat that we have to end things like free speech, etc. in order to prevent a constant threat to society. That might explain some of this divide.
> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles.
To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine that a swastika is offensive (in the west) by its shape alone.
In this case, the term "colored people" gained racist connotations from its history of being used for discrimination and segregation - and avoiding it for that reason is the primary principle at play. There's also the secondary/less universal principle of preferring "person-first language".
> gained racist connotations
This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem.
What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was, nor the speaker's intention in uttering it, it is now off-limits and subject to correction when used. People pressure others to conform, in varying degrees of politeness -- anything from a well-intentioned and friendly FYI to a public and aggressive dressing down -- and therefore the stigma surrounding the word spreads.
It's hard to believe that this terminology treadmill genuinely helps anyone, as people are perfectly capable of divining intent when they really want to (nobody is accusing the NAACP of favoring discrimination and segregation).
Add to this that the favored terms of the treadmill creators don't necessarily even reflect what the groups in question actually want. Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American (CGP Grey made a whole video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ).
So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American", who is that actually serving? It's not the people in question. It's a different set of people, a set of people who have gained the cultural power to stigmatize words based on their own personal beliefs.
>Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American
Enforcing this false dilemma is what leads us to this situation. Even this CCP Grey guy is arguing for the false dilemma. Actually referring to Native Americans or Indians as a monolithic group is the problem. The many peoples forced to live in the Indian Territories(Oklahoma) have different needs than the peoples forced to live along the US-Canadian border(like Ojibway, Blackfoot, and Mohawk) and different needs than the Apache... another overloaded name[1].
This is one of the things that most fascinates me about the anti-woke.
You're advocating for people to be described in whatever term they prefer and not have a term imposed upon them from outside.
That alien visiting for mars would think "Oh, this is this wokeness I have heard of, respecting groups desires to be addressed in their preferred way".
But no, you're only bringing this up because you believe the people you think are "woke" are imposing a name on these groups from the outside.
Is it a principle or is it a pointless gotcha? I would argue this is aggressively performative anti-wokeness!
No, my position is: stop policing the well-intentioned language of others based on a treadmill of acceptable terminology.
The principle is that language should be judged based on its intention, rather than on how it conforms the arbitrary fashion imposed by the most priggish among us (to use pg’s word).
Few of the treadmills we see are actually an organic expression of group preference. Nobody was asking for Latinx or Native American. Nobody was asking for “person experiencing houselessness.” Nobody was asking for the master branch to be renamed to main. These are activist-driven efforts masquerading as authentic priorities of the groups in question. So it goes with most of the causes generally described as woke.
In all cases we should judge speech based on its intention rather than how it conforms to shifting standards. But the fact that this language policing frequently is based on externally-invented treadmills just adds insult to injury, and exposes the vacuousness of the whole enterprise.
There's a difference between respect and compel. And it's not a fine line neither. Most people are fine with respecting people's pronouns, especially when it is someone they already respect.
The issue comes when you are compelled by your company/social circle/etc. to put your own pronouns in your bio (signalling fake political allegiance), being fired for accidentally misgendering a (badly passing) trans-woman, and so on.
It doesn't help your point at all that your two examples are things that don't actually happen outside the imagination of reactionaries.
Have you ever worked at a large organization that markets themselves as progressive? If you have and don't have any experience with being pressured or outright told to comply with performative measures like email signature changes, your experience would appear to be an anomaly.
And whether you agree with it or not, there are numerous documented cases online where people were fired for misgendering someone.
Fired for accidentally misgendering someone, or fired for intentionally misgendering someone repeatedly, often for extended periods of time? The first is the situation being discussed, the second is the situation that actually happens.
> And whether you agree with it or not, there are numerous documented cases online where people were fired for misgendering someone.
Easy enough to link some then, I take it?
I have worked at multiple, and it's getting really tiring to read these hyperboles spouted constantly by people with some weird grievance.
This distinction seems to be an untraversable chasm for the prigs PG is talking about.
Anyone (whether I already respect them or not) comes to me and asks me to refer to them by a specific name or term, I'll gladly do it.
Someone comes and accuses me of being an -ist or -phobe because I didn't put my pronouns or link to the latest iteration of a corporate-speak diversity policy in my email signature or just tells me to do it without explanation or discussion, and I'll tell them to pound sand.
If that person cared to ask why I don't put them in my email signature, I'd gladly tell them that I might have if anyone bothered to ask nicely and/or explain the merit of their request but ultimately I don't care one whit what pronouns someone uses to describe me and am well aware the corporation I work for doesn't actually stand for anything in the aforementioned statement. But the prigs won't ask.
The battle over the term "tranny" in the 2010s was very eye opening. Some celebrities were being skewered for using the term, though they and a huge % of LGBT folks saw it in a positive light.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2014/05/rupaul_s-_tran...
>So that momentary pause you feel when you almost say "Indian" and then correct it to "Native American"
Here in Canada it's "Indigenous peoples", sorry, I mean "First Nations", unless they've come up with something else now. Never mind that the people in question don't necessarily feel any kind of solidarity with other indigenous groups beyond their own.
(Also, "missing and murdered indigenous women (and children)" is a set phrase, and people will yell at you if you point out the statistics showing that something like 70% of missing and murdered indigenous people in Canada are men.)
When I went to school in Canada, the term I received in year 2000 was "aboriginals". The terminology has indeed been changing.
In fact the Gnorts would not have "a long list of rules to memorize" with "no underlying principles".
They would instead have a history and culture (or many histories and many cultures) to learn in order to contextualize words and symbols and find their actual meaning, because meaning doesn't really exist without context.
From the perspective of someone who was not raised in the culture in question, this is a distinction without a difference.
Imagine that the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate for some reason consistently uses the term "colored people".
We all know what's going to happen. The underlying history and culture would change within the span of 24 hours, and suddenly "colored people" would loose it's racist connotations.
Awareness of history and culture won't help you understand language rules. Instead, to avoid saying something racist, one must be keenly aware of political expediency.
„The Democrats control the language“ is a wild, but unsurprising take.
I read Future Shock for the first time a few years ago, on about the 50th anniversary of its publication.
One of the strongest impressions I had were that there were TK-count principle topics in the story:
- The psychological impacts of an ever-increasing rate of change and information flow. Largely a dark view of the future, and one that's borne out pretty well.
- Specific technological inventions or trends. Most of these have massively under-performed, with the obvious exception of information technologies, though how that's ultimately manifested is also strongly different from what was foreseen / predicted.
- Social changes. Many of these read as laughably trite ... until I realised how absolutely profound those changes had been. The world of 1970 and of 2020 are remarkably different in gender roles, acceptance of nontraditional sexual orientations, race relations, even relationships of the young and old. I'm not saying "perfect" or "better" or "worse", or even that FS is an especially good treatment of the topic, only that the situation is different. Moreso than the other categories, the book marks a boundary of sorts between and old and new world. We live in the new world, and the old one is all but unrecognisable.
(Those in their 70s or older may well have a more visceral feel of this as they'd lived through that change as adults, though they're rapidly dying out.)
"TK-count" should of course be "three". Gah!
Owners of social networks are terrified that they're accountable to society in any way. That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades. Basically they've taken over and are making all the rules.
What is accountability? A platform picking what the truth is?
Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you. Now that Trump is in power would you prefer if Musk/Zuckerberg placed right wing fact checkers in place and punished any opinion which is outside of the platform's Overton window?
Musk removed picking fact checkers and replaced them with community notes. Zuckerberg says he'll do the same. Isn't that the societal accountability that you want?
I'm wary of the concepts of "fact-checking" and "mis-information," but there really is a lot of bullshit being said without any corresponding check on "yeah, but is that true?"
Of course, if your worldview is sufficiently different from mine, we will disagree on what is true. But lying is lying.
> Presumably you liked the fact checkers before because they were of the same political persuasion as you
Or perhaps the GP liked the fact checkers because they were on the whole doing a good job of actually checking facts.
I don't know if that's true or not; I haven't been on social media in years. But it's an incredibly weak argument to assume that someone only likes something because it aligns with their politics.
> The document explains to employees that epithets like "gays are freaks" and "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit" are now allowed under the new policy.
but yeah, its definitely the fact checking that people are most upset about
I think these visitors from another planet would be more confused about the phrases “right/left wing _fact_ checker”…
> That explains why Musk and now Zuckerberg are so happy to throw away the last concept of accountability that society tried to create in the last decades.
This is only a tiny part of the reason.
The main reason is that fact-checking works so well against the right, and has almost no benefit for the right.
Why?
Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
So “fact checking” is an almost useless tool for the right, since it rarely ever contradicts what the left says. And yet, the right can get very severely corrected by fact-checkers with almost everything they say.
Musk and Zuckerberg are killing fact checking because they NEED misinformation to carry the day. Because if we truly understood how badly the Parasite Class were bleeding the Working Class dry just for a few extra thousandths of a percentage point of wealth accumulation, we would all rise up and bring out the guillotines to dispose of them once and for all.
Misinformation is the way they control the working class.
> Because almost everything the right says is a lie of one kind or another, but almost everything the left says is either mostly or wholly grounded in fact.
I am not “right wing” by any definition but this is naive and bubbled to the point of ridiculousness. Very little political discourse on social media is grounded in fact regardless of the ideologies involved. Layman discussion based on headlines and vibes has no place in serious politics and the real danger of these platforms is that they’ve elevated that to the standard
Who deserves a voice then? The high priests of the media annointed by billions of dollars in funding? There has to be middle ground. If I have the right to print and sell a book about any political or technical topic, why can I not post on social media? Is the threat of people being heard and finding consensus really that bad? Unless these "laymen" are calling for lynchings or something, they have every right to be heard.
Who do you think was employed as "fact checkers" and who paid them? If Zuck wanted biased misinformation, he could have hired people to push it as fact and fact-checked anyone else. It makes far more sense that "fact-checking" and related censorship is antithetical to the foundational principles of the US and a tool of oppression, so we are just going back to normal.
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Please don't cross into personal attack. Note this site guideline:
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I can't for the life of me comprehend how PG manages to write in a style that sounds so lucid, so readable and compelling, and so authoritative, but on a substance that's so factually incorrect that it won't stand to any bit of critique.
Like the paragraph quoted above: it's just so blatantly obvious what's wrong with turns like "considered particularly enlightened", or "there are no underlying principles" that I find it hard to believe that the text as a whole sounds so friendly and convincing, unless you stop and think for a second.
I wish I could write like this about whatever mush is in my head.
From a (potentially made up [1]) letter from Freud:
> So yesterday I gave my lecture. Despite a lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without any hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.
Maybe pg has the same strategy. Certainly reads that way.
[1] https://www.truthorfiction.com/sigmund-freud-i-ascribe-to-th...
Cocaine is so passé. The tech oligarchs are all on ketamine these days.
I find it's super-easy to communicate this way if I pick a position I think is bad and dumb.
It frees me from giving a shit if I'm using e.g. rhetorical tricks in place of good-faith argument. Of course the argument's obviously bad, if you're any good at spotting bad arguments! So are all the others I've seen or heard supporting it. That's why I picked it—it's bad.
I can usually argue positions I disagree with far more persuasively and fluently than ones I agree with, because I'm not concerned with being correct or making it look bad to smart people, nor making myself look dumb for making a bad argument (the entire thing is an exercise in making bad arguments, there's no chance of a good one coming out). Might try that. It's kinda a fun, and/or horrifying, exercise. Drag out those slanted and context-free stats, those you-know-to-be-disproven-or-commonly-misrepesented anecdotes and studies, (mis-)define terms as something obviously bad and proceed to tear them apart in a "surely we can all agree..." way (ahem), overgeneralize the results of that already-shaky maneuver (ahem), misrepresent history in silly ways (ahem), and so on. Just cut loose. No worries about looking foolish because you already think the position's foolish.
Turns out that technical education doesn’t equip you for dealing with every discipline of inquiry, especially not when it involves social phenomena.
Of course the humanities are all usurped by the woke elites and you should look only to PG and his friends for guidance.
I think it's called "from first principles", which is the laundered term for "disregarding context and previous work, because I don't feel other people's work is worth anything".
These are my favorite to read since it contains a full, traceable, logical path to get to a conclusion. It's much easier to understand why they think something.
On this flip side, my least favorite are when someone name drops thinkers as a way to reference an ideology. It's very hard to actually know if someone understands the ideas behind that name, so it's usually impossible to understand why they think something.
And, the names they drop often were the types to present their thoughts as the first, rarely, if ever, dropping names themselves, which I always find an amusing "they were allowed be free thinkers, but you can't!"
"Standing in the shoulders of giants is for losers! I will instead crane my neck and fail to see much of anything."
That's an incorrect interpretation of what I wrote.
What "giants" should he be standing on in your opinion?
Someone could say something similar about the large number of people who apparently reviewed this essay, who were supposed to critique it in order for him to make it stronger. It's possible he just ignored their criticism, but it's also possible they already agree with Graham and didn't think about the flawed premises, so their feedback didn't address what might be "blatantly obvious" to you or I.
Similarly, Graham almost certainly already has strong opinions on the basic premises of this essay. Thus, the process of revising and polishing his essay to make it readable and compelling doesn't help him spot any of these obvious critiques. As you quoted, he believes the people advocating "people of color" over other terms have no principles. Thus he can't apply their principles to his own essay and anticipate their criticisms. Based on how he describes "wokeness," he seems to think are generally unprincipled.
Neither he nor his reviewers are equipped to analyze the substance, which is why it can be stylistically strong but substantially weak.
The stigmatization is imagined at best. Its similar to how words to describe individuals with learning disabilities also gain a negative connotation. Its not the word its the fact that the word refers to a subset of people that a comparison to is an insult. Hence, Mongoloid -> Retard -> Special -> <whatever the new one is>
In terms of racism, its different but the same mechanism. Being compared to a minority race is not an insult (to most people). Its the fact, that racist people will use the word with vitriol. Racists and those they argue with will use the term in their arguments and gradually the use of the term will gain the conotation of a racist person. Hence, Negro -> Colored -> Person of Color -> <the next thing when PoC becomes racist>
I think _Mongoloid_ doesn't fit with the rest of your examples, as it was never originally an impartial term. There's never a time when _Mongoloid_ wasn't an offensive term to some group, whereas _retard_ & _special_ were originally impartial.
With terms for learning disabilities (and some racist terms) factual inaccuracy is also a factor.
Mongoloid, Retard, Special, individuals with learning disabilities are not entirely interchangeable (except as insults).
He's a smart enough person that even asking that question makes me think the whole piece is written in bad faith. Yes, language evolves and has specific context and nuance.
its not that complicated, he just doesn't think that hard about things when they support his conclusion. He's silently edited blog posts in the past to fix glaring holes that a 7th grader could catch after commenters on HN pointed them out.
Interesting point to consider. I recently questioned the validity of a statement made by a newsletter publisher related to a repeatedly-debunked conspiracy theory that he used to attempt to bolster his point. It reeked of irony.
I politely asked for a fact-check on it in the comments section, as I otherwise enjoyed and agreed with the substance of the post. He both removed the claim in question and my comment.
I was unsure of how to feel about this. Those who had already read the post online or still had the original in their inbox were left with the misinformation from what they may consider a trusted source.
I believed it would have been better to edit out the false information, leave my comment, and reply with clarification on the editing and why.
Likewise, this practice of dynamically-edited online content is actually relevant to the topic of PG's post and the role it plays in replacing the traditional constraints on printed media.
While there is room for quibbling about whether or not silently removing false information from a piece you've written is dishonest, it most certainly is not honest.
In addition to those who received an older version with the misinformation, a critical aspect of determining what is true is determining who to trust, since there is far too much to be known for any one person to determine it themselves. Silently editing your own writing to respond to good criticism of it leaves future readers less informed about your own trustworthiness.
Got some examples of articles that were edited? Should then be possible to check on iA.
https://paulgraham.com/wtax.html
There are numerous changes over the first two days, Exercise to the reader to find which HN comments inspired them.
To note: I really have no problem with him updating his piece to reflect accurate criticism, I do find issue with doing it silently, and with not reflecting on how it should influence his thoroughness in the future.
Indeed all I can think of now is Stewart Lee's bit about "political correctness gone mad"
(some strong language and racist words used so maybe not safe for work or around kids)
I was thinking about Stewart Lee as I attempted to read the article. It resonated especially strongly as I got to the part about how this awful "political correctness" is the reason that women are now able to report sexual harassment on campus. I wasn't able to make it much further. Hats off to those brave adventurers who made it through the whole thing.
The point he is making is that it's ultimately absurd to make moral judgements based on word usage.
A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
None of that is true, sorry
> A person who actively discriminates in hiring against black people but doesn't call anyone a slur is seen as more virtuous as someone who doesn't discriminate, yet uses the slur in jest. The first behavior is seen as more excusable than the second, although an actual reasonable moral judgement makes it evident it's not.
What in the world are you talking about?
Imagine company A and B.
A report comes out, turns out that a certain HR person in company A hasn't hired a single black applicant since they got there.
At the same time, a video comes out showing the equivalent person in company B saying the n word in passing.
In this situation, it's maybe considered that the person in A might be racist, while it's completely assumed the person in B is.
Depending on the number of applicants and job posts, it may be hard to prove that the person in company A discriminates.
Thanks for proving my point. This exact benefit of the doubt is not given to the other guy.
Where’s the plausible deniability to using the n word? I guess if you were singing? But I don’t think that’s the example you had in mind here.
I swear, you people make up the most creative mental gymnastics to rationalize why you should be allowed to call people the n-word.
Being "smart" isn't a binary, and can't describe someone in any all-encompassing ways. Someone can be smart about investing in startups but stupid about understanding social discourse around marginalized groups.
I am not surprised at all that Graham is both of those things.
Having the principle of "words become bad because bad people use them" is stupid because you cede power to bad people. But really, its not a principle at all, its just a dumb cultural signaling, ie. "I'm not like those uneducated hicks".
Is that how you justify a swastika tattoo? You can also rob the bad people of the power to hide behind the words and symbols: if only bad people use them, we know the users are bad. It's definitely signaling, I don't see why it has to be "cultural".
>You can also rob the bad people of the power to hide behind the words and symbols: if only bad people use them, we know the users are bad. It's definitely signaling
No, you are just giving them the power to actually do stuff without looking like they are doing stuff.
As long as they talk the talk, they don't have to walk the walk. You don''t have to actually care about issues, that's what the DEI department is for.
I don't think a swastika tattoo would be problematic if the person doesn't impute Nazi symbolism to theirs. Even in the West, swastikas and associated symbology is used pretty heavily in neo-pagan circles, and while some of those folk are racist, most aren't.
But OPs point is broader: if you allow the bad people to just appropriate the symbol as their own, they're going to gradually take over everything. Never mind swastikas; we're at the point where making an okay sign can be misconstrued as a white nationalist gesture, and people self-censor themselves accordingly.
There's also the reverse problem here, where, if you tie such things so strongly to symbols in popular opinion, then loud condemnation of such symbols is used to "prove" that one is not a bad person. For a major ongoing example of this look at Russia with its cult of "we defeated the Nazis therefore we're definitely the good guys".
At the end of the day, it's really just a lazy shortcut. The bad people are bad because of their ideas and actions, not because of their symbols. If we always look at the ideas and actions, the symbols are irrelevant, and we don't have to surrender them to the bad guys' claims.
That doesn't really fly. The Nazis are so bad that unless you're south Asian a swastika is assumed to be a pro Nazi sign. Does it sort of suck? Yeah but it is the way it is. Plenty of slurs don't have any inherent negative meaning and are slurs because of how they tend to be used. Occasionally some minority groups partially reclaim them like with Queer but mostly polite people stop using them
Signaling is bad because anyone can signal anything they want. Everyone should be judging either other based on actions not superfluous signals. And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Is your comment here an "action" or "superfluous signal"?
Do you have a coherent principle that separates one from the other?
Obviously its a gradient, but we can agree that "dedicate time and money" is on the action side and "typing online" being superfluous signaling. And yes, if you knew me in real life, you probably shouldn't weight my hacker news comments over what I spend time and money on.
For what it's worth, I don't think it's so much a gradient. It's that everything is always both an action and a signal. Since signals can affect the behavior of others, all signals are actions. If an action is visible, it may convey something, so all (visible) actions are signals.
> And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Tattoos can change, too. If I had a tattoo like that, but had come to see the error of my ways, I would have it removed, or if that was too costly and time-consuming (it takes a year or so of painful, expensive, periodic laser treatments to remove a tattoo), I'd have a tattoo artist cover it up with something else.
There's no excuse for keeping a neo-Nazi tattoo if you stop being a neo-Nazi and realize that neo-Nazis are disgusting people.
Everyone "should" be vegan too but I ain't holding my breath
When the meaning of a word gets distorted by use in bad faith, it's no longer useful for its original purpose.
Switching to another word isn't ceding power to the bad people. It's taking away their power to redefine things. It's letting them have the now-useless word exclusively, which will become associated with their speech, and not the original meaning. The original meaning is reclaimed by using a new not-yet-soiled word for it, and the cycle continues.
Is there a specific other word you'd suggest? I was watching an event last week where the promoters:
* had everyone declare their pronouns
* advertised their segregated black-only event next month
* repeatedly interrupted to chant "trans rights!"
This is a very common cluster of behavior, and I'm not sure what I would call it other than "woke". If there's another word that would be better, I'm all ears. But my experience has been that proponents don't find any word acceptable, because what they object to is the very idea that this is a distinct cluster of behavior. They feel, as the source article says, that each of my bullet points is just an independent matter of respect.
No one ever said the average person is smart.
It only works because we're in a society of judging people the moment we see them. Mimicking the language of "bad people" will get that association. I don't think we'll ever truly "fix" that.
Yeah pretty sure the aliens are going to struggle more with there, they’re, and their.
I think I once read on reddit that the first few votes a comment gets pretty much determines whether it will score sky-high, or get downvoted into oblivion.
In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. There need not be a history. I've seen too many blowups over the years about the word niggardly to think otherwise (more than one of these has made national news in the last few decades).
It's not that there is a history of discrimination, it's that we've all made a public sport out of demonstrating how not-racist we are, and people are constantly trying to invent new strategies to qualify for the world championships.
> In the same way "colored people" can gain these connotations, just from other few people (falsely or not) inferring that it has those connotations. [...]
> It's not that there is a history of discrimination
In abstract theory, that would be possible.
In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination, and when the context of use is not such that there is a clear separation from that history (a separation that exists in, e.g., the NAACP continuing to use "colored people" in its name) it has become problematic because of that history.
>In concrete reality, with "colored people", there is, in fact, a history of discrimination
Such is claimed. Which are the false accusations, which are the legitimate accusations, and which are merely the mistaken accusations? And how are each of those quantified? If someone actually tells me the numbers, how do I know that those are the correct numbers? And why should I believe them? Is there a reason to believe those, other than trying to qualify for the world championship "I am not a racist" games? If my skepticism is also racism, I then lack the means to be and remain rational about the subject, and if I can't be rational about it then I am with 100% certainty being manipulated with regards to the subject.
Are you allowed to be skeptical? Do you feel as if you're allowed to be skeptical? If you do feel as if you are allowed to be skeptical, why are you not?
Yeah, I generally really liked this blog post, and I was very much steeped in "woke" culture at one point. But this part struck me as an analogy that could be improved. Lots of things about human culture and language are strange if you try to understand exactly why they came to be what they are. Think of various ways of saying Christmas: Xmas, Noel. Or Santa Claus, he is also Saint Nicholas, but Christmas is not Saint Nicholas's Day, like Saint Patrick's Day or Saint Valentine's Day, etc.
It's the same with the performative moral posturing. Woke used to mean being cognizant of systemic injustice - stuff like police brutality. It came from 1970s harlem.
Then the dominant culture that was responsible for a lot of that injustice latched on to it and twisted its meaning, watering it down.
This is known as political recuperation - when radical ideas and terminology gets sanitized and deradicalized. It isnt some conspiracy either. It happens naturally, especially in America.
Just today I merged to the main branch instead of a master branch. This happened because Microsoft employees wanted to pressure Microsoft to prevent sales to ICE-the-concentration-camp-people and Microsoft wanted to throw them a bone by "avoiding the term master" while still making that sweet sale.
Rename that branch and everybody is happy, in theory right? Everybody except the people in those concentration camps, I guess.
The people in Silly valley with masters degrees and scrum master certificates can laugh and pat themselves on the back about all of this silliness, imagining that "wokeness" became stupid because of Marxism or something, rather than because of societal pressures (like the ever present profit motive) which they actually deeply approve of.
In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
Phil Ochs
That's a brilliant quote. Thank you for sharing.
wojack-meme levels of insight
Best insights are
[flagged]
Please make your substantive points without personal attacks.
Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.
they’re not negroes, they’re colored
they’re not colored, they’re African-American
they’re not African-American, they’re black
they’re not black, they’re Black
they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like
If you're truly mystified, and believe this is nothing more than PC linguistic gymnastics, I wonder why you started with "negroes"?
90% of this list is less the slur treadmill and more the MLA/AP Stylebook version treadmill. Nobody's going to get mad at you for writing African American, unless you work for a newspaper, it's largely motivated by MLA and AP wanting to sell new books every year or two, same as how titles were underlined when I was in grade school and now they're italicized.
I thought the underlining thing had more to do with practical limitations of (most people's) handwriting and of common typewriters. Italics, when available, have been preferred for titles as far back as I'm aware.
Why'd you leave the most notable one out of your list?
I don't think that one was ever "acceptable". That being said, literally every term after/including "African-American" in that list is socially acceptable. Not sure what they're going on about.
I'm not so sure. It sure gets used a lot in "Huckleberry Finn", even by people who aren't being malicious. (From my recollection, anyway. It's been ages since I read it.)
The current norm is that it mustn't be said, even in a discussion of that class of words.
Most of those are terms for different things.
Not all people who are black are African American.
Not all people of color are black.
Looking at Elon Musk, some African Americans are white.
I think this just demonstrates that changes to language are not sufficient to erase racism.
It can even have the opposite effect.
bipoc means a different thing than black. you should use the word that has the meaning you want.
But using the word he really wanted to use would totally undermine his point, not to mention getting his post flagged.
I imagine they look similar to the gymnastics you did to come up with this comment.
I think we should respect someone's preferred language for their identity. It's not that hard.
As long as assholes finds ways to ruin words for the rest of us, there will always be a new more sensitive / caring way to refer to traditionally oppressed people.
I know it sucks to keep up with things, but what sucks even works is not keeping up, and finding you and the neo nazis using the same language to mean different things. If you care, then you put the work in. That’s all anyone can do.
Seems like you're pointing to a singular imaginary boogeyman out to annoy you?
You should try the better thing of actually considering the history of each of these.
I won't deny that it can be annoying, but considering the specific why of each one is important. Necessary even.
What, IYO, is being twisted here? What should people be called?
Personally, I took the comment to imply that we are not really solving the root issue behind what is driving the change in terminology and thus we are doomed to continue to apply the same (ineffective) solution.
Why is the changing terminology something that needs to be stopped? Does the language used to describe an identity need to be frozen in time?
> Why is the changing terminology something that needs to be stopped?
It does not. If we were merely talking about the current young person slang word for something good (e.g. rad, sick, amazeballs, etc. (don't ask me for the current one)) no one cares that the terminology changes.
But in this case each change comes with the same reasoning behind it. This indicates that the change has been ineffective and people ought to consider why that is and if there is something else that could be done instead or in addition to be more effective.
Truthfully I think that it is a dialectic process that counterintuitively perpetuates a mentality of victimhood and otherness. The neverending process of being othered//feeling othered//trying to empower oneself in one's otherness is entirely futile. To assimilate, you must assimilate.
I'm well-aware that I'm being rather evasive and I certainly don't think anyone is fooled by what I'm really saying.
Yep, just the age-old trick of creating a problem and then selling an ineffective solution. Unbounded profit!
Yes exactly. The whole debate doesn't change the fact that certain people form the lower class, and those people tend to also have certain physical characteristics, and people don't like lower social class, which makes them dislike those characteristics.
Absolutely insane equivocation. "Negro" has always been associated with slavery and that's why it was used up until even recently by people like Malcom X. "Colored" is associated with apartheid America in the same way.
African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.
> they’re not black, they’re Black
Somebody has never heard of proper nouns
> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.
> they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
The I stands for indigenous.
Haven't read the article yet, skimming the comments.
Wild quote though. Does PG self censor when using the N word? Or does he say it, with the hard r?
If that word isn't part of his vocabulary, why not? Seems like it should be.
> If that word isn't part of his vocabulary, why not? Seems like it should be.
I don't get the comparison. Hard "R" or not makes little difference. You're eligible to be canceled for using either form. So not like PoC/CP.
> Hard "R" or not makes little difference
Should have told that to that teacher from decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9Zy2-C_lY
Such a wild interview that Boondocks outright sampled it for an episode.
Without the r, you could maybe say it's a friendly word and hide behind that. Though generally yeah consequences socially are the same.
The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.
> I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate
Not only lesbian. Living with a Sri Lankan woman and raising two boys. And living not in Germany, but Switzerland.
Seems to bend herself quite a lot to gain power ...
I had a similar double-take moment reading about Breitbart editor "Milo Yiannopoulos" a few years ago.
Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog':
The slur became widely diffused in Australia with an increase in immigration from Southern Europe and the Levant after the Second World War, and the term expanded to include all immigrants from the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. These new arrivals were perceived by the majority population as contrasting with the larger predominant Anglo-Celtic Australian people. [1]
All boats rise with the tide I guess.
Yiannopoulos is an... interesting case in general. Apparently[1] he declared himself to be "ex-gay", 'demoted' his husband to housemate, and is treating his homosexuality 'like an addiction'. His future plans include 'rehabilitating conversion therapy'.
Seeing all of that, I'm really not sure his boat has been rising with the tide, so to speak. I personally don't believe anyone thinks conversion therapy is good for themselves unless they are deeply troubled.
[1] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos...
> unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s
Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
Sure, the history is full of gays who were closeted or whose homosexuality were open secrets. But those have always been kept plausibly deniable towards the public, not open like this at all.
Röhm was actually known to the public to be gay for some of the time that he was in power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal He wasn't quite 'openly gay' in the modern sense, but he didn't really put up much of a pretense.
The fact that the title of that article includes the word "scandal" would imply that his peers weren't actually ok with his homosexuality, no?
Sure, but he wasn’t closeted and his homosexuality wasn’t a plausibly deniable secret.
The article you reference points out that, not only did Röhm lose all support in the Nazi party once he was "outed", but that Hitler had him executed due to, in part, his homosexuality. And: "After the purge, the Nazi government systematically persecuted homosexual men."
I'm reasonably certain the causality is the other way around: Once he was about to loose power his gayness was used to attack him. If he hadn't been gay he would have been attacked for some other reason. It's the change in behaviour that's relevant not the absolute facts.
It's reasonably simple: Be sufficiently powerful and your sins will be overlooked (for a recent example: See Donald Trump's "sentence" in New York). And in non-rule-of-law societies your sins-while-powerful will be used against you (this is why democracies historically always had immunity arrangements)
That's not an accurate summary of what the article says. There's no doubt that Röhm rose through the ranks of the SA when it was already widely known that he was gay. Even Hitler himself knew:
>Röhm's appointment was opposed from the beginning by some in the SA who saw it as cementing the subordination of the SA to the Nazi Party's political wing. His homosexuality was seized upon by those who disagreed with the organizational reforms but could not openly criticize Hitler without breaking with Nazism, because of the Führer principle. Hitler said that the personal life of a Nazi was only a concern for the party if it contradicted the fundamental principles of Nazism. The leader of the Berlin SA, Walther Stennes, rebelled against the SA leadership and declared that he and his followers would "never serve under a notorious homosexual like Röhm and his Pupenjungen (male prostitutes)". On 3 February, Hitler dismissed Stennes's objection, stating, "The SA is not a girls' boarding school."
In case it is not obvious from my original comment, I am not trying to paint Nazi party as a beacon of DEI. The Nazi state went on to murder thousands of homosexuals. But in response to the OP, Röhm was certainly not closeted and it is doubtful that his homosexuality could even be described as an 'open secret'.
It could be openly known among Nazi ranks and that's still significantly different than being publicly known. Was there any mainstream newspaper that outed his sexual preference?
It is at the top of the cited article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal
"Beginning in April 1931, the SPD newspaper Münchener Post published a series of front-page stories about alleged homosexuality in the SA, which turned out to be based on forgeries. SPD leaders set out to obtain authentic evidence of Röhm's sexuality and, if possible, convict him under Paragraph 175. Röhm was tried five times, but never convicted. During the German presidential election in March 1932, the SPD released a pamphlet edited by ex-Nazi Helmuth Klotz [de] with Röhm's letters to Heimsoth. This second round of disclosures sparked a plot by some Nazis to murder Röhm, which fell through and resulted in additional negative press for the party."
It cannot be more public than that. The Social Democrats used the anti-gay paragraph.
Another known gay Nazi was Rudolf Hess:
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/10/opinion/l-hess-homosexual...
And Klaus Mann wrote a novel about German actor and director Gustaf Gründgens, famous for his Mephisto role in Goethe's Faust:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_(novel)
"The author Hermann Kesten suggested that he write a novel of a homosexual careerist in the Third Reich, with the director of the state theatre Gustaf Gründgens as a subject matter. Gründgens's homosexuality was widely known."
The whole selective persecution of gays began after Röhm's paramilitary SA surged to 4,000,000 members in 1934, and a couple of people including Himmler intrigued against him.
People like Hess and Gründgens were never touched or exposed even though most people knew.
Yes, but the timeline of events as a whole confirms my argument that his homosexuality was a significant problem among Nazi party and its supporters. Röhm lost Nazi Party support after he was outed and was eventually murdered by Hitler. Not an analog to AfD putting forward a gay swiss woman with a Sri Lankan partner as their candidate for chancellor. There's a huge difference between two eras.
>Röhm lost Nazi Party support after he was outed and was eventually murdered by Hitler.
He wasn't killed by Hitler because he was gay, as the article and parent comment explain. The first public disclosures of his homosexuality came in 1931. Before that, everyone who mattered in the Nazi party had already known for years. He was killed in 1934 for political reasons.
Homosexuality is also a significant problem among the AfD and its supporters. Röhm's example illustrates that it is not paradoxical for a known homosexual to rise to a position of power within a homophobic party. If even the Nazi party of the 1930s could tolerate known homosexuals within its ranks, that ought to tell us how seriously we should take the argument that the AfD can't be racist or homophobic because of Alice Weidel!
Vito, an important member of the New Jersey crime family DiMeo (Italian Mafia) during the early 2000s was gay as well
Doesn't mean they aren't fascists, gay fascists are by definition, fascists.
They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s.
https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_...
Peter Thiel is gay and still advocates against gay marriage (He's married to a man himself).
Those people know the restrictions they push for won't apply to them, they are too powerful, quite literally above the law.
Do you have a source for the claim about Peter Thiel? I looked for one, and all I could find were several cases of Thiel donating to explicitly pro-gay-marriage political organizations.
I don't think it's fair to say that he advocates against gay marriage; it would be accurate to say he's willing to donate to politicians who advocate against gay marriage, however. Blake Masters and J. D. Vance being the obvious cases. Kris Kobach and Ted Cruz also come to mind.
Well, that's embarrassing. I read the Wikipedia article wrong, he donated $10,000 to an organization that fought against a law that would ban same-sex marriage. The double negation got me...
Nevertheless, Thiel donated a lot to Trump's campaign, one of its goals being a federal ban on gay marriage and other restrictions of the freedom of LGBT people.
They actually do know it, and they’re mad that so many think they don’t. It’s why they think wokeness is a problem, it is (to them) mainly performative and insulting because progress has happened and continues to.
They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
> They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
Do you genuinely think you're presenting the "woke" side of the argument in good faith here?
I'm not trying to. I'm presenting their interpretation of it.
I don't think its accurate to describe the AfD as right wing. Far right or possibly fascist
That only makes the progressive outlook more remarkable.
Im not sure why you think this is a "progressive" take that's the mainstream view of the center right Christian Democratic party of Germany.
Because I’m not making a contemporary comparison but a chronological one. Yes, women and LGBT leaders among fascists can be boringly mainstream today. It wasn’t until recently. That’s a dimension of progress.
Oh sorry I might have misinterpreted your previous comment.
I don't think its totally unknown in the past although I suppose you might say it was often done with implausible deniability. As people pointed out there's a difference between being out and being openly out.
One funny example was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky (Putin's fascist clown who played the extremist to make Putin seem more reasonable, although it was probably close to his real views). Surprisingly the antisemitic Russian ultra nationalist had a Jewish father(who divorced his mother and moved to Israel when he was an infant) which he used to sort of deny it in a ridiculous manner saying his mother was Russian and his father was a lawyer
Any real history of "political correctness," if we're going to use that term to mean the pursuit of social justice, will be incomplete without an accounting of the internal struggles of various activist causes when confronted with their own wrongdoing/ignorance/blindness/lack of "political correctness".
One of the best examples is the women's movement in the 70s being confronted internally by minority women blaming middle class white women for winning the right to work in an office building, when minority women had long been holding down jobs and needed other forms of championing, such as against police abuse, or the effects of poverty, or discrimination against their sexaul orientation.
It's insane to reduce the drive for political correctness to a bunch of radical students becoming tenured professors and unleashing their inner prigs against everyone else.
Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"
Graham is fairly explicit that the civil rights movement wasn't priggish in the way he criticizes. He basically develops the thesis that such priggishness arises as a side effect of any ideology when it becomes sufficiently dominant, and it's worth opposing the priggishness, independent of the merits of the dominant ideology in question.
There's a big difference between these two things
* Berkeley's Free Speech Movement: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
* "Free speech is a disease and we are the cure", from the sidebar of /r/ShitRedditSays: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/
Are you sure? He says 'And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.'
What "performative" and "social justice" would have meant in 1960 would be very different and a throwaway line to that effect does nothing to rescue the piece. But to give an example:
> A successful theory of the origin of political correctness has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s, for example? They were concerned with much the same issues. [1]
> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
The issue is a factual one. Student protests were in fact a huge contributor to the civil rights movement which was undoubtedly very successful. Applying his theory with this correction:
"The output of progressive movements is political correctness" + "1960s student movement output civil rights" = "civil rights are political correctness"
Of course Paul Graham believes in civil rights, which is why he instead decided that the 1960s student movements must have had no power or effect. Remove the modern context/our understanding of PG and the philosophy of the piece boils down to "things progressives try to impress on society are bad". Vague asterisks in regards to the distant past don't solve that fundamental problem.
>The output of progressive movements is political correctness
???
How did you conclude that Graham believes this?
Can you quote a specific passage from Graham's essay that supports this idea?
I thought Graham was quite clear in targeting priggishness. He analogizes wokeness to Victorian prudishness. I didn't see any claim that priggishness is inherent to progressive ideology. In fact, he wrote:
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
And also:
>But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
I don't really know what you're saying but Graham is speaking against the religious zeal of woke people, especially in regards to censorship. I'm not sure what that has to do with the civil rights movement.
It shows he doesn't answer the question of "how do we know when the woke people are right?" which is an important question given they have been right about a lot of things in the past.
How does anyone know when someone else is right on moral issues?
He's presenting his own musings as some kind of historical record. Utterly unburdened by the need for data to back up his narrative.
The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water
Not all bad, then.
I have to admit it's pretty funny that all of the citations in the piece are just more of his own opinions.
Those aren't citations, they're just asides.
From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users."
This is puzzling to me because: if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
No matter what kind of media policies there are, the fact that there is limited bandwidth means that some views are going to be emphasized, and other views are going to be suppressed.
The antiwoke crusaders are just as intent on moralizing and language policing as the worst of their opponents, and in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech and academic inquiry. To the extent that Graham and his fellow travelers in tech believe in freedom of expression, they've picked dangerous allies.
The past few years has shown us who the tech titans really are. We only had an inkling before, but now they don't have any reason to maintain a facade.
They believe in oligarchy so long as they are the oligarchs. They believe in authoritarianism so long as they are the authorities. They believe in censorship so long as they are the censors.
And now that they've amassed power that will be unopposed for the foreseeable future, there's no reason to pretend their goals are elsewhere. A single party system will cause them issues like Chin has, America has 30-50 years to get to that point and presumably they all plan on emerging as the Supreme Leader when that day comes - or at least landing in the inner circle.
For your average voter, the current two party system is almost materially indistinguishable from one party pretending to be 2 parties, so the issues have already started, perhaps even for decades. Fixes for this include, but are not limited to: campaign finance reform and ranked choice voting.
> in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech...
Is this a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
> ...and academic inquiry
I assume this is in reference to Florida's rejection of the College Board's AP Black History curriculum, which was rejected for containing "critical race theory" in violation of Florida Law. Surely our democratically elected state governments are better suited to have the final say in what goes into our kids heads than some NGO's Board of Trustees? Anyone who thinks educators make for less political judges than politicians is invited to review the donation history of teachers unions[0].
> Is This a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
To be clear, the law that the person I am replying to is likely referring to is Florida House Bill 1557, which passed in 2022 and originally applied to kindergarten through 3rd grade. In 2023, it was expanded to apply to all grades, K-12. Here is a quote from the rule [0], this is the rule's self-summary:
"The amendment prohibits classroom instruction to students in pre-kindergarten through grade 3 on sexual orientation or gender identity. For grades 4 through 12, instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited unless such instruction is either expressly required by state academic standards as adopted in Rule 6A-1.09401, F.A.C., or is part of a reproductive health course or health lesson for which a student’s parent has the option to have his or her student not attend"
[0] https://flrules.org/Faw/FAWDocuments/FAWVOLUMEFOLDERS2023/49...
Is explaining to children that a man is married to a woman speaking about sexuality? How is that different from saying a man is married to a man?
Per the description provided above, the ban is on "classroom instruction... on sexual orientation or gender identity." It's doubtful that stating "Jim is married to Barbara" could be counted as "classroom instruction on sexual orientation" any more than stating "Jim works at the pentagon" could be counted as "classroom instruction on geometry." Nor would the statement "Jim is married to John" be considered "classroom instruction on sexual orientation". The point of the law is to encourage teachers, when fielding a question like "Why is Jim married to a boy?", to reply "Ask your mom". Parents are wary of these discussions for good reason[0].
It's truly hard to imagine allies more "dangerous" (per the parent) than those who obstruct the vital "freedom of expression" that is... teachers talking to children about sexuality.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/719685/american-adults-w...
Politicians do not belong in curriculum discussions unless they are content area experts.
Probably this law that erases the concept of climate change https://www.npr.org/2024/05/17/1252012825/florida-gov-desant...
According to DHH, the massive tech layoffs were motivated by a desire to rid companies of wokeness: "most major corporations have wound down the woke excesses while pretending it's all just a correction for "over hiring"." He goes so far as to say that's what Basecamp did and (in his opinion) it's a necessity to clean out those with the wrong political views in every tech company. Sure sounds like a politically-motivated purge to me.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-s-sad-ideological-capture-w...
Much like "woke" isn't really a single coherent entity, neither is "antiwoke". E.g. Bill Maher is notoriously anti-woke, but I haven't heard him demanding language policing. The part of it that does is the same people who have always done it, i.e. social conservatives - for whom it is literally a part of their platform and has always been that.
> We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.
Is that not anti-woke?
Sure. It's also a good example of a social and cultural conservative.
No, it isn't. It's just a sentiment that shitty toxic tribalism masquerading as social justice (and whatever the equivalent is for the political right) has no place in legislature/schools/corporations.
It's actively detrimental to good policy/education/business if only by the virtue of drowning out people who are just going about their day to day responsibilities.
Hard not to interpret this:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
as an endorsement of the social conservative elements of "antiwoke".
Elon censored me for mentioning my Mastodon handle on Twitter. Me and anyone else who did the same.
i guess pg knows one thing about it ;) https://fortune.com/2022/12/18/twitter-suspends-paul-graham-...
Was going to say the same thing. I guess some people are just firm in their beliefs. It's only data if it supports what you were otherwise going to say, or something like that.
You're using a definition of "censorship" which is so broad as to be meaningless. By your definition, when I upvote a comment on Hacker News, that's "censorship" because it makes other comments in the thread a bit less prominent.
>Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
Censorship isn't the only way to prevent the rise of bad ideas. For example: "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
I don't think that's true. When you and I up- or down-vote a comment, we are a part of expressing what will end up being the community's consensus. That's not censorship.
When Twitter's algorithm promotes certain topics and demotes others, that is a unilateral act made by a single, unaccountable entity that has full control over the platform. That is (or at least can be) censorship.
> but without censoring either
PG should try using the term "cis" in a post.
(not arguing with you, but arguing with the statement that neither are being censored)
There is definitely censorship on Twitter these days. A local strip club has its account suspended for "hate speech"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/the-penthous...
> Twitter took action after a photo of the club's latest marquee reading, "Forever neighbours, never neighbors" went viral.
> The wording references president-elect Donald Trump's recent trolling of Canada by calling it America's 51st state, and uses the juxtaposition of the Canadian spelling of "neighbour" against the U.S. "neighbor" for political satire.
> ... the free speech social media platform shut down the club's account saying "it violates the X Hateful Profile Policy."
They simply realized reach is what you need to control, it doesn’t matter if you can write the most brilliant political content if no one will see it due to the distribution algorithm penalizing it while each single one of Musks mostly idiotic tweets reaches hundreds of millions of users. Free speech is meaningless if it can’t be heard by anyone.
Yes! I like to use the term "fair speech" for this concept. Free speech is that you are free from government retribution. But fair speech means that you also have equal opportunity to speak as others. As you said, if person A can say one million things while you are only able to say one thing, you are effectively denied speech.
So there was a platform called Twitter - apparently people who were 'woke' liked it and became the most loyal clients. This made the platform grow and become popular. Then came the "hero" and saved the platform from "wokeness". This is the real story. Elon came and bought something that was grown by the despised "woke" people and made it his own.
You raise good points. I’m optimistic because i think the quieting of some voices (while bad) is much better than their complete silencing, as has happened through deplatforming, shadow banning, and even White House requests in the past.
I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
> I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
> From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]"
As has been demonstrated time and time again, especially on the Internet, unmoderated discussion boards do not scale. Trolls can naturally push out the reasonable people by increasing the noise level. Once the number of users exceeds some small threshold it is basically a guarantee that trolls will move in. Shitposting is cheap, easy, and the people who do it have all the time in the world. If you don't moderate the board will become useless for substantive discussion.
I mean this was amply demonstrated back in the Usenet era. Nothing has fundamentally change with human psyche since then, so the rule still holds true. Twitter/X is just the lastest example.
You've hit the nail on the head here. If you let the trolls in they will suck all of the air out of the room.
Twitter is not unmoderated.
I don't know how many people I muted, banned, or how many times I clicked that I don't want to see something. Over time, Twitter gets better.
This being said, I prefer doing my moderation myself instead of having somebody I extremely disagree with (former Twitter employees) to do this for me.
But you have to mute each account when trolls probably create new accounts daily just to troll people and make fake engagement between their accounts to get boosted by the algorithms.
And really bad actors are taking advantage of the removal of the block feature, which was useful to block people from easily seeing your tweets, so that it leaves one open to nonstop harassment. Or in the case of Elon, forcing people to still get surfaced his tweets even if they blocked Elon on the platform.
I think the more glaring thing is that Musk has indeed directly censored twitter. Saying cis results in an auto-ban for example. But he's also just blatantly censored people for disagreeing with him.
Also, in a time when the next president of the united states is quoting hitler and also saying that Hitler "had a lot of good ideas" I hardly think a very poor multi-page screed on the word woke is the best use of time and thought.
This is BS, Elon absolutely censored people.
