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Notes -
Good morning, my fellow patriarchs, my AIPAC fellows, my Thielite dudebros and gainsmaxxing vrilchads. We gather here in memory of the dearly departed: of the progressives no longer in our midst. Of those who unironically use low human capital as an insult. They who have flounced (and who may yet remain amogus with their alts) with long, boring wordcel essays on how we're all racists, or not participating in their personal armies against Trump, or what have you. Sometimes they even delete their posts, leaving only the scathing retorts to their shaming screeds.
But why do I bring the subject up, you ask?
The reason why I bring the unpleasant topic is because it's become a distinct genre of post on the Motte. Since I am a pattern-noticer of much skill, I thought it useful to put in the effort to make a F.E.C (Frequently Expressed Crashouts) as future reference, and to hopefully save time and effort in the future to what is otherwise a pretty repetitive subject. Feel free to add onto this list, if you feel I've missed anything. I admit that I am making rote argument and there may be gaps of which clever people can argue around it.
A) I'm not comfortable with witches/HBDers/misogynists/actual racists in the Motte. That's why I'm leaving!
First of all, so long, farewell!
Secondly, why are you even here? It's not like there's a shortage of places which moderate against such people. The whole point of the Motte is to talk to weirdos and freaks such as myself with as much politeness and decorum as can be managed. If the subject matter makes you uncomfortable, tough titties. You're an adult. You can decline to participate in conversations you have no interest in. Or you can make an argument that stands on its own merits. If you can remember how to make one!
B) The moderators are terrible at their jobs! They won't ban [X] or [Y]. Here's my evidence-
@Amadan is the embodiment of the Platonic philosopher-king, and their judgement is infallible, like the pope speaking ex cathedra.
The jannies of the Motte are of a different breed than the soft, nepotistic babies of Reddit. They are veterans of forum warfare. The Navy Seals of the mop force. If you take a look at Amadan's profile and sort by top rated, you will see a long list of people they've dunked. Their rage is truly a sight to behold. The only reason they haven't torn you apart yet with their immense verbal IQ is because the other moderators have to physically restrain them from the keyboard. The fact the moderators aren't handholding every little personal spat and argument is a sign of enlightened restraint, not weakness.
C) I'm just so exhausted by the witches/HBDers/misogynists/actual racists. It's emotionally draining. For my own mental health, I have to step away.
That was always allowed. Why are you telling us this? This isn't your blog.
One of the most insidious things in internet communities is passive-aggression. Oh, if only this space wasn't so toxic, I'd participate more! This is a favorite tactic of flouncers who want to use shame but aren't aggressive enough to argue with individuals or demand change from the mods. Using therapyspeak in any other context other than therapy itself is annoying and manipulative! If you want to leave, just leave. Don't make a melodramatic show about it. No one cares.
D) I'm being oppressed because I'm going against the consensus! You guys are hypocrites!
Is the consensus in the room with us right now?
I'm not going to disagree that there is an element of groupthink to all communities. But if you come to a community with the greatest concentration of witches, contrarians, and satirical trolls per capita and you're getting pushback - maybe you should rethink things. If you feel that your position is fundamentally correct, then the number of people disagreeing with you shouldn't matter to you. So as long as you present the best version of your argument for your position, all the downvotes in the world won't change the content of your post. But if you come into the conversation expecting special treatment for being an iconoclast or going against the grain - tough luck!
Perhaps your words aren't as convincing to others as you thought it was. Get gud. Skill issue.
Reads like consensus building.
TheMotte is the TheMotte. Exiled weirdos call this place home, as do normies with high openness. Neither gets to define what this place is or isn't.
It's no secret that the median individual on this forum has been steadily shifting right. It's a valid concern.
The place risks turning into an echo chamber. Scratch that. The risk was realized, and this place is nearing a complete transformation into an echo chamber. I don't mind a shift in the Overton window. I do mind the decreasing quality of discourse.Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won. Where is the America that was promised ? Consider this. What if the forum has gotten boring because people are too scared to express the true contrarian opinion?
"Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all." (kill me)
Thanks, but no thanks. I liked what this place was. In its current state, it still exceeds the bar (low as it may be) for discourse on the internet. I'll bitch and moan as much as I like. That's my right.
I was about to summon my heritage motteizan creds. I hear JD's worldview carries weight around these parts. Alas, you created an account 1 full day before me. I concede defeat.
Respectfully, this is much too short a time-horizon. Yes, Trump is president now. But he won't be in 2 years, and there has been no substantive action taken against the organizations which enabled aggressive progressive lawfare both against conservative ideas generally, and conservative activists in particular. There is precious little stopping a hypothetical Newsome or Ocasio-Cortez administration from simply reversing every single one of the anti-DEI measures Harmeet Dhillon has worked so hard on as DAG for Civil Rights, or dropping all of the ICE detainer agreements that Tom Homan has negotiated with thousands of US local police jurisdictions.
And even now, there are significant entrenched woke gains in life and society that really are quite nauseating, ranging from the symbolic (it's still mainstream journalistic style to capitalize "Black" as an enthnicity but not "white") to the really quite substantive (a continued progressive hammerlock on the education system including continued racial setasides and preferences for the melanated). The citadels of progressivism - my own beloved, beshitted California, Chicago, NYC - remain entirely undisturbed. The battle is very much still live.
Any forum is less interesting when the dominant ideological faction is in power, because it is easier to criticize and muckrake than it is to get into the nitty gritty of governing policy, which almost always underdelivers compared to rosy dreams and expectations. However let's not get carried away and assume that current trends are anything like inevitably going to continue.
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Ummm...
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Sometimes the contrarian opinion is just bad, as your suggestion is. What is interesting is the struggle to find what the actual contrarian opinion is in the post-2024 world (it's not "da joos", either).
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I have mandatory implicit bias training at work. I work for one of the largest companies on Earth by market cap. HR hasn't been informed of this happy news.
I also think there will be a backlash against Trump. Someday Democrats will be in charge and their voters will want payback. It will look something like vindictive wokeness and motivated partisan prosecutions.
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We're only one year in, and we're not even at a fraction of the measures put forward by the woke. Wake me up after a decade of progressives getting booted from their jobs for expressing their opinions off the clock.
So contrarian. Much shock. How about you elaborate on what you find good about it, if you actually believe it?
I don't believe it yet. Let me sit on it.
It it'll take a few months for the acid reflux to go back down. May give it a shot then.
I know the core thesis I'll be going for:
Doesn't sound like something I could recognize as good. Even the stability argument is falling flat on it's face, given how much pushback it's generating.
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You wouldn’t be able to get an actually woke person to agree with any of that prescription, though.
I don’t think it’s stable to build a society on top of true believers and then expect them to stay docile and go along with the kayfabe.
Same is true on the right. Attempting to appeal to right-wingers in the UK whilst clearly acting against their desires and their self-perceived interests has destroyed the 200 year old Tory party only five years after they got a genuine landslide.
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It’s not really though. I’m a traditionalist in most respects. There are a lot of places where I disagree with people here, especially the Groyper leaning atheists, some of HBD (at least where it’s assumed to be self evidently true without mentioning potential confounding factors like environment and nutrition and education), or tech bros who assume that turning everything over to a chatbot will naturally create utopia.
I don’t think that it’s possible for any collection of people who talk with each other for a long time to not reach a sort of consensus on main issues or at least reach the point where trying to argue about it is just no longer interesting.
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“Woke isn’t bad.”
I question your motives given that you are Indian. Woke was generally rhetorically at least supportive of brown people who suffered from colonialism (eg Indians)
MAGA has been very skeptically of immigrants especially Indian immigrants.
Therefore, I’m skeptical that you objectively think woke wasn’t bad compared to the status quo post. Instead, I wonder if you think the status quo post is worse for Indians and therefore don’t like it (consciously or subconsciously).
