I admire Julius's very thoughtful comment, which expressed a lot of my concerns far better than I could. I'm not an expert on everything, in fact my expertise is very limited. One thing that my expertise has taught me is how many people in the fields I know well pretend to be experts when they are not, usually for profit/material gain, but sometimes just out of a defect in their ego/mental make up. I project this experience on to life in general, hence I don't accept others' expertise is a given, particularly when it comes to barely established "science" and rules. I know that hypotheses should not become theories until they have been so well tested that a consensus can be established. I also know that theories even after establishment can eventually crumble in the face of new facts, which require new hypothesis. Rinse and repeat. Dogma is often asserted and disguised as theory, but the tell is owners of dogma don't want it exposed to hard scrutiny. So much for areas where there is a hope of having some hard data. Hence I strongly agree with Julius' concern that no change should be made permanent without a great deal of data, recognizing that the data itself can and often is contaminated by the observers' bias.
Morals and ethics for the most part don’t have particularly hard data behind them, and here I tend to think that a lot of push and scrape is helpful because eventually what works best for the society will win out, but what wins will cycle between hedonism and aestheticism ala Russel, and a happy medium can never be struck, one can just hope for a continuation of a general trend toward a better world for a majority.
Justin, I think your general point is right on. Of course, when you drill down on the specifics of any particular "anti-woke" issue, the world becomes gray and resistant to not only the hyper-ventilating, hyperbolic rantings of the conservative anti-woke crowd but also the dogmatism of liberal woke crowd. (I actually remain uncomfortable with the word "liberal" as a pejorative because I'm old enough to remember when "liberal" meant "progressive" before the establishment Neo-liberals appropriated the word... I wish there was a better alternative to liberal ... maybe "faux woke Establishment"???).
For example, when it comes to Trans rights, I think it's obvious as someone who believes in equality, that adult Trans people deserve all the rights and dignity that all human beings deserve, but how exactly one approaches the reality of trans children is beyond my absolute judgment (not that I have any right to impose my ethics / morality on any child or parent trying to navigate sexuality and gender).
I have read the account of one young woman - an actress - who was assigned male at birth but knew very early (before puberty) she should have been a girl. She is absolutely convincing and I completely approve of her parents support and actions that made her teenage years as a girl possible. There was no reason she should have suffered mentally and physically in a state of gender ambiguity and thus experienced a teen girl experience.
On the other hand, I am loathe to agree that EVERY child that says they were born the wrong sex should get hormone therapy or surgery, pre-adult and pre-puberty. In both cases, there are permanent changes to such medical actions that that may cause irreparable harm. Maybe the child is simply gay and hasn't figured that out yet. Maybe there is some kind of peer or greater social pressure in a particular community. My main point is that I simply don't know what the right decision is for any one individual and their guardians. It's up to them and should be taken with great deliberation and care. It's a complex case by case situation where the parents are still the ultimate responsibility, however imperfect (or worse) any individual parents may be.
In any case, we don't want government laws making absolute laws, repressing what is a personal medical and psychological decision between parents, children and their doctors. But at the same time, there could be a good argument for some kind of regulation, such as required therapy sessions and required second opinions. But maybe not. I'm not well-informed enough here. I just know I want children to be protected - as they DON'T have the decision making ability of adults - but yet to still have the freedom to be who they are.
So saying "it depends" and "sometimes yes, sometime no" and "I'm not sure" and "maybe...but maybe not" to either anti-woke bigots or woke (language and otherwise) police does not serve either's agendas. And this goes back to what I think your main point is: these so-called woke anti-woke "social" issues are actually a sleight of hand: a cudgel in one hand to strike with, while the other hand is busy plundering, stealing and killing either a third victim or the electorate itself.
A perfect example (in this case using so-called woke) is when Israel Hasbara tries to portray Israeli society as pro-gay and pro-women's rights, and then using that as some kind of bizarre justification for genocide because Israeli supposedly embodies Western notions of liberty and freedom and a thus are a bulwark against the medieval Islamic horde.
This of course, ironically, then feeds the hidden racism of the faux-woke and the not so hidden racism of the anti-woke when Israeli Hasbara then promulgates false stories of mass rapes and false stories of barbaric violence e.g. beheaded babies and disemboweled mothers. It's all about greed, power and the ideology of superiority over other human beings.
'‘We are in the era of the trans child. It would be absolutely unfounded to imagine a Trans Studies scholar saying that perhaps, actually, trans children should not be given hormones. As a field we do not allow those kinds of disagreements. Everything must be ‘gender affirming’ (whatever that means).’ from an article by Michael Biggs entitled ‘Suicide by trans-identified children in England and Wales’.