The guy who drove over people in the Christmas market in Germany recently openly backed the far right and was a racist. Elon removed all tweets that didn't match with the made up story that he was an islamist.
Weren't a number of the accounts that Elon reinstated just overt white supremacists? Like, yes, by "not censoring" white supremacy, there are some causally correlated effects for what the far right considers "wokeness" on that platform.
If I go into for you instead of following it's extremely heavily skewed into conspiracy theory right. So to me it looks like they are boosting the reach of that content.
if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Not at all - the difference here is choice. You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen.
There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you couldn't pay to be heard.
Now that doesn't mean the current situation is optimal, but it at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
> at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drivel, including those that are state-sponsored though I agree the latter will have more power to counter, but it will certainly act as a drag.
I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
"Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
> The financial barrier is an excellent guardrail against bots and drive
This is Musk argument but it fails on 2 important ways.
1) You had to pay to set up a bot farm to get X ammount of engagement before. Now you can pay 1 subscription and have access to the same or more engagement. So the financial burden to peddle things like Shitcoins is ludricusly lower
2) The subscription system is built ON TOP OF the system that previously meant trust. A system that still means verified in other platforms. Essentially hijacking trust through payment, which means the people who were educated on its meaning, or know about checks from a different platform are now EXRA succeptible to bad actors.
> I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
Its not that _you can only_ pay it if youre rich. But lets say you wanna promote a specific idea, like idk "CRT is taught to children", which was an idea cooked up in a think tank to try and push for home schooling and defunding public education under the guise of some weird stuff being taught in schools.
You can easily coordinate buying accounts, talk points and the amplified attention of the subscription means you have a massive leg up. Compared to the other side, who would need to figure out what your plan is, grassroots organise, find funds for all its members to pay the subscription and then reply, without talking points and much higher risk of fucking up the response.
By virtue of having a megaphone you can pay for, you disrupt in large part the network effect of social media, and instead of consistent high quality posters you embolden and benefit people willing to pay. Its like Pay 2 Win but the whales are grifters and assholes.
> "Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
Well the consequences were pretty negligeble compared to the alternatives. FB tried low moderation and got to support 2 genocides. New Twitter has allowed neo nazi groups to organise and platform themselves, it has allowed the Turkish goverment and Saudi to disrupt dissent at home while they carry on bombings of Kurds and Yemenis respetvely.
Or is Trump getting banned from breaking the TOS much worse than Zuck and Musk allowing the taliban, Isis and any dictator who calls them get their way?
I guess you could call turning your social media site into a toilet, causing anyone with any sense of pride or morality to leave, neutralizing “wokeness”.
You can tell who a person does and doesn't talk with when reading something like this. To write an essay of this length, on this topic, and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I was a college student in the 1990s. Not only that, I was a member and even leader of evangelical Christian groups in college. Outrage, us versus them, claims of being persecuted, and imposing standards of morality on others was the reason those groups existed. The bigger the fight you started, the better.
This is like writing an essay criticizing WalMart for paying low wages when every competing business pays the same or lower wages. Not false, but definitely not the whole truth, and obviously misleading.
ironically paul graham has an essay about reading journalism as a subject expert and immediately knowing that the writer is writing about subjects that they don't know much about.
I have the impression that Paul Graham does not read. His essays are such a product of echo-chamber diatribes and accolades that I cannot fathom him sitting down and reckoning with public information that contradicts his personal philosophy.
(He very well might reread his own essays and read other people's work at a 1:1 ratio. He might also simply have poor reading comprehension.)
Graham doesn't mention Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority by name, but he does explicitly compare wokeness to religion:
> Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes.
I think it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left.
> and not bring up (at a minimum) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority suggests you shouldn't be writing about it.
I think it's fine to point out that there are parallels on the right. But I don't think it is constructive to say that he is not entitled to write about a topic just because he doesn't explicitly mention something that you think is important.
> it's abundantly clear that he does not condone priggishness whether it's coming from the right or the left
He tacitly condones Musk, whose priggishness currently consists of smugly rehashing alt-right talking points.
Not to mention marking any mention of "cis" as hate speech. This is not a recognised slur, it is only treated as such on Musk's whim, because he personally dislikes it.
You’re right that he doesn’t condone it from any side, but the article would be much stronger if it spent more time on right wing forms of this problem too.
For example, any of the “go woke go broke” forms of right wing cancel culture, the ways that Christian colleges require professors to sign statements of faith, the way that sexual repression is still very much the norm in many conservative circles…
I mean, look at the paragraph surrounding this line:
> Of course [we shouldn’t require signing DEI statements]; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs.
It’s seemingly ignorant of the fact that this still happens a lot on the right! A family member had to sign something to the effect that they wouldn’t drink alcohol even off the job because the employer was religious.
A more timely example is that a core part of project 2025 is replacing bureaucratic federal workers with specifically conservative, Christian individuals.
Now, I don’t believe PG supports that. But if you spend an article mostly only attack one “side,” without acknowledging it’s somewhat of a two way street, you’re not going to convince that many people, and you can see that in this thread.
If PG’s goal, as he says, is to fight back against the prigs, he needs to better appeal to those who want to continue being respectful & progressive. And to do that, he needs to avoid being so reductive with what “woke” means.
The title is "The Origins of Wokeness". He's writing about things that many groups were doing at the time, making his explanation at best incomplete. As for Jerry Falwell, you cannot write about the origins of modern cancel culture and not mention him, since he's the one that popularized it.
I genuinely enjoy that many people think PC culture started with BLM and woke language and what not in the 00's-10's.
There's literally a movie called PCU from 1994.
I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus damnation. That social dynamic—where the “righteous” person gains status by exposing the lapses of others—feels remarkably similar to what we see now with “cancellations” on social media.
The parallels between the "original sin" in Christian theology and "... privilege" in social justice discourse are pretty obvious.
I also find it rather amusing that the social justice movement tends to be so US-centric - i.e. focusing on the issues that are specific to or manifest most strongly in US, and then projecting that focus outwards, sometimes to the point of cultural intrusiveness (like that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US).
At the same time many people sincerely believe that US is not just a bad country - I'm fine with this as a matter of subjective judgment, and share some of it even - but that it's particularly bad in a way that no other country is. It's almost as if someone took American exceptionalism and flipped the sign. Which kinda makes me wonder if that is really what's happening here.
> that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US
Well, there are a few things to clear up:
1. Latino is an American word that's only useful in the US to summarize people south of the US in Latam. People in Latam don't use the word since that grouping isn't otherwise useful to them.
2. There definitely are Spanish speakers who do use the -x or -@ suffix like "tod@s" and "todxs".
The mass confusion between these two facts is responsible for most of the discourse you'll read about latinx.
Americans don't understand that #2 exists. "Woke" Mexicans, for example, do use the -x suffix.
"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
>"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
Active users of the suffix are a small minority: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/ho...
The book "American Nations", whose basic idea is that the US + Canada is composed of 12 cultural "nations", also observes that the Puritans were rather intolerant. The Puritan culture influenced what he calls "Yankeedom" (New England west to Minnesota) and the "Left Coast", which was settled by Yankee shipping. My impression is that these two areas are the most "woke"; it seems that Puritan intolerance casts a long shadow, even though those areas rejected orthodox Christianity a long time ago.
My 2 cents is that this book was one of the worst excuses for historical analysis I've ever read (not that the author is even a historian; he's a journalist). It felt closer to astrology or a Buzzfeed quiz about what Harry Potter house you belong to than anything of actual value. It reminded me of a litany of corporate workshops I've experienced, where the author comes up with an interesting hook and then works backwards to support their conclusions. Great for selling a story to those looking for intellectually empty calories. Pretty much garbage otherwise.
Can you recommend a better book on the same topic?
Is it possible that this is just the nature of writing about regional cultures?
Albion’s Seed is a more rigorous work.
Right: it's worth noting the Puritans departed England in part because they were, basically, zealous pains in the butt who didn't get along well with contemporary English society.
The Pilgrims left.
The Puritans got kicked out.
It's hilarious the extent to which New England history is one of people showing up in Boston, looking around, realizing who was running the show and deciding that the frontier and the natives didn't sound all that bad.
To quote mark fisher “…It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.”
Christians are so new. I wonder why Pharisees aren't mentioned more often when bringing in this topic.
Actually, "pharisaical" is the dictionary definition for this kind of hypocrisy.
An optimistic explanation is that they don't want to be antisemitic. The present-day term for "Pharisee" is "Jew." The early rabbis who created Judaism as we know it were Pharisees, and theirs was the only first-century Jewish sect which survived until today. You can even see the alternation between "Pharisee" and "Jew" in The New Testament. For instance, in some verses it criticizes the Pharisees for washing their hands before eating, whereas in others it levies the same complaint against Jews generally: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2011%3A38%...
My guess would be because most of the audience it's said to are much more familiar with Christianity than with 0000s Judaism. If the person hearing the comparison don't know anything about the operand then for them it becomes a meaningless comparison.
If anyone's familiar with Christianism they will be also familiar with Pharisians, mentioned probably mentioned more frequently in the New Testament than the old (Jesus often recused their ways)
I was raised Christian and yes, the Pharisees were not just taught about, but a subject of focus.
This makes the modern American strain of Christianity all the more puzzling to me, with how it in many ways shares more with the Pharisees than it does with the religion's namesake, but that’s a topic for a different post.
Ehh ... it's indisputable that in $CURRENTYEAR that there are a lot of people whose only experience with Christianity is "things people said on the Internet".
If many random readers won't understand a reference to "Pharisee", and people trying to make a point stop using it as a result, then even fewer Internet-educated readers will get the reference.
Probably because this topic is American and it's the history of American Christianity that's being referenced.
an interesting article on this topic: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/more-christian-th...
I grew up in the 80's - I felt exactly the same about evangelicals then as I feel about the woke today.
fr Nathaniel Hawthorne is immensely relevant in the present day
The difference here is people are trying to address people’s actual life experiences instead of something they believe based on faith.
All peoples' life experiences equally matter. Just some areas more equal than others.
/s
Or so they believe
[flagged]
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
Not exactly. The article doesn't try to draw a causative link between Christianity in particular to "wokeness".
Everyone does moral enforcement though. Even this blog post we are commenting about (which I really agree with) is an attempt at moral enforcement. He even prescribes that wholeness be treated like a religion and gives a whole list of scenarios where one should deny the request of a woke person (same as one would a religious person). To constantly keep up this equality among all ideologies requires rules and enforcement of those rules, aka moralizing
The frequency and severity of enforcement are the distinguishing factors here.
Maybe, but where's the proof that woke was more frequently and more severely enforced than other things?
i definitely believe in the relationship between modern wokeness and some older religious traditions of moral policing
there seems to be a territorial overlap between the two
The difference is religion’s justification is the words of a fictitious being whereas “wokeness” stems from principles of equality and tolerance.
Surely some adherents of each use it to feel righeous/superior, but in only one case is it actually justified.
I know what you're trying to say--But also, the (unintentional?) irony makes me chuckle:
"Sure, my group sounds self-righteous, but our view is justifiably superior."
Nobody wins a shouting match.
It was somewhat tongue in cheek ;) but between real, human impacting principles and made up stories about fairies I'll take the former every time.
Where do these principles of equality and tolerance come from? Are they descriptions of a stochastic processes produced by one of an infinite series of marble machines, or do they have a deeper root in something that is true for all places and times (I'll even accept roots in something that is true (not just acceptable) for this time, for all people within this time)?
If you want some critique of the thing PG thinks he's critiquing (which, to parallel what he says about social oppression, is a problem but not of the nature or relative magnitude he thinks it is), but from people who have agendas to oppose social oppression instead of to protect it along with their own wealth and power, you could start with:
How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?: Movement building requires a culture of listening—not mastery of the right language. by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-much-discomfort-is...
we will not cancel us. by adrienne maree brown https://adriennemareebrown.net/2018/05/10/we-will-not-cancel...
thank you for the sane comment. adrienne maree brown is wonderful
Another point, he is very invested in keeping the economy and the widening gap between the rich and everyone else out of it.
One of the big catalysts of wokeness was of course, Occupy Wall St, borne out of the 2008 financial crisis. When the bankers get bailed out and you just go underwater on your mortgage, people start to get upset and want to change things. And organizing yourselves and drilling with lots of rules and getting on the same page with people you don't otherwise have any connection to is paramount when it comes to becoming a large enough, hivemind type group that can bring about collective action. But if he brought that up in this article, people who don't care about 8 genders and fringe social issues might start backing away from the "woke = bad" message
Black person here.
Like most discussions of "woke" and "wokeness," this one too fails HARD by not fully and directly addressing the origins of the term -- and by "fails hard" I do mean will almost certainly do more obscuring than clarifying by starting from an information-deficient premise.
Including, e.g. "The term 'woke' has its origins in the Black American community as a signifier of awareness about ones political and social situation..." is a bare minimum.
There is so very little citation or substantiation in the entire essay. Even the footnotes are largely just more speculation. He presents it as some kind of historical record but it's literally just his thoughts.
It’s almost like that is the entirety of the rhetorical and argument station expectations when people comment on too much wokeness.
Vibes.
“I invented a meaning for this word that bears no resemblance to its actual meaning and then am critical of others because I think my invented definition is bad”
1. Build a strawman.
2. Beat the living hell out of the strawman.
3.”I’m sure this will trigger some people”.
4. Get a standing ovation from Elon Musk.
5. Lots of money from private capital.He didn’t even have to build his own strawman. It is a shared strawman - which is more efficient. PG out there disrupting the bad faith argument industry.
You're right, but I don't think he's interested in the term. He's interested in the social phenomenon that (briefly) appropriated the term before the other side started using it as a negative.
I'm also black and growing up I had the impression that "woke" referred to left-leaning conspiracy theorists and activists. 9/11 truthers and gay rights activists were the main woke groups of the Bush era
It is actually insane how far I had to scroll to see the first comment mentioning this. He has merits in his comparison to religion but this essay is a huge miss.
Edit: in this thread, the actual origin of “woke” is only mentioned 3 times, the thread has 1942 comments as I type
https://x.com/seunosewa/status/1878835480424513903
"Usage is usage. I don't make the rules."
He also clarifies he's referring to the contemporary meaning in the linked essay:
> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
He doesn’t even attempt to touch on the actual origins in the essay however. There are a lot of loose ends in it and this is a glaring one.
He also uses “political correctness”, which is a more precise way to describe the phenomenon he talks about. But that buzzword died a long time ago, so “the origins of woke” without actually touching on the origin of “woke” will do.
> He doesn’t even attempt to touch on the actual origins in the essay however
Because he's not talking about the terms original meaning. Plenty of people are reading the title thinking he's digging into the etymological origins of the term. He's talking about the origins of the ideas that contemporary people call "woke".
It's not an omission. Paul explicitly clarifies what he's talking about near the top of the piece. You and other readers simply wanted him to write about a different topic entirely.
This is maybe not unknown but often intentionally avoided by people like Graham who discuss this topic with an anti-woke bias. The exercise is to create a false origin and attack that rather than address the actual history of the term and its origin.
jrm4, yours should be the top comment.
I denounce Paul Graham's essay. At a time when our leaders - especially our thought leaders - reliably do the wrong thing, it's especially appalling that he has the wrong take on wokeness, transparently and self-evidently to appease Donald Trump and his followers in order to protect his financial ties to Y Combinator startups. That's low, bordering on unforgivable, and until he retracts his statements, I'm afraid that I've lost respect for him and his opinion in all other matters.
It's obvious that pg isn't schooled in the basic civic virtues that I assumed he was. Such as: in journalism one always punches up. That's perhaps the simplest litmus test to know if one is siding with the oppressor.
I identify as woke and progressive. I speak out against all forms of oppression. I call out othering such as sexism, racism, ableism and ageism. I watched political correctness rise and fall under the boot of capitalist authoritarianism. I witnessed the wrong people win the internet lottery and deliberately undermine everything the civil rights movement achieved since the 1960s, as well as the shared prosperity that the New Deal brought since FDR. I watched them monopolize our media, take over and corrupt symbols of what's possible like Twitter and Wikipedia, attack beloved institutions like the US Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency, divide us on wedge issues in order to enrich themselves, and capture our regulatory bodies through lobbying and packing courts with judges and justices who toe the party line. I watched the winners sell out like pg just did. I watched my heroes fall.
I thought the readership of Hacker News was with me on this stuff. But I guess I was wrong. It's apparent that too many people here just don't get it. They don't work on their unhealed traumas, they don't seek equitable solutions. They just side with concentrated wealth and power, whether out of fear over their own job security, greed by hoping to be at the top of the pyramid someday, or through simple projection by not nurturing their own dignity and the power that their voice could have to shed grace and light onto the world.
If everything I just said is performative, so be it. I'd rather be on the side of peace, love and righteousness than whatever all this is.
Sure but that has almost nothing to do with how it’s used today.
Language and the meanings of words change over time, and it’s all but impossible to make people go back to using tre old definition.
The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. It has everything to do with how it's used today.
but don't you think an essay titled "the origins of wokeness" should consider that definition?
It's what it meant until white people started lecturing each other on what it means, then conservatives started using it as a derisive catch-all for anything conceivably liberal or simply empathetic.
"Prig" is in the eye of the beholder. What about when the "prigs" were right? I'm sure the Quakers were seen as "prigs" by the southern slaveholders/traders. The Quakers were early to the abolition party and their opposition to slavery was based on religious zeal which made them seem like "prigs" to the people in the South who's whole society and economy was built on slavery. But we now consider the Quakers were right and the slaveholders wrong. MLK was viewed as a "prig" by many southern whites for interfering in their racism. But MLK was right.
> What about when the "prigs" were right?
I think the big take away is that being right via a lecture doesn't do anything.
If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Instead, go out and do something. For example, defer typing up that long comment about how [x] is right and [y] is wrong, volunteer for some community service. Build shelters for people who need it. Offer pro bono services to marginalized groups.
If nothing else, simply live your way of life and out compete the people who were wrong.
But that 1000th internet comment you posted, even if it was "right", it didn't make a single lick of difference. So ask yourself why you really put it up.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Actually it's through Internet conversations and mostly online education that my mind was changed, my whole worldview in fact.
Quietly doing good is admirable. So is speaking up where people are talking. Both is even better still.
Quietly being your best self doesn't give us substantial change, though. Consider that all of the big gains in civil rights for various groups came from people being loud about their belief in equality, and insisting that people who felt otherwise were wrong.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
i'm basically a professional social justice warrior in tech and nobody is lecturing each other. everybody just does the work.
"stop lecturing... instead, go out and do something" is a dangerous train of thought. I agree that building houses for the homeless is a good idea (imagine if you could actually just do that, though...) but most of the issues people are talking about can't be directly confronted in cozy ways like going to the soup kitchen or building a house. A lot of the issues people are "woke" over are societal ills and the "action" available to them is stuff we don't want people doing. We should be advocating for reasoned discourse instead of - to paraphrase a popular tweet I didn't like enough to screenshot - telling people to shut up and go firebomb a Wal-mart.
Or take the abortion debate. We don't want anti-abortionists "taking action" against clinics and doctors any more than we want pro-choice advocates doing back-alley abortions if we can avoid it. It's all very dangerous!
I think the basis of his arguement is a prig is incentivized by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Where perhaps the quakers or MLK were doing it out of moral outrage.
> by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Isn't it impossible to determine the internal motivations of others? And even if they were doing it to make themselves feel more virtuous they can still be turn out to be right on the issue, can't they? Or it's possible that there's a combination of both moral outrage and ending up feeling virtuous.
As pointed out by Uncle oxidant, this is hard to determine.
I would suggest instead that a prig deems a person to be bad/evil based on them having a different view/behavior that society is generally divided on.
Conservatives will readily confound moral outrage with virtue signaling in order to neutralize it.
Doesn’t matter ultimately. If you’re at the point of requiring loyalty oaths to get hired, you’ve already lost the plot. Way past counterproductive.
There’s a great sttng episode, the drumhead, which explores witchhunts.
I would say a lot of what drives wokeism is not priggery but ignorance and just going along with the crowd, sometimes in forms that are well meaning.
e.g. sometimes white people have some experience where they realize how much crap black people get; they might actually meet some black people or learn about history (e.g. black people have been complaining about the police in America as long as there is America, why are we supposed to remember one person's name but forget Rodney King or the Watts Riots, that people like Booker T. Washington had trouble w/ the police) but instead they chant thought-stopping slogans like "defund the police" (tell that to the black people who have gunshots in their neighborhood every night) and instead of saying something like "Black people are beautiful" they have to say "Black lives are beautiful".
The trouble is that people today are looking back 15 minutes and looking ahead 15 minutes and are up against the likes of Xi, Putin and Netanyahu who are thinking in terms of hundreds of years if not thousands. They're like children in the hands of gods.
---
There is an undercurrent of priggery in attitudes about sexuality that's a different and much more complex theme that starts w/ Baudrillard's essay at the beginning of
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
and continues with experiences such as discovering that when squicky rumours are flying around it is is the former BDSM professional several steps removed from the event who goes the the police with a garbled, confused and hysterical story or that the transgenderist gatekeepers of Tildes don't know that there are 549 paraphilias (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia) and that pedophilia is just one of them in their mad rush to cancel anyone they can. In contrast the people who pray a few times a day, homeschool their kids, and volunteer on deadly cold nights at the homeless shelter, while people who hate them are sharing hateful memes online, who "seek first to understand" the way Steven Covey says you should)
For me, Urban Dictionary[0] defines this issue much more clearly:
> When this term became popularized, initially the meaning of this term was when an individual become more aware of the social injustice. Or basically, any current affairs related like biased, discrimination, or double-standards.
> However, as time passed by, people started using this term recklessly, assigning this term to themselves or someone they know to boost their confidence and reassure them that they have the moral high grounds and are fighting for the better world. And sometimes even using it as a way to protect themselves from other people's opinion, by considering the 'outsider' as non-woke. While people that are in line with their belief as woke. Meaning that those 'outsiders' have been brainwash by the society and couldn't see the truth. Thus, filtering everything that the 'outsider' gives regardless whether it is rationale or not.
> And as of now, the original meaning is slowly fading and instead, is used more often to term someone as hypocritical and think they are the 'enlightened' despite the fact that they are extremely close-minded and are unable to accept other people's criticism or different perspective. Especially considering the existence of echo chamber(media) that helped them to find other like-minded individuals, thus, further solidifying their 'progressive' opinion.
> 1st paragraph >"Damn bro, I didn't realize racism is such a major issue in our country! I'm a woke now!"
> 2nd paragraph > "I can't believe this. How are they so close-minded? Can't they see just how toxic our society is? The solution is so simple, yet they refused to change! I just don't understand!"
> 3rd paragraph > "Fatphobic?! Misogyny?! What's wrong with preferring a thin woman?! And she is morbidly obese for god sake! Why should I be attracted to her?! Why should I lower myself while she refuse to better herself?! These woke people are a bunch of ridiculous hypocrite!"
Also:
Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683826
This is a significantly better article than the wandering drivel of the original post
I came in here to see if this had been posted already. deBoer does a much better job at talking about it in a comparatively neutral way. He only adds his two cents at the very end.
Another good one that gets it even closer is from Sam Kriss. His prose is a bit less to the point than deBoer, but he outlines his idea that "wokeness" is not a political ideology but rather an etiquette. I think it's paywalled now but the archived version can be read:https://web.archive.org/web/20230324050437/https://samkriss....
It's a good writeup that doesn't require the reader to have taken a stance or agree with the author's (arguably reactionary in the case of PG's post, depending on one's perspective) politics.
I love when urban dictionary nails something well like this, it's very amusing. Like a gold nugget surrounded by trash. The only other thing that tickles me so is the occasional pseudo-profound 4chan green text.
I thought this was an interesting read. For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice. It places an emphasis on awareness, and the solution is often left as an exercise to the observer.
Political correctness and language codes are not new. I think what was new is the idea that people could rally around the banner of awareness, and thereby avoid disputes about solutions. This is why many of these topics lose momentum once their followers get the attention and have to deal with the hard and less popular questions of how to fix something.
The Unabomber manifesto talks about this a surprising amount too -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
I have read it before but which part?
Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
I see, I think that's a related but distinct point from what I was saying. That said, I agree with the quote, but would add that it applies to most people in general, not just the leftist. I would also add that the moral self-righteousness is an essential part of the attraction.
I thought that this was particularly evident in the defund the police movements, where poor minority neighborhoods actually wanted more policing and law enforcement when polled.
There was a variety of causes that gained prominence ~2015 when Bernie Sanders came much closer to challenging Hillary Clinton than anyone expected. The Democrat party establishment picked the wishy washy meaningless bits out and focused on them while keeping away from the more challenging economic issues that would actually require their ideologies to adapt
I think what most people call "woke" is probably just a reaction to the obvious emptiness of many of the things politicians like Kamala Harris chose to focus on whilst ignoring more concrete issues. A lot of it was stuff there never was a solution for.
It goes back even further than that.
There seemed to be a surge in 2011 too, when it became apparent that the Obama administration was going to let the big banks off the hook for the financial crisis.
I mean, that's part of it. The culture war is useful to both US political parties, because they both have a bourgeois class interest and need something to keep people invested in politics for the sake of their political legitimacy, but at the same time need to prevent them from gaining class consciousness or becoming involved in class politics.
Put another way: the culture war (as woke vs. anti-woke) divides the electorate, but in a way that lets them be parceled out between two factions of the ruling class, rather than aligning any of them against the ruling class.
Criminalization of homelessness is probably the most stark example of class warfare in society today. And agitation against these policies is absolutely called "woke" by the right.
The idea that wokeness is in contrast to class-based advocacy is not correct. The right will happily call class-based advocacy "woke" until the cows come home.
The right will call class-based advocacy "woke", but that doesn't mean that centrist Democrats are going to adopt it to spite them. Criminalization of homelessness is at its most vicious in cities with Democratic mayors.
Sure. The leaders within the Democratic party are not especially good advocates for the homeless. They are similarly not terribly good advocates for a lot of suffering groups. Despite all the hay about "defund the police", it didn't actually end up materializing as policy and we saw Biden explicitly reject it in a State of the Union.
It is not true that the establishment left is using "woke" advocacy to avoid having to talk about class. It is also not true that if the left stopped talking about "woke" concepts that the right would suddenly get on board with class advocacy.
This ties back to my idea that "wokeness" is an ideology that centers awareness, not solutions. Everyone in San Francisco is sufficiently aware that homelessness is a problem. Nobody really advocates for police brutality or shooting innocents as a positive good.
However, the debate constantly returns to the the question of how important these issues are on an imaginary scale that doesn't exist, instead of what we should be doing out.
Bob thinks police brutality ranks 9.8 on Bob's "importance scale". Sue thinks it ranks 7.6 on Sue's "importance scale". Arguing about the numbers and scales is completely irrelevant, and an excuse to attack someone else's position instead of proposing a solution you have to advocate for and defend. It is a strategy of taking the fight to the enemy.
I think it is reasonable to claim that there is a general bias towards awareness over material solutions among establishment liberals. I don't really think that this is "wokeness". I'd wager that almost everybody who uses the term would say that an activist who advocates for an extreme wealth tax and a ban on corporate landlording with money redistributed to the homeless is "more woke" than a mayor who funds homeless shelters to a degree but also regularly sends cops to clear out camp sites where homeless people are sleeping.
I agree with what you said, but I still think performance and moralizing is the central aspect.
In your hierarchy, I think most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.
Similarly, someone arguing for wealth tax and transfer on moral grounds is more woke than someone who argues the identical policy saying it will result in long term cost savings.
Why do you put more emphasis on the language than the proposed solutions. Is that to control the speech?
I'm not sure what you mean.
In my opinion, and many others, the type of speech is what wokeness is about. Particularly of the kind that are moralizing lectures explaining how Superior the speaker is.
Concrete solutions are far more preferable.
> most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.
Just wondering why you are allowing "homeless" to be used without retribution, but someone using "unhoused" is disparaged as woke. Seems like language policing to me.
Im describing what the definition of wokism is. I think it is performative and judgmental moralizing with a social justice focus. Using PGs language, this might be a social justice prig.
I would agree that wokeism does not have a monopoly on performative and judgmental moralizing. I suppose prigs come in different flavors. All wokeists are prigs, but not all prigs are woke. Im not sure what the central characteristic is of anti-woke prigs...
To the language policing point, I think think there is difference in views. One person might think it is important to police language because the words matter. Another person might say the words themselves are irrelevant, but the reasons for changing them foolish.
Sure. I'm not saying that a focus on language or whatever is the opposite of "woke." I'm just saying that it is a general sling thrown at left wing politics, not a thing that exists to distract from revolutionary class politics.
OK, first of all what criminalization of homelessness? Second, if I go to work every day and don’t smoke crack and pay taxes I would like my kids to be able to go to the park down the street so can someone please take a bulldozer and take all the tents and put them in the garbage. This is actually what normal mainstream people think in their minds and everyone that thinks I’m a monster is a a woke idiot.
You can think this if you want.
But this is exactly what I'm talking about. You are saying that people who advocate for leaving these tents alone are "woke idiots", so "wokeness" is clearly about class politics too.
> For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice.
This was mostly my reading too. Maybe more cynical, but I walked away thinking that wokeness itself isn't good for business unless you are in the business of selling rides.
It's a well written piece. Early on, though, this caught my attention:
> As for where political correctness began, if you think about it, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin outside universities and spread to them from this external source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and spread from there to the humanities and social sciences? Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the humanities and social sciences.
He's setting up the assertion "political correctness began in university social science departments." He tries to make it look like the conclusion is an inevitable result of reason, but really it's just an assertion. I dislike this rhetorical technique.
His assertion is probably correct.
This feels like one of the weakest PG articles
The writing quality feels like that of a university student
Just lots of assertions thrown out without any real backing
Yes, that paragraph is patronising and cocky.
I don’t disagree with his definition, not disagree that it’s a problem, but it’s still feels a bit to anti-Wokey in that he calls out things that he just disagrees with. #metoo brought down some terrible people who did terrible things, I don’t think you should call metoo in and of itself woke, not overly moralistic to be mad about sexual assault, there should be some nuance there.
He also calls Bud Light woke for… acknowledging the existence of a trans woman? Again not excessively moralistic to reach out to a constituency he happens to not like.
There are degrees of good and bad in all of it.
Harvey Weinstein preyed on people. Louis CK consensually engaged in his kink with people who later said they didn't mean to consent but were embarrassed because they wanted to curry his favor. Aziz Ansari went on a bad date, and she gossiped to someone who wanted to write a hit piece.
PG says wokeness peaked with George Floyd. Surely there was priggish stupidity that came from Black Lives Matter (like banning "blacklist" as if it had racial connotations), but what happened to George Floyd was legitimately fucked up.
I'm looking forward to a day when these ideas can be openly discussed. It's not that everything done in the name of woke was bad, it's that wokeness is a dogma that silences discussion. People whisper in cafeterias "hey, can I tell you what I really think," but nobody wants to say "the emperor has no clothes" when your wellbeing depends on it. In the last decade in tech, part of your job was paying lip service to inclusivity. If you date in SF or NY, you'll notice a bonkers number of people still signal a trendy virtue in their profiles, usually BLM/ACAB or Free Palestine/watermelon.
If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma, you'll end up with a bunch of people performing for the dogma, because they need access to those essentials.
> If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma
And who, exactly, do you think will have to worry about being stigmatized for their beliefs in the next four years? Who will be threatening them, making laws that violate their rights, pointing guns at them? Anyone who spends their time complaining about the targets of such suppression, as though they don't have rights of free speech or association, is doing a bit of dogma enforcement themselves.
I'm not a fan of Floyd at all. Garner was the far better martyr for that cause.
I’ll never understand this. The fact that George was a criminal doesn’t mean anything. Kneeling on him until he was dead was a criminal act.
It's not that Floyd was a criminal. Garner was too though perhaps you can nitpick about degrees. It's a difference in how they were killed. The police were called on Floyd (for questionable reasons, but reasons nonetheless) whereas the police initiated contact with Garner on the basis that he wasn't giving their employer its fair cut. Floyd was killed by a rouge-ish cop who's partner didn't intervene and the system failed to hold accountable. Garner, was killed by multiple cops working together because he didn't just bend over and take it when they confronted him over a victimless crime, basically a summary execution over contempt of cop, and the institutions the cops report to thought this was fine and dandy, until people started protesting.
So yeah, Garner was the better martyr IMO.
Yeah, that's just nuts. Let's be very specific: the issue was that Bud Light hired Dylan Mulvaney to do a social media promotion. It's not as if Dylan's face was on beer cans available in stores or anything. And this simple act caused a massive backlash. I would think that this might raise some questions about who exactly the prigs were in this instance.
The backlash arose for many reasons, but this article explains the most principled one:
https://thecritic.co.uk/dylan-mulvaney-did-not-share-our-gir...
It's not priggish to take a stand against misogyny, is it?
The "misogyny" that article purports is just... being publicly trans.
Exactly. It's fundamentally misogynistic for these men to appropriate a "woman" identity, and Mulvaney is a very typical example of this.
Think about it. If you remove the female body from the definition of woman, what else remains besides sexist stereotypes?
Spending too much time in the richest, most tolerant counties in the country can make you forget that we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage.
Yes it's a teeny tiny little bit of a shame that a college president had to step down for raising a fair academic question. It is not half as important as when a cop shoots a black person dead for dating with a white girl.
Don’t criticize obviously bad things because there are things that are even worse.
> we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage
1. Who cares? Those colleges are private entities and presumably this admissions discrimination means they cannot receive Federalor state funds. If admitting gay students goes against their religious beliefs, then the rest of us benefit from having the people they reject.
2. It is not up to us to tell other families who they can and can't marry, or what they can or can't think. Let the bigots be bigots in their bigoted bubble, as long as they don't hurt anyone outside it. (If their children wish to leave the bubble, we should protect and support them privately.)
3. A cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl is homicide, independent of anyone's beliefs.
>Who cares?
I believe it’s in everybody’s best interest to stand up against discrimination.
Right, but the problem is that consequences for a cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl don't seem to be the same as the consequences for homicide.
Can you cite a case where this happened and the consequences were unreasonably light?
There's stuff all the time:
https://eji.org/news/alabama-attorney-general-releases-white...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ...
Or here's a case where 6 officers collude to torture 2 black people to death (https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-deputies-guilty-pleas...). Surely they'll get a real sentence now that it's news, but it makes you wonder how many cases never get identified as racially-based when the investigators are the perpetrators.
And boy it sure does seem odd that further south you go the more of a problem it is... I wonder what could explain that phenomenon....
Which of these links describes "a cop shooting a black person for dating a white girl"?
This seems like extraordinarily weak writing with very little backings or substantial evidence to the claims. That in itself would be fine - if presented as opinion - but this has an air of a historical biography of the actual lineage of the term. This is anything but.
It feels like an accounting of a person who is very deeply wearing tinted glasses about the world.
This is a politically charged discussion but I think it demonstrates some of the problem. Left arguments, just like the right, devolve into a theme of you are with us or a racist. There is no middle ground. I am no longer in the Bay Area but I still remember one of the depressing defining moments of this during the BLM protests. Shop owners would throw up signs that literally would say “We are minority owned, please don’t destroy our shop”. In my mind it’s the wrong way to think about it, does that mean we are giving the ok to destroy non-minority businesses? If you were to ask that question at that time, you would get labeled quite quickly as a racist.
The shame about everything these days is you cannot have a discussion anymore, maybe it never existed. I am not a republican but I also cannot stand the outspoken left shouting over everyone else in CA. Does that mean I am antiwoke?
Let me share the perspective I have as a member of a class of people that have been subject to racism for thousands of years, including enslavement, arbitrary murder, and systematic mass murder. Please forgive me, but being quiet didn't seem to work so far.
At least hundreds of thousands of polite, quiet, reasonable, assimilated urban Jews were murdered in the holocaust. It is deeply wrong that African Americans and other minorities or mentally ill people live in a world where the police can be every bit as dangerous as the gestapo. I feel like it's wrong that millions of women have been murdered simply for not doing something a man wanted. Millions or billions of women aren't treated as if they have the same value as men.
Please look at the bully pulpit standing against us. Most of the power in American society is concentrated in the hands of a very few white men. How loud do you think someone has to be when they have to stand against the megaphone of society? When someone needs to stand up against trillions of dollars in wealth?
Pretty loud as it turns out!
I am not sure what your reply has to do with my comment. Be as loud as you yourself want to be. The issue with the left is the same that as the right in America. The handful of extra vocal folks set the tone. You are unable to have any real discussion as it’s too easy to quickly get labeled a racist or some other classification. If you don’t agree with a position, well you must be a nazi of some sort. That is/was the typical vocal left in CA.
The comparison of police being gestapo is just silly. In the general case police are underpaid for what they are tasked with. I am no fan of the police but it’s naive to think they are the gestapo. Severely under paid and undertrained to then have to take care of the same neighborhoods all the time. I also think your narrative of finger pointing does not really attack any of the issues. Instead of pointing fingers nobody wants to sit down and ask why certain communities have poorer outcomes than others. Poor police outcomes are a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Hear, hear.
The beautiful thing about essays like this is that they show you that the author has truly never known what he was talking about. Just a guy who stumbled through life at the right time. It’s a shame these people have so much power and influence. It could be wielded by people much more thoughtful and benevolent.
Graham was brilliant in the 90s. I would say this article is more like evidence that he's washed up. When you no longer have to work hard because your name alone means money, your mind turns soft.
The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe... It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
To be fair, he does say the above, which is close enough. The problem with asking "what if they're right" is that there's no single formulation of beliefs shared universally by such large and diverse group, so you can't consider whether they are right or not, only whether each individual expression is.
But there’s this statement as well:
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…
The whole idea of woke (in the non pejorative sense) is that you’ve done the work to perceive the actual problem.
That statement shows that he hasn’t, which I think undermines the good parts of the essay.
It's also a little suspect when a white man talks the degree to which racism (and by extension, sexism and homophobia) is a problem. The way he writes about it is such a casual dismissal that it sounds like gas lighting to me.
Has anyone ever referred to him with a racial epithet? Has he been stopped and frisked? Racially profiled? When was he last treated as if his ideas aren't as good because of his gender? Or passed up for a promotion for any of these reasons? Was he ever treated as if he is unworthy of marriage because he loves the wrong person? Has he worried about whether or not his name sounds a little too ethnic on his resume? Has he ever been called a dirty ____?
Among other things, including being called racial epithets, and worry about whether or not my name sounds a little too ethnic, I've had to listen to contemporary American politicians talk about how my ethnic group controls lasers from space.
But no, racism is not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be? It's easy to say that when you never experienced it.
Treating ideas coming from men or white people or other oppressor classes as not as good are a central tenet of woke thought.
That’s not what is happening and I suspect you know it.
The comments have quite clearly laid out how to uninformed this perspective is because it lacks knowledge. It’s not because he’s white ir male it’s because he’s talking over people who have experienced this to tell them they are overreacting.
Gender and race are explanatory of why this is dumb but not fundamental to why it is - that is simply him being misinformed.
>When was he last treated as if his ideas aren't as good because of his gender?
In your comment.
Except in plenty of cases, Paul's claim is demonstrably true. People vastly overestimate the racial disparity in police uses of force, for example: https://manhattan.institute/article/perceptions-are-not-real...
When people were asked whether male-dominated or female-dominated industries were sexist, they vastly overestimated the degree of gender discrimination as compared to the experimentally observed rates (and in the case of male-dominated industries, they got the direction of discrimination backwards): https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S07495978230005... from https://id.elsevier.com/as/authorization.oauth2?platSite=SD%...
The whole pattern of people saying what amounts to "the fact that you disagree with me means you haven't bothered to examine the problem" is a very unfortunate trend. Did it occur to you that perhaps he did do the work on studying the problem, and came to a different conclusion?
The Manhattan Institute is so biased that it is not worth spending the time to actually engage with their articles and determine their truth, because their game is not truth, it is politics. If what they say is true, there will likely be other, less politically-motivated groups that say the same.
Sure, there are other studies that reach the same finding: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Rep...
But I wouldn't be surprised if this is also discarded as biased. The issue is that the allegation of bias is often justified by the outcomes of the research, thus statements like "the research showing people overestimate racism is biased" becomes tautological.
Also, do you have specific critiques of the study? Or is your dismissal solely based on the authorship of the study?
Thank you for that source, I do not discard it as biased.
While some people do, I am not choosing what sources are biased based on whether their findings align with my beliefs. I am choosing based on whether their results consistently align with a certain ideology or political stance, what their goals are, and where their money comes from.
The Manhattan Institute consistently publishes findings that align with American conservatism, their goal is explicitly to influence policy, and while we don't know exactly where their money comes from because they don't make that information public (which I think is generally a bad sign), information revealed by tax filings shows that most substantial donations are from conservatives. This is why I consider them to be biased.
I don't have any specific criticism of the study, because I did not spend the time to engage with it. I have limited lifetime, and I must choose where to spend it based on what is likely to be fruitful. I do not consider engaging with articles/studies from biased think tanks, whether liberal or conservative, likely to be fruitful.
“Less politically motivated groups” == “groups who happen to agree with what I already believe“.
The entire thing is an exercise in complaining about a thing that goddamn near everyone agrees is bad, then using that to complain about a much larger movement that probably aims to address a lot of legitimate issues, in such a way that you can always retreat if challenged. There's a memed name for this tactic, and it's extremely on display here.
"Well of course by 'the woke' I only meant the ones I'm talking about, and since I'm choosing what that means let's just say part of the definition includes that they think racism is an even bigger problem than it is—whatever amount you think it's a problem, they think it's a bigger one, so even you think they are wrong! So as you can see I wrote precisely and correctly and you're an idiot who can't read."
But in fact it's all nonsense. This whole essay is a bunch of mealy-mouthed gibbering, because it relies so heavily on that kind of thing. It's either saying something boring that 99% of people already agree with, or it's expressing the more controversial (and dumber) thing that's getting everyone here worked up, but accusations of the latter can be deflected by claiming it's only doing the former (in which case, why bother writing it in the first place...?)
Essays like this are one of the few things LLMs are already entirely capable of replacing us for. Bad ones that mostly lack actual content, and don't even really need to be right because they're constructed such that they can't be wrong.
Isn't that Akin to arguing if something should be a 9.8 or a 9.5 on a completely arbitrary scale with no shared definition.
From what you say, anyone who disagrees about the nature or severity of the problem hasn't done the work and is flat out wrong.
If so, then the whole idea of wokeness collapses into the state of infallible enlightenment where everything one says is correct.
Hi, you’re right - we can’t understand what the other side means without a genuine discussion.
And the polarized ends of woke and anti-woke shouting aren’t going to achieve that.
So it’s important to engage with the (non-shouty) people in our lives who we can have those discussions with.
Moreover, I think the topic of discussion is important. Arguing about how important an issue is almost always is a waste of time and a distraction.
Issues aren't in a que where the most important get done first, and there is rarely a master calculation weighing them against eachother. When there is, it is called a budget, and that come into play after people have agreed upon what they would like to do.
We dont have to fix global racical justice before a pothole in the street just because the former is more important. If you want to talk about racial justice, policy proposals are concrete. Should we have job and education quotas, should we have race based criminal sentencing, how about diversion programs? Now these are topics with some meat on the bones.
Yeah, that's where he lost me too. I get the impression that in his head the firing of a college president is a bigger problem than racism.... like bro 24% of the world lives in a caste system. I don't know if human kind will ever be capable of treating people without preference across beauty, age, race, etc.
I'd be curious how he "sizes" the import of these problems (priggishness, prejudice) and whether it's just drawn directly from personal frustrations of a wealthy white billionaire in the most progressive state in the world.
> > Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…
Rich, coming from a rich white male. Hey, we're not lynching people anymore!
The whole point of "wokeness" is being legitimately aware of these issues and not just sweeping them under the rug with an "it's a problem, but not as bad as they say".
Therein lies the issue. Just because you believe it's a pervasive issue doesn't make it so. "Wokeness" has many parallels to the "Satanic panic" of the 1980s. People wanted others to be legitimately aware of the Satanic ritual abuse and not just sweeping them under the rug with an "it's a problem, but not as bad as they say".
We're talking about ongoing systemic and widespread social issues that are easily manifested through statistical evidence and therefore not dependent on my belief or your belief. I'm old enough to remember the 80s and no, this is not something like the "Satanic panic" and other similar panics. Not even close.
You're sounding like someone in the 60s saying "yeah, equal rights is a problem but not as bad as they say". The majority of white Americans at that time didn't think there was a problem with equal rights. In 1963, 60% of Americans had an unfavorable view of MLK's march on Washington. In 1964 a survey showed that a majority of New Yorkers felt that the "Negro civil rights movement had gone too far". etc. etc.
If you're not aware that there's a problem, __that's__ the problem.
>We're talking about ongoing systemic and widespread social issues that are easily manifested through statistical evidence and therefore not dependent on my belief or your belief.
Correlation != causation. Evidence of inequity is not evidence of inequality.
White and Asian men were systemically discriminated against for college acceptance up until a recent Supreme Court decision. That was an ongoing systemic and widespread social issue that was easily manifested through statistical evidence and therefore not dependent on my belief or your belief.
>I'm old enough to remember the 80s and no, this is not something like the "Satanic panic" and other similar panics. Not even close.
For sure, this time around it's even more detached from reality.
>You're sounding like someone in the 60s saying "yeah, equal rights is a problem but not as bad as they say".
Not at all, they were de jure discriminated against. Laws on the books, they clearly did not have equal rights, unlike now.
>If you're not aware that there's a problem, __that's__ the problem.
You haven't proven there is a problem, or that the problem is systemic, pervasive, or outsized. You believe that is the truth, and like the good Christians during the Satanic panic, you're clutching your pearls at the sight of people who don't believe your religion.
There is an entire cottage industry on Substack of people writing about Wokeness. It has been covered extensively and I do not feel like PG is adding anything new here.
IMO Freddie deBoer wrote the best definition of "Woke", something that many people fail to grasp.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiede...
I first heard the term from my ex-wife when she was involved with black politics in Chicago in 2014. At that time their definition was firmly in the "awareness of racial and social injustice". It was seemingly later twisted to mean hypocrisy or hyper political correctness. Redefining it seems to have nerfed any effect it once had.
That is not incompatible with pg's definition, if "raising awarenesss" dominates "doing something about it".
He said the word woke *described* the "awareness of racial and social injustice". He didn't say it was a mechanism for "raising awareness".
Let me ask you this: How does one, in your mind, do "something about it?"
PG's article focuses on "woke" as a kind of performative morality and you've gone out of your way to try an unify this original definition of "woke" with Paul's performative definition.
Was "woke" being used performatively in the 1930's when black folk advised other black folk to "stay woke" when traveling in certain parts of the country that were hostile to their existence?
When does the original definition start becoming incompatible with Paul's half-assed definition in your mind?
> Let me ask you this: How does one, in your mind, do "something about it?"
There's a lot of injustice in the US criminal justice system.
One way you can do something about it is to actually get into criminal justice. Study and become a lawyer, become a public defender, maybe become a judge one day. Or at least make very precise arguments about the where criminal justice reform can take place.
Instead, a lot people stop at making a internet comment about who the current system isn't good enough, while offering no viable alternative. A common complaint is that defendants are effectively bullied into taking guilty pleas even when they are fully innocent.
I think that part is true.
However, what's the remedy? You can't simply ban people from saying "yeah I'm actually guilty let's just move on with it". Not to mention the fact that takes away their agency.
You may ask prosecutors or LEO to stop being bullies. God knows that doesn't work.
