[hpvic03]

This essay is so prescient.

Does anyone else think wokeism has gone too far, and we're sliding into a 1984-style era full of newspeak, wrongthink, and thoughtcrimes?

I feel a little afraid to even write that, even as a question mark, even at that level of abstraction.

That right there is probably an indication that it perhaps has gone too far.

To be clear, this is coming from a person who is hispanic, supports gay-rights, and voted for Bernie. Not that any of that should matter.

[rspeele]

The "gone too far" wokeism stuff seems to be openly mocked, almost everywhere, all the time.

Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Those posts get shared 100x more by people mocking them than by people agreeing with them.

Maybe you could give an example of something specific?

[humanistbot]

> Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream.

Do a thought experiment: Your company is a player in a certain language/framework ecosystem (python, react, whatever). As part of that, many of your employees attend and sometimes host meetups for that ecosystem. A fellow highly-involved meetup organizer from another company announces that they are transitioning gender, and that they would like to be called by a new name. Almost everyone does. A few people make mistakes, but are sincere and apologize -- they want to do better, but memory pathways are hard. But one employee at your company objects to using their new name and pronouns on moral grounds. They keep using the organizer's dead name and old pronouns, and when they are asked to use their new name, they refuse.

Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

[rspeele]

> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

No, that is rude. Calling it violence remains ridiculous hyperbole.

[thelopa]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violent

I would describe that experience for the trans person as a “vehement feeling or expression”, and inflicting a violent state on someone qualifies as “an instance of violent treatment or procedure”.

[rspeele]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Sure, words can be used in less literal context, like "an ocean of thoughts swirled violently in his head". But simply declaring "deadnaming is violence" because it causes "vehement feeling or expression", would make millions of things violence. Your partner breaking up with you is violence. Your boss giving you a bad performance review is violence. Etc.

[civilized]

These are good illustrations of the problem with the popular "NYT op-ed" type arguments for the claim "speech that upsets someone is violence".

These folks argue (with scientific citations!) that words can cause physical pain and stress, and that actions that cause such things are basically tantamount to violence. What's the difference, right? If I feel bad, what does it matter whether you said mean words to me or you punched me?

The problem is, words can cause stress in all sorts of situations because social interactions can be inherently stressful. There is no non-stressful way to end a relationship or deliver a bad performance review. But sometimes it needs to be done.

Punching someone is extremely different. It's not at all something that normally has to be done, unless perhaps you were just punched first. Physical violence is fundamentally different from speech because speech has an absolutely vital dual purpose of communication, which physical violence doesn't have.

To avoid calling a huge variety of legitimate speech acts violence, we'd have to redefine violence in some tortured way, like "stuff that causes harm and stress unless it was necessary/justified".

I don't think we should redefine the most emotionally salient words in the English language just so that activists' favorite slogans can be retroactively deemed logical.

[overgard]

The problem is, when you start referring to things that used to simply be considered "rude" as "violence", then there's no sense of scale to everything, and the people using that terminology tend to come across as hyper sensitive.

[bradlys]

Violence has scale to it too. We have people smashing their keyboards on the desk - which is a violent action yet relatively harmless… all the way to whatever scene you’d like to pluck out of Game of Thrones. It’s all violence and there’s a wide spectrum on it.

Being rude is pretty narrow in comparison.

[spiznnx]

It's not professional, it's abusive and it's harassment. But it is literally not violence by the common definition. Slogans like "silence is violence" are designed to provoke attention to an issue by intentionally shifting semantics from where they are normally understood.

[civilized]

> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

No, but if something is bad, it doesn't follow that it is every kind and degree of bad thing. Something can be impolite without being immoral, something can be immoral without being violence, something can be violence without being murder.

Personally in this case I would say it's disrespectful, and it's against my own moral code, but I know how people like this think. For the most part they're not evil or trying to hurt. They are taking principled stands at great personal risk. They have their own moral compass and it's not the same as yours or mine.

