What will eventually defeat the current identitarian ideology is that its ideas are manifestly contradictory.
To fully support one facet of this pernicious and divisive ideology puts you diametrically in opposition to another facet. If, for example, you stand up to support feminist rights, you fall foul of trans-rights, etc etc
Given the propensity of id-pol adherents to try and cancel any who dare to challenge their precepts, the whole movement becomes an Ouroboros – the mythical serpent that eats its own tail – though in the case of these activists it would possibly be better to describe a variant on the Ouroboros – as a monster that disappears up its own backside. Frankly, for the good of society, it cannot come soon enough.
I wish this were true. However, in actuality the most successful mass movements in history have relied upon contradiction or other forms of nonsense as part of their appeal.
Consider Christianity with its self-contradictory “trinity” (there’s only one God; yet he’s three persons) or Marxism/Communism with its inane slogans and patently absurd constructs (such as Marx’s theory of the value of labor, which is arrant nonsense.) The only thing more absurd than most of Marx’s analysis is that Lenin bought it, and many academics in the West consider Lenin to be a legitimate political philosopher, while at the same time dismissing Hitler, who was at least as thoughtful.
I believe that most human beings are poor thinkers, and prefer catchy slogans and easily-recitable nonsense to analysis and rational thought. The current predominance of wokeism is proof. There isn’t anything more inane than a meaningless slogan like “black lives matter.” (Matter to whom? If they do in fact matter, wtf are you rioting about?)
J Bryant
1 year ago
I hope the author is correct that we’ve passed peak woke, but I don’t see it. There are, indeed, comedians mocking the woke but they do so in a limited number of live venues, because most venues won’t book them, and if they’re active on youtube or social media they tell their jokes with one eye on the censors. And in my own life, next week I must listen to another mandatory “diversity and inclusion” lecture at my workplace.
On Unherd there have recently been articles about the global effects of the Ukraine war, the coming global economic crisis, and Xi Jinping’s unflinchingly aggressive stance toward the West. We seem to be facing tough times and, unpleasant though they’ll be, maybe a hard dose of reality is what will finally break the back of wokeism.
You’re rather muddled. It is illogical to state that green activists are now embracing nuclear because they realise there is no climate issue. It’s quite the opposite. It’s increased concern about climate change that is forcing people to re-appraise nuclear, as they now realise that climate change is rather worse than previously thought, and there is not longer the luxury of ignoring existing solutions, even risky, expensive and water-hungry ones like nuclear.
I didn’t say green activists. And I didn’t say it was because they realised there was no climate issue. You’re bending fact around ideology. It’s because alternatives will not produce the energy required that nuclear is now open for discussion and the world has been confronted with that awful reality.
It points to the fact that our divided opinions about climate change evolve around woke vs. “unwoke”. The climate alarmists (the woke) fully believe they have inside information (based on science) that the world is ending quickly because of climate models, which measure a miniscule fraction (about 100 years) of our earth’s (4.5 billion years) climate history. But the “ignorant” un-woke fully believe (based on science) that climate has always changed over 4.5 billion years and there is really nothing humans can do about it. The woke then twist the argument by calling the un-woke “climate deniers”, in an attempt to paint them as ignorant.
Having earned a Master of Science in his very field, I am glad to set the record straight. We have already killed ourselves with greed and Fascism’s need for profits.
Hello, If you genuinely have a masters in science I’d like to hear your view, I’m sorry you have been treated so badly, what your thoughts are in terms of solutions? I’m going to attempt, very badly probably, to point out what I think is the problem with this article and this weird analogy of how people are either woke or not woke?
So, first up is this climate change business, whether you believe in it or not its also tied up with the west’s endless quest for resources, the millions of tonnes of clothes and food waste produced every year, we in Britain are polluting all our seas and rivers with sewage at the moment. I honestly can’t make head nor tail of whether the planets temperature is fundamentally going up or not. But I can see all the other things we waste and make that we don’t need is probably not a good idea. Secondly, I see the evils of oil but know that the green revolution requires enormous amounts of rare earths and resources also and actually probably because of that isn’t any greener, its just the next big fad? What do you think to hydrogen vs nuclear for the future? I actually work in the electrical industry, I’ve fitted solar panels, made of glass and steel and shipped from China, got to have a high footprint and on a massive 50mW anaerobic digester that gets fed maize grown using nitrogen fertilizers and fossil fuels, its insane. At the same time we are on a mad march forward with tech that requires more of these resources but that we think somehow might save us from ourselves by making us more efficient. It’s simply logical that our resources are finite, and there’s a case for talking about this sensibly and pragmatically. But I also see that who am I to say people shouldn’t make whatever they want if they are able to sell it to another? We run a business and in a capitalist society what else do you do? Maybe capitalism is what is wrong? I think the media is driving the extreme end of woke vs unwoke and this is not helping. Most people are genuinely concerned by things like river pollution, the great Pacific garbage patch, loss of biodiversity and deforestation and I don’t see why they shouldn’t be or that that necessarily makes you woke. If we split ourselves into woke vs unwoke though we are getting hung up on idealogies and not going to get anywhere. I really don’t know what the answer is. I’ve seen a few mention BLM on here as an example of woke culture I suggest this https://m.imdb.com/title/tt20256556/
There’s a lot of crazy in the world we really need to be careful not to get too hung up on this woke vs unwoke business there’s normally a lot more to all these issues than meets the eye.
It very much depends on whether you’re prepared to unquestioningly accept the modelling of the climatologists’ equivalent of a certain Neil Ferguson, who as we all know has never once in his career of predicting human or animal health disasters called it correct, by a large margin. I could list every one with dates and numbers, but I won’t bore you. I presume you have read the latest news that the Arctic ice this year has not disappeared at the rate our climatologists predicted, though I’m sure you are likely to consider that just a blip. Climate change is not a settled science.
What is settled is that science does need to seriously consider reliable, affordable ways of producing energy. Solar panels and windmills pollute the landscape and kill plant or wildlife entirely unnecessarily. Science also needs to help us find ways to clear waste plastic from our seas and land, reliably conserve, recycle and adequately distribute our ever renewing water supply, repair the desperate widespread land polution in the areas decimated by unwise and inefficient surface mining for rare earths, and work out how man and endangered species can both thrive in our shrinking wild areas, among a shedload of other problems which have nothing to do with climate.
We were warned we faced a new ice age in the 70’s, oil would run out by the 80’s, and the date for the arrival of the fiery apocalypse has been pushed back on a couple of occasions if memory serves correctly. There is a debate to be had about “climate change” and how we might best prepare to manage it, but assuming it is largely anthropogenically caused, unquestionably ahead on a long term basis, and opting to inhumanely immiserate the nations of the world just-in-case is not the answer.
There is no such thing as”the science”.
That is a political statement used to bully, threaten and frighten people into submission.
Any movement of whatever kind which denies others the right – often by egregiously coercive sanctions – to disagree is de facto wrong – possibly on all counts – as anyone – who has seen the shift in “the science” of novel mRNA genetic inoculations and non pharmaceutical interventions – from disinformation to the truth in two short years – can so easily and clearly see.
Baaahh! Baaaahhhhh!!!! You’ve been brainwashed by the Corporate MSM, chummy, just as you were with the Covid lockdowns and vaccines – and they got you hook line and sinker, your trusting, easily-led fool, so now you wail emptily about ‘science’ you yourself know nothing about and do not understand, while unable to make any convincing argument at all.
It’s like listening to a former alcoholic bang on about Jesus.
I’m probably what you call a climate denier (I love the Newspeak-like flavour of that term – tying us to Holocaust deniers – why don’t you just hang up a big flag saying ‘my brain is turned off’), and I probably know the science at least as well as you do – including the two independent lines of scientific evidence showing that the Assyrian Empire was brought down in about 600 BC by … climate change. And after talking about them, we can talk about the Maya and the Anasazi in the New World. And then about the issues with climate models.
This is a mischaracterisation of the argument: scientists are in agreement that the climate changes and that it always has done.
They are in agreement that there is some contribution to warming from human activity.
The disagreement is only in the extent of this human contribution and, quite separate to this, there is a political discussion about the tradeoffs involved in addressing it.
It is quite possible to believe climate claims by scientists, but simultaneously disagree in the disastrous “climate policies” being imposed by politicians, often with outcomes that make the very problem they claim to be addressing, worse, and, at the same time, making people needlessly poorer.
Of course, that kind of nuance is not permitted at the moment – you either have to be a carbon fundamentalist who thinks all problems in the world emanate from the burning of fossil fuels or you are obliged to be monochromatically opposed to these people, with precisely the kind of one-track thinking that they themselves suffer from.