So you need some technical solution to this part of criminal (in)justice. But instead, people will simply comment at the face value statement of plea deals are abused sometimes, and then move on.
edit: thought of another technical solution: body cams. If people on hackernews feel strongly about criminal injustice, I urge you to develop some technology about better and more viable body cams, a technology that protects everyone (including LEOs).
> The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary
In real life, these "land mines" don't usually explode unless people think you're stepping on it intentionally.
For instance, every time I've accidentally used the wrong pronoun for someone, I've gotten a polite correction, I make a mental note, and everyone moves on. It's just not a big deal.
With a large enough audience, there will always be someone who assumes you've acted with ill intent. But if you know you've done it innocently, then you can just ignore them and move on.
Intent matters. Those performative things communicate your intent to make others feel welcome and included. So if you fly off the handle at a reasonable request that would make a group of people feel more included, you've communicated your intent accordingly.
Occasionally, there are some purely performative things that don't actually make anyone feel more included. Personally, I think it's reasonable to ask that question if you're genuinely interested in finding the answer. However, purely performative things tend to disappear in time; so sometimes the most pragmatic response is to just go with the flow and see where things land.
I think what PGs article misses, pretty much completely, is a more accurate definition of the work woke, which is:
>A word used to label another's political beliefs and activism as incorrect and foolish, particularly if that person is seen as "left leaning" or "progressive."
In other words, it's common usage has devolved to mean "you're an idiot."
This is a travesty, really, because its use erases any chance to have an honest dialogue about the topics and behaviors being labelled as "woke."
For example, people could instead say: "I disagree with X behavior, and here's why." Instead, people say: "look at that woke idiot." (And really, this is not an exaggeration.)
The normal behavior you describe, of people pointing things out, with others' responding in kind, has little to do with the common usage of the word "woke," which has simply become a form of name-calling.
And it is unfortunate, because there is much to criticize about activists on the left, but name calling is in no way helpful, and instead, drives further reductive discourse.
This is it.
Well organised and destructive conservatives across much of the western world, have conspired successfully to nullify the positive effect of a word once used to elide wide ranging ideas and discussions on the subject of social justice.
This is social media at it's most galling.
Though alongside that, we now have a wider appreciation of a long list historical crimes, and the longstanding effect of those transgressions.
In that sense, we have all become 'woke'.
> Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop say
For example, is a discussion about the defacement of the Black Hills a 'priggish' waste of time, or a valuable lesson about the real history of the United States?
> In other words, it's common usage has devolved to mean "you're an idiot."
So liberals call conservative idiots "woke"? I think people have lost the plot here in trying to define this word.
> But if you know you've done it innocently, then you can just ignore them and move on.
For sensitive people that isn't really an option, it just causes endless stress.
The land mines do explode. Edinson Cavani got three match suspension after saying “Gracias Negrito” on social media to a teammate who just had a good game. And Spanish was his mother language.
The teammate was not offended in any way, but some authorities higher up apparently were.
Easier said than done. Intent does not matter. The vocal minority will instantly peg you a racist and those whispers will continue to persist. I have personally been through it. Unfortunately we exist in a world now where the vocal left and right pollute the airwaves.
And there I was, reading a comment earlier today about how HN is better than the other places because it prefers technical articles over "politics".
If you want technical articles with less politics, try the invite-only red site.
How do you get an invite?
By asking someone you know who has one.
The one thing I'll never understand are people using self-aggrandizing titles on things that are otherwise vacuous shitposts. It happens more with blogs than it does with actual, hardcover published books. Maybe "Ferromagnetism" by Bozorth but at least he discovered/invented a particular combination that works well so he gets a free pass by the virtue of it.
(to be clear i'm not calling Bozorth's work a shitpost, but you have to got to have balls to slam that kind of title on a textbook)
Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten. I don't think what pg is saying is anything new, he's always had the same sentiment around anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian/mob and pro-breaking-the-rules attitude.
It's called "hacker" news for a reason.
shrug Well I've been on HN for about 20 years, and I'm not anti-pg (he's about 50/50 by my accounting). I'm also anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian, anti-mob.
But he missed the mark here. It feels like he published a first-draft without getting any dissenting takes on one of the biggest hot-button topics on the web. I (or a million other people) would have been happy to read a draft of this and explain that he'd create offense and confusion with his... attempt to explain the history of priggishness around social justice based on his lived experience... if that's really what this is supposed to be.
NINE other millionaires read this weird, angry screed. Not a single one felt the need to gently guide Paul Graham towards the truth.
These people are willfully ignorant, but they're so arrogant that they think that they're right about everything.
> he'd create offense
That's sort of the point of the essay, he compares woke to a religion and explores how companies deal with various religious beliefs at work, ie: no one religion is ever allowed to suppress others no matter how righteous its believers feel or offended they may become.
I'm not sure why that's a bad thing or would create "confusion" in your mind.
The essay does much more than that. It makes a number of claims that are at best debatable and at worst unfounded, such as:
* The origin of woke-ism is university humanities departments
* Musk succeeded in "neutralising" wokeness on Twitter without censoring left-wing voices.
* Racism is (or should be) independent of linguistic context.
* That wokeness is a serious problem in the US.
He also makes liberal use of argument from incredulity, does not provide any facts, figures or citations to back up his claims, and suggests some very dubious moral standpoints (that it is wrong for university staff to get reported for sexual harassment).
That said, I do somewhat agree with you when you say "I don't think what pg is saying is anything new". In fact, he's never really said anything new, and he's always been prone to fallacious thinking. What's happened here is that he's exposed this more than ever before.
Also:
* That Bud Light was boycotted for excessive wokeness
if you create a product and it doesn't target the consumer with the right messaging you dont get sales
Exactly, this “hacker” news. Where does this screed from PG fit into that? If this was published by literally anyone else it wouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
Hacking isn't just about computer programming, you could call it a philosophy.
I would call hacking a culture more than a philosophy. Specifically it's a counterculture, much like the group that seems to have the ire of PG, who can (perhaps ironically) be seen here supporting the existing hegemony.
The version of hacking I’ve grown up with for 30 plus years has always had very little space in it for bad takes from rich people.
You’re commenting on the central megaphone of one of the biggest VC components in the valley ecosystem.
That it has “hacker” is seemingly incidental. This place has always had bad takes from rich people - or takes from people who are seeking to be rich by way of tech.
No, but see, it's called the _Democratic_ People's Republic of Korea. It's right there in the name.
> That it has “hacker” is seemingly incidental. This place has always had bad takes from rich people - or takes from people who are seeking to be rich by way of tech
Right, but hacker is the culture they have wrapped themselves in, and I'm commenting on that. I'm commenting on one of the markers of validity that matters to how people in this group evaluate the credibility of an argument.
The philosophy of hacking, traditionally, aligns far more with "wokeness" (using the good faith interpretation) than with the antiwoke, redpilled, capitalist neoreactionary ideology currently wearing its skin for clout.
I think tracking vibe shifts is interesting and noteworthy.
But he's not doing that. None of this essay is based in data.
> None of this essay is based in data.
That's exactly why it's a vibe shift.
I enjoy his technical and tech culture essays, ones like this are a waste of time and mental energy. I won’t read it because I know it provides zero value.
You won't read it based off of its title I presume? On Twitter he says how so many people jumped into conclusion without even reading the essay.
Btw this falls squarely into "tech culture" category.
It's hard to take him seriously when he claims X doesn't censor, despite their very blatant and open censorship. Hacker news has not gotten anti-pg, it's more that pg has become more vocally political and is now facing the consequences of that.
Case in point, anyone else posting a screed like this would instantly be flagged and removed.
This is a significantly less good piece of writing than many of his older essays. It can be as simple as that.
> Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten.
Frankly, I find it more concerning that anyone thinks HN should be pro Paul Graham by default. He should be judged by his ideas, not who he is.
He claims to be anti-censorship, yet he can't see Twitter is just as censored as it used to be because it aligns with his world view now. The same as the Left used to be blind to Right censorship. Maybe he should try tweeting "cis".
"pro-breaking-the-rules attitude" come on. He's aligning himself with the most conservative and powerful people in the world right now. How is that a rule breaking attitude?
You can be aligned on 99% of things and still be a rule breaker. Additionally it matters a lot how big and societally ingrained the rules that you're breaking are.
> You can be aligned on 99% of things and still be a rule breaker.
No, no you cannot. That makes you someone who broke a rule, not a rule breaker. There is some nuance to it which the English language is subpar at, but it’s the difference between something you are and something you did. Like being drunk VS being an alcoholic.
You’re a rule breaker if you have a pattern of breaking rules, not if you break literally one (percent of) rule.
> Additionally, it matters a lot how big and societally ingrained the rules that you're breaking are.
It does to an extent, yes, but Paul isn’t doing anything different here. He has the same conservative opinion as his billionaire friends. He is the establishment, cosplaying as a revolutionary.
Tech billionaire Paul Graham is the establishment.
Miss when his essays were actually about hacking!
Being anti-censorship is one thing that should, taken in isolation, have nothing to do with your object-level views. But in practice, those claims tend to correlate with very specific views, and they're applied hypocritically. Elon is the most high-profile recent example - I think it's hard to argue at this point that he had any principled anti-censorship views, given his behavior since taking over Twitter - but he's far from the only one.
You won't see PG writing an article on how homeless people in SF should be more pro-breaking-the-rules. Because it's OK to steal from your users, to inflate your growth numbers, to make false promises to build your initial userbase, but it's not OK not to shoplift from the Safeway or do drugs on the BART. That's the kind of breaking the rules that isn't cool, edgy, smart, and most importantly high status and beneficial to Paul Graham. Don't you think that double standard is a bit suspect, that he's "pro-breaking-the-rules" exactly when the rules restrain him and not others, when it's the rules he thinks are stupid and not the rules someone else thinks are stupid?
You won't see PG writing an article about how it's bad to deny a 15 year old medical information on puberty blockers. That is, undeniably, censorship in its very simplest form: it's the suppression of information out of a belief that it is in some way dangerous to let people know about it. But most of the people who claim to be so concerned with censorship won't say a word against it, and a lot actively support it, because it stops being "censorship" when it's something they like.
And, of course, the idea that the anti-woke crowd is "anti-authoritarian" is kind of laughable right now, given their response to the incoming administration.
The change isn't that his (or other tech elites') ostensible values have changed. It's that their ostensible values have become increasingly transparently hypocritical. PG hasn't become less of a hacker: it's "hacker culture" itself, especially as represented and hijacked by venture capital, that is not what we (or at least what I) hoped it was.
Rule breaking for me, and not for thee sums up my objection, I suppose.
I take it as more of an indicator of how much liberal sentiment has shifted over the last 15 or so years.
That plus the community having grown.
> it's called "hacker" news for a reason.
exactly, so why is a long political opinion piece from PG on wokeness here in the first place?
Yeah man, he's really breaking out of the mold by doing the exact same thing all the other SF billionaires are doing by sucking up to the right wing. Even braver and more punk of him, like Zuck, to only do it after the right wing won the election.
I'll give my opinion, as someone who used to hold pg in extremely high regard, but who is often surprised at just how thoroughly uninsightful pg's essays seem to me now.
The biggest problem I see with pg, and basically with all of the SV elite, is that I rarely see them question any of their assumptions or conclusions that don't lead them to "everything I've done is right, or at least the original goals of the 'SV ethos' is the best thing for society."
For example, take the concept of meritocracy. I completely agree that I think the "wokeness" of many on the left went way overboard in demonizing meritocratic processes, e.g. getting rid of advanced classes and opportunities for some students in the name of "fairness". At the same time, I rarely if ever see these SV kingpins suggest viable solutions to the fact that in the relatively new "winner take all" tech-led economy, very bad things happen if only a teeny meritocratic elite hoards all the wealth and leaves everyone else in an extremely precarious state. For a counterpoint as to someone who I do find insightful, consider Scott Galloway. He is definitely not someone who I would call woke, but he also understands some of the real problems so often ignored by the "tech utopianists".
In this particular pg essay, there is not much I disagree with, but I didn't really learn anything from it either. I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans." It's similar to how I feel about Zuckerberg's recent pronouncements. When I first heard them, most of them I agreed with and they made sense to me. Then I read the actual new "hateful conduct" guidelines and I almost threw up. I'm actually fine with being able to call gay people like me mentally ill - I'm willing to debate that 9 ways to Sunday. But kindly STFU about "free speech" when only gay and transgender people had a specific carve out to allow for their denigration. Like I have to listen to all this crazy religious bullshit that in a sane world we'd recognize as symptoms of schizophrenia, yet if I said that on FB that would go against their new hateful conduct guidelines.
Frankly, I see pg largely as another uninteresting SV elite: someone very, very smart and who obviously worked very hard, but who was also obviously extremely lucky and now thinks that his thoughts are worth so much more than anyone else.
> I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans."
Yep. IMO you struck right at the heart of it. My cynical POV is that pg, like many others, tries to be on the good side of who's now in power.
Everything else discussed in the article or here, as valid or interesting as it might be, looks to be a distraction from this central motivation.
ah yes an ill-informed whiny screed about wokeness is exactly the kind of content pg is good for. that's hacker content right there!
I thought it was more pro woke than anti pg, still I was surprised.
This is simply bad writing. And it's also quite offensive given the origin (and ultimate conservative perversion) of the term "woke."
HN has many of those who have gone through the indoctrination process in college that he describes in the essay.
It is extremely silly and in bad faith to accuse anyone to disagree with of indoctrination, but it's even sillier when every single tech bro is basically the same person, reads the same books, repeats the same topics, on the same day using the same phraseology.
You could have literally taken this essay from PG posted it on the timeline of any single one of his colleagues and you couldn't even tell who wrote it. The "anti woke" economy, if you look at the numbers accounts of that flavor do on Youtube, Twitter et al. is a magnitude if not larger than what, according to them, cannot be criticized.
The phrase "woke mind virus" also featured in this essay, is more of a literal meme or mind virus in the Dawkins sense of that term than anything it attempts to address. The lack of awareness to accuse others of indoctrination when you write an essay so generic that you can autocomplete the last 90% after reading the first 10% chatgpt style is quite something.
It’s just the people online posting non-stop. The rest of us, checking in only when time allows, are not commenting 30 times in a single thread. (Check some of the posters here)
Same thing happened with the rest of the nonsense over the last 5 years. From social media you would think everyone took the clot shot. 1/3 didn’t but you’d never have known that from HN or other social media.
There is a small but loud contingent who wants to dictate our language, how we teach our children, and what we put in to our bodies. The good news is most people are not stupid and are completely rejecting it - in real life.
[flagged]
My reddit account was permanently banned for _upvoting_ vaccine hesitancy.
“Bro” but you did.
The federal government censored speech it didn’t like by PAYING social media to delete it. In many instances it was content that was objectively true.
Public schools are right now telling children in kindergarten they can choose their own gender. They cannot.
The federal government wanted to implement policies to require administration of an experimental gene therapy, that didn’t even work and was never even tested for protection against transmission, and many many people were forced in to taking it if they wanted to keep their job.
I’ve voted for left progressive candidates for 20 years but I can’t vote for this shit any more and judging by the recent election neither can over half of America. Have fun crying about trump for the next four years.
Requiring the vaccine wasn’t “requiring experimental gene therapy” since we had, and continue to have, old school style vaccines for COVID.
I know plenty of people that didn’t want to risk the newer stuff, but understood the collective issue of getting to herd immunity and took the normal version of the vaccine. To me this was very straightforward logic.
The covid vaccines were never tested for transmission.
How does herd immunity make any sense when it was never tested for transmission?
I attended a corporate training on harassment where it said you can’t say “all hands” because it’s disrespectful toward people without hands. Use “town hall” instead.
On one hand, sure it’s an easy substitution to make. On the other hand, who decides these things? How does this affect our company? Do people without hands actually care? It all adds up and it’s wearisome like PG says, all these rules and you just try to avoid stepping on one.
I find this highly highly suspect as an anecdote without some supporting evidence
A quick search suggests this is a bit of a running meme used to discredit and poke fun at such trainings rather than something you’ve honestly experienced.
Here's an article that was posted here a long time ago:
https://it.wisc.edu/learn/inclusive-language-for-it/
It attempts to replace, or offer alternatives to, offensive language in IT. For example "dummy variable" is under the category of "Ableist language" in the website and should be replaced with the term "placeholder value". "master" and "slave" are other examples of language that, apparently, need to get phased out.
I don't see the problem with the comment that you responded to. It's not surprising to me.
> I don't see the problem with the comment that you responded to. It's not surprising to me.
The problem is that you provide other examples and then extrapolate from there that the original comment could be true. However, whether or not you believe it could be true is not serious evidence that it is.
Yes, offering alternative wording to offensive language is a real thing. But notice that the OP is asserting that a facially silly example is real without any support beyond a claim of personal experience. What should matter to you is whether it is real or not as opposed to whether it is surprising or not.
Fake silly examples like this are meant to sit on the line between believable and absurd specifically to make certain ideas seem ridiculous. Making up silly examples of real things is a specific technique to undermine them. It is a propaganda tool not a good faith attempt at dialogue.
C.f., people making up stories about litter boxes in schools to try and undermine efforts to protect the rights of gender non-conforming children (https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/30/how-furries-got-swept...)
So the story is highly suspect because ..... ? Because the author didn't provide you with evidence on a message board, in order to pre-emptively defend himself against your scrutiny? Because of some unrelated episode where somebody else fabricated a story as a form of propaganda? And you think that justifies your belief that the story is fake? Right. Good luck with your future conversations.
I was obviously speaking on its plausibility.
>The problem is that you provide other examples and then extrapolate from there
You mean like your link?
I giggled at what you did here! High five!
How much money do you have to have before your beliefs stop changing like a flag in the political wind?
To be fair to pg, he has hinted at anti-radical-left beliefs before (see the essay about moral fashions). He is probably able to voice anti-radical-left views now because the Overton Window has shifted.
PG has always been annoyingly consistent about his views on this.
pg has been pretty consistent in this position for a long time. His worldview is closest to what one could call "classical liberalism":
Free speech, economic liberalism, civil liberties, individual autonomy.
That's a worldview that is pretty idiosyncratic today (sadly).
On some topics he's "left wing" (pro palestine), on others he's "right wing" (anti affirmative action in university admissions).
> The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.
Word.
Everyone agrees with this. Obviously, the problem is determining what is true. There is significant disagreement. This is the root of the problem, not that people are preventing other people from saying things that they themselves believe are true.
The problem comes from deciding what's true. It's factually true to say that a higher percentage of black people than white people are convicted felons. It's also grossly negligent to describe that as a cause ("black people have higher tendencies to become criminals") than as an effect ("centuries of systemic racism held higher numbers of black people in poverty, and poverty highly correlates to the kind of criminal behavior that gets you arrested, and also lower quality legal representation, which makes it more likely that the next generation will also be poor; lather, rise, repeat").
Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.
TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
To expound, "black people are more likely to be felons" is only true (in the truest sense of the word "true") given a clear definition of what "likely" means, and the conditions under which the statement is true.
The statement could easily be interpreted as either:
- when selecting a random black person and a random white person out of the current American population, there is a statistically higher chance that the black person is a felon than the white person
- black people are more inclined towards committing felonies than white people, and will continue to do so at a higher rate
These have very different meanings, but are both fair and natural interpretations of the information-deficient statement "black people are more likely to be felons". Given that, the statement will likely cause more confusion and argument than clarity, and so is a bad statement.
There's a term for lying with carefully selected truths: Paltering.
> Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they're not being as deceptive as liars.
It also lets the liar try to trap rebuttals with gotchas. In this case, “so you’re saying there aren’t a higher percentage of black people in prison? A-ha! Facts, not feelings!”, or something stupid like that. Then you have to waste time with that, to which they’ll reply, “so you admit they’re more likely, a-ha!”
I’ve found it more effective to just say “you’re wrong” and move on. The end result of the argument is the same, and it gets them all riled up, which is generally what they’d hoped to inflict on others.
True things which make you a jerk (to some) shouldn't be censored to avoid "distorting the conversation". Respondents can explain the context.
I would generally agree, but in many cases 1) people don't read the comments/replies, 2) interesting responses get drowned out by low-quality responses, 3) the criteria by which useful responses get highlighted can be skewed by a variety of factors, including vote brigading and algorithmic bias or sometimes just a bias towards the earliest comments (which get upvotes, which then get more views, which get more upvotes).
The flipslide is trolls will spew out the lies faster than you can rebut them. Much faster. Orders of magnitude faster. The lie is short, pithy, and requires little thought. The truth require context and effort. After a lie has been rebutted several times there is little value in allowing it to be repeated constantly. Eventually the truth tellers get worn down and the lie is allowed to live on in perpetuity, allowing more and more people to believe it over time.
So who gets to be arbiter of truth? and what is the recourse if they are wrong?
No one, and nothing.
That is a view which is entirely opposed to my own. I have no faith that there is some authoritative entity that could objectively determine what is a lie and what is the truth.
Well said. It surprises me so many people don't see the danger inherent in anointing 'fact checkers' who are supposed to adjudicate some objective "truth" around complex culture war issues along with the power to suppress other viewpoints.
Free speech isn't free. We pay for it by tolerating speech that's unpleasant, uncomfortable, wrong, insulting, offensive or hateful.
If you don't act against disinformation, you get a world that is spammed with so many statements that it's impossible for the average consumer to assess the truth of any of them.
Is that what you want?
If yes, why? If not, what's your approach?
Let people be wrong
That's great until it convinces them to make real-world decisions that affect the rest of us. For instance, vaccine misinformation talked a lot of people against getting safe (or at least safer than the illness), effective (not perfect, but effective) immunity shots for COVID. Those people are dead from being wrong.
I think someone's an idiot for denying the moon landings, but their ignorance doesn't directly affect my ability to stay alive and health. Some misinformation is worse than others.
Judges are fallible, therefore a judicial system is impossible!
The corrosive effect of suppressing potential misinformation is far worse than allowing it to spread.
I already stated my approach. Let speech be met by more speech in return. Consumers can assess the credibility of each.
But your approach results in someone who can't even conceive of the truth being identifiable. It doesn't seem like a great way to run a society.
Having the power to determine truth does not seem like a great way to run a society even if it gets you some easy wins on other fronts.
It might work at first and be effective for some time in the same way that a dictator can "get things done" but there is no free lunch.
Eventually you will get evil dictators, power hungry arbitrators of truth. It will bite you. It is only a question of when. It might be years or generations. The only winning move is not to play. Don't concentrate the power in the first place.
I am unable to connect your sentence to what I said.
> I have no faith that there is some authoritative entity that could objectively determine what is a lie and what is the truth.
I read this as "it is impossible to determine truth". If there exists a well resourced entity who's entire purpose in life is to determine objective truth and they are unable to do so what chance do I have?
You just have to use your best judgement like everybody else.
> Consumers can assess the credibility of each.
Assuming intelligence is normally distributed, then what's the plan for the bottom 50% here?
As stated.
Understood. It's an interesting long-term strategy to revive Feudalism.
More a strategy to avoid totalitarianism.
By leaving the bottom 50% to be propagandized by populists?
If we were still living in the time of thirteen channels and Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, I'd be inclined to agree with you.
An elite thinking that they know the truth and should suppress falsehoods is much more dangerous, so yes.
> Consumers can assess the credibility of each.
I ain't doing all that work. I'm picking whatever I already believe in.
/s but only kind of. That's how most people think. They aren't enlightened like you.
The opposite of “truth” is not “lie”, however.
I agree that the government should not censor statements that don't violated specific laws.
I am strongly convinced that any person or organization has the right to moderate content flowing through the systems they host. If you want to say "I don't believe the Holocaust happened", that should be your legal right. It should be my legal right to tell you, "go get your own soapbox to spout that nonsense. You're not doing it on my dime."
This presumes a high, perhaps delusional, level of faith in the public speaking space to determine what is "true."
What are some true things you cannot say? Enumerate some, please.
> saying "colored people" gets you fired
But not arrested.
Freedom of association is a thing.
Can you elaborate? I want to take you seriously but I don't get your point.
There are very few situations where speech leads to incarceration, and I don't think PG is talking about those, is he?
My point is that "cannot say" is pure hyperbole. Your freedom to say whatever you want is not impinged, and my equivalent freedom to shun you based on what you say is similarly unimpinged.
Usually when people complain about what you "can't say", what they actually mean is they can't say whatever they like and still have people still employ / socialise / be nice to them.
Expressing opinions that others find disagreeable is not a protected class.
Pure hyperbole is pure hyperbole.
If you want to shun me for not loudly enough pronouncing how great some sort of special privileges for certain ostensibly oppressed classes is, or for not jumping enthusiastically enough though hoops referencing people with exactly the most woke-community prescribed terminology, then chances are I don't particularly to associate with you either. That's fine.
If you start telling lies about me online and try to incite a mob to threaten or harm me and the people who do opt to socialize with me (despite or maybe even because of my opinions), or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Of course that would still not literally make me unable to pronounce my woke-taboo opinion, but it should nonetheless be obvious that trying to wreck my life is a disproportionate response merely to me not toeing the line you took it upon yourself to draw. What you "can't say" is almost always graded rather than absolute, but active hostility destroying months or years of a person's life is well into the territory that constitutes a real hindrance for freely expressing an opinion.
> If you start telling lies about me online and try to incite a mob to threaten or harm me and the people who do opt to socialize with me (despite or maybe even because of my opinions),
Both of these things are already well-litigated limits on speech. I.e. - it's already illegal.
> or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Either your views are so taboo that most of society doesn't want anything to do with you if you express them, or they're mainstream enough that only some people don't want to associate with you. If it's the former, then yes, you might struggle to find a sympathetic employer and that warrants some introspection. If it's the latter, then you're hardly at risk of having your livelihood taken away.
The alternative is that I should be forced to employ someone who fundamentally disagrees with my right to exist (and perhaps owns lots of guns).
Oh yes, point well taken, thanks for the extra context.
In a first instance? Unlikely.
If you KEEP saying it, despite being told that it's making your coworkers uncomfortable, then you're just being an asshole, and sorry, people don't like working with assholes.
What if the uncomfortable coworkers are wrong?
Can the people demanding more censorship ever be wrong?
I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
While the sentiment sounds good on paper, in practice it far too often is someone complaining that you can't demand a black men to be lynched if they have a white girlfriend anymore because society has gone all woke.
There are lots of things that aren't 'PC' to say anymore and that doesn't mean society is failing. In fact I would argue that it is just plain old progress, especially when it is accompanied by a number of things that we can now say that used to be taboo.
Out with: "Gay people should be burned at the stake."
In with: "Contraception allows families to decide when to have children."
> I like to follow a statement like that up with: What exactly did you want to say that you can't anymore? Please give some specific examples.
At one company, we instituted "opportunistic hiring" policies. A certain portion of our engineering headcount was reserved for women. Men explicitly could not be hired using the headcount put under the "opportunistic hiring" pool. However, it was absolutelyy forbidden to mention that gender was used as a factor in hiring.
Yes, we straight up banned one gender from a portion of our head count. But nobody could say that one gender had greater headcount than the other. That was considered offensive harassment. The same managers that would hire women under their "opportunistic hiring" pool one day would admonish other people for suggesting that women were beneficiaries of discrimination the next.
Another example: 9 out of 10 people shot and killed by police are men. Is this evidence of sexism against men in police? If I say that I don't believe that the police are sexist, but rather this disparity is due to the fact that men commit proportionally more acts of violence than women, is such an opinion sexist against men?
In many circles, pointing to the fact that the racial breakdown in policy shootings matches the racial breakdown in violent crime, with the same strength of correlation as the gender breakdown in shootings, is considered racist. In fact, even acknowledging a disparity in the rates of violent crime is considered racist by many (even if one states that poverty and historic injustice are the causes of the racial disparity in crime).
I'm very curious how you came to the conclusion that Paul was thinking of statements like "gay people should be burned at the stake" when he writes, "the number of true things we can't say should not increase".
I have a specific example in mind, but I fear that if I mention it, I'll be doxxed, cancelled, fired, and burned at the stake.
Why are the tech elite and right so obsessed with this term? It’s such a bizarre phenomenon - I can’t wrap my head around it.
Tech elite currently enjoy disproportionately large benefits from rampantly un-balanced systems that allow them to exploit people for their work and therefore they stand to lose quite a bit from any rebalancing of said systems.
Basically, workers get nothing and CEOs get everything.
It represents something they can't control and which could ultimately be used to take them down a peg or two, if not more, by ostracizing them in the public's eyes.
tl;dr - They are afraid.
For over 20 years I've been clicking on pg's essays, knowing that I can look forward to an interesting and insightful read. I can no longer assume that.
Would this have gotten front page if it wasn't pg? Because I think I know the answer to that.
It's not surprising that people come to PG's commenting site to comment on PG's writings.
Front page dynamics are complicated. I won't say you're wrong, but you might be wrong. Time of day (for instance) can have a huge effect.
His accounting for what attracts people to wokeness is incomplete. Certainly there are prigs in the mix, but for most, I think it's that wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously. The challenge, then, is how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously without also folding that effort into an ideology with vague expansive definitions that lend themselves to actual prigs.
What attracted me to it is the idea that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. are forms of bullying that are definitively antisocial. At its core, it should be about stopping bullying at the level of individuals, society, and institutions.
And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.
That’s just how the prigs justify to themselves being prigs.
> wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously.
I'm not sure that's true. Wokeness doesn't focus on actual harassment; it focuses on accusations of harassment, with a definition of "harassment" that is highly subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate very well with actual harassment.
> how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously
The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
> The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Taking it seriously is a prerequisite for any effective mechanism for reducing sexual harassment.
It’s pretty much orthogonal.
Many of the people most “taking it seriously” do the least to reduce its prevalence. Some are actually harassers.
I'm not so sure. See my response to triceratops.
I feel like when this all started out the problem was really taking it more seriously. People would talk and complain about it and no one would take them seriously. So the group managed to scrounge together enough power to force it to happen.. And then some of that power got misused. It's still better than it was before it started, though.
> It's still better than it was before it started, though.
Is it? To hear wokeness advocates talk, things have gotten worse.
Yes, it is. Unequivocally.
You might be overindexing on the loud voices.
> The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
Same principle applies.
Politicians claiming to take murder and robbery more seriously don’t necessarily do anything to actually reduce their prevalence.
Yes. All analogies suck to various extents, but, "murder" and "robbery" are pretty apt analogies.
A lot of problems can only addressed systemically.
Murder? Yes, an excellent start to solving this problem is to not murder anybody. That's really the single most important thing you do.
And yet, history shows, other people are going to do murders and simply not murdering people yourself is not sufficient to deal with this problem. You need to intervene or call for help if you see somebody getting murdered, and we need some sort of system to deal with murderers and protect other people from them, etc.
If murder is too extreme a metaphor for the anti-woke crowd, how about pissing on the bathroom floor? It's great if you are not pissing on the floor, but somebody is and we all have to walk on that floor, so we need to have some kind of community standards around it, and also somebody needs to clean up that piss.
How do we take murder or robbery seriously? We say we do that by making and enforcing laws against murder and robbery. But do we actually do what we say?
How many innocent people get convicted of murder because of our desire to "take murder seriously"? (The Innocence Project has found that the answer is "quite a lot".) Note that every time an innocent person gets convicted, it means a guilty person (the actual murderer) goes free.
How many murderers get released back into society to murder again because our desire to take something else "seriously" has somehow overridden proper enforcement of our laws against murder? (I don't know if any specific study has looked at this, but my personal sense is, again, "quite a lot".)
So no, the lesson of experience appears to be that "taking it more seriously" is not a good way to reduce how often some bad thing happens, with murder just as with sexual harassment.
So, there are (at least) two axes here, right?
"How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
In the case of murder in America, I would say the answers are "extremely seriously" and "we are doing a very imperfect job."
We should certainly do a better job of it, but I don't think the answer is to be less serious about murder. And -- clearly, I'd hope -- the point of the analogy is that some (many? most?) problems are societal.
Simply choosing to not murder people yourself is a great start, but it is a society-wide issue that can't be completely addressed by people simply choosing to do the right things on an individual basis.
> "How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
Conceptually, yes, these two things are separate. However, that does not mean these two things are independent of each other.
As you note, we take murder extremely seriously, but we do a poor job of reducing the number of murders. I think that is because we think, hey, we're taking murder really seriously, so we must be reducing the number of murders. In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously" will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing. But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite. Maybe if we paid less attention to how "seriously" we are taking murder, and more attention to actually reducing the number of murders, even if many of the things we ended up doing to accomplish that had no obvious relationship to murder and didn't look at all like "taking murder seriously", we might do a better job.
In the case of sexual harassment, similarly, "taking it seriously" does not seem to have helped in reducing its frequency; it might even have done the opposite (at least one commenter elsewhere in this thread has said they believe things have gotten worse).
> it is a society-wide issue
There is a very general society-wide issue that the things we are discussing are special cases of: how should a society deal with the fact that there will always be some proportion of people who, for a variety of reasons, don't want to behave as good members of society?
Because this issue is very general, it requires very general solutions (or maybe "mitigations" would be a better term--you can't "solve" the issue in the sense of just making such people not exist any more). But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment, does not help in finding a very general solution to the very general issue. It often hinders it, by inducing people to mistake symptoms for the root cause. The root cause is not "too many people like to murder" or "too many people like to sexually harass others". The root cause is the very general one I gave above: some people just don't want to be good members of society. Society's method of dealing with this should be similarly general. Specific applications might vary in the details, but the general principle is still the same.
In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously"
will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing.
But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite
I agree, though, that America proves that taking it seriously certainly isn't enough to prevent it.
(It's also worth noting that per capita violent crime in America has plummeted since the 90s, with no major changes in the way we handle such things...)
But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of
this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment
For example: focusing on overly rigid standards of speech to the point where nobody wants to say anything at all, a focus on overly harsh punishment instead of education/remediation, etc.
I will also share that I, personally, have seen the devastation that a provably false #metoo accusation can wreak.
Still, I strongly object to the idea that the efforts of organizations to address the "social justice" causes lumped into the category of "wokeness" are automatically bad. I don't think that's a useful discussion. It is a thing to discuss one policy at a time.
Thank you for saying this.
Maybe I could refine it to, what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things. I do think good comes out of it, along with bad. But we can set that aside and refine the point that I don't think the majority of people who initially went along with wokeness were aggressively conventionally minded nor prigs. I think his essay would be more persuasive if he acknowledged that there is an earnest desire to do good mixed in with it, which makes it a thornier issue. Otherwise, people who were or are into wokeness who are not prigs, or merely afraid of running afoul of etiquette, will probably dismiss the essay.
> what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things
While I agree that this is true, I think the point pg makes in his article could be extended to a general rule that, if you find your earnest desire to do good things is leading you to embrace something like wokeness, you need to take a step back. The best way to do good things is to do good things--in other words, to find specific things that you can do that are good, based on your specific knowledge of particular people and particular cases, and do them. Participating in general efforts to micromanage people to make them do good things, or to stop them from doing bad things, which is what wokeness is, is a very poor way to make use of your earnest desire to good things.
Some people compare wokeness to a religion, and I think this is somewhat of an apt description. There’s a meme going around about abortion or whatever that says that it’s fine if you’re religious and you want to limit yourself, but your religion shouldn’t limit me, and this is how I feel about most social justice stuff.
I read woke/social justice stuff to shape my own understanding of the world and then use that to act to help people in substantive ways, but I don’t really believe in proselytizing. This way of thinking is not for everyone, nor should it be.
> There’s a meme going around about abortion or whatever that says that it’s fine if you’re religious and you want to limit yourself, but your religion shouldn’t limit me
It's interesting that you bring this up, because I know quite a few people who are not religious (agnostic or atheist), one of whom is myself, who still believe that abortion is, if not actual murder, at least tantamount to it, and should not be done except in extreme cases (what exactly counts as an "extreme case" can vary, but the point is that "getting pregnant because of consensual sex that unexpectedly resulted in a pregnancy, and having an abortion to avoid the inconvenience of a pregnancy and then putting the child up for adoption" is not an extreme case). I can't speak to other people's detailed grounds for this belief, but in my own case, I believe that, at some point fairly early in the development of an embryo/fetus (in an online discussion on another forum some years ago I argued that that point was implantation; another such point that was argued by, IIRC, Carl Sagan, is when the fetus first shows brain activity), the embryo/fetus has interests that deserve protection in much the same way that the interests of a very young child who can't yet recognize their own interests or take action to protect them on their own deserve protection.
In other words, I don't buy the argument made by at least a fair number of pro-abortion people that it's all about the woman's control over her own body and no other interest deserves to be weighed. I think there are reasons that even a rationalist humanist should accept, or at least give strong consideration to, for rejecting such an argument.
I'm not trying to argue for such a point of view here; I'm simply describing it to illustrate that I don't think all such disagreements can be boiled down to religious belief. There can be arguments based on considerations that are much more general, to the point where they at least have a claim to be considered by anyone who wants to be a good member of a civil society.
The problem is how to reduce how often actual
sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more
seriously" is a very vague and ineffective
way to do that.
I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."
a definition of "harassment" that is highly
subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate
very well with actual harassment.
You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.
"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.
If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.
But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.
This essay might win an award for having the most words for the simplest point made. The genuflecting and synthesized history lesson that it's the first 3/4 of it was an entirely unnecessary diversion.
There is and always will be those who take earnest and reasonable ways of describing beliefs and behaviors and turn them into hyperbolic ad-hominem at both ends of the spectrum. If we are aware of it, and use common sense and a little bit of critical thinking, there will be less of this.
Did that take pages of text? No.
Paul was on the board of, and advisor to, many of these companies that exported their culture to the world through their products and services. He wasn't the black sheep of the group whom others simply ignored and promoted their own independent political convictions.
I don't understand what this comment is trying to say, but the image of pg being on the board of companies (other than one that he founded) is pretty funny. I can't imagine him wanting to do that.
There is reason why he is writing this now. He did not get rich by having an opinion.
Everyone less empathetic than me is a bigot.
Everyone more empathetic than me is just virtue signaling.
There’s no use in talking about the origins of something by basing it purely on subjective experience. This comment section is bigger than it needs to be and too many are taking the author’s version of history at face value.
> I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to 2014 > our users were about three times more likely to upvote something if it outraged them.
I see how upvotes were detected. But outrage?
> a mob of angry people uniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired
Worth noting that this arose by the specific design of the social media ownership. The "correct" side was artificially boosted and the incorrect side was censored. The outraged would have just cancelled each other out otherwise.
1300 comments seems a bit... overkill. The article is overall very pragmatic and doing exactly what the title says. Ofc this is all a soft science, so there will inevitbly be some interpretations that aren't agreeable, and no "source to back it up".
just one tiny nitpick though:
>Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups,
"quietly" is indeed a way to literally silence such progress. You don't need to be prigish about it, but you should indeed be advertising yourself and the efforts of the groups. as well as what actions to take to help relive this. It's easier than ever in the age of the internet. Any charity will tell you that awareness is one of the most important aspects of their organization. Likewise here.
I have no respect for the people like Graham who are only voicing their objections now that the election results provide cover.
Graham has always strongly opposed censorship, group think, purity spirals etc.
But he wasn’t willing to write an article like this until Trump’s election provides him cover. It’s funny how many moderate liberals have suddenly found their voices.
"What you can't say" (https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) is 21 years old now.
"Heresy" (https://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html) was during Biden's tenure.
"Orthodox Privilege" (https://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html) was during the height of lockdown-era BLM.
"Keep your Identity Small" (https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html) is from the beginning of Obama's tenure.
Criticizing "wokeness" today is not at all inconsistent with PG's historically stated opinions and beliefs.
That's not fair. He's been vocal about it on Twitter for years, for example.
Btw pg is as anti-Trump as he is anti-woke. I wonder how many heads in this thread would not explode if they really took that in.
Summary: Old successful man thinks the social justice movement is unnecessary and stupid. Also, twitter is better since Elon.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
It seems that the defining factor is that there was no actual authority attached to the morality of the situation. He is essentially saying that life was better when one could get away with doing whatever they wanted with no repercussions.
This is such a well-travelled path that I am surprised his intellect, nor that of the people that he claims proof-read this document, didn't protest before hitting 'publish'.
Here's a question: how can social justice actually be justice without enforcement. The US constitution coded this as the 13th amendment - is that now a woke document? Is that an example of "radicals getting tenure", or is it example of progress?
Articles like this really don't age well. Neither, it seems, does the author.
I found it extremely odd that he specifically pointed out professors being sexist as a thing that's perfectly fine to let them get away with.
I live in Europe (Germany) and we have no wokeness here. Saying something sexist or racist isn't a big deal. Some people will think you are an asshole and that's it. Our leftists go to the US and come back ranting about how oppressive wokeness is. I'm a minority myself and have experienced my fair share of racism. But I have no desire to push for somebody to get fired for making a racist joke or some such thing. I will just lower my opinion of them and move on with my life. I don't want to live in a country where a wrong word at the wrong time might mean you're fired.
Germany has laws against hate speech! There are opinions you can be jailed for in Germany that you couldn't be in the US.
I think it depends on the word and the context. If the person speaking is your boss, there might be situations where 'moving on' isn't an option and the words might have wider implication in your life.
Germany actually has several laws in place that explicitly protect people in the workplace, such as the General Equal Treatment Act (2006, with revisions to 2022) which contains an explicit treatment of Harrassment, specifically mentioning that of a sexual nature.
Going further, in a judgment dated from 06.12.2021, LAG Cologne, sexual harrassment was explicitly stated as acceptable grounds for extraordinary dismissal. So actually you already live in exactly that kind of country.
https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...
What I think you're trying to say, though, is that you don't experience the kind of angry fanatical discourse that seems to a big feature of social media and US discourse, where laws are being weaponised and used as blunt political instruments, with which to do as much damage to society as possible.
In this case, I agree with you and am super grateful I don't live there.
"When your market was determined by geography, you had to be neutral. But publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography" is interesting! I'd never thought of that being the cause of news polarization, but as a story it makes sense.
As a minority in the US, I experienced little to no overt racism from 2014 to the present, following years of derogatory comments and unsolicited "jokes" about my ethnicity from people who weren't fundamentally racist but still thought it was OK to say those things. I attribute this change directly to the rise of wokeness (read: awareness) around 2015 and thus have a soft spot in my heart for it, even if some of its excesses over the years have made me roll my eyes.
I sadly suspect we’re going to see some risk adverse hiring of boring white dudes in all positions of leadership. Regardless of competence.
We’re already seeing DEI weaponized. Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not. Organizations will be risk adverse and only hire the most boring white dude they can find from central casting. Whatever you want to say about diversity initiatives this will be a pretty terrible outcome.
> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.
That sentiment ("any mistake is because they're a DEI hire") is obviously wrong. But didn't DEI open itself up for that accusation by lending it some truth? It's a fact that black doctors have lower GPAs than Asian doctors on average.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors, not the blackest doctors. I don't want more black doctors, I want the best doctors, regardless of their skin color. If you want more black doctors, you should train better black doctors. However, if you're going to do that, don't be surprised when white trainees band together to work harder too. If it's fair for your side, it's fair for every side.
I have no idea why we went backwards from "discrimination based on skin color is never okay" to "it's okay if they're black" but there's no reason not to simply recognize the mistake, fix it, and move on.
> The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors
What I mean by "easy" is "quick and superficial." Hiring the most competent doctors delays achieving the statistic of "more black doctors," so it's not the "easy way" I'm talking about. It takes time for education to come up to par in black communities, because they're poorer for historical reasons. The right (and harder, because it's not doable via a means that the DEI people directly control---hiring) way is to put money where it's needed for education, and "more black doctors" will be a ripple effect achieved without discrimination.
If you are going to train black doctors, then you need to enrol them in universities. If you don’t want tu use scholarships or quotas, then you must make sure that those black candidates actually do good in high school, otherwise it’s DEI.
If you are giving scholarships or subsidies to black teenagers so they can eventually get into a university, that’s also DEI, so better subsidise their families so they can get a better primary education and upbringing… but that’s also DEI.
So you keep going back and the “solution” is basically to do nothing and keep the status quo.
> If you are giving scholarships or subsidies to black teenagers so they can eventually get into a university, that’s also DEI, so better subsidise their families so they can get a better primary education and upbringing… but that’s also DEI.
Looking at this in terms of race is misguided. Don't do anything for "black people," just help "poor people" get better educations by giving more money to poor schools. A lot of "poor" schools are actually black schools, but not all, so more than just black people will benefit; and not all black people are poor, so we won't waste resources on those who already have them.
Defining DEI as "doing anything about the problem" and then saying that DEI opponents therefore don't want to do anything about the problem is a lazy bait-and-switch that I wish we would all recognize and stop doing.
I think there is a deep seated concern that this could exacerbate the problem if poor people white people are able to take advantage of that help to a greater degree than poor black people.
I dont see how doing nothing is the logical conclusion of tracing things back to the root cause, or why non-racial solutions cant be implemented at any of the levels.
What is wrong with helping poor people get better primary education? What is wrong with making university cheaper and more accessible?
These types of things should help black people, as well as hispanic, asian, or white people that start with a disadvantage.
I don't think people regard scholarships as DEI. Lowering the standards for university admissions a la SFFA v. Harvard, yes, but scholarships to pay for university is distinct from discrimination in admissions.
Also, society can tackle problems like the study time gap https://fburl.com/oa3uenrr
> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.
This isn't restricted to tech.
"I'm French when I score, Arab when I don't" - Karim Benzema.
LinkedIn has a DEI jobs category in their Jobs section. How is that a qualification to do a job?
Why exactly is that a terrible outcome? What's wrong with boring white dudes?
Nothing. But if people are afraid of NOT hiring boring white dudes it becomes not about competence but about avoiding the optics of not wanting to look like you’re doing a DEI thing
Things will play out differently in the public and private sectors. But if you take Trump's cabinet selections as a bellwether then there are people of a variety of races, sexes, and backgrounds.
I find it hard to take seriously the notion that anybody serious is arguing for "let's go back to all white dudes" as a response to DEI. Sure...it's going to happen because nepotism and cliques aren't going away. But on the whole, it seems people want to move towards competence/merit being the only factors in play.
Will it get there? Time will tell, but there will invariably be issues. Your execution can be wrong, even if your philosophy is right. But if your philosophy is wrong (we need x% minority engineers, x% trans engineers, x% female engineers), you'd be hard pressed to avoid bad implementation.
"We are having a hard time hiring all the people we want. It doesn't matter what they look like" John Carmack
It doesn't matter what the people want in this case, but rather what the public relations look like.
OP posits that any non-white person in a position of responsibility is going to be blamed as a "DEI hire" if something happens under their watch regardless of their actual competence, because that's the kind of headlines that drive engagement with a certain audience. And I think that's a justified fear - just look at the current brouhaha over California fires.
The whole "pale, male and stale" narrative is antiwhite racism. I don't think people should perpetuate it.
White men hold almost all the power in America. I can't reconcile this fact with the idea that there is some conspiracy against white men. Can you provide some more context on what you mean?
Nobody alleged a conspiracy.
The claim is simple: using words to mock a group, hurts that group.
This is still true when the group is one that you consider to "hold almost all the power".
Holding power is irrelevant to the harm caused by actions like insulting people or discriminating against them.
Abbot and Costello - Who's on First - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU
SNL - Republican or Not - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h_N80qKYOM
If one desires understanding and learning about the world, one must remain curious and humble. Unfortunately curious and humble people are generally not as emotionally and more importantly, politically activated.
So a politician may go looking for a subject that will be emotionally activating to as many people as possible. It barely matters whether more people will be on their side or the other side. As long as the fight is going, they will get engagement.
It is very difficult to motivate a person towards a complex world where the other side is made of humans (sinners, but still human).
It is much easier to motivate a person towards a simple world where their own side is righteous and the other side is composed of demons.
