There’s a definition of journalism: “Printing something somebody doesn’t want printed. Everything else is PR.”
The cooption of corporate PR mechanisms into a woke propaganda apparatus is a kind of antijournalism: silencing orgs where they do need to say things.
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The economic opportunity in targeting PR is >> targeting HR because the risk of actually killing the host is much higher with HR. To hit HR sustainably you have to actually want to solve the problem you claim to be addressing.
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Replying to @zenpundit
I think it’s mainly PR now because the market for HR workshop grifts is both limited and already saturated, and more seriously, actually threatens to kill the host. It’s a way to milk the orgs indefinitely without killing them.
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I’m usually wary of criticizing woke from my left-of-center position because it risks creating an opening for pwnage by the right. In this case, I think it’s relatively safe because the right sucks at this class of grift. They’d pwn Corp HR and PR if they could.
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The right currently prefers to pursue grift intentions in the corporate world diffferently, at the cronyism level of the game involving government bailouts/subsidies for execs/owners, and sectoral tariffs. The left sucks at that game. Each side has carved out its parasitic niche.
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As a minority, but with sharply limited intersectional klout (straight brown-Asian immigrant male non-aspie techie is worth say 3.5/10 points in the oppression hierarchy, where straight white male would be 0.5/10), my n=1 case is not worth much but...
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... personally I have more than one episode in my personal history of firmly rejecting grifters trying to “represent” me.
This does not mean I haven’t benefitted from thoughtful individual and institutional efforts, both one-off and structural, to benefit classes I’m part of.
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I have zero illusions about the history of this country or how people who looked like me were treated even a few decades ago. I have zero illusions about what colonial rule in India was like and what atrocities it perpetuated.
There are real legitimate political aims here.
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Decolonizing minds is a real need. Activism in history made real gains. Civil rights pioneers made real sacrifices and scored real victories against human monstrousness.
Making the economy more representative of the population is a genuine need. Hiring and education must evolve.
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But grifter bullshit that plants and detonates toxic mistrust bombs in the economic engine not only serves none of these aims, it actively works against them. While also destroying the hard-won legacies of past social justice revolutionaries.
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How do you actually make continued gains in the story of “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”
The arc doesn’t bend itself. It’s like Moore’s law. Beneath the natural seeming trajectory there’s very strenuous active human effort.
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With Moore’s law, the 18-month doubling period of transistor density wasn’t a natural law. Every few years techies had to rethink large parts of the semiconductor stack to keep making the gains. The tricks that worked in 1970 ran out of juice by 1980 and new tricks were needed.
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The “arc of the moral universe” has had a huge number of diverse actors curving it over centuries. Royal-born Buddha 2500y ago, religious leaders like John Wyclif in Europe in pre-modern times, Gandhi in the 1910s-30s, black leaders 1950s-70s... each pioneered new tactics/models
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2020 is no different. It needs a new playbook. But it also needs the same old sincerity of purpose alloyed with deep self-awareness, critical self-scrutiny, systematic doubt, compassion even for the adversary/oppressor. The privilege of bending the arc is hard-earned.
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Changing history does not come cheap. You have to destroy and recreate yourself. The personal histories of past social justice leaders makes that much clear. They were *far* harder on themselves in pursuit of inner growth than they were on those they fought or the world at large.
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I personally am not a huge fan of Gandhi. I think he got lots of things wrong intellectually, philosophically, and morally.
But damn the man made sacrifices and lived his “experiments with truth” in extreme ways. I couldn’t put myself through a fraction of it. Gotta respect it.
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That phrase is important. If your social justice work isn’t a set of real, rigorous “experiments with truth” (Gandhi’s autobiography title, in case you don’t recognize the phrase, one of the few books in the literature I’ve read), you are not bending the arc. You’re grifting.
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Gandhi stub. I don’t want to overstate his role in the global story here. He’s just a key reference point for me personally for obvious reasons. To be Indian you have to sort out how you feel about Gandhi, just as you have to do that re MLK if you’re black
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Replying to @Visage_1
Long story for another time. It’s mostly dead history at this point so not that consequential anymore. Net, his contribution to both Indian history and the global history of social justice was a positive one. The critical take diesnt change that.
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While we’re on the subject, most stuff expected of white people like the white fragility book, is bullshit. Probably the biggest thing for white people to do is realize that these battles that are live ones for many groups, are deep in the past of European history for you.
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To the extent you can unconsciously enjoy many freedoms others must consciously craft, that ability rests on battles fought hundreds of years ago for you. There are basically no groups currently living that did not at some point in the past have to fight for justice.
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Social justice is not a minority story. It’s a universal story. All humans must at some point fight for justice because all humans are capable of being monstrously unjust to others. It’s the same fight. The fight against monsters includes the fight against your inner monster.
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This is the meaning of “nobody is free until everybody is free.” The hard part is recognizing that this is not just something to preach at the currently privileged, oblivious of the poisons in their freedoms. It’s a call for the currently oppressed to face their inner monsters.
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