What would actually happen in conversation would be that I’d say something like “‘Woke’ means being aware of injustice. Are you saying that you’re in favor of injustice, or just that you’re in favor of ignoring it?” The conversation may still not go anywhere useful, but it’s not going to go where you’re imagining.
If the business owner feels that the cost isn’t justified for their particular business, then they won’t do it. Problem solved.
Anyone complaining that some particular businesses did decide to provide that access isn’t complaining about the cost.
Expressing that hatred and attempting to spread it to others can’t exactly be dictated by the recipients, either. But it sure as hell can and should be fought back against. Not just taken for granted as ‘oh well, some categories of people are just going to be loudly publicly hated (and occasionally beaten up or murdered as a result), and they’ll just have to put up with it.’
Sure reads to me like it’s your definition. You’re talking about what you consider to be ‘woke’, not just what you think others use the word for.
It accomplishes at least two sorts of good:
More people get to eat what they want to eat.
The business in question gets to make more money.
Now if the people complaining that it’s “woke” will come straight out and say that those are both bad things, then they might be able to claim that, under whatever name, it’s a bad thing that the restaurant’s offering vegan food. But if you ask them ‘should a Free Independent American be able to decide what he [probably sic] wants to eat for dinner?’ and ‘should an American Capitalist Business be able to decide what it wants to sell based on the demand of the Free Market?’ – they’re almost certainly going to say Of Course to both of those things.
So when they claim that they think the restaurant shouldn’t do those things – yes, they’re lying. Either they’re lying about Freedom and Capitalism, or they’re lying about the restaurant. Personally, I think it’s some of both.
Sorry, I was assuming both conversants used my definition. And I think my imagined conversation is infinitely preferable to yours.
For the cost I had in mind the public cost, something like the individual not getting necessary nutrients, cost cutting measures to make the vegan option affordable, or delays in food service due to measures taken against cross contamination. I read the above exchange like this, which makes your latest response a non-sequitur:
Why on earth would it not be a societal good for people to be able to get what they want to eat?
There’s a societal (or public) cost involved in providing that access, which may or may not be justified.
If the business owner feels that the business’s (private) cost isn’t justified for their particular business, then they won’t do it. Problem solved.
Anyone complaining that some particular businesses did decide to provide that access isn’t complaining about the business’s cost.
But I was thinking mostly about other examples. Imagine a restaurant that sources fruit from Columbia year round instead of using local orchards. Columbian growers will give them a discount. Order from local growers and from Columbians in the off-season, and they lose the discount. They decide it makes business sense to offer fruit year round with the Columbian growers. The public cost here, which is not at all a factor in the restaurant’s decision, is that the local growers lose business.
I think agricultural and industrial waste disposal are prime examples of public costs that don’t factor into a purely business decision, at least not unless regulators have teeth.
While I can’t disagree with any of this, I think we may have lost the line of conversation. I thought you were arguing that manufactured outrage - specifically, calling someone or something ‘woke’ - is a form of hatred.
That’s me explaining correct and incorrect uses of the pejorative ‘woke’. The whole purpose of that post was to clarify that my definition is more narrow than “liberal stuff that I don’t like”. You have it exactly backwards if you interpret that post as me saying ‘woke’ means stuff conservatives don’t like. I gave two examples of things conservatives don’t like which aren’t considered ‘woke’.
I meant ‘good for society or the public, on balance’. I’ve been bad at remembering to be explicit about this, sorry.
As I wrote when asked how to tell if NASCAR’s ban on confederate flags was woke or not,
There could easily be facts the business owner knows that the conservative, who accuses the owner of being woke, doesn’t. And it could very well be that if the conservative knew these facts, they would realize that the decision to offer vegan pizza is good for society. Or maybe it wouldn’t.
Or maybe in real life, conservatives wouldn’t describe a vegan entry at a pizza place as woke in the first place, because even if it was technically woke, it’s kind of an overreaction.
You know what I’ve never heard a conservative say? “Woke vegan”. But it’s part of the hypothetical I was presented with.
You know what I have heard though? “Woke” diet.
Yeah, my senators sure are something else, aren’t they?
Granted, the act is described as anti-woke and it includes restrictions on abortion access. Nevertheless that’s not a conservative saying “woke abortion”, because linguistically, that is improper use of ‘woke’ as a pejorative. They do say “woke ideology” which is perfectly compatible with my definition of the pejorative ‘woke’.