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So, is the other side made of sinners or demons?
My main criticism is that wokeness when applied rationally could be a social lubricant. Ban a few words and expressions at work, and suddenly your hiring pool is way bigger. People shouldn't be using words like that at work anyway.
The problem is that we didn't arrive at the new norm yet. Is banning compliments overreacting? Or is asking a coworker when she would wear skirt again, complimenting her beautiful knees, completely bonkers? Or maybe skirts are too distracting and we should ban them? Do we draw a line on a n-word or on a latinx?
We had rules of politeness before, but they didn't work out. And so we are stumbling looking for rules that would work best for tolerating each other, and of course social studies and philosophy majors would suggest most of the rules – this phenomena is right up their alley. Most of everyone else is just testing those rules out and voting about the result (latinx isn't helping anyone, banning skirts scares women from seeking employment with you, etc.).
But the thing is – we need this rules. We need people who would never share a drink in a pub to work together without distracting each other too much. So we have to endure testing for a bit longer, until the pool of stupid rules is cleaned and smart rules would be renamed from "woke" to "polite"
Given that Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for murder, it feels quite shameful for the author to be unable to name his victim as anything other than "the suspect" - the sentence feels like one of endless examples of the 'past exonerative tense.' Similarly, given that up to 26 million people participated in protests over the _murder_ (not "asphyxiation"), minimizing what seem to be by any count the largest mass protest movement in US history as "riots" is nothing but a thought-terminating cliche.
Similarly, the article claims that the New York Times has become far left, but offers no evidence for this. When I think of the NYT in 2020, however, while there certainly were articles using the priggish language that Graham denounce, I immediately think of the Times's decision to feature an op-ed by Tom Cotton (right to far-right politican) suggesting that the nearly two-century long norm that the US government should not use its military to police its citizens (formalized in the post-Civil War Posse Comitatus Act) be broken in favor of an "overwhelming show of force" against "protest marches." In general, the New York Times has firmly remained a centrist (small-l liberal) newspaper, and I think claiming it has experienced massive ideological drift without providing examples says more about the writer than the paper.
In general, I feel like the essay shows a base disregard towards the concept of accurate history (suggesting that "homophobia" was a neologism invented "for the purpose [of political correctness]" during "the early 2010s" and fails to convince me of any of its points because of this.
+1
See my comment as well. The evidence PG uses to support his claim the New York Times has done this massive ideological shift is completely undone in his ninth footnote, that says the throw-away line in the article might not have even been reviewed by a senior editor. Yet PG still has gall to state it as fact.
In this article, Graham claims the following:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light was boycotted because they did a promotion with a minor trans celebrity. What is "woke" about that? It seems to me that what happened here is that Bud Light was punished for heresy, just from a different direction than Graham is choosing to condemn.
> I'm fairly confident that it would be possible to create new social media apps that were less driven by outrage,
How? App development needs money, which is today acquired through ads, which need eyeballs, and therefore engagement, which is easiest to get by outrage.
> and an app of this type would have a good chance of stealing users from existing ones, because the smartest people would tend to migrate to it.
Why would most normal people follow the smart people?
Having too much money is brain poison.
> You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
The issue with this is that it enshrines denial of identity in the same place as religion. If a trans colleague identifies a way that you disagree with, does this give you free pass to misgender them and deny their identity? That is cruel, and you would be denying a colleague their right of self-determination. This is bullying.
I'm not saying you should be stricken down for needing time to adjust to their pronouns and chosen name; I'm saying you shouldn't be cruel to them by denying them their identity, and that such cruel behavior should not be protected in society.
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I would turn this entire discourse about "wokeness" on its head, especially the discourse from the pg's and Musk's of the world, and assert that they don't actually care about the way the ideological wind is blowing; They're afraid of the collectivist nature of it.
That many less-powerful people can band together in pursuit of social justice against them, entrenched titans of capital, those capable of steering mainstream discourse, can provide a counter-argument to their power structures, is what _really_ troubles them.
> If a trans colleague identifies a way that you disagree with, does this give you free pass to misgender them and deny their identity?
Yes, of course. If you believe that false claims of an opposite-sex identity constitute a harmful lie, why should you be compelled to endorse it?
> Yes, of course. If you believe that false claims of an opposite-sex identity constitute a harmful lie, why should you be compelled to endorse it?
Because such behavior is a direct and targeted attack on an individual or individuals, not the concept of gender identity, transness, etc.
If you believe that making false claims of an opposite-sex identity is a harmful lie, then being compelled under threat of punishment to, for example, refer to a male as "she", is also a direct and targeted attack.
Being trans is identity, but being transphobic is ideology. Being a transphobe does not alter your identity in any way, nor change how you are referred to in society. Denying someone their identity and disrespecting someone in a professional setting is toxic and hostile.
If you want to be an asshole at home, you're free to do so insofar that it is legal. But if you want to be an asshole at work, that should not be enshrined in the same way as religious belief as pg suggests.
Unless you think it should be allowed, but what level of assholery is allowed? Is assholery against trans people the only assholery allowed? Is it okay to be an asshole to disabled people too? To women? To someone of a different color?
Trans is also an ideology. It's the belief that each person has a "gender identity" which may or may not align with their sex, and that this "gender identity", rather than sex, is what makes someone a woman or a man or, somehow, neither.
By the same logic as you are presenting, it is toxic and hostile to impose this ideology upon others. If believers of this ideology want to use "preferred pronouns" and such, they should of course be free to do so.
But others who do not hold this ideological stance, including those who oppose it for whatever reason (e.g. because they see the concept and implementation of "gender identity" as fundamentally sexist), shouldn't be forced to pay lip service to it, any more than atheists should be forced to pray at work.
You call this refusal "assholery", but presumably that is because you are a believer of this ideology - including the belief that to reject it is "transphobic" (which is roughly equivalent to the religious zealots' cry of "heretic") and therefore, per this belief, reprehensible?
Paul Graham complaining about societal accountability sounds a lot like a tech investor blaming users when their startup crashes and burns. “The market was just too woke for my brilliant idea!” Maybe the next essay should be titled "What You Can’t Fund Without a Backup Plan." In the startup world, if things go tits up, it’s on you—the same way words and ideas have consequences in public discourse. Play the game, take the risks, and own the fallout big man.
Is there a pejorative term for performative intellectualism?
> What does it mean now? ...
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
> In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
Oh, great! Yeah, I think we should focus on effectively furthering social justice. Can't wait for the rest of the article.
...
If you, like me, were waiting for PG to outline some methods for furthering social justice that are effective and not performative in the rest of this article, I have bad news for you. It seems that he has given no thought to it at all!
> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer ~~asphyxiated~~ a black suspect on video.
This is quite some impressive editorializing, especially when the black "suspect's" killer is currently in prison for murder. I only highlight this because it indicates a very particular viewpoint held by the author - particularly stuff like this -
> And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
So, he states very early the performativeness is the issue. But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists. I don't pretend to know this author's view here, but I'm just pointing out that the sentence quoted here is kind of dishonest - the implication being that if performativeness regarding social justice is a problem, that you should then focus on real efforts around social justice. This isn't mentioned a single time in this nonsensical screed, getting close in parts like this answering the "what now?":
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing. Prigs are prigs by nature. They need rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut off their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll see the same phenomenon again.
So, this author undermines his entire "point" (if a real one existed) with stuff like this, because the obvious conclusion is that any real effort at correcting social injustice and inequality will be met by cries of "aggressive performative moralism" by people exactly like this. From my view, that's probably the point, just please don't pretend you're doing anything intellectual here.
I'll leave this, this certainly does sound very "conventionally minded" (as he uses in a derogatory manner throughout this):
> Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong
> But, inevitably, when you ask these same people what then should be done about inequality, whether it be racial or otherwise, the answer is often "nothing" or denying that a problem even exists.
That's an assumption you're making - I don't see any evidence of that viewpoint in pg's essay. Any specifics you can point to?
I can point to a specific that seems to contradict you:
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
Inevitably, someone will chime in and say that it wasn't what he said, it's what he didn't say -- arguing from someone's purported silence. But that's exactly the kind of performative nonsense he's arguing against. It ought to be possible to speak against something without being castigated for failing to pay lip service in some way to a related topic.
This line of questioning is extremely annoying, and if I can be frank, also sounds very dishonest. You already answered your own question, knowing what it is, but I'll walk you through it -
His core "thesis" or "problem" here is the performative nature of social justice initiatives. He's correct, they often are performative. This does imply, on its face, that some efforts should be done to enact real initiatives that are not performative. I'm sure we can agree there this is what is implied by his statement.
Why then, would a serious author with this problem statement, then proceed to write thousands of words bemoaning the underlying nature of the initiatives themselves (without addressing what about them makes them performative, not even a single time in this essay) or about not being able to say "negro", rather than coming up with even a single conclusion on what must be done instead? I mean, you can just take a random sampling of the comments in this thread, which honestly shocks me it's not been flagged, to see precisely how people with his same viewpoint interpreted it. Lets please not pretend here. I can't exactly get on the phone and ask him what he thinks the answer to this question is - I can only go on a huge volume of discourse that has gone on for many, many years and make some conclusions on my own based on what he spent a very large amount of words complaining about, and shocker, none of them had to do with the ineffectiveness of social justice initiatives or "wokeness" (how he defines it), but rather how it oppresses him.
Does that help?
> Why then [...] rather than coming up with even a single conclusion on what must be done instead?
Because (a) that's not the topic at hand, and (b) in American discourse, it's rather obvious what the correct (or at least default) position is with regard to racial discrimination and injustice: Don't discriminate on the basis of skin color, national origin, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with a person's character. Love your neighbor as yourself. It's even been written into law, including an amendment to our constitution.
> sounds very dishonest
I can assure you, I am sincere and not drying to deceive. What do you think my real intent is?
> Because (a) that's not the topic at hand,
What is the topic at hand? The author's true beliefs? You're also just guessing them based on stuff he hasn't written. I can make my own conclusions based on a wealth of information on similar "essays" (much of this is not original and quite regurgitated), but we can't sit here and pretend they're simply unknowable. If you really got so worked up that you'd write this many words about the performative nature of DEI/wokeness etc, then why would you so overwhelmingly focus on the things about this that impact you rather than the groups these kinds of policies actually impact? What are PG's "damages" compared to such groups? C'mon. This is why I say this kind of talk is dishonest. If I were to give you the complete benefit of the doubt here, I would tell you to simply look to what else PG has written on social media or his blog about similar topics to conclude what he actually feels about such initiatives and whether they are worth doing at all even when done correctly (spoiler, he doesn't think so). Reading his problem statement, you wouldn't immediately guess that, and that's what I believe is dishonest (not to mention cowardly).
Why this is a problem is that this person, perhaps more than several 9's of people out there in the business world, actually has the means and capacity to do something meaningful about this and instead spends all of his mental and emotional energy bitching about a problem that honestly really isn't a real problem for anyone that is actually trying to help the problem at hand here.
> and (b) in American discourse, it's rather obvious what the correct (or at least default) position is with regard to racial discrimination and injustice: Don't discriminate on the basis of skin color, national origin, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with a person's character. Love your neighbor as yourself. It's even been written into law, including an amendment to our constitution.
This is just so decidedly untrue I don't even know where to begin. This author can't even bring himself to say without dancing around the language (weird that he has no issue with terminology in this case) that George Floyd was murdered in cold blood, which is an absolute fact backed by evidence. Why do you think this? We live in a world where saying afro americans should have the same opportunities as whites is "woke propaganda." Why do you think this?
it just reads like a petulant teenager complaining he got his wrist slapped for saying the n word in class. Sorry if that's "offensive" or oppressing anyone, I'm just reading the words he literally wrote. If he has anything else to say on this matter in contradiction to what I've said, please by all means show me. Again, I can draw my own conclusions based on what similar people (and not to mention PG himself) have had to say about this topic.
> What is the topic at hand? The author's true beliefs?
The topic at hand is woke ideology, sometimes known as "identity politics" -- the worldview preached by people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, as well as many university professors. This ideology is very distinct from the Civil Rights Movement and other ways of attacking racism and other forms of oppression, because its foundational propositions are incompatible with them, namely: (1) Everyone, whether they know it or not, is either an oppressor or oppressed. This is the most correct way of viewing society. (2) Race is the characteristic that most tends to separate people along this axis (although any aspect of identify politics also goes here -- even israel/palestine. There are people being arrested in the UK for saying or posting things that are even slightly against palestine, like "Why do we have Palestinian flags in our town square instead of a UK flag? -- which leads to a loud knock at 5am the next morning and an arrest. Just 1 example."). (3) Black people are the oppressed, and white people are the oppressors (but also add any other groups identified under identity politics).
This ideology inherits so much from Marxism - where (1) is identical, but (2) is proletariat vs bourgeoisie and (3) is capital ownership. It also tends to lead to categorically similar outcomes. In particular, it seems to tap into what I've heard described as "ancient tribal circuits in people's brains", by identifying "them" as the enemy, whoever "they" are (in anti-racist woke ideology, it's white people). Young people inculcated with these types of ideologies are literally becoming ready for tribal warfare, whether that's an intentional outcome or not.
> If you really got so worked up that you'd write this many words about the performative nature of DEI/wokeness etc, then why would you so overwhelmingly focus on the things about this that impact you rather than the groups these kinds of policies actually impact?
Because woke ideology actively inhibits healing, brotherly love, and government policy that helps people who are actually oppressed. It sets people up against each other. "Kill all of those people" is a gross overreaction. The French Revolution happened because of real, very big problems, but mass guillotining was a big overreaction that caused far more problems than it solved. If woke ideology continues unabated, we're headed for a similar outcome. MLK spoke against "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism" and I agree -- but that doesn't mean overreactions don't exist as a category. MLK and Malcolm X also spoke out against initiating violence.
I'll stop there, since I'm sure you already disagree enough with everything I said. But I hope that at least helps clarify the "anti-anti-racist" position a little. It is not pro-racist at all. Instead it's saying "marxism will make this a lot worse, so let's not go that direction."
One thing more that I should say. In the above post, I argued against woke ideology primarily from the grounds of its similarities to Marxism and its outcomes. What I left out was the assertion that its foundational propositions simply aren't true. That's the primary basis by which any system of belief ought to stand or fall.
The oppressor/oppressed axis is not the most correct or best lens through which to view society, because in truth, everyone is both. We all at times sin against others and are sinned against ourselves. We all fail to love at least some of our neighbors as fervently and generously as we ought to. In a sense, we're all in this mess together, and although helping and defending the oppressed and downtrodden is a noble and very good thing, it doesn't follow that entire demographics of people ought to be labeled as "oppressors" and opposed (in the same way that entire demographics shouldn't be intentionally discriminated against on the basis of the demographic variable itself--either directly or indirectly). Sin is individual, and should be addressed on an individual basis, since we each bear individual accountability for our behavior. From the government's perspective, individuals who have discriminated against people on the basis of race or otherwise oppressed people ought to be individually tried and sentenced through the court system. If that's not happening, hire better DAs and write better laws. If that isn't happening, engage in political campaigning and activism (with the right message), or at least support those who do.
What makes an ideology wrong isn't first whether its outcomes are bad, but whether its propositions are false. (Note the notions of good and bad themselves need to also be subjected to the truth test, which is why pure utilitarianism is fundamentally ungrounded to reality.)
I flipped the Bozo Bit on Paul Graham a long time ago. But if I hadn't then, I would now. I simply do not care to know what yet another tech industry financier thinks about "wokeness". Or, indeed, whatever anyone involved with startup culture thinks they know about history, culture, or philosophy of any sort - it's always just a distillation of their class interest dressed up to look profound to people who tried hard to avoid classes in the arts and sciences.
I remember having a conversation with someone around a decade ago about whether "social justice warrior" pointed at anything real. My contention was that every popular moral system has its prigs and its fanatics - social justice no less than Christianity, environmentalism, socialism, etc, etc, etc.
Every decade has its new leftest boogeyman for the right to complain about, same as always. Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness, Hippies, Civil Rights Crusaders, etc... Doesn't really matter, just so long as it is an "other" that can be ostracized as a group.
The left is lucky in this regard because they get to complain about the same two boogeymen all the time: white males and Israel.
Or to boil it down even more: the rich, particularly billionaires.
I remember how a particular AI ethics reasearcher got Yann Lecun to leave Twitter. That's perfect definition of wokeness for me.
Just reading that he can apply the word to himself, you can't take the opposite stance of being morally superior by mocking someone for taking a moral stance.
Articles like this on either side are a waste of time to write and read. Commenting on them is even worse (and here I am too...)
Zero people are receiving value from any of this energy, because it is impossible to - these are intellectual empty calories. Nobody here will be changing their mind, and these comments won't bring anybody closer to changing their mind. Literally nothing of substance is being created, and nothing will change because of any of it.
It proves that you and I are foolish that we participate in such useless activities while our short lives slip away. I'm here hypocritically yelling into the wind like an idiot right now. All of this is a sad waste of human potential.
Imagine if the time spent writing this article and all these 1400+ comments went into something simple like picking up litter where we live. What a real appreciable difference that would make. I'm going to go do that to offset the time I spent writing this stupid comment.
Thanks for this.
Thank you for the reply.
And I hate the term "Politcal Correctness", what does it mean? I think it means the opposite, your politics we're previously correct and now they aren't, it's an excellent rebranding. They can always joke that we can't say things anymore but actually, you really couldn't say things or act in certain ways or even exist or you would suffer violence.
I think the conditio sine qua non of whatever social movement PG is trying to describe here is that we have become, and will become more, a low-trust culture. Social circles are wider and shallower now than ever. If I can't take the time to get to know a person, I can't assume good faith when they use some questionable word. It benefits me to impute the worst motive, because (1) it is much safer to avoid a false harm than to admit a false good, and (2) it brings me social credit.
Instead of assuming that someone is well-meaning and requiring much evidence to refute that assumption, people are marked by small infractions, because the cognitive effort of the presumption of innocence cannot be applied on such a large scale and is not worth it to us. This is the mentality behind the "believe all women" principle: women are harmed more by letting a rapist free than by jailing an innocent man, and since we can't vet all the claims of sexual assault, better just lock them all up. A metaphor frequently given by proponents of that ideology is that men are like M&Ms. Would you eat an M&M from a bowl if you knew that a few were poisoned? If even 1 in 100,000 were poisoned, would you take the risk? No. Low trust. (I've never heard someone reply that women are not all benign either and yet people don't seem to apply the same logic to them.)
You see the extremes of this in the politicians representing US political parties. Trump can say anything and supporters never waiver, because they know he's "just joking around" or whatever. Meanwhile a Democrat candidate can say something small askance with what seems to me like innocent intentions, and their career is over.
This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances.
Some people tire of this low-trust culture (because they haven't been burned by trust before) and are pushing back on it.
In my opinion, the low-trust people are going to win eventually because the higher-trust people are more local and less internet-connected. Either society will collapse into many sub-societies, or else these sub-societies will dwindle until there's nothing left of them, and all that's left is The Culture.
> This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances
The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
> The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.
It's natural that the politicians selected by this group are going to be self-serving, unable to cooperate, etc. The fractiousness I'm describing is at the level of the voter, not the politician. See the 2024 presidential election for an example.
Ohhhh, he’s genuinely stupid. Got it.
I’m sure elites love that we’re spending more time arguing about tokenism in mediocre corporate franchise media and other nonsense than we are talking about economic and material concerns
Since YC startups (culture) is the exact opposite of what PG is saying, this is just a political stance in words, nothing more.
> optimizing for proportional representation has to come at the expense of quality
That's like saying a baseball team should try to sign a catcher if that's the best available player right now, even if they already have plenty of catchers and desperately need a shortstop. You need balance on a baseball team, just like you get a better party with a good mix of people, just like you get a more interesting university community if you bias against a monoculture.
Clad in shining armor, I’ve sworn to protect all that is holy and honorable. My vow drives me forward, blade at the ready. My task today clear: to beat a dead horse, and, if that fails to satisfy the call, to lay my blows upon a dead snake, a snake that is dead.
It's a political distraction to keep the working class fighting themselves while the wealth class continues to pilfer.
This one was staying in the Drafts folder if Kamala won.
Call me woke, but I feel like I’d be an idiot not to read between the lines here. Graham was very careful to mention acquittal when discussing the event that led to the formation of BLM, then very careful to avoid Chauvin’s conviction when he got to Floyd, in the same article where he argued against the stigmatization of the word negro. I think that’s a very unlikely framing to use if your goal is legitimate exploration.
I feel like with something this transparent, the sides are already drawn, and you either agree with Graham’s loosely disguised opinions or don’t, and this sorta makes the supposed purpose, to analyze the origins of wokeness, a pointless sidequest. I don’t particularly like moralizing lefties, but this isn’t a proper, objective analysis.
I am in particular happy that we at least try to banish s-word from tech vocabulary. I never thought it bothered me, but someone out there cares for me before me even knowing, and I am grateful.
Is it policing speech? Yes, kind of. Can it be considered under PC umbrella? I guess so.
Priggish? Hell no. This is not priggish, this is just respect for human beings.
It's rather ironic that this is the exact priggishness he's talking about.
Is this a subject Paul has expressed an interest in before, or is this another instance of tech founders cozying up to the incoming president before he's installed? There seems to be a lot of that going around in Silicon Valley lately, is something threatening their billions of dollars if they don't toe the line?
He’s been interested in how taboos influence our thought and speech for a long time: https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .
Yet this article is the only mention of the term "woke" on his site. What a strange coincidence that it happens now even though he's been interested in the topic since at least 2004.
He's been pretty consistent about this.
“An aggressively performative focus on social justice.”
Paul is giving the strawman definition (or, ironically, the PC definition) of “woke”. It’s a code word that can be anything the user doesn’t like, and isn’t anything they do like. It’s used as a weapon along with its alias, DEI.
But people aren’t using it with that “performative” definition in practice. People are using it to label social justice topics that they don’t agree with. So it’s disingenuous to try and define it in a way that is much more narrow than its practical usage.
Even Paul himself uses the word in a way that sure seems inconsistent with his definition:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney promotional cans of beer to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of her web series about her transition. Mulvaney had been a target of right-wing activists for some time, and those activists drove the boycott. This was just a particularly effective example of a long line of right-wing campaigns against companies that associate with trans celebrities. How does "woke" fit into this except from the perspective that "woke" just means being on one side of the culture war?
why is a beer a platform for pushing some individual's personal choices?
why should it be used to push any sort of political messaging?
why shouldn't bud light owners reject a brand that pushes those political messages?
The premise here is that the existence of trans people is inherently political, but in any case, Graham didn't define "woke" as "political", he defined it as "an aggressively performative focus on social justice". How does that describe sending beer cans to a social media influencer?
It's perceived as performative by the dominant culture because it's purpose is to bring certain injustices to light; injustices that are sometimes nuanced, but usually just obscured by history and bias.
That's about as long an essay at PG has ever written; red flag.
Imagine individuals and their experiences that "wokeness" is meant to help and notice none of that is recognized in the essay.
> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade campus life.
> What happened? How did protest become punishment? Why were the late 1980s the point at which protests against male chauvinism (as it used to be called) morphed into formal complaints to university authorities about sexism?
Wait, what? I feel like I'm not hearing this right, but this feels a lot like implying "people should be able to complain about things, as long as there's no consequences of those complaints". It goes on with:
> A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting was that they were allowed to attack professors.
Really? You think they just like attacking professors, that this is, in and of itself, exciting, rather than... Oh, let's say: Seeing a professor who has been actively misogynist towards you face some consequences for that? They just like to attack, with no cause at all?
Can we all agree that this is an exemplar of the sort of priggishness that defines "wokeness"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268
Great idea; shame about the name.
Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly) [...]
If pg isn’t writing about startups, we’re all better off not reading it.
There’s nothing here but fuel for the comments section.
If anything, this is a useful looking glass into the minds of people who love to complain about language policing and think "censorship" is our biggest social problem.
If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem. Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.
It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.
Censorship is and always has been a central threat to a free, pluralistic and democratic society.
It is always a key tool of authoritarian governments. And always starts with people thinking certain ideas are too dangerous to express.
I love that complaining about language policing is language policing
It isn’t, though.
In the same way that the police upholding the law is vigilantism?
Well, with the recent news that Facebook censored vaccine side effects by order of the government, I think we shouldn't underestimate censorship.
FB was not ordered to do this. In their words:
it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement... we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today
- Mark Zuckerberg, 26 August 2024
"News"
I'm not saying this didn't happen but I wouldn't trust Mark Zuckerberg if he said the sky was blue. He is trying to curry favor with the new administration and he is not above lying or embellishing what really happened.
Ok, so they're making that up according to you? Wouldn't they be investigated and if it turns out to be BS they would get an enormous fine? The Biden administration can easily sue them, why wouldn't they do that? Maybe because they know it's true, and they don't want to draw more attention to it, and they don't want an investigation?
And there are clearly side effects [1], and it was already clear before this news that this was being censored. We just have confirmation from the CEO of Facebook now.
[1]: https://dailysceptic.org/2024/12/11/revealed-the-full-hidden...
1. The Biden admin is already suing them for a different reason.
2. The Biden admin won't be there to sue them in 7 days.
3. I'm not saying this didn't happen, I'm saying Zuckerberg is a habitual liar and I wouldn't believe him if he said his name was Mark.
3: Fair enough, but you also have to consider what is wise for him to say and not. You can't just make any shit up and get away with it. He might say certain things and certain other things not to aid his agenda, but I don't think he just makes this stuff up.
> You can't just make any shit up and get away with it.
Trump and Elon Musk literally just make any shit up and get away with it.
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble.
This is fundamentally an argument against systemic change, as "getting people in trouble" is both core to the genesis and the enforcement of things like the Civil Rights act.
Attacking "wokeness" with this argument is deeply problematic, and extremely tone deaf in the wake of the Meta moderation leaks, wherein their internal documents highlight that the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”
>Following this logic, the Emancipation Proclamation was "problematic" because the "correct" thing to do is free slaves quietly via the underground railroad, as we wouldn't want to get slave owners in trouble.
Present-day racism and slavery are in completely different neighborhoods of magnitude; to the extent that the comparison borders on false equivalency.
>...the new moderation changes allow statements like "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit."
If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform. The root of the argument is the disagreement on whether and where one should be "allowed" to say those things.
Saying it's problematic is not a trump card (no pun intended). If you can demonstrate how allowing people to say offensive/harmful things (excluding established limits on free speech regarding safety) is inconsistent with free speech, then you're adding something to the discussion. Anything else is likely a disagreement on utility of free speech vs. civility; a place where folks can agree to disagree.
> If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform.
Ah, but you aren't allowed to say "Christian men are totally useless" or "Lesbians are so stupid", so it sounds like you should take up the ethos/spirit of free speech with Meta as well.
I don't follow that logic and that is the kind of absolutism many of us disagree with. It seems like an appeal to emotion to me. I'm not sure you can characterize the EP as shallow; aggressive yes, if one considers bold to be synonymous with aggressive in this context.
I don't find any issue with people making statements like that. I also don't need to agree with it to think that you should be allowed to say it. Do you find that to be problematic?
I'm reminded of a lyric from "Mississippi Goddamn."
> Don't tell me, I tell you
> Me and my people just about due
> I've been there so I know
> They keep on saying "Go slow"
This is a good write up that is sure to trigger a lot of people. The main two things I see coming out of this aggressive militant moralism is the death of public and to some degree private dialog. This is especially apparent in left-wing medias who seem to have completely cleaned up their writings to the point that now in order to get informed about what's actually going on you literally need a separate news source. Interesting discussions have also died out because there is one right way that everyone must adhere to, one correct language, one correct behavior. They died out because any voiced opinion that is slightly off is going to get canceled by the moralists so we're left with silence and private echo chambers. At this point its a religion where the tenets are more important than actual reality. As a fellow atheist I can't wait for it to dissipate.
I presume the essay went through many revisions earlier, but right now, talking about embers bursting into flame and burning hotter than ever feels a bit - awkward?
Interesting to compare this narrative to "A history of 'wokeness'". (Specifically, it's interesting that the "origins" seem to have very little to do with the history.)
https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
Came to share the same link, much better piece than PG's
I thought it was going to be like the origins of corn syrup where we actually learn some history but no it's just this guy's ramblings.
It's political correctness gone mad!
>Thanks to Sam Altman, Ben Miller, Daniel Gackle, Robin Hanson, Jessica Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and Tim Urban for reading drafts of this.
Can we have a conversation about the fact that Y Combinator is full of weird conservative dudes who actively lie about easily verifiable things? I mean, everyone knows "woke" originated in black culture... Except, perhaps, for out-of-touch Silicon Valley tech bros. This is just disgusting and pathetic.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
This sounds quite wrong to me. The people who use "woke" pejoratively don't limit their use to aggressively performative focus on social justice. They actively oppose the specific stances on social justice themselves, regardless of how aggressive or performative they think the advocates are.
Thank you pg for writing this!
People have been writing the same article since 2016. It’s unbearable
This guy thesauruses!
As a general principle, if you are hurt by _words_ then the problem is you and not the other person.
Those prigs exist but they're just emotionally immature and adopt a victim-cause as a means to express their frustration. If somebody is looking for a fight, if you give him a gun he's going to use it.
If you want to kill it forever, you should probably teach emotional intelligence in high school.
The essay was posted about 60 minutes ago but must have been removed as that post is no longer discoverable through yc search. Weird.
(This comment was originally posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683660 but we've merged that thread hither)
It got flagged to death. 50+ upvotes, 6 comments, but flag killed.
I mean, I kind of understand: The discussion is going to turn into the kind of thing that HN tries to avoid. And yet, "moralities" driving things we can't talk about is the point of the essay, so it's really ironic to have it flag killed here.
Off topic: We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That means that flag killing is uncorrectable - if users decide that it's inappropriate, their only recourse is to email dang. That seems to me to be a step backward - let the user base correct the overreach of others in the user base.
> We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more.
That hasn't changed. Neither has any of the other logic around voting, flagging, or vouching.
Vouching unkills [dead] posts. The current thread was dead, for example, and vouches rescued it. But a post can be [flagged] without being [dead]. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918548 for a past explanation.
It should be possible for vouch-capable users to un-vouch in order to demote obvious rage-bait like this article. I'm sorry, but no constructive or intellectually curious discussion is possible here.
Some is happening in this thread, so it's possible.
Your second paragraph is very well said. Made me chuckle but also lament.
He is attacking a straw man, by defining "woke" in a far narrower sense than it is actually used. Any objection to any form of prejudice, or any indication that the speaker is aware that members of some groups are better off than others, will be labelled "woke" by many commenters. It's to the point where some bigots say "woke" in the exact same places that their grandparents would say "n***-lover".
But instead Graham focuses on people who are overly concerned with specific language because those people are easier to criticize.
No that’s the most common usage now. It’s almost exclusively used pejoratively. Very few people use it in a positive sense anymore.
It’s hard to define “woke” as anything other than “something someone politically to the left of me does that I don’t like” as that’s how broadly it’s used.
It’s utterly meaningless.
Graham's article is persuasive on describing societal shifts around 'wokeness'. However, I'd like to see a bit more introspection on what constitute non-'religious' (to borrow his term), or foundational, principles of Western liberal democracy. There are some grounds to prohibit speech in society and also practice - much of wokeness is about practice as much as speech, which he doesn't really explore. At the edges societal norms inevitably become messy, but he doesn't acknowledge this fact. Nor that the edges move over time and, on balance, this has often been a good thing (think of civil rights for example).
In this way, and similar to a lot of simplistic economic analysis (i.e. the sort that blanketly insists free markets solve everything - ignoring the realities of imperfect information, natural monopolies, externalities, etc., and also ubiquitous government intervention even in the US), the argument lacks depth. If we take his piece as a polemic then perhaps this is intentional and not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not sure he presents it that way.
I think PG is right in tracking modern political ethical standards (that he prefers to refer as wokeness) to the student movements of the 60s. It is worth reminding about the roots of 60s movements itself though.
It was spread over the whole Western world, and was basically reconsidering Western power structures and political beliefs in the aftermath of WWII. The generation of the 40s-50s was either complicit in fascism/nazism directly or have seen it as "them" problem and was more preoccupied in defeating it militarily. The generation that came after them though had more time to reflect on how it all was even possible, and found its roots not just in Germany or Italy, but all over the world including the US - in colonialism, in racism, in sexism, classism/social darwinism etc.
So I think we should understand where we are going to be heading to if we let the oligarchy declare this work and the ethics that stemmed from it outdated.
At no point in this long piece does the author seem to consider that people may be "woke" because they sincerely believe that they need to raise their and other people's awareness of prejudice or ways in which society puts people down. Instead it immediately assumes it's a liberal arts movement from those lefty universities.
Of course any cause or point can and likely will be distorted, and some will be performative. There are also, e.g. performative people who like to moan about lefties in universities, but this kind of low effort behaviour doesn't in itself undermine reasonable criticism about e.g. universities sometimes being too intolerant of free speech.
My point is this is fairly lazy. It starts assuming woke, which I note the author agrees is often used perjoratively (and therefore is surely used in a specific loaded way, in the same way if I call someone a piece of shit I'm not generally using it to praise the human body's ability to excrete waste effectively), is some performative nonsense and not wondering or being curious whether there's something useful or at least sincere underneath that.
This would all be fine if there was a bit more thoughtful distinction and critical appraisal of the author's work, and he wasn't treated with such uncritical reverence.
I continue to be fascinated by "coded slurs" -the way people use labels like this to attack views they oppose. It feels like a shorthand, but also a way to attack the voice, not the message.
So "thats just PC|woke|SJW nonsense" is used, over time, to avoid having to address the point.
TBF it's also true "he's a fascist" is probably shorthand.
>and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
Type the word "cisgender" on twitter and say that again, Paul.
https://x.com/search?q=Cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live
There are many typing that word?
Try posting it yourself. See what happens.
I deleted my account long ago. What happens if you type that?
It gets immediately marked as hate speech. Due to personal whims of the company's owner, rather than some widely held belief that it is hate speech
I extra made an account and nothing extraordinary happened. How does this mark look? Is it a warning-message or symbol?
The message gets hidden and a warning placed on it saying:
"Visibility limited: this Post may violate X's rules against hateful conduct"
You then have to click "View" where you're taken to another view where the message is shown, but with the warning still present. You can't share, like, or reply to the message
Not sure if the account also receives a suspension or shadow banning.
It's policy from Elon himself: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
You can see it play out in replies to my tweet here, where someone didn't believe it: https://twitter.com/WickyNilliams/status/1855754162102816937
What an embarrassment. To think I once respected you. On the near eve of Trump retaking power and this poorly reasoned garbage is what you choose to post. The most generous explanation I can muster is that this is a cynical ploy to ingratiate yourself with the man who just bought the government.
Congrats on pontificating on the most serious issue of our time: why you can’t call black people negros or colored people. I’m done with HN.
Those who complain about Wokeness most often can't see their own thorn in their eye. Peter Beinart wrote about this years ago:
> The theme of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was “uncancel America.” But when news broke that one of the speakers, a hip hop artist named Young Pharoah, had called Judaism “a complete lie,” CPAC cancelled him. Which led Young Pharoah to denounce CPAC for practicing “cancel culture,” which just goes to show: Denouncing “cancel culture” is a lot easier than defining what it actually is.
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/want-to-fight-cancel-cul...
In my country an artist made songs titled "Fuck children" and "Women are whores". He was cancelled (and then cried about it). Cause it's so unfair to not book artists who jokes about raping children? Who gets to cancel who? In the real world, pro-Israel "wokeists" have gotten way more people in trouble, both on and off campuses, by calling people "anti-Semites" than left-wing "wokeists" have for complaining about usage of wrong words for "non-white" people.
Like certain washed up comedians, these people are all hypocrites. They reserve the right to offend others, but when others offend them they cry.
Sorry, Dang, that you have to deal with this. I definitely don't envy you. If this were written by anyone else I'm not sure it would make it to the front page.
That being said, if we're here, we're here. Paul Graham is defining wokeness as a form of performative moral superiority, so let's use that definition here. I think we can all agree that performance moral superiority is at the very least annoying, so wokeness sounds pretty bad and we should try to avoid it. So this leaves me very curious as to examples. Graham unhelpfully gives very few specific examples, but one he does give is the Bud Light controversy. This one is particularly interesting to me because I'm not sure that Bud Light ever did anything particularly priggish. As I understand it, all they did was sponsor a social media influencer who happened to be transgender and suddenly half of the country lost their minds? Mulvanney's transgender identity had nothing to do with her Bud Light advertisement. I cannot see any priggishness here. No one made any statements about how anyone else should speak or act, no one was removed from any position of power. But the right was outraged by this and Graham refers to it as wokeness despite it not matching his definition. I'll put the subtext away and just say what I'm thinking. I think Graham's wokeness is real and legitimately annoying. But I don't believe it's anywhere near the scale of problem he's claiming it is and most importantly I think he's using it as a sort of effigy for underlying leftist ideas of inclusion and diversity. Graham makes wokeness out to be just about moral pricks but not the underlying ideas, but then classifies the protests after George Floyd's death as wokeness. Similarly to the Bud Light example, I see no performance there. I think it's hard to argue that protests and riots are purely performative and not real actions designed to make change. So to me, as a reader, it feels like Graham is masking his distaste for liberal ideology behind an obviously agreeable distaste of prigs. I don't necessarily think he's even doing this consciously and I think he's projecting the frustration from threat he sees to his power by liberal ideology towards this particular target. I know the feeling. This post has been long enough but I want to at least mention that this is how I feel about a lot of propaganda (from every side, mind you). People use real problems as stand-ins for things they can't talk about and get unreasonably upset at what's on the surface, not a big problem. It's important to read critically and pay attention to your own feelings and the logic of the arguments you're reading, because at least for me, it's very easy to be manipulated into believing something that's nonsensical or inconsistent with your values.
The real "mind virus" is the fragility of mind required for people to be so damn bothered that people unlike themselves exist. This essay is as much an example of that fragility as those who cannot find any merit in critiques of "wokeness's" loudest proponents. A world where those on the end of the political spectrum better understand each other is something worth working towards. This essay doesn't get us closer to that world, nor does lording one's perceived moral superiority over others. Maybe it's time to reset.
A good portion of the comments here are people talking past each other, with seemingly no interest in mutual understanding. We've gotten so very lazy about disagreement. Its harder and more useful form involves conceding that your counterparty probably has a point, even if very small. And if you can't see it, you might not be trying.
In any serious discipline, ranging from philosophy to mathematics, precision is a requirement. Here, "woke" is everything but precise. It's an umbrella term that the right uses with bad faith to discard any form of social struggle or claim for a more egalitarian society, then part of the left took ownership of the term (reverse stigma).
Then a quoted aberrations IMO,
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.
These statements are typically what fuels some people's outrage. Who is PG to decide what is the right scale? In the US for example, too many black people lost their lives because of a systemic racism, at the scale of society (police, job, housing, ...). Is this not scaled enough? To me, it shows an incredible level of disconnection between the social class PG belongs to and the actual problems in society.
So the society should pay attention and stamp out whatever new fad the students got up to? Never mind the concerted well-financed efforts to smear and destroy truth, reason, democracy, pretty much any values there are?
At the dawn of Project 2025 let us think how to stop the woke the next time?
More importantly, how do you challenge social/moral injustice or push for good change without being dismissed as "woke"? Or do we not care about that now that we're just in it for ourselves?
As we've recently established, we apparently do like to watch the world burn and maybe that's just where we're at for now, like a pressure release valve.
Reminder: these are the same people who police language about gender routinely.
"What is a woman", etc.
If you say there are more than 2 genders, they will shun you.
There's prigs on both sides
There’s a globally shared movement opposing anything the left considers progress—for minorities, the environment, a shift away from fossil fuels, animal rights, fairness, and other ethical causes. This opposition dismissively labels such efforts as “wokeness.” From the US to Germany, from Orbán to Erdoğan, you see this trend everywhere.
It’s largely driven by men who feel their way of life is under threat. They want to continue as they always have: eating giant tomahawk steaks, driving oversized SUVs, denying climate change, and being offended by the existence of gay people. These are the same individuals who empower fascists—whether in the US, Germany, Argentina, or Italy.
The world seems to have forgotten the lessons and the misery of the Second World War.
In other words, it is impossible for there to be excesses or incorrect opinions on the left.
My friend, I am a leftist. I guarantee you no one hates leftists more than leftists.
We fight each other to death over everything.
"Progress for the tick is not progress for the dog."
> These are the same individuals who empower fascists—whether in the US, Germany, Argentina, or Italy
Correct, madame.
Imagine that, there are also men who care about environment, who are not offended by seeing homosexual human beings, and who don’t want to have fascism.
ahhhahahahaha saw the title then saw who wrote it hahahaha.
anti-woke people are more annoying than the people they criticize. yawing on like a broken robot. this is one of PG's longest essays which should say a lot about somebody who has written such great, tight, concise essays about startups.
i will not be reading this. compact has a better-written reactionary pov about wokeness if you want to read it (i don't recommend that one either though. honestly i recommend reading american history instead of some white dude's reactionary "a history of wokeness" blog post)
Here are some takes on woke from the left:
The Origins of Contemporary Woke Culture ft Christian Parenti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxdBOxl_eik
which is an excerpt from the full This is Revolution podcast episode:
The Cargo Cult of Woke ft. Christian Parenti
https://www.youtube.com/live/6TJbv45DJyk
Chris Hedges interviewed Parenti also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTpeQ4V-YeY
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-wokeness-kills-class-...
One the one hand, I think it’s great that after all these various iterations of prigs throughout human history, we’ve finally arrived at a point where the label they gave themselves has become a humorous insult. Unfortunately, this means
- they culturally appropriated “woke” from a group they believe to be systemically persecuted and turned it into a joke,
- telling someone that you don’t want to hear their racist joke is now “woke” even if you’re not playing to an audience, and
- suddenly, every little thing people don’t like is “woke” and it is beyond ridiculous.
Summary: Rich white guy complains that it's too much effort to figure out what we're supposed to call 'coloured people' these days. It reads like the lament of a sore winner who has been forced to think of other's feelings against his will.
And all of this is couched in a pseudo-histororical style that perhaps the author hopes will shield it from being read as an 'emotional' argument.
And you know what's the worst thing? We live in a conservative world. They set the rules of the game, the draw the chalk outlines of the playing field, they own the ball the stadium and the referees.
And now they tell us we have to be silent when they rough us up too?
Yeah I guess wokeness and cancel culture are what you complain about now when your life is so free from challenges that you have nothing else to complain about.
Would this essay be on the HN frontpage if it was written by anyone else?
There was an essay by Ken Shirriff on the front page earlier, discussing political stuff but leaning in the opposite direction. It, at time of writing has 271pts vs this with 218pts.
No. And man, I feel like the quality of PG's essays have declined. Even if I agreed with a few points, it was so rambling, and just made so many leaps. The sheer length of it is a pretty good signal he didn't really work that hard on this.
No. Stuff like this benefits those behind HN and many who frequent this site. The political-neutral face HN puts on is a farce.
I'd like to think "no", but we've debated a lot of dumb shit written by famous-in-some-circles people over the years.
I'd also push back on HN ever having been politically neutral. I think 20 years ago it was "politically naive" or "politically ignorant", but that's not the same thing.
Did pg really think through the timing of this essay?
Whether his intention or not, releasing this right now feels like it's part of a concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually.
> concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually
If that was his intention, wouldn't he make an article calling for the end of wokeness and everything related to it? Instead of saying something that can be summed up as "There are bad parts of wokeness, and there are some good parts"
your summary sounds an awful lot like a "good people on both sides" variation...
That's sure a lot better variation than "those Other people are just Bad" that seems to be current on both the left and the right currently.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is a rare case where the author and their position makes the content more important than the content itself.
It was already flagged like 8h ago
No.
It would but not for long . politics stuff tends to get flagged fast .
Not if they're from PG apparently
Sometimes it's good to know where people stand when they're shooting themselves in the foot.
...especially because this class of society is often standing on the backs of others!
We just had a day-long front page about why we need to feel shameful about using the term "Cargo Cult" because some tribe that positively no one is thinking about when they use the phrase believed a God would deliver cargo if they setup fake radio towers and used bamboo headsets. Some sort of hand wavy "why I am better than all of these fools who don't understand the real details" bit of noise. Colonialism or something. White guilt.
When I saw this PG article I wondered if that article inspired it. It is the perfect example of someone walking into something where zero people have ill intentions, and everyone understands exactly what that very useful term means, and telling us all we should stop using it because of their moral eye opening. Aren't we all better people now?
> In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
No, in almost every usage I've seen it's people objecting to the actual social justice. There is a massive wave of reaction breaking right now. To posit that it's just (or mostly) about some annoying attitudes is absurd. This kind of strength of feeling you can only get from people feeling actually threatened – which is pretty pathetic when you pick out what the actual policies and demands of the accused "woke" are – very mild progressiveness. A desire to go a little way to redress the balance. It's a lot less than I'd favour!
This is a silly straw man argument with lots of claims and little evidence supporting them.
You all understand that this is to appease MAGA/trump right?
So what? well, are you not terrified? if they preemptively are going to such lengths to appease the racist MAGA crowd, are you not afraid of what they will do with all the data they collect and with the amount of dependency we have on tech?
Please be afraid. IDK, maybe watch star wars or something, the piece about how fear leads to anger, then hatred then violence should make you afraid. Have you ever seen CEOs an tech leaders line up to brown-nose a president before? what happens when he asks them to do even worse?
I don't find that to be true and I find your own rationale to be its own sort of performative moralism. Many normal people feel this way and it isn't to appease MAGA or Trump or whatever, including myself and many people I know who have been and/or are lifelong leftists. It is not impossible or even unlikely that people in higher positions developed these feelings on their own accord. I'm not saying your statement is always untrue, but it denies the people you're writing about much agency.
I think that what's happening is that people on all levels are now more comfortable in saying what they actually think or believe rather than saying things to avoid busting arbitrary social rules.
this has nothing to do with leftism or rightism. MAGA is not right-wing,they're fascist and authoritarian.
paulg has a reliable pattern of history, where he echoes the current trends in the tech company leadership circle. him, altman, musk, bezos,etc.. they run in the same circles. I am not even disagreeing with his sentiment of being against performative morality or equality, people on all sides of politics have been saying that for decades! the framing of anti-racist and anti-fascist people as "woke" and hijacking that conversation as a culture war item where any attempt to criticize racist and fascist systems and sentiment is classified as "woke" (they tried the term "SJW" a few years prior to "woke") is what is happening here, and it is very obvious.
You cannot plead ignorance on this!
This isn't about arbitrary social rules or saying "colored people" vs "people of color" or b.s. like that. that sort of mis-framing is mis-direction, straw-man reasoning. Someone tells you "hey, pay minorities a fair wage" and responding with "I can't call them _____, that's woke and political correctness", how sickening it is when the tech world shows its hypocrisy. Better to have performative morality many times over than willfully ignorant tolerance of hatred and prejudice. Use the terms "DEI" and "woke" in any context other than their original intended context and you're either a damn racist or an enabler.
I hope these people read this, I for one would be very vocal for calling them out and shaming them after they've drunk from the poisoned chalice of trump.
Core tenet of anti-wokism: one must acknowledge/ pay lip service to the notion of racism and other social issues, but one must not permit any further exploration of said issue.
One interesting subtext to where tech philosophy is landing in all this is that it will be the downfalll of America if woke ideas are promoted, and it will similarly be the downfall of America if racists/sexists/etc can’t practice free speech.
The origin of woke is not the alt-right's pejorative, nor the thing being lampooned.
It used to mean the more literal "open your eyes." As in, pay attention to the propaganda/scam/traps that you face every day.
