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arcticdementor · 2 years

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1/ This is the game the woke are playing: -Don't call it "woke" that's racist -Don't call it "Critical Social Justice," that termnis made up -Don't call it "Critical Race Theory," that's incorrect They don't want their ideology to have a name. Let's talk about why. A Thread🧵

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2/ The people who say terms like "Critical Social justice," and "woke," are pejorative, made up, meaningless, or substitutes for the N-word, are playing a rhetorical and linguistic game in order to undercut and subvert your ability to criticize their ideas. Here's how it works:

3/ I'm going to explain this using Zebras as an analogy. Trust me, this will explain it perfectly. Many animals have fur, feathers, skin or skin that matches the colour of their environment. This acts like camoflouge so they can blend in and hide. This owl is a fine example👇

3/ Zebras are different. They're covered in black and white stripes even though the environement they live in is mostly brown and green. If you see a zebra by itself, it's very easy to see. It's like they have a neon sign over them saying "lions, please eat me" But...

4/ The zebras' stripes don't help them blend into the environment...they help it *BLEND INTO THE HERD* Zebra camoflouge works by making zebras blend with the herd so that lions can't focus on any one zebra and target it. If lions can't pick a target, the Zebras are safe 👇

5/ Scientists discovered this as they studied Zebras and got confused about which zebra was which... because the zerbas look alike and blend into the herd. They tried to fix this by taging a zebra with red paint so they could recognize it from the others. Guess what happened?

6/ The Lions killed the tagged Zebra. A tagged zebra stands out from the herd so lions can tell it apart and focus the hunt on it. The lions don't catch weak zebras, they catch the *IDENTIFIABLE* Zebras they can focus on This is a great analogy for the game the woke are playing

7/ The reason the woke attack any and every term you use to try to name their ideology. Once a worldview can be named and defined, it can then be pointed out, highlighted, and subjected to criticism. Once you can *IDENTIFY* a worldview or set of ideas you can focus on it...

8/ The woke don't want anyone to be able to give a name or label to their ideology because if that happens we can "tag" examples their ideology with a label when we see it. This allows us to highlight it, point it out, and examine it when we see it. They don't want that...

9/ Once a worldview can be named, labelled and defined, it can then be pointed out, highlighted, and subjected to criticism. You can't criticize something you can't focus on. That is what the woke want. They want to make their ideology, their *WORLDVIEW* impossible to focus on.

10/ Because we label things and name them in order to help us "tag" them, so we can point them out and focus on them, the woke are trying desperately to destroy all of our linguistic "tags." They know once we tag them we will be able to examine thier idea and criticize them..

11/ Woke ideas really can't withstand proper rational and logical analysis. The lions of reason: evidence, logic, rationality, etc, will eat the Zebras of Wokeness, CRT, and Critical Social Justice for lunch...if the lions of reason can focus on and identify the woke Zebras.

12/ And this is what the woke want to avoid. The woke think our criticisms our criticisms are not legitimate; just an attempt by us to protect our ideolog so we can hold on to "power and privilege." For thst reason the woke seek to insulate themselves from our criticism...

13/ So, to avoid getting eaten by the lions of reason the woke want to mix their ideology into society and have it blend in so it becomes just another part of the social fabric. They don't want wokeness to be, seen, pointed out, highlighted, or (in woke parlance) "made visible."

14/ They want hide their worldview by making it impossible to focus on and impossible to tag, label, or name. so they can say they are "just doing history" or "just dicussing gender," and "blend in" as though they fit right alongside reason, evidence, logic, and rationality.

15/ Using labels like "woke," "CRT," AND "Critical Social Justice," allows us to tag woke ideas so we can hold them up to the light and examine them. It also lets us poi t out wokeness to other people so they can see it too, and reject it. This is what the woke want to avoid.

16/ They want to act liks all the bits of woke activism we see are unconnected phenomena spontaneously springing fourth in the name of justice in an undefineable way. When in fact woke activism is the fruit of a well thought out and clearly defined academic ideology/worldview.

17/ This is why they are so desperate to discredit any word, term, or phrase we use to names, label, point out, or highlight the woke ideology. Do not let them do this. Do not let them play games and use linguistic and rhetorical sleight of hand to hide their worldview...

18/ Label, name, highlight, and point out their ideas. Label fairly. Use labels from their literature. But label those woke ideas and then subject those woke ideas to the bright light of rigorous criticism and analysis. /fin

#twitter thread #threadreader #wokal distance #crt #zebras

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

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By: Wokal Distance

Published: Feb 16, 2023

Recently there was another dust up about what we mean when we talk about “woke.” This was sparked by a Television interview where Bethany Mandel, who I consider a friend, was interviewed about her new book and was asked by the host Briana Joy Gray to define woke. Unfortunately, Bethany had difficulty giving an on the spot definition of the term, and simply responded by saying the Woke was difficult to define.

Predictably, this lead to something of a pile on as a tweet of the moment went viral on twitter. In short, a large number of left leaning accounts proceeded to say words to the effect that when conservatives call things woke, all they are doing is dog-whistling various bigoted sentiments. In other words, “woke” is just a term that conservatives use as a slur. Here are just a couple of examples:

This is all part of a strategy that is being employed by Critical Social Justice (AKA “woke”) activists in order to protect their ideology and worldview from criticism. As we will see, what they are doing is attempting to prevent us from giving their ideology a name or a label in order to protect it from criticism.

So I am going to explain how and why they do this, and what we can do about it. Let’s begin.

1. Sketching the problem

No doubt readers of this substack have heard people who claim to fight for Social Justice say things like: "White privilege is a product of systemically racist social structures which center whiteness and marginalize people of color while reproducing white supremacy. This reinforces dominant power structures and a cultural hegemony that benefits cisgendered heterosexual white males at the expense of BIPOC, Latinx, and LGBTQS2+ folx."

We've all seen that jargon coming from people with similar views, politics, and ideas, all demanding sweeping social change from the left. They might be doing advocacy in different areas of society, and with respect to different topics, but the similarity of the language, the overlap of the concepts, and the fact that the arguments are always concerned with oppression, privilege, systemic power, diversity, equity, inclusion, inequality, ability status, sex, race, and gender indicate that here is clearly a coherent worldview at work here. However, every time we try give that worldview a name they say the name we pick is problematic, wrong, incorrect, bigoted, misleading or otherwise problematic.

Many names have been tried, but every time we try to name this ideology: woke, Critical Race Theory, Socialism, neo-marxism, cultural Marxism, Critical Social Justice, The successor ideology, and we are told none of this is appropriate or correct.

This inability to give the ideology in question a name prevents people from being able to talk about the project of social, cultural, and political change coming from the left. They want to agitate, advocate, and demand social change without acknowledging, much less defending, the worldview at the center of their project.

The result is that there is a large number of ideologically connected but formally unconnected social movements which all proceed from the same worldview while all denying that there is a single distinct worldview, mindset, or ideology at work. We have:

BLM

Defund the Police

Critical Race Theory

Queer theory (aka, gender ideology or radical gender theory)

Drag Queen Story Hour

Diversity Equity, and inclusion

And a host of other social and political movements, all of which use similar language, have similar policies, similar concerns, and which work together in “solidarity” with each other, all while claiming that there is no underlying common worldview which can be given a label.

They will tell you that they want to change society, change the world, and change the culture, but if you ask them to put a name to their ideology it always comes up empty. Sometimes they will say “oh, this is just kindness,” or “we call it fairness.” This is absurd. Most people do not think “society is constructed by systemic power which socializes people to accept the legitimacy of a system which reproduces white privilege at the expense of POC and which needs to be decolonized in order to make space for non-binary folx” when they are trying to talk about fairness.

So what exactly is going on here?

2. The strategy at work.

So I would like to now explain what I think is going on using Zebras as an analogy. This will make sense I promise you.

Many animals have fur, feathers, or skin that blends in to their environment. This acts as camouflage so they can blend in to their environment and hide. This owl is a fine example:

Zebras, however, are different. They use camouflage, but they way they use it is entirely different. Zebra’s are covered in black and white stripes even though the environment they live in is mostly brown and green. If you see a zebra by itself, it's very easy to see.

It's like they have a neon sign over them saying "lions, please eat me." Look at this picture below, this Zebra does not blend into it’s background at all:

So how does Zebra Camouflage work? Well, its simple: Zebra camouflage works by making zebras blend with the herd so that lions can't focus on any one zebra and target it. In order for Lions to kill a zebra they need to be able to pick one Zebra, focus on it, and then go after it. If the lions are unable to pick a target then the Zebras are safe.

