Comment by cmdli

That is a source of a lot of conflict. Some take "woke" policies as they are, a policy that people should be more inclusive etc. pp., and those that evaluate such policies for their most likely effects, like further discrimination. The conclusions would vary widely, even if you might formally agree on common values.

> e.g., Harvey Weinstein

Must, like him or not, had a counter example to that where vanity disallowed necessary police work because many feared the PR outcome, while the scope is a thousand times that of Weinstein. Investigations were very likely stunted because of that.

That's not a joke. This piece is so ridiculously tone deaf precisely because it lacks any hint of self-awareness that exactly the same performative priggishness is normal for the right - with the difference that it's aggressively economically self-serving, often irrational and sometimes anti-scientific, rather than simply annoying.

IMO the priggishness is baked into American culture, which is descended from cranky puritans and literally defined itself as the most moral (police) force in the world after genociding the original inhabitants of the continent and setting up a culture for billionaires that leaves even qualified and talented workers increasingly insecure about housing and health care.

In reality "woke" has been a hugely convenient way for the US establishment to confine the Left to a ghetto of minority interests, especially about sexuality. Because if the Left rediscovered economic justice as a cause it would cross political boundaries and become a raging wildfire. (See also - Luigi.)

So now we have anti-woke for the wannabe intellectuals, and Q for the useful idiots.

Meanwhile Graham is more outraged - outraged I say - by how annoying feminism etc are than by election interference, raw milk drinkers, and the spread of lunatic propaganda about vaccinations and climate science.

>it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r

I still have to remind myself that this refers to the racial slur and not an intellectual one. One of the funniest moments of 2024 for me was watching an episode of the wan show where linus admitted he'd used 'the hard r' in the past. His co host (Lucas?) was visibly taken aback. Like, color drained from his face. As linus goes on about how *tard used to be acceptable when he was younger you see it slowly dawn on Lucas that Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means and the relief that his boss isn't some sort of avowed racist is palpable.

> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex.

Wow that's not my memory of the 90s at all. We're talking about the decade when Loveline with Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla was a popular MTV show?

> I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity.

I read the entire article hoping it would acknowledge that the rightwing moral majority invented, or at least popularized, much of the behavior the article decries. For example, I went in expecting it to touch on the rights version of newspeak and cancel culture (see Freedom Fries and the Dixie Chicks for memorable examples).

It was strangely silent in that regard.

"hard-r"?

I've lived in the South all my life, worked with blacks and whites, gone to college and this HN post is the first time I've seen/heard the expression "hard-r".

I now believe "hard-r" is regional slang, since it appears to be (at least) a west-coast expression [the Linus recording convinced me] but rare in the South.

> PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone

That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part:

> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.

It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad.

> Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.

Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?

> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.

Yes, but this is also the part that glues together the larger coalition of people left of center. Racially segregated affinity groups and affirmative action are the thing that AOC and Jamie Dimon can agree on.

A 2022 poll showed that something like 20% of Biden 2020 voters would pick Liz Cheney in a three-way race with Trump. The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives who are willing to put up with woke stuff. Including Paul Graham himself.

If Fetterman comes out and says we are going to ban racially segregated affinity groups, and the compromise is he’ll raise my taxes to pay for more healthcare services, I’d vote for that. But my experience with the last 10 years is that team blue never raised my taxes but did recruit my daughter into a “BIPOC” group. The policy is what it does, as they say.

> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to [...]

That's precisely the point: the function of the word "inclusive" mentioned in TFA, or several related like "diversity" was twisted for the purpose of waging culture war. (E.g. Biden had some "most diverse" team somewere, and it meant 0% men, didn't it.) The purpose of the culture war was to drop entire chain of thought not aligned with current heresy.

Google Maps allows you declare your allegiance. You can mark a business as LGBTQ+ friendly (why should I have to declare that and it not just be assumed?).

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/addi...

You can also declare a business as "woman owned/led"

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/empo...

and "black owned"

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21348990/google-black-own...

Pronouns are pretty useful when you have a lot of Chinese and Indian coworkers and don't know what to call them by their names. People from HK tend to give themselves English names, but mainland Chinese I know don't.

Of course that's not their original purpose and they aren't very fit for their original purpose. (it's to include trans people, but trans women don't want you to ask what their pronouns are, they want to be addressed like women.)

> I found it all really weird, fake, and reminiscent of 1940s Germany where people had to wear their pins

did you know LGBT were explicitly targeted in the holocaust? You know about the holocaust, right? You are aware that 1940s Germany is when and where the holocaust happened, right?

