Woke friends

[shabanga]

Name changed, regular poster.

I just need some advice. How do you guys handle friends captured by wokeness?

I have an old friend who I noticed kept quiet about woke issues whenever I mentioned them, which I optimistically hoped meant she agreed but was too afraid to say, because she works in academia.

However after our last meet up I feel like she is totally captured and I was unable to say anything due to the circumstances of that meet up (kids around). I feel so sad about it because I know she is a good person. I feel like she needs her eyes opening but I just don't know how to do it. I'm so terrible at directness and want to be gentle with her.

Any advice much appreciated.

This what I have been getting at. People use it to mean so many things that it is meaningless. "Anti-woke" could mean GC person or Andrew Tate!

I didn't say anything about anybody supporting a racist killing, I was just giving examples of events that can start deep and sometimes revealing conversations.

Edited to add that I agree about the slipperiness of the word 'woke', which reminds me of 'PC gone mad' which also used to mean anything and everything, depending. It's not a word I find useful, for that reason.

Not sure what your point is - OED’s definition doesn’t seem to be at odds with any of the posts on this thread, as it describes both previous and more recent usage?

Anyway, ‘literally’ literally got a second dictionary definition because people started using the word in a different way to how it was used originally.

Dictionaries just track language as it’s used, (but obvs with a bit of a time lag).

The battle over the word ‘Woman’ is precisely because no one actually uses ‘Woman’ to mean ‘Man who proclaims a womanly gender identity’ without the qualifier ‘trans’ in front of it.

Thanks for prompting me to look it up as the OED has given me another useful term to describe Woke Activists, ‘Doctrinaire’.

Yup. If enough people persist in using 'infer' to mean imply, that meaning will find its way into dictionaries. But the meaning of some words can't be allow to wander. 'Woman' and 'female' for instance.

It depends on the friend tbh.

Some we are the type of people who can agree to disagree and just avoid the topic at hand or others where we are prepared to have constructive discussions without mud slinging.

For a minority though I have cut them off when they take the view that it's their job to "educate" me by throwing sound bites and baseless "evidence" and refuse to listen to my position in turn.

In general I would say life would be poorer if I cut off everyone from myself who didn't agree with me on any given (important) topic. So no, I'm not going to lose a friendship because someone votes conservative or believes TWAW as long as they respect my right to alternative stance and aren't pushing their views onto me.

But Anti Woke genuinely can be someone like Andrew Tate or someone like Andrew Doyle, both oppose Wokeness but it doesn’t mean they are part of the same group/movement or have anything else in common.

A Right Wing/Conservative Authoritarian opposes the Left part of Left Wing/Progressive Authoritarianism.

A Left Wing Liberal/Libertarian opposes the Authoritarian part of Left Wing/Progressive Authoritarianism.

It’s a similar sort of oppositional overlap as here:

Back on topic and the handful of people who started avoiding me in 2017/2018 (when I first went terfy) have all come back into my life having realised 2018 Me did have a point after all and no, I’m not cryptofashy and never was.
Some have even actively sought me out as a sort of safe person to verbalise their own emerging views to.

So who knows, maybe if we keep old friendships on a back burner rather than burn them down completely there will be something salvageable in future.

I think this illustrates the point I am making.

It is better for women's rights to be specific in what you actually mean, lest your declaration of being anti-woke is taken to be something you did not intend, given that it can mean many things.

I didn't say anything about anybody supporting a racist killing, I was just giving examples of events that can start deep and sometimes revealing conversations.

Thank you clarifying, I understand now.
I think that there is a bit of tendency in this conversation to group people into "terfs" (classed by some as bigots driven by hate) and "handmaidens" (classed by some as idiots who fall over themselves to be seen as good people while not caring about women). I feel like this really hinders nuanced discussion of the issue and makes an arrival at a solution much less likely.

I don’t agree with policing other people’s language, we all get to choose the words we use ourselves but we don’t get to decide what
other people can and can’t say.

I’m (and probably 90% of FWR posters) am impervious to shaming attempts via forced teaming after 6 years plus of it.

Plus plenty of reasons to oppose Progressive Authoritarianism beyond the Women’s Rights aspect.

I can’t believe people are still defending woke as ‘being a decent person’ when it’s so very far from that. You can be progressive, liberal, left, wonderful and caring - all without being ‘woke’. As someone said earlier, woke is authoritarianism. It’s thinking you in all of human history have the ‘right and true’ opinions and anyone who veers from them even slightly deserves to have their lives destroyed.

No genuine liberal would want people to be ‘cancelled’ for any reason. For ‘misgendering’ or ‘microaggressions’ to put you beyond all redemption.

I’m fucking sick of people misrepresenting ‘woke’. It’s a cult. When arch-misogynist and patroniser of black people James O’Brien is proud to call himself ‘woke’ that says it all.

When I'm worried about a friend falling down an ideological pipeline that encourages them to develop negative views toward marginalised minority groups, I usually start by asking them to define what Woke means.

It is important to establish a baseline of meaning in order to enable future communication. For example, they could be using 'Woke' as a pejorative neologism that holds the same meaning as the older term 'Political Correctness' that served a similar purpose during the 90's and the first decade of the millennium. If they are using it in this way, I would ask them which marginalised minority groups they hold negative views about and what their desires for how those groups should be treated would be.

Sometimes the process of being asked to explain their views causes them to become quite aggressive and unpleasant. I observe similar behaviour with my 6 year old nephew when he is asked to explain why he was rude to his sister or why other people should also be allowed to have birthdays as well. This aggressive guilty-conscience defensiveness is normally a strong sign that I am unlikely to find a common ground with this person without significant work, but as with my nephew, most reasonable people are able to find a way toward a grounded stance that is compassionate and respectful once they are able to step beyond their initial hostility.

I hope your friend receives a pleasing answer to that question one day.

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

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. 🤷‍♀️

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?

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.

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.

Yes, I agree, language policing is the key.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?