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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   20369 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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'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?

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