The protestors for government policies, ESG and corporates are still a protected class. Guarded by the police, dismissed from the courts and funded by the very people they are supposed to be against (Getty).
Yes, they do. As a former Senior Engineer with PG&E, my own household and both electric cars are powered by the PV solar system on the roof. We do nto go out to gas up, need no oil changes or engine maintenance at all, and love the power and freedom of EVs from all that maintenance.
Which would be why the Great Barrier Reef has – to the BBC’s disgust and annoyance – suddenly recovered to its greatest and healthiest extent since the 1980s? Get outta here, you smug credentialed agenda-mongering twit.
Nuclear is “water-hungry”? Say what? Some plants use water for cooling, but they put out as much water as they take in, just at a different temperature. (The real ‘pollution’ of nuclear plants is heat; they are (like all ‘engines’) not 100% efficient at turning the heat they produce with fission into more useful forms of energy, primarily electricity. In fact, they’re quite low efficiency at that, much lower than other electrical-generating processes, in part to keep them simpler. The real pollution of fission plants is fission products.) Are you talking about the water used to make the concrete they are built out of? That’s probably their biggest terminal (i.e. chemical transformation) of water. Of course, other things chemically transform water, like forests – they turn it into cellulose.
Most people aren’t educated enough in the science of climate change. There are obviously those out there who work in the field, but most have only a passing understanding because their interests don’t lie in science. So when they discuss the subject they are really only repeating the talking points they’ve heard of. So for those people, who I would say are the majority, it really is ideology. What else could it be?
“And in my own life, next week I must listen to another mandatory “diversity and inclusion” lecture at my workplace.” Please speak up against these disgusting racist scum.
Not being employed I don’t encounter this racist lecturing but if I were they would encounter my righteous anger at such offensive teaching.
I would be strongly inclined to report such propaganda as constituting a hate incident that deeply offends me to the police despite my disapproval of the underlying legislation and the likelihood that the police would gape uncomprehendingly at my complaint.
Unless people call these ideologues to account for their pernicious racist propaganda they will continue to spread their divisive teaching and poison civic life.
That approach just gets you cancelled – either in practice or in your colleagues attitudes towards you. You need to try less confrontational tactics – allow the inherent bias and contradictions to be revealed. See my comment above – it worked for me.
The 42 upvotes for him, and 24 downvotes for you, would indicate to any rational observer that it is you who is embarrassing himself here, not Mr Bray.
You eejit…
Interestingly I was at a meeting recently with a high woke quotient and I noticed several times when I referred to my “wife” this was fed back to me as my “partner”. Being married is important to me – which is why I got married! So I am more comfortable with the idea of our relationship being one of husband and wife. Without prejudice to anyone else’s relationship. And I thought how odd: because I will always refer to someone’s “partner” if they have called him/her a partner. I didn’t say anything, didn’t want a fuss. But it was interesting since these are people who are very hot on pronouns of choice. What’s the difference? OK, I didn’t put “husband” at the bottom of an email signature but implicitly it was pretty clear where I was coming from…
You make the mistake of assuming they’re truthful in their statements and demands. The pronoun thing is actually control and compulsion, merely dressed-up as care and consideration.
Diversity and Inclusion are based in a political ideology of marxist identity theory.
Surely you can object and remove yourself of philosophical belief grounds?
James Lindsay spells it out here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKLuhY2Q7Rw&t=2s
You’re revealing more about yourself with every line, you dim, snotty, idle, credulous Clinto-Bidenite one-man XR-Stonewall-Raytheon Wokefest.
Now get to bed: you and your worthless BA Hons have to be at Starbucks by 6AM to prepare the coffee machine.
In reply to your comment: ‘“And in my own life, next week I must listen to another mandatory “diversity and inclusion” lecture at my workplace.”
Please speak up against these disgusting racist scum. ‘
Right. Steady on now. I’ve seen some genuiniely xenophobic stuff on here and actually this might not hurt a few people, when there’s genuine racist comments on these threads no body speaks up and if they do they get down ticked. There’s no balance to these threads, what is this place like a weird extreme right wing cabal? I am from a business background, businesses these days have to run courses in absolutely everything from ‘manual handling’ ie: how to pick a box to ‘team building excercises’, this is for no other reason than the massive rise of compensation culture, the ‘no win no fee’ business. This has more to do with it than anything, anything now that goes wrong in a workplace you can potentially sue the company for or take to tribunal. The only way a business can protect itself is by covering its arse and providing training. It’s not necessarily all a bad thing, it means we have excellent and equal rights as employees in this country and ensures very safe work places.
I think you saw my post on Kanye I shared the Cadance owens documentary, division is being sown from right up at the top, we need to be smarter, to see past the hype of the media, the hype of issues that actually probably going to be realisticly very secondary compared to the energy crisis about to hit Europe, the war in Ukraine and the global supply chain crisis issues. I don’t really know why we are bothering to argue about climate change by the time we’ve finished with these sanctions and this war we could be blacked out winter 23 anyway! We are being distracted and divided, quite often by distorted media. And ever increasingly into the old extreme camps of left and right. It’s insane, be smarter people! I’ve come across the kind of extreme views on here I’m alarmed still exist. What has happened to good old fashioned common decency? Pragmatism, common sense. If that poor lad you’ve just savaged has got a masters degree in environmental science it might do you well to at least take his point. Or let the rest of us hear it.
I dodged the woke bullets at work when I retired last year.
But J, it is possible to challenge these workplace initiatives without looking like you resist them. I found asking faux naive questions with appropriate phrasing to imply I wanted the initiative to be effective was a very effective strategy. It caused others in attendance to ponder and debate the issues, and then unwittingly reveal the inherent contradictions.
One of my standard examples that I used before retirement was to quote the statistic about white working class boys having by far the worst performance in educational outcomes of any category (apart from gypsies). It’s an undeniable fact. How could we ensure the success of this group? In raising this repeatedly, but constructively, I managed to get this covered by my HR colleagues and corporate leadership in their diversity and inclusion plans.
Yes, that’s the way to do it. Turn their weapons agains them. I had to endure a whole semester of Critical Race Theory during my doctorate studies. It was sheer torture.
“CRT is not being taught” is a claim made only about elementary and secondary schools, in which context it is not a lie, but a misdirection.
Actually, in universities, Critical Race Theory is taught. In elementary and secondary schools, rather than the theory being taught, the tendentious conclusions of CRT are smuggled into the curriculum by people who were taught it at university as if they were established facts, which is, in fact, more pernicious than actually teaching the theory would be.
How would you know? Because MSNBC and CNN, er, told you so, explaining it as a GOP ‘culture war’ canard…. while, er, reporting positively on the progressive teaching if CRT everywhere form Californian nurseries to Yale Law School?
You mental void. You mindless weathervane. You human-shared cushion. You pathetic, pliable, double-thinking tapeworm.
Have to admit I wouldn’t have done it as a young professional; but I was respected as a senior compliance manager in my roles, and did have some licence to query methods for fairness, objectivity and ethics which no one dared to challenge me on.
I must have slept though the transition to post political correctness. Tough times, indeed. With ESG still being pushed there seems to be no slowdown in woke, just opportunities for monetisation from the growing number of discontented.
When these crimes against humanity and those who are proponents thereof are actually held to account and punished appropriately for their lies, abuse and manipulation, that will be the post-woke era. However, it will never be. Because the narrative will change to where there’s another solution just waiting for the appropriate problem to be engineered and that will demand our full attention with the now insane precedents we discuss being just that.
Many of the currently fashionable obsessions are properly called luxury beliefs. If and when we no longer have the luxury to afford them they’ll be abandoned. That may be some recompense for the loss of luxury.
erikhildinger.com
You cannot even define woke”, but it is a word invented by kids and taken up by conservatives thought-providers to mean something unearthly to SCARE their followers with poor education.
Funny, you keep banging on about ‘education’ despite having: a mediocre grasp of English; limited vocabulary; no evident comprehension of science, fact or logic; no grip of the basics of discussion or debate; a £60k student loan debt; and no job.
You’re not educated, sonny. You’re just been stuffed with the full portmanteau of fashionable new religious views, by people who don’t know any more about it than you and credentialed for loyally regurgitating it. And with a £60k debt to the taxpayer – sorry, ‘Student Loans Company’ that you’ll never repay, a lifetime of barista shifts and gluing yourself to roads awaits. You’re too dim to see it yet – but you’ve wasted your life, you smug young fool.
When I got to the part that said “Even more so than the restorationists, the woke are fundamentally conservative,” I gave up on the article. No one knows what the heck is going to happen going forward, but I can say one thing for sure: The woke are whacko and the only thing keeping them in any power is the stupidity of the Republicans. The Dems are the party of whacko and the Republicans are the party of stupid. The problem with America can be summed up by asking a question:
Do you think your political opponents are your enemy and must be destroyed?
