WOKE and proud of it....

[Immanuel Can]

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.

Yes, you're right. To be fair, I feel the same about somebody like Andrew Tate, on the other side, the extreme "right" of things: he spends far too much time trying to prove he's "a man," and it makes me think he's somehow nervous about it...not sure that enough people know it's true, so that it must be publicized again and again. If he had said it once, and gone away, we might believe him more easily than if he keeps trumpeting what a boss he is. But as things are, we cannot help but doubt his real confidence. His conversion to the most sexist religion on earth only underlines that nervousness, I think, and only makes it worse.

The same is true of Wokies: they spend so much time signalling their "virtue," and trying to prove to everybody that they are "liberators" or "advocates of the oppressed," you feel that they must really be in doubt of it in a very serious way. And when they frantically try to differentiate themselves from "racists" (i.e. everybody who expresses even a hesitation about the total Woke preoccupation with race), that they secretly suspect themselves of falling seriously short of the standard they're claiming to uphold. If they did not feel that, they would be nowhere near so anxious to prove they are not racist.

And, of course, they are racist. Race is their one essentialist certainty. They are absolutely committed to the proposition that race determines everything you are, and your total worth as a person, and your right even to speak on particular topics. Even MLK was too right-wing for these people, because he wanted us to set race aside, and judge people by their characters. This is anathema to Wokies. EVERYTHING must be judged by race, and there are really essentially only two, in their thinking: black, and white. That's really how extremely limited and racist they are.

[accelafine]

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.

Yes, you're right. To be fair, I feel the same about somebody like Andrew Tate, on the other side, the extreme "right" of things: he spends far too much time trying to prove he's "a man," and it makes me think he's somehow nervous about it...not sure that enough people know it's true, so that it must be publicized again and again. If he had said it once, and gone away, we might believe him more easily than if he keeps trumpeting what a boss he is. But as things are, we cannot help but doubt his real confidence. His conversion to the most sexist religion on earth only underlines that nervousness, I think, and only makes it worse.

The same is true of Wokies: they spend so much time signalling their "virtue," and trying to prove to everybody that they are "liberators" or "advocates of the oppressed," you feel that they must really be in doubt of it in a very serious way. And when they frantically try to differentiate themselves from "racists" (i.e. everybody who expresses even a hesitation about the total Woke preoccupation with race), that they secretly suspect themselves of falling seriously short of the standard they're claiming to uphold. If they did not feel that, they would be nowhere near so anxious to prove they are not racist.

And, of course, they are racist. Race is their one essentialist certainty. They are absolutely committed to the proposition that race determines everything you are, and your total worth as a person, and your right even to speak on particular topics. Even MLK was too right-wing for these people, because he wanted us to set race aside, and judge people by their characters. This is anathema to Wokies. EVERYTHING must be judged by race, and there are really essentially only two, in their thinking: black, and white. That's really how extremely limited and racist they are.

They can also be distinguished by their sanctimonious need to project their own odious personality traits onto others. Truly loathesome human beings. I can't think of any worse group around at this time. Their favourite phrase at the moment? 'I'm not 'anti-Jew I'm anti-ZIONIST'. Yeah right

[Immanuel Can]

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.

Oh, I disagree.

There are certainly more powerful narratives than Marxism, narratives that have endured for thousands of years -- both good and bad ones. Marxism is of very recent provenance and full of absurdities, really. It is by no means an obvious set of beliefs, and has a really poor track record. However, in Wokism, it's been regenerated. The zombie of Marx has stood up again. For few of the old narratives are so appealing to the baseness in human nature, as the "Woke Creed" indicates. And it is that that makes Wokism so alluring to people; it plays to the very worst in them, and really asks nothing virtuous from them. And all the old codes and creeds demand more, in regard to virtue.

People today do not like moral demands being made of them, unless they've chosen to impose those demands on themselves. The old narratives ask too much of us. Wokism invites us to turn out own predilections and preferences into moral imperatives, instead. That's more attractive.

But secular Conservatism...as you point out, is going nowhere, really. And that's because it, too, is unanchored to compelling narrative. It's based on a good impulse, in a way -- to preserve the best of what we have from the past, while still moving forward. (Somebody has called secular Conservatism, "Progressiveness with safety-rails," and that's tidy way to put it.) But secularism has no narrative, really. It's just a denial or attempted nullification of all the previous narratives, and an attempt to retain the goods of the past without retaining the worldviews that made those gains possible.

[Immanuel Can]

They can also be distinguished by their sanctimonious need to project their own odious personality traits onto others. Truly loathesome human beings. I can't think of any worse group around at this time. Their favourite phrase at the moment? 'I'm not 'anti-Jew I'm anti-ZIONIST'. Yeah right

Well, yes...and again, that inability to recognize contradictions: that they advocate for the HAMAS terrorists who would throw them off rooftops, and hate the only liberal, Western and open society in the Middle East. And they seem utterly incapable of detecting the irony.

[Alexis Jacobi]

From The Queering of the American Child:

Queer Theory was built to run on the machine that is Freire's Marxist theory of education. In a sense, Freire's ideas had already queered U.S. education prior to Queer Theory's ascent in the academy. Freire's theory of education is one that challenges existing concepts of knowledge and who counts as a knower. In fact, the heart of Freire's argument, which finds its home in all of education today, is that learners must be taught how to dismantle the “mythical norms” of society.

Queer Theory is entirely concerned with analyzing and abolishing norms, so educators who shared Freire's faith found QueerTheory to be a potent tool that they could incorporate into their teaching practices.

