My definition of woke

In My Humble Opinion
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Almost every non-left person has been banned from this board or quit of their own accord. Also a good many left ones who had some difference with the prevailing opinion. Face it, this is a you problem.

I have seen the change I described in the left first hand. And I spend most of my time in spaces where this is understood as a matter of course. Demanding evidence for it is as bizarre and confounding as demanding evidence that conservatives exist, or that Trump has produced a profound change in attitudes and expressed policies in the Republican party.

I had been meaning for a while to describe my understanding of this subject, so when @DocCathode kept demanding a definition, I thought this was as good a time as any. Writing down one’s thoughts is often helpful in clarifying them. And it was necessary to give a definition of these terms, because otherwise someone would undoubtedly have demanded one.

Turns out it is very hard to give a neutral description of ideas you dislike and oppose - I don’t think I have seen one description of conservative ideas since I came back to this site that would not be strongly repudiated by actual conservatives (although I sincerely doubt anyone is making an effort to be fair or accurate). As I said in the thread this one spun off from, I think this is responsible for a lot of misunderstanding: there is a meme among conservatives and liberals that the response of leftists to being told about a ‘woke’ policy is “it’s not happening and it’s good that it is”. IME it genuinely is a common pattern that first they deny it’s happening, then you show them evidence, and they start justifying the policy. I now suspect this pattern is due to unsympathetic/overly negative description of the policy in question, whereas the sympathetic depiction in the cite (it is of course necessary to cite left-biased media which treats the policy sympathetically, or they won’t believe it) causes them to support and defend it.

Because people denounce and condemn others on social media for absurdly little, as I have both observed and experienced. But I shouldn’t be surprised, because these are your real life friends, who are naturally inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, although it’s a nice idea, I don’t believe the radfem’s project of completely dismantling gender stereotypes is currently possible, since they are based on real innate differences and on the practicalities of reproduction. It is still an option to defy these stereotype, but that is difficult and stressful, and we only get one life, so I don’t blame anyone who thinks transition is the best chance of having a happy one.

Yes, and the fact that based on my own experience I don’t believe the ‘woke’ explanations for the first definitely informs my suspicion of the ‘woke’ explanations of the second.

Would you expect someone who replied to agree with you to look at the cite? I can see an argument for checking evidence for things one already believes - it’s obviously a good practice, and something we all should do - but I don’t think that’s the argument you’re making, and I’m really at a loss to understand your issue here.

I’m pretty much going on the fact no one is claiming black Americans are being slaughtered by the thousands by white Americans each year. Because that would be way more significant than police killings, and I’d expect to hear about it if it was happening. As for the actual stats, the FBI have annoyingly revamped their website to be modern and interactive and impossible to link to. Here’s a screenshot of homicide stats according to race, with time period set to January 2023 - December 2023:

Literally more black victims than white, literally more black perpetrators than white, and yet I’m pretty sure white people are still a majority in America today (and these figures do include Hispanics AFAIK). WTAF is happening in America? This is not normal.

Even if we grant that, it’s a very different situation where excessive police shootings are due to differential crime rates due to 100’s of years of prejudice, compared to one where police shootings are due directly to racism of police officers. You’d probably want to address these two possibilities in rather different ways.

Occam’s razor. If disparities in homicide rates are real, that increases my confidence that disparities in other types of crime are real. Also there are studies saying so:

Well sure. A constructive conversation looks like “I don’t think A is correct here, rather it’s A’, or B, which is different from A in the following ways”. Not constructive is “you’re strawmanning/poisoning the well (but I won’t bother to say how, or what I actually believe about the subject)”, or “please provide a cite that police are more nervous interacting with a heavily armed populace”, or maybe a cite that the sky is blue, or “please define what you mean by ‘sky’ and ‘blue’ so I can waste your time picking holes in your inevitably flawed definitions”. :roll_eyes:

Everyone’s a minority in some dimension, And leftists’ much vaunted empathy is ‘mysteriously’ absent for anyone who doesn’t affirm their political beliefs, no matter how many categories they are intersectionally disadvantaged in. It was instructive to see that they didn’t support reopening schools during Covid, despite this disproportionately impacting the education of poor and minority kids. Sympathy only goes so far.

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Not quite.

According to ScienceDirect.com, some say that academia has overstated the evidence for racial disparities in the US criminal justice system. However, there is significant evidence of racial disparities in the criminal justice system, including:

  • Arrest rates

Criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck found that higher arrest rates explain between 70% and 80% of the Black overrepresentation in prisons.

  • Sentencing

Black people are more likely to receive longer sentences than white people.

  • Charging

Prosecutors and judges often treat Black and Latinx people more harshly in their charging decisions.

  • Incarceration rates

Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of whites.

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Did they catch the killer?

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or…

…you drop yet another scurrilous misrepresentation of the left in the same post that you deny any responsibility for being unable to engage in productive conversations with the left.

