How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

Think less Mafia Don and more Invisible Hand.

Recent anecdote of notoriety: Twitter CEO publicly bankrolling Kendism. Though some read that as indulgence purchase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence

Ex 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4sNoKJqj7k Skip past the hype, the key phrase from the GM (paraphrased) "Sometimes it's not about the viewer, it's about what your CEO reads"

Ex 2: Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow are both examples promoting someone who is a true believer of an agenda being promoted and given a big platform to expound those views. This is why the elite doesn't have to coerce key public figures; those public figures can only get in that position if they are loyal to the agenda.

It's actually good that, now, I understand the big ol generic "Indian" with a war bonnet painted in the school gym when I was a kid was a misrepresentation and misuse of sacred, hard-earned symbols. It's good that I know whose land those pipelines cut across now. It's good that I understand spirit animals are a sacred, private thing, not something to bandy about or declare for every fleeting interest on Twitter. It's good that I know naming certain evils is kind of a jerk move to do in a crowd of people who believe in them.

If someone is punching you in the face every single day, and nothing you try that’s non violent works, but suddenly you get results when you push back, wouldn’t you employ that method? Sure, it hurts the person punching you, but they were punching you.

I’ve had discussions about “equality” with folks aligned across the political spectrum, and most everyone agrees they want equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. I’m confused about who or what group is speaking about people desiring equality of outcome.

And discriminating against other people because of their views - what if their view is, “group A of people, who didn’t do anything to belong to group A, shouldn’t exist or have the same rights as group B?”

At some level, I'm disappointed that we've progressed so much in the last few decades, but all the effort was in the direction of keeping discrimination going, instead of trying to end it completely. Yes, many people have a disadvantage due to centuries of discrimination, but I don't see equality of outcome as being the way forward towards an equal society in the long run.

And that is why you're earning downvotes :)

This is honestly a great HN thread for wilfully burning karma in fires of brigading. I know my own interaction with it, is in the full knowledge that if I do correctly identify and explore ideas, I'll be massively downvoted for sheerly tactical and ideological reasons. You could hardly have a thread less conducive to the stated aims of HN discussion.

For example, I’ve yet to meet a libertarian who cares about their carbon emissions, even though that affects everybody else via climate change. Same goes for coronavirus - they don’t care if they spread the disease to others, but they feel like it’s oppression if they have to wear a mask.

And the same goes for trampling on the feelings of others, or passively accepting that they’ve been given huge advantages over others in society. They feel like they should be able to do anything short of actually stealing from or hurting others physically, and don’t consider the subtle ways they impact others in society.

No, it isn't. Its core is to enforce private property rights? That will very likely not translate into "letting everyone be themselves".

One of the more ridiculous ideas to come out of this is that “everything is a human construct”. For example, it appears to be a woke idea that mathematics, science is some human (more specifically, white) invention and we should explore “alternative mathematics” or “alternative science”. Perhaps a new (and most importantly less oppressive) scientific method is right around the corner.

Like a long forgotten music video that you talked about with all your friends, most of these ideas will end up with no relevance and are completely meaningless. Wokeness is primarily an attention-seeking social phenomenon where influencers can tell you the new hot woke which you can mention later to impress your friends or get a date.

Libertarianism fails really hard in situations where you have a lot more overall prosperity if you limit everybody. Libertarianism misses these opportunities because of its blindness to anything but individual freedoms. In economic terms it mostly refuses to deal with the tragedy of the commons. And it likes to pretend negative externalities don't exist, or that the most free markets would make negative externalities magically disappear.

Let's get concrete with a real life example.

Air pollution will very likely shorten my life by a couple of years (if the science is to be believed). A very moderate libertarian might be willing to discuss preventative regulations, but the vast majority of libertarians' response is "oh well, you can only sue after the damage has been done". Which puts the entire burden on the victim and after preventable damage has already been done. It's too late.

