As a christian I believe in mercy and grace. And yes, many of us 'believers' have not practised what we preached. Many of us do try however not to be hypocrites.
Here's my question. Where is mercy and grace in the midst of wokeness? I want you to believe my christian message but I will not force you to do so. I don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what I believe. I don't want you to lose your job because you don't agree with me. There seems to me to be a ruthlessness to wokeness which I don't understand.
I think the answer to your question is actually answered in your first paragraph. In the same way that you believe all Christians shouldn’t be judged by those who haven’t “practiced what they’ve preached”, consider that your understanding of “woke” people might be tainted by the fact that whatever media you are consuming might be focusing on the ones who also don’t practice what they preach.
In other words, any movement, Christian or “woke”, will have a subset of people who are hypocritical and/or ruthless. It is an easily observed behavior of biased media outlets that they will pay especial attention to the more unsavory outliers of a movement.
I think in some cases silence is violence. For example, the silence of ones witnessing co workers when a woman tries to report being sexually harassed in her workplace. Like if a woman describes witnesses to her being groped by a co worker, and all the witnesses just shrug and say nothing to defend her, that workplace has in effect allowed sexual harassment to occur and condones continued harassment of women.
That being said I do think it’s dumb for putting ones pronouns or whatever. But I think when we paint “wokeness” with this extremely broad brush we’re just doing the same bullshit that we’re accusing “wokeness” of doing.
And dole out the harshest possible sentence, short of physical maiming: unbounded social ostracism. In old times we'd brand undesirables by burning their skin with a hot rod. These days we brand them 'racist' or 'sexist' on the Internet, and rely on the fact that the Internet never forgets and is easily searchable.
I think this will ultimately be Wokeness downfall. The woke turn on themselves for perceived lack of purity to the cause almost as quickly as their adversaries. look at far left movements of the past for example, the french revolution started beheading people that had been for the revolution because they weren't revolutionary enough.
Not sure how that's important. Very often looking from the outside, and particularly at outcomes, is quite sufficient.
I really don't have to understand the core principles of Maoism to be opposed.
I really don't have to understand the core principles of the Khmer Rouge to be opposed.
I really don't have to understand the core principles of Fascism to be opposed.
I really don't have to understand the core principles of Stalinism to be opposed.
What's more, what the core principles are may not be very relevant, because very often the most heinous acts are performed in the service of supposedly very fine "principles". In fact, the more hallowed the principles, the more permission/cover they often give to their followers for the most heinous acts. After all, they are doing this in the name of what is good and righteous.
And of course, this "do you understand X" is typically a deflection, particularly if X does its damn best to obscurantist. And this is often deployed quite tactically.
> What links these developments is a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world. This credo still lacks a definitive name: it is variously known as left-liberal identity politics, social-justice activism or, simply, wokeness. But it has a clear common thread: a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled. These notions were incubated for years in the humanities departments of universities (elite ones in particular), without serious challenge.
We can add to this list: meritocracy, capitalism. Both are considered racist and oppressive.
Tl;dr Woke means being opposed to Western ideals while pretending to uphold those same Western ideals.
You’ve contributed nothing to this discussion except telling people their understanding of the term “woke” is incorrect. Perhaps define what that term is, and how this movement works since you’re implying in your posts you know and others do not.
Ugh, c'mon, this is Fox/CNN-tier. "The Squad" is not especially woke (maybe Ilhan Omar?), except in the minds of Republicans who want something to rail at, and Democrats who want to appeal to "the youth". Like, AOC in particular, the figurehead, is really not especially radical. Neither was Bernie (with whom she was roughly aligned), even if he did absorb and make peace with parts of BLM (actually I respected him for that; it shows he's a peacemaker -- I digress).
As a general rule, you're not going to find a lot of this woke stuff in conventional political channels. You're going to see it more in universities, or from "public intellectuals", and on Twitter.
If we're looking for someone who actually does hold political office and who might fit the bill, Chesa Boudin might be appropriate:
Those don’t say the racist things from the video but they do believe America (the West) is bad. Capitalism is bad. Meritocracy is bad. Freedom of speech is bad, …
Not my worldview.
The west, capitalism and meritocracy are not beyond criticism. Those ideals aren’t perfect and fail millions of people. Self critique is important and after all, aren’t they entitled to exercise their fee speech?
> The west, capitalism and meritocracy are not beyond criticism.
This is a really good example of motte-and-bailey argumentation.
The motte (minimalist position that is uncontroversial and easy to defend) is that the west, capitalism and meritocracy are not beyond criticism. 99.9% of people beleive this.
The bailey (much more controversial position, that is hard to defend but stakes out more territory), is something like this: the west, capitalism and meritocracy are evil and must be destroyed.
- a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism
This is maybe too broad but mostly true. I mean, has the author read like any American history?
- that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination
I’d say this is largely not relevant but the thing people see as this is largely just individuals no longer “playing along” with other folks using terms & language that demean them.
- and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled
Language? No. Privilege? Probably! It’s easy to point out political dynasty privilege or obvious hollywood nepotism but it’s not the only type of privilege that gives some of us a leg up and others of us a massive hill to climb just to get to zero.
> I mean, has the author read like any American history?
They believe that it's the same outside America as well, so American history doesn't matter. E.g. Turks in Germany (who immigrated in the 60ies) don't achieve as much as native Germans after three generations => structural racism. Asian immigrants do quickly achieve as much and more than native Germans => more structural racism, I guess.
Regarding the treatment of Turkish immigrants in Germany, I'd recommend you read "Ganz Unten" (Gunther Wallraff, 1985) which sent shockwaves through Germany when it was published for revealing the racism people liked to pretend wasn't an issue at the time, and leading to many thousands of criminal investigations over the treatment of immigrant labour.
While that was a long time ago, it by no means it fixed the issues.
Though this is undoubtedly good for click-rewarded media, it’s also good for society if it invokes a rejection of the extremists and unsavory outliers both from outside and within the community, whether woke extremists, Christian Taliban, or other.