Ironically, (or perhaps intentionally) it's been completely co-opted to the point that it's impossible to advise others to "stay woke."
In the US, both the Left and the Right have been taken over by their more fringe elements. For now, the Right has won.
Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups. Too few votes. (See Sex in America, the Definitive Study,[1] which selected their survey group randomly across the whole US and followed up with mailed, in person, and paid interviews, until they got >90% participation. Most other surveys have some degree of self-selection of the participants.)
Occupy Wall Street never came up with a political agenda. Black Lives Matter had a huge agenda, and one of the groups claiming to be in charge had a document over a hundred pages full of demands. Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population. Nobody was pushing to break up monopolies that raised prices, even in apartment rentals and health care where collusion has been proven.
This lack of focus lost elections.
The Right agenda is basically tax cuts for the rich, plus God, Family, and Guns. That's enough to form a majority.
So here we are.
[1] https://archive.org/details/sexinamericadefi00mich/mode/2up
> Left strategy has been terrible for years. That's one of the consequences of the Woke movement. Far too much political capital was expended on niche issues. Gays are 3% of the US population. Trans are 0.3% of the US population. Can't win an election catering to those groups.
This isn't the left's strategy. It's the right's. The right targets these small groups because they know we won't let them be attacked. We will push back. It makes it very easy to paint the left as trying to cater to LGBT folk, but that's nonsense that only sells to those completely out of the loop. Which is unfortunately most of the US electorate. And it's not about it being a strategy. It's about being an ally against bigotry. It takes a really fucked up person to abandon millions of people to increased discrimination because you think it'll help your polling with middle America.
> Nobody was pushing hard on worker protections or labor law enforcement - not cool enough, but affects a big fraction of the population.
I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.
The difference is that corporate media is often very comfortable boosting ideas such as racial justice, but not class consciousness.
Left strategy appears to be terrible is imo because neither party is left wing. There is simply no place in the current political landscape for a labor party/wing to address the issue for the big fraction of the population you mentioned. The republicans pretends to address it, the (majority) democrats dance around it.
> I don't think this statement is fair. There has been unionization effort across the country throughout the years.
Not very successfully. Only 6.9% of private-sector US workers have a union. That peaked at 35% in 1954.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/union-membership-data/#full-...
It seems to me that there's no place for it precisely because of what PG calls "woke". Class consciousness doesn't work if it's not reciprocal. Obama put up great working class numbers, but the modern Democratic coalition isn't willing to pander to socially conservative views, so it doesn't work so well anymore.
A pithy but I really feel important example: a party with no room for Joe Rogan in it is definitionally not a party of the working class.
This is a long essay; there's a lot of really good and a lot of not so great.
One might compare the first century of Christianity, where the only way to increase the number of adherents was to personally convince each one to make a commitment which would potentially be costly to them; and the situation a few centuries later, where Christianity offered opportunities of riches and power to those who accepted it, and many of those with power succumbed to the temptation to increase the number of the faithful at the point of a sword -- although of course, all that can be imposed is compliance with certain kinds of external behavior, not an actual change of heart.
The thing about BLM and Me Too is that these things are still problems. Black people are still disproportionately killed by police officers, and it's very difficult to hold them to account. One powerful person was found by a jury, who had examined evidence which the accused person had every opportunity to rebut, to have sexually assaulted a woman; after that he was elected president of the United States.
When the only way to make people more aware of these problems ("woke") was to personally convince each person to make a commitment which would be personally costly to them, things were fine. But as Paul points out, at some point getting on the "woke" bandwagon offered opportunities for riches and power; and it became a temptation to short-cut the process of transformation with threats of punishment, rather than changing people's minds individually.
I mean, yeah, the ideological madness that refuses to have reasoned discussions, and attempts to enforce the latest complex orthodoxy (chosen by a few without the proper level of reasoned debate) with the threat of punishment rather than convincing each person one by one, needs to die. But if the result is that people in power are still not held responsible for their actions, then I think we will have lost something important.
EDIT: One thing I've tried to do when possible is to point out that bullying people into silence won't change their mind. Obviously it takes the right kind of person to hear this, but it has at least a few times seemed to help someone begining to go "woke" wake up to what it is they're actually doing.
FWIW, my llama suggests that the original usage of the term `political correctness` was somewhat inverted:
> The term "political correctness" was first used in a political sense by Maoist factions within the American New Left movement during the 1970s. It was employed to criticize liberal critics who were perceived as compromising revolutionary principles for the sake of mainstream acceptance.
So the original sense was a too-centrist/too-mild/too-pragmatic sort of INcorrectness. I found that interesting.
Is wokeness / anti-wokeness the new heresy ? Cool beans. I'm not really interested either way.
"Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one."
Thank you rich white man for letting us know racism isn't that big a problem. We did it!
Thank you for saying this.
is this just me or this post also seems to be indicating some form of "moral superiority" and bias in the author's thinking?
To me it seems like Musk's twitter takoever has done more than just "neutralize" the wokeness of twitter. It has amplified factless-ness and fake claims beyond proportion.
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2024/how-elon-musk-twi...
In general an essay writer believes his opinion is the correct one. Otherwise he wouldn’t write the essay.
[flagged]
This kind of "upspeaking" will probably get more accepted and popular now. Dark times ahead.
yeah, I have underestimated the lust for authoritarianism in silicon valley tbh
It’s interesting to me that a certain type of person is so susceptible to buying into this fable of wokeness, especially when it pertains to universities. Almost like there is a woke mind virus, but it’s not infecting the people they think it is.
I attended university in the mid 2010s, so close to peak “wokeness”, and I never witnessed or heard of anything like what pg is describing. In my experience it was totally fine to hold just about any political/ethical view as long as you were a decent human being to your fellow classmates. There certainly was no political correctness police forcing us to assimilate.
The popular perception, especially in certain circles, is that there's been a rash of "cancellations" and extensive banning of, especially, outside speakers on college campuses, and also to some extent professors, accompanied by large and successful movements there to accomplish those outcomes.
In fact, there are so comically few cases of any of that that the couple real-ish ones are always cited by those advancing that position, plus a handful that really, really aren't that sort of thing at all (always look up the full story, 100% of the time they omit context that totally reframes what was happening, this phenomenon is more reliable than most things in life).
Real data exist on things like speakers' appearances at schools being cancelled, and it's most fair to say that the trend there is it's gone from "damn near never happens" to "still damn near never happens". And it's not because controversial right-wing sorts, which we may presume would be the most likely to be banned, aren't even trying to speak on campuses when e.g. invited by friendly organizations—they are, and frequently do.
The entire phenomenon is extremely close to being imaginary. That's why you, actually being there and not just going by social media and pop-political-book and talk radio and podcast "vibes", didn't see it.
On YouTube, watch the Evergreen State College 3-part documentary by Bret Weinstein. This is much more common than you think, through your anecdote, unfortunately. Granted, this happened in 2017, so a few years after your time in college, but I would argue "peak wokeness" sits between 2016 to today, in large part due to Trump's first election win.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0W9QbkX8Cs
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vyBLCqyUes
This should make anyone's skin crawl with the way this college's faculty and staff were treated, and the childish behavior of the students to allow this to happen. This gives a reason why "college kids" are no longer considered adults.
So if one takes PG seriously, it’s ludicrous for him to unequivocally say “On October 11, 2020 the New York Times announced that "The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives.", but then in the footnotes backtrack and say “It's quite possible no senior editor even approved it (the quote in question).”
Making such an absurd claim brings into question everything written on a subject he clearly knows nothing about.
> Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
But a group prayer led by a school coach is, of course, totally fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Bremerton_School_Di...
Pretty sure pg would say they’re the same thing. I don’t remember him carrying water for religion.
I'm sure we are going to see his treatise on the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court any day now, right?
Were the students forced to participate though, or was it voluntary?
You don't think high schoolers would succumb to authority and peer pressure even if they didn't really want to participate?
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
In my personal experience, after Elon bought Twitter and implemented his policies, I have seen an influx of Hitler quotes and literal Nazi propoganda (advocating for the Final Solution, etc.). I literally had to leave Twitter recently because it was mentally draining to have to argue with someone over why the Holocaust was bad.
I read a tweet around 2014 that was very short and simple and stayed with me for a while and now seems prescient. It was something like "man, anti-SJW is getting worse than SJW" (using sjw as the precursor for woke). Makes me think that reactions are sometimes stronger than the actions they go against and can often be swinging too far the other way.
If it takes a felon winning an election for you to come out and write this then you are a coward. Where were these deep thoughts when BLM was blocking public roads and emergency services. I'm impartial to both sides simply making an observation.
PG has been tweeting about woke for years.
Most people were cowards then, and now too. It's nice to finally get these leaders sharing what they actually think again. After biting their tongue for what a decade?
If you insist on casually calling the guy you voted against a felon, I don't think you're as impartial as you claim.
He is in fact a convicted felon. That is objectively, impartially true.
It not be impartial to mention it, though. PG almost certainly didn't write this essay out of cowardice because a felon got elected.
He may have written it out of cowardice because a bully got elected, though...
I erred on the side of pithy to try to avoid derailing. I've never voted for him and there's a lot that I dislike about him; however…
There's a very credible argument that the DA overcharged the case so people who dislike him can try to ostracize him as a felon and make his supporters look unhinged. If your shorthand for "the less woke candidate won" is "the felon won," you don't get to credibly claim "I'm impartial" in a conversation about wokeness.
So still a convicted felon then?
It's not a credible argument. The "overcharges" led to a guilty verdict and sentence. That could not have happened if they were truly as you portray. Believing that your less-informed opinion overrules those of everyone actually in the courtroom is pure hubris.
It is a fact that he is a convicted felon.
If you're being a dick then someone will call you out for it. They can do that. You can get hung up on them being woke and woke being the problem but you were still a dick.
- a dick
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it?
Yes. It requires the willpower to disengage from the performative point scoring of internet discourse. Most good conversation must now happen in private for many reasons, much of that has to do with the technology PG himself has previously supported.
Presently, you are seeing social media forking into red and blue (x and bsky and fb and truth social). This is bonkers. A superior format for discussion is a place like HN which is tightly (and opaquely) moderated. Another great development is the use of 'community notes' which, for all its imperfections, is superior to straight censorship.
Ultimately I'd like to see people like PG invest in high quality journalism where the mission is a dispassionate reporting of the best-available facts, supported where possible with data, and presented in such a way as to demonstrate transparency.
The journalism point he made hits home, hard. I'm a sunday times subscriber, and just added WSJ and Financial Times paper edition. I don't really want to add 10 substacks and parse through them all. I'd pay a lot, a lot a lot, for a quality daily briefer, known in some circles as a newspaper of record.
One that I love, deeply, is the Martha's Vineyard Gazette -- still printed on broadsheet, and with fantastic journalism -- it's what regional and local papers used to be. I wish we could have something like this in the national format.
I think part of this is correct regarding the professors who started off as "radicals" or hippies in the 1960s but there is no mention of why the cultural revolution of the 1960s happened in here. Couldn't that be examined more closely?
In my opinion, we have been undergoing a cultural clash for power at the top of society for decades between various groups. At one point in time this country was firmly in the hands of WASPs. Waves of immigrants arrived in cities who clashed with them. There were fights about who could get into the most powerful universities which was directly related to the struggle for power between the groups. Wokeness in the US, is in my opinion, a consequence of identity politics which we have had for some time. I think identity politics is probably more natural than not having it because we see it all over the planet. I think a lot of people have created a narrative that they are fighting against identity politics but in fact have just recreated it in different terms.
For the record, there are some conservatives on YC that agree with PG.
As defined in a Florida lawsuit, woke is, "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." I think that is generally true. I also agree with parts of what PG stated. More than anything, I think the term 'woke' as defined above has been twisted by both sides, and action is more important that talking.
I can't be the only one that sees "wokeness" and general political radicalization (on either side) as being explainable by the collapse of religion and nationality as the key sources of identity and group-inclusion.
Political identities are modern-day religions, basically.
I'm not saying it's better to be actually religious - this isn't some sob-story about how the decline of religiosity is some great evil. I'm just pointing out the parallel: that something that's consumed A LOT of human energy and attention has disappeared in 1 generation leaving a huge vacuum of meaning for most people, and people are filling that vacuum with political identities.
Doesn't this list work for both political movements and religions: shared moral frameworks, common enemies, a metaphysical value system, sense of belonging, set of virtues and sins, rigid orthodoxy, regular rituals (protests, boycotts, etc), transcendent societal goals, conflict-as-sacred-struggle, etc.
Overly simplistic, maybe; but I think I'm not too far off.
The problem with words like "woke" is that there is no agreement on what it means. One sides it means this another says it means that. I think whatever it means to you shows truly what you believe. I don't use this word because it means nothing to me and I use more specific words to better communicate.
"Cancel Culture" has agreement on what it is, but one side says only the other side does it while doing it themselves. Give me a break. I just don't care enough about this.
Feminism, Privilege, gaslighting, toxic, DEI, etc. These words are perverted to mean whatever people want it to mean these days. Sometimes there is agreement other times there are not. DEI means inclusion spaces to one and exclusion/racism/sexism/ageism to another.
To address one part of the article about moral purity, again give me a break. We all have our compasses and will typically react with disgust to those who don't follow. Some people share some vague sense of moral compasses. You see it everywhere, not just politics. The spreading of outrage via the mainstream via internet and media outlets is really what has changed.
America, in its history, has had mobs that would be "woke" in today's culture apparently. Social media mobs are nothing fundamentally different.
Also, Twitter under Elon did censor people and ban words causing them to move to Mastodon and Threads before Bluesky, so let's not whitewash the suppression of "free speech" under him by saying that all he did was give more visibility to paying members when in fact it's what they settled on.
If PG actually wants better examples of moral purity and pushback against it, he can get in touch. Some of these examples are just not it.
The timing makes me think that its just another rich guy re-aligning himself with Trump.
If this is the case it's interesting to see how each different tech figure expresses this fealty.
Focusing on the term “wokeness” is a bit silly. I’ve always liked to think of it (“it” being the wave of political thought that came into influence around 2013 or so) as the latest wave of the civil rights movement. I call it “social justice” since they often use that term, but of course that term has been around for decades as well. It doesn’t matter what name you use, as long as we agree on the phenomenon we’re describing.
But really, you can trace it back further than the 60’s, as far back as in the 1920’s with C Wright Mills. He was a sociologist who essentially argued that science shouldn’t pursue explanatory knowledge, but rather emancipatory knowledge. The idea was that science can’t be some external objective thing apart from human political systems.
As for why it didn’t enter the national awareness until the last decade, I have no idea. But I think it has to do with the internet, that’s my intuition.
I've lived long enough to see pg turn into a boomer-ass uncle lmao.
It's also very funny that he decided to publish this _now_ of all times.
It's no coincidence that PG published this days before Trump's inauguration.
This is yet another Silicon Valley elite kowtowing to their new GOP overlords.
I understand the perception but I know pg well enough to say that I think it is very likely a coincidence. From everything I've seen, he isn't driven by such calculations.
I always thought the origin had something to do with Zack de la Rocha screaming "wake up" into my ears over and over in the 90s
> You know they went after King when he spoke out on Vietnam
> He turned the power to the have-nots
> And then came the shot
Not even wrong
> The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it
What did they do that was "An aggressively performative focus on social justice."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Light_boycott
Seems like they did a branded tie in with a celebrity who was trans?
Would it be woke to have an advert with a black, Jewish, female, immigrant, albino, gay, Chinese or Hispanic celebrity?
I kind of feel like it would have been at some point in the past.
Is there a list somewhere of what kinds of celebrity is "politically correct" these days so that corporations trying to advertise beer can avoid these accusations?
I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus. "Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.
The implicit message is that the "us" cannot trust the "they", and writers like Paul Graham show the reason why: Any attempt at social change can easily be labeled a virus by capitalists if it does not produce greater prosperity. It's the same prosperity that has poisoned the earth, so I hope they have answers there too.
> I would have to refute the notion that wokeness is a mind virus.
So would anyone with even 4th grade critical thinking skills. Sadly the text is riddled with the kind of naive, unearned confidance that dominated Sillicon Valley in the early 2000s.
I grew up then, every kid on a computer was smarter than the entire world put together. If only things were run by engineers all the problems would be fixed. We werent racist, or sexist, as long as you used Latex for your work, and Vim for your coding and looked down on humanities you belonged.
Only problem is, engineers did end up running everything. FB replaced traditional media, and what it achieved rather than the mass of uninformed working class, the mildly educated propagandised working class and perpetrating owner class. Well you ended up with heaps of misinformation, 2 genocides (one in africa and another in asia), 2 stable countries brought to the brink of civil war with brexit and trumpism, an arab spring that led to a decade of unstable countries from Lybia to Afghanistan. And the same safeguards that have been built for traditional media are now being built for FB, just 2 decades late and with way less regulatory teeth than the goverment fines imposed to early yellow newspapers.
Uber and wework were another engineer led proyects. Transport and Offices all gonna be cheap, available and with that magic Sillicon valley sauce, where people at google use a slide to go to work. But now wework is a documentary of failure and hubris and Uber is on a long term bet for self driving cars to try and abate its unionising workers who are recreating the old taxi system without the medallions or insurance.
Tesla and Airbnb were gonna change our lives. But one is a plastic badly built car with no lidar because its owner made a bad bet a decade ago, and the other is being demonised in every city for aggravating the housing crisis while remaining less safe and more expensive than most hotels.
Engineers like PG run the show and we are recreting 100 years of guardrails, while they become billionaires over our inability to stop them and punish them. They then buy newspapers, social media platforms and think tanks and destroy words made up by marginalised communities to use as insults. Then useful idiots like PG read the insult, and not the original word and write lengthy essays with nothing interesting to say because they are attacking a strawman created by a republican think tank because some billionaire cant say the n word anymore.
>"Stay Woke" has a much deeper origin in African American culture, and it refers to the fact that one needs to stay vigilant about another's intentions.
Yes, this origin is correct as I remember it. I first heard the term publicly from Larry on his show a decade or so ago, mainly referring to police interactions. He presented it well using comedy, unlike the rabid versions of today. He presented it too well as today, it seems this movement has since taken over by (mostly) white college people to service their own selfish ends; that's the mind virus part.
This clip pretty much encapsulates this idea:
It's true, but one has to ask "who made woke-ism into a mind virus?". I think alt-right media say that BLM/Liberals have, but in reality it went viral when it became a favored perjorative and performative act by the alt right, a sort of gradual straw man argument that became true by its own belief. That's the textbook definition of a virus if I've ever seen one.
And it spread like no other.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
This is exhausting. I don't have the emotional energy right now to lay into this properly. I hope someone else does a good job, so I don't have to waste time on it tomorrow.
All else being equal, we think it's good to avoid being a jerk, especially when you're in a position of power.
If people inform you that you're being a jerk, try to understand and follow the rules to avoid being a jerk, even if you don't understand the reasoning.
And yes, like all things, it gets out of control sometimes.
Tedious moral panic.
I have observed Hacker News commenters to be more predominantly left-leaning and "WOKE" compared to the general population. Not sure what the reason may be, but it is possible that they are taught about woke culture in their companies or universities. Generally, compared to the founder and startup culture that we all aspire for, wokeness is more prevalent in the majority of the YC audience.
>Much as they tried to pretend there was no conflict between diversity and quality. But you can't simultaneously optimize for two things that aren't identical. What diversity actually means, judging from the way the term is used, is proportional representation, and unless you're selecting a group whose purpose is to be representative, like poll respondents, optimizing for proportional representation has to come at the expense of quality. This is not because of anything about representation; it's the nature of optimization; optimizing for x has to come at the expense of y unless x and y are identical.
Eh, if x and y are correlated, you can optimize for x to a point and still get y gains.
Cartoonish displays of "wokeness" are stupid and corrosive. But I would argue that people who are loudly "Anti-woke" could also be described as "self-righteously moralistic [people] who behave as if superior to others". Both sides are impenetrably convinced that they alone are the arbiters of what is "good" behavior. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the far ends of "Woke" and "Anti-woke" people have far more in common to each other than they are to people the middle.
Ultimately, I think the problem is we separate ourselves along easy to define lines like left vs right, white vs non-white, bike vs car, and let the loudest assholes on either sides dictate terms.
If anyone complains about "woke" or "DEI" it is safe to assume they're a racist, just as with paulg.
See, the thing is, @paulg does understand that there is a difference between "prigness" as he put it and the original term of "woke" which in no way means political correctness or some culture war term. Matter of fact, the only people I see use it are racists, as a dogwhistle. outside of rare "liberal arts" academics on twitter, you don't see anyone use the term "woke" to mean politically correct or anti-racism. Woke was a term black people used to to mean raising awareness to a racially complicated past, as in being "awoke", and even then it is academics not every day people that used the term.
It has been hijacked as a dogwhistle, with the purpose of propagating racist agenda.
Same with "DEI", you all know why tech CEO's are rolling it back right? they all were summoned by trump who instructed them to roll it back. and he did that because he and his backers have a racist agenda. of course "DEI" is performative b.s. to the most part, but it did help raise awareness to racial issues in the work place. It forced saying the quite part aloud. Racists also hijacked the term to essentially mean the "n-word". I recall with the crowdstrike outage, racists were using it very obviously to attack minorities as the cause (although that is a view divorced from reality in that case).
Whether it comes to "return to office" or now this, I keep meaning to afford @paulg the benefit of doubt. Perhaps he is just that disconnected from the non-rich world? but he and his ilk are too smart, and I otherwise respect them and their acheivements too much for them to be so ignorant.
This is @paulg jumping on the bandwagon and kissing trump's ring. Perhaps he is not a racist at heart, but he certainly is a racist by action, and action is all that matters.
Dear tech CEO's: May your cowardice never be forgotten and may you be crushed along with trump and share in his downfall as you have decided to lie in his bed. You lie with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
Understand that the only scenario where the world forgets your cowardice is if trump/gop succeed in installing a dictator that will rule America for decades.
HN: I'm disappointed in all of you on staying silent or afraid to speak up to these people. Who are we without principles? These CEOs and founders are nothing without your support. They need you, not the other way around.
> Article titled "The Origins of Wokeness"
> Doesn't actually discuss the origins of wokeness
> Claims to be against male chauvinism
> Publish date timed within days of right wing male chauvinist being inaugrated as American president
> Article is full of right wing male chauvinist talking points
> Author moved from United States to England in 2016, the same year that right wing male chauvinist became president for the first time
Hmmmm...
The comparison between religious fanaticism and wokeness is incomplete. One big difference is that religion can be deeply meaningful to an individual without them needing to express their beliefs publicly - religion can often be an entirely private affair. Many a loud preacher of religion has retired to a private life of quiet worship. Wokeness would have no meaning at all as a private affair, it's entirely based around shaming others in the public discourse. That's why PG's proposed solution of "allowing expression of beliefs without enforcement" might work for creating religious tolerance, but will not work for combatting priggish wokeism. If you don't allow their policing of words, there's nothing left to wokeism.
I agree with Sam Kriss, "wokeness" is an etiquette: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics
> They’ll tell you that actually, there’s no such thing as wokeness. It’s not an ideology. It’s not a belief system. It’s just basic decency. It’s just being a good person.
> They’re right. Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.
> The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder.
It would help to be a multi-planetary civilization, because seen from afar it's obvious wokeness, or prudishness or what-have-you is a bad idea.
Most people have antibodies to wokeness in the sense that it's easy to see it's performative. People, especially the internet generation, have finely-tuned BS detectors.
But as PG said, the majority are performing not to be lauded but to avoid being ostracized/canceled/fired.
With some physical and societal distance, say 140 million miles, perhaps that's enough of a barrier to let one society deal with the latest prudishness while the other remains healthy, then switch.
Reaction, reaction everywhere
I think the term woke is a clear and unambiguous term. I find it surprising people consider it a slur / empty insult. I consider it a substantive characterization of people and acts that reflects a genuine disagreement.
To me, as the right uses it, the term woke refers to people or movements prioritising signalling virtue (e.g., policing the words people use) over actually improving the world. One clear instances of it was the spate of scrapping standardized testing (despite this scrapping actively harming rather than helping the disenfranchised).
This just reads like the usual anti-intellectualism.
That’s really all Silicon Valley has to offer at this point.
They are our betters and we should follow them without question.
> They are our betters and we should follow them without question.
Wasn't this basically the messaging of the Harris/Walz campaign? Perhaps if not directly then through the commentary around it.
I’m not sure. I don’t listen to much political commentary outside of the stuff shoved in my face.
What gave you that feeling from the Harris campaign?
Trump suggested he was "anointed by God" to serve a second term. I can't think of anything that says "I'm better than you" than that.
Bigot grandad is back on the sauce
Related: People wonder why English has so many weird spellings. It's a complicated answer. The Vikings seem to show up way too often (grin). One of the reasons, though, is that several hundred years ago we all thought that Latin was the bees knees. The Greeks and Romans were the model. So took words that were perfectly-well phonetically-spelled and "fixed" them, returning them to some kind of bastardized form that was "better".
For some words it didn't work -- people went back to the old ways. But for some it did.
This chaotic priggish churning in society is not new, as pg points out. I love how language, manners, idioms, and cultures interact. It can be a force for good. It can also be extremely destructive, usually in tiny ways and over centuries.
While I love these intricacies, I also always fall back on the definition of manners I was taught early on: good manners is how you act around people with poor manners. Add complexity as desired on top of that. The form of communication and behavior can never replace the actual meaning and effects of it. (There's a wonderful scene in "The Wire" where they only use the f-word. Would have worked just as well for their job to have used the n-word. 100 years ago, the n-word would have been fine and the f-word beyond the pale. Draw your lessons from that.)
ADD: I always try to be polite and abide whatever traditions are in place in any social group. One thing I've noticed, though: the more people express their politics, their priggishness, their wokeness, etc -- the crappier they seem to be in their jobs. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because this is such as easy social crutch to lean on and gain social advantage that it becomes kind of a "communications drug". Scratch a loud prude or moralizer, you find a dullard or slacker. Conversely, people who produce usable advances in mankind tend to be jerks. I suspect this relationship has held up over centuries. cf Socrates and the Sophists, etc. (A good book among many along these lines is "Galileo's Middle Finger")
This article never takes up the cause of the minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language. For this reason it reeks of self-centered willful ignorance.
That's the point.
Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.
This seems illustrative of the "boogeyman" points that many commenters are making. I think it is a very small number of people who don't want people to call black people "black", and that the majority of liberal people would find the notion "you can't call them black people" to be ridiculous.
Are there people who believe this? I'm sure there are, but I think they are a vocal minority.
How exactly would you go about implementing the "real change" here?
It really depends on the situation.
Sticking with the hiring situation, if you notice that a recruiter only ever recommends hiring people with say the last name Pandit then ask them about it. A lot of times people are not ashamed of their views and will just straight up tell you that they could tell the other candidates were inferior because of their name.
But as somebody else mentioned, there is no silver bullet here. Racism varies from instance to instance. A solution to fix racism in hiring isn't going to fix red-lining. You need to be keeping an eye of things and looking for patterns that don't make sense for the given sample size.
That's part of the problem, there is no silver bullet. I implement it by not being racist (or sexist or any other -ist) personally and refusing to support anyone who is.
That's largely all anyone can do (and I have a lot more ability to do something about it as a business owner than the average progressive), which I'm sure feels inadequate and leads to roving bands of thought police members looking for perceived transgressions to attack.
> That's largely all anyone can do
When you don't have an understanding of racism as a systemic issue, this ends up being the conclusion. Which is why "woke" people (the ones who aren't just adopting the aesthetics and being annoying) typically discuss social issues in systemic terms (prison, policing, discrimination, etc). Which requires not just individual actions but collective action.
The inability to understand this concept is really just a lack of imagination that comes from internalizing the status quo for too long. Not to the fault of anyone, it's only natural. But I think this is why "woke" looks like a bunch of nonsense from the outside.
For example: the US has 2M people in prison more than any other country. An insane number, but to live in the US is to accept that number as normal.
And how do you decide whether someone you're considering supporting is or isn't racist? Do you, by chance, use the way they talk about black people or other minorities (man that's a mouthful, maybe just shorten it to BIPOC) as a way to gauge it?
For example, if someone said the N word in front of you, or made an uncomfortable joke about a Mexican, would you decide not to support them? If so, then does that make you one of those roving thought police? You'd obviously be censoring free speech if you decided how you treat them based on what they say!
On the other hand, people are clever, they know not to be too obvious or it may cause them social issues. So, as long as they don't do something too untoward right in front of you, does that mean they gain your full support?
Of course, I won't be surprised if those proponents of free speech decide to censor me by downvoting instead of engaging speech with speech
> And how do you decide whether someone you're considering supporting is or isn't racist? Do you, by chance, use the way they talk about black people or other minorities (man that's a mouthful, maybe just shorten it to BIPOC) as a way to gauge it?
The same way I determine anyone's beliefs on any other topic, which is watching their actions over time, including what they say.
> For example, if someone said the N word in front of you, or made an uncomfortable joke about a Mexican, would you decide not to support them?
Probably, but context matters.
> If so, then does that make you one of those roving thought police? You'd obviously be censoring free speech if you decided how you treat them based on what they say!
And here we go. I'm not censoring anyone by not continuing to associate with someone I don't agree with. I'm also not digitally screaming to ostracize someone I disagree with over terminology, as is the case with cancel culture advocates.
> On the other hand, people are clever, they know not to be too obvious or it may cause them social issues. So, as long as they don't do something too untoward right in front of you, does that mean they gain your full support?
See what I said above about how I assess people. But if someone is a closet racist and I know nothing about it, what am I supposed to do?
> Of course, I won't be surprised if those proponents of free speech decide to censor me by downvoting instead of engaging speech with speech
Knock it off.
If my using the same rhetorical devices as you annoys you, maybe consider how you come across to others? Phrases like "roving bands of thought police" make you sound like a child, and makes it easy to dismiss your opinion out of hand.
You aren't using the same rhetorical devices, you're assuming a lot and pretending to be helpless.
Exactly what term would you use for the groups of terminally online people who dig through decades of social media posts looking for something like a mildly offensive tweet to blow out of proportion?
What term would you use to encompass non-white folk?
Person of color is not for "non-white", see: east asians.
The question stands, then! What's your answer?
Why are you trying to divide people based on immutable characteristics anyhow?
"People of color" is a broader term than "black people", and is meant to replace the (pretty widely accepted as) offensive "colored people", not "black people". I feel like it's useful to have a non-offensive phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people, but maybe I'm just too woke to reason effectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people
That does sound quite oxymoronic. (I’m not American.)
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style and please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? You've been doing these things repeatedly, they're not what this site is for, and they destroy what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
From the article:
>>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
pg, and many anti-woke crusaders, employ examples of performative anti-racism to undermine the necessity of genuine anti-racism altogether.
Is it the critics of performative anti-racism or the actual performers of performative anti-racism who are undermining anti-racism?
How do the critics divine the intention here? At a certain point, we're going to get to anything short of a riot being labelled virtue signaling. I'd like to avoid riots altogether.
Do people that love Chipotle actually hate burritos? It's Sturgeon's law all the way down.
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
It seems like pg sees good parts with "wokeness", and also bad parts. He want to continue with the good parts, while getting rid of the bad parts. The essay mostly seems to speak about the historical context, and how to work with "wokeness" so the good parts can persist, rather than "whining about having to show empathy".
Lots of comments here would do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay they deem worse, as currently there seems to be a lot of handwavey-arguments based solely on the title alone.
> do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay
I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him.
>> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness
This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states.
One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence.
>> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter.
>> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall".
>> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that
They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects.
I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions.
Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is
>> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do.
We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
It bothers me so much that Paul Graham people thinks it's performative. He can't imagine anyone actually, sincerely holding those beliefs, because he doesn't hold them himself. If someone is trying to modify their beliefs and then their behaviour, say, by mild self-censorship, he's got a list of insults ready for that person trying to better themselves: prig, politically correct, woke.
It's not performative. We really do believe that there are injustices and that if we can begin by changing the language, we can change the behaviour.
Just because Paul Graham can't imagine himself sincerely believing in self improvement followed by social improvement doesn't mean we don't believe it in ourselves.
You can hold the beliefs without being "performative"
A perfect example is when gay marriage was illegal and some straight people loudly announced that they wouldn't get married until gay people could.
OK. Your motives are good but how exactly is this going to help legalize gay marriage? And why did the world need to know about it?
While your example is interesting, I would at least give those people some credit for taking the action they could (even if it is largely pointless as you said).
I think a better analogy is people who would criticize other heterosexual couples for getting married when homosexual couples could not, as it is both pointless and needlessly antagonistic.
Except the goal of this kind of behavior is not actual change but proving to the world you are "morally superior" by your chosen system of morality.
Would you say the same about people joining picket lines and marches? Any sort of peaceful protest?
Also, you're projecting. You don't (and can't) know what a person's true goals are. Framing these actions as them communicating they are morally superior to someone (you?) is a thought in that other person's head, not the protestors. Maybe these straight people truly believe this form of protest (not getting married) will bring attention to a cause and maybe change some people's minds. Did it? Who knows. But good on them for at least trying.
Charitably, PG refers to the policing part as performative. He’s probably fine with what you describe as sincere self-improvement, but not when people start wanting to police everyone else.
You don't understand the difference between attempting to improve yourself and aggressively applying your definitions of words and morally acceptable behavior to others without any serious thought.
Beginning by changing the language is so fundamentally flawed that I have a hard time believing you seriously think it could ever be effective.
Who's being killed on a daily basis? Could you provide sources?
People in Chicago?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/03/chicago-homicides-...
Yeah, and who is doing the killing?
> but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language
Inclusive language can prevent homicide? I'm so lost, what does that have to do with cold-blood murder?
No one is saying that
Currently, Ukrainans are.
But I suppose the color of their skin means they don't count towards the particular argument that dude is trying to make. Not calling him racist of course. I'm not even suggesting it.
[update] Hey! Look! I was down-voted for mentioning that white people are being killed on a daily basis, what an absolute surprise :D
You might've been downvoted for bad style, irrespective of your actual argument.
Institutionalized racism, sexism, and the general idea that some lives matter less than others kills people every day through healthcare claim denials, red-lined neighborhood districts with lack of infra for safe access to food/water/health/civil services, etc. If you want explicit violence, police in the USA literally kill people at alarmingly high rates usually reserved mostly for countries with notoriously violent regimes or gangs, beating out Mexico, Sudan, Rwanda [1].
"Wokeness" is a fake bear the right has built up to distract from class issues and sow dissent amongst workers and stave off class solidarity. Progressive policy is largely embraced by the majority of Americans [2], but because the right (and its newfound grifter-billionare tech exec class like PG, Musk, Zuck, etc.) have convinced an overwhelmingly large amount of Americans that their woes are because we have gender neutral bathrooms (instead of wage theft by the C suite), it is peddled and use as a smokescreen to continually push through policy and regime changes that will only every serve the .1%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/majority-of-americans-suppor...
"Paul Graham is an idiot. Heres the real issue: [deliberately convoluted and unfalsifiable conspiracy theories]"
I think that inclusive language became a symbol of a step too far. If you expect me to adjust some governmental policies to make a better society that's fine, but if you expect me to change the way I express myself because you personally don't like it and you have a bunch of bullies behind you, that's just not okay and should be fought against.
> minorities
Ahem! I think you mean People of the global majority? Please consider using more inclusive language in the future.
Actually I think that's exactly the problem with "wokeness" today. People care so much about minorities that we've come to a point where people will be extremely quick to cancel someone online who says something wrong but the same people turn a blind eye to the actual injustices that happen in the world like homelessness and hunger. It's easier to ban someone who says something ignorant than it is to go out and advocate for building new homes or deciding to stop buying on Amazon and Temu to curb the capitalism that people seem to hate so much.
Change needs to happen and I think the "woke" are at least working in the right direction compared to a lot of the right (who seem to be moving back a lot of progress that's been made in the last 50 years) even if their actions are woefully inadequate.
I feel like it's important to enter this part of the cycle where the absolute worst people feel comfortable entering their most heinous takes into the permanent internet record under the delusion that the social pressure to be a good person has been defeated forever.
This is effectively putting the popcorn into the popper, but it won't be served until about ten years from now.
Trump won the popular vote; it's very hard, over the long term, to have strong social pressure from a minority over the majority.
The quote doesn't go "The arc of history is short and goes straight toward justice. Absolute downhill battle, frankly embarrassingly easy."
Their problem with "political correctness" is that someone corrected them who them deem lesser than them.
In the US statistically speaking a minority is much more likely to be killed by another minority than a "white" American.
Most people are killed by someone they know. Due to redlining many minorities live in communities that are, to this day, essentially segregated. Add the disproportionate correlation of violence and poverty, adn you get a volatile cocktail.
You will find it that cities with less redlining have less srong correlation between races of victims and perpetrators than cities that are more strongly, or more recently, redlined.
Sure, for the same reasons 84% of white people are killed by white perpetrators, and most child abusers are family members of the victim. Closeness brings both opportunity and conflict, and things like redlining and white flight have ensured the white and black population are quite well segregated.
Great fact!
I wonder... why is that? Is it simply because they are non-white? What do you think is making your fact a fact?
Statistically true. What's your point?
Except the state is doing its killing as normative behavior in all of our names, whereas disorganized gang violence is already generally seen as wrong.
And yes, police unaccountability most certainly affects more than just minorities. The lawlessness of law enforcement is actually the most pressing second amendment issue of our time, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the fully-pwnt political hacks at the NRA, pushing their chosen "side" of the group-herding thought-terminating "woke" strawman like pg here (sigh). How can you claim to have a second amendment right to self defense when the police can summarily execute you for exercising that natural right, in your own home, at night? (The answer is that you can't)
But it's not just minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, so why should they get special consideration? That's the problem I have with it. It puts people into buckets, and then claims one bucket is more important than the others, even when that bucket is statistically insignificant compared to the others. Wokism is simply racism rebranded.
You did notice the trend of 2025 is Billionaires complaining?
I think they don't care at all, this is just signalling, different camp has the power to rule the country now and suddenly all of them are changing their minds
If you look how many white people are killed by blacks versus blacks killed by white people, you will have a shock. Even when you account for whites being a few times more than blacks in the general population.
I really don't buy this "minorities" are being killed story.
This is how to lie with statistics. Two things can be true without contradiction. Does a black gang member randomly killing an innocent white person cancel a white cop randomly killing an innocent black man?
The original comment made it sound like minorities are just hunted down by random whites, lynching style.
But even if you look at police murders on civilians, they are killing more whites than blacks. You might argue that whites are 5x more than blacks, but police has more interaction with blacks than with whites. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
"Inclusive language" won't stop anyone from being killed or harassed, especially with Trump in power in the US again.
Can you point to an increase in minority vs majority deaths while Trump was in office last time?
When I see someone use that word, it's almost always a clear knee-jerk reaction to:
- Media featuring women who aren't exclusively an attractive love interest or a very minor character
- Media featuring non-white or non-heterosexual people in major roles
I find it difficult to have any rational discussion of this topic because it always gets drowned out by overwhelming racism and sexism. You can't talk about overcorrection or virtue signalling without an army of angry white guys present who watch hours of "(some guy) DESTROYS wokeness with FACTS and LOGIC" on youtube every day.
That said, compared to disinformation and identity politics, this is a non-issue. It's a convenient topic to focus the anger and time of straight white men so they don't notice how billionaires and opportunistic politicians are taking their futures away while pretending to care about "free speech". This will have huge consequences not just for victims of racism and sexism, but literally everyone who isn't filthy rich.
This article puts in words what I have been thinking for some time. I can't comment on the theory of when and where wokeness starts, but I can relate to people I have had experience with, especially online, especially in academic contexts, that readily correct innocuous words or jokes which were perfectly fine until yesterday, extracting the word or part of the concept out of the context, and pointing out how politically backwards you are, with added crucification from supporters.
I am coming from a left-wing perspective: always voted left and very supportive of fights for social justice, which is also why it makes me angry when the language police comes to shut me up and call me names that I am definitely not.
I think PG is right in many aspects: it's a sort of empty moralism, a way to signal virtue based on an arbitrary, ever-changing set of rules. The intention is to be inclusive but it ends being snobbish and exclusive. I hope that PG is also right about this attitude -or fashion- to be on the retreat, especially if we want to get serious about social justice again.
I couldnt get past his definition of woke. It seems to mean "brown lady in my video game" today but the ranticle didnt seem to even care. It just wanted to hate on social justice.
The issue is this: 2010s SJWs were annoying. Gamergate, anti DEI, anti Woke people of today are even more annoying.
Wokeness is what happens when you have socially liberal and fiscally conservative investors / executives try to please their democratic leaning employees without having to pay more taxes. It costs them nothing, so you get corporations and the media to embrace race and gender progressivism with a full clamp down on any true progressive causes like universal health care, free education and etc.
The same VCs crying about wokeness are also crying about a collapse of the manufacturing base in the US, when they're the ones responsible for offshoring all of it and not investing in any business that deal with physical goods because software are so much larger.
As an example, yes Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions.
"Starbucks can have LGBT mugs but hell no to unions". I think you hit the nail on the head. There is a whole chapter to be written about pro/anti "wokeness" stances used by companies / politicians to divert attention from the deeper class vs class issues.
Wokeness is also a way the media can smack down candidates like Corbin and Sanders, labeling them sexist or an antisemite for focusing on class instead of identity politics.
It is no coincidence that wokeness arose during Occupy Wall Street, and the insistence on the use of the "progressive stack" was part of what destroyed that protest movement.
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
Wow, PG downplaying racism and sexism was not on my 2025 bingo card.
I hear some good points and I can understand the fatigue with cancel culture; still, discussing recent movements like blm and #metoo in negative light only seems very narrow.
I guess especially for rich celebrities movements like these and the power they represent can feel limiting, threatening, to the point of feeling targeted.
PG would have done well to read this rather good Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
The defining work on this subject is “Industrial Society and its Future” by Ted Kaczynski. Where he says “leftism” say “woke” and you have it.
This always needs to be followed by a condemnation of his violent methods, but that has been used as a way to avoid dealing with his horribly on point diagnosis of the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_F...
[flagged]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> it’s now “woke” to say that multiple police officers shouldn’t kill someone by sitting on their neck for 9 minutes
He’s using the moment as a time stamp, not rendering commentary on it per se. Floyd was arguably the peak of legitimacy and acceptance of what we (and he) now calls woke culture. (I’d set the time a little later, around the ‘22 midterms, but we’re in the same ballpark.)
That doesn’t exactly help. Minorities have been trying to get society to wake up to police brutality since at least as far back as NWA’s “Fuck the Police” when Tipper Gore was clutching her pearls about the affect such music had on society.
It was just not until social media where minorities could get around the press and media filter.
> Minorities have been trying to get society to wake up to police brutality
And it happened, to a degree. Then it got overplayed, in part because the prigs Graham criticises were less concerned with police violence than they were with arguing online about it.
That in turn not only animated a pro-police backlash on the right, it also sapped the police/sentencing reform movement of the legitimacy it would need to survive mistakes, e.g. Chesa.
The right has been pro police since day one. There is no world where the right was going to be in favor of criminal justice or police reform until it started affecting them.
This is so well known that during the protest in 2021, there were “white shields” where White people would stand in front of Black protestors because everyone knows that police would not beat White people because there would be consequences.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
> no world where the right was going to be in favor of criminal justice or police reform until it started affecting them
Sure. That doesn’t mean it’s a given that the disinterested middle will be swayed by them.
That we agree with. There is a huge difference between “we need to allocate funds for mental health and other societal ills that cause people to be incarcerated and we need to have more accountable for police misconduct” and “defund the police”.
Here "affect" should be "effect".
You’re getting downvoted. But one of my pet peeves is when people use “jive” instead of “jibe”. Fair is fair.
Using his definition, it was peak performance.
I think a key tenant to wokeness in this framework is the emphasis on awareness/alertness relative to solutions.
This is pretty much a canonical example of what does not belong on HN. A dumb topic, and then on top of that a dumb take on that dumb topic.
>A dumb topic, and then on top of that a dumb take on that dumb topic.
Agreed. A dumb topic, with dumb people discussing at length.
Reminder to flag the submission if you think it’s inappropriate for HN.
IMO, it doesn’t belong here.
With how long it's been on the front page, how controversial it is, and the fact that it was posted earlier and that post _was_ flagged... I would be willing to bet a moderator has somehow disabled the ability for this post specifically to be actually flagged and is simply ignoring those that click the flag button.
I'm sure that seems conspiratorial but the guy writing the post effectively "cuts the checks" for the moderation staff here.
It's not conspiratorial, it's how HN works:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But it has nothing to do with "cutting checks". PG hasn't been doing that, nor influencing HN, nor even reading HN as far as I know, for many years.
It's like calling the word of Jesus heresy ... if pg essays don't belong on HN then the word "hacker" has lost all meaning. He's describing a system and how to change it. What else are we doing all day on these computers?
the origin of wokeness was childish gambino's 2016 single "redbone" from the album "awaken my love", in this essay i will. . .
Are we going to see our institutions flexibly re-align themselves basically every US election cycle? Or do the recent changes at Facebook and Amazon, and this essay, herald a long-term shift to the right in USA politics?
Where individuals, institutions and society have to be flexible/whiplashed around in order to survive and thrive, it can be good from time to time, but it's not great for everyone to have too much such change on an ongoing basis.
If we're talking about the origins of wokeness, I would tend to go back further and look at Christianity as a whole. Suggest Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, which states that the morality of the day is somewhat arbitrarily dictated by those currently in power, and you had better snap to it and conform, which I think is more or less what we're seeing here?
Specifically, the idea of wokeness originates in the Christian conceptual understanding of pity, which is basically that we should sympathise with and help other people. Further, wokeness has in it that we don't accept people who work to benefit themselves and their cadres at the expense of society at large. Of course, this is ultimately incompatible with VC, which is why wokeness and tech/VC ultimately make an odd pairing, inevitably destined for a split, which we are now seeing.
“Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness.
…
My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“
I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.
That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.
Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”
Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?
> My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
Fundamentalist Christians were the original prigs. It is amusing to see pg try and shoehorn the word on to the social justice movement.
Puritans predate "Fundamentalists" in the American Christian sense of the term, and if we're just following _this_ line of thought (and no others) the Romans were busy setting Christians on fire for garden parties because they were not willing to conform to what the Empire demanded (worship of the Emperor and acknowledgement of many gods).
They have much in common.
The behaviors and reactions to benign, relative ideas and thinking from anyone they disagree with are uncannily identical. There is no shoehorn to be found here.
I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note whether the person is mocking the southern accent or just imitating it as a form of flattery. Often it's the former rather than the latter. The (vast) majority of the time I hear someone doing a southern accent it's for purposes of making fun of them, especially for being stupid/redneck. I don't think it's unreasonable to be offended when somebody is mocking you.
There is no world where people imitate a southern accent as a form of “flattery” any more than when a White person immitates how they perceive Black people talking or how imitating Indian accents use to be the norm.
Of course the exception I can think of for imitating southern accents would be acting
I think you're probably right wrt flattery of southern accent, but for white people imitated black accents I have to disagree. Growing up one of my friend idolized Will Smith and thought he was the most badass dude on the planet. He would often quote movie lines from him with the accent, and it was 100% a form of flattery. It is also very common for white people to rap along with black artists using the same accent, and it's because they love the song and the style. Nowadays most parents will immediately try to silence their kids for doing that in public, and anyone older than about 12 is now terrified of doing that, so it's quite possible things have changed.
That said, I would agree that the majority of people doing accents are likely to be mocking. I'm not sure how to prevent throwing the baby out with the bath water though.
