Pedantic note: I think the og comment was (grammatically) correct actually. "There is an enormous number of issues." That's because the "is" is referring to the word "number" in that sentence, which is singular.
The objects of the sentence are the issues, not the number. "A number of" is functioning as a modifier of "issues", not as the object of the sentence. For an example where "number" is the object, you might say, "There is a number of issues that is too big to handle." Here using "is" instead of "are" is appropriate.
Why is it that "a number of" is modifying "issues," rather than "of issues" being a modifier of "an enormous number?" The sentence "There is an enormous number" makes sense, including in a context of
"How many issues are there?"
"There is an enormous number."
It's not immediately clear to me that "of issues" is not the modifier in this context.
This doesn’t make sense because “with the left” modifies “issues.” So, if you’re omitting “issues” you must also omit “with the left.”
I originally thought Roman’s Attic had wrongly conceded the point here. But then I asked chatGPT and it gave me an answer I found more persuasive: We basically rewrite the rules of grammar in the cases like this one to make sentences sound more natural to our ears. Under the formal rules of syntax, we should use a singular verb here. But apparently there’s also something called “notional” grammar that can override the formal rules to make it sound better (although technically, I’d probably say that it becomes a formal rule once we recognize it as such?). See here: https://chatgpt.com/share/681f4023-e178-8002-b960-28bf61ca090c
I think you are right. The meaning is "there are lots of issues..." but grammatically
"There" is the subject, "is" is the (linking) verb, "a number" is a singular subject complement (because linking verbs don't have object0, and "of issues" is a prepositional phrase modifying number.
Of course, the sentence does not make sense without the prepositional phrase. "There is a number." sounds like a math point. But many sentences need modifiers to make sense. The meaning is different
I'm suggesting that they use the rhetoric of wokeness as one of their strategies (alongside cyber and conventional military threats) to undermine the fabric of Western societies which they regard as their rivals/adversaries. I wouldn't think that this is a controversial claim.
but what evidence is there to suggest theyre using it alongside them and that to specifically to "undermine the fabric of western socieities" from what i see most of these movements predate involvement of any foreign agents
The vast majority of TikTok users aren’t seeing political content at all. Im a young, politically informed person who uses TikTok and I have not seen one of these videos. Seems like your algorithm knows this content pisses you off and is showing you said content.
I just want to add that as someone on the center-right, Wokeness (not unlike McCarthyism) clearly worked. It bullied some college-educated white people out of the Republican party and into the Democratic party, and it bullied some non-white people out of the Democratic party and into the Republican party. This resolved the peak of racial polarization in 2012 between non-Hispanic whites and everyone else, which the smarter woke liberals understandably argued was a structural threat to multiracial democracy independent of any personal flaws on behalf of any individuals.
They looked at America's history, said the 2012 election was a sign of great danger of the GOP becoming a pan-class white coalition, and set about changing this. Now Republicans and Democrats are somewhat less racially polarized, with the decline in polarization steadily marching on from 2012 until the last major election in 2024. If you believed this was a big structural problem, and some people after the 2012 election clearly did, it was in fact somewhat addressed. Every serious criticism of Wokeness should take seriously the long view of the decade and the realistic alternatives.
If the goal was just trying to force all educated whites into one party, that seems like a medium term recipe for failure when the US electoral system hasn't been controlled by the educated white vote for a long, long time.
The US political system is overwhelmingly run by college-educated white people. Both parties contain many white people with college degrees, especially closer to the top. But you said electorally. So electorally, there has never been a working majority in America of white people with four-year university degrees at basically any point in our nationwide history. If that is a problem, it's not a medium term one but one that has existed for the entire history of the country.
I would add that the education divide is quite real but also regularly overrated. Take a look at exit polls from Edison (not as high quality as stuff still in the works, but decent.) Edison polls conducted across several news agencies[1] found college-educated voters broke by 56 to 42 for Democrats (and that's 53-45 among college-educated white voters.) Consider that Latinos broke 51-46 for Democrats according to the same poll. How Republican do we think Latinos are? We should view people with 4-year degrees the same way.
