Huh! I had no idea this was a thing. Thanks for bringing it up!

The Wide Awakes were a youth organization and later a paramilitary organization cultivated by the Republican Party during the 1860 presidential election in the United States. Using popular social events, an ethos of competitive fraternity, and even promotional comic books, the organization introduced many to political participation and proclaimed itself as the newfound voice of younger voters. The structured militant Wide Awakes appealed to a generation which had been profoundly shaken by the partisan instability in the 1850s, and offered young northerners a much-needed political identity.

It’s odd. I’ve seen much in left-wing communities stating that the right-wing can’t define “woke” and that it simply means “I don’t like X thing therefore it’s woke.”

The meaning has been pretty plain to me, but it meant different things depending on what side of the political spectrum you’re on.

The Left-Wing definition seems to be: “Awareness of negative things that one group in power does to other groups who have less power. Right-wingers are also stupid if they use this word as they totally don’t get this.”

The Right-Wing definition seems to be: “A largely preformative outrage from the left-wing focused on discussing issues that they complain about to make themselves feel better about doing nothing. It is now a slur for ineffectual and whiny.”

I feel that both definitions coexist and do not rule each other out, however I won’t deny that I’ve seen it misused.

I don’t feel I see the North American left use the word any longer as it has basically become a pejorative against them.

Well, it’s definitely more wrong , so there’s that.

17276667. Thanks for the memories.

Understanding underlying causes? On Lemmy? Abso-fucking-lutely not!

If you like strudel and Hitler liked strudel, then you’re Nazi by default. That’s just simple logic.

I’ve read Orwell and fully agree.

I hadn’t seen that column from Frye however - his statement about levels of language and thinking akin to levels of math was something I hadn’t seen put into words before and really enjoyed!

Words are wonderful and descriptive when you know how to use them and I’ve always felt that there is no perfect synonym for most. If you study language (at least in English), some really strange shit has happened over the last 20 years or so. Language via political pushes has happened way more often than any time I can find throughout recorded history thanks to the internet and flat-mass culture.

Left-wing language seems to have been pushed to obfuscate, and right-wing wording is pushed towards blame. Either way, linguistically it makes zero fucking sense sometimes. Broadly applying misunderstood terms has always felt like a dumbing-down to me (see the recent breakage of the word “literally”) and I feel it only hurts discussion and understanding of others.

For more function and clarity, I wish we created more terminology for edge cases instead of breaking specificity to apply to everything. As a reminder, I’m not here to spread my ideas, I’m here to discuss all ideas. Feel free to pick these apart!

Some examples (and please don’t be offended, I’m speaking about words and their usage, not accusing or maligning anyone):

1. Bigot - This is a massively overused word that is only partially understood since it became a slang. Why? Because the definition is “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.” So by definition it is anyone not accepting of other ideas, no matter how dumb those ideas may be. Vehemently don’t like anti-vaxxers, flat Earthers, liberals, leftists, the religious, atheists, Nazis, or conservatives? You’re the textbook definition of a bigot. This makes the word incredibly easy to overuse by anyone, because damn near everyone is a bigot about something, but you’re intended to simply intuit the kind of bigot the user doesn’t like from the usage and assume it’s an insult.

2. Gender - (Edited from our Gender weekly topic) I still don’t understand the purpose of gender beyond a useless classification akin to classifying people by hair colour and the definition doesn’t help. Take trans issues, for instance. If you are “transgender,” that means “I changed my gender” which in turn means… nothing because gender is so effusive. Even if it indicates change, then it changed from what to what? Does it mean you had surgery? Does it change daily? Maybe! But conversationally, it seems to only serve to mask things about a person rather than clarify them - it’s a useless term. On the other end, the term “trans-woman / man” makes sense. You immediately get more information about someone upon hearing it. It is additive instead of obfuscating language and means that that person is one sex, but presenting another. Easy, more accurate, and as a bonus, would sidestep some needless culture-war bullshit instead of wallowing in it.

3. Retarded - An obvious one, but why is that? We all know that it was a medical term and became an insult, but so were the words “dumb,” “dork,” “idiot,” and “imbecile.” Once it became a mild slur, people stopped using “retarded” as a descriptor and started using “special.” Then “special” became a pejorative. Quite literally any word implying that someone is less intellectually-abled is available as an insult. Really, I’d like to understand it, but someone already said it much better than I could.

