New Discourses

First of all it is sad to see a comment like this under yet another throw-away account. Just say what you want, using your regular account. The worst that can - and possibly will - happen is that you get shadowbanned in which case you just create a new account.

There are a number of current theories around the woke phenomenon, of which the "trans movement" is but one exponent. Vivek Ramaswamy (writer of "Woke, Inc." [1]) sees it as an outgrowth of a corporatist agenda which is meant to channel public outrage - which was turning against them, viz. Occupy Wall Street - towards shallow social causes to draw away attention from a corporate power grab. James Lindsay (of New Discourses [2], Cynical Theories [3] and the grievance studies hoax fame) sees it as the latest iteration of a Marxist-inspired agenda intent on domination or, lately, as a deflection manoeuvre by the ruling class to try to steer society away from the second enlightenment where the marketplace of ideas will become a reality. Vladimir Putin - yes, the Russian president - compares it [4] to the ideology which led the Bolsheviks to hijack the Russian revolution for their own purposes.

All of them are right, in their own ways. Corporations have jumped on the woke train, often using it to deflect attention away from whatever nefarious activities they're up to. There is no doubt about the fact that its proponents lean strongly to the left in their political opinions and favour Marxism or one of its many offshoots…

I am glad this topic is getting attention. There is significant bias in academia in social science even outside flaws in statistical techniques. The field has been weaponized to build foundational support for political stances and blind institutional trust granted to academia is enabling it. This author mentions the implicit association test (IAT) as an example of a social science farce that is well known to be a farce, and notes that most social science work is undertaken in good faith.

However the damage has been done and it doesn’t matter if MOST work is done in good faith if the bad work has big impact. As an example, IATs have been used to make claims about unconscious biases and form the academic basis of books like “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo. Quillette wrote about problems with White Fragility and IAT as early as 2018 (https://quillette.com/2018/08/24/the-problem-with-white-fragility-theory/), and others continue to write about it even recently in 2020 (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/flaws-white-fragility-theory-primer/). However few people are exposed to these critical analyses, and the flaws in the scientific/statistical underpinnings have not mattered, and they have not stopped books like White Fragility from circulating by the millions.

We need a drastic rethink of academia, the incentives within it, and the controls that regulate it to stop the problem. Until then, it’s simply not worth taking fields like social science seriously.

The problem is that now we have all of these discussions on a stage in front of a mob.

Discourse is no longer a tool we use to approach a better mutual understanding, it’s a gladiator match where there has to be a loser and a winner.

I’ve run into this problem with people who use a lot of twitter. They would keep asking me to “state my position”, and also demand it to be about 1 sentence long. The problem being…I don’t usually have a “position”, but rather I have a set of things which haven’t yet been proven false. So it’s really a body of existing understanding, not an individual idea, which should be examined as part of a discussion. (I run into this problem with young people, in real life).

An prescient example might be my dislike of electronic voting machines. If I say this in public, to the audience that grew up on twitter, they’ll accuse me of being a Republican, an insurrectionist, racist, ivermectin conspiracist anti vaxxer.

I’m none of those things (although ever day I become close to being some sort of Republican), but the more complex discussion isn’t really possible on twitter. Because that is where so many people learn how to interact with others, snd where they learn to derive understanding, it doesn’t matter. And even trying to explain that some of these ideas can be bad independently springs some sort of Kafka trap.

Here’s a fantastic article that I think lays out a version of the problem:…

Woke-ism is a cult.

There is no generally accepted definition of woke, and that is largely by design to mislead others through well known psychological blindspots (Cialdini), towards inducing others to join collectivism while also inspiring disunity and hate, albeit indirectly.

The movement often couches its perspectives in power dynamics which follows elements common to Maoism and Communism, along with many other similar marxist movements. It also has elements from critical pedagogy (the critical turn), which has origins in Marxist movements.

The mind virus part of it is the same with any belief system that lends itself towards irrational delusion, inducing bitter resentment in individuals and falsely criticizing without any rational framework or basis, often ignoring objective reality for a false narrative.

Woke-ism is a cult of the semi-lucid insane brainwashed children they manage to mislead, who desperately try to poorly grapple with reality, miserably, and bitterly, while dragging everyone else down.

Its rather sad for the individuals who become both victim and perpetrator. There is no cure for insanity, nor the blindness induced.

If you want a rational discussion on this subject matter, I'd suggest checking over James Lindsay's work outing these type of movements. Your description is fairly misinformed.

https://newdiscourses.com/2023/03/workings-of-the-woke-cult/

White supremacy as an ideology is as poisonous as black supremacy or any other "ethnic" supremacy.

White supremacy as the label being used by "progressives" has nothing to do with the ideology other than in sharing a name. The label is just one of the many applied to those who dare to divert from the narrative, often used in situations where the "progressive" has talked herself into a corner from where there is no getting out other than by creating a path of labels to escape on.

I think it is better to only use the term "white supremacy" when describing the former. Don't use it as a label for something you find distasteful, only use it as a term for a specific ideology. The same goes for words like "fascism", "racism", all the "-phobias" and more. Take back the language from those [1] who have used it to drive their own narrative.

[1] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-derridean/

James Lindsay has a lot to say on this. The guy is probably the most intellectual commentator in conservatism. Here's the first part of his three part series on the death of the university.

https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-1-red-thread/

He says that the decline of universities was all started by Herbert Marcuse in the 60s. James reads all of Marcuse's old books and deconstructs them and shows how all the crazy stuff going on today in universities and soft sciences makes perfect sense from the perspective of these leftist theoreticians and their goals. Their goals are not to improve scientific understanding, but to turn absolutely everything in higher education into a political weapon to transform society.