No, I meant more that the ... well, OK, maybe that is actually what I said.
What I think that I *meant* was that the current wad of moralistic assbats (I don't have any idea why spellcheck had that word in its memory, but I'm going with it) were cultivated via the internet, but that's not actually an interesting observation of mine, as it's just restating the egregore hypothesis.
I think I must have read that comment as being more specific than it turned out to actually be. Crap, maybe the egregore *I'm* inside of caused me to read that as a specific case against my "enemies". Yikes.
Interesting that it seems like I should encourage most people to turn to an older organized religion to inoculate them against Wokeness, even if I don't believe in any of them myself. I'll have to ponder that.
And regarding Azov, the upside there is that it would be *immediately* obvious to nearly everyone that it was absolutely time to start capping some bastards. I mock the recent "punch a Nazi" bullshit since for the most part there aren't any; if that should change, it'll be time to break out the rifles.
Though honestly, why can't all these motherfuckers just leave me the hell alone?
I mean, sometimes you just need a meat shield. But yes. I meant more that if it gets to the point where there are a significant number of Nazis walking around being as provocative as the Wokies currently are, well, it's probably time to do something about that.
I just don't understand Azov though, or any modern Nazis, really. Those guys were idiotic assholes. Why emulate them? It's entirely possible to love your country and be anti-communist without going into National Socialism.
That does not hold for Slavic "clannish" gene pools because they were very inbred historically until recently, and "classical liberalism" (openness to new experience, etc.) was selected AGAINST by clan inbreeding (and then communist repression).
The only competition is between two forms of totalitarian authoritarianism, the "fascist" tribal-nationalist form and the communist form (Russia is post-communist but still has delusions of quasi-communist grandeur in some ways).
To make things even more weird (I guess), Zelensky has openly stated that he wants to turn Ukraine into a "big Israel". Endless war on the fault-line of the clash of civilizations.
Defense contracting (and arms dealing) is good work if you can find it.
People that just desire to be left alone tend to retreat till there is nowhere left to go. The pushy asshole karens perceive that relative lack of resistance as acceptance rather than conflict avoidance. They don't avoid conflict, thus cannot imagine anyone else shying away. It just isn't possible in their worldview or moral frameworks.
What happens when there is nowhere left to retreat to is the dangerous bit. As you put it, it becomes immediately obvious that it would be absolutely time to start blasting. There isn't any being left alone after that point is reached though.
The counterfactual point is an important one. Where does wokeness sit on the spectrum of possible egregores from 'benign' to 'catastrophic'. Certainly not at either far extreme, but I could easily see it being much closer to 'benign' than otherwise.
And the point about allowing the woke to sterilize their own children is another salient one. If the anti-woke reaction isn't careful (as it often isn't), it will deliberately undermine parental rights in ways which will soon be used against it... there are a lot of Christians in the US who are attached to male circumcision as a practice (despite St. Paul being extremely specific about this being unnecessary for Gentiles).
For the record, I'm not taking a natural selection approach here, myself, but a principled one. i.e. that it is much more important (especially in the wake of the COVID immune booster bullshit) to retain parental rights over medical decisions about children than it is to stop a handful of people from doing really stupid permanently damaging shit to their kids (though there's probably still room to, for example, require that the child clearly consents to the treatment).
Curious as to whether and when female circumcision/genital mutilation reenters the broader conversation (it may never, which would itself be interesting).
I couldn't disagree more. Stop supporting the beast in DC and worry about what's at home. That's all that matters. If enough communities decide to tell the fed to get f-ed, they will be out of power.
Fair points. Honestly, it's hard to see a time where genital mutilation doesn't reenter the discussion if one can put their kid on puberty blockers just because they *might* "identify" as another gender (cough* I mean be mentally ill *cough).
I see, from a principled perspective, how one is really different than the other?
You mean: If your kid can *put themselves* on puberty blockers which might permanently sterilize them, before having the genitals altered. Resulting in some cases, adults who will never experience an orgasm, have an adult relationship or children of their own, leaving them in a permanently sexually juvenile state, and incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills the parents are responsible for, without any ability or opportunity to consent. This is far more severe than female circumcision, if viewed objectively.
Not really. From what I know, female genital mutilation can result in loss of feeling, and never experience an orgasm in some cases as well. That's literally the same thing as here. I disagree with all of it, but again *not my monkey, not my circus*. If the idiots want to do this to their children, be my guest. Eventually things will go bad enough for these people that the moralistic Karen's discussed above decide enough is enough and ban it.
That's all fine and dandy if you people would stop supporting public schools. This shit wouldn't occur without being complicit to sending your children to those indoctrination camps to start with.
You're not wrong, but it's not as easy as all that when the government takes a cut of your check whether you're using their schools or not. Or when government is taking a big enough cut of everyone's check, and inflating the currency enough, that you can't easily have mom or dad stay home and teach instead of work.
(Note, I am not and never will have children, but I'm an uncle to a lot of kids. Mostly, I just try to set a good example for them.)
I pay about $5,000/year in property taxes to the State of California (on one average suburban "ranch" style house), and a big part of that is to support a dismal, failed public education system that is quickly become a "woke" (neo-communist) indoctrination system.
The only meaningful way for me to stop "supporting" public schools would be to sell my house and move out of state, which I can't do until my 93 year old mother passes away.
As a practical matter, most of the places I might want to move to within a 1,000 mile radius are already filling up with pot growers or other old retired boomer assholes driving up property values, so the economic and social appeal isn't that compelling. Southern Nevada and Arizona will probably almost completely dry up leaving millions of people with barely enough water to live on if they limit themselves to taking a 5 minute shower once a week and using their flushed toilet water to irrigate the cacti and thornbushes in their yards.
This whole issue is one for the elites that will have far more severe consequences for working families that never enter the conversation somehow.
They glide blithely past cost, but transition and puberty blocking care can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which parents aren't even allowed to contest. Sure, insurance is pressured to cover it, but of course everyone here who isn't an elite with huge bank accounts know how much their health insurance actually covers. So you're bankrupted so your kid can destroy their sexuality because our current culture won't let anyone become functional adults. You can't argue or refuse without running the risk of being branded a bad parent and transphobe.
Yep. That is why "wokeness" inevitably descends from its utopian promises (which are absurd anyway since they assume postmodern-relativism, which holds that "reality is a social construct") to ILLIBERAL, Orwellian totalitarianism.
"Wokeness" will always map into dystopia because it can only survive as a tool of global finance, the media-tech oligarchs and the PMC (Ehrenreich) to create Neo-Feudalism.
Nassim Taleb's "Dictatorship of the Intolerant Minority" is one good explanation of how "woke" enshittification sets in.
The military has had contingency plans to carry out a coup of the US government and impose emergency measures for social order for a long time (my late father was in the Pentagon during the Nixon-Watergate crisis and saw the plans on paper).
Any peasant rebellion could be quickly and easily be stopped by turning off communications, power, gas pumps, food and water distribution, etc.
Within weeks or months 98% of the population would be begging for a dictator to restore order. But competition between military factions would probably lead to civil war, which would probably escalate to nuclear war within 6-12 months (according to war game models).
My grandfather, a Kansas farmer that lived in a sod ranch hut on the eastern Colorado prairie as a young man after WW1, later died before he was as old as I am now (mid 60s), so "retirement" means something completely different to people that actually live that lifestyle.
Almost all of his 7 children, including my mom, lived to about 85 years old or older.
Same. Hell, for over a decade I could have given 2 chits less about abortion. It didn't/doesn't affect me. I find it personally repulsive, but not my business. That being said, 2021 sent me off the deep-end with their bs forced injection narrative. Hypocritical jerks. However, in principle, I do still agree with what you said. You want to murder your offspring, who am I to stop you?
Oh, I was perfectly happy to beat on them with mocking "my body my choice" chanting. I'm tactical agnostic, and therefore willing to pick up any weapon in a fight. ;)
Your point about parental rights is well taken. I also understand the point of view that has been expressed by a few here that we should just allow the “wokes” to self select themselves out of existence. But the problem with that approach is it leaves the children of these people to be victimized and abused in truly horrible ways (talking both about abortion and transgenderism). Who’s gonna protect the kids?
While I understand where you are coming from; that argument can be twisted in a myrid of ways. A perfect example is how it's being twisted now to all for the sterilization of children for political beliefs/mental illness. Because let's be honest, any parent that isn't a bloody moron isn't going to irreversibly damage their child without being 100% sure they were doing the right thing. So the only ones pushing for this are just the ones we really, imo, don't want their genes continuing to live on.
Dont get me wrong, I get what you are saying, and you aren't wrong. We just can't protect those without infringing on others and therefore, imo, it's the lesser of the evils. (parents accidentally/intentionally fuck their children up all the time for other reasons, so where does it end? My mother included.)
On a practical, political level, I agree with you. I have a baby and the idea of Child Protective Services showing up at my door scares the hell out of me. The right very often builds government mechanisms that are later used against them (like department of homeland security). And IMO the libertarian approach is best whenever there is doubt. So maybe no laws against parents doing the transgender bull shit to their kids.
But there’s also a lot of people who say they don’t care, “do whatever you want it doesn’t effect me.” Which is ugly.
I do disagree with your suggestion that there’s relatively few parents who are dumb enough to do this to their kids. If the woke egregore really has control of as many people as most of us in this thread seem to believe, then there’s likely vast swaths of the American parent population who would go along with it if their kid told them they wanted puberty blockers etc. Right now there are enormous social incentives to go along with the transgender agenda in specific areas. Even some of the more level headed parents will be overcome by this social pressure.
The social pressures and incentives need to be reversed. It should be so socially unacceptable that only the truly crazy parents would ever consider doing something like this to their kids. And the ostracism would be immediate and severe. Unfortunately our society is far, far away from that reality.
I agree with you on the libertarian thing. Either the Left or the Right could try to legislate this issue, and whatever came out would be guaranteed to be wrong. Here is a fairly long but objective interview by Chris Williamson finding out what went wrong at the Tavistock in the UK, which was generally better than the American clinics, but still made huge mistakes.
The only thing that's going to work is a set of Professional Standards which sets the bar incredibly high on gatekeeping and safeguarding children, but still allows for a degree of flexibility when it comes to dealing with the 20% or so of GD kids for whom it becomes obvious that their GD will persist into adulthood.
The other component is robust civil suits. I don't care what your ideology is, if you know you're going to lose your house and families financial future, you are going to make sure you adhere to the highest standards of clinical care. Some might argue this should have been the case with American doctors prescribing pain meds, especially when one considers that in the same year (2021) America saw 70,601 people die from Fentanyl overdoses, England and Wales (population 59 million) saw only 58 deaths.
> But there’s also a lot of people who say they don’t care, “do whatever you want it doesn’t effect me.” Which is ugly.
Lots of things are ugly but still true. I know for an absolute fact that I can't care about everyone and there are plenty of people on the planet. The species will survive without those lost to their own parents, and probably better without their gene lines. I think the world will be better off without mine as well, which is why I've ensured that. If I don't care about my potential children, why should I care about theirs?
I believe you can have sympathy for all people generally, even if you can’t know them each individually. A brief and sincere introspection on what these kids are suffering at the hands of their own parents should leave anyone with a pit in your stomach.
I also don’t like this line of thinking that presumes the human race would somehow be better off without certain gene lines. That kind of thinking can lead to genocide very quickly. In fact, that’s where it must inevitably lead. There’s not too many people on the planet anyway, in fact soon, with our declining birth rates, there may be too few.
And there aren't declining birth rates world wide. Just in the countries that are committing suicide. Maybe "being a first world nation" isn't a genetic win in the long run either.
Genocide requires an active component. Recognizing that gene lines which are susceptible to Moloch sacrifice are likely not long term survival fit is just letting evolution take its course and commenting as it goes by.
And you're right about the sympathy, but I also recognize that there's only so much I can mentally encompass. Yes, it's terrible, but I can't do anything about it, and I have more local battles to fight.
I would argue that letting the "wokes" sterilize their own children is a net positive. But hey, I'm a fan of Darwin. So what do I know. Instead we have people fighting against them self selecting from future generations.
Note: I don't have kids, and won't have kids. It's the end of the line for my ilk, so I really don't care one way or another once I'm buried.
More and more of the USA will look like the failed states in latin america (rule by crime crtels) as the crisis unfolds. Life will regress to the level of poverty stricken favela/ghetto shitholes for a lot of people, but life will go on.
