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I think the answer to your question is actually answered in your first paragraph. In the same way that you believe all Christians shouldn’t be judged by those w
by lemmsjid 5y ago
I think the answer to your question is actually answered in your first paragraph. In the same way that you believe all Christians shouldn’t be judged by those who haven’t “practiced what they’ve preached”, consider that your understanding of “woke” people might be tainted by the fact that whatever media you are consuming might be focusing on the ones who also don’t practice what they preach.
In other words, any movement, Christian or “woke”, will have a subset of people who are hypocritical and/or ruthless. It is an easily observed behavior of biased media outlets that they will pay especial attention to the more unsavory outliers of a movement.
- sokoloff 5y agoThough this is undoubtedly good for click-rewarded media, it’s also good for society if it invokes a rejection of the extremists and unsavory outliers both from outside and within the community, whether woke extremists, Christian Taliban, or other. Unfortunately, I don’t see quite strong enough (for my taste) version of that repudiation (in general across both causes I believe in and ones where I disagree).
- kortilla 5y agoBut the core principles of being woke require ruthlessness (“silence is violence”, etc).
- ggggoz 5y agoWhat are the core principles of being woke?
- plexman 5y agoNo idea, but i love McWhorter ideas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDlmSn3aGYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDlmSn3aGYU
- ggggoz 5y agoYou don’t know the core principles of the thing you want to cancel? What do you know about the thing you want to cancel?
- MonkeyClub 5y agoThat generally isn't necessary in cancel culture. Generic outrage suffices. /s
- mpweiher 5y agoHow are the core principles relevant? Look at outcomes.
- octonion 5y agoWhy would you ask someone who doesn't understand a concept to explain it?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoYou would certainly ask someone who despises a concept to explain what it is that they dislike. Major red flags if they cannot.
- ggggoz 5y agoI don’t know about you, but I try avoid hating that which I do not understand.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoYes, but propaganda for intolerance requires that you hate something ill-defined, shifting, "other". Examples throughout this thread.
- vimy 5y agoIt’s in the article. > What links these developments is a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world. This credo still lacks a definitive name: it is variously known as left-liberal identity politics, social-justice activism or, simply, wokeness. But it has a clear common thread: a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled. These notions were incubated for years in the humanities departments of universities (elite ones in particular), without serious challenge. We can add to this list: meritocracy, capitalism. Both are considered racist and oppressive. Tl;dr Woke means being opposed to Western ideals while pretending to uphold those same Western ideals.
- mpweiher 5y agoNot sure how that's important. Very often looking from the outside, and particularly at outcomes, is quite sufficient. I really don't have to understand the core principles of Maoism to be opposed. I really don't have to understand the core principles of the Khmer Rouge to be opposed. I really don't have to understand the core principles of Fascism to be opposed. I really don't have to understand the core principles of Stalinism to be opposed. What's more, what the core principles are may not be very relevant, because very often the most heinous acts are performed in the service of supposedly very fine "principles". In fact, the more hallowed the principles, the more permission/cover they often give to their followers for the most heinous acts. After all, they are doing this in the name of what is good and righteous. And of course, this "do you understand X" is typically a deflection, particularly if X does its damn best to obscurantist. And this is often deployed quite tactically.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoI think in some cases silence is violence. For example, the silence of ones witnessing co workers when a woman tries to report being sexually harassed in her workplace. Like if a woman describes witnesses to her being groped by a co worker, and all the witnesses just shrug and say nothing to defend her, that workplace has in effect allowed sexual harassment to occur and condones continued harassment of women. That being said I do think it’s dumb for putting ones pronouns or whatever. But I think when we paint “wokeness” with this extremely broad brush we’re just doing the same bullshit that we’re accusing “wokeness” of doing.
- throwaway210222 5y ago> woman describes witnesses to her being groped by a co worker, and all the witnesses just shrug and say nothing Surely they are only alleged witnesses until they testify? How else do you tell the difference between a witness who actually saw nothing? [Or do you just declare that scenario to not exist?] And that there is the violence in the woke - no due procedure. If the claimant said it happened, then it happened - let's move on to sentencing.