Why a weird, distorted take. People who put “LGBTQ Ally” in their signatures aren’t being phony. They have friends or family who are LGBTQ, and being visible is one way to support them. If it’s unprofessional to be an ally to LGBTQ friends and family then it is easy for hateful folks to claim it’s unprofessional to even be LGBTQ. Why does it offend you so much for someone to say “I support my gay friends”?

> when I see someone frothing at the mouth because someone spoke about selfishness, hypocrisy or cruelty in way they didn’t like, I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them

I think you may be right here, but I think it's also worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.

What I see is that a lot of "woke" starts with the assumption that the audience is bad, then tries to work backwards to prove it

Of course discussions about selfishness, hypocrisy and cruelty are going to infuriate people when you start from the assumption that the people you are talking to are the ones who are selfish cruel hypocrites

Next time you see someone make a comment about "straight cis white men" (or any demographic, but this one comes up a lot), replace it with "selfish cruel hypocrites", that probably would give you a good idea why that demographic reacts poorly to the message

> I’m generally left with the impression that there is no way to confront those topics in a way that would satisfy them

Epictetus said, "Don't explain your philosophy, embody it."

Woke ideas also collide with general humanism. "I don't see color" is an example here.

But the ideas of humanism are better and woke people often dislike that their ideas get rejected. Still, people were made fun off on TV for expressing "old" humanistic ideas in favor of idpol. I don't think that some woke ideas fly very high on an intellectual level so that too much discussion would not even be necessary. Not that the criticism is taken seriously if you have your dogma at hand.

There are well known dynamics that even putting people in camp blue or red creates conflict. Woke ignores these dynamics completely, but did further ideas of that kind to the letter. Current conflicts are further empiric evidence that some assumptions do indeed hold.

> The left isn’t talking about “wokeness”.

They are (or were throughout the 2010s), but they have a way of talking about it where they do it, but then claim it doesn't exist if anyone tries to give a name to it. So "wokeness isn't real" is a popular way to say "wokeness is real and I think it's good". Sometimes this is called Voldemorting.

I personally think it's good but also think it's real.

> Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition

What percentage of what group is “many on the left”? This does not sound plausible to me.

Re: 3 ... the level of misunderstanding about what affirmative action is and means is so wide and so deep that "the public doesn't like this" is more or less an information-free observation. Most of the public has only a strawman in place when it comes to understanding affirmative action, and sure, if the strawman was accurate, most of the people who do support it would drop their support.

What you call "the left" is part of the public, but you make it sound like it is not. You also make it sound like the public has a coherent opinion, which I don't think it has.

Do you mean majority when you say public? Do you think what the majority thinks should be done (mob rule)?

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There's a key difference though: while vegans are generally proud of being vegan, it's very hard now to find anyone who will admit to being woke or even that a single one of their beliefs is woke. It was only in fashion for a brief period and is now distinctly out of fashion. It's kind of similar to being a hipster—a lot of people get called hipsters, but no one has self-identified as one since probably the early 2010s.

This makes discussions like these inherently slippery and circular. While it's clear that many people do actually hold beliefs that their critics would characterize as woke (as evidenced by real-world impact like master branches being renamed, indigenous land statements, and DEI quotas), they're never going to voluntarily accept a label that has been turned into a pejorative.

Because 1 in 10 (for examples) vegans are calling meat eaters as cruel murderers. And that becomes the image of vegans because they are the noisy ones.

> That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.

There are whole ragebait youtube channels that disagree.

> In fact, left-wing people are generally open to divergent ideas and will debate them ad nauseam. That's the boogeyman. People on the left are generally very tolerant of diverging ideas.

Fascinating. I'm sure you're not lying and that this is true from your perspective. And yet my experience is the exact opposite. If the "divergent ideas" are e.g. "everyone who voted for Trump is an evil nazi" vs "everyone who voted for Trump is just stupid", I'll grant that those two ideas will be entertained and debated. But if the idea falls anywhere outside the accepted orthodoxy, for instance "maybe people who voted for Trump were well informed and had good reason to do so", that idea is not tolerated at all.

Granted I live in Seattle, which is probably home to a disproportionate number of more extreme progressives.

I e met many people in group 2 though. Many of them have legitimate political and economic power. You can’t just brush them off as insignificant.

Agree that group 1 is far larger but it doesn’t take many negative experience to sour the way someone feels about a political ideology.

