“But they [GCHQ] want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”
Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.“
These bankers and banks basically destroyed the american dream like no other person/corporation in history, they did more damage to minorities than any "white oppressor", yet they've basically been forgotten because activists types feel like they can make a difference by introducing trans issues into corporations. No, you didn't. The same crooked billionaires are syphoning off even more cash, not to mention the government is now printing money for them to socialise their losses.
I have to congratulate these corporations, it's been the perfect divide and conquer tactic. Almost everyone's forgotten the 2008 crises, who caused it, and what damage it did.
The Occupy movement failed because sitting in tents complaining about systems almost invariably fails, and people aren't as angry about a deep recession caused by subprime mortgage lending because it's 13 years later and the deep recession we experienced most recently wasn't caused by anything at all to do with the banking system.
Some overlapping but largely different groups, with different priorities and strategies had more success in making a difference; perhaps not a difference you care for but a difference. Rather than wonder if certain groups of "woke" activists were better at organising and picking their goals, and can be learned from, you accuse them of "neutralising" unrelated causes you feel closer to, as if it's impossible for any activist to be opposed to homophobia and Goldman Sachs, and spend your message board days railing against "woke" activism instead of corrupt bankers.
It's the perfect divide and be conquered tactic, and you can guarantee nobody appreciates your argument that the real reason billionaires got away with crookedness is some trans activists had a bit of success more than crooked billionaires.
The Democratic Party: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/16/wall-street-donors-line-up-b...
Parties are coalitions of voters. A lot of the anti-Wall Street populists are rural or working class whites who may have regressive views on social issues. As the Democratic Party moved to the left on social issues since 2010, it has replaced those working class white voters with high income professionals, including most of Wall Street.
Remember, in 2009, Democrats held both Senate seats in West Virginia. Now, those working class white states have all flipped Republican. Biden’s 2020 run failed to recover Obama’s 2008 support in the Midwest. He won the presidency thanks to vote Reagan suburbs around Atlanta and Phoenix going Democrat. (My traditionally red Maryland county went +14 for Biden but +30 for Larry Hogan, during a blue wave. It voted for both Romney and McCain.) You can’t have a meaningfully left party when your marginal voters are socially liberal Republicans.
I don't really understand the point you're trying to make here. It doesn't take a social scientist to figure out what's going on in West Virginia. West Virginia is East Wyoming. It's overwhelmingly white, has no urban centers, and is starkly less educated than Iowa (itself a heavy lift for the Democratic party). Your point is what? That the parties have polarized on education? Yes, I think we've priced that in now.
The last Democratic Presidential candidate who took West Virginia was Bill Clinton. There were still Dixiecrats in the party when he won it. It's a red state; in fact, it's the second reddest state in the union. Even Alabama sends a Democrat to the House. Not WV. Capito slaughtered Swearengin in 2020 i in every county in the state.
What that tells us about Democratic attitudes towards banks is precisely zero. Get rid of Republic Senate votes in the south and we'd have broken up the major investment banks (I don't think that would have been a good thing).
Rural whites don’t protest. But the group of people who oppose Wall Street and the WTO and private equity are rural whites and young urbanites. If you’re trying to build a coalition to oppose those things those are the people you need to pull together (which Obama did in 2008). A study showed that over half the people who fit the profile of a “Trump Republican” (versus a Romney Republican) actually voted Democrat before 2016.
> I don't really understand the point you're trying to make here.
By moving to the left on social issues Democrats make a deliberate choice to abandon parts of their coalition opposed to fighting wealth inequality—including racial wealth inequality—and replace them with groups that benefit from and perpetuate it.
Put differently, the people who actually control the levels of systemic racism, i.e. structural economic and social disparities, have a tremendous interest in keeping minorities focused on the individual racist attitudes of rural and working class white people.
This is the most economically left Democratic party we have had since Roosevelt. It's far to the left of Obama's. And Clinton, no wokescold himself, served two terms with a Democratic party that deliberately tacked to the right on economics without giving up anything to wokeism. I don't think this analysis holds together.
I get what you're trying to say, that there's a tradeoff between cultural issues and economic issues. My problem is that you haven't provided evidence that the tradeoff exists or is meaningful.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/07/24/growing-part...