Will Smith has never had a stereotypical “black accent”. (I’m Black by the way). But do you notice that no matter how accepted an actor is in the Black community or even the Black hip hop community - ie Eminem - that they never say “the N word” in public or in their lyrics? Of course in movies you will hear it.
As an aside, I do think Robert Downey Jr. may be the last White guy who can wear Black face in a movie without getting canceled.
> See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice
Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
> are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian
But they haven’t—until recently—had the power to e.g. end someone’s career or ability to perform in New York or San Francisco over it.
> Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
That idea gets very close to
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2009/march.htm
> “I am a middle-aged white person and even I know that blacks and other racial minorities cannot be racist, just like women can not be sexists. Racism equals power. Whites are not hurt by the everyday flow of society.”
I’m Black and I can go into a long rant about how I disagree with every word of that sentence.
But the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years. The entire crusade against “woke” is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a “minority majority” country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out.
> the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years
I’d argue their power fell earlier, with the Civil Rights movement: we’ve seen almost monotonic decreases in Christian religiosity since [1]. (It’s currently in a generational peak. I don’t know if that’s a last gasp of their boomers or something deeper.)
> The entire crusade against ‘woke’ is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a ‘minority majority’ country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out
I think it’s about as unfair to paint the rejection of “wokeness” like this as it is to paint every progressive policy as woke.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
> I’d argue their power fell earlier, with the Civil Rights movement: we’ve seen almost monotonic decreases in Christian religiosity since
Unfortunately between the way that Electoral College, gerrymandering and 2 Senators per state works, the religious right has far more influence than their population would call for.
I’m not saying that last years election was caused by that. It was mostly because of the ineptitude of the Democrat party
I sure do love VCs pontificating on life like they live the same day-to-day like the rest of us wage-slaves.
the playbook of lever up, risk it all, sell out, make billions, and then lecture people on how society should be is hilarious. Why should we listen? Because you have a B next your net worth? okay hah hard pass.
Paul clearly got the memo that he wasn’t going to be invited to eat at the big boy table at Mar-A-Lago unless he turned in his homework assignment.
With this coordinated oligarchic turn to the right I finally feel very progressive again.
It's very telling that he gives Marxist-Leninism as an example of moral orthodoxy instead of the much more relevant Capitalist orthodoxy that exists in the U.S. which he viciously upholds. It's pretty clear that it's much more acceptable to rail against DEI, "wokeism", etc., than it is to suggest that a different economic system is possible in American society. There's very few people in power that can get away with suggesting that there can be something better than Capitalism, or even admitting that there's some problems that Capitalism just can't fix. Most of the progressives or "wokes" in power only go so far as suggesting refinements and guardrails for the current system. Meanwhile, roughly half our elected officials rabidly speak out against the "woke" with no consequences, and the media clearly props up the current system against all else.
It's just so frustrating to see guys like Paul Graham pretend like they're somehow outside of or above "orthodoxy" and "ideology", to use their own terms. "Wokeism" is a religion, but somehow "anti-wokeism" isn't? My point isn't that all of what they label "wokeism" is good or that Capitalism is all bad, it's that there is a hypocrisy in their beliefs that belies their whole argument.
Above all it's just embarrassing to see, and it kills me that they paint their obvious orthodoxy as heresy, when it's anything but.
“Anti wokeism” is to atheism what wokeism is to Christianity. It can turn into a religion in its own right sure but it’s origin is disbelief in another ideology.
Sorry, but at this point I don't think this article is appropriate for this website
Additionally, what's with the amount of US politics discussion increasing lately
It's not increasing - whatever you're seeing is most likely random fluctuation. HN's approach to political stories was established a long time ago and we aren't changing it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
are you the Daniel Gackle mentioned at the bottom of the article or a different one?
What's intellectually interesting here? This article is mindless pap you could get anywhere online with some quick searching for anti woke. I don't mind political content if it's saying something novel, but this.... there's nothing here.
Paul Graham is an important figure in tech (and arguably even more so on this site). If he comes out on one side or another of an important issue, it is interesting to this community. IMHO. If Zuckerberg had written TFA, I'd be interested too.
If Paul Graham published his list of favorite la croix flavors, would it be interesting because of who he is?
I don't understand celebrity worship in the slightest -- if a celebrity says something, why does that make it valuable to listen? Especially if it's poorly written drivel.
Certainly this essay is, mostly, “not wrong”. But I was hoping PG might use his powerful brain and hundreds of words to explain how one should combat structural racism and sexism without the unfortunate side effect of “wokeness”. As far as I can see, he just recommended you do it “quietly”. Disappointing.
Here’s how:
Don’t discriminate on the basis of sex and race.
For sake of argument, what if the answer truly is "do it quietly"?
What if it's most effective to live your life to the best of your ability without prejudice, and instead of preaching about what people should do, you just do what it is that you believe to be right?
I grew up in (and left behind) conservative evangelical christian circles, and the thing that always made me most uncomfortable with "wokeness" is how much it often resembles those holier-than-though people I grew up around.
It's not that I disagree with the underlying ideas behind "woke" positions as much as it is the behavior of the people who want to move those ideas forward.
Whether it's overly pious evangelical christians or "very woke" people, I think there's an underlying belief that transcends particular points of view that there's a particular way people must conduct themselves and that using various tactics ranging from moralizing to public shaming are tactics that are effective.
Except I don't think these tactics are effective at all, and while it may be unsatisfying, "try to be the best example you can be" seems far more helpful than what often emerges when people feel they're morally justified.
There is a particular way people should conduct themselves. For example, they shouldn’t murder other people, damage public property, or systematically discriminate against other people based on gender or “race”. We aren’t “quiet” about the first two.
The trouble is that many of the issues now under the "woke" umbrella are not nearly as simple/obvious as the examples you've chosen.
To raise just one example: for most people, terms like "whitelist" and "blacklist" held no racist connotations. When they uttered those words, they felt no animus towards another person or race. If they were asked to speculate why those words exist or how they originated, there's a good chance they'd point out that "light" and "dark" have longstanding associations often evoking religious imagery of good vs evil. And indeed, if you investigate the history of these words, they don't seem to have a problematic racial history (which can't be said for all words).
But due to the potential for racial connotations, replacing these words was part of a widespread campaign. Resisting the removal of these words would result in someone being labeled a racist/bigot etc.
Personally, I've chosen to remove those words from my vocabulary because they offend some people in neutral settings and it's not a big deal to say "allowlist/denylist". But I'm not taking it upon myself to scold other people for not doing the same thing. On the other hand, if someone started using the n word, I wouldn't be quiet about it.
My general point was that acting as if all "woke" issues rise to the level of murder, property rights or racial discrimination is exactly the problem. People stop taking the "you must live this particular way" people seriously when the issues up for discussion are complex and not obvious.
Yes, I agree, when it gets to the level of "that made someone vaguely uncomfortable" rather than "that ruined someone's entire life", it no longer qualifies. So, how do you effectively fight the latter without ending up fighting about the former? "Working quietly" doesn't seem like a good answer. This is an unsolved problem that PG seemingly isn't much interested in solving; he's more interested in how people talk about it.
> For sake of argument, what if the answer truly is "do it quietly"?
Then why is the richest man in the world buying a social media platform? Why is Bezos buying newspapers?
Why are christian preachers shouting at everyone all the time?
Why are republican think tanks and lobbysits spending their entire career fighting tooth and nail against public education and healthcare?
Why are those preachings not demonised, or considered a problem and why is no one asking them to do it quietly?
> Except I don't think these tactics are effective at all
The loudest president of all time just won re election despite being a convicted felon, he will walk next week into the white house with his wife the ex playboy model voted by Evangelicals who say gay people are the devil.
Idk it seems like empirically the attempts to demonise wokeness as a loud abbrasive movement that "doesnt work" is an attempt to disuade the fact that it DOES work the only issue is one side is much much much louder due to owning the means of communication and can create consent around their behaviour.
Or is Zuck coming out and saying " we need more masculine energy" and removing all DEI iniatives at FB a week before trump takes office not the same kind of pandering behaviour just "anti woke"? Or Elon talking about how we need "Christian values", when he has 11 children from 7 women, 3 of whom worked for him, he has more money than god and wont share it with any good causes, while he buys a social media platform to force everyone to hear each one of his brain farts not the same kind of pandering?
That aint quiet, subtle or living anyones best life. Yet PG is not writting an essay about their behaviour, or calling that pandering and katowing to anti intellectualism which is a much worse cause than social justice btw
> "What if it's most effective to .. instead of preaching about what people should do, you just do what it is that you believe to be right?"
It isn't. See these LessWrong articles[1,2,3] about charitable giving for more reasoning. People take ideas, understanding of the world, behavioural cues, from what we see around us. From the first link, a charitable fund raise over a mailing list involved quiet private donations without fanfare, and public mailing list posts about why (other) people were not going to donate, why it was a bad idea. None of the donators posted publicly in support of donating.
I could make up any number of examples, but here[4] is a recent news article about two young lesbian women living together who "had been spat at in the street and received anonymous messages - including abuse scrawled across their front door on Christmas Day". What good does it do them if everyone who supports them does it quietly, and everyone who hates them does it loudly and publicly? What world does it lead to when spitting on someone in the street is fine, but speaking out against it is "woke leftist moralizing"? What world does it lead to when people who are not involved looking around to see how others are behaving (bystander effect) see LGBT hate enacted, written, spoken, and don't see or hear anyone around them speaking against it?
Would the young women care if someone vocally complaining about it at the pub is genuinely annoyed or just performatively status grabbing?
Seems pretty clear from history that just quietly living your life while horrors whirl around you is a personally comfortable way to live your life, but is not an effective way to change any of the horrors. Whereas taking arms against the horrors can be an effective way to change the horrors regardless of whether you're doing it because you really want to, or because you were peer pressured into it, or because you are just going along with what everyone else is doing.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-ki...
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N6FNkxMJpraMLTPwq/to-inspire...
[3] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KoTCTwmPbEAZTyPbz/why-you-sh...
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgnwqdp7gno?at_bbc_team...
Oh god why is pg even writing about this? Why does every aging, decrepit Silicon Valley oligarch think the world needs to hear their opinion on political correctness? It's all becoming too much. Please buy a diary and write your important thoughts there.
I admire PG's essays, but this one seems to give an origin theory about a complex societal issue without any evidence.
My pet theory is is that liberalism won the battle with conservatism and achieved everything useful that it could with it's existing instruments. But then it kept looking for something more and went into wokeness with good intentions. With women's equality and gay marriage the movement was able to convince people and also create legislation. When going into equity and inclusiveness there isn't a legislative solution (or there are, but they don't do much to fix the root of the problem). And people are already convinced that it's good in theory. The only solution is to make an incredible effort to actually help the communities that are raising the disadvantaged- an incredibly challenging task. Instead they maintained the existing approach of convincing and cancellations and DEI policies (in place of legislation).
I think the approach for liberalism to get back on track and achieve their goals is to do the hard work of helping disadvantaged children. If you want to make a difference, the Big Brothers Big Sisters program is a program that helps things at their root- improving the support structure of children in need.
As an outsider, the rambling against wokeness is insufferable, even though I personally agree with some points usually brought up.
I only found out what wokeness is from people ranting against it, and never really see anyone arguing in favor of it. It has become a mania of the right.
Oh boy.
No surprise that Paul is on the Elon, Mark, Trump side of things — like 99% of the American rich.
> Thanks to Sam Altman [...] for reading drafts of this.
Ftfg.
> The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case.
This seems like a good argument. It's very clear that 'wokeness'/political correctness is more about fixating on syntax (the literal words used) over semantics (the intention of the speaker). But in my book, it's the intention that matters — in fact I'd argue it's the only thing that matters. If you're choosing to wilfully misinterpret and be offended by something someone innocently said, that's completely on you. We shouldn't celebrate the act of taking offence, but at the same time we should all make an effort not to accidentally create it. Why are people who can do both seemingly so rare?
> What does it mean now? [...] > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
sure yup. Performative social justice bad. Now lets continue reading and see what PG thinks is performative.
> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."
> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia
> Another factor in the rise of wokeness was the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida.
> Similarly for the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017 after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness
> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent protests broke out across America.
note: it's ok PG, you can say the cop murdered him. no one will cancel it for you (except maybe the right).
Wow you're right PG, all of this IS performative, because none of it has actually helped anyone you know and respect. It's just helped women, POC, LGBT etc.
TL;DR; PG like most billionaires hates when anyone like him is held accountable, would rather see humanity suffer than not be able to say whatever he wants.
There's a guy on X named Gad Saad writing a book called "suicidal empathy". I think this term captures it better than "wokeness".
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
You mean how twitter is censoring users who use "cracker" but not those who use the N-word.
As an extreme outsider (and mostly emotionally uninvested) to this whole scene, and having read a few of the most popular articles, I've always taken Paul Graham to be an intelligent and articulate person. This article is has made me really reevaluate my judgement.
I'm open to thinking about and discussing the points he is raising, but his arguments and the presentation feel weird and flimsy. Lots of anecdata, cherry-picked history, bad arguments propped up by debatable ideas presented as facts. And weird, almost sociopathic lack of empathy (eg: the 2020 "a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video" event)?
I mean, sure aggressive policing of speech and performance in social media is somewhat dumb, but any normal mind should be able to look behind the overreaction and realise that the underlying issues raised are valid and pressing.
Is article is just a performance piece in preparation for the incoming regime?
There were some interesting points, thanks for sharing.
One of the fallouts from this movement, is that the identity of the groups of people “wokeness” (sorry, I am using terms from his article) claimed to protect, are now intrinsically linked to this movement without their consent.
I am politically progressive, but strongly believe in free speech especially when it comes to science and research. But as a trans person, I do genuinely need help sometimes to overcome folks biases, since we make up less than 1% of the population.
My fear now is that social-justice warriors might have unintentionally made things even more difficult and complicated for me, because what I do to survive is intrinsically linked to a modern political movement.
Hopefully something that will be considered, for folks against dogmatism/puritanism who still understand bias :(
So now the ones who want to preserve the constitution and the democratic processes (aka by demanding peaceful handover of power instead of hanging the Vice President), are woke.
Strong Weimar vibes from our billionaires.
Seeing as how the left lost all three branches of government in the last election, isn't it now "politically correct" to be non "woke"?
This seems a very long way to say: "I believe that 'woke' has become dogmatic."
Merely saying that without explaining your reasoning is worthless.
I did not read till the end yet, but "woke" is also a very successfully weaponised word for anyone to help push their ideology to further extremes, both left, right, not center. Woke is also a very good detractor from rich and poor discussions.
Some attributes I don't like in people:
- Nit picking/pedantic thinking.
- Snitching.
- Keeping score/counting favors.
- Blaming.
- Attacking ad-hominem.
- Latching onto words instead of principles.
The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk does a really good job of tracing the history of "woke". In particular he does a good job of not lumping woke in with all left ideas.
All of "wokeness", "social justice", etc, when you look at the "forest not the trees" ends up pretty simple:
One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop", to which the other group says: "No".
So the first goes back to the drawing board to come up with reasons, theories, explanations, convincing arguments... and you get things like critical race theory, systemic *isms, etc.
That's pretty much it. Sure, there's other bits in there - about accomplishing the "stop", or about handling emotions around blame, or about handling your own hurt, etc - but, at the end of the day?
It's really just people saying "this hurts, please stop", and what forms around the response when the response is "No".
> One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop"
But the entire article you're criticizing can be summed up as "wokeness hurts, please stop". To which you say, "No".
Wokeness simply means “awake to recognize injustices”. It is a statement of empathy, of acknowledging crimes of bigotry against the powerless, of refusing to look away and ignore when hatreds are visited upon others simply because they are not a part of some random overprivileged in-group.
As in, to not intentionally sleep through, and be ignorant of, the application of evil against others.
The fact that it has become a pejorative, only highlights how inhuman and immoral and _evil_ those people who use it as a pejorative are.
Few things are as performative as venture capitalists aligning their politics with the upcoming government.
I read it more as finally being safe to share his views without gross retaliation leading to a complete excommunication from every professional venture he's involved in. The powers have tilted in such a way that people no longer have to hide their true feelings. Refreshing, really.
Paul would much rather make a punching bag out of straw than actually grapple with the massive inequality that he has personally helped cause. Just remember guys, the real problem our society faces is that someone was once mean to paulg on Twitter.
The timing on when this essay is being published is interesting. Are all the tech billionaires falling in line before the next administration takes over? Also, let this be a lesson that no matter how “brilliant” and rich someone is, they can have comically bad takes.
It was a good analysis but definitely longer than it should have been to communicate the came thing.
A glaring omissions is overlooking the origin of the term "woke" in the context it is being used today.
It was around 2010 as a rallying call for black folk to be aware of being taking for a fool. Then the Occupy Protests and Black Lives Matter came next and as usual it was hijacked by more savvy operators.
This is one of Paul Graham's best essays. The historical timeline is accurate, the phrasing is much more careful than the comments here claim.
If you are 20 and in university, it will be hard to understand the historic perspective. You cannot just rip out single sentences and attack them without context.
If you disagree with everything, at least read the paragraph about Mao's cultural revolution, where he riled up young people against his political opponents. It may sound appealing if you are 20 and in university, but keep in mind that it can happen to you, too, just 8 years from now when the purity spiral has evolved.
Software organizations like Python have been taken over by shrewd manipulators who used exactly that tactic: Have a small "elite" that dictates ever changing morals, does not contribute much or anything at all and weaponizes new contributors against their opponents. The result is a dysfunctional organization where most interesting people have left, some companies still force contributions but there is virtually no organic open source activity. And a couple of "elites" have been fired by Google. That is the standard path of performative wokeness.
Anyway, a great essay and I hope that Paul Graham will treat us to more historic perspectives this year.
I didn't know that happened to Python. It happened to NixOS.
This article reads like a just-so story. Sounds plausible, but there's so much wiggle room for the narrative. And the "solutions" to wokeness he wrote left me puzzled, questioning whether the issues he paints were thought through. He mentions two solutions to wokeness: treat wokeness like a religion and submit it to "customs", and "fight back." So... essentially fight emotivism with emotivism. What does it mean to fight back and submit to customs other than perpetuation the same thing that's being criticized.
The wokesters of Bluesky (of course) are dunking on PG's essay in their usual condescending manner: https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3lfnoikjxrc2c
Whole article on the word "woke" and no references to Erykah Badu. I don't think he knows what the word means.
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that.
Au contraire, the idea that racism is a problem is now labeled "critical race theory" and it's a crime to spread this knowledge to students in multiple states.
Teachers in Oklahoma can't teach students the fact that the Tulsa Massacre was race-driven.
So Paul himself, it appears, has given himself over to the wokeness by acknowledging that racism is a genuine problem.
This is a dishonest argument. Paul can oppose an ideology without agreeing with everyone and especially extremists who also oppose that same ideology.
I dont think wokeness or paul graham are communist or fascist respectively so forgive the hysterical sound of the analogy im going to make here, but i think your argument is similar in reasoning to this one:
You oppose fascism? Well, fascism opposed gulags. If you oppose gulags I guess you were a fascist after all."
> Paul can oppose an ideology without agreeing with everyone and especially extremists who also oppose that same ideology.
He's doing it by conflating 'priggishness' (puritanical moral conservatism) with a movement that's advocating for equity and trying to dismantle structural oppression. He's deftly sidestepping the power dynamics at play, which fundamentally distinguish these two things. It just so happens that he's in a class of people who sit at the top of a tower of structural advantages benefitting him as he tut-tuts people who are pointing out that they're oppressive to some groups.
Ultimately he's just building a massive wall of text strawman for things he doesn't grasp and attacking it. We're fully in the era of this lazy take, like a dam breaking loose, lots of people who have been threatened by those movements are finally feeling free to attack them en masse.
>a movement thats advocating for equity and trying to dismantle structural oppression.
Well, for years those advocates did so with censorship, gaslighting, destruction of property, threats and calls for violence, etc. They had a hysterical fervor and lack of rationality that did often seem quasi religious. I dont think Paul's understanding is perfect but the parallels to religious puritanism are quite obviously there.
> Well, for years those advocates did so with...gaslighting
> They had a hysterical fervor and lack of rationality
Of all the ways of attacking a class of people, labeling them as gaslighters while at the same time calling them crazy is certainly one of them.
They protested Starbucks all year after hallucinating some connection between the company and the Israeli invasion in Palestine. Irrational is a fine description. And a good example of the gas lighting is them saying wokeness doesn’t exist.
IMO people who whine about wokeness or, more broadly, political correctness, just don't like it when they're called out for being insensitive pricks, or for perpetuating the garbage that marginalized groups have to put up with every day.
Sure, there are people who preach wokeness and empathy and whatnot who are indeed actually prigs. That's true of every movement, good and bad. But as usual, those are the small vocal minority, while most of us just want society as a whole to stop shitting on people just because they're different from whatever the mainstream du jour is.
The blowback against wokeness is mostly due to conservatives hijacking the term and over and over and over using it to describe only the bad behavior they see, while ignoring that the bad behavior is in the minority.
I used to really enjoy Graham's writing, but this is rubbish.
I feel like this is the most neutral, correct take on "wokeness" I've ever read on the internet. Good job!
Hmm, this is a completely generic and unreflective rant about ‘wokeness’ that could have been cobbled together from YouTube comments and Jeremy Clarkson columns. What is PG thinking?
The most striking thing about it is that it makes absolutely no attempt to consider how there might be a link between the undeniable social progress that’s been made on race and gender over the past decades and the aspects of ‘wokeness’ that PG finds distasteful. He simply assumes that you can automatically get all of the progress without any of the stuff he doesn’t like.
In "The Age of the Essay"[0], Paul writes:
"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
"Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
"If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them."
So there's your answer. PG is thinking "This is something I don't know; I should write an essay to figure out an answer."
It also makes sense to me that when he writes an essay connected to an area he knows well (like startups), the result is maybe full of unique perspectives and is broadly insightful/useful. Whereas an essay on wokeness isn't likely to bring much to the table to anyone who has been paying attention to diversity for several years.
Maybe it's still useful to engineers who've been living under a rock and haven't paid any attention at all; I don't know.
That's a good reason to write an essay. I think the present case illustrates that it's not a sufficient reason to publish it.
> What is PG thinking?
My assumption would be that he's doing a performative hard right turn like pretty much every other tech billionaire this week in order to make nice with the incoming lunatic administration.
he made a hard right turn a decade or more ago. Its not just now.
source: his other blog posts.
I find it hilarious that the prophet of modern Startup Culture and its subsequent proliferation of Y Combinator/FAANG cult practices (e.g. growth at all costs or practising agile as a copy-cat set of misunderstood tech rituals) is blind to fact that the only ones proselytising about "wokeness" these days are the same ones trying to outrage you about it (i.e. Fox News and Elon Musk) in order to distract you from the fact that wealth and resources are being hoarded by the very same companies/individuals.
Just call it "The International Woke" already. It's what this is getting at, isn't it?
Actually having a substantive argument about right and wrong is fraught, and so it's much easier to hide behind a combination of tone policing and armchair psychoanalysis of your opponents.
Better to accuse your (imaginary) interlocutor of being a moralist, a meaningless term that tells me much more about your feelings on being "told what to do" than it does about your actual values.
I want to see a reddit clone, except users can only downvote
I wonder what would happen
Republicans spent a lot of money and energy to poison the word "woke".
I don't know if Paul is ignorant or evil.
But an article such as his on this topic that doesn't mention the machine is not factual.
An unusually bad essay.
Yes, cancel culture is bad.
But when an entire group of people (eg women, or non-white people) says ‘this thing is a problem’, maybe take them seriously?
(Like pg would like to be taken seriously right now?)
This is an essay against introspection, against discomfort (as much as discomfort intolerance is raised as a symptom of woke), and an argument for maintaining the status quo.
It's magnificently Paul Graham that he wrote some incredibly long essay called "The Origins Of Wokeness" without ever discussing, the origins of wokeness. Whatever you think about the current situation of "wokeness", the fact that pg manages to never once mention the origin of the term, going back to Marcus Garvey and Leadbelly, speaks to pg's monumental intellectual incuriosity.
Paul Graham is a billionaire frantically trying to fingerpoint and blame other people when his ilk have had an outsized influence on politics and business for years and we're no better off.
if you're going to talk about history, it really helps to ground your narrative in real people, events, or statements. This all comes off as a history of vibes, and I don't remember the same vibes at all (maybe because I wasn't on twitter).
When pg does make contact with reality, it mostly doesn't even support his narrative. He mentions the George Floyd protests and the MeToo movement/Weinstein - by any measure real social justice issues where the perpetrators deserved condemnation!
He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
Also not on twitter, other than to camp my name. I disagree with your reading of the essay - he says that both of those were sort of "peaks" for their respective movements, and I would say that feels accurate to me. I'm in a mixed-race family, and George Floyd was the first and so-far only period where our family needed additional support, talk, help, considering how to respond.
I agree that Anheuser-Busch seemed to have been stunlocked by Dylan Mulvaney v. Kid Rock on the internet.
I didn't mean to imply that pg was saying that these incidents were unjustified or performative. I just think it's telling that the actual real-world events he discusses are not examples of the supposed overwhelming trend he's trying to diagnose.
I think if he tried to actually discuss the main events of cancel culture, it would give the game away, because it would be a lot of penny-ante whining about minor setbacks in people's professional lives. Like, who is the most prominent example of an unjustly cancelled person? Larry Summers, who had to leave his job at Harvard almost 20 years ago, and later served a prominent role in the Obama administration? I'm inclined to take Summers' side in the controversy, but if that is a historically significant injustice in your worldview then you might be suffering an advanced case of brainrot.
I'm in general agreement with you. And <<-- I think he's right to complain about US Universities on this. There was a period quite recently where literal invitations to self-criticism were required at some of the US' top schools. I cannot believe this increased the diversity of opinion and thought at those schools. To me, Summers is a stand-in for a lot of academics in the essay, and most interesting because he was a powerful person who was not as powerful as the social movement of the time.
Anyway, as you say, Mr. Summers will be fine.
> Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever
Isn't it one of the tenets of wokeness that "nothing is apolitical"?
There are no "tenets of wokeness", because "wokeness" isn't an ideology, a movement, an organization, etc. but rather a pejorative.
> He also mentions the Bud Light boycotts as a case of going "too woke", but Bud Light's actions were not an "aggressive performative focus on social justice." Bud Light simply paid a trans person to promote their product, without any political messaging whatsoever. It was the boycott by anti-trans bigots that politicized that incident.
This is a double standard. For example, Contrapoints was cancelled for using Buck Angel to do a 10 second voice over in one video[1]. A far less politically charged association with someone than what Bud Light did. In this regard, I think the left has been the ones who primarily set the rules of engagement for the last few years. Can't complain when those same rules are used against you.
[1] https://medium.com/@rachel.orourke_88152/the-10-second-voice...
Contrapoints, her defenders, and her critics (mostly) were all on the left. I don't know the person you linked to, but she seems to be defending Contrapoints from a left theoretical perspective. It's deeply disingenuous to argue that bigoted right-wing campaigns are justified by some subset of people on the left being cruel to other people on the left.
“Can you believe it? That colored boy wants me to call him ‘mister!’”
You would think these tech oligarchs might be concerned with some other problem facing th world. This is the only one they seem to care about and much of it just seems like fragile ego.
A well-considered essay from PG. I thought this part, discussing a practical approach to dealing with disagreement of beliefs, was particularly insightful:
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
> If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
For better or worse, I don't think much practical possibility stems from this insight, and I wish PG had considered the possibility that the enforcement of some orthodoxy is unavoidable, and that the liberal environment he's describing is a vacuum into which some orthodoxy will inevitably insert itself.
This is great and the spiciest take buried within what you mention is the following (Christian) POV:
People inherently need meaning to function and if a postmodern society insists that there is none, life is a tabula rasa, and religion is basically the projection of the mind, then people will begin building new religions and even “a-religious” religions to substitute for this lack.
Personally, I disagree with the overall tack that leftism is always and inherently religious but the elements which are come from exactly the void you’ve described, just blown up to the level of society.
Business leaders would be wise to set a vision for their companies that creates meaning and even, yes, acknowledges the transcendent in how they do that. People seem wired to want this and pretending we are all too reasonable to need meaning isn’t getting us anywhere.
I guess pg might have power to implement this by dictating to his companies' HR leadership through the CEOs/boards. As for the rest of us...
It's interesting that pg doesn't connect the type of thinking and indoctrination he sees in wokeness with similar types of thinking and indoctrination we currently see in followers of Trump. Crowds of people holding up "mass deportation now" signs, the governor of Texas ordering flags at full mast for the inauguration in the middle of a period of mourning [1], Republican politicians refusing to say whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election [2], Republican state legislatures trying to minimize mentions of LGBTQ topics in the classroom. Not only is much of it performative, as he complains about in the essay, but it has the feel of religion more than just a political movement. It almost seems like one could rewrite this essay with the focus on Trump instead of wokeness.
This part in particular seems misguided if only because pg fails to recognize that "the next thing" is already here and wearing a red MAGA hat.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing.
[1] https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-orders-flags...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-still-t-trump-lost-17...
Interesting. But that shouldn't surprise us. "Performative" means you're doing something to be seen, not because it's really "you". Well, when the power shifts, then who it's worth being performative for also shifts. I wonder if that's what we've been seeing in the shifts since November.
That Elon/Twitter part was really out of place, like a VPN ad integration in the middle of a Youtube video. Attributing the rise of wokeness to students becoming deans and administrators sounds kinda dubious but maybe, he could use more evidence there.
Otherwise a great piece.
And why does he post this on January 2025, not January 2024 or 2023?
Why did he magically started calling out wokeness issue only after Trump's win?
Weak
oh no
Pauly G. such a fortunate one. Just a defensive old white man. Not a good look, son.
I have read this text, a treatise on what PG calls “wokeness,” and what many in my lifetime would have called simple human decency, or perhaps its performance—a pair of very different things. The essay denounces the manner in which social justice can become a strict set of rules, a shallow costume worn by self-appointed arbiters of morality. In reading these arguments, I find myself wondering about the deeper currents that made such performances necessary in the first place, and what underlying truths might be sacrificed when so many focus upon appearances instead of realities.
This nation has a long history of clinging to illusions, and that is not solely a white American failing—though it has cost Black Americans dearly. In Nashville, where I spent my earliest years trying to find the contours of my own identity, I realized that there were always people ready to lecture me about how I should dress, speak, or pray. None of that, however, changed the reality of my father’s income, or the conditions of the neighborhood around us, or the power structure that deemed our lives less worthy. So the mere spectacle of moral purity could never deliver us from oppression—only committed, genuine love of one’s fellow human being can begin that labor.
The essay’s admonition against “performative” justice is not without merit; any moral crusade that pays no heed to the living, breathing conditions of the oppressed cannot stand. But if I may say so, there is a danger here, too. If one becomes preoccupied with the shallowness of some so-called “woke” individuals, one might forget that certain communities do not have the luxury of retreating from the harsh facts of racism or sexism or homophobia. Those who have spent generations fighting for the right even to speak are indeed sensitive about words, for words have been used to degrade, exclude, and dehumanize. And if their vigilance sometimes appears shrill, we would do well to remember what America has demanded of them.
I would remind PG that while a fixation on language can obscure the underlying injustice, so too can dismissing that fixation blind us to the pain that gives rise to it. For every “prig” who delights in moral bullying, there are many more souls demanding that America acknowledge and atone for its long and brutal history of denial. These men and women—students and professors, activists and ordinary people—are not simply hungry for new battles; they have inherited a centuries-old conflict between a democracy’s exalted promises and its dreadfully unfulfilled duties.
We live, after all, in the aftershock of slavery, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the racial terror that thrived long after the Emancipation Proclamation. We have seen so many movements come and go, each bearing the hope of a more honest confrontation with power. Some movements will indeed trade genuine moral work for the easy gratification of punishing superficial infractions. But let us not confuse a moment’s self-righteous fervor with the profound and continuing necessity of building a world in which human dignity is honored. Let us not conflate every cry of outrage with mere vanity. After all, an anguished cry can be genuine proof that one is alive, and that something in this society continues to break the heart.
It is not enough to scorn “wokeness” as though it were merely the mania of a new generation. We should rather ask: Why do certain people still feel so powerless that they rely on punishing speech transgressions instead of forging true solidarity? Where does this anger come from, and what truths do they feel are perpetually denied? If our citizens are turning to moral performance instead of moral substance, we must question our entire social order, lest we merely stumble from one hollow righteousness to another.
I believe our task, now as ever, is to recognize when the clamor about words and rules drowns out the deeper music of genuine empathy, justice, and hope. But we must not abandon the moral struggle itself, for it is older than any catchphrase and deeper than any university policy. We must refuse both the tyranny of empty slogans and the tyranny of despair. Only in that refusal—dangerous, uncertain, and profoundly human—will we begin to shape an America not built upon illusions but upon the sacred fact of each person’s worth.
Actually, the origin of “wokeness”, the term, is right-leaning bigots who need to discount any grievance by any group of people who claim they might just possibly be suffering some systemic disadvantages in this country.
Nope. It was a term of respect and affirmation in the African American community first, and seems to have been successfully expropriated and rebranded.
I understand your point, but I don’t think anyone used the word “wokeness” before the Right started it as insult.
That sounds right to me, too. Five years ago someone of color could say to a white guy "if you're not down, you're at least woke" and mean it as a compliment. Not sure what the new way to say that would be.
Good lord I cannot stand the tech-bro echo chamber.
They're just as self righteous as the "woke" just much less self aware.
Can someone steelman (or just represent) the argument of why Bud Light supporting Dylan Mulvaney is wokeness and not classical liberalism/free speech?
https://thecritic.co.uk/dylan-mulvaney-did-not-share-our-gir...
This article explains why.
That ad campaign was enabled by the 1st amendment but not motivated by it. You’re conflating why they wanted to do it with why they could do it
People on the left don't like to admit it, but a lot of the left wing activism we see today growing out from the 1960s was directly influenced by the Soviet Union and it's "active measures" programs
According to the KGB defector Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, the Soviets actively encouraged colleges to focus on studies away from science and engineering, and also encouraged the "break down" of things like "religion" and "family" to make for more fertile soil for the inevitable communist takeover. At best such measures were focused on encouraging anti-nuclear activism to reduce the US capacity for nuclear retaliation in the event of a total war. At worst it led to Cultural Revolution style critiques of college faculty. Despite the Soviet Union being gone, the cultural aspects of these efforts live on (mostly in Sociology departments)
People on the right don't like to admit it, but a ton of the right wing "activism" we see TODAY is from modern Russian efforts to try the same sort of interference on the right (and still to a lesser extent on the left). There was no one from the 80s more disallusioned by the old Soviet tactics using left wing actors than Putin (who was in contact with left wing Red Army Faction terrorist groups in Germany). He's sought to try the same tactics out on the right which has been incredibly receptive to conspiracy theories of all kinds.
There's an active campaign to erode the public's faith in science (anti-vaccine movements, ivermectin being a cure-all for everything) and journalism. Spread through channels like Rogan's podcast, and perhaps even Mr. Musk himself who spreads propaganda about big lies like "Ukraine having some sort bioweapons program" unquestioningly. Gradually the goal is not to get people to believe in something, but rather to get them to not know what to believe.
The American left is too distracted by culture wars bullshit to counter blatant propaganda, and people like Paul Graham are too enamored by the success of Musk et al to see what is directly in front of them.
I did not expect CEOs / industry titans to fall in line with the new regime so quickly, in the few weeks since Trumps election most tech leaders have completely changed their public stance on these topics. Why are they so afraid? Or are they simply happy to drop the charade as it seems clear the wind blows the other way now?
I wasn’t feeling very positive about all the talk about making the world a better place but recently I’ve become quite cynical, it’s really just about the money it seems. I even find this whole hacker ethic quite stupid now, basically all that ethos about free software was just instrumented by corporations to extract wealth, and now that AI is seemingly around the corner they can finally drop most people building the software for them, as that was always the biggest cost center anyway.
IMO most of these CEOs are not motivated by wokeness or anti wokeness. They are motivated by money, and the freedom to take whatever action they deem appropriate both inside and outside their companies.
Biden was anti-monopoly and Trump is pro-corporate, so these CEOs are just naturally aligning according to their own motivations. And like all people, sometimes they take on the other priorities of the group, to feel that they fit in.
The fact they do this is not very surprising, what I find surprising is the velocity of the change of sentiment in large parts of the tech industry. It seems a lot of people were fed up caring about these topics and feel safe to openly say so now. That wasn’t the case during the first Trump administration, so I wonder what affected this change of heart now?
I would imagine it's the fact that during the first Trump admin, the political elites were still mostly old-school and only giving token support to MAGA talking points to score some easy points with their electorate. Given that the admin was mostly run by those same people in practice until very late into his first term, I think it wasn't seen as something serious.
But this time around, we're looking at a full term by an admin that is staffed for the most part by die-hard Trumpists who make it very loud and clear that this particular topic is of utmost concern to them. Republicans in Congress are also much more in line with that.
Perhaps even more importantly, this change of sentiment didn't start with tech - it started with prominent figures among the establishment liberals publicly calling out "excesses", and while this narrative received some pushback already, it has received way more support among the rank and file. This is a signal that the next Dem administration, should there be one, is likely to be much more hands-off in these regards. So, then, why would big tech stick to their guns on DEI if it disadvantages them immediately with no clear advantage to hope for in the future?
I agree that velocity is surprising, though. Mostly because it makes it very clear that any talk of "values" has always been bullshit, so why would this new take be an exception? MAGA folk don't seem particularly convinced that e.g. Zuck is sincere, and I can't blame them.
I don't disagree with a lot of what he says here, but I feel like too many people in Silicon Valley are hyper-fixated on the conformity and enforcement coming from the left, while ignoring and even stoking the flames of anger and conformity on the right. Particularly his points on news, because much of the news is now heavily skewed to the right.
PG would do well to reflect similarly on the rise of the right wing equivalents and recognize that they're the ones actively stymying progress on many of the critical issues of our time.
People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the author is just more aware of it now, or modern technology has pushed it deeper into our lives, but it's not new.
And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue. If they care about it.
Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe? Now you're just being performative about performative people.
Perhaps the best way to lower the number of performative individuals is to... you know... resolve their issues?
> Annoyed people are whining about civil rights?
Nobody is annoyed people are whining about civil rights. We are annoyed that people a) are whining about non-issues that they have gone out of their way to be offended by, and b) are demanding that the rest of us change the world based on their blown out of proportion views.
>People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon
People have always done lots of things. The degree, intensity, and manner with which they do them varies and matters.
>And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue
They could be already focusing on the issue. Or they could be ignoring it. That's their decision. Perhaps they have problems of their own to tackle first. Nobody has to be an activist about some cause just because another wants them to.
The problem with performative justice is that (when the performative types get enough power) its bizarre demands and rituals are imposed onto and everybody else, with little recourse.
Another problem is that the performative justice diverts resources to tackle the performative insignificant or detrimental aspects instead of the real issue.
>Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe?
Wouldn't solve the issues described in the article caused by performative justice, from stiffling academic discussion, to creating an outrage factory that diverts the press from its mission and polarises society to a detrimental effect.
> People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue.
You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker.
There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist.
When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them.
It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.
// Now you're just being performative about performative people. //
Nice ricochet.
I'm grateful to Paul Graham for actually giving a definition of "woke". Really, this is the first anti-woke essay I've seen which actually tells us exactly what the author is complaining about.
And it makes it rather abundantly clear why nobody else has given a definition of exactly what the author is complaining about.
Me as well, having a definition is useful when trying to understand someone’s perspective and I applaud him for that.
It seems that his opposition is with SJW Puritanisms and I agree with him on that point.
it's not about the "meaning" of the word but more the way people use it and its connotations.
it is often code for a racist or homophobic sentiment the speaker doesn't want to own up to.
when people say "things are getting too woke" - let's be honest, they are often saying that people who were once unfairly marginalized (black people, gay people, women) are getting less marginalized.
Where I live, while I was at school, the proper way to say that a person was of colour, was the word "negro" (in Portuguese, and I think also in Spanish).
At the time, using the word that directly translates to "black" in English "preto", was considered extremely offensive and was never to be used applied to a person.
Now, fast-forward a few years and the influence of American woke culture, the word "negro" is now connected with the N-word slur in English and is considered offensive. You now have people of colour demanding to be called "preto".
This is one of the many insanities that the woke movement brought us. I'm glad the world is changing away from it.
An Internet rails against political correctness, forgetting that it's not 1996 anymore. Some Hackernews decry the woke mob. No technology is discussed.
N-gate will be missed!
RIP to a legend
Oh man … stay in your lane. Capitalism. The human condition can seem very hopeless, for sure.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now.
Graham is really skipping over some pretty significant whys and wherefores on how a term that dates back to, at least, 1923 becomes a pejorative starting around the '80s. Perhaps it is worth considering in what publications and media it became a pejorative, and who would benefit from others thinking it should be one.
While some folks who lived through the Sixties went into academia, others went on to own media empires. Those groups didn't have particularly aligned goals.
The rich are choosing sides for Trump era, and this is just a white flag raised.
wokeness will be discussed until morale improves... (or better said easier to rule and win elections while the masses are fighting the non-existent "culture war" and have no time to look at real problems (which whoever is ruling has no interest in solving..)
So now we have pg virtue-signalling his fealty to the other old rich white guys. Great. Just great.
The only people who use the term "woke" are social conservatives, and those to their right. Everyone else talks about "justice" and "equality" and "awareness". The woke problem is a conservative problem.
Bingo! This accusation is a confession.
And what are people supposed to do about injustice? Resolve it without talking about it?
Why does woke like set people off like this?
Someone should study the anti woke they way these people focus on woke so much. I don't get it? If it's truly just words why are so bothered by them, let them go for the worthless words they are.
I think it's related to the perceived centrality of identity in the world. I see this as a natural consequence of individualism, which itself is championed by both modern capitalist and libertarian thinking, to pick two.
As the focus on the individual's happiness, wealth, values (etc.) have become more and more ubiquitous, the need to define oneself becomes more and more important. As this has matured, many systems have build that reinforce it. Representative democracy - one person, one vote, and welfare systems that address indivudual needs, are positive examples.
With this comes also a much stronger need for protecting these identities, and more weight is given to perceived categories, whether they are superficial, like skin colour, or structural, like religion or class.
So, when people talk about wokeness, they are not only trying to define the social contract, but they also aligning with it their identity, which gives a kind of existential urgency. The idea that we might be wrong about our position carries with it a sense of loss of self, which triggers most people.
Just my two cents.
There will never be anything funnier than a massive article which talks about the "origin of wokeness" that fails to, at any point, talk about the actual origin of "wokeness" – Black communities online.
This is the greatest weakness of an already weak essay.
A big swing and a miss by Paul Graham for a season-losing strikeout. Above all, he begs the question in the original sense of "beg the question" - he defines the terms "woke" and "wokeness" by themselves. He uses the secondary and willful redefinitions of those who would permanently corrupt the terms. Further, he excludes the original and true meanings of "woke" and "wokeness" by denying that they are still in play or still in use merely on his say-so, perhaps because that conveniently fits his narrative. Excluding contradicting data is how you corrupt an analysis to match the thesis statement. Additionally, matching the terms to anything to do with "political correctness" is the same: borrowing the right's redefinitions in a circular question-begging fashion. It's also all rather unoriginal and tired. We've had many decades of this anti-political correctness sophistry if not so well-written. It's cud pre-chewed by a thousand dull-eyed ruminants. What is accomplished here? I think we've only learned about Paul Graham and it isn't flattering.
Eh, it’s par for the course for a blog post—some good, some inchoate, a little wrong.
I appreciate having the word “prig” to replace criticism of both wokeness and the new right Silicon Valley’s Musk-Trump worship.
I agree, but I think in the context of pre-twentyfirst-century religiosity, "prig" had the connotation of a person who was, yes, a huffy moral scold, but essentially harmless. In the context of current wokeness, there is a very real intent and ability to destroy lives. (As for the new right tech bros, I'm not sure if any prigs really have the power to hurt them seriously, though certainly Elon's investment in Twitter has taken quite a hit.)
> As for the new right tech bros, I'm not sure if any prigs really have the power to hurt them seriously
The new right tech bros are doing their own cancellations. Silicon Valley traffics in old tweets critical of Musk or Trump like the Victorian courtesans Graham ironically criticises.
Do I want to read an essay about PG yapping about wokeness? Is this a realistic conversation engendering 1500 comments and 500 points? Why?
[flagged]
"No doubt he voted for Trump."
It must take a special effort to be this wrong. PG has vocally advocated for the Democratic candidate for at least the last 3 elections.
So he’s an anti-woke California Democrat. That would make him a republican in most other states.
To me this seems to be the most rambling, disorganized essay I've seen him write. I normally appreciate how he structures his arguments and in this one, I struggled to get past the first few sentences.
Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Wouldn't calling some a prig or woke, saying that the people are "self-righteously moralistic people who behave as if superior to others," in a way, be demonstrating the same behavior?
Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
In that vein, I don't know what Paul's motivations were to write this post and I don't know why he lacked the normal structure with headings and such, I just hope that he's doing OK. I'm trying to understand the feelings he's experiencing, and maybe if I'm able to get through his writing I'll have a better sense. He seems a bit distraught, frustrated, ranting, not sure.
> Also maybe it's because he assumes there is a group of "the woke" instead of realizing that the people who self-identify as "woke" probably mean something really different than the ones who use "the woke" in a demeaning way.
Just mentioned this in another comment, but historically the only people who've actually identified as "woke" are black civil rights activists, who used it to mean that someone was aware and informed. I've never seen it used in any other context (or really by other people) until the latest culture war generals co-opted it as an insult for progressives and minorities.
> Shouldn't the antidote to such a behavior be to see the humanity in others, coming closer to them rather than distancing from them?
You would hope so, but I'm guessing the people who use civil rights-era slang to belittle activists probably don't care about the humanity those activists are trying to highlight and fight for.
The biggest flaw imo was the deafening silence around how "wokeness" is used as a tool by corporate Dems/Repubs and state agents of capital interests to distract from material issues and keep people divided over "culture war" / identity politics issues instead of uniting their focus on the former.
No mention of how the recent resurgence coincided with the Occupy Wall St protests.
No mention of how it was used to dismantle the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
Etc.
That is what most people avoid. Ramaswamy said it outright in his book but is now pro H1B. I have never heard Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray mention any economic issues ever.
There seems to be a secret penalty for bringing up that subject, unless you are running for MAGA like Ramaswamy and then possibly reverse opinion once people voted for you.
This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire. Is wokeness a problem? If I recast it as an assault on free speech, sure. But exactly how bad is this assault? I sure hear a lot of really rich people talk about wokeness, despite the proclaimed suppression of their speech. And is it as much of a problem as racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of bigotry endemic in our society?
I just picked this one at random today; took about a minute to find something: https://www.startribune.com/mom-ids-son-as-teen-left-with-br...
I’m relieved to read that racism isn’t as bad as I think it is.
> This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire
But that's the thing, it's not a hill to die on for him. This is simply 'anti-woke' virtue signalling intended to show his alignment with the growing right-wing sentiments that seem to be a backlash to certain perceptions of the American left-wing, without really contributing anything novel to the discourse. To me, this 'anti-woke' sentiment is as much of a mind-virus as 'wokeness' supposedly is, and it's a convenient distraction from many of the underlying issues that the 'woke left' actually care about.
This post feels like Paul Graham is another billionaire(or multi-milionaire, whatever) to confess his past sins in attempt to win a seat in Trump's administration....
Reading Paul Graham's musings on "wokeness" is a complete waste of time. Please find the words of other better informed people to read, who have an actual interest in addressing problems like racism and sexism.
