Observation: In keeping with the old saw "Everyone is conservative about that which he knows best", I observe the correlation between the strength of woke views and personal disconnect from the subject matter, vis-a-vis the opposite tendency among people with opposite views - that is, the person who lives in a border town is most opposed to illegal immigration.
Living in a border state, can confirm. Four times as many people as legitimately live in the state have illegally crossed the southern border since Biden took office. I wonder if that has anything to do with rising rents and homelessness... Nah, couldn't be.
This seems wildly improbable. You're claiming the population of your state has risen by *at least* (even assuming zero legal migration) a factor of 5 in the last three years, entirely due to illegal immigration? That really can't be correct.
I don't think Mek said the population of their state had increased by at least a factor of 5, just that four times the population of the state had crossed the border - presumably not all of those people settled in that state.
No comment on whether the claim is true, just trying to parse it.
Ah, OK. That's admittedly not *quite* so absurd. I'm still quite skeptical, though. Only four states border Mexico (I assume no one is worried about illegal Canadian immigrants). New Mexico is by far the smallest of these, with 2 million . 8 million in 3 years is nearly 1% (of total US population) per year. Official US population growth is around 0.5% per year. So unless illegal immigration over the New Mexico border alone is more than 100% of total US population growth (not mathematically impossible, but seems unlikely), this doesn't really add up.
I will grant that I did not specify explicitly, but I meant "the southern border of the country" not "the southern border of the state". Typical local parlance has "the southern border" meaning the national one but I can see how what I actually typed in could be unclear if one is not a local and having those sorts of conversations regularly.
No. I am claiming that 4 times as many people as are legal residents of my state -- New Mexico -- have illegally crossed the entire southern border of the United States, since Joe took office. The southern border also includes CA, AZ, and TX.
They certainly haven't all settled here, or there would undoubtedly already be a civil war in action, because yes, our population jumping from 2M to 10M in 3 years would *vastly* overstress the infrastructure here. We're poor, we're not highly populated, but things are getting grimmer than usual. I suspect some of the increase in housing costs and the homeless population have to do with illegal immigration.
Another way to look at it is that the equivalent of the entire population of New York City have illegally immigrated into the country since February of 2021.
New zealand is super woke, and it sucks. I believe a massive factor in the scale of any country's wokeness, and why the usa is perhaps less woke than you'd think: lack of mainstream press opposition. There is virtually no large non-woke press here in nz. Most everyone is getting the same news and it's all taking the line that there is forever white privilege and poor trans kids and so forth, and nobody is aware of the conversation even possibly going in another direction in usa, etc.
Track hate speech laws, is my theory: they correlate with wokeness
Jun 23, 2023·edited Jun 23, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Speaking as an Irishman, you might be surprised by how much Kendi-style anti-racist rhetoric there is, despite a black population even smaller than Canada's (something like 1.3%, according to the most recent census). See here:
They sure did a mindfuck on Australia, 30 years ago it was gun toting country of rugged individualists now it is among the most woke, gun grabbing, and authoritarian countries in the world. WTF happened there?
For all those terms, really have to question the searcher's disposition towards them. Is looking up "transgender" really a woke act? I know in 2020 I did a lot of searching for "Police on black violence" or something similar just trying to get to the bottom of things.
Also regarding Canada being woker the US (same for UK), I would think this is more about the state than the people. In the context of laws (speech, advertising), the police in London, the SNP in Scotland, Pronoun laws in canada, sexual assault court procedures. Those countries already have their nanny state proclivities and are much easier on the uptake for woke shit.
"Transgender" is not a great term for the list, because as someone else pointed out it's a porn search term. I think we'd see similar results if it was wiped out and replaced with something else though.
I encourage anyone to replicate the analysis and share their results. It only took me about an hour.
I think what you’ve stumbled upon is actually just an indicator of political divisiveness in the western universe. A lot of people searching these terms are actually conservatives and “anti-woke.” I think what you’re measuring is just general animosity between the aisles.
Jun 23, 2023·edited Jun 25, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
I'm from the Philippines and most everyone is religious on paper. Whether they actually adhere to the religion is a different thing altogether - there are a lot of Sunday Catholics, and there are a lot of people who are genuine in their faith. I do agree with the findings so far - we're not very woke in general, since our concern is still solidly on getting ahead and building up our country, rather than having the money to argue over the pot.
Any arguing over the pot here is more a class thing than a social justice thing. Take this with a grain of salt, though, I try to keep out of politics and political discussion.
Also note that this methodology conflates anti-woke with woke. In my personal experience, I see more anti-woke content than woke content on the Internet, and that would of course show up as a positive signal in your research. Not so much "which countries are more woke?", as "which countries talk more about wokeness?"
