For a long time, the word “woke” referred exclusively to being “awake to racial discrimination.” Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, the black folk singer who popularised the term, used it to warn black people to avoid the fate of the Scottsboro boys, a group of nine African American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama.
Both sides delude themselves that 'only the other side' is like that. Reading 'The Cancellation of the American Mind," by Greg Lukianoff. All about how the left went off the rails with cancel culture. But when I lived in the States I studied how the right went wrong, particularly conservative Christianity. Humans are humans. We always make it all about how glorious we are and how awful the other side is.
Slightly off-topic, but this morning I read about an elementary school here in California that hired a company called "Woke Kindergarten" to try and improve students' reading and test scores.
The company is exactly what you'd think it was, based on the name, and after two years the results were exactly as you'd expect.
"After all, like so many words nowadays, quibbling about the definition of words is much easier than acknowledging the problems the words describe." Isn't that the honest truth? I've been "woke" since I was in high school. And I'm going to stay that way, acknowledging every person I meet and know as a PERSON first, and all their other characteristics get consideration AFTER that acknowledgement.
It's a big problem with political partisanship. People keep expanding things until they have no meaning. In the case of trying to make things good by associating them with something good they dilute it. In the case of making something they don't like bad; they attach other crap to it. Again, diluting it into irrelevance.
A quibble: you refer at one point to "illogical feelings". Implying that some feelings are logical. I demur. This is something about which I see a fair amount of confusion. I will clear it up: feelings are not thoughts. They are emotions. As such, any and all feelings are by definition illogical.
People tend to attach ownership of something they don't like to the tribe they don't like, even when it is nonsense. You called Rich out on it. <3
Both sides delude themselves that 'only the other side' is like that. Reading 'The Cancellation of the American Mind," by Greg Lukianoff. All about how the left went off the rails with cancel culture. But when I lived in the States I studied how the right went wrong, particularly conservative Christianity. Humans are humans. We always make it all about how glorious we are and how awful the other side is.
Slightly off-topic, but this morning I read about an elementary school here in California that hired a company called "Woke Kindergarten" to try and improve students' reading and test scores.
The company is exactly what you'd think it was, based on the name, and after two years the results were exactly as you'd expect.
"After all, like so many words nowadays, quibbling about the definition of words is much easier than acknowledging the problems the words describe." Isn't that the honest truth? I've been "woke" since I was in high school. And I'm going to stay that way, acknowledging every person I meet and know as a PERSON first, and all their other characteristics get consideration AFTER that acknowledgement.
It's a big problem with political partisanship. People keep expanding things until they have no meaning. In the case of trying to make things good by associating them with something good they dilute it. In the case of making something they don't like bad; they attach other crap to it. Again, diluting it into irrelevance.
A quibble: you refer at one point to "illogical feelings". Implying that some feelings are logical. I demur. This is something about which I see a fair amount of confusion. I will clear it up: feelings are not thoughts. They are emotions. As such, any and all feelings are by definition illogical.