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> I think Hollywood is lot less subtle now at trying to push political propaganda I think the past efforts were pretty blatant. I think we just know more about

> I think Hollywood is lot less subtle now at trying to push political propaganda I think the past efforts were pretty blatant. I think we just know more about how they operate and so it becomes easier to see. > wokeism Would love to know what this means.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
vintermann 5y ago
Something like this? https://twitter.com/raytheontech/status/880497266255175685?lang=en https://twitter.com/raytheontech/status/880497266255175685?l... It's not that there's something wrong with gay rights, or any other specific social cause powerful organizations adopt. It's just that it's a very cheap way to win a positive image for things that ... would have trouble getting a positive image if focus was on their core business.
- foldr 5y ago
  It's possible to be not totally cynical about this stuff. The CEO of Raytheon might very well genuinely support gay rights. After all, many people do. Also, I don't really see the connection between this tweet and Holywood.
  - crate_barre 5y ago
    Eh. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/09/yemen-us-made-bomb-used-in-deadly-air-strike-on-civilians/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/09/yemen-us-made... Raytheon lobbies for Mideast arm sales. In the hierarchy of shit they need to be ethical on, LGBTQ rights is not really top of the list. It’s nice though, nonetheless. No connection to Hollywood of course, Raytheon would love nothing more than war never being mentioned. The more they can sell outside of the US and not have anyone know it’s causing genocide in places like Yemen, the better.
    - foldr 5y ago
      You're going off on a tangent here. By all means criticise Raytheon for the bad things they do. But why criticise their CEO for making a tweet supportive of gay rights? No evidence has been presented that the tweet is not sincere. HN all too often seems prone to spinning complex and sometimes borderline conspiratorial narratives around LGBTQ rights advocacy.
      - atq2119 5y ago
        It's arguably not a tangent but simply a more holistic view. Twitter is a lot of posturing, and the tweet is posturing "look how progressive/ethical/whatever I am". GP is simply pointing out that yes, supporting gay rights is a good thing, but the person overall is still a piece of shit for all the atrocities they implicitly support. The gay rights stance, even if genuine, simply can't balance that out.
        foldr 5y ago
        Yes, of course it is possible to advocate for gay rights and yet also do bad things. Perhaps that was the OP's point, but it seems too obvious to be worth mentioning. You may view the tweet as 'posturing', but we have seen no evidence that it is not the expression of a sincerely held belief. This is the sort of attitude that I was talking about when I said that HN seems to like to spin complex narratives around LGBTQ rights advocacy. Sometimes people speak out for LGBTQ rights because...they support LGBTQ rights. And that's all there is to it. If you don't like other stuff that Raytheon does, then it makes a lot more sense to criticise them for doing that other stuff than it does to spin speculative narratives around the motivation behind their pro-LGBTQ tweets.
      - michaelt 5y ago
        > No evidence has been presented that the tweet is not sincere. Imagine, in the age of chivalry, a lord who arrives at every battle with his forces - but who delays his arrival until the battle is already won, and always joins the winning side. You might well say arriving late is better than not arriving at all. Perhaps there are some last pockets of resistance, you wouldn't turn down his help sweeping those up. Alternately, you might say they are cowardly, insincere opportunists. They ended up on on the right side, but the timing calls their sincerity into doubt. To some people, all LGBTQ 'activism' by Fortune 500 companies looks like this. Especially if their 'activism' doesn't extend to their middle east or russian divisions.
- pydry 5y ago