It seems reasonable to assume there's a strong correlation between how much people in a country talk about wokeness and how much wokeness itself dominates the conversation. Anti-woke people aren't just tilting at windmills, generally speaking.
I disagree about that to the extent that anti-wokeness has become a successful political platform for the right. If woke terms are "played out" in liberal discourse, but are successful identity politics for the right (at least 20 states have passed anti-trans legislation, and de Santis declared Florida to be "where woke goes to die"), it's entirely conceivable that "electable" Democrats will avoid that terminology, whereas Republicans experience success using it as much as possible. During her hearings, Justice Jackson was asked by Republicans to define "woman". Democrats did not ask Justice Barrett the same questions. By these measures, it's possible that the U.S. used to be the most "woke" nation, whereas it's moved on to be the most "anti-woke". (Remember, we're measuring search terms here, not actual opinion)
To the question "what is a woman?", Justice Jackson responded by asserting that she wasn't a biologist and hence wasn't qualified to provide an answer or definition i.e. a textbook "woke" answer to the question. This seems like a rather poor example to illustrate your claim that wokeness is completely played out in progressive circles.
American progressives routinely express admiration for the way things are done in the more liberal European nations, but the fact of the matter is that numerous European nations not known for being bastions of conservatism (the UK and Finland among others) are pressing pause on gender-affirming care for trans children, while blue states are manifestly not. So I don't buy that the US is the most anti-woke nation in the world either.
Well, you confuse what I'm arguing here. I'm arguing that counting the number of times woke terms are used is not as clean a correlation to wokism as might first appear. I was arguing neither in favor nor against the claim that the U.S. is the most woke, nor that it is the most anti-woke. At some point you have to haggle over definitions, but the "most woke" nation possible would probably be one in which woke opinions aren't even controversial, and so don't rate high for Google searches. For example, if you do a Google Trends search for "capitalism", Tanzania comes up number 1. U.S. ranks high, but isn't in the top 5. On the other hand, try "communism" and you get the U.S. as the gold medalist. But that doesn't make us a communist nation. All it says about us is that it's another hot button topic (coincidentally, used almost exclusively by the right).
Jun 27, 2023·edited Jun 27, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
I see your point. But you seemed to be arguing that the US has "moved on" from being the most woke nation to being the most "anti-woke" nation, which by your own definition would be a nation in which woke opinions and policies have no foothold whatsoever and anti-woke opinions enjoy broad popular support. This sounds like a fairly apt description of Hungary, Poland or Qatar - it does not sound remotely like an apt description of the US (pushback from Trump, deSantis and co. notwithstanding).
I think it's entirely possible for the US to be one of the most woke nations in the world AND one of the most anti-woke, which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from an extremely politically and culturally polarised nation.
Right - I agree. I don't think the U.S. is majority anti-woke, nor that it has "moved on". I think we're very polarized on that point. I DO think that, like communism, the majority of political talking points are coming from the right at this point (hence, the search hits), but that's an assertion based on personal experience and legislation in the news I've seen - I have no data to back that up.
If you're tabulating 'transgender' as a Google search term, you're getting a lot of porn searches. Maybe 'transgender (-tranny -shemale -futa)' would improve the data set a bit...
That's right, there are *infinite* genders. More genders than humans! Because everyone can change their gender every day if they want, or even multiple times per day, thereby rendering the concept completely meaningless.
Suggesting we should just go back to using sex as the discriminant, which everyone with even a quarter of a brain knows can't be altered by any amount of surgery.
You’re pretty off the mark when you say Canada is a “country full of white people”.
We have about 500k immigrants come to our country each year (~1.2% of population), most of whom are East and South Asian. Additionally, relations between aboriginals in Canada and “settler” Canadians is much more present in the national discourse than in the US.
Does it spook anyone else the top five countries are the Five Eyes?
Ooofff.
Yuck.
Don't send me down this rabbit hole. I do not want to go here.
Don’t lie. You kinda do.
Citizen this is an NSA alert, put down that keyboard, you've had too much to think.
> you've had too much to think
*applause*
Not original, I wish. :-)
Still, worth a clap, I think. Oh shit, Feds incoming! :D
THERE ARE MANY POSTS, YES FEDBOI?
Observation: In keeping with the old saw "Everyone is conservative about that which he knows best", I observe the correlation between the strength of woke views and personal disconnect from the subject matter, vis-a-vis the opposite tendency among people with opposite views - that is, the person who lives in a border town is most opposed to illegal immigration.
