"Wokeist" - When people talk about progressivism without acquaintance

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The camps were created with the antithesis of ownership. I assume that if you are a proponent of materialist theory, "something new" should have evolved? I don't believe, once the ability of ownership is attained, it can't simply be stripped (and here, i am referring to an individual not to society).

Is that in line with your previous post, where you were saying that it was the dogma that was creating the camps, and so therefore intolerance?

It seems much more likely to me that in-groups creating themselves to exploit outgroups, and high rank groups maintaining their rank through coercion, bear a greater burden of responsibility for intolerance.
 
I wonder why these historically marginalized groups would seek to distance themselves from the same majority that oppressed them... ah must be a total mystery
 
Well then, is there some point for some people when "the broader lesson" is no longer understood in which they could be functional? The world is filled with Boxers.
The emergence of any kind of hierarchical authority dates back a few thousand years at most, a few percentage points of humanity's time on this earth, and the degree of the division of labour and of central supervision in the modern workplace isn't even anticipated until the last few centuries. If the world is full of witless drudgeons, what were they doing for all that time? Have human beings really degraded so rapidly in their capacities that the greater mass of them can no longer be productive without constant instruction from their superiors? Is the modern worker really so much stupider, so much more inept, than a Medieval peasant, that where the latter could be trusted to manage the cycle of seasons and harvests by himself, the former must be scrutinised and dictated to in every working moment?

Not at all. However, both you and @Traitorfish seem to be ascribingsome negative connotation to taking direction (aka learning) and TF seems to be making some bold claims regarding human nature and psychology.
In what sense does taking direction imply learning? If the directee does not have a view of the larger process, if they are not learning how to personally manage the whole process or at least to participate in its managements, if the instructions are simply passed down from on-high without justification or context- and you correctly identified in a later post the key phrase in my argument, "may as well be arbitrary"- then what is the directee learning? What lesson is contained in "do this, because I said so"?

The only lesson I can see is "do what you're told, because I said so", and how many times does that need to be taught? Children pick up quickly enough; does it really need to be repeated for eight hours a day, every day, for fifty years, in order to stick?
 
Is it not normally only serial threads that get the 1000 post break?
 
The highly charged political threads don't get serialised, unless they run into thousands and thousands of posts.
 
The highly charged political threads don't get serialised, unless they run into thousands and thousands of posts.

Well its taken 6 weeks to reach 1000, so i'll see you then :hatsoff:
 
If "woke" people aren't along in using a thing, then it's not uniquely something that belongs to them. It is a problem that all of us have to overcome at one time or another, and often repeatedly. You can claim that labeling things racist, or sexist, or whatever, is moral blackmail. There isn't much evidence it's successful, so we are in essence debating a kind of pressure that comes from assigning moral weight to actions. And everybody does that. You see it in the religion thread (not just from religious folk). You see it in politics threads (galore). You see it in threads in other subforums about video games. People assign moral character to others based on the kinds of video games they enjoy ("it's not my fault you like bad games", etc). It's human nature. It's a rationalisation process (however flawed it can end up being at times).
Of course you see it everywhere, as I said. It's a common behaviour in humans, due to human psychology, and it's something we all have to deal with everytime.
But that it happens to everyone doesn't mean it happens equally everywhere, and some groups are more prone to it than others - and the woke group is especially prone to it, just like the right in the McCarthism era was especially prone to it, and the Catholic Church was also especially prone to it, and so on.
That it's successful or not is pretty irrelevant, what's important is that the woke subgroup tend generally to use it a lot.
"woke" is, in fact, a great example of the same thing. It's a pejorative label. It assigns moral weight to those labelled by it. Your argument throughout has been "yes but it's accurate and that's why people use it". But that's exactly what arguing things are racist, sexist, etc. are. It's the same thing. The people making the argument believe the label is accurate. The actual disagreement is over that accuracy, but the shortcut you and others use is people "being woke". If you're fed up, it happens. This is why I talked about the cyclic question thing. Everyone gets fed up. If you judge others for their responses when fed up, but you find reasons for you own being fed up (leading to a form of lashing out) . . . that's inconsistent.
You know, that's actually a pretty good analogy. "woke" and "racist" as labels is definitely a good analogy - they're descriptives that are perceived bad because they describe behaviours that are repellent to a lot of people, and can be abused to dismiss what someone is saying without having to confront his arguments. I think it might count for what the OP said about the use of "woke" by mainly right-wing and ignorant - that it's mainly abused by right-wing and ignorants (like simply saying that sexism/racism exist, or pointing at something that is ACTUALLY sexist/racist and not abusively so).

