Was there?
I ask because I’ve been repeatedly told that Disney “went woke” with that move. I’m trying to resolve that with your definition.
Woke and flimflam are two different words with different meanings, and there’s also more than one definition of woke.
ETA: Flimflam is like nonsense, strong connotation of trickery. Flimflam artists are scam artists, and just like “scam artist” it is often used as hyperbole. You could argue that Disney’s hesitancy with the whole Don’t Say Gay fiasco proves the Lightyear thing was just virtue signalling. You can also argue that Disney/Pixar isn’t monolithic and the decisions at one level don’t reflect the decisions at another level, or that Disney changed course on the bill in the end.
~Max
I’m confused. Corporate token virtue signaling, e.g., putting up rainbow flags in June, is widely discussed on the left. It’s real different from the nonsense that Fox News talks about; for one thing, it’s a problem.
In my experience token virtue signaling is very often (but not always) the direct referent when someone uses “woke” in a pejorative sense.
~Max
But we already have a pejorative for that – we call it virtue signaling.
Eta: so there’s a venn diagram, one circle is virtue signaling and the other is woke. Sometimes they overlap, but not always. How does knowing this help us?
For the most part, no, it quite literally is not. The people who yelled at Guardsmen during the end of desegregation are very old now. While I’m sure many get from Fox news that they should hate “woke”, who’s actually conducting this train?
Bethany Mandel is 37.
Tucker Carlson is 53.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is 48.
There’s all kinds of people bitching about “Woke” who are in their 20s, 30s and 40s. These people were born long after the civil rights movement.
I don’t hear that term as often from the political right, except when quoting the political left. In fact I haven’t heard “virtue signaling” in organic conversation ever. It’s a newer and more academic term and I’m guessing it has much less currency on the right than the left, similar to how the pejorative “woke” has less currency on the left than the right.
ETA: A concrete example, Greg Gutfeld on Fox’s ‘The Five’ last September (source)
There’s another little uglier part going on here. Unilever is like a really, really, really wealthy person who brags about giving to charity, even though it’s a tiny percentage, they never give enough to feel it. So, what they’re asking and demanding of other companies, they can’t do. So, all these – all these big giant companies, they are virtue signaling. They’re saying, look how good we are. We care about social issues, and we care about – they’re only doing it to cover their asses and we know that. That’s all this – that’s all the woke corporate policy is, it’s to keep the activism out of their front and backyard.
~Max
When it is twisted into a pejorative, yes.
Compare virtue signalling with this blurb from NBC in 2021,
Among conservatives, “woke” has been adopted as term of derision for those who hold progressive social justice views. In particular, the word’s right-wing connotation implies a “woke” person or entity is being performative or phony. It’s directly linked to language like “political correctness” and “cancellation” — which are also at the forefront of conservative messaging.
I speculate that many or even most conservatives added the term to their political vocabularies after Kaepernick.
~Max
…you’ve sure gone a long way just to prove that this has nothing to do with woke.
Not the real woke, anyway. Just the invented description that you are choosing to use for the purposes of this debate.
We are under no obligation to indulge you here. If “wokeism” and “virtue signalling” are the same things to you, thats fine. You can do anything you want in the privacy of your own home.
But that isn’t even close to the original meaning of the word. And it isn’t close to how most of us on the boards are using it. And it isn’t even close to how many who use it as a pejorative choose to use it. This thread is literally called “defining woke.” The very least you can do is provide a more concrete definition of the term, and a better example than what you did.
Yeah, as if we’ve all got a blurb from a US based network filed away on speed dial.
How about we agree to disagree?
I meant your definition of virtue signalling, not for you to consult the NBC article every time you encounter virtue signalling. (Or this Vox article, linked by another member upthread, which also mentions a performative connotation.)
~Max
…in a thread called “defining woke?”
I think not.
To be honest: it isn’t really clear what you mean. At all. Almost everything in marketing has a “preformative connotation.” But that doesn’t mean all marketing is virtue signalling. Its just marketing.
Late on that, conservatives, even the ones in congress; are adding things like vaccination to what “woke” is supposed to mean among them.
It shows how that term is a great dog whistle now, it is harder now to acknowledge by many conservative moderates and a good number of independents that they are being blindsided by the changing meanings that the extreme right is giving to that word.
Mind you, that wasn’t always the case with “woke.”
It wasn’t so long ago that “woke” was a slang term from Black America, and it meant something substantive and easy to define. To be “woke” was to refuse to be complacent about social injustice. This definition offended Republicans, whose very existence depends on complacency in the face of social injustice. So as an act of very racist revenge, they appropriated the term “woke,” turning it into a catch-all insult for anything that annoys them.
