There are a handful of these people I engage with semi regularly (mostly women, many former/questioning evangelicals who don’t yet recognize they’re filling the Church Need with a new social based dogma) and any time I make a reasonable comment or ask a reasonable question, I literally get ignored. Total silence.
Here’s an example. One woman casually dropped in an otherwise loosely related Instagram post “what are you doing to keep from raising little white assholes?”
I replied: “I imagine the best way to not raise little white assholes is similar to the way Asian parents don’t raise little Asian assholes, or Iranian parents don’t raise little Persian assholes, or Latino parents don’t raise little Latino assholes: By teaching them that every person is an individual with unique life experiences, interests, and cultural traditions, and to not assign moral value or deficit to any person based on their immutable phenotypical characteristics. To approach every person with curiosity and good intentions. To realize that so many of life’s “blessings” can be chalked up to good luck, but they should always live as if their actions and words matter.”
On “dog whistles”: Last week, Tom Cotton was on Fox news complaining about the teachers’ union president and he said: “Randi Weingarten is a joke. Randi Weingarten does not even have children of her own. What in the hell does she know about raising and teaching kids? In fact that’s probably why she was perfectly fine to shut down schools for two years and force kids to wear masks, because she didn’t have to deal with it at home.”
They called this a “homophobic dog whistle” and also an affront to every teacher who doesn’t have children. Tom Cotton does seem to be homophobic in general, but it’s ridiculous to read this as an effort to stoke anti-lesbian prejudice. Why would he even need to do that, when parents are extremely pissed about the school closures? But they call it a “dog whistle” because they know that Cotton’s actual message resonates with voters.
This tactic might work on some people, but when it stops working it really stops working. Parents are fed up with being told they’re prejudiced when they know they’re not.
I am more and more convinced that the politics ostensibly practiced by the people who are noisiest about being part of the left in America literally don't actually even exist. There are no coherent positions, no policy agendas, no ideas that go beyond trying to torture the English language around the clock with one another.
It's simply just a tedious, linguistic parlor game played for one-upsmanship points in the Professional Managerial Class.
I think the term "woke" is starting to piss them off now because people are starting to realize just how empty and self-righteous social justice politics, aka woke politics really is. More than anything, the language games, non-sensical politics, and shoddy intellectual thought is starting to lose its power. Maybe some of them are becoming more self-aware of how it's almost exclusively tribal signaling, but a majority don't understand that what they're doing is alienating a remarkably large share of the country. CNN just ran a segment about how Virginia elected Youngkin because non-college educated white women voted overwhelmingly in his favor. They have the position that non-college educated people are the problem...
This exemplifies what compels me to give you 5 dollars every month. It's the incorrigible sincerity and forthrightness. Throws a lifeline to my despairing, irony-poisoned brain.
Something that worked in academia with real, actual-CRT CRT and adjoining critical theories (post-colonial, queer) was that the language was complex and encoded, even if the ideas weren't that hard to make sense of when translated from the academic jargon. This jargon was useful in part to communicate with devotees while at the same time saying, 'Nothing to see hear folks,' and, 'We are being totally reasonable.'
I think it also worked for a short time in actual, real world politics. That is, until it hit a threshold and normal people were wondering WTF was going on. The simultaneous radicalism and, 'Nothing to see hear folks,' have imploded and made it easy for Chris Rufos to do what Chris Rufos do. Basically, for wokeness to spread it had to be translated into accessible language and that lowered the bar in terms of time investment (decreasing value of 'rational ignorance') for normal people as its costs were increasing.
Because wokeness was so ensconced in a corner of weird, elite discourse, it hasn't adapted to be able to stand broader scrutiny. Maybe there's a lesson in that for the Left.
"If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes!"
I saw a LinkedIn post advertising a talk called something like "Corporate Diversity in the Post-George Floyd Era." Ok. A poor guy getting shot over convenience store food was actually about 6-figure corporate executive positions!
I think these people want to sound revolutionary, I don't think they want any meaningful change. I used to call myself an "anarchist" before realizing the "radicalism" amounted to little more than putting stickers on street signs.
the whole purpose of democracy is to resolve otherwise intractable disagreements without violence. the premise is you will live in a country with people you really disagree with and we want to move past that to solve the things which impact us all (read: material concerns).
