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> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the cul

> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part. That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem. I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".

diggan 2y ago
> PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part: > But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do. It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad. > Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem. Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?
- petsfed 2y ago
  PG says >Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism. Is that really your charitable reading of the part you quoted? In my mind, a charitable reading would be that he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be. I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me. It is a divisive topic already, we would all be better off trying to understand as well as we can before replying.
    - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
      > he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be Who is "the woke"? How big do they think big is? How does PG know what this nebulous group all agrees upon? How big of an issue does he think it is, as far as actions to be taken? Is "the woke" just anyone who disagrees with him here? Not specifying any meaning makes it literally a meaningless, divisive (us vs. them), dismissive statement on racism at best, and at worst, rhetoric to baselessly paint my opponent as more extreme than myself, because I am of course precisely the correct amount of reasonable. A rebuttal in similar style would be "racism is actually a problem larger than thought by those who think it isn't", which you may notice is also meaningless and dismissive.
      - Levitz 2y ago
        Pretty much all of that is answered if you actually read the article.
        petsfed 2y ago
        I just read the article, and I can conclusively say that no, he does not explain how big a problem racism actually is, he claims that its all humanities professors and students (my experience as a physics and engineering student prior to 2015 suggests otherwise), nor does he explain why he is such an expert on what "the woke" all believe. What he does do is explain at length how unfair it is that offenses he considers minor are now grounds for termination. See one of my other comments for details about why professors need to be particularly aware of the hostile environment they can create by dint of being in a position of considerable power over their students.
- vannevar 2y ago
  I don't think anyone reading this article would conclude that PG believes racism is a bigger problem than wokism. Which wildly diminishes the actual real-world impact of racism and wildly exaggerates the actual real world impact of wokism.
  - bpt3 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > designed to appease (and in some cases enrich) a very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population. Note that the people enriched here aren't the poor minorities, it are the self proclaimed leaders of these movements that gets high positions in governments and companies and thus enrich themselves. There is no value in making those grifters richer, even though there is value in helping poor people.
    - vannevar 2y ago
      Is it an "enormous amount of resources"? How do you think it compares to the amount of resources historically put into racism, including all the waste and lost opportunity costs? In my experience, most people complaining about wokism are projecting their own annoyance at language policing into some kind of massive social problem. But I'm open-minded, and if you have a good argument that the resources put into wokism far outweigh the losses from racism, I'm happy to listen. PG's essay makes no effort to present that argument.
      - bpt3 2y ago
        [flagged]
        vannevar 2y ago
        So your point isn't so much that language policing costs a lot, it's that it doesn't provide any value. But what if it does? What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior? Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights? What about slurs against gays, or Jews? Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?
SoftTalker 2y ago
> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. Wow that's not my memory of the 90s at all. We're talking about the decade when Loveline with Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla was a popular MTV show?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Cable has always pushed the boundaries a bit. I remember pearl clutching over The Simpsons in the early 90s, to the point where Bush Sr. got involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors
  - connicpu 2y ago
    My mom was a teacher around that time, the school instructed her to stay on guard against kids who were watching the show
- evilduck 2y ago
  Loveline, the show that wasn't allowed to air before 11pm EST due to the same Christian sensibilities, yes.
wing-_-nuts 2y ago
>it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r I still have to remind myself that this refers to the racial slur and not an intellectual one. One of the funniest moments of 2024 for me was watching an episode of the wan show where linus admitted he'd used 'the hard r' in the past. His co host (Lucas?) was visibly taken aback. Like, color drained from his face. As linus goes on about how *tard used to be acceptable when he was younger you see it slowly dawn on Lucas that Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means and the relief that his boss isn't some sort of avowed racist is palpable.
- tivert 2y ago
  > Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means I don't either. What does it mean?
