Beats me. I also think that’s not useful as a metric since, as stated before, it’s more of a “One more stick on the load” than someone saying “Well, I NEVER…”
Maybe because actual Nazis are on the rise in Germany, and one of the things they do is rhapsodize fondly about WWII Germany, and he doesn’t want to be associated with those scumbags?
I hang out with Pagans a fair amount, and I’ve known folks who follow the Norse pantheon for decades. In the past ten years, explicitly racist Norse Pagans seem to be on the rise, and those who practice Asatru who aren’t White supremacists find themselves disavowing that ideology, not because they’re afraid of being canceled, but because they don’t want to have anything to do with the racists.
Because fans of Hitler and the Nazis are about to take power, and unless you make it clear that you don’t support the Nazis while saying anything good about WWII Germany it’s quite possible people will think you genuinely are one.
The thing is, the stick is “Republicans freaking the fuck out over an extremely minor movement in academia,” not “People having legitimate concerns about a major problem.” If you figure out how to completely purge academia of 100% of its failed ideas and to make academics only say wise things, Republicans will still lie about them; but you can’t make any group of people not have a few dummies in it in the first place.
Worrying about “Latinx” is pointless. You can’t get rid of stuff like that, and if you could, Republicans would lie about it anyway. Focus on things that you can affect.
Alright, I’ll concede the point that wokeness did not cause Harris to lose the election.
But I still find the pointless woke bitching about history trend irritating. And I don’t think it’s helping the progressive cause.
I find dummies being dummies irritating. But I hear stupid woke things about a bajillion times more from conservatives freaking out about them than I hear from actual leftists saying them.
There’s an old joke about a guy who walks into the bar, holding a handful of wet dog shit. “Guys! Guys!” he shouts: “Look what I almost stepped in!”
Don’t be that guy.
I listen to a BBC podcast called You’re Dead to Me where they spend 45-60 minutes each episode going over some aspecto of history whether it’s a person, a time period, or even something more abstract like cave paintings. They have a no-Nazi rule, which if fine, they’re not obligated to talk about the Nazis as there’s plenty of other topics to cover. But they had an episode about the Weimar Republic which was in power until the Nazi’s gained control in the early 1930s. So when they talked about the end of the Weimar era they just danced around the topic. It irritated the hell out of me.
But then Nazis makes thing more complicated. During the first 
Trump adminstration, a Wolfenstein video game was released and there were complaints that it was “too political.” In case you’re unfamiliar, Wolfenstein is a game franchise dating back to the 1980s and the principle antagonist have always been Nazis. Suddenly punching Nazis was too political. If punching Nazis is wrong, brother, I don’t want to be right.
Woke is a vague catch-all phrase that critics, particularly on the political right, use to label a wide variety of social justice causes, progressive ideas, and cultural shifts they disagree with.
This is one of the ways they have flattened nuance and completely stifled empathy.
It’s more of a devious political dagger not a consistently meaningful concept.
By delegitimizing concerns and labeling them as woke they don’t have to engage in any kind of recognition or discussion of the issues at hand.
The brutal math is this: The Democrats really need to stop emphasizing most causes that are only popularity with the minority but not the majority. (Except for causes which are truly right and necessary, such as fighting against climate change.)
In a battle of razor-thin margins, the D’s really can’t afford to take on the burden of those net-vote-losing causes.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve seen things that, while I wouldn’t call them “woke,” are stupid ideas from the left. I had someone tell me that the best thing I could do to increase racial equity in math instruction was to stop talk about “story problems” and instead call them “number stories,” because the word “problem” is intimidating to Black people. That’s a dumb idea, and it distracts from a super important issue.
But there are stupid ideas on the left because there are stupid people on the left, and there are stupid people on the left because there are stupid people absolutely everywhere. We need to be able to recognize stupid ideas, and also not pretend like those stupid ideas are representative of the left as a whole.
Are you at all hesitant at this point to offer political advice, given the success of your predictions over the past two months? This might be a moment to listen, and wait to offer “brutal” opinions until later.
Hid off-topic reply
He won the popular vote by only 2%. This was no trouncing. It was well within Harris’ reach.
Moderating:
Remember, attack the post and not the poster.
Get on topic or exit the thread. No more trying to hijack the thread with this off-topic minutiae.
