Wokeness is as much driven by the form of social media as anything else. You maximize engagement by pandering to people who like you and people who hate you. Personal whining appeals to your base and angers the people who dislike to you, double the fun.
Complaining about pop culture is the bread and butter here. Watch the trailer to a new popular movie, find some tidbit to attach your bullshit to, sit back as the high fives and middle fingers roll in. This is fast and easy, you'll need to be doing it multiple times a week.
It seems that woke is not anything unique to the left but something that emerges from more general tendencies of human nature. Tribalism, rationalizing, moralism, etc. It's good to see that people are recognizing the woke behavior of the right early on now that they have institutional power. Hopefully, it means we can bring politics towards something more rational.
You can understand the woke right as being an inversion of the woke left. Instead of an oppression hierarchy ordered with more white, male, and straight on top - and brown, female, and gay on bottom, the opposite is true for the woke right.
Those “dirty brown Africans abroad” are the ones oppressing our nation. This is the belief of the woke right.
I was part of a very niche heterodox corner of Gay Twitter a few years ago and a few of my mutuals were into Terese. (A certain one of them is now a writer for The Free Press, but that's a story for another day...) She used to be annoying and woke in a leftist way, like Chapo Trap House adjacent, but around 2020 became disillusioned with Bernie, so she started calling herself "post-left," then became what I can only describe as a MAGA Communist. I stopped keeping track two to three years ago but it's not surprising that she's come full circle.
A fruitful analysis of Terese's behavior these days definitely needs to take into account her history, but this is only partially accurate.
Aimee Terese was never woke (and neither was the more interesting half of Chapo). On the contrary, she's always been militantly anti-woke, which is what ultimately broke her brain. To the limited extent that the "post-left" was ever anything more than an internet meme, it's the mirror image of the old trotskyist-to-neocon pipeline, but with tumblr standing in for Stalin.
I could well be wrong, but the right-wing’s disavowal of any Enlightenment concepts (in favor of nebulous and unfalsifiable "reenchantment" notions) have made them less accountable in the broader political sphere. Once someone is no longer willing to be held to universal standards, I think it's only a matter of time until their sense of tribalism rules over their behavior.
Those tweets you cited: *none of the grievances are genuinely concrete*. Grievances with non-meritocratic policies and curtailing of free speech are legitimate, but I no longer see them espoused on the right. It's grandiose sentiments regarding the "lack of traditional values" (similar to the left's notion of "patriarchy" or "unconscious racism"). It's fine to be upset about less tangible things, but I think one should be careful when those things aren't quantifiable.
There will always be a blue-haired nose-ring wearer who calls herself a "girlboss", just like there will always be that one guy who flies the Confederate flag in his backyard. That shouldn't be someone's scope.
I think there's a point you're missing here. They are signalling virtue.
There are two major right-wings and neither of them especially values universal empathy. You've got the capitalist, technocratic variety for which empathy is a distraction, and the conservative, traditionalist variety for which universal empathy is betrayal.
As such, coming off as tough-minded and unwilling to be convinced by emotional arguments is signalling virtue, just a very different form of it.
I hate to say it, but this post also seems a bit histrionic, just like the behavior it criticizes? A more sober post might note that e.g. Aimee's points about foreign aid are arguably a more extreme version of the demandingness argument which is well-known in EA. An effective response might be to point out that supporting USAID is not that demanding for an individual taxpayer, you're in favor of cutting ineffective parts of USAID, and also try a "desire to help" as opposed to "obligation to help" framing. I am a little sympathetic to Aimee, because one of the things I learned when I was an EA is that if you take the "obligation to help" framing too far, you will burn yourself out. So if you err on the side of assuming good faith, you could provisionally assume that Aimee is concerned about e.g. a slippery slope here, and address that concern.
I don't feel Aimee's posts are problematic to the same degree the worst left-woke posts are, I'm not totally sure why. Maybe because it feels like Aimee is more speaking about herself rather than trying to enforce her views on others? Maybe because we haven't reached the stage where people are adopting her style of rhetoric as a pure power play? Aimee et al have developed overly aggressive antibodies for left-woke style rhetoric, and just like an autoimmune disease can be helped by an anti-inflammatory diet, I think it's better to try and cool things down than amplify with more inflammation. It would be good if we could identify a clear and effective distinction between effective good-faith compassion vs coercive compassion, so that the effective good-faith compassion can bypass the "coercive compassion" antibodies that people developed in response to wokeness.
