Comment by Festro

> Annoyed people are whining about civil rights?

Nobody is annoyed people are whining about civil rights. We are annoyed that people a) are whining about non-issues that they have gone out of their way to be offended by, and b) are demanding that the rest of us change the world based on their blown out of proportion views.

>People have always been performative about social justice, it's not a new phenomenon

People have always done lots of things. The degree, intensity, and manner with which they do them varies and matters.

>And it shouldn't detract from the justice itself. People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue

They could be already focusing on the issue. Or they could be ignoring it. That's their decision. Perhaps they have problems of their own to tackle first. Nobody has to be an activist about some cause just because another wants them to.

The problem with performative justice is that (when the performative types get enough power) its bizarre demands and rituals are imposed onto and everybody else, with little recourse.

Another problem is that the performative justice diverts resources to tackle the performative insignificant or detrimental aspects instead of the real issue.

>Annoyed people are whining about civil rights? Okay? Don't whine about it yourself maybe?

Wouldn't solve the issues described in the article caused by performative justice, from stiffling academic discussion, to creating an outrage factory that diverts the press from its mission and polarises society to a detrimental effect.

> People are obssessed with talking about how bad the performative nature is, when they should ignore that aspect and just focus on the issue.

You can do both: focus on fixing performative "justice" in order to fix the issue. Particularly the part that is spinning your arguments and using them for injustice, making them appear weaker.

There's a strategy: support flawed people on your team, because they'll help your team overall. And sometimes this is good, even necessary, e.g. voting for the less-bad candidate in an election. But sometimes there are teammates who are counter-productive even for their own goals. You don't even have to eject these people, but you have to correct them, or they'll make your team worse than if they didn't exist.

When I hear conservative arguments, they rarely if ever target the points I think are reasonable and obvious. They target points that I think aren't worth defending (e.g. "illegal immigrant who commit armed robbery not deported"), and points that I think are worth defending but require nuance (which can be defended with some form of "you're correct, although..." to reveal and protect the reasonable part). Conservatives win voters by targeting the weakest points, which just about anyone previously uninformed would side against; "performative justice" creates most of these points, and attacks against attacks against performative justice protect them.

It's like a bottleneck or unstable pillar in a building. You don't want to divert everyone to fixing it, because the overall pipeline or building is the ultimate priority, but it has to be addressed. Likewise, fixing the issue is still the ultimate priority, and I don't expect everyone to address performative justice, but somebody has to do it.

// Now you're just being performative about performative people. //

Nice ricochet.

I'm grateful to Paul Graham for actually giving a definition of "woke". Really, this is the first anti-woke essay I've seen which actually tells us exactly what the author is complaining about.

And it makes it rather abundantly clear why nobody else has given a definition of exactly what the author is complaining about.