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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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Hence 'the trouble with labels'. Perhaps what I didn't make clearer is that I'm mainly talking about how in British discourse it's a much more moderate notion than it seems to be in the US. Remember that Freddie deBoer piece a while ago that asked 'what the hell are we meant to call it if you don't like the term Woke'? You're asking the same thing and I don't have an answer. Of course, all of this speaks to the problem I see with ideologies instead of picking individual ideas out as worth pursuing.

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Ah! I was wondering why that question popped into my head so readily :) It probably came from the deBoer piece.

I agree that picking apart ideas is much more important than the ideologies as a whole when working with them. I wish we could get a better classification system for ideas other than "what people called X think". It is a nice overlap if there are some core ideas that the ideology holds onto that lead logically to the rest of the ideas, but that's a rare bird, especially in politics where it is more just "who can I favor to get enough votes?"

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I think of ideologies as ‘bundled’ products. You buy the thing you wanted & then you’re saddled with the set. It’s funny that refusing to do this is labelled as heterodox.

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Agreed, that's a nice way of putting it. I was half writing a paper a few years back about voting behavior. The idea was to model people's political orientation as a multi-agent system, where each voter has 1 or 2 issues they care about, pick their political party based on that, then sort of adopt the other issues of the party by osmosis as they reduce cognitive dissonance and ideological distance with other party members around the other issues. So maybe Dave cares about gun control, so he votes Republican. He doesn't start out caring about abortion etc. but since he votes for politicians who argue against abortion, and associates himself with the team of other people who care about abortion, he changes his position to match theirs over time. The main idea was that people are only firm about a few policy issues they really care about, but were pretty flexible about the rest, and that explains shifts in voting behavior between parties over time as the parties move about a bit in terms of their positions, or groups that care about things change over time due to aging etc.

Turned out to be an interesting model but hard to narrow down enough to make a paper out of, but I think it explains a lot of the oddities with ideologies: ideologies are used by political rulers to garner support, and don't often need to be consistent because most people don't care if they are. No one starts from the root principles and works out (almost no one), they rather start with a pile of stuff they want to believe and try to work out principles that will allow for it. If it doesn't quite work out perfectly, eh, just keep believing what they want.

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Bloody hell, I just posted exactly the same sentiment on a different article of yours.

I mean, it does my head in, labels for everything and the whole I am A and you are B so therefore I am super and you are shit reasoning.

(Not you obviously BTW)

The Brexit thing was ridiculous in that it totally divided people, friends and families and for what at the end of the day?

Who bloody knows??

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I think it's worth digging in your heels and being a bit of an asshole about it in general, because the idea of "mandatory niceness" isn't a trivial or good thing, either. The motte here has cavalry spikes and boiling oil, too.

I don't want to be COMPELLED to "just be nice" at any time, for any reason. There are people and values and views I find repugnant, and I want to be able to criticize them, even if it hurts their feelings for me to do so.

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That's true too. I find there is a lot too much interest in being nice and avoiding any confrontation at work, resulting in a lot of unacceptable things just sliding by. Possibly just where I work, but it really is maddening that no one takes responsibility to pass a judgement and do the requisite shaking the shit out of the people who need to shape up.

Culturally, I think that 'go along to get along so you don't get signaled out as not nice" habit results in things like never being able to point out that people's disappointments in life might be a result of their own shortcomings, not someone else's. The SAT isn't racist, you just can't read or do math above a 6th grade level sort of thing. I saw that a lot when teaching, students who apparently were just continuously passed along who just couldn't read, write or do basic math yet somehow were freshmen in college. Can't fail students, because you might hurt their self esteem, I suppose?

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Dishonesty is baked into social engineering and codifying speech norms.

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You've got that right.

Here's the part of it that often intrigues me when I brawl with woke shit: what's the difference between the "natural" (am I biased even saying that?) and positive (in that it enhances descriptive value and communicative ease) evolution of language vs. social engineering/newspeak? Is it simply the absence of intentional design?

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That's a big part of it, but I was thinking more about the evolution of explicitly coercive aspects of "enforced niceness." In the examples that you give, the explicit threat for most people isn't really that "you might hurt their self-esteem" but that "you might find yourself in an adversarial meeting with HR, lose your job, and get blacklisted in your entire field."

I am very, very suspicious of the increase in words like "be kind," and "be nice," which is ironic, because outside of my online persona I'm both of those things. When I hear them as things I'm being told to do, what my mind tells me is, "this person has a VERY specific idea of what 'nice' or 'kind' constitutes that they expect differs from yours, or they wouldn't be making that unsolicited request, and they're going to do whatever they have to to make certain you conform to it."

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I react similarly. If someone is a dick in real life I’ll usually roll with it because I don’t know what fresh hell has emerged in their life. But make that a rule and you can fuck off.

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There are social circumstances where I don't give any quarter because I'm afraid of being perceived as weak in that moment usually due to perceived danger. This is probably a gender divide.

But typically, I give people ONE, and then notice a pattern. I'll still point out that they're being a dick the first time, though. I'm just likely to be reasonably polite about it.

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I am reminded of Rand's admonition to "forgive, but don't forget." I'd say that is wise, because to make proper judgements of people's behavior you have to take their previous behavior into account. Everyone has bad days but when every day is a bad day, well... it probably isn't the day that is bad :)

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That's another good point, assuming I am getting it correctly :) "Nice" and "kind" seem to be going through a cultural shift in terms of what counts, and as you say it is a very specific form of behavior they have in mind. I think at root it is redefining the back end definition so the front end request is more palatable to force people to do. Effectively redefining "moral behavior" to be "whatever my religion demands, including the really specific and finicky bits", then saying "Look, man, I am just acting that you behave morally. Are you really saying you don't need to be moral?" Nice and kind are used because some time ago we all started to agree that moral behavior was hard, but nice and kind, well everyone agrees on that right?