Some people are, in fact, crazy and neurotic. Maybe they were even born that way. You're preaching compassion in this post. What would a compassionate response to a person who's crazy and neurotic be?
Do you seriously think people like Aimee can be persuaded by those arguments? I don't know why you're so generous to her. Yes, she is speaking about herself and how she is 'burned out of trying to help people,' but her conclusion is that we should let the stinky brown kids starve to death because of some trauma in her personal life. This is obviously insane or in bad faith. A compassionate response to crazy and neurotic people is certainly not to entertain or encourage their delusions by treating them as serious concerns.
>Do you seriously think people like Aimee can be persuaded by those arguments?
Even if she can't be persuaded, think about what would be most persuasive to someone on the fence who's reading the argument.
>I don't know why you're so generous to her.
Perhaps because I've struggled a lot with burnout myself.
>This is obviously insane
Well yeah, she says she's traumatized, Bentham says she's crazy and neurotic. We all agree there's an element of mental illness here.
>A compassionate response to crazy and neurotic people is certainly not to entertain or encourage their delusions by treating them as serious concerns.
Would you expect a compassionate, effective therapist to use the sort of language Bentham used? Imagine a therapist saying: "You're a particularly amusing goldmine of this kind of insanity", "oh you poor thing!", "do you think you're happy?", "this is just insane histrionics", "you delight in wickedness"... Would you hire such a therapist for a second session?
I don't think our goal is to be Aimee's therapist, it is valuable to ridicule people like this. I see no reason to treat psychotic aggressive people like they're babies. People on the fences aren't relevant here, any normal, offline people would be completely alienated by the language Aimee uses, and online people are typically more persuaded by aggressive and confrontational approaches.
'Woke right behavior' isn't just whenever anyone is unforgiving or confrontational, there's obviously a significant difference between me making fun of Aimee for being a psychopath and, like, a right-winger bullying trans people.
Two more cultural-right-wing critiques of the "woke" were postmodern reality-denial and moral relativism. As with all the other critiques these only really applied to a sub-set of the woke world but were used to condemn the whole (and even broader ideas of justice, fairness, even morality). Of course, most woke people always agreed that our shared reality probably exists and that needlessly causing suffering is generally bad.
Now the far-right who made these critiques is as proud of their "these are our facts! - socially constructed reality" as they are of their highly relativistic "what my buddies say goes and can't be challenged" amorality. It would be embarrassing if they had the capacity to be embarrassed. These people used to complain about the "grievance olympics". Now they've won it.
In terms of the right being 'woke', it is learning to use social media as a vehicle for creating policy by means of whackjobs saying nutty things and getting a million likes. In the internet age this seems unavoidably effective to not use.
On the other hand, there are no Chris Rufo anti woke squads hunting you down for being a woke conservative. So you can continue spouting your whackjob opinions about shrimp and not lose your job. Sounds pretty good to me!
I think this is just typical politics-brain in the age of social media, and the reason you're now seeing a right-wing version of it is because up until very recently right-wing content was heavily censored on most major websites. This is not to excuse the behavior, of course. I find it very concerning that this style of thinking seems to now dominate on the right in exactly the same way that wokeshit dominated on the left. People don't care about governance or morality or any of that inconvenient stuff, they just want to "own the libs."
I’m for aid to Africans as long as it involves paying them to stay at home, their leaders to keep them at home, promotion of abortion, family planning.
Wokeness is as much driven by the form of social media as anything else. You maximize engagement by pandering to people who like you and people who hate you. Personal whining appeals to your base and angers the people who dislike to you, double the fun.
Complaining about pop culture is the bread and butter here. Watch the trailer to a new popular movie, find some tidbit to attach your bullshit to, sit back as the high fives and middle fingers roll in. This is fast and easy, you'll need to be doing it multiple times a week.
