Too often the culture war is misconceived as a conflict between Left and Right, with “woke” aligned with the former and “anti-woke” with the latter, but “wokeness” carries with it the kind of clout that transcends the political binary. In their 13 years of government, the Conservatives have presided over the worst excesses of this identity-obsessed ideology and the havoc it has wrought on society. Far from fighting a “war on woke”, they have been actively enabling it.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the day – woke and anti-wokeSamizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Arts & Entertainment · Culture Wars · Slogans & Quotations January 9th, 2024 |
 25 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – woke and anti-wokeLeave a Reply |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
I think it’s a mistake to differentiate between this imaginary construct of “Left” and “Right” when it has become abundantly clear that there’s not a hairsbreadth of difference between the outcomes of putting either group into power.
The real conflict here is the one between professional politician/charlatan and anyone who isn’t in on the fraud. Other than coloration, there’s no difference between the two classes of criminal.
I’ve heard the so-called “Republican conservatives” espouse fiscal restraint all my damn life. What do they do, in office? Can you tell a difference in spending rates and all that between them and their supposed “Democrat” opponents?
No, the whole thing is a con game. They, the professional politicians and fraudsters, tell us all these things they think we want to hear, and then do whatever they damn well please. In the UK, the assholes never once thought to actually ask the electorate what it thought of either being replaced or giving up national sovereignty, they just went ahead and did it.
So, if you let them distract you with this supposed “ideological” difference, which demonstrates no performative variance whatsoever…? You’re not paying attention, and you are enabling your own violation.
“Woke” is a policy and tool of the political class, our mutual self-declared enemies. If we all rose up and put these assholes out of power, the world would be a far better place. I’ve yet to run into a situation wherein the person seeking political office has been someone I’d want in charge of anything, to include running the local public convenience. Most of them would have trouble doing even that…
Thomas Sowell said this:
Ask yourself this: Who has done this? Has there been any difference between the two supposed “sides” of our political class? Or, have they all been moving “forward” with this BS, together, in lockstep?
Why hasn’t anyone called them to accountability for these things? Why are there no performance metrics set, no demands for responsibility when these things go “wrong”?
It’s a con game, and it is far past the point wherein we ought to take note and cease falling for the swindle.
You look at what’s happened across most of the Western world since the 1970s, and the whole situation starts to look like a classic organized crime “bust-out”, where the criminal conspirators take over an existing business and then run it into the ground while looting it. Classically, they use the good credit of the business to order in goods and materials, which are then sold illicitly for profit of the criminals, while never contributing a dime to the bottom line of the looted business.
If you don’t see the similarities between what the political class in all our nations has been doing, I think you have to be willfully blind.
But we do, regularly. We vote. That’s democratic accountability. (Leaving aside the entire vote-fraud argument, of course.)
I think the voters, as a whole, have moved leftward, leaving those of us who identify as further right alone and outvoted. The system is working – we’re just losing the popularity contests.
So, it’s not that our system no longer responds to what the people want. I think it’s more like, the people as a whole want a more woke/lefty governance.
Which I think is stupid and unproductive and ultimately damaging to the country, but nobody asks me.
I don’t think you can “leave aside” the vote fraud. At all. If the electorate were, as you say, “moving leftward”, then why would they need to fraud their people and policies into place in the first place?
I’ve been observing this corruption since the 1990s. The number of times initiatives or state-wide elective offices have been thrown by last-minute recounts in the major urban counties is statistically unlikely, yet it keeps happening. The fraud is transparent; the “found ballots” are always in favor of the Democrats or the desired initiatives of the crooks.
I don’t believe the mass of voters want this crap. They want to be left alone; they want to live safely and securely in their homes; they do not want their kids proselytized into sexual confusion. Yet, those are the precise things that keep happening in the “electoral market”. Why?
I don’t think the voters have “moved left”; I think the fraud has, and it only looks that way. The moment is going to come when the majority realizes they’ve been cozened by the fraudsters into thinking that everyone else believes in all this woke bullshit, and afterwards, things are going to change. It won’t be pretty, either.
“I don’t believe the mass of voters want this crap.”
I wish I could believe that. I look around here and see the majority being very happy with this leftward lurch. Maybe it’s just where I live – Minnesota
This past year, it’s not that Democrats beat the Republicans here. It’s that the Democrats all lost out to the Democratic Socialists. (We don’t even get Republican candidates in many races.) That was the only real competition for government here, and the actual socialists/communists beat out the Democrats.