Also, for all his complaining about people being performative, he commits the sin himself. He is doing the dance conservative fascists want him to. Paul, do us all a favor, and just skip to the ending we all know you're heading for: fall in line with Trump, lock arms with your fellow oligarchs, and take obvious active measures to suppress any threats your wealth and power.
Used to be we just called people who went overboard promoting their beliefs assholes, or zealots, or ideologues. So many perfectly descriptive words. You'll never want for a synonym to avoid excess repetition.
Why take a perfectly good, specific, and useful word like woke and wrap it up in all this?
"woke" is believing and wanting to do the right thing before the majority see it as moral and correct
ie. Slavery abolitionists would have been harassed as "woke" if the word had existed then
It's that simple.
People just REALLY don't like being told what they are doing is wrong and that they should be more enlightened and change, change is the real showstopper.
So they've given "woke" a toxic treatment.
The real test is if "woke" costs someone nothing and yet they still refuse.
An incredibly ignorant article from someone who clearly has no concept or understanding of the topic being discussed. He defines wokeness from the perspective of those who are anti-woke. Remember, Elden Ring is a woke video game.
"Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong."
No one was prevented from saying anything. People just decided they didn't need to listen to it.
The reality is, PG is just writing this now because a new administration is coming in, and he wants to play nice with a felon. No morals to stand on, only money. Ethics be damned, I'll sell my soul and kill the children for a dollar. Sad state of affairs.
a lot of people here don't realize they are woke prigs
If woke people are performative... then what is this incoherent nonsense meant to be?
It's interesting that none of these anti-woke oracles can tell that they're at the center of an even greater cancel culture mob than the one they purported to be against. Wasn't PG just getting canceled a few months ago by the right for speaking up about Palestine? Give it a few years, this manifesto will look hilarious.
Of course they can tell they're at the centre of an even greater cancel culture mob, the writing of these articles is entirely with fear of avoiding cancellation in mind...
Wow! This is basically a master class in performative mediocrity.
we’re flagging pg now?
Hopefully flagging is based on the content and not the writer.
This sort of thing makes me nervous. When the owner of a forum finds the masses don't unflaggingly support his take on something, what's the reaction?
Elon has recently shown us what happens on Twitter when you don't tow the line. I don't know that Zuck is meddling behind the scenes, but it could just be that he doesn't telegraph it as boldly as Musk.
Yes, why not? Why should he get a free pass for his bad takes?
> we're flagging pg now?
I assume it's because the term "woke" will almost always derail a thread.
well, people who use it to self-identify often use it in terms of being aware, a positive attribution, and I assume people who use it to identify others use it in terms of being judgmental, a negative attribution. So yeah, it's a highly charged term.
I have never seen anyone in a social network self-identifying as "woke".
I have seen it countless times being thrown as a vague, shapeless accusatory things that can go from people being overboard in their language policing to opposing real, actual fascism.
Precisely. One commenter above got close to the point but then completely missed it: they suggested that people get into “wokeism” with good intentions, such as wanting to reduce things like sexual harassment. Then, they ponder whether there is a way to reduce sexual harassment without becoming “woke.” They fail to realize that you don’t simply declare yourself “woke.” It is a label others assign to you once you decide you are no longer going to tolerate things like sexual harassment.
Same with SJWs. Lots of people wore that label until their actions caused it to become negative, at which point everyone who proudly wore it pretended to never have ever heard of it before their ideological enemies started using it. No doubt some new label will replace woke, be worn proudly, get tarnished by the people who wear that label, and once again they'll try fleeing from the associations they created.
False, people with an axe to grind decided to accuse everything they don't like of being woke or SJW the same way that Americans scream "communism" at everything they don't like.
It's the lowest form of public discourse, spewed by ignoramuses who have nothing of value to contribute to conversations.
Rewriting history was never more fun!
There's left-wing orthodoxy.
There's also right-wing orthodoxy.
On the internet right-wing orthodoxy is the prevailing one, and it's also better funded (and more politically connected).
You are not a rebel if you support the oligarchs.
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
There is nothing that better demonstrates how disconnected your average ivory tower silicon valley elite is than this sentence. You would have to exist in an entirely different reality to believe this is the case.
Really disappointing article, full of disingenuousness and strawmen and a few interesting points as well. For the record, while I'm on the progressive side of things, I certainly do not agree with all of the various viewpoints and practices ascribed to "wokeism."
He seems close to misunderstanding a pivotal thing, but glosses over it:
[Priggish] was not the original meaning of woke,
but it's rarely used in the original sense now.
Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
Instead of going out into the world and quietly
helping members of marginalized groups, the
politically correct focused on getting people in
trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
I mean, I have certainly done both. There really isn't a conflict there.
Another, similar false dichotomy:
The danger of these rules was not just that
they created land mines for the unwary, but that
their elaborateness made them an effective
substitute for virtue.
It's the kind of sentence that sounds good if you don't think about it -- because of course doing good things is better than simply making rules -- but this is such an amateurish and false dichotomy.
This is about as sensical as saying that we shouldn't have code review, or coding standards, we should just focus on writing code in our own personal little vision of what good code is. Yes we should write "good code" on an individual basis, and yes we should (as a team working on a project together) have standards and reviews. If a particular team member is contributing zero code and doing nothing but toxic reviews, sure, that is a problem but that is a problem with that individual and not some kind of inherent paradox.
Some things can only be effectively tackled with both individual effort and community/systemic effort. If you feel that things like racism, sexism, etc do not fall into that category... well, I strongly disagree, but I wish people would simply say that directly than ranting and raving about this bogeyman of modern "wokeness" that is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- a mindbendingly nonspecific term. Talk ideals and policies.
There are also some real zingers in his unexplored trains of thought here. He notes that "wokeness" in academia originated in the social sciences and not, say, mathematics or engineering. He then goes on to concoct some explanation based on folks from the Sixties getting into academia and not a far more obvious explanation: our modern understanding of the ills and boons of society originated from the sciences focused on studying society.
(Sure, Paul, the physics department didn't come up with woke. They were too busy overlooking Richard Feynman hitting on every undergrad woman that came through his department).
FWIW, I also saw political correctness "rise." In my experience, it rose in the computer science department discovering that when they adjusted their approach to incoming undergrad students based on observations from the social sciences that systemic sexism was bending the nature of their pre-undergrad education, the women performed better in the computer science undergrad curriculum. There's Paul's missing evidence from the "hard sciences."
He notes that "wokeness" in academia originated in
the social sciences and not, say, mathematics or
engineering.
Woke is apart of neoliberalism, the other half is probably MAGA. It's post-political think, a fake competition that coerces you into arguing within private sector terms. If MAGA is FOX News then Woke is CNN/MSNBC. It's harder to define woke because it's built on old postmodern language-power games. The most obnoxious games that wokies play are semantic games and riddles. For example: "what is woke, you don't even know what it is." Similarly I've heard people say "how am I not myself?" A: when you're aloof. Woke is nostalgia for America's anti-Soviet propaganda. It's an antagonistic parody.
It’s simple, if you can do a special rain dance that makes you not have to draw back your bottom line, you will do it every day of the week whether you’re a billion dollar corporation or a 500 year old university
This article was written due to recent events.
- IMO it should've acknowledged that there is genuine "intolerance" of foreigners/gays/trans, not the speech/writing you hear about in the news, but specifically the physical attacks and legal discrimination in third-world countries and rarely by extremists in first-world countries. And that seemingly-mild speech can lead to blatant hate speech, then physical attacks and legal discrimination; but it's not inevitable, and analogously when society swings to the center, it can swing too far to the other side, but maybe there's friction that makes it swing less and pulls it closer to an ideal equilibrium.
- It also states that Twitter doesn't censor left-wingers, which is factually wrong, unless every case of journalists being suspended and links being auto-removed is made-up or overblown. 4chan is an example of true free speech (sans calls to violence etc.), but it doesn't help the argument for multiple reasons. I think it's too early to say that "wokeness" is being rolled back; the truth is, woke intolerance isn't as pervasive as people think it is, so you will always find examples of people who directly contradict it and prosper.
However,
I strongly agree with the core message: there will always be people who use "morals" to control others. Taken straight from the article: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce." The article applies this and the remaining parts to left-wing "social-justice warriors" but you can apply it to right-wing religious zealots.*
The reality of "free speech", "live-and-let-live", and other compromises, are that people use them for their own agenda, to get more control. But that's OK. One of the reasons we have as much free speech as we do today, is that there are groups from all sides pushing it for their own reasons, and within these groups there's an opening to express your opinion. The vast majority of people are more focused on helping themselves than they are hurting you, even when hurting you is on their agenda, which means you can benefit from compromising with even smart people who hate you.
* Also, Paul Graham isn't really saying anything that he hasn't before. See: https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html, https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html, and https://paulgraham.com/say.html, written in 2022, 2020, and 2004. For a different left-biased take, see https://paulgraham.com/pow.html, written in 2017. But even if he was, this response stands. You can pick decent messages even out of articles people far, far more "right-wing" say, although it's a lot harder, and unlike this one the message you pick out probably won't be what the writer intended.
I think it's interesting that pg references James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in footnote 15.
These two (professional) philosophers are arguably the vanguard of philosophical opposition to identity politics; they have written extensively on it, tracing its ideological roots to Karl Marx and comparing it to the Maoist cultural revolution in China. (And it bears being said: they're certainly not prejudiced against any majority or minority group.)
woke wasn't bad in the beginning, but it became more powerful than needed and that power was abused. When you get people to rename universities and streets you grew up intimately with, it's very annoying.
"Social justice" is a perversion of justice. Eastern Europe and other countries that tried communism used social justice as an excuse to eradicate middle and upper classes through mass murders, incarceration, confiscation of property, denial of access to education or higher-paying jobs, and promotion of lower classes to the levels of their incompetence.
Cant imagine a better person than Paul Graham to give us the history of the origins of the struggles various underprivileged groups have had over the recent decades.
Anyway the conservative reaction to “wokeness” (or “wokism” if youre an annoying european conservative) is way more annoying than “wokeness” ever was. And as far as I can tell its just them going “I am annoyed by these people so I am going to be a huge baby”
Like theres no material impact to them here. How much can a DEI team possibly cost? It’s just babies being babies.
Actually I’m going to take that back. There is a material impact to them but it is that they risk losing out by not being in Trump & friends good books. In that case Paul’s rant is not only wrong but it is hypocritical because this is just as performative! If not more! The billionaires are already the most privileged group!
> How much can a DEI team possibly cost?
I don't think opposition to "a DEI team" is about cost at all, it's about the fact that it's harmful to your company to hire and fire based on skin color or gender expression, or to harass and lecture people for not participating in the DEI religion enough. If I had a nickel for every hiring discussion I've been in where I felt pressured to thumbs-up someone with serious flaws just because we were below an unspoken but widely-understood quota, I'd have a lot of nickels.
The idea that we should pass over the best candidate if he's a certain color and pronoun, thinking that will right the wrong of centuries-old sins, that's the mind virus that some of us don't approve of.
If you want an example of why it's bad and dumb even if you're a progressive, our VP, a very unpopular candidate who ran a laughably failed campaign for president was undeniably chosen as VP for DEI reasons, then she couldn't be "passed over" when Biden changed his mind about running, due to optics, so she, a candidate who peaked at 17% in the 2019 primary, was installed as the nominee.* The DNC killed itself on the altar of DEI in this case, and then lashed out at everyone else saying things like "Latinx people are white supremacists!"
*Stipulated: Democrats have a massive shortage of popular national-level politicians, so obviously while Harris was a bad choice, I can't point to any guaranteed 'better' ones.
Not much I can say other than that was a disappointing piece of trash from Paul.
The whole tirade against wokeness by the far right is nothing more than a bizarre attempt to stigmatize those who want to improve things for segments of society.
A more legitimate article might have focused on tactics such as shaming and cancelling those who disagree which is problematic in many instances, but Graham paints with too broad of a brush and comes across as another conservative whose only interest is to discredit those who think differently.
> comes across as another conservative
Graham endorsed Harris.
The left needs to stop accusing other members of the left of being "far-right" everytime they dare to have a different opinion on a topic.
That tendency of the left to ostracise its own rather than engage in debate, is exactly what pushed people like Elon and Rogan away, along with much of the centre, and is exactly why Trump won.
Whether he endorsed Harris or not is irrelevant to my point.
It was a poorly written article. I am actually very sympathetic with some of the pushback against some things associated with wokeness, like poorly implemented DEI policies that don't address root causes for representation disparities.
And you have no evidence that any of this is why Trump won. From the people I know who supported Trump, they did it for much different reasons.
on the other hand, throwing people under the bus is cheaper than spending $1M for the inauguration, you see the savvy investor!
I want to share a personal story.
I’m from Argentina. When I met my current wife, she volunteered at an orphanage. Her task was to take one of the children out for fun on weekends. It seemed simple, but it wasn’t. There, she met “A,” a 10-year-old girl. Some weekends with “A” were easy, but she was generally problematic. So, as we tried to understand what was happening to her, we learned a bit about her past.
Her mother was a drug addict and a criminal. Her father was likely her grandfather and was also in jail for various reasons, including abusing her.
We were heartbroken and tried to help, but we didn’t plan to adopt her. There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety.
However, the story takes a positive turn. When Argentina legalized same-sex marriage, two women adopted “A.” It was the first adoption case involving a same-sex marriage in our country.
Things weren’t easy for them. We’re friends now and see each other occasionally. They transformed “A’s” life for good. But it’s not like the movies. Once a child has endured such trauma, recovery can take years, and sometimes, it’s not even possible.
Nowadays, we have a president in Argentina who constantly claims to be engaged in a “cultural battle.” He’s a fan of Elon Musk and Trump. The “cultural battle” primarily involves removing sexual education from schools, removing organizations dedicated to protecting women from abuse, and portraying government spending on helping the poor as communism. He frequently uses the term “woke” to denigrate people who don’t share his views.
However, this “cultural battle” is all about hate.
The entire concept of “canceling culture,” “anti-woke,” and Mark Zuckerberg removing tampons from bathrooms are distractions. The world is full of children like “A,” and the cost of proofreading this with AI is probably enough to feed one person for a day. I’m not trying to sit on a moral high ground while I write this from my iPad Pro. But, at least, we should have more empathy.
Sorry for my long comment, but I feel that this article from PG misses the point (ja! It’s my second time writing in disagreement with a PG article). I’m concerned about the direction that all this hate is taking here in Argentina, echoing the things that happen in the US.
I appreciate your story and feel for "A" and the women who adopted her. But I think we need to get beyond this idea that there are only two sides and you have to pick one or the other. I don't see why I can't agree with you and also agree with PG. I didn't feel any hate in his article and I imagine he would support the people who have been helping "A", i.e. you and your wife and her adoptive mothers.
> There are many other details, but I don’t want to bore you with the horrors. To summarize, this story shattered my naivety
I have had similar experiences and understand you.
Here's a ChatGPT rewrite, focusing on a different end of the political spectrum:
---
The word "puritan" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it might sound familiar. Google's version isn't bad: “A person with censorious moral beliefs, especially about pleasure and sexuality.” This sense of the word originated in the 16th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although *freedom conservatism* is a relatively recent phenomenon, it's just a modern iteration of an ancient habit.
There's a certain kind of person who is drawn to a rigid, dogmatic sense of virtue and demonstrates their superiority by policing anyone who steps out of line. Every society has these people. The only thing that changes is the rules they enforce. In Puritan New England, it was religious purity. In McCarthy's America, it was anti-communism. For the freedom conservatives, it’s about traditional values.
If you want to understand freedom conservatism, the question to ask isn’t why people act like this. Every society has moral busybodies. The question is, why are *our* moral busybodies obsessed with *these* ideas, at *this* moment?
The answer lies in the 1980s and 1990s. Freedom conservatism is a sequel to the culture wars, which started with Reagan's "family values" campaign and found new life in the early 2000s when people realized reality TV wasn't enough drama. Its second wind came with the rise of social media echo chambers, which peaked around the Great Meme Wars of the late 2010s.
What does freedom conservatism mean now? I’m often asked to define it by people who think it’s an empty buzzword, so here’s my attempt: *An aggressively performative devotion to traditional values.*
In other words, it’s people being puritans about old-fashioned ideals. The problem isn't traditional values themselves—family, patriotism, etc., have their place. The problem is the *performance.* Instead of quietly living their lives and, say, mowing their lawn while humming "God Bless America," freedom conservatives focus on getting people fired for not standing during the anthem.
And of course, freedom conservatism started in the best possible place for self-serious, inflexible ideology: academia. Did it begin in hard sciences, where people have to deal with facts? Of course not. It began in the cushy chairs of humanities departments, where abstract ideas about morality and society are debated without anyone worrying about inconvenient things like lab results.
Why did it happen in the 1980s and not earlier? Well, the answer is obvious: the hippies of the '60s got jobs. Radical students grew up, got tenure, and traded in their flower power for bow ties and flag pins. Now they were the Establishment they'd protested against, and they weren't about to let anyone disrespect their shiny new rules.
Suddenly, campus life wasn’t about free expression anymore. Now, students were encouraged to rat out professors who said something insufficiently patriotic or questioned the sanctity of heteronormative nuclear families. It was the Cultural Revolution, but make it apple pie.
And what about the rules of freedom conservatism? Oh, they’re a hoot. Imagine explaining to an alien why it’s okay to chant “freedom” while banning books. Or how “family values” means yelling at teenagers about abstinence, but having your own scandalous tabloid history is perfectly fine. The rules are neither consistent nor logical—they’re just a list of traps, perfectly designed for the self-righteous to trip others up.
Freedom conservatism thrives on outrage. And boy, does social media deliver. If outrage were a currency, Twitter would’ve been the new Fort Knox. Freedom conservatives figured out that they could rally mobs online to cancel anyone not adhering to the prescribed "values." Ironically, this led to the thing they claim to hate most: cancel culture.
And let’s not forget the administrators and HR departments hired to enforce this ideology in workplaces. Their job titles often feature words like "patriotism" or "family," but their real goal is to make sure you don’t say anything remotely critical about their flag collection or their favorite founding father.
The sad thing is that freedom conservatism is not going anywhere. The aggressively conventional-minded are like weeds—they’ll always find a crack in the pavement. But the key to stopping them is simple: stop letting them create new heresies. The next time someone tries to ban a book or a word in the name of protecting “values,” maybe, just maybe, we should push back.
Because when freedom conservatism—or any performative moralism—runs wild, the number of true things we can say shrinks. And that’s a loss for everyone, even the puritans."
Incredible article, thank you for sharing. The parallels to unwelcome and unsolicited religious proselytizing is something I've been calling out for years, and ironically have often been met with extreme hatred and condemnation in response.
Never in my life did I think that nearly every institution, company, corporation, (you name it), would compel and coerce people into following a narrow set of societal rules that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and grated firmly against a functional, albeit imperfect, status quo -- most of which was accepted and even celebrated by most people in Western nations.
What's terrifying to me is how acceptable it became to write and defend academic literature around these manufactured problems, specifically for "prigs" to justify their abhorrent behavior towards other people.
I'm glad more people are finally willing to have an honest discussion about this, without immediately labeling it a "right-wing talking piece", as too many so lazily love to do.
even though I agree with much of his commentary, the piece that's missing is in the questions: were you principled and brave? how were you an example?
I know what I did, and some of it is in my comment history on this site. but I think the whole episode was a failure of moral courage. sure, it was the woke, but really, it was us. I think anyone feeling more free to speak now needs to reflect on that. Watching Zuck on Rogan was refreshing and hopeful, but that (very Harvard) oblivious affect that blows with the wind is not a foundation on which to rebuild the culture.
there's a very compelling take from the woke, which summarizes as, "you don't get to say mean and dumb shit without a cost anymore, and we're not bearing the costs of your culture that is set up to exclude us." This must be heard, and most criticisms of the totalitarian moment that seized our culture overlook that this argument was the kernel of truth that anchored the system of chaos and lies that followed.
to most of them I would respond, "you othered yourselves and when adults wouldn't listen to you, you organized to terrorize kids about their 'privilege.'" however, for our civilization to survive, there is a social re-integration of a lot of people that needs to be done so that there is an us again, and a sense of our shared protagonism.
I'm glad PG, Andreesen, Zuck, Musk, and others are addressing this stuff. Elon's massive gambit and persistent leadership, and Zuck hiring Dana White for the Meta board are very good starts.
If you want to be a part of rebuilding after this dark period, ask yourself if you had courage when it was hard, and reflect on when you didn't so that you don't fail like that again.
I did, and do, and each day I pay the price and then some.
Free speech and research is critical in order for our society to thrive. That said, it is not mutually exclusive with helping folks that need a little help to integrate and contribute when they really want to? It’s sad to see changes that helped, getting thrown out for its association with a social craze.
Fully responding to this takes more space than HN--very reasonably--allows. But here we go anyway.
> [A lot of takes on universities and journalism]
Universities and journalists became left-leaning because conservatives are wrong about almost everything. They were wrong about markets, sex, Iraq, financial regulation, climate change, al-Qaeda, race, China, Russia, health care, immigration, education, COVID, vaccines, masks, NATO, tax policy, tech policy, the Civil War, on and on and on. It's like someone's running an experiment on how many times you can be bafflingly wrong before people notice. Very few people can be both evidence-based--like most people in academia and journalism--and conservative.
> [I dislike cancel culture, it's performative, indicative of left-wind orthodoxy, and masks bad people]
- Almost no people have been canceled (more people have been killed by dogs).
- You are performatively writing a blog post. At least Steve Ballmer made a website. At least Steve Bannon has a podcast (and I guess ran a presidential campaign for at least a little while).
- You can't say your main issue is larping while also detailing how DEI is corrupting corporate and government hiring. Either it's real or it's not.
- The right has its own edge lord orthodoxy--some time in the "manosphere" would convince you if you need convincing. You can buy in by saying the N word publicly, by writing a blog post railing against wokeness, or changing your company's DEI and content moderation policies to favor the right. Well, I guess people saw right through that last one though.
- Being "the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't" perfectly describes Donald Trump (or Andrew Tate, or David Duke).
But more broadly, we can lump all this (Larry Summers, etc.) under a pattern where a successful person confidently walks on to an issue where they're deeply ignorant, and assumes they can apply tools they're facile with to fix them. For Summers it was economics (in that keynote you referenced he made the bonkers argument that since the market hasn't corrected for discrimination it must not exist); for you and other SV VCs it's tech. Media studies and gender studies are complicated. I assure you smart people are working on them all the time. You need their help, not the other way around.
> The rise of social media and the increasing polarization of journalism reinforced one another. In fact there arose a new variety of journalism involving a loop through social media. Someone would say something controversial on social media. Within hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers would then post links to the story on social media, driving further arguments online. It was the cheapest source of clicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news bureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to do was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost them on your site, with some additional comments to inflame readers further.
This happened far more on the right than the left. You should visit sites like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and Fox News.
> By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide." [10]
I was pretty sure we'd get to the "communist Russia" part of the argument, but I can't say I'm not disappointed. The EEOC was established in 1965 "to administer and enforce civil rights laws against workplace discrimination." You're naive to this space, so let me tell you that one of the reasons women and members of other marginalized groups leave high-powered positions is discomfort in the workplace: microaggressions, stereotypes, etc. Simple policies like using "inclusive language" can go a long way towards making a workplace more hospitable to people you want to retain.
> [A lot of takes essentially on media studies]
The tension between "orthodoxy" and "free speech" is--I would hope obviously--facile. Let's think about some of the questions someone running a social media platform would ask:
- Can my users opine on the lab-leak hypothesis?
- Can my users opine on the Holocaust maybe not being real?
- Can my users opine on the sexuality of others?
- Can my users opine on my sexuality?
- Can my users opine on Paul Manafort being a Russian agent?
- Can my users post PII of others?
- Can my users talk up the benefits of poison (chemotherapy, nicotine)?
- Can my users brigade other users?
- Can my users track the location of my private jet at all times?
- Can my users opine on Matt Gaetz having had sex with a minor?
- Can my users blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can my users write programs to blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can my users hire influencers to blast these opinions to millions of people?
- Can I be lobbied to prioritize some opinions over others (sponsored posts, foreign governments, interest groups, etc.)
- Can I be made personally liable if I don't prioritize specific pieces of information (amber alerts, VAERS stats, violence against LGBTQ people, Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, how to make napalm)
> The number of true things we can't say should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.
Here are some true things:
- White men are responsible for the vast majority of white collar crime
- White men are responsible for the majority of US war crimes
- White men instituted the worst form of slavery the world's ever seen
- Men are responsible for the majority of fraud
- SV VCs are disproportionately responsible for fossil fuel consumption (data center go brrr)
- Men commit the majority of mass shootings in the US
- Europeans have killed far more Africans than Africans have killed Europeans
- Men are responsible for almost all rape
- Men are responsible for nearly all mass shootings
Should we start making policy on these kinds of things? Something like "men can't own firearms" or "white men can't be accountants" or "white men can't run businesses that receive government reimbursement" or "white men can't run US foreign policy" or... I honestly don't know what you'd do about the rape thing. Would we welcome it if some foreign country--say Russia--started paying influencers with huge reach on social media to push these policies? Would we defend these people's right to "free speech" as troll farm after troll farm pushes this agenda, after Bari Weiss and her ilk start pushing it, after SV VCs start advocating for it in their blogs?
"Free speech" sounds like a right, and it is, but it's much, much more of a responsibility. I don't expect your average person to understand "imminent lawless action" vs. "shouting fire in a crowded theater", or content-based vs. content-neutral jurisprudence. I don't expect them to understand the nuances of the Holocaust, gender studies, or epistemology. I do expect the owners of huge platforms to understand these things though. I expect smart, rich, educated people like you to understand them before trying to influence people with your platform. I earnestly implore you to do better.
Unfortunately he's going along with right-wing orthodoxy instead of seriously confronting modern internet cults. Graham proves himself to be a groupthinker, not an independent thinker.
(The real tragedy of "woke" is how it undermines the left; how could you ever win an election if people who seem to travel with you tell 70% (white) or 50% (men) of people that they're intrinsically bad? Worse yet those "fellow travelers" will sit out the election because they think any real politicians is a "fascist" for one reason or another.)
My son has two friends who I'll call B and C -- "wokeness" could be evoked in the case of B but you'll see it is a wrong mental model.
I knew B from elementary school and I know he's a bit out of sync with other people, like myself and my son. Call him "neurodivergent" and leave it at that. I introduced B to TTRPGs which he enjoyed greatly at the time and is an ongoing interest for him. (Unlike my transsexual friend from college, neither I nor his mother ever heard him express anything noncongruent about his gender identity as a child.)
My son met C in high school. He probably has a developmental problem too but I wont't DX it. B seemed a little depressed and withdrawn, C has always expressed hostility against people and institutions. C certainly has pathological narcissism and says that hard work is for suckers, his dad is a provost at an elite school. If he was seriously seeking a royal road he'd continue in the family business (where nepotism rules) but he hasn't talked to his dad in years, though, like B, he still lives at home. C jumped off the roof of his house one day to impress his little brother and broke his leg. His mom, who grew up in rural China and later got an MD valid in China but not here, thinks he is possessed by demons.
B works part time. C doesn't work. Neither are in school.
During the pandemic B was worked on by an "egg-hatcher" who helped B develop body dysmorphia. Last thanksgiving family plans fell through but we went to the community center in B's hamlet because we knew we'd get to meet up with B and his mom. (B uses a different pronoun and different name at work but doesn't mind if we use his old pronouns and name.) B told us all about the horrible side effects of the meds he is taking, and then got jumped on by a (seemingly mental ill) Trump supporter when I was coming out of the bathroom. B expresses a lot of hostility to the likes of J K Rowling because he's been told to.
C encountered "blackpill" incels who also talked him into body dysmorphia. (Like the transgenderists they have a language of transformation through ideology, in this case based on a scene from The Matrix.) His height is average, but that's not good enough. He stretches every day and wants to have surgery where they break his legs to extend them. He hasn't talked my with my son or myself since the time my son said what his real height was in an online chat. I had a 'Black Card' membership at Planet Fitness and made the offer to teach him how to lift weights, but he refused. Rumor has it, however. that he bought anabolic steroids online and injected them.
People who see things through an ideological lens would see B as good and C as evil or maybe C as good and B as evil. I look at them and see similar signs and symptoms and if I had to DX it would be "lack of social connection and lack of meaning"; both acquired body dysmorphia through ideology, I've got no doubt about it and I see both as victims of internet cults.
In Terry Prachett's Hogfather professors at the Unseen University discover a principle of "conservation of belief" so that when the Hogfather (like Santa but comes on Dec 32, drives a sleigh pulled by pigs, ...) is assassinated the world becomes plagued by the Hair Loss Fairy and the God of Hangovers (the "Oh God!") I see transgenderism, inceldom, evangelicals who don't go to church, BLM enthusiasts who don't personally know any black people, people senselessly adding stripes to the rainbow flag (hmmm... people in those classes have always had trouble with being confused with others... In Iran they think gay people need trans surgery, Intersex people frequently express that they've been violated when they get the same surgery that helps transexual people feel whole, etc.) , anti-vax activists and people who are obsessively pro-vax just to oppose anti-vax people as being our own Hair Loss Fairy that comes out of traditional religions failing.
Read this and understand one thing, you being anti-woke is not fighting the elite, fighting a cabal of anti-freedom leftists.
You are sided with the billionaires, politicians and justices of the Supreme Court that hold virtually all the power in this country. You are on the side of Putin and the Iranian regime, both calling out "western degeneracy".
"Wokeness" is nothing but a scarecrow used to discredit any and all progressive ideas. In the name of "anti-wokeness" women are dying of complications, giving birth to the child of their rapists. LGBT people have to hide in the closet, from fear of repercussions to being who they are, enduring massive psychological pain.
As a remedy, I would like you to hold one conversation with a trans guy/girl, hear them complain about the harassment they receive almost daily, about how difficult it was to have anyone recognize their illness and receive treatment, and realize that they are simply trying to live a life in this messed up world, like you and me.
"Wokeness" is what results in horrifying outcomes of policy like this:
https://4w.pub/male-inmate-charged-with-raping-woman-inside-...
This is a direct result of "progressive" beliefs being translated into policy.
It should be no surprise that people start to question and reject these beliefs when they begin to understand the harm they cause.
Please do not let the kind of news you linked inform your opinion on genuine transgender persons. Obviously that law wasn't thought out well enough, and this guy abused it, causing tremendous harm.
One in two transgender person is victim of sexual assault at some point in their life [1]. That is the very real and statistically significant result of "anti-wokeness".
[1] https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/pubs/forge...
Crazy and rather ironic that an essay from pg himself gets flagged no HN.
[flagged]
Presumably because he owns the site. You would think this would be the one place that PG didn't get much pushback on his opinions. I'm not too surprised though; he hasn't been very involved here for years so the culture has shifted.
I don't think he would have written this 10, even 5 years ago. It only really started becoming a trendy viewpoint in his social circles recently.
That's not true. PG has been ranting about wokeness for quite a long time already. I don't think you quite understand the nuance of a lot of these definitions. PG isn't a conservative MAGA guy nor a bigot. He just does not like how the woke crowd goes about trying to affect social change and how unsavory types use the woke crowd to achieve their political goals.
I've read his earlier writings on the topic and they are substantially less conspiratorial and influenced by neoreactionary thought. He even previously used the term "prig" in this 2004 article:
https://paulgraham.com/say.html
This is top to bottom a more thoughtful, nuanced take on essentially the same topic. The main difference is that saying stuff like "class of bureaucrats pursu[ing] a woke agenda" and "woke mind-virus" is fashionable among SV elites today, and it was not in 2004.
I think the big shift was in cancel culture, doxing, swatting, and all that stuff starting to rise, which is all relatively recent.
A moralistic ideology acting holier than thou is nothing new. In the 80s (and for sure time after) evangelicals had their "Moral Majority."
But nobody really cares until an ideology starts regularly driving harmful actions, at which point there starts to be a lot more push back.
Swatting and doxing aren't ideologically-aligned actions, though. They certainly don't have anything in particular to do with "woke".
I imagine if you polled all HN users vastly more would sympathise with this essay than not. But the YC flag (and voting) system still seems relatively straightforward, and consequently enables small groups of activists to have quite a significant capability to censor (or promote) topics/comments.
This is one reason I think community notes style algorithms is where we'll probably see pretty much all community voting/moderation head over time. It's just objectively better since it basically fixes this 'glitch' in straightforward systems.
HN also has vouching, so a small minority of flaggers shouldn't be able to censor a topic that a large number of HNers want to read about.
I think this got flagged initially because PG doesn't have anything to say about 'wokeness' that we have not heard many times before. He doesn't like it (big surprise) for exactly the reasons that you'd expect someone like him not to like it.
Vouching relies on visibilty while flagging dramatically reduces visibility.
Appeal to authority needs to be used with prudence. I wouldn't trust pg on a medical topic, but I have no issue hearing what he has to say on this particular topic because as far as I am concerned academic credentials do not give you a better understanding of the contemporary social climate.
For that matter Trump and MAGA have no degrees in psychology and sociology. Despite this, they were much more in tune with the American public than the Democrats with their fake intellectualism.
I mean that's fine, that's the kind of distinction everyone has to make for themselves. Personally I haven't encountered anything from PG that conveyed meaningful information to me at any point in the last decade so this is more a continuation of ignoring a zero value content stream than anything else. Put simply I don't need a lecture from PG regardless of topic.
Wow, I really hated this article. Thanks for the bad opinion, Paul.
[flagged]
Ok, but please don't break the site guidelines when posting to HN. Name-calling and personal attacks aren't allowed here, and your comment consists of nothing but.
The sheer amount of content-less booing of political outgroups throughout the thread (overwhelmingly in one direction, unsurprisingly given the article content) has really disappointed me.
I can't help but wonder if this is intentionally ironic.
(From TFA: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules.")
I think it’s intentional and ironic. But I don’t think PG realizes what he did. I throughly believe he’s in the space of “I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.” I get this feeling from reading not just this, but his other essays too.
@malcomgreaves I'm not sure you caught the intended target of @cle's comment. I believe he was talking about your comment being the thing he thought may be intentionally ironic, not PG's essay.
One of the main points in the essay: "The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so"
And your comment is a classic example of that behavior.
> I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.
I think it’s more of “I can do it because I can afford it. But other folks can’t because they need their job (or something similar).”
Not sure about 'I can do it because I am morally superior'. Is it required to be morally superior to have an opposing view?
> other folks can't because they don't get it like I do
His point of view undoubtedly resonates with 'some folks'.
My respect for PG and the rest of the leadership of the tech world unfortunately seem to be headed off the same cliff.
The arrogance and lack of empathy is so disappointing and so unnecessary. Please try harder. A lot is at stake here.
Your comment, while eloquent, is totally unsubstantiated. At least PG tries to justify his perspective.
You didn't.
This comment is kinda harsh isn't it? Do you have anything specific from his words to support:
> ... mind become filled with mush
> desperate pledge of allegiance ...
I think it's just the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness. His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
> His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
Arguably because a large portion of the population doesn't agree that it's unimportant and performative. Current culture is captured by the concept and collectively spends a massive amount of time worrying about it.
If you personally feel that this is a waste of time, how else do you communicate that if not by spending time thinking and writing about it?
I also think most meetings are a complete waste of time. The fact that many other people feel meetings are important directly impacts me, and just believing that they're a waste isn't good enough. It's necessary to actively push against something if you think that thing needs to change.
Because it comes with very real consequences, sometimes even criminal now.
He doesn't argue it's unimportant. If you took that away from the essay you didn't read it closely enough because it contains sentences like:
"College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination."
If you're describing something as poisonous, especially if it's the behavior of a large group of people, then you're saying it's important.
> the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness
This is the first and only article I recall from PG about wokeness, is it part of some anthology that I've missed or where are you getting the "this much time" part from?
https://x.com/paulg/status/1878495314975277093
Here he is with receipts that he has been talking about wokeness like a weirdo for close to a decade now.
Aha, on Twitter, makes sense I'd miss it. I've mostly been thinking of Twitter as a place for posting random thoughts, and I thought most others saw it like that too, not like a place for serious thinking/discussions. I guess I was wrong.
Do you have any points of substance you can elaborate with? I would genuinely like to hear your argument.
Not OP, but personally it's just sad to see someone that you view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense, like if a great mathematician suddenly stopped their research to focus on flat earth and contrails
> view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense
Are you saying that thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction, regardless of the person? Or that specifically PG thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction? Or maybe even "thinking about wokeness in that way" is the distraction?
It seems like if "wokeness" is important, then having more people thinking about it is better, regardless of their outcome from thinking about it. If "wokeness" isn't important at all, I'd totally understand you, but seems there are way more people out there thinking about it more than PG, since it's the first time I see him say anything about it at all.
Thanks for engaging. Is it nonsense if it greatly affects government and workplace policies? Especially now at a time where the incoming POTUS has demonstrated a lack of respect for a wide swath of people.
(Just to be clear, despite the above comment, I do not align with "wokeness".)
I do agree with you that it seems like that and I generally agree with you, but I'm also not a fan of your comment that only addresses the mind of PG, while the words he written are right there.
Point out the parts of the blog post that shows his lack of rational thinking and research, rather than just giving some overall personal attack, as currently the comment is relatively off-topic considering the submission.
I'm sure there are good and bad parts of the blog post, while you failed to address any sides of it.
Did we read the same article? It seems like a pretty coherent and plausible explanation for the current state of political correctness.
You read a reply from a person that doesn't like the implications of PG's statements and conclusions. Which I think is further evidence of PG's claims.
Could you expand on why this article makes you believe his mind has "become filled with mush."
What points is he making (if you consider him to be making clear points), how do you think those points are flawed, etc..
He's just kissing the ring.
As a liberal/left/progressive person who agrees with many of the ideas "woke" people are pushing, I find "wokeism" extremely problematic.
We need to put to bed the notion that criticizing some aspect of a social phenomenon somehow means someone is wholly endorsing the worst elements of the opposition.
Personally, I believe "wokeism" (I hesitate to even use this word because it's poorly defined) is actually one of the largest impediments to moving society towards the ideas generally associated with the word. It's a tactics issue.
The difference between "We want the world to look more like X" and "Let's do these specific things to make the world look more like X" is critical. How you go about the latter can have a huge impact on the former.
That's just not true. He did not like wokeism, but on the other hand he's aligned with the democrats, including voting for Kamala. Like his politics or not, he is independent thinker.
Paul Graham was never smart. He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
Paul Graham is one of the smartest people I've ever met, hands down, not a close call.
If I know propositional logic, one of two things follows: either (1) I've never met any smart people, or (2) you've jumped to a false conclusion.
Either way, you shouldn't be posting personal attacks to HN.
I'm assuming you're exaggerating for effect at least a little but with that caveat I couldn't agree more. CS Lewis has a great argument for this in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. Paraphrasing his argument: Time naturally filters out the nonsense and what we're left with are the books that are worth reading by virtue of the fact that they have stood the test of time. Truth or at least the closest we can get to it naturally bubbles up to the surface over time.
https://thecslewis-studygroup.org/the-c-s-lewis-study-group/...
Counterpoint: all the nonsense in millennia old religious texts that still wastes people's time to this day.
You must have spent a lot of time studying them to reach your conclusion.
Aye, but that nonsense benefits religious authorities and politicians, it has value to them, hence its staying power.
Taleb is a strong proponent of this as well. Related to the “Lindy Effect”
This is horrible advice if you want to work on anything innovative. You don't have time to wait for things to bubble up. For example, physics textbooks from the early 1900s rarely use linear algebra, even if they're written well.
Point taken. I wouldn't recommend avoiding anything modern across the board and neither does CS Lewis. And innovation is great but I would guard against assuming that innovation is always positive and a step in the right direction even if not directly. It's also true that many old texts, religious or otherwise, contain timeless wisdom that can inform innovative efforts. And I'm not talking about old by many centuries either. For example, I think many of the hacker types that frequent HN and seek to build something innovative would probably benefit from reading some of Alan Turing's writings. On the other end of the spectrum, maybe Sam Altman could benefit from studying the story of the tower of Babel.
"He then received a Master of Science in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990, both in computer science from Harvard University."
Anyone with a PhD Comp Sci from Harvard is automatically very smart in my mind, unless by "smart" you mean something else...
So I've been thinking about this recently and come to the conclusion that 'smart' and 'stupid' are just extremes of behaviour and capability.
That is, people have clever _moments_ - some more than others perhaps - but can equally have stupid ones. We convenientally flatten the statistics into a boolean.
For example, recently someone considered to have made a lot of smart decisions in his life has been found to have payed others to rank his character up in a video game so he can brag about it. Everyone has stupid moments.
He’s smart in Computer Science. I studied mathematics in graduate school. Lots of smart people in my class…in mathematics. What I’ve experienced since graduate school is people being smart in their area of expertise thinking that smartness automatically extends to other areas. Arrogance and stupidity shine brightest when such people write authoritatively on areas they haven’t actually studied in any real depth.
You have fallen for the classic blunder. Just because someone is smart in area X does not mean they have the same proficiency in Y.
Then explicitly say "PG should stick to topics in his domain", don't use a generic term that indicates low IQ...
So this is completely out of his ballpark, and he's commenting on it publicly? Seems pretty stupid to me
If pg spent any of his time talking about actual computer science topics instead of the dull pablum and oligarch apologia he outputs today, we’d all be better served.
> He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Agreed. People seem to think that success is deterministic, so following the advice of successful people will lead them to success, rather than there being any number of other factors that might make someone who might make choices with the highest chance of success end up not succeeding, or someone who might make choices that aren't actually that smart end up becoming successful in spite of that. The worst part of this is that it's not just the students who naively believe this, but the successful people themselves. When someone mistakenly thinks that their own success is solely attributable to your own superior intellect or work ethic, it's not surprising that they end up advocating for policies that treat people in unfortunate circumstances as being not worth trying to help.
Graham's early essays on, say, the ambitions of cities or hackers and painters, were interesting, original, were grounded in his personal experiences, and were focused in scope.
This latest mush makes extravagant claims about the evolution of society over the course over a 70 year period, seems shocked that news rooms might have style guides, and suggests that recent campus life can somehow be meaningfully be compared to the Cultural Revolution.
It observes many trends, perhaps some accurately, but observes everything superficially.
Pragmatically, what Graham suggests at the end is reasonable--pluralism combined with openness to the ideas of others about morality. I don't know that we needed 6000 words of vague dyspeptic musings to get there.
He has demonstrated the ability to write and think more clearly than this. It is reasonable for someone to observe this and be disappointed.
Both of you are attacking pg's character, yet he's done no wrong here.
> These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide."
As an LGBT Latino, I feel gross when people step up to "include" me. The "LatinX" thing is just sick, and the fake "pride" bullshit makes me feel unbelievably cheapened. Not all gays or bis are the same. I don't go around screaming "yass qween", listen to Beyonce, or watch Ru Paul. But we're token represented like that. I hate everything about it.
Superficial facets of my "identity" have been commoditized and weaponized. (I'd say "appropriated", but that'd only be the case if this wasn't a complete cartoon representation.)
I've been called a "fag" once in public for kissing a guy. Whatever.
My wife has been called cis-scum (despite the fact she's trans!), I've been made to write software to deny grants to whites and men [1], I've been told I can't recommend people for hire because they weren't "diverse", I've been taught by my company my important "LatinX heritage" and even got some swag for it, I've had a ton of completely irrelevant people make my "identity" into a battle ground, etc. etc etc. I can't count the number of times this surfaces in my life in an abrasive and intrusive way.
I felt more at home in the world before 2010 than in the world today that supposedly "embraces my diversity".
[1] Restaurant Revitalization Fund, look it up.
He's smart about startups and tech but as soon as he starts to talk about politics or philosophy he gets very 2 dimensional very quickly.
In much the same way people who build useless startups never talk to any actual customers, Paul Graham wouldnt be seen dead with the types of 1970s black activists from Harlem who actually originated the term "woke" (to refer to e.g. police brutality).
Im sure he knows plenty of the rich, white moral posturers who run large corporations and pride themselves on making a rainbow version of their company's logo for use outside of middle eastern markets, though.
(regardless of the merit of your criticism, this comment was at least very funny to me, so thank you for that)
In a way, this kind of ad hominem attack supports his point.
It just amazing to see how the new Trump administration prepares to take over, all the Tech Bros suddenly are coming out of their shell.
Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...
I don't disagree, but Thiel has been "out of his shell" for decades.
I found the essay cogent and accessible. He's very active online and engages in good faith even with his detractors.
Whatever else you think of him, he's an incredibly concise and persuasive writer. Even on topic I disagree with him on, I can't fault his reasoning or presentation.
>Whatever else you think of him, he's an incredibly concise and persuasive writer.
This is not a concise essay.
There is nothing logical about his essay. There is no reasoning. It's kind of all over the place. It's kind of a desperate essay.
What I find funny is that PG thinks he is a thinker who breaks the rules. No PG, you and your friends write the rules. Wokeness is about acknowledging the game is rigged against black people and others. But go ahead PG, redefine it as political correctness, then write an essay about how the current system is actually good.
The reason wokeness scares the elite like PG is because it targets the system they themselves helped create.
It doesn’t even have any kind of real power to unseat these dorks. They have enough capital and connections to hold on to power for life. It attempts to delegitimize them, question their worldview and expose them to other viewpoints and their reaction is to lash out against it. Very fragile identities.
This is a ridiculous comment. I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of what's happening in the entire western world politically is a result of the backlash against wokeness and leftist economics.
Without wokeness there is no Trump, and the far right in Europe would still be marginal.
Edit - it's funny, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast where Peter Thiel was lamenting the lack of introspection on the left. Lots of comments proving it correct.
This comment is historically and intellectually uninformed, i.e., devoid of understanding about the antecedents and relationships between what is driving todays rise of the right, which is a populist counterrevolution to the 60s and beyond’s postmodernism-fueled culture wars, which elevated the marginalized and women, and served as a strategic distraction while the elite locked in wealth extract ion from below and minority rule by manufacturing a pervasive epistemic crisis.
Same for yours, You can hardly call the free market and privatization policies that the western europe has been going through these last three decades "Leftish economics"
What big leftist economics policies have been enacted in the West recently?
Massive expansionist post-Covid fiscal policy and QE that created the inflationary crisis. Mass immigration (yes immigration is an economic policy).
Immigration was kicked off long before recent times and used to largely be a right-wing policy.
The rate of immigration and our ability to assimilate immigrants matters.
That is not a relevant answer to my statement.
Immigration is not leftist, it degrades value of labor. It's liberal policy - in the US this is conflated with left, but elsewhere liberal stands for individualist policies, while left is more or less socialist, the exact opposite.
Certain kinds of leftist are anti-immigration. But anarchists and those in favor of international communism are aggressively (sometimes militantly) opposed to the concept of national borders or any meaningful restrictions on the movements of people.
And were the people making pro immigration policies in the west in favour of "international communism", or liberal capitalism?
Those groups are not anywhere close to wielding power or influencing govs decisions.
What nonsense is this? The St. Louis Federal Reserve documented most inflation was due to profit seeking (gouging), not QE—that’s right wing libertarian drivel.
Profit seeking is normal behaviour. The economic system normally keeps it in check through competition. If it's not kept in check it's because of the economic conditions.
I've not seen the economic system keeping it in check through competition in my lifetime and I don't think it did historically.
All those commie socialist corporate bailouts?
2008 TARP for Wall Street? Corporate tax breaks that were unfunded and yielded $2 trillion in cash reserves decidedly not funneled down to working people. Sounds like socialism for institutions too big to fail, but not for people who needed it (70% of Americans with less than $1,000 in savings for emergencies).
