We all know that being woke requires you hand in your critical thinking card, because the ideology is circular and not internally consistent. But then there are those who through some strange series of events somehow think that being woke simply means becoming aware of injustice and its a good thing. This is an example of what the activists mean by being ‘woke’.
Being woke mean judging people inherently as members of superficial identity groups, then slotting them into a rubegoldberg-esque rubric of power/oppression ratings,and then judging their claim as to where they fall on this bullshit ‘matrix of oppression’. The more oppression factors you have been deemed to have the more troothiness your claim is.
Watch what happens though when you inadvertently break a trip wire and your ‘oppressed privilege rating’ isn’t high enough for the claim you make.
Man claiming to be a woman: NO PROBLEM.
WHITE Man claiming to be a woman and COLONIZING A JAPANESE name: ALL SORTS OF PROBLEMS.
Utterly ridiculous.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
9 comments
October 12, 2024 at 7:44 am
Steve Ruis
Congratulations! You have just accepted a definition of woke after the term had been passed through the right-wing language propaganda processor.
Here is the Wikipedia definition of woke: ‘Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) originally meaning alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to be used as slang for a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights.”
Just like that very same propaganda processor turned the word liberal into a slur, the term woke is no longer recognizable to the people who created it.
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October 12, 2024 at 8:46 am
tildeb
It was only a matter of time before the idiocy of the easily bamboozled was blamed on everyone except those who have created it, taught it, practiced it, protected it, vilified those against it, and then supported its institutionalization. I know! Let’s blame those who criticize it! Such meanies. They must be the ones who caused the problem to begin with.
Good grief. This OP example demonstrates the absurdity that is wokeness (do you have a better term, Steve? Maybe post-modern identitarianism?): internally incoherent and exteriorly idiotic to the extreme. And it’s not the political right doing all the yeoman work to keep it going; it’s the political left. So much for the ‘propaganda processor’ claim (in practice, wokism ain’t a word problem, Steve: it’s an anti-liberal authoritarian extremist problem maintained by belief from the bamboozled).
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October 12, 2024 at 9:06 am
The Arbourist
@Steven Ruis
First – Wikipedia is a captured institution, so a fair amount of skepticism is required regarding sourcing Wikipedia to any important topic.
Second – Partisan politics aside, the etiology of the word “woke” has been evolving over time. Please see Peter Boghossian as to how the word’s meaning has changed over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSJwpbayuqE
Third – There is a case to be made that the “right wing propaganda processor” you cite in your comment isn’t a correct diagnosis of the situation. Consider the idea of polysemy (referenced here on the blog) that is part of the activist Left’s strategy when using language politically.
The polysemy dodge is a variation on the Motte and Bailey argumentative ploy. Briefly – For any important word an activist uses (woke, inclusion, diversity et cetera) two meaning exist in parallel – The first meaning is the commonly accepted meaning – for example the meaning you mentioned in your comment. However, the second meaning is also baked into the word (Woke- The belief that censorship is necessary, some groups of people have more power than others, what groups you belong to is more important than who you are as an individual, and that lived experience is more important that empirical evidence) and most importantly activists can flip between the two definitions of the word to tailor it’s use/effect on the audience.
Thus, in a sense, using “woke” as a pejorative against the first meaning clearly is a problem. Being aware of injustices and inequalities is fine. However, the activist Left will preach and push the second definition until confronted – then they will abandon the hard to defend definition (the bailey) and retreat to the first more reasonable definition (the motte) and try to frame arguments as unreasonable in terms of the context of the motte, while still holding and pushing the beliefs contained in the second definition (the bailey) when not being critiqued or argued against in society.
It is through these deceptive rhetorical techniques that activists advance their subversive ideas and ideology into the institutions and society.
A more thorough explanation of the Motte and Bailey argumentative ploy can be found here – https://newdiscourses.com/2020/05/stealing-motte-critical-social-justice-principle-charity/
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October 12, 2024 at 10:24 am
tildeb
Speaking about the evils of cultural appropriation, ever noticed that the indigenous tribes of Canada had no written language before ‘colonization’ yet nary a peep of condemnation for the appropriation now commonly used to vilify said colonization.
Or the criminal context from some past misdeed or poor joke or lack of purity used to wave away critics of this idiotic framing of the world (Critical Theory) when said ‘criminal’ just so happens to be held in some regard by the bamboozled. An excellent example of this hypocrisy in action in Canada is our very own Tommy Douglas – the political champion of such policies like universal healthcare. The fact he was a well known proponent of eugenics never seems to bubble to surface when we favourably view his contribution to ‘social justice’. I’m sure any such contributors from the political right would receive fair and equitable treatment as anyone from the left like dear old Tommy.
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October 12, 2024 at 11:19 am
Infidel753
Beautiful. This is the inevitable fate of an ideology whose appeal lies partly in the opportunity to chastise and feel superior to those who demonstrate insufficient purity — different prioritization of different forms of purity leads to fragmentation and internal quarreling. Anything that anybody does or says will look “not woke enough” to somebody. Saeko_Cut chastises the therapist for deadnaming, the others chastise Saeko_Cut for cultural appropriation, and yet others will doubtless find something to chastise them about. With any luck, they’ll eventually be too busy fighting each other to hassle normal people.
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October 12, 2024 at 11:26 am
The Arbourist
@ Infidel753 – The purity spirals are real. It would be nice if they only inflicted this burden on themselves, but more often than not, they apply this same sort of pretzel logic to the rest of the world and try and coerce the rest of the world to play along. :/
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October 12, 2024 at 12:03 pm
tildeb
And “coerce” is the right term in order to recognize the inherent authoritarianism needed to impose wokism – or whatever the Puritans want to call it – on everyone. This is the danger created by those who presume this is what ‘being kind’ and ‘being on the right side of history’ looks like in action, and it explains the increasing rates of cancelling and destroying people’s careers who break the (arbitrary and incoherent) woke purity standard at a much, much greater rate (more than double) than even during the worst times of the McCarthy era. It’s not a negligible danger but a growing threat to maintaining a liberal democracy. Liberalism is the real target.
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October 13, 2024 at 12:05 pm
Green Eagle
I generally agree with you that “woke” ideology has degenerated into little more than a parody, but I do think it is a little unfair to make this obviously very silly individual representative of the whole thing. And let’s be clear here, compared to the tens of thousands of monstrous comments you can easily find from right wingers, this is a very small problem.
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October 19, 2024 at 8:35 am
The Arbourist
@Green Eagle
It may be not representative, but rather illustrative of what so much of identity politics is about. The truth value of your statement is not based on objective reality, but rather where you happen to sit (self identity into) in the synthetic hierarchy of oppression. It’s a system pump that tends to select for damaged and or megalomaniacal tendencies in people.
Not a good system, in my opinion.
The BS from the Left is more prevalent – hegemonic even – and while right wing crazy most definitely exists and is problematic – it isn’t anywhere near to controlling societal narratives like the Left currently is.
I try to be an equal opportunity caller of BS policy, regardless of which wing it happens to originate from.
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