It's far cheaper and more effective for me to support a government that stops them from damaging my health and stops them from inteferring with my freedom to breath clean air. The complaint from libertarians is that I'm interfering with their freedoms using the threat of government force. Damn right I am! Because the only thing that has worked over the decades to clean up the air I breath is government regulations interferring with the freedoms of car manufactures, and the freedoms of consumers to buy and operate excessively polluting vehicles. Along with government interference in other polluting industries. Government inference 1, free markets 0. If I could find viable candidates who would intefere and regulate at a much faster pace, they would get my vote. Because it increases a freedom I deeply value.

Libertarianism would be a lot more interesting if the libertarians I talk to were actually interested in my freedoms and priorities (which are often collective freedoms to enjoy a shared resource) instead of only being interested in maximizing individual freedoms and their own priorities.

As far as asking "woke stars on their views of libertarianism" can you give examples and sources?

Silence is violence when there's a concerted effort to normalize unjustified hierarchy through cultural peer pressure. Whether it's 'let's all make rape jokes, also rapists aren't actually bad', or 'let's put up statues of slavers waaaaay after the war they were in, because slavers aren't actually bad', part of the purpose of such social pressure is to stifle anybody who's inclined to object.

The intensity with which people demand their right to performatively line up with bad things they claim they are not, right then, themselves, actually doing, tells me something about those people. I'm deeply not interested in exploring hypotheticals through which people might claim they want to dress up as a Nazi without actually being one, and deeply not impressed with the argument, "You're cruelly trying to punish me for BEING a Nazi, but I am only DRESSED as one, so you're morally obligated to be silent and let me do my own thing!"

If people constantly joke around about rape, it's clearly not meant to be that big of a crime, plus it's on people's minds as a possible thing to do.

If it's normal to go around presented with swastikas and nooses but not normal to react angrily to such messaging, then those things and Nazism and lynching are culturally acceptable regardless of the letter of the law, which will be next on the list to bring up to speed with what the cultural messaging is saying.

If it's normal to go around seeing giant expensive statues of slavers put up, not during a conflict but many years later when black civil rights are becoming a thing, then those slavers are the real heroes regardless of what the laws say… and the laws will follow along as soon as it's convenient to do so.

It's always projection. The fear of Critical Theory is real and not unjustified. That sort of societal-context thinking is how Nazis, slavers and racists have historically got what THEY wanted, so it stands to reason they'd recognize it right away when it's used against them.

We need a separate word for leering, groping, fondling, sex with dubious consent, and violently beating someone during penetration without consent.

Rape used to mean only the last thing and it was regarded as basically the worst form of assault short of murder since it included every possible form of assault.

Today it's moved to fondling and people are trying to make it include leering. Using the same legal punishments for something that is clearly different makes very little sense and normalizes rape in the long term.

(Of course there's a liberal moral agenda- there's an X moral agenda for every X).

One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allowed to refer to power, and pathologize expressions that are offensive to it. Liberals have all these rules about how you are allowed to describe liberals—the idea that we should observe similar courtesies when describing the “reactionary right-wing” as you pejoratively put it is, naturally, absurd.

So even an anodyne description like “liberal moral agenda” of what is objectively a moral agenda informed by liberal priorities becomes verboten, simply because it allows its adversaries to vocalize their opposition to it. Depriving the opposition of their own vocabulary and replacing it with one of your making is a classic move—anyone who fails to update their dictionary marks themselves as an enemy.

Someone is indeed making conversation impossible to have, but whose fault is that, exactly?

> Id recommend getting outside of your social circle/geo a bit more. I’ve never once experienced this in Denver, and have only ever seen gender pronouns be a thing on linkedin.

I've started to see them in email signatures at work, but only in situations where such specification was entirely unnecessary. Though most cases have consistent enough formatting that there may be some corporate-standard signature template that has it now.

Yes, you don't care what pronouns people use for you. You're privileged in that you've never struggled with gender and gender identity in a society that shames and ridicules you for it. Giving people space to be themselves (in a very basic human-rights sort of way) shouldn't be narrowly dismissed as stupid and "a big deal to some people".

I thought "guys" (plural) was already considered gender neutral?

Here's what I mean: Let's assume you are male (gavin). That means that in professional settings when people refer to you they would say "he".

