Comment by diggan

> 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

Who is "the woke"? How big do they think big is? How does PG know what this nebulous group all agrees upon? How big of an issue does he think it is, as far as actions to be taken? Is "the woke" just anyone who disagrees with him here?

Not specifying any meaning makes it literally a meaningless, divisive (us vs. them), dismissive statement on racism at best, and at worst, rhetoric to baselessly paint my opponent as more extreme than myself, because I am of course precisely the correct amount of reasonable.

A rebuttal in similar style would be "racism is actually a problem larger than thought by those who think it isn't", which you may notice is also meaningless and dismissive.

My charitable reading is that he believes the concept of wokeness is a bigger problem than racism. I feel that's wrong on its face, but an actual point-by-point (indeed, line-by-line) retort to this essay would be exhausting and ultimately pointless.

To whit, he repeatedly brushes aside the concept of hostile work environment, in particular professors making their students feel uncomfortable, as if its just a question of one person making their equal feel uncomfortable due to a simple disagreement. This is a dramatic misread of why a professor (who is by definition in a position of power over the student, and such power may well include the career and profession of the student, even ignoring the sexual overtones, which are all-too-common as well) needs to be aware of and avoid hostile environments. Like, a woman who constantly hears from her math professor how s/he thinks women are bad at math will likely not be super-psyched to continue with math coursework. I would certainly leave a company if a manager was constantly insulting whatever group of people I was born into, and they pay me to be there. If I'm paying thousands of dollars a semester, the least the professor can do is stay in their lane.

That's five sentences to retort 2 more-or-less throwaway statements. The entire essay is stacked with stuff like that.

And its all pointless because odds are, instead of changing any minds, or even engaging with what I've said, the anti-woke types will just vote it down.

> 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.

I think it is a weakness of the article that PG does not address this directly. He dis say that racism is

> Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be

So if someone only uses woke to mean "being aware of and attentive to important social issues" it is easy for the to wake away with the impression that PG painted their concerns as overblown.

If I was PG's editor I would suggest replacing 'woke' with prig here for clarity.

Wokeness means awareness of things like racism, the functional purpose of complaining about wokeness is to rollback anti-racist policy and social norms. Whether or not PG is a useful idiot or a thought leader on this subject would be a homework assignment for the class.

>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...

Is that really the only real-world impact? Is there no value in examining the link between how we refer to people and how we treat them? What about the affirmative action aspects of wokism---is there some impact there?

If you define woke as only the people performing meaningless rituals, then of course you're going to dismiss wokeness. But not all of it is meaningless ritual, affirmative action has created real change. And I would argue that efforts to take pejorative terms out of language are worthwhile, even if some people get overly academic about it.

Which performative activities, though, for which very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population? Have you seen Musk's or Zuck's antics lately? Condemning the lesser offender(s) can gain favor with the greater, but it's useless for making any real point. Who's being performative now?

> designed to appease (and in some cases enrich) a very small, fickle, and vocal portion of the population.

Note that the people enriched here aren't the poor minorities, it are the self proclaimed leaders of these movements that gets high positions in governments and companies and thus enrich themselves.

There is no value in making those grifters richer, even though there is value in helping poor people.

Is it an "enormous amount of resources"? How do you think it compares to the amount of resources historically put into racism, including all the waste and lost opportunity costs?

In my experience, most people complaining about wokism are projecting their own annoyance at language policing into some kind of massive social problem. But I'm open-minded, and if you have a good argument that the resources put into wokism far outweigh the losses from racism, I'm happy to listen. PG's essay makes no effort to present that argument.

He spends 4500+ words talking about how bad wokism is (mostly complaining about how some people are complaining about language), and all of maybe 100 words acknowledging racism, and even then uses some of those to say it isn't as bad as the woke think. If you were writing an essay opposing a solution to a problem you really believed to be a terrible problem, wouldn't you take a little more time on why the solution was counter-productive, and maybe offer some alternatives?