1/ The woke are not trying to win the culture war against liberals intellectually, they are trying to win SOCIALLY.
The woke don't fight academically with evidence and reason.
They fight SOCIALLY using power moves to take over institutions and bullying tactics to shut us up.
2/ The woke do not want to merely participate in liberal democratic society; allowing their ideas to be carefully scrutinized by our academic, cultural and democratic institutions.
The woke want to SEIZE POWER in those institutions, and mutate them into institutions of wokeness.
3/ So the tactics adopted by the woke were developed for seizing institutional, cultural, and political power, not for discovering the truth. If it works to send social media mobs after people to get them fired so woke people can take their jobs works, then that is what they do.
4/ Since the goal of the woke is to seize social and political power so they can wield it in the name of their ideology, they are not interested in being kind, civil, or "nice."
In fact Robin DiAngelo actually says "niceness" is bad, and claims it reproduces white supremacy:
5/ The result is that when the woke try to get into positions of power, they do not typically do so by demonstrating they have the MERIT to be in those positions. They are not, to be frank, interested in meeting the standard of merit that liberals use in selecting their leaders.
6/ This is because the woke think liberals and other non-woke groups don't really care about merit, and just use merit as an excuse to keep "marginalized groups" out of positions of power. The woke think leadership requirements are little more than poorly disguised power hoarding
7/ As such they think meeting liberal standards accepts the logic of liberalism, which they reject and want to replace with wokeness.
So, rather than follow liberal rules of civility, merit, reason, and democracy; they follow woke rules and play cynical social power games.
8/ They will accuse, imply, and insinuate all kinds of things about anyone in order to socially destroy whoever dares to get in their way.
They're not going to tell you you're wrong, they're going to tell everyone else you're a racist, sexist, homophobe.
That's how it works.
9/ Here, @BretWeinstein explains how false accusations of racism were used to try to intimidate him into going along with a woke takeover of College where he was teaching at the time.
Please pay close attention here:
10/ In this Clip Reihan Salam (@reihan) response to comments by Eddie Glaude (@esglaude) and while he is talking Eddie interrupts him to insinuate that Reihan is not being genuiune and is merely trying to score political points in a debate.
This is a typical woke tactic.
11/ The point he is that if you think you're going to push back on wokeness with arguments according to the rules of civility, fairplay, evidence and reason you are sorely mistaken.
This is not how this works.
12/ The woke don't play that game. Theirs is a contest for power, and they use cynical social tactics in order to try to browbeat people into doing what the woke want them to do.
Push back requires we recognize what game the woke are playing, and make that clear to everyone else
13/ Wokeness has a vulnerability: being understood.
When people understand the game the woke play, they stop going along with it and the woke lose power.
So make their game clear, make it transparent, and call it out. The sooner you do the sooner they woke lose power.
/fin
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In the Trump/Elon dispute Elon represents fiscal reality, Trump represents Political reality.
Elon knows the Unite States is headed toward financial collapse caused by its debt, Trump knows voters will never accept the spending cuts and tax hikes needed to solve the debt crisis.
Elon is correct that the United States 36 TRILLION dollar debt will eventually crush the American economy and eat it's budget.
Trump is correct that voters will never accept the tax hikes or spending cuts (especially social security and medicare cuts) needed to pay off the debt.
Elon is saying "The financial crisis is coming. Either we deal with it now or we will deal with the financial collapse of the American economy."
Trump is saying "We can only do what is politically possible. Voters refuse to elect congressmen who will make large cuts to spending"
I think society is returning to the desert of the real.
The social narratives which animated people's lives have lost their power and are dying, and the counter-movements they spawned will (eventually) die alongside them.
We are now living in a decaying hyper-reality...
Baudrillard said we're so saturated in representations and images from mass media (T.V., Movies, books, social media, etc) that images become more salient to us and matter more then the real world, so artificial representations become more "real" to us then actual reality itself.
The result, says Baudrillard is that what feel real to us, what feel immediately important, salient, and meaningful to us is whatever emerges from the ecosystem of artificial, curated, simulated, and manufactured representations produced by the vehicles of mass communication.
1/ Woke activists bully people by using social pressure. They publicly shame and attack people to make them feel like all of society is rejecting them.
See the photo below? They want people feel like all of society is doing that to them.
2/ Call-Outs and Cancel Culture are related but different. Cancel culture tries to get people fired or de-platformed as a way to punish them economically and professionally in order to silence them.
It uses economic and professional punishment to make people fall in line.
3/ Call-outs operate using a very different set of mechanisms: social pressure, the sense of hyper-visibility we feel when we are publicly humiliated, and fear of social rejection.
Call-out leverage these Social Mechanisms in order to apply pressure and make people fall in line.
The woke left thinks what is true depends who says it and which side they are on. Only claims made by "COUNTER-HEGEMONIC" people are believed
The woke right thinks what is true depends on who says it and which side they are on. Only claims made by "DISSIDENT" people are believed
People keep saying the right can't be woke because wokeness denies objective reality, and the right doesn't deny science and biology the way the left does.
That's wrong.
Once the right adopts the belief that truth is matter of who says it and which side they are on....
then it is only a matter of time until they begin denying scientific and biological truths because they are being made by people with the wrong politics.
You can actually see this dynamic in the Glen Greenwald discourse that has shown up over the last several days...
1/ Leftists took over the culture so they could own and control the production and interpretation of *meaning*
They wanted to control culture in order to control meaning, and they wanted to control meaning in order to control thought...and that's the real goal: thought control.
2/ The idea is a pretty simple one, people interpret the world using the concepts, ideas, and frameworks of their culture, so whoever owns the apparatus which produces a societies culture decides which ideas, concepts and frameworks people use to understand the world.
3/ The left thought the reason people supported capitalism and hated communism and socialism was because evil capitalists controlled the culture, and used that control to embed capitalist ideology and ruling class values in the culture where they would be absorbed by the masses
Gen Z women leave the church for the same reason they polarize left.
Intersectional feminism says every belief is socially constructed, and anything claiming to be an absolute universal truth, including Christianity, must be exposed as a social construct through deconstruction,
The Critical Social Justice (AKA: "woke") worldview (ubiquitous among Gen Z college educated women) adopts the postmodern contention that all beliefs and truth claims are "socially constructed," and are thus contaminated by the interests and biases of those who constructed them.
As such, the typical Gen Z college educated woman sees Christianity's claims to being an absolute and universal truth as little more than a mask for what the feminists thing Christianity really is: an expression of the interests, biases, and political agenda of the patriarchy.