What Zebras Camouflage does is to make the Zebras blend into the heard. It makes them all blend in together with each other so that it becomes near impossible for the lions to select any one zebra to attacks. If lions can't pick a target to go after, then the Zebras are safe. And as you can see in the pictures below, when the Zebras are in a single herd it becomes nearly impossible to pick out any one of them:

Scientists discovered this as they studied Zebras and got confused about which individual zebra was which, and that happened because the zebras camouflage causes them to all blend into the herd.

So, they tried to fix this by tagging a zebra with red paint so they could recognize it from the others and keep track of it.

Guess what happened?

The Lions killed the tagged Zebra. A tagged zebra stands out from the herd so lions can tell it apart and focus the hunt on it. The Lions don't catch weak zebras, they catch the *IDENTIFIABLE* Zebras they can focus on. If a Zebra stand out from the herd, or gets separated from the herd it no longer blends in with the rest of the herd and it loses the benefit of it's camouflage, at which point the lions can focus on it, target it, and kill it.

This is a great analogy for the game the woke are playing.

Once a worldview is named and defined, it can then be pointed out, highlighted, and subjected to criticism. Once you can *IDENTIFY* a worldview or set of ideas you can focus on it. Naming an idea lets us separate it from the herd of other ideas and examine it up close. The woke don't want anyone to be able to give a name or label to their ideology because if that happens we can "tag" examples their ideology with a label when we see it. This allows us to highlight it, point it out, and examine it when we see it.

We label and name things to help us "tag" them, so we can point them out and focus on them, the woke are trying desperately to destroy all of our linguistic "tags." Woke activists do not want us to be able to single out their ideas and subject them to criticism. Woke ideas really can't withstand proper rational and logical analysis. The lions of truth: evidence, logic, rationality, etc, will eat the Zebras of Wokeness, Gender Ideology, Critical Race Theory, and Critical Social Justice for lunch. But only if the lions of reason can focus on and identify the Zebras of woke ideology.

This is what the woke want to avoid. The woke think our criticisms are not legitimate and merely an attempt by us to attack them so we can hold on to "power and privilege." For that reason the woke seek to insulate themselves from our "illegitimate" criticism.

So, to avoid getting eaten by the lions of reason the woke want to camouflage their ideology in a way that makes it impossible to it to be seen, pointed out, highlighted, or (in woke parlance) "made visible." They want hide their worldview by making it impossible to focus on and impossible to tag, label, or name. so they can say they are "just doing history" or "just discussing gender," and "blend in" as though wokeness fits right alongside reason, evidence, logic, and rationality.

We need to use labels to be able to point at, highlight, and otherwise tag woke concepts so that they can be seen and then held up and examined for criticism. Using labels like "woke," "CRT," AND "Critical Social Justice," lets us tag woke ideas so we can hold them up to the light and examine them. Labels help us point out wokeness to other people so they can see it too.

This is what the woke want to avoid.

What the woke want is to act like all the bits of woke activism we see are unconnected phenomena spontaneously springing fourth in the name of justice in an organic and decentralized way. They want to act as though things like BLM, Defund the Police, “Diversity, equity, and Inclusion,” and Drag Queen Story Hour are diffuse and unconnected movements when in fact they are all connected by their adherence to an underlying worldview and ideology.

The formal name of this ideology is Critical Social Justice,1 or in common parlance, wokeness.

3. What is the solution

Do not let them do this. Do not let them play games and use linguistic and rhetorical sleight of hand to hide their worldview. You do not need to give an exhaustive definition every time they invent a new term, or every time they present you with some new bit of jargon. All you need is a definition of wokeness that communicates its ideas in a clear way so people can examine it.

I would like to provide what I think is an accurate definition of wokeness that even a person who is “woke” would be willing to accept.

Woke: (sometimes called Critical Social Justice) is a type of social justice politics that claims systemic identity based discrimination such as racism, sexism, homophobia, white privilege, and other sorts of injustice are baked into the fabric of society. In short, society is oppressive. They believe this occurs through “systems of power” which were created for the benefit people who are white, straight, and male, at the expense of everyone else. This power operates through cultural hegemony (cultural dominance) and by socializing people into accepting the legitimacy of this oppressive system, and accepting their place in it. Wokeness claims these systems of power warp every element of western culture in a way that harms people, and for that reason all of society must be radically restructured. Everything, including science, knowledge, truth, beauty, economics, education, sports, music, film, agriculture, justice and everything else on society are full of bigotries, biases and self-interest which are a product of the systems of power which were created by and for straight white males. On this view even such things as math, biology, physics, and chemistry must be radically rebuilt with a focus toward diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, anti-racism, and so fourth.

To give you something that is a little easier to memorize and pull out in conversation, Neil Shenvi has offered a definition of wokeness which fits into a single tweet:

Wilfred Reilly offers and even shorter definition that is excellent for use in everyday conversation:

With a proper definition of wokeness now in view we should now proceed to make sure that we carefully, accurately, and carefully label things as Critical Social Justice or “Woke” when they fit that definition. We should have absolutely no hesitation in doing so.

These woke activists have labelled everyone they disagree with as:

racist

bigot

sexist

white supremacist

nazi

fascist

transphobe

homophobe

ableist

misogynist

anti-black

They absolutely do not get to complain when we label them as “woke.”

Label fairly, use labels from their literature, and label accurately, do not hesitate to label those woke ideas and then subject those woke ideas to the bright light of rigorous criticism and analysis.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance

1 Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, second edition. Teachers College press. 2017. P.19

An alternate approach is to ignore the definitions entirely.

I don't really care what name you want to call it when:

everything is seen through paranoid, invisible power dynamics and emotional abuse and manipulative lies are used to coerce people who have done nothing wrong;

or when the most fragile, most ideologically possessed can, and do, weaponize the worst, most intellectually dishonest reading of a statement or situation and insist you're a bigot if you don't accept it as true;

or when black kids are told that society is structured around "anti-blackness" and white kids are told that they are oppressors;

or when the liberal mainstay of colorblindness (reducing the social signifiance of skin color) is itself regarded as "racist", and the new morality declares the opposite is required;

or when equality and merit are treated as bigotry, and standards must be lowered;

or when racial segregation is rehabilitated as a virtue;

or when objective reality is denied, objectivity itself is bigoted, and truth becomes merely an opinion;

or when gay conversion therapy is being endorsed by supposed LGBT organizations;

or when parents transition their kids because they liked the wrong toys;

or when doctors and hospitals lie about the need for medical experiments on kids, or that they're doing them at all;

or when people keep pretending they don't know how babies are made;

or when organizations are consumed with ideological activism and become incapable of fulfilling their actual mission;

or when our knowledge-producing institutions are tearing themselves apart and dismantling our knowledge-making processes in order to restructure themselves instead for the production of religious piety as ideological convents;

or when words are redefined or eliminated entirely for the purpose of controlling thought and re-engineering society;

or when the most privileged, most entitled people in the world in the freest countries in the world are roleplaying as oppressed victims;

or when people in those countries voluntarily implement defacto blasphemy laws to suppress or punish wrongthink, and even arguing in favor of freedom of speech is recast as a "dogwhistle" for "hate";

or when it's somehow both the case that LiTeRaLLy nO oNe Is DoInG tHiS and you're a bigot for getting in their way.

I don't care what you call this.

It just has to end.

#Wokal Distance #woke #wokeness #woke ideology #wokeness as religion #woke activism #wokeism #cult of woke #language manipulation #language games #word games #religion is a mental illness

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years

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By: Wokal Distance

Published: Oct 28, 2022

One aspect of woke ideology which flies under the radar is that wokeness has no stopping point. That is, there is no norm, value, idea, concept, expectation, standard, moral, or theory that wokeness will not dissolve, dismantle, deconstruct, and get rid of. What this means is that there is no point at which wokeness stops; it is like an acid that is so powerful that dissolves any container that tries to hold it. As such nothing, not math, not biology, not engineering, not religion, will avoid being obliterated once wokeness gets a hold of it.

There are two reasons that wokeness has no brakes and no stopping point.

The first is that there is an ethical imperative in wokeness which requires the subversion, deconstruction, dismantling, and "calling into question" of any and every narrative, paradigm, ideology, worldview, value set, ethical system, or cultural belief that gains cultural prominence. Anything that becomes the "status quo," is widely accepted in society, or becomes the dominant narrative in society must immediately be subverted, dismantled, deconstructed, challenged or "called into question."

The second reason wokeness has no brakes is that the ideas, concepts, philosophies and theories that make up wokeness will dissolve anything that sets itself up as a boundary, limit, or stopping point.

I will explain both of these points in turn.

