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We’ve semantic-drifted a long way. ‘Woke’ first hit my radar as a black activist term around Ferguson/BLM in 2014. Feels like yesterday. It’s gone from a brain-dead obvious thing to be to a brain dead obvious thing to avoid being.
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People who are not woke: blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, gays, trans people. People who are woke: a small minority of college-educated, disproportionately white, disproportionately wealthy people + educated, professional middle class minority rent-seekers
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Back then, to me it meant “being alive to structural iniquities that lead to black kids getting arbitrarily executed by cops” Now it means “power-tripping sociopaths trying to leverage mob-control powers to take over sclerotic institutions”
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You’d have to be a true asshole to not be woke by the first definition. You’d have to be pretty gutless patsy not to resist and reject woke by the second definition. The semantic drift from woke (2014) to woke (2019) is so extreme we shouldn’t use the same word for both.
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Yeah, I mean no. 2. We don't have good terminology for the amorphous, shape-shifting set of claims that this ideology makes use of it in pursuit of institutional, in large part because the effort manipulates terms such as "diversity" to disguise its character.
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The thing is, since the leaders stay in the shadows hiding their authoritarian intentions, they exercise power via their mooks using their designated shibboleth-language. You can weaken them by simply not using language they want used.
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Unlike active provocation by using verboten language, which paints a target on your back and makes you vulnerable to cancelation, simply avoiding approved language and using alts is a kind of passive-aggressive attack that drains momentum and cohesion from their mook mobs.
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