I think the spinelessness thing comes from the abject apologies that are de rigeur when called out by internet activists:
Most definitely, if the competition is Al Gore.
The GOP doesn’t need a spelled out platform. Whatever Democrats are for, they’re against it. That’s their platform. It’s one of the few things Mitch McConnell has been consistently honest about.
Apparently not in 1971. From the New York Times:
Gov. Ronald Reagan cut California’s budget today by more than a half billion dollars. Items for education, welfare and medical care bore the brunt of the slash.
Even with the cut, the budget Mr. Reagan signed was not a balanced one. He said he hoped to negotiate with the Democratic majority in the Legislature for further cuts in welfare.
From a quick read, there were ambiguous requirements for a balanced budget that could be bypassed with the agreement of the legislature. However, an actual balanced budget requirement was enacted in 1983, and then further reinforced through a later amendment and court rulings.
Well, this is an old example, but how about the Occupy Wall Street protestors in London who protested against capitalism, but went into Starbucks to buy coffee, use the toilet, and charge their phones?
Also Prince Harry, who was happy to both make speeches on the importance of being environmentally frugal, and to take private planes.
More generally there are legions of people who are happy to be social justice warriors and environmental scolders on Facebook and Twitter, but do practically nothing in real life. I mean if you’re going to post that Save the Earth meme, maybe you should think about the message you’re sending when you’re also posting pictures of yourself tailgating beside your 2-ton 4x4.
Then there’s the vegetarians and vegans who are avoiding meat to save the planet while eating smashed avocado on toast and drinking almond milk.
But mostly I was discussing the fact that millions of people embraced the “woke” label and proclaimed it about themselves, but then dropped the label when people started making fun of it. I know it was just jumping on a bandwagon, but it does make me question how heartfelt their other principals are.
And in terms of the OP, I think that perceived shallowness of the left helps the Republican Party retain non-left voters.
I’m sorry, but no. Al Gore is no Ronald Reagan but he is easily on par with GWB.
Republicans caught shit in a bottle with Trump. We (the country) are paying for it but the GOP is in some disarray right now. They’re all afraid to throw their hat into the presidential ring because of what Trump might do. There are serious law suits hanging over the conservative media stations and legal vultures are circling the Trump swamp.
Perhaps the best thing that could happen to the GOP is for Trump to be convicted and thrown in jail. Then they could fall all over themselves claiming to pick up the mantle and fight for Trump.
The GOP is doing just fine. GOP state legislatures are passing restrictive voting laws while the Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches have to beg their own members to pass HR1 to avoid a potential 2022 trouncing. Democrats can’t get out of their own way when they are driving.
Like I said. The GOP always plays like they have more to lose.
That “because” is quite misleading. They apologised for mixing up the playwrights. They cancelled the program because the playwrights had decided they no longer wanted to be involved in the scheme they were a key part of. The theatre did not, as implied, decide to cancel the program just because they made the mistake. At most you could criticise the playwrights for overreacting to the mistake (if that was even the reason for their withdrawal - it’s not stated specifically) but it wasn’t the “very left-wing theatre in left wing Islington” being “woke” here that caused the cancellation, nor who demonstrated “shallow spineless pretentiousness” as you assert. Would you care to provide a different example?
But thank you again for another example for my point. You may have made an understandable error here (the piece is rather sparing on details), but the right-wing media is full of deliberate misrepresentations of similar events. It is not the left that has made “woke” a parody; it is a concerted effort on the part of the right to first make it a term of ridicule and then to apply it with as broad a brush as they can get away with, to the point where even things like “teaching actual historical events” or “suggesting that the police shouldn’t kill black people with impunity” are being tarred with the “woke” slur. Much in the same way as they did “political correctness” previously, they have successfully made “not being an overt asshole” somehow worthy of disdain.
I mentioned Laurence Fox above, whose entire shtick is complaining about the “tyranny of the woke mob” who are actually holding him accountable for a quite a large number of questionable statements (like claiming that Meghan Markle wasn’t subject to racist abuse but he as a white male was, that the appearance of a Sikh soldier in the film 1917 was “forced diversity”, and for his vocal “All Lives Matter” support). As I said, it’s deliberate - first you characterize “woke” as ridiculous, and then you use that characterization to dismiss criticism of actual bigotry and discrimination.