Now of course it would be fair for you to say “you too” but in reverse. I guess the difference is this is still a white country so it seems like the majority ought to be able to say “we want to benefit the majority; not the minority.”
I think you missed the 'kill me' part of my comment. Gamergate happened right as I was becoming political. I was anti-woke from the very beginning.
India has the world's most popular right wing leader - Modi. Therefore, it is hated by the woke. Western Indians are wealthy, which also puts them at the bottom of the woke totem pole. There is reason that MAGA has so many Indians. Most aspiring Indians pray at the altar of merit. It puts them at odds with the woke. 2nd gen Californian Indian women and Indian muslims have specific reasons for being woke. They're edge cases that'll take their own post. But the median Indian stem guy disagrees with woke culture and hates socialism.
The woke, in their wilful ignorance, view western Indian hindus as upper class Brahmins. It treats them as oppressors. Little sympathy is extended to this lot.
Now, back to where we were....
It is an uncomfortable question I am asking myself as much as I'm asking the community.
The question isn't if woke is bad. The question is whether it is the lesser of 2 inevitable evils. Let's assume the disillusioned populace wanted to express their populist discontent by associating with a stupid and shiny movement. In that scenario, was woke the worst of all options ? MAGA and the woke are cut from the same cloth. Both view the world as a zero-sum race conflict. Demographic and loyalty points take priority over merit. Both movements have their gray tribe intellectuals and policy wonks who're kept at an arms length from power while the identarians find themselves on the throne.
If these negatives are a foregone conclusion, which flavor of it would I be able to live with ?
Idk. I genuinely don't so. That's why it is an interesting question.
I don't think zeke is suggesting you were woke, or even that you prefer woke to the pre-woke state of affairs, but that you prefer woke to the current state of affairs (because of MAGA anti-Indian sentiment)
"Islam is in diametric opposition to feminism. Therefore, it is hated by the woke"
Or less glibly, the woke have a bunch of different priorities, and sometimes they come into conflict, and they might overlook one thing for another. In this case, they would be willing to overlook Modi being right wing for India being brown.
Like with the Modi thing, that doesn't prove that the woke weren't trying to run cover for the Indians. On a group level, most normie Blacks didn't like wokeness either (especially with the whole LGBT thing), but wokeness benefitted them.
I think the woke extended less sympathy to Indians (and just brown people in general) than Black people. And I think AA in the US discriminated against Indians? (this was never made clear - everything just seemed to reference "anti-Asian" discrimination)
But at the very least, wokeness provided all non-White races an immunity from being criticised on the basis of their race. Specifically, criticisms about Indian workers being less competent but taking jobs by working for less money due to lower standards, Indians being racist, Indians being scammers, Indians being rude etc - this kind of rhetoric is just unacceptable to left wing people (much less actual wokes)
I will register disagreement to this strong characterisation on both points. But I agree there is undeniably a racial angle for wokism (this is not even denied by the woke), and whilst there isn't the same hard proof for MAGA, I think there is a racial angle there too (but at least for MAGA, "world as a zero-sum race conflict" is way too far - the VP's wife is Indian, and ACB has 2 Haitian adopted children)
Also I'll nitpick "identarian" here. I think there is a difference between being racist and being identarian - the MAGA stuff seems more like wanting to have a nice country, and being willing to think about race in service of this goal. Again I'd point to Usha and the Haitian adoptees.
But this is exactly zeke's criticism - you are doing this musing without addressing the fact that you are Indian, and how that is going to play into your feelings about the matter.
In general, I appreciate the forum culture where we focus on ideas instead of poster identities, so even if you disclose identity markers at some point you don't have to carry it with you everywhere and just state your thoughts as thoughts instead of as a White/Black/man/woman/transsexual/etc
But in a case like this, when one's [demographic marker] is so obviously tied to the issue (and [demographic marker] is unusual amongst Mottizens), and it is a subjective moral question (I don't think a poster should have to bring their own personal race into, say, a HBD writeup) and you are going mainly on vibes and what you see with your own eyes (which I am not against!)... it comes across as sort of insincere to not address it at all.
