The Real problem with cancel culture

[viper37]

https://medium.com/@zelphontheshelf/10-signs-youre-probably-in-a-cult-1921eb5a3857

#10... Do these coke fueled orgies count for the secret rites thing?
'Cause up to there, I'd swear that was the GOP.

[Berkut]

You can be anti radical left wing identity politics without being in a cult. (Do we really have to avoid using the word "woke"?)

Maybe he meant only those who are anti radical left wing identity politics AND in a anti radical left wing identity politics cult? But it sure sounded to me like he was saying that anyone who is "anti woke" is in a cult, as in "the anti woke cult". 

It's frustrating (and happens right here basically 100% of the time) that the far left gets to immediately retreat to "YOU MUST BE A RIGHT WING BIGOT, OR SUPPORT RIGHT WING BIGOTRY!" the moment anyone questions their orthodoxy. They don't ever have to defend their positions on their own merits. I suspect it is because they know how weak those merits actually are....

[crazy canuck]

Depends, do you want to use the term in a way consistent with the Fox interpretation or the way in which the people who coined the term meant it?

[Josquius]

You can be anti radical left wing identity politics without being in a cult. (Do we really have to avoid using the word "woke"?)

Maybe he meant only those who are anti radical left wing identity politics AND in a anti radical left wing identity politics cult? But it sure sounded to me like he was saying that anyone who is "anti woke" is in a cult, as in "the anti woke cult".

It's frustrating (and happens right here basically 100% of the time) that the far left gets to immediately retreat to "YOU MUST BE A RIGHT WING BIGOT, OR SUPPORT RIGHT WING BIGOTRY!" the moment anyone questions their orthodoxy. They don't ever have to defend their positions on their own merits. I suspect it is because they know how weak those merits actually are....

Completely the opposite in my experience. You've basically just summed up hard right behaviour there. Dare to question the orthodoxy of the right and you're clearly just a radical woke sjw. For a random example suggest maybe not fucking the environment by using peat when gardening...? Nah. Woke. Exactly the same as a stinky hippy who wants us all to live in mud huts. It's woke so it's invalid and can't be engaged with.
Call out their bollocks, like weasley hate-masks such as "gender identity ideology" for what it is, sneaky bigotry, and they just scream "you just call everyone you don't like a nazi you radical woker you".

As to identity politics, that tends to be the domain of the right. It has been a favourite tool of theirs for many decades now and in recent years they've really turned it up to loopy extremes.

Does the stinky blue haired gender non conformist perpetually offended radical left twat of the Conservative imagination truly exist? Yes. They're out there. But they're pathetically marginal characters with zero power or influence. Huge contrast to the manufactured "anti woke" cult that is absolutely fucking with our society and is, no exaggeration, a serious threat to the continuation of human civilization with its inbuilt hate of anything THE OTHER doesn't hate, eg. Wanting to do something about climate change.

And yes. Best avoid the word woke. It's dumb and meaningless. If you hate a certain left wing belief then say you hate that belief.
In the modern parlance woke is a pointless cluster of a bunch of disparate things that share the only commonality that this wasn't how things were in 1978.

[DGuller]

I think the reason the word "woke" evokes such an emotional reaction is precisely because it is meaningful.  Meaningless things rarely evoke reactions.  I also think it's a fool's errand to look for an alternative to "woke", because it'll quickly just become the next "woke", and we'll keep on looking for alternatives endlessly without actually discussing the woke ideas.  Which is maybe the plan...

[Jacob]

I think the reason the word "woke" evokes such an emotional reaction is precisely because it is meaningful.  Meaningless things rarely evoke reactions.  I also think it's a fool's errand to look for an alternative to "woke", because it'll quickly just become the next "woke", and we'll keep on looking for alternatives endlessly without actually discussing the woke ideas.  Which is maybe the plan...

The reason woke evokes such an emotional reaction is because there's a massive media machine - formal and informal - dedicated to metastasize garden-variety discomfort and disagreement with left of centre views into a political weapon.

[Josquius]

I think the reason the word "woke" evokes such an emotional reaction is precisely because it is meaningful.  Meaningless things rarely evoke reactions.  I also think it's a fool's errand to look for an alternative to "woke", because it'll quickly just become the next "woke", and we'll keep on looking for alternatives endlessly without actually discussing the woke ideas.  Which is maybe the plan...

How about the word "modern"?
That pretty much sums up the same. Whenever someone says "anti woke", "anti modern" usually subs in quite well.