Exactly. Anyone with any reading comprehension (and honesty) can tell that PG conflates being woke with acting woke early on for exactly this purpose. He also talks a lot about polarization as though it's entirely the "woke mob's" fault, about moralizing without mentioning evangelicals, about "enforcers" without mentioning MAGA paramilitaries, etc. It's all very disingenuous, even for him.

> We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first

Incidentally, this has been a major part of the post-election discussion about it.

I agree that the term has become diluted to a point that it's lost most meaning, and in many cases it means "behaviors and opinions I disagree with".

I think it mostly means some combination of: morality police, people against "wrongspeak", holier-than-thou attitudes, white people advocating for topics they don't understand, and in general a kind of tribal behavior that "others" people who don't fully buy into the entire spectrum of ideas this group is selling, i.e. they treat their beliefs as absolutely true, and anyone who questions them or wants to debate them are automatically othered.

> People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.

I agree and disagree. The media landscape has had a major hand in shaping the discussion, and social media has validated the worst fears of the people working themselves into a tizzy. e.g. if someone supports trans rights but has concerns about minors receiving certain surgeries and wants to discuss those concerns, they're put in the same category as transphobes who wish real harm on other people. Depending on where they raise these topics, they'll automatically be blocked and/or put on lists of transphobic people.

Discussions that actually focus on something material, concrete or substantial are derailed by collective community behaviors that refuse to engage with the concrete and substantial.

It's a sad state of affairs for public discourse, and figuring out how to de-escalate the conversation and somehow return to substantive good-faith conversations might be the most important problem of the century.

The essay touches on something that I think explains that, though. Disputing an actual specific allegedly-woke idea requires one to confess their heresy specifically, so as the essay says, it's not smart to confess directly to holding a specific heretical opinion.

Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency, as Black author John McWhorter argues. He gets called all kinds of nasty things for speaking that opinion, and he's Black! On the other hand, it's harder to "cancel" or accuse someone of absolute racism (or race traitor-hood) if they say "I don't think the woke mindset is helping, and I think there are better ways to help Black communities."

So that's why imho the word "woke" is a popular tool among those who don't like the various components of it, which are much, much easier to enumerate than those on the Left incredulously pretend. It's basically just:

1. The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with, and that society should punish those who spoke those ideas.

2. Ideologies about race and generational guilt which basically boil down to "the whole world would be much better off if all Europeans had mysteriously vanished 1500 years ago and we wish that had happened."

3. Ideologies that have to do with gender, which I dare not even elaborate on, because of how heretical all but one opinion on that subject is.

TFA spends the first 7-8 paragraphs defining "woke", even a dedicated callout to a concise definition:

  > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.

I was at a house party once here in Australia, and a Canadian friend got frustrated at me. "It sounds like you believe in policy X, but also policy Y! I don't get it! What are you, left or right?". And I responded by asking what policies X and Y have to do with each other at all? Why should your stance on war and fracking be correlated? Or have anything to do with your opinion about gun control, abortion rights, racism or free speech?

I'm not convinced "actual leftism" has any well accepted meaning. Liberalism has a clear meaning. But "leftism" / "rightism"? They both seem like kinda arbitrary grab bags of policy ideas to me. Why not a pro-war & pro-fracking democrat?

Kamala has either the #1 or #2 most left voting record in the Senate.

> To be clear - Kamala was not remotely a leftist. She got in without a primary and was pro-war and pro-fracking, both positions totally antithetical to actual leftism.

Those are both good because they fight off fascism. There's nothing leftist about letting someone be genocided by Russians.

> I'm of the opinion that many of the folks on the actual right and actual left agree on a lot - our system is broken, politicians and the elite are the problem, inflation has gotten out of control, the economy sucks, housing is too expensive, and it's not gonna get fixed by doing what we've always been doing.

This is a demonstration of "horseshoe theory". Most of these are wrong! Inflation is not "out of control" but has already been fixed. The US economy is the best it's ever been and people are mad about it because they think they saw it was bad on the news!

The real correct opinion is that American elites are good and the voters are bad.

> Liberals and Conservatives are just two marketing arms for the same business - business as usual.

This is the classic indicator that you're a teenager and have an emotional need to appear above everything. They couldn't be more different. Only one of them wants your wife to die in childbirth.

The humorous part to me is when folks talk badly about 'antifa' they either forget or gloss over what the 'fa' means in antifa.

