Something that I was thinking about seeing the reaction to the Dead Space remake (TDLR for my opinions on the game, looks alright but an inferior version of the original which you can buy cheaper).
I've seen more and more that media we term as 'woke' (which most of the time we are right about but a few false flags here and there) getting dismissed as us applying our political biases onto a product because of who made it, the characters being displayed etc than valid criticism of an inferior product usually belonging to a franchise that was usurped than built up.
We're risking the same issue the left did with Nazi and racist where it was overused to such a degree it became easy to dismiss. The best way to counter this really is just go tldr than just say 'It's woke'. Quick points to highlight issues (e.g. the writing is terrible, the sound design is poorly utilised) than writing a paragraph to explain your point. If people then respond you can go deeper if they're not being asinine (you only hate it because she no longer has big boobs etc)
So I'm not a hypocrite in this example, TDLR: We're overusing 'woke' that we risk being dismissed easily.
No.
Fair enough
I will concede that we probably sometimes lump things into the category of "woke" that are in fact just bad, but the comparison with the left's use of "racist is a false equivalence. "Racism," to the extent that it even exists in the modern West, is not a coordinated project of social engineering. Wokism absolutely is.
Not just false equivalency, it's opposite world.
They don't disagree with whether something is woke or not - they disagree that actual woke is bad. Woke became an insult because it accurately described their views. They want us to be more racist/nazi to hate us more.
We disagree with whether something is racist or not - we don't disagree that actual racism is bad. Racist became not an insult because it didn't accurately describe our views. We don't want them to be more woke to help them.
I disagree "racism" is bad. Because when gay commies say "racism" they really mean "white people".
Letting them redefine language is a mistake.
Agreeing with the enemy's premise is the real mistake.
This is why, at all times, you have to avoid all euphemisms and never, ever use exclusively leftist language to discuss their totalitarian project. Use leftisms only when criticizing them.
For one gigantic example, absolutely never, even tacitly, agree that such a concept as "hate speech" exists, never use the phrase unless criticizing it, and always trap it between quotation marks.
Be not afraid of using "nigger" when discussing its censorship or when discussing language generally, but remember not to fall into the trap of calling it "hate speech." "Slur" is about as far as I'd go. For god's sake, never use the infantile expression "N-word."
I like to substitute "race hatred" for "racist." It's more specific, it emphasizes the actual category of race, and it avoids the main word-weapon of the left.
This will get you banned from social media but being honest is worth it.
by accepting the term "racist" and agreeing that "it's bad", you already fell into the bolshevik trap. racism was coined by Leon Trotsky (lev bronstein) specifically to subvert and undermine the west. by accepting it's bad, you'd self censor topics about race and ideas of preserving your own race.
The term I used was "actual racism".
People that hate an individual for no good reason are different from those who point out that blacks commit over 5x more violent crime. Somebody of another race who has proven themselves a true patriot and respectable citizen - maybe you feel it's good to hate them because of others of their kind, but I don't.
Racism doesn't mean "hate an individual for no good reason"
It means recognizing that races even exist.
Nevermind the modern usage that means something like "races don't exist but also these good races have been oppressed by those bad races, and the oppression exists to this day and colors everything that everyone does at all times".
You can say that "discriminating on the basis on skin color alone is bad". Ok, that's one thing.
Even though it's natural for people to prefer to associate with others who are culturally and biologically like them. And it's perfectly fine to discriminate, it's necessary even, we discriminate successfully all the time. And skin color is just another data point, with meaning as long as groups with different skin colors act differently on aggregate, which they do, even if you hold that it's bc of some coincidence or consequence.
So maybe "discriminating on the basis on skin color alone is suboptimal, as sometimes it will lead you to avoid a competent or good person" is more accurate.
But as soon as you use the word "racism" you're a retard if you think you're not invoking the vast library of meanings that the predominant culture has dressed it with.
And notice there's no mention of hate, bc noticing things has nothing to do with hate.
The term has been coopted, it's just another brainwashing tool, and you should stop wanting to appease the empire by pointing out how racism is bad for brownie points.
Be concise in your language. Don't use a word that has a clear meaning in the dominant culture idiosyncratically. You can't walk around town with a swastika and claim it's an Indian peace symbol. You have to recognize the words the empire ideology is using to trigger its brainwashed cult members, and either avoid them or subvert them. Otherwise you come off as just another NPC, and modifying it just makes you sound like you're maybe slightly less of an idiot but you're still a fucking idiot.