1. The moral imperative of Critical Theory.

The moral imperative for wokeness to never stop comes to us from the Brazilian Marxist educator and Critical Theorist Paulo Freire. Freire thought that educators (that is, teachers, including teachers in k-12 public schools) "ideally become partners in this self-emancipation process, contributing to what he sees as a struggle toward perpetual revolution and universal liberation."1

Freire wanted a "perpetual revolution," a revolution which never ends. Freire thought that as soon as a revolutionary movement came to power it would immediately become the status quo and the dominant power. In order to avoid this, Freire thinks we must always and forever approach the world with "Critical Consciousness" in order to avoid becoming and oppressive dominant hegemony. For Freire and other critical theorists Critical Consciousness is: "to have taken on a worldview that sees society in terms of systems of power, privilege, dominance, oppression, and marginalization, and that has taken up an intention to become an activist against these problematics. To have developed a critical consciousness is to have become aware, in light of this worldview, that you are either oppressed or an oppressor—or, at least, complicit in oppression as a result of your socialization into an oppressive system."2

The woke theorist is thus morally required to always be looking for oppressive power dynamics and must dedicated to be dismantling, deconstructing, subverting and otherwise challenging anything that becomes the status quo. This means that as soon as some idea, paradigm, convention, ideology, truth claim, or narrative becomes dominant they must immediately begin to interrogate it for anything that might resemble an oppressive power dynamic.

In the woke worldview any form of social, economic, or political inequality is viewed as oppressive, and anything that results in unequal outcomes is necessarily “problematic.” Further, because the woke theorists always think in terms of “systems,” anytime inequality of any kind shows up woke theorists will immediately assert that this inequality is the result of systems of power, privilege, and domination. For this reason they will subvert, dismantle, deconstruct, and challenge any system that allows any inequality of outcome at all.

Because the woke seek absolute social and economic equality of outcome, and because some people will always achieve greater outcomes than other people for a variety of reasons (talent, drive, work ethic, luck, etc) this process of criticism never stops. It goes on indefinitely.

2. The acid of postmodernism.

I very often see people attempt to push back on the claims made by wokeness by attempting to appeal to something that they think is beyond contention, or something they think provides and objective view of the facts in play. They are attempting to put the brakes on wokeness by establishing some objective facts which they think will show that the woke view is wrong. For example, in universities when woke people attempt to say men can give birth people will appeal to biology for a clear definition of what a biological female is. They think that science can settle the issue in an objective way. Another example of this is when woke Christians claim men can become women, non-woke Christians will quote say “we ought to use the Bible to build our ideas about the world” and then quote Genesis 5:2 (“He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created”) in an attempt to establish that Christian doctrine ought to say that men and women are different. So the University professor will attempt to stop the march of wokeness by appealing to scientific facts, and Christians will attempt to stop wokeness by appealing to facts about what the Bible says.

In this example both the Professor and the Christian are attempting to put the brakes on wokeness by using established objective facts (the professor appealing to biological facts, the Christian appealing to facts about what the Bible says) to set a limit on how far wokeness can go. In this way people seek to establish a sort of boundary that wokeness cannot cross.

This won't work, and I'd like to explain why.

The core of woke ideology is thoroughly postmodern, and that means it comes with a set of theories, concepts, and tools which when taken together are capable of dissolving anything.

First off, the postmodern theorist denies the possibility of objectivity. On a postmodern view of the world there is simply no way for anyone to have an objective view of anything. All viewpoints are merely a view from a point. Postmodern thinkers believe is not possible for anyone to get outside of their cultural upbringing and the way they were socialized. As such the biases, interests, and prejudices that everyone must have inevitably make their way into every judgement, decision, appraisal, analysis, observation or evaluation that occurs. This means no one can never arrive at a truly objective account of anything.

On a postmodern view of the world there are no objective interpretations of either language or the world. Everything can be interpreted and understood in a nearly infinite number of ways, and there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct. Any statement put forward as a “fact” can be interpreted in any number of different ways. For example most people would view the statement “men are stronger than women” as an objective statement about the average height of men and women. However, the postmodernist could reinterpret that statement and view it as a way of asserting that women are weak with the goal of establishing male dominance. On a postmodern view there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct.

Thus, even if we could get a truly objective view of the world (which they believe we cannot) whatever description of the world we provide can be reinterpreted in any number of different ways. It would not be possible to provide an absolute, objective, universal description of anything. Whatever description of the world that we give can be interpreted in many different way and there is no objective way to decide which one of those interpretations ought to be considered “correct.”

The postmodern thinker does not think of truth as “a description of the world which corresponds to reality.” Postmodern thinkers believe that what is true is matter of who gets to decide what is true, and how the get to decide what is true. In other words there are certain people in society who are given the privilege of getting to decide what is true because they have the validity, credibility, legitimacy, social status, and trust that is required to be believed, and thus the things they say are “true” are then accepted as “true” by the society at large. On the postmodern view, a statement becomes “true” because the people in society with the power to decide what is true have said a thing is true. Whether a claim actually matches the world is not what matters. The only way claim X gets to have the status of “true” is when the people in society who have the power to decide what is true have chosen to say that claim X is “true.”

The catch here is that the postmodern person will assert that the people who decide what is true have their own hidden agendas, ulterior motives, cultural biases, and self-interest. As such, the agendas, motives, biases and self interest of those who decide what is true warps their judgement such that when they decide what is true they do so in a way that serves their own interests. Those who dicide what is true only decide that a statement is true when it is in their own interest to do so, or when it aligns with their agenda and motives.

The same goes for knowledge. Knowledge is not a matter of having an awareness of understanding of the way the world really is. For the postmodern thinker knowledge, like truth, is matter of who has the power to decide what counts as knowledge, who is believed, who has credibility, and who has legitimacy. What matters is not what actually corresponds to reality, what matters is who in society gets to decide what counts as knowledge. And, like truth, the people who decide what counts as knowledge do so in a way that benefits themselves and which serves their interests.

To oversimplify the matter for the sake of brevity, the postmodern person thinks that knowledge and power are two features of the same object, and these two features mutually reinforce each other. The people who have power get to decide what counts as knowledge and truth, and the people seen as having knowledge and truth are given additional power. The people who have the power to decide what is true use that position to increase their power, to benefit themselves, to serve their own interests, to maintain their social position, and to increase their social status, social prestige, and clout.

3. Postmodernism and critical theory are one hell of a drug.

The alloy of Critical Theory and postmodernism that we typically call wokeness believes that power dynamics are present in every single situation. There is no social interaction in which power dynamics do not play a role, and there is no social structure, convention, institution, or arrangement which is not permeated by power dynamics. Once the alloy of Critical Theory and Postmodernism comes together it creates a worldview that deconstructs, dismantles, and subverts everything it touches.

Rather than going through all the ways that it does this, I’ll just provide some examples of what it looks like. If you have ever seen woke activists attempt to attack something, you will no doubt recognize the wording and rhetorical moves.

Take for example a couple deciding who should drive to the theater. The average person would see this as a simple matter of trying to figure out which person should drive, and that this can be resolved without one person oppressing the other. The postmodern theorist would say that whoever drives is the one in charge of the vehicle which is a matter of power, that there is a social trope about women being bad drivers that is reinforced when the man drives, and that if the man assumes he ought to pick the woman up that he is assuming that it is his job the lead the date and that is a power move which oppresses the woman by placing her is a subserviant position. Further, postmoderns might say that the patriarchy has created an expectation of male driving in order to reinforce the idea that men should be “in the drives seat” when dating a woman. All of this is, of course, problematic, and must be taken into account when deciding who will be driving.

Here is a another example: When a person claims that a certain person is “beautiful” the woke theorist does not take this as a mere statement of preference. Rather, they would seek to ask: by what standard is the person beautiful, who made the standard, why was the standard made, who benefits from the standard, who gets prestige and clout from being considered beautiful by the standard in question, whose interests are served by the standard of beauty, who is left out of the beauty standard. The question would be asked which groups stand to benefit from being considered beautiful, why are we fixated on beauty, why does beauty matter, what assumptions go into our ideas of what beauty is? The woke activist is going to fixate on the fact that being beautiful increases a persons social status, dating options, prestige, ability to gain clout in social media, ability to gain modeling work, and a host of other advantages.

We could even use a silly example of a truck. You might say you want a new truck. The woke activist will respond with questions and arguments like: why do you want a truck not a car? What is the purpose of the truck? Why do we have individually owned vehicles of transportation and not public transportation. Is the system of private transport a product of capitalism and does privately own transportation reinforce a capitalist ideology? Trucks are associated with masculinity and the advertisements for the truck contain themes of traditional masculinity while excluding images of gender non-conforming people; thus trucks discourse is transphobic. Is your desire for a truck the product of the advertising agencies which have created a discourse in which trucks are seen as a symbol of strength and power. Does the desire for a truck that is advertised in this way reflect your desire for power? Is the Truck built in a way that is inaccessible to disabled people? Does the truck, with it’s design features for manual labor implicitly privilege manual labor (done by able bodied people) over and above the contributions of the disabled? Does the frequent appearance of pick-up truck in country music mean that the truck is designed for and built for white people while ignoring the needs of Indigenous people and people of color? Trucks are associate with cowboys, and it was cowboys and frontiersman who colonized America at the expense of indigenous people. Thus the truck needs to be decolonized by being redesigned in a way that disassociates it from masculinity, ableism, sexism, transphobia and colonialism.

