The Woke Generation - Fighting Back

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To add to that last post, I've caught a few rounds of 'Black News Tonight' on Youtube with Marc Lamont Hill and I see some of this as an example of where there are voices along these lines who are making things a lot more intelligible and self-reflective.

I also get hints that the whole 'Wetiko' or 'Moloch' problem is what many people mean by 'whiteness' when it comes down to it and it's a poisonous network effect, it's the thing we tend to - as autistics - relate to how many NT's we feel are pathological liars and algorithmic social climbers.

This is also why I can't recommend Daniel Schmachtenberger's interviews like 'Ubiquitous Psychopathy' enough and other places where he's talked to people for close to an hour on things like multi-polar traps. For what I've seen of this it's a poisonous network effect (as the Wetiko proponents would suggest), it's partly mind-virus in the sense that you realize that you live with cannibals and that plenty would carve you up given the opportunity if you're 'other' in any significant way, and for people for whom I'd have to assume the lights aren't on bright enough upstairs not to have that revelation consume them they become another node in that network.

This is also why I'll keep beating the Darwinian game theory drum and say that that race is really a secondary consideration. I worry that whiteness both misses the causes of the contagion and opens vulnerabilities to said malware if people take the label literally.

I was watching Australian autistic celebrity Jayden Evans (star of the reality TV show Love on the spectrum broadcast on ABC TV) being interviewed on another ABC panel discussion program called Q&A

Jayden was asked about Australian politics and the arguments between left and right etc...Jayden made a valid point that as an autistic man he is interested in specific issues/interests but is not invested in politics as it involves duplicitous behaviour and self serving agendas.

This resonates with the comment - "as autistics - relate to how many NT's we feel are pathological liars and algorithmic social climbers."

This is precisely the reason why I warn autistic people on WP to not buy into fraudulent claims by some elements of society (who have been paramount in the USA for the last 4 years) about fears over wokeness as the people pushing this agenda are perfect illustrations of the "archetypes" for pathological NT liars and social climbers.

Conservatism in America is inexorably intertwined with politics of identity and the anti-woke movement is simply the latest manifestation of the "old guard" fighting progressive change.

They're not fraudulent claims, nor are they specifically Trumper claims. When you have a mode of politics that purity-spirals into cannibalizing anything that's not in the most narrow purview of thought that attack includes anyone whose trying to solve problems by traditional means and it involves anyone who doesn't share the same perspective on the problems, and when the nuttier edges of such a movement start dominating the cooler heads (happened notably from 2017 through 2019) you get something that turns into a violent and solipsistic monster that's great at extremely high-level first-stage thinking with no grasp of consequences it's also expert at attacking it's own goals. This is 'whiteness' on display if I've ever seen it.

I believe Noam Chomsky said it best that in particular AntiFa was the best gift the far right could have received. For a lot of the 2017 to 2019 period I do blame the black-black organizers, which were really these college age white kids traveling from city to city to turn demonstrations into riots, this happened in my own city when we had our BLM demonstrations last summer - in this case BLM were actually fine until they showed up. If BLM is doing better at all right now it's to the degree that they can get away from AntiFa as well as the white social climbers who want to hijack their movement for their own gains.

Electing Trump was actually a reaction to things that were escalating in the US, partly this ^ happening even before late 2016 but much more so the things Mark Blyth talked about in his Global Trumpism lecture - ie. that both parties have abandoned the working class in the US and you saw populism, both with Trump and with Burney Sanders, getting a lot of traction precisely because people realized they were screwed. This is also why I'll still say that so much of what's happened with BLM, AntiFa, etc. seems to come in the context of the world after 2008 and it's based on a problem that we're all feeling, ie. that the well of economic progress is drying up and that the Ponzi schemes that we run our economics that we've been running on since the growth stopped are getting increasingly transparent - all the while people are increasingly living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to make ends meet. Those same people then wonder why in the midst of not resolving serious economic problems we're having our attention pointed at just about anything else.

Don't you thin these 75 million people are misattributing their social and economic woes to the wrong thing then?