The larger group of liberals will tell you you’re fascist if you want to discuss Israel and history or vaccines and facts or trans identity and facts. Or policy and the corruption of capitalism etc.. In the same way it happens with Zionism, it happens with other groupings like these. If you even think about questioning what they say you are fascist and should be marked for social isolation. This is the issue as I see it. As simply as I can put it.
Anti-wokism didn't just appear out of thin area; it was provoked. I believe that wokism itself was deliberately funded and supported by industry, Friends of Israel and right wing puppet governments and media to create a backlash that only the right wing could solve.
Focus on black people arriving in the UK in small boats; though immigration overall hasn't increased, images of athletes with dicks in swimming costumes and leotards on podiums for women's sport, vulnerable women assaulted in prison, suppression of dissent and free speech during 'covid', ridicule of vegans and environmentalists and WEF conspiracies (that have even managed to turn 'equality' into a dirty word) targeted at the anti-vaccine movement plus deliberately annoying and staged Just Stop Oil stunts among others.
The Zionazis and climate change deniers at the Free Speech and Health Freedom movement now try and claim that support for Palestine and the environment is woke.
It's all wearing very thin.
I've written many posts on this I can link if you're interested.
"Trans women competing in sports" is double speak for "men competing in the women's categories" and the fact that any anti- imperialist doesn't see that for the sexual imperialism that it is, and smears dissenting leftist women as "fascists", or even "liberals", is a pathetic joke.
Women aren't going to give up our rights that were won by our grandmothers to men in sports bras. Use your dialectical thinking and figure it out. And drop the post modern, corporate-backed, identitarianism while you're at it. Men aren't women.
First, if you the Gaza genocide as a pass/fail test as Justin does here, then clearly most of the media and the "public" figures fail spectacularly, woke and anti-woke alike. "Free speech crusaders" are not actually concerned about someone else's proscribed speech, certainly not on the matter of Palestine much like anti-trans crusaders are hardly interested in protecting women's toilets. This fact overshadows any and all deeper analysis here.
Still perhaps we should not be too quick to dismiss any who use the anti-woke terminology as irredeemable: "Woke" and "anti-woke" is an analytical frame that the right has provided for some surprisingly powerful cultural trends in our actually existing neo-liberal capitalism.
A few examples, to add to those by Julius' and other comments:
1) In the U.S. there are a few yearly prizes that form the scifi and fantasy book "canon" such as the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Until 2010 or so these prizes went 80%+ to white men. In the 2020ies women authors lead men by a substantial margin, there are popular Black and Asian authors, and a quite substantial number of works deal with LGTBQ+ issues written by actual trans and queer authors whose sub-culture has reached mainstream scifi.
Personally I find the new authors quite refreshing, even as a cis white guy ;-). Of course, if a person actually likes their space adventures where the pale male overcomes the villain with violence, saves the world, and gets the girl - then I can relate that this would feel like a hostile takeover to them.
2) Almost anything that Disney, Netlifx, Amazon... touch now has a tight script which to actual feminists will seem like two steps forward ten steps back: we now have women as lead characters but they have to be girlbosses who will win every fight and invariably achieve mastery without ever having to train or make a single mistake. Since we know Justin likes Avatar the last Airbender ;-), consider the Netflix live action adaptation: Katara does not have to train let alone with a master, nor can by "motherly" since girlboss. This is not an isolated incident.
I think we IMDb commenters can be forgiven by replying "Katara was actually a relatable and strong female protagonist precisely because she had to train hard and tried to take care of people. Not again this stupid ideology". This is the very sentiment that the right wants to package as "anti-woke" (or less successfully as anti-"cultural Marxism").
This even works both ways: I distinctly remember a reviewer of Amazon's $$$ Rings of Power $$$ who observed that Amazon (who own IMDb) were trying to simply dismiss the negative reviews as racist/"anti-woke" backlash to the casting of a person of color as an elf - when most of them agreed that the scripts were rubbish and that if anything Ismael Cruz Córdova actually was the only actor who played a believable Tolkin elf.
More generally, it is always cheaper for a corporation to color their fracking drill bits pink than to raise women's wages to the level of men's. Likewise it is cheaper for them to mandate their employees' twitter accounts to be politically correct than to hire workers from minority populations. I think we on the left can easily see through this co-optation, and can also see through the right's attempts to paint leftists as the personification of marketing and worker control campaigns dressed up as identity politics.