What happens if one person - just one coworker - kept referring to you as "she". "Yes, I'm working on her (Gavin's) pull request".

I simply don't believe that you wouldn't notice it or wonder what's going on.

Oh sure, maybe it wouldn't BOTHER you, but it would STAND OUT. It would come up.

And if there were no political agenda behind you saying you don't mind being an attack helicopter, you might ask "Why do you keep saying she/her? I'm a man"

Now let's raise this up a notch. What if you asked this person why they keep calling you she/her - when they are the only ones, and it stands out, and their answer was "Because fuck you, that's why. I don't care what your pronouns actually are. I'm deliberately trying to choose the opposite to bother you. Is it working?"

Hmmm...you could ignore that. You probably would. I believe that you have enough confidence and security to just ignore that. But it's fucking weird, and needlessly hostile, no? You would wonder what you did to earn this hostility and if the person is going to question your motivations/actions, sabotage you professionally, or generally be an enemy.

THIS IS WHAT TRANS PEOPLE FACE. If you are transgender, trying to transition, but you are making all the steps (hormones, surgery, makeup, social expression, clothing), but you are not quite passing, and ask your coworkers to use your PREFERRED pronouns, and MOST do (which they will), but one fucking asshole Bob deliberately doesn't and says "NO. You are born male. So I will use your male pronouns.", that is exactly the same level of hostility and unprofessionalism.

People (including myself, a cis hetero male) put pronouns in their public profiles to normalize it so that it's not just trans people that have to face the burden of having to ask for their preferred pronouns.

When you put "i don't give a flying fuck what you call me" as your pronoun, you are not just mocking their struggle, you are giving a strong signal that you are going to be Fucking Asshole Bob to any trans person that approaches you and asks you to use their preferred pronouns.

Seems like your own linked article says it's not just a leftist thing?

What I find heartbreaking in all this identity issue is the ever-increasing number of dimensions. Simple math shows that at about 20 or so there’s going to be about one gender identity per person or two. Which is absolutely correct as all people are unique and beautiful in their own ways. But instead of being able to freely move across the spectrum that is being a “man” or a “woman”, each person would be locked in their own tiny identity. And, as we see, crossing the identity barriers is hard for many many reasons. I can’t see this increasing happiness of people. Everyone is or should be looking for their identity for most of their lives, creating additional barriers on this journey is unlikely to be beneficial.

From context it should be clear that I'm talking about identarianism in the literal sense of the term (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/identitarianism), not the European right-wing political movement that confusingly shares the same label.

>women's suffrage, the US civil rights movement, universal male suffrage

the keyword in those movements is 'suffrage' and 'civil' not 'man' or 'woman'. The reason they were successful is because they were republican movements. Women's suffrage wasn't about women with a capital W having a sort of privileged identity, it was about the opposite, women being treated like equal citizens. Identity politics is the opposite, it is the creation of separate, distinct, protected spaces for groups of people based on some set of features.

Rather than gaining access to the commons, aspiring to universal values which was the goal of desegregation in the civil rights era, women's rights and so forth, identity politics seeks to carve out virtual spaces that are only even understandable if you share said identity. The notion of the a citizen proper goes out of the window.

And the gay rights movement is a good example of that shift, whereas historically it was focused on access to civil rights, nowadays you have clashes between different queer groups. Which part do we include, are TERFS reationary? Are asexuals queer? There is at least half a dozen fronts in this war already about who deserves to be part of the rainbow label.

These days anti-capitalism is literally sold as a commodity. Anti-consumerism has become a consumer identity. While this helps deradicalization by diverting the radical energy away from actual causes towards consumption, it also tends to make a good profit.

The problem isn't the worldviews. The problem is that you can't fight capitalism through consumption. You can't fight hierarchies by acting within the system of hierarchy, you have to step outside.

As an example, the Black Panthers (not the Marvel movie) not only offered social programs and free food in Black communities, they also built coalitions with other racial groups who tried to do the same in their communities. While at a glance acting only within their racial lines (i.e. racial identity politics) they actively worked against racial division through mutual solidarity.

