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Woke is dumb. It's virtue theatre. It needs to stop before a proudly non-woke fascist grabs power. That's where we're heading now.
Anti-wokeism is beyond dumb and beyond virtue-singaling. At its best, it is based on misperceptions, over-generalization and throws out the baby with the bath water. But at its worst, anti-wokeism is a tool of fascists and white supremacists, an under-current of anti-anti-racism that has always existed in American society and always utilized to push back against progress and bring in the racists and fascists. That isn't where we're heading now. It's where we have always been.
On the other hand, being woke is actually a good thing. While a particular individual and individuals in particular instance(s) can mean well and be wrong about something and those individual(s) can be "woke" and further the nature of the instance can be race/gender/sexuality/etc related, it does not mean that being woke is incorrect, just that those individuals are wrong about whatever it is they are wrong about. It should come as no surprise to rational people in this forum because to be open--most people aren't really that smart or logical and the kinds of people making the most noise are often people trying to fit a square peg into a round hole....especially when you only have 180 characters to type out your message, the most outrageous gets the feels, and we live in a world of instant gratification and bubbles.
While our struggle is to always fight fascism and anti-anti-racism, we also need to occasionally write on issues where our allies disagree, where they may be wrong, and to fight the misinformation superhighway.
Well, I had what would now be called "woke" views before the word "woke" was being used, but I have my own reasons why. I grew up in a state where gay sex was a felony, and defense attorneys were still trying to use the "gay panic defense" in court, which is literally the defense, "My client was just so disgusted by the thought of such UNNATURAL sex acts that he was rendered temporarily insane. He really couldn't help himself." This was still going on in the 1990's. That is not something that I know because of an ideology. That is something I know because it was my life.
I am not sure that I like being called "woke" because it implies the assumption that I have only had the feelings that I have since the start of the woke movement. This would be a false characterization. I did not need to be "awoken" because I was never given a chance to fall asleep. I would be glad if I ever did have a real opportunity to rest, but that is not nigh.
I also used to have woke values. I've had woke values my entire life up until a couple of years ago. I grew in a city where gay bashing was a popular past time. At some point in the 90'ies it swung over to the other side, and people who had a problem with homosexuality were socially excluded. Bullied.
I still have to live with being transgender, and I actually am justified in doing whatever I have to do in order to make sure that I am safe in my day-to-day life. Literally everything else will always come second, and it should.
That's completely reasonable. And should be how everybody lives their lives. But there are limits to how much we're all willing to sacrifice for other people's safety. And that's where the wokes run into conflict with society. And the idiotic demand that everybody needs to understand every difficulty every other group is going through is bizarre. It's reasonable that experts in the field have that degree of understanding is reasonable. But for the population at large? No.
For one thing, I again resent being called "woke." I am a queer that grew up in the 1980's and 1990's, and furthermore, I am also a zoo, which gives me additional personal insight into the anatomy of hate. My views on this subject are based on half of a lifetime of experience, not on a popular ideology.
I don't see this as a problem. I see this as the perfect example of Hegelian dialectics. In the olden days (1980'ies) the social pressure was to hate gays. In the 1990'ies it became increasingly apparent that this was a dumb value. It was a value borne out of world with high mortality and keeping farm land within the family was important. In a world where this was a non-factor it felt like increasingly like an antiquated and dysfunctional value. We slid over to a world where the social pressure was to accept gays.
Thesis, anti-thesis and the next step synthesis. A marriage of these two positions. Ie we stop bullying people into any position on the gay question. And our societies find a new problem we can fight for or against, to create a dichotomy about. Perhaps global warming and energy efficiency? Or how to handle Russia?
Hegelianism is cancer. I am not under any obligation to compromise in regard to my own safety or the security of my livelihood under any conditions whatsoever.
Hegel (together with Smith) is the foundation for Marx, who in turn is the foundational ideology of the left. If you reject Hegel, what are you basing your narrative of history on? What's your theory on how cultures change? If Hegelian dialecticism isn't true then how do you explain shifts in values over time? Are you using the Great Man theory of historical change? That wouldn't be very woke of you.
Jonathan Swift beat them to it. I am also interested in the writings of Jean-Jaques Rosseau, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, David Ricardo, and Jeremy Bentham. I trace my views back to the early anarchists and the radical subculture that was active in and near the Clerkenwell district. Early 19th Century Clerkenwell was actually a pretty fucking awesome place to be.
The nearest I come to any interest in the philosophy of Lutheran countries is that of Knut Wicksell, and Knut Wicksell spent some time in prison on charges of blasphemy for making fun of Lutherans and making them cry. Hegel was a douche-flute, and Karl Marx was a homophobic piece of shit that I would have given an orbital fracture if I had had a chance.
Woke had a function when gays were being murdered in the streets. Woke solves no problems today. Instead it needs to continually invent bullshit problems. You know... like fascists have to continually find someone to blame their failures on the wokes need to continually expand the reach of the patriarchy. Occupy Wall Street was utter bollocks. What exactly has BLM achieved?