A friend yesterday posted a DEI training at her job that said to avoid the word "blindness" in a negative way because it can hurt people that have disabilities
I admire Julius's very thoughtful comment, which expressed a lot of my concerns far better than I could. I'm not an expert on everything, in fact my expertise is very limited. One thing that my expertise has taught me is how many people in the fields I know well pretend to be experts when they are not, usually for profit/material gain, but sometimes just out of a defect in their ego/mental make up. I project this experience on to life in general, hence I don't accept others' expertise is a given, particularly when it comes to barely established "science" and rules. I know that hypotheses should not become theories until they have been so well tested that a consensus can be established. I also know that theories even after establishment can eventually crumble in the face of new facts, which require new hypothesis. Rinse and repeat. Dogma is often asserted and disguised as theory, but the tell is owners of dogma don't want it exposed to hard scrutiny. So much for areas where there is a hope of having some hard data. Hence I strongly agree with Julius' concern that no change should be made permanent without a great deal of data, recognizing that the data itself can and often is contaminated by the observers' bias.
Morals and ethics for the most part don’t have particularly hard data behind them, and here I tend to think that a lot of push and scrape is helpful because eventually what works best for the society will win out, but what wins will cycle between hedonism and aestheticism ala Russel, and a happy medium can never be struck, one can just hope for a continuation of a general trend toward a better world for a majority.
Justin, I think your general point is right on. Of course, when you drill down on the specifics of any particular "anti-woke" issue, the world becomes gray and resistant to not only the hyper-ventilating, hyperbolic rantings of the conservative anti-woke crowd but also the dogmatism of liberal woke crowd. (I actually remain uncomfortable with the word "liberal" as a pejorative because I'm old enough to remember when "liberal" meant "progressive" before the establishment Neo-liberals appropriated the word... I wish there was a better alternative to liberal ... maybe "faux woke Establishment"???).
For example, when it comes to Trans rights, I think it's obvious as someone who believes in equality, that adult Trans people deserve all the rights and dignity that all human beings deserve, but how exactly one approaches the reality of trans children is beyond my absolute judgment (not that I have any right to impose my ethics / morality on any child or parent trying to navigate sexuality and gender).
I have read the account of one young woman - an actress - who was assigned male at birth but knew very early (before puberty) she should have been a girl. She is absolutely convincing and I completely approve of her parents support and actions that made her teenage years as a girl possible. There was no reason she should have suffered mentally and physically in a state of gender ambiguity and thus experienced a teen girl experience.
On the other hand, I am loathe to agree that EVERY child that says they were born the wrong sex should get hormone therapy or surgery, pre-adult and pre-puberty. In both cases, there are permanent changes to such medical actions that that may cause irreparable harm. Maybe the child is simply gay and hasn't figured that out yet. Maybe there is some kind of peer or greater social pressure in a particular community. My main point is that I simply don't know what the right decision is for any one individual and their guardians. It's up to them and should be taken with great deliberation and care. It's a complex case by case situation where the parents are still the ultimate responsibility, however imperfect (or worse) any individual parents may be.
In any case, we don't want government laws making absolute laws, repressing what is a personal medical and psychological decision between parents, children and their doctors. But at the same time, there could be a good argument for some kind of regulation, such as required therapy sessions and required second opinions. But maybe not. I'm not well-informed enough here. I just know I want children to be protected - as they DON'T have the decision making ability of adults - but yet to still have the freedom to be who they are.
So saying "it depends" and "sometimes yes, sometime no" and "I'm not sure" and "maybe...but maybe not" to either anti-woke bigots or woke (language and otherwise) police does not serve either's agendas. And this goes back to what I think your main point is: these so-called woke anti-woke "social" issues are actually a sleight of hand: a cudgel in one hand to strike with, while the other hand is busy plundering, stealing and killing either a third victim or the electorate itself.
A perfect example (in this case using so-called woke) is when Israel Hasbara tries to portray Israeli society as pro-gay and pro-women's rights, and then using that as some kind of bizarre justification for genocide because Israeli supposedly embodies Western notions of liberty and freedom and a thus are a bulwark against the medieval Islamic horde.
This of course, ironically, then feeds the hidden racism of the faux-woke and the not so hidden racism of the anti-woke when Israeli Hasbara then promulgates false stories of mass rapes and false stories of barbaric violence e.g. beheaded babies and disemboweled mothers. It's all about greed, power and the ideology of superiority over other human beings.
very thoughtful comment. thank you
Trans rights do not trump women's rights. It's actually very simple! https://jowaller.substack.com/p/sex-vs-gender-identity?utm_source=publication-search
https://jowaller.substack.com/p/transactivism-is-a-war-on-women?utm_source=publication-search
'‘We are in the era of the trans child. It would be absolutely unfounded to imagine a Trans Studies scholar saying that perhaps, actually, trans children should not be given hormones. As a field we do not allow those kinds of disagreements. Everything must be ‘gender affirming’ (whatever that means).’ from an article by Michael Biggs entitled ‘Suicide by trans-identified children in England and Wales’.
Not woke, but anti-anti-woke. The ruling class loves and fosters division - all manner of division except one.