Not at all what it means to anyone. And anyone who phrases it so reduced is either lying or oblivious

Many people have decided that "woke" means one very specific and unimpeachable thing to them. The term generally means far more than "I support black people having a right to exist". By that definition, even many conservatives would have to label themselves "woke".

And this is at the heart of why the topic is controversial.

I've sat in on a meetings where a central team of copywriters openly shamed engineers for disagreeing about the importance of renaming certain terms that had existed in the software for decades (whitelist/blacklist/master). The engineers in question were Indian, and couldn't have been any further removed from the original context.

To be clear, I'm supportive of efforts to remove racially charged language. But I found the tactics and behaviors associated with that project ridiculous, and challenge the notion that "wokeness" is limited to your definition as written.

Is this not the best example of what a lot of people think is the problem with wokeness? You are either “woke” or a racist. It’s almost comical.

GitLab announced in 2020 they were making a focus on hiring Latinx directors: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/06/16/our-journey-to-a-di...

Interesting. I have seen that in official HR training.

Sadly, Latinx is still used all over the place. Google turns up 94,800 instances of "latinx community" just in the past year:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22latinx+community%22&tbs=q...

In fact, when I query for results and specify date ranges for each year (using Tools > Any time > Custom range), I get:

    2018: 4,410 results
    2019: 7,070 results
    2020: 15,900 results
    2021: 17,500 results
    2022: 21,000 results
    2023: 34,300 results
    2024: 88,600 results

Yeah, Google probably has a recency bias in its search corpus, but this is still a large amount of recent and ongoing usage.

Google Trends doesn't show a clear decline either: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...

> the observed behavior of many self-described feminists might lead you to believe that the definition was "someone who thinks that any dispute between men and women should be resolved in favor of women"

I think there's a broader problem here, where there's a tendency to define all cultures by their most extreme elements and have conversations that are centered around those. This sells, this gets clicks, and it also decimates our theory of mind of others. The left does this, the right does this, centrists do this as well by pretending that what is "extreme" in their culture is unknowable and impossible.

A respectful conversation with someone while holding curiosity can resolve most of the ills of the day. Lots of folks want to tell their story, and they're told that its not safe.

I don’t know what you mean by the “official” definition of “feminist”. There’s no single authority that decides what an English word means or how it should be used like there is for French (which has the Académie Française).

Perhaps you mean to say the “original” meaning of the word, but language is not static. Meanings change over time and vary from place to place.

I’m not trying to be pedant. Reasonable people can disagree on what being a feminist means, it doesn’t mean one side is automatically correct or another side is cynically acting in bad faith.

> 2) sincere adoption and practice of those values

> 3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values.

That’s not what most “anti-woke Marxists” are saying though. They aren’t saying that the “woke” have fundamentally the right values but are just adopting them insincerely or performatively. They are pointing to a much deeper dispute.

The basic divide: which is more fundamental, class-based oppression or non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc)? The former is the traditional/orthodox Marxist answer, whereas Reed/etc use the word “woke” to refer to the second answer. By contrast a right-wing approach would say neither, rejecting framing society as fundamentally oppressive.

By the time I gained political sentience, PC referred to perceived limits on speech and conduct that went at the expense of current or historically marginalized groups.

All these things have been derided as "politically correct" in my lifetime (and therefore a bad things): "You can't make a joke these days", i.e. you will get an earful if you make sexist, homophobic or racist jokes. "You can't give a woman a compliment these days", i.e. you can't engage in wanton sexual harassment. "Education is too politically correct these days", i.e. schools teach a history curriculum that recognizes and is critical of imperialism, racism and the like.

In my 30-odd years of life I don't recall it ever being used in the way you describe, but it could predate me.

I think your understanding is wrong although my experience with the term PC started in the early/mid 1980s and I don't know much about its use before that. What you're describing is more like "don't ask - don't tell" and "parental advisory" labels.

Typically, PC is associated with attempts to de-marginalize groups that are historically disadvantaged due to structural discrimination. To me the canonical PC is always spelling "women" as "womyn", to avoid using a term that contains the word "man", as a way to push back against perceived patriarchal naming/language systems.

You are 100% correct. The conservatives disagreeing with you (and downvoting you) are either willfully ignorant about their own history of "political correctness" or else were under a rock (or perhaps weren't alive yet) during the heyday of McCarthyism and the still-ongoing legacy thereof.

Now, when the tables are turning and companies would rather appeal to the progressive-leaning majorities than the ever-shrinking conservative minority, all of a sudden conservatives are eager to pretend that they've been the champions of the First Amendment all along (never mind that the First Amendment never applied to private platforms/businesses choosing with whom to do business).

> Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications.

This has always struck me as a fatal messaging problem. When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.

The real problem isn't that [men / white people] may indirectly get propped-up when others are artificially held down -- it's that people are being held down. The current (and disastrous) progressive messaging often sounds like "we want to hold you down, too".

I'm totally fine with recognizing that other groups of people might struggle more than me, and maybe we should try to help them. I.e. setting up a free tutoring program in inner city schools is a good example.

I'm not fine with my hard work being dismissed because of my sex, ethnicity, or whatever other 'privileges' I had. When I see someone online speak about privileges, it's often being used as a cudgel to silence someone. It wears away at my empathy.

My interpretation is something like:

Step 1 - recognising an advantage e.g. "I am straight/white/Asian/tall/short/whatever".

Step 2 - recognising that it's unearned "I didn't choose it, I was just born that way".

Step 3 - is to hold the belief that because it's unearned that no advantage should be assigned to it, we cannot claim that it's preferable, etc.

To me, what it means to be woke requires the belief in step 3.

That's what makes it a kind of funny insult word, because it's logically unworkable and runs counter to well, literally the entire world. It feels like the kind of classic autistic technical gotcha.

If you're stronger and faster you don't get eaten by the tiger. If you're more attractive you get the better mate. At the end of the day it's just like, you know, grow up, deal with it.

Right. The original meaning was just "politically aware", the same basic metaphor as the "Wide-Awakes" in the Civil War era. If you go back far enough you found it sometimes used in the "wake up sheeple" sense (i.e. referring to a conspiracy mindset). But it's basically never been the self-appellation of a political or cultural movement; essentially everyone who uses it that way is deriving it from critical right-wing discourse.

If wokeism remained a personal awakening I don’t think there would be much push back. It’s the virtue signaling and holier than thou judgment people don’t like.

> “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”

Generally the people saying that really mean "more (listening to what I say) leads to (what I believe) beliefs".

> So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs.

They should probably educate themselves by listening to what she says about women's rights then. Maybe then they'd understand her perspective and her principles.

That would be much, much better than what they actually did: call her a cunt and wish death and rape upon her. Which really is not the most convincing of counterarguments.

if the movement stopped at the level of consciousness, then there wouldn't have been as much backlash. It went way beyond consciousness. You are admonished if you aren't actively anti-racist.

> Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum.

And/or where one falls in the social hierarchy and power structures.

I'm having some trouble understanding, does "These people" refer to the David family referenced in the article, the Jane Minor community garden referenced, Rootwork Herbals mentioned, or some other group of people?

> some of them have told me that he's always been eccentric and hard to live with and some of them have tried to talk him out of his misbehavior to know avail

It sounds like the alleged crimes in the article are pretty rough to put up with, if it was your neighbor:

> David alleges Whittaker has vandalized her son's car, spray painted her fence, threateningly shot a BB gun in the air during a teen gardening session, removed sections of her fence and threatened to hit her son with a stick, among other offenses.

I wouldn't call that kind of behavior "eccentric", maybe antisocial. And if that behavior was directed mainly towards their black neighbor, I would call it racist.

If that were a remotely accurate definition of how it is commonly used, you'd have a point. Instead we can see you're part of the problem.

That's strawmanning, not steelmanning.

> And what did AOC get in return?

We probably won’t know for a long time.

> I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here - what is the "woke" agenda

Well partly it's this exact kind of self righteous language policing.

> I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here

I never labeled myself as a liberal, I just said that most folks would put me into that category.

I definitely have some beliefs that do not toe the party line of either side of the American divide.

> what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation?

PG just wrote an entire essay on this exact topic, and that essay is what we are commenting on.

I more or less agree with pg’s stance.

> The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.

In your reply, you’ve given me a purity test and then indirectly labeled me as an ignorant member of “the other”.

This is exactly the type of behavior that gives “progressives” and “liberals” a bad reputation, even though most liberals (and many progressives) don’t engage with this sort of rhetorical style.

There are much more constructive ways to have these conversations, and I wish that folks (on both sides, fwiw) would commit to trying to take the more constructive paths.

If there are any specific points about my post that you would like me to clarify or address, I will be happy to do so.

Hollywood, mainstream media, academia, most big tech, ...

Professors, judges, lawyers, journalists, politicians, tech moderators, probably anything in the arts or education. On reddit and bluesky you can get banned for having the median voter's opinion on gender norms and immigration.