Woke? WTF?

It's not just conservatives, but traditional liberals who criticize what is formally and informally lumped under the "identity politics" label (think Bill Maher, for instance). Those miscellaneous groups -- including the New Atheist members (below at bottom, that made hay during the first decade of the century) -- are categorized as the "intellectual dark web" by today's nouveau establishment.

We've got to take into account that as the Left morally evolves into new territories charted out by humanities scholars, in turn it leaves many of its older members behind. I mean, they are more "progressed" than conservatives, but not as ethically enlightened as the new generations of activists who have absorbed the latest literary intellectual trends.

Take for example, how the Beat Generation was a step behind the standards of the New Left of a decade later, despite being a precursor of the latter's neoteric society.

Lewis Marker, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (excerpt): Furthermore, Burroughs’s tone in Queer toward the Latin American countries he wanders is unrelentingly racist, smug, entitled and elitist. The “William Lee” of Queer isn’t rebellious, he’s just irresponsible, and his supposed counterculture is paternalistically conservative: toward Latin America, toward Adelbert Lewis Marker, and toward Joan Vollmer.

And the New Left, accordingly, was more antiquated than the future social justice orientation of the 1990s.
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Intellectual dark web: "The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a term used to describe a loose affiliation of academics and social commentators who oppose the perceived influence of left wing–associated identity politics and political correctness in higher education and mass media."

  • What Was New Atheism? (Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Shermer, Pinker, etc)
    https://thepointmag.com/politics/what-was-new-atheism/

    EXCERPTS: The New Atheists were initially delighted by Barack Obama. [...] The romance proved to be short-lived. By Obama’s second term, the president who had seemed a rebuke to Republican irrationalism began to be connected with a different kind of flight from reason. With Christian conservatism out of the White House, Harris and others gave increasing voice to what had previously been a secondary concern: liberal political correctness.

    Gradually, Obama was transformed from the professor come to restore sanity to American politics into the identity- and sensitivity-obsessed cultural liberal afraid to utter the phrase “radical Islamic terror.” As the Trump era dawned, many of the figures that had risen to prominence waging war against religion and fundamentalism took up the new challenge of reclaiming American liberalism from a left too consumed by “political correctness” to remember what it truly meant to be a liberal.

    [...] the prominent New Atheist celebrities—including Harris, Dawkins, Michael Shermer and Dave Rubin, a former employee of The Young Turks ... felt that the emphasis on feminism, diversity and anti-imperialism distracted from the fight against religious extremism.

    [...] Since Trump’s victory, which Harris and his confrères have interpreted as a confirmation of this prediction, the issue of political correctness has only become more pressing for many prominent New Atheists. Increasingly central to their arguments today is the idea that American liberalism has in fact become illiberal, obsessed with the primacy of group identities over the individual and intolerant of speech that contradicts the latest “woke” orthodoxy on race and gender.

    As many of those associated with New Atheism have taken up the fight against political correctness -- including Harris, Maher, Shermer, Rubin, Peter Boghossian and Steven Pinker -- they have gravitated towards a larger group that includes not only self-described liberals, but also conservatives like the former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro and the celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson.

    Many in this group, sometimes called the “intellectual dark web,” follow Pinker in his rhetorical association of liberalism with the Enlightenment, suggesting its connection to scientific thinking as well as to the achievements of Western civilization. Others prefer to call themselves “classical liberals,” a label that allows for overlap between a Hayekian embrace of the free market and support for more progressive libertarian causes like gay marriage or legalizing marijuana.

    What unites these apparently dissimilar figures is the belief that the contemporary left has abandoned both rational thinking and liberal values, and that this left must be defeated by appealing to a more authentic liberalism....     (MORE - missing details)
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The author is a master of detail. Being an old sailor I appreciated his estimation of the needs for the ship and crew. We ran out of toilet paper once. Luckily we were less than 24 hours from PI.
 
DaveC426913 said:
I don't know to what ZPN was referring. I assumed it was C C's post 22.
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ZPN seems like a very troubled person, quite confused and can't really explain himself. His often cryptic comments are hard to follow.
 
Pinball1970 said:
He said some stupid nonsense about COVID so I switched off a little after that.
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It's almost like he continuously watches some sort of propaganda channel all the time. I wonder which one that would be? ;)
 
(Q) said:
Woke seems more like a lack of think ideology.
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Seems to me like the ideology you get when you understand more.

Every time I've spent time talking to someone who was gay, or black, or the only Hindu in an all-Christian school, or a white woman who lived in Africa, or a woman who was sexually assaulted when she was younger, I learn a little more - and become a little more woke. I prefer that to ignorance, although ignorance is often more comfortable.
 
billvon said:
Seems to me like the ideology you get when you understand more.

Every time I've spent time talking to someone who was gay, or black, or the only Hindu in an all-Christian school, or a white woman who lived in Africa, or a woman who was sexually assaulted when she was younger, I learn a little more - and become a little more woke. I prefer that to ignorance, although ignorance is often more comfortable.
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I totally get that. I've seen plenty of folks on the left state that if 'woke' means compassion, empathy, equality and other such characteristics, then they are indeed woke. I would agree with that, too. But unfortunately, the right, in their infinite lack of wisdom, turned the term into something they have more in common with; hatred, rage, bigotry and lack of any compassion or empathy.
 
(Q) said:
I totally get that. I've seen plenty of folks on the left state that if 'woke' means compassion, empathy, equality and other such characteristics . . .
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I don't think it even means that. It just means alert to injustice in society. All it means is that you know a little more about what women, black people, trans people etc go through. I'm never going to be 100% aware of that stuff - I'm a middle aged straight cis white guy, so I don't see what those other people do.

But I think it's worth trying.
 
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