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    "Nigga" as used in songs etc. vs the full N-word.
    - earnestinger 2y ago
      Where is the “r”?
      - davorak 2y ago
        Simple wikipedia seems like a good source to explain this https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger > However, in the late 20th century, the word was seen as a hurtful racial slur in English. It was called hate speech. "Nigger" was seen as very offensive to say or hear which caused many to not use the word at all. They instead called the word "The N-Word". It is said with a "hard R", because the word ends in 'er' instead of 'a', as in the word "nigga".
        earnestinger 2y ago
        So -a is more polite than -er? Really? I mean rap songs and movies have both, as far as I can tell they are used interchangeably. Any chance the distinction existed long time ago and now it does not anymore? (Im not from US)
mapontosevenths 2y ago
> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. I read the entire article hoping it would acknowledge that the rightwing moral majority invented, or at least popularized, much of the behavior the article decries. For example, I went in expecting it to touch on the rights version of newspeak and cancel culture (see Freedom Fries and the Dixie Chicks for memorable examples). It was strangely silent in that regard.
- Levitz 2y ago
  But he is talking about the phenomenon at large and Christians are literally the first example he gives: >In Victorian England it was Christian virtue He even references what you talk about later: >One big contributing factor in the rise of political correctness was the lack of other things to be morally pure about. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
  - stevenAthompson 2y ago
    He does contrast what he calls "wokeness" with a sort of Christian prudishness ("prig") several times, and even says that it's the same sort of person responsible. However, both sides are not treated equally throughout the text. For example, he talks about the impact of the Bud Light thing on Anheuser Busch, but he doesn't acknowledge that the backlash was itself a perfect example of cancel culture. Your mob and my mob are both mobs, but he paints one angry mob as righteous pushback and the other as priggish busybodies. Regardless, it was a well formed piece that caused me to think. I just think the argument would have been more compelling if it had been offered from a more neutral frame.
    - Earw0rm 2y ago
      This. I mean, he says that comedy defeated political correctness on the years up to 2000, but then entirely omits what happened in comedy immediately afterwards. Love a bit of no-holds-barred 00's comedy.. well, some of it.. but I don't think anyone should find it surprising that there was a cultural backlash. "You can offend anyone as long as you offend everyone" was the rule of the day, which failed to account for some having much thicker skins than others. It's also worth noting that up until about 2008, free speech was broadly identified with progressive/Left views not conservative/Right. I'm not sure when or why exactly the right lost interest in censoring sex and violence in the media, but they quietly let that drop just around the time the left became more censorious. Now for me personally, the kind of populist-conservative that hangs out with strippers whilst pursuing abortion bans is the worst kind of hypocrite, but I guess for a lot of people it's something more like wish-fulfilment.
rayiner 2y ago
> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part. Yes, but this is also the part that glues together the larger coalition of people left of center. Racially segregated affinity groups and affirmative action are the thing that AOC and Jamie Dimon can agree on. A 2022 poll showed that something like 20% of Biden 2020 voters would pick Liz Cheney in a three-way race with Trump. The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives who are willing to put up with woke stuff. Including Paul Graham himself. If Fetterman comes out and says we are going to ban racially segregated affinity groups, and the compromise is he’ll raise my taxes to pay for more healthcare services, I’d vote for that. But my experience with the last 10 years is that team blue never raised my taxes but did recruit my daughter into a “BIPOC” group. The policy is what it does, as they say.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives Dependent on them for what, exactly?
  - rayiner 2y ago
    For votes: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-premise-poll-liz-cheney-receives-nearly-20-support-in-three-way-contest-with-biden-trump-301623817.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-premise-poll-li... (“Among Democratic voters, Biden leads Cheney 61% to 39%.”). My historically red county in Maryland went 55-41 for Harris, but 55-43 for Larry Hogan. It’s full of woke Romney 2012 voters.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Behind so many anti-lefty beliefs, there’s simply a man feeling like he lost control of some specific woman :( Seriously, it’s quite a pattern!
throw_a_grenade 2y ago
> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to [...] That's precisely the point: the function of the word "inclusive" mentioned in TFA, or several related like "diversity" was twisted for the purpose of waging culture war. (E.g. Biden had some "most diverse" team somewere, and it meant 0% men, didn't it.) The purpose of the culture war was to drop entire chain of thought not aligned with current heresy.
giardini 2y ago
"hard-r"? I've lived in the South all my life, worked with blacks and whites, gone to college and this HN post is the first time I've seen/heard the expression "hard-r". I now believe "hard-r" is regional slang, since it appears to be (at least) a west-coast expression [the Linus recording convinced me] but rare in the South.