  I think it's kind of an compromise between the artistic community in Hollywood who usually want to be progressive and capital, which dont want to do anything risky or threatening to powerful/rich people/advertisers. Gay rights and a few other issues satisfy both groups.
- ben_w 5y ago
  That example sounds like pinkwashing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT) Whenever I see someone use “woke” as an insult… it’s been an inconsistent mishmash that matches what was called “political correctness gone mad” when I was a kid — stuff the user doesn’t like but knows better than to say plainly that they don’t like. Of course, I know plenty of people who have used the word “woke” positively, in the same way I know people who respond to “X is PC gone mad” with “X & PC is just being polite to people”. Hard to tell what the common current use is though, given the lack of social connection during the pandemic and living in a non-English speaking country. Online polls have a self-selection bias, but I wouldn’t know in which direction that bias alters results.
  - pydry 5y ago
    It's a word whose meaning is gradually being deradicalized by mass media. Once it stops being about fighting back against the black community being murdered in broad daylight by police or striking for $15/hour and starts being about "unthreatening-to-state-and-capital" topics like pronoun choice and diversity quotas in the C suite it starts to look a bit ridiculous. And thats the point where a lot people start to hear about it and reject what they see.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
For all the feigning of ignorance, 'woke' is well entrenched in in mainstream language now. It would definitely have made it to one of those "word of the year" things within the past few years if it wasn't for wokeism. Urban dictionary can help you out if you really don't know https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woke https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woke Pretending to be bravely battling fascism and tyranny on behalf of the oppressed while censoring for theocratic and communist dictatorships is Hollywood's bread and butter. Not just Hollywood for that matter, a lot of multinational corporations in other industries too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > For all the feigning of ignorance, 'woke' is well entrenched in in mainstream language now. I can't speak for the other person, but the term is so loaded that it's lost meaning, and it seems important to define your meaning if we are going to talk about it. I agree that it's a bit disingenous to just ask for a definition rather than say, 'that term is so loaded; what do you mean by it?'
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    It hasn't lost meaning at all, it's just that some people don't like the meaning so they misrepresent it or pretend not to know what it is. It basically means hypocrisy and/or insincerity toward popular progressive causes. That's the meaning. There's also an older one which has mostly been displaced as far as I'm aware, but if it's still used it also has a pretty well defined meaning. In context, at least in this context, it was not ambiguous which meaning was being used.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > It basically means hypocrisy and/or insincerity toward popular progressive causes. A bizarre claim only made by people who attack progressives.
h0h0h0h0111 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
elefanten 5y ago
> Would love to know what this means. You saying you’re completely baffled by this term, or asking for the poster’s particular meaning? I’d draw a parallel to “White supremacy”. Given the wild range of applications for the term, you need to get a sense of what any one wielder really means. But it’d be quite obtuse to reply “what’s White supremacy?”
