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".

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?

That's very achievable and beneficial to society overall imo.

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.

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.

Compared to the value provided, I would say so.

> How do you think it compares to the amount of resources historically put into racism, including all the waste and lost opportunity costs?

Over all of human history? Obviously less. No idea why that's relevant. Wasting resources on performative activities or worse isn't going to correct a wrong that occured 200 years ago, or 50 years ago.

> 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.

It was the entire point of his essay imo. We're being distracted from important matters and actual improvements by people who want to play oppression Olympics to the benefit of no one other than them.

How often do you think the average person actually has to change their language? It seems like it would be a pretty tiny fraction for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of circumstances. On the other hand, if you're a professor of history or a public official, it probably does cost some of your time. But in those cases, doesn't it also provide value?

My guess is, if I'd had to learn to use a knife and fork and typical Western table manners at 35, it'd remain a small stone in my shoe for life.

Which is to say, not using certain language might always grind our gears a little. I notice it, certainly don't always use the words my brain first reaches for, but not so much as to bug me. There's so much other self-censorship that we automate subconsciously or almost, it's not a big deal.

For younger people? It's no deal at all, they have no more use for the R word than you or I do in some obsolete 19th century racial slur.

That's because they replaced the r word with autistic, which I presume will be the a word in about 20 years and some other term will be used to describe autism.

I've never heard "autistic" applied to anything other than people (and possibly animals, for humour) for example, in the way the r word was used as a stronger version of "dumb".

Anyway, I think people having to be a little careful with their words is a small price to pay to breaking the linguistic and stereotypical link between people with learning difficulties, Downs etc. and dumb, annoying situations.

It's called spelling a word because words are spells, which is why it's ok to place some of them off-limits.

Not what I'm talking about at all. Teens in the US use autistic in the exact same way the r word was used 20 - 30 years ago. It's an insult that is a stronger version of dumb.

> I've never heard "autistic" applied to anything other than people (and possibly animals, for humour) for example, in the way the r word was used as a stronger version of "dumb".

You're just not exposed to it then. Which is fine, but doesn't mean it isn't commonplace. I am guessing you don't live in the US based on your spelling of humour, which would be one explanation of why you aren't tuned into this.

> Anyway, I think people having to be a little careful with their words is a small price to pay to breaking the linguistic and stereotypical link between people with learning difficulties, Downs etc. and dumb, annoying situations.

People being considerate is good. But banning specific words doesn't accomplish what most of the word police claims it will.

> It's called spelling a word because words are spells, which is why it's ok to place some of them off-limits.

Very cute; not very persuasive.

Well that's... <searches mental Rolodex> the actions of a bunch of people with the intellect of a grape, the empathy of a stale French fry, and the collective odour of a sack of dead badgers.

(See how much more fun this whole insult business is with just a little more effort?)

> You're just not exposed to it then. Which is fine, but doesn't mean it isn't commonplace. I am guessing you don't live in the US based on your spelling of humour, which would be one explanation of why you aren't tuned into this.

Yep. I'm in the UK. Have teenage kids, if I caught them using autistic in that way, they could say goodbye to wifi access for a month.

> People being considerate is good. But banning specific words doesn't accomplish what most of the word police claims it will.

Eventually it does, or helps to at least, but over a much longer timeframe. Generations, realistically - many middle-aged people don't have the mental plasticity to absorb big shifts in how race, gender, sex, sexuality are addressed.

Changing minds takes a lot longer than changing manners, but the latter can make a positive difference in the meantime.

That's not my point. I think they're both true.

> But what if it does?

Why are corporations dropping it as soon as it became socially acceptable to do so if it is providing value to them?

What value is yelling at people who don't include their pronouns in their bio providing to society? What about education consultants who have a stated goal of assuring equal outcomes for all students (this happened in my very large, progressive district and parents lost their minds)?

> What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior?

There are much more effective and efficient ways to accomplish this than what the people in question are doing if that's the case.

> Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights?

Not particularly

> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?

Not particularly

> Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?

Feel free to share any evidence you have, I'm open to hearing about it

>Not particularly

>> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?

>Not particularly

Honestly, if you're having a hard time seeing the harm that ethnic and racial slurs do, particularly from public officials or community leaders, you're not going to understand any of this.

Ethnic and racial slurs are harmful. Adding social stigma to specific words just causes the people who would use them to use different terms if they care about the stigma, and the change does very little to contribute to equal right.

Agreed.

>Adding social stigma to specific words just causes the people who would use them to use different terms if they care about the stigma, and the change does very little to contribute to equal rights.

So your hypothesis here is that people just switch slurs. But is that really true? It's not easy to get a new word into the general vocabulary. Sure, a small group of people could agree to a substitute for the n-word. But when they used it in public, most people wouldn't have any idea what they were talking about. Which means the slur wouldn't have the same impact as if they'd used the slur everyone knows.

I didn't reframe, but I did draw a logical conclusion that may seem opaque if you haven't thought it through. You acknowledge that ethnic slurs are harmful, but you don't see the link between equal rights and how people are referred to by those in power. Do you see the contradiction there? You're imagining a world where leaders can use the n-word without reproach, yet people of color are treated equally by society. That just isn't plausible.

Yes, that is my "hypothesis", having a basic familiarity with history where this has happened repeatedly. It's obviously not that hard to get a word into general usage, and it's also not a mystery when someone is attempting to insult you even if you aren't familiar with the word in the moment.

> I didn't reframe, but I did draw a logical conclusion that may seem opaque if you haven't thought it through.

You asked a question, then changed the phrasing of that question in your next question. I would say that failing to ask the question you actually meant to ask (which is a generous reading of our discussion) is indicative of failing to think things through.

Again, your behavior has been consistently antagonistic and obnoxious (the comment above is another example).

> You acknowledge that ethnic slurs are harmful

Yes

> but you don't see the link between equal rights and how people are referred to by those in power.

Never said anything close to that.

> Do you see the contradiction there?

I get that you'd like it if I said what you are claiming as that could be contradictory and you could expand on that while asking leading questions and contributing little else, but I didn't and frankly have no interest in continuing a conversation with an insufferable prig.

> You're imagining a world where leaders can use the n-word without reproach, yet people of color are treated equally by society.

No I'm not. Go have your imaginary conversation elsewhere.

>> Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights?

>Not particularly

>> What about slurs against gays, or Jews?

>Not particularly

How else should someone interpret your response, other than as stating that you don't see any connection between ethnic slurs and equal rights? If you misspoke, or I'm somehow misinterpreting, maybe you should elaborate, if only for the sake of others coming across this thread.

Goalposts are moving quite a bit here. Companies are dropping some affirmative action, but I don’t see anyone dropping things such as pronouns or unisex restrooms, vegetarian/halal/kosher meal options, and so on.

It seems like the pronoun push has passed (the performative part about chastising people for not wearing a pin or updating an email signature, not correctly using someone's preferred pronouns), but I'm also largely removed from the portion of society that cares a lot about at it at the moment.

I believe PG's essay is intentionally trying to separate the two, and nothing you mentioned as remaining would be considered affirmative action (which largely would fall under what PG is criticizing imo).

I'm sorry, but I can't recall a single time it actually happened. Expressing support is important, but I never heard of it being mandatory. And since pronouns are a big part of someone's identity, I'd say one should try to get them right, especially now that most of us made it easy to do (mine are he/him, BTW).

I'm sorry, but it does happen. I've personally experienced it and witnessed it.

> And since pronouns are a big part of someone's identity, I'd say one should try to get them right, especially now that most of us made it easy to do (mine are he/him, BTW).

We should absolutely get it right, but they are not a big part of everyone's identity, which is a point missed by the people who feel it is an extremely large part of theirs and want everyone to know about it.

I'm POC. Many people, even some really close friends of mine, don't know the primary language that I grew up using even though I speak, read, and write in English with an American accent. Some folks have used invented names to describe my primary language. Others don't know that someone who looks a lot like me doesn't speak the same primary language. It's annoying, sure. Sometimes it feels vaguely discriminatory. But I'm not going to get extremely angry about it, rant about it, or launch into attack over it. I generally smile a bit, correct them, and move on. I might then laugh at them a bit (gently) with some friends of the same ethnic background. Again I don't mind that much. It's the price we pay of living in a multicultural society, that to some extent we always understand yet misunderstand everyone else.

Now obviously some people use these styles of microagressions to discriminate or throw hate or prejudice at others. If you're reading a small snippet (like Twitter-alikes) or if you read something out of context, it can be hard to tell whether this person is prejudiced against you or is simply unaware. But generally in long-form online conversation or in face-to-face conversation, it becomes very obvious when people are prejudiced vs unaware. And sometimes there are borderline cases where you can't tell. This line is ill-defined, varies by situation, and often varies by person. Part of participating in a multicultural society is to find your line. For some folks it's a quick one: small microaggressions and you disengage. Others are fine to forgive and are open to more of these microaggressions.

I'm not saying this in the abstract. I have definitely gotten weird vibes from folks in conversations who kept tiptoeing around ethnic slurs. I trust my gut. I usually walk away from those conversations IRL or block the person online. I've also been racially harassed before in person, both as bullying when I was younger and just plain anti-ethnic behavior as an adult.

Constantly trying to be considerate to every minority group for every perceived grievance is exhausting and creates a chilling effect on speech. This is the problem with this form of "wokism." There's a different category of issues when this gets extrapolated into politics and large social issues that requires a much longer answer than this, but I hope my answer offers some insight.

So it's not everyone then.

> It’s inconsiderate to ignore that.

Who here is ignoring that?

Some people in higher positions in many companies quickly understood it. And there it will also be used against you. If you aren't in on it that is.

