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by kungtotte
2398 days ago
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People can't only be judged on where they are right now, you have to include cultural and sociological aspects as well. I would consider myself open minded and liberal and for lack of a better term, "woke". But I was born in the 80s to parents who were born in the 60s and their parents in turn were born in the 30s and so on. So my parents were raised with some racism and a bunch of sexism. That meant I grew up with a bit less racism and declining sexism, but those things were still there. In my teens I used "gay" as a slur. Am I awful? Can you take one look at a forum post I made in the late 90s and judge me entirely? I'm doing my best now to fix these things so hopefully my son will grow up with none of this cultural and sociological baggage, but I'm not a bad person for acting in accordance with the times 20 years ago. Nor were my parents in the 80s. Nor was Knuth in the 60s. Is it okay what he did? No, of course not. But let's not hang the man for something that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow at the time. |
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The opposite. I'd judge anybody judging a person from a 90s forum post as awful scum themselves.
>Is it okay what he did? No, of course not.
Yes it is. It's not even that controversial. Men and boys, whether one is woke or not, have some different characteristics, age, maturity, strength, etc, being some of them. That was the purpose of the analogy, which was, and remains, a common idiom across the globe.
Is it okay for 2019 people of a particular (woke) subset of a particular (Anglo-Saxon) culture to impose whatever latest retrospective moral panics they have on everybody? No. For one, that's cultural imperialism...