Ohio Republicans say openly that they want to raise the threshold for passing referendums to a supermajority to block majorities of citizens from protecting their rights.

This is another good example of what I've called the GOP Retreat into Fortress MAGA:https://t.co/P16b9Eo4NY

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) April 23, 2023

You have got to be kidding me. pic.twitter.com/6ePcy4XzMk

— mike freeman (@mikefreemanNFL) April 24, 2023

okaydo said:

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Hey @Disney, my home state will happily accept your 70,000+ jobs if you want to leave Florida.

We’ve got great weather, great people, and it’s always a great day in South Carolina!

SC’s not woke, but we’re not sanctimonious about it either. pic.twitter.com/uf1PWQjGc5

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) April 26, 2023

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calbear93 said:

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Unit2Sucks said:

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Not woke really just means racist and bigoted. Let's not pretend like it's anything else. These people are so happy that they can go back to telling everyone they are prejudiced while pretending that it's acceptable.

I'm not saying that everyone has to consider themselves woke or spend all their time trying to understand the challenges faced by marginalized groups but if you go around shouting about how unwoke you are that is just a code. Normal people don't do that and I've yet to hear a coherent non-racist justification to deny that black people face challenges in this country because of the color of their skin. That's really the origination of the term.

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I agree with you on the original meaning of the word.

However, through loose use of the term by folks on the left and right, it has taken on a different term.

While not the historical use, when I think of woke, I think of people with no practical application or solution that promote non-sensical solutions to real problems.

Like $5m reparation for everyone who may have had a historical connection with someone who may have been a slave. $5 million?

Or trigger warning on college course syllabus. Or teaching gender identity and sexual preference to elementary students.

And cancelling those who challenge their solution and painting everyone who dare disagree on solution as racists to chill speech and debate.

It is not about ideology on the problems. You probably share the same ideology on the issues as those people I consider woke, but I would not consider you "woke" in the pejorative sense that it may be used. I respect your view points even if I disagree. In fact, you and I probably agree a lot on the existence of the problems but we disagree on solutions. That's OK. I respect your actual knowledge and will consider your viewpoint. I have no time to discuss with those who revert to name calling and tribalism because they are boring and provide no insight.

It is the sanctimonious folks on the left without actual knowledge or practical experience (and never letting lack of practical knowledge from tempering their arrogance as if they have everything figured out) but offer utterly stupid solutions that I consider woke. Not the historical term but how I understand its use now. I am sure there is a like term for those with similar proclivity of bad behavior on the right. Like those who think not raising the debt ceiling under any circumstance is the right thing to do. You and I may agree that spiraling debt is a problem, but we also agree that that is a dumb solution.

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Big C said:

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Regarding the word "woke", one of the amazing things about the English language is its dynamism. We're always adding new words and new meanings to existing words. For "woke", there was the original meaning, which is still used by some, and the new meaning, usually used pejoratively. You can say that the new meaning is different than the original, but you can't deny that it's a legitimate meaning (even if the way it was co-opted pisses you off).

The fact that it is used as it is by tens of millions of people gives it legitimacy. We don't have an "academy" or some such that determines what gets to be a word and what doesn't.

Back to Republicans, it pisses me off the way they are able to message so well, at least to 100 million or so Americans.

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calbear93 said:

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Unit2Sucks said:

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calbear93 said:

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Unit2Sucks said:

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Not woke really just means racist and bigoted. Let's not pretend like it's anything else. These people are so happy that they can go back to telling everyone they are prejudiced while pretending that it's acceptable.

I'm not saying that everyone has to consider themselves woke or spend all their time trying to understand the challenges faced by marginalized groups but if you go around shouting about how unwoke you are that is just a code. Normal people don't do that and I've yet to hear a coherent non-racist justification to deny that black people face challenges in this country because of the color of their skin. That's really the origination of the term.

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I agree with you on the original meaning of the word.

However, through loose use of the term by folks on the left and right, it has taken on a different term.

While not the historical use, when I think of woke, I think of people with no practical application or solution that promote non-sensical solutions to real problems.

Like $5m reparation for everyone who may have had a historical connection with someone who may have been a slave. $5 million?

Or trigger warning on college course syllabus. Or teaching gender identity and sexual preference to elementary students.