Of course the impact is massive, it is a source of the success of many populist political leaders because people believe the intellectual left has abandoned them. And I am not sure if that is incorrect in the first place.

This isn't wokeism vs. racism, that is a wrong axiom in the first place.

I personally find it preposterous that language policing by universities and social media sites (and virtually all of his criticism is about that aspect of wokism, and not affirmative action) is somehow worse than systematically jailing millions of people and denying them economic opportunities out of bigotry. But even if you think it is, the article doesn't even attempt to make that case. He just notes in a throwaway line that "Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one." (Emphasis mine.) And that's about it on how bad racism is vs how bad woke is.

Woke is all rituals, no substance. If anyone profits off it, it is highly educated individuals that belong to the visible minorities = precisely the people that don't need so much support.

Woke is deeply uninterested in actual problems of the poor non-academic population. High cost of living? Food deserts? Meh. That doesn't register on the high-brow radars.

Is that really the only real-world impact? Is there no value in examining the link between how we refer to people and how we treat them? What about the affirmative action aspects of wokism---is there some impact there?

If you define woke as only the people performing meaningless rituals, then of course you're going to dismiss wokeness. But not all of it is meaningless ritual, affirmative action has created real change. And I would argue that efforts to take pejorative terms out of language are worthwhile, even if some people get overly academic about it.

>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.

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.

To whit, he repeatedly brushes aside the concept of hostile work environment, in particular professors making their students feel uncomfortable, as if its just a question of one person making their equal feel uncomfortable due to a simple disagreement. This is a dramatic misread of why a professor (who is by definition in a position of power over the student, and such power may well include the career and profession of the student, even ignoring the sexual overtones, which are all-too-common as well) needs to be aware of and avoid hostile environments. Like, a woman who constantly hears from her math professor how s/he thinks women are bad at math will likely not be super-psyched to continue with math coursework. I would certainly leave a company if a manager was constantly insulting whatever group of people I was born into, and they pay me to be there. If I'm paying thousands of dollars a semester, the least the professor can do is stay in their lane.

That's five sentences to retort 2 more-or-less throwaway statements. The entire essay is stacked with stuff like that.

And its all pointless because odds are, instead of changing any minds, or even engaging with what I've said, the anti-woke types will just vote it down.

My personal philosophy for most topics is to find out what the extremes are, then look at what the middle between these would be, and then call that the ideal.

On Reddit, that philosophy is enough to be called "racist" and "Nazi". Trying to start a proper discussion to (in-)validate any of my - in my opinion - rational points was met with "I don't talk to Nazis!" several times. Mind you, I never even talked about race or anything similar and most times not even about culture. I basically formulated my starting points, added some facts, and was ready to discuss. There were very few discussions that really took place and I have even changed my opinion on several topics based on these discussions. But in the last few years, even these few discussions became less and less. I can only remember one discussion in the last two years that I had with a left-wing person (a teacher from Africa) and I only got this far because our kids were playing with each other. Based on what she told me, I am pretty sure that I would not have the chance for that discussion under other circumstances. She even thanked me for that conversation and told me, that she could not remember the last time that she could talk so open to anyone. I don't know if she realized that she told me how she categorized every negative feedback about her as "racist" half an hour earlier. Strangely, the more to the left a person is leaning, the less they like to discuss nowadays. I find that very strange and also not helpful to their case. If I have two parties where one of them likes to discuss and argue, while the other one directly calls anyone with a slightly different opinion a swear-word, I tend to sympathize more with the party that likes to speak with me. I've yet to encounter a really right-wing extremist that is actually racist. I know that they exist, and I have a friend who was in one of these groups when he was young, but I never had anyone tell me directly that they find any specific ethnicity inferior to others or something in that regard. Well, except for members of a certain religion, but I don't want to start that topic here.

Btw., I am German, and I associate the word "Nazi" with war, racism, and industrial-scale mass murder. But today it is enough to say "I don't like how the immigration into Europe is handled, and I think we should reduce the amount of illegal immigration" to be called a racist and even a Nazi. Ffs, I've seen people in high ranks calling people "racist" because their products were criticized. It had nothing to do with race or anything like that, only with the quality of the product, but they still throw that word around as if everything was just based on race. And if people say that everything and everybody is racist, they at some point start believing that themselves.

Nowadays, you really have to be careful if you criticize anyone's work if they are part of any minority. What's even more ridiculous, most times it's not even the person themselves, but some other person who has their "everyone is racist" opinion, and they will start attacking everyone who dares to critique anyone belonging to any kind of minority. That leads to "toxic positivity", where no-one dares to call out any BS. And that leads to bad products being created. Just look at some of the films and games that have been produced in the last few years. Concord is a good example of something that is the result of this "woke" culture.

This is bad in so many ways. If you hire people by how good they fit into their role, the heritage of the applicant must not be a factor. If the pool of applications does not fit the overall demographic, that is not the fault of the recruiting company. If a company obviously discriminates against anyone, they should be held accountable. That is what I call the balanced solution.

But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive. Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results. You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session. And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway. That only creates further resentments.

The greatest success I have seen in the fight against racism was not seeing color. We should be color-blind and treat everyone equally. For a time, that worked great. Today, the heritage, gender, color of skin and even sexuality are things that have to be acknowledged, recognized and valued. I've only seen bad results coming out of this and nothing positive.

Oh, and about the part of the professors making their students "feel uncomfortable"; Of course, if a professor says something like "Women belong in the kitchen anyway", or any really sexist or racist stuff, that behavior is not okay, and they should face consequences for that. Only making someone "feel uncomfortable" is not enough, though. To learn, you have to be told if you are wrong. Feedback can't just be positive, and it doesn't help anyone to be wrapped in cotton candy for their whole education. That's what leads to the aforementioned "toxic positivity".

About my last point, I strongly recommend this podcast. One part dedicated to this is timestamped, but I recommend listening to the whole thing. It's really good and it explains a lot about our behavior. https://youtu.be/R6xbXOp7wDA?si=MCF3hfZxe9NmzJ-b&t=4724

I didn't play Concord and only saw Sony are shutting it down shortly after release due to poor sales. The reviews I saw were about uninteresting gameplay and characters. What exactly was "woke" about it?

> But forcing them to hire specific percentages of certain demographics is contra-productive. Now you don't have the best person for the job, if their ethnicity, sexuality or whatever doesn't also align with the current requirements. This might lead to very bad results. You want your brain-surgeon to be good at his job, and not just the only one that had the right skin tone in that hiring session. And even if they are good or even the best choice, others in the company don't know that, and they might categorize them a "DEI-hire" anyway. That only creates further resentments.

I agree, forcing specific percents of people is counterproductive. It would be good if it happened naturally, but it didn't for a variety of reasons (some of them various -isms, like hiring managers with biases, poor schooling outcomes or directions due to bad locations/prejudices; some of them more widely cultural, religious, personal). But are you aware of any place where there are actually forced distributions of people to hire? I'm aware of multiple efforts to level the playing field at the hiring stage, including by the European Comission (on men/women equality). But they're all about goals, with extremely explicit caveats that the best candidate should be picked, but if two candidates are equal, the less represented one should be preferred to add diversity. Diversity in a business or public facing organisation is good for them due to a wider representation of ideas and lived experiences. Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.

And that's what really pisses off the average guy. It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues. The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men. So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience. But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner. Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this. Here, the consequences were quite spectacular. The average gamer who plays hero shooters wants to have their escapism in games and be the great hero that they can't be in real life. This game did not provide that. There are also games that are openly about specific statements, and they openly communicate that. They are also usually niche products because of that because - like I said - the average gamer wants escapism from games.

An example where that's done better is Baldur's Gate 3. The overall game is great, but you also have all the relationship options you might like. I learned that the hard way, when I accidentally broke my carefully created romance between my male avatar and a female party member. I was just being friendly to another male party member, which directly started a gay romance with him. In this case, I would have preferred an option to select the sexual preferences before that happens, but it's nothing that makes the game bad.

> Are you aware of any places where there are fixed quotas and random unqualified people are hired because of their gender or skin colour? I'd be shocked, and all "DEI HIRE" outrages I've seen have been utter nonsense spread by right-wing crisis actors (I've seen it for firefighters, Boeing, Alaska Air and a bunch of other things I can't recall) because it's fashionable to say any non-majority employee was hired only because of their immutable characteristics and is by definition unqualified. Which is, of course, nonsense.

Well, that doesn't look like you are really open to any discussion on this, since you're dismissing anything that's said about this as "nonsense" and you are calling anyone who brings up the examples you just mentioned "right-wing crisis actors" by default. That's not how you discuss this. You bring up your position and already define any other perspective as invalid. But maybe I am wrong, and you are actually willing to change my mind. So, what do you say about this video? It's less than 1.5 minutes and I think it is a good example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghBAcxEMzM

I'm calling the nonsense claims nonsense.

> So, what do you say about this video? It's less than 1.5 minutes and I think it is a good example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghBAcxEMzM

It's a good example of grifting, yes. We have an ad by the LA fire department where a high positioned person at it talks about diversity. Considering the high amounts of incidents between police and minorities, and high distrust of officials, having the fire department be diverse and representative of the population it serves is a good idea, no? That being said, that must happen with regards to what their job is. No point in hiring someone who can't do the job. And you'll notice that in the ad (or at least the cut this youtuber has chosen to use for engagement, who knows if it's representative or not) the person doesn't say they'll hire anyone or will have a quota. There's a very dumb and aggressive attempt at a dismissal/joke/I don't even know what about a potentially sexist reaction to the above ("can she carry me"). I personally trust the fire department or medic will be able to do their job regardless of their gender or skin colour or whatever. If they're indeed hiring incompetent people because of quotas or any other reason I'd want to know, but neither the ad, nor the youtuber make that claim.

