#wokedom

[mariacallous]

Down the road from where I live a friend came across a man tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages. You’ve probably seen the portraits by bus stops and railway stations. Activists print them off from sites highlighting the hostages’ plight and fly-post pictures of the men, women and children Hamas kidnapped.

As the hostages are civilians, my friend asked why would anyone want to destroy their pictures.

He was beaten up for his pains. Defending innocent Jewish civilians makes you an accomplice of Benjamin Netanyahu in London today.

And not just in London. Anti-Jewish hatred in the UK has exploded since Hamas attacked Israel – recorded incidents have doubled.  The violence my friend experienced is still rare, thankfully. But the fear of Islamist terrorism or just everyday thugs running riot is everywhere in the Jewish community, and to a lesser extent in wider society as well.

A drumbeat of stories builds the tension.

Belatedly and reluctantly, the Labour party disowned its Muslim candidate in the forthcoming Rochdale by-election. He had all the usual prejudices, and a few I had not heard about before.

He imagined that “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” were targeting pro-Palestinian politicians, and that the Israeli state had allowed Hamas to rape, shoot and burn alive 1200 of its people because it wanted a pretext to invade Gaza.

As I am writing this piece, there’s news of a (white) comedian, who describes himself as an “experimental fusionist” and an “absurdist laughter chef,” and is just as stupid as his description implies. In a scene redolent of medieval prejudice, he encouraged the audience at the Soho Theatre in central London to chant “get the fuck out” and “free Palestine” at a Jewish member of the audience.

Incidentally the Soho Theatre is on the site of the old West End Great Synagogue, built at a time when Jews were welcome in London

Before that Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, the Jewish chaplain of Leeds University, his wife and two kids were moved to a safe house on  police advice after receiving hundreds of death threats.

Online “activists” pointed out the rabbi had served in the Israeli Defence Force, and so presumably any number of violent threats were justified.

The justification, such as it is, would have carried more plausibility if incidents of hatred had not exploded as soon as the news of the Hamas massacres broke in October.  They were celebrations of anti-Jewish violence not a reaction to the violence of the Israeli armed forces.

If you doubt that there are reasons to be frightened, go to your nearest synagogue and see the guards. Or talk to the parents of Jewish children and hear them describe how Jewish schools tell pupils to discard uniforms that allow potential attackers to mark them out as targets.

All of this and much more is causing deep alarm in the Jewish community, and a dangerous reaction among right-wing Jewish pressure groups, who are getting the response to racism about as wrong as they possibly can.

Here’s how.

The Jewish right is caught up in the same paranoid ideology of the rest of the modern British right, and indeed of the Trumpian right in the United States. It sees the woke mind virus everywhere. It assumes that progressives have marched through the institutions and made them borderline antisemitic, if not all-out racist.

In the case of violence against Jews, the supposed triumph of wokedom means that ideologically compromised police officers will not protect Jews by standing up to far leftists and Islamists.

 The Campaign Against Antisemitism, has encouraged its allies in the Conservative government to introduce ever-greater restrictions on rights to protest. This week it was welcoming new punishments for demonstrators who desecrate war memorials (who could already be prosecuted under existing law) and who wear face coverings to conceal their identity.

I do not want to condemn the campaign out of hand. There’s no doubt the pro-Palestinian marches in London frighten Jewish people. Some  90% of British Jews say that they would avoid travelling to a city centre if a major anti-Israel demonstration was underway.

There is no doubt, too, that fear of violence is not just confined to Jews. It is everywhere, although we don’t like to talk about it.

People disappear in ​the UK for offending Islamists, and respectable society looks the other way. Before the rabbi at Leeds University, there was a religious studies teacher at a Yorkshire school. Three-years ago he showed his students a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. He still remains in hiding and is unlikely ever to return home.

The UK is nowhere near being the free country it pretends to be. I understand why so many are frightened. That said, you can still look at right-wing politicians and organisations and wonder where they are heading.

While praising Conservative ministers’ trifling changes to the law, which are little better than PR stunts, the Campaign Against Antisemitism denounces the police.