And how are you going to go about proving causation between pinkwashing and support for intelligence agencies? Do you think maybe the Trump/Qanon rhetoric around the FBI/CIA/Deepstate might have had something to do with republicans opinion shift? (your own link alludes to that)
I mean, if PR didn't work, why would any organization spend money to do it?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
The origin of the word shows criticism of the concept isn't just "Orwellian duckspeak".
It's of course in-character for the New York Times to punch down. That's the same thing they did when Wall Street was full of Rockefeller Republicans while rural and working class white people voted Democrat. The only thing that's changed is the moral failings assigned to them.
I have, but I'm not a frequent reader so I must have missed the issues where "Rural and working class white people" were being called "deplorables". Can you link me to some of those articles?
>... meaning people who were racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic
so not "Rural and working class white people", unless you think those attributes are fundamentally a part of being "Rural and working class white".
>https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/29/politics/wives-of-the-dep...
0 matches for "rural"
1 match for "working", but in the same context as "working class"
3 matches for "white", but they're all used in discussions about voting patterns, not in describing "deplorables"
>https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/clin...
0 matches for "rural"
0 matches for "working"
1 match for "white", but it was "white house".
No, but the New York Times does, insofar as it’s constantly calling all Trump voters white supremacists. (Clinton was gracious, she called only “half” of Trump supporters “deplorables.”)
More to the point, whatever the personal moral shortcomings of rural white Trump voters, they don’t have any power. The media smoothly segues from talking about systemic racism to talking about the personal prejudices of individual Trump voters. But the people who control the systems are woke. The Black-white wealth gap results from folks on Wall Street who read Robin Di Angelo, not folks in Lincoln City, OR who don’t want her ideas taught in their elementary schools.
Wokeness is a white hedge fund manager putting his arm around a white Wal-Mart greeter and admitting that white people are the reason for persistent racial wealth gaps (but at least he’s “doing the work”).
Source?
>More to the point, whatever the personal moral shortcomings of rural white Trump voters, they don’t have any power
They got trump eleceted, didn't they?
You want to talk about racial wealth inequality? Rural white Trump voters don’t have any power over that, Wall Street and Silicon Valley do.
You want to talk about police in American cities shooting unarmed Black men? Trump supporters in rural Minnesota had no say over the Minneapolis police department that employed Derek Chauvin, or the mayor that supervised him.
You want to talk about lack of education and opportunities? Who has control over the schools in Wilmington, DE, where I used to live? Not Trump voters in rural Delaware. Who destroyed the port city’s economy, creating concentrated Black poverty downtown, by shipping Pennsylvania manufacturing jobs up the river over to China? It wasn’t rural white people.
Whatever the condemnable personal prejudices of these people, they have little power to actually hurt Black and brown people as a whole group.
Except, of course, putting Trump and Stephen Miller in power.
They claim to protect the weak while acting ruthlessly in software projects.
They claim to be oppressed by people earning much less than them.
They claim for strive for equity but never give up their MAGAF positions, council memberships or president titles.
In general, they are useless and should be fired.
Think less Mafia Don and more Invisible Hand.
Is there some sort of shadow organization funding all the woke stories?
Recent anecdote of notoriety: Twitter CEO publicly bankrolling Kendism. Though some read that as indulgence purchase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-a...
Ex 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4sNoKJqj7k Skip past the hype, the key phrase from the GM (paraphrased) "Sometimes it's not about the viewer, it's about what your CEO reads"
Ex 2: Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow are both examples promoting someone who is a true believer of an agenda being promoted and given a big platform to expound those views. This is why the elite doesn't have to coerce key public figures; those public figures can only get in that position if they are loyal to the agenda.
>“Corporate wokeism I believe is the product of self-interest intermingled with the appearance of pursuing social justice,” says Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive and author of “Woke, Inc.”. He argues that Big Tech pursues corporate wokeism because appearing to embrace social justice suits such firms’ commercial interests—both in terms of recruitment and appeal to their customers. It performs allegiance to identity politics while simultaneously rejecting the left’s critique of capitalism. “A lot of Big Tech has agreed to bend to the progressive left,” he says, but “they effectively expect that the new left look the other way when it comes to leaving their monopoly power.”
Or like people say, there's identity politics and then there's actual politics.