See how this works?

The Critical Theory and postmodernism work together to create a worldview that cannot in principle be limited. There can’t be any stopping point because on the one hand Critical Theory requires critique to continue endlessly, and on the other hand postmodernism will act as a universal solvent that will dissolve anything that wishes to act as a limit, restriction, check, boundary, cap, or stopping point for wokeness.

4. How do you stop a universal solvent?

So the question is how do we stop the universal solvent from dissolving our entire society and civilization?

The answer to this requires it’s own article, but I will give two brief answers here.

Learn the linguistic, social, and rhetorical tactics of wokeness so that you can spot them and disarm them when you see them. Wokeness does not seek to win on the grounds of logical argumentation, or by providing evidence for its assertions. Rather, woke activists win socially by attacking the legitimacy, moral authority, credibility, social status, and public standing of their opponents. They gain control of the conversation and place themselves in the position of being the person in the conversation or debate who is taken seriously, believed, differed to, listened to, and seen as a good person. If you can learn how to combat these tactics you can neutralize them and steer the conversation back towards facts, reason, evidence, logic, and argumentation.

The second key is to reject the underlying assumptions and premises of postmodernism that they use to dissolve everything. By pointing out the flaws, errors, and mistake in those underlying assumptions you can show that the conclusions of wokeness are not on solid ground. The key is not to attack the woke person’s credibility, but rather to focus on their assumptions, presuppositions, and underlying premises and show that they are deeply flawed and ought to be rejected for intellectual reasons. Refocus the conversation back towards truth.

Wokeness has no stopping point and it cannot be appeased, satiated, or bargained with. Accepting their worldview and trying to set limits will not work. For that reason you must neutralize the rhetorical tactics and then show the underlying worldview is wrong. If you don’t, wokeness will dissolve every aspect of our society and civilization.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

1 Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change," Ed. Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova. (New York University Press, 2020) p.117

2 https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-consciousness/

#Wokal Distance #critical theory #postmodernism #universal solvent #deconstruction #woke #wokeness as religion #woke activism #wokeism #cult of woke #objective reality #knowledge #perpetual revolution #Paulo Freire #corruption of education #religion is a mental illness

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

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By: Wokal Distance

Published: Mar 24, 2023

One aspect of woke ideology that flies under the radar is that wokeness has no stopping point. That is, there is no norm, value, idea, concept, expectation, standard, moral, or theory that wokeness will not dissolve, dismantle, deconstruct, and get rid of. What this means is that there is no point at which wokeness stops; it is like an acid that is so powerful that it dissolves any container that tries to hold it. As such, nothing—not math, not biology, not engineering, not religion—will avoid being obliterated once wokeness gets a hold of it.

There are two reasons for this.

The first is that there is an ethical imperative in wokeness that requires the subversion, deconstruction, dismantling, and “calling into question” of any and every narrative, paradigm, ideology, worldview, value set, ethical system, or cultural belief that gains cultural prominence. Anything that becomes the “status quo,” is widely accepted in society, or becomes the dominant narrative in society, must immediately be subverted, dismantled, deconstructed, challenged and questioned.

The second is that the ideas, concepts, philosophies and theories that make up wokeness will dissolve anything that sets itself up as a boundary, limit, or stopping point.

I will explain both of these points in turn.

The moral imperative of Critical Theory

The moral imperative for wokeness to never stop comes to us from the Brazilian Marxist educator and Critical Theorist Paulo Freire. Freire thought that educators (that is, teachers, including teachers in K-12 public schools) should “ideally become partners in this self-emancipation process, contributing to what he sees as a struggle toward perpetual revolution and universal liberation.”1

Freire wanted a “perpetual revolution,” a revolution that never ends. Freire thought that as soon as a revolutionary movement came to power it would immediately become the status quo and the dominant power. To avoid this, Freire advocates for the constant adoption of Critical Consciousness to ensure that we remain vigilant against oppressive dominant hegemonies.

For Freire and other critical theorists, Critical Consciousness is:

[T]o have taken on a worldview that sees society in terms of systems of power, privilege, dominance, oppression, and marginalization, and that has taken up an intention to become an activist against these problematics. To have developed a critical consciousness is to have become aware, in light of this worldview, that you are either oppressed or an oppressor—or, at least, complicit in oppression as a result of your socialization into an oppressive system.2

At the heart of the woke theorist’s moral code lies an unwavering commitment to identifying and confronting oppressive power structures, with the ultimate goal of dismantling, deconstructing, subverting and otherwise challenging anything that becomes the status quo. This means that as soon as some idea, paradigm, convention, ideology, truth claim, or narrative becomes dominant, they must immediately begin interrogating it for anything that might resemble an oppressive power dynamic.

According to this worldview, any form of social, economic, or political inequality is inherently oppressive. The mere presence of unequal outcomes is seen as necessarily “problematic” and a cause for concern. This is because woke theorists think in terms of “systems,” and view inequality as de facto proof that systems of power, privilege, and domination are at play. For this reason they are quick to subvert, dismantle, deconstruct, and challenge any system that perpetuates or allows for any amount of inequality.

This unyielding pursuit of equality of outcome is complicated by the reality that some individuals will inevitably achieve greater success than others, due to a multitude of factors including talent, drive, work ethic, and luck. Because of this, the woke theorist’s work is never done. It goes on indefinitely.

The acid of postmodernism

I often see people trying to push back on the claims made by wokeness by attempting to appeal to something that they believe is beyond debate or provides an objective view of the facts. They want to establish some objective facts to show that the woke view is wrong and put the brakes on its influence.

For instance, in universities, when woke people claim that men can give birth, some will appeal to biology for a clear definition of what a biological female is, believing that science can settle the issue objectively. Similarly, when woke Christians claim that men can become women, non-woke Christians may defer to the Bible for an objective standard on how to view the world. They may reference Genesis 5:2 (“He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created”) to establish that Christian doctrine should acknowledge the difference between men and women. Thus, the academician endeavors to arrest the advance of wokeness by invoking established scientific facts, while the Christian appeals to biblical knowledge to forestall wokeness.

In this case, both the professor and the Christian seek to thwart wokeness by employing established factual frameworks (the professor referencing biological knowledge, and the Christian referencing the Bible) to limit its proliferation. In doing so, they attempt to establish a boundary that wokeness cannot cross.

This approach is futile, and I’ll explain why.

The core of woke ideology is thoroughly postmodern, which means it comes with a set of theories, concepts, and tools which when taken together are capable of dissolving anything.

First off, the postmodern theorist denies the possibility of objectivity. On a postmodern view, no one can have an objective perspective on anything. All viewpoints are just that—a view from a point. Postmodern thinkers don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to get outside of their cultural upbringing and the way they were socialized. As such, the biases, interests, and prejudices of each person inevitably influence any judgment, decision, appraisal, analysis, observation, or evaluation that occurs. This means that no one can arrive at a truly objective account of anything.

On a postmodern view of the world there are no objective interpretations of either language or the world. Everything can be interpreted and understood in a nearly infinite number of ways, and there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct. Any statement put forward as a “fact” can be interpreted in any number of different ways. For example most people would view the statement “men are stronger than women” as an objective statement about the average height of men and women. However, the postmodernist could reinterpret it as an attempt to establish male dominance by portraying women as weak. According to the postmodern view, there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct.

Therefore, even if we could obtain a truly objective view of the world (which they believe is impossible), whatever description of the world we provide can be reinterpreted in any number of different ways. It would not be possible to provide an absolute, objective, universal description of anything. Whatever description of the world we provide can be interpreted in multiple ways, and there is no objective way to determine which of those interpretations ought to be considered “correct.”

The postmodern thinker does not view truth as a description of the world that corresponds to reality. Instead, they believe that determining what is true is a matter of who has the power to decide what is true and how they decide what is true. In other words, certain individuals in society are given the privilege of determining what is true because they possess the validity, credibility, legitimacy, social status, and trust necessary to be believed, and thus the things they say are true accepted as true by society at large.

In the postmodern view, a statement becomes “true” because the individuals in society with the power to decide what is true have stated that it is true. The statement’s accuracy with respect to the world does not matter. The only way for a claim to be considered “true” is when the individuals in society with the power to decide what is true have decided to say that a claim is “true.”

The catch here is that the postmodernist will assert that the people who decide what is true have their own hidden agendas, ulterior motives, cultural biases, and self-interests. As a result, these biases and self-interests distort their judgment and cause them to make truth claims in a manner that serves their own interests, agendas, and motives.