“For months now, we have been asking for tougher restrictions to be placed on these protests, which have made our urban centres no-go zones for Jews. While the police have failed the Jewish community and law-abiding Londoners, the Government, to its credit, is listening. These new laws will help address the mob mentality that we have observed in these protests. There is no justification for such scenes, and now, there will be no legal defence.”

Jewish leaders who work to protect the community told me on condition of anonymity that the attacks on the police make no sense. They consult with officers regularly, they say. The idea that the police are part of some woke conspiracy to ignore radical Islam and turn a blind eye to potential terrorism is ridiculous.

So it is, and it conceals a dangerous desire.

For if you think that conservatives are yearning to ban peaceful demonstrations, you are not wrong. Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, his radical right home secretary last year, tried to force the police to do just that.

Braverman fell into anti-woke conspiracy theory and accused the police of taking a tougher approach to right-wing groups than to “pro-Palestinian mobs displaying almost identical behaviour”.

The Met to its credit refused to buckle under the pressure. Officers told the politicians they could interfere with freedom of assembly only if there was a threat of serious disorder, and that the "very high threshold" has not been reached.

The right has not given up. Here is the Campaign Against Antisemitism again.

“The people of this country expect the lawlessness on our streets to be brought firmly under control, and with these changes there are now even fewer excuses for police inaction.”

The attack follows the Campaign’s previous denunciations of London’s liberal Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan (which I covered here). Khan has gone out of his way to defend London’s Jews, but is the centre of a far-right and at times a fascistic hate campaign from Donald Trump and others, simply because he is a Muslim.

Yearning for bans is hopeless from both a moral and practical point of view. Tactically, it is all wrong. I can think of nothing more likely to fuel conspiracy theories about Jewish power than the banning of demonstrations.

If they were turning into riots, it would be another matter, and they should be banned regardless of the conspiracy theories.

But they are not degenerating into riots, and in a free country, people should be free to protest. We do not want to be governed by the Western equivalent of Hamas, after all.

Equally if protestors are not engaged in violence or the incitement to violence, it is a waste of police time suppressing them: police time which – and forgive me if I am labouring the obvious – could be better spent countering authentic threats to Jews and everyone else.

For who on earth do right-wing Jewish groups think stand between them and Islamist terrorism? The Tory party? The comment desk of the Daily Telegraph? A professional loudmouth on GB News?

Or the police service they waste so much time and energy denigrating?

[lookwhatilost]

Smearjob metoos can happen (with and without legit allegations), but russell brand feels more like a "washed up, burned too many bridges, not useful to Big Guys, nobody is suppressing the allegations anymore" metoo. In a sense I can see why some metoo'd guys get a martyr complex because they did this shit for decades, with a bunch of other guys who did that shit, and never had problems until one day they were more useful as a scapegoat/example then as an entertainment product.

this is probably the new trend –once your career/connections decline to a certain point, you get all your dirt exposed as a kind of ritual sacrifice to public sensibility which preserves all the guys who are still considered worth protecting and if you play it right, you recuperate it into a right-wing grift as a martyr to elite hollywood groomer wokedom and end up making more money and getting more attention than you would've otherwise and everybody wins.

not to say it's a bad thing for a powerful public figure who uses their public power to commit abuse to be outed. it's what you accept as a consequence of being a powerful public figure. but one should always be aware of the business of everything imo. One looks at the back and forth of WB and Disney's rising stars getting “cancelled” and one wonders if there aren't teams of guys digging/amplifying dirt on rival studios casts, or sometimes stuff just breaks containment and it's nobody's plan. can't know from outside.

I'm not a proponent of "everything is part of the plan" ultra-narrative mindset, but especially in the world of media and entertainment, you can't ignore how whole networks and institutions exist and make their business just on spin and crisis management. Imo the key to parsing speculative claims is to never imagine big groups/classes/institutions as being all homogenous, nor omniscient, but to imagine overlapping webs of normal petty self-interest pulling all different directions.