The generation of activist researchers, teacher-educators, and teachers that followed in the footsteps of Freire, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and others pushed queer Theory into schools so they could challenge the status-quo of cultural norms related to sex, gender, and sexuality. Activists like bell hooks pushed the intersectional aspects of race, sex, and gender into education through books like Teaching To Transgress, and according to Isaac Gottesman, the post structuralist feminists, who were precursors to Queer Theorists, made headway at bringing their ideas into the classroom on the back of the critical turn.

These activists and others more directly located in Critical Pedagogy believed that “every dimension of schooling and every form of education practice are politically contested spaces" that must be fought for. So, drawing on their critical roots, they set out to radically politicize their classrooms as they developed their “social activist teacher persona[s].

No stone would be left unturned in the schoolhouse. Queer Activists began queering not just the school curriculum but school policies and procedures, all under the guise of becoming more “culturally relevant,” “diverse,” “equitable,” and “inclusive.”

Each advance was accompanied by the moral weight of an argument to increase “LGBT empathy," “visibility," and “representation.” To be abundantly clear, many of these Queer Activists had no idea that they were, in fact, Queer activists. They thought they were simply embracing the latest and best educational practices to improves schooling, especially for kids who might have a tougher time.

Most of the educators who have irrevocably harmed education — and therefore children — over the past three decades aren't aware that their theory of education and teaching practices are derived from the works of Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, Henry Giroux, Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Joe Kincheloe, Peter McLaren, Gloria-Ladson Billings, Geneva Gay, Mary K. Bryson, Suzannede Castell, Jack Halberstam, Deborah Britzman, Judith Butler and many others.

Still, despite their ignorance, the literature is unambiguous. Educators today have inherited a critical orientation towards schooling from these revolutionary radicals, who have been explicit about their intentions and goals for a very long time.

[promethean75]

When Marx and Engels said they wanted to make the factories and workers gay, they meant happy and joyful, dufus.

[Systematic]

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?

I'm sorry your king is punishing you with woke-ness.

[Alexis Jacobi]

When Marx and Engels said they wanted to make the factories and workers gay, they meant happy and joyful, dufus.

So sorry, Promethean. All this anti-Marxist talk must be giving you hives …

[Alexis Jacobi]

It’s a rough time in Gaza! Hamas operatives have a super tough time finding an intact rooftop from which to throw their captive queers!

[Immanuel Can]

When Marx and Engels said they wanted to make the factories and workers gay, they meant happy and joyful, dufus.

Not such a "dufus." In this case, he's right.

When the Cultural Marxists talk about "gay," they mean gay. But "gay" is not quite the same as "queer." If you read queer literature, such as Halperin's original book Saint Foucault, (1995) "...queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without essence..."

In other words, "queer" is opposed to heterosexuality. But note this: as subsequent events have proved, it's also opposed to anything that becomes part of the "normal, the legitimate, the dominant," including gayness, if it becomes mainstreamed. So once gays started marrying each other and adopting children, then they became a target for queer theory. They weren't, in a sense, "queer enough" anymore. Likewise, Feminists were useful only so long as Feminism was not part of the dominant social narrative; but once it was, and once trans came along, trans was more "queer" than Feminism, and women could forget about any advocacy for their sports or social privileges or rights to segregate prisons from "transwomen." Queer had moved to a new foothold.

And if transing ever becomes mainstream, legitimate, dominant, or normal, you can be quite sure that queer theorists will immediately be opposed to that, as well. It's the root of what "queer" is supposed to signify. It's a resounding "not that" to anything that becomes normalized.

That's much more than gay. Many gays today would not be happy any longer to have their options dictated by queer theory. Queer is a very extreme position indeed. And just as it has no "essence," so too it has no loyalties. It's against everything stable, everything status quo. So the minute one "liberatory" cause has any measure of success, and becomes in any way mainstream, you can be assured that queer thinkers will not leave it alone anymore. It will become the new enemy.

[Gary Childress]

If you read queer literature, such as Halperin's original book Saint Foucault, (1995) "...queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without essence..."

That seems like it's probably a good definition of what "queer" generally refers to. Is there something erroneous or nefarious about that definition? Should Halperin have used a different definition, and if so what?

[Alexiev]

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.

Of course the desire for a smaller nose or more shapely breasts or fewer wrinkles is also a social-psychological phenomenon. Perhaps it is less politically charged, but desire for social acceptance is at the heart of most cosmetic surgery.

I actually agree with some of your concerns. My kindergarten grandson in liberal Portland is, along with his classmates, asked what pronouns he prefers. It's likely that emphasizing gender choice causes more confusion than it solves. Without knowing much about it, I'd guess such policies might help those few children who are somehow innately trans, and harm and confuse others. Whether the (perhaps) vital help these policies offer the few justifies the minor confusion it causes the many is a question for which I have no answer.

Obviously, disliking one's gender is a form of self-hatred. But so is disliking one's nose, breast or wrinkles. I don't doubt that so profound a form of self denial as transexuality probably often suggests deep psychological issues that surgery will not solve. Nonetheless, I may be wrong. I'd leave that to the medical experts, not the philosophy posters or poli ticians.

[promethean75]

"All this anti-Marxist talk must be giving you hives"

I call for the immediate unionized cooperative ownership of all the means of production and distribution of the world's major industries by the working class.

[Alexis Jacobi]

You’ll need to establish a firm time-limit.

[Immanuel Can]

If you read queer literature, such as Halperin's original book Saint Foucault, (1995) "...queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without essence..."

That seems like it's probably a good definition of what "queer" generally refers to. Is there something erroneous or nefarious about that definition? Should Halperin have used a different definition, and if so what?

No, I think Halperin is telling the truth. How could he not be: his book is the one that essentially launched the movement. But is queer anything good? Look at what they say, and you tell me.