Solidarity across divisions is important, but it can only work if you acknowledge the existence of the divisions and the power imbalances these divisions reinforce.

As an example in the negative, unions in the early 20th century US often failed because they rejected Black workers who then had no other economical option but to become scabs when white unionized workers went on strike (because they didn't get any of the union benefits and had no union covering their backs if they had joined the strike).

There's a widespread misconception these days that "left solidarity" means that all members of "the left" have to be equally "woke". They all have to believe in exactly the one leftist ideology you think is best, they all have to treat all marginalized groups exactly the way you think they must be treated and so on. This is where the leftist memes of the circular firing squad and purity spirals come from. THIS is harmful and divisive.

However the answer is not to "not be woke". The answer is to better embrace pragmatic alliances and understand that you can have a shared struggle even if it doesn't perfectly overlap. There's a place for close-nit communities but "the left" is not a clubhouse.

As another final example, there's a famous incident in the UK (recently portrayed in the movie "Pride") where gay activists joined striking coal miners because both groups were facing violent opposition from the police. The collaboration helped foster class consciousness in the gay activists and queer acceptance among the coal miners. They didn't become one cohesive ideologically perfect group but their solidarity made them more powerful in their shared struggle than either group would have been on their own.

What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures.

It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".

Racism is a system of hierarchy where one race is inherently good and normal and others are deviations from that, or at least every race is good or bad in some ways and there is an implied value judgement in every assertion about them. Not every person doing a racism necessarily fully commits to racial pseudoscience but if pressed they'll have to justify their conceptions by citing them. Racial mixing of course is unacceptable as it goes against this order and since the racial social castes are a natural order, any attempt to overcome them is bad and anyone making it further than their kind is expected to should either be celebrated for their excellence (and everyone else be held to their standard to demonstrate their insufficiency) or be viewed with suspicion because they probably cheated or got handouts.

Sexism is a sexual hierarchy with women being one way, men another and everyone who doesn't neatly fit into either category being deviant and a troublemaker. It's not so much about one sex being better at all things than the other, much like racism, but about there being a natural order and everything being well as long as people follow it.

Economic right wing thought posits that there is a natural order in that poverty is largely a failure of the individual and can be overcome with sheer will so wealth is the just spoils of success and personal quality and charity is the only acceptable form of welfare because it is for the wealthy to decide how to allocate their deserved riches.

This is also why right-wing people have recently picked up the term "Marxist" (or even "Neomarxist") to describe not just socialists but also progressives in general, even when they lean economically more right-wing than left.

The question of how you align within that spectrum is mostly a question of whether you think a natural order exists and/or should be enforced in each of these dimensions (and there are probably more). Most Democrats don't want to abolish private ownership, they just want more regulations to shift some of the wealth to the lower classes, i.e. balance out the hierarchy rather than getting rid of it. They are however more likely to be opposed to the idea of a natural order in social questions.

The obvious solution is meritocracy and race/sex blindness. That's the world I wish to live in - non-discrimination & equality of opportunity, not "positive" discrimination (it's always positive for someone) and (enforced) equality of outcome. But the Woke Left has been quite hostile to those concepts recently...

Edit: added "Woke" before "Left" because presumably there's other (liberal) Left that would support meritocracy.

It looks like a weird neurotic guilt attack that is probably counterproductive to any future common prosperity. Pushing "Latinx" on Hispanics and discriminatory quotas on Asian students is almost guaranteed to generate some weird backlash. Import of the same ideas to Europe whose racial dynamics is absolutely different (black people from Africa sail here on their own and "we"* mostly want to stop this movement, so pretty much the opposite of American slave history) is almost guaranteed to wake up some old demons.

* Of course there is not a uniform opinion on this among 400 million people, but the last five years have been spent tightening borders, not opening them, and even some lefty parties like Danish Social Democrats joined in.

Most of the discussions around systemic racism and sexism fundamentally boil down to the topic either poverty or violence from police.