"-ism" doesn't mean "against", either.
Capitalism means you're in favour of capital and view your economic situation through that lens, communism means you're in favour of the commune and view your situation through that lens.
Racism means you're in favour of (your) race, and view your socio-political situation through that lens.
I get you, and agree on the principal point about ism's, but racism doesn't even need to mean that you're in favor of your own race.
It's ok and essentially natural to preference your people (we are animals after all), so I'm not making a normative statement, but racism can also just simply mean that you see the world through the lens of evolutionary biology and group selection. Just a positivist theory of anthropology, nothing more or less, no judgement implied.
Like; different peoples exist, and here's some ways where they are different. Simply that.
In our time even this is enough to get you excommunicated, and so you should hold such opinions to yourself. But I bet most people, silently, secretly, notice things - and from their experiences they form their own ideas, in silence.
Goddamned right. Avoid, subvert, and rationally criticize leftist language at all times. Never adopt their terminology, even if doing so would be easier or more convenient; never use it except as a target for criticism.
lol civic nationalism
Woke was a they used about themselves just like sjw and then we took it and made it an insult because it's ridiculous. We mock them with their shit and they try to unsuccessfully steal our insults
Fair enough, I was using the example they scream the most lol
Bit of a tangent, but I think 'wokism' is a bit of a coordinated project but also opportunistic. A lot of the woke companies were going broke long before they started kissing the feet of the left and turned woke to get kickbacks from things like ESG to stay in business.
Yes, but ESG itself is designed to encourage exactly that behaviour. Companies that are just taking advantage of the cheap money may not be ideologically committed to the project, although I would argue that many are. But even the ones that aren't are still a part of the project. Gaining compliance through bribery is still coordination.
My problem is that "woke" is too soft. Calling a tirade in favor of white genocide "woke" is affording it concealment and conflation that it doesn't deserve. There are deeply disturbed and dangerous people ruling over us, so giving them a cutesy descriptor like "woke" is a massive mistake. We need to start identifying these people as exactly what they are as often as possible.
That's another concern I have, is that we get lazy using the term woke when it's worse than the term implies
Like imagine if we just called Cuties woke, not the demonic pedophilic excuse Netflix made to normalise sexualization of kids.
I prefer "neo-Marxist" to "Communist." It's more specific and has less historical baggage.
I still believe in debate as the 'slow knife that cuts deep in the armour' in real life interactions (it's how I changed many minds on the vaccine, online anonymity, the media etc).
Online I admit it's negated by the sea of replies but in this case I'm more worried about us than convincing others. I like to learn from my opposition as much as possible, and their tactic of shouting 'racist, sexist, nazi etc' at everything has dulled any critical thinking they had to begin with to be a mindless zombie/NPC spouting the latest talking point.
Being able to just quickly summarise and show our points against at least stops us falling for the same pitfalls.
That's exactly the point of democracy. It's certainly not to make everyone the leader (which doesn't make sense), it's to make decisions with as much input as possible without making everyone the leader.
As an example, say some countries national holiday is coming up and the leader decides to increase electricity production at the hydro-dams because he's anticipating the festivities to consume more power that usual.
Say one of the dams is damaged and could get much worse under serious strain.
Even though the leader is trained and educated, he's not down at the dam to see it. There needs to be a way to get him that information so he can change his decision, if necessary. If the workers don't have a way to influence his decision without making one themselves they'll freeze, as exemplified at Chernobyl.
That's what democracy is for.
I agree. Debate works more as a learning tool than as a means of persuasion, especially in the case of an intractable opposition. There is no longer any compromise possible between the left and everyone else.
I try to call it Jewish but that doesn’t work as well for some reason...
No because everything really is woke
I don't use the term "woke" when I'm trying to convince someone else about a "woke" behavior being shit.
I use it as a shorthand for other people who already know what "woke" is.
That's how you do it. I don't go about explaining almost demonic things as woke either, just feels too weak or a word for some of the stuff that have been happening lately(namely related to them wanting to diddle kids).
Yes, all such terms become thought-terminating cliches. That's doesn't mean we're wrong, and is not necessarily a bad thing. It's often better to encapsulate a complex idea into a simple concept to avoid over-analysis. Our "tribe" knows what woke means, so saying something is woke is enough to get it. It IS lazy, but that's fine for us because it lets us spend thought-cycles on more important questions.
The problem is when trying to convince people outside your "tribe" of your position. The further out you go, the less defined or more ambiguous the term becomes. Using it with outsiders leads to misunderstanding, and causes people to ignore you when your exclamation of why a game is "woke" doesn't jibe with what they thought the word meant.