EDIT: (shortened for brevity)
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95% of western woke people probably don’t know who Modi even is. They also don’t think about much of the caste system.
In the U.S., Indians are brown immigrants and therefore virtuous.
Also, from my experience Indians like meritocracy when competing with non Indians but can be rather tribal when they are able to be so. Woke permits in some ways both.
I happen to live in a predominantly Indian community. They are very upset about immigration restrictions. Perhaps I am over indexing to my local neighbors.
In the end, MAGA seems Lindy in a way woke just isn’t.
This is news to me. If anything it would seem to me that "the Woke" and "Radical Islam" are nominally allied. Otherwise where would all the "Queers for Palestine" and mainstream media support for the Ayatollahs be coming from?
I think you meant to reply to @FlyOnTheWall but I think the OP was using that example to prove that even though wokes should hate island we know they support it thus saying wokes dislike Indians because Modi is right wing misunderstands woke.
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You're projecting MAGA demographics onto to woke people.
Woke people are usually aware of both Modi and the caste system. It may a couple of sentence, but they know. "Isn't Modi the hindu fascist? Isn't the caste system like slavery but worse? Are there still untouchables in India? I hear Modi is genociding the muslims in India". They know.
Indians in the west are politically homeless. Neither the woke or MAGA want them. It's mostly gray tribe 'Indians looks good on statistics' crowd that defends them.
No. Most woke people are dumb and ignorant. After all, most people are dumb and ignorant.
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The motte is not an echo chamber. It is a forum with admirable diversity of right wing opinions, which doesn’t quite correspond to the typical diversity of IRL right wingers.
Revleft, back when it was a thing, wasn’t an echo chamber either- it was different kinds of communists screeching at each other for being secret reactionaries, and sûre that’s not the vibe thé motte is going for, but you don’t have to have the conventional representatives of the other side to not be an echo chamber, is my point.
Internal diversity. It's just us weirdos and freaks. But wouldn't it be a more interesting space where left leaning users participate while being held to the same moderation and quality standards so they engage without the usual social shaming dialogue (accusations of bigotry, bad faith, or moral failure)? Let the discussions move beyond status games and purity spirals toward actual arguments. I want the leftists in the conversation. Darwin was one of the few prolific leftist posters around here, though a ragebaiter admittedly. Been two years since he ditched this site and retreated to reddit.
I will note that SJ, as a rule, is not very fond of the idea of talking to racists/sexists. This is one of the defining attributes that distinguished SJ from 90s liberalism. This creates two issues:
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The Motte is what you get when you get arguably decades of selection pressure.
I've noted this before, but let me re-elaborate what my experience has been in forums regarding left/right politics. Most forums that allow for political sub-forums to discuss such things tend to be heavily leftist. As a result, you end up with two things;
One, left-aligned individuals will find themselves in a massive echo-chamber supported by a horde of fellow leftists;
Two, right-aligned invidiuals will find themselves obscenely outnumbered and buried under mass-replies or gish-gallops, or both.
This results in a curious selection pressure; The right-aligned posters that stay and actively discuss politics despite the above conditions end up being a cut or two above normal posters. They are the White Whales, as I personally call them, hardened in debate by scars, able to smash others in one-on-one debate while still behaving well enough that the Admins can't overtly censure them, and they refuse to flame out. (Instead, things will often escalate to the point where such posters just get pushed out for other, made-up reasons, or forum rules forcing them out.)
Now, here's the other side of this; I've seen circumstances where, in another, smaller, seperate, more niche outside forum, still made up of contintuents of the larger forums for one reason or another, allowing for a political sub-forum.
Except, things are changed, now. The White Whale is still the White Whale, but the left-aligned are no longer in whaling ships. They no longer have the echo-chamber or gish-gallop to bring down the larger foe, or atleast drown them out.