Meanwhile SenilePuppet gets to make jokes about ice cream in the White House before announcing condolences to the victims of the trans kook that shot up an elementary school.
I love how the Matrix of Oppression lists it as "*temporarily* abled-body people". Remember -- if you currently enjoy good health, that is just an accident. It has nothing to do with exercise or eating habits. Striving to become a strong and useful human being is an offensive act.
Enh, that one sorta does make sense. How many truly able bodied 80 year olds do you know of? I believe the point of listing that one that way is to get people to think about the fact that if everything goes well, they're going to be old, someday.
Sure, but being old doesn't have to mean being a physical wreck. Yes, you won't be 20, but it's possible to remain strong and vital in your 80s and 90s. Again, it all comes down to habits.
I've seen skinny, old affluent/rich, otherwise physically healthy people descend into the living hell of dementia in 6 months, and it had nothing to do with habits.
But that is just an exception to the pattern you correctly describe, and the whole issue is complex.
For many people, healthy habits are a function of social status.
Recall Tom Wolf's description of "social x-rays" in Bonfire of the Vanities.
Apr 11, 2023·edited Apr 11, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
This is such a well-written and documented piece I feel like I’m not worthy to comment, as I don’t have such a command of those 26 Roman characters that we call the Alphabet as the author does. But I must. Here’s why: I’m a 52 year old black dude and although I wouldn’t consider myself Woke, I am fully sympathetic to the term and sentiment behind it. While some may have trouble defining it, focusing on the word itself should lead to a basic definition. Not all-encompassing but basically the word “woke” as it’s used today in noun form is a cultural euphemism for “being awake”. And it gained ground because it inherently states that the person in a prior time and place was asleep. Simple, no?
Just some basics: On many many many occasions as a youngster, I’ve daydreamed about being white. I recognized the value of being white. The access; the approval that is automatically assigned to that ethnic group, etc. self-loathing for having big lips or less than Euro-typical physical traits and wishing my hair was straight and a host of other things that most black people probably won’t admit to. I spent most of my adult life attempting to fashion myself into a linear-thinking, white-sounding, and white-dressing individual with moderate success because I realized the importance of assimilation. I recognized how poorly ghetto blacks were estimated and had the capacity to make changes where needed. I essentially ran from my “blackness” because I believed it was bad and unworthy.
Most of the adult spaces and institutions I belonged to were predominantly white and I stuck our like a raisin in a pound cake!
Then 2020 came (I know, you were waiting for this) and the time at home the reflection and learning that ensued from that period cannot be overstated for me. For instance, I learned that the version of the history of the United States that was handed to me by the US Public School system was only a partial telling. I learned that there is a hidden half of the story that for very obvious reasons, had been suppressed. (Where I may disagree with many is that I don’t believe that the current narrative needs to be abolished, but it certainly needs to be augmented)
Sounds like Critical Race Theory to you?
I thought it would.
When I hear white people make laws or protest curricula that make them and their children feel bad for simply being white, my response is always “the bad people are making you feel bad because of your skin color?…Aww, tell me what that feels like”
Dude, to properly teach that Columbus was equal parts visionary and whoremonger, and animated by predatory lust, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that the George Washington and the nation’s founding fathers were complicated individuals (like you and everyone reading this) and while they praised the virtue of liberty, thought little about enslaving other human beings, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that the United States potentially faced a stalemate in the forming of the union because of the Southern lawmakers and the topic of slavery, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that many US lawmakers wanted to expand slavery into deeper parts of Mexico and other Central American countries, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that the King Cotton and the sugar industry enriched the Southern and Northern states and other industrialized countries in Europe and that the sole machine employed was unpaid labor, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that when the Transatlantic slave trade was outlawed, a sinister process was instituted to breed existing slaves and forcibly remove the offspring to continue the lucrative endeavor and create laws that state that the fruit of the womb will be under the same status as that of the mother; well, that is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
Obviously, these lesser-known historical items weren’t congruent with the exceptionalism and Judeo-Christian virtues that was promoted to the stars. With the white man at the center and front and all other ethnicities regarded as lesser, it was an easy narrative to follow. Up until now, or up until relatively recent years, these other peoples have come to realize that they are not somehow lesser than the white race or ethnicity or whatever is the proper way to call whiteness.
To digress again, I dream of what it might have looked like when the religious people and the the non-religious (who were in the majority) alike had descended from the Mayflower, respected the natives and created something that looked more like synergy than rape, plunder, and deceit. I wonder what it may have looked like if Conquistadors hadn’t destroyed the wonderful cities and cultures that they found in Mexico and Central America. I wonder what would’ve happened if they saw beyond the visible; saw beyond the bare breasts and lack of Euro-centric clothing styles and instead of regarding the natives as inferior and ripe for subjugation, saw them as human and equally worthy as the Bible they carried under their arms taught.
Speaking of Bibles, here’s yet another aside: I often hear about how barbaric the Aztecs and others were with their human sacrifices, as if Europeans with their countless bloody human sacrifices that they performed on each other in the name of orthodoxy and interpretations of their faith (and I’ll limit the carnage to just the Christian religion) was somehow less senseless and brutal in scope and nature. But we know all better. (I hope we all know better).
Again, thank you 2020!
I could go on and on as I’ve learned so so many well-documented facts that can’t be twisted for any political or cultural aim. But amazingly, these are facts that never made it to the Blue Back Speller & Reader and every other US textbook that followed.
Not gonna lie, I only skimmed the surface and didn’t quite respond to the thrust of your article. I’m not even equipped for that type of technical stuff. I’ll admit it. Just wanted to speak from personal experience as I value it more than a million beautiful words. And I’m sure many others can share this sentiment. And especially since I haven’t seen anything from a similar perspective here in the Comments section.
Let the off-topic, ad hominems, and non sequitors fly. Fly high!
Well, maybe. In a classic Derrick Bell sense, then it might indeed sound like CRT, but it does not at all sound like "wokeness applied CRT" as it expresses itself in some grade schools and in DEI classes, which are more akin to anti-whiteness indoctrination than anything else. And I do not think Derrick Bell intended his work to be used to promulgate the sort of anti-whiteness grifting we see today out of Ibrahim Kendi. I have black friends who are more educated than I on both authors who agree with me on this point, who are fans of the former and not the latter.
But I have a bias. I grew up in the south and attended heavily black public schools, so I was exposed to a tremendous amount of black history. I've toured MLK's house something like four times on school outings. I admit that my experience being taught black history may not reflect the same experience of some students, including potentially black students, in rural Oklahoma for instance. My experience may not align with yours. It may be that my exposure to black history is a privilege of my southern upbringing, because I was raised around black people.
>> "Dude, to properly teach that Columbus was equal parts visionary and whoremonger, and animated by predatory lust, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known."
I agree with most of your points here. Where the "applied CRT" folks jump the shark is not "Columbus was a bad dude," but rather "and therefore you're bad too."
Your rhetorical technique of repeating "it's just the truth that hasn't been widely known" is really good, and really strong, and doesn't fit my experience. Of all the things you list, I was taught *all* of them by the end of Junior High except for the one about folks wanting to extend slavery into Mexico and South America, and I was taught those things in the late 1980s. I didn't learn about the Mexico thing until today. Thank you.
Is this because I'm from Atlanta? Possibly. I think the nation's approach to race probably varies widely by region, and I think that might bear itself out in the 2020 riots most obviously in the fact that the two whitest cities in the country were the most violent. Portland and Seattle. Most of those protesters probably don't know a single black person, they probably have no exposure, no familiarity. In my experience, lack of exposure is the greatest source of prejudice, so they might be railing against a prejudice they know they have. Growing up here, I get uncomfortable in cities that *don't* have black people in them. Denver and Las Vegas just seem weird when I visit. Too many white people. Makes me think they're hiding their black folks somewhere. Makes me want to put on a Vick jersey and sneak into the alleyways looking for the non-robots.
>> "I wonder what it may have looked like if Conquistadors hadn’t destroyed the wonderful cities and cultures that they found in Mexico and Central America."
I'd like for them to have kept the cities and burned the cultures. Those cultures sacrificed millions of lives per year in rivers of blood to make the sun come up. The Aztecs had to go, flat out, and they are my go-to example for why culture war isn't always bad. The Aztecs were significantly worse than Nazis, and I don't hear anyone bemoaning us bombing them. Yes, it was absolutely more brutal in scope and nature than anything done in Christendom, and it was also growing, and in fact colonizing. The Aztecs were infiltrating New Mexico and Colombia, killing natives and sacrificing them and doing all the same colonial crap the Europeans were, except much more brutally and with much more blood. The human condition is awful, and no race or region gets a pass.
Thank you so much for your very well crafted response, Mitch. It was a pleasure to read, and if you're ever in the ATL reach out. I'd love to buy you a beer.
Apr 11, 2023·edited Apr 11, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Grabbing a beer sounds awesome! Thanks for the invitation. I live in Savannah Ga so we might just make that happen!
One comment on the practices of the early inhabitants of modern-day Mexico and Central America: The primary sources that we have to go by were written by Catholic Missionaries. They no doubt left very detailed records. But I wonder how much credence should be given to their accounts. No doubt every society and culture has horrible histories of colonialism and rapacious brutality, and as you stated, no one gets a pass, but if my enemy gets to write my history for me, how fair of a treatment will I receive?
And regarding the comment “I wish they had kept the cities and burned the cultures” I ask: who makes the judgement call in such cases? Or why does anyone feel the need to remove anyone’s culture for that matter? And who should’ve been sent to Europe to stamp out that culture due to their multiple Crusades, Inquisitions, and the host of large and smaller scale religious wars?
Archaeological sources I've read seem to indicate that the Catholics were *undercounting* the human sacrifices, because the Catholics weren't exposed to the empire at the height of its power before pathogens cratered their population.
As far as who makes the judgement call? Ordinarily, it's the victors and history book writers. The "contrarian history book" written by the victors against themselves is a relatively new invention.
One day you and I might be wiped out by a mass genocide of angry vegans, who colonize our culture and kill our babies and replace them all with clones who follow their own angry vegan ideology, and on that day they will tear down the MLK statues because he ate a hamburger, and we will be the apostates.
This is the way of the world, and always has been. Every current culture presumes it is maximal, and that's because it's current, and every culture up until now got wiped out by some other one.
Question about being raised in Savannah in the 80s - did you not get exposed to many of those educational principles you talked about in your original post? I was in the Marietta city school system since 1986, which was about 40% (maybe 50%?) black, and we had quite a bit of black history in our curricula, seemingly every year. I can imagine South Georgia being a different animal, as I've visited friends in Douglas GA and that place is racist as fuck going both directions. I'd always imagined Savannah would be a little more cosmopolitan, but I have no firsthand knowledge.
There is a CRT grift that says normal social studies stuff is some kind of secret knowledge that once you know it of course “policy idea that didn’t work the last ten times” is the solution to race gaps or whatever else.
I disagree on the prejudice/exposure thing.
It’s true that if you haven’t been exposed to black people and your a “good white person” especially of puritan or Quaker background (most very white parts of the country come from those backgrounds) then your going to have an almost angelic reverence for blacks in the current environment. Exposure will reduce that prejudice (lower and make more realistic) your opinion, as it did for me when I lived in Baltimore. If that’s how you mean prejudice (as in having an unrealistically good) belief in blacks then maybe we aren’t in much disagreement.
This group of white people does this about once a generation. They see that blacks don’t seem to be doing to well based on some metrics, decide it must be the result of some moral failing in whites, and implement some variety of the same basic ideas they always try (with the same lackluster to counter productive results).
This attitude had some positives up until the mid 1960s, but after that most of the low hanging fruit was gone and the interventions have gotten more and more ridiculous. They should probably just read The Bell Curve, declare mission accomplished, and leave everyone alone. But then what would they do all day? And anyway it’s being an ongoing thing to fix is big money for lots of people.
I recall the antitheism-sphere morphing once people started saying "oh look, my interlocutor is making the deonotological argument for the billionth time." Religion was killed on the internet, but lots of people had still been raised in stuffy, angst-inducing Christian households.
Wokeness seemed to spring from there, a continuation of trying to scourge boomer bullshit. Boomer-ite reality must be entirely rewritten to prove they were, in fact, assholes who made their kids sit through Sunday school to absorb hateful beliefs.
Once a younger generation takes up the torch, they get the fervor without the explicitly Christian angst. Plus an ever-growing online life and pre-existing activist institutions marking targets.
