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Doctor Hammer's avatar

I think a fair question is "If you don't want us to use the word Woke, what should we call it?" This might be a little more salient in the US where woke has become a bit of a negative, but there is something that needs to be talked about, and it needs a term to refer to it so that we don't have to list all the related beliefs and habits of the movement. I think that if someone wants to consider woke to be "just being nice" then they need to differentiate that from the other set by some sort of terminology. I doubt they will, because woke as nice vs woke as oppression are just the bailey and motte of the same the ideology, but maybe there will be a big split where the crazy woke separate from the "look, just be nice to people" woke. It has happened before, so one can hope.

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Rikard's avatar

It used to be called being politically correct, which is a term originating with Lenin and was used among "lefties" (despicable term, as if politics canbe measured with a slide ruler between left and right - nonsense and such) as a completely unironic term for being right, ideologically and therefore also factually.

During the 1970s, it came to be used more and more as a slur for precisely the kind of twit, twat and idiot what thinks ideology trumps reality or that reality is some kind of social construct - it's ok when we're 14 or so but not not when we're older than that. That's not to say you can't be marxist - old timey marxists where generally very well read and studied, it's just that their ideology simply doesn't work that's the problem (oh, and the wars and genocide trying to make it work always causes).

And so during the 1990s it sinks into the piss and mire of terminology to be replaced by woke, which means the exact same thing, only woke being even more shallow, anti-intelligence, and anti-facts. Woke is the (possibly) ultimate form of linguistic authoitarianism in thatit defers any and all thought, knowledge and so on to this:

"Has virtuous and morally and peer-approved social authority said that A equals Fnord? Then A is Fnord. Until said authority or higher such says differently: then what they say will be how it has always been."

The purpose of woke is to create followers, and only that.

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