Instead, they find themselves in a dinghy, up against a scarred monster, and, as a result, it's now the left-aligned posters having a severe flame out and reduced to bad behavior when, all of a sudden, thier arguements no longer work(from thier PoV) and they find themselves constantly on the backfoot.
...naturally, the sub-forum ends up closed, as the Admins just get sick and tired of having to deal with said left-aligned posters behaving so badly.
I bring up all of the above personal anecedants and observations to get to my points; Left-aligned posters have no reason to get in that dinghy, IE, the Motte. They're perfectly content in thier various echo chambers - indeed, as we've seen, when such places end up turning more neutral(such as Twitter), the left-aligned posters will end up fleeing for more safer waters(Bluesky).
Now, I'm sure there are a host of posters on the Motte thinkings 'But I'm left-aligned and don't think that way/do that'. And yes; You, instead, have made it through another selective pressure where you don't flame out, or behave badly, or expect echo-chamber backup when making your arguement.
The Motte will always have it's selection pressure, and there's never going to be a way to combat against that. Trying to find 'new blood' will always be a fools gambit, as you're never going to be able to lay down the nessecary bait to get the left-aligned posters you want. The only way to do so would be to allow special exceptions for left-aligned posters, and all that would result in would turn the Motte into yet another left-aligned echo chamber as what centric and right-aligned posters shrug and leave, as the unique charachteristics that make up the Motte would no longer exist.
If anything, your example of Darwin is very topical. People were pointing out his bad behavior and special treatment for years, and every time this was brought up, the only real defense that could be mustered was along the lines of 'Well, he had a bunch of quality posts, so...'
Directionally agree, but I have seen a lot of very low-quality right-wing takes heavily upvoted while those who try to respond have from -1 to +4 vote count. I can see how that could be frustrating for someone going against the tide. Not sure why voting feature was even preserved from reddit, it only serves to enforce consensus.
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I don't think that's an issue related to quality of arguments so much as what happens in forums that are heavily slanted but don't actively ban heretics.
For instance, I came from /r/moderatepolitics . It has a similar nature to The Motte, but with a different moderation style. You can argue almost anything if you do it in a very specific way, but the mods are both hypersensitive to and arbitrarily define what is and isn't a personal attack. It leads to things like not being able to accuse someone of being disingenuous even when they do things like repeatedly attribute a belief to you that you've explained is wrong. Even though the sub was created for debate it still ends up with a consensus belief - IMO anti-Trump, somewhat left-leaning but right-leaning on guns and immigration.
That said, in my experience the people in the minority who stayed weren't necessarily better debaters, they were just people who were completely undeterred by downvotes and often just repeated the same argument and ignored reasons why their argument was bad.
Of course I'm sure The Motte would say that about the left-leaning people here. Like I remember in the not too-distant past where magicalkittycat was farming downvotes arguing something, and had to respond to an accusation of ignoring someone with "You know I get 20 responses to every comment right?"
As far as the heretic goes, the experience is "Why are you booing me? I'm right!" Your good arguments will just go ignored and be buried. The difference between a friendly forum and a hostile forum is you can say the same thing but in the latter it feels like you are talking to a wall.
Limiting personal attacks and heat between posters is a good policy, one which I wish the Motte would follow more closely. It's almost never productive to accuse someone of being disingenuous if your goal is test ideas, rather than to "win debates" in some nebulously defined way.
As a first order effect this is true, it is probably not productive to the debate at hand. But at a second order effect it could be good if done appropriately. Because if someone actually is being disingenuous you want them to stop and/or leave. Discouraging and disincentivizing bad behavior increases the quality of contributions over time and prevents things from slipping down the slope of easy farmable engaging content. If done appropriately. If the accusation is false/unwarranted then it just become ad-hominem and that itself is bad behavior we want to discourage.