So it seems that John McWhorter's bestseller "Woke Racism", the results of Virginia elections, and Christopher Rufo's big-time outing of CRT has pissed the woke.
AOC says that you are an obsolete humanoid if you use the word "Woke" and Adam Serwer essentially calls you a racist.
And the reaction by the Woke is straight-out of central casting: Circle the wagons and patrol language.
They will keep on using names they think are good, and if the names get co-opted and used to make them look silly, they'll say that using those names is bigoted. (This happened with fake news; I recall when the term was used by the left to describe right-wing misinformation sites. Then Trump managed to make it describe mainstream media sites, after which it became a term that, if you unironically used it, meant you were right-wing.)
The thing is, it's precisely their lack of centralized coordination that's a strength. On the one hand, there is no central authority anyone can point to as the source of terms or ideas. And yet on the other hand, highly educated people download phrasing and ideas at the same time and try them out en masse, and if it doesn't work, they can use the lack of centralized authority as a shield and say that no one ever said that. (Yes, you can numerous people who said that, but they'll just respond by saying that all of those people are nobodies, and no one listens to them.) As Vox Day once put it, they act like a school of fish. (Note: from what I know about him, I have a pretty low opinion of Vox Day, but I don't know that much about him.)
This had a lot of amazing and hilarious lines in it, so thoroughly enjoyed.
As I often say, they took a core part of the politics I spent my life advocating for, divorced it from the part that makes a difference, ripped out any intellectual rigor and put in things designed to make them feel better, and packaged it in language designed to make them look cool to people exactly like them.
In a century we went from John Reed to threatening on Twitter to beat people up for using the W word.
Because it's all just semantics. A postmodern trick. There's hardly any actual substance behind the latest iteration of the self-styled social justice movement. The actual organizations and people who have been "doing the work" for decades (nonprofits, progressives, school systems) are now in the thrall of the new ideology which has little practical benefit to actual oppressed and marginalized people. Microinvalidations and epistemological framing games are nothing more than moving the "discourse" onto the postmodern playing field, where words have no meaning and objectivity is oppressive.
They've been around for years, but only in the last year or two have they gotten everything they wanted. Now that the the curtain is beginning to be pulled back and shining a light on their ideas and tactics, more and more people are discovering the dark hollowness that underlies the movement.
Here’s my attempt to put the issue in the least polarizing way possible.
Last week’s election results (VA, NJ, NYC to a lesser extent) show we (Democrats) cannot win in the foreseeable future with this level of performance. We’re doing very well with college educated whites- indeed the college educated of all races. But that’s it. We’re doing terribly with white non-college. We WERE doing great with non-college non-whites, but since 2012 we’ve seen serious erosion among Latinos, and smaller (but still real) erosion amongst Black people. Asians have fluctuated- but they are also a significantly smaller group and largely concentrated in Democratic strongholds (CA, NY) so they are not as much of a concern with me at this point.
If we want to win, we have to bring some of these people back. You don’t want to talk to (pander) to white non-college, who you believe are irretrievably racist? Ok- I wouldn’t advise that because there are a hell of a lot of non college whites and they are fricken everywhere (from a Senate/electoral college perspective) but fine. But if you do that, then you have to do better with Latinos and Black people. This is just math.
You need a message to bring these people back, and I don’t think calling them “white supremacists” or- in the case of non-white people- “dupes of white supremacy” is going to be that effective. It’s not a question of whether you are right or wrong. It’s about what kind of a message and strategy we are going to use to bring at least some of these people back.
Bravo. And for fuck's sake stop calling people "racist" or "transphobic." I will bet you $1000 that nobody who has been called a racist realizes "oh yeah, I'm probably a racist. Sorry I'll change my attitudes and beliefs now that I have been called out."
Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand
There are a handful of these people I engage with semi regularly (mostly women, many former/questioning evangelicals who don’t yet recognize they’re filling the Church Need with a new social based dogma) and any time I make a reasonable comment or ask a reasonable question, I literally get ignored. Total silence.
Here’s an example. One woman casually dropped in an otherwise loosely related Instagram post “what are you doing to keep from raising little white assholes?”