It doesn’t take fraud here to do that, either.
In the end, when the free cheese runs out, and the rats are eating the mice? It’ll all come crashing down.
Minnesota is one of those weird states where a bunch of the population has been convinced to ignore the reality displayed by their own eyes, and keep right on doing all the things that got them into trouble in the first place.
The whole George Floyd/Chauvin thing is a case in point: Do tell, who has been running the city government in those cities since forever? And, why is it that they can point at the manifest failures of their police departments, and then blame anyone but themselves? I mean, look at the Justine Diamond killing, as well: That can clearly be laid at the door of an utter lack of good oversight over the police department, yet… Not a damn thing was done about it, and nobody cared.
Meanwhile, the idiot do-gooders in all the Lutheran church-affiliated charities work their asses off to bring in refugees from places like Somalia, profiting heavily from the government cheese that’s on offer. To the detriment of all the existing residents of the state…
At some point, the party is going to come to a screeching end, and then the hangover is going to be epic. Not even the reality distortion field they’ve been using for years is going to be up to the task… The stark facts are going to be right there in front of them, when Minneapolis/St. Paul both look like Detroit.
Seattle is in a similar situation, but what is interesting is talking to the people who’ve left that region for “reason”. They know what was done, they know who did it, and they’re more than a little bitter about it. That bitterness is going to be expressed at the polls, one day.
As I’ve been saying… You can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time, but when you can’t fool anyone any longer, you’re in trouble. And, that’s precisely where these wokesters are heading.
I normally agree with Andrew Doyle but here he bizarrely seems to think the Conservative Party is on the right
When that happens, there will be bodies all over the place. I agree that it will happen, but I am not very happy about the inevitability of it.
I also think that for a certain kind of “liberal” or even some libertarians, perhaps, they conflate ideas of “freedom” and “individualism” with the post-modern idea that reality is simply what is in your head, or to put it another way, they conflate freedom with “subjectivism”.
This is epistemological solipsism – the claim that one can only be certain of the existence of one’s mind. Therefore, if a person states that today, I intend to be a woman, or a man, or a giraffe or green turtle, they will see statements about biological reality as a threat and demand they should be banned. So here we are. The party of Peel, Churchill and Thatcher has people now in it who think sexual identity is just a subjective preference.
I want to stress that I doubt most Tory MPs grasp this, and even among those who go along with contemporary ideas about gender fluidity, they don’t see the philosophical roots of where this comes from. The rot arguably goes back to Hume, who denied even the existence of a coherent self – a point that Paul Marks of this parish makes from time to time. These ideas haven’t just sprung out of thin air.
When Jacob Rees-Mogg, then a senior Cabinet minister, tried to roll back “Diversity and Inclusion” in the Civil Service he was obstructed at every turn – and what little progress he managed to make was reversed as soon as he was no longer in post. Such things as the Equality Act (2010) lead to “Diversity and Inclusion” “Wokeness” – as does the education system.
Culture does not just appear (whatever the late F.A. Hayek may have thought about “the product of human action but not of human design” “social evolution”), culture is the manifestation of, it derives from, ideas – beliefs. Philosophical, religious and (yes) political beliefs.
Unless one understands what belief system “Woke” culture derives from one can not successfully oppose it, and one can only oppose it with other ideas – one can not have a culture without a foundation of ideas-beliefs. The questions is not “how do we have a culture that does not have a foundation in ideas -beliefs” no such culture is possible, the question is “what ideas-beliefs should be the foundation of our culture”.
The “Woke”, or rather the thinkers behind this movement (not the mass of foot soldier “activists”) understand all the above – and so must their enemies.
So Andrew Doyle is exactly WRONG – being “Woke” is (not is not) being on the left (it is about destroying society for the cause of, supposedly, clearing the way for a new society) and being “Anti Woke” is (not is not) about being on the right (being a supporter of the ideas-beliefs that underpin Western civilisation).
The problem with Britain, and many other nations, is that there is not much of a “right” remaining – few people who understand and will fight for the ideas-beliefs that are the foundation of Western Civilisation.
Hence, for example, only six Members of the House of Commons voting against the Equality Act of 2010.
Society, including culture in its various aspects, is the manifestation of (is based upon) certain ideas-beliefs – when people no longer understand or will not fight for these principles, then society (the culture) starts to die (for it has no living core of basic ideas – it is just a husk) – which makes the task of the enemies of civilisation (the thinkers behind the Legion of unthinking “Woke” activists) easy.