Unfortunately, I don’t see quite strong enough (for my taste) version of that repudiation (in general across both causes I believe in and ones where I disagree).
It isn’t just the media. Here in Canada, the government literally passed the mathematics curriculum which claimed nonsense like “mathematics is subjective” and “mathematics is colonial”. I emailed them a long rant that I would rather ship my future kids to India for a better education instead of the nonsense they are teaching.
So no, it isn’t just some media. Nor do I follow corporate news.
> An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective. Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline. However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective. Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions. The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education.
After I along with a bunch of others emailed them, they got rid of it. However no one was fired for writing such nonsense, nor did we figure out how such nonsense got through the top officials in the government. Here's the news on them removing it:
Please don't copy and paste the same comment multiple times. That's spamming. People can read the rest of the exchange where I already linked to it (specifically to avoid spamming), along with the link to the original source but not my own comment as you falsely accuse.
You are projecting while accusing me of projecting. As I noted, the reason I put this comment is because you copy pasted your comment. Stop projecting and then accusing me of projecting.
"There's plenty of room for subjective opinion in mathematics. It usually doesn't concern questions of the form Is this true? since we have a good consensus how to recognize an acceptable proof and which assumptions for such a proof you need to state explicitly.
As soon as we move onwards to Is this useful? and Is this interesting?, or even Is this likely to work?, subjectivity hits us in full force. Even in pure mathematics, it's easy to choose a set of axioms and derive consequences from them, but if you want anyone to spend time reading your work, you need to tackle the subjective questions and have an explanation why what you're doing is either useful or interesting, or preferably both.
In applied math, these questions are accompanied by Is this the best way to model such-and-such real-world problem? -- where "best" again comes down to usefulness (does the model answer questions we need to have answered?) and interest (does the model give us any insight about the situation we wouldn't have without it?).
The subjective questions are important in research, but can also arise at more elementary level. The high-school teacher who chooses to devote several lessons to presenting Cardano's method for solving the generic third-degree equation will certainly have to answer his students' questions why this is useful or interesting. Perhaps he has an answer. Perhaps he has an answer that the students don't agree with. In that case, he cannot look for a deductive argument concluding that Cardano's formula is interesting -- he'll have to appeal to emotions, curiosity, all of those fluffy touchy-feely considerations that we need to use to tackle subjective questions."
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1354044/can-math-be....
Exactly. It's selection bias, ruthlessly exploited by people who have their own agenda and therefore an interest in focusing attention on the worst excesses of those who resist (continued) imposition of that agenda.
What might that agenda be? Here's a hint. A certain "shadow docket" decision by the US Supreme Court has been in the news a bit lately. As it turns out, all five of the concurring justices are Catholic, and under pressure (e.g. threats of being denied communion) to decide as they did. That pressure should have been grounds for recusal, but of course none of the five had the decency to do that. Where's the "mercy and grace" in that law? What "woke" group is doing that much harm to that many people's lives?
Selection bias? My province in Ontario literally changed the curriculum for mathematics claiming mathematics is subjective and colonial and all other woke nonsense. You mean to tell me I am not seeing what I am really seeing?
Thank you for providing an example of the selective presentation (exploiting selection bias) I was talking about. Here's the official version of the current Ontario curriculum guidelines, for anyone to read.
There's a bunch of stuff about how the teaching of mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization etc., but that's not the same as mathematics itself being subjective or colonial. (Personally I think even the stuff about teaching is kind of garbage because it's vague and non-actionable, but that's a different discussion.) A cherry-picked, exaggerated description like that is exactly the kind of selective presentation I was talking about. You have received a distorted view, and are now passing that on to others.
> An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective. Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline. However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective. Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions. The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education.
After I along with a bunch of others emailed them, they got rid of it. However no one was fired for writing such nonsense, nor did we figure out how such nonsense got through the top officials in the government. Here's the news on them removing it:
> A cherry-picked, exaggerated description like that is exactly the kind of selective presentation I was talking about. You have received a distorted view, and are now passing that on to others.
Before accusing someone of that, please research the topic.
"However, the content and the context in which it is taught"
I don't know how you interpret that as anything but a commentary on the teaching of mathematics. The excerpt supports my point, not yours. Maybe Ontario should look into their curriculum for reading as well as for mathematics.
> please research the topic
Stop projecting. I posted a link to the original source material before you did, and I interpreted it as a sane person would rather than how the Canadian equivalent of Fox News told people to. That's more diligence than you have shown.
You first accused me of lying about Ontario's "subjective mathematics" announcement. So I showed you how that's exactly what they had:
> An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective. Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline.
thus refuting your "misinformation" claim.
Claiming I am making false accusations while I am literally citing the archive page and the governor's response of why they removed the "subjective" nonsense is plain mental gymnastics. Why don't you simply agree that I was correct since even Doug Ford admits the nonsense was there in the curriculum?
Yet you continue to play partisan politics and then bring up Fox News out of nowhere? I neither follow Fox News, nor do I follow any Canadian equivalent. I don't follow any corporate media.
Please don't bother replying as you seem more interested in ad hominem attacks.
Yes, the document exists. Nobody ever denied that. But no matter how you try to spin it, no matter how many schoolyard-rhetoric tricks you try to apply so you can have the last word, your presentation of it was still cherry-picked and exaggerated at best and that was my original point.
>> don't want you to lose your job because you don't agree with me.
But lots of people want that power. It is within living memory that people could be fired or denied employment based on thier religion. Many today still want thier religion beliefs to be enforced against believers and non-believers alike (abortion, education, marriage, adoption, right to die etc). Not every person of faith is so liberal about the affairs of others. Many call for a return to a past where religious "values" were enforced by the state at the point of a sword.
And most of us agree that it's bad. But most of us somehow don't agree that forcing wokeness on others is bad. Because the woke ones can't possibly imagine being wrong. Theirs is the right way, everyone else are bigots and racists. It's an aggressive religion, a cult even.