I guess in terms of damage, could wokeness be compared to historical eugenics? Wikipedia says in the US, at least 64K people sterilized in the 56 years between 1907 and 1963, so ~1142/yr. Ostensibly, the majority were criminals or other forms of "defective."
According to Reuters, in 2021 1390 people between 6-17 years were on puberty blockers in the US. 2017 was 633. Also in 2021, same age bracket saw 4231 on hormone therapy (No clue on overlap). Not trying to make a conclusion here, just considering your question of "how bad is it, really."
This is why Sam Harris was antiwoke in the early days - he was part of the whole New Atheism movement who got torqued off at the "Atheism+" people, who were basically prewokes. James Lindsey was in this same camp.
Thanks, but I don't really think so. There were no new concepts in it, just a gathering of stuff into one location for easy linking. I did like how I managed to arrange it so the conclusion of one section pointed at the next one, though. That took a little trickery.
"Karen is a pejorative term used as slang for a white woman perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is normal. The term is often portrayed in memes depicting white women who use their white privilege to demand their own way."
In other words, anti-woke, judging others as inferior or not deserving of respect.
My understanding of "woke" is people trying their best to treat others with respect, based on the others' terms. It can certainly be self-righteous, as can any movement (talk to any Trumpers lately?)
As a liberal living in a liberal city, the only people I've met who are really invested in preaching their beliefs have been TERFs; so if wokeness means insisting that others agree with you, they fit that definition better than most. (Obviously, liberals here would be preaching to the choir, so that tips the scales of my argument a bit.)
Lol, I guess it all depends on who you follow. As you say, something else will be next. Maybe being moderate, hahaha! I do recommend this piece about on wokeness by Noah Smith
“A prairie fire burns very quickly and eats up a lot of ground, which was undoubtedly one reason the Weathermen chose the analogy. But another feature of prairie fires is that they burn out very quickly. If you look at aerial photos of prairie fires, they look like a long ropy line of flames. This is because they consume the available fuel, so that the area that has already been burned smolders and then goes out.
I see something analogous with wokeness in America today.”
"My understanding of "woke" is people trying their best to treat others with respect..."
This is such a common Motte/Bailey and such a dishonest piece of gaslighting (sorry nothing personal)
Rewriting American history to say that the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery...is "treating others with respect"?
Racializing every aspect of human existence and every cultural interaction...is "treating others with respect"?
Lowering school standards and replacing merit with racial quotas...is "treating others with respect"?
Forcing someone to engage in compelled speech and assent to the DEI dogma for employment...is "treating others with respect"?
Forcing someone to mouth the pieties of Gender theory and pretend that there's something called "nonbinary"...is "treating others with respect"?
I could go on but will stop.
The Social Justice zealots obviously don't care about people respecting each other or they wouldn't be so intolerant of dissent and so vindictive against any dissenters or opponents.
In fact, as with most claims made by postmodern academic Marxism, the opposite is true: this isn't a new form of polite etiquette but instead the manipulation and weaponization of these things, taking advantage of human kindness to bully and blackmail people into acquiescing to a radical political agenda.
Are you saying slavery was not an issue in the Revolutionary war? It was. Are you saying there's no such thing as being non-binary? How do you know? Racializing things? Acknowledging that a large number of US citizens have been mistreated and trying to figure out some recompense sounds respectful to me. The school thing-ugh, that's a mess, kids should be taught at the level they're at, and should get treatment for trauma if needed and that's never going to happen. So that's complicated.
DEI? Good intentions but sounds like a lot of it's mostly performative if that at this point. Noah Smith has a good analogy.
"Are you saying slavery was not an issue in the Revolutionary war?" Cmon, that's not what the 1619 Project and CRT claim, they claim it was the crucial, most important issue that defines America. That is a big difference.
"Are you saying there's no such thing as being non-binary? How do you know?" LOL of course there's no such thing, is there a blood test for nonbinary? a thermometer? no one has ever presented a definition that rose above vague moods and feelings. "Nonbinary" is another absurd pseudo-intellectual fad like orgone energy or the philosopher's stone, which will be laughed at in a decade or 2.
"Racializing things? Acknowledging that a large number of US citizens have been mistreated and trying to figure out some recompense sounds respectful to me."
I agree with some of what you say, I just don't think the rich white liberals who write, produce and direct Social Justice care about the supposed marginalized as much as they care about publicly performing how much they care. Black people are just the tokens and mascots they wheel out to show how much more compassionate and enlightened they are than the Deplorables.
I'm sure we could agree on a lot of things, but I can never agree with a word the Critical Race and Gender Theory people say, they are pseudo-scholars filled with resentment with the stated goal of dismantling our entire society. Democrats and liberals will rue the day they got into bed with the miserable zealots of Crit Theory.
You are saying many of the social justice people care mostly about publicly performing how much they care- not saying they don't - and what I see are people on the right enjoying their outrage and catastrophizing a little too much. Very little of this extremism on either side will affect many people in a way they can't overcome. I do have a couple of trans woman friends, and they have been through a lot to be who they truly feel they should be, so I'm not going to doubt their reality or sincerity.
Look, I'm sorry. I know actual trans people. 95% of the mind virus infected I see these days don't count. They're just narcissistic assholes who have found another bat they can use to ensure compliance with their delusions.
I was firmly on the "trans women are women" bus until I saw the rabid, psychotic nature of the modern trans movement. And as an anarchist, I'll never support anyone trying to smash their way into private spaces they aren't wanted in.
The problem with woke is that it often tends to prioritise lived experience over empirical evidence. Don't get me wrong, people can be insensitive and often, in discussion, scoring points can overwhelm genuine dialogue, in which people can learn from each other. But when one all the evidence points to the fact that diversity is best encouraged by formalised mentoring programs, and the response comes back 'do we really want white men lecturing others more?' it's clear that ideology has trumped the desire for genuine common sense change- because, although advancement may have been restricted from some in the past, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone in a senior position is going to have more of value to teach than four years at an elite college at the cost of what these days amounts to as a small fortune.
Plus, lived experience can often deceive through deeply flawed availability heuristics. A good example of this would be the depiction of police shootings of unarmed Black men on social media and YouTube. Recently when progressives were asked how many unarmed Black men were shot by police in 2019, over 50% believed that the figure was over 1,000 and over 20% believed the figure was over 10,000. The actual figure for 2019 was 27.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy was the narrative that higher rates of COVID deaths were due to structural racism. Of course, there is some truth to it, a back of the envelope look at two distinct cultural groups in the UK, with very similar genetics but widely different socioeconomics, shows that around 20% of all disparities in medical outcomes could potentially be described as structural. But the emphasis on structural racism unfortunately obscured the fact that vitamin D deficiency was a major factor for COVID deaths and vitamin D deficiency was a greater risk for Black people. Recent research shows that vitamin D supplementation could have reduced COVID deaths by a third.
Another area where structural racism has been alleged is in relation to disparate rates of maternal death in childbirth, but low birth weight, premature birth and preeclampsia have all been linked with vitamin D deficiency. This knowledge, more widely distributed, could go a significant way to reducing race essentialism, by reversing some of environmental/epigenetic factors which give rise to such notions. It would probably reduce the supposed gap by a significant degree.
Liberals tend to get a bit squeamish about vitamin D deficiency because they think it will suggest that Black people living in Northern countries are living in the wrong environment in terms of exposure to sunlight. Quite the contrary, a recent Lancet article showed that North African countries contain some of the most Vitamin D deficient populations ever studied. If you have any Black friends planning to have kids I would tell them about some of the more recent vitamin D research. Vitamin D supplementation seems to have a positive effect on a range of conditions from hypertension (John Henryism) to improved cognitive development in children (studies mixed) to slowing the rate that Alzheimer's develops.
In short, the woke mindset encourages people to look in all the wrong places for solutions. This doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist, especially online. It doesn't mean that implicit bias or structural racism doesn't exist- in fact if we look at fields like finance and risk management the evidence shows that even if one removes race as a criteria from lending criteria, race will always assert itself through other data, primarily the associative tarnish attached to location. The insurance and lending institutions assess the risk of people, for actions they themselves have never taken, all the time- and the ingroup tendency to self-segregate if you are a minority, out of desire to feel the relief of being surrounded by one's own culture, encodes financial bias.
But overall, structural racism should be only one of the things we should consider when looking at problems and how to provide people with genuine economic opportunities which can change their lives. For example, Dr Raj Chetty's research on social mobility shows that it's fathers at a community level which really count and are even more important than the quality of education in a neighbourhood. In all probability, this is probably because collectively they act as an informal safety net for boys who don't do well at school, shepherding them into better paid blue collar work.
Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 29, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
The original usage had to do with white women doing racist stuff. Just thought it was kind of amusing that Karen was now identifying as woke. The reality is, of course, that there are Karens on all sides. Florida is teeming with them.
I’m all for letting them sterilize their own kids as long as me and mine are left alone. Within a generation maybe the problem would take care of itself?
Mar 27, 2023·edited Mar 27, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
The problem is that strongly heritable does not necessarily mean genetic. Think concepts like IQ. the genetic component is hard to nail down, but it's a strongly heritable trait.
A lot of values people hold are taught. Control of institutions like schools or social media will sweep up people who are predisposed to being a karen regardless of their origins. I also suspect we're within a generation of the sterility not being a permanent problem. Technologies like IVG stand to benefit a lot of people besides the LGBTetc groups.
In the absence of effective hands and feet for God, society will find other cults to belong to. The churches have fallen down on the job. Not all of them, but enough that we've given current society very little reason to seek answers that have stood the test of time. How we (a very atomized "we" that may no longer have a comfortable center ground) once again become relevant is not wholly evident. I think we should stop directly fighting the cultural wars and work on building up institutions within the churches that offer alternatives to the woke-overtaken institutions that can no longer be salvaged. Yes, we can speak to the insanity of our current culture, but foaming at the mouth on the internet will be far less effective than building a Christian hangout space that appears to center around skateboarding and foosball, but provides the organizers with an opportunity to shared Jesus with the kids.
Yes, I'm speaking of a real-world initiative that is apparently working in my town -- that took 15-years of hard work to begin to produce a harvest. Same with the recent signs of improvement in the Christian-focused film industry. Christian music made that leap several years ago, now if books and movies follow -- Well, there's hope. Maybe not in my remaining lifetime, but hopefully within my kids' -- there'll come a time when whatever that generation's version of irrational wokesters won't matter because sane people have created their own institutions so there are alternatives to the insanity.
Woke is an attempt to 'prove' the unfalsifiable through Lived Experience. If their college professors were doing their job they should have taught them the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know that *I* am not a revolutionary. I've got two kids to look after, I can't afford to get shot. Revolutions are for single males in their teens and early 20s. There's math on that. :P
Hey, look, I'm not saying I wouldn't join a revolution if I wasn't a parent. But seriously, this parenting thing is a total time sink and completely changes your life priorities.
If not, the problem has been examined by many people for many decades.
The shitshow that resulted from Ken Wilber's criticisms of the "mean green meme" (using the Spiral Dynamics model) were a classic example.
Wilber's model is useful in that it adopts Jean Geber's idea that human consciousness emerges from Ursprung und Gegenwart, the Ever Present Origin, each paradigm shift "transcending and including" the previous paradigm.
But in periods of severe disruption, as currently, regression to more primitive social forms takes place in systems that are NOT "anti-fragile" to disruption.
So what initially sounds good about being "woke", sensitivity to the demands of pluralism and multiculturalism, regresses to social fragmentation, atomization and then totalitarianism as bad elites turn "woke" into a weapon in the culture wars (which are actually archetypal wars between digital-luxury-gnosticism and industrial-modern-rationalism).
"Wokeness" quickly mutated into dogmatic, quasi-religious cultism, belief that "reality is a social construct" (which is partially true if not weaponized by the digi-gnostics).
(sorry if this is a repeat of a previous discussion)
I think that Iain McGilchrist (evolutionary psychologist, EP) explains that, from what I remember of his David Fuller (Rebel Wisdom UK) interview a while back.
Physical brain circuits evolved in ancient humans to INHIBIT "undomesticated" instincts and urges that worked against parochial (kinship group) altruism and social cooperation, shared ritual and learning. According to Samuel Bowles (Ulam Lectures, 2008, Santa Fe Institute, explaining extensive computer modeling of human evolution using game theory) and other EPs, there is a strange part of that story: war BETWEEN such ancient kinship groups intensified altruism and social cooperation (group survival and selection) WITHIN a given kinship group.