So yes, thank you for illustrating my point. There's a bunch of outrage about "DEI" and quotas and what not, but when you look at the substance, it's nothing.

> And that's what really pisses off the average guy. It is perfectly fine to have certain statements and to want to raise awareness of specific issues. The main demographic for these computer games is straight white men. So it makes sense to try to insert your views about this in a game if they are your target audience. But that needs to be done properly and in an intelligent manner.

While it's true that that's the main demographic, maybe game publishers are trying to add others as well? Increase their target demographic if you will.

> Just adding one white dude option into a mix of overly diverse characters, also making them visually very unappealing to not follow traditional beauty standards and then telling the average dude to "Acknowledge their privileged position" is not an intelligent way to handle this

You're mixing a lead's personal opinion with what the game's options are. I personally don't consider the characters being ugly to be a game stopper (and I'm not alone, I don't think anyone complained about Travis looking like he did in GTAV), but I can see how that can be a problem for some.

Absolutely, that one dev has some weird opinions. But if those opinions are/were core to the game design, and done on purpose, then the marketing also failed to get that point across.

There's also something sort of funny about digging up 4-year-old tweets and saying "see, this is what cancel culture looks like in action".

Speaking to the concept of "DEI hires", the implication is always that the person in that role is only there because they met some quota. The reality of affirmative action was that frequently, you could never get into that role, regardless of qualifications, if you had the wrong skin color. And that wasn't just like a backroom sort of thing. There are countless examples of explicitly racist policies in the US prior to 1964. But the funny thing is, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it became illegal to hire based on race in either direction. "DEI Hire" affirmative actions are explicitly illegal, and it would be an easy case to win if you thought you lost the job to a less-qualified "DEI" candidate. Indeed, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that racial quotas (of any stripe, but especially "hire more minorities") are illegal.

Re: that video, I see that as less of a policy fail and more of a marketing fail. Like, everybody producing that video understood that as "when a firefighter, ANY firefighter, is physically carrying somebody out of an actual fire, a great number of things have already gone VERY wrong, and being a racist prick about the exact race/gender/etc while a rescue is underway is severely missing the point". But nobody bothered to run that in front of somebody who wasn't adjusted to how firefighters see the world.

Firefighters' physical exams are notoriously physically demanding, because the consequences of not measuring up are pretty dire. And yet I know several female firefighters.

You almost got it. Not "some developer made some ill-considered tweets 4 years ago", but the Lead Character Designer. That is the person who is responsible for the whole character design concept. And because you're so focused on the Tweet being from was 4 years ago: That game did not magically appear a few months ago. 4 Years ago, it was deep in development and that person was already very publicly apparent about their opinion regarding the main target audience. The characters in question were being formed at that time.

And it was also the first hit I got on Google with my search query. It's not that I dug really deep. It was literally the first result I got.

People like these are what the average guy calls "woke" nowadays. This person has a very toxic agenda and is still put in a lead position for a project with a budget that - according to some sources - may have been up to 400 Million USD. And that is an example on what is considered problematic regarding the DEI topic. If you think that this is not a problem and not even a part of the reason why games like these fail; fine. Then we agree to disagree on this point. You could also look at the game "Dustborn", if you want something that you could find in the glossary next to "woke game". I don't even know what to say about that mess. But that game at least was openly marketed for it's woke target audience.

> Indeed, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that racial quotas (of any stripe, but especially "hire more minorities") are illegal. I don't like this Dave Rubin guy, but this video sums it up pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwjREOWtm0

In the comments, you can find plenty of people who tell their own stories matching the one told in the video. So, this apparently does happen. People see that and they're angry. Normal, simple people see that. Some of them, who were neutral before, now look at these minorities with distrust. That's what I mean when I say that these practices sometimes increase racism in the end. That's normal human behavior. If you say those things and are called "racist" in response, that doesn't help. Instead of a proper discussion and trying to find solutions on how equality can be reached without creating these issues at the same time, people need to get together and find solutions. Calling each other swear words and continuing as planned does not help, but worsens it.

> that video, I see that as less of a policy fail and more of a marketing fail. Like, everybody producing that video understood that as "when a firefighter, ANY firefighter, is physically carrying somebody out of an actual fire, a great number of things have already gone VERY wrong, and being a racist prick about the exact race/gender/etc while a rescue is underway is severely missing the point". Wow. I have to admit that I did not manage to get to that train of thought. So, they created a narrative that people care how their rescuers look like, and then they call the people in their story "racist pricks"? How often does this happen that somebody complains about who they were rescued by? I haven't heard that before. So either you know of some of these cases - in that case, please enlighten me. Or are you already conditioned to see racism everywhere, even in made up stories? Honestly, how did you manage to interpret racism into that video?

That is precisely the problem that I mean. People call out an obviously bad video. Instead of saying: "Oh boy, they messed up there. Let's see how we can fix that." the people criticizing it are being called "racist prigs". That will surely improve the situation! Well, shit. If that's how people "discuss" things nowadays, society is really doomed.

The only thing that I know average people complain about is when anyone considers lowering the criteria for physically demanding jobs specifically for women. And that is precisely what this question is about. "Is that woman able to carry a man out of a burning house?". If the answer is "Yes, she has to meet the same physical requirements as the men", then that is the answer that should make everyone happy. To answer "It's his fault to get into a fire anyway" is the worst answer anyone could give. And this went through numerous hands before it was published. So either no one involved realized that this spot could be a bad idea, or there was toxic positivity involved again. Things like these push people further apart when we should be working together. But, I forgot. Nowadays, one also gets called a "racist" for listing biological facts like "women have different bone structure, average muscle mass and hormone levels than men".

Yeah, I can't see why the average person would have anything against the woke people.

I think it is a weakness of the article that PG does not address this directly. He dis say that racism is

> Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be

So if someone only uses woke to mean "being aware of and attentive to important social issues" it is easy for the to wake away with the impression that PG painted their concerns as overblown.

If I was PG's editor I would suggest replacing 'woke' with prig here for clarity.

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.

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.

It reminds me of the deeply corrupt late Medieval church. A reformation is long overdue.

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?

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

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.

I don't either. What does it mean?

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)

I always wondered why that word had such negative connotation over other pejoratives. I believe it was Maya Angelou who said, paraphrasing, "it's so hurtful because it was the last word people heard before the noose tightened around their neck."

Some dark stuff.

They are not.

> Any chance the distinction existed long time ago"

What is "long time ago"? This stuff isn't exactly gone.

You really need to realize that American slavery really wasn't that long ago. It was only 1975 when the last survivor of American slavery died. Generational effects last and the reverberations of years of oppression still reverb very, very loudly today.

Anyone who is offended by it should get government help to see a psychologist. There are way more and better things to be offended by.

So I'll happily continue to say negro or nigar when ever I want to, because it is an integral and important part of freedom of speech.

this very much illustrates that blacklisting (sic) words leads to nothing but confusion, not mutual understanding to each other's speech, let alone understanding each other's position. is it what social justice warriors want to bring about general compassionating with?

From first search:

  The n-word pronounced with the final ‘r’ sound, as opposed to a softer pronunciation that often omits this sound

  Over the decades, the n-word has evolved, with the softer version being reclaimed by some within the Black community as a term of endearment or camaraderie. However, the “hard R” variation remains a symbol of hate and discrimination.

Why try and use that context for judgment when a more appropriate one exists?

My comment explains what hard-R means from the point of view of someone outside the states, and gives enough context for a non-native English speaker to understand the term. The subtleties of English are hard even for those with English as a mother tongue.

From the Wikipedia article:

  Among certain speakers, like some in the northeastern coastal and southern United States,[6][2] rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic /r/ is deleted depending on an array of social factors,[7] such as being more correlated in the 21st century with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, particular ethnic identities, and informal speaking contexts.

I knew an American who, on his first visit to NZ, described how much he enjoyed eating kiwis to his horrified hosts. Of course he meant the Chinese gooseberry, which in US grocery stores is labeled a “kiwi”.

I think this video might help

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.

>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.

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.

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.

It didn't stop. Republicans have been passing laws requiring identification to access pornography and as a result pornhub is blocked in 16 states currently.

https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025

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.

Dependent on them for what, exactly?

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.

Seriously, it’s quite a pattern!

But I don’t need a 12 year old who tells me that “affirmative action is morally wrong” and yells at me about not knowing how to cook curry. I want her to have the post-racial upbringing I did as a 1990s kid.

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.

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 am classifying the expression "hard-r" as "bullshit", that being clearer and much more established.

We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first before there's any discussion worth a damn. As best I can tell it just means "any behavior coming from young people I don't like as a cable news viewer". Frankly, I'm at the point where if someone uses the word non-ironically I just write the speaker off as not seriously trying to communicate. Use your words! Describe specific behavior. People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.

  > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?

I also think there's a pretty big difference between keyboard jockeying / speech policing, and putting yourself in physical danger by physically confronting racists who'd lynch you if there weren't cameras around.

That woke people should be resorting to physical violence to further their cause.

Doesn't seem productive or healthy for society.

> "The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power."

That's both literally incorrect (we shouldn't consider the Black Panthers or the ACLU "student movements") and seems ignorant of the real power those organizations had (their agitation led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act).

As an example, see this old anti-MLK comic; it certainly sounds quite familiar: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/s6ll2c/a...

It looks like the boring job of actually writing policy. Here in Australia, I've run into several people who work for the government helping to draft policy and things. Eg, one friend works for my state's government helping draft energy policy to fight climate change.

