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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.
As an aside: I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't. I find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing easier to understand (not that I consider her unattractive either).
It's the same phenomenon as calling Elon Musk "stupid," which is basically dogma in some parts of the country, including where I live. People, even educated, intelligent people who went to academic institutions purportedly meant specifically to disabuse people of that notion, really love the idea that people they disagree with also have other negative characteristics that realistically ought to have minimal - if any - correlation with conformity to one's own personal set of ethics or ideals. So damn physical reality, since I don't like AOC/Musk, then s/he is unattractive/stupid. To be fair, the latter set of people often openly admit to rejecting empiricism as a tool of oppression by White Supremacists, so they're living up to their stated principles there.
As an aside, I'm apparently in a tiny minority in considering Zendaya not only attractive, but one of the most attractive women in Hollywood right now, but also I do find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing not hard to understand. She has bodily and facial features which are not what I'd consider screaming in femininity.
Several months ago, I noted the peculiar irony that many progressives believe that there are multiple different kinds of intelligence which are orthogonal to one another, such that deficiency in mathematical or verbal reasoning doesn't necessarily imply deficiency in artistic expression or physical domains.
This demographic is probably the demographic most likely to say something to the effect that "Elon Musk has stupid political opinions, therefore he can't possibly be a talented engineer and must have earned his wealth illegitimately".
I'm not sure how "notable" these "peculiar ironies" are anymore, sadly. When one of the core, underlying principles that animate everyone in your movement is "logic, reasoning, and empiricism are inventions by cis/white/male/etc. people whose only function and purpose is to oppress minorities," then it follows that holding opinions that are logically contradictory is no vice. In fact, it's pretty easy to argue that it's a virtue, for how it "challenges" the norms of current "hegemony" of "white supremacy/patriarchy" and "queers" reasoning by lionizing "other ways of knowing" over crufty oppressive things like "logic."
Oh, come on. Nine sets of scare quotes to say this movement is unusually prone to contradiction?
Show me a coalition which has national reach and I’ll show you a contradictory mess.
That's not what I said, nor is it even adjacent to what I said. Every movement - down to a movement of one individual - has internal contradictions. Usually enough to call it a "mess." Not every movement - certainly not every individual - believes in the fundamental principle that logic, reasoning, and valuing empirical evidence are arbitrary bullshit that ought to be discarded if they're not useful for attaining what one considers "justice." What makes "wokes" distinct from many (not all - though most similarly national/international-level movements) movements is that it specifically flouts logical thinking and doesn't see logical contradictions as something to resolve or to address at all. This is, somewhat ironically enough (though not really), quite Trumpian, in the belief that what is true right now isn't contingent on being consistent with other things that one has stated as being true, a sort of lack of object permanence.
Mea culpa. Nine sets of scare quotes to say that this movement is inherently averse to consistency, with no comparisons to similar movements.
I think this is still awfully uncharitable. “Alternative ways of knowing” have next to zero impact on the vast majority of progressive politics. People can and do argue any number of progressive policies—police, borders, reparations—on the boring ol’ grounds of facts and logic. That doesn’t change when some jackass decides to mock mathematics for being too white.
I'm not sure how one could even quantify this to enough of an extent to support such a statement. Perhaps you could come up with a way of measuring things such that this is true, but you'd have to be counting the stuff they have in common with virtually every other movement - akin to how humans, chimps, and mice share like 90%+ of the same DNA or something - because whatever sets apart progressive policies pushed by the typical/powerful modern progressive from bog-standard liberal is certainly mostly a consequence of "alternative ways of knowing." I.e. personal revelation, which is never called that but rather often "lived experience," based on the idea that we can judge the veracity of someone's claims about reality based purely on their identity, which is what holds up all of the stuff about "white/male/cis/etc. privilege," which itself holds up almost all of the specific policies that the typical/powerful modern progressive pushes for.
Correct. I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment, though. Some progressives still exist who are still committed to facts and logic. Sadly, they have about a homeopathic level of impact and influence in modern progressive politics. I fantasize that many of us exist, and that we're just cowards who try not to be noticed lest we be cut down, but that's probably just typical mind fallacy + wishful thinking.
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