Another factor is that sectoral polarization[2] is much higher than tertiary education. So I'm not sure if people with college degrees going from 52-45 for Republicans to 40-55 for Democrats over 30 years is as powerful as the sectoral divisions and the result that a few highly educated post-industrial sectors very interested in writing for public audiences often have few Republicans in them. Someone with a B.S. in computer science probably votes differently than someone with a B.S. in petroleum engineering.
It sure sounds like a giant education shock has occurred, but I don't think it adds up in the voters or elite party networks. It's everywhere in political analysis but not as *dramatically* often in the data. And so it must be a secret thing, which perhaps Democrats call Republicans being anti-intellectual and Republicans call Hollywood and non-right Media having it out for them. Until, of course, Silicon Valley becomes more like Finance in the last election and now is bipartisan as an industry once again. So goes fortune in politics.
>It bullied some college-educated white people out of the Republican party and into the Democratic party, and it bullied some non-white people out of the Democratic party and into the Republican party.
You could just as easily give Trump credit for both of these.
Serious question - what do you think should be the response to hate-mongers like "LibsOfTikTok"? I use that term specifically and deliberately. These people scour the entire social media world, to find any little snippet they can feed into their hate-machine, to shriek:
LOOK AT THIS STUPID PERSON! THEY SAID SOMETHING BAD!! DENOUNCE THEM!!!
Are you going to propose: Nobody, ever, anywhere, should ever say a word that the rantiest right-winger would find objectionable? That's impossible. It's a big world.
Are you going to propose: If a hate-monger calls on you to denounce their target, you must immediately do so unreservedly? Then, see above, big world, you'll have to do it all the time. Not to mention these people are mean vicious liars, integrity isn't good for their business.
Are you going to propose: Well, don't go along with them every day, but maybe every week. Then, see above, they'll simply repeat the process with anything you didn't denounce to their satisfaction.
Again, what? I just don't see what's a realistic course of action.
Don't bother trying to argue with an "effective altruist". They spend their time being actively malicious, today, in order to pursue a hypothetical justice that will almost definitely never materialize.
The most obnoxious, high-on-their-own-farts, type of asshole.
Bentham's Bulldog presumably wants the Democratic party to be under the exclusive control of moderate (by some definitions), center left types. Libs of Tiktok hurt a little for this, since they give reminders to the center-center and the center-right that the left is still crazy. But main people causing the center left problems are still the far left, the 'woke'. They make it difficult for any wannabe center-left candidates to get a thing going, by vigorously reminding them that they have to adhere to the power struggles about minority rights and microaggressions and whatnot.
A radical proposal to fix this could be to make radical leftism so completely shunned by everyone else that such individuals are forced to flee the democratic party, and all productive avenues of life generally. But, amusingly enough, the only person with the power and motivation to do such a thing is Donald Trump!
I don't really buy the thesis here that woke TikToks are making young people more right wing.
Some woke stuff is certainly aggravating, but I think a lot of anti-woke commentary just gives it way too much credit as a political force. The fact is that overall demographic voting trends in the US are repeated in many other countries which simply don't have the same cultural context and identity debates.
I'm not saying the woke thing is only a US phenomena, but it is certainly much more prominent in the US and - to a lesser extent - other English speaking countries. However, we see the shift in young people moving to the right across much of Western Europe.
Pointing out the crazy shit young people do on the internet can be amusing. But I don't think it actually matters.
>The fact is that overall demographic voting trends in the US are repeated in many other countries which simply don't have the same cultural context and identity debates.
I’m tempered just to respond “they don’t” - but to try to be more specific:
Take France as an examples, the popularity of the far right surged (including amping young people) well before ‘woke’ became a major talking point.