What I'm saying, just to be clear, is that he did bad things but it didn't catch up to him until now because he's no longer valuable enough to anyone to protect — no manager or producer, studio or agency can be bothered to kill stories for him. when you're still headlining movies, bringing in big fees for your agencies, being a lynchpin face for a franchise, whatever, you have whole teams of people, connected to other people, that bribe/threaten journalists and victims, astroturf shit, etc... when a celebrity gets metoo'd after years/decades of doing nasty shit, there's good odds (i think) that it's because they lost value and/or burned bridges and lost the protection of those networks and institutions.

That said, persistent allegations bubbling into public consciousness can erode a celebrity's value itself so, like with all things, it's a multilateral feed of incentives. and as I mentioned above, you've got the opposing incentives of salacious stories and hostile factions. It's just this but instead of badly made cars causing accidents it's celebrities doing sex crimes.

[pazodetrasalba]

Peterson

Dear Caroline:

It is difficult to believe that you are not being disingenuous here. I can easily belief that you don't know much in depth about Jordan Peterson and his thought, but it is so ridiculously easy to watch some videos, read some short articles, just browse wikipedia, that 'having no idea who Jordan Peterson is' seems a bit impossible. Then again, I don't remember how famous he was already in 2018, but I'd Imagine he was well known enough.

I am no expert myself on him bit I shall play along, indulge you and try to dispel some of your imaginary doubts, even though you don't seem to be much interested in the answers anyway. As far as I know, he's a respected Canadian psychologist of a Jungian inclination, and has become a standard-bearer for an anti-woke politics and thought, and for a revisionist and positive view of some aspects of positive masculinity. As such, he has become a lightning rod for Wokedom, and has also, I feel, radicalized his views in the last few years. Some time ago, I would have described him as a 'classical liberal'.

Not quite sure the intellectual status of his books, although I feel you would probably agree with a lot of what he says -and get even more shot at because of it-. I haven't read any yet, but his 12 Rules for Life seems like a self-help guided for lost men. Probably, Maps of Meaning is the book one should read instead. I would concur that the Culture Wars tend to be tribal, exhausting, dull and ultimately pointless.

Quote:

It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It's not in happiness. It's not in impulsive pleasure.

Jordan Peterson

#caroline ellison #woke #culture war

[davidblaska]

Prove you are not a racist, job applicant

Diversity on campus? How about some intellectual diversity?! Hasn’t made the national news wire yet but should. The president of the University of Wisconsin system — that sprawling tentacle of 13 four-year and 13 more two-year campuses and outreach through University Extension — drove a fat wooden stake through the heart of Wokedom.  Jay RothmanUW system president since June 2022 Jay Rothman,…

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[garythingsworld]

[cultml]

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Truths, meanings, facts, and values are now regarded as negotiable. The curious thing, however, is that this woolly-minded subjectivism goes with a vigorous censorship.

- Sir Roger Scruton, Extinguishing the Light

#scruton #roger scruton #quote #woke #wokedom #philosophy #ideology #critical thinking (or lack thereof) #culture #funny #social justice warrior #sjw #truth #meaning #facts #values

[the-empress-7]

M didn’t even trend on tumblr, the OG wokedom in the internet.

LOL

[whimsycore]

its literally only white kids hyped abt that dad game anyways 

#like no one cares that you play it just stop actig like its the Pinnacle of All Wokedom

[bighermie]

The Report

The Salvation Army takes an even deeper dive into wokedom https://tiny.iavian.net/1j6vi

[bisluthq]

Nat you're really overeacting about this, you keep saying Ariana is appropriating "marginalized aesthetics" but there's NOTHING about those pictures that even gets close to being korean, she looks super normal, also korean people dress like everybody else in the world too, people had a point about the blackfishing but now sounds like they're blowing things up out of proportion and just going at her for nothing, you can make an argument about her eyes (wich is what everyone is talking about) but she's just doing the eyeliner like she always does, just go look for pictures and you will see that besides her looking more natural now there's nothing really different

see the pictures on this thread: https://twitter.com/thkutoulouse/status/1466862412364234760?t=VrQt1Xe0bo802uWtkEUJTw&s=19

“Korean people dress like everybody else” is true but also fucking stupid lmao. If we use that logic like no aesthetic can be appropriated because everyone just wears all sorts of shit. It’s like the whole “dreads aren’t appropriation because Vikings wore them” argument like it’s not untrue but it’s also fucking stupid.