I replied: “I imagine the best way to not raise little white assholes is similar to the way Asian parents don’t raise little Asian assholes, or Iranian parents don’t raise little Persian assholes, or Latino parents don’t raise little Latino assholes: By teaching them that every person is an individual with unique life experiences, interests, and cultural traditions, and to not assign moral value or deficit to any person based on their immutable phenotypical characteristics. To approach every person with curiosity and good intentions. To realize that so many of life’s “blessings” can be chalked up to good luck, but they should always live as if their actions and words matter.”
Zero responses to that.
This was glorious, thank you.
On “dog whistles”: Last week, Tom Cotton was on Fox news complaining about the teachers’ union president and he said: “Randi Weingarten is a joke. Randi Weingarten does not even have children of her own. What in the hell does she know about raising and teaching kids? In fact that’s probably why she was perfectly fine to shut down schools for two years and force kids to wear masks, because she didn’t have to deal with it at home.”
They called this a “homophobic dog whistle” and also an affront to every teacher who doesn’t have children. Tom Cotton does seem to be homophobic in general, but it’s ridiculous to read this as an effort to stoke anti-lesbian prejudice. Why would he even need to do that, when parents are extremely pissed about the school closures? But they call it a “dog whistle” because they know that Cotton’s actual message resonates with voters.
This tactic might work on some people, but when it stops working it really stops working. Parents are fed up with being told they’re prejudiced when they know they’re not.
Randi calling it a dog whistle: https://twitter.com/rweingarten/status/1456085062584311817
I am more and more convinced that the politics ostensibly practiced by the people who are noisiest about being part of the left in America literally don't actually even exist. There are no coherent positions, no policy agendas, no ideas that go beyond trying to torture the English language around the clock with one another.
It's simply just a tedious, linguistic parlor game played for one-upsmanship points in the Professional Managerial Class.
I think the term "woke" is starting to piss them off now because people are starting to realize just how empty and self-righteous social justice politics, aka woke politics really is. More than anything, the language games, non-sensical politics, and shoddy intellectual thought is starting to lose its power. Maybe some of them are becoming more self-aware of how it's almost exclusively tribal signaling, but a majority don't understand that what they're doing is alienating a remarkably large share of the country. CNN just ran a segment about how Virginia elected Youngkin because non-college educated white women voted overwhelmingly in his favor. They have the position that non-college educated people are the problem...
A) "Here is my new idea called X"
B) "We think idea X is bad"
A) "WE NEVER SAID IDEA X - IDEA X Is a [SEMI-ACADEMIC SLUR] term for actual idea Y"
B) "We think idea Y is bad"
A) "WE NEV....
Easy mode is right. It's such nonsense, but seems to be facilitated by collective goldfish level memory (intentional or otherwise).
This exemplifies what compels me to give you 5 dollars every month. It's the incorrigible sincerity and forthrightness. Throws a lifeline to my despairing, irony-poisoned brain.
Something that worked in academia with real, actual-CRT CRT and adjoining critical theories (post-colonial, queer) was that the language was complex and encoded, even if the ideas weren't that hard to make sense of when translated from the academic jargon. This jargon was useful in part to communicate with devotees while at the same time saying, 'Nothing to see hear folks,' and, 'We are being totally reasonable.'
I think it also worked for a short time in actual, real world politics. That is, until it hit a threshold and normal people were wondering WTF was going on. The simultaneous radicalism and, 'Nothing to see hear folks,' have imploded and made it easy for Chris Rufos to do what Chris Rufos do. Basically, for wokeness to spread it had to be translated into accessible language and that lowered the bar in terms of time investment (decreasing value of 'rational ignorance') for normal people as its costs were increasing.
Because wokeness was so ensconced in a corner of weird, elite discourse, it hasn't adapted to be able to stand broader scrutiny. Maybe there's a lesson in that for the Left.
"If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes!"
I saw a LinkedIn post advertising a talk called something like "Corporate Diversity in the Post-George Floyd Era." Ok. A poor guy getting shot over convenience store food was actually about 6-figure corporate executive positions!