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  White supremacy is the belief that white people and whiteness should hold power over black and brown people. No one in my social circles uses “wokeness” at all, certainly never seriously. It always seems like people upset at “wokeness” are actually just upset that people producing popular media support very simple concepts of diversity. Like when black actors get representation in media previously dominated by white people, to me that is just a good thing, but I see reports that many think this is “wokeness”, which they think is bad. This ultimately reveals that they simply do not like it when white people have to share space with people of other skin tones. Their concerns always seem to me to be… misplaced. In other instances the person may be unhappy about female representation, or trans, queer and non-binary representation. Those are all thinks I think are great. I’m non-binary and it’s really meaningful to me. So when someone calls those things “wokeism” I don’t actually see “wokeism” as the problem I see that persons ideas as the problem. Hope that answers your questions!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - CodeGlitch 5y ago
    > Like when black actors get representation in media previously dominated by white people, to me that is just a good thing, but I see reports that many think this is “wokeness”, which they think is bad. In the 90s Will Smith starred in Independence Day, and absolutely no one complained (as far as I know) because Will Smith is awesome and he deserved the role. See also Blade from the same era. People get upset when it's clear that a person has been chosen for a role/position just because of their skin colour/gender/sexuality rather than their talent. I can't actually think of any movies that have done this, but plenty of TV shows (Star Trek Discovery). Obviously some roles require the person to be of a certain race for it to appear authentic. Lots of older films used white actors for middle Eastern roles, which is seen as "white washing" and is therefore wrong. The latest Ghost in the Shell race swapped the main character to be American, and was rightly called out for doing so. Basically we should be allowed to criticize both ways...
jl6 5y ago
> Would love to know what this means. It is a headstone marking the semantic battlefield where competing definitions killed the possibility of clear communication, and now it means nothing.
- davidwritesbugs 5y ago
  I demand you submit this to Urban Dictionary. Its splendind & I'd upvote if that were a thing on HN.
icare_1er 5y ago
It's the name of a fairly recent kind of cult, more or less related to the left, and trying to influence a lot of the political/corporate/cultural world.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  Quoting from Wikipedia: “ Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.” I’m wondering what specifically you disagree with and why that is a cult?
  - gurkendoktor 5y ago
    Before the mid 2010s, we talked about how the 99% could avoid concentration of power and wealth in the 1%. Now the richest and worst companies in the world paste BLM rainbow flags on their website, and suddenly large swaths of society have decided that, coincidentally, the folks with the big money are the good guys, while random middle and lower class people with slightly outdated beliefs are the actual problem. There are many long magazine articles discussing whether wokeness is a religion or cult. Either way, it has completely derailed all political discourse for the benefit of the most privileged (as defined by money). And in the media world, it means that everything is now over-the-top preachy, and that scoring political points has become more important than making good art. Sucks, but at least there are plenty of classic movies to re-watch.
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    Did “woke” actually originate in AAVE instead of whatever the technical term for twitter-speak is?
    - anonfornoreason 5y ago
      I saw it used a bunch in early 2000s to reference hip hop that strongly focused on class struggles, race issues, etc. It was also used in stoner / party culture around that time to describe being in on the secret that the government was bad, capitalism was bad, etc. Maybe directly influenced by the movie “waking life” but not sure on that. I was a stoner party kid and my memories of that time are pretty hazy. The culture was super accepting, early advocates for lgbtq before it was an acronym, etc. I also remember that group being very very accepting of everyone who had good intentions regardless of views. “___ is good people” was what we used to say. Probably why I dislike the modern version of woke so much.
wesleywt 5y ago
Wokeism- any movie that does not involve a white guy being a hero.