If it's actual clear trolling then that's something a moderator should deal with. I've rarely seen accusations of "bad faith" or being "disingenuous" from a user debating another user to ever end up going well. It's almost always little more than "I disagree with them strongly". A lot of times it happens from 2 users occupying different information bubbles, this causing them to not really understand each others' arguments, and thus putting words in each others mouths as was often the case when people debated Darwin2500.
This seems like a different issue.
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The Motte and the CWR thread it birthed from, arose at a time when, on Reddit and other social platforms, expressing extreme LW opinions in most places was deemed acceptable or popular, and extreme RW views had a good chance of getting you banned.
The Motte offered a safe space, but one with a value proposition that was more attractive to the disenfranchised. This informed our starting pool, which skewed RW even if it had a large number of centrists or more heterogeneous thinkers.
I agree with netstack below that there are other strong selection effects in terms of openness to ideas, inclination to debate, and ability to be polite. I'll gloss over that.
We skew to the right of /r/SSC, our ancestor, and to the right of the typical subreddit, at least the ones that weren't founded for the purposes of gathering around RW views.
And this is... fine? At least for me. I am an Enlightened Centrist, but the based kind, where the dots on the political compass that represent my individual views form a circle with the center at the intersection point of all quadrants.
I'm the annoying type of person that usually looks at the two polarized sides of a debate and says they both make valid points. From my perspective, the average Mottizen is to my right. But I don't care, I know that the typical liberal or leftist is more eager to burn me at the stake for wrongthink or being some kind of right-wing fanatic. Adversity makes for strange but reasonable bedfellows, the kind you can trust to take out the trash. If I didn't like talking to the mix of people here almost all the time, I'd go find some other place to mentally-masturbate.
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Yes, our users are unusually polite, patient, and so on.
Yes, our users are also rather right-wing.
No, correlation is not causation. The underlying politeness is due to our rules. The political slant owes more to our other users.
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I agree with the overall schema of how forum cultures work but I think you have a blindspot. The motte is the equivalent to the left-wing dominated forum but for right wingers. Lefties here are absolutely dogpilled, mass-replied, gish-galloped, mass reported, or downvoted. Far more than the reverse happens here. So yes the lefties that stick around here do have a selection pressure, but lets not pretend that righties don't stoop to the same left-forum behavior when they are suddenly the majority.
EDIT: This is straight up just human tribal behavior. Attaching a political label to it is just further evidence.
As a lefty (in multiple senses of the word) here, I disagree heavily. The rate at which this happens is orders of magnitude lower than the mirror image in a typical subreddit that has discussion about similar topics as here. By my observations, leftist posters who get treated this way are almost always treated this way in response to particularly careless or bad-faith posts*.
* Aside: these extremely low quality posts often have characteristics which appear to me as posts that would be popular on a typical subreddit; my conjecture is that these commenters are used to calibrating their arguments for the type of scrutiny in those environments and didn't properly re-calibrated for the standards of this forum before commenting.
Actual lefties (of the woke variety) would get absolutely eviscerated here. Darwin was the only person I can think of that was consistently left and who posted for a long time, and his posts were always lightningrods despite him being extremely polite relative to his interlocutors. And people were constantly accusing him of doing something "wrong", of violating the rules somehow, but I kept asking for examples and people could never give me any.
I recall multiple threads where evidence was provided that went nowhere, and I have no interest in going down that path again, so I'll just register that I disagree on your assessment of Darwin and how he was treated.
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Then we disagree. As a centrist, I witness and have experienced it with my own eyes.
If this is your major point then you are making a point I am not arguing, its not about quantity it's that it happens at all. This place has orders lower magnitudes of people than the mirror image typical subreddit. This is like saying it's safer to be be next to a bear in the woods because bears kill less people then men do. It's bad stats because you interact with an astronomically large amount of men everyday, everywhere. I doubt the Motte has more than 50k-100k active users. Just went and looked at the comparative PurplePillDebate on reddit. It has 121k weekly visitors, and it is very degraded from its heyday.
