WOKE

Wokish is a different language from English. Failure to understand the differences and their purpose is double plus ungood.

The differences can be seen in sudden shifts in word frequencies starting in the Year 2013. Just as the Mayan Long Count calendar aprocryphally ended in the year 2012, so did the English language disappear for many people, replaced by the vocabulary of a new age: Wokish for woke folx.

I'm not making any of this up. You can see these sudden shifts using Google's ngrams viewer, which now incorporates texts from recent years. The results are uncanny. Here we can see gender-affirming beginning to replace life-affirming in 2013, and grow for the last 7 years as fast as life-affirming did in the 1990's.

Crits [history of critical race theory] don't affirm universals and individuality. In fact they find that whole notion an abhorrent product of liberal, western, capitalist domination designed to enable racist oppression. Just as in Orwell's newspeak, wokish employs doublespeak. Words sometimes deliberately mean their opposite - not depending on context, like an auto-antonym, but simultaneously holding two contradictory meanings, forcing you to accept an absurd contradiction as truth.

Affimation is an example of doublespeak. It is not the intent of affirmation to make people of color, women, LGBTs, people with disabilities or people of a certain size feel good in their skin. On the contrary, because there are many intersections of privilege, and new ones remaining to be discovered wherever there is [capitalist] domination, the point of affirmation is to "challenge" the dominance (privilege) of whatever is not being affirmed.

So for example fat, disabled, poor, black transgender women in prison are not "affirmed" in the sense of having their accomplishments celebrated and their issues priorities. They are "affirmed" in the sense of drawing attention to the oppressive dominance of whatever-they-are-not. Affirmation involves these people becoming woke or re-educated about their own internalized oppression as well as the internalized dominance of their oppressor. And even then intersectionality is not done working it's verbal magic until our fat, disabled, poor, black, transgender female inmates start calling out each other's privilege as non-indigneous people who benefit from historical colonialism and genocide.

Affirmation = degradation.

Wokeness is not about loving some things or people and hating others. It's about getting everyone to hate themselves, so they'll become angry and support a revolution which brings crits to power. Then maybe things will get a little less horrible, they tell us.

Do not believe a word of it. It's irrational and harmful. 

Related: rights are good affirming is wrong

Racism

[ written by friend. posted anonymously ]

First, even in science, the role of science is to inform not to decide. This is the empirical method. We do science to prove something, and then we use that to inform our next steps. This is and always has been the appropriate role of science. The fact is, science is merely data, in this context. Data can't make decisions. It definitely cannot make value judgements. Politics is all about value judgements. Data is really good at providing context for value judgements, but it can't make those judgements. What does science say about racism? It exists. The distrust of people who are different is an evolutionary trait, evolved because it was useful for improving odds of survival. It is no longer strictly necessary for that purpose among humans, because we have developed civilized cultures where we don't go around murdering each other all the time. Is racism evil? This is an opinion, not data. Science does not have opinions. Science cannot make that value judgement. If we add a value judgement, science can answer the factual parts.

For example, if we decide that all people deserve to be treated well, science can be used to conclude that racism that results in poor treatment of people is bad. Note, however, that given that axiom, it doesn't support the conclusion that being racist is evil, only that mistreating people (out of racism or not) is evil. In addition, the same axiom can be used to conclude that treating racists poorly is just as bad as racists treating people they are racist against poorly. Of course, this isn't the SJW axiom. The SJW axiom is that merely being racist is evil, even if it doesn't result in bad or harmful behavior. They've cut science out the problem entirely, which is just a little ironic, I think.

History of critical race theory

[ written by a friend. posted anonymous ]

Herbert Marcuse: Critical Theory is an alternative to traditional theory. Traditional theory strives to be objective. Critical theory seeks to expose and challenge power structures. In other words it's revisionist Marxism that tries to explain the failure of socialism and rise of fascism in the West as a problem of false political consciousness: the sheeple need to get woke. Any kind of left wing political violence is considered a good sign in Critical Theory, because the status quo is always assumed to be on the verge of going full Third Reich.

Angela Davis: Student of Marcuse, communist, radical feminist and black power revolutionary. Returns to the academy after left wing political violence peters out in the 70's. Loves every kind of communist dictatorship and left wing cult (Jonestown.) Hates every kind of liberal democratic reform movement. For example instead of decriminalizing drugs, her "solution" to mass incarceration is "schools not jails." It's about which ideological tribe controls the bureaucracy and not the actual treatment and rights of people under that bureaucratic system.

Kimberle Crenshaw: Around 1990 develops critical race theory into Intersectionality. The idea here is that poor black women (or these days we would say LGBT+ BIPOCs) need to get woke so they can lead the movement using their personal knowledge as victims of multiple kinds of oppression. In other words civil rights reforms were just more false consciousness, because Western democracy and it's capitalist mode of production is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, and nothing will change until people get really mad about that and take to the streets to force the current regime (i.e. liberal democracy) out.

Robin DiAngelo: critical race theory and whiteness studies scholar. Develops theory of White Fragility while giving corporate racial sensitivity trainings for the last 20 years. Shows up on the radar about 7 years ago with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (which is very much built on critical race theory - see the About page of any organization affiliated with the movement.)

I was a very woke left wing socialist anarchist back in 2013 when "white fragility" appeared in our lexicon - 3 years before she spoke at Evergreen and 5 years she published her manifesto of the same name. However, my wokeness was with the old school Marxists, anarchists and communists, who were very skeptical of the "identity politics" of the critical race theorists. Critical race theory was a mental virus that infected our movement and turned us against each other, every white activist striving to call each other out for (purely intellectual) abuses of white privilege and defensive white fragility. It was all 100% NONSENSE, but it was also highly effective at derailing our movement, and has cost me several friendships.

People go to corporate sensitivity trainings to save their jobs, they listen to critical race theory in college because they want to learn and they show up at Black Lives Matter protests thinking that they are literally protesting for black people's lives, and then they get fed something different.

Because critical race theory is NOT about helping individual black people or solving specific problems that affect black people. It's about using racial anger and guilt, as well as sexual identity, poverty, disability, obesity, and other sensitive subjects to radicalize people and put leaders with the correct critical ideology in positions of political and bureaucratic power.

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Struggle Sessions

Here's an article I had cut out from March 9, 2019; about a year-and-a-half ago, well before the virus and what I guess I will call our cultural conflict.

Peggy Noonan says:

"I ask you to entertain an idea that has been on my mind. I don't want to be overdramatic, but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely."

The "struggle sessions" Noonan explains, were introduced by Mao Zedong in the mid-1960s to purge China of its enemies. University students were charged to "clear away the evil habits of the old society and extinguish what came to be known as 'the four olds'—old ideas and customs, old habits and culture."

So when Noonan proposes that "the spirit of the struggle sessions are here," she means there is a group of people in the United States who want to purge it of, what they perceive to be, political enemies and "evil habits."

"The air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don't try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence."

This is a snapshot of how tense our society was a year-and-a-half ago. Primed and ready for the explosion that was sparked on May 25.