The same applies to knowledge. Knowledge is not a matter of having an awareness of understanding of the way the world really is. For the postmodern thinker, knowledge, like truth, is matter of who has the power to decide what counts as knowledge, who is believed, who has credibility, and who has legitimacy. What matters is not what actually corresponds to reality, what matters is who in society gets to decide what counts as knowledge. And, like truth, the people who decide what counts as knowledge do so in a way that benefits themselves and which serves their interests.

Postmodernism and critical theory are one hell of a drug

The alloy of Critical Theory and postmodernism that we typically call wokeness posits that power dynamics are at play in every social interaction, and that no social structure, convention, institution, or arrangement is exempt from these dynamics. Once Critical Theory and postmodernism become fused, it creates a worldview that deconstructs, dismantles, and subverts everything it touches.

Rather than going through all the ways that it does this, I’ll just provide some examples of what it looks like. If you have ever witnessed woke activists in action, you will no doubt recognize the phrasing and rhetorical moves.

Take for example a couple deciding who should drive to the theater. The average person would see this as a simple matter of trying to figure out which person should drive, and that this can be resolved without one person oppressing the other. The postmodern theorist, on the other hand, would argue that whoever drives assumes power over the vehicle, which is a power dynamic. Additionally, there is a societal trope that women are bad drivers, which is reinforced when a man drives. If a man assumes that it is his responsibility to pick up the woman, he is also assuming that he should lead the date, which is a power move that oppresses the woman by placing her in a subservient position. Furthermore, postmodernists may argue that the patriarchy has created an expectation of men driving to reinforce the idea that men should be “in the driver’s seat” when dating a woman. All of this is, of course, problematic, and must be taken into account when deciding who will be driving.

Here is another example: when someone declares that a certain person is "beautiful," the woke theorist does not regard this as a simple statement of preference. Rather, they would seek to ask: by what standard is the person deemed beautiful? Who created the standard, and why was it created? Who benefits from this standard, and who is left out? Which groups stand to benefit from being considered beautiful? Why are we fixated on beauty? Why does beauty matter, and what assumptions go into our ideas of what beauty is? The woke activist would focus on the fact that being beautiful provides numerous benefits, such as increased social status, dating options, prestige, social media influence, modeling jobs, and many other advantages.

We could even use a silly example of a truck. You might say you want a new truck. The woke activist will respond with questions and arguments like: Why a truck and not a car? What is the purpose of the truck? Why do we have individually owned vehicles instead of public transportation? Is private transportation a product of capitalism, and does it reinforce capitalist ideology? Trucks are often associated with masculinity, and truck ads typically feature traditional masculine themes while excluding images of gender non-conforming people; thus truck discourse is transphobic. Is your desire for a truck the product of ad agencies, which has created a discourse where trucks are seen as a symbol of strength and power? Does the desire for a truck that is advertised in this way reflect your desire for power? Is the truck built in a way that is inaccessible to disabled people? Does the truck, with its design features for manual labor, implicitly privilege manual labor (done by able bodied people) over and above the contributions of the disabled? Do pickup trucks, which often appear in country music, cater to white people while ignoring the needs of Indigenous people and people of color? Trucks are associated with cowboys, and it was cowboys and frontiersman who colonized America at the expense of Indigenous people. Therefore the truck needs to be decolonized by being redesigned in a way that disassociates it from masculinity, ableism, sexism, transphobia and colonialism.

See how this works?

Critical Theory and postmodernism collaborate to form a worldview that is inherently limitless. This is because Critical Theory necessitates an unending process of critique, while postmodernism serves as a universal agent that dissolves any constraints or barriers that attempt to restrict or contain wokeness. Therefore, there can be no definitive endpoint in this worldview, as it continually strives to expand beyond any imposed limitations.

How do you stop a universal solvent?

How can we prevent the universal solvent from dissolving our society and civilization? While a comprehensive answer would require an article of its own, I can provide two brief suggestions here.

Firstly, familiarize yourself with the linguistic, social, and rhetorical tactics of wokeness so that you can spot and disarm them when you see them. Wokeness does not seek to win through logical argumentation or by providing evidence for its assertions. Rather, wokeness aims to win socially by attacking the legitimacy, moral authority, credibility, social status, and public standing of their opponents. They gain control of the public conversation by placing themselves in the position of being perceived as the person who is to be taken seriously, believed, deferred to, listened to, and seen as a good person. If you can learn how to combat these tactics, you can neutralize them and redirect the conversation towards facts, reason, evidence, logic, and argumentation.

Secondly, reject the underlying assumptions and premises of postmodernism that they use to dissolve everything. By exposing flaws, errors, and mistakes in these underlying assumptions, you can demonstrate that its conclusions is not based on solid ground. Rather than attacking the credibility of woke individuals, focus on their assumptions, presuppositions, and underlying premises, and show that they are deeply flawed and should be rejected for intellectual reasons. Refocusing the conversation back to truth is essential.

Wokeness has no stopping point and it cannot be appeased, satiated, or bargained with. Its unrelenting nature means that we must take action to prevent the dissolution of every aspect of our society and civilization. By arming ourselves with knowledge of its tactics and challenging its premises, we can neutralize its power and redirect the conversation towards facts, reason, evidence, logic, and argumentation. Failure to do so would be catastrophic.

We can't rely on this just burning itself out, or reaching a stopping point beyond which it can't proceed.

Wokeness is never done.

As Robin DiAngelo says: "no one is ever done." Its inherent paranoia and authoritarianism mean there is always another microaggression to uncover, another word to ban, another emotional ouchie to punish.

The only thing that can stop it is people resisting it, showing what it's doing and putting a stop to it. And not being afraid of it.

#Reality's Last Stand #Wokal Distance #universal solvent #wokeness #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #wokeism #woke #religion is a mental illness

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years

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By: Wokal Distance

Published: Jun 3, 2022

1/ What is a woman?

In the @MattWalshBlog documentary "What is a Woman?" woke gender experts say:

-No one thing makes someone a woman -Woman can mean many things to many people -Some Women have penises

Let's explain what's happening here, and how to push back.

A thread🧵

2/ The first thing we need to do is get clear about why they say Women can have penises, there's no one thing that defines "woman", and woman can mean many things to many people.

Why do they think this?

We need to understand WHY they believe these things before we can push back

3/ To understand this we need to unpack a point about language and especially "categories." This is the hardest part of this thread, but once we have this point nailed down the rest is easy.

Wokeness thinks that all categories are "socially constructed." What that means is...

4/ We use categories to carve up the world and organize our understanding of reality. We use names, labels, descriptions, and other linguistic tools to break apart to world, to divide it and draw lines so we can understand it

This is hard, so here's an example: Think of a forest

5/ The forest contains many objects. Suppose you're the first person to discover a forest and you want to study it. What you might do is try and figure what is in the forest.

So you go walking and see a lot of really tall things with a brown trunk and green leafy things on top.

6/ You decide that all the things that are tall with brown trunks are categorized as "trees." You see things running about roaring and growling. You categorize them as "animals." You see things fly and chirp and make nests, so you categorize those as "birds."

See how it works?

7/ We put things in categories to intellectually organize them so we can makes sense of the world.

We also categorize at different levels.

Look at trees. The top level is the category "tree." The next level what makes up the tree: "leaves," "branches," "bark," and "roots"

8/ See how it works?

We start at the highest level with the category "forest," move down a level to"trees," move down to "leaves" we can even categorize the parts of leaves:

9/ Now in wokeness, the idea is that we can construct any category we want, and we can organize things however we want.

Lets use books as an example.

You can organize you books in order of author, genre, length, publisher, fiction/non-fiction, or by the colour of the cover...

10/ The woke think we can organize the world using whatever categories we want to invent. It's up to us. There is no objectively right way to do it.

Trees are only categorized as "trees" because we put them in that category.

Now, this next bit is the key to the whole thing...

11/ The woke don't think our categories are made to help us get an objectively TRUE picture of the world. They think we invent categories ACCORDING TO OUR OWN INTERESTS. We categorize things according to what we care about and what matters to us

We can categorize however we want

12/ Now, the same process we use to categorize the physical world is the process we use the categorize society. Our social categories, the categories we use to organize how society works are also "socially constructed."

That includes the terms "man" and "woman...."

13/ Now here is the point:

The woke think that the categories "man" and "woman" are arbitrary categories. They are not accurate reflections of the world as it is, they are categories invented by people who wanted to divide society into the groups "men" and "women"

14/ The woke think these categories were arbitrarily constructed by the dominant group in society (straight white men) in order to set up society in the way that makes everyone conform to the straight white male ideal of how things should be.

The woke things we could have...