Its tedious and boring, and entirely thankless. But its incredibly important. Its well and good for protesters to send a clear message to the government that the people want change. Its another thing entirely to actually negotiate how those changes will happen on the ground.

How do you improve mental health services? How do you balance the needs of the economy today with the needs of future generations? Its difficult stuff.

>In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.

>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

>Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?

He doesn't even point fingers on this matter, but the social justice angle is the evident answer to that.

> Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

> The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so.

Even more so when some of your views are not widely seen as an agreed upon social norm.

Also, I didn't see anything arguing for this in the article in the first place.

It's worked wonders for Donald Trump.

More like starting with existing conclusions and working backwards from them. Even in the example you quote, Graham begs the question of "woke" and "politically correct" being equivalent and works backwards from that assumption - in the process incorrectly pinning the origins of political correctness on university social science / humanities programs and the hippie kids being hired into them in the 70's (never mind the multiple-centuries-long history of the political right policing speech and expression in service of the exact opposite of the intellectual pursuits universities foster; apparently that doesn't count as "political correctness" because reasons).

What was the point you thought you made?

"It has a concise definition!"

moments later

"It took a whole article to explain!!!"

Also entertaining - the idea that racism has an uncontested definition.

It seems like a reasonably concise definition to me. It's reasonable to disagree with the definition of course, but to merely dismiss it as not concise is both incorrect and not useful because it lacks specific criticisms.

But I acknowledge people may disagree with this.

And besides, the definition of "woke" is a secondary issue anyway, the article's purpose isn't to propose a definition of woke, it's to judge and criticize people who behave a certain way, and he's done an adequate job IMO of describing the behaviors he's criticizing.

The actual meaning of "wokeness" is that it has several different meanings. For instancee, the first could be what you outlined:

1. an "awareness of the existence of social injustice"

And another, equally valid one (that comes about from the reaction to people who embraced the first meaning and proceeded to behave obnoxiously and gain lots of attention) is:

2. the obnoxious and doctrinaire enforcement of the values of the "social justice" subculture on the wider population through bullying tactics (e.g. social media pile ons)

etc.

Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent (usually by the left, as they have more access prestigious institutions, but language is language and no authority can suppress new words and new senses of existing words).

I think the thought process is that there was a word and it had a positive meaning. It was then used in a negative way to delegitimize an opponent. So I think some people feel like the word is stolen or still being purposely miss used. For better or worse that is not how language works, in general new meanings can be attached to words and at least in my experience the majority of people using woke negatively are not trying to miss use the word.

What this post is hilariously doing is policing what is considered superficial humanity and what is not.

Let's be woke but really mean it lads, then the conservatives will be with us!

Incidentally, this has been a major part of the post-election discussion about it.

I agree that the term has become diluted to a point that it's lost most meaning, and in many cases it means "behaviors and opinions I disagree with".

I think it mostly means some combination of: morality police, people against "wrongspeak", holier-than-thou attitudes, white people advocating for topics they don't understand, and in general a kind of tribal behavior that "others" people who don't fully buy into the entire spectrum of ideas this group is selling, i.e. they treat their beliefs as absolutely true, and anyone who questions them or wants to debate them are automatically othered.

> People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.

I agree and disagree. The media landscape has had a major hand in shaping the discussion, and social media has validated the worst fears of the people working themselves into a tizzy. e.g. if someone supports trans rights but has concerns about minors receiving certain surgeries and wants to discuss those concerns, they're put in the same category as transphobes who wish real harm on other people. Depending on where they raise these topics, they'll automatically be blocked and/or put on lists of transphobic people.

Discussions that actually focus on something material, concrete or substantial are derailed by collective community behaviors that refuse to engage with the concrete and substantial.

It's a sad state of affairs for public discourse, and figuring out how to de-escalate the conversation and somehow return to substantive good-faith conversations might be the most important problem of the century.

The right is notoriously great at hijacking words terms/words and flipping them into something nefarious. Or sometimes that exact opposite like they did turning the well supported by all Estate Tax into the conservative hating death tax.

Now woke has morphed into this weird thing. A clapback insult for the insecure to justify their insistence at exclusion of one kind or another.

Some subset of people understands the "true" meaning of the word, and the set of ideas originally associated with it. I suspect the majority of people are more likely to use it in the sense it has evolved into.

Some kind of separation needs to happen. The underlying ideals and ideas vs. the tactics people employ in bringing them about. If someone's MO is to judge/shame people, exert their moral superiority over others, and see the people around them in absolute terms, that set of behavior is particularly harmful to the underlying goals. It presents itself as the "truest" form of support for the goal and the only right way to go about achieving it. But it uses coercion/manipulation to take advantage of people's fear of public shaming and the consequences of "getting cancelled" which tends to ensure silence from people who see themselves as more pragmatic but not interested in getting labeled with "them" for raising questions about reasonable things.

I agree that when people use it now, it's less about anything substantive and entirely about what people feel the word has come to mean. Not sure how, but we need to fundamentally change the conversation.

Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency, as Black author John McWhorter argues. He gets called all kinds of nasty things for speaking that opinion, and he's Black! On the other hand, it's harder to "cancel" or accuse someone of absolute racism (or race traitor-hood) if they say "I don't think the woke mindset is helping, and I think there are better ways to help Black communities."

So that's why imho the word "woke" is a popular tool among those who don't like the various components of it, which are much, much easier to enumerate than those on the Left incredulously pretend. It's basically just:

1. The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with, and that society should punish those who spoke those ideas.

2. Ideologies about race and generational guilt which basically boil down to "the whole world would be much better off if all Europeans had mysteriously vanished 1500 years ago and we wish that had happened."

3. Ideologies that have to do with gender, which I dare not even elaborate on, because of how heretical all but one opinion on that subject is.

> The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with

You seem to be arguing that Black people are harmed by being exposed to ideas about victimhood, and then ridiculing the idea that being exposed to ideas can be harmful.

But I think you already know that and went with the selective quote anyway.

Whenever I see someone try to pull bad-faith arguing like that, I just immediately bail.

Another fan-favorite of that cohort is incessant demands of proof.

Well, first we could start by having a discussion of whether or not it is actually true that "they are being told they are always victims with very little agency".

Now, if that were in fact true, we could go on to talk about how we might reduce that harm, and one part of that might involve saying that less.

But then again, were that not true, then we could pretty much discard the person's objections and move on to something that is actually happening.

I read and respect McWhorter, but I don't think that (a) he's right about everything or that (b) your one line summary characterizes his position accurately.

I'll reply separately to your attempted summary.

2. No, that is also not the point at all. The actual view is that there has been, at least within the world once controlled by various European powers since somewhere in the range of 1200-1500, a wilful ignorance and downplaying of the horrors created by the colonialism perpetrated by those European powers.

3. Since you don't elaborate, it's hard to respond to this. But I will note that the recognition that gender and sex are not the same thing goes back many decades, if not centuries; that gender roles and sexuality have not been even remotely close to fixed across the time and space in which human civilization has existed; that the response from people who declaim the "woke" approach is so often summarizable as "I don't like it and other people should lead more miserable lives because I think so".

I'm not sure how we can move forward without some degree of empathy; "Yes, you got the short end of the stick, but how about if we try such and such to ameliorate the impact of the past on your present".

I don't think you are advocating sweeping the past under the rug, I'm just saying that telling a person who is still feeling the sting of a perceived slight (real or imagined) is unlikely to result in moving forward.

Our ignorance of the cultures (positive and negative) in parts of the world where colonization did not happen is motivated by something less pernicious - people are parochial, and European culture in particular took a fairly strong stance that despite knowledge of the civilizations along (e.g.) the silk road, they were of no particular significance since they didn't have (Jesus|Bach|Newton|Galileo|etc.)

You ask "to what end?" I would say the end has multiple components. One is that history rhymes and so if you want to understand the future better, understanding the past better will often help with that. Another is that cultures themselves carry the past forward for amazingly long periods - the English have still not really abandoned the Norman conquest of 1066 as a socio-structural signifier even though it was nearly 1000 years ago. The Hopi still have many stories of things that occured in their world 600-1200 years. If these historical stories are inaccurate, a culture is doing itself no favors carrying them forward. And similarly, a culture that carries such a story as a tale about injustice is not done any favors by being told "ah, fuhgedaboutit".

What? The Rennaisance that grew birth to the Modern West was an intentional attempt to revive and surpass the ideals of Old Rome and Greece. When they excavated the Pyramids, many in the West took to adopting parts of Egyptian Culture for legitimacy, the Washington Monument being one prime example. Imperial China was seen as stagnant, but they certainly were respected as highly civilized and organized. What special qualities they gave themselves were their flexibility, rationality and technological superiority, which is not entirely wrong in the battlefield.

This "central myth" you are saying Europeans told themselves sounds more like a fictional strawman to attack and is contradictory, especially in the context of OP's point towards the attitudes held by the people currently attacking Western ideals, not defending it. It's not really refuting the point either that the world pre-1945 was a brutal place, and EVERYBODY was trying to conquer and dominate each other, it was just the West was the strongest of them all and won at the end.

That's why if you solely focus on the West as opposed to understanding the general context of the world at the time and critiquing equally those other culture, it calls into question whether one really cares about these shared ideals of anti-imperialism or if it's just an excuse for nationalist grievances that they weren't on the dominating side. And you know, in Turkey, in China, in India, that kind of mindset very much is the case. It's not that imperialism was bad, it was only bad because it happened to them. For those they conquered, it was glorious event to be valorized.