Are you suggesting that media such as the Times aren’t filled with politically-motivated anti-Left exaggeration created with ill intent by the right wing? Because they kind of are. I realize that it’s easier to handwave such characterizations away as partisan bias, but it’s not remotely subtle.
As an example, a cursory search of right-wing newspapers such as the Times and the Telegraph turns up a whole plethora of stories about “social media outrage, campaigns for mass call-outs, cancel culture, and calls for boycotts”, although ironically it’s “woke culture” they want to protest, boycott, cancel, and stir up outrage about. I mean, the Telegraph had an article last week called “Drop the ‘woke’ posing and stick to your day job, companies told”, which is paywalled but which refers to a study conducted by Frank Luntz that reports on an already heavily-biased study in inflammatory terms, and that’s just one of several similar recent articles railing against wokism in such language. Those are not just pointing out examples of overreactions to “trivial or non-existent harms” by the left; they are overreactions to trivial or non-existent harms by the right.
Anyway, thank you for continuing to provide evidence that the right-wing representations of what “woke” means are at best incorrect and at worst deliberate calumnies.
How about them? Are they relevant here? Was “woke” a thing for the OW crowd?
Does Harry describe himself as “woke”?
How many people does this apply to? Rough estimate?
I feel this is drifting off into the weeds now.
Did “millions” do that? On what are you basing all these shallow and pretentious characterizations of woke people? Are they based on those Times articles you’ve been reading?
Yes, you’re quite right that that carefully-cultivated perception does help the Republican Party retain non-left voters.
These are great examples of hypocrisy, which is of course universal to the human experience, but I still don’t see spineless. And if you use hypocrisy as a marker of sincerety, I’m afraid nobody is sincere about anything ever. Humans are walking contradictions and always will be.
It might also help to keep in mind that liberals believe the solutions to social problems are systemic. They often actively combat the claim that these things can be fixed with individuals taking personal responsibility. It’s not really contradictory in that light.
I have a degree in macro social work from a very progressive department of a stodgy old university. I work at an explicitly feminist, anti - racist organization. In my years of experience with progressive politics, I’ve rarely if ever heard anyone describe themselves as “woke.” I’ve heard, occasionally, “stay woke,” as an exhortation to question one’s own assumptions and check one’s own privilege. Maybe some people took it a bit further, but I’m skeptical of this idea that hordes of liberals were ever clamoring to identify themselves as woke.
Uh, then you were not aware of the origin. Really.
Right. Incidentally, what many right-wingers miss is that they are being manipulated into a very similar behavior that racists used to shame other whites that decided to support change that benefited blacks and other minorities in the recent past. Before it was to call the whites in favor of that “N**** lovers”. Can’t do that now, so demonizing “woke” and other behavior from whites that are supporting change is the way now.
You don’t have any more information than I do, or if you do you’re not citing it. You’re just interpreting it in a different way. I didn’t even put any right-wing spin on the facts of the incident, other than stating that the theatre and Islington are left wing. Go visit the Almeida Theatre’s website. Read their About Us page and try to tell me they’re not left-wing.
But since you’re objecting so strongly, here’s the actual statement from the theatre:
https://almeida.co.uk/a-statement-on-the-almeida-genesis-writers-scheme
Last year on the Almeida Theatre’s Twitter account we misattributed a photo of one of the Black writers on the Almeida Genesis Writers scheme, mixing them up with another Black writer on the scheme. We apologised at the time to those involved, but we failed to acknowledge that in perpetuating harmful and discriminatory experiences, it was an act of racism. We would like to publicly acknowledge that now and apologise for the pain this has caused all those impacted, especially the two writers at the centre and for our failure to call it out sooner. We have not named the writers in this apology out of respect, following consultation with them.
Somebody screwed up a picture caption on Twitter. Apologise for it, sure. They did so on the same day the mistake was made. But they weren’t “perpetuating harmful and discriminatory experiences” or committing “an act of racism.” Apparently, the Twitter tweet is still up:
So the offending material wasn’t a press release or anything significant; it was a casual blurb saying congratulations. Do you seriously not think that apology is over the top for a mistake in a tweet?
