5 ms·

The "gone too far" wokeism stuff seems to be openly mocked, almost everywhere, all the time. Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying

The "gone too far" wokeism stuff seems to be openly mocked, almost everywhere, all the time. Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Those posts get shared 100x more by people mocking them than by people agreeing with them. Maybe you could give an example of something specific?

zozbot234 5y ago
That still doesn't disprove wokeism's influence on the whole "things you can't say" dynamic. Leo Strauss has famously pointed out that censored ideas often end up being conveyed in a disguised manner, generally involving some kind of reverse psychology where a purposely clumsy or hyperbolic argument for X is used as a signal of believing not-X. So it may be that these seemingly "extreme woke" ideas are being purposely targeted to an unsuspecting Twitter audience as a broader challenge to wokeism itself, and that much of the mockery simply misses the point.
commandlinefan 5y ago
That’s like saying “I tried to kill you, but you survived, so what are you complaining about?” The Twitter mob has ruined lives and is doing everything they can to ruin the ones they target.
humanistbot 5y ago
> Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Do a thought experiment: Your company is a player in a certain language/framework ecosystem (python, react, whatever). As part of that, many of your employees attend and sometimes host meetups for that ecosystem. A fellow highly-involved meetup organizer from another company announces that they are transitioning gender, and that they would like to be called by a new name. Almost everyone does. A few people make mistakes, but are sincere and apologize -- they want to do better, but memory pathways are hard. But one employee at your company objects to using their new name and pronouns on moral grounds. They keep using the organizer's dead name and old pronouns, and when they are asked to use their new name, they refuse. Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?
- rspeele 5y ago
  > Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession? No, that is rude. Calling it violence remains ridiculous hyperbole.
  - thelopa 5y ago
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violent https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violent I would describe that experience for the trans person as a “vehement feeling or expression”, and inflicting a violent state on someone qualifies as “an instance of violent treatment or procedure”.
    - rspeele 5y ago
      I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Sure, words can be used in less literal context, like "an ocean of thoughts swirled violently in his head". But simply declaring "deadnaming is violence" because it causes "vehement feeling or expression", would make millions of things violence. Your partner breaking up with you is violence. Your boss giving you a bad performance review is violence. Etc.
      - civilized 5y ago
        These are good illustrations of the problem with the popular "NYT op-ed" type arguments for the claim "speech that upsets someone is violence". These folks argue (with scientific citations!) that words can cause physical pain and stress, and that actions that cause such things are basically tantamount to violence. What's the difference, right? If I feel bad, what does it matter whether you said mean words to me or you punched me? The problem is, words can cause stress in all sorts of situations because social interactions can be inherently stressful. There is no non-stressful way to end a relationship or deliver a bad performance review. But sometimes it needs to be done. Punching someone is extremely different. It's not at all something that normally has to be done, unless perhaps you were just punched first. Physical violence is fundamentally different from speech because speech has an absolutely vital dual purpose of communication, which physical violence doesn't have. To avoid calling a huge variety of legitimate speech acts violence, we'd have to redefine violence in some tortured way, like "stuff that causes harm and stress unless it was necessary/justified". I don't think we should redefine the most emotionally salient words in the English language just so that activists' favorite slogans can be retroactively deemed logical.
VirusNewbie 5y ago
Sure. There have been numerous mainstream articles as well as a recent segment on John Oliver that liken teaching CRT to teaching about the fact racism exists. This is becoming a mainstream viewpoint, that "banning CRT" in classrooms is banning talk of racism. None of these articles mention any of the more controversial CRT viewpoints that you can find by...reading the wikipedia article. It isn't exactly a hidden secret that CRT purports that any racial disparities must be due to systemic racism, though we can use some logic to quickly falsify some its main beliefs.
paulpauper 5y ago
employers have much more power than individuals. even if the public is mostly opposed to wokeism , companies, fed. govt., and universities still seem intent on pushing it.
lubesGordi 5y ago
Openly mocked? Definitely not. I know someone who knows someone who ran an art gallery on the west coast. Most of the artists were black and the gallerist was a white man. At one point he made some offhanded remark that "don't worry, the white artists have an area over there..." Guess what happened to his career after? These stories are everywhere, and are why people think things have gone too far.
bob34 5y ago
“Transwomen are women” is a religious precept on the left yet the overwhelming majority of people can see the obvious truth that they are in fact men in dresses with a serious disturbing sexual fetish.
- rspeele 5y ago
  The overwhelming majority of people just don't care at all. What does it matter to me if you want to dress as a woman and be called "she"? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Life is very short and if somebody finds that way of living theirs to be fulfilling, I see no reason to waste mine being agitated by it.
  - ManuelKiessling 5y ago
    There are two comments above mine, one by a person who has learned some very important life lessons and is at peace with himself and the world, and one by – someone else.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bob34 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Is there any adult alive who does not have a potentially disturbing sexual fetish? Even "asexuals" get tarred that way. So, you cannot distinguish them on that basis, even where it is true. (I know a trans person who is also a furry. Figure that one out!) It is of course possible that some subset of trans people are as you say. Is it your business to sort out which are and which are not? What will you say about a trans person who is also "ace"? It is far from uncommon for people to come out as trans in their 70s, long after fetishes have lost their grip on most people. So, if you are among that "overwhelming majority", you are just obviously wrong, on several counts.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Isn't deadnaming a trans person literally a bannable offense on Twitter? https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18113344/twitter-trans-user-hateful-content-misgendering-deadnaming-ban https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18113344/twitter-trans-u...
- jkubicek 5y ago
  Twitter (rightfully, imho) banned target harassment campaigns, not some coworker accidentally using the wrong pronoun.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Is there anything not a bannable offense on Twitter? I pre-banned myself just for existing, and am happy to have done it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

zozbot234 5y ago

That still doesn't disprove wokeism's influence on the whole "things you can't say" dynamic. Leo Strauss has famously pointed out that censored ideas often end up being conveyed in a disguised manner, generally involving some kind of reverse psychology where a purposely clumsy or hyperbolic argument for X is used as a signal of believing not-X. So it may be that these seemingly "extreme woke" ideas are being purposely targeted to an unsuspecting Twitter audience as a broader challenge to wokeism itself, and that much of the mockery simply misses the point.

