Woke friends

I can see that you might have found my post pretty rude. In fact, I'm religious myself and also (not as often as I should) read the office. But I recognise bad religion and I'm smelling a lot of it in places that aren't religious in the normal sense at all.

No biggie if you have no interest in understanding how all these seemingly disparate ideas fit together 🤷‍♀️

Yes but according to the Daily Mail chicken sandwiches are also woke. I have also seemed it used as a blanket condemnation of anyone saying something politically to the left of the person calling them woke. If people want to say "progressive authoritarian" then people should say that rather than "woke" and having to explain which definition they are using.
But of course, if you start talking about "progressive authoritarian" rather than the issue in front of you (eg trans women in sports, general ridiculousness of TWAW) then you are straight away asking people to buy into your own world view/analysis of the overarching problem. Which is fine. In the same way it's fine to do consciousness raising feminism if that's your thing. But if you/the other person just want to talk about their ex or how their boss is a exist bastard it can be a bit alienating. Especially if any rejection of that analysis is met with disappointment by the OP. I might not care if my friend subscribes to radical feminist analysis. I might if she thinks her boss sexually harassing other coworkers is ok. Those two things aren't the same. Best not to confuse them. Likewise "I don't see all the fuss about woke" is not the same as "TWAW lemme get my flags out" for most people.

Slightly blunt answer here, but if differences of views are affecting a friendship then (peacefully) end it and find new friends?

I have a friend that’s so woke I despair. It really makes me question everything I thought I knew about her as an intelligent, reflective human being. We skirt around the subject, but I’m increasingly uncomfortable in her company.

I also have a sister who in all seriousness holds up Eddie Izzard as the paragon of womanhood, and I’m a bigot for disagreeing. We don’t talk anymore.

'Progressive' authoritarianism is more like it.

but is woke not the new normal, i mean if society wants a star trek style utopia where everyone is respected ect then at some point society needs to become more woke overall ?

Firstly, if it can possibly be avoided I won’t bring up topics I am likely to disagree with my friends on. There are plenty of other topics to discuss.
If it is something I don’t know much about, I’ll listen to their pov and consider it, then go away to look into it if I think I need to.

If something comes up and I hear something I know I strongly disagree with (the scenario I think you are referring to here), I will make a mild comment of disagreement- they can then drop it if they don’t want to go there.

If they carry on to tell me where I am wrong then ok, we go there. I don’t make contradictory statements without knowing my ground. I will take their argument head on and discuss it. I’m willing to be persuaded to their pov if they can make the case (it’s happened) but will not back down if they cannot. I’m pretty good at defending my opinions as I don’t start unless I know what I’m talking about. It will then continue until they drop it. The ferocity of my discussion will match theirs. I’ll always drop the matter as soon as someone wants to.

Over time this has meant that if I start to defend a ‘controversial’ position, my friends know this is not due to lack of knowledge on the topic and generally only continue if they are genuinely interested in my pov rather than in ‘educating’ me.

Lost no friends so far - fingers crossed - but probably put a few acquaintances off closer friendship, if I’m honest.

I’ve had this, I have a good friend who works in fashion and is very much TWAW. It’s taken a few years but last time we spoke she didn’t cut me down as she had previously.
Interestingly it was the Pelicot case that helped as we were talking about how depraved men can be compared to women which led to me talking about crime stats and how they’re skewed when TW are classed as women.

I’ve started to use the term ‘penis person’ instead of man and talk a lot about ‘penis privilege’ instead of male privilege. It seemed to help her realise that it doesn’t make a difference what clothes cover the penis, the privilege is still there in terms of strength, body shape, offending rates, entitlement etc.

You sound like a patronising "friend". You don't get to dictate what others think, and it's arrogant in the extreme to be thinking that your role in life is to convert others to the "right way" of thinking. You wouldn't need to worry about such things if you were my friend - the minute you started your "conversion therapy" you'd be my ex-friend. If your basis for friendship is so shallow that you need your friends to agree with you, then it'll not be any great loss to her to find out that you aren't really a friend of hers.

‘An alternative words for woke which probably fits better are probably moralistic, pious and evangelical.‘

The problem is that ‘pious’ and ‘evangelical’ do have specific and not necessarily pejorative meanings . I would define myself as ‘pious’: I read the office every morning, I honour many Saint’s days, I pray….( and I don’t care if the atheists laugh at me, he who laughs last etc. ). I don’t think my worst enemy would describe me as ‘woke’ though.

Similarly ‘evangelical’ has a specific meaning (although Capitalised) , and has a neutral usage in history. WOKE is still the best term, IMHO, because it was self produced, its adherents used to boast about being woke, and indeed ask other people if they were. (Mainly so they could launch into one of their boring and illogical rants). They have only got cold feet as it has sunk into the public consciousness, and rather a lot of people have realised that they don’t much care for the views and policies represented.

