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While I compliment the author of that piece for coining the word "dinergoth", I'm not sure that I would make the same connection to wokeness that you are making here.
My main objection to wokeness was always more about the tactics than the things they advocate for. There are plenty of groups that believe in and advocate for weird things that I don't agree with from the Scientologists to the Jehovah's Witnesses. Heck, I think the Fundamentalist demonization of Harry Potter, Pokemon and D&D was always pretty silly, but I don't care about it as long as they don't make it my problem and attempt to restrict my access to things I enjoy through law. Wokeness crossed the line by trying to force everyone to live according to their dictates through a number of underhanded and illiberal tactics, but a little-L liberal wokeness would be as unobjectionable to me as any of the other crazy things my fellow country-men and -women believe in.
More than anything as I read the piece, I kind of wondered where the author has been for the last 20-30 years. A lot of the trends he was noticing for the first time with his dinergoth girlfriend were already in motion decades ago, as any kid who had a high school classmate who was a little too into Naruto can attest. I also don't think "dinergoth" actually captures what I see as the cause, which is the proliferation of "extremely online" subcultures as a pan-American phenomenon. This explains the loss of regional accents (which were probably already in decline from the TV era and the radio broadcast era before that), and why "weird" things like anime, memes, queer culture and many other things are becoming more common everywhere in the United States at once.
I just think that the author is a normie yuppie, probably raised by normie yuppies, and he's making the wrong generalizations about the why and how of "weirdness" in American culture. I think even if many young people didn't feel down and out in America, that we would probably still see a lot of the same weirdness. I found it especially funny the way he threw together phrases like "Nintendo Hispanic", as if Hispanics enjoying one of the longest running and most popular brands of video game consoles was some weird and mysterious thing that could only be explained by American decline and degeneracy.
The distinction you make between the sort of coercive vs. non-coercive wokeness sounds good, but it hasn't held up in practice. We really don’t have to speculate about that either because we’ve already seen how it has played out. At a certain point, little-L liberal wokeness reached critical mass within our institutions and they stopped being one perspective among many and instead became the framework that shaped all the norms and policies that these places enforced.
I suspect part of the issue is that a lot of the time, wokeness is more about the tactics than the actual beliefs. In other words, for example, a large number of wokies (perhaps most of them) don't start from the premise that they desire racial equality and then start thinking about ways to work for racial equality. Rather, these wokies really like the idea of terrorizing other people with ever-changing language rules; taking over buildings on college campuses; blocking traffic; getting laws passed to punish and humiliate their out-group; and so on. Wokeness gives them a means to pursue these activities while feeling righteous in doing so.
It's a bit disappointing the term CHORFs never caught on (outside the Warhammer fandom)
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The problem I see with vorpa-glavo's comment is that it comes off like they think wokeness itself isn't really something that needs to be addressed, and that it only needs to be occasionally dealt with when it gets out of hand.
I, on the other hand, think it's more of a critical mass thing. Once an ideology reaches a certain scale, it obviously starts to affect the population, and at that point it almost inevitably develops coercive or oppressive elements, regardless of its original intent.
I started to use vorpa-glavo's example of Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses to make that point, but then I stopped and kept my orginal reply short. Nobody really cares about a quirky subculture or religion with strange beliefs so long as it doesn't have political power and control over the mainstream. But imagine instead of there being 1 million Scientologists there were 50 million Scientologists and they disproportionately controlled academia, media, corporate HR departments, and other institutions that affect how we view reality. At that point it wouldn’t just be a quirky and harmless belief system. It would define what is acceptable and what isn't, and it would be influencing policy in drastic ways that many people would not like. That's where we are with wokeness. It doesn't need to be occasionally batted down when it oversteps. We're past that point. It needs to be rooted out and removed.
It seems to me that ideologies vary in terms of how oppressive or coercive they are. For example, consider what could be called "liberal democracy" or "social democracy" -- the sort of ideology that has been ascendant in much of the developed world since after World War II. It seems like it's possible to openly be a Marxist or Communist or Libertarian or whatever in such societies. By contrast, if Marxism is ascendant, it's much more difficult to be an open subscriber to some other ideology.
As another example, one can ask who is more likely to be disrupted: A conservative speaker on a liberal college campus or a liberal speaker on a conservative college campus?
And when you think about it, it kinda makes sense. One of the basic tenets of Wokeness is that white people, as a group, have committed a horrible crime against non-whites and continue to do so. And conservatives help to perpetuate that crime. This would seem to justify quite a bit of coercion and oppression.
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According to the author's bio he is the creator of an AI wingman "dating assistant." I'm sure he views himself as not part of the problem, but...
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