”Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?”
This contrived question is working very hard to avoid sounding like plain old Both-Side-ism.
This FAIR organization sounds like another flavour of stochastic terrorism. Or perhaps stochastic fake balance? The key line is this:
“fair was basically virtue-signalling for the anti-woke,” he said. “It was not an organization designed to actually do anything.”
This is exactly like stochastic terrorism. It’s both a bug and a feature of the alt-right. They can’t quite actually ever come together to coordinate action, but the movement still creates action indirectly*. Here’s a great video covering this idea:
I’m not even sure it’s possible to be moderate right now. When one side is actively trying to suppress large groups of people (LGBTQ, BIPOC, poor people, socialists, Democrats), trying to take a middle position and pretend that both ends are bad is no better than actually taking the right wing position. As many have said, if there are 9 Nazis in a room and one person remaining silent, there are 10 Nazis in the room.
Yes, exactly. What does “moderate” even mean any more? People are finding a middle ground between fascism and everything else? That line is too thin to stand on. Claiming “moderate” requires believing that a reasonable non-fascist Right still exists. That’s a fantasy for people who never had to think about politics before and don’t want to start.
To be Moderate is to not believe in anything. They cannot because believing in anything forces them to take a side. Today they are between the liberals and the fascists, in twenty years time they may be between the liberals and the communists. They will still be Moderates.
They aren’t even nihilists, that would mean they would have to take a stand against everything.
Well now, they’re not against tolerance and diversity, they’re just against the groups that are advocating for tolerance and diversity being mean to people who are against tolerance and diversity (we’re gonna need a bigger eyeroll)
Fucking Christ, they’re like a shell corporation for fascism.
Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”;
Here we go again. When you liken your project to a fascist terror weapon designed to destroy inhabited planets and everything living on it, an act that would make the word genocide look for reinforcements, maybe, just maybe, you’re the baddies?
The later reference to Obi-Wan is kind of weird in that context.
Manhattan Institute is a member of the Koch State Policy Network.
The question also doesn’t make sense. What is “moderate”? Politically moderate, I guess. That’s fine. But “anti-woke”? The peddlers of “anti-woke” ideology have struggled to define what the heck “woke” is. Because they’re play-acting at academia, they can’t come out and use the functional definition they and everyone on the right uses—“ ‘woke’ means anything I don’t like”—because then their vaunted pseudo-academic position would seem meaningless. Which, of course, it is.
He has gleefully, trollishly launched legions of his followers on social media harassment campaigns against several personal friends of mine — all women of color, naturally — who dared to interview experts on things like human biology and human sexuality who purported such radical beliefs as “trans people exist” and "human sexuality is way more complicated than your middle school sex ed class explained it.”
Even among people with academic or professional degrees, there’s a tendency and desire to really get out over your skis. For people without professional training in a particular field, they always seem to revert back to middle school, as though that understanding of the world is the controlling one and all others are merely theoretical.
My partner has a Ph.D. in computational chemistry. She can only roll her eyes when people on the Internet talk about “quantum physics”—because she has had to use actual quantum equations in her research. I once mentioned to her something about the different electron shells that we learned about in high school and she said it’s even more complicated than that.
Could it be that the world is really complex and in high school we’re presented with a simplified version of it simply because we don’t yet have the training to understand the way things actually are? No, clearly it’s the people with years of study who are wrong.
This. This is how you identify as “moderate” right now. You declare that you respect the rights of people to viciously deny basic human rights to other people, and also respect the rights of those people being denied their basic human rights. It’s quite simple, really!
They all know exactly what woke means, though. It means being aware of social issues, and treating minorities with respect. They just don’t want to say so because it doesn’t make them sound great, and they can communicate just fine using the implicit term.
Indeed. This is because it is stochastic terrorism. For anyone interested, the video I linked above also explains this well- how the alt-right makes up terms without really ever defining them, then makes them an enemy. It’s like Schrödinger’s Enemy though. If you try to look closely at it, it jumps to something else. There’s no belief system underpinning it, which is why they can’t define anything. Great video.
Just a note that they did not “make” this up, though. They more often redefine terms, such as how socialism has been redefined to mean the worst aspects of 20th century communism. Woke existed as a term well before Fox news discovered it. There is evidence that it goes back to at least the 1930s (Leadbelly used it, for example). See this thread on this issue:
There is, though. It just means being aware of racism (and other forms of oppression) as you go through life and to participate in tearing that down. I suspect many know what the term means, but refuse to acknowledge that most people would embrace that idea when presented with it. So instead, they turn it on its head and pretend it means “oppressing white people” - which, is not what it means.