Or yet another way of putting it is that class differences trump fake differences in the real world but academia and the media focus on fake differences.
Hierarchies and social strata exist and persist over centuries. The problem of economic inequality is a tough nut to crack. We have pretended to ourselves that there is decent social mobility and that economic inequality is not too bad. But it's bad, so – hey – let's focus on non-issues of race and gender and whatnot.
Some call "wokeness" radical egalitarianism – enlightenment ideals taken to their breaking point and beyond. People urge us to focus on reaching some utopian ideal of equality of outcomes. Better to focus on reducing economic inequalities. But entrenched interests will not share the pot without being forced to, I believe.
This is the defining struggle of our era – of every era really. The struggle between those who have access to opportunity and wealth and those that barely do.
It's a lie that we've had a bunch of popular revolutions. We've never truly had one. A landed aristocracy and merchant class has held sway over us all (systemically) from feudal and aristocratic times down through to this era of nation states – be they communist or capitalist, doesn't matter.
Not to mention it's a prolific and constant distraction from real topics of interest, and is at best superficial, and identity issues can be drummed up infinitely. But it generates user interaction, and inundates them, and dissolves community. These are all big wins for those at the top, whether they're aware of it or not. Personally I like to assume that it's automatic, user interaction whether sympathetic or indignant is sells, inundation is the nature of the medium, the dissolution of community is just an aside.
What’s interesting is the knock on effects as these interactions get internalized into culture. Working out to maximize attractiveness, especially while networking, just becomes part of climbing the corporate ladder.
Maybe somewhat ironically, though economic leftism or at least Marxism certainly started in academia (Marx himself being a scholar), as far as I know, the recent push for wokeness and the term "woke" itself arose originally from AAVE in the 1930s and became popular more recently thanks to Black Twitter. It did not come from academia, and it doesn't seem like the form it has taken in academia is anywhere near what the original proponents had in mind.
Lead Belly was singing "stay woke" back in 1938 and he was not talking about intersectionality and transgenderism.
FWIW, here in Germany/Austria the word “race“ (= “Rasse“) is more or less taboo and you would get strange looks asking someone about their race. It always bewilders me how the concept of race is still a thing in the US when it's really just about skin color.
Officially the US census defines "White" as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa" [0]
However, the "Middle East, or North Africa" part seems rather disputed in American culture. Some Americans are happy to view the Middle Eastern and North African people (MENA for short) as "White", and some MENA Americans are happy to identify as "White". Other Americans disagree that MENA people count as "White", and some MENA Americans disagree with the application of the "White" label to themselves. [1]
The US Census Bureau proposed to add a separate MENA racial category to the 2020 US Census, [2] but later dropped the proposal, allegedly due to political pressure from the Trump administration [3]
Another issue is the status of Hispanic people. Approximately 65% of all Hispanic/Latino people in the US identify as "White" (that's what they put down on their Census forms), but I know from discussions I've had with Americans on this topic that some of them don't actually perceive "White"-identified Hispanic/Latino people as "White". And many US sources, e.g [4], claim that the US will become "minority white" around 2045; that is only true if one excludes "White Hispanics" from the category "White" – if one includes "White Hispanics" as "White", the US will likely still be majority "White" by the end of this century – but this just shows how even in official contexts "White Hispanics" are often not considered "really White".
Many other countries sidestep these kinds of issues by officially avoiding putting people into broad racial categories, and focusing instead on narrower ethnicity/nationality/ancestry categories (Nigerian, Mexican, Argentine, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Iranian, Indian, Arab, Jewish, Kurdish, Tibetan, etc). But, viewing human diversity as coarse rather than fine-grained groups is deeply entrenched in American culture, and seems in the last few years to have become even more emphasised than it was in the past, so it appears unlikely that America will follow the example of any of these other countries any time soon.
[0] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
[1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-no...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/03/11/519548276...
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/1/why-is-there-no-mena...
[4] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-...
I do enjoy CNN anchors lecturing and belittling middle America from Martha's Vineyard. It's some sick fetish of mine. Equipped with the latest air pod pros and Zoom they don't have to leave their beach front properties.
It is far better for upper class to ensure that people discuss and focus on issues like gender and skin colour than the class differences. Hence, they ensured that this is the issue plebs would hear all over on the media and shift their attention from class divides to gender and skin colour.