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There's something horrifying about that Independent article on yahoo. It's hard to describe, but it feels like I'm reading Pravda.
Slightly off topic, but was reading Scott Aaronson's blog and saw he used "make AI unable to draw Mohammed for you" as an example of perfectly reasonable censorship that should be imposed on any learning model. What happened to these people in the last ten years?
It's like they were programmed to forget everything they used to be, and unlike Sydney they're not even worried about it.
Any text that uses "problematic" in the woke meaning would sound like Pravda.
They were scared into submission. The wokes offered them a bargain - we turn your area into a barren wasteland of culture war (and you personally would be accused in heinous crimes and shamed and hounded ceaselessly by furies of hell) or you bend the knee and we let you do what you love, largely unaffected, under our wise guidance. They bent the knee. I'm not sure given the stakes I wouldn't.
As a Christian primed from an early age to expect totalitarian Satanic one-world rule “soon”, I was memetically immunized against ever bending the knee to a skin-suiting power-gathering egregore. For me, the stakes are eternal.
I imagine for a rationalist atheist attacked by a memetic weapon built on weaponizing compassion and fairness ethics, it would be much harder to resist. The only basis you can lean on would be consequentionalist observation of the ruination the wokes cause, but you can always write it down to "bad things happening to bad people" and "temporary difficulties caused by rare exceptional mistakes". I spent my childhood in the late years of a decaying totalitarian state, so for me the wokes trigger a huge blaring mental alarm immediately on contact. They reproduce almost every single pattern, it's eerie. But for someone lacking one or other kind of immunity which assigns huge innate cost to bending the knee, it can seem completely rational to bend the knee to an ideology that proclaims fairness and compassion and love for all - the costs seem to be reasonably small and the BATNA looks rather unattractive...
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