Anyway that answer yes to this is the problem in America. If you think your political opponents are your enemy and need to be destroyed then you are the problem.
I think in china, korea and SE Asia , woke , and even BLM is despised and laughed at. Wokeism and BLm were seen as the reason for chaos and decline in America. S korea and CCP’s anti feminist propaganda,nationalist and traditional movement in SE Asia, Indonesia’s rejection to Jessica Stern’s visit, etc etc. And in my country, we call them WOKENAZI.
Ludwig van Earwig
1 year ago
Post-woke? I’m not seeing it where I live, in Jacinda Muddleduck’s realm. Almost every day we see new levels of insanity. Just a few days ago Creative New Zealand defunded a popular Shakespeare school program because apparently the bard is “locked within a canon of imperialism”. My own employer is embarked on a program of decolonization and “indigenization”. Which is interesting, because I work in science. More and more colleagues are using pronouns. Plus the government has set in motion a plan to hand over inordinate power to unelected and frankly unqualified tribal leaders.
The author seems very certain that “right-wing populism” is “even more dangerous” than Left-identitarianism, but I’m not so sure about that.
As the article point out, how will they manage to export “pronouns” if the language doesn’t allow that kind of use? Clearly the Romans (and the languages derived from it) were into something….
It may be a “funny” comment but it drove me write the following. Do bare with me. I believe it’s worth it.
The Romans started a democracy of the mass in place of the power of people (demos+kratos). Later on, the Germans presented a democracy of the individual. Neither included in their democracy both of the necessary elements, the community (demos, the people) and the individual (the singularities of demos, the people). The hellenic paradigm, based on the natural evolving of the growing smaller communities, presented a democracy of “a community of individuals/persons”. It is a greek formation, not an invention, that naturally belongs to the world. The roman democracy kept the community but extinguished the individual person. The northern/germanic model did the opposite and so started the kingdom of today’s individual with demos / us the people, being driven to a suppressed community without an actual vote.
In parallel, the church in the west slowly accepted a swift into a “square” theology that lessened the open philosophical ways of the Hellenic fathers of the church into a “logical” religious system. And thus the debate of “progress”* got deeper roots in the west and particularly in the north (the peculiarity of the UK is a side story). Language played indeed a significant role in the diminishing of democracy and the rationalization-logicalization (allow me to say) of the church, as well as a new way of science that has a tendency to issue finalized theories.
The trouth is that the trouth is that it remains the trouth. No matter what. Language on it’s own can not diminish the trouth unless an external force of power comes to use it in lustful thirst for ever extended power.
Thomas Aquinas was a trouth seeker but powerful forces in and out and around the church, stepped on the understanding of his own and on that of many that followed, to create a “logical” cage for the truth, thus a system of theology, philosophy and science (in hierarchicall order of value) stepping away from the truth as much as possible. Fear, inferiority & superiority complex of kings, barbarians and the like, blindness and denial of actual progress and truth, endless last for power, paved a way that brought about darkened souls that hate the light. This is the glass seen half empty. But the water is there. God forbid. This is the world seen in dispare. We, the people, are not desperate.
Once a person in a tinny village anywhere on earth is looking up the heavens in hope and towards the neighbor with a soul-dwelling love, that person becomes part of true progress, of true light, a believer of trouth and justice. Regardless of the perils and mischief and mistakes and sin.
We want the Sun of Justice to prevail. And so shall be it..!
________
* A very interesting relevant reading is the article on “The Professor of Apocalypse”
[Jacob Taubes’ deeply penetrating and profoundly mischievous thoughts on the evasions of liberalism and the irreconcilable nature of Messianic expectation strike a chord in the present moment]. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/professor-of-apocalypse-blake-smith
That last point, when made in the article, had me literally looking askance at the screen. On what possible basis could that claim be made? And what would “dangerous” look like, respectively? I’d suggest there would be no discernible difference.
Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
Albireo Double
1 year ago
A good try but too early I fear.
Wokeism has become a sacred creed of the Left, as has Islam . They tend never to give up on their shibboleths so I think we are stuck with it.
However it will be entertaining watching an incoming UK Labour government trying to deal with the “wokesters” as well as the more aggressive, stabby, and rape-loving practitioners of the “religion of peace”.
Only when they disagree with the masses. There seems to be an aversion to debate with dissenters. A preference for name calling: populist, racist, islamaphobe, transphobe. A tendency to represent any opposition as evil in an attempt to silence, rather than discussing and trying to understand the others point of view and maybe arriving at an acceptable compromise.
we got jihadist from islam, feminazi from feminist and wokenazi from wokeism .. oh america. I love your dollar but I can stand your insanity
Richard Craven
1 year ago
I’m thoroughly looking forward to the woke scum being hounded out of their jobs and homes, and to the lengthy incarceration of their castration-cult cadres.
Frank McCusker
1 year ago
There are some straws in the wind alright. I hope you’re right. So much woke-ism is really just thinly-disguised religiosity. It struggles to survive rational scrutiny.
Take trans ideology, for instance.
Trans ideology only makes sense if you believe that male bodies should only dress and behave in old-fashioned 1950s masculine ways and that female bodies should only dress and behave in old-fashioned 1950s feminine ways.
If trans people were less sexist, and could bring themselves to accept that men or women can be and do whatever they want to be or do, then the logic of their position evaporates.
In the early 1980s, Boy George, a gay man, won worldwide acclaim and success, while wearing make-up and a skirt. He did so as a man, just a man who happened to be gay, and conventionally feminine. Around the same time, Mike Tyson was world heavyweight boxing champion. He did so as a man, just a man who happened to be straight, and conventionally masculine. The full spectrum of behaviour and attire was and is available.
But trans people believe that men and women can only access 50% of the human experience.
Of course, in many societies – such as Iran – or other v conservative societies – that is true. But that has not been true in much of the West for decades.
You can be a woman or a man and, with either body, access any point on the full spectrum of masculinity to femininity.
The idea that you have to have surgery(!) to do so is irrational, and, ironically, quite sexist, in a very old-fashioned way.
Essentially, trans people ***seek to conform to self-imposed sexual stereotyping*** by having needless surgery done to them.
It’s irrational behaviour, and such mentally-ill folk need care and counselling – instead of encouraging rogue elements of the medical profession to exploit such self-esteem issues for money.
> So much of what the author characterises as “persuasiveness” involves Left-liberals offering something like political-cum-psychological therapy to other Left-liberals.
I’d rather be publicly flogged than have to endure this.
Matt Sylvestre
1 year ago
Let me say this: Ms. Bari Weiss talks good sense indeed! She is here to save us all.
Try her podcast, Common Sense to hear for yourself….
Steve Jolly
1 year ago
Put more succinctly, the establishment neoliberals are realizing that their alliance with all the woke cancel culture nonsense is a millstone around their neck that will pull down the entire neoliberal regime if they don’t excise it from their politics. When Trump and co. pushed out the establishment types from the Republican policy, the Democrats became the party of the establishment, and that party has always been easier to manipulate and control with money and political machinery. I expect once they get destroyed in this mid-term, the Dems will silence or marginalize their more prominent far left voices and double down on being the moderate, safe, establishment party in an effort to paint Trump 2024 as the radical threat to democracy. Whether they’ll be successful is an open question. Whether the neoliberal regime can survive on its own merits in America or anywhere else in a multipolar world of less economic growth, aging populations, and greater international competition and rivalry is anyone’s guess.
Emre S
1 year ago
This made me laugh out loud several times – very witty article. I’m also glad to see Mr Ahmari stopped referring to the Woke as liberals which wasn’t being helpful in identifying who is who.
Observing that nothing good eventually came out of anything named radical in a long while I’m hesitant go on board with his idea of radicalism. Having said that evening out a little of the huge concentration of power in places in America doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But often in such things the devil is in the detail – whose money/power is going to be given to whom and with what justification.
Malcolm Knott
1 year ago
I view the woke decade as something similar to Oliver Cromwell’s rule; a brief period of history, now thankfully drawing to an end, when the lunatics took over the asylum and briefly occupied all the positions of power until quite suddenly…they didn’t. (Or rather, they did, but found it expedient to grow their hair long and wear lace and pretend they had always been cavaliers.)
Johan Grönwall
1 year ago
Woke has died on the fields of Ukraine where white toxic masculinity is used by the ukranians (yes, there are women fighting but men as usual carry the heavy load) to defeat the orcs trying to kill the very democracy wokers use to spread their madness with. As always, reality the great arbiter.