And cancelling those who challenge their solution and painting everyone who dare disagree on solution as racists to chill speech and debate.

It is not about ideology on the problems. You probably share the same ideology on the issues as those people I consider woke, but I would not consider you "woke" in the pejorative sense that it may be used. I respect your view points even if I disagree. In fact, you and I probably agree a lot on the existence of the problems but we disagree on solutions. That's OK. I respect your actual knowledge and will consider your viewpoint. I have no time to discuss with those who revert to name calling and tribalism because they are boring and provide no insight.

It is the sanctimonious folks on the left without actual knowledge or practical experience (and never letting lack of practical knowledge from tempering their arrogance as if they have everything figured out) but offer utterly stupid solutions that I consider woke. Not the historical term but how I understand its use now. I am sure there is a like term for those with similar proclivity of bad behavior on the right. Like those who think not raising the debt ceiling under any circumstance is the right thing to do. You and I may agree that spiraling debt is a problem, but we also agree that that is a dumb solution.

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I hear everything you are saying. I think that it boils down to you accepting the intentional perversion of the concept by disingenuous awful people. Woke hasn't taken on a different term, Christopher Rufo types purposefully misconstrued and twisted it so that it would be a weapon for their unjust cause. The "woke" you think of isn't woke at all, it's some other boogey-man that has been attached to the term. I'm not criticizing you for allowing this to happen, but I do think that your feeling is the product of a successful and quite intentional misinformation campaign.

It's also all part of a motte and bailey. They get you worked up over teaching gender identity to elementary students, but Florida has expanded the Don't Say Gay bill to prevent teaching all the way through high school.

You are correct that I would never refer to myself as woke and for similar reasons I would never tell a black man like G4R that I'm not racist or anything like that. While I might strive to understand the challenges that marginalized people have (and in some ways I could be marginalized myself), I am not prepared to adjudicate myself as successful.

I'm not going to pretend that the left is unified and has it all figured out or that or that there are a great many who are impractical and making demands that don't make sense and will never happen but I think that rewarding the Christopher Rufo's of the world by allowing them to reframe every discussion into this soft of discussion of extreme outliers is to our collective detriment. It is the reason that Fox News viewers are so angry about so many things that they don't understand and it is one of the biggest things preventing our body politic from making actual progress.

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I don't think I allowed it to happen. I think it just happened. It happened with white suburban kids who used the term to identify themselves in a virtue signaling nonsense. It happened with the right bundling everything they viewed as overreach to a legitimate issue as woke. But it happened, and now when it is used, it is not used in the original sense. So, I think when we criticize their use of the term, you have to understand it in the right context and what was meant and not in the context it may have been originally.

You can call it motte and bailey but I think you are letting folks on the left off too easily. Despite my religion, I am an advocate for people with different gender identity and sexual orientation to feel accepted and loved as themselves. If I saw any right-wing nutjob harassing someone for being trans or gay, I would risk my physical safety to defend them.

But too many on the left don't understand anything about degrees or showing grace to others. I wouldn't want my kids in elementary school to learn about sex until they were about to start puberty. Let them be kids. When I feel that way, why must the kids now have to learn about a specific type of sexual or gender identity and sexual orientation in elementary school? When they push to 100% purity test and my-way-or-highway, I am more inclined to react the opposite. And I think that is part of what you are seeing. It's also partly the inflexibility and lack of grace of those who otherwise may have a legitimate concern.

Same with racial injustice. I am under no delusion that we do not have blind spot and I am under no delusion that there isn't still residual impact from past and present racism. That exists for Asians, Jews, Latino, etc. as well. But if the response is to exempt another form of racism where you can now group and mock a group of people (even if white and turn them into one dimensional characteristic based on skin color) and you are telling me (as some on the left do) that I need to feel shame and be open to mockery and hate because of my skin color, you have lost me. Again, lack of grace leads to the opposite reaction and, quite frankly, open to monsters like Trump.

There is generally lack of grace in America now, and you have tribalism and name calling. No need to look beyond here. If you are waiting for the right to surrender and make this normal unilaterally without any form of self-awareness or self-inspection by the left, nothing is going to change. We are all responsible for the stupidity that exists in our country now.

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