Most of us are good, and the few extremists don't represent who we are.
Most of them can't possibly imagine being wrong. They're fanatical cultists.
Here's the problem: These two paragraphs are unrestricted opinions, it's a feeling that anyone could have about anyone, and there's nothing factual about it.
This is a feeling that's not rooted in falsifiable observations, and so, there is nothing that prevents the same thought from applying to any other group of people.
And that's where the symmetry hurts. Maybe they, the other people, maybe they feel the same way about you? That you can't imagine being wrong, that you're fanatical.
Wouldn't that make them hypocrites, for painting all those people with the same brushtroke? For making generalizations about people without bringing anything to support those? Without any desire to see yourself proven wrong?
I think that someone's words would suffuse hypocrisy, were they to neglect disloging the beam in their own eye, before looking for the mote in their brother's eye.
I am condemning Christian fanatics. You are however writing abstract apologetics for woke cultists instead of condemning them. That's the difference between us. No need for all this mental gymnastics imagining that most other people on "my side" are worse than me and on "your side" better than you. At least do your own part.
That’s only the woke people you hear about. I consider myself pretty woke and the only woke thing I could imagine to demand from a workplace is sexual harassment policies with real teeth. (And not a he said she said scenario but Eg. Dont pinch the ass of your direct report against their consent or else you’re out of the door).
I think there are people who take it too far just like there are people who take anything too far. But clearly to me wokeness hasn’t stopped Eg. Blizzard-Activision for all their woke PR so I’m skeptical that wokeness has nearly as much influence as is often implied.
Was'nt sexual harassment recognized as wrong much before this 'woke' thing became popular...
What then did 'woke' bring to the table?
Increased awareness? action without trial? -- even here we have a mixed bag, we want some trial of sorts, otherwise accusations would fly all over.
Those who rail against 'woke' are not railing in favor of the perpetrators in the me-too cases.
In many solutions, there are pros and cons of policies, and quite hard to just nail them.
The rational people among both those who are woke and those opposed -- should identify those that are clearly detrimental to society without equivalent benefits.
One such group - the influence of the college administrators -- comes to mind. This segment is already a major cause of college fees inflation, and now is also identified in bolstering the extreme woke actions. Also, because they are management, they are not going to fix themselves.
This is where external actors need to step in to clean up the mess.
It would be easier to listen to concerns about creeping wokeness if the alleged dangers were actually different and worse than the problems that already exist. In many states people are fired from their jobs for not being conservative, for being lgbt etc. It happens with full knowledge of the state and is completely legal; the media doesn't even bother trying to follow up. Worse than that: our prison system, our overseas military belligerence etc etc. Wokeness? Add it to the list I guess, but the only reason some people spend so much time screeching about it is because they have been lucky to avoid getting nailed by one of the many other long-lived dangers that continue to stalk our society.
It's human nature to ignore the excesses of your own tribe and focus on problems originating across the border, but when it's just pure hypocrisy (another feature of human nature) it's hard to really give a shit. If we were discussing an asteroid hurtling toward the planet I'd like to think we could reach some kind of rough consensus that it is indeed an imminent threat, although my confidence in even this contrived scenario playing out as one might hope has been significantly shaken the more time I spend around large groups of humans. When it comes to trying to mediate the culture war, while real injustices occur on both sides and should punished/prevented, the fact remains that justice is often slow or absent for many, if not most. The truly powerful in our society are conveniently immune from the petty struggles, happy to watch the little people tear each other apart over skin color or religion or anything at all.
You know how woke people say that being silent about racism you see is being complicit in it? Well it goes both ways. My woke-tending friends refuse to express any opinion condemning any of the woke bullshit, never happened even once. I wonder if that's because they agree with all of that bullshit, or if they're afraid of speaking their mind for dear of being labelled a racist by their own peers. End result is the same though.
True that. I was told to shut it at work, and not just in a private 1 on 1, and nobody moved. corportate American and their employees cowardice in action Behind curtains of course. No reporter to come ask. The signs of tyrany are clear.
Yes but their reputation probably wasn’t completely destroyed which allowed them to find another job I would guess. Not the case with this woke outrage thing.
Perhaps, but that's still not something we consider state action. People lose their jobs or reputation all the time, and we don't consider it worthy of redress.
Many people appreciate the American right to refuse service to anyone; this is that same impulse exercised towards racists and bigots.
Time heals most wounds. Although it may feel like their reputation was "completely destroyed", I think many will find that they can get another job, once the immediate thunder and fury blows over.
Gee why does crime happen when we have laws against it!?
Good luck suing a Twitter mob or some activist/student who has no assets but can crowdfund a legal defense fund overnight which they won't need because there will be a line of lawyers wanting to represent them pro bono.
Also riling up a smear campaign does not necessarily rise to the level of defamation. You can get fired for simply having the wrong opinions. I'm sure you have no trouble seeing this as a problem when it's the people you like suffering that. Headline: BLM activist fired from their job for saying woke shit. Much outrage. Oh wait they just need a defamation suit. All good then. Right.
Yes, it happens. It's the nature of an employer / employee relationship; being a BLM activist isn't a protected class, and in only a few states does he have any legal recourse (in California, there's a law against firing a person for political affiliation). We definitely have a system where political activism is something those who have plenty to defend themselves or nothing to lose are best suited to engage in. I wouldn't have recommended to him he do this if he couldn't afford to lose his job.
I think you may have lost the thread though... I was talking about false accusations. Defamation would not help in a case like this one, as truth is always an affirmative defense.
The other point you raise (crowdsourced harassment) is trickier. IIUC, you could sue someone with deep pockets for that... "I heard what I was saying from someone else" is not a defamation defense. But a lot of the mob is bankrupt judgement-proof types.
Defamation isn't the worst of it. There's an ocean of normalcy between wokeness and alt-right, people forget that. It's ok to have different opinions on equity vs equality, on social norms, etc. You're not a racist bigot for not supporting every woke cause, despite what they claim. Yet having the wrong opinions will easily get you fired if you cross some woke activist on twitter or at your workplace / university. This isn't something a lawsuit or a thousand lawsuits can fix. It's the new repressive culture we're heading towards.