Yeah. That’s a “me” problem.

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Yeah, ‘’‘they’‘’ didn’t support reopening schools during Covid despite this disproportionately impacting the education of poor and minority kids . . . because there was a fucking Covid pandemic going on at the time.

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Can you name a single poster who was banned because they didn’t agree with “the prevailing opinion” of this board?

The argument for keeping schools closed was for safety reasons, regardless of whether it had unequal outcomes. If it did have worse outcomes for blacks and the poor, that’s unfortunate, but not enough reason to ignore the pandemic.

Intent matters:

  • Police target blacks because they are black. I don’t like OJ because he killed his wife, not because he’s black.

  • Transphobes target trans people because they are trans. I don’t like Caitlyn Jenner because she supports politicians who oppose transexuals, despite being one herself.

  • Misogynists target women because they are women. I don’t like Nancy Mace because she is a vile individual, not because she’s a woman.

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Well, there was Clothahump…

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Let’s try this first.

Yet again, it was post #50.

There were five direct questions for you in that post. You have answered none of them. You don’t have to, of course – but if you genuinely want to discuss the ideas you specifically said that you wanted to discuss, there’s your chance.

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Do you have a cite proving “this is a you problem”? If so, kindly provide it. The argument you put forth seems fallacious and is unconvincing.

Moving the goal posts/ Misrepresentation. You did NOT say ’ police are more nervous interacting with a heavily armed populace’ You said (not an exact quote) ‘Police disproportionately kill black people because a heavily armed populace makes them nervous’. I said ‘Police disproportionately kill black men due to prejudice’. I admit I asked for a cite for your explanation as it is not obvious to me and does not seem to fit the facts.

I’m so glad you agree that the definition you eventually provided was flawed.

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Why I Ask For Definitions

My beloved and I are fond of studying mythology. I am a long time fan of Fox Sunday Night. When I saw the new show Krapopolis (it’s filled with characters and references from myths- usually Greek), I thought she might enjoy it as well. I attempted to describe it to her.

She asked “So, does it have ‘Simpsons Humor’?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know what ‘Simpsons Humor’ means! You’re a big fan of The Simpsons!”

“No. I know what I think ‘Simpsons Humor’ is. I have no idea what it means to you.”

“You know what I mean! For example Family Guy has 'Simpsons Humor”!"

“No, honey it does not. The Simpsons does not include abortion, incest (see footnote) and holocaust jokes. Nearly every Family Guy episode does.”

This calmed her down.She admitted we had different understandings of what ‘Simpson Humor’ was and continued the conversation using term with concrete and agreed upon definitions

  • I later realized I was technically in error here. On at least one occasion Kletus (the slack jawed yokel) Delroy Spuckler says of his wife’s parents “They’s my parents too.”
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Lol, yes. But what i actually wrote is true, too.

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Of course I would expect someone who agreed with me to look at the cite. Or at least to explain why they can’t if there’s some reason it’s a problem.

The default expectation, if you are replying to something with a cite, is that you have at least checked over the cite to make sure you know you’re on the same page with that person. It’s basic due diligence. Whether you think you agree or not. How do you even know if you don’t check?

But also, when you replied to my post with cites of your own, after not even looking at mine, what do you expect me to do? Am I supposed to do you a courtesy you won’t do me? How can anyone make progress in a discussion that way? It signals to me that you aren’t serious, and so why on earth would I continue to engage?

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No, they never did. But we were able to push them to look, for a while at least. And the family took some comfort in knowing their neighbors actually cared.

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Nope. “Minority” as used in sociology and politics is not synonymous with “group with less than half the population”, nor is it synonymous with “disadvantaged group”, although there is considerable overlap there.

Women, for instance, are a disadvantaged group, but are not considered a minority. White South Africans are very much outnumbered by Black South Africans, but they are certainly not a minority group here.

I refer you to the Paradox of Tolerance for why this is a good thing.

Just because a Nazi is a deaf gay Nazi doesn’t make him not a Nazi.

Because being dead, and their families being dead, would have impacted their education even more.

Sympathy has everything to do with that calculus.

Nope. Healthy straight White cis Christians of Western European ethnicity in modern Western society have no claim to any dimension of minorityhood.

Love the term!

Most of this board is centrist, not left. Bog-standard liberals, like the majority of posters here, are not leftists.

I would, if they were who I was discussing things with.

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Probably quite a few - note that the “prevailing opinion” in question is kept carefully undefined. Because of course of the kinds of opinions the Right has. “X was banned because they wouldn’t stop using slurs” isn’t as sympathetic an argument.

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DemonTree using a term without defining it? How shocking and unprecedented!

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But we are following her pattern. First denying that this is happening, then, when examples are offered, saying it’s a good thing.