And maybe in the case of woke, even WE don't always agree on what it means. I've seen debates here on whether something is or isn't woke. If we can't agree about something among ourselves then that weakness is going to be used against us.
I rarely see people incorrectly accuse something of being woke.
Normally, they say Bolshevik.
I like the term "Wokeshevik". It connotes the Communist origins of the term "Woke" that go back to The Frankfurt School & Cultural Marxism.
It's a "catch all" term. I'm not a fan of em personally. It does as you say encourage laziness. It is an absolute, which means nuance or context can not exist. People that abuse it are as useless as those that go straight to calling everyone Hitler. There is no discussion with either of these people and they will live forever in a cycle of ME GOOD, THEY NOT ME, SO THEM BAD cave man brain. It's childish.
Its lazy because it allows people to not articulate their thoughts to a point where they cannot even explain why they think that, without dissolving into a Leftist Meme level of text explaining 4 decades of politics. Similar to things like "pozzed."
Because most often times it is woke, they aren't wrong. But good luck understanding why it is unless you are so deep in this "culture war" that you just get it. Which makes it completely useless in combatting the problem in a larger way, and only useful for circlejerking with people who already agree with you.
So, its not that its wrong to call it such. But its a thought trap that makes people lazier and walls them into a method of explaining the cultural rot that sounds like a loon to those outside their echo chambers.
Well let’s take the underlying meaning of both. When we use the term “woke” it is to identify someone whose zealous for their religion. In this particular case it is the church of Marxism and it’s offshoots. When they are using the term “Nazi” or “Racist” they are signaling to their fellow members that you have sinned in their eyes. That is why the “woke” require sacrifice (cancel culture), a purity spiral, and atonement for those sinning, there is however no redemption as that would make the main bastion of “wokeness” which is a perpetual state of repentance. It’s the equivalent of us calling people zealots and them calling us heretics and demons. Quite pious of them frankly.
It's a pretty wide category, that's the problem.
If something has hints of it, it gets lumped in there.
There could be, and probably should be more nuance to it, but then we would need more words for it, and woke sorta is a nice big envelope, which doesn't help in that case.
Yeah need to use that word the Chinese came up for Western leftists, any remember what it was again?
Baizuo
Thank you!
Yeah, there is a real problem of "has a black/gay character mentioned, woke shit" being placed alongside "makes an explicit argument in favor of trannies and has extreme pedo angles."
Like, the first example could happen naturally. Isn't always natural, but plausibly could. The second is absolutely deliberate, and is undeniably woke shit.
Is it?
I interpret "woke" as: captured by the post-modern neo-marxist mind virus and acting with the intent to spread it".
Said virus consisting of the beliefs that a) reality is subjective and created by power, b) systems or hierarchies of which you aren't at the top are inherently oppressive and immoral and should be destroyed or subverted, and c) those "victimized" by said systems should have the most power.
Woke is also closely linked with "queer"; the practice of not being normal for the express purpose of undermining a system or making others uncomfortable.
While all the Woke are Queer, not all Queers are Woke.
It's not broad, it's just ubiquitous today.
No. There's just a problem with a term actually being successful.
"Cancel Culture", "CRT", "Woke", "triggered", "snowflake", and "SJW" have entered the mainstream lexicon, so as a result, the Left has attempted to intentionally use counter-rhetorical techniques:
"Communism" used to be the Right's watch word back in the day until the same strategies were applied, and the very idea that communism has ever existed in the US is considered utterly laughable. Communism was deeply unpopular in the US, to such a degree that progressives and socialists actively dropped it and tried to call themselves literally anything else, eventually co-opting the term Liberal itself to avoid accusations of Communism. It's all just rhetorical warfare on the Left's side, and all that's being done is an attempt to undermine the word's effectiveness.
Correct, preaching to the choir.
No
I think "woke" can be overused, but you just have to break it down to people sometimes. I've gotten people to see my point by saying the following. "no, a black character is not woke, but when you constantly push that every show has to have a black character or race swap then it becomes woke" or "yes, gay people exist, but they are way overrepresented in media and then people are attacked for noticing"
That's exactly my point, just making a sentence than going 'it's woke' tends to have more impact
It's the difference between saying 'you're stupid' and 'you're so dim that you look down a loaded gun barrel whenever it jams'
I guess I should try that. I have tried to get sjws to actually have a conversation and that isn't easy.