It sounds like you’ve made your feelings very clear, she’s repeatedly stayed silent and now she’s told you where she stands. Let it go. I don’t think it’s your place to ‘correct’ her views.
If she says something you disagree with, by all means say so, but surely you don’t need to discuss it otherwise?

Thankyou for saying this - I think it's easy for the nuance to get lost in the weeds. A person can hold virulently transphobic views and still be accused of 'wokeism' by reactionary populist media publications and politicians.

An alternative words for woke which probably fits better are probably moralistic, pious and evangelical.

As well as massively hypocritical.

A decent historical reference point would be the puritan movement of the 1600s - that sparked a huge amount of emigration to the US and formed a key part of the dynamic which resulted in the English civil war.

That comparison should ring alarm bells - perhaps not so much in the UK. It's definitely more of a concern within the United States and there has been considerable talk about this for some time.

There's a school of thought by some that the US is already at war with itself due to the number of gun related deaths. I don't subscribe to this, however I do think we will see an uptick in political motived incidents - the death of the healthcare CEO should be making people shift more uncomfortably than they are.

There's a real issue with this progressive authoritarianism.

I saw a couple of tweets relating to this, this week. I posted them on another thread - a lot of it is class related. Even in the US which says it's doesn't have class issues (it most certainly does).

It's about shutting huge numbers of people out of democratic conversations by cultural power holders saying their views are illegitimate and therefore can be ignored by redefining terms of participation. And this has led to a backlash we are now seeing in progress.

Progressive Authoritarianism. I think it's a precise replacement of the Church of England actually.

Most people go along with it without really believing it, just as people used to with the C of E.

A minority are really into it, just as once was the case with the C of E.

People prefer not to criticise it, because doing so is somehow disrespectful and marks you as a bounder .

There are saints' days and liturgical seasons, ie, Trans Awareness Week and International Asexuality Day etc, complete with liturgical colours.

Powerful people are more likely to be co-opted into it. The movement is good at this.

And increasingly there are blasphemy laws.

I find woke people very pedantic in their authoritarian views and ways. Only had one friend that used to drain me out. I simply stop socialising with her. Talked to her from time to time. I have very real problems and have not time for little activists on 24/7 trying to change everything about the world. Mostly I find they want to look cool, relevant and interesting.

"So you would happily be friends with someone who was campaigning to remove all laws forbidding sex between adults and children?"

What a silly question. Having concerns about labelling somebody as "woke" and needing to educate them about how wrong they are to be "woke" doesn't mean you are a big fan of pedophiles. Ludicrous and unhelpful to any meaningful discussion.

I do think just labelling people who have views that you don't agree with as woke and stating you are anti-woke is unhelpful to the wider debate. Woke can mean so many things and is used as a criticism by so many awful people (Andrew Tate, Daily Mail, Trump etc) that I automatically assume anybody who has a starting position that they are anti-woke is a dickhead. This isn't about language policing but perception.

Plenty of people term all feminists as woke, after all. Tate would label 99% of the people posting on MN on women's rights as woke.

I have massive concerns with the trans movement. I do not consider myself anti-woke. Anybody who starts a discussion about a topic by saying they are anti-woke loses me before the discussion even really begins. It's therefore not a helpful approach to truly trying to have meaningful and informed discussion with people.

So you would happily be friends with someone who was campaigning to remove all laws forbidding sex between adults and children?

Yes, I agree, language policing is the key.

I think political correctness was in fact directly related to the language policing we are seeing now. It was the beginning, now we are much further along, but the principles are largely the ones they started with.

There have been threads on here numerous times trying to find a better word than "woke".

For a while some people were using neomarxist, which is ok, I guess. But then people tend to get into the weeds of "well, it's not real Marxism" which is hardly the claim but seems to be a sticking point for some.

It often seems to come down to identity politics, but that doesn't seem to have caught on.

"Intersectionality" is sometimes used, I think it doesn't really describe the belief set well, and in any case is just too obscure to be widely used.

Sometimes people will say critical theory, or dei, but they tend to be in specific settings. And people will argue they are fine when not used outside their proper place so it's misleading to label all "woke" things that way.

There are some more obviously pejorative phrases "performative social justice," for example, but that's generally not going to be a useful approach.

Woke has the continued advantage that communicate a good sense of the set of beliefs you are describing and people will usually understand what you mean without it being explained. So people continue to use it.

People say vegetarianism (and veganism in spades) is 'woke'. People say all kinds of crazy shit. And of course it come to mean the current version of Political Correctness. And how tedious was that?

It's hard- the 'jk Rowling debate' came up in conversation yesterday with a friend. She was receptive but I just didn't know where to begin. This shit has been going on so long!

I just did the same as a previous poster and mentioned the big issues: sport; safeguarding children; women's rape centres. I didn't do it justice. Being 'woke' or 'anti-woke' makes no sense to me. 🤷‍♀️

I can't say I have ever heard anyone say that maternity leave is "woke".