100,000s of years of ice age nomadic hunting/gathering roll by, and the ice ages end about 11,000 BC. Atmospheric CO2 rises as it is released from the melting ice, then air becomes more humid and warmer and plant life flourishes. Resulting increases in prey animal populations leads to the expansion of human populations, and societies began to become more dense, complex and hierarchical (Dunbar's Number limits start to play out). Temple building and/or agricultural practices lead to settlement and more social hierarchy is needed for social order.
Eventually (Bronze Age collapse) the "pagan" (embodied) gods start to mutate into contemplative gods in walled city-states, and finally a transcendent God (in Islam the concept of the "Oneness of God" finishes the evolution of contemplative religion). Pagan, embodied rituals give way to contemplative PURITY myths: renunciation, sin, evil, suffering and atonement, spiritual salvation and liberation.
What McGilchrist and other EPs seem to be thinking is that Axial (post-Bronze Age collapse) contemplative religion was an evolutionary "software upgrade" that significantly enhanced the biological INHIBITION circuits in the human brain.
"Axial" humans were able to further domesticate themselves (via enhanced inhibition) and function at a higher level of spiritual, psychological and social order and cooperation.
When the Enlightenment (classical liberalism, modern rationalism) disrupted mythic-contemplative sense making there was deep alarm and angst about a subsequent loss of social order. (Nietzsche's "Gid dead... and we killed Him).
The industrial revolution was the nail in the coffin of traditional, mythic social order, and things really started hitting the fan as mechanized warfare evolved alongside increased colonialization and imperialism and "great powers" competition.
Part of the response to the angst over "God is dead..." was a rejection of classical liberalism and market economies (and Constitutional order), including "class revolution" ideologies, which developed into anti-imperialism. Romanticism rejected modernism and mutated into communism (which explicitly rejected mythic religion) and fascism (which regressed to tribal-nationalism, reviving the idea of a charismatic mystic leader).
After the shitshows of WW1, WW2 and various national liberation movements, liberal-capitalism managed to integrate enough of the reforms demanded by class and social justice revolutionaries to survive, but the problem of spirituality, meaning and purpose (God is dead) wasn't adequately resolved.
As such, postmodern relativism and counterculture got a big toehold (thanks to suburban consumer culture, which allowed for the reinvented Ascona Wandervogel counterculture from the early 1900s), and the foundations were laid for the culture wars and insane "wokeness".
But wokeness isn't an adequate solution to the postmodern problem of meaning and purpose, it just tries to turn neo-marxist ideology into a creepy quasi-religious, dogmatic cult that demonizes "whiteness", masculinity, etc.
There is a lot of jabber about re-integrating both embodied and contemplative-mythic spirituality, a lot of it pretty weird, but the idea that social order requires the cultural software update of enhanced INHIBITION, via mythic religion, appears to be the core consideration.
Having spent several decades studying esoteric Islam I don't have much interest or energy left to delve into embodied spirituality (Raro? tantra, shamanism), but it seems to offer a lot of value to postmodern creatives, and in healing trauma and that kind of stuff (Esalen mind-body programs, integrative medicine).
Have you heard about Integral Theory? It's the idea that one needs to least have an understanding of the preceding types of knowledge/belief systems in order to be able to critique them. So, for example, whilst some postmodernism may be of minor use, it is worse than useless if learned as a philosophy, per se. Funnily enough, Foucault of all people intimated as much, as postmodernism seeded the earlier stages of education, and his students became progressively more ignorant of rationality, empiricism and science.
Great post by the way- you really should write your own substack. Oh, I just saw the Modern Wisdom mention- you've probably heard of integral theory.
In that case I would recommend reading Mark Ledwich on Medium or reading some of his standalone research which debunks the concept of YouTube radicalisation- his research clearly shows that the algorithm pushes people towards Left-leaning MSM content.
Sorry for the late response, I was just re-reading this.
Yes, I came across HWFO via a mention in Rebel Wisdom or some other aspect of the Integral Theory (Ken Wilber, etc.) online community's anarcho-libertarian element.
I was involved in discussions/debates in the Wilberean online community from about 2005 when I heard about it from a Bahai named Terry Culhane who lived in Omaha. Culhane was part of an earlier "dissident" liberal reform movement within Bahaism that was opposed to the growing religious fundamentalism in the western/USA Bahai community after the 1970s.
Lots of hippies/liberals/counterculture types converted to Bahaism in the 1960s as a result of the religion's western element began to aggressively rebrand the religion from its Islamic origins to a more liberal form. But the newly converted liberal Bahais had to immediately confront the problem of the religion's strict, "conservative" moral codes (no alcohol, no sex before marriage, no involvement in politics) and middle-eastern patriarchal organizational hierarchy.
Weirdly, after large numbers of Iranian Bahai refugees arrived in the late 1970s (many of which had been subject to religion discrimination in Iran and were unable to go to public schools), the religion took a turn toward backward thinking and fundamentalism and away from the superficial facade of liberal reformism that it developed after WW2. Conservative and fundamentalist Christians also began to join Bahaism, which was bizarre. The hierarchical-patriarchal nature of the religion's organizational culture ensured that fundamentalist Christian converts to Bahaism that had a good grasp of theology and politics rose up quickly as "leaders" to further oppose the 1960s liberal-reformers, especially a small bunch of loud, dissident academic liberals that became variously known as the Los Angeles Study Group, the Talisman email discussion group, and then several internet and social media groups (riven within internal, conflicting factions, like all "leftist" protest subcultures, of course).
Culhane's background was in social justice Catholicism and mysticism, as a Vietnam War combat veteran (medic?) before he converted to Bahaism. He didn't fit the neat category of a morally deficient academic-urban, liberal, multiculturalist "liberal" that the fundamentalist Bahai administration used to attack the academic dissidents. Culhane was deferential to the "world" Bahai administrative leaders and emphasized the "common ground" of esoteric mysticism and associated rhetoric used by the Bahai administration to justify its fundamentalist mindset.
When a particularly sociopathic Bahai fundamentalist mid-level administrator attacked Culhane, the "world" Bahai admins came to Culhane defense (after being prompted by an ex-liberal american Bahai academic that was one of Culhane's main defenders). But it was too late, the attack on Culhane had spread into the fundamentalist tentacles of the religion and Culhane was marginalized and stigmatized.
Among the fringe of academic-liberal dissidents and reformers that were moderates, that increased Culhane's credibility against the more "woke" (culturally leftist) academics such as Juan Cole, who was "forced" to resign from the religion after the fundamentalist administrators ex-communicated some other "far left" dissidents.
Culhane had come across Integral Theory somehow that I don't remember ever hearing, probably because Boulder, Colorado was connected to places like Omaha (college town with a small counterculture) in the midwest culturally via vacation resorts and conferences. Wilber lived in Boulder for years and lives in Denver now.
Culhane's "centrist" proposal to the "liberal" Bahai dissident community was to give up on radical-left academic style thinking and replace with Integral Theory (that there are stages of psychological and social development/evolution).
Culhane's reasoning was that the mystical underpinnings of Bahaism, in Shi'a Islamic esotericism, could be a bridge between conservative religious people and liberal reforms, while also providing a sane critique of postmodern (what became "woke") excesses.
As I later found out, weirdly (IMO) both Wilberean Integral Theory and Bahaism got evolutionary theory wrong, which was one of the indicators that both Bahai and Integral "sense-making" were going to implode and disintegrate into spiritual "lliberalism", Integral mutating into yet another neoliberal money machine in the corporate personal transformation business, Bahai into a static, rigidly orthodox hierarchy dedicated to preserving its fundamentalist elites.
Integral is still useful to some extent in that the raw material that Wilber drew on widely, such as Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary theory, Robert Kegan's developmental stage theory, and Sri Aurobindo's and Jean Gebser's earlier, pre-hippy version of Integral are still available to anyone that bother's to study them.
A couple of attempts at "wokeifying" Wilberean-integral have become absurd. David Long's woke-integral is just plain bizarre and incoherent, aspie.
"Hanzi Freinacht", a fake persona made up by a British and a Danish academic, invented a weird mishmash of integralism and cultural-leftism called Metamoderna or something like that. It predictably was like a burning candle that attracted some of the more psychologically dysfunctional characters on the far-left who proceeded to pronounce that anyone who didn't agree with their "woke" version of integral theory was a "redneck" right winger.
Meanwhile, mainstream Wilber-integral continues to draw support from enough Boomer, post-postmodern Trust Funders and such that it has survived economically and still produces books and training materials in the "life coaching" area as a result of Wilber's handlers' spinning off a couple of life-coach training centers about a decade ago.
There are several integral-adjacent scholars and groups that I find more valuable at this point, such as David Chapman's metarationality.com and Iain McGilchrist's work in evolutionary psychology, but there is no denying that Wilber was pretty successful in popularizing integral theory for several decades, spinning off various more interesting and/or weird mini-movements and tendencies.
I'm a big fan of McGilchrist- he really nailed it with The Master and his Emissary.
Talking about Leftists and their tendency to grasp at theories they simply don't understand, I had a young, effective altruistic try to lecture me on consilience. There was a certain gleeful schadenfreude in explaining to him that when E O Wilson literally wrote the book, one of his main points was that policy makers and cultural types needed to become more scientifically literate, not that other way around.
(trying again, subtack's edit function appears to be malfunctioning)
yep, they usually attempt, with frequent success in dysfunctional (fragile) organizational settings, to hijack anything that they can either turn to their own uses ("leftist" narrative control), and failing that, they try to "cancel" it with mentally dysfunctional rhetoric.
the best critiques of scientific rationalism I've seen just explain its limits (which are the limits of the human brain, as evolved), they don't try to portray it as "white supremacy" or that kind of crazy "woke" postmodern/neomarxist nonsense.
science needs to become anti-fragile to disruption, like everything else historically rooted in the cultural conditions of modernism and classical liberalism (300 years ago, aprox.).
Social media has been an absolute disaster for the scientific method. It only works when the dissidents and contrarians are allowed to tear down bad ideas. Social media creates incentives which favour silence on many issues.
I would add that the discussion of the Isrealites' focus on informational hygiene is also very meaningful. Such a thing could be very important for avoiding zombiefication.
You really need to avoid interacting with information that you are not wise enough to engage with productively. How to become wise enough to make this distinction is beyond me however.
> We accidentally created a deep well of unaligned moralistic judgmental asshats at exactly the same time we invented the internet.
I would **not** assume these two things are unrelated.
I don't necessarily think that the internet is inherently a force against religion.
No, I meant more that the ... well, OK, maybe that is actually what I said.
What I think that I *meant* was that the current wad of moralistic assbats (I don't have any idea why spellcheck had that word in its memory, but I'm going with it) were cultivated via the internet, but that's not actually an interesting observation of mine, as it's just restating the egregore hypothesis.
I think I must have read that comment as being more specific than it turned out to actually be. Crap, maybe the egregore *I'm* inside of caused me to read that as a specific case against my "enemies". Yikes.
These egregores are sneaky. :)
Interesting that it seems like I should encourage most people to turn to an older organized religion to inoculate them against Wokeness, even if I don't believe in any of them myself. I'll have to ponder that.
And regarding Azov, the upside there is that it would be *immediately* obvious to nearly everyone that it was absolutely time to start capping some bastards. I mock the recent "punch a Nazi" bullshit since for the most part there aren't any; if that should change, it'll be time to break out the rifles.
Though honestly, why can't all these motherfuckers just leave me the hell alone?
If my country were invaded by Russians I would rather inhabit a foxhole with an Azov than a Woke.
I mean, sometimes you just need a meat shield. But yes. I meant more that if it gets to the point where there are a significant number of Nazis walking around being as provocative as the Wokies currently are, well, it's probably time to do something about that.
I just don't understand Azov though, or any modern Nazis, really. Those guys were idiotic assholes. Why emulate them? It's entirely possible to love your country and be anti-communist without going into National Socialism.
That does not hold for Slavic "clannish" gene pools because they were very inbred historically until recently, and "classical liberalism" (openness to new experience, etc.) was selected AGAINST by clan inbreeding (and then communist repression).
The only competition is between two forms of totalitarian authoritarianism, the "fascist" tribal-nationalist form and the communist form (Russia is post-communist but still has delusions of quasi-communist grandeur in some ways).