For the record, i am not in favor of driving posters off the board if they hold conservative opinions about, say, taxation. And i am in favor of banning posters who have “conservative” opinions that lead them to repeatedly use slurs. So I’m going to suggest that here, as in other areas, the devil is in the details.

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I don’t deny that a lot of the more right-ist posters are no longer with us. I absolutely deny it’s because of their opinions. It was because they broke the rules about behaviour. And for every RW example, I can think of a centrist or leftist also no longer here because of bad behaviour.

The ones who actually left because their actual opinions were no longer tolerated, like the TERF sisters, weren’t right-wing AFAICT. And yeah, in their case, it was a good thing.

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Well, this is a message board. We don’t know what you are thinking. And it’s pretty hard to track down a fellow poster and punch him in the face. So people who are banned are pretty much always banned for what they wrote on this message board.

That’s certainly a form of behavior, but i can see a blur between statements and opinions.

But my point was that when DemonTree says that “liberals first deny a thing is happening and then, when confronted with examples, admit it happens but say it’s a good thing”, that there is some nuance lost. The nuance is often that the initial claim is broad enough to encompass a range of behavior, some of which sounds bad. (“We banned swears-a-lot for his opinions”.) But when you examine an actual example, it turns out that swears-a-lot held the opinion that you can’t discuss race without throwing around racial slurs, and he was actually banned for using racial slurs in his posts. And so we, the evil left-wing message board, retcon that and say, well, yes, swears-a-lot was banned, but it’s a good thing he was banned. Or, you know, maybe some nuance was lost.

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Depends what you mean by equality. In general I’m opposed to trying to make the demographics of each profession match that of the population, if that requires hiring less skilled people. I think different people prefer doing different things, and that should not necessarily be seen as a problem to solve, especially when it comes to men vs women. I want to have an equal chance to pursue my interests and use my talents, not be either favoured or limited because they are unusual in women.

I understand ‘privilege’ to be the opposite of disadvantage, which certainly exists. It’s a different way of looking at the same thing - instead of taking the ‘privileged’ group as the baseline and describing other groups as suffering impediments, it takes the disadvantaged group as the baseline, and describes other groups has having unearned advantages. IMO it has some merit in that it helps those who have privilege in a given area understand why those who don’t may have a harder time. However, I dislike the way the term encourages ‘leveling down’ as a solution: calling it ‘privilege’ makes it sound like something that should be taken away, whereas in most cases it’s something we want to extend to all.

People also get dogmatic in insisting privilege is absolute, ie that all else being equal, it’s always strictly better to be white than black, or a man rather than a woman, and I think depending on the specific circumstances of your life, this probably isn’t true.

In practice, ‘equity’ seems to be described as equality of outcome:

Equity means equal outcome (and they conveniently chose an unusual situation where taking resources away from the tall guy doesn’t leave him worse off than before).

Youtube video of Kamala Harris Equity cartoon, because apparently I can’t embed media items.

The last line: “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

And in practice, disparate outcomes are assumed to evidence a lack of equity - if some groups do better in school than others, and some are excluded more, that is inequitable. If some live longer or have better health outcomes than others’, that is inequitable. How else are you going to measure it?

Sure, and when members of disadvantaged groups disagree too strongly with social justice ideas, they are frequently accused of having ‘internalised racism/sexism/ableism/homophobia/etc’, or not being a real X. Heads you win, tails I lose. But my biggest issue with this is the people who insist it’s impossible to understand the problems X suffer if you’re not a member of X, that your opinion on eg whether something is a microaggression doesn’t count if you’re not an X, and only X people get to decide what is anti-X. Fortunately I think this has become significantly less common in the last few years.

In my experience, this gets trotted out to ‘justify’ unequal treatment like stereotyping privileged groups, saying derogatory things about them, and using ‘harmful’ language that would never be countenanced for disadvantaged groups. An ethic that says these things are bad and you shouldn’t do them to any group of people is morally far superior, and much easier to get people to subscribe to in practice. There is really no excuse for this.

I think that unlike you I live in a country with no constitutional guarantee of free speech, so erosion in support for the principle has translated directly into legal restrictions. But even in America, how much real freedom you have in speech depends indirectly on cultural attitudes towards it. If you don’t value it, if you think other principles are more important, it will be degraded.

You just endorsed support for punching up, so I don’t think you really believe this. In fact, I doubt anyone does. The most they want to do is protect specific people from specific harms. The question in each case is what is the cost of such changes, and will the new language even result in less harm? Even if teaching kids about slavery made them feel genuinely upset, I assume you would still want to do it, because they need to know. If university students learn a lot from being exposed to a variety of different stories and media, then they should study them, even if it makes some feel upset due to their history.

I don’t. I oppose content that makes kids feel guilty for something that was not their fault, or makes them feel responsible for it, because that’s wrong in itself. However, that is an issue of curriculum design. As long as parents and media are free to criticise specific curriculums without automatically being denounced as racist etc (which has not always been the case) then it can be sorted out.