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.
So your point isn't so much that language policing costs a lot, it's that it doesn't provide any value. But what if it does? What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior? Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights? What about slurs against gays, or Jews? Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?
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.
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So your point isn't so much that language policing costs a lot, it's that it doesn't provide any value. But what if it does? What if the way people talk publicly about other people does impact behavior? Do you think the social stigma attached to the n-word, and the consequential reduction in its public use, helped contribute to equal rights? What about slurs against gays, or Jews? Maybe there is some value in policing language after all?
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