Make no mistake, Republicans will talk about woke ideology or woke policy or woke bills and it’s perfectly fine for them to have in mind ideology/policy/bills that protect the right to abortion. You shouldn’t find them talking about “woke abortion” or “woke inflation”, however. That use just makes no sense. (Sort of like saying “intelligent rock” makes no sense - rocks can’t be intelligent, abortion can’t be woke. But you can speak of intelligent rock designs, for instance).
(Ditto for the Sen. Scott page on the inflation report.)
This just happened recently. Fox News’s Dana Perino claims that it’s not possible to define woke. She instead uses the comparison to obscenity made by Oliver Wendel Holmes, who said “I know it when I see it.”
Nope, you lost me there. As well as your argument. Remember, the point I was making is that you are living in a nice bubble of information when your leaders can do such blatant dog whistles where the meaning is loud and clear to extremists that are willing to do harm to minorities, science and reason, and you are happy to ignore the crazy and the bigoted meanings that leaders of the conservative movement are giving to “woke”.
Max has drawn graphs. Provided lists. Told us about a restaurant owner who lied about where he got his meat. And I still don’t have a clue what they are trying to tell us here.
Max is telling us that woke apparently means everything, everywhere, all at once. I think that’s what they are saying.
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make. Most people who identify as ‘woke’ (non-pejorative) are Black. Total disconnect
when I’m talking with someone and they call something out as ‘woke’ (pejorative).
We’re talking about defining ‘woke’, and it would be a great disservice to communication to interpret all those people who say ‘woke’ in the pejorative sense as racist. They aren’t implying there’s something bad about Black people. That would border on wilful misinterpretation.
It works the other way too, when someone proudly proclaims that they’re woke, it’s wilful misinterpretation to read that as an admission of virtue signalling.
I’m not sure the second part happens much anymore. I’ve never heard a liberal refer to something they do as woke. When I hear the term used by liberals, it’s usually in the sense of many of the posters in this thread, I.e. trying to understand what exactly a conservative is saying when they use the term.
Take the example of the vegan that’s being discussed. The vegans I know would say something like “Being vegan means I’m animal friendly / helping the environment / eating to be healthier.” I’ve never heard anyone say “I’m vegan (support BLM, support LGBQT people, drive an electric car, whatever) because that’s the woke thing to do.”
These days it’s mostly used by conservatives, and as the link I posted above suggests, it’s not something they care to define, because they “know it when they see it.”
Sure it would. There’s other potential types of traitors. Someone that’s betrays their country for money is the easiest example to come up with, but I’m sure there’s other possibilities.
The other aspect to consider is that one can only be betrayed by someone on one’s own side. The queer trans black atheist woman, by that reckoning, might actually be less woke than General Milley.
So they’re just making noise without thinking about what, if anything, it means.
In which case they’re not using Max’s careful list of what he thinks does and doesn’t qualify as “woke”, either.
– and whoever first generated the lie about the restaurant was still lying. The stuff that gets repeated isn’t coming out of nowhere. It’s being deliberately fomented.
(I do agree that a lot of this stuff is repeated by people who are being deliberately lied to and who are getting only bad “information”, and not seeing/hearing anything to contradict the lies. That that’s the only information they’re getting is partly by their choice; but only partly, and it isn’t always a conscious choice.)
That strikes me as massively unlikely. I don’t think anybody other than you is using your definition.
Why?
First of all, I don’t see how any of those are “public” costs. The first would apply to the specific individual, and the second two only to the specific restaurant.
Second, in order if not in importance: if you’re concerned about the individual not getting necessary nutrients, why are you picking on the vegan pizza, and not on fast-food pizza in general? Pizza certainly can be a healthy food, but it very often isn’t. And nobody sensible gets all their nutrients from one type of meal, anyway. Many people can get all their needed nutrients from a vegan diet, presuming that they know what they’re doing. Nobody could get all their needed nutrients from a diet made up solely of, say, pepperoni-cheese pizza with a white-flour crust. Do you think those should be banned? I’m fairly sure that at least most of the people complaining about vegan options don’t think so.
In addition: Why would there be more cost cutting measures needed to make the vegan option affordable? Seems to me that something like a meat-eaters pizza is going to be more expensive to make.
