WOKE and proud of it....

[attofishpi]

Being woke is futile. It's like being nailed to a cross and trying to survive longer. The anti-woke are determined to f*** up the world. They get their way sometimes. Eventually we will perish.

Please list all the things of and how being "WOKE" makes the world a better place - than NOT being WOKE.

I'll add to this:

- am I WOKE because I have LGB friends - no issue with their sexual preferences?
- am I WOKE because I have friends of pretty much all ethnicities?
- am I WOKE because I believe in a multicultural society that does NOT overrun my own culture?
- am I WOKE because I believe in LEGAL immigration at levels that is not going to destroy my own culture of my own native people?
- am I WOKE because I believe that ISALMIC ideology is a very very EXTREME ideology that should be avoided as part of immigration to my nation?

[Alexis Jacobi]

…

I looked up the title you mentioned and these bolded words interested me.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

This (from the blurb) also caught my attention:

the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

How •fiction works• is one question certainly, but •why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times• remains opaque so far.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Some quotes from Camp of the Saints (Jean Raspail):

Day by day, month by month, doubt by doubt, law and order became fascism; education, constraint; work, alienation; revolution, mere sport; leisure, a privilege of class; marijuana, a harmless weed; family, a stifling hothouse; affluence, oppression; success, a social disease; sex, an innocent pastime; youth, a permanent tribunal; maturity, the new senility; discipline, an attack on personality; Christianity... and the West... and white skin...

Whole countries full, bristling with poignant appeals, pleas that seemed more like threats, and not begging now for linen, but for checks to their account. And in time it got worse. Soon you saw them on television, hordes of them, churning up, dying by the thousands, and nameless butchery became a feature, a continuous show, with its masters of ceremonies and its full-time hucksters. The poor had overrun the earth. Self-reproach was the order of the day; happiness, a sign of decadence. Any pleasure? Beneath discussion.

[Alexiev]

…

This (from the blurb) also caught my attention:

the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

How •fiction works• is one question certainly, but •why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times• remains opaque so far.

Of course the notion that our times are particularly divided and turbulent is incorrect, even ridiculous. When I was a youth, college kids were being shot at Kent State (and their cohorts in Nam). ROTC buildings were bombed. America was far more divided than. It is today.

When my father was a young man, he was landing in Normandy.

I'm familiar with Bolano and Sodeberg, but I've never read their stories.

Saunders writes about technique more than "meaning", although certainly Tolstoy, especially in his later period, obsessed about meaning. In "Alyosha the Pot", per Saunders, Tolstoy seems to laud dutiful, cheerful acceptance of fate. But his artistic sensibilities will not allow him to praise unreservedly. The reader sees Alyosha's cheerful acceptance with mixed feelings. Is he really being good to his father through obedience? Or would argument and rebellion help not only him, but his father?

The story takes 10 minutes to read, and is doubtless available on line.

I'd be interested to hear what you think about cosmetic surgery in general. How is gender affirming cosmetic surgery different?

[Alexis Jacobi]

The story takes 10 minutes to read, and is doubtless available on line.

Thank heavens I have Leo Tolstoy The Collected Shorter Fiction (Vols.1&2) in the Everyman’s Library edition.

[Alexiev]

Some quotes from Camp of the Saints (Jean Raspail):

Day by day, month by month, doubt by doubt, law and order became fascism; education, constraint; work, alienation; revolution, mere sport; leisure, a privilege of class; marijuana, a harmless weed; family, a stifling hothouse; affluence, oppression; success, a social disease; sex, an innocent pastime; youth, a permanent tribunal; maturity, the new senility; discipline, an attack on personality; Christianity... and the West... and white skin...

Whole countries full, bristling with poignant appeals, pleas that seemed more like threats, and not begging now for linen, but for checks to their account. And in time it got worse. Soon you saw them on television, hordes of them, churning up, dying by the thousands, and nameless butchery became a feature, a continuous show, with its masters of ceremonies and its full-time hucksters. The poor had overrun the earth. Self-reproach was the order of the day; happiness, a sign of decadence. Any pleasure? Beneath discussion.

Self reproach has one advantage over reproaching others; it is more likely to lead to valuable change. Often, however, people turn from self reproach to fake self reproach. Reparations for past sins and apologies for the misdeeds of our ancestors are phony. Why should we apologize for sins we have not committed? Perhaps we should concentrate on self reproach, instead of reproaching the dead white males who can no longer defend themselves, and who are the products of a different culture.

Attacks on "Christianity, the West, and White skin" are reasonable in that these institutions are (for white westerners) institutions that affect the attackers, and that the attackers may be able to change. What good does it do white Americans to criticize warfare in some New Guinea backwater?

I'll grant that sometimes self reproach turns into self hatred. Sometimes it is projected and turns into loathing for others. Neither is productve.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I'll grant that sometimes self reproach turns into self hatred. Sometimes it is projected and turns into loathing for others. Neither is productive.

And what’s that got to do with poor Alyoshka, Bartleby the Scrivener, or the price of Maoist tea at a Manhattan Whole Foods?!?

[Alexiev]

I'll grant that sometimes self reproach turns into self hatred. Sometimes it is projected and turns into loathing for others. Neither is productive.