'woke' = 'politically correct" 2.0
The larger group of liberals will tell you you’re fascist if you want to discuss Israel and history or vaccines and facts or trans identity and facts. Or policy and the corruption of capitalism etc.. In the same way it happens with Zionism, it happens with other groupings like these. If you even think about questioning what they say you are fascist and should be marked for social isolation. This is the issue as I see it. As simply as I can put it.
This is kinda my lane and my area of interest.
Anti-wokism didn't just appear out of thin area; it was provoked. I believe that wokism itself was deliberately funded and supported by industry, Friends of Israel and right wing puppet governments and media to create a backlash that only the right wing could solve.
Focus on black people arriving in the UK in small boats; though immigration overall hasn't increased, images of athletes with dicks in swimming costumes and leotards on podiums for women's sport, vulnerable women assaulted in prison, suppression of dissent and free speech during 'covid', ridicule of vegans and environmentalists and WEF conspiracies (that have even managed to turn 'equality' into a dirty word) targeted at the anti-vaccine movement plus deliberately annoying and staged Just Stop Oil stunts among others.
The Zionazis and climate change deniers at the Free Speech and Health Freedom movement now try and claim that support for Palestine and the environment is woke.
It's all wearing very thin.
I've written many posts on this I can link if you're interested.
Jo
"Trans women competing in sports" is double speak for "men competing in the women's categories" and the fact that any anti- imperialist doesn't see that for the sexual imperialism that it is, and smears dissenting leftist women as "fascists", or even "liberals", is a pathetic joke.
Women aren't going to give up our rights that were won by our grandmothers to men in sports bras. Use your dialectical thinking and figure it out. And drop the post modern, corporate-backed, identitarianism while you're at it. Men aren't women.
First, if you the Gaza genocide as a pass/fail test as Justin does here, then clearly most of the media and the "public" figures fail spectacularly, woke and anti-woke alike. "Free speech crusaders" are not actually concerned about someone else's proscribed speech, certainly not on the matter of Palestine much like anti-trans crusaders are hardly interested in protecting women's toilets. This fact overshadows any and all deeper analysis here.
Still perhaps we should not be too quick to dismiss any who use the anti-woke terminology as irredeemable: "Woke" and "anti-woke" is an analytical frame that the right has provided for some surprisingly powerful cultural trends in our actually existing neo-liberal capitalism.
A few examples, to add to those by Julius' and other comments:
1) In the U.S. there are a few yearly prizes that form the scifi and fantasy book "canon" such as the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Until 2010 or so these prizes went 80%+ to white men. In the 2020ies women authors lead men by a substantial margin, there are popular Black and Asian authors, and a quite substantial number of works deal with LGTBQ+ issues written by actual trans and queer authors whose sub-culture has reached mainstream scifi.
Personally I find the new authors quite refreshing, even as a cis white guy ;-). Of course, if a person actually likes their space adventures where the pale male overcomes the villain with violence, saves the world, and gets the girl - then I can relate that this would feel like a hostile takeover to them.
2) Almost anything that Disney, Netlifx, Amazon... touch now has a tight script which to actual feminists will seem like two steps forward ten steps back: we now have women as lead characters but they have to be girlbosses who will win every fight and invariably achieve mastery without ever having to train or make a single mistake. Since we know Justin likes Avatar the last Airbender ;-), consider the Netflix live action adaptation: Katara does not have to train let alone with a master, nor can by "motherly" since girlboss. This is not an isolated incident.
I think we IMDb commenters can be forgiven by replying "Katara was actually a relatable and strong female protagonist precisely because she had to train hard and tried to take care of people. Not again this stupid ideology". This is the very sentiment that the right wants to package as "anti-woke" (or less successfully as anti-"cultural Marxism").
This even works both ways: I distinctly remember a reviewer of Amazon's $$$ Rings of Power $$$ who observed that Amazon (who own IMDb) were trying to simply dismiss the negative reviews as racist/"anti-woke" backlash to the casting of a person of color as an elf - when most of them agreed that the scripts were rubbish and that if anything Ismael Cruz Córdova actually was the only actor who played a believable Tolkin elf.
More generally, it is always cheaper for a corporation to color their fracking drill bits pink than to raise women's wages to the level of men's. Likewise it is cheaper for them to mandate their employees' twitter accounts to be politically correct than to hire workers from minority populations. I think we on the left can easily see through this co-optation, and can also see through the right's attempts to paint leftists as the personification of marketing and worker control campaigns dressed up as identity politics.
A friend yesterday posted a DEI training at her job that said to avoid the word "blindness" in a negative way because it can hurt people that have disabilities
So when someone bumps into me in my home state of New Jersey I can't say, "Wotsamatta ya blind?" Is that now off limits?