To make things even more weird (I guess), Zelensky has openly stated that he wants to turn Ukraine into a "big Israel". Endless war on the fault-line of the clash of civilizations.
Defense contracting (and arms dealing) is good work if you can find it.
Viktor Bout is a free man after the Brittney Griner swap, yes? Praise The Lawd and pass the ammunition.
If people didn't know Puddin' Joe was senile before, that trade confirmed it.
This one kind of depends on how one feels about Russians and one's country. Under the correct circumstances a rational person might go Quisling.
Different worldview and egregore.
People that just desire to be left alone tend to retreat till there is nowhere left to go. The pushy asshole karens perceive that relative lack of resistance as acceptance rather than conflict avoidance. They don't avoid conflict, thus cannot imagine anyone else shying away. It just isn't possible in their worldview or moral frameworks.
What happens when there is nowhere left to retreat to is the dangerous bit. As you put it, it becomes immediately obvious that it would be absolutely time to start blasting. There isn't any being left alone after that point is reached though.
Yeah, that's a one time switch. Once it's set to "on", it's on like Donkey Kong, until your quarter is all used up. :-/
The counterfactual point is an important one. Where does wokeness sit on the spectrum of possible egregores from 'benign' to 'catastrophic'. Certainly not at either far extreme, but I could easily see it being much closer to 'benign' than otherwise.
And the point about allowing the woke to sterilize their own children is another salient one. If the anti-woke reaction isn't careful (as it often isn't), it will deliberately undermine parental rights in ways which will soon be used against it... there are a lot of Christians in the US who are attached to male circumcision as a practice (despite St. Paul being extremely specific about this being unnecessary for Gentiles).
For the record, I'm not taking a natural selection approach here, myself, but a principled one. i.e. that it is much more important (especially in the wake of the COVID immune booster bullshit) to retain parental rights over medical decisions about children than it is to stop a handful of people from doing really stupid permanently damaging shit to their kids (though there's probably still room to, for example, require that the child clearly consents to the treatment).
Curious as to whether and when female circumcision/genital mutilation reenters the broader conversation (it may never, which would itself be interesting).
Worryingly, in Washington, it appears that the wokes are trying to legalize (and normalize) sterilizing other people's children.
And that's where the battle really needs to be fought.
I couldn't disagree more. Stop supporting the beast in DC and worry about what's at home. That's all that matters. If enough communities decide to tell the fed to get f-ed, they will be out of power.
I believe they were talking about Washington State.
https://mynorthwest.com/3296653/rantz-washington-laws-permit-teen-gender-reassignment-surgery-parental-consent/
What do the feds have to do with anything?
Fair points. Honestly, it's hard to see a time where genital mutilation doesn't reenter the discussion if one can put their kid on puberty blockers just because they *might* "identify" as another gender (cough* I mean be mentally ill *cough).
I see, from a principled perspective, how one is really different than the other?
You mean: If your kid can *put themselves* on puberty blockers which might permanently sterilize them, before having the genitals altered. Resulting in some cases, adults who will never experience an orgasm, have an adult relationship or children of their own, leaving them in a permanently sexually juvenile state, and incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills the parents are responsible for, without any ability or opportunity to consent. This is far more severe than female circumcision, if viewed objectively.
Not really. From what I know, female genital mutilation can result in loss of feeling, and never experience an orgasm in some cases as well. That's literally the same thing as here. I disagree with all of it, but again *not my monkey, not my circus*. If the idiots want to do this to their children, be my guest. Eventually things will go bad enough for these people that the moralistic Karen's discussed above decide enough is enough and ban it.
The idea that the woke are "only hurting their own children" is ridiculous when they've worked so hard to take over all schools.
That's all fine and dandy if you people would stop supporting public schools. This shit wouldn't occur without being complicit to sending your children to those indoctrination camps to start with.
You're not wrong, but it's not as easy as all that when the government takes a cut of your check whether you're using their schools or not. Or when government is taking a big enough cut of everyone's check, and inflating the currency enough, that you can't easily have mom or dad stay home and teach instead of work.
(Note, I am not and never will have children, but I'm an uncle to a lot of kids. Mostly, I just try to set a good example for them.)
I pay about $5,000/year in property taxes to the State of California (on one average suburban "ranch" style house), and a big part of that is to support a dismal, failed public education system that is quickly become a "woke" (neo-communist) indoctrination system.
The only meaningful way for me to stop "supporting" public schools would be to sell my house and move out of state, which I can't do until my 93 year old mother passes away.
As a practical matter, most of the places I might want to move to within a 1,000 mile radius are already filling up with pot growers or other old retired boomer assholes driving up property values, so the economic and social appeal isn't that compelling. Southern Nevada and Arizona will probably almost completely dry up leaving millions of people with barely enough water to live on if they limit themselves to taking a 5 minute shower once a week and using their flushed toilet water to irrigate the cacti and thornbushes in their yards.
This whole issue is one for the elites that will have far more severe consequences for working families that never enter the conversation somehow.
They glide blithely past cost, but transition and puberty blocking care can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which parents aren't even allowed to contest. Sure, insurance is pressured to cover it, but of course everyone here who isn't an elite with huge bank accounts know how much their health insurance actually covers. So you're bankrupted so your kid can destroy their sexuality because our current culture won't let anyone become functional adults. You can't argue or refuse without running the risk of being branded a bad parent and transphobe.
Yep. That is why "wokeness" inevitably descends from its utopian promises (which are absurd anyway since they assume postmodern-relativism, which holds that "reality is a social construct") to ILLIBERAL, Orwellian totalitarianism.
"Wokeness" will always map into dystopia because it can only survive as a tool of global finance, the media-tech oligarchs and the PMC (Ehrenreich) to create Neo-Feudalism.
Nassim Taleb's "Dictatorship of the Intolerant Minority" is one good explanation of how "woke" enshittification sets in.
The military has had contingency plans to carry out a coup of the US government and impose emergency measures for social order for a long time (my late father was in the Pentagon during the Nixon-Watergate crisis and saw the plans on paper).
Any peasant rebellion could be quickly and easily be stopped by turning off communications, power, gas pumps, food and water distribution, etc.
Within weeks or months 98% of the population would be begging for a dictator to restore order. But competition between military factions would probably lead to civil war, which would probably escalate to nuclear war within 6-12 months (according to war game models).
My grandfather, a Kansas farmer that lived in a sod ranch hut on the eastern Colorado prairie as a young man after WW1, later died before he was as old as I am now (mid 60s), so "retirement" means something completely different to people that actually live that lifestyle.
Almost all of his 7 children, including my mom, lived to about 85 years old or older.
I don't know if that tactic works in the era of "we printed another trillion dollars today and didn't even use any ink".
This is essentially my position on abortion. Let them select out of procreation. I certainly don't want *more* of them.
Same. Hell, for over a decade I could have given 2 chits less about abortion. It didn't/doesn't affect me. I find it personally repulsive, but not my business. That being said, 2021 sent me off the deep-end with their bs forced injection narrative. Hypocritical jerks. However, in principle, I do still agree with what you said. You want to murder your offspring, who am I to stop you?
Oh, I was perfectly happy to beat on them with mocking "my body my choice" chanting. I'm tactical agnostic, and therefore willing to pick up any weapon in a fight. ;)
Your point about parental rights is well taken. I also understand the point of view that has been expressed by a few here that we should just allow the “wokes” to self select themselves out of existence. But the problem with that approach is it leaves the children of these people to be victimized and abused in truly horrible ways (talking both about abortion and transgenderism). Who’s gonna protect the kids?
While I understand where you are coming from; that argument can be twisted in a myrid of ways. A perfect example is how it's being twisted now to all for the sterilization of children for political beliefs/mental illness. Because let's be honest, any parent that isn't a bloody moron isn't going to irreversibly damage their child without being 100% sure they were doing the right thing. So the only ones pushing for this are just the ones we really, imo, don't want their genes continuing to live on.
Dont get me wrong, I get what you are saying, and you aren't wrong. We just can't protect those without infringing on others and therefore, imo, it's the lesser of the evils. (parents accidentally/intentionally fuck their children up all the time for other reasons, so where does it end? My mother included.)
This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Great poem. Here's a 1936 version of W. H. Auden's Night Train performed by Benjamin Britten.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EZxJ9Bkoeg
On a practical, political level, I agree with you. I have a baby and the idea of Child Protective Services showing up at my door scares the hell out of me. The right very often builds government mechanisms that are later used against them (like department of homeland security). And IMO the libertarian approach is best whenever there is doubt. So maybe no laws against parents doing the transgender bull shit to their kids.
But there’s also a lot of people who say they don’t care, “do whatever you want it doesn’t effect me.” Which is ugly.
I do disagree with your suggestion that there’s relatively few parents who are dumb enough to do this to their kids. If the woke egregore really has control of as many people as most of us in this thread seem to believe, then there’s likely vast swaths of the American parent population who would go along with it if their kid told them they wanted puberty blockers etc. Right now there are enormous social incentives to go along with the transgender agenda in specific areas. Even some of the more level headed parents will be overcome by this social pressure.
The social pressures and incentives need to be reversed. It should be so socially unacceptable that only the truly crazy parents would ever consider doing something like this to their kids. And the ostracism would be immediate and severe. Unfortunately our society is far, far away from that reality.
I agree with you on the libertarian thing. Either the Left or the Right could try to legislate this issue, and whatever came out would be guaranteed to be wrong. Here is a fairly long but objective interview by Chris Williamson finding out what went wrong at the Tavistock in the UK, which was generally better than the American clinics, but still made huge mistakes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdBfHwzDYLg&t=1856s
The only thing that's going to work is a set of Professional Standards which sets the bar incredibly high on gatekeeping and safeguarding children, but still allows for a degree of flexibility when it comes to dealing with the 20% or so of GD kids for whom it becomes obvious that their GD will persist into adulthood.
The other component is robust civil suits. I don't care what your ideology is, if you know you're going to lose your house and families financial future, you are going to make sure you adhere to the highest standards of clinical care. Some might argue this should have been the case with American doctors prescribing pain meds, especially when one considers that in the same year (2021) America saw 70,601 people die from Fentanyl overdoses, England and Wales (population 59 million) saw only 58 deaths.
> But there’s also a lot of people who say they don’t care, “do whatever you want it doesn’t effect me.” Which is ugly.
Lots of things are ugly but still true. I know for an absolute fact that I can't care about everyone and there are plenty of people on the planet. The species will survive without those lost to their own parents, and probably better without their gene lines. I think the world will be better off without mine as well, which is why I've ensured that. If I don't care about my potential children, why should I care about theirs?
I believe you can have sympathy for all people generally, even if you can’t know them each individually. A brief and sincere introspection on what these kids are suffering at the hands of their own parents should leave anyone with a pit in your stomach.
I also don’t like this line of thinking that presumes the human race would somehow be better off without certain gene lines. That kind of thinking can lead to genocide very quickly. In fact, that’s where it must inevitably lead. There’s not too many people on the planet anyway, in fact soon, with our declining birth rates, there may be too few.
And there aren't declining birth rates world wide. Just in the countries that are committing suicide. Maybe "being a first world nation" isn't a genetic win in the long run either.
Genocide requires an active component. Recognizing that gene lines which are susceptible to Moloch sacrifice are likely not long term survival fit is just letting evolution take its course and commenting as it goes by.
And you're right about the sympathy, but I also recognize that there's only so much I can mentally encompass. Yes, it's terrible, but I can't do anything about it, and I have more local battles to fight.
I would argue that letting the "wokes" sterilize their own children is a net positive. But hey, I'm a fan of Darwin. So what do I know. Instead we have people fighting against them self selecting from future generations.
Note: I don't have kids, and won't have kids. It's the end of the line for my ilk, so I really don't care one way or another once I'm buried.
Also childless, I don't think this society has ten years left. You can't run a successful society based on fantasy and printed money.
More and more of the USA will look like the failed states in latin america (rule by crime crtels) as the crisis unfolds. Life will regress to the level of poverty stricken favela/ghetto shitholes for a lot of people, but life will go on.
Meanwhile SenilePuppet gets to make jokes about ice cream in the White House before announcing condolences to the victims of the trans kook that shot up an elementary school.
MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN
Heh, I've used that tagline...
I love how the Matrix of Oppression lists it as "*temporarily* abled-body people". Remember -- if you currently enjoy good health, that is just an accident. It has nothing to do with exercise or eating habits. Striving to become a strong and useful human being is an offensive act.