Thus the twin story of MAGAstan and Wokastan. One's looking to racism as an explanation for why the world is inside out, the other is looking at anything from elites to supposed Illuminati pedophile witches running western governments or...lol... 'Teh juuuhz!'.

It's a simpler story but the contributing factors:

1) Per Mark Blyth - the US benefited massively from capital flight from Europe after WW2, so much so that by 1950 we had 51% of the world's capital. That was a highly unnatural situation and was deleveraging back to Europe and other places hence, thus the baby boomers lived in an incredibly unnatural economy. The other part - Keynesianism was crushing the investor class by the 1970's, great time to be a debtor, terrible time to be an investor, the unions were getting increasingly garish, the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal revolution was the investor class revolt against post WW2 Keynesian economics.

2) Per Eric Weinstein - embedded growth obligations in academia, in law firms, in large corporation, anywhere, with as much growth as there was from the 1950's through early 1970's the story was correct that you could indeed get ahead with hard work and, if it had lasted, there'd be places for all of the people who were being educated to climb the ladder. You also had the stagnation of physics (Eric's hobby-horse to beat on) which I suppose the lack of commercial applications in things like string theory is notable. What we've had since the early 1970's is a continued story of growth without the growth, thus the professional community ends up self-selecting for people who are perfectly fine with lying, bluffing, and telling tall tales about how well things are going when it's a complete charade. There's also a whole cluster of stories about our country having these great global trade and visa ideas which were essentially done to price our graduates out of work but that's a long discussion.

3) Peter Turchin - elite degrees have been overproduced for a climate where there aren't enough jobs to absorb those degrees. People who put all of their effort into social climbing through degrees, get a few hundred thousand dollars in debt, and find out that their Phd gets them a job at Walmart because the job they wanted had 400 applicants per position - they're going to be *FURIOUS* with having been lied to (that and they'll never get off the hook for the student loans - they're non-dischargeable in bankruptcy even if their guidance counselor and the school's bursar were complicit in gross negligence and malpractice, this is assuming they didn't spend $200K for a PhD in underwater basket weaving) and plenty then try to use their intelligence in ways significantly less noble to take revenge for that sort of betrayal.


This then takes us to the civilizational growth frontiers that Bret Weinstein has talked about in some of his lectures to students and collegues:

geographic frontier - discovered unpopulated land (for the most part prehistory).

technological frontier - being able to wring out more from what you have (ongoing through human history).

transfer frontier - take resources from people or groups of people who can't amass enough force to protect their assets (ongoing through human history but notably colonialism forward).


We're in a situation where the US is effectively in a state of socioeconomic cannibalism and it's part of why the news makes no sense, why we don't have many public figures worth anything, why we run our country worse than a corporation (every four years we spend four years undoing the last four years), we're essentially on a glide path right now from early 1980's Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism and Clintonian neoliberalism toward neofeudalism, and we may very well end up between those two anchors being in a sort of ex-Soviet satellite oligarchy, in a way we're pretty much there now in terms of any usefulness that voting does but the whole democracy and 'greatest nation' is kinda-sorta still hobbling along.

This is why I can't help but see MAGA and Woke as both self-centered spinoffs of the same story.

Watching us go from having more than half of the world's wealth in 1950 toward political anarchy or post-democratic technological neo-feudalism, it almost rhymes with Venezuela's self-immolation, just that rather than choosing socialism - which will get you there faster, we decided to go a strange route of just letting Darwinian evolution lead the charge in our economic sector and not worry too much about what the results were. That last part is also making us incredibly mercenary, in a sort of old Roman way. I haven't seen or heard of white collar workplace stabbings or increased suicides from laid off workers who'd rather die than face the dishonor of not having a job, but that's psychologically a place that seems quite possible to come up if we keep playing the 'Your right to be treated like a human being is your answer to the question - what do you do for a living' game. We're not quite as severe as South Korea, they seem like an even worse caricature of what we are, but who knows - with the way things are going, if we can't get responsible adults to put downward pressure on all the arms races and multipolar traps, give us time.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 29 Jun 2021, 8:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Good post. I miss this type of critical thought in WP.

