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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
What she's calling Woke 1.0 was actually already Woke 2.0. Woke 1.0 existed on tumblr, it was Atheism+ and the invention of a billion insane genders.
These are non-achievements. Wokeism is still the law of the land. Policy is still based on it. Until you can get fired from university positions for being accused of being a communist, it isn't done. Until 13/52 is openly stated and policy is based on it being true and self evident, it isn't done. Until BLM is viewed the same as Kony2012, it isn't done. Until stating your pronouns gets you laughed out of a room, it isn't done. As long as people are willing to openly call themselves socialists, antifa, anti-racists and the like, it isn't done. Until Ibram Kendi, Kehinde Andrews, Priya Gopal and all such people are destitute, derided, and working in McDonalds cleaning toddler vomit from the ballpit, it isn't done.
I’d call it Woke 4.0 or 5.0. ‘Racism’ is a Trotskyite concept from the ‘20s. The concept of ‘Whiteness’ was developed and popularized in the late ‘60s. Feminist theories that became law in the 2010s such as the Duluth Model and affirmative/enthusiastic consent (the concept of ‘yes means yes’ as opposed to ‘no means no’) were developed in the ‘90s. ‘Critical race theory’ is from the ‘80s or so. And the list goes on. Otherwise I agree. I’d nitpick about Kony2012 as I guess it was mostly and correctly seen as harmless and organized by a lunatic.
This rhymes with "rape is really the fault of whomever named the concept, without it there would only be sex".
Are you arguing that there were never any racists, that the Nazis and the KKK were simply "race realists" who had discovered HBD a century before it became cool? That the fascists murdered the Ashkenazim due to an unfortunate sign error when applying their otherwise correct HBD theory?
If you want to argue that racism is one of those problems where the cure turns out to be worse than the disease, that is a point which can be argued, but to argue that the evil commies have invented the concept of racism from whole cloth seems far-fetched. Might as well blame Marx for inventing capitalism.
Likewise, the antebellum Southern States clearly had a concept of 'Whiteness', where certain ethnicities could be full citizens and other ethnicities could be property. Even in the 1960s, a sociologist would likely find that some men who have consensual sex with unmarried white women in the South get shotgun weddings and some get lynched. And he would likely discover that a great predictor for the outcome is skin color.
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Honestly, I hate the way that "consent" language has crept into so many other domains.
Like the artists complaining about the lack of "consent" to having their images be used to train image models and LLMs. Like, if there's some sort of law that has actually been violated, I'm all ears, but I care about artist's "consent" to AI training about as much as I care about an artist's "consent" to me learning their art style and stealing all their business by undercutting their pricing.
Unfortunately for them, destroying someone's livelihood doesn't require consent under capitalism. Look what happened to the AM radio monopoly after FM radio was invented! Or what is happening to Google as LLMs start to become the most common way to search the web.
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