I don’t know what happened with the writers. Apparently, the diversity scheme was put on hold for a year, rather than cancelled. But between the theatre and the writers, that seems like an extraordinary overreaction for a meaningless Twitter screw-up that everyone should have viewed as a harmless mistake.
And then there’s this doozy of a paragraph from the theatre’s statement:
Over the last six months, the Almeida has undergone an in-depth review around equality, diversity and inclusion which has included an intensive period of learning and anti-racism training in partnership with Inc Arts UK. We are committed to dismantling inequalities that have existed in the organisation for too long. We have set new targets in every part of our work and formalised our accountability structure. As part of this we published ‘Actions for Change’ and our pledge to becoming an anti-racist organisation.
So they’ve managed to combine the worst of bland corporate public relations statements with liberal orthodoxy that sounds like it came out of a handbook.
Seriously, you don’t find that woke? Have you ever thought that anything was woke?
But thanks for confirming my earlier point. The right and the left think differently. And when the right sees how convoluted, overwrought and preposterous leftist thought is, and how it subordinates common sense to ideology, they’re quite happy to stay away from it.
It’s one thing to drop the label because it’s been co-opted by the right wing misinformation sphere; it’s another to drop your principles.
I don’t find it “woke” because I don’t use the term, and never will again. Like CRT, it’s been re-defined by Fox News to the point of having lost all meaning.
I will call it hyper-sensitive over-reaction.
Oh, and before I overlook this:
The Times is the UK’s premier newspaper. It’s equivalent in stature to the New York Times. It may lean right at times, but it’s reporting is generally impartial and they have columnists from both the left and the right. Your categorisation of it as “illed with politically-motivated anti-Left exaggeration created with ill intent by the right wing?” Is thoroughly off base.
Let me guess. You read the Guardian? Well at least it’s not the New European.
Not really, the right has made a lot of inroads with convoluted, overwrought and preposterous anti-scientific guys out there. Issues like natural healing or anti vaccination that had similar numbers of leftists and rightists as members before, but most are being goaded by right wing social media and the regular one into believing things like the election was stolen and that Trump needed to have a second term by any means necessary.
The point is, besides showing that accusing others of being preposterous is a silly comparison, it is a rich thing to accuse the left of what the right is currently being the champion of.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/politics/big-lie-election-2020-poll/index.html
The phrase I recall is “Get Woke” and it was all over my Facebook feed a few years ago and there were some pop culture references associated with the phrase from that time. I tried looking up a few of them, but the term seems to have been superseded on Google by “Get Woke, Go Broke.”
Straw men mostly, because as usual, democrats like Biden (who is the real president, -not directed at you but to most of the ones you stand with-) did not express support on doing that or everything that the most progressives demanded in your less important list that you made there (Even in the latest budget, Biden is giving more money to ICE)…
The list I posted still stands, more so because it showed several examples where even a significant number of Republicans supporting change are being ignored by the current Republicans in congress. Talk about not being sustainable.
I noted that before elsewhere in the sdmb.
The phrase Get woke, go broke is a right-wing form of schadenfreude, specifically directed at media or cultural ventures that lose money and/or popularity when they become (if they weren’t already) woke. This phrase is repeated in a mocking sense ad nauseam in online forums and social media circles frequented by the alt-right and neoreactionaries whenever a “woke” venture goes “broke”. Interestingly, users of this phrase seem to stay quiet when woke ventures succeed.
This phrase can also mean that things that are “woke” have become morally and intellectually bankrupt, but the former usage is far more common.
I’m so old I can remember when some obscure right-wing group used the term ‘tea bag’ it was used as license by the left to call all Tea Party members ‘tea baggers’, because hey, they used the term first. They knew damned well how offensive it was, which is why they used it. But the rule then was that since some clueless Republican used it first, it was totally okay to use it forever, even if the offensiveness was clear to everyone.
A while back I predicted that progressives would eventually run away from ‘woke’ and CRT as fast as they did from their support of fascists and eugenics in the past once it became clear how toxic these ideas are to average voters. I should have added Voter ID opposition and ‘defund the police’, their support of which Democrats are now trying hard to send down the memory-hole.