I think something else missing here is the role of social media in spreading propaganda used to stoke fear/agitation in the populace, This was used effectively by the Farage anti-Eu pro-Brexit movement in the UK and in the rise of the Tea Party in the US spreading lies about Obama and subsequently the proto-QAnon Trump social media accounts spreading lies about Hillary Clinton that all seem outrageous to normal people but worked effectively in conflating the left with being unpatriotic/woke/working to destroy society.

Erstwhile normal Americans believed Obama was born in Kenya and was secretly a muslim. They believed Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophile cult (and still believe these things).

The same accounts drive Americans to panic about current issues like Biden allowing BLM to take over schools.

Yep, it's that sweet 'engagement' money, and as Tristan Harris noted misinformation spreads six times faster than factual information because its salacious and that's what drives engagement and brings the advertising revenue.

I can't remember who else was talking about this, probably one of the Weinsteins again on a panel (might have been Bret talking to Robert Malone), there was a lot of agreement on 'destroying trillions to make billions', you see that with military contracting firms and technologies but you also see that with corruption in the pharmaceutical world. It's the game of chopping up the furniture to throw it in the fireplace, what's worse perhaps - chopping up other people's furniture based on purchased government mandates.

Benjamin Boyce interviewing Blaire White on the current state of trans issues and culture.

For those who aren't familiar with Blaire, she's got a similar style of processing to Douglas Murray so it's interesting to hear her input on these topics. I think what resonates with me is her sense that the trans community has been turned into a political football and that a lot of the trans people who do approach her (could be some selection bias since she's anti-woke) aren't enjoying it and are if anything worried about the backlash that might be coming as a result of this being a 'flavor of the year' (or several years) issue that's gone through the funhouse mirror of public and social media, click-bait articles and the most garish and confrontational edges being preferred over the average (most trans people pass because...well... they also don't have blue hair and 15 facial piercings and aren't wearing sandwich boards in protests every day... they're normal people with a wide arrange of opinions trying to solve problems in their lives and pay bills... whoda thunk!). It sounds like the concern is, as it becomes vogue for white suburban single moms to have trans kids or how many online communities have tried selling this as the 'answer to everything' to awkward and disaffected kids, there's likely going to be a big raft of de-transitioners and that's a big part of the concern, ie. the hangover that comes after the media party.

Autistics generally have more difficulty with change than NT’s. So it makes it convenient to dismiss an autistic person’s objection to certain changes as just his autism, similar to how it is convenient to dismiss a baby boomers objection to change as he or she is just too old to get it.

The going assumption in both cases is change=good, objection to change=obstacle in the way of good. Adding to the cockiness of some who argue this is since change is inevitable resistance to the change I want is futile. Go along with the change I want or be othered.

Like anything else in this life some change is good some change is bad, most is a mixture of the two.

While a lot of objection to change is indeed stubbornness in the way of progress some of it prevents or mitigates disaster, forces change in a better(or worse) direction. The natural autistic discomfort with change combined with our different way of thinking can at times make us see and want to avoid future problems that most can not see.

I think I understand the appeal of the woke for some autistic people. As a group that has been not understood, misunderstood, ignored, discriminated against our whole lives a movement that promises to tear down everything and rebuild from scratch a society that has systematically oppressed minorities sounds necessary. It is more than satisfying to envision a change where FINALLY “we” are in power and “they” are on the defensive and cornered.

I find elements of woke particularly fraught for autistic people. The emphasis on groups goes against the whole “If you have met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person” idea. A central strategy of the woke movement is changing or expanding the meaning of terms and shaming and othering those that do not go along. A bunch of the new meanings are non literal such as “defund the police”. We really did not mean take away money, we meant reprioritize, or so they say. Ignore the race part in racist, it is just a matter of the privilege because the group you are in is in power. That does not make you evil, it just means you have to recognize your privilege. If it is not evil why have people fired for it?. Forgetting figurative meanings autistic people are more likely to slip up and use the old “racist” word and get in trouble for it. And many of us react to bullying badly in general, and in the view of woke language policers in ways that “prove” the autistic person that used the old terminology is a racist.

Finally for the wokes the bad people in the way of progress are white, males, particularly in “Big Tech”, the stereotypical aspie.