If it were up to me, I would stop interactions between the two, then do my best to educate and persuade the offending party, and professional sanction would be a last resort.

Why are we being pushed to flatten all moral distinctions? I don't understand. Flattening all distinctions makes our thoughts crude and unwieldy. Who thinks this is a good idea and why?

Could it be that redefining our moral vocabulary dissolves the signposts of our moral world, and allows illiberal, extreme positions to masquerade as liberalism?

[zozbot234]

> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

That's beside the point, since not being rude to others for no reason is very much part of mainstream professional norms. The question you might ask yourself is rather: "is this one person acting violently towards the meetup organizer by not using their preferred pronouns and updated name". There are people who would answer this in the affirmative, but this implies a pretty loose understanding of what qualifies as "violence" in the first place, which leads to all sorts of unforeseen implications. There's a very good reason why etiquette is generally regarded as trivial when compared with more tangible ethical challenges, and "use the correct pronouns, styles and honorifics when addressing So-and-so" is the quintessential example of etiquette.

[Animats]

deadnaming a trans person

The other side of that being "gender fraud".[1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/well/mind/is-sex-by-decep...

[betwixthewires]

Yes.

I think if I find myself in a profession that is overly concerned with things other than the work of that profession then it is time to find a new profession, or at least find new circles within the profession to associate with.

[tyuiopp]

They probably shouldn't use the old name of the person, as people can change their names for all sorts of reasons, and there's not really any good argument for refusing to use a person's updated name at their request.

However, pronouns are rather different, as there is an established usage of using 'he' for males and 'she' for females, i.e. in reference to the immutable quality of a person's sex. If you don't believe in the ideology of gender identity, it's more honest to keep using a person's sex-based pronouns, regardless of their preferences to the contrary.

[lubesGordi]

Openly mocked? Definitely not.

I know someone who knows someone who ran an art gallery on the west coast. Most of the artists were black and the gallerist was a white man. At one point he made some offhanded remark that "don't worry, the white artists have an area over there..." Guess what happened to his career after?

These stories are everywhere, and are why people think things have gone too far.

[inglor_cz]

Isn't deadnaming a trans person literally a bannable offense on Twitter?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18113344/twitter-trans-u...

[jkubicek]

Twitter (rightfully, imho) banned target harassment campaigns, not some coworker accidentally using the wrong pronoun.

[ncmncm]

Is there anything not a bannable offense on Twitter? I pre-banned myself just for existing, and am happy to have done it.

[paulpauper]

employers have much more power than individuals. even if the public is mostly opposed to wokeism , companies, fed. govt., and universities still seem intent on pushing it.

[zozbot234]

That still doesn't disprove wokeism's influence on the whole "things you can't say" dynamic. Leo Strauss has famously pointed out that censored ideas often end up being conveyed in a disguised manner, generally involving some kind of reverse psychology where a purposely clumsy or hyperbolic argument for X is used as a signal of believing not-X. So it may be that these seemingly "extreme woke" ideas are being purposely targeted to an unsuspecting Twitter audience as a broader challenge to wokeism itself, and that much of the mockery simply misses the point.

[VirusNewbie]

Sure. There have been numerous mainstream articles as well as a recent segment on John Oliver that liken teaching CRT to teaching about the fact racism exists. This is becoming a mainstream viewpoint, that "banning CRT" in classrooms is banning talk of racism.

None of these articles mention any of the more controversial CRT viewpoints that you can find by...reading the wikipedia article. It isn't exactly a hidden secret that CRT purports that any racial disparities must be due to systemic racism, though we can use some logic to quickly falsify some its main beliefs.

[commandlinefan]

That’s like saying “I tried to kill you, but you survived, so what are you complaining about?”

The Twitter mob has ruined lives and is doing everything they can to ruin the ones they target.

[bob34]

“Transwomen are women” is a religious precept on the left yet the overwhelming majority of people can see the obvious truth that they are in fact men in dresses with a serious disturbing sexual fetish.