People man...

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You summed it up perfectly as a cultural shift. "Kind" and "nice" has become conflated with an absence of criticism, disagreement, or self-advancement.

It is then, as you said, a "why wouldn't you vote for the Build Back Better plan? Are you saying you DON'T want to build back better? Why do you hate America?"

Is there a word for this? Disingenuously naming things so that disagreement makes you rhetorically kick puppies? There must be a name for this. Or should be.

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I call it triangulation.

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Ok, Rollins responds:

"Okay. This is actually kind of complicated. What you're describing is based on the framing. The two relevant terms are "sense" and "reference." Example: The Morning Star and Venus are the same reference but a different sense; both refer to the same thing, but the language that is used to describe that thing is different. Similarly, the Morning Star and Lucifer are the same reference, different sense. The example you're describing is weaponizing the difference between sense and reference; it's exploiting the fact that there are naming conventions in a familiar social language that are explicitly benign, and using those conventions to refer to an ambiguous or malign institution. Basically, this is an intentional usage of of Shiri's Scissor.

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/facebook-is-shiris-scissor?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

"

Rollins to the rescue!

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Let me send up the Rollins Signal... there has to be a word for it, if only because it has been a staple of how legislation gets named for like 60 years.

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I like the term "Kafka trap".

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You are only kind if what you say agrees exactly with my predetermined opinion of kindness otherwise you are a big meanie and I shall make sure everyone knows it.

Is that the sort of thing you mean?

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The argument that the act of questioning the efficacy or value of alleged acts of "kindness" intrinsically constitutes "unkindness," but also that "kindness" necessarily involves acting to one's own detriment without protest or complaint (again, while not questioning the efficacy of the act).

The position wrongly synonymizes unthinking self-sacrifice with kindness and its absence with unkindness.

Maybe the Earth would use fewer resources if I were dead. But I'm not going to kill myself for the Earth's benefit, and I reject a framework that says that makes me immoral.

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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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My perception of PC was more of a counterweight to the casually racist & misogynistic cultural environment in which I grew up. No longer calling Brits with brown skin (for example) 'pakis' was, I still believe, a necessary advance. Or joking about 'women drivers'. PC was a correction, to establish more respect and equality, whereas Wokeism (in the US sense) is unhelpfully belligerent and determined to crush the less 'enlightened' who also happen to be those who have been abandoned by the left.

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I am beginning to think you are stealing my thoughts a bit as I was just about to say to me PC is not using the N-word or the P-word, not referring to the sad kid in junior school as a g**lord (in my defence I had no idea what that actually meant at the time.

I remember watching Top Of The Pops years ago and the Pet Shop Boys came on and my Dad said something that is unacceptable to say and I remember thinking "why did you have to say that"

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Nice article (no pun intended). I think the secret to understanding "woke" as an ideology lies in its bundling of contradictory ideas and interests. I think this is the reason it is (sometimes fairly, often unfairly) compared to doctrinal religions. That is where its primary danger lives; communication, problem-solving and even basic sense-making mechanisms require a high degree of consonance among basic beliefs about the structure of reality.

The vague ideology we are attempting to describe appears to contain contradictory arguments and incompatible factions at almost any level of granularity you study it from. If trans rights activists, radical feminists, Sunni clerics, black liberation theologians, atheistic Marxists, labor unionists and open borders advocates are all herded into the same territory, the inherent contradictions make it sound more like a battlefield than a political tent.

If it is a church, then it is a Church of Chaos, in which consistency of meaning is unraveled in pursuit of total consequentialism. In the ideology's apotheosis, all actions and reactions are declared to be both perfectly valid and perfectly invalid. Even the current model, in which morality is vaguely attached to various identity markers of the actors (skin color, ethnicity, age, sexuality, etc.), would eventually vanish. "Do what thou wilt" would indeed become the whole of the law, as Aleister Crowley predicted.

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>> If it is a church, then it is a Church of Chaos, in which consistency of meaning is unraveled in pursuit of total consequentialism. In the ideology's apotheosis, all actions and reactions are declared be both perfectly valid and perfectly invalid. Even the current model, in which morality is vaguely attached to various identity markers of the actors (skin color, ethnicity, age, sexuality, etc.), would eventually vanish. "Do what though wilt" would indeed become the whole of the law, as Aleister Crowley predicted.

You just describe the specific, literal, and explicit goals of postmodernist deconstructivism, which I argue is in fact the foundation of woke.

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Exactly! An ideology that dissolves the capacity for anything resembling a coherent ideology until all that's left is power. A doctrine of demons.

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Excellent summary and analysis of the wokeist ideology/movement/cult! Wokeism is to the human mind what HIV is the immune system.

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My working definition of Woke is to embrace nonscientific ideas in the name of science, on gender, race, climate, law, history and covid, in the name of taking over the empire, to destroy Western Civilization, making common cause with corporatism and totalitarian transhumanist globalization.

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New here. Good article.

I use the term "postmodern progressivism." It's a little unwieldy but actively captures what's going on here, and does not attempt to map to a left-right spectrum. I would love to be able to stand anywhere near someone on the left in the US anymore and live to tell about it.

>> Just as fervent right wingers seem to combine otherwise disparate beliefs such as Covid vaccines are a crime against humanity, climate change has always happened so stop worrying about it along with charity begins at home and I should be able to keep more of the money I worked for,

I don't really understand this line. How are these three examples "disparate"? Is it because they're about different topics? They don't seem to be morally or logically contradictory to each other in the same way the examples on the left that follow in the paragraph are.

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