Enh, that one sorta does make sense. How many truly able bodied 80 year olds do you know of? I believe the point of listing that one that way is to get people to think about the fact that if everything goes well, they're going to be old, someday.
Sure, but being old doesn't have to mean being a physical wreck. Yes, you won't be 20, but it's possible to remain strong and vital in your 80s and 90s. Again, it all comes down to habits.
I've seen skinny, old affluent/rich, otherwise physically healthy people descend into the living hell of dementia in 6 months, and it had nothing to do with habits.
But that is just an exception to the pattern you correctly describe, and the whole issue is complex.
For many people, healthy habits are a function of social status.
Recall Tom Wolf's description of "social x-rays" in Bonfire of the Vanities.
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/death-of-the-social-x-ray-20050707-gdln1m.html
It doesn't have to, but statistically speaking, it seems likely.
Then again, I worked as an EMT, so most of the old people I saw were almost definitionally in bad shape.
Pleats never went out. I defy the mandates of fashion through the sheer power of faith.
This is such a well-written and documented piece I feel like I’m not worthy to comment, as I don’t have such a command of those 26 Roman characters that we call the Alphabet as the author does. But I must. Here’s why: I’m a 52 year old black dude and although I wouldn’t consider myself Woke, I am fully sympathetic to the term and sentiment behind it. While some may have trouble defining it, focusing on the word itself should lead to a basic definition. Not all-encompassing but basically the word “woke” as it’s used today in noun form is a cultural euphemism for “being awake”. And it gained ground because it inherently states that the person in a prior time and place was asleep. Simple, no?
Just some basics: On many many many occasions as a youngster, I’ve daydreamed about being white. I recognized the value of being white. The access; the approval that is automatically assigned to that ethnic group, etc. self-loathing for having big lips or less than Euro-typical physical traits and wishing my hair was straight and a host of other things that most black people probably won’t admit to. I spent most of my adult life attempting to fashion myself into a linear-thinking, white-sounding, and white-dressing individual with moderate success because I realized the importance of assimilation. I recognized how poorly ghetto blacks were estimated and had the capacity to make changes where needed. I essentially ran from my “blackness” because I believed it was bad and unworthy.
Most of the adult spaces and institutions I belonged to were predominantly white and I stuck our like a raisin in a pound cake!
Then 2020 came (I know, you were waiting for this) and the time at home the reflection and learning that ensued from that period cannot be overstated for me. For instance, I learned that the version of the history of the United States that was handed to me by the US Public School system was only a partial telling. I learned that there is a hidden half of the story that for very obvious reasons, had been suppressed. (Where I may disagree with many is that I don’t believe that the current narrative needs to be abolished, but it certainly needs to be augmented)
Sounds like Critical Race Theory to you?
I thought it would.
When I hear white people make laws or protest curricula that make them and their children feel bad for simply being white, my response is always “the bad people are making you feel bad because of your skin color?…Aww, tell me what that feels like”
Dude, to properly teach that Columbus was equal parts visionary and whoremonger, and animated by predatory lust, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that the George Washington and the nation’s founding fathers were complicated individuals (like you and everyone reading this) and while they praised the virtue of liberty, thought little about enslaving other human beings, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that the United States potentially faced a stalemate in the forming of the union because of the Southern lawmakers and the topic of slavery, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that many US lawmakers wanted to expand slavery into deeper parts of Mexico and other Central American countries, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that the King Cotton and the sugar industry enriched the Southern and Northern states and other industrialized countries in Europe and that the sole machine employed was unpaid labor, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
To teach that when the Transatlantic slave trade was outlawed, a sinister process was instituted to breed existing slaves and forcibly remove the offspring to continue the lucrative endeavor and create laws that state that the fruit of the womb will be under the same status as that of the mother; well, that is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known.
Obviously, these lesser-known historical items weren’t congruent with the exceptionalism and Judeo-Christian virtues that was promoted to the stars. With the white man at the center and front and all other ethnicities regarded as lesser, it was an easy narrative to follow. Up until now, or up until relatively recent years, these other peoples have come to realize that they are not somehow lesser than the white race or ethnicity or whatever is the proper way to call whiteness.
To digress again, I dream of what it might have looked like when the religious people and the the non-religious (who were in the majority) alike had descended from the Mayflower, respected the natives and created something that looked more like synergy than rape, plunder, and deceit. I wonder what it may have looked like if Conquistadors hadn’t destroyed the wonderful cities and cultures that they found in Mexico and Central America. I wonder what would’ve happened if they saw beyond the visible; saw beyond the bare breasts and lack of Euro-centric clothing styles and instead of regarding the natives as inferior and ripe for subjugation, saw them as human and equally worthy as the Bible they carried under their arms taught.
Speaking of Bibles, here’s yet another aside: I often hear about how barbaric the Aztecs and others were with their human sacrifices, as if Europeans with their countless bloody human sacrifices that they performed on each other in the name of orthodoxy and interpretations of their faith (and I’ll limit the carnage to just the Christian religion) was somehow less senseless and brutal in scope and nature. But we know all better. (I hope we all know better).
Again, thank you 2020!
I could go on and on as I’ve learned so so many well-documented facts that can’t be twisted for any political or cultural aim. But amazingly, these are facts that never made it to the Blue Back Speller & Reader and every other US textbook that followed.
Not gonna lie, I only skimmed the surface and didn’t quite respond to the thrust of your article. I’m not even equipped for that type of technical stuff. I’ll admit it. Just wanted to speak from personal experience as I value it more than a million beautiful words. And I’m sure many others can share this sentiment. And especially since I haven’t seen anything from a similar perspective here in the Comments section.
Let the off-topic, ad hominems, and non sequitors fly. Fly high!
>> "Sounds like Critical Race Theory to you?"
No, actually.
Well, maybe. In a classic Derrick Bell sense, then it might indeed sound like CRT, but it does not at all sound like "wokeness applied CRT" as it expresses itself in some grade schools and in DEI classes, which are more akin to anti-whiteness indoctrination than anything else. And I do not think Derrick Bell intended his work to be used to promulgate the sort of anti-whiteness grifting we see today out of Ibrahim Kendi. I have black friends who are more educated than I on both authors who agree with me on this point, who are fans of the former and not the latter.
But I have a bias. I grew up in the south and attended heavily black public schools, so I was exposed to a tremendous amount of black history. I've toured MLK's house something like four times on school outings. I admit that my experience being taught black history may not reflect the same experience of some students, including potentially black students, in rural Oklahoma for instance. My experience may not align with yours. It may be that my exposure to black history is a privilege of my southern upbringing, because I was raised around black people.
>> "Dude, to properly teach that Columbus was equal parts visionary and whoremonger, and animated by predatory lust, is not CRT. It’s just the truth that hasn’t been widely known."
I agree with most of your points here. Where the "applied CRT" folks jump the shark is not "Columbus was a bad dude," but rather "and therefore you're bad too."
Your rhetorical technique of repeating "it's just the truth that hasn't been widely known" is really good, and really strong, and doesn't fit my experience. Of all the things you list, I was taught *all* of them by the end of Junior High except for the one about folks wanting to extend slavery into Mexico and South America, and I was taught those things in the late 1980s. I didn't learn about the Mexico thing until today. Thank you.
Is this because I'm from Atlanta? Possibly. I think the nation's approach to race probably varies widely by region, and I think that might bear itself out in the 2020 riots most obviously in the fact that the two whitest cities in the country were the most violent. Portland and Seattle. Most of those protesters probably don't know a single black person, they probably have no exposure, no familiarity. In my experience, lack of exposure is the greatest source of prejudice, so they might be railing against a prejudice they know they have. Growing up here, I get uncomfortable in cities that *don't* have black people in them. Denver and Las Vegas just seem weird when I visit. Too many white people. Makes me think they're hiding their black folks somewhere. Makes me want to put on a Vick jersey and sneak into the alleyways looking for the non-robots.
>> "I wonder what it may have looked like if Conquistadors hadn’t destroyed the wonderful cities and cultures that they found in Mexico and Central America."
I'd like for them to have kept the cities and burned the cultures. Those cultures sacrificed millions of lives per year in rivers of blood to make the sun come up. The Aztecs had to go, flat out, and they are my go-to example for why culture war isn't always bad. The Aztecs were significantly worse than Nazis, and I don't hear anyone bemoaning us bombing them. Yes, it was absolutely more brutal in scope and nature than anything done in Christendom, and it was also growing, and in fact colonizing. The Aztecs were infiltrating New Mexico and Colombia, killing natives and sacrificing them and doing all the same colonial crap the Europeans were, except much more brutally and with much more blood. The human condition is awful, and no race or region gets a pass.
Thank you so much for your very well crafted response, Mitch. It was a pleasure to read, and if you're ever in the ATL reach out. I'd love to buy you a beer.
Grabbing a beer sounds awesome! Thanks for the invitation. I live in Savannah Ga so we might just make that happen!
One comment on the practices of the early inhabitants of modern-day Mexico and Central America: The primary sources that we have to go by were written by Catholic Missionaries. They no doubt left very detailed records. But I wonder how much credence should be given to their accounts. No doubt every society and culture has horrible histories of colonialism and rapacious brutality, and as you stated, no one gets a pass, but if my enemy gets to write my history for me, how fair of a treatment will I receive?
And regarding the comment “I wish they had kept the cities and burned the cultures” I ask: who makes the judgement call in such cases? Or why does anyone feel the need to remove anyone’s culture for that matter? And who should’ve been sent to Europe to stamp out that culture due to their multiple Crusades, Inquisitions, and the host of large and smaller scale religious wars?
Archaeological sources I've read seem to indicate that the Catholics were *undercounting* the human sacrifices, because the Catholics weren't exposed to the empire at the height of its power before pathogens cratered their population.
As far as who makes the judgement call? Ordinarily, it's the victors and history book writers. The "contrarian history book" written by the victors against themselves is a relatively new invention.
One day you and I might be wiped out by a mass genocide of angry vegans, who colonize our culture and kill our babies and replace them all with clones who follow their own angry vegan ideology, and on that day they will tear down the MLK statues because he ate a hamburger, and we will be the apostates.
This is the way of the world, and always has been. Every current culture presumes it is maximal, and that's because it's current, and every culture up until now got wiped out by some other one.
Could be 🤷♂️ but there’s a 50% chance that it may not be that way. Either way, good chat!
Question about being raised in Savannah in the 80s - did you not get exposed to many of those educational principles you talked about in your original post? I was in the Marietta city school system since 1986, which was about 40% (maybe 50%?) black, and we had quite a bit of black history in our curricula, seemingly every year. I can imagine South Georgia being a different animal, as I've visited friends in Douglas GA and that place is racist as fuck going both directions. I'd always imagined Savannah would be a little more cosmopolitan, but I have no firsthand knowledge.
I was born in Trinidad & Tobago and went to Junior and High School in Brooklyn NY. I moved to Savannah when I turned 21.
Aahh, interesting. I can understand why T&T wouldn't have a whole lot of schooling on the specifically American history of the black condition.
I was taught all that stuff growing up too.
There is a CRT grift that says normal social studies stuff is some kind of secret knowledge that once you know it of course “policy idea that didn’t work the last ten times” is the solution to race gaps or whatever else.
I disagree on the prejudice/exposure thing.
It’s true that if you haven’t been exposed to black people and your a “good white person” especially of puritan or Quaker background (most very white parts of the country come from those backgrounds) then your going to have an almost angelic reverence for blacks in the current environment. Exposure will reduce that prejudice (lower and make more realistic) your opinion, as it did for me when I lived in Baltimore. If that’s how you mean prejudice (as in having an unrealistically good) belief in blacks then maybe we aren’t in much disagreement.
This group of white people does this about once a generation. They see that blacks don’t seem to be doing to well based on some metrics, decide it must be the result of some moral failing in whites, and implement some variety of the same basic ideas they always try (with the same lackluster to counter productive results).
This attitude had some positives up until the mid 1960s, but after that most of the low hanging fruit was gone and the interventions have gotten more and more ridiculous. They should probably just read The Bell Curve, declare mission accomplished, and leave everyone alone. But then what would they do all day? And anyway it’s being an ongoing thing to fix is big money for lots of people.
I recall the antitheism-sphere morphing once people started saying "oh look, my interlocutor is making the deonotological argument for the billionth time." Religion was killed on the internet, but lots of people had still been raised in stuffy, angst-inducing Christian households.