diggan 2y ago

> PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part: > But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do. It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad. > Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem. Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?

petsfed 2y ago
PG says >Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
- diggan 2y ago
  > I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism. Is that really your charitable reading of the part you quoted? In my mind, a charitable reading would be that he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be. I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me. It is a divisive topic already, we would all be better off trying to understand as well as we can before replying.
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    > he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be Who is "the woke"? How big do they think big is? How does PG know what this nebulous group all agrees upon? How big of an issue does he think it is, as far as actions to be taken? Is "the woke" just anyone who disagrees with him here? Not specifying any meaning makes it literally a meaningless, divisive (us vs. them), dismissive statement on racism at best, and at worst, rhetoric to baselessly paint my opponent as more extreme than myself, because I am of course precisely the correct amount of reasonable. A rebuttal in similar style would be "racism is actually a problem larger than thought by those who think it isn't", which you may notice is also meaningless and dismissive.
    - Levitz 2y ago
      Pretty much all of that is answered if you actually read the article.
      - petsfed 2y ago
        I just read the article, and I can conclusively say that no, he does not explain how big a problem racism actually is, he claims that its all humanities professors and students (my experience as a physics and engineering student prior to 2015 suggests otherwise), nor does he explain why he is such an expert on what "the woke" all believe. What he does do is explain at length how unfair it is that offenses he considers minor are now grounds for termination. See one of my other comments for details about why professors need to be particularly aware of the hostile environment they can create by dint of being in a position of considerable power over their students.
vannevar 2y ago
I don't think anyone reading this article would conclude that PG believes racism is a bigger problem than wokism. Which wildly diminishes the actual real-world impact of racism and wildly exaggerates the actual real world impact of wokism.
- bpt3 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > designed to appease (and in some cases enrich) a very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population. Note that the people enriched here aren't the poor minorities, it are the self proclaimed leaders of these movements that gets high positions in governments and companies and thus enrich themselves. There is no value in making those grifters richer, even though there is value in helping poor people.
  - vannevar 2y ago
    Is it an "enormous amount of resources"? How do you think it compares to the amount of resources historically put into racism, including all the waste and lost opportunity costs? In my experience, most people complaining about wokism are projecting their own annoyance at language policing into some kind of massive social problem. But I'm open-minded, and if you have a good argument that the resources put into wokism far outweigh the losses from racism, I'm happy to listen. PG's essay makes no effort to present that argument.
    - bpt3 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - vannevar 2y ago
        So your point isn't so much that language policing costs a lot, it's that it doesn't provide any value. But what if it does? What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior? Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights? What about slurs against gays, or Jews? Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?

SoftTalker 2y ago

> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. Wow that's not my memory of the 90s at all. We're talking about the decade when Loveline with Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla was a popular MTV show?

ceejayoz 2y ago
Cable has always pushed the boundaries a bit. I remember pearl clutching over The Simpsons in the early 90s, to the point where Bush Sr. got involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors
- connicpu 2y ago
  My mom was a teacher around that time, the school instructed her to stay on guard against kids who were watching the show
evilduck 2y ago
Loveline, the show that wasn't allowed to air before 11pm EST due to the same Christian sensibilities, yes.

wing-_-nuts 2y ago

>it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r I still have to remind myself that this refers to the racial slur and not an intellectual one. One of the funniest moments of 2024 for me was watching an episode of the wan show where linus admitted he'd used 'the hard r' in the past. His co host (Lucas?) was visibly taken aback. Like, color drained from his face. As linus goes on about how *tard used to be acceptable when he was younger you see it slowly dawn on Lucas that Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means and the relief that his boss isn't some sort of avowed racist is palpable.

tivert 2y ago
> Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means I don't either. What does it mean?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  "Nigga" as used in songs etc. vs the full N-word.
  - earnestinger 2y ago
    Where is the “r”?
    - davorak 2y ago
      Simple wikipedia seems like a good source to explain this https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger > However, in the late 20th century, the word was seen as a hurtful racial slur in English. It was called hate speech. "Nigger" was seen as very offensive to say or hear which caused many to not use the word at all. They instead called the word "The N-Word". It is said with a "hard R", because the word ends in 'er' instead of 'a', as in the word "nigga".
      - earnestinger 2y ago
        So -a is more polite than -er? Really? I mean rap songs and movies have both, as far as I can tell they are used interchangeably. Any chance the distinction existed long time ago and now it does not anymore? (Im not from US)

mapontosevenths 2y ago

> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. I read the entire article hoping it would acknowledge that the rightwing moral majority invented, or at least popularized, much of the behavior the article decries. For example, I went in expecting it to touch on the rights version of newspeak and cancel culture (see Freedom Fries and the Dixie Chicks for memorable examples). It was strangely silent in that regard.

