That narrative of “black lives matter is racist against white people” has really taken such deep roots in the UK. Just a few months from a video of a black person getting choked to death by a police officer, and now you’re “woke” just for caring about that.
When people say “stop being so woke”, they sometimes mean “stop being so self-righteous”. *Most* of the time, though, they mean “stop having integrity”: because they don’t have integrity and they’re too cowardly to get it, so they have to market their own failures as bravery.
The world would get a lot better a lot faster if people stopped using the word “woke” as a defence mechanism and simply admitted “I’m simply too exhausted and terrified to care about anything other than the basic needs of me and my immediate social circle”.
Reminder that the word “woke“ is the spearhead of what I have described as “debate culture”: a culture where any idea, no matter how unsupported it is by fact or reason, must be debated. I wrote a thread on that here:

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More from @Okwonga

11 Nov
In future Sky cannot platform these liars. US democracy, already long corroded, is in such a dangerous place at the moment.
I worry that the debate culture in which so many journalists were raised - where a smart line or argument demolishes the opposition’s case - has made them uniquely vulnerable to this political moment. You can’t beat these people in debate. The platform itself is their victory.
When it comes to anti-democratic actors, sunlight is rarely if ever disinfectant. Sunlight is what they crave. Debate didn’t reduce the effectiveness of online extremists. Removing their platforms did. But of course the biggest profits come from politics as spectacle.
Read 7 tweets
30 Sep
"When would you say you first sat up and felt that Trump represented a real...authoritarian threat?"

"Immediately. Every country that becomes a dictatorship started with a chorus of people saying, "It can't happen here." It can happen anywhere."

the.ink/p/sarah-kendzi…
"[Trump] cares about three things: money, power, and immunity from prosecution. If you threaten any of those things, you have leverage. But people would rather talk about how he wrote "covfefe" in a tweet." the.ink/p/sarah-kendzi…
They kept insisting [Trump] was making errors, and that's why he let the virus spread. I saw the situation and said...he wants to kill people and make money off the crisis. He is absolutely willing to let Americans die; he gets off on it. And I was right. the.ink/p/sarah-kendzi…
Read 6 tweets
27 Sep
1/ Every so often, I re-read this harrowing yet inspiring interview with Benjamin Ferencz, the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials. He is someone who looked at the very worst that human beings could do and still found a way to push forward.

cbsnews.com/news/what-the-…
2/ The biggest challenge for anyone trying to do anything progressive in response to the current social, political and ecological moment is keeping focus. The most helpful thing for me has been to re-read the stories of people who had to engage with huge challenges years ago.
3/ This interview is incredible and it contains the best lines about fending off apathy and cynicism that I may ever read.

"People get discouraged. They should remember, from me, it takes courage not to be discouraged."

We need the courage not to be discouraged, always.
Read 4 tweets
23 Sep
1/ Quick thread. It’s #BiVisibilityDay, and so I thought I would mention what I call my “iceberg theory of bisexuality”: which is that for every openly bisexual person in your friends’ circle or workplace, there are likely a few others just below the surface.
2/ There’s still a lot of ignorance about bisexual people - I received a weapons-grade dose of it just the other week - so that’s why I am open about it. (I hope that the relevant individual, should they read this, is utterly ashamed of themselves.)
3/ Now and then I get messages from bisexual people, mostly men, who say that it’s helpful that I talk about this subject, so that’s mostly why I do it. We’ve got a lot of serious challenges facing this world so people should really be too busy to be ignorant, yet here we are.
Read 6 tweets
22 Sep
Protect Paul Rudd at all costs. That is all.
My timeline is particularly unhappy about politics tonight, so here is a Spotify playlist that I made specifically to raise spirits on such occasions. Nothing worse than an evening spent feeling helpless and miserable. open.spotify.com/playlist/16gBs…
The thing I love most about that Paul Rudd dancing video is that these are ridiculous dances that pretty much all of us have done in private at some point, but he has done them all in public, in front of millions of people. Repeatedly. What an absolute hero.
Read 4 tweets
20 Sep
Christensen had to go, he was all over Sadio like a winter coat.
Is this Chelsea-Liverpool match what they refer to as "an absorbing encounter"?
That Chelsea sub was a shame. If you want the best player in this squad to link the play on a counter attack, it’s Kai Havertz.
Read 4 tweets

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