"Wokeist" - When people talk about progressivism without acquaintance

[Berzerker]

This may come as a shock to some people in this thread but the police in this country are not allowed to just kill suspects, even if they are suspected of violent crimes. Which is why the police have to routinely lie and say they felt "threatened" or whatever. I suspect the police also routinely allow people they shoot to die without medical attention so that their victims cannot later testify against them.

Who said they were allowed to kill suspects? What murder did I justify? As for what police routinely do, people who screw up often try to hide their responsibility. But if 1000 people are killed by cops each year and we look at the specifics we dont find racist cops out to murder black people. Virtually all those people were male and most of them were under 50.

According to the FBI, African-Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 41.1%, and "Other" 3.0% in cases where the race was known.[52] Among homicide victims in 2019 where the race was known, 54.7% were black or African-American, 42.3% were white, and 3.1% were of other races. The per-capita offending rate for African-Americans was roughly eight times higher than that of whites, and their victim rate was similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_... to the FBI, African,3.1% were of other races.

8 times... That sounds high but all we hear from our media is black people are killed 2-3 times the rate for whites. Cops are chasing murderers around, if younger black men - maybe 3% of the total population - are responsible for half the homicides are we supposed to be shocked if younger black men get killed by cops at a higher rate?

 

[cardgame]

instead, it is usually things like cancel culture/crt/social issues being pushed strongly and penalizing dissenting opinions that seems to fit the category of woke most frequently. those things have found their home in the democratic platform, but are a small subset (especially if you consider them against % of country as a whole).

When have democrats made cancel culture the law of the land? I can name a dozen times Republicans have done so.

 

[cardgame]

if you're willing to misrepresent my stance on different things blatantly, itself a tactic favored among the "woke" as well, then sure.

in reality, however, requiring evidence for systemic racism + coherent standards to make that conclusion is not the same thing as "reject all existence of systemic racism".

normally, what happens instead is that someone blathers "x population is under/over-represented in y thing, thus systemic racism" and then gets butthurt when anybody points out that such isn't how statistics or reality work. bonus points if the same person doing this also openly advocates racism themselves, or ignores counter-evidence from z population that is not consistent with their assertions, or both.

nevertheless, the guy pointing out racist assertions as racist gets criticized for "opposition to anti-racism", lol.

Oh, go ahead and tell us how statistics and reality work, then. Tell us how the income and wealth of black people is completely independent of societal forces that limited them from getting a job or a loan, then threw them in jail for anything it could think of. Tell us how that has nothing whatsoever to do with racism :laughing:

i'm not a fan of victimless crimes in general.

Do you remember the influencing factor that made marijuana criminal? Can you extrapolate from its origin to its harsher enforcement in the drug war? Are you capable of the nuance you espout, or will you ignore how many black people were and are jailed for marijuana, which was criminalized in the first place why? Go ahead, enlighten us.

 

[Akka]

Ah specifically as an insult... Well in that case I believe there are fewer cases, yes. But I'm honestly not as interested in that as I am in general misappropriation. We might have talked past each other here. It's that the right keeps misappropriating language - while the left is unable to - that I find interesting.

What do you mean by "misappropriation" though ?
Your previous examples seem to imply "abusing words to distort their meaning", but then I don't really see either how it's a "bad thing" if one side doesn't do it (while you seem to imply regrets that the "left" doesn't manage), nor how it's actually really right-specific (seriously, the "woke" subset is massively using this manipulation method).
Unless I misinterpreted what you said, once again I absolutely don't have the same experience as the one you claim.

All the way back in the 90s, Newt Gingrich circulated a memo among Republican congressional candidates called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." So this isn't exactly a secret.

It just seems more deliberately organized from the GOP side, but I don't see it as actually more successful.

