That’s my point. You almost certainly do not consider yourself to be obnoxious in your pursuit of fighting in justice. Yet you have beliefs that others have labeled woke.
What I specifically had in mind when writing that are how they object to characters in fiction who are trans. That’s considered “woke” in a TV show or book. I also thought about history books that want to acknowledge trans people in them.
That was painful to watch. As the saying goes, if you can’t explain something briefly in simple terms, then you don’t really understand it. She claims she wrote a whole chapter about “wokeness” in her new book, but apparently can’t explain what’s in it.
But she scored on one prescient prediction – that this video was going to go viral! 
I’d feel sorry for her if she wasn’t a dangerous lunatic spreading lies from the far right.
I wouldn’t limit it to that, but certainly that’s one factor. But, as @RickJay says, the real answer is to properly investigate. Are there real arguments by serious folk against being “woke”? In general, I suspect that you could find things under the following buckets:
But likewise, there are more real aspects of life like allergies or athletic prowess that you might not realize you have until later in life. But you ask a toddler what allergies he has and tell him that it’s really really important that he decide which ones he has, to protect himself, and he’s going to think about whether there was anything weird about any fruits or vegetables that he had. Lemons make his face all tight so…he’s allergic to lemons? That’s what he says. You ask him if he’s strong or fast or stretchy and he’s going to answer that, too, all based on nothing.
If everyone tells the kid that you can’t just decide whether you’re allergic to lemons then, sure, when he gets older, he’s going to look up what an allergic reaction is like, realize that that’s not what he had with lemons, and he’ll try a lemon again. And if everyone tells him that strength is something you build over time, limited by genetics, then he’ll accept that.
But if, instead, everyone told the kid that he just needs to trust and have faith in his earlier decision then he’ll feel like he needs to stick with it and avoid citrus. He’ll go his whole life avoiding the fruit, because of an uninformed declaration that he made as a toddler. He’ll be confused that he’s weaker than someone of his identity should be.
Ultimately, there’s a right order for things. You might tell young kids that there is such a thing as allergies, but it makes no sense to be pushing allergies on them and making them feel like they should have some. It would be bizarre to ask them what allergen type they identify as when they’ve never even had any reactions to anything and given you no indication to think that they’re allergic to anything and when all indications are that allergies are fairly uncommon.
Later, when they start showing symptoms of a reaction then, sure, you give them the talk about what they need to do about this new element of their life.
And if someone is saying, “This guy is telling young kids that they need to decide what allergies they have. That makes no sense.” Maybe that guy is a far right troll who distrusts doctors. But maybe that’s just the reasonable position and there’s no deeper read on it. You should look at what’s actually being said and taking it face value, minus reason to believe otherwise.
What are you even talking about? No one goes around asking children what animal they identify as. That’s something the anti-woke people made up. (Or maybe they were trolled.) There’s a reason the guy who goes on about “litter boxes” was made fun of.
Your allergy thing seems to be based on that, but makes even less sense. Allergies are an immune response, not something you can identify as. And children without allergies do in fact learn about allergies, because they need to be aware of others who have them. Even before you learn about them in health class, you need to know that Jeremy will get sick if you give him peanut butter, and that, if Alice starts wheezing and turning blue, you need to get an adult’s attention.
I’ll give you this: the stuff you’re saying here makes about as much sense as some of the anti-woke stuff I’ve heard—usually from those who read and believe all the outrage-bait articles about how woke people are this threat that are taking over. They’re the ones I have the most sympathy for, since they’re often just gullible and scared of change.
Without putting words in @Sage_Rat’s mouth, I beleive the animals and allergies thing was a well-written metaphor for asking kids about sexual orientation before they’re old enough to fully understand what “sexual orientation” even is, much less the consequences of choosing any given path. And implicitly he’s suggesting that however old that is, it sure doesn’t include kids who still live with their parents.
Hell, I’m 64, plain hetero-interested, and I’m not sure what sexual orientation is in all its nuanced variations.
I think he’s written a nice metaphor as far as it goes. The difference of course is that sexual orientation is self-evidently a lot more innate than is believing one is an, e.g., raccoon.
So now we see the real issue. it is that wacky parents can confuse and mislead and mis-raise their kids. And kids can make naturally make dumb decisions given a bit of peer pressure, parental pressure, or just a desire to be non-conformist or “special”. And if they do so in the sexual orientation department, especially if pre-pubescent or nearly so, and any sort of medical or psychological treatment follows, then something totally awful and unprecedentedly abusive has been done. Said more baldly: if parents or kids are permitted to make decisions about sexual orientation, that’s anathema.
Seems to me we do far more damage in the world by permitting, nay encouraging, a large fraction of parents to teach a large fraction of kids primitive beliefs about invisible sky people ruling over everyone and everything than we do by permitting a tiny fraction of kids and parents to handle (or even mis-handle) sexual orientation anomalies that are a totally real, if statistically rare, phenomena.
In a country where WAG 10,000 parents beat their child for every one who confusedly and wrongly persuades the kid they’re transsexual, I think I know which social ill ought be cured first.
…it isn’t a metaphor. Not in certain mainstream right-aligned echo chambers. Not accusing Sage Rat of believing this of course, but there are a not insignificant number of people, including high profile pundits and politicians, who either believe or propagate the idea that schools are encouraging children to identify as animals. The recent story about a transgender clinic in St Louis, for example, centres around the claim that one of the patients “identified as a helicopter.”
More on that:
It’s complete and utter nonsense, of course. But Singal has a significant audience and his message has been boosted by many prominent people that align to the so-called-centre.
