I think it is, and it's also a useful conversational marker.
As soon as someone starts complaining about "woke" and "SJWs" and "cancel culture" and so on, I know I can just switch off and disengage, as anything they have to say on the topic will be some reactionary bullshit they're parroting at me.
The first thing would be for someone to actually define "woke", as opposed to slinging it around as a conveniently-nebulous catch-all to describe people they're opposed to (see also "liberal" and "conservative"). What is the woke manifesto?
If you have something to say, then please just say it without couching it behind vague terms and "you can connect the dots yourself" conspiratorial thinking.
The American right has spent the past 35 years inventing scary new names for the same nebulous concept of a Marxist horde threatening to prevent them from speaking honestly.
It’s been known as “political correctness”, “social justice warriors”, “wokeness” and certainly a bunch of other names. The fundamental premise doesn’t change because it’s rooted in some deeper fear.
Do you think that no one has ever unironically used "politically correct", "social justice warrior", or "woke" to describe themselves or their opinions?
I'm not saying that the response to it isn't rooted in some deeper fear, but that doesn't mean that the phenomenon they are afraid of doesn't exist.
My first exposure to the term "social justice" was several years ago, when a family member began working with local jails and businesses, personally visiting and establishing relationships with inmates, and working to help reduce recidivism by arranging jobs for former inmates. I have never heard the addendum "warrior" added as a self-description, and have only ever heard it applied as a term of mockery from the right.
> I have never heard the addendum "warrior" added as a self-description, and have only ever heard it applied as a term of mockery from the right.
I'm reluctant to name specific individuals, but there are people who embrace the "SJW" term for themselves. For example, the flair next to the username of this semi-famous developer[0] is a self-description that he is known for.[1]
Perhaps you could argue that he is being ironic, but it is a self-description and he certainly doesn't mean to mock people who identify that way.
Of course it exists, but for decades it's been cast into a mold that pattern-matches a longstanding reactionary anxiety.
Just like "cosmopolitan" is a neutral/positive adjective by its dictionary definition, but has a very negative connotation in certain right-wing and/or anti-Semite circles.
> if you do not think the kinds of behavior we are seeing where people's lives are being ruined by mob justice are anything other than "bogeymen"
That's not how I took their response at all. I believe they were specifically picking up your derogatory use of the term "woke". If you meant "illiberal", why not use that term? It's far less ambiguous and less loaded.
Check the author of the comment you are referring to, it's not me. For what it's worth, I do not use the term "woke" for the reason you mentioned, but if someone asks what definition I would apply to it if I had to (as I was here) what I wrote is my answer.
The thesis of the illiberal left isn't that universality under the law shouldn't exist, the free speech shouldn't exist, that individualism shouldn't exist, that color-blindness shouldn't exist, that equality of opportunity shouldn't exist, or anything else.
The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen. But the goal of abandoning liberalism is not actually to abandon those things, but to actually really realize them.
The thesis is that our current systems are not principled either in their means or their ends.
And it is true. Free speech is proportional to your means to challenge threats to your livelihood. Rule of law, universality under the law, equality of opportunity, simply do not exist - depending mainly on your socio-economic status but also on other axes such as racial perception of the individual by society, and so on.
Equally, the thesis isn't that we shouldn't have color-blindness, simply that the current social and material reality makes this impossible. As a result of this, attempts/pretensions at color-blindness simply make the problem worse.
If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex. The exact same set of theories are applied to race, before racial abolition there must be a realization of the existence of racial identity (which is indeed the definition of race in the leftist sense - racial identity is completely orthogonal to traits and genetics, it is indeed a completely cultural and social phenomenon and process), then true racial equality, then essentially complete racial abolition.
Systems that actually provide real equality of opportunity will always provide actually equitable collective outcomes on the average.
Equally, the leftist opposition is not to markets themselves. The leftist opposition is to our current set of property relations and to the relationships of productions. Attempts to change those when the time is not opportune have been disastrous, so the aim is to compensate and slowly work towards actually fixing them using state intervention that ancillary limit the freedom of the free market. But there is no inherent opposition to markets at all.