The myth is "we bought civilization to places that didn't have it". And that is absolutely a lie. There is a second myth that is particularly applicable in the Americas, which is that Europeans discovered a land that God intended them to have dominion over (essentially ignoring or belittling the existing civilization that was here). Neither of these are fictional strawmen - they are real and documented positions found through the writings of European explorers and American settlers and leaders.

It remains puzzling to me why settler colonialism (the dominant, though not only form of European expansionism) was not common in either the pre-1492 Americas or in Asia. The cultures/civilizations there certainly were expansionary but rarely seemed to feel the need to replace existing populations with their own. Whatever the reasons, the results are wildly different.

Some cultures have known that things are not binary for a very long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)

Being "a wife to start a family" requires a person with female sex, and is typically associated with female gender. But that association is not required, and has not been so across all human cultures and all time.

FWIW, I try to use "male/males" to refer to sex, and "man/men" to refer to gender, since AFAICT, there are no terms that clearly refer to gender.

"men" and "women" should not have their meaning diluted. They already have the meaning of "male" and "female".

What constitutes the gender role of "a man" or "a woman" is fluid, not well defined, and subject to change. What constitutes "femininity" and "masculinity" is also fluid, not well defined, and subject to change.

Even if sex was a binary (which it isn't, but it's not a terrible argument to say that it is close enough to one for many purposes), when it comes to gender we all exist in a multi-dimensional space with so many variations on so many themes. Insisting that gender is binary is so harmful, even to people who consider themselves as being at one or other end of that binary. It's fine that there are people who fully embody a particular Victorian-era notion of masculine and feminine (or any other one, really), but the vast majority of us are nowhere near that simple. Insisting that gender comes in only two forms, and has no fluidity to it hurts all of us.

The reactionaries to “woke” ideas know that (2) is a small number of vocal people and yet they still wrap the anchor around the necks of both (1) and (2). Same strategy for “communism”, “socialism”, “groomers”, “Hamas apologists”, etc. It’s convenient to do this and say all Democrats (or all non-Republicans, or non-MAGA, etc) are painted with this broad brush.

What your comment misses is that the “morality police” has always existed and currently exists along different poles than in the recent past. When I grew up, the social conservatives / incredibly religious were the ones trying to bully people into moral positions. Now, we still have those people (old groups like Family Research Council and new groups like Moms For Liberty) are doing the same thing, but aren’t getting flak from the “anti-wokeness” crowd. Bad faith actors all around.

https://x.com/search?q=cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live

https://x.com/search?q=cis&src=typed_query&f=live

I'm from Denmark, and we were first-movers in Europe on "anti-wokeness" since our election in 2003 (before the term existed). Interestingly, as Europe has moved more to the right in recent years, the wave has been quietly receding a bit here.

Other countries outside of the North Atlantic West also have intense nationalist and "anti-woke" movements (Duterte, Bolsonaro, Milei, Putin, etc.) which do their own anti-woke policing, sometimes literally, through law.

In general, my feeling is that the main actual threat to free speech globally is nationalist "anti-woke" movements.

Agree that group 1 is far larger but it doesn’t take many negative experience to sour the way someone feels about a political ideology.

You're making the assumption that most of that isn't performative nonsense that in reality doesn't help anything.

Also known as slacktivism.

It got to the point where I would see pronouns and flags and URLs to DEI policies (Click here to stop racism now! Really?) in people's email signatures that I would immediately assume they were insincere and phony.

One person I knew had "LGBTQ Ally" in their professional signature. It's one step removed from writing I HAVE GAY FRIENDS and frankly I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins to proclaim their allegiance. None of this has place in a professional setting.

Picture going into a restaurant, and before the hostess seats you she says "I'd like to remind you that I love black people".

That's out of place it is. It doesn't offend anyone, it's just an odd thing to say. You may not perceive it so if you're inside the bubble.

I’ve gone into a restaurant and had the hostess tell me they don’t serve gay people.

So I think it can be very contextually relevant for the hostess to say they’re an ally.

So yeah, it can't be assumed businesses are queer friendly because lots of American Christians and conservatives would prefer queer people dead, or at least back in the closet.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/addi...

You can also declare a business as "woman owned/led"

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/empo...

and "black owned"

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21348990/google-black-own...

That’s an easy question with an easy answer.

Because it can’t be assumed. Because there are people (who own businesses) who are not friendly to LGBTQ+ people. And people (such as LGBTQ people) may want to find or avoid certain places.

Is a good-faith interpretation of such a signal that it would be some sort of silly performative measure?

People who dismiss labels like "LGBTQ-friendly" as "performative moralism" (to use the term Paul Graham used multiple times in his article) have clearly never had their very existence threatened on a frequent basis simply because of who they are.

Of course that's not their original purpose and they aren't very fit for their original purpose. (it's to include trans people, but trans women don't want you to ask what their pronouns are, they want to be addressed like women.)

Yes but how are you supposed to know if an obvious male in 'feminine' type attire wants to be referred to as she/her unless you ask? Could just be a man with a niche fashion sense. See e.g. Grayson Perry.

did you know LGBT were explicitly targeted in the holocaust? You know about the holocaust, right? You are aware that 1940s Germany is when and where the holocaust happened, right?

It was "political correctness" in the 90s and now it's CRT, DEI, cancel culture, SJW, antifa, it's all the same strategy.

It's the predicted consequences of thatcherite and reaganomic policies which were also practiced by clinton/obama/biden. The people who are still true believers of this disasterous Jack Welching of the american economy is blaming imagined 19 year old college kids, dishwashers and janitors for consequences of their intentional politics.

This is similar to how the nationalists blamed everything but nationalism for the consequences of WW1 and then thought hyper-nationalism was the solution.

Our economic state is the consequence of our economic policy.

It's the same mechanism of imagining an enemy causing the negative consequences of the policies they advocate for.

It's actually the core thing that connects tech startups, conspiracy theories, medical quackery, and fascism - a desire to be guided by the imaginary and construct necessary delusions to deny reality.

Wildest thing is, every now and then, it works out - the most delusional Bitcoin people of 2010 are genuinely billionaires now.

Most of the richest people had to deeply believe in what was, at some time, an irrational fantasy and that taking inadvisable acts of insanity would somehow work out.

It seems a bit odd to call them delusional while in the same breath admitting that they were right all along.

You can go to the old Bitcointalk forum. Some people stocked up, for instance, because they thought the American dollar and civilization would collapse in 2012 due to the supposed Mayan apocalypse.

Some bought feverishly in 2016 predicting a communist takeover by Hilary Clinton...

There's many dumb reasons people bought and held.

Think back about what investments you could have done to maximize your income - you'll invariably come up with things like "I should have put my life savings into Tesla before they delivered they're first car instead of $100. Then I should have held on regardless"

or "I should have trusted that Steve Jobs returning to Apple after failing at Next was going to be a legendary turnaround by combining his failed NextStation into a new operating system. Then he'll come out with Apple Newton 2.0 and it will make them one of the most powerful companies in the world"

If I had told you in say, 2004, to take all the high end CRTs being tossed out en masse, put them in a huge barn in the desert and then sell them for thousands each in 20 years, you'd call me nuts.

These are all absurd things that happened.

You can be a stupid fool and still hit it right sometimes.

True, but you can readily point to the things they were actually dumb about. Most people, I'd argue, had the simpler reason of "I'm willing to bet this will grow in value over the long term, given that it's finite and it has some advantages over normal money" - and those people ended up being very, very right.

Likewise, even in those "absurd" examples you bring up, there would have been entirely rational reasons to believe them, like

- "Fossil fuels are unsustainable so the automotive market will start to shift toward electric cars; I should invest in electric car companies, even early-stage ones", or

- "I think Unix is the operating system of the future, and Apple taking Unix mainstream by rebranding NeXT will give Microsoft a run for their money", or

- "These CRTs are obsolete, but so are vinyl records and some crazy audiophiles still pay big bucks for those decades later, so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to toss these out"

Even without the benefit of hindsight, those seemingly-crazy bets could have been - and probably were - predicted via entirely rational and intelligent thought processes. Those rational people likely didn't put all their eggs in any one of those baskets, but they didn't do so for Bitcoin, either, and still ended up rich.

Crypto currency wasn't a new thing. There has been digital currencies going back decades. They had all failed and become worthless.

Looking at the these ones that became valuable and chin stroking with a monocle is silly.

You can rationalize anything but that's really just imagined story telling.

It's all fundamentally irrational. Wise people don't get on top, it's blustering audacious gamblers and those of fortuitous delusion.

You combine that together and you could everybody from SBF, to WeWork, to Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes.

This is far more predictive of future events than writing stories after the fact and convincing yourself that everything is sensible

That didn't make them unreasonable bets. Lots of smart ideas fail to gain traction in spite of being smart ideas, for a variety of reasons. The electric car market (for example) had its share of false starts, too, in the late 19th Century and throughout the entirety of the 20th Century - and yet the people betting on EVs weren't irrational in doing so before the 21st Century, and still weren't irrational to do so afterward. It ain't like the problems with fossil fuels were completely unknown before 2000, after all.

If you're saying you saw Tesla as a success way before they put out there first car because of some rational eventuality, I don't believe you.

The Berlin Wall was officially called the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart". Russia claims they are fighting in Ukraine to denazify their regime. North Korea is called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

A bit naive to take these self-appointed labels at face value.

AIDS activists like Act Up were genuine about the threat of AIDS.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the civil rights movement were genuinely students committed to nonviolence.

The suffragists genuinely wanted woman's suffrage.

But for anti-fascists, we have jpeg memes calling them fools.

Just like how racists dismissed the civil rights movement, homophobes dismissed gay marriage, people against women voting dismissed suffragists, and people made jokes about AIDS in the 80s, people who dismiss anti fascists are probably... well...