15/ used any categories at all. We could divided people up by eye color, shoe size, or hair length

They woke don't think "man" and "woman" describe any objective fact about the world: They are made up to force people to fit into categories created by straight white men...

16/ The woke think putting someone into an arbitrary category that they don't want to be in is an act of oppression.

They want people to join whatever category they want. This is why they say "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman," and this is where the trouble starts:

[ Sorry, I can't add more than one video. ]

17/ To attack the categories "man" and "woman", they usually do 2 things:

1. Say "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman,"

2. Nitpick the definition of "man" and "woman" to make it look like we can't give a biological definition of "woman"

Let's show how to deal with both

18/ Let's start with:

1."a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman"

The problem here is two fold.

First, the definition is circular: it uses the term being defined (woman) as a part of the definition. This assumes we already know what a woman is!

Let's make that more clear:

19/ Suppose I invent the word "ZORP" and I define ZORP as "anyone who identifies as a ZORP.

Do you know what ZORP means?

Given my definition, how would you know if you want to identify as a ZORP? On what Basis would anyone identify as a ZORP?

And here is the key...

20/ "a ZORP is anyone who identifies as a ZORP" **doesn't give us any new information** about what ZORP means, what the Criteria are for identifying as a ZORP, what feeling like a ZORP means, or anything else.

Same thing goes for "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman"

21/ That definition of woman does not tell us what it means when someone says they identify as a woman.

A person could say "I identify as a woman because I had eggs this morning" and no one could argue. It leaves the term without a proper definition and renders it meaningless.

22/ If you can identify as a woman for any reason at all, because a woman is whoever identifies as a woman I could say "I am participating in the women's 100M dash because I identify as a woman because I had eggs for breakfast," and no one could argue with me.

This is absurd...

23/ Let's now turn to the second move they do to attack biological categories.

2. Nitpick the definition of "man" and "woman" to make it look like we can't give a biological definition of "woman"

This one is harder to beat, but analytic philosophy gives us tools to defeat it.

24/ A nice example of this strategy come to us from @VaushV

Here, he shows us an example of attacking the definition of "woman" by attempting to show that there are border line cases that we can't account for.

Here is his argument:

25/ The way this argument works is to find cases where there is a person who is missing some feature of female biology that we think women have, or who have biological features men usually have.

The goal is to show that there are women who do not fit our definition of woman...

26/ Another way this argument is used is to present a chart like the one below, and then argue that the everyday definition of women that people use does not account for every single one of the various exceptions, anomalies, and variations that exist in the world...

27/ Both of these types of arguments make use of the same rhetorical and argumentative strategy:

Appealing to borderline cases and anomalies to argue that the lines our definition draw are inadaquate.

Let's use another example examine this strategy, then show why it fails.

28/ Suppose I ask you "what is a 'stack, of books?"

Is one book a stack? what about 2 books? Or 3 books? Or 4 books?

So you say 4 books, and I ask "why not 3?"

You can't think of a reason and agree to 3 books. So I say "why not 2?" You again agree, so I say "why not 1?"

29/ So you say "well that isn't a stack?"

And I say, why not? Is five books 10 pages long a stack? Is one 50,000 page book a stack? What counts as a stack?

You, not knowing analytic philosophy, are stumped.

This move is called "the fallacy of the beard"

I'll explain...

30/ The beard fallacy is named for the example of a beard. One hair on the chin is not a beard, nor is two, nor is 3, and we can add one hair at a time, and at some point the person has a beard. But drawing the line is hard. It seems odd to say 299 hairs is not a beard but 300 is

31/ But that doesn't mean there is no difference between having a beard and not having a beard. There is, it is just hard to pinpoint and justify drawing a precise line at the exact number of hairs. The same is true with determining the exact number of books required for a stack.

32/ This logic can be used with other things as well.

Think of a table and chair. We can blur those lines. Is a chair I set my drink on a table? Is a table I sit on a chair?

What about k-12 desks? Does this mean we don't know the difference between tables and chairs?👇👇👇

33/ Of course not.

All these examples us the same bad reasoning: they claim the existence of unclear cases implies there are no clear lines, or that the existence of borderline cases means that we don't actually know where the lines are drawn.

Let's show why this is wrong...

34/ The beard fallacy relies on a wrong assumption pointed out by John Searle in his essay "Literary Theory and it's Discontents." That assumption is (quoting Searle): "unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise, WITH NO MARGINAL CASES, it is not a distinction at all."

35/ Searle points out that all concepts are rough around the edges. He gives a technical argument for why it is a fact about humans and the way we use language and communicate that our concepts will always have edge cases.

Think of it this way:

36/ We all have different networks of beliefs, experiences, ideas, and we have a background of capacities, abilities, and presuppositions we use when communicating. This fact makes it impossible develop any concept that are so clear nobody can misinterpret it.

That means...

37/ Someone somewhere will always be able to come up with some edge case which doesn't fit perfectly.

There is one more point...ALMOST DONE

We can apply the beard fallacy to everything that exists, cars, lakes, mountains, the earth, sausages, and anything else and do this...

38/ We can take your car and say "I will remove one atom, or molecule, from your car at a time...how many atoms EXACTLY can I remove before your car ceases to be a car. At some point the whole car will be gone. how many atoms can I take and still have your car be a car?

Now...

39/ Using beard fallacy logic we have to conclude if you can't draw an exact line for how many atoms your car has to have to be a car you don't know what a car is. I can do this with anything.

I can say "how many atoms must a sausage have? what about a goat? or a hat?"

40/ You see how that works?

No woke person would let you steal there money and then blur the definition of dollar bill by saying "how many atoms of this bill can I take before you accuse me of theft?"

"But wokal, how do I explain that, it's so complex"

It's very simple....

41/ When someone brings up borderline examples or edge cases and says "This example proves we don't know where the lines are"...the correct response is:

"THE ONLY REASON YOU CAN THINK UP CASES THAT BLUR THE LINE IS THAT YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHERE THE LINE IS "

See how it works?

42/ They can only blur the lines with cases that fall on or close to the line because they know where the line is. When they bring up edge cases, they only know those are on the edge because the edge is clear enough for them to find...and they know EXACTLY what we mean by "woman"

43/ Ok, we're done! I know that was long but I hope now you now have the tools and needed to push back when woke gender theorists say "a woman is whoever identifies as a woman," or when they try to blur the lines of your definition of what a woman is.

So, let's define woman:

44/ This definition comes to use from the wonderful @HeatherEHeying:

Women are adult human females….Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs.

45/ And when the woke gender theorists try to attack your that definition by blurring lines or using circular definitions you now know exactly how to respond.

Thanks for reading, I really appreciate it. 😀😀😀😀

/fin

The woke don't use language to communicate. They believe it's used to exert control, so that's the way they use it. They don't believe that reality is there to be discovered and described, but created and imposed onto others. Multiple realities and multiple truths. My truth is as good as your truth. This is why their projects always involve redefining words, scolding people who don't comply, and censoring dissenters. The view of social constructivists is that if language constructs reality, then they can always construct it differently.

But reality won't be fooled by word games. The only question is how much damage will the attempt inflict, and who will suffer the consequences.

#gender ideology #Wokal Distance #woke #wokeness as religion #wokeism #woke activism #cult of woke #queer theory #social constructivism #social construct #gender identity #biological sex #human biology #word games #what is a woman #reality denial #my truth #fallacy of the beard #religion is a mental illness

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years

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By: Wokal Distance

Published: July 11, 2022

It is time to talk about “Deconstruction.” If you have been paying attention to discussions about wokeness and postmodernism (What Wes Yang calls “the successor ideology) over the last 5 years, you've likely seen this word. The term “Deconstruction” goes back to Jacques Derrida’s book “Of Grammatology” and is one of the most important concepts in all of postmodernism. If you want to understand wokeness and how it operates, you MUST understand deconstruction. It is one of the key ways that postmodern woke activists use to attack our society.

It can be a bit tough to nail down just what exactly deconstruction is. For his part Derrida insisted that deconstruction was not a method, technique or style of any kind, and Derrida is also notorious for being difficult to read and being incredibly complex in his argumentation and as such it is not easy to find a simple definition or explanation of deconstruction in his work. To make matters worse, the philosophy of out of which deconstruction falls is incredibly complex to explain, and this can make it almost impossible for the average person to get. Further, deconstruction has developed and changed since Derrida first coined the term more than 40 years ago, and this complicates the matter even more.

So, in order to help us to get a grasp of what is going on with deconstruction, I am going to describe deconstruction in terms of what it does, and how it does it. This is not a comprehensive overview of deconstruction and all the philosophical assumptions that go into Derrida’s development of deconstruction. Rather, I am attempting to give you a glimpse of what deconstruction is today by telling you what it does and the uses to which it is put, and why.

