Comment by monkeycantype
6 days ago
I see the problem you identify with people's behaviour and agree with the noisiness of people you refer to as group two - people who aren’t thinking deeply about what they are saying have a lot of freedom to shoot their mouth off. To be very clear, I see your comment as a sincere attempt to articulate and respond to a problem, most discussion of woke isn’t. While I do want to offer just one olive branch to people upset about woke, that yes - annoying people really are annoying, self-righteous twits truly are unbearable - but 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. There are idiots everywhere – even the smartest of us are part-time idiots, stupidity is just the background noise we have to talk over, rabbiting on about woke usually seems to part strategic tantrum to avoid real discussion and part real tantrum.
I think I’m looking for a way to distil the ideas you’ve expressed into a response I can use when someone complains about woke : `that sounds quite annoying, but let’s discuss the idea not the idiot`
> 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
Now imagine that is what you mostly hear "straight cis white men" are "selfish cruel hypocrites" over and over again.
Where are you hearing this over and over again?
Are you seeking this out or consuming algorithmic media that sends it to you to make you mad and get you hooked?
I'm in that demographic and do not recognize this at all. From my perspective this sounds paranoid bordering on mental illness.
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We are recreating the "not all men" argument here, except hyper-specialized to "not all straight white cis men."
And so, in the spirit of that argument, sure, maybe not all straight white cis men are a problem, but ENOUGH of us are that we should be paying attention to see if we're unknowingly part of the problem, or even better if we can help at all to improve things.
Hopefully in another couple decades we can revisit this topic, only specialized down another couple adjectives. =)
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Hi, permanent victim.
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I'm the white cis male with grey hair, but in my n of one experience I have encountered very few situations in which not taking the bait on the first provocation, showing a bit of empathy and respect didn't quickly get the same empathy and respect in return.
> worth looking into just why this causes people to go into a mouth frothing rage.
I agree with this, it's not nice to be dehumanised or disrespected, it's awful. I saw someone speak recently who dipped into this kind of broad anti-male language to get a sneering laugh from the crowd more than once. With friends, with people who matter deeply to me, I'd want to speak to them about the petty provocation in their choice of language, but right now, I still think that following down the path of chasing down that language in public is a dead end, because a person speaking in that way is scratching for a fight, probably not a productive fight but a let the fury out fight. There may be a legitimate reason for that fury but I don't want to be the bucket it gets poured into. I am up for a sincere difficult conversations about real problems, and usually people pick that up and respond accordingly. Most people aren't sociopaths, and can't resist reciprocating sincere empathy and respect.
I’m going to add a caveat here : people reciprocating respect is my personal, subjective experience, I don’t believe everybody gets this same treatment. I think people who look like me, who are used to at least a tiny bit of status - the pool from which must of the upset about woke is coming - we generally get respect reciprocated. When we don’t get treated with respect it’s a bit of a shock. I think reflecting on how unpleasant it is to be treated poorly, what a frequent experience it is for some people and how it might affect them is the way to go.
> 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."
People are doing exactly that.
They're welcoming historically marginalized groups into their workplaces, their families, their communities. Every day they treat others with basic respect.
It makes some people so mad that they crawl the internet for examples of these people "going too far". They'll bring up examples from other continents to get that angry fix. They'll misconstrue them in the worst possible light and pass it on telephone style till it's unrecognizable. And if they don't find any they'll make them up. They'll sometimes pretend to be the people they hate and propose stupid things to make themselves angry.
I've seen the latter happen in comments here where one reactionary sarcastically suggests something ridiculous and another one takes it seriously and gets angry at it.
Currently online lesbians are being blamed for forest fires. Which is only a minor update on the classic religious claim of "hurricanes caused by being tolerant of gays".
So I don't think you can escape this just by not being "woke" and "annoying".
> They're welcoming historically marginalized groups
So humans then?
Because all humans have been marginalized at some point in history. Even the language you're using is an example of the problem, since it insinuates that some groups of people were marginalized and some people were not. If you really wanted to embody the values of compassion and selflessness, it wouldn't be contingent on the physical traits or background of the person in question.
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.