This response indicates you didn’t read what I said.
I’m already getting tired of needing to say “I didn’t say that”.
This, thank you.
But is the time wasted by saying, “Hey in an email about school shootings, don’t use the phrase, ‘shoot me an email’.”? Or is it wasted in the pushback against it?
That seems to be the playbook, get you arguing with them about minutia, and then observe that you are spending all your time focused on minutia. The whole point is to derail and distract, to get in the way of more important work.
It would be like going to your doctor, and them saying, “You have pneumonia, here’s a treatment that will help with that. But your chronic recurring pneumonia is caused by a vitamin deficiency, you should either eat a more balanced diet or take supplements.” You argue with them about the benefits of vitamins for the rest of the visit, and leave the office telling everyone that the doctor didn’t want to talk about your pneumonia, only about vitamins.
A month later, since you ignored the advice, you get pneumonia again, but now you blame it on the doctor.
100% the former, since neither I nor anyone else said a word in pushback. I don’t know why others kept silent, but for me it was because I didn’t want to waste time in a back-and-forth over a triviality. Yet the committee still spent less than 10% of the meeting talking about things that matter, and almost all the meeting talking about how brave it was for the staffer who sent the email to talk about her error, and how important it was that we all interrogate ourselves in a similar manner, and how it was a model for equity, and so on.
No, it’s nothing like that. I guess that would be an entirely different thing that could happen, but it’s not the kind of thing that happened here.
No. Liberals don’t have a monopoly on awareness of social problems (and in fact have some obvious glaring gaps in their awareness by virtue of being liberals).
I’m not a liberal, and I’m very aware of social problems.
Short meetings then. Or at least very badly planned and executed. I don’t see how a list of things that are considered to be problematic should take more than ten minutes or so, if no one is objecting to it. Maybe the presenters were not able to organize their information well, and took longer than they needed to.
I’m just not seeing how you end up spending 90% of your time on things that don’t matter. But I now see that you’ve done an edit to flesh things out a bit, and I’ll agree that a meeting is not the best time for an awards banquet.
But, to me, it sounds like whoever is running your meetings needs to review Robert’s Rules or even better a contemporary update to them, that sounds like the problem.
Then I’d say that you are the exception, as that is how it plays out time and time again.
For real, how many progressive meetings do you go to that are run according to Robert’s Rules? I go to like 2-3 meetings a week, we’re talking meetings with land acknowledgments and pronoun declarations and titles like “Mass meeting” and “Equity Committee.” Of those, I think one meeting a year follows Robert’s Rules.
But very few of the meetings go down rabbit holes in the way this one did.
Why? Why do institutions inherently deserve respect? Institutions should earn respect based on their behavior.
I mean they shouldn’t automatically be disrespected either. We have an entire movement doing everything they can to destroy all of our institutions and our entire democracy right now.
Parliamentary procedure can’t fix a culture that doesn’t understand the difference between form and substance. It only determines the order that people talk about their pet concerns. If you’re not convinced, spend a little quality time watching Congressional proceedings on C-SPAN.
No, they should
Like I said earlier.
I disagree. Yes we should work to improve them, but your stance means the nihilists will succeed. I’m not ready to live in a country without institutions, at the whim of those who destroyed them.
Respecting why we have institutions is not the same as thinking they are perfect.
Maybe you’re thinking of “institutions” in the narrow sense of business organizations like banks or the Federal Reserve. But in the broad sense of the term, social institutions are the essential underpinnings of civilization. Without them, all we have is anarchy. It shouldn’t be controversial that kids should be brought up to respect civilization
As readers of this message board know, going down rabbit holes happens whenever participants lose focus.
How are “compassion and love” not "“feelings” and passion?
I get very tired of people saying, in effect, ‘My opinions are based entirely on facts and reason but my opponents’ opinions are based on emotion!’ Everybody’s opinions and stance on issues are based on emotion. If you had no emotions, you couldn’t want anything, you couldn’t care about anything – you wouldn’t care whether you or your child or neighbor had a job or not, had a home or not, were being lynched or not.