Wokeness seemed to spring from there, a continuation of trying to scourge boomer bullshit. Boomer-ite reality must be entirely rewritten to prove they were, in fact, assholes who made their kids sit through Sunday school to absorb hateful beliefs.
Once a younger generation takes up the torch, they get the fervor without the explicitly Christian angst. Plus an ever-growing online life and pre-existing activist institutions marking targets.
I guess in terms of damage, could wokeness be compared to historical eugenics? Wikipedia says in the US, at least 64K people sterilized in the 56 years between 1907 and 1963, so ~1142/yr. Ostensibly, the majority were criminals or other forms of "defective."
According to Reuters, in 2021 1390 people between 6-17 years were on puberty blockers in the US. 2017 was 633. Also in 2021, same age bracket saw 4231 on hormone therapy (No clue on overlap). Not trying to make a conclusion here, just considering your question of "how bad is it, really."
This is why Sam Harris was antiwoke in the early days - he was part of the whole New Atheism movement who got torqued off at the "Atheism+" people, who were basically prewokes. James Lindsey was in this same camp.
I think my first encounter with "SJW" was levied against Atheism+ers crusading in a forum I frequented.
This is your best essay yet.
Thanks, but I don't really think so. There were no new concepts in it, just a gathering of stuff into one location for easy linking. I did like how I managed to arrange it so the conclusion of one section pointed at the next one, though. That took a little trickery.
You do realize what a Karen is?
"Karen is a pejorative term used as slang for a white woman perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is normal. The term is often portrayed in memes depicting white women who use their white privilege to demand their own way."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki
In other words, anti-woke, judging others as inferior or not deserving of respect.
My understanding of "woke" is people trying their best to treat others with respect, based on the others' terms. It can certainly be self-righteous, as can any movement (talk to any Trumpers lately?)
As a liberal living in a liberal city, the only people I've met who are really invested in preaching their beliefs have been TERFs; so if wokeness means insisting that others agree with you, they fit that definition better than most. (Obviously, liberals here would be preaching to the choir, so that tips the scales of my argument a bit.)
Have you ever seen a photo of a social justice march where less than 70% of the marchers weren't white women with free time to march?
The TERF War is a war between groups of white women over whether to let born men into the white woman club.
Right. White women march, while white men eviscerate each other on Twitter 😆
I'd say "eviscerating each other on Twitter" is a bigendered hobby.
Or, you know, multigendered depending on your opinion about gender. :)
In 'bigendered hobby', the second word could also use some targeted elaboration 😉
Lol, I guess it all depends on who you follow. As you say, something else will be next. Maybe being moderate, hahaha! I do recommend this piece about on wokeness by Noah Smith
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-prairie-fire
“A prairie fire burns very quickly and eats up a lot of ground, which was undoubtedly one reason the Weathermen chose the analogy. But another feature of prairie fires is that they burn out very quickly. If you look at aerial photos of prairie fires, they look like a long ropy line of flames. This is because they consume the available fuel, so that the area that has already been burned smolders and then goes out.
I see something analogous with wokeness in America today.”
"My understanding of "woke" is people trying their best to treat others with respect..."
This is such a common Motte/Bailey and such a dishonest piece of gaslighting (sorry nothing personal)
Rewriting American history to say that the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery...is "treating others with respect"?
Racializing every aspect of human existence and every cultural interaction...is "treating others with respect"?
Lowering school standards and replacing merit with racial quotas...is "treating others with respect"?
Forcing someone to engage in compelled speech and assent to the DEI dogma for employment...is "treating others with respect"?
Forcing someone to mouth the pieties of Gender theory and pretend that there's something called "nonbinary"...is "treating others with respect"?
I could go on but will stop.
The Social Justice zealots obviously don't care about people respecting each other or they wouldn't be so intolerant of dissent and so vindictive against any dissenters or opponents.
In fact, as with most claims made by postmodern academic Marxism, the opposite is true: this isn't a new form of polite etiquette but instead the manipulation and weaponization of these things, taking advantage of human kindness to bully and blackmail people into acquiescing to a radical political agenda.
Are you saying slavery was not an issue in the Revolutionary war? It was. Are you saying there's no such thing as being non-binary? How do you know? Racializing things? Acknowledging that a large number of US citizens have been mistreated and trying to figure out some recompense sounds respectful to me. The school thing-ugh, that's a mess, kids should be taught at the level they're at, and should get treatment for trauma if needed and that's never going to happen. So that's complicated.
DEI? Good intentions but sounds like a lot of it's mostly performative if that at this point. Noah Smith has a good analogy.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-prairie-fire. Some people are extreme! Free whataboutism available on request!
If I took things personally, I would certainly not post on this substack.
"Are you saying slavery was not an issue in the Revolutionary war?" Cmon, that's not what the 1619 Project and CRT claim, they claim it was the crucial, most important issue that defines America. That is a big difference.
"Are you saying there's no such thing as being non-binary? How do you know?" LOL of course there's no such thing, is there a blood test for nonbinary? a thermometer? no one has ever presented a definition that rose above vague moods and feelings. "Nonbinary" is another absurd pseudo-intellectual fad like orgone energy or the philosopher's stone, which will be laughed at in a decade or 2.
"Racializing things? Acknowledging that a large number of US citizens have been mistreated and trying to figure out some recompense sounds respectful to me."
I agree with some of what you say, I just don't think the rich white liberals who write, produce and direct Social Justice care about the supposed marginalized as much as they care about publicly performing how much they care. Black people are just the tokens and mascots they wheel out to show how much more compassionate and enlightened they are than the Deplorables.
I'm sure we could agree on a lot of things, but I can never agree with a word the Critical Race and Gender Theory people say, they are pseudo-scholars filled with resentment with the stated goal of dismantling our entire society. Democrats and liberals will rue the day they got into bed with the miserable zealots of Crit Theory.
You are saying many of the social justice people care mostly about publicly performing how much they care- not saying they don't - and what I see are people on the right enjoying their outrage and catastrophizing a little too much. Very little of this extremism on either side will affect many people in a way they can't overcome. I do have a couple of trans woman friends, and they have been through a lot to be who they truly feel they should be, so I'm not going to doubt their reality or sincerity.
The difference between what he says and what you say is that what he says is true and what you say is not.
I can't take Noah serious on anything.
A prairie fire can still kill a person.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/27/we-must-confront-this-woke-misogyny/
That said, if trans people have been treated with more respect and less condemnation and violence they might not be so pissed off.
A lot of trans folks took a lot of shit for a very long time. There's no denying that.
Look, I'm sorry. I know actual trans people. 95% of the mind virus infected I see these days don't count. They're just narcissistic assholes who have found another bat they can use to ensure compliance with their delusions.
I was firmly on the "trans women are women" bus until I saw the rabid, psychotic nature of the modern trans movement. And as an anarchist, I'll never support anyone trying to smash their way into private spaces they aren't wanted in.
True, definitely not in favor of violent extremism in any form
The problem with woke is that it often tends to prioritise lived experience over empirical evidence. Don't get me wrong, people can be insensitive and often, in discussion, scoring points can overwhelm genuine dialogue, in which people can learn from each other. But when one all the evidence points to the fact that diversity is best encouraged by formalised mentoring programs, and the response comes back 'do we really want white men lecturing others more?' it's clear that ideology has trumped the desire for genuine common sense change- because, although advancement may have been restricted from some in the past, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone in a senior position is going to have more of value to teach than four years at an elite college at the cost of what these days amounts to as a small fortune.
Plus, lived experience can often deceive through deeply flawed availability heuristics. A good example of this would be the depiction of police shootings of unarmed Black men on social media and YouTube. Recently when progressives were asked how many unarmed Black men were shot by police in 2019, over 50% believed that the figure was over 1,000 and over 20% believed the figure was over 10,000. The actual figure for 2019 was 27.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy was the narrative that higher rates of COVID deaths were due to structural racism. Of course, there is some truth to it, a back of the envelope look at two distinct cultural groups in the UK, with very similar genetics but widely different socioeconomics, shows that around 20% of all disparities in medical outcomes could potentially be described as structural. But the emphasis on structural racism unfortunately obscured the fact that vitamin D deficiency was a major factor for COVID deaths and vitamin D deficiency was a greater risk for Black people. Recent research shows that vitamin D supplementation could have reduced COVID deaths by a third.
Another area where structural racism has been alleged is in relation to disparate rates of maternal death in childbirth, but low birth weight, premature birth and preeclampsia have all been linked with vitamin D deficiency. This knowledge, more widely distributed, could go a significant way to reducing race essentialism, by reversing some of environmental/epigenetic factors which give rise to such notions. It would probably reduce the supposed gap by a significant degree.
Liberals tend to get a bit squeamish about vitamin D deficiency because they think it will suggest that Black people living in Northern countries are living in the wrong environment in terms of exposure to sunlight. Quite the contrary, a recent Lancet article showed that North African countries contain some of the most Vitamin D deficient populations ever studied. If you have any Black friends planning to have kids I would tell them about some of the more recent vitamin D research. Vitamin D supplementation seems to have a positive effect on a range of conditions from hypertension (John Henryism) to improved cognitive development in children (studies mixed) to slowing the rate that Alzheimer's develops.
In short, the woke mindset encourages people to look in all the wrong places for solutions. This doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist, especially online. It doesn't mean that implicit bias or structural racism doesn't exist- in fact if we look at fields like finance and risk management the evidence shows that even if one removes race as a criteria from lending criteria, race will always assert itself through other data, primarily the associative tarnish attached to location. The insurance and lending institutions assess the risk of people, for actions they themselves have never taken, all the time- and the ingroup tendency to self-segregate if you are a minority, out of desire to feel the relief of being surrounded by one's own culture, encodes financial bias.
But overall, structural racism should be only one of the things we should consider when looking at problems and how to provide people with genuine economic opportunities which can change their lives. For example, Dr Raj Chetty's research on social mobility shows that it's fathers at a community level which really count and are even more important than the quality of education in a neighbourhood. In all probability, this is probably because collectively they act as an informal safety net for boys who don't do well at school, shepherding them into better paid blue collar work.
> "You do realize what a Karen is?"
A recently coined slang term, the definition of which is likely to remain highly in flux for at least a little while longer?
"A loud white woman who tries to get people fired" certainly fits the modern cancel culture movement.
The original usage had to do with white women doing racist stuff. Just thought it was kind of amusing that Karen was now identifying as woke. The reality is, of course, that there are Karens on all sides. Florida is teeming with them.
I’m all for letting them sterilize their own kids as long as me and mine are left alone. Within a generation maybe the problem would take care of itself?
The problem is that strongly heritable does not necessarily mean genetic. Think concepts like IQ. the genetic component is hard to nail down, but it's a strongly heritable trait.
A lot of values people hold are taught. Control of institutions like schools or social media will sweep up people who are predisposed to being a karen regardless of their origins. I also suspect we're within a generation of the sterility not being a permanent problem. Technologies like IVG stand to benefit a lot of people besides the LGBTetc groups.
In the absence of effective hands and feet for God, society will find other cults to belong to. The churches have fallen down on the job. Not all of them, but enough that we've given current society very little reason to seek answers that have stood the test of time. How we (a very atomized "we" that may no longer have a comfortable center ground) once again become relevant is not wholly evident. I think we should stop directly fighting the cultural wars and work on building up institutions within the churches that offer alternatives to the woke-overtaken institutions that can no longer be salvaged. Yes, we can speak to the insanity of our current culture, but foaming at the mouth on the internet will be far less effective than building a Christian hangout space that appears to center around skateboarding and foosball, but provides the organizers with an opportunity to shared Jesus with the kids.
Yes, I'm speaking of a real-world initiative that is apparently working in my town -- that took 15-years of hard work to begin to produce a harvest. Same with the recent signs of improvement in the Christian-focused film industry. Christian music made that leap several years ago, now if books and movies follow -- Well, there's hope. Maybe not in my remaining lifetime, but hopefully within my kids' -- there'll come a time when whatever that generation's version of irrational wokesters won't matter because sane people have created their own institutions so there are alternatives to the insanity.
Woke is an attempt to 'prove' the unfalsifiable through Lived Experience. If their college professors were doing their job they should have taught them the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I know that *I* am not a revolutionary. I've got two kids to look after, I can't afford to get shot. Revolutions are for single males in their teens and early 20s. There's math on that. :P
Hey, look, I'm not saying I wouldn't join a revolution if I wasn't a parent. But seriously, this parenting thing is a total time sink and completely changes your life priorities.