I'm not really going to weigh into a discussion of "quality". That is highly subjective, to the point, that one could easily just say every post that gets dog-pilled and mass-reported was "low quality". It's a just-so-story.
I hate the centrists label because fundamentally it means you have no beliefs. If the left pushes the left Overton farther left then a centrists moves left, if the right is winning the pushing of the Overton window then you move right.
I feel confident say Trump political core is a ‘90s finance bro in NYC which would be mostly left then. Of course he has some eccentricities but he’s mostly that. A centrists political position over a life time would be like a pinball bouncing around as a npc.
It also strongly encourages Overton window pushing, if 30-40% of voters are just centrists then the best thing you can do as a political operative is push hard on boundaries. If you move the boundaries then a bunch of centrists slide in as your voters.
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If this is your interpretation of my point, then you are wrong. The "rate" is on a "per-[leftist/rightist] comment (implicit: that bucks the general popular trends of the forum)", not on a "per-day" or whatever. If the rate of physical injuries during a typical encounter with a bear in the woods was lower than the rate of such during a typical encounter with a man, then it absolutely would be safer to be next to a bear.
If you aren't going to weigh into "quality," then all you're really doing is commenting on the lack of equality of outcomes (as measured by things like responses that amount to dogpiling, Gish Galloping, etc.) based purely on left-right-partisanship. And that's just irrelevant here, because the point of this forum isn't to achieve such equity. Quality is highly subjective, but it's also not infinitely so, and there are certainly qualities which are agnostic to partisanship that this forum specifically demands of the comments both by rule and by norms, and it is a good thing that a comment's quality determines, in a large part, the pushback it gets from other commenters.
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To quote Scott:
Your QCs are, like, almost entirely criticisms of progressives. That’s basically catnip for this site. It doesn’t mean you aren’t left-leaning, but it does suggest that you aren’t getting the typical experience.
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Agreed. We could do better. Myself included.
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I'm probably more of a classical liberal than a leftist but I grew up in a very leftist space so I can Steelman a lot of it. I do my best. It's fun bickering with people here.
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You know the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, do you not? Despite the format, it's not one of Aesop's but apparently originated in early 20th Century Russia.
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I don’t mind claims of bigotry (sometimes it is true). But what I dislike is assuming bigotry is always wrong (or at least irrational) and the inability to recognize the lefts own bigotry.
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Woke isn't over until there is a flier of FBI crime statistics (or the equivalent thereto depending on month) posted next to the HR-mandated "[allegedly oppressed group] history month" flier.
True. That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with? I've worked for over ten years in tech, an industry that is often considered to be a hotbed of progressive activism, and I have almost never seen it. Yes, I would get fired if I started saying ethnic slurs at the office. But I've seen almost no woke propaganda at my jobs. If I recall correctly, the closest has been some very minor but not coerced options to have custom pronouns and maybe one brief computerized inclusivity training that I think pretty much everybody just ignored and clicked through. And that's in over ten years.
The Canadian NDP (fairly popular centre-left party) is literally handing out privilege cards to members of the oppression stack to determine the speaking order at their party convention -- the rankings on said stack being determined by a non-binary chairPERSON who scolds you if you call her MADAME chairperson. Nothing is over, it's just gone to ground. (in the US)
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I worked at Google, and the answer is no.
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Wasn't it always just a few college kids on Twitter? /s
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Really depended on where you were. I was at a university and it was stifling. Militants took over my student union and made seats for every minority under the sun until they outnumbered representatives of actual students, and anyone who objected was unpersoned. There were the ‘how not to be a
Taoist’ (really, Apple?) workshops. The endless complaints from female colleagues about all the white men they had to put up with, apparently oblivious to my gender and skin colour. The girl who went trans, putting me at serious risk of being thrown out if I ever forgot myself and used ‘she’ for the squeaky voiced 5ft ‘man’ sitting next to me. The manager at my first tech job who hinted that I hadn’t been promoted because of my failure to give sufficiently woke answers to an HR training quiz.Above all there was just the fear. The knowledge that if you put a single foot wrong you were dead, a decade of university and research work just done in the blink of an eye.