Ideally, people seek out facts in order to sort out how to best apply their emotions, instead of leaping into emotion-filled opinions without checking into what’s actually going on. Being “woke”, in the original sense, was exactly about doing that – about becoming more aware of the facts of the situation.
Being “woke”, in the accusatory sense, is just a noise. Partly because many of the people using it that way aren’t looking, in a rational fashion, into the facts of what the word means. (Some people of course know exactly what it means when it’s used with actual meaning, but have realized they can use it as a cudgel to drive others the way they want them to go, and are doing so.)
The OP does not appear to me to be asking for definitions of “woke”. The OP appears to me to be asking why people are objecting to the word and/or idea, and why some are saying that it’s hard to define. The OP starts off with a definition, and then asks
– and, as LHOD says, yes we’re having a debate. Did you think a debate was a discussion in which everybody agrees with each other?
FWIW, my answers to the original question are: it’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. Some specific things that people are discussing doing about it may be bad things, most of them are good things, some may be reasonably debatable. But being aware of a situation is a good thing.
And it’s not a difficult thing to define – except that as LSLGuy says, people who are opposed to doing anything at all about injustice and would prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist, as well as people who are in favor of injustice, are refusing to recognize the definition and are instead insisting that the actual definition is ‘people trying to insist we all do silly and obnoxious things about a nonexistent problem.’ And they’ve convinced enough people that this is now, indeed, an alternative definition; because that’s how language works.
Yeah, I’d like to see an answer to that also.
I don’t spend any significant part of my time listening to preachers of any sort. But a couple of them came up on my first page of Google results. And I read, all the time, about Christian preachers railing against trans rights. They don’t, of course, represent all Christian preachers; but blaming this specifically on Islam looks very squicky to me.
if what you were saying was that you think Islam is a “fringe view” – do you have the remotest idea how many Muslims there are in the world?
I certainly didn’t, until I read wolfpup’s post, and I am grateful to them for posting it.
ETA: And from the context in which Moonrise has been addressing the term, I wouldn’t lay a lot of money on the line over the question of whether they did, either.
FWIW, although Iran is far, far from a paradise for transfolk, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah in the eighties calling for the respect of transgender rights.
Shit’s complicated.
I didn’t say follow them, I said review them, you know for tips on how to run an effective meeting.
I run meetings, I don’t follow Robert’s Rules, but knowing them and other ways of organizing a meeting helps to get through all that needs to be gotten through.
That’s my point, it really sounds like a failure to run a meeting effectively than any issue with the content.
I earlier took it that you meant that 90% of the time in meetings was spent on this stuff, and that this meeting was just an example of a typical one. If it was just this one meeting that went off the rails, then that’s really not as harmful, at least not on the sort of systemic basis that would give any sort of meat to the complaint that the Left spends all its time on these subjects.
And it doesn’t matter the merits of the subject of a meeting if it is not well organized.
Nihlists will succeed if we judge institutions based on their actions rather than blidnly following them? I don’t think I follow that logic.
The only way this stance makes sense is if you assume that all institutions are inherently so bad that if we took a good hard look we’d decide to abolish them.
So if I was born in the 1800s, you’d have me raising my kids to respect the institution of slavery just because it’s the institution in place and the country relies on it?
Saying this with respect, I really need you to read me more carefully here. I am neither trying to give meat to that sort of complaint, nor saying that the left spends all its time on those subjects. In fact, I specifically repudiated that in my first post.
I AM agreeing with:
As part of the left, I think we have specific things that sometimes crop up that we need to do better about. This is an example of one of them.
I don’t have to think the left is without flaw to work passionately for the leftist causes I believe in. In fact, I suspect that the more you’re involved in leftist organizing work and activism, the more you’ll realize both that the flaws are there, and that in no way do they undermine the core ideals nor the activists doing the good work.