Comment by thrance
5 days ago
Pretty much any billionaire I can name has taken an "anti-woke" stance: Musk, Trump, Thiel, Graham, Zuckerberg, Andreesen, Ramaswamy... Money is definitely not on the side of the "woke", whoever they may be.
5 days ago
Pretty much any billionaire I can name has taken an "anti-woke" stance: Musk, Trump, Thiel, Graham, Zuckerberg, Andreesen, Ramaswamy... Money is definitely not on the side of the "woke", whoever they may be.
Seems like the only billionaires you can name are the ones that made the news in the past week... How about the "silent majority" of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Sergiey Brinn, Lary Page, Warren Buffet, Steve Ballmer, etc? Are they all "anti-woke" as well?
I guess my point here is: until recently "wokeness" was the mainstream ideology, basically the default setting for all the rich and powerful. Yes, recently half a dozen of billionaries switched sides, but that does not mean that wokeness doesn't still have trillions of dollars behind it.
A friend of mine pointed out that in societies like Russia and China, it is the oligarchs who are most directly under the thumb of the strongmen. They're visible and are the first to "fall" out a window, whereas if you're some nobody you might be able to get away with dissent.
Bezos's quashing of dissent at The Washington Post might not (just) be the solidarity of a real billionaire with a fake billionaire but rather the very real fear he won't get a permit for anything for the next four years. If Zuck plays along with Trump, Trump eliminates competition from a better alternative, etc.
A counterexample is Bloomberg Businessweek which trivializes racism with the mindlessly woke policy of always writing "black" (as in African-American) with a capital B right next to reviews of $350 bottles of booze and $3000/night hotel rooms.
> always writing "black" (as in African-American) with a capital B
Not really agreeing or disagreeing with your overall point, but I'm fine with this practice. I used to think it was weird, but I've come to realize some things:
1. "Black" is not acting as a descriptor of color. Black people do not have black skin. Black people with even the darkest of skin in the spectrum of "Black person" still do not have black skin. So the word is being used in a very different way than its common meaning.
2. "Black person" has become a proper noun of sorts, in parallel to "Asian person", etc. I also see most (all?) publications that capitalize "Black" to also capitalize "White" when talking about race, which seems reasonable through this lens.