Unit2Sucks said:
calbear93 said:
Unit2Sucks said:
calbear93 said:
Unit2Sucks said:
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.
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.
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.
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.
When did someone tell you to feel shame simply for being white? Acknowledging white privilege is not shameful. I know some white people feel like it's an attack on their pride to accept that we don't have a level playing field in this country but to me it's not a persuasive argument. I'm all for grace but I think it's difficult to demand all people who have been impacted by centuries of oppression to exhibit grace, especially when a significant portion of the population is still quite actively attempting to continue, if not increase, that oppression.
And with respect to teaching sex in schools, I think this is 99% fear-mongering. Children are bombarded with "sex" from an early age through the media we consume in this country. They see their parents kissing throughout their childhood. They see hetero love interests throughout movies - including "children's" movies. How many traditional Disney movies center around a kiss between a man and a woman? Imagine if Disney remad Pocahontas, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid, Snow White, Cinderella, etc. and changed nothing else other than the gender of one of the love interests. You would have pandemonium and conservatives claiming that Disney is pushing the woke agenda or shoving gayness "down their throats" (conservatives love that term). You might not feel the way the modern conservative movement does, but that doesn't change things.
When right wing extremists complain about "teaching sex" in school, it's really just opposition to allowing children to be exposed to the sort of thing that the extremists wouldn't care about if it were same-sex relationships but call grooming or sexualizing if it's 2 men or 2 women.
To circle back to the first thing I mentioned in this response: if someone told me to feel shame for who I am (regardless of which part of my identity they attack - white, male, Jewish, Cal fan, lawyer, ex-lawyer, skiier, whatever), it would have absolutely no impact on my self-opinion but it would certainly impact by opinion of the other person. That's my personal version of grace and why I don't get riled up by knuckleheads criticizing me.
Well, I think the first thing to having an open mind is being open to how others feel. No one is going to feel something just because you think they should. Personally, I don't feel shame for being white no matter how much one poster here in particular may claim I should. I acknowledge that there are privileges to being white. I also think that there are privileges to being born in California as opposed to Alabama. There are privileges to being born in a wealthy family. But when there are posters here grouping white people and saying your ilk or whites being white, etc., and justifying that type of behavior as entitlement for not being white with others agreeing, it is an attempt to shame. By that point, you have lost me. If it were just an acknowledgment that white, like being born in California or born rich, is an unearned privilege, then I would easily agree since it is not controversial. It is the shaming and stereotyping that does happen even here that is a bit different from what you are suggesting.
When it comes to children, one thing that the Democrats have to learn to do is listen to the parents and let parents determine what they are comfortable with their kids learnings. I suppose you would be offended if a stranger went to your kids and started talking about sexually explicit things and argue that they most likely already heard it. I say this as a parent of now successful and well adjusted adults. I also believe you are a parent. You have certain values that you want your kids to learn and certain things you want them to learn at a pace you want even if someone may think it should be even earlier. If someone were to force your kids to learn about fundamental Christianity (ignore separation of church and state for a second), you would not be too happy. What if they forced your kids to learn about the glory of Russia? Or maybe explicit sex (not equating that to teaching about gender identity but writing that as an extreme example). The point I am making is that parents are very protective about what their kids learn. It is not persuasive to say we are just fear-mongering. It is not enough to suggest every parent has to feel comfortable with what you specifically are comfortable with your kids learning.
About your examples on Disney movies - Disney is a for-profit organization. If they believed that it would generate more revenue to have all their movies be about homosexual characters, they would. They would not care if the right objected as long as it brought more revenue. Nike will continue to cater to the liberal movement as long as it brings more revenue. Disney doesn't do so with their movies. The reason they don't is that majority of Americans don't want their kids to have outweighed exposure to alternative lifestyle at such a young age. If they did, Disney, with all the money spent on marketing research, would do so in a heartbeat.
Also, knowing I just complained about schools teaching sex in elementary school, when you write "right wing extremist complain about teaching sex", you are just using a tactic that is not intended to engender debate but just insult. You are smart enough that you don't need to do it. Maybe you didn't mean to insult me or insinuate that I am a far right extremist, but it seem unnecessary in light of my prior post. I will choose not to be insulted and give you the benefit of doubt. You have good enough arguments on its own. I don't care whether it's opposite sex or same sex, I don't want sex taught in elementary school. This world, with social media, already forces kids to grow up too quickly. Let kids enjoy their innocence. There is plenty of time after elementary school for kids to explore their sexuality. That's my personal feeling, and no amount of implication of me being right wing extremist is going to persuade me. It will only harden my feeling and feel like the other side stopped listening and is not worth listening to. And then we each go to our own echo chambers and become radicalized. That's a loss.
I don't get riled up, but when someone tells me to be ashamed for my inalienable traits, I stop listening to them. And again, that's how we become radicalized. We really need to focus as a country on debating ideas instead of debating lack of worth of those who may disagree. Instead of complaining about how the other side is low IQ or ignorant (with the other side saying the same about the other tribe), let's be one of the few who promote ideas and not more vilification and name calling.