I let your first post go, but no more.
There’s a board game called War Room that was designed by the guy who did Axis & Allies where the appeal is that you can have six players, three on each side, and play all the theaters simultaneously. It uses flags for the nations to mark units and such, but two are wrong. One is that Germany doesn’t use the swastika or even the earlier black/white/red tricolor but some sort of cross. The other is that China (which is generally controlled by the American player because it’s so small) doesn’t use the flag of the Republic of China but something else that’s pretty much nothing.
The difference is that the manufacturer will happily sell you a set of period correct Chinese flags to replace the ones the game comes with. You can’t get proper Nazi Germany stickers at all.
It had enough of an influence that many Democrats tried desperately to distance themselves from any semblance of whatever “woke” is, which is a criticism they can’t escape because it means whatever their critics, and even many of their ostensible advocates, want it to mean. And every fucking pundit who was telling us how certain Harris was to trounce Trump are now ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ the mistakes that Harris and other Democrats made in not distancing themselves from ‘the woke’.
Meanwhile, Trump had no plan, no real campaign unless you consider standing on stage and ranting incoherently for hours, or sometimes just swaying to ‘Ave Maria’ for forty of the most awkward minutes in political history. And he won handily anyway, despite being objectively not only the most unqualified person to ever run for president (and I’m including Joe Exotic in comparison), a convicted felon, an acknowledged (if not convicted) rapist, and the man who incited an insurrection last time he was legally required to relinquish power. Despite that Harris got near record numbers in the popular vote for a Democratic candidate, beating what both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump pulled in in 2016 (even adjusted for population growth), 75 million voters saw all of Trump’s character in plain view and decided to vote for him anyway, because in my opinion the American public has been primed for fascism and Donald Trump is their ideal, clownish leader who will drag them down the well-tread path of fascism while most of them (at least, the ones strenuously objecting to not liking Trump but voting for him anyway because he is somehow in their view ‘the least of all evils’). And you know why? Because none of these fucktards knew enough about history—not even history still in living memory—to recognize fascism or understand its ultimate consequences even when it is right in front of them in waving red flags and collective hatred against a defenseless ‘other’ outgroup.
So, fuck no, Democrats and anyone else who actually cares about justices and liberty and equality and all that ‘shit’ should not forget about the past in order to ‘win elections’, and they certainly shouldn’t bow before the stock strawman arguments of the o.p. because would be a meaningless and hollow victory if it doesn’t actually stand for their ostensible values, even the ones they often seek to distance themselves from in the name of political expediency.
Stranger
I agree with a poster upthread that Republicans have built a mountain out of a molehill by focusing on a few examples of true wokeness and blowing them way out of proportion, as if that’s mainstream Democratic policy. Unfortunately, as long as a few fringe leftist radicals continue to provide fodder for the Rs that way, the Rs will pounce and magnify them each time. It would have to take a thorough weeding-out or hard steering away for the D’s to not fall into that pitfall trap again, and I don’t know how you do it when you’ll always find a few radicals in a political movement of 100 million people.
Ayup. The truths about Donald Trump were profoundly worse than the endless lies the RW propaganda machine daily and repeatedly told the nation about Biden and Harris.
But the left heard all of the RW lies, while the right heard none of the LW truths, and what they did unintentionally get wind of, they simply dismissed as ‘fake news.’
To ME … that’s the crux of the issue. For the most part, the rest of that strikes me as stereotypical Democratic circular firing squad stuff.
I don’t think the Democrats need to radically alter their platform. I think they need to radically alter their communication strategy.
And I’m oh-so-grateful that the task doesn’t fall to me.
Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
–Mark Twain
It’s a metaphor for today’s GOP/MAGA machinery. I’d hate for the Democrats to engage in their game in their way. I also don’t see them beating the MAGA GOP at their own game.
I believe I understand the problem (and, IMHO, it ain’t ‘wokeness’). Like others, I simply don’t have the short-term solution.
Again: it doesn’t take a few fringe leftist radicals. There are zero Haitians eating people’s pet cats, and there are zero schools performing genital surgeries. When people are lying about you, stop focusing on getting them not to lie about you. There is no way to get them to stop shouting about the Woke Left, so don’t bother trying. Try something else instead.