And, yes, Johnathan Pearce – this attack is a lot older than Marxism, the idea that there are not basic principles, not even a coherent self (“I”) goes back at least to David Hume – indeed beyond him to Thomas Hobbes and others.
It will not lead to a wonderful new society (a Marxist utopia) – as it is really nihilism, it will lead to destruction, it will lead to the void.
Many things sound nice till one understands their philosophical basis – which is why it is so vital to understand the philosophical basis (the ideas behind the nice sounding slogans).
For example, “anti racism” sounds nice – as it is wrong to judge people by the colour of their skin.
But then one finds out that “anti racism” is precisely about judging people by the colour of their skin, with being “white” (pinkish-gray) meaning being evil, it being the manifestation of “whiteness” which is evil “capitalism”.
This is the lunatic doctrine that is, for example, being taught in the United States military. What seems to be “do not be nasty to black people for being black” turns out to be something entirely different when its philosophical basis goes into effect.
To give a much older example – Dr Martin Luther saying “here I stand, I can do no other” sounds like a magnificent example of moral conscience, till one understands the philosophy behind that statement – which is revealed in such works as “Bondage of the Will” by Dr Luther.
Dr Luther believed that moral agency (free will) did not exist – so when he says “here I stand, I can do no other” he means “there is no “I” – Martin Luther is a pre programmed flesh robot, which was programmed, at the start of the universe, to stand here and say these things”.
Note that is not dependent on atheism – either open atheism, as with Hume and Dr Marx, or disguised atheism as with Thomas Hobbes. Dr Luther was not an atheist – on the contrary he was fanatically religious, to Dr Luther there was one free will being (moral agent) in the universe – God. With the actions of everyone else being predetermined by God (a denial of the distinction between a subject and an object – to Dr Luther we are all really just objects, we do not have free will – moral agency).
In this Dr Luther was close to extreme versions of Sunni (although not Shia) Islam.
By the way….. – if all actions are predetermined by God, that makes God the author of sin (if “sin” can, properly speaking, be held to exist at all) – but Dr Luther would not have accepted this.
Bobby:
I suggest that you read The Machiavellians by James Burnham, and specifically the chapters on Gaetano Mosca and Robert Michels. Burnham does a good job of summarizing Mosca’s and Michels’ theories of why representative “democracy” is always a bit of a sham, even in the absence of voting fraud.
Does that mean that i am in favor of absolute monarchy, like some of the people enthusiastic about Mosca, Michels, and Burnham? (Michels, a German naturalized Italian, was himself a supporter of Mussolini.)
No, of course not: what i want is Popperian democracy, the power to overthrow a regime without violence.
I agree with Mosca, Michels, and Burnham, that the winners of elections do not reflect the popular will; but i still think that the losers deserved to lose — at least if they were in power before the election.
PS: IIRC Mosca, Michels, and Burnham did fail to foresee the rise of the Administrative State (Deep State), which has become the main impediment to Popperian democracy.
Our discussion here is ignoring a critical flaw in the “woke” line of thought:
In the final analysis, a belief system has to work. You can believe in all sorts of absurd things, act on those things, and then encounter no problems with that system… Right up until you hit the hard stops of reality. Those are not amenable to belief, and they’re not going to change just so you can continue to believe.
The wokista types have proposed a belief system that contravenes reality. The inevitable outcome is that they are going to run into the hard stops before long, and then the whole bloody thing is going to crash. Those stops are not going to move, they’re not going to go away, and that’s the bottom line. What doesn’t work, won’t continue… Because it can’t.
Man proposes; God (or, the natural universe, whichever you prefer…) disposes. It’s always been that way, and always will be. You can have your theories, you can have your “beliefs”, but if those are not in accordance with the true nature of things, you’re going to find that it just doesn’t matter, when it comes down to it. You can believe the moon is made of green cheese, but when you send off your cheese-miners to get it, you’re going to find that it’s mostly rocks and dust.
Kirk, the problem is Woke doesn’t actually need to work. The rank and file want the end result but their masters know it can’t, so just like the Fascists and Communists they will ALWAYS say the reason it doesn’t work isn’t because the fundamental premises are flawed but because there is an enemy of some sort. External, internal, religious, anti-revolutionary, whatever, there will always be someone to blame when Utopia doesn’t arrive and someone to vilify. And once that group is eliminated, they just shift their target to another group to blame.