I think these people want to sound revolutionary, I don't think they want any meaningful change. I used to call myself an "anarchist" before realizing the "radicalism" amounted to little more than putting stickers on street signs.
I can't image why a movement bent on deconstructing everything and creating nothing has a hard time coming up with a label.
the whole purpose of democracy is to resolve otherwise intractable disagreements without violence. the premise is you will live in a country with people you really disagree with and we want to move past that to solve the things which impact us all (read: material concerns).
Woke Fragility.
So it seems that John McWhorter's bestseller "Woke Racism", the results of Virginia elections, and Christopher Rufo's big-time outing of CRT has pissed the woke.
AOC says that you are an obsolete humanoid if you use the word "Woke" and Adam Serwer essentially calls you a racist.
And the reaction by the Woke is straight-out of central casting: Circle the wagons and patrol language.
It's a fishing expedition, right?
They will keep on using names they think are good, and if the names get co-opted and used to make them look silly, they'll say that using those names is bigoted. (This happened with fake news; I recall when the term was used by the left to describe right-wing misinformation sites. Then Trump managed to make it describe mainstream media sites, after which it became a term that, if you unironically used it, meant you were right-wing.)
The thing is, it's precisely their lack of centralized coordination that's a strength. On the one hand, there is no central authority anyone can point to as the source of terms or ideas. And yet on the other hand, highly educated people download phrasing and ideas at the same time and try them out en masse, and if it doesn't work, they can use the lack of centralized authority as a shield and say that no one ever said that. (Yes, you can numerous people who said that, but they'll just respond by saying that all of those people are nobodies, and no one listens to them.) As Vox Day once put it, they act like a school of fish. (Note: from what I know about him, I have a pretty low opinion of Vox Day, but I don't know that much about him.)
This had a lot of amazing and hilarious lines in it, so thoroughly enjoyed.
As I often say, they took a core part of the politics I spent my life advocating for, divorced it from the part that makes a difference, ripped out any intellectual rigor and put in things designed to make them feel better, and packaged it in language designed to make them look cool to people exactly like them.
In a century we went from John Reed to threatening on Twitter to beat people up for using the W word.
Because it's all just semantics. A postmodern trick. There's hardly any actual substance behind the latest iteration of the self-styled social justice movement. The actual organizations and people who have been "doing the work" for decades (nonprofits, progressives, school systems) are now in the thrall of the new ideology which has little practical benefit to actual oppressed and marginalized people. Microinvalidations and epistemological framing games are nothing more than moving the "discourse" onto the postmodern playing field, where words have no meaning and objectivity is oppressive.
They've been around for years, but only in the last year or two have they gotten everything they wanted. Now that the the curtain is beginning to be pulled back and shining a light on their ideas and tactics, more and more people are discovering the dark hollowness that underlies the movement.
Here’s my attempt to put the issue in the least polarizing way possible.
Last week’s election results (VA, NJ, NYC to a lesser extent) show we (Democrats) cannot win in the foreseeable future with this level of performance. We’re doing very well with college educated whites- indeed the college educated of all races. But that’s it. We’re doing terribly with white non-college. We WERE doing great with non-college non-whites, but since 2012 we’ve seen serious erosion among Latinos, and smaller (but still real) erosion amongst Black people. Asians have fluctuated- but they are also a significantly smaller group and largely concentrated in Democratic strongholds (CA, NY) so they are not as much of a concern with me at this point.
If we want to win, we have to bring some of these people back. You don’t want to talk to (pander) to white non-college, who you believe are irretrievably racist? Ok- I wouldn’t advise that because there are a hell of a lot of non college whites and they are fricken everywhere (from a Senate/electoral college perspective) but fine. But if you do that, then you have to do better with Latinos and Black people. This is just math.
You need a message to bring these people back, and I don’t think calling them “white supremacists” or- in the case of non-white people- “dupes of white supremacy” is going to be that effective. It’s not a question of whether you are right or wrong. It’s about what kind of a message and strategy we are going to use to bring at least some of these people back.
Bravo. And for fuck's sake stop calling people "racist" or "transphobic." I will bet you $1000 that nobody who has been called a racist realizes "oh yeah, I'm probably a racist. Sorry I'll change my attitudes and beliefs now that I have been called out."