I'd love to see some demographics around this. When I lived in the bay area, most of my friends were part of this woke / "activist" community. I had some friends who disagreed, but mostly they were terrified to say so for fear of the mob.

Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.

I don't know how you'd measure, but I'd love to see stats on what percentage of the communities in different cities hold this political stance. Is it growing or shrinking? Is it widespread in the west, or is it mostly just a bay area / portland / NY phenomenon - with small satellite groups in other countries?

The problem is that most of the West tends to imitate cultural and political trends that originate in the US. And this is already being imitated. In most other countries we are not yet seeing a war to the extent we see in the US, but the American situation could be the canary in the coal mine.

LOL no

You have a moderate right and a far right party by now.

Even in 2016, an analysis between Hillary Clinton and Theresa May showed some of Clinton's views were to the right to those of May.

It's going to be funny a few years down the road when the trend comes to Australia before they actually notice.

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/why-are-you-like-this

I don't know if iView works overseas, but I think the show is on Netflix too.

I work with a Canadian team but American parent company. We see what they are going through and it is definitely different. I think our version of equality is just working together as peers and respecting each other, there is no performative or ablutionary aspect.

For the record, I think parent co. is genuine and seems very diverse too. Views are my own yada yada.

1a. The number of valid participants is low. It is easy to feel powerful sitting comfortably hidden in your parent’s basement behind a keyboard craving attention and direction. Misery loves company and when such people band together their numbers can appear large compared to something like a real world gathering of persons in a physical space. But it’s not real people in a real space, because that takes considerably greater effort.

1b. The numbers also appear artificially inflated because there is a low effort of repetition, which can appear as false participation, spam, trolling, denial of service.

2. There isn’t any real investment in most of this. Most of the motivation are bored people looking for inspiration to be emotionally concerned. They will point where the carrot leads. That isn’t a movement. A real movement features numerous participants willing to make a personal investment like those criminals that stormed the capital.

Insisting to help people is quite insulting, actually. Empowerment means you voice your own grievances. It doesn't mean recruit an army of armchair activists to do it for you.

Or to put it this way, if the "woke mob" decided to protest capitalism or even higher/stricter taxes, do you think that anything would change? Probably not, because production for profit it still at the core of every corp while at the same time the woke crowd has a limited understanding of capitalism to begin with (as can be seen by the claims that capitalism is by necessity based on racism). It is the worst of both worlds.

You mean the professional-managerial class? Or something else?

I get your sentiment, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse, in multiple ways. Divorce rates and births out of wedlock do not have "a slew of knock-on effects"; they are the effects. There are only two reasons to care about those rates:

- They are easily measured, due to existing government accounting (birth/marriage/divorce certificates, etc.)

- Religious bullshit

I'll ignore the latter, since it cannot be reasoned with.

In the case of divorce, it doesn't happen without reason. Anecdotally, my parents divorced due to alcoholism and domestic abuse; my childhood, social mobility, earnings potential, etc. was improved by their divorce. Tackling alcoholism and domestic abuse may have "a slew of knock-on effects", including lower divorce rates; yet the reverse is not true, e.g. making it harder to get a divorce will not reduce alcoholism and abuse, it would merely subject more children to it for longer.

If we make the charitable assumption that the goal of what you're saying is for more children to receive more help and support, rather than the opposite described above, then that's several levels removed from what you actually said; and each of those levels introduces exactly the distracting, partisan rhetoric that you are arguing against.

- The first level of abstraction is focusing on the US. This seems fair enough, assuming you're in the US. Yet it's still important to note this abstraction, e.g. in the context of foreign aid. For example, it might be more efficient (i.e. give more help to more children) to spend more on foreign aid, since money can go further in poorer countries; alternatively, spending that money domestically might be more efficient (give more help to more children) due to targeting and accountability. If we want to give the most help to the most children, we should base policy on measured impacts; yet this is often framed as a "left vs right" partisan issue (pretending for the moment that the US even has a left wing), which distracts from actually achieving the stated goal.

- Next, you further narrow your focus to the black US population. This also seems fair, as they are a disenfranchised and oppressed group, and hence this focuses on a large number of large issues that need fixing. Even from a purely utilitarian point of view, it may be cheaper (or even reduce costs) to, say, tackle over-policing of black neighbourhoods; compared to tackling some more diffuse, less directly-controllable issue in other populations (e.g. suicide rates in white males). However, it's again worth noting the abstraction: in particular, a large improvement for the minority black population may have less impact than a smaller improvement for a larger population (e.g. the female population). Again, policy should be based on measurable impacts towards the stated goal, and again this has been turned into a partisan circus to distract from real change (e.g. with concern trolling about 'ignoring' white males).