We'd all like to imagine we're August Landmesser - especially those who were driving around with American flag bumper stickers during things like Abu ghraib. The ones who are most fervent about saluting also swear they'd never be heiling. Sure.

Right. Nobody ever thinks they're the bastard.

Yes, because "fascist" is possibly one of the most abused words in our political landscape.

If a group showed up from the right promising to beat up "commies" I don't think people would be too keen on that either.

There are groups that self-describe as fascist such as National Alliance, American Vanguard or Patriot Front. National Vanguard has careful literature back to 1930s fascism. Search for "National Vanguard History of American National Socialism" it's a lengthy multipart series on why they think they are the true descendents of American fascism. There's also groups like Identity Evropa (now known as AIM) and the base.

There's pro fascist gab, telegram, bitchute, rumble, and parler channels/groups. They make memes about how much they absolutely love fascism and are extremely open and explicit about it.

I've lurked in these groups, gone to their meetings, I've got literature with titles like "why Hitler was right" and "fascism will fix it".

But sure enough there's people who even look at this that are like "well well, people will call school hall monitors fascists" as if it can't actually exist.

This is equivalent to hearing a school child call something gay and then concluding homosexuality couldn't possibly exist.

I mean really now ... knock it off. People aren't that stupid.

(I'm not anti-fascist btw, I'm just anti-bullshit. All the fascist logic I've heard happens to be bullshit but it's the BS I've got a problem with)

Trump and the republican party at large has been called a fascist a truckload of times. This alone means "antifa" can take action against an immense swath of the population.

In the exact same way, there are groups that label themselves as communists or hell, even pedophiles, and we should still be wary if the anti-commie or anti-pedo force showed up because you can't trust vigilantes not to be utter morons.

I know there's some wild imaginations depicting other things but they aren't grounded in reality.

There aren't anarchists marching with face-coverings, helmets, weapons, and tactical gear shouting pronouns to overtake blue cities. The craziest fictions people convince themselves of.

This is probably the most organized group there is: https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/ ... they're pretty focused. The Rose City Nationalists for instance, is a splinter group kicked out of the Proud Boys for being too extreme, similar to how the Black Legion split off from the KKK.

And this is at the heart of why the topic is controversial.

I've sat in on a meetings where a central team of copywriters openly shamed engineers for disagreeing about the importance of renaming certain terms that had existed in the software for decades (whitelist/blacklist/master). The engineers in question were Indian, and couldn't have been any further removed from the original context.

To be clear, I'm supportive of efforts to remove racially charged language. But I found the tactics and behaviors associated with that project ridiculous, and challenge the notion that "wokeness" is limited to your definition as written.

I think I’m looking for a way to distil the ideas you’ve expressed into a response I can use when someone complains about woke : `that sounds quite annoying, but let’s discuss the idea not the idiot`

I think you may be right here, but I think it's also worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.

What I see is that a lot of "woke" starts with the assumption that the audience is bad, then tries to work backwards to prove it

Of course discussions about selfishness, hypocrisy and cruelty are going to infuriate people when you start from the assumption that the people you are talking to are the ones who are selfish cruel hypocrites

Next time you see someone make a comment about "straight cis white men" (or any demographic, but this one comes up a lot), replace it with "selfish cruel hypocrites", that probably would give you a good idea why that demographic reacts poorly to the message

And so, in the spirit of that argument, sure, maybe not all straight white cis men are a problem, but ENOUGH of us are that we should be paying attention to see if we're unknowingly part of the problem, or even better if we can help at all to improve things.

Hopefully in another couple decades we can revisit this topic, only specialized down another couple adjectives. =)

We absolutely are.

I think that in itself is the problem, you dont need to be cis, white or male to be the problem, its just a group that is the target of choice.

Targeting straight white men this way isnt going to be the solution to the problem, especially those that are the problem. I don't have a good solution to this but pouncing on a large group for the actions of a few isnt a great idea.

If they want to radicalize a group, this is a great way to go about it.

Labelling an entire race (noting caveat above) of people as problematic is not a traditional progressive worldview and in my opinion that this view is being promoted in modern progressive politics has contributed to a large proportion of traditional progressives feeling politically stranded.

There is no spirit of argument, your axioms are lacking. Either you can form an argument without generalization or it is very weak. That is mostly the gist of the criticism of contemporary progressive arguments.

Especially on the topic of racism it is paramount to stay precise in your wording and especially if your own policies circle around changes in language.

And if your argument gets the basics wrong, you should not wonder about any headwind and no, these arguments cannot form a revisited civil rights movement.

Are you seeking this out or consuming algorithmic media that sends it to you to make you mad and get you hooked?

I'm in that demographic and do not recognize this at all. From my perspective this sounds paranoid bordering on mental illness.

I think that a lot of people see their own flaws in others, they assume that everyone else has the same perspective or is damaged.

There is little point to putting thought into a responses because of how twisted their view is.

Others can try, I work on more productive things.

> worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.

I agree with this, it's not nice to be dehumanised or disrespected, it's awful. I saw someone speak recently who dipped into this kind of broad anti-male language to get a sneering laugh from the crowd more than once. With friends, with people who matter deeply to me, I'd want to speak to them about the petty provocation in their choice of language, but right now, I still think that following down the path of chasing down that language in public is a dead end, because a person speaking in that way is scratching for a fight, probably not a productive fight but a let the fury out fight. There may be a legitimate reason for that fury but I don't want to be the bucket it gets poured into. I am up for a sincere difficult conversations about real problems, and usually people pick that up and respond accordingly. Most people aren't sociopaths, and can't resist reciprocating sincere empathy and respect.

Epictetus said, "Don't explain your philosophy, embody it."

They're welcoming historically marginalized groups into their workplaces, their families, their communities. Every day they treat others with basic respect.

It makes some people so mad that they crawl the internet for examples of these people "going too far". They'll bring up examples from other continents to get that angry fix. They'll misconstrue them in the worst possible light and pass it on telephone style till it's unrecognizable. And if they don't find any they'll make them up. They'll sometimes pretend to be the people they hate and propose stupid things to make themselves angry.

I've seen the latter happen in comments here where one reactionary sarcastically suggests something ridiculous and another one takes it seriously and gets angry at it.

Currently online lesbians are being blamed for forest fires. Which is only a minor update on the classic religious claim of "hurricanes caused by being tolerant of gays".

So I don't think you can escape this just by not being "woke" and "annoying".

So humans then?

Because all humans have been marginalized at some point in history. Even the language you're using is an example of the problem, since it insinuates that some groups of people were marginalized and some people were not. If you really wanted to embody the values of compassion and selflessness, it wouldn't be contingent on the physical traits or background of the person in question.

But the ideas of humanism are better and woke people often dislike that their ideas get rejected. Still, people were made fun off on TV for expressing "old" humanistic ideas in favor of idpol. I don't think that some woke ideas fly very high on an intellectual level so that too much discussion would not even be necessary. Not that the criticism is taken seriously if you have your dogma at hand.

There are well known dynamics that even putting people in camp blue or red creates conflict. Woke ignores these dynamics completely, but did further ideas of that kind to the letter. Current conflicts are further empiric evidence that some assumptions do indeed hold.

They are (or were throughout the 2010s), but they have a way of talking about it where they do it, but then claim it doesn't exist if anyone tries to give a name to it. So "wokeness isn't real" is a popular way to say "wokeness is real and I think it's good". Sometimes this is called Voldemorting.

I personally think it's good but also think it's real.

No, you do not. I know this because when I advocate for actually not being racist, members of your group call me racist for it.

I am the one who seeks policies that do not take a person's race into consideration when making decisions where race is clearly a priori irrelevant. That is what it means not to be racist.

Your group is the one that insists that doing so is necessary to achieve a moral outcome.

More thoroughly:

* The online left was using terms like "social justice warrior" to describe themselves in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Some of them even used alternate terms to try and fit their kind of activism closer, one I remember being "social justice paladin".

* The first big round of backlash turned SJW into an insult in the mid 2010s, so they rebranded themselves as "woke".

* As the backlash grew, "woke" was also turned into an insult.

* DEI was the most recent rebranding, but since that describes actions instead of the people doing the actions there wasn't really a way to turn it directly into an insult, and "progressive" isn't zing-y enough to catch on, so "woke" stuck.

This perception is a constant cause of concern for the actual left, and it's created by liberal politicians attempting to co-opt the movement, because it represents a huge part of their disenfranchised base.

In today's reality:

- left: socialist, progressive policies and in favor of fixing the system from the ground up. Election reform and the dissolution of failed establishments find support here (i.e. "too big to fail" was capital B "Bad"). An actual leftist today would say that Trump is awful, but also that Obama probably did more damage to us in the long term. We have not had a leftist in power in any surviving generation.

- liberal: most of the democratic party. Biden's a lib, so was hillary. Liberal voters (somehow) believe that the current system can (and should) be saved by incrementalism. My take is that mostly, liberal politicians are pulling a fast one and just wanna keep that campaign money flowing, which is why you get a lot of talk about campaign finance reform and no action whatsoever. Liberals are terrified of ranked-choice, and economically look a whole lot like conservatives (we used to call this neoconservative or neoliberal but the distinction has become very indistinct).

There's overlap in demographic between the leftist and the liberal - so liberal politicians have frequently used the "jangling keys method" and pushed stuff like wokeness real hard when they're trying to distract from the fact that they're taking money from JPMorgan and Shell Oil. Hillary was one of the worst - refusing point-blank to talk about banking as a real problem while accusing all her detractors of being "Bernie Bros" - which was really just a hamfisted smokescreen to try and turn the party against itself (this ended predictably).