Last edited 1 year ago by Johan Grönwall
Daniel Lee
1 year ago
All right on the money except that Mr. Ahmari implicitly echoes the Left’s smug view that the supposedly impoverished “many” must be helped by some upper level elite, rather than being left alone to see to their own success — which is the true motivating force of the populism he sees as more dangerous than Left-identitarianism. (Seriously? Good Lord.) He wants the re-imposition of a priesthood to replace our bossy nanny-class leftists. No thanks.
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago
In Britain the problem isn’t so much the ‘asset rich few’ as the ‘asset rich many’. Most of us (or our parents) now belong to the property owning middle class who for the past twenty years have been getting richer while rent payers and wage earners have got steadily poorer.
The point is, property owners (by which I mean those who own an average family home, not millionnaire mansions) are only getting richer on paper. People need a house to live in, and if houses are increasing in price, if one moves then one has to pay these inflated prices to buy another house, although it is possible to pocket some cash if one down-sizes. The beneficiaries of the increase in house prices will be the heirs of the propery owners (usually children or grand-children) or the care homes into which many will go to end their days.
But on the other hand, the access to further credit that owning a house got people allowed them to accumulate multiple houses. When living in Scotland I met a few families that owned upward of 100 properties, leveraged up to the hilt, and gambling on the fact that property prices would go up forever. At the time I thought they were mad. And guess who’s laughing now?
The flip side that occurred to me at the time was that, for every 100 properties that someone like that owns, another 99 people have been unable to get onto the property ladder and have been trapped in a kind of feudal existence paying ever increasing rent to those who made that initial gamble.
This is the standard excuse that people make. It’s nonsense though. Owning property makes it easier to borrow. Equity release makes it easier to pass on wealth to your children. There are many more ways in which this form of unearned wealth creates undeserved privilege.
David Yetter
1 year ago
Ahmari writes, “…the virus of Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism.” On my side of the Pond, I’m not sure Right-wing populism is more dangerous. The entire security state (FBI, CIA, NSA,…), the media, the office corps in our military, the universities and the professional managers at places like BlackRock, StateStreet, Vanguard and Berkshire Hathaway that vote most of the controlling shares in American corporations have all thrown in with the former, while the latter is represented by Donald Trump and his acolytes.
Is a buffoon and sore loser who spins specious constitutional theories really more of a threat than people who want to be able to cut off dissenters from the latest utopia du jour (I think it’s still transgenderism, but I haven’t check the rest of the internet) not only from Twitter, but from the banking system, who brand parents who object to gender ideology and tendentious versions of American history being foisted on grade school children “domestic terrorists”, and accuse everyone who thought on balance Donald Trump staying on would have been better than Joe Biden taking office “semi-fascists”?
I’m not even sure it’s true on your side of the Pond. Your Right-wing populism expressed itself in a preference for laws made by Parliament over regulations imposed by the European Commission in the form of Brexit. Quelle horreur!
Of course, I guess one might wonder dangerous to whom? If you’re part of the professional managerial class, the security apparatus, or the American Democratic Party, I guess Ahmari is correct. If you’re someone of whatever current political persuasion who loves the Anglo-Saxon conception of liberty, whether as secured by the American Constitution or by tradition in Britain, it’s the identitarian Left that is the major threat, and Right-populists are one of those auxiliaries Lord Acton wrote of, with whom the friends of freedom must make common cause, even if the result could prove disastrous.
Last edited 1 year ago by David Yetter
Galvatron Stephens
1 year ago
Wishful thinking. The thing about wokeness is that it is slippery and you can never pin them down on anything. It is inconsistent and has a lot of tactical plays it can use. If you think the demise of Mermaids is going to stop them, think again. They will still define the moral good and moral taboos of the society. If you do that you run the society.
Last edited 1 year ago by Galvatron Stephens
R Wright
1 year ago
I tuned out at the constant use of the textbook Marxist term ‘material conditions’.
I didn’t tune out when I saw this phrase….
“Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism”
… and was rewarded with a decent overview of the current post-Woke options for Progressives.
Michael Saxon
1 year ago
Can Sohrab explain why ‘right-wing’ popularism is more dangerous than left wing woke-ism? In fact why is it any more dangerous than any other political ‘ism’? Popularism put Trump into power and geo-politics and the US economy were in far bereter shape under his administration. So, at least that example gives popularist policies some credibility.
Last edited 1 year ago by Michael Saxon
Warren Trees
1 year ago
I didn’t realize Disney workers were underpaid. Are their employees forced to work there, or is Disney the only employer in the area?
I lived in Orlando for years. If you’re looking for a service job, Disney’s payscale sets the bar for the area as it’s such a huge employer. The 2 benefits are 1) Disney does ( or did maybe that’s changed) promote from within and 2) corporate types like seeing a stint at Disney – even if it’s service oriented- on a resume.
Christopher Barclay
1 year ago
Sacco was clearly bad at PR. She should have been sacked for incompetence. Then there is the narcissism. She didn’t write the tweet for the benefit of people who knew her and knew she was white; she wrote it for people who didn’t know her. Her last thought before getting on a long haul flight was ‘let the world know about me, me, me!’
AC Harper
1 year ago
The battle, then, is between individualists and “collectivists” of various stripes.
You could argue that most social history has been a battle between the individualists and collectivists – but the ideas driving those groups changes. Radical reformers against landowning aristocracy, Marxists against capitalists, nationalists against communism, managerialists against nationalism, and so on. There will always be the disaffected and the comfortable – and sometimes you wake up and find you are in the ‘other’ group.
michael stanwick
1 year ago
Why not two camps such as realist and anti realist or gnostic and anti gnostic or subjectivist and objectivist etc etc.?
Adam McIntyre
1 year ago
The real Beast that needs to be killed is Egalitarianism. The obsession with “equality” underlies nearly every malady in modern society, among all factions, except for the very alt-right Reactionaries (e.g. Curtis Yarvin.)
Egalitarianism is nonsense. It is premised upon the idea that men are “equal” somehow. They are not. Once this false premise is discarded, politics becomes much more simple, and the way forward is clear.
The real danger to wokeists is not that their slogans are meaningless and their ideology inherently contradictory; everyone knows that, the way they know that the music sucks at a party. They’re not going to leave; it’s still the best party around, because everyone’s there!
No, the real danger is that when the Reaction that is coming gains power, and displaces the Wokeists (and their enablers and predecessors, the egalitarian progressives and “conservatives”) they will conduct a purge that it is impossible for Wokeists (or anyone else) to properly conduct, for the simple matter that there is no contradiction or weakness in the Reactionary position that could possibly undermine it. Once the fundamental premises of Egalitarianism are abandoned (and they will be, as Wokeism is the reductio) the Reactionary fire will be unstoppable. In a period of a few decades, all of Egalitarian’s institutions, principles, artifacts and strongholds will be destroyed, and Western man will finally be free of the dysgenic influence of equality-obsession that has plagued him for two thousand years.
Elizabeth dSJ
1 year ago
Ahmari shares all of Wokeness’ core suppositions about human equality, universalism, and transcendence of ethnicity.
The Pope of his faith cheers on the migrant invasion of Europe.
I’ll pass.
Lisa Simeone
1 year ago
Hilarious that Linda Sarsour thinks of herself as not-white. She’s more pale than I am.
Excellent column, Mr. Ahmari (except for the masking-during-Covid bit. There is abundant scientific evidence for the importance and efficacy of wearing masks. Amazing that so many people get their knickers in a twist over putting a little piece of cloth over their faces).
George K
1 year ago
I want to debate the Deniers here.
Send me your uneducated conservatives.
Most revolutionaries were extremely well educated. What is the point here?
George K
1 year ago
This guy is an expert in projecting the crimes and character of conservatives on liberals.They scream “cancel culture” at libs as they try to overturn an election.They run on lies and depend on their followers with no character to do the same, because they have the same lack of character.
George K I wish you had something relevant to say, otherwise, I think everyone on here will agree that you are a serendipitous example of why the title of this article is true. Well done you!!!
What will eventually defeat the current identitarian ideology is that its ideas are manifestly contradictory.
To fully support one facet of this pernicious and divisive ideology puts you diametrically in opposition to another facet. If, for example, you stand up to support feminist rights, you fall foul of trans-rights, etc etc
Given the propensity of id-pol adherents to try and cancel any who dare to challenge their precepts, the whole movement becomes an Ouroboros – the mythical serpent that eats its own tail – though in the case of these activists it would possibly be better to describe a variant on the Ouroboros – as a monster that disappears up its own backside. Frankly, for the good of society, it cannot come soon enough.
Are you sure? See the concept of “doublethink” in 1984.
I wish this were true. However, in actuality the most successful mass movements in history have relied upon contradiction or other forms of nonsense as part of their appeal.
