Engage & Participate

Oh dear so sorry to hear. Thanks for posting. Many people I respect are supporting. This is important. Thanks Josh

I empathize with the intent of being “woke” but the people I know who claim to be “woke” are not people whose reasoning represents anything I would choose to be associated with.

Chloe Valdary is such a beautiful soul...

I'm generally a fan, and there's a lot to like here. But I'm a little perplexed by this statement: "To perceive a person as an academic problem to be solved is not merely a technical error in one’s perception. It is fundamentally evil." Overfitting the data, sure. Misguided, counterproductive, partial, yes. Narcissistic, maybe. But calling it evil seems to add to polarization rather than transcending it.

I imagine this analysis (of mental health metrics being measurably higher for conservative/right vs liberal/left) extends to "gender dysphoria". (Its apparently a cultural contagion now hitting young female adolescents particularly). In particular, that the stresses of the biological maturation process ( puberty ) would be more likely catastrophized by those leaning left and cashing in on the higher status victimization gains in the hierarchy of left wing intersectionality ; but in this case the oppressor is biological nature itself (and not some ruling class/race/system). I've been reading some articles about it on the PITT substack: pitt.substack.com/p/headline-when-a-quarter-of-the-class

I think the categories of Social Justice Fundamentalism and Liberal Social Justice offer both a helpful distinction and an oversimplification or semi-false dichotomy. To Yglesias’s quote, “At the same time there is a school of left-of-liberal thought on identity issues that has stubbornly refused to give itself a name “ , I would say that maybe those left of liberalism have only refused to accept a singular name. Because I can think of a whole list of names like democratic socialist, leftist, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anarchist, environmentalist, abolitionist and so on. While many of these left wing subgroups share some values, they don’t share all values, and they often argue about their differences. My hope is that a collection of big coalitions can emerge around tangible shared goals that are effective enough, focused enough, emotionally intelligent enough, inclusive enough and aspirational enough that people from across the liberal-progressive-leftist spectrum can collaborate without feeling like they are giving up or betraying the values, identities and goals that are more specific to their sub-groups.

Damn, that is so good.

I would like to see "Western Liberalism" as the distinction versus Liberalism, since there are very compelling arguments that wokeism is fundamentally challenging the upsides and advances of Western thought. I can see liberal social justice as an evolution of those Western fundamentals.

I'm having my usual response, which sounds something like: "I see where this is going and like it, and also, I like all of it" (except the fundamentalist bits). More accurately, big fan of liberal social justice but think intersectionality, at least as I understand it, plays a role in the achievement of liberal social justice in practice. I'd consider adding an arrow, dotted line or something like that between critical and liberal and maybe choosing nicer colors for the left hand column so we're not unconsciously bastardizing critical theory, which does matter. Useful to see the flow, but think these are still worth integrating and not splitting.

This is really well done, but too complicated for most to follow, it is much easier to label "woke" and "wokeism" as a problem since BOTH Liberal Social Justice and Social Justice Fundamentalism politically have come from the left, and the current movement of fanaticism from the right is to label everything on the left with one broad stroke and as an existential threat to those on the right. Demonization of all of the left is the approach, and "woke" (and green, and sustainable, etc.) is a term that has been successfully weaponized. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/16/republicans-2024-dark-apocalyptic/

Adding this here (posted on this earlier) to demonstrate the detrimental effects of "wokeism" on mental health. As I keep going on and on about (haha), the problem many of us see is not about social justice, inclusion--all that *good* stuff. It's about how all this is being approached in some quarters: the *damage* that is being done. jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls

From one of the links in one of the links in the Twitter thread posted above :-D. This essay is excellent, I think: freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means?r=1emko&utm_campaign=post&utm_med...