Let’s begin.

The first thing that we need to understand is that deconstruction does not seek to show that things are true or false, good or bad, or better or worse. Deconstruction does not operate at the level of describing how the world is or at the level of truth telling. Deconstruction operates at the level of MEANING.

The primary purpose to which deconstruction is put is to blur, attack, subvert, undercut and otherwise take apart the ideas, beliefs, words, texts, thoughts, concepts, claims, assertions, ideologies, art and discourses that make up our society by going after them at the level of MEANING. In other words, anything that can be understood to mean something can have that meaning challenged, subverted, blurred, unsettled, uprooted, or otherwise taken apart by deconstruction.

If a set of ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms and philosophies form the blueprint for a society, then you can tear down that society by destroying it's blueprint. The way that deconstruction seeks to attack the blueprint of our society is to attack that blueprint by going after the meaning of the ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms and philosophies that form our societies blueprint.

This is the game that the woke are in. They do not like our liberal democracy, and they want to tear it down by destroying it’s blueprint. They want to destroy the blueprint of our society that we use to hold our society together with the goal of ripping apart our society as it is. This is why "deconstruct" often appears alongside "dismantle" and "disrupt." So how does deconstruction work?

Deconstruction operates by attacking at the level of MEANING. What gets deconstructed are words, ideas, ideologies, concepts, discourses, art, texts, symbols, etc. Whatever can be used to MEAN something or communicate gets deconstructed.

Like all societies, in our society there is a certain set of ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms, and philosophies which we have elevated to a higher status. There are things that we have lifted up and said “these things are better than other things.”Every society has a blueprint made of ideas that society has thought is right, good, and better than other ideas and it is those elevated ideas that make up the blueprint for the society. The ideas which are elevated become POWERFUL in that they are able to convince people, move people, inspire people, influence people, and move people toward cooperation and action as they participate in society. Deconstruction is used to attack such ideas because if you destroy the MEANING of ideas you can suck the power out of those ideas. You can take the wind out of the sails of those ideas. Deconstruction is a way to knock those ideas off the pedestal that they were placed on so that they lose their power to inspire, motivate, move and influence. And, here’s the thing: if ideas lose their power whatever is held together by those ideas (in this case our society) will begin to come apart.

There are a few things deconstruction does as it operates in our current milieu. This includes, (but is not limited to):

1. Blurring the lines and boundaries which define a concept or idea.

2. Subvert the meaning of an idea by seeking to invert it or undercut it’s legitimacy.

3. Attempting to show that concepts, ideas, assertions, and claims to truth are socially constructed are always influenced and corrupted by the interests, desires, and biases of the people and culture that developed them.

4. Arguing that claims to truth are really claims to power. That whoever decides what is true for society gets a lot of power, and that power seeking influences the process of deciding what is true.

5. Endlessly reinterpreting, re-framing, decontextualizing, and re-contextualizing anything that has meaning and claiming that there is no single right, correct, true way to interpret anything that has meaning.

6. Parodying ideas and mocking them so that they appear silly, goofy, misconstrued, ill-concieved, and unserious. What all of this has in common is that on this view there are no assertions, ideas, concepts, values, morals, norms, interpretations, or philosophies that can lay claim to being absolute, objective, and universally true. Nothing has the status of being absolutely good, right, correct, legitimate, or valid. If the deconstructor is successful in taking down the ideas that we have elevated and provide the north star for our society, they can create doubt and uncertainty as to whether or not the ideas, concepts, values, morals, and norms that form the blueprint of our society are right, correct, true, or worth following.

The goal of the deconstructors is to (in their view) liberate themselves from the tyranny of all the terrible ideas that built our society and which oppress them and hold them down. They think part of the way to liberate themselves is to deconstruct those ideas. This is, of course, a terrible idea. Destroying the blueprint of a society makes it difficult to construct a coherent society, and makes it impossible for society to choose a direction.

Let’s finish up by tying together these threads and showing why, despite it’s practitioners claims, deconstruction is a destructive and ultimately nihilistic enterprise.

In Mere Christianity CS. Lewis discusses morality by comparing it to a convoy of ships. He says that in order for a voyage to be successful ships need to be able to avoid from running into each other, and if the ships are able to keep from sinking, and the ships need to know where it is that they are going. 1

Sucking the power out of the ideas, concepts, values, morals and norms of a society and leaving a society with no elevated ideas, concepts, values, morals and norms to organize around is the societal equivalent of shredding the sails of a ship, destroying it’s rudder, and leaving it adrift and directionless on an open sea. With no ability to pick a particular direction, and no way to navigate the difficulties of the open seas the ships will simply drift and will be unable to reach any particular direction, to say nothing of being able to avoid crashing into one another.

Deconstruction has no limiting principle and eventually deconstruction will deconstruct any blueprint a society develops. This is something that even some activists who use deconstruction admit. For example the Trans activist Riki Wilchins writes (emphasis mine): ”A frequent complaint of Foucault critics is that he seems to dance just out of reach, demolishing each attempt at Truth while coyly refusing to offer his own. Where, they ask, is his version of what is true? What does he propose as the alternative?

This, of course, is exactly what he cannot provide. Foucault understands statements of universal truth to be a form of politics—an intellectual fascism, a way of taking the universal voice in order to seize power while at the same time immunizing itself from criticism. Following Foucault often appears to be a one-way ticket: deconstructing practically everything while constructing almost nothing.” 2

Wilchins goes on to say about the deconstruction of gender that(emphasis mine): ”In the end, the question that hangs over Butler’s brilliant, unruly philosophical campaign is the one with which she herself introduces her first book: What shape of politics emerges when identity no longer constrains our politics?

At present, postmodernism is unable to tell us why we should care about the shape we have, or why we should desire a different one. It’s more than a little like Scarlet O’Hara, promising breathlessly that “tomorrow… is another day,” without knowing that tomorrow will be better, or even explaining why it should be.”3

The methods of deconstruction can be applied to anything that has meaning and thus they are a universal solvent that dissolves all meaning while creating none. Unable to construct anything that itself cannot be deconstructed, deconstruction and the postmodern philosophy out of which it flows is unable to provide any objective meaning. To use Lewis’ ship analogy, deconstruction leaves us all adrift on an open sea. In choosing to adopt deconstruction as a method and accept the postmodern philosophy that goes along with it the woke have placed themselves in the situation of having no idea where they are going to end up but being determined to get there as quickly as possible.

It is there fore imperative that we be able to spot deconstruction when we see it, recognize how it operates, and be able to push back against it. To that end, I will be doing a follow up post on how to recognize deconstructive tactics and how to respond.

Thank you for reading

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

1 C.S. Lewis, Mere Chirstianity, HarperCollins ebook, P. 71-72

2 Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (pp. 97-98). Riverdale Avenue Books. Kindle Edition.

3 Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (p. 151). Riverdale Avenue Books. Kindle Edition.

#Wokal Distance #Woke Tactics #deconstruction #wokeness #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #woke activism #wokeism #woke #word games #postmodernism #postmodern religion #applied postmodernism

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years

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By: Wokal Distance

Published: July 7, 2022

It has been quite frustrating for me to watch well meaning people try to debate a woke person, only to end up upset and humiliated, with their reputation in tatters, after a getting verbally and socially outmaneuvered by a woke person in a public discussion. The thing to remember is that most of the time, the woke person is not playing by the same rules as the rest of us.

A very important thing to remember about the tactics that woke people use is that very often the woke are not trying to win an argument by using reason, superior argumentation and evidence. In many cases (if not most cases) the woke person is trying to win the argument by achieving a SOCIAL victory. That is, they are trying to win the argument by getting the upper hand in the conversation through use of social games, power plays, status jockeying, verbal gimmicks, and emotional manipulation.

To unpack this just a little further, woke activists are not trying to win the debate by showing that they are right and explaining it so that everyone understand them. The game the woke play is to win their battles *SOCIALLY*, and one way to do that is to use social games, power plays, status jockeying, verbal gimmicks, and emotional manipulation to take social control of the conversation. They do this so they can place themselves in position of power and high status within the conversation so they can become the one who is listened to and taken seriously. By doing this the woke person seeks to ensure that the things they say carry more weight then their opposition.

To put this in the simplest terms possible, this tactic is the equivalent of the woke person placing themselves in the position of something like “teacher” withing the conversation, and placing the non-woke person in the position of something like “student.”

The goal of the woke person using this tactic is to create a social asymmetry such that they have credibility within the conversation and their ideas carry a great deal of weight, while relegating the non-woke person to a low status position with no credibility so the non-woke persons arguments and ideas carry little to no weight within the conversation. The woke person wants to place themselves in a position of prestige within the conversation so they are the person who is believed, listened to, and taken seriously, while placing the non-woke person in a low status position so the non-woke person lacks the social standing within the conversation that is needed to be taken seriously and push back effectively.