Consider Christianity with its self-contradictory “trinity” (there’s only one God; yet he’s three persons) or Marxism/Communism with its inane slogans and patently absurd constructs (such as Marx’s theory of the value of labor, which is arrant nonsense.) The only thing more absurd than most of Marx’s analysis is that Lenin bought it, and many academics in the West consider Lenin to be a legitimate political philosopher, while at the same time dismissing Hitler, who was at least as thoughtful.
I believe that most human beings are poor thinkers, and prefer catchy slogans and easily-recitable nonsense to analysis and rational thought. The current predominance of wokeism is proof. There isn’t anything more inane than a meaningless slogan like “black lives matter.” (Matter to whom? If they do in fact matter, wtf are you rioting about?)
I hope the author is correct that we’ve passed peak woke, but I don’t see it. There are, indeed, comedians mocking the woke but they do so in a limited number of live venues, because most venues won’t book them, and if they’re active on youtube or social media they tell their jokes with one eye on the censors. And in my own life, next week I must listen to another mandatory “diversity and inclusion” lecture at my workplace.
On Unherd there have recently been articles about the global effects of the Ukraine war, the coming global economic crisis, and Xi Jinping’s unflinchingly aggressive stance toward the West. We seem to be facing tough times and, unpleasant though they’ll be, maybe a hard dose of reality is what will finally break the back of wokeism.
Interesting how a discussion on nuclear power is now legitimate. It took the broken ideology of climate change and net zero to get us here.
You’re rather muddled. It is illogical to state that green activists are now embracing nuclear because they realise there is no climate issue. It’s quite the opposite. It’s increased concern about climate change that is forcing people to re-appraise nuclear, as they now realise that climate change is rather worse than previously thought, and there is not longer the luxury of ignoring existing solutions, even risky, expensive and water-hungry ones like nuclear.
I didn’t say green activists. And I didn’t say it was because they realised there was no climate issue. You’re bending fact around ideology. It’s because alternatives will not produce the energy required that nuclear is now open for discussion and the world has been confronted with that awful reality.
How does any of this relate to the original comment or article?
It points to the fact that our divided opinions about climate change evolve around woke vs. “unwoke”. The climate alarmists (the woke) fully believe they have inside information (based on science) that the world is ending quickly because of climate models, which measure a miniscule fraction (about 100 years) of our earth’s (4.5 billion years) climate history. But the “ignorant” un-woke fully believe (based on science) that climate has always changed over 4.5 billion years and there is really nothing humans can do about it. The woke then twist the argument by calling the un-woke “climate deniers”, in an attempt to paint them as ignorant.
Having earned a Master of Science in his very field, I am glad to set the record straight. We have already killed ourselves with greed and Fascism’s need for profits.
Hello, If you genuinely have a masters in science I’d like to hear your view, I’m sorry you have been treated so badly, what your thoughts are in terms of solutions? I’m going to attempt, very badly probably, to point out what I think is the problem with this article and this weird analogy of how people are either woke or not woke?
So, first up is this climate change business, whether you believe in it or not its also tied up with the west’s endless quest for resources, the millions of tonnes of clothes and food waste produced every year, we in Britain are polluting all our seas and rivers with sewage at the moment. I honestly can’t make head nor tail of whether the planets temperature is fundamentally going up or not. But I can see all the other things we waste and make that we don’t need is probably not a good idea. Secondly, I see the evils of oil but know that the green revolution requires enormous amounts of rare earths and resources also and actually probably because of that isn’t any greener, its just the next big fad? What do you think to hydrogen vs nuclear for the future? I actually work in the electrical industry, I’ve fitted solar panels, made of glass and steel and shipped from China, got to have a high footprint and on a massive 50mW anaerobic digester that gets fed maize grown using nitrogen fertilizers and fossil fuels, its insane. At the same time we are on a mad march forward with tech that requires more of these resources but that we think somehow might save us from ourselves by making us more efficient. It’s simply logical that our resources are finite, and there’s a case for talking about this sensibly and pragmatically. But I also see that who am I to say people shouldn’t make whatever they want if they are able to sell it to another? We run a business and in a capitalist society what else do you do? Maybe capitalism is what is wrong? I think the media is driving the extreme end of woke vs unwoke and this is not helping. Most people are genuinely concerned by things like river pollution, the great Pacific garbage patch, loss of biodiversity and deforestation and I don’t see why they shouldn’t be or that that necessarily makes you woke. If we split ourselves into woke vs unwoke though we are getting hung up on idealogies and not going to get anywhere. I really don’t know what the answer is. I’ve seen a few mention BLM on here as an example of woke culture I suggest this
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt20256556/
There’s a lot of crazy in the world we really need to be careful not to get too hung up on this woke vs unwoke business there’s normally a lot more to all these issues than meets the eye.
Climate Deniers ARE ignorant of the science.
It very much depends on whether you’re prepared to unquestioningly accept the modelling of the climatologists’ equivalent of a certain Neil Ferguson, who as we all know has never once in his career of predicting human or animal health disasters called it correct, by a large margin. I could list every one with dates and numbers, but I won’t bore you. I presume you have read the latest news that the Arctic ice this year has not disappeared at the rate our climatologists predicted, though I’m sure you are likely to consider that just a blip. Climate change is not a settled science.
What is settled is that science does need to seriously consider reliable, affordable ways of producing energy. Solar panels and windmills pollute the landscape and kill plant or wildlife entirely unnecessarily. Science also needs to help us find ways to clear waste plastic from our seas and land, reliably conserve, recycle and adequately distribute our ever renewing water supply, repair the desperate widespread land polution in the areas decimated by unwise and inefficient surface mining for rare earths, and work out how man and endangered species can both thrive in our shrinking wild areas, among a shedload of other problems which have nothing to do with climate.
We were warned we faced a new ice age in the 70’s, oil would run out by the 80’s, and the date for the arrival of the fiery apocalypse has been pushed back on a couple of occasions if memory serves correctly. There is a debate to be had about “climate change” and how we might best prepare to manage it, but assuming it is largely anthropogenically caused, unquestionably ahead on a long term basis, and opting to inhumanely immiserate the nations of the world just-in-case is not the answer.
There is no such thing as”the science”.
That is a political statement used to bully, threaten and frighten people into submission.
Any movement of whatever kind which denies others the right – often by egregiously coercive sanctions – to disagree is de facto wrong – possibly on all counts – as anyone – who has seen the shift in “the science” of novel mRNA genetic inoculations and non pharmaceutical interventions – from disinformation to the truth in two short years – can so easily and clearly see.
Baaahh! Baaaahhhhh!!!! You’ve been brainwashed by the Corporate MSM, chummy, just as you were with the Covid lockdowns and vaccines – and they got you hook line and sinker, your trusting, easily-led fool, so now you wail emptily about ‘science’ you yourself know nothing about and do not understand, while unable to make any convincing argument at all.
It’s like listening to a former alcoholic bang on about Jesus.
I’m probably what you call a climate denier (I love the Newspeak-like flavour of that term – tying us to Holocaust deniers – why don’t you just hang up a big flag saying ‘my brain is turned off’), and I probably know the science at least as well as you do – including the two independent lines of scientific evidence showing that the Assyrian Empire was brought down in about 600 BC by … climate change. And after talking about them, we can talk about the Maya and the Anasazi in the New World. And then about the issues with climate models.
This is a mischaracterisation of the argument: scientists are in agreement that the climate changes and that it always has done.
They are in agreement that there is some contribution to warming from human activity.
The disagreement is only in the extent of this human contribution and, quite separate to this, there is a political discussion about the tradeoffs involved in addressing it.
It is quite possible to believe climate claims by scientists, but simultaneously disagree in the disastrous “climate policies” being imposed by politicians, often with outcomes that make the very problem they claim to be addressing, worse, and, at the same time, making people needlessly poorer.
Of course, that kind of nuance is not permitted at the moment – you either have to be a carbon fundamentalist who thinks all problems in the world emanate from the burning of fossil fuels or you are obliged to be monochromatically opposed to these people, with precisely the kind of one-track thinking that they themselves suffer from.
Thanks for your comment. 100% agree.
My comment was in relation to J Bryant’s comment;
“maybe a hard dose of reality is what will finally break the back of wokeism.”
The protestors for government policies, ESG and corporates are still a protected class. Guarded by the police, dismissed from the courts and funded by the very people they are supposed to be against (Getty).
Yes, they do. As a former Senior Engineer with PG&E, my own household and both electric cars are powered by the PV solar system on the roof. We do nto go out to gas up, need no oil changes or engine maintenance at all, and love the power and freedom of EVs from all that maintenance.
It is REAL. Look outside.
Look up Ocean Acidification. I even spelled it for you
Which would be why the Great Barrier Reef has – to the BBC’s disgust and annoyance – suddenly recovered to its greatest and healthiest extent since the 1980s? Get outta here, you smug credentialed agenda-mongering twit.