In the UK, ‘woke’ debates remain extremely politically marginal and are not a significant part of politics (despite for example the Conservatives making efforts to create culture war issues)
In both these countries, the centre left parties have been very ambivalent about supporting wha are perceived to be more out of the ordinary views.
I think it’s just hard to argue from the actual facts that ‘woke backlash’ is contributing to these parties unpopularity. Boring normal things like employment, cost of living and lack of affordable housing seem like much stronger contenders to me
I can’t say about tiktok, but I would not by any means characterize instagram as ‘woke’. The majority of comment sections on popular videos and posts are quite intensely hateful towards women, gay people, trans people, etc.
Yet another "effective altruist" telling us the people pointing out the problems *are* the problem (and "annoying"), and the people doing fuck-all or being actively malicious are the heroes, actually.
I don’t use TikTok but seeing some of the creators who reacted to the Zee situation adds evidence to your hypothesis.
A fun fact about myself is watching anti feminism videos on YouTube was what caused me to think the left was insane and start learning right when I first started attending college. With the ascendance of Trump I decided to look more into my perceived enemies because I couldn’t justify voting right. I found many great liberal thinkers and now consider myself left of center, but I could have easily seen a version myself with a little more desire to fit into my tribe and a little less curiosity about my opponents continuing to lean right.
Response to the pedantic note: People substitute "there are" for "there's" all the time in speech. It is very interesting how rare it is to hear "there are".
Pedantic note: I think the og comment was (grammatically) correct actually. "There is an enormous number of issues." That's because the "is" is referring to the word "number" in that sentence, which is singular.
The objects of the sentence are the issues, not the number. "A number of" is functioning as a modifier of "issues", not as the object of the sentence. For an example where "number" is the object, you might say, "There is a number of issues that is too big to handle." Here using "is" instead of "are" is appropriate.
Why is it that "a number of" is modifying "issues," rather than "of issues" being a modifier of "an enormous number?" The sentence "There is an enormous number" makes sense, including in a context of
"How many issues are there?"
"There is an enormous number."
It's not immediately clear to me that "of issues" is not the modifier in this context.
"There’s an enormous number with the left" vs. “There are issues with the left”
This doesn’t make sense because “with the left” modifies “issues.” So, if you’re omitting “issues” you must also omit “with the left.”
I originally thought Roman’s Attic had wrongly conceded the point here. But then I asked chatGPT and it gave me an answer I found more persuasive: We basically rewrite the rules of grammar in the cases like this one to make sentences sound more natural to our ears. Under the formal rules of syntax, we should use a singular verb here. But apparently there’s also something called “notional” grammar that can override the formal rules to make it sound better (although technically, I’d probably say that it becomes a formal rule once we recognize it as such?). See here: https://chatgpt.com/share/681f4023-e178-8002-b960-28bf61ca090c
Ah, I see. Thanks.
I think you are right. The meaning is "there are lots of issues..." but grammatically
"There" is the subject, "is" is the (linking) verb, "a number" is a singular subject complement (because linking verbs don't have object0, and "of issues" is a prepositional phrase modifying number.
Of course, the sentence does not make sense without the prepositional phrase. "There is a number." sounds like a math point. But many sentences need modifiers to make sense. The meaning is different
It's a media arm of the CCP, so that fits.
I think this is too conspiratorial. The algorithm itself is enough to explain this.
Are you suggesting that the CCP is woke? I don't think that's true.
I'm suggesting that they use the rhetoric of wokeness as one of their strategies (alongside cyber and conventional military threats) to undermine the fabric of Western societies which they regard as their rivals/adversaries. I wouldn't think that this is a controversial claim.
Ah, I see, that seems plausible.
but what evidence is there to suggest theyre using it alongside them and that to specifically to "undermine the fabric of western socieities" from what i see most of these movements predate involvement of any foreign agents
Instead of adolescence young people in schools should view your 'the woke aren't woke' article
The vast majority of TikTok users aren’t seeing political content at all. Im a young, politically informed person who uses TikTok and I have not seen one of these videos. Seems like your algorithm knows this content pisses you off and is showing you said content.
