In a piece at The Week Damon Linker tries to provide some background on the history of Wokeness:
The Great Awokening is gathering speed.
Hardly a week — and sometimes barely a day or an hour — goes by without a fresh incident of “cancel culture” or another “woke” scandal breaking in the news.
Whether you think the trend a good thing, a bad thing, or a trivial thing, you know exactly what I mean. To list just a few of the stories from recent weeks: Longtime New York Times reporter Donald McNeil was fired for quoting a racial slur in conversation with high school students on a trip sponsored by the newspaper; six Dr. Seuss books were discontinued by their publisher because an advisory committee flagged racist images within them; the incoming editor in chief of Teen Vogue has gotten into hot water for tweeting anti-Asian remarks 10 years ago, when she was a teenager; the host of the TV show The Bachelorette has been pushed out because he defended a current contestant who, according to CNN, “was reportedly photographed at an antebellum plantation-themed fraternity formal in 2018.”
He traces it back about 50 years. Given its increasing prominence in education, media, and entertainment, the “commanding heights” of the culture to paraphrase Lenin, IMO simply dismissing it as inconsequential or only being promoted by an irrelevant minority is not a credible argument.
As I’ve said before I think it’s largely Marxism, replacing class consciousness with race consciousness or sexual identity consciousness mutatis mutandis which not only is not an improvement, it’s actually dangerous since it is inherently a demand for minority power.
He concludes:
That’s just the barest sketch of what might be behind the Great Awokening roiling our politics and culture. Until we make more progress in coming to terms with its deepest motives and ultimate aims, we will find ourselves at a loss in how to respond.
I don’t believe that “responding” is nearly as difficult as he does. All it takes is fortitude which, as we have had demonstrated over the last year, is in increasingly short supply, particularly among our political leadership. And as Tom Lehrer pointed out years ago it take a certain amount of courage to stand up in a coffeehouse and sing a song protesting against things that everybody else there believes in.
It was the family of Dr Seuss that decided to pull the books. Too date, I have yet to see anyone complaining about this actually post the pictures and then defend them. This may be the 200th time I have heard about McNeil being fired. He must be a lot more special than I realized.
So I think there are some purity police out there. I think they should mostly be ignored or ridiculed and as far as I can tell that is mostly what I see and hear. I ma still not seeing a credible argument that it is truly widespread and common, other than in some media repeating the same stories.
Steve
Scott Sumner, definitely not a Republican and neither a conservative nor a progressive but presumably mostly a libertarian, did both.
Nope. Sumner avoids the most offensive ones also. He does advocate for what makes the most sense, ie update the pictures. I guess that is up to the family. I really dont see the need to have anyone dictate to them what they should do though that seems to be what conservatives want.
Sumner also links to the evidence that Covid may’ve come from Thailand, not covered at all by those with right wing leanings.
Steve
I’ve mentioned that here. IMO although a possibility it does have some issues. It’s about 2,000 klicks from Thailand to Wuhan. To the best of my knowledge there are no non-stop flights so you’d expect Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen to have had some early cases.
C’mon, Joey, have some courage…..