But just like "racism" being abused and overused doesn't mean the concept of "racism" doesn't exist, or that anyone who call something "racism" is "woke", then "woke" being abused by ignorants and right-wingers doesn't mean that the subgroup "woke" doesn't exist, or that anyone using it is ignorant or right-winger. As you said, it's about accuracy - and self-awareness.
I'm nowhere near perfect, right? I blow up more often than I should. I'm dog-with-a-bone with tangents for longer than I should be. I am a constant work in progress in how I approach and disengage with arguments online (specifically, it's pretty different to how IRL discussions tend to play out). I have been inconsistent at times. But I have to recognise it, and every time it happens I need to recognise it sooner, or I keep making the same mistakes. And that's what I think you're doing when it comes to your frequent use of "woke" and related phrases. I'm not here to convince you that your life needs turning around. I just want to try and use this back and forth to explain what I think is a factor in these back-and-forths.
I understand what you're talking about, but that's a point where I think it'll be extremely hard to see eye to eye, because I think that the reason is a fundamental difference in the core perception about what's happening.
I accept you're talking about your experiences off of the forums. That's why I asked you back when you were calling Angst's arguments (and honestly by extension my own) "delusions" how I could get you to believe that we were talking about our actual, honest experiences. Because the way it read, it seemed that your experience was undeniable evidence of a thing, but ours was . . . not. And sure, it likely wasn't intended (or if it was, it was a mistake at the time), but that's still how it came across. That's the moral weight in writing off peoples' arguments as "delusions". It doesn't debate their merit. It just assigns them a label and moves on.
I've no problem with people talking about their own experiences. But the OP doesn't exactly give a feeling of "just my experience" you know. Let's remember, the first paragraph is this :

"Short version - litmus test. If someone says "political correctness" or "wokeism" they are not acquainted with any sort of the literature they're criticizing. Noone in the literature identifies themselves as such, and they're often diametrically opposed to each other. They're only identified as such when talked about between right wingers who, by the way, also have their speech reflected by virtue of not having read a damn article of the positions they don't like."

Am I wrong saying that it doesn't sound like sharing an experience, but making a strong factual affirmation ?
 
Sorry for the late reply, I have a lot going on generally at the moment.
I was going to say "but you hadn't actually apologised at the time of me posting that", but I realise my language was unnecessarily predictive; i.e. it could be read as claiming I don't see you doing that, period. Which isn't what I meant it as, but that's my mistake. I saw your post in the other thread not long after you made it, and I accept it :)
This, I'm going to admit, is a challenge to wrap my head into that "everything is racist/problematic" is a strawman of the wokeist's positions. I don't know but I'm going to admit that I have a bias from bad experience (as previously demonstrated on being unnecessarily on guard all the time in lefty or left-wing spaces) and assuming the worst outcome. I still need to dig for your post as, I admit, tend to be on the wordy side.
It's challenging because, structurally, there is a lot of racism, and sexism, and so on that emerges from Western society (especially when founded upon Abrahamic religious principles). And other societies, sure. But I don't live in them, nor am I necessarily informed about them, so it's not really relevant to what I talk about, or about "woke" or progressive stuff in Western countries generally. And this is what makes these threads on an international web forum tricky. Because while a lot of people are from Western countries (and those that don't still tend to have good English), not everyone is.

The whole structural stuff is a whole topic of its own, and it tends to get peoples' backs up to assert that we live in a particular kind of society, with good and bad connotations. Because we live in it. And by living in it, we have to figure out how complicit we are in it. And people don't like that. The "complicit" word especially. It's an easy position to make straw out of. Which is why it can be a challenge to get at the nuance behind it. Especially on the Internet. "just trust me bro" doesn't really ever work out, because anybody can say it, and everybody at some point tries to.

I get it. I'm a straight white dude, I get it. I've been there. But it's not about self-flagellation. It's not about going "shame, shame" while ringing a bell about town. It's about recognising where we are, how we got there, and most importantly what we do going forwards about it. But like I said, it's a whole other thread. I don't want to bang on about it (anymore than that).

Who said you should tolerate getting your head stamped and does that qualify as a straw man if no one did?
You're the one asserting that just because "wokists" preach tolerance that assigning labels is intolerance. If the labels are accurate, then it isn't intolerant at all. The problem is (and this is core to Akka's arguments as well, and probably more people besides) that you disagree that the label is accurate, and you think "wokists" are just throwing labels of "-ist" at people to shut them up first and foremost.

Tolerance is not universal. Calling people out for sexism, racism, you name it can be done because it is genuinely perceived to be those things. It can also be weaponised. The problem you have is you see it all as weaponisation and none of it as genuine. Which leads you to make silly gotchas like "tolerant people call other people racist, meaning they're not actually tolerant of other opinions".

