Comment by JohnBooty

Really disappointing article, full of disingenuousness and strawmen and a few interesting points as well. For the record, while I'm on the progressive side of things, I certainly do not agree with all of the various viewpoints and practices ascribed to "wokeism."

He seems close to misunderstanding a pivotal thing, but glosses over it:

    [Priggish] was not the original meaning of woke, 
    but it's rarely used in the original sense now. 
    Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.

He then moves on to spend hundreds of words talking about why wokeness is bad, never really recognizing that for most of its relatively short lifespan the modern incarnation of "woke" has been defined and used almost exclusively by conservatives as sort of an amorphous blanket term for "various progressive ideas they dislike" and is not useful as a basis for any discussion or essay.

    Instead of going out into the world and quietly 
    helping members of marginalized groups, the 
    politically correct focused on getting people in 
    trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

This is a glaringly bad false dichotomy. Apparently we can talk about good things or do good things, but not both?

I mean, I have certainly done both. There really isn't a conflict there.

Another, similar false dichotomy:

    The danger of these rules was not just that 
    they created land mines for the unwary, but that 
    their elaborateness made them an effective 
    substitute for virtue.

We can't have rules and virtue?

It's the kind of sentence that sounds good if you don't think about it -- because of course doing good things is better than simply making rules -- but this is such an amateurish and false dichotomy.

This is about as sensical as saying that we shouldn't have code review, or coding standards, we should just focus on writing code in our own personal little vision of what good code is. Yes we should write "good code" on an individual basis, and yes we should (as a team working on a project together) have standards and reviews. If a particular team member is contributing zero code and doing nothing but toxic reviews, sure, that is a problem but that is a problem with that individual and not some kind of inherent paradox.

Some things can only be effectively tackled with both individual effort and community/systemic effort. If you feel that things like racism, sexism, etc do not fall into that category... well, I strongly disagree, but I wish people would simply say that directly than ranting and raving about this bogeyman of modern "wokeness" that is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- a mindbendingly nonspecific term. Talk ideals and policies.