Nuclear is “water-hungry”? Say what? Some plants use water for cooling, but they put out as much water as they take in, just at a different temperature.
(The real ‘pollution’ of nuclear plants is heat; they are (like all ‘engines’) not 100% efficient at turning the heat they produce with fission into more useful forms of energy, primarily electricity. In fact, they’re quite low efficiency at that, much lower than other electrical-generating processes, in part to keep them simpler. The real pollution of fission plants is fission products.)
Are you talking about the water used to make the concrete they are built out of? That’s probably their biggest terminal (i.e. chemical transformation) of water. Of course, other things chemically transform water, like forests – they turn it into cellulose.
It is a SCIENCE, not an ideology. I recommend EDUCATION for your lack of knowledge. Look up Ocean Acidification. I even spelled it for you.
Most people aren’t educated enough in the science of climate change. There are obviously those out there who work in the field, but most have only a passing understanding because their interests don’t lie in science. So when they discuss the subject they are really only repeating the talking points they’ve heard of. So for those people, who I would say are the majority, it really is ideology. What else could it be?
I get your point but part of the reason nuclear didn’t get far was due to big oil in the first place so I can see what Frank is saying too, they bank rolled the big protests in the 70s bit of info here but there’s plenty of it if you research it
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/amp/
And the chernobyl disaster.
“And in my own life, next week I must listen to another mandatory “diversity and inclusion” lecture at my workplace.”
Please speak up against these disgusting racist scum.
Not being employed I don’t encounter this racist lecturing but if I were they would encounter my righteous anger at such offensive teaching.
I would be strongly inclined to report such propaganda as constituting a hate incident that deeply offends me to the police despite my disapproval of the underlying legislation and the likelihood that the police would gape uncomprehendingly at my complaint.
Unless people call these ideologues to account for their pernicious racist propaganda they will continue to spread their divisive teaching and poison civic life.
That approach just gets you cancelled – either in practice or in your colleagues attitudes towards you. You need to try less confrontational tactics – allow the inherent bias and contradictions to be revealed. See my comment above – it worked for me.
Stop letting your political prejudice determine your science!
Get educated, you are embarrassing yourself in public.
Stop letting your political prejudice determine your science!
Get educated, you are embarrassing yourself in public.
The 42 upvotes for him, and 24 downvotes for you, would indicate to any rational observer that it is you who is embarrassing himself here, not Mr Bray.
You eejit…
Well said.
Interestingly I was at a meeting recently with a high woke quotient and I noticed several times when I referred to my “wife” this was fed back to me as my “partner”. Being married is important to me – which is why I got married! So I am more comfortable with the idea of our relationship being one of husband and wife. Without prejudice to anyone else’s relationship. And I thought how odd: because I will always refer to someone’s “partner” if they have called him/her a partner. I didn’t say anything, didn’t want a fuss. But it was interesting since these are people who are very hot on pronouns of choice. What’s the difference? OK, I didn’t put “husband” at the bottom of an email signature but implicitly it was pretty clear where I was coming from…
You make the mistake of assuming they’re truthful in their statements and demands. The pronoun thing is actually control and compulsion, merely dressed-up as care and consideration.
‘Narcissistic empaths’ one might say.
My wife detested being referred to as my “partner”, as it we’d just temporarily hooked up for a golf game or something.
Diversity and Inclusion are based in a political ideology of marxist identity theory.
Surely you can object and remove yourself of philosophical belief grounds?
James Lindsay spells it out here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKLuhY2Q7Rw&t=2s
Putin sent that note to me, too.
You’re revealing more about yourself with every line, you dim, snotty, idle, credulous Clinto-Bidenite one-man XR-Stonewall-Raytheon Wokefest.
Now get to bed: you and your worthless BA Hons have to be at Starbucks by 6AM to prepare the coffee machine.
In reply to your comment: ‘“And in my own life, next week I must listen to another mandatory “diversity and inclusion” lecture at my workplace.”
Please speak up against these disgusting racist scum. ‘
Right. Steady on now. I’ve seen some genuiniely xenophobic stuff on here and actually this might not hurt a few people, when there’s genuine racist comments on these threads no body speaks up and if they do they get down ticked. There’s no balance to these threads, what is this place like a weird extreme right wing cabal? I am from a business background, businesses these days have to run courses in absolutely everything from ‘manual handling’ ie: how to pick a box to ‘team building excercises’, this is for no other reason than the massive rise of compensation culture, the ‘no win no fee’ business. This has more to do with it than anything, anything now that goes wrong in a workplace you can potentially sue the company for or take to tribunal. The only way a business can protect itself is by covering its arse and providing training. It’s not necessarily all a bad thing, it means we have excellent and equal rights as employees in this country and ensures very safe work places.
I think you saw my post on Kanye I shared the Cadance owens documentary, division is being sown from right up at the top, we need to be smarter, to see past the hype of the media, the hype of issues that actually probably going to be realisticly very secondary compared to the energy crisis about to hit Europe, the war in Ukraine and the global supply chain crisis issues. I don’t really know why we are bothering to argue about climate change by the time we’ve finished with these sanctions and this war we could be blacked out winter 23 anyway! We are being distracted and divided, quite often by distorted media. And ever increasingly into the old extreme camps of left and right. It’s insane, be smarter people! I’ve come across the kind of extreme views on here I’m alarmed still exist. What has happened to good old fashioned common decency? Pragmatism, common sense. If that poor lad you’ve just savaged has got a masters degree in environmental science it might do you well to at least take his point. Or let the rest of us hear it.
We thought that Covid would kill off the absurd posturings of the SJWs, but that didn’t happen.
Covid was itself an ‘absurd posturing of the SJWs’ and of the whole Corporate-Governmental ruling class whose useful idiots they are.
I dodged the woke bullets at work when I retired last year.
But J, it is possible to challenge these workplace initiatives without looking like you resist them. I found asking faux naive questions with appropriate phrasing to imply I wanted the initiative to be effective was a very effective strategy. It caused others in attendance to ponder and debate the issues, and then unwittingly reveal the inherent contradictions.
One of my standard examples that I used before retirement was to quote the statistic about white working class boys having by far the worst performance in educational outcomes of any category (apart from gypsies). It’s an undeniable fact. How could we ensure the success of this group? In raising this repeatedly, but constructively, I managed to get this covered by my HR colleagues and corporate leadership in their diversity and inclusion plans.
Yes, that’s the way to do it. Turn their weapons agains them. I had to endure a whole semester of Critical Race Theory during my doctorate studies. It was sheer torture.
You did not! It is not taught.
Do one, you woke gaslight t**d. Everyone hates you.
I don’t, I think he made some valid points. Just because you’re not interested, don’t speak for everyone. Ocean acidification is genuinely killing coral. Fun Science fact.
https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/scientists-identify-how-ocean-acidification-weakens-coral-skeletons/
He doesn’t have to prove he’s right. You have to prove he’s wrong.
“CRT is not being taught” is a claim made only about elementary and secondary schools, in which context it is not a lie, but a misdirection.
Actually, in universities, Critical Race Theory is taught. In elementary and secondary schools, rather than the theory being taught, the tendentious conclusions of CRT are smuggled into the curriculum by people who were taught it at university as if they were established facts, which is, in fact, more pernicious than actually teaching the theory would be.
How would you know? Because MSNBC and CNN, er, told you so, explaining it as a GOP ‘culture war’ canard…. while, er, reporting positively on the progressive teaching if CRT everywhere form Californian nurseries to Yale Law School?
You mental void. You mindless weathervane. You human-shared cushion. You pathetic, pliable, double-thinking tapeworm.
Have to admit I wouldn’t have done it as a young professional; but I was respected as a senior compliance manager in my roles, and did have some licence to query methods for fairness, objectivity and ethics which no one dared to challenge me on.
I must have slept though the transition to post political correctness. Tough times, indeed. With ESG still being pushed there seems to be no slowdown in woke, just opportunities for monetisation from the growing number of discontented.
When these crimes against humanity and those who are proponents thereof are actually held to account and punished appropriately for their lies, abuse and manipulation, that will be the post-woke era. However, it will never be. Because the narrative will change to where there’s another solution just waiting for the appropriate problem to be engineered and that will demand our full attention with the now insane precedents we discuss being just that.
Many of the currently fashionable obsessions are properly called luxury beliefs. If and when we no longer have the luxury to afford them they’ll be abandoned. That may be some recompense for the loss of luxury.
erikhildinger.com
You cannot even define woke”, but it is a word invented by kids and taken up by conservatives thought-providers to mean something unearthly to SCARE their followers with poor education.
I most certainly can define woke. I define it as the authoritarian pseudo-progressive usurpation of liberalism.