I think it's more the same repressive culture we've always been in, but new centers of power have emerged in it. Different people, as a result, are now feeling what was always there.
You could always be fired for doing something embarrassing to your boss (witness the example of the BLM protester who worked at a library and shared a book-burning video). But the "woke" now have enough social / economic clout to cause a big enough stir to shift the window on what's embarrassing to a boss. Whereas in the past, for example, inappropriate activity with a subordinate was swept under the rug "for the good of the corporation" (but having the wrong hairstyle could get you fired), now enough people agree such rug-sweeping shall no longer be tolerated (while hairstyle standards were probably racist) and corporations have reacted to new incentives.
Under the woke philosophy the criterion for deserving forgiveness still exists but is changed. In classical Christian philosophy, forgiveness requires contrition whereas under woke philosophy forgiveness requires powerlessness.
This is often misinterpreted as an absence of forgiveness because no amount of contrition seems to abate the condemnation.
In classical Judeo-Christian philosophy, there is one law for all - regardless of whether the person is poor or rich, and other classifications.
Also, there existed this concept of a re-do -- as in a 'jubilee' - land is returned - and 7 years where the debts are reset etc ( the original of current laws limiting bankruptcies to 7 yrs ). No one in a biblical scenario remained poor because their ancestors slacked off.
Now that those are not in play, one sees a class of people condemned to remain low with no ways of rising up.
While there is progress being made to alleviate these conditions, it is not fast enough. These group ( poor socio-economic) train their guns against the rich.
The rich being smart, use their puppets like the media, etc to create fake outrage - propping up 2 parties which essentially are the same thing with minor differences, drumming up differences based on race, creating new controversies with gender etc.
I think you're redefining things. Since no amount of contrition abates the condemnation, there is an absence of forgiveness. Powerlessness doesn't abate the condemnation either, after all.
Instead, these people who refuse to forgive do so because they feel that forgiveness has been used to excuse abuse (read broadly) and to keep abusers in power. In other words, it's all about power, and forgiveness just doesn't feature.
Worth also noticing that it comes from the USA where justice is punishment and vindication for the victim. It's why victims and their families are invited to be present when a criminal is killed via the death penalty, and ex cons can't vote. Eye for an eye is very American.
Is it old protestant and puritan? Possibly, I'm not sure of the origins.
Even the Soviets thoughts that prisoners could be rehabilitated (in principle), and we can consider the Nordic prison model for a more contemporary example. Even English criminology is more about reform than punishment. Often victims feel sidelined because of this.
American justice in general doesn't have this sense of rehabilitation being more important than vindication. Justice is retribution by the victim on both right and left wings. I posit that this is why the US is struggling with the "woke", it's because the methods and tactics are seen as normal.
> Worth also noticing that it comes from the USA where justice is punishment and vindication for the victim. It's why victims and their families are invited to be present when a criminal is killed via the death penalty, and ex cons can't vote. Eye for an eye is very American.
I hadn't thought of it from that angle, but it fits.
Ironically the people I know that are the most extreme on the social justice spectrum are also the most likely to talk about how justice shouldn't be about revenge and we should focus on rehabilitation wherever possible. Which I agree with (although might have a more skeptical take on how often it's possible). But then it's hilarious to see the same people turn around and post in detail about how some case of sexual assault or racism should be punished vindictively.
Sometimes I at least understand the urge to be emotional in response to a story, other times the desired punishment seems absurdly disproportionate. Regardless, there is a clear ideological conflict with wanting to rehabilitate murderers!
> Powerlessness doesn't abate the condemnation either, after all.
It does when the current majority no longer has a systemic advantage. Essentially it's saying, I don't want you to say you're sorry, I want things to change.
In a world where nobody feels like they have enough, I don't blame white individuals for being upset by the claim that they are privileged. And I don't think the answer is to take away all advantages from anybody because that's a race to the bottom. But, I do understand how a black American might eventually get frustrated when people display contrition over, for example, police brutality, but it continues to happen disproportionately.
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding this. What you you mean by 'requires powerlessness'? If I commit a sin against wokeness, how do I demonstrate powerlessness in order to gain forgiveness?
That's exactly it. You don't "demonstrate" powerlessness. The woke left will only be happy when there is actual change and the systematic advantage for the current majority is removed. Which of course will not happen, and even if it did, would result in other unfairnesses and in fact already has. Nobody will ever be satisfied because the fairer things are, the fairer they will need to be.
Still, I understand better now how empty words will do little to soften woke hearts.
Not sure who downvoted you, but I found this to be an incredibly insightful comment. Possibly one that conservative (anti-woke) voices might benefit from hearing. Not that it seems like you were taking a side here.
Under American society it had been deemed adequate to feign contrition to maintain the entrenched power structure, while continuing to engage in the same terrible behavior as before. That's no longer being tolerated.
The practice of Christianity is primarily about repentance. We none of us have full control over our behaviour but we always have the ability to correct our hearts by swallowing our pride and accepting divine forgiveness. And we are obliged to forgive others who have repented.
Wokeness doesn't understand this. It sees people, woke and Christians both, as hypocrites. And we are! This is because it's necessary to advocate ideal moral standards, even the ones we ourselves are incapable of meeting.
However, if someone posts 'hate speech' somewhere this will always be held against them by the woke. So, yes, wokeness does not forgive. There is no mercy.
Even worse, we're supposed to follow the example of forgiving our enemies while they murder us. ("For they know not what they do")
this leads to controversy even among Christians, but the cross is scandalous (Greek skandalon is literally a block that causes stumbling) foolishness when encountered face first.
God acted first, forgave us before we repented, even forgives those who will never repent ("causes rain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous"). But there is judgment, krinomai, discernment of a heart's response to that forgiveness -- God allows us to reject him in the end, and if I ultimately reject the source of life, I die.
