Short and to the point. Love it! Hopefully the rest of the pundit class will pick this point up and spread it like the "There are no Refs" essay is starting to make the rounds.... And you did it without having to use the increasingly tired "motte and bailey" phrase.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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...
I had a conversation with someone over on Slowboring who stated the commonly held belief that there is nothing wrong with a manager picking a newly married 27 year old guy over a similar newly married 27 year old woman on the grounds that the guy is less likely to go out on maternity leave. He also felt that it was totally appropriate for the police to treat people differently based on the statistical likelihood of them being a threat. A 19 year old Black male is more of a threat than a 19 year old Asian male and a 70 year old Asian female is vastly less of a threat than either 19 year old. And the cops should act accordingly.
For the woke twitter folks I'm curious to know how they would convivence someone like that of their error of their ways? Certainly 10s of millions of Americans hold those views.
I've come up with a term for them: Carthage. As the Romans destroyed Carthage thousands of years ago, surely there is nobody to object to use of that name. And it conveniently starts with CRT.
When people talk about CRT, they are talking about “the latest stupid thing a diversity consultant who read Robin DiAngelo’s book said”. And here you find the agents of Carthage. Carthage is the Revolution. From this angle, it looks like it is mostly a Cultural Revolution.
Carthage is “Defund the Police”, Carthage is the Twitter personality who calls you a racist and insists “my job isn’t to educate you” when you ask why. The people that came up with Latinx as a word live in Carthage. Many of the people who use that term have visited Carthage, though they may have done so as wanderers lost at sea.
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.
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.
Okay, but I've seen "woke" used for everything from the most extreme radical politics to not using racial slurs, so the word brings only a limited amount of clarity itself.
There are terms that I expect could be used without too many complaints, but mainly unsatisfactory. "Antiracist activist" is too narrow, and ceding the word "antiracist" to them galls; "progressive" is far too broad. Something based on "social justice" might work (but not "social justice warrior," obviously), even though I don't think "social justice" is bandied about as much as it used to be.
Isn’t a lot of this just like Occupy- a refusal to work through the difficult trade offs any solution to a complex problem will have, and then coalesce and prioritize? “Hey Occupy- you’re right - Wall Street has too much power. What should we do about it?” …and we got drumming. I guess “Defund the Police” was an attempt to do that, but even that wasn’t tightly defined (no we just mean add social service money. No we mean transferring resources. Yes we actually do mean abolish!). Not everything in DEI is bad, but some of it is and nobody wants to do the internal policing of the movement necessary so that it can be boldly advocated for. So instead they try to slip it in stealthily (while denying that it’s happening) and that predictably pisses people off.
Short and to the point. Love it! Hopefully the rest of the pundit class will pick this point up and spread it like the "There are no Refs" essay is starting to make the rounds.... And you did it without having to use the increasingly tired "motte and bailey" phrase.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
Until the movement you are referring to has named itself, I propose "social justice maximalist".
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.
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).
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.)
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...
I had a conversation with someone over on Slowboring who stated the commonly held belief that there is nothing wrong with a manager picking a newly married 27 year old guy over a similar newly married 27 year old woman on the grounds that the guy is less likely to go out on maternity leave. He also felt that it was totally appropriate for the police to treat people differently based on the statistical likelihood of them being a threat. A 19 year old Black male is more of a threat than a 19 year old Asian male and a 70 year old Asian female is vastly less of a threat than either 19 year old. And the cops should act accordingly.
For the woke twitter folks I'm curious to know how they would convivence someone like that of their error of their ways? Certainly 10s of millions of Americans hold those views.
I've come up with a term for them: Carthage. As the Romans destroyed Carthage thousands of years ago, surely there is nobody to object to use of that name. And it conveniently starts with CRT.
When people talk about CRT, they are talking about “the latest stupid thing a diversity consultant who read Robin DiAngelo’s book said”. And here you find the agents of Carthage. Carthage is the Revolution. From this angle, it looks like it is mostly a Cultural Revolution.
Carthage is “Defund the Police”, Carthage is the Twitter personality who calls you a racist and insists “my job isn’t to educate you” when you ask why. The people that came up with Latinx as a word live in Carthage. Many of the people who use that term have visited Carthage, though they may have done so as wanderers lost at sea.
Read more: https://yevaud.substack.com/p/what-is-carthage
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.
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
Okay, but I've seen "woke" used for everything from the most extreme radical politics to not using racial slurs, so the word brings only a limited amount of clarity itself.
There are terms that I expect could be used without too many complaints, but mainly unsatisfactory. "Antiracist activist" is too narrow, and ceding the word "antiracist" to them galls; "progressive" is far too broad. Something based on "social justice" might work (but not "social justice warrior," obviously), even though I don't think "social justice" is bandied about as much as it used to be.
Isn’t a lot of this just like Occupy- a refusal to work through the difficult trade offs any solution to a complex problem will have, and then coalesce and prioritize? “Hey Occupy- you’re right - Wall Street has too much power. What should we do about it?” …and we got drumming. I guess “Defund the Police” was an attempt to do that, but even that wasn’t tightly defined (no we just mean add social service money. No we mean transferring resources. Yes we actually do mean abolish!). Not everything in DEI is bad, but some of it is and nobody wants to do the internal policing of the movement necessary so that it can be boldly advocated for. So instead they try to slip it in stealthily (while denying that it’s happening) and that predictably pisses people off.