That it's successful or not is pretty irrelevant, what's important is that the woke subgroup tend generally to use it a lot.
My point is more that most people use it a lot. The stereotyping of "woke" behaviour is a stereotype. Nobody here can provide a statistical analysis that demonstrates "woke" people use language like "racist" anymore than a hardcore culturally right-wing Republican-voting conservative. And indeed, the alt-and-far-right groups most people are familiar with do call people sexist, racist, etc. So how do we quantify who uses it "a lot"? Genuinely. How do we work out what demographic is exhibiting this behaviour more or less than other demographics?
I understand what you're talking about, but that's a point where I think it'll be extremely hard to see eye to eye, because I think that the reason is a fundamental difference in the core perception about what's happening.
I agree. It's about how we see these accusations as accurate or not. On the whole, I believe they are. If you don't mind me assuming so, when it comes to these discussions, us posters, and even what we see of behaviour elsewhere online . . . you probably don't. Right? I'm not saying you don't see them (sexism, racism, and so on) as problems at all, just to be clear.
Am I wrong saying that it doesn't sound like sharing an experience, but making a strong factual affirmation ?
My question would be: what's the difference? Life experience shapes our understanding and bias towards factual evidence. This is what I meant about delusion vs. reality. Angst's OP was purely a conclusion he had arrived at himself. He is presenting it as an explanation for how the word is used. To him, it is factual, or at the very least it makes sense as a way to explain the phenomenon.

Right? He believes in it (otherwise why else post the OP he did). Does that make it a fundamental axiom of reality? No. It doesn't make anyone who uses the word "woke" ignorant of the general subject, but it is useful as a short litmus test. As per the paragraph you quoted. A litmus test is, figuratively, just a test of character on a specific topic. Like how people use belief in one thing to assume beliefs in other things. It's not "and therefore these things are always correlated", it's "generally we can more safely assume than not". And a lot of people seem to be taking issue with the OP on the basis of some kind of declared "and therefore everybody who uses this word is an ignorant right-winger". Which isn't declared. Because it explicitly says "litmus test" (among other things).
 
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You're the one asserting that just because "wokists" preach tolerance that assigning labels is intolerance. If the labels are accurate, then it isn't intolerant at all. The problem is (and this is core to Akka's arguments as well, and probably more people besides) that you disagree that the label is accurate, and you think "wokists" are just throwing labels of "-ist" at people to shut them up first and foremost.

Tolerance is not universal. Calling people out for sexism, racism, you name it can be done because it is genuinely perceived to be those things. It can also be weaponised. The problem you have is you see it all as weaponisation and none of it as genuine. Which leads you to make silly gotchas like "tolerant people call other people racist, meaning they're not actually tolerant of other opinions".

My choice of words was not meant to assign labels, just convey a hypocritical venom. I said the woke are not taking us down the road to tolerance. If all the people called these labels were actually being described accurately the woke and a bunch of other people would be in death camps. It's a demagogic weapon to shut down dissent and it makes the woke movement look authoritarian.
 
Tolerating intolerance is like using pacifism to restrain violence. It doesn't work. But, like violence, the 'intolerance of intolerance' can be inaccurately targeted. So, a self-description of 'woke' can only predict accurate targeting, not guarantee it. It's like trying to use the term 'pastor' to predict theologically sound interpretation of Scripture and the faith.

Credentialing is difficult, so all that can really be done is mould the zeitgeist. Even worse is when the people handing out the credentials are not qualified to do a proper job, if it causes either misinformation with in the community or a source-of-evidence against it.
 
You know, that's actually a pretty good analogy. "woke" and "racist" as labels is definitely a good analogy - they're descriptives that are perceived bad because they describe behaviours that are repellent to a lot of people, and can be abused to dismiss what someone is saying without having to confront his arguments.

Critics of the woke didn't invent the label

It's a major fallacy saying that to be tolerant you have to tolerate intolerance.

Wouldn't that make 'you' intolerant?
 
Yes, obviously it does, at the personal level. Just like using violence to stop violence stops you from being a pacifist.
I think the sentiment is better phrased as 'tolerating intolerance doesn't increase net tolerance'. Just like we use violence to suppress even more violence.
 
Tolerating intolerance is like using pacifism to restrain violence. It doesn't work.
Attempting to supress violence without resort to violence is very arguably the key indicator of a civilised society. Do we not try to talk people down before we resort to clubbing them over the head? Do police not, at least ideally, order a hostile crowd to disperse before they resort to teargas and billy clubs?

So if we're taking this analogy at face value, the assumption of Western liberal society is that we should attempt to address intolerance with tolerance, and resort to intolerance only when tolerance has demonstrably failed.

"Short version - litmus test. If someone says "political correctness" or "wokeism" they are not acquainted with any sort of the literature they're criticizing. Noone in the literature identifies themselves as such, and they're often diametrically opposed to each other. They're only identified as such when talked about between right wingers who, by the way, also have their speech reflected by virtue of not having read a damn article of the positions they don't like."
People use the label "woke" to dismiss their opponents out of hand without engaging with their arguments, therefore, someone who uses the label "woke" can be dismissed out of hand without engaging with their arguments.

Am I reading that correctly?


[edit: misquoted, as pointed out below.]
 
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