Gay people and transgender people are still harassed and beleaguered in many parts of my country. We currently have a US state where the families of transgender kids are literally being persecuted by the government, and we have another attempting to slap their doctors with decades long prison sentences. Anti-LGBTQ violence is becoming a problem again in many districts. We may always need to work to keep these problems under control. What we have learned, over the past couple of decades, is that the pursuit of LGBTQ rigthts is not a "once and done" kind of deal, but it is something we have to maintain for generation after generation.
I think the fight for LGBTQ acceptance and equal rights is something that will never end. Because people who don't share your experience or problem will never get it. That's just part of the human experience. Reading books from a different historical period can teach you that. They have problems we will never be able to related to, or even understand why it's a problem. I will never know how it is to be transgendered. I will never know how experiences differ between transsexuals and transvestites. And that's ok. It sucks to be weird (not the norm). That's just how it's going to be. Forever.
Accepting that is not the same thing as condoning violence against queers.
You are again engaging in the naturalistic fallacy. You are again espousing the idea that, just because it is naturally harder for LGBTQ to have a good quality of life in a world where they are the minority, then we must be obligated to accept that as our ideal existence or our only possible existence. You are wrong. As a matter of fact, minority groups can live very well if they work very hard on improving their quality of life, and this has been proved in spades in districts where LGBTQ have succeeded at living a better quality of life, on average, than their straight counterparts. We do not really have to accept a terrible quality of life, and if we choose to try to live well, then we can. Jewish people in the United States have also proved this point: they have higher average incomes than most Americans. This is not because they are Jewish, but this is because the Jewish community, in the United States, have traditionally worked very hard to have an excellent quality of life. but this activist part of their culture is actually a response to the historical persecution against Jewish people. The only reason why there is any substance to the "stereotypical rich Jew" is that, culturally, Jewish people are very vocal about the idea that they are people that have escaped from a place where they had fewer opportunities, and they teach a sense of gratitude for the opportunities that they have where they currently are. This is not something they are born with, but it is something that they are taught. In places where the LGBTQ community are doing particularly well, they are basically just doing the same thing. They teach the idea that they are fortunate to have better opportunities, and they are grateful for those opportunities. Gratitude for the opportunities they have and a sense of determination to seize upon those opportunities has made them prosperous.
The reason that say you are committing the naturalistic fallacy is that you are implying that, as a transgender woman and therefore a minority, I should just be at peace with having a lower quality of life than straight people, just because it is natural that I, as a minority, would have fewer opportunities. You are wrong. I do not really have to accept having a shitty life. Instead, I and other transgender people can choose to work hard to develop a good relationship with society, and we can choose to work harder than everybody else to turn that relationship into opportunity. If we choose to have a great quality of life, then we can, even if we might have to overcome longer odds than others.
The idea behind what you call "woke," which is not term that I like, is that I am choosing to try to make my life good. I reject the idea that I should have to truckle to the tyranny of evil men, but instead, I think I can choose to fight, campaign, and politic for opportunities to make an extremely good life for myself.
If you are an evil person, you might choose to put barriers in my way, but I do not have to accept that it is a normal or good thing for you to do that. Instead, I could choose to try to make sure that you are punished for that. I could choose to develop my alliances in society well enough that, when you choose to try to put barriers in my way, that could really have serious negative consequences for you, and you could even lose your livelihood. If you choose to get in the way of me pursuing a good quality of life, then I am justified in hurting you for doing so.
You are attempting to make an argument that I should just accept having a terrible quality of life, and I reject it. I would rather destroy your life because you choose to be an unjust man. While that takes me more effort than just choosing to truckle, I nevertheless choose justice.
Just because it takes me more effort to live well does not mean that it is rational for me to choose to live poorly.
In Hegelian terms, woke is the anti-thesis to the previous intolerant conservative norms. And when any paradigm achieves total dominance it becomes destructive and suffocating. That's what woke has become today. I'm not against woke because I hate gays (or blacks). I'm against woke because I think it's role has been played out. We don't need it anymore. We will never achieve total equality in society. It's a dumb goal.
There is no universe where I am obligated to tolerate SOME amount of endangerment of my life, SOME amount of cruel discrimination in my everyday life, or SOME amount of indignity in my existence. There will be no compromise under any conditions whatsoever. The exact amount of cruelty I am ever obligated to tolerate is precisely
bupkis.
You're not obligated to. But your choices aren't about making it stop or not. Your choices are about living your life in a state of victimhood or trying to find some beauty in a cruel world.
Everybody's life is endangered every day. Cruel discrimination is a part of everybody's life, consciously or not. Indignity is just a fact of life for everyone. You're not obligated to tolerate it. But your choice is to accept it or turn bitter. That was the insight of Buddha. He wasn't wrong.
I am currently living in an educated area where social justice is actually the norm. The only reason why my career has not advanced farther than it has is that it took me several years to accept that it was real. Even though I intellectually understood that things worked differently here, it took me time to learn to trust that the system worked differently here. Once I did, my life was actually going extremely well.