> I want you to believe my christian message but I will not force you to do so. I don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what I believe. I don't want you to lose your job because you don't agree with me.
Perhaps that's true. But too many of your fellow faithful do, or at least, want to. Just look at Texas and their recent abortion law for one of many egregious and current examples of "good christians" spreading the "good word".
The ruthlessness is born of centuries of persecution, belittlement, prejudice, and hate. This does not make it justified, but it is a natural consequence of the masses and the natural swing of the social pendulum.
I suspect you very much do understand, but just wish it weren't true, just as the woke and the progressive overlook their own overreach, hate, prejudice and hypocrisies in their plight to right perceived wrongs and pursue some balance of equality and opportunity.
In order to achieve peace and understanding, we must hold ourselves responsible, and our own accountable, and that starts with not being ignorant (willful or otherwise) to the misdeeds of those in each of our own tribes.
Where is there mercy and grace in being unwilling to make an effort to show the utterly minimal respect of e.g. addressing them how they prefer?
There's a ruthlessness to it in large part because of a recognition from many that asking nicely has been met with immense vitriol, anger, even violence in some cases. At some point you stop asking and start demanding.
I can only correct this so many times, so here's my drop into the ocean on this thread:
The paradox of tolerance is that if you're too tolerant to nazis, they might take over everything and you wind up with less tolerance.
It is NOT a get out of jail free card for "you don't have to be tolerant to people that you label as intolerant, in fact terminate them with prejudice". You need a credible threat of the 'bad people' taking over and limiting tolerance for it to hold together.
You're not "correcting" anything. You're misrepresenting the intent to try to reduce the scope of it. Popper did not target just authoritarianism, but intolerance in general.
He's arguing that, sure, being prepared to use force is a last resort, but he's also arguing that the intolerant must be met by arguments and kept in check by public opinion if possible.
I'm sure some extremists would like to use violence against those they deem intolerant, but when discussing "wokeness" most people fall firmly in the camp of using arguments and using the power of public opinion to keep the intolerance in check.
I'm absolutely trying to reduce the scope from what it has become.
It has become, "person I don't like is intolerant, according to me, and hey paradox of tolerance, therefore I will persecute them with no quarter and no decency". Did you see some of the crazy cancellation stories last summer? One guy was ruined for saying "please don't burn down buildings, especially right next to my house": https://reason.com/2021/06/15/daniel-elder-cancel-culture-ch...
If you think you've found a loophole that enables you to be a McCarthyist rooting out evil, you're the bad guy.
You specifically used the word 'ruthlessness', approvingly, and cited the paradox of tolerance as justification.
People are really out there being ruthless, trying to hurt people, and justifying it using your logic. It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.
Ruthlessness does not imply force or hurting people.
It's a strawman because the situation you constructed implied things I'd never suggested and then used those to attack what I said instead of attacking what I actually said.
> It's not a strawman if it's literally happening.
We live in a democratic society. Intolerant ideas, held en masse, have a way of becoming laws. It is worth fighting them, even if they're not wearing swastikas.
No. Just the ones that are most visible in your mind.
And you'd be foolish to assume that cancellation is a thing of the left. What happened to Colin Kaepernick? Or republicans that dared to impeach Trump? McCarthyism? Cancel culture is a tactic that conservatives have used for decades now, only recently adopted by the left.
> "And you'd be foolish to assume that cancellation is a thing of the left. What happened to Colin Kaepernick? Or republicans that dared to impeach Trump? McCarthyism? Cancel culture is a tactic that conservatives have used for decades now, only recently adopted by the left."
Is that an admission that the current left is on the same moral footing than the McCarthyites? All this time, I had hope we'd risen above that but if that is so, it's even more cause for those who identify as liberal to abandon and repudiate the left.
It's exactly the same as McCarthyism. And yeah, we should have risen above it by now, but it has only gotten stronger. But where are liberals going to go? The right is even worse...and they have 3/4 of a century of experience doing it.
The people canceled by antiracists are mostly cultural moderates in liberal spaces, and that will always be true, because that's who they can get. They can't cancel conservatives, they can only make them stronger, so it's cancel well-meaning center-left people, or cancel nobody.
He just barely lost, after getting covid right before the election and looking like a huge fool, while democrats lost seats in the house, underperformed in the senate... no covid, he wins, easily.
If I were a Republican, I'd be congratulating you and handing you as much rope as I had right now. Say defund the police again, please, here's a megaphone, we'll record it for Fox News.
What are some concrete examples of the ruthlessness you mention?
More than a few people that identify as Christian are more than willing to ban abortion, as an example. They could care less about what anyone “believes” but will gladly force others to live as they want. How is that any less ruthless than someone losing their job because they went on a racist tirade and let it end up on Instagram?
Lgtbq+ have a long history of not even being allowed to acknowledge their nature for fear of violence, actual violence. Losing a job due to anti-lgtbq+ views that are expressed and recorded, and nobody forces anybody to express their opinions, just doesn’t seem ruthless in comparison.
I get it that it sends a chilling to those that share those particular ideals but it’s not like they are trying to have civil discourse either.
You say "you" don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what you believe.
Are you fighting against the people you voted for passing those laws? Are you willing
to vote the other side given evidence that the current group is passing un-Christian laws?
If you aren't speaking up for others, then you are complicit in these things you "don't want".
I'm sure many may have heard this quote before:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The back story of Niemöller is quite interesting. He was a Christian pastor who heard the general
message and agreed with the goals of making a better German and having individuals give up some
freedoms to make a better country. However, after a meeting with Hitler, some things became very
clear. 1) He was being spied on and his phone was tapped (remember, he was pro-Nazi and preaching
as such) 2) Hitler didn't care about making Germany better, he just wanted complete and total control
over everyone and everything. After this meeting, he saw the man behind the curtain and started
preaching against the Nazis and was shortly after locked in the camps. The quote from above was from
after the war. He spent the rest of his life recounting how he had failed to life up to his beliefs.