Poverty:

Specific groups are over-represented in the impoverished population, sometimes across generations. We, correctly, have identified systemic bias as an contributing factor to these trends.

Imagine a hypothetical society where the means of comfort (good food, safe and adequate housing, new clothing, entertainment, etc...) are available to people that need them, regardless of whether or not one is employed. Now ask yourself, would racism and sexism have the same bite that it currently has? If one's ability to live comfortably is not based on systemic bias, one would be disingenuous if they said "yes".

Life gets a lot easier when one can ignore shitty racists and sexists without fear of losing their means of survival. It would be nice if racists and sexists didn't exist, but if everyone had the means to ignore them without fear of repercussions, that's almost as good.

Violence from police:

A few observations from the last few years of police violence and the BLM movement:

-There is a large portion of shitty individuals within various police forces that enjoy victimizing victimizable individuals

-Racialized groups are more victimizable than the average

-Police violence, although concentrated against minorities, also victimizes everyone to some degree, regardless of race or gender.

What practical solutions have come out of all of the years of outrage and protests? Instead of using "master/slave" software terminology, my company now encourages "leader/follower", while all of management is patting its back for "fighting systemic racism". Huh?

Here are some actual practical solutions to this issue:

-federally-mandated body cameras for all overt police officers that are always-on, and record to multiple external and publicly-viewable archives

-police review bodies with actual teeth to punish criminality amongst police officer

-a legal mechanism to permanently bar an individual from any kind of policing, country-wide

-removing "verbal evidence from a trusted officer" as admissible evidence in court

"Wokeness" is just yet another socially-acceptable form of discrimination, where us commoners have been pitted against each other playing some stupid "privilege points" game based on physical appearance. It's divisive, and is not actually moving us towards a healthier society. We should be looking towards our government to solve the actual issues that are aggravated by (and not caused by) sexism and racism.

You claim this is denial, but that's a biased reframing of the stated solution. This is a potential solution, but is not acceptable to the 'woke'

It also destroys any form of class consciousness, replacing it with one based on race. The white middle class get the catharsis of flagellating themselves but the people struggling to pay rent or working two jobs are understandably defensive when you try to tell them how privileged they are.

As far as I'm aware, the motivation behind this had nothing to do with social justice for trans people, but more as a potential alternative to the awkward/ambiguous singular they. (Or at least that's how I would've interpreted it back then, having been a teenager with no real concept of or experience with LGBT issues.)

This is interesting because I've heard this explanation before from an international student. You still have 他/he 她/she despite them being pronounced the same, so the gendered pronouns still do exist, but the mistake of switching he/she in conversation is still commonly made.

It's not like Vietnamese where Em ấy or Ẻm (both meaning he/she for someone younger than the speaker) where a genderless pronoun is used, and yet I've seen he/she mixed up a lot less often.

I can understand why 'they' is chosen as a way to introduce neutrality of gender but it pains me that this also introduces of ambiguity of plurality. We _really_ need a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. We're lucky that our first and second-person pronouns and our plural pronouns by fluke of language evolution just happen to already be gender neutral. It's just this last one -- third-person singular -- that is causing all this discussion, political fights, and newspaper column inches. It seems absurd to me when we could just call each other ze/zim (or whatever, the actual word doesn't really matter) and call it a day. If it turns out that the only way we can shut up about pronouns is to sacrifice 'they', then I guess that's an acceptable loss. But it does feel like all we need is a tiny tweak of the language to iron out this wrinkle by introducing something new (or taking one from another language, if that's more palatable).

Is it? I mostly see non-Spanish people using "latinx".

That's not what I've seen. "Latinx" isn't pronouncable in Spanish. The actual attempt to introduce a neutral gender uses the suffix -e. For example "les estudiantes ruidoses" or "mis amigues".

Did it really come from native Spanish speakers or is it an exonym? It is not the preferred term for the vast majority of Hispanic people even in the US.[1]

> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun

A Comedy of Errors (William Shakespeare, c.1594), Act 4, Scene 3:

> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend

Singular 'they' even when the gender is known has been popular in the English language for hundreds of years. Even longer than singular 'you'.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

This isn’t true. The term is enormously unpopular with latinos, only 3% use it. The entire spanish language uses gendered nouns, and unlike german has no neuter. The term may have originated with puerto rican academics but it is mostly used by English speakers.