Yes, but the people who are seeing that sort of content are majorly on TikTok, which is what the post is about.
> owning dogs [is] racist
As an avowed cat person, I support this message. But seriously, though, I never heard this claim being made, and it puzzles me.
I feel like every week there's a tweet that says, "white people care more about dogs than black people/refugees/etc."
I just want to add that as someone on the center-right, Wokeness (not unlike McCarthyism) clearly worked. It bullied some college-educated white people out of the Republican party and into the Democratic party, and it bullied some non-white people out of the Democratic party and into the Republican party. This resolved the peak of racial polarization in 2012 between non-Hispanic whites and everyone else, which the smarter woke liberals understandably argued was a structural threat to multiracial democracy independent of any personal flaws on behalf of any individuals.
They looked at America's history, said the 2012 election was a sign of great danger of the GOP becoming a pan-class white coalition, and set about changing this. Now Republicans and Democrats are somewhat less racially polarized, with the decline in polarization steadily marching on from 2012 until the last major election in 2024. If you believed this was a big structural problem, and some people after the 2012 election clearly did, it was in fact somewhat addressed. Every serious criticism of Wokeness should take seriously the long view of the decade and the realistic alternatives.
If the goal was just trying to force all educated whites into one party, that seems like a medium term recipe for failure when the US electoral system hasn't been controlled by the educated white vote for a long, long time.
The US political system is overwhelmingly run by college-educated white people. Both parties contain many white people with college degrees, especially closer to the top. But you said electorally. So electorally, there has never been a working majority in America of white people with four-year university degrees at basically any point in our nationwide history. If that is a problem, it's not a medium term one but one that has existed for the entire history of the country.
I would add that the education divide is quite real but also regularly overrated. Take a look at exit polls from Edison (not as high quality as stuff still in the works, but decent.) Edison polls conducted across several news agencies[1] found college-educated voters broke by 56 to 42 for Democrats (and that's 53-45 among college-educated white voters.) Consider that Latinos broke 51-46 for Democrats according to the same poll. How Republican do we think Latinos are? We should view people with 4-year degrees the same way.
Another factor is that sectoral polarization[2] is much higher than tertiary education. So I'm not sure if people with college degrees going from 52-45 for Republicans to 40-55 for Democrats over 30 years is as powerful as the sectoral divisions and the result that a few highly educated post-industrial sectors very interested in writing for public audiences often have few Republicans in them. Someone with a B.S. in computer science probably votes differently than someone with a B.S. in petroleum engineering.
It sure sounds like a giant education shock has occurred, but I don't think it adds up in the voters or elite party networks. It's everywhere in political analysis but not as *dramatically* often in the data. And so it must be a secret thing, which perhaps Democrats call Republicans being anti-intellectual and Republicans call Hollywood and non-right Media having it out for them. Until, of course, Silicon Valley becomes more like Finance in the last election and now is bipartisan as an industry once again. So goes fortune in politics.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
[2] https://vrscores.org/index.html
>It bullied some college-educated white people out of the Republican party and into the Democratic party, and it bullied some non-white people out of the Democratic party and into the Republican party.
You could just as easily give Trump credit for both of these.
Serious question - what do you think should be the response to hate-mongers like "LibsOfTikTok"? I use that term specifically and deliberately. These people scour the entire social media world, to find any little snippet they can feed into their hate-machine, to shriek:
LOOK AT THIS STUPID PERSON! THEY SAID SOMETHING BAD!! DENOUNCE THEM!!!
Are you going to propose: Nobody, ever, anywhere, should ever say a word that the rantiest right-winger would find objectionable? That's impossible. It's a big world.
Are you going to propose: If a hate-monger calls on you to denounce their target, you must immediately do so unreservedly? Then, see above, big world, you'll have to do it all the time. Not to mention these people are mean vicious liars, integrity isn't good for their business.