Writing and speaking about (essentially) the slippery slope of in-action so others wouldn't end up
making the same mistakes he did the next time evil returns. Too many people would rather not do this
critical thinking on their own, instead just believing and trusting in others who are "right".
Wokeness is not unique in having people like that. As with any group of significance, there's some included that actively weaponize it. And also many people are new to it. I experienced this first-hand when I was introduces to something that was new and exciting to me, that suddenly everything I did was about that thing, and that I was doing everything to further my experience with it. I feel like some people do that with wokeness too, pushing it as far as they can with this momentum. Which is experienced as ruthlessness from the outside.
I mean critical theories critique liberalism. So it's not just a few people. The movements intellectual basis has a critique of liberalism at its core.
Probably one of the reasons Western Europe diverges from the US, despite the academic scene being similar and even more entrenched, is that the conservative bogeyman in Europe was smaller.
Do you not think there is a difference between 'you should follow my religion' and e.g. 'you should use neutral pronouns to make other people more comfortable?' The later isn't about some fundamental belief, it's really just an extension of a concept that has existed for thousands of years -- politeness
> The later isn't about some fundamental belief, it's really just an extension of a concept that has existed for thousands of years -- politeness
No, it actually is a new, fundamental belief: The belief that it’s okay to assume the worst intent unless others go out of their way to follow all of the correct wokeness rules.
Ironically, assuming the worst intent in cases of ambiguity is quite the opposite of politeness.
For what it’s worth, I’ve made a best effort to use neutral pronouns in my own writing. However, when I read someone else’s writings that use “his” or “her” in a generic statement, I don’t assume the author is being sexist, misogynistic, or impolite. I assume the author was simply making a generic statement.
That’s the difference with the new woke movement: It has been misused and abused as an excuse to assume ill intent in others unless they know and follow all of the right rules.
Since when did "politeness" mean you have to do what other people tell you? If English people demanded that we spell color like "colour" because seeing it without the u made them uncomfortable, the correct response would be to tell them to fuck off. I don't see why it's any different with people demanding their own pronouns
Because when a specific person asks you to refer to them in a particular way, it’s polite to acquiesce. When you call someone something they don’t like, they will respond by not liking you. If someone asks you to refer to them as “they”, and you tell them to “fuck off”, you’re not going to have a good relationship with that person.
Yes, if someone asked me to refer to them as "your royal highness," I'm sure they will not like me if I don't. But generally I don't care if people who go around making demands for special treatment like me or not. This is what the pronoun people do. They end up not well liked because of their attention seeking demands, and then when they notice that no one likes them, they blame it on "bigotry."
People aren't asking you to call them "your royal highness" though. It's typically "he", "she", or "they" 99% of the time, words you already use to refer to people. People are just giving you the right mapping rather than hoping your heuristics get it right. I appreciate this especially in situations when my heuristics fail, and if you meet enough people they fail often enough to create noticeable social friction. As the world becomes more interconnected, this friction is appreciable, and can be alleviated easily by just adding pronouns to the formalities of introducing one's self. When we meet, I already tell you my name. You tell me yours, and I wouldn't presume to just call you whatever I want. It would signal I don't appreciate you or consider you worthy of remembering. The same is true for pronouns. If I tell you I want to be called "they" and you decide you'd rather call me "she", it's the same level of indifference as if I tell you my name is "Sue" and you insist on calling me "Sam."
They aren't asking for special treatment either -- I think everyone in your life appreciates that you refer to them using their personally preferred gender pronouns, rather than ones you might prefer for arbitrary reasons. Go ahead and switch around the pronouns you use with people in your life, and see how those people react. Trans people and non binary people are just asking you to use the pronouns they prefer, the same as everyone asks and expects.
Yes, the difference is the second question is a loaded question, it has already moved the definition of "politeness" to exclude people who don't answer "yes" to that question.
IMHO, it is a more sneaky question than some religious preacher who can easily take "no" for an answer
> I don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what I believe
20th century America has spent years doing exactly this. It's still ongoing in Texas right at the minute. People have been fired for being atheist. Children are send to indoctrination camps for "gay conversion therapy" if they are suspected of homosexuality, a practice which leads some of them to commit suicide.
Rein in your fellow Christians and things might calm down.
I recall a researcher who lost his job for publishing research that violence on black lives by police was only covered by the media when the media understood them as sympathetic victims and so a successful strategy is to intentionally play up the helplessness of being violenced upon as opposed to militant resistance and cooperative resistance. I believe the rage about it at the time was more or less how dare this person try to finger waggle how black people can effectively protest. But the study itself was fairly milquetoast.
David Shor? It seems he was sacked for reducing black grief and anger to nothing more than a bad campaign strategy for the democrats in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It wasn’t a smart thing to tweet, given that he worked for a political org. Should he have been sacked? I don’t know.
Wokeness is essentially a New England Puritan movement with some minor modifications. Even the sources (Ivy Leagues) are the same. If you view it through this lens, the lack of tolerance and crusader zeal becomes very apparent. It is perhaps the exact opposite of libertarianism.
Edit: some Puritan libertarians do not like this comment :)
"Wokeness" (liberal universalism) is actually closely related to libertarianism. It's really just the same Western, individualistic, idealistic, Christian worldview and values applied at different societal scales, generating different conclusions.
Small scale rural (or elite)? These values manifest as libertarianism.
Big scale urban? These values manifest as liberal universalism, or "wokeness".
Not at all. The woke thing is not liberal universalism, because it is actively hostile to any competing ideologies or definitions. That makes it explicitly anti-libertarian.
That's where the "universalism" piece comes from. It's the belief that deep down everyone on the planet is a liberal, and is therefore hostile to other ways of thinking.
Yes, superficially it is very different to libertarianism. But stick a libertarian in a big city for a few years and they will realize how silly libertarianism is (there's too many people for it) and transition into a liberal universalist.
Sorry but I think they are entirely different things with entirely different lineages. Woke comes from the Puritans, (American) libertarians come from the Western frontier.