Again - you don’t have to get offended like make your own decisions dude. One of the biggest issues with like Wokedom is making out as though there’s one right thing to say. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion tbh. But a bunch of non-Asian people - as with the thread you linked - shouldn’t be up her asshole defending her tbh.

#nat talks ari

[mia-soufi2018]

TV's fearless firebrand who refused to be gagged: Meghan Markle sought Piers Morgan's friendship - then cut him dead. Now, writes ALISON BOSHOFF, he's her fiercest critic... and waging war on wokedom 

By Alison Boshoff for the Daily Mail - March 10th 2021, 10:21:00 pm

ALISON BOSHOFF: Morgan lost his £1 million-a-year job on ITV's Good Morning Britain after Meghan herself complained to ITV over remarks he had after the interview with Oprah

[jerseydeanne]

TV's fearless firebrand who refused to be gagged: Meghan Markle sought Piers Morgan's friendship - then cut him dead. Now, writes ALISON BOSHOFF, he's her fiercest critic... and waging war on wokedom

TV’s fearless firebrand who refused to be gagged: Meghan Markle sought Piers Morgan’s friendship – then cut him dead. Now, writes ALISON BOSHOFF, he’s her fiercest critic… and waging war on wokedom

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#alison boshoff #ghosted #mm #piers morgan #Wokeness

[pazodetrasalba]

(Im)balance

Dear Caroline:

This short post of yours is a very good follow-up to yesterday's comments about your high school friend and Scott's post, taken to the higher level of superior education. This obviously comes as no surprise, though.

Last week we got a new cycle of the Shanghai rankings, and unsurprisingly, it didn't have many changes. If I remember well, your Alma Mater remains in second position, just after Harvard. Besides, it is a notorious temple of wokedom, with occasional ripples and controversies -like the hostility of some towards Jo Boaler and her deconstruction of the math curriculum in California. It fits my priors 100% that they'd put the focus on careers for women in, among other things, social justice.

I tend to consider myself a centrist in politics these days -used to be very, very far-left when young and not so young- and the imbalance in this respect of the liberal consensus between, say, an evaluation of the iniquitousness and evils of Communism and Fascism never ceases to amaze me now, but I kind of get it. It is actually something quite anti-consequentialist (and in this case I actually find myself in agreement with those evaluation of consequences): communism and communists can be excused because it is assumed they come from good intentions and ultimately sound and good principles (human equality, eliminating discriminations and privileges, etc...):, whereas the values of fascism are loathsome to a greater pie piece of the political spectrum. Actually, I feel this sort of argument should be more damning for the extreme left than for the extreme right: you don't expect anything good from the latter, but the fact that you share so much with the former should make you fear and worry both how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, how these can be no excuse sometimes for what you actually do, and how partial, biased and forgiving we can be in an imbalanced way.

Quote:

Ten years later, in The European Civil War (1987), the German historian Ernst Nolte brought ideology into the equation. The First World War had spawned the Bolshevik Revolution, he maintained, and fascism should be seen as a ‘counter-revolution’ against communism. More pointedly, since fascism followed communism chronologically, he argued that some of the Nazis' political techniques and practices had been copied from those of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, such propositions were thought anathema by leftists who believe that fascism was an original and unparalleled evil.

Norman Davies

#caroline ellison #women in stem #wokeism

[wandering-storm-lost-shadow]

“Facial tattoos are not exactly a polished, civilised presentation for a foreign diplomat in the 21st century," she said on Twitter.

“Facial tattoos, especially on a female diplomat, is the height of ugly, uncivilised wokedom."

Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon said Mahuta's kauae moko was special to Maori and to be celebrated.