There is an old idea that says that you can win a debate intellectually, but lose the crowd. The woke often take advantage of this phenomena to win the debate by coming out on top SOCIALLY. Let’s take a look at one way they do this.

By far the most common move that the woke use to try to take control of the conversation is to use academic jargon as a sort of smokescreen. This is where someone uses excessive amounts technical wording to give the appearance of intelligence and expertise while at the same time hiding their argument under dense enough jargon that what they say goes unchallenged.

Let’s take an example of this occurring in a different context so you can see what I mean here. A rather common example of the jargon-as-smokescreen tactic is when a mechanic overcharges for his services, and when he is challenged on the bill he responds with something like: "The head-gasket failed and we changed bushings on the wishbone and adjusted the pistons a few degrees before they (TDC) on the compression stroke." Here the car owner has no idea what the mechanic said. The mechanics explanation looks like a good technical explanation, but the car owner has no idea what was actually done to their car, or if what the mechanic said actually makes any sense. The car owner can’t really challenge the mechanic here because the car owner doesn’t understand the jargon and thus lacks the ability to challenge the mechanics claims. In this situation, the car owner lacks the social standing to question the legitimacy of what the mechanic did. Unless the car owner has a friend with them who IS a mechanic, they have no reason to do anything but pay the large bill no matter how large it may be. The woke version of this is when you disagree with a woke person and they say something like: "The patriarchy is rooted in systemic racism that perpetuates white hegemony by de-legitimizing the epistemic authority of indigenous folx."

Here, like in the mechanic example, you have no idea what the woke person said. It looks like a technical explanation, but you have no idea if what the woke activist said actually makes any sense. It becomes socially difficult to challenge the woke person here because you don’t understand the technical jargon in play, and so it is easy for the woke person to make it look like they are an expert and you are just an ignorant fool who is out of his depth.

By using technical academic jargon the woke person creates the appearance of expertise while at the same time creating the impression that those who don't know the technical jargon are simply ignorant. By using this tactic the woke person can destroy whatever social standing or credibility a non-woke persons has, undercutting the ability of a non-woke person to be taken seriously within the conversation. The result is that those who are not woke look like they have no legitimate reason to be heard, listened to, or paid attention too.

This can be a very difficult tactic to deal with. If you ask the woke person to unpack and explain their jargon they can respond with something like “it isn’t my job to educate you,” or “why don’t you go read a book before arguing with me,” and those responses can be very effective in a debate.

However, the situation is not hopeless and there is a way to effectively push back. As many of you will have noticed, they way to diffuse most of these woke tactics is the expose the tactic for what it is and make people aware of the dynamic that is in play. The way around this tactic is to say something like the following: “I strongly suspect that your use of dense technical jargon is an attempt to win by making yourself look good and to avoid having the explain and defend your position. I think you are using technical jargon as a way to take over the conversation and make yourself look like the expert so that you can win without having to actually unpack your ideas and defend them in a way that regular people can understand and question. If you are interested in having a conversation in a way that everyone can participate in I am willing to do that, if you want to bury you ideas in dense academic jargon so that they can’t be challenged then I am going to assume that you really can’t defend your ideas.”

This response is an excellent way to diffuse the tactic and put the woke activist in the position of having to actually engage in fair and even handed conversation. The goal here is not to place yourself in the driver seat of the conversation. We don’t use woke tactics against them because using woke tactics against woke people leaves the conversation on the terms that the woke prefer. The goal here is to pull the conversation away from being a fight over credibility, social stats and “whose the expert,” and re-focus the conversation on who actually has the better argument.

In most cases the way to push back against woke tactics is to use responses that force the woke person to be clear about exactly what they are arguing. Once the view of the woke person is clear to everyone in the conversation you can go about showing why the ideas of the woke are destructive and false.

Thanks for reading

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance

The dense jargon is there to mask how shallow, juvenile and parochial their ideology is. Very few of them actually understand the jargon themselves, they simply parrot back what their priests say. Just like any religion.

#Wokal Distance #Woke Tactics #jargon #academese #academic bullshit #language games #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #woke activism #wokeism #woke #religion is a mental illness

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years

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By: Wokal Distance

Published: July 2, 2022

One of the more common tricks used by woke Social Justice activists is to de-legitimize criticism by attacking the character of the person who is criticizing them.

Typically an attack on someone’s character has at least 3 goals:

- have people to turn up their skeptical dials toward the ideas of the person being attacked - view the person under attack with suspicion and mistrust so that person loses social standing and moral authority within the conversation - have the audience stop giving the “benefit of the doubt” to the person under attack

I am sure everyone reading this understands how this works in normal situations, after all character assassination is a tactic as old as time. However, when postmodern social justice activists (AKA ‘woke’ activists) use this tactics they have a very specific way of implementing it and that is what I would like to focus on today. When the woke activist attacks a person they will generally use CYNICISM as their weapon of choice. They will attempt to leverage cynicism against that speaker in order to render the speaker ineffective. Let’s take a look at how this works.

Stated simply, the woke version of character assassination is to attribute bad motives to anyone who disagrees with wokeness in order undercut the moral authority, credibility, and social standing of the person who opposes woke vision of “social justice.”

When a woke activists goes about attacking the character of a person they disagree with, they focus on the *motives* of the person they are attacking. They usually will not straight up accuse someone of a crime, rather, they will use subtle insinuations to accuse the person of having selfish, underhanded motives and “being in it only for themselves.” The activist who implements this tactic will attempt to undercut a non-woke speaker by suggesting, implying or insinuating that the non-woke speaker is not being fully honest about what they really want. They will typically imply, suggest, or insinuate that the non-woke speaker is not coming to the conversation in good faith but is rather making bad faith arguments in order to get an outcome that benefits themselves or their group.

The suggestion will be that a person opposes wokeness because they benefit from the current social system and they don’t want to give up all the unfair benefits that they are receiving from the current system. The woke activist might say something like “Your opposition to wokeness is not due to legitimate concerns about real problems in woke ideology. You don’t really care about that. You only oppose wokeness because us woke activists will make things fair; and right now you non-woke people have an unfair advantage in society, and you want to keep your unfair advantage in society. You’re afraid of losing all your unearned, unfair benefits. That is why you oppose wokeness.” It might not be as blunt as that (although it may) but that is the type of cynical reasoning that will be used against non-woke speakers.

The underlying mechanics of this tactic have to do with how cynicism is leveraged to hijack the way a non-woke persons arguments are analyzed. What this tactics does is try to have people stop analyzing what a non-woke person says in terms of arguments, reasons, evidence, and truth, and instead have people analyze what a non-woke person says as though the arguments they make are really just covering up a power move or dominance play. In other words, the point is get get people to stop analyzing arguments in terms of what is true and false, and instead have people analyze the argument in terms of other peoples interests. The woke person wants to get you to stop asking “is this idea true?” and to start asking “whose interests are in play here and who stands to benefit from this idea?”

By attacking a non-woke speakers motives the woke activists can both discredit them while also getting the audience to raise their level of skepticism towards the arguments the non-woke speaker uses. This sort of impugning the motives of other people through sociological power analysis is a way to poison the well by calling into question the motives of someone while maintaining the appearance of intellectual rigor. This can make the tactic very difficult to deal with.

If this tactic is deployed against you the response to this tactic is not to defend yourself. When someone calls your motives into question the correct thing to do is point out that they are doing this, then move the conversation away from speculation about motives and back to the question we ought to be asking: is the view in question true? The solution to this tactic is clarity. You must respond in a way that makes the tactic completely obvious to the point where the fact that the woke activist is employing this tactic should be as obvious as the nose on your face or the sun in the sky. It must be painfully obvious. Once you have made the tactic completely obvious, so obvious that no person could deny it, then you can move the conversation back to asking about what is true.

People can be cynical by nature, and this particular type of poisoning of the well is leveraging that natural cynicism as a way of discrediting non-woke speakers so the audience will dismiss their ideas. However, people also like truth, and you can leverage that desire for truth by pointing out that poisoning the well moves the conversation away from truth and toward speculation about motives. Once people see that the conversation has moved away from truth their natural desire for truth will help them to adjust accordingly. After that happens, you can further leverage people’s natural inclination toward truth seeking by providing truthful, careful, rigorous arguments bolstered by sound reasoning and strong evidence.

Don’t get sucked into fights about your motives because that only derails the conversation further. Diffuse attempts to poison the well by making them obvious, then move the conversation back to the question of truth.

Thanks for reading

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance

#Wokal Distance #Woke Tactics #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #woke #woke activism #wokeism #clarity #precision #ad hominem #ad hominem fallacy #cancel culture #poison the well #character assassination #religion is a mental illness

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