I have been seeing a certain archetypal commenter in the spotlight recently; all women my age, progressive, and employed at mainstream institutions. I don't know them. Yet in every case, I can intuit their origin story.
It goes something like this:
> be an older millennial female, no strong passion, but strive hard in school
> reach High School
> steer clear of the kids who like talking about “far out” philosophical issues
> also steer clear of student government and debate club, which seems too contentious and vaguely threatening
> focus on getting perfect marks, complying with college reqs. Get into top uni based on those marks
> get introduced to politics in freshmen social justice class, instantly floored
> the appeal of college politics is just how cut-and-dried it is. Unlike other fields, it has a clear “good” and “bad” side, no ambiguity. The “good” side always wins in classroom discussions, you feel like a hero for validating consensus with "The Conversation"
> politics becomes your religion, “this is my passion!”
> graduate with top marks and recs. Your degree is essentially in “Current Thing-ism”. Have no broad understanding of history or philosophy.
> Your concept of human events is just people being oppressed for 4000 years until feminism and progress happened in the 20th c.
> despite the Global Financial Crisis, immediately get hired by a government/media org because they want someone who “understands the role of female politics in our new digital era!”
> most of your colleagues share your perspective, the ones who don't are older guys on their way to retirement, not looking for the confrontation that disagreeing with you would certainly involve.
> great awokening happens, double down on Current-Thingism politics
> organe-man-bad and COVID happens, triple down on politics.
> you are 15 years deep in your career, you have never once genuinely engaged with a peer who didn't validate your worldview or who you didn't consider a "token" opposition to placade your political enemies
> vibe shift happens, establishment uncertain, time to have a "conversation" with the people you've considered deplorable
> have conversation, hear non-progressive opinion that is common in the modern world, historically ubiquitous
> react with schock, umbrage horror. "Can you even believe this is happening?"
> confident that non-progressive opinion is trivially easy to refute, somehow have no idea how to actually refute it
> unaware just how deeply you have been betrayed by your education, such that the average educated man on the street has more practical understanding of what politics is than you do with decades of "experience."
Fun fact:
I used a VPN & a throwaway SIM to create the twitter account that got me arrested, when I asked the police interrogator how they found me, they admitted they matched up the details of my stabbing that I posted about on the account to the police report I made. Pure evil
To me, this is a perfect artifact of “Peak Woke.” A totally senseless factoid, where the premise is a complete lie — and that lie is the actual payload.
On a factual level, “Avicenna” is just a transliteration of “Ibn Sina.” And besides, it’s not some insane jump, especially when Plato in Arabic is “Aflāṭūn,” and Hippocrates is “Buqrāṭ.” But none of this is the point.
The real content of this genre of post is asserting to the reader: “You grew up learning that Avicenna was a white European man, as part of a systematic effort to wipe nonwhite historical accomplishments out of the public record.”
This is an insane lie. Completely off-the-wall. But it goes unquestioned, and the reader is meant to absorb and be outraged by this act of ignorant racism.
(That he didn’t know who Avicenna was before reading it is irrelevant — and he will not learn who Avicenna was after, either)
But… he now knows in his heart that it’s *ackshually* written “Ibn Sīnā.” He feels not only intellectually, but *morally* superior for knowing this. His imagined miseducation has been corrected.
This lying-by-premise schtick is, to me, the central pillar and hallmark of “Wokeism.” All of education and media has orbited around this rhetorical device for… what, over a decade now? Everything from K-12 to network TV to graduate scholarship to national politics.
I can’t count how many times I had a teacher tell me that some historical figure “wasn’t the hero you were always taught he was.” Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Henry Ford, etc… meanwhile, that’s how all of these figures were being introduced for the first time!
@WinkleWithAnL@minordissent No, aggressive bloodthirsty savage violence is still good, as long as it's aimed towards enemies. Getting rid of the cucked idea that if we defeat our enemies we lose is important.
@DipsumValley The problem is that when someone goes "you should give a shit about art, here's why:" 90% of the time they continue with some revolting pomo dogshit. Normies can learn to parrot the arguments, or play politics, but you can't make them like intentionally low quality art.
@UdahoDuncan@revenant_MMXX@JemmDrakenblood "We are going to obliterate all of these things" doesn't mean "all of these things are historically connected", and you know this. What audience are you trying to persuade? If you're lying to yourself and this works on you, wow, that's pathetic.
@Netoey@john_wilddog Point out that law is fake, judges and juries aren't neutral, all efforts made towards fairness are instrumental and contigent, etc. - that's what autists are really missing, the _reasons_ why following the rules is insane, not the fact that others don't, they already know that.
@ArtemisConsort Even the "describing your own failure modes without fixing them" failure mode is there. Still, their main failure is being infected by progressivism, not the cringe autist parts, nor AI doom (for a decade now, the scoreboard has been stuck at 0 compelling arguments against).
@atlanticesque Sometimes you're corrct. Sometimes you're wrong, it's 100% network effects, the company brings nothing to the table except being first to wise up on spending a majority of its budget on marketing, then extracts rents forever.
https://t.co/HEVsvoRQXd Atomically precise, positionally-controlled, zero-bias #mechanosynthesis. High reliability. Including the demonstration of C-C bond formation in the form of short polyyne chains in surface configurations never before reported in the literature.
@litrllyBased@xwanyex Here's a free high-IQ haver pro tip: Responding to insults of low intelligence that way just indicates they landed, avoid that. The only possibly real Epstein crime was bringing a few sub-18 teenagers to his island, which is very different from events in people's imaginations.