How long will this situation continue before the house of cards tumbles down?
Are you accusing the people who fight against Trump's politics and who vote against him to have put him in power? Also, what "leftist economics" are you talking about?
Now this is a ridiculous comment.
It reads just like "antifascists are the new fascists" discourses. It's absurd.
When a vocal, extreme minority of the left drives things towards absurdity, there is likely to be an acute reactionary response.
Because they are helping Trump, their behavior is often so insane it drives people into his camp who might have otherwise been somewhere in the middle.
Look at the surveys done of swing voters in the last election, they biggest single item was social issues such as trans.
Also just read the linked article(seems reasonable enough, though I don't necessarily agree with all of it), and the moralistic responses attacking him personally, instead of responding by pointing with the part they disagree with, this is a logical fallacy.
A bunch of people who previously voted left are now voting right. Ask yourself why.
Massive disinformation campaigns that have occurred over the past 10 to 15 years.
Trump is the "solution" to the problem of militant radical Neo-Marxism or whatever you want to call it. He exist in a world where the Overton window sits comfortably over the destruction of the entire western world by the hand of communists bent on burning down the world to rule over the ashes. When everything is bent into identity politics, for good or ill those that can manage their image will thrive. And Trump is very good at managing the Trump brand.
This isn’t the Cold War and ideology is for simpletons.
I may have to write a book to educate people about how the world really works.
Thanks for the motivation.
You're welcome. But until then your comment has nothing of value for me to digest that is relevant to the conversation.
> He exist in a world where the Overton window sits comfortably over the destruction of the entire western world by the hand of communists bent on burning down the world to rule over the ashes.
In which alternative reality is that happening? Where in the western world are communists in power?
I'm amused that it's so hard to see but as a single example take the current situation happening in the UK. There have been organized child human trafficking rings that have been allowed to operate with complete impunity due to the race of the participants.
If you speak out about the injustice you are deemed a far right extremist and a raciest and given a harsher sentence than the pedophiles that are raping children.
Now you might see that as unrelated but In my option it's exactly the sort of thing that is emblematic of the radical left being in power. There is an inversion of justice to correct for the "demon of whiteness".
>If you speak out about the injustice you are deemed a far right extremist and a raciest and given a harsher sentence than the pedophiles that are raping children.
I would like to see a source for this.
I think this is a bit reductive.
Trump came to power on the back of a populist anger at the wealthy elite and the consequences of neo-liberal economics (which is pretty fucking far from e.g. Marx. Regardless of the entirety of his meaning, certainly some of Alex Jones' hatred of "globalists" springs from the fact that they outsource jobs to where the labor is cheaper). Insofar as "wokeness" factors into Trump's power, it was to harness that anger and direct it at some wealthy elites, but not others. That is, he claimed that these wealthy elites are being performatively sanctimonious and are trying to rob you of your freedom, money, power, etc, but those wealthy elites have your best interests at heart. Even though the two wealthy elites are kissing cousins (to whit, Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump Jr. both engaged in a committed long-term relationships with the same woman, albeit at different times) and don't actually care either way.
"Woke" in the traditional sense is realizing that no matter what they say, both groups are wealthy elites, and that neither actually has the interests of anyone but the elites at heart.
There are definitely moments of "are we really prioritizing this right now?" with modern social justice movements. But even on the subject of trans kids, the question for me is not "are we encouraging the wrong ideas around gender?" but rather "are we doing everything that's necessary to keep kids from committing suicide?"
The other day there was a post about fascists vs. rakes, and I really do feel like the the discussion around wokeness comes down to a similar misunderstanding about the intentions and moral principles of the two sides of the discussion.
Without wokeness, Trump et al would've already steamrolled us.
Being woke is to be aware of inequalities between ethnicities, religions, and classes. Being woke is to be aware of the fact that the planet is overheating due to our unfettered capitalism.
You calling something ridiculous is what is ridiculous, friend.
Yeah, what the rich need is more tax breaks {sarcasm}.
The world is full of people too stupid to know how stupid they are. They need to wake the fuck up.
The scientific method is to look at data and form models of reality from that. Not to have a model in mind and then look for evidence to support it or evidence to ignore.
Graham has a Hegelian, Panglossian view of things. In "woke" terms he is a very, very wealthy white cishet male born to an upper middle class physicist. As the relations of production and social order were created for and are controlled by his class he defends it.
To use an example - due to government mandates, the number of blacks attending Harvard Law School this year is less than half what it was last year. It does not fit into the narrative of a progressive, forward moving country which is meritocratic (although absurdly the legacies etc. taking their place is called a move to meritocracy). You can't say there is a national oppression of Africans in the US by the US, or that things are not meritocracy, so thinking starts getting very skewed. You can read this skewed thinking in Graham and others.
YC was started by a convicted felon, and it's due to his privileged birth that Graham was not convicted along with his co-founder. Meanwhile black men are killed by police for selling loose cigarettes or handing a clerk a counterfeit bill (something I unknowingly did once) to cheers from corporate media commentators and demagogues. What kind of country you live in even here in the imperial center is very much a question of what class you are in, as well as other things.
The working people and wretched of the earth are tired of being lectured to by the scions of diamond mines, Phillips Exeter graduates and the like. Even if they do know the worst case big O time for quicksort. History goes through twists and turns, and I welcome the challenges to their power we will be seeing this century.
Still can't believe we all changed our branch names from master to main.
Decades ago, when I was a teenager, and saw that “master/slave” was a technical term, it made me uncomfortable- like, it has so much baggage for a technical term.
I’m guessing that the master branch is not a master/slave reference, but “master copy”. But I think main is just as good, so I really don’t care that it got caught up in the movement. This is just language naturally evolving, which I know many people are fundamentally against on an ideological basis.
To me, fighting the changes of language over time is like yelling at the wind. Just let it go and focus on what’s truly important (almost everything else). People will advocate for changes and they will stick or they won’t. If you are an effective communicator, you really shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping up.
Wow, Paul Graham just kinda set the standard for cognitive dissonance on HN. In short, sins of elision, omission, and exaggeration in this post and elsewhere in his absurdly entitled world make it clear that he is himself the prig here.
Are there viable alternatives to HN? I'm pretty sick of PG and Altman's influence.
They aren't good people.
Lobsters probably comes closest. But still invite-only (AFAIK) and you also don't bump into random programming superstars (who programmed that one childhood game you absolutely loved) there every now and then.
Besides, I feel like HN is dang's kingdom, and compared to how it used to be, pg is barely mentioned nowadays. Based on feelings only, it doesn't feel like HN skews pg/altman friendly, I'd probably say it's the opposite if I had to say anything.
PG and Altman don't have editorial influence on Hacker News, and current moderation policy is to not kill topics partaining to YC. (which is why I suspect this blogpost got rescued from being flagkilled)
100% agree. They've become a symbol of how money corrupts people.
> They've become a symbol of how money corrupts people
Become? I've read at least one of pg's books, and probably 10s of the essays, and even when I first read it (probably close to 2012 sometime) it was evidentially clear he is mostly about money. If the job (VC) didn't make it clear, the essays makes it even clearer.
In short, most people involved in the VC/startup ecosystem are mostly about money. They will say they care about other things too, but they mostly say that because they care about money. If there is no way to make money saying/doing a thing, then they won't do that thing.
>how money corrupts people
Money just exposes what was latent. Similar goes for power.
Ycombinator is of course, involved to some extent with the creation of HN. So I get it. Tech leaders cultism sort of infests the space.
But I do tend to find HN pretty broad in topics. I do think they end up on here because they’re good at making news for themselves (not a compliment) and the sort of people posting on here, are posting tech news. I don’t see ending up on HN’s front page as any indicator of goodness, but more so, it’s at least something people are talking about and sparks some discussion, goodness-neutral on the specific topic at hand.
dang is really good at his job!
That said, I really like mastodon! Obviously it’s a different sort of platform, but you can get a similar but less-tech-thought-leader-centric experience with some light curation. (And participation by yourself!)
What influence of theirs are you seeing on HN?
Lobste.rs
People suggesting lobster.rs as an alternative are the Marie Antoinettes of 21st century.
With Meta, X and Hackernews right wing American now I am also struggling where to go. Sure it won't be much here or the aforementioned networks anymore.
Reddit? Not sure why you decided today is the day to move
I stopped using Reddit after the 3rd party app massacre. I don’t even do it out of protest, it’s just I don’t feel like it anymore. I guess that’s how powerful habits are.
Probably because of the blog post that it is a comment to
Really? In a thread discussing PG's most recent brain fart you can't understand why today would be the day?
lots of things reach a breaking point: dams, pollution assimilation, BS jobs, social media sites...
Same but also with Dang.
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness
This is a fake news. Research shows that Twitter algorithmic amplification favored right-wing politics even before Musk made it even worse. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
> On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to.
Being this much clueless in pg's position is not possible. I can only assume he's consciously lying. He can see front row what Musk does with Twitter and how the "free speech" he's supposedly defending is actually "what Musk likes to hear speech", and he perfectly knows Musk is strongly aligned with the far right that he supports however he can all over the world. See for example: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
I wish, but to be Black in America is to witness this sort of cluelessness (despite prowess in other areas) ALL THE TIME.
Domain specific knowledge is SO REAL.
(Incidentally, this is roughly why I don't believe we will ever have so called "AGI")
Calling this "cluelessness" is being more charitable that parent, and on the balance of evidence, mayn not be the correct explanation.
If one were sceptical of this synchronized "political awakening" in the tech industry, that incidentally is aligned to an incoming presidential administration, one might call it some sort of gratuitous signaling of virtues. Which is hilariously ironic, and shows either a lack of self-awareness, or profound levels of shamelessness.
This feels like another VC/executive "taking a knee" towards the new administration, a vivid trend in the last few weeks. I feel like pg was particularly more left/right neutral just up until this month of inauguration.
Sorry, can you back this up with some data and specificity?
I understand that you feel Musk is aligned with the far right; my question is what exactly is Musk doing with twitter, and (other than when people take the piss against him personally) how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"?
I'm genuinely interested in the details -- and they are hard to come by.
Elon suspended PG's account just for lightly alluding that another social media platform exists. I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the idea of free speech on Twitter. Can you imagine Discord suspending your account for lightly alluding that Slack exists?
That's a great example of the insincerity of the PG article. I mean, I can believe there are people that don't pay very much attention to Twitter who genuinely believe that Elon Musk is the sort of free speech absolutist he says he is, but someone who was suspended and then left Twitter because a new Elon censorship policy praising Elon for not censoring anyone is quite funny.
... Or he is well placed to make an even-handed assessment? If your prior is that people generally are smart and have agency, it seems like you might not want to discard pg's opinion out of hand.
Agreed that Elon doesn't seem to be as much of a free speech absolutist as he promised, especially if you hurt his feelings, or seem fun to ban.
Well if we agree that Elon's regime is pretty ban-happy (his own published data agrees too), I don't see how we come to the conclusion that a statement praising Elon for making Twitter "neutral" and "without censorship" after literally seeing his posts censored under Elon policy is an "even handed assessment". It's precisely because I think PG is smart and has agency that I assume he's someone that's aware of obvious benefits to ingratiating himself with the new regime rather than oblivious to how Elon actually runs the place.
I do not call that a censorship of speech decision, it's a banning encouraging the competition decision, no? The company doesn't want competitors being boosted, so it makes and enforces a policy. I presume people discussing the Fediverse as a concept are not routinely suspended, although I'm too lazy to check.
So you imagine Discord punishing you for talking about Slack? Or Google suspending your account for talking about TikTok? On the matter of customers talking about marketplace alternatives... your instincts say "oh yes, let's exclude this from the discussion of free speech?"
Nope, I don't imagine this because those companies make different promises to their users than X does to its. They, none of them, are part of the commons of US discourse, embedded in our infrastructure. They'd have to be universal or nearly so to even qualify for most definitions of the way the word 'censorship' applies under the US 1st amendment.
I don't take my business to Twitter, and that's fine. I choose to use Discord because, in very small part, I guess, of its attitude on content. Google would no doubt ban me for some sorts of content, but not most. Again, these are business decisions that any of these companies can make; some will lose them users (money), some will gain, that's all fine with me; they'll (generally) adjust to making the most money, e.g. serving the most economically large portion of their user base they can attract.
Musk's a wild card because he can (mostly) afford to pay extra to get a different mix of users than might be totally economically optimal, but history shows that most significant and impactful companies trend hard toward serving their customer base and trying to expand it as widely as possible.
Free speech is alive and well in the US; I can publish a website with nearly anything I want to say on it, and if it's taken down, I am allowed access to Federal courts to determine if that takedown was legal. I can email it, I can print it on broadsheets and distribute it anywhere I want, I can text it out en-masse. I cannot say whatever I want on a Disney forum, however, and that, like Twitter does not impact the question of whether or not we have free speech.
Publishing a website is about as good as writing a book and dropping it off in an alley trashcan. You may have a voice but you won't be given volume or oxygen. X actively drops visibility for posts linking to external sites, and bot generated blogs are polluting Google so badly that you have no luck for organic reach.
Free speech requires public spaces [digital townhalls], but any journalist breaking critical news of Musk gets muted or banned on X. [https://thespectator.com/topic/spectator-story-debunking-elo...]. This is why several major global journal outlets have taken to just entirely leaving X in protest [https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists_leaving_x_bl...].
This is by Twitter itself, before Musk: "Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left." https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
This is more recent: "We observe a right-leaning bias in exposure for new accounts within their default timelines." https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01852
You can also find a lot a testimony from users like: https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1es2lfd/...
---
Now from personal experience (I've been on Twitter since 2007 and used it virtually everyday since then):
I've heard and read a lot of such testimony in particular from user who don't post much or at all and only follow a few accounts. In the last two years they've been exposed to a lot of far right content.
I've seen how the moderation team at twitter took action before musk when reporting (often illegal) hate speech and now just respond by saying that it doesn't violates the platform rules.
I've seen on the contrary people (even journalists) and political or news organization getting locked out of their account following a far right online mob against them, and then having a hard time (sometimes to the point of giving up) getting it back because the moderation team did not act.
I can. Before he owned twitter, if someone called me the n-word or other racial slurs, action was taken. Now when that happens and I report it, they reply to tell me no rules were broken
I'm sorry to hear you're called slurs. They seem endemic for my kid as well as soon as you move out of ultra progressive areas; as a white parent of a black kid, it's disheartening and eye opening to find out just how racist some families are, and how immensely wide spread it is.
That said, I don't think this qualifies as newly minted removal of speech. It is the allowance of speech that was formerly removed.
He does not allow the use of the word cisgender, in any context, for one
This is so vigorous that the standalone term "cis", is frequently targeted for visibility reduction even when used outside of the context of gender.
Yep, this was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and it's the only example I've heard of. Like I said elsewhere, seems performative to me.
I use Twitter for machine learning research only, but somehow that account gets inundated with Maga crap. That's proof enough for me.
Sure, that's an anecdote of one instance, but it's so clear. And how would you do a proper study? I'm guessing you would need Elon's permission.
Its interesting how doing something is immediately equated with 'removing not far right' free speech.
The idea is he promotes the talking points that benefit the right and the Republicans. Both personally and in changing the platforms algorithms [1].
There have been reports of people disagreeing with that general 'platform' loosing their blue check marks [2], accounts being disabled, followers dropped [3] and so on to reduce the reach of left/liberal people.
He doesn't need to remove speech he disagrees with, he can drown it and amplify the messages he wants to be heard and significantly control the narrative and discussion that way.
[1]https://eprints.qut.edu.au/253211/1/A_computational_analysis...
[2]https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-accused-...
[3]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-twitter-accounts-left-los...
If your position is that awareness of Musk’s alignment with the far right is a matter of feeling rather than well-documented fact [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] then no amount of easily-accessible and readily-available detail will convince you to adjust that position.
As for an example of Elon making Twitter rules around speech he doesn’t like, here[8] is one that is very public and not hard to come by.
1 https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/02/elon-musk-nazis-kanye-twit...
2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/12/20/elo...
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/elon-musk-far-...
4 https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
5 https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/business/elon-musk-nazi-jokes...
6 https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/05/02/elon-musk-reinstates-...
7 https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-twitter-nazis-whit...
8 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-cis-cisgender-slur-twitter-185...
No, I didn't make any statement on Musk's politics; it wasn't the part of the comment that interested me.
To the extent you slightly implied you were interested in what I think, he certainly seems trending far-right to me, but I think you need to moderate any thoughts on Musk with the reminder that he loves the drama, enjoys trolling, and has an almost unique freedom (in the west) to say whatever he likes online. Combine that with the drugs and his current ego trip, and I don't think it's that easy to say what he actually thinks, and I certainly don't think it's worth a lot of my time to consider it deeply.
I agree that banning cis while allowing the n-word is a concrete example, thank you. Super dumb. Speaking as a cishet guy. Also, banning cis seems essentially performative for Musk's (target?) audience(s?) -- I note that anti-trans rhetoric was one of the major platform points for Republicans in this election, so it's not, like, risky performativism, just run of the mill performativism.
> I think you need to moderate any thoughts on Musk
The idea that forming an opinion about somebody based on what they publicly repeatedly say and do over the course of years is somehow the wrong approach with This One Guy is an act of unnecessary and unjustified generosity. “Loving the drama” is not in any way exclusive to having actual opinions, and trolls are not magical beings that exist in an inscrutable superposition of possible realities that they may or may not support.
It is downright silly when someone’s conduct is so clear that the only way to defend them is to handwave away everything that they say and do and retreat into the philosophical ideal of the unknowability of a man’s heart. That is an academic exercise that’s only useful in analyzing fictional characters and has negative value when applied to real-life powerful people that fund politicians and buy social media sites to forcibly mold public discussion to fit their values.
I'm not defending Mr. Musk at all. I'm saying it's pointless to spend more than 0.0001% of my time or brainpower thinking about him and his politics -- a COMPLETE waste of time exceeded perhaps only by reading his Tweets, be they heartfelt or performative or trolling. To the extent I'm thinking about Elon, I'm thinking about what led to his success, and how those lessons might apply to me or people I'm supporting.
Saying “we don’t know what he actually thinks” is a defense. You only ever see people use that line when it comes to his politics, but never say, to question whether he actually likes Diablo 4 or AI.
When it comes to things that people find mundane or agreeable, the stuff he posts about all day reflects what he thinks but when he gives fifty million dollars to Stephen Miller[1] in 2022 to fund his Citizens for Sanity ads[2], maybe he’s trolling or it’s drugs or whatever.
> I'm thinking about what led to his success, and how those lessons might apply to me or people I'm supporting.
This is quite literally a defense of his character. If your response to “this guy sucks, here is proof that this guy sucks” is “there is literally nothing bad he could do that justifies thinking about anything other than the positives about him”, that is what defending a person looks like.
1
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4912754-musk-donated-m...
2
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/who-is-behind-citize...
> you feel Musk is aligned with the far right
It's not a feel, it's real (unless you're so far to the right yourself, you don't consider the AfD, neo-nazis, TERFs, etc etc such)
TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are generally left-wing, despite holding a reactionary view on trans people. That sort of comes with the territory of being a radical feminist. If someone is right-wing, or even just a centrist liberal feminist, then they're just an ordinary transphobe, not a TERF.
While you may be right by academic classification, most TERF studies I've seen and most notable TERF accounts on X are almost exclusively far right-wing, because it is an inherently conservative stance even if the grounding starting position is more socially progressive.
TERFs outed themselves as exclusionary. As such, they can't be left wing, even if they would like to align with it on some other principles. You can't be humanistic only towards some humans.
We're "exclusionary" in the sense that we want males be excluded from spaces intended for women and girls, yes. This is entirely compatible with left-wing political views.
Really, this should be uncontroversial.
Elevating tweets of folks that pay the troll under the bridge, where folks on the left are going to avoid that fee (why would someone on the left materially support a right wing pundit?) is one very obvious way.
He tweeted 150x a day in support of Trump leading up to the election. Just go look at his timeline.
Edit: lol at this getting downvoted. Some of you free speech purists really don't want to hear basic facts. Seriously. Just go look at the timeline. 150x a day is not an exaggeration. All of it in direct support of Trump, or attacking DEI and anything else associated with Democrats.
Just go check out that man's X (twitter?) feed. Elon constantly says the quiet part out loud. I'm from genx and if you're younger I'm going to give you all some solid life advice. When someone tells you who they are, listen.
Create a new account and find out. If you create a new account, without any other information, twitter will recommend you follow Musk, Don Jr (President's right wing son), and Babylong Bee, a right wing fake news joke site.
Go ahead, do the experiment and come back and tell me what you see.
You don't even need a new account. You could have a years old account and you'll get notifications about that crap even if you have never followed anything even remotely similar. That's what made me delete my account. I got Musk's tweets in my notifications and noped the fuck out.
It’s interesting to see how polarizing views about Musk have become. People often overlook the fact that Musk was, and in many ways still is, aligned with traditional liberal values. He’s been a long-time supporter of initiatives like universal basic income, environmental sustainability through the green movement ect... Yet, the moment he expresses support for ideas that deviate from the more extreme edges of left-wing ideology, he’s vilified and treated as a pariah by those who once championed him.
Regarding X, I still see plenty of left-leaning content, but the dynamic has undoubtedly shifted. What’s changed is that the platform no longer artificially amplifies one ideological perspective at the expense of others. Previously, algorithms seemed to prioritize content aligned with extreme left narratives while outright blocking opposing views. That system gave the impression of a dominant left-leaning consensus, that was entirely artificial.
At the end of the day, it's impossible to remove all bias so whatever system maximizes free speech is the best one.
What are you saying? Musk is literally and openly supporting the far right neo-nazi party in Germany these days. See: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
Also, it's just not true that "Previously, algorithms seemed to prioritize content aligned with extreme left narratives while outright blocking opposing views". It's a lie. Twitter's research itself revealed their algorithm favored right wing politics even before Musk. And it became a lot more true since he took power. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
While at the same time our tax dollars are supporting literal Nazis in the Ukraine.
People who lean left are choosing to leave.
Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, a free speech defender said Musk made twitter better for free speech (on balance): https://youtu.be/Er1glEAQhAo?si=2aWdSIsbKzjz0nGA&t=2853
Musk recently de-verified or banned a bunch of far-right accounts that were posting anti-H1B content. Musk isn't far right, he's just looking after his business interests.
Well like any political descriptor, "far right" is a generalization that applies to several groups. In this case, Elon is part of the corporate-techno-authoritarian far right that supported trump, while figures like Loomer who were posting the anti-H1B content are part of the white-nationalist/christian-nationalist far right (that also supported trump).
Musk literally supports the far right in elections all over the world. In the past few days he intervened in Germany in favor of the far right candidate. See https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
I was banned from Twitter within hours of Elon having control for changing my displayed name (not my handle) to "Elon's Musk" in a reply to something unhinged that he had tweeted.
So much free speech.
The easiest thing for a truly evil person to do is lie. They lie about being good, first and foremost. That most people are just a bunch of willfully ignorant rubes works very well for them, unfortunately.
Were you banned for your speech or for being a troll intent on being disruptive to the community? Because there's a difference.
Shouldn't matter. Musk is a free speech absolutist after all.
In this case, they are one in the same. And if it is a free speech forum, then it should have been a protected act.
Free speech means free speech for those you dislike too. It also means having a space for those that are disruptive, loud, and engaging in trolling. That's what those fire-and-brimstone "you're going to hell" preachers are doing at universities. (Which isn't all bad - it gives students a great opportunity to learn debate and to stand up for what they believe in.)
The ACLU has represented the Vietnam War protestors, the KKK, neo-Nazis, LGBT activists, Westboro Baptist Church members, religious followers of Jerry Falwell, flag burners, anti-abortion activists, women's rights activists, communist party members, gun rights advocates, anti-Trump protestors, BLM protestors, and more. And it's a good thing they represented every single one, because erosion of free speech for those we don't like will eventually get back to us.
The most ardent tattletales from pre-Musk Twitter, angry that their sandbox has been opened up, have now co-opted the free speech argument to act like complete assholes. They're not one and the same.
To those I suggest they move on to BlueSky, where the preshared blacklists and ability to inform on others they despise would be more to their liking.
Alternatively, they could go touch grass.
So you were banned for the new rules on imitation as opposed to free speech
This is clearly not an imitation. Parody if nothing else which is protected by fair use.
The imitation rule states that it's perfectly fine to run parody accounts as long as you clearly state that it's a parody. There are a ton of accounts named Elon Musk Parody, Biden Parody and similar
Without it every post of a famous person was botted with 100 accounts with identical display name, pfp that tried to promote scams like with YouTube comments
Here's an account that calls itself Michelle Obama (not even Michelle's Obama) after the parody rule went into effect (unlike Elon's Musk). It doesn't label itself a parody. It's still there. https://x.com/TaxpayerEnrique
The user says they were banned within hours of Elon taking over Twitter. New Parody rules did not come into affect until November 2022.
I replied to your comment about what constitutes imitation and why that rule exists. Neither of us have any idea about the details of that particular ban
I know why the rule exist. Getting banned for a rule that did not exist at the time is an overreach from a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist.
How is that imitation?
That sounds like satire not imitation to me.
"free speech absolutist"
Free speech is the freedom to communicate ideas and opinions. The above censors none.
This is also why spam is not covered under freedom of speech.
presumably downvoted because a) every time you mention 'free speech' to these techbro nutjobs it's clear they don't have the first idea what it actually means b) insecure snowflakes, every one of them.
Can you prove it? Do you have any proof that Twitter promotes right leaning views more than left leaning ones?
"When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression"
Twitter was discriminating against right leaning views. Extreme far left views (like communism) were absolutely OK and widespread on Twitter. If one had as extreme right leaning views, he would be shadowbanned, reprioritised etc.
What is Twitter now is a fair game. Every voice is heard the same. What Twitter is doing now should have been the norm the whole time.
And the same is true for all major social networks, search engines, public funded media, universities and other organizations. When only leftists get their voice heard, they got used to it. Loosing this privilege looks like discrimination, doesn't it?
Are you aware you are asking parent to “prove it” to the claims you don’t agree with, and then make similar claims in the opposite direction without “proving it”?
I believe he's referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
Easy, Reclaim The Net documents Twitter censorship for years. Here, you have dozens of links, pages and pages https://reclaimthenet.org/?s=twitter
The contention you are trying to challenge is that Twitter amplified right wing posts more than left wing posts in the pre-Musk days.
Your link fails to support you. It is mostly just examples of alleged Twitter censorship, mostly of right wing-ish stuff. This has a couple of problems.
First, the claim was about what Twitter amplified, not what it censored. It is quite possible to both amplify a given type of post more and censor that type of post more. It is possible that censorship might inversely correlate with amplification so that one can be used as an inverse proxy for the other, but that would require research because it is also possible they correlate rather than inverse correlate. Something amplified draws more readers, which could increase the likelihood that someone will notice any violations of the rules and report it.
Second, even if we make the assumption of an inverse correlation between censorship and amplification to see how left and right amplification compares we would need to know how they picked which incidents to write stories about.
Reclaim the Net does not provide any information on who funds it or who runs it, it is asking for donations but doesn't say what the donations are used for. The names listed on it don't show up in search except at RTN or on sites that are reprinting RTN stories. There is just not enough information available as far as I could find to tell what biases they have when selecting stories.
The commenter you asked for proof cites a published paper in a peer reviewed open access journal that gives a detailed explanation of how it reached its conclusions. Its authors include several people who worked at Twitter and had access to its internal data.
People gave Elon a lot of shit over his comments on supporting H1B visas and those comments weren't banned or deleted. There's your proof.
Actually many people on the right believe they have been censored by Musk because of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/elon-musk-far-...
Bullshit. Try using the term cisgender on Twitter, regardless of context
Based on looking at the "Latest" feed (which shouldn't be biased by the algorithm), and on what newly created accounts see, right-wing posts on Twitter outnumber left-wing posts something like 10:1.
"What is Twitter now is a fair game. Every voice is heard the same. What Twitter is doing now should have been the norm the whole time."
Where is your proof for that being true? I was a left-leaning voice that was banned from Twitter after changing my display name (not handle) to "Elon's Musk".
How is that free speech?
You got banned for impersonation, not speech.
> for impersonation
Of a cologne brand of some kind? "Elon's Musk" is very clearly not a person.
"Joe's Rogan" is also not a person, but plenty of bots and scammers on social media use such celebrity names to obfuscate their accounts and scam people with crypto/erection pills, etc. You have to ban all of them to eliminate scammers as much as possible.
> use such celebrity names to obfuscate their accounts
I thought free speech and sunlight were the best disinfectants. By leaving these accounts up and allowing other users to point out how they were misleading, everyone will learn and be wiser.
It's an actual cologne one can buy: https://www.joketown.com/smell-rich
Never heard of it. Was the banned account flogging its own cologne with the same name?
Nobody would confuse "Elon's Musk" with Elon Musk.
You're clueless of the real world if you think nobody falls for that. There wouldn't be any scammers if that would be the case.
who needs scammers when you have the real Elon selling full self driving.
wokeness is more or less southern Baptist fire and brimstone Christianity for posh urban white people. For western minorities it functions as a kind of nationalism
I think you describe it really well. There is certainly a large pocket of black communities on social media sharing dreams of a Western takeover, ranging anywhere from outright (fraudulently) claiming inventions they never invented, brazenly replacing characters in every form of entertainment, all the way to openly proposing a white purge, let's call it. Very concerning.
What's even weirder is that this content was rarely ever flagged in the Twitter days, and still prevails on X today. Demonizing anyone of white European descent on Reddit is also completely acceptable, and doesn't result in moderation.
"what did you think decolonization meant? Vibes, essays, papers? Losers."
Based on my AI semantic chunking Paul is exploring 36 ideas in this blog post:
1. *The Origins of Priggishness and its Modern Evolution*
2. *Wokeness as the Modern Priggishness*
3. *The Timeline of Wokeness: From the 1980s to 2020*
4. *The Aggressiveness of Political Correctness*
5. *Universities: The Breeding Ground for Political Correctness*
6. *The Humanities and Social Sciences: Origins of Ideological Enforcement*
7. *The Rise of Political Correctness in the 1980s: A Historical Perspective*
8. *From Protest to Power: The Shift in Academic Culture*
9. *Political Correctness as a Tool of Moral Enforcement*
10. *Parallels to the Cultural Revolution*
11. *Moral Etiquette and its Superficial Complexity*
12. *Orthodoxy as a Substitute for Virtue*
13. *The Moral Vacuum of the 1980s: A Fertile Ground for New Rules*
14. *The Fall of Marxism and the Shift to New Ideological Purity*
15. *Comfort vs. Truth: The Central Conflict in Academic Freedom*
16. *The 1990s Burnout of Political Correctness*
17. *The Resurgence of Political Correctness in the 2010s*
18. *The Expanding Scope of Political Correctness*
19. *Social Media as the Catalyst for Wokeness*
20. *The Strange Popularity of Outrage on Social Media*
21. *The Polarization of Journalism and its Role in Wokeness*
22. *The Feedback Loop Between Social Media and Journalism*
23. *Outrage as a Commodity in the Press*
24. *The Professionalization of Wokeness*
25. *The Role of Bureaucrats in Enforcing Wokeness*
26. *The Influence of Movements like BLM and Me Too*
27. *The Trump Presidency and the Peak of Wokeness*
28. *The Decline of Wokeness: A Viral Ideology Reaches its Zenith*
29. *"The Retreat of Wokeness: Shifts in Culture, Consumer Behavior, and Politics"*
30. *"Addressing Wokeness and Preventing Future Outbreaks of Performative Moralism"*
31. *"Rejecting Woke Orthodoxy: A Case for Pluralism and Freedom of Thought"*
32. *"Balancing Critique with Acceptance: Lessons from Religion and Wokeness"*
33. *"Containing Wokeness: Preventing the Spread of Aggressive Moral Fashions"*
34. *"The Burden of Proof: Defending Freedom of Expression"*
35. *"Censorship vs. Harm: Who Bears the Burden of Justification?"*
36. *"Recognizing and Resisting New Ideologies: A Call to Vigilance"*
> Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for
If the "conventional-minded" define new heresies, against a new creed, how are they conventional? What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish. (Actually, they do neither, but those who believe the former also believe the latter)
As with the myth of the "cancel culture" that Graham mentions (or the similar myth of "the war on Christmas"), the problem isn't the truth of certain events that do occur. It is the exaggeration of magnitude and ignorance of context. Clearly, at no stage in human history were more people not only free but also able to widely disseminate a wider range of views as they are today. Specifically, far fewer people are "silenced" at universities today than were, say, in the 1950s (except, maybe, in super-woke Florida).
> College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination.
Yeah, larping in a world of Jewish cabals and weather/mind control has turned out to be far more poisonous.
Anyway, for a more interesting and astute perspective on wokeness, see https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics Kriss shows why comparing wokeness to socialism or Christianity -- as Graham does -- is a category error:
> [I]t’s not a politics, or an ideology, or a religion. If you’ve ever spent any time in a political movement, or a religious one—even a philosophical one—you’ll have noticed that these things always have sects. Small differences in doctrine turn into antagonistic little groups. There are dozens of denominations that all claim to be the universal catholic church. Put two Marxists in a room and you’ll get three different ideological schisms. ... But it’s hard to see any such thing happening in any of the movements that get described as woke. Black Lives Matter did not have a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ wing; the different rainbow flags did not belong to rival queer militia ... The spaces these movements produce might be the sites of constant churning mutual animosity and backstabbing, but the faultlines are always interpersonal and never substantive. This is very, very unusual. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the woke mind virus is so perfectly bioengineered that it’s left all its victims without any capacity for dissent whatsoever, permanently trapped in a zombielike groupthink daze. This is the kind of possibility that a lot of antiwoke types like to entertain. Let me sketch out an alternative view.
> ... Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.
> ... What makes something woke is a very simple operation: the transmutation of political demands into basically arbitrary standards of interpersonal conduct. The goal is never to actually overcome any existing injustices; political issues are just a way to conspicuously present yourself as the right kind of person.
> ... Unlike wokeness, the word antiwokeness is still used as a self-descriptor. The antiwoke will announce themselves to you. They won’t deny that antiwokeness exists. But since there’s no fixed and generally agreed-upon account of what the object of this apophatic doctrine actually is, you could be forgiven for wondering whether it is, in fact, particularly real. Wokeness is not a politics. And antiwokeness is not a politics either. It’s a shew-stone
> Every day, the antiwoke are busy producing wokeness, catching visions of incorporeal powers, desperately willing this thing into colder and denser form. What does this look like? Hysteria over uncouth material in entertainment media. Pseudo-sociological dogshit jargon. Endless smug performances of wholesome trad virtue. To be antiwoke is to be just another type of person who mistakes etiquette for politics, putting all your energies into the terrain of gesture and appearance, obsessed with images, frothing at every new indecency, horrified, appalled. We must protect the children from harm! I’m sure that some day very soon, the antiwoke will have their own miserable cultural hegemony. Big companies organising compulsory free-speech training for their workers. An informal network of censors scrubbing the mass media of anything that smacks too much of progressive tyranny.
> What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish.
Can you give an example of what you mean here?
I'll try, but it's a little tricky because, again, I don't think wokeness (whatever it is, although I agree with Graham that the term is usually applied to some superficial performance) actually does much of anything. Graham and other centrists latch on to cases where "heretics" are banished, but the sparsity of these cases only demonstrates how few of them are punished. Furthermore, centrists often emphasise how productive and useful past movements were in contrast to excessive and ineffectual current ones (I would say that the use of such a claim is the defining characteristic of the centrist). Of course, they say this at any point in time, and because the effect of current and recent movements is often yet to be seen, the centrists are always vindicated in the present. If a movement does happen to be effective relatively quickly -- say, support of gay marriage -- the centrist retroactively excludes it from the PC category (note that the most significant successes in the gay rights movement coincided with Graham's wokeness, but he doesn't even mention that).
Anyway, to answer your question: the same people who make up new heresies also challenge old creeds. In the case of wokeness, what's being challenged is the centre's (neoliberal or neocon) belief in its rationality, meritocracy, and objectivity. For example, Graham mentions "woke agendas", highlighting DEI (never mind that DEI is a new version -- and an aspirationally less excessive one -- of the 60s' affirmative action), but while he focuses on the ineffective performative aspects, he ignores the underlying claim which remains a heresy to him: That the old meritocracy is not what it claims to be, and that it, too, is missing out on "Einsteins" (to use his terminology) due to its ingrained biases.
>In the case of wokeness, what's being challenged is the centre's (neoliberal or neocon) belief in its rationality, meritocracy, and objectivity.
The ideals of the Enlightment, the epistemological foundations of rationality and objectivity are not perfect, and liberals don't claim it to be such, but it exists because after Fascism & Communism, there wasn't better alternatives.
Regardless, we've had 10 years of trying such post-Enlightment policies, and predictably it's just resulted in just a flood of populism, crime and tribalism. I guess we'll have to go through a crash course again in understanding the reason why hierarchical thinking emerges in the first place, just like in Old Antiquity 2000 years ago. You never really had a solution to the Paradox of Tolerance, or the Friend-Enemy distinction...
But look around you, the rest of the world is moving past you. Even if you succeed in the West, China, India, Southeast Asia, the developing world have all picked up the spirit of modernity anyways. Theirs is a homogenized vision of "soulless" luxury malls, modern skyscrapers and totalizing impression of capitalism, meritocracty, rationality and objectivity that you oppose so much. But they are rising, and I daresay their living standards already exceeeds yours in many areas. In the future, if they seek to impose their domains to your borders, do you think you can seriously think your "woke" frameworks can compete?
> Regardless, we've had 10 years of trying such post-Enlightment policies, and predictably it's just resulted in just a flood of populism, crime and tribalism.
I don't agree that some centrist policies are in the spirit of the Enlightenment. They claim to be, but they ignore empirical observation and they don't question themselves, the latter of which is probably the biggest insight of the Enlightenment. I also don't agree we've had any "post-Enlightenment policies". The Enlightenment is at least as much about an ongoing process of introspection, doubt, and questioning as it is about any fixed directives.
For fun, here's something I read years ago, which I recall to have found quite entertaining. It's a treatment of how the Enlightenment is invoked by people who know little about it and internalise nothing from it: https://thebaffler.com/latest/peterson-ganz-klein Here's a snippet:
The strange paradox we face today is that the Enlightenment is being invoked like a talismanic object to thwart the very questioning of political hierarchies and norms that, for Enlightenment thinkers, was necessary for humanity’s emergence from tradition and subordination.
This is similar to what I claimed is bothering Graham more than the creation of new heresies: the questioning of old ones.
As for "a flood of crime", I'm not sure what you mean, at least in the US (https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...), and as for tribalism, here, too, I think context is necessary. Things may feel more tribal than in, say, the 1990s, but even if that could be quantified, America and other western countries have certainly been more tribal before (a particularly egregious example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#...), and it may be that if things are indeed more tribal than recent history, it is recent history that's the anomaly.
> do you think you can seriously think your "woke" frameworks can compete?
I don't know what you mean by my woke frameworks (or even by woke frameworks, but that would take much to define, I expect). I've never implemented a DEI process, never seriously studied the effectiveness such practices (and so I cannot have any strong opinions one way or the other about them), never put any kind of banner or flag on my social media avatar, and I've never advertised my preferred pronouns.
My contribution is merely that I spent a few years in a former life academically researching history, and I have little patience for superficial "analyses" by people who have far too little knowledge of the matters they write about, and rather than acknowledge their superficial familiarity, resort to assertions that only show how much context they're missing (and do so with a straight face and no trace of humour). My purpose was only to highlight some glaring flaws in Graham's treatment.
For someone with even some training in historical analysis, Graham's article reads like what an article about the nuances of memory safety in programming written by a historian (and one that doesn't pretend to be even an amateur programmer yet writes undoubting conviction) would read to a programmer. Graham's piece doesn't even rise to the level you'd expect from an amateur. It's more a rant you'd hear from your grandfather about the good old days after he'd seen something in the news that upset him.
As to modernity, much of it was brought about by things that were called the analogous of "woke" by the centrists and conservatives of the time. As I wrote in another comment, claims of empty performance were contemporaneously levelled at the very same movements that Graham now characterises as substantive (radical chic). The way the arguments were presented were also similar: the feminists of the interwar period fought for something real but now it's all a show. You speak of the Enlightenment, but many things we take for granted were heavily debated in the West until the late 1960s at least, and those debates seem to be making a comeback. Many of the places you mentioned certainly have yet to accept some of the most basic ideals of the Enlightenment.
As to whether or not I think wokeness (once properly defined) is purely performative or also contains some substance, I hope to form a reasoned opinion in twenty years' time, but until then, I find it more helpful to discuss these matters with people who actually study the subject more rigourously (and comparatively to historical events with the appropriate rigour) and may have valuable insight rather than an opinion based on gut feelings.
>As to modernity, much of it was brought about by things that were called the analogous of "woke" by the centrists and conservatives of the time. As I wrote in another comment, claims of empty performance were contemporaneously levelled at the very same movements that Graham now characterises as substantive (radical chic). The way the arguments were presented were also similar: the feminists of the interwar period fought for something real but now it's all a show. You speak of the Enlightenment, but many things we take for granted were heavily debated in the West until the late 1960s at least, and those debates seem to be making a comeback.
Of course what passes as modernity today would have been considered progressive back in the past, but you fail to mention also that many such of those debates back then also never panned out and fizzled out (aka non-substantive), while others were actively fought against and rolled back.
The French Revolution, Communism, Fascism, The Cultural Revolution, society at many points has historically pushed back against radical progressive visions that ultimately turned into horrific failures that the majority opposed. And the helm of many of those movements were power-hungry Authoritarians, aka the "Aggresively-Conventionally Minded" PG is referring to. The point is that radical progressive movements often provide the unfettered space for Authoritarians to act out their own worst impulses on society, the Reign of Terror and the Cultural Revolution being a prime example.
That's why also the point of "conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy" is just reiteration of the etablishment view of slow, iterative change vs highly disruptive change, of which the former can more effectively keep authoritarians in check. This is not a paticularly controversial view either.
The point is that for PG, and for the majority that voted Trump, Wokeism isn't working, it's not the direction that people wish society to move forwards in. I don't think it's analogous here to Civil Rights or Feminism either because it's a question of speed rather then change. Equality via Long-term Integration (& Homogenization) vs Equality via Aggresive Multiculturalism, and I think people prefer the former.
> Of course what passes as modernity today would have been considered progressive back in the past, but you fail to mention also that many such of those debates back then also never panned out and fizzled out (aka non-substantive), while others were actively fought against and rolled back.
Sure, but Graham isn't suggesting there is any radical progressive movement with any real power. The question is whether wokeness, however it's defined, is mere performance or carries any real substance. The only people who believe there is any sort of ascendant left are on the far right, and Graham certainly isn't there (he's a middle-of-the-road neoliberal centrist).
In fact, the lack of an ascendant left was the argument used in the debate among historians and other scholars of authoritarianism on whether or not MAGA is a fascist movement. Some (those who typically associate themselves with the more radical left) claimed that MAGA cannot be fascist because fascism must be a reaction against an ascendant left and there isn't one. The response to that arguments by those who say MAGA is fascist is that even though it doesn't exist in reality, such an ascendant left does exist in the MAGA imagination.
> That's why also the point of "conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy" is just reiteration of the etablishment view of slow, iterative change vs highly disruptive change, of which the former can more effectively keep authoritarians in check.
Maybe, but Graham isn't claiming there's some radical left with some significant power. He's clearly not a radical, but his point is that wokeness isn't radical, either. If anything, he thinks it's mere radical chic and believes that to be different from the "real" protest movement of the sixties, and I pointed out that radical chic was levelled at the time against that movement, too.
> The point is that for PG, and for the majority that voted Trump, Wokeism isn't working
I seriously doubt Graham ever entertained voting for Trump, and those who did would find it hard to define what wokeism is (only that it's one of the many things they're against, including Graham's neoliberalism). They would find it hard to consistently define anything.
Also, when comparing the empty wokeness to the substantive protest movement of the sixties, Graham not only neglects to mention the real achievements of the former (LGBT rights, some MeToo successes) but also the performative aspects of the latter, as if radical chic never happened or a whole fashion and lifestyle (with a name that lasts to this day) -- also co-opted by corporations -- didn't emerge. I think there was even a pretty famous musical about it.
Do religious and political movements always develop such sects within a decade or so of their founding? If not then I'm not sure wokeness has existed for sufficient time (since the mid 2010s in the form it's discussed in the article I think) that the analysis you present here applies.
But I still find the analysis interesting. I think one difference between wokeness and political and religious movements is that wokeness doesn't seem to have a doctrine.
It's questionable in what way wokeness exists at all without a clear definition. Graham's definition is more personal judgment than definition, but according to him, whatever he thinks it is seems to be about 30 years old. Bolshevik-Mensheviks and Trotskyists-Stalinists sects appeared faster than that (the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split a mere 5 years after the creation of the party).
Also, I think Sam Kriss's point about sects and splits was meant to be taken in humour. Funnily enough, both Kriss and Graham seem obsessed with convincing the reader they're not boring. But whereas Graham's writing is predictable though he repeatedly insists on telling the reader that his old-school conventionalism is the true rebelliousness, Kriss writes provocatively in a way that's supposed to make you unsure of whether he's serious or not. In any event, Kriss's writing is at least always entertaining even when it isn't interesting.
Right, and maybe one of the reasons that we don't see a split is because there is no clear definition, no clear boundaries. But perhaps we can find splits if we look more carefully. One notion that could be indicative of a split is "white women's tears".
"And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice."
"Social justice" is inherently problematic, as explained in "Hayek: Social Justice Demands the Unequal Treatment of Individuals" https://fee.org/articles/hayek-social-justice-demands-the-un....
Telling that you believe this as Boston has to fix its deep seated racism.
Amen! Thanks for the link.
This is the wokest essay I've ever read.
I like the idea that you could think of the essay as part of the newly performative "not-hard-left" messaging. I guess maybe it is a product of its very recent times. It seems to me like there's a bit of social and cultural space for people to "speak up" that haven't felt like they can for some time. To my mind, that's all to the good, it leaves room for discussion and debate which is healthy.
Very interesting piece. Thanks for sharing!
The one thing Paul missed is Russia's role in the rise of wokeness. The Internet Research Agency controlled over 50 percent of the largest ethnic Facebook groups in 2019 and organized multiple BLM protests, including one attended by Michael Moore.
Wokeness was a state sponsored attack.
But as with most things, it isn't mono causal. The largest blame should lie with the social media platforms themselves. They created something that rewards the narcissistic, anti-intellectual and authoritarian tendencies that drive both wokeness and the alt right.
I think focusing too much on wokeness itself would be an error. We should focus on the conditions that lead to these kind of unhealthy authoritarian-leaning social movements in the first place, which is social media, inequality, inflation, etc.
wow, somehow you jumped to some next level conspiracy garbage more extravagant than the rest of the comments. 20 million people participating in protests was not a “state sponsored attack”
> 20 million people participating in protests was not a “state sponsored attack”
It was partly that, though. Read the section "Rallies and protests organized by IRA in the United States" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
Also: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
These troll farms exploited genuine grievances in order to stoke as much chaos as possible.
I'm not trying to say this was the main cause, my comment "wokeness was state sponsored attack" was rhetorical in nature. While a state sponsored attack did happen (see above links...) it isn't the main explanation.
If pg wants to hang out with dt at mar a lago he's gotta have some easily googleable bona fides afterall.
I have no idea why this was shared on Hacker News (might simply be the Paul Graham connection), but it was one of the best, well-written, and researched articles I've read in years!
I can't tell if this comment is serious