 

[Angst]

What do you mean by "misappropriation" though ?
Your previous examples seem to imply "abusing words to distort their meaning", but then I don't really see either how it's a "bad thing" if one side doesn't do it (while you seem to imply regrets that the "left" doesn't manage), nor how it's actually really right-specific (seriously, the "woke" subset is massively using this manipulation method).
Unless I misinterpreted what you said, once again I absolutely don't have the same experience as the one you claim.

The thing is that the left doesn't do it efficiently. Yes, the stereotypical person you refer to tries to direct language, but the attempts have a hard time cementing themselves outside leftist circles. The left has a very hard time restructuring language in the centre. The right is just better at it, it has succeeded several times. It has picked up on observations of left-leaning researchers about this stuff and have weaponized it.

Am I regretful that the left doesn't warp language? I mean, in a way, not really, but in a way, it's saddening to see. It's good because we have enough distortion as is, but it's alarming because regardless of what's right, some people are benefiting from language warping and there seems to be not much stopping it from happening, from what we can see in public discourse. I don't want the left to misdirect language but as is it seems to have difficulties just correctly directing it.

That you don't see eye to eye as to how language is actively warped here is fine. Like to me it's obvious, it's constantly happening, and you don't think so, fine. I'm still responding to outline where I'm coming from; what I believe is happening, and then I'm questioning why the left is so bad at reaching outside leftist circles when applying power ro language, misappropriation or not.

 

[Samson]

I shall repost my graphs illustrating my thesis that woke is another iteration of Right on and Politically correct, is used in much the same ways by both the left and the right and is likely to follow the same trajectory.

Spoiler Use over time :

 

[Angst]

I shall repost my graphs illustrating my thesis that woke is another iteration of Right on and Politically correct, is used in much the same ways by both the left and the right and is likely to follow the same trajectory.

Spoiler Use over time :

Thank you for this. I had no data on this, just earlier articles I've read and it's been too long for me to remember and share.

So the usage follows the same trajectory in this regard, and one can observe qualitatively in the environment that it fits. But even as I agree with the graph, could the usage have spread for different reasons? Like to be completely clear, word spread can be tracked that isn't explicitly political at all due to language just evolving. As much as I find the graph useful, are there considerations as to this in the data? Can it be done? (I'm not a statistician, and I'm solely asking to make sure this is as useful as possible.)

 

[Samson]

Thank you for this. I had no data on this, just earlier articles I've read and it's been too long for me to remember and share.

So the usage follows the same trajectory in this regard, and one can observe qualitatively in the environment that it fits. But even as I agree with the graph, could the usage have spread for different reasons? Like to be completely clear, word spread can be tracked that isn't explicitly political at all due to language just evolving. As much as I find the graph useful, are there considerations as to this in the data? Can it be done? (I'm not a statistician, and I'm solely asking to make sure this is as useful as possible.)

I have to admit that this is really not a statistical argument. I am not sure what answers statistics could really help with. It is quite possible that any similarity in shapes are coincidental, and I cannot see a way to prove otherwise.

The theory is really based on the similarity in language and acceptance that the words/phrases have had. They were coined/introduced as positive, and have been taken up by the right is some version of "X gone mad".

 

[Lexicus]

At what point, in this thread, did I mention "cancel culture"?


When have I expressed such a framing?


In what way have I made this conflation?

I don't intend to be pedantic here, but the point I'm trying to hammer home is that you're making all of these dramatic inferences which do not proceed from the argument I have actually made (an argument I laid out in I think fairly reasonable detail here) but from the arguments which you assume I would make if allowed to ramble long enough. By all appearances, you're making these assumptions based not on the content of what I've said but on the cultural posture you take it to imply. If you want to provide another rationale for how you're teasing out these sinister threads from a plainly stated and quite specific argument contained in the linked post, I'm all ears, but I do not see it.

Those are descriptions of what you were arguing, not inferences. I mean, you literally say in the post that you link to here that boycotting media products is an attempt to use market exchange as a sort of fig leaf to hide that a boycott is a totalizing attempt to control cultural expression.