I guess that was a joke?
If not, the problem has been examined by many people for many decades.
The shitshow that resulted from Ken Wilber's criticisms of the "mean green meme" (using the Spiral Dynamics model) were a classic example.
Wilber's model is useful in that it adopts Jean Geber's idea that human consciousness emerges from Ursprung und Gegenwart, the Ever Present Origin, each paradigm shift "transcending and including" the previous paradigm.
But in periods of severe disruption, as currently, regression to more primitive social forms takes place in systems that are NOT "anti-fragile" to disruption.
So what initially sounds good about being "woke", sensitivity to the demands of pluralism and multiculturalism, regresses to social fragmentation, atomization and then totalitarianism as bad elites turn "woke" into a weapon in the culture wars (which are actually archetypal wars between digital-luxury-gnosticism and industrial-modern-rationalism).
"Wokeness" quickly mutated into dogmatic, quasi-religious cultism, belief that "reality is a social construct" (which is partially true if not weaponized by the digi-gnostics).
This is great wisdom.
(sorry if this is a repeat of a previous discussion)
I think that Iain McGilchrist (evolutionary psychologist, EP) explains that, from what I remember of his David Fuller (Rebel Wisdom UK) interview a while back.
Physical brain circuits evolved in ancient humans to INHIBIT "undomesticated" instincts and urges that worked against parochial (kinship group) altruism and social cooperation, shared ritual and learning. According to Samuel Bowles (Ulam Lectures, 2008, Santa Fe Institute, explaining extensive computer modeling of human evolution using game theory) and other EPs, there is a strange part of that story: war BETWEEN such ancient kinship groups intensified altruism and social cooperation (group survival and selection) WITHIN a given kinship group.
100,000s of years of ice age nomadic hunting/gathering roll by, and the ice ages end about 11,000 BC. Atmospheric CO2 rises as it is released from the melting ice, then air becomes more humid and warmer and plant life flourishes. Resulting increases in prey animal populations leads to the expansion of human populations, and societies began to become more dense, complex and hierarchical (Dunbar's Number limits start to play out). Temple building and/or agricultural practices lead to settlement and more social hierarchy is needed for social order.
Eventually (Bronze Age collapse) the "pagan" (embodied) gods start to mutate into contemplative gods in walled city-states, and finally a transcendent God (in Islam the concept of the "Oneness of God" finishes the evolution of contemplative religion). Pagan, embodied rituals give way to contemplative PURITY myths: renunciation, sin, evil, suffering and atonement, spiritual salvation and liberation.
What McGilchrist and other EPs seem to be thinking is that Axial (post-Bronze Age collapse) contemplative religion was an evolutionary "software upgrade" that significantly enhanced the biological INHIBITION circuits in the human brain.
"Axial" humans were able to further domesticate themselves (via enhanced inhibition) and function at a higher level of spiritual, psychological and social order and cooperation.
When the Enlightenment (classical liberalism, modern rationalism) disrupted mythic-contemplative sense making there was deep alarm and angst about a subsequent loss of social order. (Nietzsche's "Gid dead... and we killed Him).
The industrial revolution was the nail in the coffin of traditional, mythic social order, and things really started hitting the fan as mechanized warfare evolved alongside increased colonialization and imperialism and "great powers" competition.
Part of the response to the angst over "God is dead..." was a rejection of classical liberalism and market economies (and Constitutional order), including "class revolution" ideologies, which developed into anti-imperialism. Romanticism rejected modernism and mutated into communism (which explicitly rejected mythic religion) and fascism (which regressed to tribal-nationalism, reviving the idea of a charismatic mystic leader).
After the shitshows of WW1, WW2 and various national liberation movements, liberal-capitalism managed to integrate enough of the reforms demanded by class and social justice revolutionaries to survive, but the problem of spirituality, meaning and purpose (God is dead) wasn't adequately resolved.
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
As such, postmodern relativism and counterculture got a big toehold (thanks to suburban consumer culture, which allowed for the reinvented Ascona Wandervogel counterculture from the early 1900s), and the foundations were laid for the culture wars and insane "wokeness".
But wokeness isn't an adequate solution to the postmodern problem of meaning and purpose, it just tries to turn neo-marxist ideology into a creepy quasi-religious, dogmatic cult that demonizes "whiteness", masculinity, etc.
There is a lot of jabber about re-integrating both embodied and contemplative-mythic spirituality, a lot of it pretty weird, but the idea that social order requires the cultural software update of enhanced INHIBITION, via mythic religion, appears to be the core consideration.
Having spent several decades studying esoteric Islam I don't have much interest or energy left to delve into embodied spirituality (Raro? tantra, shamanism), but it seems to offer a lot of value to postmodern creatives, and in healing trauma and that kind of stuff (Esalen mind-body programs, integrative medicine).
I think I might have understood about half of that... 🤪
Have you heard about Integral Theory? It's the idea that one needs to least have an understanding of the preceding types of knowledge/belief systems in order to be able to critique them. So, for example, whilst some postmodernism may be of minor use, it is worse than useless if learned as a philosophy, per se. Funnily enough, Foucault of all people intimated as much, as postmodernism seeded the earlier stages of education, and his students became progressively more ignorant of rationality, empiricism and science.
Great post by the way- you really should write your own substack. Oh, I just saw the Modern Wisdom mention- you've probably heard of integral theory.
In that case I would recommend reading Mark Ledwich on Medium or reading some of his standalone research which debunks the concept of YouTube radicalisation- his research clearly shows that the algorithm pushes people towards Left-leaning MSM content.
Sorry for the late response, I was just re-reading this.
Yes, I came across HWFO via a mention in Rebel Wisdom or some other aspect of the Integral Theory (Ken Wilber, etc.) online community's anarcho-libertarian element.
I was involved in discussions/debates in the Wilberean online community from about 2005 when I heard about it from a Bahai named Terry Culhane who lived in Omaha. Culhane was part of an earlier "dissident" liberal reform movement within Bahaism that was opposed to the growing religious fundamentalism in the western/USA Bahai community after the 1970s.
Lots of hippies/liberals/counterculture types converted to Bahaism in the 1960s as a result of the religion's western element began to aggressively rebrand the religion from its Islamic origins to a more liberal form. But the newly converted liberal Bahais had to immediately confront the problem of the religion's strict, "conservative" moral codes (no alcohol, no sex before marriage, no involvement in politics) and middle-eastern patriarchal organizational hierarchy.
Weirdly, after large numbers of Iranian Bahai refugees arrived in the late 1970s (many of which had been subject to religion discrimination in Iran and were unable to go to public schools), the religion took a turn toward backward thinking and fundamentalism and away from the superficial facade of liberal reformism that it developed after WW2. Conservative and fundamentalist Christians also began to join Bahaism, which was bizarre. The hierarchical-patriarchal nature of the religion's organizational culture ensured that fundamentalist Christian converts to Bahaism that had a good grasp of theology and politics rose up quickly as "leaders" to further oppose the 1960s liberal-reformers, especially a small bunch of loud, dissident academic liberals that became variously known as the Los Angeles Study Group, the Talisman email discussion group, and then several internet and social media groups (riven within internal, conflicting factions, like all "leftist" protest subcultures, of course).
Culhane's background was in social justice Catholicism and mysticism, as a Vietnam War combat veteran (medic?) before he converted to Bahaism. He didn't fit the neat category of a morally deficient academic-urban, liberal, multiculturalist "liberal" that the fundamentalist Bahai administration used to attack the academic dissidents. Culhane was deferential to the "world" Bahai administrative leaders and emphasized the "common ground" of esoteric mysticism and associated rhetoric used by the Bahai administration to justify its fundamentalist mindset.
When a particularly sociopathic Bahai fundamentalist mid-level administrator attacked Culhane, the "world" Bahai admins came to Culhane defense (after being prompted by an ex-liberal american Bahai academic that was one of Culhane's main defenders). But it was too late, the attack on Culhane had spread into the fundamentalist tentacles of the religion and Culhane was marginalized and stigmatized.
Among the fringe of academic-liberal dissidents and reformers that were moderates, that increased Culhane's credibility against the more "woke" (culturally leftist) academics such as Juan Cole, who was "forced" to resign from the religion after the fundamentalist administrators ex-communicated some other "far left" dissidents.
Culhane had come across Integral Theory somehow that I don't remember ever hearing, probably because Boulder, Colorado was connected to places like Omaha (college town with a small counterculture) in the midwest culturally via vacation resorts and conferences. Wilber lived in Boulder for years and lives in Denver now.
Culhane's "centrist" proposal to the "liberal" Bahai dissident community was to give up on radical-left academic style thinking and replace with Integral Theory (that there are stages of psychological and social development/evolution).
Culhane's reasoning was that the mystical underpinnings of Bahaism, in Shi'a Islamic esotericism, could be a bridge between conservative religious people and liberal reforms, while also providing a sane critique of postmodern (what became "woke") excesses.
As I later found out, weirdly (IMO) both Wilberean Integral Theory and Bahaism got evolutionary theory wrong, which was one of the indicators that both Bahai and Integral "sense-making" were going to implode and disintegrate into spiritual "lliberalism", Integral mutating into yet another neoliberal money machine in the corporate personal transformation business, Bahai into a static, rigidly orthodox hierarchy dedicated to preserving its fundamentalist elites.
Integral is still useful to some extent in that the raw material that Wilber drew on widely, such as Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary theory, Robert Kegan's developmental stage theory, and Sri Aurobindo's and Jean Gebser's earlier, pre-hippy version of Integral are still available to anyone that bother's to study them.
A couple of attempts at "wokeifying" Wilberean-integral have become absurd. David Long's woke-integral is just plain bizarre and incoherent, aspie.
"Hanzi Freinacht", a fake persona made up by a British and a Danish academic, invented a weird mishmash of integralism and cultural-leftism called Metamoderna or something like that. It predictably was like a burning candle that attracted some of the more psychologically dysfunctional characters on the far-left who proceeded to pronounce that anyone who didn't agree with their "woke" version of integral theory was a "redneck" right winger.
Meanwhile, mainstream Wilber-integral continues to draw support from enough Boomer, post-postmodern Trust Funders and such that it has survived economically and still produces books and training materials in the "life coaching" area as a result of Wilber's handlers' spinning off a couple of life-coach training centers about a decade ago.
There are several integral-adjacent scholars and groups that I find more valuable at this point, such as David Chapman's metarationality.com and Iain McGilchrist's work in evolutionary psychology, but there is no denying that Wilber was pretty successful in popularizing integral theory for several decades, spinning off various more interesting and/or weird mini-movements and tendencies.
I'm a big fan of McGilchrist- he really nailed it with The Master and his Emissary.
Talking about Leftists and their tendency to grasp at theories they simply don't understand, I had a young, effective altruistic try to lecture me on consilience. There was a certain gleeful schadenfreude in explaining to him that when E O Wilson literally wrote the book, one of his main points was that policy makers and cultural types needed to become more scientifically literate, not that other way around.
Needless to say, I never heard from him again.
(trying again, subtack's edit function appears to be malfunctioning)
yep, they usually attempt, with frequent success in dysfunctional (fragile) organizational settings, to hijack anything that they can either turn to their own uses ("leftist" narrative control), and failing that, they try to "cancel" it with mentally dysfunctional rhetoric.
the best critiques of scientific rationalism I've seen just explain its limits (which are the limits of the human brain, as evolved), they don't try to portray it as "white supremacy" or that kind of crazy "woke" postmodern/neomarxist nonsense.
science needs to become anti-fragile to disruption, like everything else historically rooted in the cultural conditions of modernism and classical liberalism (300 years ago, aprox.).
Social media has been an absolute disaster for the scientific method. It only works when the dissidents and contrarians are allowed to tear down bad ideas. Social media creates incentives which favour silence on many issues.
Or throw together a guest piece and I'll just host it here.
Sorry, I'm not a trained writer!
There's no such thing as a trained writer.
Snow Crash was incredibly prescient, and I am disappointed that more people are not discussing it.
Between that, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon, Stephenson had a real knack for prediction in that phase of his writing.
Seeing how that writing arc culminated in Anathem makes me do some head scratching about our current UFO problem.
I would add that the discussion of the Isrealites' focus on informational hygiene is also very meaningful. Such a thing could be very important for avoiding zombiefication.
You really need to avoid interacting with information that you are not wise enough to engage with productively. How to become wise enough to make this distinction is beyond me however.