The western settlers were a quite diverse group. Many came from the South. They certainly didn’t all come from a narrow group in one region of the northeast? This is...basic history.
Have you visited any American school recently? No cross in sight, but plenty of rainbow flags. Not sure about the gunpoint (in both historical and contemporary sides of the argument), but mass conversion it is.
Yes, actually. I live in the heart of downtown Dallas and was a fairly active Pokemon Go player for years, so I traveled all over the city to gyms and raids, many of which were at schools. I don't recall seeing a rainbow flag at any school at all. I do recall seeing them at City Hall and at a Raytheon facility, bizarrely enough. The only thing that stood out about the schools is how many of them had the names of confederate generals that never lived anywhere near Texas and they all seemed to magically acquire these names right as civil rights legislation was being passed in the 60s.
That said, I don't exactly doubt that tolerance and acceptance of gay people is being taught in many places, but I find this quite baffling as something that I am apparently supposed to find troubling and a sign of violent conquest at the illiberal hands of people advocating for tolerance and acceptance of gay people.
That the outcome of the mass conversion has positive aspects is orthogonal to the point that mass conversion is happening.
I'll let you ponder whether donning sexual behavior symbolism at all in kindergarten and elementary school is an appropriate adult behavior. Which is pervasive on the West Coast, possibly Dallas is different.
There are some theological interpretations of this state of affairs that point into the direction of wokeism being a Christian heresy: Christian religion without Christ. I won't go any further because this is sadly radioactive ground.
Plenty of cultures and religions that did the same don’t exist any more. So I don’t think killing heretics and taking their children is a guarantee to success for a religion.
I'm curious whether dukeofdoom's post will be removed. It's an offensive take, to be sure, but I wonder if it's over the line of what hnews is able to tolerate these days.
Jesus, dude. I rather specifically said I'm aware that this is a normal way cultures go out and I'm perfectly happy to be American rather than whatever obscure Native Mexican tribe I'd have been a part of otherwise. And I'm well aware the Aztecs were no better than the Conquistadores.
All I'm asking is everyone here, including you, take a look in the mirror and read some history when you start trying to set your particular tribe up as somehow uniquely charitable and forgiving in contrast to the ultimate tyranny of American college students. You guys are vandalizing this comments section with hysteria around how the "woke" are so uniquely uncharitable to those they deem as ideologically other while showing absolutely no charity to any of the people you're setting up as bogeyman. Where does this cycle end?
Thank you for clarify your position. Even though I replied to your comment, it wasn't an attack on you personally. Sorry if you took it that way. More of a cultural comment and society at large.
Identity politics is a Marxist revolutionary movement. As Lenin pointed out, in the Revolution, morality is subsumed in politics and Revolutionary violence is not actual violence, or rather, it is not immoral. The is no mercy to be shown to anyone who obstructs the Revolution. Phase I of the Revolution is to destroy the values of the "oppressive" preexisting order. Phase II is the realization of the promised Utopia, which of course never happens. We are in the logically necessary nadir of nihilism where no values can claim universality. This could be considered the antithesis of Christianity. The woke are the intellectual vanguard of the Revolution when they are self-conscious of their historical role. Most are simply unwitting foot soldiers pushing this revolution forward like ants, without understanding. Many are simply aspirational elites playing the power game for petty stakes. Some are true believers. If you want to understand what the world looks like when morality is subsumed under politics, consider the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, for which that was a defining feature. The woke are playing a dangerous game, supported by the ruling elites who are thinking they can control this. Are they right? We'll see. There were plenty of elites who thought they could control the revolutionary forces they were harnessing to gain or keep power.
It is anti-Marxist, in that Marxism requires that the whole proletarian class of a society unite, whereas wokism pretty much guarantees that society will be shattered into thousands of mutually suspicious parts.
Can you explain that further? I'm interested in the idea that our understanding of an idea like Marxism can improve the further away we are in time from it. That seems counter-intuitive.
It doesn't seem counter-intuitive to me that understanding improves with time. Quite the opposite. It's odd that you think that. Why wouldn't our understanding deepen with time to reflect, more information, and with the unfolding of events in history to reveal mysteries?
I don't agree that our understanding of ideas improves with time. For example, do we understand the teachings of Jesus better today than someone who heard them first hand?
I would argue no, because we don't have anywhere near the same life experiences as that audience. In addition, all our information has been mediated through the accounts of others with their own biases and every recounting makes it a little bit worse.
With this in mind your statement that someone "has an outdated view of Marxism" sounds odd to me, like someone saying "You have an outdated view of Christianity". Says who? Marx?
This is so ignorant I don't even know what to say to you. If you're interested in learning about the connection and evolution you can look into the Marxist Frankfurt school and its influence on modern identity politics.
Well, Marx famously wrote he himself wasn't a Marxist ("je ne suis pas marxiste"), but putting that aside, Marx was himself a bourgeois intellectual (as were Lenin and Trotsky, Che Guevara, and many other famous revolutionaries). Read Lukas' History and Class Consciousness if you want to understand the relationship between bourgeois intellectuals and Marx's revolutionary politics.
I made no claims for any One True Marxism when I described Identity Politics as "a Marxist revolutionary movement" but I would agree that Identity Politics is consistent with what Marx actually wrote. Consider Marx's third Thesis on Feuerbach:
"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."
The part of society that is "superior to society" is just those bourgeois intellectuals who are able to transcend their place in their own culture, who have a view of History and can execute its logic ("The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."). These are the Revolutionary Vanguard, as Lenin described in What is to Be Done? Moreover, the materialist doctrine forgets, according to Marx, that circumstances are changed by man and "self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice", which i would argue is the essence identity politics and consistent with the centrality of 'homo faber' to all of Marx's philosophy.