“Woke,” you see, expands and contracts depending upon the momentary needs of authoritarian figures like DeSantis. When teachers are stocking shelves, “woke” is a massive category, covering thousands of books, to the point where it’s easier not to let kids read at all. But when deflecting criticism, “woke” is minuscule, covering almost no books at all. The brilliance of “woke” is that it is Schrödinger’s cat as a political concept. A book is both “woke” and “un-woke,” depending on the moment. In the classroom, the book is “woke” and forbidden. Outside, when speaking to reporters, it’s not “woke.” Indeed, the victims are blamed for misreading “woke,” probably because they are too “woke,” but of course, they will never actually be told what it would take to not be “woke.”
This is hardly the first time that Republicans have latched onto deliberately amorphous terms to convey a sense of outrage while evading responsibility to define what exactly the hell they are on about. “Marxism,” “socialism,” “political correctness,” “demonic,” “sexualization”: The world of right-wing propaganda is rife with terms that have been appropriated and rendered meaningless, allowing conservatives to apply them to everything. A Republican loves an empty signifier. Specificity invites rational discourse. And rationality is the death of reactionary politics.
What ever happened to CRT?
Swallowed by the latest definition of woke among hard conservatives.
…from Max’s article that is being used as evidence of “wokeism”:
This isn’t a story about “wokeism”.
Its a story about lying. The restaurant owner is lying. The food isn’t coming from where he says its coming from.
Rich people falsely advertising their products doesn’t have anything to do with “woke.”
Well, we disagree about that. It’s fun to say marketing is misleading, but I am of the opinion that most is substantive. Marketing is a broad category of communication and the vast majority of goods for sale or services offered do in fact do what they are represented to do.
Even if it were true that most marketing is performative rather than substantive, it does not follow that all marketing is virtue signalling and your stating so is wholly irrelevant to the discussion as I see it. I claim that there exists a market for wokeism, and that virtue signalling exploits this market. I do not think all marketing is virtue signalling.
~Max
I don’t know about blindsided. If you ask most people for a definition of “woke”, they will be perfectly aware of its nebulous nature. But I think if you ask someone (not a politician) exactly what they mean when they describe something tangible as “woke”, they’ll have no problem dereferencing the term for you in that specific context. I’m sure conservatives (not politicians) complaining about how the DoD is woke will have no difficulty telling you whether they think mandatory vaccinations are a woke policy.
ETA: My personal experience is that most of the time, when someone uses woke as a pejorative, they mean behavior which, whether misguided or with deceptive intent, appears to be progressive but doesn’t actually accomplish good. Fits for almost all use cases I’ve encountered, including with one exception the ones you linked. YMMV.
~Max
…you mean like:
“Coke is it!”
What is it, anyway?
“Just do it.”
Just do what?
Most marketing isn’t substantive. It isn’t outright misleading, but what the people in the article you cited were doing was lying. They were literally making stuff up. Claiming things were happening when they were not.
That isn’t virtue signalling. That’s just lying.
And you cited a case where the owners were lying. They lied. It has nothing to do with woke.
Speaking of being wholly irrelevant to the discussion as (we) see it:
Is this it?
Is this single example the very best you can do?
A random restaurant claimed he bought pork from a small Tallahassee farm but…
SHOCK HORROR
He didn’t!
He lied.
He told a porky. (Get it? Pork, pig, porky, its a pun)
How is this, in any way, shape or form, even tangentially relevant to the topic at hand?
And you are accusing me of getting off-topic?
People that consider themselves woke are simply “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”
The bolded parts are important here. Because while sustainable, locally sourced food is an important issue, if you consider yourself woke, and if you are concerned about racial and social justice, then you are much more likely to be concerned about food deserts, and prioritising access and affordable food, than anything to do with food sustainability.
I think sustainable, locally sourced food is great for a variety of reasons, none of them virtue signalling. And I’ll go out of my way to support them, because I’m a small business myself, and if locals didn’t support me, then I’d find myself quickly out of business.
I’m in the target market. But it isn’t because I am allegedly woke. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
No, not like those.
I still disagree. Marketing is more than just copy from television adverts - Coca Cola somehow manages to get the message across that it sells soft drinks. Somehow, all of the goods and services that you sought out for their functionality got the message across that they provide that functionality.
I disagree. Some virtue signalling is lying, such as when restaurants represent themselves as sensitive to the plight of local farmers but actually don’t give a shit.
If you were correct, no significant number of people would describe vaccine mandates or climate change initiatives as woke. People do so describe those policies as woke, and I think you are wrong.
You might contribute to the market for wokeism precisely because you are sensitive to the issue of sustainable, locally sourced food. If you seek out goods or services because you doing so furthers a societal issue, unless you verify the legitimacy of each good or service with respect to that issue, you could contribute to the market for wokeism.
Note that I’m not calling you woke (in the pejorative sense), because it makes sense to me that buying locally sourced food is generally a good thing to do, even if I don’t do it. I happen to buy most of my groceries from a farmer’s market, but exclusively because of the price and convenience.
I picked an issue that is local to me of the top of my head when specifically asked to provide a single example, even if it was written a few years before I moved here. That was one example from a series of investigative reporting that demonstrated a systemic issue in the local economy.
~Max