Levitz 2y ago
But he is talking about the phenomenon at large and Christians are literally the first example he gives: >In Victorian England it was Christian virtue He even references what you talk about later: >One big contributing factor in the rise of political correctness was the lack of other things to be morally pure about. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
- stevenAthompson 2y ago
  He does contrast what he calls "wokeness" with a sort of Christian prudishness ("prig") several times, and even says that it's the same sort of person responsible. However, both sides are not treated equally throughout the text. For example, he talks about the impact of the Bud Light thing on Anheuser Busch, but he doesn't acknowledge that the backlash was itself a perfect example of cancel culture. Your mob and my mob are both mobs, but he paints one angry mob as righteous pushback and the other as priggish busybodies. Regardless, it was a well formed piece that caused me to think. I just think the argument would have been more compelling if it had been offered from a more neutral frame.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    This. I mean, he says that comedy defeated political correctness on the years up to 2000, but then entirely omits what happened in comedy immediately afterwards. Love a bit of no-holds-barred 00's comedy.. well, some of it.. but I don't think anyone should find it surprising that there was a cultural backlash. "You can offend anyone as long as you offend everyone" was the rule of the day, which failed to account for some having much thicker skins than others. It's also worth noting that up until about 2008, free speech was broadly identified with progressive/Left views not conservative/Right. I'm not sure when or why exactly the right lost interest in censoring sex and violence in the media, but they quietly let that drop just around the time the left became more censorious. Now for me personally, the kind of populist-conservative that hangs out with strippers whilst pursuing abortion bans is the worst kind of hypocrite, but I guess for a lot of people it's something more like wish-fulfilment.

rayiner 2y ago

> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part. Yes, but this is also the part that glues together the larger coalition of people left of center. Racially segregated affinity groups and affirmative action are the thing that AOC and Jamie Dimon can agree on. A 2022 poll showed that something like 20% of Biden 2020 voters would pick Liz Cheney in a three-way race with Trump. The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives who are willing to put up with woke stuff. Including Paul Graham himself. If Fetterman comes out and says we are going to ban racially segregated affinity groups, and the compromise is he’ll raise my taxes to pay for more healthcare services, I’d vote for that. But my experience with the last 10 years is that team blue never raised my taxes but did recruit my daughter into a “BIPOC” group. The policy is what it does, as they say.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives Dependent on them for what, exactly?
- rayiner 2y ago
  For votes: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-premise-poll-liz-cheney-receives-nearly-20-support-in-three-way-contest-with-biden-trump-301623817.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-premise-poll-li... (“Among Democratic voters, Biden leads Cheney 61% to 39%.”). My historically red county in Maryland went 55-41 for Harris, but 55-43 for Larry Hogan. It’s full of woke Romney 2012 voters.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
llamaimperative 2y ago
Behind so many anti-lefty beliefs, there’s simply a man feeling like he lost control of some specific woman :( Seriously, it’s quite a pattern!

throw_a_grenade 2y ago

> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to [...] That's precisely the point: the function of the word "inclusive" mentioned in TFA, or several related like "diversity" was twisted for the purpose of waging culture war. (E.g. Biden had some "most diverse" team somewere, and it meant 0% men, didn't it.) The purpose of the culture war was to drop entire chain of thought not aligned with current heresy.

giardini 2y ago

"hard-r"? I've lived in the South all my life, worked with blacks and whites, gone to college and this HN post is the first time I've seen/heard the expression "hard-r". I now believe "hard-r" is regional slang, since it appears to be (at least) a west-coast expression [the Linus recording convinced me] but rare in the South.