My experience has been that, in my area, it has really opened up opportunities for me that people in my area have been championing social justice for generations. This has made it possible for me to start, however belatedly, living a normal life. It has definitely been worthwhile that activists in my area have worked so hard.
I would not really say that I am bitter at all, but I would actually say that, for the first time, I recognize the real, unwitting wisdom behind my maternal grandmother's advice: I really do deserve to benefit if I have worked hard to make my life better. A part of the work that I have to do, though, has to be social justice activism. That is the investment that I need to make in making sure that I have a good quality of life.
In my area, that investment has paid incredible dividends, so I really have nothing whatsoever to be bitter about. I see a successful investment that I have begun to try to take part in contributing to, and I am justified in feeling good about that investment.
The primary fault that I can find with the LGBTQ community, over the past decade, is that the community had become complacent. The past year's political abuses, by the GOP, are hopefully going to be enough to jolt them awake while they are still able to organize openly.
I also happen to be a member of the zooey community, and we are in a much more difficult position. By comparison, it is very hard for us to organize openly, and as a consequence, the growth of our organizations and of our community has been painfully slow, although a few brave individuals have succeeded at establishing underground communities. It is feasible but difficult to organize under such circumstances. What happened to the zooey community was that, back in 1991, the leadership of our online community took an officially conservative and reclusive stance insofar as their relationship with society, and we have documented evidence of this. It is going to take us generations to undo the damage that was caused by this policy. I can tell you first hand that the conditions that this created for us have made it very difficult for us to get anything done whatsoever.
The LGBTQ community had similar problems when the sodomy laws, in the United States, were more widespread and were being more widely enforced. Largely, we had to organize in secret. The majority of our organizations were clandestine, underground organizations. When LGBTQ were at serious risk of damage to their reputations, their livelihoods, or their safety as a consequence of the sodomy laws, getting anything done in the community at all was a mission. We had to be careful of what we said about anybody in our community because, for some of us, getting outed could have catastrophic consequences. It therefore took an absolutely insane amount of trouble just to get the simplest things done.
The GOP has every intention of attacking Lawrence v. Texas. They have made it clear that they do not hold any of the progressive advances, in their rulings, to be permanent, They have no intention whatsoever of leaving the Lawrence v. Texas ruling intact or unaltered, and they have no intention of leaving Obergefell v. Hodges intact or unaltered. They have every intention of attacking those rulings the first chance they get.
The Texas GOP's current platform is particularly dangerous:
The new platform follows a series of headline-generating anti-LGBTQ policies proposed by Texas lawmakers.
www.nbcnews.com
The LGBTQ community needs to respond aggressively to a party that has this kind of platform.
It's always going to suck more to be gay/queer than straight.
This is actually false. In the most educated areas in the country, LGBTQ tend to actually have a very good quality of life, and in some parts of the country, gay men and lesbians actually have an even higher life-expectancy than straight people just because, culturally, they make a higher investment in their health in those parts of the country. Stepping it out to make an effort to live well is worth doing. This is a natural way for them to behave: they have worked very hard to have the same opportunities as others, so it is natural for them to work just as hard to take advantage of those opportunities. However, this shows that it is worthwhile to try.
The LGBTQ community became complacent because it won.
I believe that this reflects a poor understanding of what happened. The LGBTQ community, in the western world, became complacent because they overestimated how permanent their victories were. I think that it was really harmful when supporters of LGBTQ rights started saying things like, "It's 2022" as if it were an absolute that homophobia and transphobia inherently needed to stop being possible after a certain date. This was a reckless way to behave, and it has created a serious problem.
All it proves is that what you call "woke" is something that we should have done more to embrace.
That's what happens to any movement that managed to grab power. The core problem of any special interest group is that most people don't share that interest. Today the LGBTQ has disproportionate power and influence in relation to their numbers. That can only be a temporary situation.
All social advances are "temporary" as long as nobody is working hard to sustain them.
It's going to get worse for the LGBTQ community going forward.
In my area, at least, you are quite mistaken. I live in a very progressive area, and I am thankful that the LGBTQ community, in my area, has been working hard to keep fighting to improve our relations with society in my area. Most people, where I live, are even more educated on transgender rights than I am as a transgender person. I did not know that it was becoming normal here to ask people their preferred pronouns until I heard it from a straight person that was apparently very well educated. Locally, our lives are still improving, and this proves that it can be done.
Once straights realize that the pay-off for promoting gay rights is low, they're going to stop.
The reason why straight people, in my area, came out in support of LGBTQ equality was that they never liked living under oppression, either. As a matter of fact, the environment that people grow up in, at the local schools in my area, is a lot different from the environment that I grew up in, and I have heard this from professional educators. Young people of middle school age are a lot less resistant to touch, in this area, than they ever were in the past or in areas that are not as progressive. In an environment where nobody is saying, "You can't do that because it makes you queer," the environment that young people are growing up in is a lot warmer and a lot more supportive. The general payoff has actually been tremendous. People in my area grow up to be much more well-adjusted. That just also happens to be good for queers.
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