Friends are individuals, enemies are a horde. Any time you spend differentiating them by their chosen title is time you've wasted.
To add to other comments here, there's also the issue of degree. Calling a leftist woke is hardly comparable to them calling someone a racist or a Nazi in terms of severity. Those labels carry massive baggage and are outright dehumanizing . "Woke," by comparison, is an extremely tame label.
It's tame so it's probably why it's taken this long to start getting dismissed as much considering we don't have an authority to enforce compliance of the labels like the left does.
Same difference. No thanks.
Nope as that one is a criminal judgement (dispite how much the left wants to make it a sexual preference)
Racism is just a term invented to denigrate the ingrained behaviour of distrusting those we aren't used to or as a cudgel to stop noticing patterns and behaviour of a group openly hostile to others.
No "racist" actually works.
woke is a catchall and has always been a catchall.
racist refers to a specific behavior
I mean I won't deny some have used the term 'woke' in situations where it doesn't apply. But even then, I think it's a false equivalence to compare it with the left crying 'racist'.
'Woke' used to have a positive connotation and was started by the left to show how 'socially aware' they are. It wasn't until later where it became a word to mock the left. Racism (the unironic version), on the other hand, is driven by hatred of other people purely because of their race.
Personally, I see 'woke' as an evolution of 'SJW'. 'SJW' was used quite a bit in the mid to late-ish 2010's and it seems have been replaced with 'woke'. For what reason? I'm not sure, but I would have to guess that it's less of a mouthful to say and its noun form, 'wokeism', is a quick and easy way to call out the progressive ideology that has infected media and entertainment.
It's to the point it's easier to label things as 'not woke'. Saves time.
I've heard the term "awake" used in this context.
The thing is, "woke" encompasses the entire Progressive movement. "We are awoken to special knowledge of what the world should be, so we should be given power to run it." The term is properly broad. That doesn't mean it's always the best tactical choice of words, but it is accurately used most of the time.
It's a different kind of laziness even assuming it happens. Over applying 'woke' to dismiss stuff means you've possibly inserted a couple of ill-fitting things under an already fairly broad umbrella. Woke can mean anything from racial tokenism (present in DS remake), shoehorned LGBT stuff (present in DS remake), transgender bathrooms (present in DS remake) or whatever other aspect of progressive ideology. It's not the first or final word to serve its purpose; 'SJW', 'progressive', 'feminist', 'regressive leftist' and others can cover similar but equally broad circles within the venn diagram.
Misusing 'nazi' or 'racist' happens when people want to misapply an extreme or emotional label which used to have quite a narrow meaning, but which has been contorted into an overly broad one for political purposes.
If anything we're under-using terms because too many of us are selectively blind to examples of agenda-pushing. Enjoy anything you want, don't selectively miscategorise just because you're enjoying it though.
EDIT: wanted to go further and point out that I recognise the danger of 'thought-terminating cliches', as they're called. I didn't call anything 'SJW' for ages, when that term was more in vogue, because I felt there was a danger of laziness. Still, I maintain it's a different kind of laziness and the culture war is at a stage where I just don't care.
No. Are we overusing it? About 1 in 10 times it's not actually woke, it's just cringe. Yes.
Yes, but it's inevitable that easy catchall terms will be used. Woke. SJW/Social Justice. PC/Politically Correct. It's been going on for decades with very little difference between the terms.
It does trivialize the situation when it is used to gloss over a specific problem. It's dismissive when used that way, a lazy habit that discourages real criticism.
Racist is an effective term for the left because everything they label racist is in fact racist from their perspective. It isn't a lazy label. It is a correct label. Woke is also a correct label. That is all.
Using any kind of label is lazy, even if correct. I don't mean that in a bad way though, so maybe a better term than lazy is "efficient". It's easier and faster for us to just say something is woke than explain every little detail that makes it woke and why.
Way to give into subjective equivalency.
Is Dead Space even woke though?? I don't think there was any obvious woke stuff in it, just the usual terrible modern writing and effort and talent.
they changed things they had no business or right to.
"all gender restroom"
this is woke faggotry.
Wasn't that also one where someone hung themselves? What did they mean by that? Lmao
From what I've seen, I'd go with they don't have the talent to match the original so probably put in a few left leaning changes as cover to hide their lack of talent
I've said it before, the talent that built these franchises and companies up have retired or gone off to a new project. The new guys in charge can't match the mindset and work ethos to match and have being using leftist ideology to hide their inadequacies.