This worldview is only a few decades younger than classical liberalism itself, and started with the disappointed third estate of the French Revolution. Put simply, the thesis is that classical liberalism failed to achieve its promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that making good on those promises requires more careful and less idealistic theories of society and social change than the idealist ones of classical liberalism.
I just thought you would enjoy not arguing against strawmen.
Well articulated and a good example of why one ought to be able to cleanly argue both sides of an argument if one expects to be taken seriously.
I would take issue with your first point: many of those who ascribe to these theories believe that the principles you mention like free speech are inherently platonic: they cannot be achieved in any meaningful sense, regardless of what is done, due to the inherent nature of human beings. The measures you refer to often do not have the goal of bringing about justice through mechanisms other than coercion of society against its inherent nature (Ie, by force.) So I would argue that many abandon the goal of achieving them in the first place due to their unattainability. Ironically, honest liberals acknowledge the realities of the difficulty of ever attaining them in full - however the liberalist approach is that there is no other moral effort other than to try to close the gap as small as reality will permit, and that ultimately the method of steady, incremental progress towards attaining these things will in fact result in the best of all possible worlds.
I certainly agree that a lot of those ideals are platonic, though not at all. It's important to note that I'm only limiting myself to those arguments for the purposes of the argument.
I also agree that steady, incremental progress has a lot of value, and that there is probably a bit more improvement that is feasible within the liberal framework, which is why I'm glad to work with liberals on those.
The issue I have with the liberal perspective on this is that most of the imperfection (or gross deficiency, depending on the specific aspect) ultimately originates in economics, both socially and economically. The result of this is that (reluctantly) I had to recognize that these deficiencies are not solvable within the liberal framework, as it presupposes the economic and social relations that cause the issues. That said, I don't think that this change of framework shouldn't be done incrementally, if such a thing is at all possible.
On the moral side, though arguing morals of the internet quickly gets hairy, the leftist argument (this one I consider incomplete), is that there is quite some absurdity in claiming that using coercion for the goal of changing social relations in a way that will clearly improve society, since liberal society itself is ultimately based on massive amounts of coercion, which is reproduced by the perpetuation of the current framework.
I'd also take issue with the idea that society has an inherent nature which social change butts against. Indeed, not only are the mechanisms for social change, coercive as they may be, themselves a part of society and not extrinsic to it, but there is very little in the way of inherent nature as far as society is concerned, as society itself has seen almost total change in a great many ways as the relationships between the self, the social, and the material changed.
That said, I certainly understand your position, and my goal wasn't really to attempt to debate which viewpoint is right - not only is it that I cannot fully do them justice, but the nuances of of each one of our contentions I think merit a full thread or more by themselves. I just think a lot of liberals do not really understand the illiberal left at all. I think the peak of this was the Peterson vs Zizek debate, where Peterson read the Communist Manifesto once, and then operated in idées reçues for the actual positions of the illiberal left, in the process completely missing the point and leading to a non-debate.
I don't understand how I was arguing with a strawman, when your entire argument is explaining WHY the left is illiberal. I said that the illiberal left differs from liberals in that they don't, for example, find color-blindness to be a reasonable strategy for eliminating racism. You go on to explain why the illiberal left doesn't find color-blindness to be a reasonable strategy for eliminating racism. No strawmanning was done, nor was a moral judgment.
To address some of your points. You say
> The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen
Liberalism doesn't make a claim regarding whether or not things exist or not. It is a fixed compass of procedural principles. Completely consistent of means, independent of ends, and independent of the state of things. You can't say that "free speech doesn't exist in the real world," when free speech is a procedural description of the way the system should run. If there is a failure of free speech to be applied unilaterally, that isn't a failure of liberalism, so much as an implementation error, and a failure to actually run the system as described. Your argument is like saying that "habeas corpus doesn't exist because the Japanese were interned in WW2." Habeas corpus is a procedural description of a process. What happened in WW2 wasn't habeas corpus not existing, but an implementation failure where habeas corpus was not implemented.
Much of the liberal ethos was present in the country since the get-go, and the failures of the country were actually failures of implementation. How can you have slaves, how can you treat people differently in accordance with their race, how can women not vote, in a country whose espoused ethics describe systems that would in no way tolerate these failings? The strongest leaps forward in progress have come from making the claim "this is what the liberal ethos describes, and this is how you're failing at it." MLK or the suffragettes are making the case that they're being denied their ability to act as individual actors, being denied equality under the law.
