Comment by spats1990 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spats1990 | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I tend to think "woke" as a sneer word is just the new "PC/politically correct" as a sneer word.

Corporations wouldn't be engaging in this kind of token support for progressive issues if they did not believe such issues were broadly popular. Such organizations rarely do anything for free. The token support is a reflection of something in the culture.

Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public. So it gets framed as some sort of virus, or as an orgy of cynical virtue signalling. But in order to virtue signal, you need somebody who understands (and ideally even shares) the virtue that is being signalled.

Your entirely reasonable comment being flagged currently is an example of this cognitive dissonance at work.

There are many valid critiques of so-called "wokeness" but most of them come from angles that reactionaries generally dislike.

> Most of the "backlash" to "woke stuff" is a working-through of the cognitive dissonance this notion brings for certain people/organizations. They cannot believe that such ideas can have even token support among the broader public.

But that's the thing: a lot of the woke stuff isn't publicly supported. Latinos don't care for "Latinx" [1]. Enforcing more gender-speech in Germany has decreased the support in the general population, also among women. [2]

It's the media that is going crazy over it and really, really wants it. And the politicians are willingly following. The electorate does not.

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

[2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/grosse-mehrh...

On the first point, a ~recent (2020) poll suggests most Latino people don't even know that "Latinx" is a word. Your post contradicts itself somewhat there. It says "the media are going crazy" over "woke stuff", but seems to make the assumption that "Latinx" is being actively pushed on Latino people, which seems like it isn't true--since if it were, far more of them would actually know it was a word. I suspect the prevalence of "Latinx" in the media is largely due to its being held up so frequently as an example of the putative derangements of wokeness (there are several examples of this in this thread). https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-08-11/...

On the second point, I simply don't know enough about the specifics of that debate, and I can't read German.

I remain convinced that corporations specifically show token support for social-progressive issues because they see some benefit to it; that is, they see some amount of broad support for these ideas in society.

> It says "the media are going crazy" over "woke stuff", but seems to make the assumption that "Latinx" is being actively pushed on Latino people, which seems like it isn't true--since if it were, far more of them would actually know it was a word.

You might have misunderstood my point. I'm saying the media cares, not the Latinos. They don't care, otherwise they'd be out there saying they want to be called Latinx -- instead, they don't even know that there's a debate. Similarly, most people of most cultures don't care for the concept of cultural appropriation, yet there's a fuzz in the corporate media about it.

Since German has gendered nouns with the male form usually doubling as the neutral form (e.g. teacher = Lehrer, female teacher = Lehrerin), there's been a push by the media, academics and politicians to gender (e.g. to say either Lehrende = "those who teach" or use things like Lehrer_innen which is supposed to also include transsexuals, non-binary and intersex). The public is opposed to it, but the corporate media and politicians are forcing the issue and the opposition gets stronger.

The only group that is split on the issue are those still in education, where indoctrination has become much more severe.

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