You know he’s just trolling?
It’s about time for woke scum like him to be told NO.
I mean, he’s just trolling.
Er isn’t that what they do for living? Trolling. Wokenazi is indeed a troll trying to play hero.
Agree.
Funny, you keep banging on about ‘education’ despite having: a mediocre grasp of English; limited vocabulary; no evident comprehension of science, fact or logic; no grip of the basics of discussion or debate; a £60k student loan debt; and no job.
You’re not educated, sonny. You’re just been stuffed with the full portmanteau of fashionable new religious views, by people who don’t know any more about it than you and credentialed for loyally regurgitating it. And with a £60k debt to the taxpayer – sorry, ‘Student Loans Company’ that you’ll never repay, a lifetime of barista shifts and gluing yourself to roads awaits. You’re too dim to see it yet – but you’ve wasted your life, you smug young fool.
I really must compliment your flair for verbal abuse. This post is even better than the one with “mindless weathervane” and “human shaped cushion”.
You’ve inspired me ! Now I have another bullet to shoot at those wokenazi
When I got to the part that said “Even more so than the restorationists, the woke are fundamentally conservative,” I gave up on the article. No one knows what the heck is going to happen going forward, but I can say one thing for sure: The woke are whacko and the only thing keeping them in any power is the stupidity of the Republicans. The Dems are the party of whacko and the Republicans are the party of stupid.
The problem with America can be summed up by asking a question:
Do you think your political opponents are your enemy and must be destroyed?
Anyway that answer yes to this is the problem in America. If you think your political opponents are your enemy and need to be destroyed then you are the problem.
……… one is a whacko and one is stupid .. ahh
I think in china, korea and SE Asia , woke , and even BLM is despised and laughed at. Wokeism and BLm were seen as the reason for chaos and decline in America. S korea and CCP’s anti feminist propaganda,nationalist and traditional movement in SE Asia, Indonesia’s rejection to Jessica Stern’s visit, etc etc. And in my country, we call them WOKENAZI.
Post-woke? I’m not seeing it where I live, in Jacinda Muddleduck’s realm. Almost every day we see new levels of insanity. Just a few days ago Creative New Zealand defunded a popular Shakespeare school program because apparently the bard is “locked within a canon of imperialism”. My own employer is embarked on a program of decolonization and “indigenization”. Which is interesting, because I work in science. More and more colleagues are using pronouns. Plus the government has set in motion a plan to hand over inordinate power to unelected and frankly unqualified tribal leaders.
The author seems very certain that “right-wing populism” is “even more dangerous” than Left-identitarianism, but I’m not so sure about that.
As the article point out, how will they manage to export “pronouns” if the language doesn’t allow that kind of use? Clearly the Romans (and the languages derived from it) were into something….
Ha ha ha..!
It may be a “funny” comment but it drove me write the following. Do bare with me. I believe it’s worth it.
The Romans started a democracy of the mass in place of the power of people (demos+kratos). Later on, the Germans presented a democracy of the individual. Neither included in their democracy both of the necessary elements, the community (demos, the people) and the individual (the singularities of demos, the people). The hellenic paradigm, based on the natural evolving of the growing smaller communities, presented a democracy of “a community of individuals/persons”. It is a greek formation, not an invention, that naturally belongs to the world. The roman democracy kept the community but extinguished the individual person. The northern/germanic model did the opposite and so started the kingdom of today’s individual with demos / us the people, being driven to a suppressed community without an actual vote.
In parallel, the church in the west slowly accepted a swift into a “square” theology that lessened the open philosophical ways of the Hellenic fathers of the church into a “logical” religious system. And thus the debate of “progress”* got deeper roots in the west and particularly in the north (the peculiarity of the UK is a side story). Language played indeed a significant role in the diminishing of democracy and the rationalization-logicalization (allow me to say) of the church, as well as a new way of science that has a tendency to issue finalized theories.
The trouth is that the trouth is that it remains the trouth. No matter what. Language on it’s own can not diminish the trouth unless an external force of power comes to use it in lustful thirst for ever extended power.
Thomas Aquinas was a trouth seeker but powerful forces in and out and around the church, stepped on the understanding of his own and on that of many that followed, to create a “logical” cage for the truth, thus a system of theology, philosophy and science (in hierarchicall order of value) stepping away from the truth as much as possible. Fear, inferiority & superiority complex of kings, barbarians and the like, blindness and denial of actual progress and truth, endless last for power, paved a way that brought about darkened souls that hate the light. This is the glass seen half empty. But the water is there. God forbid. This is the world seen in dispare. We, the people, are not desperate.
Once a person in a tinny village anywhere on earth is looking up the heavens in hope and towards the neighbor with a soul-dwelling love, that person becomes part of true progress, of true light, a believer of trouth and justice. Regardless of the perils and mischief and mistakes and sin.
We want the Sun of Justice to prevail. And so shall be it..!
________
* A very interesting relevant reading is the article on “The Professor of Apocalypse”
[Jacob Taubes’ deeply penetrating and profoundly mischievous thoughts on the evasions of liberalism and the irreconcilable nature of Messianic expectation strike a chord in the present moment].
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/professor-of-apocalypse-blake-smith
beautifully out!
Thank you..! I take it as a compliment..!
That last point, when made in the article, had me literally looking askance at the screen. On what possible basis could that claim be made? And what would “dangerous” look like, respectively? I’d suggest there would be no discernible difference.
A good try but too early I fear.
Wokeism has become a sacred creed of the Left, as has Islam . They tend never to give up on their shibboleths so I think we are stuck with it.
However it will be entertaining watching an incoming UK Labour government trying to deal with the “wokesters” as well as the more aggressive, stabby, and rape-loving practitioners of the “religion of peace”.
‘Populism’ is what elitists call democracy.
Only when they disagree with the masses. There seems to be an aversion to debate with dissenters. A preference for name calling: populist, racist, islamaphobe, transphobe. A tendency to represent any opposition as evil in an attempt to silence, rather than discussing and trying to understand the others point of view and maybe arriving at an acceptable compromise.
we got jihadist from islam, feminazi from feminist and wokenazi from wokeism .. oh america. I love your dollar but I can stand your insanity
I’m thoroughly looking forward to the woke scum being hounded out of their jobs and homes, and to the lengthy incarceration of their castration-cult cadres.
There are some straws in the wind alright. I hope you’re right. So much woke-ism is really just thinly-disguised religiosity. It struggles to survive rational scrutiny.
Take trans ideology, for instance.
Trans ideology only makes sense if you believe that male bodies should only dress and behave in old-fashioned 1950s masculine ways and that female bodies should only dress and behave in old-fashioned 1950s feminine ways.
If trans people were less sexist, and could bring themselves to accept that men or women can be and do whatever they want to be or do, then the logic of their position evaporates.
In the early 1980s, Boy George, a gay man, won worldwide acclaim and success, while wearing make-up and a skirt. He did so as a man, just a man who happened to be gay, and conventionally feminine. Around the same time, Mike Tyson was world heavyweight boxing champion. He did so as a man, just a man who happened to be straight, and conventionally masculine. The full spectrum of behaviour and attire was and is available.
But trans people believe that men and women can only access 50% of the human experience.
Of course, in many societies – such as Iran – or other v conservative societies – that is true. But that has not been true in much of the West for decades.
You can be a woman or a man and, with either body, access any point on the full spectrum of masculinity to femininity.
The idea that you have to have surgery(!) to do so is irrational, and, ironically, quite sexist, in a very old-fashioned way.
Essentially, trans people ***seek to conform to self-imposed sexual stereotyping*** by having needless surgery done to them.
It’s irrational behaviour, and such mentally-ill folk need care and counselling – instead of encouraging rogue elements of the medical profession to exploit such self-esteem issues for money.
Man, I miss the 80’s!
> So much of what the author characterises as “persuasiveness” involves Left-liberals offering something like political-cum-psychological therapy to other Left-liberals.
I’d rather be publicly flogged than have to endure this.
Let me say this: Ms. Bari Weiss talks good sense indeed! She is here to save us all.
Try her podcast, Common Sense to hear for yourself….
Put more succinctly, the establishment neoliberals are realizing that their alliance with all the woke cancel culture nonsense is a millstone around their neck that will pull down the entire neoliberal regime if they don’t excise it from their politics. When Trump and co. pushed out the establishment types from the Republican policy, the Democrats became the party of the establishment, and that party has always been easier to manipulate and control with money and political machinery. I expect once they get destroyed in this mid-term, the Dems will silence or marginalize their more prominent far left voices and double down on being the moderate, safe, establishment party in an effort to paint Trump 2024 as the radical threat to democracy. Whether they’ll be successful is an open question. Whether the neoliberal regime can survive on its own merits in America or anywhere else in a multipolar world of less economic growth, aging populations, and greater international competition and rivalry is anyone’s guess.