- angelzen 5y agoAnd dole out the harshest possible sentence, short of physical maiming: unbounded social ostracism. In old times we'd brand undesirables by burning their skin with a hot rod. These days we brand them 'racist' or 'sexist' on the Internet, and rely on the fact that the Internet never forgets and is easily searchable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_branding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_branding
- swayvil 5y agoInteresting. If you are silent then you are not explicitly with us. And if you are not explicitly with us then you are guilty of violence. That is to say, against us. Thus "silence is violence" = "if you are not with us then you are against us".
- smegger001 5y agoI think this will ultimately be Wokeness downfall. The woke turn on themselves for perceived lack of purity to the cause almost as quickly as their adversaries. look at far left movements of the past for example, the french revolution started beheading people that had been for the revolution because they weren't revolutionary enough.
- notacoward 5y agoExactly. It's selection bias, ruthlessly exploited by people who have their own agenda and therefore an interest in focusing attention on the worst excesses of those who resist (continued) imposition of that agenda. What might that agenda be? Here's a hint. A certain "shadow docket" decision by the US Supreme Court has been in the news a bit lately. As it turns out, all five of the concurring justices are Catholic, and under pressure (e.g. threats of being denied communion) to decide as they did. That pressure should have been grounds for recusal, but of course none of the five had the decency to do that. Where's the "mercy and grace" in that law? What "woke" group is doing that much harm to that many people's lives?
- busymom0 5y agoSelection bias? My province in Ontario literally changed the curriculum for mathematics claiming mathematics is subjective and colonial and all other woke nonsense. You mean to tell me I am not seeing what I am really seeing?
- notacoward 5y agoThank you for providing an example of the selective presentation (exploiting selection bias) I was talking about. Here's the official version of the current Ontario curriculum guidelines, for anyone to read. https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/secondary-mathematics/courses/mth1w/course-intro https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/secondary-mathem... There's a bunch of stuff about how the teaching of mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization etc., but that's not the same as mathematics itself being subjective or colonial. (Personally I think even the stuff about teaching is kind of garbage because it's vague and non-actionable, but that's a different discussion.) A cherry-picked, exaggerated description like that is exactly the kind of selective presentation I was talking about. You have received a distorted view, and are now passing that on to others.
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- busymom0 5y agoIt isn’t just the media. Here in Canada, the government literally passed the mathematics curriculum which claimed nonsense like “mathematics is subjective” and “mathematics is colonial”. I emailed them a long rant that I would rather ship my future kids to India for a better education instead of the nonsense they are teaching. So no, it isn’t just some media. Nor do I follow corporate news.
- rayusher 5y ago"There's plenty of room for subjective opinion in mathematics. It usually doesn't concern questions of the form Is this true? since we have a good consensus how to recognize an acceptable proof and which assumptions for such a proof you need to state explicitly. As soon as we move onwards to Is this useful? and Is this interesting?, or even Is this likely to work?, subjectivity hits us in full force. Even in pure mathematics, it's easy to choose a set of axioms and derive consequences from them, but if you want anyone to spend time reading your work, you need to tackle the subjective questions and have an explanation why what you're doing is either useful or interesting, or preferably both. In applied math, these questions are accompanied by Is this the best way to model such-and-such real-world problem? -- where "best" again comes down to usefulness (does the model answer questions we need to have answered?) and interest (does the model give us any insight about the situation we wouldn't have without it?). The subjective questions are important in research, but can also arise at more elementary level. The high-school teacher who chooses to devote several lessons to presenting Cardano's method for solving the generic third-degree equation will certainly have to answer his students' questions why this is useful or interesting. Perhaps he has an answer. Perhaps he has an answer that the students don't agree with. In that case, he cannot look for a deductive argument concluding that Cardano's formula is interesting -- he'll have to appeal to emotions, curiosity, all of those fluffy touchy-feely considerations that we need to use to tackle subjective questions." https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1354044/can-math-be-subjective#:~:text=Every%20single%20statement%2C%20question%2C%20and%20claim%20in%20mathematics,arbitrary%2C%20and%20are%20picked%20to%20observe%20their%20consequences https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1354044/can-math-be....
- notacoward 5y agoNo, they didn't. Here's the real thing again. https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/secondary-mathematics/courses/mth1w/course-intro https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/secondary-mathem... My (slightly) more detailed response is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28415992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28415992 Stop spreading misinformation.