What do grievance, contempt, and sex have in common? They sell.
It seems that woke is not anything unique to the left but something that emerges from more general tendencies of human nature. Tribalism, rationalizing, moralism, etc. It's good to see that people are recognizing the woke behavior of the right early on now that they have institutional power. Hopefully, it means we can bring politics towards something more rational.
You can understand the woke right as being an inversion of the woke left. Instead of an oppression hierarchy ordered with more white, male, and straight on top - and brown, female, and gay on bottom, the opposite is true for the woke right.
Those “dirty brown Africans abroad” are the ones oppressing our nation. This is the belief of the woke right.
I was part of a very niche heterodox corner of Gay Twitter a few years ago and a few of my mutuals were into Terese. (A certain one of them is now a writer for The Free Press, but that's a story for another day...) She used to be annoying and woke in a leftist way, like Chapo Trap House adjacent, but around 2020 became disillusioned with Bernie, so she started calling herself "post-left," then became what I can only describe as a MAGA Communist. I stopped keeping track two to three years ago but it's not surprising that she's come full circle.
A fruitful analysis of Terese's behavior these days definitely needs to take into account her history, but this is only partially accurate.
Aimee Terese was never woke (and neither was the more interesting half of Chapo). On the contrary, she's always been militantly anti-woke, which is what ultimately broke her brain. To the limited extent that the "post-left" was ever anything more than an internet meme, it's the mirror image of the old trotskyist-to-neocon pipeline, but with tumblr standing in for Stalin.
I could well be wrong, but the right-wing’s disavowal of any Enlightenment concepts (in favor of nebulous and unfalsifiable "reenchantment" notions) have made them less accountable in the broader political sphere. Once someone is no longer willing to be held to universal standards, I think it's only a matter of time until their sense of tribalism rules over their behavior.
Those tweets you cited: *none of the grievances are genuinely concrete*. Grievances with non-meritocratic policies and curtailing of free speech are legitimate, but I no longer see them espoused on the right. It's grandiose sentiments regarding the "lack of traditional values" (similar to the left's notion of "patriarchy" or "unconscious racism"). It's fine to be upset about less tangible things, but I think one should be careful when those things aren't quantifiable.
There will always be a blue-haired nose-ring wearer who calls herself a "girlboss", just like there will always be that one guy who flies the Confederate flag in his backyard. That shouldn't be someone's scope.
I think there's a point you're missing here. They are signalling virtue.
There are two major right-wings and neither of them especially values universal empathy. You've got the capitalist, technocratic variety for which empathy is a distraction, and the conservative, traditionalist variety for which universal empathy is betrayal.
As such, coming off as tough-minded and unwilling to be convinced by emotional arguments is signalling virtue, just a very different form of it.
I hate to say it, but this post also seems a bit histrionic, just like the behavior it criticizes? A more sober post might note that e.g. Aimee's points about foreign aid are arguably a more extreme version of the demandingness argument which is well-known in EA. An effective response might be to point out that supporting USAID is not that demanding for an individual taxpayer, you're in favor of cutting ineffective parts of USAID, and also try a "desire to help" as opposed to "obligation to help" framing. I am a little sympathetic to Aimee, because one of the things I learned when I was an EA is that if you take the "obligation to help" framing too far, you will burn yourself out. So if you err on the side of assuming good faith, you could provisionally assume that Aimee is concerned about e.g. a slippery slope here, and address that concern.
I don't feel Aimee's posts are problematic to the same degree the worst left-woke posts are, I'm not totally sure why. Maybe because it feels like Aimee is more speaking about herself rather than trying to enforce her views on others? Maybe because we haven't reached the stage where people are adopting her style of rhetoric as a pure power play? Aimee et al have developed overly aggressive antibodies for left-woke style rhetoric, and just like an autoimmune disease can be helped by an anti-inflammatory diet, I think it's better to try and cool things down than amplify with more inflammation. It would be good if we could identify a clear and effective distinction between effective good-faith compassion vs coercive compassion, so that the effective good-faith compassion can bypass the "coercive compassion" antibodies that people developed in response to wokeness.