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago

vintermann 5y ago

Something like this? https://twitter.com/raytheontech/status/880497266255175685?lang=en https://twitter.com/raytheontech/status/880497266255175685?l... It's not that there's something wrong with gay rights, or any other specific social cause powerful organizations adopt. It's just that it's a very cheap way to win a positive image for things that ... would have trouble getting a positive image if focus was on their core business.

foldr 5y ago
It's possible to be not totally cynical about this stuff. The CEO of Raytheon might very well genuinely support gay rights. After all, many people do. Also, I don't really see the connection between this tweet and Holywood.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  Eh. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/09/yemen-us-made-bomb-used-in-deadly-air-strike-on-civilians/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/09/yemen-us-made... Raytheon lobbies for Mideast arm sales. In the hierarchy of shit they need to be ethical on, LGBTQ rights is not really top of the list. It’s nice though, nonetheless. No connection to Hollywood of course, Raytheon would love nothing more than war never being mentioned. The more they can sell outside of the US and not have anyone know it’s causing genocide in places like Yemen, the better.
  - foldr 5y ago
    You're going off on a tangent here. By all means criticise Raytheon for the bad things they do. But why criticise their CEO for making a tweet supportive of gay rights? No evidence has been presented that the tweet is not sincere. HN all too often seems prone to spinning complex and sometimes borderline conspiratorial narratives around LGBTQ rights advocacy.
    - atq2119 5y ago
      It's arguably not a tangent but simply a more holistic view. Twitter is a lot of posturing, and the tweet is posturing "look how progressive/ethical/whatever I am". GP is simply pointing out that yes, supporting gay rights is a good thing, but the person overall is still a piece of shit for all the atrocities they implicitly support. The gay rights stance, even if genuine, simply can't balance that out.
      - foldr 5y ago
        Yes, of course it is possible to advocate for gay rights and yet also do bad things. Perhaps that was the OP's point, but it seems too obvious to be worth mentioning. You may view the tweet as 'posturing', but we have seen no evidence that it is not the expression of a sincerely held belief. This is the sort of attitude that I was talking about when I said that HN seems to like to spin complex narratives around LGBTQ rights advocacy. Sometimes people speak out for LGBTQ rights because...they support LGBTQ rights. And that's all there is to it. If you don't like other stuff that Raytheon does, then it makes a lot more sense to criticise them for doing that other stuff than it does to spin speculative narratives around the motivation behind their pro-LGBTQ tweets.
    - michaelt 5y ago
      > No evidence has been presented that the tweet is not sincere. Imagine, in the age of chivalry, a lord who arrives at every battle with his forces - but who delays his arrival until the battle is already won, and always joins the winning side. You might well say arriving late is better than not arriving at all. Perhaps there are some last pockets of resistance, you wouldn't turn down his help sweeping those up. Alternately, you might say they are cowardly, insincere opportunists. They ended up on on the right side, but the timing calls their sincerity into doubt. To some people, all LGBTQ 'activism' by Fortune 500 companies looks like this. Especially if their 'activism' doesn't extend to their middle east or russian divisions.
pydry 5y ago
I think it's kind of an compromise between the artistic community in Hollywood who usually want to be progressive and capital, which dont want to do anything risky or threatening to powerful/rich people/advertisers. Gay rights and a few other issues satisfy both groups.
ben_w 5y ago
That example sounds like pinkwashing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing_(LGBT) Whenever I see someone use “woke” as an insult… it’s been an inconsistent mishmash that matches what was called “political correctness gone mad” when I was a kid — stuff the user doesn’t like but knows better than to say plainly that they don’t like. Of course, I know plenty of people who have used the word “woke” positively, in the same way I know people who respond to “X is PC gone mad” with “X & PC is just being polite to people”. Hard to tell what the common current use is though, given the lack of social connection during the pandemic and living in a non-English speaking country. Online polls have a self-selection bias, but I wouldn’t know in which direction that bias alters results.
- pydry 5y ago
  It's a word whose meaning is gradually being deradicalized by mass media. Once it stops being about fighting back against the black community being murdered in broad daylight by police or striking for $15/hour and starts being about "unthreatening-to-state-and-capital" topics like pronoun choice and diversity quotas in the C suite it starts to look a bit ridiculous. And thats the point where a lot people start to hear about it and reject what they see.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

For all the feigning of ignorance, 'woke' is well entrenched in in mainstream language now. It would definitely have made it to one of those "word of the year" things within the past few years if it wasn't for wokeism. Urban dictionary can help you out if you really don't know https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woke https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woke Pretending to be bravely battling fascism and tyranny on behalf of the oppressed while censoring for theocratic and communist dictatorships is Hollywood's bread and butter. Not just Hollywood for that matter, a lot of multinational corporations in other industries too.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wolverine876 5y ago
> For all the feigning of ignorance, 'woke' is well entrenched in in mainstream language now. I can't speak for the other person, but the term is so loaded that it's lost meaning, and it seems important to define your meaning if we are going to talk about it. I agree that it's a bit disingenous to just ask for a definition rather than say, 'that term is so loaded; what do you mean by it?'
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  It hasn't lost meaning at all, it's just that some people don't like the meaning so they misrepresent it or pretend not to know what it is. It basically means hypocrisy and/or insincerity toward popular progressive causes. That's the meaning. There's also an older one which has mostly been displaced as far as I'm aware, but if it's still used it also has a pretty well defined meaning. In context, at least in this context, it was not ambiguous which meaning was being used.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > It basically means hypocrisy and/or insincerity toward popular progressive causes. A bizarre claim only made by people who attack progressives.

h0h0h0h0111 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

elefanten 5y ago

> Would love to know what this means. You saying you’re completely baffled by this term, or asking for the poster’s particular meaning? I’d draw a parallel to “White supremacy”. Given the wild range of applications for the term, you need to get a sense of what any one wielder really means. But it’d be quite obtuse to reply “what’s White supremacy?”

