Comment by skepticATX
5 days ago
It’s interesting to me that a certain type of person is so susceptible to buying into this fable of wokeness, especially when it pertains to universities. Almost like there is a woke mind virus, but it’s not infecting the people they think it is.
I attended university in the mid 2010s, so close to peak “wokeness”, and I never witnessed or heard of anything like what pg is describing. In my experience it was totally fine to hold just about any political/ethical view as long as you were a decent human being to your fellow classmates. There certainly was no political correctness police forcing us to assimilate.
The popular perception, especially in certain circles, is that there's been a rash of "cancellations" and extensive banning of, especially, outside speakers on college campuses, and also to some extent professors, accompanied by large and successful movements there to accomplish those outcomes.
In fact, there are so comically few cases of any of that that the couple real-ish ones are always cited by those advancing that position, plus a handful that really, really aren't that sort of thing at all (always look up the full story, 100% of the time they omit context that totally reframes what was happening, this phenomenon is more reliable than most things in life).
Real data exist on things like speakers' appearances at schools being cancelled, and it's most fair to say that the trend there is it's gone from "damn near never happens" to "still damn near never happens". And it's not because controversial right-wing sorts, which we may presume would be the most likely to be banned, aren't even trying to speak on campuses when e.g. invited by friendly organizations—they are, and frequently do.
The entire phenomenon is extremely close to being imaginary. That's why you, actually being there and not just going by social media and pop-political-book and talk radio and podcast "vibes", didn't see it.
On YouTube, watch the Evergreen State College 3-part documentary by Bret Weinstein. This is much more common than you think, through your anecdote, unfortunately. Granted, this happened in 2017, so a few years after your time in college, but I would argue "peak wokeness" sits between 2016 to today, in large part due to Trump's first election win.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0W9QbkX8Cs
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vyBLCqyUes
This should make anyone's skin crawl with the way this college's faculty and staff were treated, and the childish behavior of the students to allow this to happen. This gives a reason why "college kids" are no longer considered adults.
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> "genital mutilation of children (gender affirming surgery)"
In the past 4 years in the USA there have been:
- roughly 14.4 million children born, half of them are boys (7.2 million) and 57% of those circumcised. 4.1 million non-consenting genital mutilation surgeries on people who didn't ask for them, mostly infants.
- 4160 breast removal surgeries in minors under 17.5 years old on people who did ask for them, mostly teens.
- 660 phalloplasties in the same group.
We should definitely wonder why Republicans are fine with four million non-consensual genital mutilation surgeries every year mostly on infants, but against a thousand times smaller number of surgeries mostly teens willingly asking for them. We should wonder this in the context of Republicans pushing back against legislation raising the minimum marriage age:
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/louisiana-... - "If they’re both 16 or 15 and having a baby why wouldn’t we want them to get married?" - said representative Nancy Landry, a Republican from Lafayette
- "The West Virginia bill is an outright ban on all marriages under 18. When the House advanced it to the Senate with a resounding 84 votes in support, just over 12 Republicans voted against it" ; ""The only thing it's going to do is cause harm and trouble in young people's lives," Harrison County Delegate Keith Marple, a Republican and the lone person to speak against the state bill" - https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-make-case-child-marriag...
i.e. Republicans being fine with 15 year olds "making their own choices" when it comes to marriage.
> "stating pronouns as a performative act" ; "Continue to deny that this worldview exists, and you will continue losing elections."
This is the United States where you stand up every day in school and performatively pledge allegiance to a flag, yes? Where you stop strangers in the street to "thank them for their service"? How are you so annoyed about someone putting "he/him" next to their name (but not about them putting captain/corporal/major/doctor/reverend next to their name), and as a response you vote for a man who admits sexual assault, has been convicted of federal crimes, lies about his experience, knowledge and credentials, spent $141,000,000 of your money playing golf - mostly at his own golf clubs, used the presidency to (illegally!) promote Goya products, nepotistically sent his own children as official US representatives to meetings? A president who performatively attends church for photo shoots but doesn't regularly attend church for prayer?
It's this kind of behaviour which gives rise to the jokes "the Right will eat a shit sandwich if it means the left will catch a whiff of their breath" and which makes a mockery of the claims that it's all the left's fault; the Right is fixated on trivial bullshit, arguing for the right to be able to lie and be jerks without being fact checked or facing any consequences, without a sense of proportion of different events, obsessed with being angry about the left's feelings and calling them snowflakes, while choosing who to vote for because a film character gets black skin instead of white skin.