Living in a border state, can confirm. Four times as many people as legitimately live in the state have illegally crossed the southern border since Biden took office. I wonder if that has anything to do with rising rents and homelessness... Nah, couldn't be.
This seems wildly improbable. You're claiming the population of your state has risen by *at least* (even assuming zero legal migration) a factor of 5 in the last three years, entirely due to illegal immigration? That really can't be correct.
I don't think Mek said the population of their state had increased by at least a factor of 5, just that four times the population of the state had crossed the border - presumably not all of those people settled in that state.
No comment on whether the claim is true, just trying to parse it.
Ah, OK. That's admittedly not *quite* so absurd. I'm still quite skeptical, though. Only four states border Mexico (I assume no one is worried about illegal Canadian immigrants). New Mexico is by far the smallest of these, with 2 million . 8 million in 3 years is nearly 1% (of total US population) per year. Official US population growth is around 0.5% per year. So unless illegal immigration over the New Mexico border alone is more than 100% of total US population growth (not mathematically impossible, but seems unlikely), this doesn't really add up.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-crossings-fiscal-year-2022-topped-276-million-breaking-rcna53517
2.76M illegal border crossings in FY2022. It is indeed nearly 1% of the entire population of the country.
This is why we down here laugh when NYC or Chicago whine about a couple of thousand. That's like, an hour's worth.
And as for your earlier claim that there have been 8 million border crossings since January 2021?
I will grant that I did not specify explicitly, but I meant "the southern border of the country" not "the southern border of the state". Typical local parlance has "the southern border" meaning the national one but I can see how what I actually typed in could be unclear if one is not a local and having those sorts of conversations regularly.
I agree with you, that seems like a stretch.
No. I am claiming that 4 times as many people as are legal residents of my state -- New Mexico -- have illegally crossed the entire southern border of the United States, since Joe took office. The southern border also includes CA, AZ, and TX.
They certainly haven't all settled here, or there would undoubtedly already be a civil war in action, because yes, our population jumping from 2M to 10M in 3 years would *vastly* overstress the infrastructure here. We're poor, we're not highly populated, but things are getting grimmer than usual. I suspect some of the increase in housing costs and the homeless population have to do with illegal immigration.
Another way to look at it is that the equivalent of the entire population of New York City have illegally immigrated into the country since February of 2021.
New zealand is super woke, and it sucks. I believe a massive factor in the scale of any country's wokeness, and why the usa is perhaps less woke than you'd think: lack of mainstream press opposition. There is virtually no large non-woke press here in nz. Most everyone is getting the same news and it's all taking the line that there is forever white privilege and poor trans kids and so forth, and nobody is aware of the conversation even possibly going in another direction in usa, etc.
Track hate speech laws, is my theory: they correlate with wokeness
And thank your stars for 1a in usa 🇺🇸
Speaking as an Irishman, you might be surprised by how much Kendi-style anti-racist rhetoric there is, despite a black population even smaller than Canada's (something like 1.3%, according to the most recent census). See here:
https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/the-blacks-of-ireland-the-blacks-of-america
https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/the-journals-new-article-about-anti
https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/american-cultural-exports
They sure did a mindfuck on Australia, 30 years ago it was gun toting country of rugged individualists now it is among the most woke, gun grabbing, and authoritarian countries in the world. WTF happened there?
The St. Helena result might be from the use of VPN rather than be native interest.
Aha.
For all those terms, really have to question the searcher's disposition towards them. Is looking up "transgender" really a woke act? I know in 2020 I did a lot of searching for "Police on black violence" or something similar just trying to get to the bottom of things.
Also regarding Canada being woker the US (same for UK), I would think this is more about the state than the people. In the context of laws (speech, advertising), the police in London, the SNP in Scotland, Pronoun laws in canada, sexual assault court procedures. Those countries already have their nanny state proclivities and are much easier on the uptake for woke shit.
"Transgender" is not a great term for the list, because as someone else pointed out it's a porn search term. I think we'd see similar results if it was wiped out and replaced with something else though.
I encourage anyone to replicate the analysis and share their results. It only took me about an hour.
I think what you’ve stumbled upon is actually just an indicator of political divisiveness in the western universe. A lot of people searching these terms are actually conservatives and “anti-woke.” I think what you’re measuring is just general animosity between the aisles.
Can't be antiwoke without wokes.
Indeed. Who google searches the word “transgender” more? An SJW or an “ultra maga republican”? I don’t know.
I'm from the Philippines and most everyone is religious on paper. Whether they actually adhere to the religion is a different thing altogether - there are a lot of Sunday Catholics, and there are a lot of people who are genuine in their faith. I do agree with the findings so far - we're not very woke in general, since our concern is still solidly on getting ahead and building up our country, rather than having the money to argue over the pot.