The trouble with "woke"* is it's not a word used to describe a coherent ideology or set of physical items or anything. It's a purposefully ambiguous word defined purely by the opposition to it. It morphs and shifts to whatever the pack master has set his eye on at that moment.

That is, this is an ideology of hate in the dictionary definition of the word. Its not for anything in particular. Merely opposed to an ill defined morass which it sees as sullying the previously pure world.

In the past we didn't call this sort of thing anti woke. Back then its proponents tended to be a bit more straight forward and honest (albeit not entirely so) and came up with a new word to describe their ideologies as distinct ideas in themselves rather than purely in terms of being opposed to something.

*modern meaning of woke here. The old meaning of aware of racial injustice in an African American context is long gone. Intentionally so some would claim. Not my area at all however.

[grumbler]

I think that the Brits and Americans on this board need to understand that the British-English word "woke" is not the same "woke" as is used in American-English.  The dictionaries use the American-English definition, so I don't really know what the British-English word means, other than that is an insult of some kind.

So people here tend to speak at cross-purposes when using the word "woke" because they seem to think that it means the same in both languages.

[Sheilbh]

T-Rex is woke now


Woke, I think, means anything that is different to what I learned when I was at school.

[Berkut]

You can be anti radical left wing identity politics without being in a cult. (Do we really have to avoid using the word "woke"?)

Maybe he meant only those who are anti radical left wing identity politics AND in a anti radical left wing identity politics cult? But it sure sounded to me like he was saying that anyone who is "anti woke" is in a cult, as in "the anti woke cult".

It's frustrating (and happens right here basically 100% of the time) that the far left gets to immediately retreat to "YOU MUST BE A RIGHT WING BIGOT, OR SUPPORT RIGHT WING BIGOTRY!" the moment anyone questions their orthodoxy. They don't ever have to defend their positions on their own merits. I suspect it is because they know how weak those merits actually are....

Completely the opposite in my experience. You've basically just summed up hard right behaviour there. Dare to question the orthodoxy of the right and you're clearly just a radical woke sjw. For a random example suggest maybe not fucking the environment by using peat when gardening...? Nah. Woke. Exactly the same as a stinky hippy who wants us all to live in mud huts. It's woke so it's invalid and can't be engaged with.
Call out their bollocks, like weasley hate-masks such as "gender identity ideology" for what it is, sneaky bigotry, and they just scream "you just call everyone you don't like a nazi you radical woker you".

As to identity politics, that tends to be the domain of the right. It has been a favourite tool of theirs for many decades now and in recent years they've really turned it up to loopy extremes.

Does the stinky blue haired gender non conformist perpetually offended radical left twat of the Conservative imagination truly exist? Yes. They're out there. But they're pathetically marginal characters with zero power or influence. Huge contrast to the manufactured "anti woke" cult that is absolutely fucking with our society and is, no exaggeration, a serious threat to the continuation of human civilization with its inbuilt hate of anything THE OTHER doesn't hate, eg. Wanting to do something about climate change.

And yes. Best avoid the word woke. It's dumb and meaningless. If you hate a certain left wing belief then say you hate that belief.
In the modern parlance woke is a pointless cluster of a bunch of disparate things that share the only commonality that this wasn't how things were in 1978.

You are doing *exactly* what I am describing. Perfectly.

There is no "hard right" HERE. I don't think there is anyone on Languish now who reflects what you are talking about.

So why bring it up every single time the question of "woke" culture comes up, and people here on Languish question or challenge those ideas?

What relevance does the fact that the hard right doesn't like the hard left have to a debate between people who are on the left about the merits of positions?

The fact that the hard right is against ALL left of center positions has zero relevance to a discussion about what a bunch of progressives think about the most radical of left wing ideas.

[Admiral Yi]

Squeeze, what markers, if any, do you use to distinguish between the "anti-woke cult" and those who are presumably within the Pale but criticize wokeness?  How do you tell that someone is not in the cult?

[Josquius]

You are doing *exactly* what I am describing. Perfectly.

There is no "hard right" HERE. I don't think there is anyone on Languish now who reflects what you are talking about.

So why bring it up every single time the question of "woke" culture comes up, and people here on Languish question or challenge those ideas?

What relevance does the fact that the hard right doesn't like the hard left have to a debate between people who are on the left about the merits of positions?

The fact that the hard right is against ALL left of center positions has zero relevance to a discussion about what a bunch of progressives think about the most radical of left wing ideas.