And what’s that got to do with poor Alyoshka, Bartleby the Scrivener, or the price of Maoist tea at a Manhattan Whole Foods?!?

Alyosha and Bartleby never reproached themselves. They "preferred not to".

Perhaps they should have, though. They could have improved both their moral and physical well being.

In the other hand, decrying the attempts if others to solve their psychological problems may lead "where passions have the privilege to work, and never hear the sound of their own name." (Wordsworth)

[Alexis Jacobi]

I was drawing a contrast between Alyosha’s ever-agreeableness and Bartleby’s unwillingness to cooperate in the schemes of others. It escapes me now how Bartleby died. But I assume with no •look of surprise•.

We will get back to ideological battles soon enough but …

(And speaking of odd characters in literature)

… did you ever read Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell?

[Immanuel Can]

Being woke is futile. It's like being nailed to a cross and trying to survive longer. The anti-woke are determined to f*** up the world.

On that note, here, we might say, is the Woke Creed -- minus the posturing and self-congratulation:

- I am WOKE because I'm insecure about how virtuous other people think I am.
- I am WOKE because I am rich, Western, upper middle class and spoiled.
- I am WOKE because nothing is ever my fault.
- I am WOKE because I am bored.
- I am WOKE because the major mass media is.
- I am WOKE because I believe I see things that the rest of civilization is asleep to.
- I am WOKE because I know nothing true about history.
- I am WOKE because I believe everything is "constructed."
- I am WOKE because somebody who seemed smarter than me told me I should be.
- I am WOKE because I don't want to diet or exercise.
- I am WOKE because I don't pay my own bills.
- I am WOKE because I am envious and covetous.
- I am WOKE because I could not establish relationships of family or community.
- I am WOKE because I am terrified of climate change.
- I am WOKE because I am terrified of growing up and becoming an adult.
- I am WOKE because I am a violent person, but am weak and need a mob to help me act on that.
- I am WOKE because I like free things, and trust that Big Government will parent me forever.
- I am WOKE because I can't build, invent or add anything to society...but I can complain and destroy, instead.
- I am WOKE because I hate order and authority, and want to be left free to do anything I please.
- I am WOKE because I think power is behind all alleged morality, and there is no such real thing as morality...except that I have lots of it myself.
- I am WOKE because I think what I put on for show is much more important than anything I have actually done.
- I am WOKE because I can't think for myself, and have limited critical faculties.
- I am WOKE because I don't do logic.
- I am WOKE because I don't understand science.
- I am WOKE because I think self-contradictions are no problem for coherence.
- I am WOKE because I believe race is an absolute, ironclad fact that defines every person and cannot be denied, but biological sex is completely fluid.
- I am WOKE because I don't know what a "woman" is.
- I am WOKE because I am sexually adrift, debauched, or confused, and determined to make everybody else that way.
- I am WOKE because I am terrified of the lack of meaning my secular society has left me with.
- I am WOKE because I have achieved nothing, and fear I never will achieve anything.
- I am WOKE because I follow the most wicked promulgator of lies in all of human history down the dark tunnel of Marxism.
- I am WOKE because I fear I am a piece of historical flotsam, swirling toward the drain of time, and desperately trying to establish my own signficance, and willing to see the world burned to ashes in order to make that happen.

But why be "proud" of any of that?

[Alexis Jacobi]

I'd be interested to hear what you think about cosmetic surgery in general. How is gender affirming cosmetic surgery different?

The difference to take notice of is in the pathology of gender dysphoria as a social-psychological phenomenon.

I have watched numerous ultra-positive documentaries about parents helping their misgendered children undergo hormone treatments and surgery. And I’ve seen or read as many cases of children, now adults, who deeply regret what was done — and are now activists against the processes.

I cannot say I understand the cause of this and other (what appear to be) social hysterias.

But I have a strong sense that what we have been talking about here — queer theory activism, activist critical theory — which operate through undermining established categories determined to be •oppressive•, may have contributed to a profound sense of dissatisfaction with self — what one is. And an activist’s praxis in the remodeling of self.

Your perspective that the Sixties were far more tumultuous than our present is interesting. It must have seemed then that everything was on the verge of explosion or collapse.

[Alexis Jacobi]

With all respect, Immanuel, I strongly sense that the logic of the critical theories generally, based as they are in an established Marxist historical interpretation; deeply infused into the very perceptual structure of most people, and taught in the public schools, calls forth a response, a contrasting narrative that is more powerful, more convincing than the operative one — but it simply has not been articulated.

The critical theories call forth reaction to them but the power of reaction — force, decisiveness, even violence — is not enough in and of itself. That is where so-called Conservatism fails. It is incapable of conserving anything at all and is carried along in the general progressive current.

It just laments that things are that way.

[accelafine]

Being woke is futile. It's like being nailed to a cross and trying to survive longer. The anti-woke are determined to f*** up the world.

On that note, here, we might say, is the Woke Creed -- minus the posturing and self-congratulation:

- I am WOKE because I'm insecure about how virtuous other people think I am.

This is the only one you need except that I think they are WELL aware of how NON-virtuous they are hence the need to constantly signal it.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Pregnant, Sylvia Plath wrote:

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Accelafine — what are you reading these days?