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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

I see woke as mainly two things. First, it’s the elevation of feelings above reality, and if need be redescribing reality to contort to certain people’s feelings. (“Certain people” leading into the second point) Second, it’s seeing everything through the lens of historical power imbalances, but importantly it’s taking an “ends justify the means” approach that discards all principles to rectify those imbalances…that rectification is itself the only principle.

It’s all a cult, and an extremely ugly one at that.

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Yeah, see, this is what you've been trained to believe by people with an agenda against addressing systemic reform. They have made you a really great little political pawn.

As another poster said:

> When pressed to define the term, Ron Desantis’s general counsel provided this definition:

>> the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them

So to people who understand the term this way, which apparently includes a conservative political front runner's legal counsel, what you're saying when you are using "woke" as a pejorative is that there are no such injustices and it is silly to believe otherwise. Which is why people with that understanding of the word would rightly think all sorts of ungenerous things about you for saying that.

Which is just fine, as far as the people pushing your definition are concerned, since further divide and unreasonable discourse helps cement their base.

"The need to address them" is key there. There is no need for everyone to work to address or think about the injustices, people who push the "you are either with us or against us" onto people and force them to make a choice instead of being bystanders are "woke". Most people dislike that kind of "woke", no matter if they are left or right, being forced to take a stand when you are stressed and tired enough already is very uncomfortable.

There is definitely an element of that, and I think most people would agree that that behavior is harmful.

But I think we would say that such behavior is not actually that common and is very much exaggerated by the loud "anti-woke" crowd, who seem to equate any steps taken to address the issue or even draw attention to it as some kind of assault. See: "go woke go broke" nonsense, anti-CRT education legislation, etc.

From the other side, I could say that a lot of the "anti-woke" rhetoric is just bigotry in disguise, but I know that is only a relatively small minority of very loud assholes who, naturally, draw the most attention. Unfortunately many of them are also elected officials.

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