#news #politics #new zealand #maori culture #maori #racism #olivia pierson

[centrally-unplanned]

(Some very uncharitable and high-context ranting of stuff coming up here)

Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts dropped on Netlifx this week, and even though lots of western animation suffers from this “we are for kids! but also...not?” rut in terms of writing and plotting I still enjoy following the medium as an animation junkie. And Kipo has some real strengths going for it in the animation and design department. Its part of a growing trend of shows pushing away from the “CalArts” style, using the hybridized “western anime” design pioneered in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which allows for much more expressive action animation and a greater range of character emotion. Kipo also doesn’t shy away from putting in the work on detailed backgrounds, necessary given their fantastical apocalyptic setting, and getting creative with the way they communicate motion with some Warner-Brothers style zany-ness. 

(Also its definitely drawing some influence from The Boondocks. At first I wonder if that thought was, *ahem*, ‘biased’ in some way, but by the time you see Wolf in her flashback school uniform it goes from influence to straight-up reference. And its logical - Studio Mir, the South Korean company that Dreamworks partnered with for Kipo, made Season 4 of The Boondocks. They also made Korra, so yeah none of this animation direction is much of a surprise.)

Anyway, so Kipo has some inventive animation and design choices, despite its workhouse plot and a very thematically-contradictory ending (an essay for another time). It would be cool to talk about this direction with other people, right? So I go on twitter to see the discussion, and literally every single point of discussion is either official promotion or celebration of this:

I’m sure this is no surprise to anyone, and it honestly shouldn’t have been to me. I had momentarily forgotten that, though, because this scene in the show is...kindof terrible? Watching it made me groan out loud.

To give the briefest context possible, this scene occurs in an episode where the main female character, Kipo, asks out our friend Benson up here and this is his rejection. The problem with the scene are two-fold: for one, Kipo and Benson have had absolutely zero romantic chemistry before the 5 minutes leading up to this scene. Hes actually the background character in comparison to Kipo’s relationship to another character, Wolf. The romantic chemistry just sortof “appears”, she asks him out, he rejects, then after that scene, her feelings for him never come up again in the show. Its never mentioned or hinted at, they are just deleted from existence - which of course they were, they only existed so he could explicitly say the phrase “I’m gay”. 

The second problem is a world-building one - Benson grew up in the post-apocalyptic ruins of earth, alone, without a single other human around. He has only vague artifacts from earth, and no human society. He is maybe 13? And has never dated or had romantic feelings for anyone. He should really have minimal self-awareness of what his sexual orientation is, or the language to express it, certainly not in the confidence done here. This is actually a frequent issue with the show - characters from a post-apocalypse setting make casual references to things from modern society they would have no real way of knowing - this just happens to be the worst example of it. It was done this way of course because him being gay isn’t really sufficient - its about the declaration, about saying it in *our* words.

And I just know that, if I was actually engaging in the Kipo “fan sphere”, I could not say any of this. Not that I would be attacked or whatever - its just that no one would care. The logic, construction, art of the scene, all of that is irrelevant beyond the checkbox of validation-through-representation. And the density of conversations around representation, around shipping, etc, are just suffocating - there is very little space to get a word in otherwise sometimes. The weaponization of this suffocation to castigate non-participants as social regressives just compounds the problem.

Its moments likes these that crystallize how certain things are just not made for you, not because of the product itself but because of how the product is embedded into cultural groups. And its hard sometimes not to be judge-y about it, to watch media get reduced down to tokenized components by the fandom’s that consume them and think of that as bad.  And of course show designers know this dynamic - this Kipo scene exists the way it does to be direct fanservice to that audience. Its the jiggling anime breasts of western wokedom. These dynamics shape not just the fandoms, but the shows themselves, looping perpetually.

This is where this whole thought process is highly unfair - the actual people don’t individually only care about these few reified things, those are just the loudest voices, the most retweeted and upvoted comments. Yet I don’t see a reason to ignore my own feelings, that I shouldn’t waste my time engaging with people primed to be so distant from my own concerns. Ill just discuss animation with the communities that do value these things (anime, disney movies, etc). How that is a self-fulling prophecy, evaporative cooling writ large to fandom discourse, is obvious, but sometimes the fight isn’t worth it.

(I obviously need to post some of my policy/history/econ writings here, before I morph completely into a media discourse monster)

#kipo and the age of wonderbeasts #Fandom meta-discourse-norms