[rspeele]

The overwhelming majority of people just don't care at all. What does it matter to me if you want to dress as a woman and be called "she"? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Life is very short and if somebody finds that way of living theirs to be fulfilling, I see no reason to waste mine being agitated by it.

[ManuelKiessling]

There are two comments above mine, one by a person who has learned some very important life lessons and is at peace with himself and the world, and one by – someone else.

[ncmncm]

Is there any adult alive who does not have a potentially disturbing sexual fetish? Even "asexuals" get tarred that way. So, you cannot distinguish them on that basis, even where it is true. (I know a trans person who is also a furry. Figure that one out!) It is of course possible that some subset of trans people are as you say. Is it your business to sort out which are and which are not?

What will you say about a trans person who is also "ace"? It is far from uncommon for people to come out as trans in their 70s, long after fetishes have lost their grip on most people.

So, if you are among that "overwhelming majority", you are just obviously wrong, on several counts.

[drewbeck]

Your “obvious truth” displays the standard ignorance around this topic. If you were intellectually curious and not pre-judging based on an emotional response you might find yourself digging in and learning the science and lived experiences of trans folks. Alas.

30 years ago people still said the same kind of uninformed stuff around gay people. Do you feel similarly about gay people?

[zzzap]

Perhaps the commenter you are replying to hasn't, but I've looked into this extensively, listening to the lived experiences of transgender-identifying people, reading their forums, poring over the scientific research into gender dysphoria, and listening to the arguments on the gender critical side too.

From this, I can only conclude that transwomen, being of the male sex, are not actually women, but are simply men who want to be women, to the extent that they attempt to masquerade as such in everyday life.

Most of them will wear attire more typical of women, and many seem to be driven by a deep-seated sexual desire of themselves as a woman. So while it was put rather crassly, I don't see how what this commenter said was particularly inaccurate.

[gc_hn]

Not all on the left share that belief, there's plenty of us gender critical leftists around, who still understand the material reality of who are the women and who are the men.

It boggles my mind how this has become the cause célèbre amongst certain other factions of the left in recent years. Particularly given how it relies on misogynistic stereotypes and is effectively erasing homosexuality.

[majormajor]

Discussions of "wokeism" should keep in mind that one of the most visible cases of being "canceled" is Colin Kaepernick, and you'd hardly call those blackballing him "woke." Meanwhile other less-accomplished QBs still bounce around from at least backup job to backup job...

But beyond that... people have been getting blackballed forever in this country.

So it's very important in this discussion to make it clear if you're complaining about just:

a) people facing repercussions for saying 'conservative' things

or

b) people facing repercussions for other things as well

or even just something like

c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter

[rootusrootus]

> c) the outsize influence of random anonymous people and mobs on Twitter

Ding ding ding! This is the fundamental problem. We collectively seem to care entirely too much about the fringe people who bother to vent their minds on Twitter.

[inglor_cz]

A lot of influence with no responsibility, that is the hellish combination. If the Twitter mob drives somebody to suicide, no one is going to punish them.

Power without responsibility is a wild combination, very unstable.

[rootusrootus]

I think we have to resolve that a real person (or at least a discrete identifiable group) has the actual power, and the responsibility lies squarely with them. That may require them to take heat directly rather than fire some random employee the Internet has decided to hate, but I don't think they get to deflect responsibility for taking the easy out.

That doesn't necessarily address the suicide part, except to observe coldly that the person directly responsible for the suicide is the only one who can stop it, unfortunately. So they have to figure out how to stop the assault from reaching them.

I don't have any particularly good answers, this is a fairly hard problem to solve. Probably some combination of things, up to and including involving law enforcement and giving them the tools to identify people and hold them accountable (as much as we'd like the Internet to be an anonymous place, that may be a pipe dream). Of course, what constitutes breaking the law? If someone on the playground taunts you, they're not breaking the law, and the risk to you is pretty low. But if a million people on the Internet taunt you, this is a different thing.