To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.

I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing. Problem is, we've been divided by wedge issues (some of which are truly relevant, like the climate) that make it impossible to form a coalition to accomplish actual reform. This was done on purpose.

Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual. At the risk of being accused of being 'woke' - i'd ask that the two terms (left and liberal) don't get further confused. It muddies the conversation in ways that are destructive.

> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.

Those are both good because they fight off fascism. There's nothing leftist about letting someone be genocided by Russians.

> I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing.

This is a demonstration of "horseshoe theory". Most of these are wrong! Inflation is not "out of control" but has already been fixed. The US economy is the best it's ever been and people are mad about it because they think they saw it was bad on the news!

The real correct opinion is that American elites are good and the voters are bad.

> Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual.

This is the classic indicator that you're a teenager and have an emotional need to appear above everything. They couldn't be more different. Only one of them wants your wife to die in childbirth.

I was at a house party once here in Australia, and a Canadian friend got frustrated at me. "It sounds like you believe in policy X, but also policy Y! I don't get it! What are you, left or right?". And I responded by asking what policies X and Y have to do with each other at all? Why should your stance on war and fracking be correlated? Or have anything to do with your opinion about gun control, abortion rights, racism or free speech?

I'm not convinced "actual leftism" has any well accepted meaning. Liberalism has a clear meaning. But "leftism" / "rightism"? They both seem like kinda arbitrary grab bags of policy ideas to me. Why not a pro-war & pro-fracking democrat?

No, it really is about specific ideas. I’ll discuss four:

1) Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition with common cause and shared interests. This goes back to the 1990s with the “rainbow coalition.” A lot of the way the left talks to minorities, and various things like affinity groups arise out of this idea that non-whites will bring about left-liberal changes to society. Also the antagonistic way many on the left talk about whites. But most non-whites don’t think of themselves that way, as we saw in the election.

2) Because of (1), many in the left believe in permissive approaches to policing and immigration because of the disproportionate effects of those policies on black and Hispanic people. But the public wants more policing and less immigration, including black and Hispanic people.

3) Many on the left believe in treating people of different races different to remedy past race-based harms. But the public doesn’t like this—even California voted overwhelmingly against repealing the state ban on affirmative action.

4) Related to the above, there’s a general belief on the left that, in any given issue, policy should cater to the “most marginalized.” When confronted with the burdens to the average person, their reaction is to either (a) deny such costs and accuse the other part of various “isms” and “phobias,” or (b) assert that the average person must bear the cost.

Here's the Harvard data from the somewhat recent SCOTUS trial: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/222325/202...

Asians in the top academic decile are half as likely as African Americans in the 5th decile to be accepted. I highly doubt exposing Americans to this data would make them more favorable to affirmative action– the very opposite is more likely.

When stated by opponents seeking to strawman it, certainly.

But:

"when faced with multiple equally qualified candidates for a position, it is permissble and perhaps even desirable to use demographic factors such as race or gender to select among them"

generally doesn't get much opposition. It's not absolutely impossible that this is a steelman version of affirmative action, but it's also the one I grew up hearing from the actual proponents of the concept.

Regardless it took only a few years for what I heard to go from "we should use gender/race as a tie breaker" to "our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call. And that's inevitable because the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions. The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was, which results in people being targeted and fired for -isms of whatever kind.

So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.

I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?

> the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions

That doesn't seem to be the case for other problems. I don't see what makes this problem special so there can be no push back on extreme solutions.

> The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was

What about using non-extreme steps to try to mitigate the issue.

> So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.

Idiots is a word that originated in ancient Greek and was used for the people who did not care about the matters of the Polis. Everybody is born an idiot until they participate in public matters. That costs (time and effort to familiarize yourself). In that sense maybe the people you are talking about are idiots...

It is illegal for jobs in USA, but not for university student spots. Trump has said he will make that illegal though, so it might change and become illegal like in most of the world.

What a university can do, or any form of corporation in the USA can do, is to announce goals to have its body be made up in roughly the same was as the general population, according to some demographic metrics.

So you can't say "student #68 must be female"; you can say "we are aiming for a 50/50 male/female student body" and then take steps to get there.

“In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity.”

> Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.

It was a preceding Gallup poll that found the result you're thinking of:

> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.

The disconnect between this sort of response with the one you cited at the end of your comment just serves to underline my point about the public's lack of clear understanding of what "affirmative action" means (and they cannot be entirely blamed for this, since in the culture, it has come to mean different things).

Institutions like Harvard will (for the foreseeable future) always have vastly more fully qualified applications than they can accept. The concept of affirmative action was originally intended by its proponents to be used only when tie-breaking between equally qualified candidates. Harvard and the other Ivies have this situation in extremis. The idea was that when faced with the question "well, we have 26 people all fully qualified, how are to pick between them?" that using race was a legitimate choice as long as the racial demographics of the institution did not match those of the overall population. They have (for a while) used gender in a similar way, and arguably could use favorite ice cream flavor if they chose, because the candidates are all qualified to be selected.

There was never a suggestion that "affirmative action" meant selecting less qualified candidates because of their racial status. However, the conservative right has claimed that this is what affirmative action really means in the world, and this idea has been broadly picked up by the media and public at large. Whether there is actually any evidence that this has happened on a significant scale is not something I've seen adequately addressed. From what I have read, including the Harvard case, I'd say it was much more an unfounded grievance on the part of people who felt they had a right to be admitted or hired than what actually happens. I could be wrong.

And people see that this framing of “breaking ties between qualified candidates” concept is merely wordplay. Harvard doesn’t say “everyone above a particular academic index score is ‘equally qualified’ and there’s no difference above that line.” According to the SFFA data, Asian and white students in the 10th decile of academic index score are 5-6 times as likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 5th decile (who have virtually no chance). But black and Hispanic students in the 5th decile are as likely or more likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 9th and 10th deciles. Thus, Harvard uses race to admit less qualified students—as measured by the very metric Harvard has established to measure qualifications.

Most people intuitively understand this without the explanation. They intuitively understand that grades and test scores establish a sliding scale of more or less qualified candidates.

Of course, should they be admitted and it is realized that they abused the definitions of race that society uses to group and classify people in some egregious way, they may face consequences for that.

And sure, I'm entirely sympathetic to the scientific observation that race is a myth, but in the actual USA, in actual 2024, basic physiological features like skin color, face shape, voice tone, hair texture will result in you receiving different treatment in many contexts. Whatever triggers such different treatment is what defines race on the ground (ignoring the equivalent set of things related to sex/gender).

What percentage of what group is “many on the left”? This does not sound plausible to me.

Activists then forgot this was the point and changed the name to "BIPOC" to de-emphasize half the "POC" group (the ones who aren't "BI"), but the whole point was to keep them in the group.

Couple that with the prospect of America becoming a majority non-white, it’s easy to see why the broader left of center embraced the rhetoric and policies they did over the last decade—e.g. reframing policy issues like immigration and policing in racial justice terms.

The problem is that “white racism” as a lens for understanding America—widely shared by modern liberals—is a poor tool for understanding Latinos and Asians.

Do you mean majority when you say public? Do you think what the majority thinks should be done (mob rule)?

Wokeness is the comparable, I teach at a liberal art university, there are probably few places more "woke" than this. Even here if I count there is probably a 10:1 ratio of "people complaining about woke" vs "people demanding a woke thing".

The feeling that others are judging you from a high horse is a very strong force, even if they aren't judging you at all. And strong forces can be used to manipulate people into making choices against their interest .

You never eat lunch with colleagues? Never eat dinner with family and their significant others?

It is very hard to hide that you are a vegan.

I don't know about you, but I don't give a damn about made up problems that aren't part of my life. Don't get me wrong, I can totally imagine smug vegans. I just made the observation that 99 percent of the ones I met would receive a disservice if I went under the assumption that "all vegans are smug assholes".

Similarily my assumption for meat eaters isn't that all of them are assholes. But I observed there are people who are so triggered by the mere thought of vegans existing, they can't stop talking about it or demanding from any supposed vegan that they explajn themselves — so the exact thing they claim vegans do.

This makes discussions like these inherently slippery and circular. While it's clear that many people do actually hold beliefs that their critics would characterize as woke (as evidenced by real-world impact like master branches being renamed, indigenous land statements, and DEI quotas), they're never going to voluntarily accept a label that has been turned into a pejorative.

During that time actual cliché hipsters existed as was apparent (via the internet), but more important to my own life was another aspect: it was a kind of catchall term for people who didn't fit neatly into the usual known groups (Punks, Skaters, Metalheads, Ravers, Emos, ..) or did their own thing. I was connected to my local art scene, most of which have been called hipsters without actually being or remotely looking like hipsters.

Hipster was a degorative for: "Oh you think you're different". The thing was I didn't only think that, I was different. Probably most people on this website here were different from the average person during their teens.

You don't just eat vegan, you are a vegan. The thing to recognize is that these boxes exist to make themselves feel superior. So they put the people whose behavior and existence induces cognitive dissonance into their world view into boxes and pat themselves on their backs whenever they can convince themselves they spotted a marker that proves the person opposite is part of that box.

And before there is a misunderstanding: the boxes can work both ways. People within a box can hate on those outside of it and vice versa — and both feel superior to the other. The point is that people ascribe certain attributes to the boxes and use it to paint simplistic pictures of the world around them, precisely because it makes them feel better. Made a certain food choice? Congrats, idiots now think you're smug.

And I am not even vegan. I just try to look past the boxes as life is much more nuanced and much richer behind them.

