[mapt]

It has become fashionable among Very Online people who obsess about social justice to loudly reject generalizations.

They took the very reasonable "you're not allowed to talk about black people liking watermelons" and applied it to every statement about every minority, disadvantaged or not, ethnically defined or not, whether offense was taken or not. Generalization was relabelled a microaggression, and avoiding them (or calling them out) became an urgent imperative, whether or not you're a member of the group in question. Whether or not you take offense personally, it became a Duty To Police this sort of speech.

This alienates one from the vast majority of humanity, which uses generalizations about people and things every day as a cognitive & social necessity. It makes it impossible to communicate or organize, because some sort of nitpicking about social equity, even purely semantic equity, is always prioritized over topical action in SJW-oriented leftist conversation. The rally for women's rights is cancelled because the committee spent all day deciding whether to use the term "women" or some alternative.

It also makes one less effective as a thinker, because there are statements that you can make about cultures and people's background that are statistically very likely, or which indicate a very real difference in the center of different bell curves.

[JasserInicide]

Great post. The increasingly insane purity tests that the far left levy upon others they deign as less woke (in the original sense of the word) has gotten completely out of hand. Especially here on HN. Too many times I've seen normal discussion happen and then someone comes along with "Um excuse me can you not use that term because [3 paragraphs of nonsense when one time one person somewhere took offense to said term]". It feels paralyzing. People can't have discussions anymore, especially online. There's always 20 caveats you have to worry about.

Personally I blame autism for much of it but that's another can of worms.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I know this is what you're complaining about, but did you just equate autism and being far left? Do you find that the sort of complaints you are describing come out after you do groupings like that?

[JasserInicide]

but did you just equate autism and being far left

No, more so it's at the root of crippling all online discussions.

[latentcall]

To be fair as someone on the far far left we really think of those people as liberals caught up in culture war nonsense with conservatives. Many of us at least in my local community see “woke” as ultimately damaging to what we’re hoping to achieve. While we advocate for marginalized groups, we really generalize everyone (except the bourgeois) together into a working class. This includes conservatives, liberals, trans people, Christians, Jews, whatever.

I know in the US “liberal” is the “radical left” which is unfortunate as hell.

[mapt]

Leftist ideas favor the disadvantaged generally, but they have traditionally discussed economic disadvantage, since money is the primary way we denominate power and implement material change.

This recent "woke" trend originates from leftist impulses in a society where the fall or even moderation of neoliberal capitalism is 'harder to imagine than the end of the world'. A society where Reaganomics has been adopted wholesale by Third Way Democrats who still control the political discourse because that's what effectively fundraises from billionaires. Politicians who try to satiate their political base by promoting diversity initiatives that will make zero dent in the economy or institutions of state. "Social Justice" as explored on Tumblr by people still in university (isolated from economics) is largely orthogonal to that, and it wouldn't be possible for people exposed to more of the diversity of society and the exigencies of life to ruminate on the subject, absent economic concerns.

This is what leftists complain about with the pejorative "liberals", a distinction that half of the country appears to be completely unaware of because every pejorative means the same thing on Fox News.

This tendency to substitute diversity messaging for systemic material solutions appears to have zero appeal left to the American people. No, the American people do not want to send the gender noncomformists to the gas chamber, but if that's all you talk about, it does not add up to a political platform that people vote for. The "Black Lives Matter" protests demanded dramatically reshaping the way criminal justice works, not wearing kente cloth for an afternoon. The last Democratic presidential candidate scrupulously avoided social justice, but they didn't actually substitute any sort of populist left-wing economic ideas because the donors wouldn't allow that.