The following should not have to be said but needs to be.
Not all progressives are woke but all progressives are stereotyped as woke. Not all woke people believe in everything and do everything I mentioned above.

The Trumpian right and to arguably a lesser degree conservatism in general present significant dangers for autistic people but this post and this thread is not about them.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 01 Jul 2021, 5:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don’t like illiberal ideology. Left or right.
Progressive illiberals calling for censorship of any criticism.
Using relational aggression to attack people outside of the ideology online and in the workplace.
Telling kids they are bad people for having the original sin of light skin.
Telling darker skinned children they are oppressed by a system they can’t see or feel.
This cannot be good for these children’s psychological development. Bitterness, resentment, paranoia come from these kinds of abuse.

If they want to recruit adults into the ideology, go ahead. But when they started indoctrination of children my hackles went up.

I really like Dr. Martin Luther King and Enlightenment liberalism, they ring true.

This topic makes me sad.

Much love for everyone everywhere. I hope you have a wonderful day.
Boden

The issue isn't being made aware of racism, the issue is that racism exists. Your blame is misdirected.

Thanks for your wishes for a good day.

This stuff is damaging for adults also. If a parent is either a woke ideologue themself or are bullied into silence it is most likely going to effect their kids negatively.

As supporters of Critical Race Theory like to point out this has been around for decades but it took elements of “Anti Racism” training in high schools and below for it to become a big deal. Of course Republicans have done a lot to make people aware of it, and hyperbole it for partisan advantage. My guess because it was starting to hit the schools the backlash would have happened anyway. Schools are mostly local affairs so part of this is organic. The Republican party mainly associated with insurrection these days saw an opening and took it. While they helped the backlash spread, the association with them (as well in some cases with actual racists) has the potential to kill the backlash.

Of course raciest illiberal progressives exist, that’s the topic of this thread.

Agreed, the whole my team vs your team mentality really gets in the way of nuanced discussions.

The critical theories work as thought experiments but applied in the real world it’s a paranoid disaster that absolutely refuses any nuanced critique. It’s like trying to explain to a flat earther that the earth is in fact round. They’ll call you all sorts of names. Nobody wants to know they’ve been tricked or misinformed so I understand the ego defense but when they fall back on relational aggression you know they’re lashing out because they don’t really understand it themselves. If it made sense they could defend it with science. No such scientific evidence exist.. So name calling. Plus science is racist

Much love
Boden

Blaire White might be trans, but she is transphobic. She has a long history of making fun of people who transition and don't pass enough to her standards. She was just fairly recently embroiled in a controversy where she attacked a transgender bodybuilder, saying that it was unfair for her to go into women's competitions, but never bothered to research that said bodybuilder has never entered female categories.

She is hardly a good defence on her own side, as she recently went on that Republican panel that mostly saw her get called a gateway to paedophilia or something. She couldn't defend her position on the Right other than acting as a Pick Me that would just be used as a token, at least as far as she is useful before people that will never accept her beyond removing her own rights.

She is a transmedicalist that has taken part in bullying of literal teenagers, especially those that don't conform to her idea of transgender, especially going after non-binary people. And frames her attacks against those she doesn't like by using poorly photoshopped images or pictures of drag queens to make her target look as ugly as possible.

Her opinions are at best worth just a look at someone who will push beliefs only as far as what will validate her, and then kick ladder down to make herself look more valid.

How does critical race theory not work in real life?

Kind of sounds like a strawman to say that the argument is saying that science is racist. Evidence of institutional racism goes back to outright confirmation that the drug war was made to target black communities, that the electoral college is set up to to disadvantage certain groups like the black community, along with things like voter ID laws to go after the groups that cannot afford them, and single day voting without it being a holiday against those who cannot afford to take that day off.

As it stands it is only really taught in higher education, by professors that know what they are talking about. And there seems to be a very intellectually dishonest framing that the theory is about making certain groups inherently abusers and others inherent victims, rather than as a study of frankly rather sound trends. Kind of seems like criticism is mostly by people who would rather not think about certain policies that target the poor can create certain biases about those part of a race historically disadvantaged based on their race, that can cause other disadvantages based on those biases.