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

Not true - Latinx was invented by English speakers and the vast majority of "Latinx" people don't use or like the term.

No, they're not. In WALS (https://wals.info/chapter/30), almost half of the languages have gendered nouns.

> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown. For example, if you found a random wallet, you might say, "Someone lost their wallet," and it would be acceptable.

It's actually reasonably weird to propose since usages historically mattered. Also that's what gives you collocations, idioms, etc. If you look at grammars of English, you find plenty of examples of similar generalizations that people consistently refuse to make, such as the lack of "I could X" in the sense of "I was able to X", even though though nobody bats an eye at "I couldn't X" in the sense of "I wasn't able to X".

But also, we tend to collectively adapt much quicker and much better. I'm pretty comfortable claiming that this will be the case based on my own experiences with friends and family. In college, I'd say about half of my black friends were pretty "homophobic" and exactly zero of those same people are still.

Care to expand?

Because different languages have different pronouns. You don't adopt function words into your language the same way you can adopt content words (unless you're, for example, code switching, but even then you don't switch for a single function word).

I have no problem being on friendly terms with people who think it's a bit silly of me to have them there. But people who are so offended they don't want to follow me? Good riddance.

Relevant comedy skit:

https://youtu.be/Ev373c7wSRg

I think they're trying to reckon with their ads business model not succeeding in the online world, so their editors allow these controversial pieces to exist as a means to retain viewership by appealing to some mob anger.

I also want to mention that of all the news agencies, I have consistently not felt this way from anything from the Atlantic, which is the only publication I now subscribe to, because this work is kind of nonsensical.

Some things really are objectively stupid as hell.

I find it kind of sad that the US is so polarized that everything (like the Economist) that doesn't fit neatly into Democrat/left vs Republican/right is nonetheless forcibly pigeonholed into one of the two camps, with absurd results like you labeling the Economist -- historically a very liberal/libertarian publication -- some kind of right wing Trojan horse.

Two solutions I've seen native speakers employ: Sometimes in written language, the @ symbol will be used because it's like an A and an O overlayed ("latin@s"). When speaking, the only thing that could work would be E, "latines", which at least would be pronounceable and would rhyme. Did the idiot who thought of "latinx" think about rhyming? Spanish speakers write poetry and music too.

That’s not the proper way to treat depression. No amount of social acceptance will lower the suicide rates of people with mis/untreated depression.

You should consider why you feel comfortable pushing something that's obviously bollocks, just because it supports your anti-trans activism.

https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement

You're effectively presenting a transgender person as a second class person, or a mistake.

You're also aligning the ability to grow a beard with being a 1st class citizen.

Don't downplay the influence of interracial mixing in the Americas, where I will perhaps incorrectly assume you live. Large amounts of body hair are not a universal male trait. Europeans and Mediterraneans are much hairier than Native Americans. If your ancestors were mostly on one side of that, then sure, they were hairier. Many of my more distant ancestors had no body hair at all.

You may notice a tradeoff here, as the same sensitivity to DHT in your hair follicles that causes facial hair to proliferate also causes male pattern baldness, and Europeans go bald much more often.

Have you considered that they may have been talking about it privately, and decided to come out at the same time to reduce the risk of being singled out for it? I don't see how the timing implies a "bandwagon". It seems obvious that doing that together is less scary than alone.

For what it's worth, i think the gender fight in the media is not worth it for anybody. I dont see an end anytime soon, and i'd rather have gay marriage settle, add counseling in schools for kids who need it, and then maybe the LGBTQ+ community can start fighting this gender fight. Transversal fights are surely worth it (as Fred Hampton and the BPP proved), but i think this one we might want to avoid until we fix the rest.

Also, I'm hearing more and more what It would be conservative opinions from the gay people I have more trust with. Which is quite unexpected for me.