I am not sure why you are disavowing the arguments you've been making in the whole thread up til now. My previous was not inferring anything, it was a description of what you've been arguing as I understand it. And if I understand you correctly, your use of "sinister" and "dramatic" seems to imply you regard what I'm saying as a personal condemnation of some sort but I just disagree with you, that's all.

 

[Lexicus]

It just seems more deliberately organized from the GOP side, but I don't see it as actually more successful.

The GOP has been wildly successful in this; you may not see it from across the Atlantic but the influence of this right-wing machine, which includes not only media outlets and politicians but also "strategists" and polling firms - it is an integrated system that tests different "messages" in real time, filtering out the less effective ones - has been immense.

 

[sophie]

I don’t actually think the move typically is to „change“ the meaning of terminology, but rather to drain a term of meaning, leaving behind, an empty signifier, free for each individual subject to apply whatever meanings, significances, and cultural associations one chooses. I think this is part of why the right is so effective at controlling narrative and distorting terminology: it’s the same principle as combatting disinformation where it requires exponentially more time and energy to positively establish the boundaries of a term than it takes to negatively destabilize those same boundaries.

This is also why I think „woke,“ isn’t a useful or meaningful word now that it’s been effectively unmoored from its original context as a term within black communities to describe the process of coming to understand the totality and perniciousness of anti-blackness. It doesn’t have any positive meaning in public discourse anymore, and is instead an empty vessel to fill with whatever your personal cultural antagonisms might be, whether that’s radical direct action; impotent, cynical liberal grand gestures; the mere existence of openly queer people; pronouns in bio; or showing feathered dinosaurs in your nostalgia movie. When any individual person uses the word „woke,“ I have no idea what they actually mean, and so it ends up being a guessing game - more a reflection of the speaker‘s own prejudices than an objective term, dialectically understood between both parties.

It’s the same with all the other big Republican bugbears: CRT, idpol, sjw, PC, socialist/communist/anarchist. Etc..

Also it’s not like the left is immune to this process either: fascist is the big one that immediately comes to mind.

 

[João III]

People in the West focus so much on racism and white guilt that they ignore the classism pervasive to all capitalist societies.

"There is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called Capitalism."

 

[Gorbles]

People in the West focus so much on racism and white guilt that they ignore the classism pervasive to all capitalist societies.

This sure is a wild generalisation, huh?

 

[sophie]

Race and class intersect. They are deeply bound up in one another, just as gender and class likewise intersect. It is no accident that the modern racial hierarchy, patriarchal norms, and capitalist relations all sprung up at around the same time.

And no country is free from the struggle against racism because every corner of the world is living in the shadow of 500 years of European colonial domination and capitalist expansion (which is, again, intrinsically bound up in our present racial hierarchy), and we are still living today within a neocolonial order where the methods of control have changed but the underlying dynamics are no different than they were 150 years ago.

 

[Lexicus]

People in the West focus so much on racism and white guilt that they ignore the classism pervasive to all capitalist societies.

"Classism" is a dumb liberal concept, implying that the problem is prejudice between classes rather than the existence of class as such.

 

[Farm Boy]

What do you think class is?

 

[Senethro]

What do you think class is?

Lexicus is saying its the material differences between the classes, that are indeed most of the definition of those classes, not the cultural issues (prejudice) that lead to conflict.

 

[Lexicus]

What do you think class is?

Defining class as prejudice is a new low in the history of Americans' desperate attempts to avoid material definitions of anything. But if your definition of class is untethered to material reality, it's no wonder you think of Joe Manchin as a "labor democrat"...

 

[Narz]

When have democrats made cancel culture the law of the land? I can name a dozen times Republicans have done so.

Moral superiority isn't really a left/right thing it's a human thing.

 

[Farm Boy]

It's not untethered. Material status is downstream of class. Which operates quite well with no material wealth whatsoever. There is always sex.