4. Fascist - Seems to be a very popular slang among leftist communities from what I’ve seen and not really used much by the right wing (and yes, I can warrant a guess as to why some may think that is). Tends to mean “bossy / slightly less leftist than me / right-wing / independent / centrists that disagree with me on this particular issue.” I’ve had this entire sub reported for being “fascist” according to one user despite not adhering to any of the values that make up the definition and quite literally upholding the polar opposite values in most cases. Funnily enough, if you wanted to be fascist, you wouldn’t discuss things and encourage discussion with people with varied takes on a situation, you’d try to silence opposition.

5. Centrist - (From our weekly topic on Centrism / Independents) If someone says that they are “centrist” they are not telling you that they base all of their opinions on being dead-centre in the middle of the US “Left” and “Right” positions. That would be an astoundingly stupid position to undertake. Centrists are not a cohesive group and each have their own ideas - they may be a centrist because they take many positions that don’t adhere strictly to party lines. I think they only reason this take is as popular as it is on Lemmy is because people like to bad-faith strawman any arguments that aren’t theirs. It’s much easier to insult someone than it is to understand them.

I know that humans play with words and that language moves, but feel these are examples of political movement of words instead of natural linguistic movement. It’s certainly not an exhaustive list, just a few off the top of my head to test the waters.

Gah! I missed this thread. Hope it’s not too late to contribute. I am the C.E.O. (and an Economist) of a medium-sized I.T. firm in Canada and designed the company to be as ethical as it could possibly be from the ground up.

• All employees have equal votes after their initial 3 months is up in any part of the company that they are engaged in. I can (and have) been outvoted.
• After employees are here long enough (a few years), they can purchase shares if they like.
• I am the lowest paid full-time employee at the company by design. I do not take dividends.
• We operate on a Matrix org chart meaning that the “boss” on every project changes based on who is best suited to lead it and who has experience in that area.
• We have it in our charter that there are never any outside shareholders allowed. If you leave the company, your shares are purchased by the company for current market value. This includes myself. This is why employees owning shares is a good idea; it becomes a retirement plan. Unlike most corporations, we don’t want solely financially invested shareholders as they’re in business to extract value. They are parasites.
• We have acquired other companies. We have never had to pay for one. Our procedures are so thorough and ticket counts so astronomically low compared with other I.T. companies (which are called MSPs) due to our subsystems and customizations that they literally give themselves to us.
• We are as environmentally conscious as we can be. We redo and donate old systems to nonprofits and schools where we can. The only waste we put out is utterly dead hardware - no forced upgrade cycle. Electricity bills also drop dramatically at clients we take over due to more efficient machine use.
• During COVID, we gave away over $500k in free support. I figured it was more important that our nonprofit clients stay open than we stay open.
• We have a full FOSS stack that we can deploy if a company is open to it (and would like to save a bit of cash to boot).
• In nearly ten years, we’ve never had an employee leave, and never had a client leave (well, we had one restaurant client close during COVID, but I don’t count that).
• We have full benefits.
• We have zero interest in “infinite growth” as it’s not a functional model. We have turned down clients because they don’t “get” us and would be a headache for our staff.
• Our current goal is a 9-5 (not 8-5), four-day workweek for all staff.

I understand that not every business owner is “good.” I believe that with proper regulation, however, we can make them at least behave way, way the fuck better than they do now. It’s what I call Social Capitalism and it’s exceedingly functional from my experience.

I’ve built this model out in hopes it will catch on. I feel that if most companies operated under Social Capitalism that we’d be substantially better off. Certain aspects of it are so important and such a step up from the norm that I don’t understand how they weren’t obvious to other owners. But… greed I guess. Greed hurts every system it’s in.

Also of interest, we don’t have an issue with The Peter Principle as you’re never forced to move out of a position of competence or interest. You’re not salary-limited simply because you don’t want to be a manager; in fact, there are no managers.

I see what you mean, but energy isn’t currently free, and as we built more headroom, crypto and AI have simply eaten up that headroom. Don’t take my word for it, simply look at the statistics on how much more energy we are using than 10 years ago, and then look at corporate energy usage now on those two things. Renewables haven’t kept up because large corporations keep eating more and more. In fact, governments have had to **de-**decomission a few coal plants because the energy usage was so high. Here’s an article on one of them that is supporting a massive crypto farm.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely 100% glad that the energy is not all coming from coal plants anymore, but also it isn’t like none of it is.

And no energy is emission free. You still have to pay the environmental cost to create and maintain the equipment gathering the energy in the first place.

In short, renewables are great. Corporate overusage of energy is not, especially for incredibly selfish gain like crypto and “AI”. I’m not going to cheer for the shares at corporations to be higher simply because we have renewables offsetting a tiny bit of the massive power they suck up.

“Oh, nice!” - Companies haphazardly adding AI into everything whether you want it or not and eating up three times this energy produced for short-term shareholder gain.