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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   34464 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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I don’t mind being called “woke right”, if you can actually address my ideas head-on.

I do because it propagates a dangerous misconception about what 'woke' means.

'Woke' is having become awakened to the 'reality' that all differences in hierarchy are unjust, i.e. Marxism. If someone makes more money than someone else, or one group is healthier than another, or people from one neighborhood go to jail more often than people from the next neighborhood over, the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions. The explicit demand to 'heal' these 'historical inequities' is to feed the golden geese that are white (and sometimes Asian) males to everyone else until no distinction in outcome remains. That's wokeism. Unfortunately, in real reality, this victory condition is impossible and the whole thing is a road straight to hell.

In contrast, leftists would have you believe that 'woke' means 'interested in ethnic solidarity'. That's not woke. That's just how human beings naturally operate without a lifetime of indoctrination teaching us that preferring our own kind is evil.

If someone makes more money than someone else, or one group is healthier than another, or people from one neighborhood go to jail more often than people from the next neighborhood over, the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions.

To be fair, there is a relatively small but quite loud subset of right-wingers who believe exactly this about Jews. And there are quite many right-wingers who really overestimate the degree to which leftists make their decisions out of deliberate maliciousness and really underestimate the degree to which leftists make those decisions out of a combination of ignorance and pathological empathy. Some right-wingers have even adopted a Rousseauian "man is innocent in the state of nature" attitude, except their idealized pre-modern utopia from which humanity has fallen is some kind of amalgam of ancient martial cultures, 19th century farmsteads, and the 1950s.

That’s a good defining aspect of the woke right.

The discrimination against whites and males, that is on the books, enshrined in government contracts, jurisprudence, harvard. Explicit. Not woke right.

To justify the octopus conspiracies otoh, they have pamphlets from the 19th century, hinting at early life bios of successful people, coded parentheses, jewish media interpretation, and aryan studies. It's all implicit mystery knowledge, like the tenets of scientology. You then become clear, awaken, put on the 'they live' glasses, get a superpower where you don't have to check early life section anymore.

Can you name people who actually have this as their ideology except random anon accounts on Twitter?

I sense that people like Lomez are probably the closest to what you mean, but he's published enough books that contradict this reading profusely that it seems specious.

When people refer to the "woke right" they're referring to right-wing people who behave like woke people in the sense that they try to censor, cancel, and thought-police those who disagree with them. They aren't saying the woke right is politically woke, they're saying they use the same illiberal tactics as the woke.

they're saying they use the same illiberal tactics as the woke

Do the illiberal tactics include trying to scare away Joe Rogan and other people with big platforms from having conversations with certain people? Do they include lumping in people you don't like with nazis? Do they include complaints about online abuse when people start commenting on how you're being ridiculous?

Not at all, what they are referring to is people on the right wing who do not buy into liberalism.

Otherwise you're going to have to explain to me when Auron McIntyre has ever done any of these things for Lindsey to coin the term to go after him and his ilk.

Except if that definition were operative it would make no sense for guys like Lindsey, Murray, Kisin or Peterson to talk about the woke right. All four take up the mantle of 'concern for where the discourse is headed' if people they don't like are allowed to speak freely on topics they disagree with.

'Anti-liberals use illiberal tactics' is a silly kind of thing to complain about.

But also, I don't think it's apples to apples. IME when people on the right are doing this it's often simply trying to get leftists held to any kind of sane standard at all -- saying 'kill all white people' should not be tolerated in polite society, but generally is. Whereas the left, again IME, is generally happy to ruin lives over much less, e.g. refusing to create art celebrating gay 'marriage'.

'Woke' is having become awakened to the 'reality' that all differences in hierarchy are unjust (…) the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions.

These strike me as different claims. Wokeness as originally defined was really more about the second one. The moral truth that inequality is unjust was taken for granted from the start; it needn't be "awakened" to. Woke in the original sense was very much about "awakening" to the pervasive-systemic-oppression theory of why inequality of outcomes arises. The two different claims can be believed independently. And more importantly, believing both still doesn't inherently require you to be in favor of censorship/cancel culture.

I think at this point "woke" in colloquial Internetese long ago ceased to have anything to do with the original meaning, and means something more like "leftist Political Correctness thought-policing" whether it's about racial equality or anything else. This is the meaning of "woke" that is then applied to "the woke right" when it begins engaging in similar anti-free-speech behavior for partisan gains.

This is the meaning of "woke" that is then applied to "the woke right" when it begins engaging in similar anti-free-speech behavior for partisan gains.

There's a slight problem here, because from my point of view the Jedi are evil "anti-woke" are the ones doing this. Trivially: who's the one whinging to Joe Rogan that he shouldn't have so many people with [insert opinion] on?

I do because it propagates a dangerous misconception about what 'woke' means.

Well, I'd be worried about this more if I thought the tame came about as a result of a genuine misconception. When I'm worried this is used to shut out my ideas, I prefer to play the reverse of the "Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand" card, and say "ok, I'm woke right, now address my arguments". It cuts to the chase, puts the ball in their court, and arguably actually lowers the chances of any misconceptions being spread.

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