- Next you split the focus between births out of wedlock and divorce rates. I've mentioned the impacts of divorce above; the partisan circus in this case involves 'traditional values', and bleeds into other areas like gay, trans and women's rights.

- The phrase "lowered births out of wedlock" is problematic, since (again) it is very far removed from the assumed goal of 'the most help to the most children', and hence puts the cart before the horse; and secondly it is charged with dangerous ambiguity. For example, lowering birth rates of 'undesirable' demographics (e.g. unmarried black people) could be achieved via eugenics; I'm hoping that is not what you had in mind, but that depends heavily on the reader's overton window; hence provoking both the far right and their opposition. Another way to lower this rate would be forced marriage; again, I hope that wasn't your intention, but again that depends on the reader, and the normalisation of such rhetoric stokes division.

I agree with your overall point that 'culture wars', 'wokeness', etc. are a distraction from solving real problems; yet what you are saying is itself an example of such distraction. I'm not aware of a word that sums up 'concern-trolling about how "wokeness" is concern-trolling', but that's how I would describe your phrasing.

In this case, I'm not aware of any person or group (e.g. Black Lives Matter, 'wokeists', etc.) who has asked for Github to change their naming policy, let alone demand it under threat of protest/boycot (AKA 'cancel culture'/'voting with your wallet', depending on which side of the circus one is sitting). Exactly the same can be said of Washington DC renaming Black Lives Matter plaza, and many other such real, measurable examples. Hence, when discussing such actions, any focus (for or against) on 'woke' individuals is itself a distraction.

Those who applaud such moves (if that's actually a thing; I've come across nothing but scorn for such actions) have been successfully distracted from the real issues that have sparked protest and boycot; whether it's GitHub's sexism and discrimination, or the US police system's racism and lack of accountability.

Those (like yourself) who scorn such applause (again, under the assumption that it actually exists in some non-manufactured/devil's-advocate form) have also been successfully distracted from those real issues of sexism, discrimination and racism. Complaining about 'wokeness' is a partisan circus, abstracted away from the stated issues themselves, fighting hypothetical slights from imagined enemies.

Of course, I'm not immune from such attacks myself. In this case, I'm grounded by the sheer prevalence of such backwards logic as you've expressed here, which I come across without seeking it out (cherry-picking smallfry posts scoured from Twitter/Tumblr/etc. is a perennial hobby of the 'anti-woke' distraction machine). On sites like Reddit I merely find it concerning (whether real or astroturfing to shift the overton window, the effect is similar). When it starts infecting sites like HN, which tend to reward thoughtful, reasoned content rather than knee-jerk memes, I feel a need to push back :)

Translation: people who see an opportunity to debase others for free and put themselves on a pedestal

Update: We call this class of people Mullahs here in Iran. It's been slowly but surely becoming apparent to us that they are somewhat of a societal parasite.

Edited: removed snark

Edited: removed snark

[+] note how you just assumed "the other side", and the existence of exactly 2 sides.

The alternative interpretation is that they're consciously being malicious.

Another example, Bezos recently banned books critical of transgender from being sold on Amazon. And just like that, everyone forgot about Amazon's brutal suppression of union organising activity in their warehouses. Similarly the rest of Big Tech thinks it can toss out token gestures and placate those who are critical of its business practices.

What are they going to do? Stop using GitHub? Good f ing riddance

The master branch thing was an attempt at misdirection and throwing the mob a bone.

It's a classic PR move. The entire objective was to generate distracting noise.

Policing language is popular among corporations for the same reason oil companies got "woke" about recycling in the 80s:

* It doesn't really change anything and doesn't affect profit margins.

* It affects everybody albeit very lightly and is extemely visible.

* It naturally leads people to shame each other, taking the heat off the corp.

* They can score some progressive points at minimum cost.

Same mechanism, different era.

I'd argue if someone is feigning offense we should call them out on it, not collectively fucking prostrate ourselves.

This whole fiasco just makes me wonder what the hell is going on in the background while we're being distracted by this... surströmming-level red herring.