Things suddenly designated "woke"

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Thats not the issue. The US vs other countries. Its the human race vs other species.

But yes...the atom bomb was invented very late in human history.

According to that vid twelve percent of chinchillas meet their maker at the hands of their own kind.

How long is the average lifespan of chinchilla in the wild? Five years?

So one fifth of chinchillas die every year. And of that 20 percent 12 percent die from foul play by their own kind. So that would yield a "murder rate" among chinchillas of 2.4 percent per year.

Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and kicked off World War Two. By its end in 1945 60 to 70 million people world wide had died directly or indirectly from the war.

The world population at the time was two billon. So the war killed about three percent of the world population of humans. But the war took six years. So that yields a "murder rate" of 0.5 percent a year.

So even during the bloodiest war in human history involving the whole planet in all out total war. (most of the industrial output of virtually all nations in the world)..we humans were able to kill each other off at a rate that was only slight more than one fifth that of the normal homocide rate of chinchillas! And chinchillas dont even have any kind of technology to assist!

So we humans are actually rather lame and pathetic at killing ourselves off...at least when compared to chinchillas!

So thats why we needed to up our game. And in the last year of WWII we finally split the atom and now CAN kill ourselves off in significant numbers at the mere push of button. But as I said thats only a recent thing.

In that respect the Mongols and the plague killed off more of the world's population.

Actually an expert on NPR talked about how WWII was only like 8th or 10th (not numero uno as you might expect) in the rank of how deadly wars were relative the population of the world at the times they were fought.

The Mongols, Tamerlaine, the Thirty Years War in Europe, were probably worse in relative numbers.

The Bubonic plague wasnt even a war. BUT when the horsemen of apocalypse ride they tend to ride together. Pestilence famine plague and War. The previous century from the Plague the Mongol conquests opened up trade routes across Eurasia...and a germ that infected wild marmots of the steppes of central asia jumped to rats and rats moved the newly mobile people and spread the plague both east and west.

The first world war killed 9 to 13 millon people, but the movements of troops around the world paved the way for the Spanish flu to spread around the world and kill another 20 million to fifty millon world wide (even the conservative number is worse the biggest toll for the war itself).

In the medieval period I wonder if the trauma of war and famine was handled better as people were prone to a miserable hard existence believing in superstition and war/famine was the "hand of god". Subsequent generations shrug their shoulders and go back to ploughing their fields.

In stark contrast the people of the 20th century Europe were living soft middle class lives, many enjoying a "bourgeois" existence. To be suddenly thrust into a world of invasions, bombing, living in bomb shelters, murder and concentration camps would have completely shaken their worlds.

Those who cannot refute an unpleasant message often resort to attacking the messenger.  Thank you for re-affirming THAT fact yet again.

Anti-Wokism is another form on Anti-intellectualism -- it takes introspection and critical thought to realize one's own prejudices and how they contribute to systemic bigotry, while any ignorant fool can be a bigot.

TUREdude

Wokeism among other things centers on defining people by the groups they were born into. That is a bigoted way of looking at the world. Being anti woke is being against a bigoted way of thinking. Implying those that are anti woke are ignorant, bigoted fools is attacking the messengers.

Then explain to me why it seems that anti-wokeness is itself based on stereotypes, falsehoods, and fear?

And then there's the truth AS
https://www.reuters.com/legal/governmen ... 023-02-13/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ca-history

What seems and what is are often two different things. A while back you had a very extensive list of false autism stereotypes. It demonstrated that to a lot of people, autism seems like a horrible thing. To our credit, we don't let autistic-hating bullies define autism for us. Why let MAGA's and political opportunists who prey on fear and use bigotry define what woke is?



I have been acknowledging the nefarious uses of "woke" for years and referenced them just now in my reply to Fnord. In general you anti anti-wokes love to use the above to "prove" anti-wokeism is invalid. Speaking of denial I don't understand the problem so many have with acknowledging that defining people primarily by the group they were born into will lead to bad things, especially at a moment when it is a factor in what we are seeing on the streets of my country and yours. You think "woke" became hijacked to such a degree, or it was nefarious from the get-go, use another term to describe defining people primarily by their group and the other beliefs I have ascribed to "wokeness". I predict either the replacement term will be a wishy-washy euphemism or that the replacement term will be hijacked to such a degree that it will replaced by another term. I could be wrong somebody may with come up terminology I will think wow that is just so much better than "woke". Either way, I am not going to tell you what wording to use. What is the obsession with that term by people both on the left who are against it for ideological reasons and people on the right who think it means everything they disagree with?

To answer the question, you asked in the OP. The engaged/activist types who are most effective at bullying, most effective at communicating via use of words their definition of the term, or most likely a combination of the two will decide the term's future.

If the concept has weak intellectual rigor then its predictive validity for use in the future is also going to be weak. It's largely being propelled through popular use as a pejorative.

I believe this is correct. But the identity of these "players" are what I was originally interested in and their "power" to influence. Going back to the beginning of the thread, fashion "going woke" is starting to push the boundaries where the use of the word "woke" is beginning to impinge on popular culture. France is generally considered a driver of global fashion so it was interesting this debate over the length of women's hair in a beauty contest was being held in their popular media.

“Intellectual rigor”? It’s a colloquial term, it was that way in its original positive iteration. We are not talking Ivy League political science peer reviewed thesis here. Similar with MAGA. Started out as a positive, there are people that still use it that way to say I am a Trump supporter, wear the hat, but it is mostly used as a pejorative that arguably has even more diverse meanings than woke, the original Trump supporter meaning but as an insult, white nationalist, insurrectionist, dumb, unhip person who lives in flyover country, snowflake(white fragility), some or all of the above. It is hypocritical to moan and b***h about the use of a colloquial pejorative while often using another colloquial term as a pejorative.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 29 Dec 2023, 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It is not surprising that another culture would use the same word in a different context.

Back to my answer to the original question the future of the use of “woke” is weak for two reasons. Often political terminology fades in popularity due to changing times, one side wins the controversy etc. “Woke” is a candidate for early death because of the persistent effort to erase it. I have never encountered somebody advocating stopping the use of “MAGA”. I have a feeling “MAGA” will be around long after Trump dies.

Big difference between "MAGA" and "woke":

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any Trump critics define "MAGA" as a single specific ideology and argue over the definition of "MAGA," insisting that their own definition of "MAGA" is the "correct" one, the way I've seen you say that your use of "woke" is the correct one and that other "anti-woke" folks, who use the word "woke" in a much looser sense than you do, have got it wrong.

I've seen some debate over what motivates most Trump supporters, e.g. over whether they are motivated primarily by economic issues or primarily by racism. But I have not seen these debates framed in terms of the definition of "MAGA."

By the way, there actually is a canonically-defined ideology that Trump's views fit for the most part -- paleoconservatism, a term coined by Thomas Fleming and Paul Gottfried. Trump's views are not entirely paleoconservative, but they do fit that label to a large degree.

When discussing political ideologies of any kind, it is, in my opinion, better to use canonically-defined terms like "paleo-conservativism," rather than loose colloquial terms like "MAGA" and "woke."

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 29 Dec 2023, 11:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.