It seems to me you're the one who is far more doing the textbook thing here. Refusing to engage with the actual topic and merely getting defensive in the 'you just call everyone you don't like a nazi!' style.

Anti-woke IS a hard right stance. This isnt just some insult to delegitimise it, it's a simple statement of fact.

Note its perfectly possible to combine ideas from across the political spectrum in one's own system of beliefs. That the left is generally anti corporal punishment doesn't mean someone who is a committed socialist can't actually be all for the cane.

The very concept of woke is a right wing culture war tactic. That's the reason we are even having this discussion. It's simply impossible to discuss it without mentioning it in its proper context - that is unless we want to grab our pitchforks and blindly swallow what the media feeds us. Mission accomplished for the hard right.

I don't actually believe you are fully anti-woke. I'm sure there are plenty of parts of the ideology that you don't follow and there's merely some small aspects of it that really appeal so you've chosen to describe yourself so. But then that's the beauty of such a vague non-term.
You might  see woke as just meaning left wing anarchist idiots on twitter, to others it's gays acting with impunity and publically gaying, for me woke is babies crying in the night. Whatever is different in a upsetting way to when one was a kid is woke so let's all sign up to be anti-woke.
It's meaningless.

You want to discuss some extreme left positions? Then discuss some extreme left positions. There's no need to be vague and evasive by simply yelling about the woke.

[Berkut]

But every time we do discuss extreme left positions, like how awesome it is to cancel people, the response is to immediately bring up how terrible the bigots on the right are, and how the entire objection to firing professors is just something the right invented.

We do exactly what you are demanding, and the response, 100% of the time, is to immediately start crying about the right wing anti woke cult.

And anyone on the left who talks about extreme left positions, FROM THE LEFT, is consistently railed on as right wing enablers.

Again, the is no "anti woke cult" *here*. 

Again, there is no question that nearly 100% of progressive ideas are opposed by the Trumper/Tea Party dumbasses. That means that by definition, literally any discussion about any progressive idea between progressives, if you don't agree with it, the other side can trot out the fact that you are on the side of the dumbass right.

It's exhausting, and I know there are several people here (because we've discussed it via PM) just don't even bother anymore. Which is the entire point of the tactic, I guess.

[Josquius]

But every time we do discuss extreme left positions, like how awesome it is to cancel people, the response is to immediately bring up how terrible the bigots on the right are, and how the entire objection to firing professors is just something the right invented.

That isn't an extreme left position though. "Cancelling" gets done by people of all positions whether it's fascist book burning or the apartheid boycott.
Similarly it has varying degrees of validity from a tool of authoritarian oppression to a valid method for the powerless to let their voice be heard.
Ironically this "woke" stuff is inherently about cancelling anything with the wiff of being progressive. Suppressing any dissenting views... Having first got the jab in to accuse those with these views of doing this all the time.

We do exactly what you are demanding, and the response, 100% of the time, is to immediately start crying about the right wing anti woke cult.

And anyone on the left who talks about extreme left positions, FROM THE LEFT, is consistently railed on as right wing enablers.

That's not what you're doing though by attacking "woke". You are just swallowing the rights culture war.
As said, have an actual issue with something then mention it specifically. Don't just go in for the old man shouts at cloud it's different to my day thus bad woke stuff.

Again, the is no "anti woke cult" *here*.

That's the issue in the modern world however. That's what the interesting article talked about.

Again, there is no question that nearly 100% of progressive ideas are opposed by the Trumper/Tea Party dumbasses. That means that by definition, literally any discussion about any progressive idea between progressives, if you don't agree with it, the other side can trot out the fact that you are on the side of the dumbass right.

There's not agreeing with something and having an alternative idea then there's automatically taking a contrarian position because it is branded as woke.
You can argue for instance whether nuclear power is a good way of tackling climate change or not. However to argue climate change is just a big conspiracy.... Yeah no. When left wingers do that (piers Corbyn...) they absolutely are on the side of the loony right.

It's exhausting, and I know there are several people here (because we've discussed it via PM) just don't even bother anymore. Which is the entire point of the tactic, I guess.

Again with the projection.
Its not those opposed to the anti woke hysteria who are using sneaky tactics here.
I'm just calling it like it is. And I'm not the only one. A pushback is getting into gear, as mentioned in my first post here.

[Berkut]

OK, I give up.

It is all cults, all the way down, and I am just "swallowing the rights culture war".