[overgard]

I don't think Kaepernick is really relevant here because he didn't piss off most people, he pissed off 32 mostly white billionaires in their 70s and 80s. IE, it's less that he got "cancelled" by society in general but rather he got cancelled by an insular cabal. That culture really doesn't reflect the culture of society as a whole.

[ncmncm]

They are little different from millions of others, aside from their excessive power. Wokeism enforcement (as distinguished from being woke, itself) could even be interpreted as a defense against their hegemony.

The Iraq War minted hundreds of them, mostly in Dick Cheney's camp. We will be living with that legacy for generations.

[majormajor]

You think it was the owners who cared directly themselves, not the pressure generated by a right-wing fan and media shitstorm?

[overgard]

Mostly yes. Buying a professional sports franchise is rarely a true business decision; it's a chance for these people to be the king of their own kingdom. It's a vanity project. These owners go against the wishes of fan bases and media all the time

[commandlinefan]

> Colin Kaepernick

If he had been winning football games, he’d still be playing football. Witness the legions of other non-cancelled football players who’ve done way worse (but still win).

[majormajor]

Colt McCoy is older and still has a backup job. Lots of other crappy QBs bouncing around for years too... If not for the right-wing shitshow, someone would've taken a flyer in the last five years on a QB who once led a team to a superbowl appearance.

We also, if we want to say it's just about results, can look at Dave Chappelle, who falls on the opposite side of the "woke or not-woke" line but remains famously un-canceled despite that. So I could see someone reaching the conclusion of "the lines of 'what you can't say' aren't as strong as they're made out to be on either side, if you can bring in the money" OR the conclusion that it's not a one-sided "wokeism" thing... but "this is purely a woke thing and it's a huge problem" seems unsupportable.

[overgard]

Right, like, teams are still courting Deshaun Watson who is, if the accusations are true, a pretty awful person. Because Deshaun won games. I think the ostracism of Kaepernick was super unfair and ugly, but I also think he was playing himself into being a career backup.

[philwelch]

Kaepernick’s career was going downhill before he started protesting. He was already the backup by then and frankly already had a reputation as an egotistical jackass. If you want to be an egotistical jackass in the NFL, it’s possible, but it will limit your career options even if you have the talent to back them up, which Kaep didn’t at the end. He’s also went on to sabotage his own comeback opportunities at least once. Probably the best comparison I could make is Kyrie Irving, and the only reason Kyrie isn’t out of the league is the NBA CBA.

[screye]

It certainly did. Although, it seems like the opposition to it is in full swing.

Wokeness (as portrayed in popular culture) hit its peak during the George Floyd protests and subsequent publishing of the Harpers letter. Since then, an entire ecosystem has risen in opposition to ideas of wokeness.

Alas, the reaction to this opposition has not been to find a new consensus. Rather, communities have sharded and further polarized. Now, fervent ingroup loyalty is mandatory while the difference between each ingroup keeps expanding.

This is especially noticeable in the most radical communities on the left and the right. From draconian Trans-bans to radical no-questions asked trans-acceptance, these communities have started dealing in absolutes. The more nuanced anti-woke have coalesced around Substack and honestly make good money. But, they rely on word of mouth to reach their readers. The other side of the anti-woke use viral video and aggressive youtube algorithms to reach their viewer base. However, the nature of these algorithms means that strong emotion is promoted over nuance and reason. Finally, there are celebrity faces like Rowling, Chapelle and Rogan, who can't really be deplatformed and serve as lightning rods for criticism, while smaller voices get the necessary protection to build out their platform.

The sad part of this, is that you can't be apolitical anymore. There are only 3 acceptable positions. 1. Strong support and be embraced, 2. strong opposition and lose your friends but gain new anti-woke friends and lastly 3.stay silent while nodding to those in strong support.

Now, if your profession is one is wholly in-group for the woke, then you will be in a difficult situation. Academia, print journalism and legacy media practically force you to be #1 or #3. If you are in a more technical field like tech, it doesn't really affect your life. But, if you choose to interface with social-sciencey aspects of big-tech such as ResponsibleAI, DEI or hiring, then you will also be forced into #1 or #3.