commandlinefan 5y ago

That’s like saying “I tried to kill you, but you survived, so what are you complaining about?” The Twitter mob has ruined lives and is doing everything they can to ruin the ones they target.

humanistbot 5y ago

> Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Do a thought experiment: Your company is a player in a certain language/framework ecosystem (python, react, whatever). As part of that, many of your employees attend and sometimes host meetups for that ecosystem. A fellow highly-involved meetup organizer from another company announces that they are transitioning gender, and that they would like to be called by a new name. Almost everyone does. A few people make mistakes, but are sincere and apologize -- they want to do better, but memory pathways are hard. But one employee at your company objects to using their new name and pronouns on moral grounds. They keep using the organizer's dead name and old pronouns, and when they are asked to use their new name, they refuse. Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

rspeele 5y ago
> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession? No, that is rude. Calling it violence remains ridiculous hyperbole.
- thelopa 5y ago
  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violent https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violent I would describe that experience for the trans person as a “vehement feeling or expression”, and inflicting a violent state on someone qualifies as “an instance of violent treatment or procedure”.
  - rspeele 5y ago
    I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Sure, words can be used in less literal context, like "an ocean of thoughts swirled violently in his head". But simply declaring "deadnaming is violence" because it causes "vehement feeling or expression", would make millions of things violence. Your partner breaking up with you is violence. Your boss giving you a bad performance review is violence. Etc.
    - civilized 5y ago
      These are good illustrations of the problem with the popular "NYT op-ed" type arguments for the claim "speech that upsets someone is violence". These folks argue (with scientific citations!) that words can cause physical pain and stress, and that actions that cause such things are basically tantamount to violence. What's the difference, right? If I feel bad, what does it matter whether you said mean words to me or you punched me? The problem is, words can cause stress in all sorts of situations because social interactions can be inherently stressful. There is no non-stressful way to end a relationship or deliver a bad performance review. But sometimes it needs to be done. Punching someone is extremely different. It's not at all something that normally has to be done, unless perhaps you were just punched first. Physical violence is fundamentally different from speech because speech has an absolutely vital dual purpose of communication, which physical violence doesn't have. To avoid calling a huge variety of legitimate speech acts violence, we'd have to redefine violence in some tortured way, like "stuff that causes harm and stress unless it was necessary/justified". I don't think we should redefine the most emotionally salient words in the English language just so that activists' favorite slogans can be retroactively deemed logical.

VirusNewbie 5y ago

Sure. There have been numerous mainstream articles as well as a recent segment on John Oliver that liken teaching CRT to teaching about the fact racism exists. This is becoming a mainstream viewpoint, that "banning CRT" in classrooms is banning talk of racism. None of these articles mention any of the more controversial CRT viewpoints that you can find by...reading the wikipedia article. It isn't exactly a hidden secret that CRT purports that any racial disparities must be due to systemic racism, though we can use some logic to quickly falsify some its main beliefs.

paulpauper 5y ago

employers have much more power than individuals. even if the public is mostly opposed to wokeism , companies, fed. govt., and universities still seem intent on pushing it.

lubesGordi 5y ago

Openly mocked? Definitely not. I know someone who knows someone who ran an art gallery on the west coast. Most of the artists were black and the gallerist was a white man. At one point he made some offhanded remark that "don't worry, the white artists have an area over there..." Guess what happened to his career after? These stories are everywhere, and are why people think things have gone too far.

bob34 5y ago

“Transwomen are women” is a religious precept on the left yet the overwhelming majority of people can see the obvious truth that they are in fact men in dresses with a serious disturbing sexual fetish.

rspeele 5y ago
The overwhelming majority of people just don't care at all. What does it matter to me if you want to dress as a woman and be called "she"? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Life is very short and if somebody finds that way of living theirs to be fulfilling, I see no reason to waste mine being agitated by it.
- ManuelKiessling 5y ago
  There are two comments above mine, one by a person who has learned some very important life lessons and is at peace with himself and the world, and one by – someone else.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bob34 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ncmncm 5y ago
Is there any adult alive who does not have a potentially disturbing sexual fetish? Even "asexuals" get tarred that way. So, you cannot distinguish them on that basis, even where it is true. (I know a trans person who is also a furry. Figure that one out!) It is of course possible that some subset of trans people are as you say. Is it your business to sort out which are and which are not? What will you say about a trans person who is also "ace"? It is far from uncommon for people to come out as trans in their 70s, long after fetishes have lost their grip on most people. So, if you are among that "overwhelming majority", you are just obviously wrong, on several counts.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Isn't deadnaming a trans person literally a bannable offense on Twitter? https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18113344/twitter-trans-user-hateful-content-misgendering-deadnaming-ban https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18113344/twitter-trans-u...

jkubicek 5y ago
Twitter (rightfully, imho) banned target harassment campaigns, not some coworker accidentally using the wrong pronoun.
ncmncm 5y ago
Is there anything not a bannable offense on Twitter? I pre-banned myself just for existing, and am happy to have done it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]