And there are a whole lot of things that can possibly delay service. Is it a damage to society as a whole if a particular restaurant decides to make special orders? To provide sit-down service? To provide sit-down service that includes the type of table settings that take longer to change out between customers? To offer alcoholic drinks, which requires taking time to confirm the age of the people ordering them? To offer high chairs, which requires somebody’s time to schlep them out to the people who want them and then away from the next table of people, who don’t, and to clean them between customers? To allow small children, who spill stuff on the floor which needs to be cleaned up?
If you have a lot of vegan customers, and also a lot of non-vegan dishes, then you have more than one grill, and nobody’s slowed down anyway.
Our conversation went like this:
So you appear to be the one saying, or at least agreeing, that manufactured outrage is a form of hatred (I think someone else may also have said so earlier in the thread, though it wasn’t me); but you also appear to be saying that it’s “recreational”. Which to me, at least, implies that you’re saying it’s some sort of game that doesn’t matter; and you also appear to be saying that the resulting hatred is something that nothing can or should be done about.
I don’t think manufactured outrage is necessarily hatred in itself; the manufacturers may be doing so for a variety of reasons, including desires for money and/or power – but it often incites hatred.
They are “correct and incorrect uses” only according to your private definition.
Note @GIGObuster’s post half an hour before you repeated that.
– oh. You had seen it. You’re just saying
that since they’re using the word in a fashion that doesn’t match your definition, they’re not actually using it at all. Which makes no sense whatsoever.
This appears to be a misunderstanding. The context was “Manufactured outrage is recreational. Hatred is a wholly different beast.” I was distinguishing manufactured outrage from hatred. I mistakenly thought you were arguing that I was wrong, i.e. manufactured outrage is hatred. Glad we could clear that up.
Furthermore, I’m saying my definition is the same one conservatives use, even if they don’t realize it or are to dense to articulate it. I’m staking the most on-topic position I possibly can in this debate. I presented a definition of woke and I’m claiming it is the one everyone else uses - at least when used as a pejorative, which is the majority of usages these days. I tested my definition with a long list of use cases and I’m open to try and explain how it applies to any use case you can throw at me.
No, I’m saying they didn’t actually use the word in that fashion at all. Go and open up GIGObuster’s links. Nowhere will you see the word ‘woke’ in front of the ‘abortion’ or ‘inflation’.
Piffle, Trump and many conservatives also did not really said that covid was a hoax, so the plausible denial will be maintained, but the whistles continued and the result was that many died thinking that covid was a hoax anyhow.
Dog whistles not only work by making the base fall for a lie, they work by making the more intelligent miss that the plausible explanation leads them to not bother to set the record straight among that base.
Because instead of getting into a semantic argument about the meaning of the word ‘woke’, you could go straight into substance - why you disagree on something being a social good or not. Why you think it’s good for society to offer vegan food, why the hypothetical conservative thinks it is neutral or bad.
Or, you could spend all the time arguing who’s woke and who’s not. It’s not actually important who is or isn’t woke. Woke, like any word, is just an utterance or scrawling, the purpose of which is to facilitate communication of a more important idea.
More than one vegan, more than one individual, and besides the public is made of individuals. Satisfying their nutritional needs takes precedence over access to food they want, but maybe don’t need. Most vegans probably do get their needed nutrients via supplements or good planning. That’s probably true, I don’t know for sure. Good point about pizza not being too healthy, though strictly speaking that’s not a counterargument.
I don’t know what the price point is for vegans. In my experience vegetable heavy pizzas and pizzas with special cheese are priced similarly to meatlovers. Some places price all the specialty pizzas the same.
With regard to the list of things restaurants do that result in delays, none of those are relevant; only whataboutism can weigh those against the potential delay from isolated preparation of vegan dishes. But you are correct on the other point: if there are a lot of vegan customers and parallel prep stations, there will be minimal disruption.
But keep in mind we aren’t here to debate whether it is good for society when someone adds vegan pizza on the menu. I’m not even sure where I stand on that question. All I’m saying here is that it is possible for a reasonable person to judge the restaurant’s decision as neutral or even bad for society. Maybe not if they have all the facts but that’s usually not the case. If it’s possible for a reasonable person to think it doesn’t provide a public benefit, well, they’d have to think so to call it ‘woke’.
(It seems debatable to me whether veganism itself is actually good for society (as opposed to neutral or even slightly bad). Also, just because something isn’t good for society, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for society to ban. That’s a whole 'nother can of worms I’d rather not get into.)