Are you going to propose: Well, don't go along with them every day, but maybe every week. Then, see above, they'll simply repeat the process with anything you didn't denounce to their satisfaction.
Again, what? I just don't see what's a realistic course of action.
Don't bother trying to argue with an "effective altruist". They spend their time being actively malicious, today, in order to pursue a hypothetical justice that will almost definitely never materialize.
The most obnoxious, high-on-their-own-farts, type of asshole.
I usually just give them a half-assed, "Yeah that's bad, but what's it got to do with me?"
Bentham's Bulldog presumably wants the Democratic party to be under the exclusive control of moderate (by some definitions), center left types. Libs of Tiktok hurt a little for this, since they give reminders to the center-center and the center-right that the left is still crazy. But main people causing the center left problems are still the far left, the 'woke'. They make it difficult for any wannabe center-left candidates to get a thing going, by vigorously reminding them that they have to adhere to the power struggles about minority rights and microaggressions and whatnot.
A radical proposal to fix this could be to make radical leftism so completely shunned by everyone else that such individuals are forced to flee the democratic party, and all productive avenues of life generally. But, amusingly enough, the only person with the power and motivation to do such a thing is Donald Trump!
I don't really buy the thesis here that woke TikToks are making young people more right wing.
Some woke stuff is certainly aggravating, but I think a lot of anti-woke commentary just gives it way too much credit as a political force. The fact is that overall demographic voting trends in the US are repeated in many other countries which simply don't have the same cultural context and identity debates.
I'm not saying the woke thing is only a US phenomena, but it is certainly much more prominent in the US and - to a lesser extent - other English speaking countries. However, we see the shift in young people moving to the right across much of Western Europe.
Pointing out the crazy shit young people do on the internet can be amusing. But I don't think it actually matters.
>The fact is that overall demographic voting trends in the US are repeated in many other countries which simply don't have the same cultural context and identity debates.
They do
I’m tempered just to respond “they don’t” - but to try to be more specific:
Take France as an examples, the popularity of the far right surged (including amping young people) well before ‘woke’ became a major talking point.
In the UK, ‘woke’ debates remain extremely politically marginal and are not a significant part of politics (despite for example the Conservatives making efforts to create culture war issues)
In both these countries, the centre left parties have been very ambivalent about supporting wha are perceived to be more out of the ordinary views.
I think it’s just hard to argue from the actual facts that ‘woke backlash’ is contributing to these parties unpopularity. Boring normal things like employment, cost of living and lack of affordable housing seem like much stronger contenders to me
Perhaps you haven't heard of bluesky?
I was wondering about that too, but I think Bluesky is a lot less popular than TikTok.
I can’t say about tiktok, but I would not by any means characterize instagram as ‘woke’. The majority of comment sections on popular videos and posts are quite intensely hateful towards women, gay people, trans people, etc.
Yet another "effective altruist" telling us the people pointing out the problems *are* the problem (and "annoying"), and the people doing fuck-all or being actively malicious are the heroes, actually.
I don’t use TikTok but seeing some of the creators who reacted to the Zee situation adds evidence to your hypothesis.
A fun fact about myself is watching anti feminism videos on YouTube was what caused me to think the left was insane and start learning right when I first started attending college. With the ascendance of Trump I decided to look more into my perceived enemies because I couldn’t justify voting right. I found many great liberal thinkers and now consider myself left of center, but I could have easily seen a version myself with a little more desire to fit into my tribe and a little less curiosity about my opponents continuing to lean right.
Part of the social cost of social media is that it is built around a reality tv model where the goal is to watch people with strange beliefs
Response to the pedantic note: People substitute "there are" for "there's" all the time in speech. It is very interesting how rare it is to hear "there are".
I disagree with pedant note. Amount is singular, it gets there's, not there are.
It moved to tik tok? Then pull the plug and implement the ban.