Now, compare this to the modern left.
> If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex.
You have described the exact opposite of what the modern left is. In the 60s-00s, the movement regarding gender equality was primarily what I would have described as a liberal movement. One that is hyper focused on individualism, and asserting that identity could exist as independently from sex or race as one wanted. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, that is as valid an expression of what it means to be a female as any other variant. This is an anti-collective, purely individualistic position, and is spot on with the liberal assertions of individualism and (gender)-blindness.
The modern leftist position is a complete inversion of this. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, are you sure you're not a boy? Your gender presentation is rather male, you must at least be non-binary? Do you see how this is a complete inversion? It goes back to making the assertion that these gender expressions are actually fundamentally to be associated with fixed collectives. I find it to be a much more powerful expression for a man to have long hair, wear dresses and makeup, love whoever they want to love, and say "I'm a man, and this is what being a man means to me." I don't take any issue with that same person asserting that they're a woman, I just think, again, that it could not stand in starker opposition to what is clearly the extension of the liberal movement regarding gender identity.
I'd keep discussing more of your points, and I'd be happy to continue later, but I'm honestly slightly apprehensive by your tone that you might not actually be interested in a conversation. Like I said, though, if you're looking to continue the conversation genuinely, then I'd be happy to.
In summary, I think the illiberal left DO think that universality under the law, free speech, individualism, color-blindness, equality of opportunity shouldn't exist. Your argument is that they do think that they should exist, but believe that they don't exist. My case against this is that, not only do I virtually never see any of these things espoused as values by leftists, but often see them ridiculed. And as I said, these are all descriptions of procedural means, they are not ends. So you literally cannot believe in those things if the procedures you want to see implemented are done so in pursuit of corrective ends. I can't say I believe in free speech, but then restrict the speech that I think that is harmful to the equitable outcomes I want. Controlling speech in pursuit of outcomes is itself the opposite of what free speech is. The desired outcomes are irrelevant. To then say that leftists "don't believe these shouldn't exist," is not correct. They very much don't believe that these procedural systems should exist, because none of the procedures they design or implement remotely resemble any of these systems.
Oh no, poor literary agent caught posting on Gab, a far right white supremacist website, and losing her job. Thoughts and prayers.
More seriously if you think that's a problem IMO the solution is to ask for better employee protection laws so that people can't be fired at will. This is not a free speech problem IMO, it's a worker right issue.
And if it turns out that her contract did mention that she shouldn't publicly engage in something that would damage the company's image or something of the sort, well, that's just the way it works really.
The actual posts I saw were on Parler, and she wasn't posting anything even remotely connected to white supremacy, just normal things you would post on Twitter. She was banned for having an account, as best I can tell. This shouldn't surprise anyone. (And your comment obviously provides further evidence for why this shouldn't surprise anyone.)
Gab isn't a far right white supremacist website. It's just right wing Twitter. I don't understand where all this hyperbole comes from but it's a perfect example of the low-information individuals we have in society today.
The populist right has been systemically purged from Twitter. It's not that Twitter is left wing but they ban right wing thought, leading it to be a slanted echo-chamber. Gab is definitely right wing Twitter.
I've seen equally whacky things trending on the left side, e.g. "Russian Ads on Facebook won Trump the election".
> equally whacky things trending on the left side, e.g. "Russian Ads on Facebook won Trump the election".
Why is that "whacky"? There were Russian ads.[1] They obviously intended to affect the election result (because why bother otherwise). Whether or not they were actually successful in affecting the election is unknowable. But it's not flat-earther-whacky to think they succeeded.
I don't think you understand what "circumstantial evidence" is.
I'm aware I'm biased, but in this case the facts are in plain sight for Russian ads. A Republican authored that report. You may think yourself unbiased by saying "both sides are the same" but both sides are in fact not the same at all.
The "right" may say the same about "election fraud" but saying is not the same as having a well-sourced report, and federal investigation that netted multiple indictments and convictions.