[inglor_cz]

Also, Trump's visibility in media has been reduced.

I believe that Trumpesque utterances were driving certain demography crazy and it overcompensated by going all in into wokeness and doubling down. And while Trump was president, there wasn't a chance to escape his daily, uh, serving of wisdom, which served as an irritant that had to be scratched, scratched, scratched, scratched.

Nowadays Trump is much less prominent in the media and some people started rethinking their previous fervor.

[nperez]

I think the term "woke" has been hijacked by some people to refer to anything minorities do in a disparaging manner, so I would need more concrete examples of what that means.

[gnicholas]

Linguist (and heterodox thinker) John McWhorter has written about this shifting usage:

> For example, it’s only recently that he noticed the term “woke” being used beyond black Americans in just the way that “politically correct” was used before it was a pejorative. And already, he observed, it is beginning to take on the same baggage as PC once did.

from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/the-futili...

[rootusrootus]

> Does anyone else think wokeism has gone too far

Yes, because it is locked in a feedback loop with the folks who have recently decided to start saying the quiet part out loud. If people could just all around stop acting like jerks, everything would be much quieter. But nobody thinks they are the jerk.

[michaelmrose]

Maybe it's not so much an indication that reality has gone too far so much as it is that we aren't all equally aligned with reality.

You say that you are a little afraid to speak up but realistically you are being deliberately dramatic. Shall we start a campaign to get you booted from your job tomorrow because you are being dramatic? It's not a crime nor a reason for outrage. You face at worst a down vote

[overgard]

People get in trouble for decade old social media posts all the time. There's a lot of weird vindictive people that will go through ten years of twitter posts to be like "gotcha". The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing.

[michaelmrose]

Social mores actually move relatively slowly. In 1950 it was OK to be bigoted say towards gay men. In 2022 it is not. In 2022 people may be bitten for something they said in 2012 but it wasn't because such bigotry suddenly became unacceptable in 2013.

The vanguard of decency and tolerance had begun advancing in the 60s and was well under way in the 70s. Forty years later they had failed to apprehend the indefensible nature of their position which for most of the roadkill on the road to reason had been underway for their entire lives.

> The only way to not worry is to never have a high profile, or be extremely careful what you say in writing.

One could also try not being 40 years behind moving social mores in a way that currently makes your children embarrassed to be seen with you and will in 10 years be seen as indefensibly bigoted or hateful because if its going to get you fired in 10 years its probably already pretty bad you just didn't notice.

[overgard]

I think the vast majority thinks that, but the extremists (for or against) are the ones carrying the megaphones because media craves controversy.

[psyc]

I agree with them on most issues. I appreciate them raising and theorizing about their more fringe issues. What I don't appreciate are their tactics and aggressive enforcement.

[odonnellryan]

No. Why do you think it has gone too far?

[d0mine]

'wkeism' as a tool reminds me about authoritarian states introducing laws that are impossible not to break by design and then applying them selectively to obliterate any dissent.

[moltke]

We knew where it was going decades ago but it was considered too fashionable.

[robbyking]

I don't think "wokeism" has gone too far, I think accusations of it have. There are plenty of high profile sex offenders and homophobic/transphobic celebrities who continue to get work.

Instead what I see is misrepresentation of what "wokeness" is; I often hear conservatives say they're "not allowed" to discuss race/sexuality/etc., when in actuality what has happened is most of American has just moved on from finding homophobia and racism entertaining.

[lashloch]

After reading your comment, I think it hasn't gone far enough.

[hpvic03]

... and my crime is?

Mentioning the idea of wrongthink?

You're kind of proving my point.

[lashloch]

Your "crime" is over-acting as you nail yourself to an imaginary cross.

Can you be specific about some of the things you believe are "wrongthink" in the eyes of "wokeism"? (Only if you feel safe doing so, of course...)