To understand Marx, you must understand that, first and foremost, he was a revolutionary. The failure of the actual Marxist revolution to arise from the proles as Marx predicted or to produce the kind of society most people would chose to inhabit (in fact, the opposite, in the form of Bolshevik and Nazi totalitarianism), was instrumental in the thinking of later Marxist theorists, Weimar bourgeoisie though some may have been. I would not count Gramsci as a Weimar bourgeois but he was instrumental in shifting the interpretation of Marxist revolutionary politics to the commanding heights of culture, rather than industry per Lenin. In that, he was 100% predicting the take-over of our education and media systems by revolutionary politics. Gender theory and identity politics are self-professedly Marxist ideologies. There's no real debate about what they think they're about, it's pretty well-documented.
I wonder why you think you have a better claim to interpreting Marx correctly than 150 years of dedicated scholar-activists have been able to do. If you've slogged your way through Kapital vol III, I'm impressed and a bit mystified as to why you might think Marx's important thinking about political economy isn't consistent with identity politics, which, if it's about anything, is about deconstructing the legal and political superstructures that create power. What's more Marxist than that?
I think that there is a hidden assumption, in wokeness. It isn't explicitly stated but it is strongly implied.
That assumption : The WOKE IDEOLOGY is realer than reality. That is to say, it comprises the primary reality and all else (time, space, dogs, cats...) Is secondary.
Thus reality is what we agree it to be. A side-effect of authority, consensus and conversation. If we agree that I am a frog then I am literally a frog.
And it follows that the greatest perversion is to contradict that ideology.
No doubt there are historical examples of something similar.
Where's the mercy and grace in allowing people to engage in terrible behavior without consequences? The ruthlessness was in tolerating serial predatory behavior, and people are finally tired of it.
You can't be seriously using Christians, of all people, as an example of people who don't try to force their views on others.
If your argument is that many don't, well I'd argue the "woke" people you're thinking of are just like the evangelical Christians who are not practicing what they preach.
> Where is mercy and grace in the midst of wokeness?
Friend, to be frank, I don't see any way that beliefs in providence and deferred reward can even begin to explain economics. (And I daresay this is by intent.)
Consider this definition from the article:
> injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled
From a clear reading of history and world events, you can see that terrible wrongs have been mercilessly committed for profit. Today, if it is hard to discuss these problems, it is in part because the topics have been so well buried, and honest discourse is a forgotten social principle, replaced by social media.
There is a significant difference in that woke, like SJW, is for the most part a derogatory term. It would be as if the word "christian" was a word created by athiests specifically to refer to those who did not practice what they preached. Any discussion of the merits of "wokeness" is approaching the subject in a biased and unproductive way.
I would suggest that those you would describe as woke have, on average, just as much belief in the importance of mercy and grace as you do, and would likely believe they have more. The difference is who is seen as worthy of that grace and mercy. Is it grace to allow someone who has made unwanted sexual advances in the workplace a second chance? Or is it mercy to those who were victimized to remove the problem? Obviously this is a crude and simplified example, as examples often are, but it illustrates the point.
> It would be as if the word "christian" was a word created by athiests specifically to refer to those who did not practice what they preached.
May off-topic, but it might be interesting to note that 'christian' was similarly not something the Christians called themselves, but were derisively called that by others as in "followers of Christ or Messiah' alluding to the fact that they followed Jesus who proclaimed himself as messiah but was killed in a pitiful way in their eyes. The Christians actually called themselves "people of The Way"
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You make a good point that when starting with a derogatory term does not lead to a productive debate. How would the 'woke people' define themselves?
For example, justice is not a new concept. It exists in every society, even the most primitive ones. So, justice as we have it in the US or West, could be seen as derived from English Common Law, which in turn was derived from the Bible's Judeo-Christian origins. Since the times and the culture of the people had changed, the laws itself have evolved.
So, what should 'social justice' bring to the table? Are there opponents of these woke actions that agree with the perpetrators of sexual harassment? If not, why are we debating an area we are in full agreement?
It's a good point, and I did consider noting that at one time this was also true for the word christian. But I think we agree that this is not the case now.
There are several considerations that underpin my own thinking on social justice, but perhaps most relevant here is the concept of competing freedoms. It's easy to say that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, but the debate over hate speech is much more controversial. In the case of personal threats or libel, we do have a history of recognizing that there are potentially competing freedoms at stake when it comes to certain kinds of speech. We can productively disagree on how to balance these freedoms - even at the extremes - but the caricature of wokeness pretends that I don't care about freedom of speech at all, while simultaneously dismissing that there may be competing freedoms worth considering. I personally believe that freedom of speech outweighs the freedom to live unencumbered by impersonal threats and libel - but I also acknowledge the damage that allows, and believe we should consider ways to minimize or compensate for it.
This applies to my example of sexual harassment, but in that case with what I will call "soft freedoms." That is to say, the hypothetical harasser does not have a right to work at that company, and the hypothetical victims do not have a right to not see a particular person. In a perfect world, a reformed harasser could return to work and get a second chance, and those they worked with could feel secure and safe. Given that we do not live in this perfect world, there is a choice in how to balance these soft freedoms. I think we might disagree on where to place this particular line, but probably not by very much. But the "anti-woke" would have you believe that I think that anyone who was accused of the slightest transgression should be fired.
> I also acknowledge the damage that allows, and believe we should consider ways to minimize or compensate for it.
But when the meta-discussion about how to compensate for it gets shut down, then the dialogue simply stops.
No longer is the perpetrator the primary target, but the person who makes a statement questioning some part of it.
Many of those cited in the article are actually on the left, and would generally agree with the broader positions, but now find themselves attacked with no recourse.
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Even in this imperfect world, the harasser can be put on 'probation' to see if there is a 2nd strike, the 'victim' can have additional monitoring... We need to build systems and processes knowing that we have imperfect people who sometimes make unintentional mistakes, or even if it was intentional, we can have systems that ensure that if they claim repentance, it is genuine
Here's my question. Where is mercy and grace in the midst of wokeness? I want you to believe my christian message but I will not force you to do so. I don't want to introduce laws to force you to believe what I believe. I don't want you to lose your job because you don't agree with me. There seems to me to be a ruthlessness to wokeness which I don't understand.