Some of them did even mention it only after a meat eater asked them why they are not eating $X.

As mentioned in my live I met only one vegan that smugly and unprompted talked about veganism. And they were the type who would talk that way about literally every topic.

I am generally careful with stories like that. "Trans bathrooms" is another one of those. My institute has non-gendered bathrooms for the past century, mainly for space reasons. And that never was a problem.

If you love meat, but understand the ethical argument behind not eating it, wouldn't it be practical if vegans were smug assholes that you don't have to listen to? That is why some people want them to fulfill that cliché — I am more interested in the truth, especially the truth that has an impact on my direct life.

¹: There ought to be a number of people everybody met, who are vegans, but you don't know they are, because they did not mention it. E.g. my bands drummer (a old punk) is vegan and it took me two years to figure that one out.

I have several friends who are vegan. My point is that they don’t deny it–if you ask them, they’re happy to say “yeah, I’m vegan.”

But people who believe in things that are widely considered woke, like changing ‘master’ branches to ‘main’, usually will deny that they are woke or that they want to change the name for that reason. They’ll tell you it’s about common decency or not offending others and that it has nothing to do with wokeness.

Now is this a (main) hill I have to die on? Totally not. Do I have very strong opinions on this? Nope. Does it cost me a lot? Nope. As I said, I have to type less, and as a teacher explaining that the main branch is the main branch is easier than explaining that master means it is the main branch and explaining where master comes from electronics etc.

"Woke" people for the most part are like me: not adamant social justice worriors whose ardent opinions have to be defended till the last drop of blood, but people who are like "meh, why not, doesn't cost me a thing and maybe it is only right". And that is the polar opposite of what the political right wing and their whole billionaire-funded propaganda machine likes to paint people whoe make choices like that as.

Now I don't say people with strong opinions on these issues don't exist, because there do. But they are the minority. But taking vocal minorities and declaring them the representatives of the majority seems to be a trend these days.

I hear you... you go along with it because the zealots who do feel strongly are aggressive and it's easier to concede the point than face backlash, even if you object to (or are indifferent to) the language-policing. I've switched to 'main' as well, so I get it. pg's essay discusses this:

> Most people are afraid of impropriety; they're never exactly sure what the social rules are or which ones they might be breaking. Especially if the rules change rapidly. And since most people already worry that they might be breaking rules they don't know about, if you tell them they're breaking a rule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially if multiple people tell them. Which in turn is a recipe for exponential growth. Zealots invent some new impropriety to avoid. The first people to adopt it are fellow zealots, eager for new ways to signal their virtue. If there are enough of these, the initial group of zealots is followed by a much larger group, motivated by fear. They're not trying to signal virtue; they're just trying to avoid getting in trouble.

-

All I'm saying I guess is let's not pretend that the subject of the essay isn't a real thing. Just because no one self-identifies as 'woke' doesn't mean the ideology doesn't exist—call it whatever you want, but the phenomenon is real and it's had tangible influence on our culture, including in tech.

> 2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes

Who are you talking about? It seems to me that you are using very general and broad language so avoid having to defend any specific points. Who exactly shamed you and for what? Give some examples. Who exactly are you paraphrasing with "that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive"? For the record, my experience of left-wing politics (two decades+) is very different from yours and I haven't noticed the phenomena you speak of. In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam.

That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.

You are using quotation marks so you must be paraphrasing someone, right? If so can you give some examples of this phenomena?

Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. And yet my experience is the exact opposite. If the "divergent ideas" are e.g. "everyone who voted for Trump is an evil nazi" vs "everyone who voted for Trump is just stupid", I'll grant that those two ideas will be entertained and debated. But if the idea falls anywhere outside the accepted orthodoxy, for instance "maybe people who voted for Trump were well informed and had good reason to do so", that idea is not tolerated at all.

Granted I live in Seattle, which is probably home to a disproportionate number of more extreme progressives.

I guess the difference is that I actually hang out with left-wing people and have been doing so for decades, whereas you base your opinions on rage bait news and internet interactions? You may think Trump voters are well-informed and you may think the moon is made of cheese. In both cases there are mountains of evidence to the contrary. I don't know what being wrong has to do with tolerance.

The rest of your comment proves my point quite nicely though!

There are whole ragebait youtube channels that disagree.

> There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.

But who will morality police the morality police? (Paul Graham of course!)

Jokes aside, the difference between the 1) and 2) is the difference between progressivism and wokeism. But I think many here – as well as the article – miss the point by aiming squarely at 'noisy' humanities students, and not at the governments and corporations that leveraged their movements into this realm of the purely performative. That's not to say that there isn't scope for government and corporate interventions that actually make positive change to social justice outcomes. And there's also some merit to both online and meatspace activism causing many bad actors to consider their behavior (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, excessive force by law enforcement, wrongful incarcerations/executions).

> e.g., Harvey Weinstein

Must, like him or not, had a counter example to that where vanity disallowed necessary police work because many feared the PR outcome, while the scope is a thousand times that of Weinstein. Investigations were very likely stunted because of that.

People who perceive themselves as losing rights will always be angry at losing their privileges. Growing up white in Brazil was great for the most part: police never stopped me, I got away of many speeding tickets just because I looked like a “good kid”, and so on. My non-white friends never had it that easy. One was charged with drug trafficking because the combined amount of pot he and his white friend were carrying went over the limit a single one could be carrying before being considered a dealer. Of course the police assumed it was the less Caucasian (in reality, it was the other guy who went to buy the pot from his dealer). Even though the white friend stated half the pot was his, the case went to trial.

As I said, rulebook of toxic middle management. Treat people differently and they fight among themselves and you don't have them on their back. Simple workplace dynamic, even if not intuitive.

IMO the priggishness is baked into American culture, which is descended from cranky puritans and literally defined itself as the most moral (police) force in the world after genociding the original inhabitants of the continent and setting up a culture for billionaires that leaves even qualified and talented workers increasingly insecure about housing and health care.

In reality "woke" has been a hugely convenient way for the US establishment to confine the Left to a ghetto of minority interests, especially about sexuality. Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)

So now we have anti-woke for the wannabe intellectuals, and Q for the useful idiots.

Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference, raw milk drinkers, and the spread of lunatic propaganda about vaccinations and climate science.

There is a definitely a new discourse gaining traction post-Luigi that the polarization between left and right has been used as a distraction to the ever widening disparity in wealth, and the receding quality of life in the West.

> Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference

I've no insights into the specific nature of PG's outrage, but I imagine some in the SV entrepreneurial bubble might be concerned with how effective activists can be at ruining financial ledgers using boycotts and the like. Such power wielded by the plebs can be concerning, especially when businesses need to stay solvent, so it is indeed best to keep a lid on it.

I don’t think there is any sensible person on the planet that hasn’t noticed that.

Is that why Tesla, the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles wasn't allowed to attend the electric vehicle summit?

For those not in the high risk groups, it just an choice based on personal taste. It seems a bit funny that the reason why it is allowed to be sold is directly related to the heavy regulation that enforces such high amount of testing (and strict consequences), so that the product is generally safe regardless of added pasteurization.

It isn't really. It was a short-lived joke that the left didn't realize was a joke, started pushing themselves and gave it new life, but it's still mostly just a joke.

I don’t think most people were aware of this until it made the rounds on social media, but even if some people are joking, it’s a real thing.

I think you may have this a bit backwards and there’s some conflation going on between real social phenomena and people who find those phenomena too ridiculous to believe and decide to make jokes about it.

I can assure you the basis for the home schoolers, anti-vaxxers, and raw milk consumers wasn’t some joke. They came from disgraced scientists, church leaders, quack doctors, etc.

I’m not saying there has never in history been a joke that directly led to a conspiracy theory or social movement, but the history of many of these things is pretty well documented and several of the categories you mentioned have origins in the 70s/80s.

> (The Iowa vote broke almost perfectly along party lines with nearly all Republicans in favor and only a handful of Democrats defecting to their side.) And it’s not just in Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-ri...

Remember a lot of people who are “proudly white” always mention lactose tolerance. They also carry tiki torches.

In term of lactose tolerance, the consensus seems to be that raw milk is slight worse for people with that problem, but again only with a very small margin. It is most likely related to that 7-10% number above.

Priggishness means self-righteous, performative morality. Can you give an example of this that is normal for US right-wingers? They certainly have plenty of daft ideas (e.g. anti-vax), but I haven't seen right-wingers being priggish about them. Priggish would be positioning themselves as superior people for living in an unvaccinated neighborhood or working for an anti-vax employer, or proclaiming that they will not date a vaccinated person, or vaccinating their baby in secret while posting the opposite on social media, or cancelling a public figure who gets outed as vaccinated, etc.

The first that sprung to mind:

> An update by the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom recently released preliminary data stating, "between January 1 and August 31, 2023, OIF reported 695 attempts to censor library materials and services and documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles - a 20% increase from the same reporting period in 2022." Many of the book titles targeted were BIPOC and LGBT groups. The book bans are largely the result of laws passed in Republican-led states.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_S...

What if someone says "that was sexist" and let's assume it was. Then, complaining that s/he who said it, is too woke, can itself be priggishness? The morally right thing, in that community, might be to be anti woke.

Many point it's from the professional/managerial/bureaucratic class, which never was into free speech to begin with. Take pg's mention of the Soviet Union. That's actually a country where that class overthrew the capitalists to become the ruling class. (They were called "The New Class" there. In countries like the US, they're above workers but subordinate to capitalists.)

And all this is a useful distraction: criticizing wokies distracts from the structure of power that leads to homelessness and working your one (1) life away under some boss. Which is ridiculous in the 21st century.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=woke&year_star...