reminder that every time people complain about wokeness they’re literally just complaining about being conscious about systemic racism, because that’s what woke means.
Just replace “woke” with “being a decent person” and it becomes pretty clear what these people want.
“Woke” started out as a simple acknowledgment that a person is conscious of the systemic oppression of various groups. Now the right wing has got its claws into the term it’s been effectively neutered. Now all it means is, “stuff that right wingers don’t like”
It’s like “defund the police” which quickly became “abolish all policing”.
It’s a useful strategy for them and it works to prevent honest discussion on how to solve societal problems by preventing people from having a shared understanding of the language needed for such discussion.
Ugh, “defund the police” is a terrible phrase if you actually want the movement to succeed. I wish they would have gone with something along the lines of “police reform”. Immediately every conservative glommed onto “now they want to abolish all police!”
We do need a massive overhaul to police. Unfortunately that means better marketing of the idea of it’s going to happen.
I could be wrong but “defund the police” was just a discussion point for activists talking amongst themselves. In that context it makes sense. What happened was that this inelegant phrase was seized as a weapon by the right and then every Dem politician had to answer if they supported the idea of abolishing the police.
I’d imagine that many people would be receptive to the idea of taking some money out of police budgets so social workers and people trained in deescalation can be hired. For example cops aren’t a good fit when dealing with people facing mental health crises because they mostly turn to use of force and make a bad situation worse.
If you twist this into, “are you in favor of abolishing all police?” then most people are going to say, “hell no, what a stupid idea, you moron”.
Now any discussion about the rotten state of policing in the US had been effectively hobbled. Discussion is shut down. The right wing wins.
Unfortunately police reform doesn’t necessarily imply taking police funds and diverting them to nonviolent responders instead. It’s hard to make that into a catchy phrase that can’t be misinterpreted. I could see cities implementing some rubber-stamp oversight board filled with ex-cops and saying, “see, we reformed the police! They have oversight now.”
Ugh, “defund the police” is a terrible phrase if you actually want the movement to succeed.
I feel like these are probably astroturfed movements. Because you can say the same thing about the “antiwork” movement, whose proponents claim to actually want to work.
The designation of your movement is kind of important.
I still have a hard time how “woke” is bad. Woke means your not asleep, it means you are not guided by others. How can people turn this into a bad thing. I’m proud to be woke.
Woke means that if you’re in a privileged position in a society, more equality is a threat to your status and should be suppressed.
Same happened to the terms “political correctness” and “social justice”. The meaning gets twisted into something grotesque by think tanks and then it’s shipped out to talking heads so Billy-Bob can regurgitate it at the water cooler.
Critical Race Theory, school libraries full of porn, caravans of migrants heading to the southern border, activist judges legislating from the bench, and so on.
“It’s like “defund the police” which quickly became “abolish all policing”.”
It’s actually the other way around. The radical demand got watered down but it didn’t slow the fearmongeringbl even a little bit
I honestly can’t believe that using this word unironically has caught on. Everything I think is just a stupid joke on the internet turns out to be the internet reflecting just how idiotic humanity really is.
Either that, or just an unpleasant shock at just how ‘mask-off’ some people have become.
Lots of ‘woke’ people are shitty people. I’ve had way too many experiences in the past few years with ‘woke’ people screaming at me about how I need to read more women authors or I’m a shitty awful human being. Or other equally absurd things, like I’m a bigot if I don’t ask you what your pronoun is. If you have a pronoun preference, how about you tell me? Just like you tell someone how to pronounce your name if it’s non-standard.
I know lots of progressive people, and I am progressive. But I would never say I am ‘woke’. People who self-identify ‘woke’ tend to be mentally ill crazy people in my encounters, and use their politics as an excuse for abusive and hostile behavior just the way right-wing nazi nutbags do.
Hell I even had a transwoman assault me verbally one day while I was just reading a book in a cafe. Comes up to me and demands that I give her my table because I’m a white cis guy and I should give up my ‘privileged’ to her. I told her to f off. My small business has been harassed by ‘woke’ activists who demand we give them money or they will say we are anti-black/lgbt+, etc. That’s not woke, that’s blackmail.
Most ‘woke’ people I meet are basically 20 sometime trust-fund types who need a cause to give her their miserable lives purpose, because god knows they can’t get their shit together and do something positive with their lives. If they did maybe they’d stop being such awful abusive people who threaten and harass others.
Hell I even had a transwoman assault me verbally one day while I was just reading a book in a cafe. Comes up to me and demands that I give her my table because I’m a white cis guy and I should give up my ‘privileged’ to her.
I’m betting this never happened.
Hell I even had a transwoman assault me verbally one day while I was just reading a book in a cafe. Comes up to me and demands that I give her my table because I’m a white cis guy and I should give up my ‘privileged’ to her. I told her to f off. My small business has been harassed by ‘woke’ activists who demand we give them money or they will say we are anti-black/lgbt+, etc. That’s not woke, that’s blackmail.
That transwoman? Albertina Einstein.
That’s not woke, that’s blackmail.
That’s worse. That sort of shit turns ignorant and gullible people anti-LGBT and makes their already difficult lives even harder.
who need a cause to give her their miserable lives purpose
Tell them to fight global warming. It is the problem that makes all other problems all but irrelevant in comparison.
Except woke people aren’t decent. Some woke people have good intentions, sure, but they aren’t decent. Being woke means being evil.
I have mixed feelings about Lemmy still being so small that I can recognize usernames and think, “oh, there’s that nut job again”
Lumping ‘always’ with ‘sometimes’ is cooking your results to meet your objective.
That was the most infuriating thing about this whole post to me. Elon’s braindead take is on brand and expected at this point, but that chart (or worse, the reaserch behind it) is the true crime here.
If this graph isn’t just made up bs in the first place, one thought I recall from every major college campus I’ve been to is random religious preachers camped out every day telling everyone they’re evil, subhuman, and going to hell. Guessing the atheists find that a little more annoying and worthy of shouting back at than some of the religiously inclined.
Nazi: “white power!” Normal people: “hey, stfu!” Cristian Conservatives: “hey I don’t agree with it but let’s hear him out. Some people might agree, his ideas deserve to be discussed and given a platform”
Study is done by “TheFire.org,” which is described as a competitor to the ACLU.
I know… why do we need a competitor to the ACLU?
Well, per Wikipedia: “FIRE has been described as a competitor of the ACLU. In 2021, the organization had an annual revenue of $16.1 million. FIRE has received major funding from groups which primarily support conservative and libertarian causes, including the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute.”
Oh Charles Koch, you scoundrel.
They have unmatched methods. Is there any other place on the internet with 2024 college free speech rankings?
Fwiw, they do explain:
This year’s survey includes 55,102 student respondents from 254 colleges and universities.[1] Students who were enrolled in four-year degree programs were surveyed via the College Pulse mobile app and web portal from January 13 to June 30, 2023
Kinda like being able to buy a 2024 Kiacarnival since July.
Ahh yes a graph without citation of research, lovely
Let’s go a step further and analyze exactly what this graph is saying:
There’s only about a 20% distribution difference in the “never” sections between Christians and atheists. So on average, 4/5 atheists would answer the exact same as Christians. All this graph says is that Christians are barely more tolerant than people who identify as atheist. Barely is the key word. If anything, this graph proves that tolerance levels don’t fluctuate that much for the individual between differing religions.
But Bible thumpers need any win they can get, so they don’t read the data for what it is, they just see one bar longer than the other and declare victory.