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
White supremacy is the belief that white people and whiteness should hold power over black and brown people. No one in my social circles uses “wokeness” at all, certainly never seriously. It always seems like people upset at “wokeness” are actually just upset that people producing popular media support very simple concepts of diversity. Like when black actors get representation in media previously dominated by white people, to me that is just a good thing, but I see reports that many think this is “wokeness”, which they think is bad. This ultimately reveals that they simply do not like it when white people have to share space with people of other skin tones. Their concerns always seem to me to be… misplaced. In other instances the person may be unhappy about female representation, or trans, queer and non-binary representation. Those are all thinks I think are great. I’m non-binary and it’s really meaningful to me. So when someone calls those things “wokeism” I don’t actually see “wokeism” as the problem I see that persons ideas as the problem. Hope that answers your questions!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  > Like when black actors get representation in media previously dominated by white people, to me that is just a good thing, but I see reports that many think this is “wokeness”, which they think is bad. In the 90s Will Smith starred in Independence Day, and absolutely no one complained (as far as I know) because Will Smith is awesome and he deserved the role. See also Blade from the same era. People get upset when it's clear that a person has been chosen for a role/position just because of their skin colour/gender/sexuality rather than their talent. I can't actually think of any movies that have done this, but plenty of TV shows (Star Trek Discovery). Obviously some roles require the person to be of a certain race for it to appear authentic. Lots of older films used white actors for middle Eastern roles, which is seen as "white washing" and is therefore wrong. The latest Ghost in the Shell race swapped the main character to be American, and was rightly called out for doing so. Basically we should be allowed to criticize both ways...

jl6 5y ago

> Would love to know what this means. It is a headstone marking the semantic battlefield where competing definitions killed the possibility of clear communication, and now it means nothing.

davidwritesbugs 5y ago
I demand you submit this to Urban Dictionary. Its splendind & I'd upvote if that were a thing on HN.

icare_1er 5y ago

It's the name of a fairly recent kind of cult, more or less related to the left, and trying to influence a lot of the political/corporate/cultural world.

kmonsen 5y ago
Quoting from Wikipedia: “ Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.” I’m wondering what specifically you disagree with and why that is a cult?
- gurkendoktor 5y ago
  Before the mid 2010s, we talked about how the 99% could avoid concentration of power and wealth in the 1%. Now the richest and worst companies in the world paste BLM rainbow flags on their website, and suddenly large swaths of society have decided that, coincidentally, the folks with the big money are the good guys, while random middle and lower class people with slightly outdated beliefs are the actual problem. There are many long magazine articles discussing whether wokeness is a religion or cult. Either way, it has completely derailed all political discourse for the benefit of the most privileged (as defined by money). And in the media world, it means that everything is now over-the-top preachy, and that scoring political points has become more important than making good art. Sucks, but at least there are plenty of classic movies to re-watch.
- ryanlol 5y ago
  Did “woke” actually originate in AAVE instead of whatever the technical term for twitter-speak is?
  - anonfornoreason 5y ago
    I saw it used a bunch in early 2000s to reference hip hop that strongly focused on class struggles, race issues, etc. It was also used in stoner / party culture around that time to describe being in on the secret that the government was bad, capitalism was bad, etc. Maybe directly influenced by the movie “waking life” but not sure on that. I was a stoner party kid and my memories of that time are pretty hazy. The culture was super accepting, early advocates for lgbtq before it was an acronym, etc. I also remember that group being very very accepting of everyone who had good intentions regardless of views. “___ is good people” was what we used to say. Probably why I dislike the modern version of woke so much.

wesleywt 5y ago

Wokeism- any movie that does not involve a white guy being a hero.