It was bad. I’m glad it was better for you.
Got it. To be fair, I did see negative consequences of wokeness. Just not in my career. I saw it in changing attitudes to police work that, I imagine, probably explain why one of the pharmacies in my neighborhood closed and another has almost every item locked up.
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No, it's not. Thr claim was never particularly believable even at the start of the SocJus trend, and it's even less believable after years of every major company draping itself in rainbow flags every June.
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The anti-woke have discovered that half of them hated the process of wokeness, and the other half hated the way the process was targeted. On this forum this mostly takes the form of disputes around the Hebrews, elsewhere it revolves around Charlie Kirk or foreign wars.
Can you please expand on this? Are you arguing that there are two politically effective ways to combat the process? Maybe more?
The opposite, I'm saying the anti-woke coalition is a mixed-marriage between people who think that wokeness is wrong because the theory is bad, and people who think the theory is good it should just be applied to a different group. The former are horrified by the latter, the latter think the former are moral mutants and cowards.
Take as our basic woke concept "if you criticize the actions of BlackTM Folx, it's because you are racist and bad. Any bad outcome for BlackTM Folx is due to Systemic Racism, even if the people in power are not and would not be racist. Policies can explicitly help BlackTM Folx, but if they even implicitly hurt BlackTM Folx, then they are racist and bad."
There's a large portion of people who disagree with that concept! But they don't all disagree for the same reasons.
Some people disagree with the process. It's stupid and reductive to attribute everything to an -ism, any -ism. Identitarianism harms the group you're trying to help by stifling their drive for success, removing their internal locus of control, leading them to attribute all their failures to nebulous "haters." Every group, and every member of that group, can do bad things and be bad people, no matter how much Oppression the group may have faced before. Affirmative Action is bad because it undermines meritocracy, etc.
Other people disagree with the targets, but love the process and want to use the same process but for other groups. BlackTM Folx fail because of their bad genes or bad culture, but any criticism of Jews should be met with thought terminating screeches of ANTISEMITISM. Affirmative Action was bad when it was targeted at BlackTM Folx, but it should be targeted at white Christian Conservatives, who are the real oppressed. Etc.
Both very divergent ideologies are labeled as "anti-woke" and travel under the label, but they're diametrically opposed. One group wants free speech on campus even if the speech is offensive; the other thought it was bad for kids to be hounded for saying nigger in an instagram post but don't mind kids being hounded for saying "From the River to the Sea!" at a protest. One group thinks tracking down a twitter commenter at their job and reporting them to HR for making a joke about faggots is bad because it threatens free speech, the other group thinks that it's bad because sodomites are sinful, but are happy to track down cashiers who talk shit on Charlie Kirk. This realization is uncomfortable for the three principled libertarians, and maybe for the seven zilliion witches as well.
So in other words, the anti-woke camp is divided on the issue of identity politics or alternatively on the issue of civic nationalism.
I would say it's divided by the question of virtue.
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"No bad tactics only bad targets" etc.
It comes down a difference in views on virtue and sin.
One side thinks that you restrict tactics because they are bad for your enemy. The other thinks that you restrict tactics because those tactics are bad for you.
Like a jiu-jitsu coach that tells the white belts not to lean too hard on cheesy moves that will only work against other white belts, or caution big guys against moves that only work against smaller guys in workouts, because then as you progress or you want to compete you have to learn jiu jitsu twice.
A lot of people think sinning is winning, and that the only reason not to do bad things is out of some primitive feeling that Sky-Daddy is going to punish you when he goes through his giant ledger at the end of days. Others think that sin is bad because it destroys you, destroys a society.
Identitarianism is bad for blacks because victimhood politics holds people back. It is equally bad for whites. I'm sick and tired of hearing pissant "I coulda been a contenda" speeches from people.
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