Comment by taurath
6 days ago
> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture.
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.
That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.
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. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".
>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.
> Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means
I don't either. What does it mean?
I've never heard the term as a New Zealander (perhaps not in right social circles though).
From first search:
A fecking weird distinction given that it depends on your accent. Hard-r is rhotic and here in NZ I think we mostly are non-rhotic and don't pronounce the r at the end of words: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
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"Nigga" as used in songs etc. vs the full N-word.
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Linus thought "hard r" meant "retarded", when it actually means "nigger" (a really really bad slur, as opposed to soft-r, "nigga"). It was funny when everyone realized he didn't mean what they thought he meant.
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Here's a link to the hard r clip https://youtu.be/MFDiuBomSuY
> 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?
Loveline, the show that wasn't allowed to air before 11pm EST due to the same Christian sensibilities, yes.
Cable has always pushed the boundaries a bit.
I remember pearl clutching over The Simpsons in the early 90s, to the point where Bush Sr. got involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Bad_Neighbors
My mom was a teacher around that time, the school instructed her to stay on guard against kids who were watching the 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.
But he is talking about the phenomenon at large and Christians are literally the first example he gives:
>In Victorian England it was Christian virtue
He even references what you talk about later:
>One big contributing factor in the rise of political correctness was the lack of other things to be morally pure about. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex.
He does contrast what he calls "wokeness" with a sort of Christian prudishness ("prig") several times, and even says that it's the same sort of person responsible. However, both sides are not treated equally throughout the text.
For example, he talks about the impact of the Bud Light thing on Anheuser Busch, but he doesn't acknowledge that the backlash was itself a perfect example of cancel culture.
Your mob and my mob are both mobs, but he paints one angry mob as righteous pushback and the other as priggish busybodies.
Regardless, it was a well formed piece that caused me to think. I just think the argument would have been more compelling if it had been offered from a more neutral frame.
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"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?
PG says
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
> I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
Is that really your charitable reading of the part you quoted?
In my mind, a charitable reading would be that he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be. I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.
It is a divisive topic already, we would all be better off trying to understand as well as we can before replying.
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I don't think anyone reading this article would conclude that PG believes racism is a bigger problem than wokism. Which wildly diminishes the actual real-world impact of racism and wildly exaggerates the actual real world impact of wokism.
The actual real world impact of wokism is that the left-leaning part of the elite is distracted into performative games outdoing one another in verbal righteousness, instead of actually doing something for the people, which should be the defining part of being left.
Woke is all rituals, no substance. If anyone profits off it, it is highly educated individuals that belong to the visible minorities = precisely the people that don't need so much support.
Woke is deeply uninterested in actual problems of the poor non-academic population. High cost of living? Food deserts? Meh. That doesn't register on the high-brow radars.
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I concluded that PG thinks we as a society should stop wasting an enormous amount of resources on performative activities solely designed to appease (and in some cases enrich) a very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population.
That's very achievable and beneficial to society overall imo.
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Your interpretation is the exact problem. How many times do people need to say it? Racism is bad, what else there to say? Because he did not say it multiple times throughout the essay we are going to label him though and suggest and at the same time conclude that the thinks wokism is worse than racism. Sheesh that’s a great imagination.
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> 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 current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives
Dependent on them for what, exactly?
For votes: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-premise-poll-li... (“Among Democratic voters, Biden leads Cheney 61% to 39%.”).
My historically red county in Maryland went 55-41 for Harris, but 55-43 for Larry Hogan. It’s full of woke Romney 2012 voters.
Behind so many anti-lefty beliefs, there’s simply a man feeling like he lost control of some specific woman :(
Seriously, it’s quite a pattern!
To the contrary she’s red pilled. The ordeal has forced her to think about race and she’s responded by developing a strong Bangladeshi identity as a coping mechanism.
But I don’t need a 12 year old who tells me that “affirmative action is morally wrong” and yells at me about not knowing how to cook curry. I want her to have the post-racial upbringing I did as a 1990s kid.
> 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.