Any arguing over the pot here is more a class thing than a social justice thing. Take this with a grain of salt, though, I try to keep out of politics and political discussion.
Also note that this methodology conflates anti-woke with woke. In my personal experience, I see more anti-woke content than woke content on the Internet, and that would of course show up as a positive signal in your research. Not so much "which countries are more woke?", as "which countries talk more about wokeness?"
It seems reasonable to assume there's a strong correlation between how much people in a country talk about wokeness and how much wokeness itself dominates the conversation. Anti-woke people aren't just tilting at windmills, generally speaking.
I disagree about that to the extent that anti-wokeness has become a successful political platform for the right. If woke terms are "played out" in liberal discourse, but are successful identity politics for the right (at least 20 states have passed anti-trans legislation, and de Santis declared Florida to be "where woke goes to die"), it's entirely conceivable that "electable" Democrats will avoid that terminology, whereas Republicans experience success using it as much as possible. During her hearings, Justice Jackson was asked by Republicans to define "woman". Democrats did not ask Justice Barrett the same questions. By these measures, it's possible that the U.S. used to be the most "woke" nation, whereas it's moved on to be the most "anti-woke". (Remember, we're measuring search terms here, not actual opinion)
To the question "what is a woman?", Justice Jackson responded by asserting that she wasn't a biologist and hence wasn't qualified to provide an answer or definition i.e. a textbook "woke" answer to the question. This seems like a rather poor example to illustrate your claim that wokeness is completely played out in progressive circles.
American progressives routinely express admiration for the way things are done in the more liberal European nations, but the fact of the matter is that numerous European nations not known for being bastions of conservatism (the UK and Finland among others) are pressing pause on gender-affirming care for trans children, while blue states are manifestly not. So I don't buy that the US is the most anti-woke nation in the world either.
Well, you confuse what I'm arguing here. I'm arguing that counting the number of times woke terms are used is not as clean a correlation to wokism as might first appear. I was arguing neither in favor nor against the claim that the U.S. is the most woke, nor that it is the most anti-woke. At some point you have to haggle over definitions, but the "most woke" nation possible would probably be one in which woke opinions aren't even controversial, and so don't rate high for Google searches. For example, if you do a Google Trends search for "capitalism", Tanzania comes up number 1. U.S. ranks high, but isn't in the top 5. On the other hand, try "communism" and you get the U.S. as the gold medalist. But that doesn't make us a communist nation. All it says about us is that it's another hot button topic (coincidentally, used almost exclusively by the right).
I see your point. But you seemed to be arguing that the US has "moved on" from being the most woke nation to being the most "anti-woke" nation, which by your own definition would be a nation in which woke opinions and policies have no foothold whatsoever and anti-woke opinions enjoy broad popular support. This sounds like a fairly apt description of Hungary, Poland or Qatar - it does not sound remotely like an apt description of the US (pushback from Trump, deSantis and co. notwithstanding).
I think it's entirely possible for the US to be one of the most woke nations in the world AND one of the most anti-woke, which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from an extremely politically and culturally polarised nation.
Right - I agree. I don't think the U.S. is majority anti-woke, nor that it has "moved on". I think we're very polarized on that point. I DO think that, like communism, the majority of political talking points are coming from the right at this point (hence, the search hits), but that's an assertion based on personal experience and legislation in the news I've seen - I have no data to back that up.
Living in the UK, I definitely *feel* the UK is significantly less woke than the US.
The US is very large. I highly suspect the UK is far more woke than Oklahoma, and far less than San Francisco.
Fair point.
If you're tabulating 'transgender' as a Google search term, you're getting a lot of porn searches. Maybe 'transgender (-tranny -shemale -futa)' would improve the data set a bit...
"Transition" would bring up a lot, especially regarding minors!
See also: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/gag
That's right, there are *infinite* genders. More genders than humans! Because everyone can change their gender every day if they want, or even multiple times per day, thereby rendering the concept completely meaningless.
Suggesting we should just go back to using sex as the discriminant, which everyone with even a quarter of a brain knows can't be altered by any amount of surgery.
You’re pretty off the mark when you say Canada is a “country full of white people”.
We have about 500k immigrants come to our country each year (~1.2% of population), most of whom are East and South Asian. Additionally, relations between aboriginals in Canada and “settler” Canadians is much more present in the national discourse than in the US.
I've found that if you put the word "conservative" in your search you or more likely to get a liberal viewpoint. Conflict rules the internet!