Some people are, in fact, crazy and neurotic. Maybe they were even born that way. You're preaching compassion in this post. What would a compassionate response to a person who's crazy and neurotic be?
Do you seriously think people like Aimee can be persuaded by those arguments? I don't know why you're so generous to her. Yes, she is speaking about herself and how she is 'burned out of trying to help people,' but her conclusion is that we should let the stinky brown kids starve to death because of some trauma in her personal life. This is obviously insane or in bad faith. A compassionate response to crazy and neurotic people is certainly not to entertain or encourage their delusions by treating them as serious concerns.
>Do you seriously think people like Aimee can be persuaded by those arguments?
Even if she can't be persuaded, think about what would be most persuasive to someone on the fence who's reading the argument.
>I don't know why you're so generous to her.
Perhaps because I've struggled a lot with burnout myself.
>This is obviously insane
Well yeah, she says she's traumatized, Bentham says she's crazy and neurotic. We all agree there's an element of mental illness here.
>A compassionate response to crazy and neurotic people is certainly not to entertain or encourage their delusions by treating them as serious concerns.
Would you expect a compassionate, effective therapist to use the sort of language Bentham used? Imagine a therapist saying: "You're a particularly amusing goldmine of this kind of insanity", "oh you poor thing!", "do you think you're happy?", "this is just insane histrionics", "you delight in wickedness"... Would you hire such a therapist for a second session?
I don't think our goal is to be Aimee's therapist, it is valuable to ridicule people like this. I see no reason to treat psychotic aggressive people like they're babies. People on the fences aren't relevant here, any normal, offline people would be completely alienated by the language Aimee uses, and online people are typically more persuaded by aggressive and confrontational approaches.
Congratulations, you just made an argument used to justify woke right behavior. Just replace "Aimee" with a woke left person.
'Woke right behavior' isn't just whenever anyone is unforgiving or confrontational, there's obviously a significant difference between me making fun of Aimee for being a psychopath and, like, a right-winger bullying trans people.
In both cases, a person with some form of mental health issue is being bullied.
Lethal injection
Two more cultural-right-wing critiques of the "woke" were postmodern reality-denial and moral relativism. As with all the other critiques these only really applied to a sub-set of the woke world but were used to condemn the whole (and even broader ideas of justice, fairness, even morality). Of course, most woke people always agreed that our shared reality probably exists and that needlessly causing suffering is generally bad.
Now the far-right who made these critiques is as proud of their "these are our facts! - socially constructed reality" as they are of their highly relativistic "what my buddies say goes and can't be challenged" amorality. It would be embarrassing if they had the capacity to be embarrassed. These people used to complain about the "grievance olympics". Now they've won it.
The Right was always this way. Wokeness was a reaction to right wing identity politics.
In terms of the right being 'woke', it is learning to use social media as a vehicle for creating policy by means of whackjobs saying nutty things and getting a million likes. In the internet age this seems unavoidably effective to not use.
On the other hand, there are no Chris Rufo anti woke squads hunting you down for being a woke conservative. So you can continue spouting your whackjob opinions about shrimp and not lose your job. Sounds pretty good to me!
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. Albert Einstein
> Leibniz famously believed that we live in the best of all possible worlds. I do not think he is right
Dumbass Twitter users >>> infinite SIA evidence for God. The bird transcends logic itself.
I think this is just typical politics-brain in the age of social media, and the reason you're now seeing a right-wing version of it is because up until very recently right-wing content was heavily censored on most major websites. This is not to excuse the behavior, of course. I find it very concerning that this style of thinking seems to now dominate on the right in exactly the same way that wokeshit dominated on the left. People don't care about governance or morality or any of that inconvenient stuff, they just want to "own the libs."
I’m for aid to Africans as long as it involves paying them to stay at home, their leaders to keep them at home, promotion of abortion, family planning.
Genuine question: if the problem is that stupid people exist, what is the best solution? What if education doesn't work, what is the next thing to do?
This reminds me of articles that you might find relevant.
https://maxread.substack.com/p/soy-right-ascendant
https://www.dialecticsofdecline.com/p/the-soy-right-needs-a-safe-space
https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/jd-vance-and-vice-signaling