This made me laugh out loud several times – very witty article. I’m also glad to see Mr Ahmari stopped referring to the Woke as liberals which wasn’t being helpful in identifying who is who.
Observing that nothing good eventually came out of anything named radical in a long while I’m hesitant go on board with his idea of radicalism. Having said that evening out a little of the huge concentration of power in places in America doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But often in such things the devil is in the detail – whose money/power is going to be given to whom and with what justification.
I view the woke decade as something similar to Oliver Cromwell’s rule; a brief period of history, now thankfully drawing to an end, when the lunatics took over the asylum and briefly occupied all the positions of power until quite suddenly…they didn’t. (Or rather, they did, but found it expedient to grow their hair long and wear lace and pretend they had always been cavaliers.)
Woke has died on the fields of Ukraine where white toxic masculinity is used by the ukranians (yes, there are women fighting but men as usual carry the heavy load) to defeat the orcs trying to kill the very democracy wokers use to spread their madness with. As always, reality the great arbiter.
All right on the money except that Mr. Ahmari implicitly echoes the Left’s smug view that the supposedly impoverished “many” must be helped by some upper level elite, rather than being left alone to see to their own success — which is the true motivating force of the populism he sees as more dangerous than Left-identitarianism. (Seriously? Good Lord.) He wants the re-imposition of a priesthood to replace our bossy nanny-class leftists. No thanks.
In Britain the problem isn’t so much the ‘asset rich few’ as the ‘asset rich many’. Most of us (or our parents) now belong to the property owning middle class who for the past twenty years have been getting richer while rent payers and wage earners have got steadily poorer.
The point is, property owners (by which I mean those who own an average family home, not millionnaire mansions) are only getting richer on paper. People need a house to live in, and if houses are increasing in price, if one moves then one has to pay these inflated prices to buy another house, although it is possible to pocket some cash if one down-sizes. The beneficiaries of the increase in house prices will be the heirs of the propery owners (usually children or grand-children) or the care homes into which many will go to end their days.
bond and equity investor only get richer ” on paper”, value and price are not the same.
But on the other hand, the access to further credit that owning a house got people allowed them to accumulate multiple houses. When living in Scotland I met a few families that owned upward of 100 properties, leveraged up to the hilt, and gambling on the fact that property prices would go up forever. At the time I thought they were mad. And guess who’s laughing now?
The flip side that occurred to me at the time was that, for every 100 properties that someone like that owns, another 99 people have been unable to get onto the property ladder and have been trapped in a kind of feudal existence paying ever increasing rent to those who made that initial gamble.
This is the standard excuse that people make. It’s nonsense though. Owning property makes it easier to borrow. Equity release makes it easier to pass on wealth to your children. There are many more ways in which this form of unearned wealth creates undeserved privilege.
Ahmari writes, “…the virus of Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism.” On my side of the Pond, I’m not sure Right-wing populism is more dangerous. The entire security state (FBI, CIA, NSA,…), the media, the office corps in our military, the universities and the professional managers at places like BlackRock, StateStreet, Vanguard and Berkshire Hathaway that vote most of the controlling shares in American corporations have all thrown in with the former, while the latter is represented by Donald Trump and his acolytes.
Is a buffoon and sore loser who spins specious constitutional theories really more of a threat than people who want to be able to cut off dissenters from the latest utopia du jour (I think it’s still transgenderism, but I haven’t check the rest of the internet) not only from Twitter, but from the banking system, who brand parents who object to gender ideology and tendentious versions of American history being foisted on grade school children “domestic terrorists”, and accuse everyone who thought on balance Donald Trump staying on would have been better than Joe Biden taking office “semi-fascists”?
I’m not even sure it’s true on your side of the Pond. Your Right-wing populism expressed itself in a preference for laws made by Parliament over regulations imposed by the European Commission in the form of Brexit. Quelle horreur!
Of course, I guess one might wonder dangerous to whom? If you’re part of the professional managerial class, the security apparatus, or the American Democratic Party, I guess Ahmari is correct. If you’re someone of whatever current political persuasion who loves the Anglo-Saxon conception of liberty, whether as secured by the American Constitution or by tradition in Britain, it’s the identitarian Left that is the major threat, and Right-populists are one of those auxiliaries Lord Acton wrote of, with whom the friends of freedom must make common cause, even if the result could prove disastrous.
Wishful thinking. The thing about wokeness is that it is slippery and you can never pin them down on anything. It is inconsistent and has a lot of tactical plays it can use. If you think the demise of Mermaids is going to stop them, think again. They will still define the moral good and moral taboos of the society. If you do that you run the society.
I tuned out at the constant use of the textbook Marxist term ‘material conditions’.
I didn’t tune out when I saw this phrase….
“Left-identitarianism, which conjured as a reaction the even more dangerous virus of Right-wing populism”
… and was rewarded with a decent overview of the current post-Woke options for Progressives.
Can Sohrab explain why ‘right-wing’ popularism is more dangerous than left wing woke-ism? In fact why is it any more dangerous than any other political ‘ism’? Popularism put Trump into power and geo-politics and the US economy were in far bereter shape under his administration. So, at least that example gives popularist policies some credibility.
I didn’t realize Disney workers were underpaid. Are their employees forced to work there, or is Disney the only employer in the area?
I lived in Orlando for years. If you’re looking for a service job, Disney’s payscale sets the bar for the area as it’s such a huge employer. The 2 benefits are 1) Disney does ( or did maybe that’s changed) promote from within and 2) corporate types like seeing a stint at Disney – even if it’s service oriented- on a resume.
Sacco was clearly bad at PR. She should have been sacked for incompetence. Then there is the narcissism. She didn’t write the tweet for the benefit of people who knew her and knew she was white; she wrote it for people who didn’t know her. Her last thought before getting on a long haul flight was ‘let the world know about me, me, me!’
You could argue that most social history has been a battle between the individualists and collectivists – but the ideas driving those groups changes. Radical reformers against landowning aristocracy, Marxists against capitalists, nationalists against communism, managerialists against nationalism, and so on.
There will always be the disaffected and the comfortable – and sometimes you wake up and find you are in the ‘other’ group.
Why not two camps such as realist and anti realist or gnostic and anti gnostic or subjectivist and objectivist etc etc.?
The real Beast that needs to be killed is Egalitarianism. The obsession with “equality” underlies nearly every malady in modern society, among all factions, except for the very alt-right Reactionaries (e.g. Curtis Yarvin.)
Egalitarianism is nonsense. It is premised upon the idea that men are “equal” somehow. They are not. Once this false premise is discarded, politics becomes much more simple, and the way forward is clear.
The real danger to wokeists is not that their slogans are meaningless and their ideology inherently contradictory; everyone knows that, the way they know that the music sucks at a party. They’re not going to leave; it’s still the best party around, because everyone’s there!
No, the real danger is that when the Reaction that is coming gains power, and displaces the Wokeists (and their enablers and predecessors, the egalitarian progressives and “conservatives”) they will conduct a purge that it is impossible for Wokeists (or anyone else) to properly conduct, for the simple matter that there is no contradiction or weakness in the Reactionary position that could possibly undermine it. Once the fundamental premises of Egalitarianism are abandoned (and they will be, as Wokeism is the reductio) the Reactionary fire will be unstoppable. In a period of a few decades, all of Egalitarian’s institutions, principles, artifacts and strongholds will be destroyed, and Western man will finally be free of the dysgenic influence of equality-obsession that has plagued him for two thousand years.
Ahmari shares all of Wokeness’ core suppositions about human equality, universalism, and transcendence of ethnicity.
The Pope of his faith cheers on the migrant invasion of Europe.
I’ll pass.
Hilarious that Linda Sarsour thinks of herself as not-white. She’s more pale than I am.
Excellent column, Mr. Ahmari (except for the masking-during-Covid bit. There is abundant scientific evidence for the importance and efficacy of wearing masks. Amazing that so many people get their knickers in a twist over putting a little piece of cloth over their faces).
I want to debate the Deniers here.
Send me your uneducated conservatives.
I thought you were too busy castrating boys.
First of all define “uneducated” so that we all know what we’re talking about.
Most revolutionaries were extremely well educated. What is the point here?
This guy is an expert in projecting the crimes and character of conservatives on liberals.They scream “cancel culture” at libs as they try to overturn an election.They run on lies and depend on their followers with no character to do the same, because they have the same lack of character.
George K I wish you had something relevant to say, otherwise, I think everyone on here will agree that you are a serendipitous example of why the title of this article is true. Well done you!!!
You can’t talk reason to a dog with rabies and wokenazi