It’s not a belly-itcher?
I’m not sure what you mean here. And how would you handle the case of Mack Beggs? He’s transitioning from female to male and taking testosterone to get there, but wants to wrestle boys. The state of Texas said no, you must wrestle girls, and he dominated. Now they say he can, but he must stop taking testosterone.
Maybe letting him wrestle boys is woke?
Or maybe it makes no sense because it is something that is not actually happening. That any stories of children being told what to be allergic to are simply bullshit put out by those trolls.
So, you are right, it’s possible that he’s not a troll, but instead has chosen to listen to the trolls for his information as to what is going on in the world, and has walled himself off from doing any “investigation” of his own.
It’s always like this, isn’t it? The far right needs to be understood, we need to coddle them and tell them that they are right about all their fears. But they don’t have to do any work of their own, not only to tell if those fears have any basis in reality whatsoever. They just tune into their echo chambers, mute the rest of the world, and follow the hive mind that they have chosen to join.
Do you think that those on the right have no agency, or just no responsibility to exercise it?
And I’d say that we need to cure both. Damage is damage, no matter how many victims are involved.
I was having a talk with a guy about a month ago. In the course of our conversation, he mentioned the fact that he had transitioned from female to male 5 years ago, in his late 20s. Although he didn’t look like a stereotypical alpha male, I’d never have guessed. It was an open and light-hearted conversation, so at one point I joked that he didn’t have to worry about having periods anymore. He replied that actually yes, he still had periods, explaining that he had stopped the transition half-way through because he’d had second thoughts. Then, he said he was furious against the people who had not just helped him, but actually encouraged and even pushed him to do it the first place and who now do not want to have anything to do with him because he’s a “traitor”. His argument boiled down to “there are people out there who play a nasty political game of using the confusion that some people like me experience, then turn their backs on us when we don’t stick to the programme”.
This gives me pause. It certainly echoes the unease I’ve felt recently with some of the woke agenda. I feel that absolutely legitimate calls for justice and equality are being drowned in an ocean of hatred and extremism that is no better than that of right-wing nutjobs. I’ve always considered myself very liberal, and still do. But I’m really concerned by the recent apparition of extremism in our ranks. Perhaps I just don’t get it anymore. Perhaps I’m right to find this worrying.
All in all, I find myself very much aligned with @Sage_Rat 's post.
And I know, anecdote is not data. And my post is my cite.
There is such a thing as prioritization. Only so much can be done. So, the question is, do we prioritize making right wing trolls and their followers feel better about their ignorance and lack of agency, or do we prioritize actual child abuse?
Not saying that it’s not worth focusing a tiny fraction of our attention on the former, but it seems as though that’s all the right wing wants to focus on now.
Interesting anecdote. It would be more interesting to actually hear this from his perspective, rather than third hand, as third hand is next to useless n this sort of context. “People are saying” seems to be the go to these days, but it is not a cite.
But, assuming that everything was relayed perfectly, it sounds like an individual who chose to rescind his own agency, and is now complaining that he is unable to make his own decisions, depending entirely on the opinions of others in order to try to find his own way.
No one is going to be happy or fulfilled that way.
I’m not sure why, as what you described has nothing to do with “woke”, much less any sort of agenda.
Maybe you have unease about some of the woke agenda because the only people who define what that is are far right trolls?
Tell you what, why don’t you tell us what you think the “woke agenda” is, what you object to it, and we can see if we can do anything to alleviate your unease.
Okay, are you agreeing with him that it is important to properly investigate, or do you take at face value the fallacious implications made in that post?
It is essential to investigate, and that includes the motivations and potential effects of demands made by our side.
You’re right. But that’s unfortunate (the situation, not the fact that you’re right). In an ideal world, all forms of abuse should be addressed.
I know and I presented it clearly as such. If you find it irrelevant, fair enough.
What I understood was that he was angry at the people who now refused to hear about his change of mind because it did not fit their interest.
That was an unfortunate choice of words. My bad.
Something I deeply object to is the existence of sensitivity readers.
Having (self-proclaimed ?) experts judging what can and what cannot be said and rewriting novels. Wrong, misguided, despicable and above all supremely arrogant. Why not try teaching critical reading of texts instead of mutilating works of art ?
The right wing is incredibly successful at focusing people on these irrelevant issues. I literally have a list of over 300 of these things, that’s why this country has not done a single great thing since we put somebody on the moon. The amount of effort these people put into wasting millions of people’s productivity and time, freaking out the socially and emotionally weak re: these culture war issues surely has some macroeconomic impact… none of it good.
Don’t be so sensitive to what others do with art.
Hum, OK. Thanks. I guess…
This made me laugh harder than it should have.
The sensitivity is coming from you, not the piece of art. If you don’t like the piece of art, you can just ignore it.
It’s legitimately not that difficult to not get upset over changes to a book we’ve never read.
Then why rewrite it ?
I will say, as somebody who fancies myself as an writer, I rewrite and repurpose my stuff all the time. And I do it because the audience is different.
It’s that simple. It’s called capitalism: positioning your products so they achieve the maximum amount of sales in our society. And it’s not worth getting upset over.
Because they want to. Art for the sake of art, and so on. Artists are going to make and remake art as their wont.
We can adore or abhor or ignore their art.
(Ninja’d multiple times by JohnT–stop editing your post. 
)
@John T
Will you be changing your own works after you’re dead ?
Are you OK with people who have never known you or the times you lived in, decide that what you wrote is offensive and that it needs to be purified ?
As for writing books being about capitalism… let’s just say we have very different definitions of Art.