Comment by ljm
5 days ago
The irony of all of this is that if you boil down the concept of 'wokeness' to simply looking past the status quo, then a lot of the things that are currently labelled 'woke' are in fact anything but. It transcends the political spectrum and simply becomes a cudgel for shit you don't like but can't explain why.
Gay marriage? It's legal, therefore status quo. Making gay marriage illegal again? Not status quo, therefore woke.
Abortion? If it's legal and you want to make it illegal, that's also changing the status quo. Woke.
Immigration? Status quo is to hire employees who are citizens or resident. Laying them off in favour of H1B workers? Woke AF.
Roe v Wade and the Chevron Doctrine? Those were status quo for decades! How woke of the Supreme Court to reverse those decisions after so many years.
Of course in each of these cases the policy is actually regressive as it reverts society back to the point before the original policies were implemented, and to that extent the argument falls apart: none of that actually seems 'woke'. Except...the people who agree with all of the above would see it as progressive towards their own aims, so it pretty much is 'woke' for them, especially as they believe their own morals to be superior (and traditionally backed by religion).
>that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
If you're going to be reductive with someone's argument, at least use the entire argument.
If we do, IDK how you can say woke is just oppositional positions when that wasn't the idea OP proposed.
Because it's actually just a verbal cudgel used by the right for things they don't like. Religious groups especially have all sorts of arbitrary rules for which words you can use to talk about them, and if you use the wrong words they'll absolutely cancel you - up to and including murder.
That is the entire argument though, it's just that the parent's idea is based on their own morality when, in fact, there is more than one morality in play. Flipping it on its head shows that it's not really about 'wokeness', which might as well be a thought terminating cliché at this point.
Here is another part of the parent's post which I alluded to:
> the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
This is why it's ironic. Two sides of the same coin: one group of righteous people claims moral superiority over another group of infidels, and vice-versa.
It's the Spidermen pointing at themselves meme. These conflicting beliefs can reasonably co-exist (as they always have done), so who stands to gain from treating them as mutually exclusive (there can only be one?)?