House of Eratosthenes

Apart from the Trump indictment, and the awful event over in Nashville, perhaps the most significant event in the month of March was when Bethany Mandel was asked to define “woke.” She didn’t do very well, and a lot of leftists took to the Internet to make hay out of the “breaking of her brain” or some such thing…

LOL: Briahna Joy Gray BREAKS the brain of Rising guest Bethany Mandel by asking her to define "wokeness" pic.twitter.com/uwRSSH0LaM

— The Vanguard (@vanguard_pod) March 14, 2023

She handled it well, shying away from excuses, and admitting that her performance at this key moment fell short of what she might have wanted. Also, she conceded the same point I did, in subsequent discussions: This is a fair question. We shouldn’t leave it unanswered.

At the same time, though, it’s mendacious to argue that the problem extends beyond mere ambiguity. “We know it when we see it,” while leaving the job not fully done, is satisfactory in most cases. Sylvester Stallone says None of this woke crap in my movies and we know exactly what he means. People aren’t lost on this.

It’s not easy to define, which gives The Left room to cheat, and cheat they do.

Mandel offers:

A radical belief system suggesting that our institutions are built around discrimination, and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination. It seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint, enforced by an angry mob.

The lingering question, and the issue surrounding it, reveals something important about us. Every single high office that could be occupied by some woke piece of crap, is. I’m looking at the World Economic Forum, the Davos dipshits legislating away my carbon emissions, Justin Trudeau, etc. Sorry Catholics, but that includes His Holiness. Whose elevation to that position remains shrouded in secrecy, practically unprecedented, and bizarre. It also includes the President of the United States, whose elevation to that office also occurred under suspicious, weird circumstances.

Davos People Outside of occupations of high office, every chance the people have to show they’re done with wokeness and don’t want any more of it, without exception, they take. Look at the Oscars. Look at subscription bases for woke printed material. Ratings of woke teevee shows. Sales of woke products. Movies starring woke superheroes. If there’s any sort of staged show to go with it, resulting in few having power over many, woke wins, and all or nearly all of the time. If the people have some clean and unfiltered way of showing their priorities and concerns, woke is an albatross, a consistent loser.

It has something to do with racism, climate change, LGBTQI+, homelessness, and many other issues near and dear to The Left. It is distinctly leftist, and angry too. But the relationships it has with being angry, and leftist, are subset relationships; all “woke” people are leaning left, and they’re all angry, but all angry people aren’t necessarily woke and all leftists are not necessarily woke. All left-invested issues aren’t necessarily woke issues. To want to put more decision-points that go with everyday living under government control, in & of itself, is not a “woke” desire although it’s exactly what leftists want to do. Leftists want to increase spending and raise taxes but that’s not necessarily what the “woke” want to do. They just end up wanting the same things, once all the serious proposals are in and we’re deliberating what to do about them.

Woke, I see, has something to do with the word “equity”:

While the terms equity and equality may sound similar, the implementation of one versus the other can lead to dramatically different outcomes for marginalized people.

Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.

That’s what the word “equity” means after the wokesters and the social justice warriors have gotten done mangling it. They were flailing about looking for a word they could dress up as “equal, but not equal” and, like a predator pulling the least fortunate out of a herd of pack animals, set upon the poor slowest-of-the-bunch “equity.”

Well, this is what it meant before that happened:

The money value of a property or of an interest in a property in excess of claims or liens against it. Justice according to natural law or right; specifically, freedom from bias or favoritism.

You see what they did here?

Before they came along, equity meant “no bias or favoritism.” Then they start masticating the word, and when they’re done with their grinding and their salivating and their digesting it means: They see one contestant as advantaged and another one as disadvantaged, so they’re going to stack the deck in anticipation of equal outcome.

But of course, we know from observing social justice warriors that your membership in an oppressed class or oppressor class, is a brand. You carry it womb to tomb. They don’t anticipate equal outcomes, to the contrary they have it all figured out who needs help and who needs a hobbling. And there’s no precision in their deck-stacking because there’s no restraint. The more, the better.

They have screwed up the word “equity.” They’ve re-defined it to mean the exact opposite of what it really means. So getting back to the word “woke” — let’s not pretend we’re busting a sweat coming up with a workable and precise definition for the woke. They don’t need our help. We know them when we see them, and you can bet they know themselves when they see themselves.

An “Old Curmudgeon” came up with something good about this:

In short, woke ideas positively encourage paranoid habits of mind, which are analogous to those exhibited by people suffering from depression, anxiety, and other psychological disorders. Looking at the world through woke lenses leads one to see oppression and injustice even where they do not exist, to feel strongly aggrieved at this imagined oppression and injustice, and then to treat the narrative of grievance that results as if it were confirming evidence of the reality of the imagined oppression and injustice…

[snip]

The difference between wokeness and other forms of delusional paranoia is that the wokester’s delusions and paranoia reflect what I referred to above as a hyper-egalitarian view of the world…What I am calling hyper-egalitarian is the tendency to suspect all inequalities of being per se unjust – for example, to suppose that if 10% of the population of a country is of a certain race yet less than 10% of the stockbrokers in that country are of that race, this amounts to a “racist” inequity that cannot be given an innocent explanation and must somehow be eliminated by governmental policy.

What we call “woke” is a betrayal against the progressive promise of a better new world in which we get along together in a sense of harmony that’s been missing up until now. Whether any particular “woke” person understands this consciously, varies according to which one it is. But for people of many different viewpoints and backgrounds to get along with each other and co-exist with greater understanding and less conflict, there would have to be provisions made for imperfections, and other things that could be perceived as slights.

In one word: “Slack.” We would all have to cut each other some.

And “woke” doesn’t cut us any. This is a microaggression, that is a microaggression, microaggressions everywhere…everyone with some of the five senses working and a pulse to keep ’em going, is a proximity-detonated land mine. Because every possibility for offense is an opportunity. That’s what really distinguishes them.

If we’re looking for the perimeter, so that we can minimize ambiguity in declaring this thing to be woke and that other thing not to be woke, it might be best to form and then judge by a bullet-form definition.

With that in mind, I submit the following. However many bullets qualify for a “positive diagnosis,” I’ll leave to the reader, although it’s clearly more than one and it may fall short of all ten:

1. Preferring visible expressions of dissatisfaction over less visible observations of fixable things.
2. Placing greater weight on group memberships than on individual hopes, dreams, concerns and ambitions.
3. Preening.
4. Angry.
5. Unready for normal human interaction or relationships.
6. Pursuing a cause that involves revenge against a group for a perceived slight.
7. In search of such a cause.
8. Advocating one brand of discrimination as redress against another.
9. Pursuing esteem but unready to offer skills, talents or values that would legitimately earn it.
10. Annoying.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Defining “Woke”Friday, March 31st, 2023

Defining “Woke”
Friday, March 31st, 2023