And the useful idiots will ALWAYS buy the excuses.
So… Steven, did I just imagine the fall of the Soviet Union, and things like what happened to Ceaucescu, in Romania?
Part of the problem here is that folks like you see what is going on, despair, and resign yourselves to “the inevitability”. There is no such thing, and there isn’t any end-state where the delusional world-views of the woke wind up winning everything forever. Why? Because, as I have to repeatedly keep telling people there is an underlying reality that they’re not accounting for with all their wishful thinking.
Don’t buy the bullshit. They’re only able to do what they are because enough people with sense are despair-mongers, watching the stupidity overcome that segment of the population that’s vulnerable to it. In the end, those people are going to find out the hard way, and you’re going to have to deal with them having met their misadventure as well as try to help them understand reality as it actually is.
You can’t fly to the moon by clicking your heels and flapping your arms while believing really, really hard in yourself. The wokesters are engaged in similar folly, and will achieve similar results.
Mr Marks
You’ve been making the same point about Martin Luther for some years. I’ve so far refrained from responding because this is a political/current events blog, not a theological discussion forum. But tonight I’m well into a rather decent Chilean red and, frankly, I don’t care.
Your analysis of Luther’s thought is mistaken. You’ve taken his argument in one fight with the Dutch humanist Erasmus, an argument addressing a single, narrowly-defined theological point, and from that extrapolated an imaginary idea of Luther’s view of humanity in general.
Erasmus had pushed the idea of the power of reason in the origin of one’s faith nearly to the point of not requiring any contribution from the Holy Spirit at all, as if one could reason oneself into belief. That was heresy, and Luther called him out on it.
As for your partial quotation from Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms before the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, you’ve again come to a mistaken conclusion. What he actually said, in Latin, was,
Then, in German, he summarised his point by saying,
There is nothing in this to suggest he believed men were “flesh robots”. Only that his reason, applied to Scripture, had led him to a position contrary the Catholic Church’s and, unless proved wrong, he was unwilling to recant.
@Phillip Scott Thomas
I think your analysis is correct. I think the accusation that Paul throws out about “flesh robots” could rather more fairly be directed at John Calvin. Luther’s position, if we are to use a modern analogy, was that the scriptures where a set of axioms, to be taken on faith, and then from these one can derive other ideas through a process of rational deduction. Something that is, depending on how you define it, a process of free will.
“Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise” is not a statement of inability, but of unwillingness. I don’t speak German but I am curious what word he used for “cannot”. In English we sometimes make a distinction between what we “can” do, which is to say what the laws of physics and our training allow us to do, and what we “may” do, which is to say what we have permission to do, and what we “will” do, which is to say what we plan to exercise our free will to actually do. The semantic domains of these words tend to blur in modern English. However, I do not think Luther’s statement is using the strictest meaning of “can”, in the sense of “Here I stand, the laws of physics and my training prevent me from doing otherwise”, which is what we would expect were he to think of himself as a flesh robot. But is more along the lines of “Here I stand I will not do otherwise”, or more explicitly “I’m not going to do otherwise because it would violate everything I believe and I couldn’t live with myself.”
I offer this as an analysis of Luther’s thinking rather than making any specific claims as to what I think about free will.
And to say, much as I disagree with a lot of what Luther said, he was one very, very brave person. “Canceling” the way the medieval church did it was a lot different than what even the most radical wokests do today. I suppose such zealotry is only available to the religious.
Kirk wrote:
No you didn’t. While we’re on the subject, how are those revolts working in Cuba, and Venezuela, and North Korea, and South Africa, and China anyway?
But totalitarian states aren’t the issue. The issue is whether or not Woke ideology can work. It can’t and the people calling the shots know it. This isn’t an economic or political system or even a viable ideology. It’s just a way to keep the unwashed masses at each other’s throats and the end goal can never be met because there will always be some group in the way. Eliminate that group and the next group gets in the firing line. And because no one ever really knows where the line of acceptable thought is, that line can be moved at any moment by TPTB. What was on the Right Side Of History today is anathema to civilized behavior tomorrow and vice versa. This time though, it isn’t simply pushed by political movers and shakers, but by big investment firms like Blackrock and every major corporation on Wall Street.
tl;dr Woke doesn’t need to work, it just needs to present an enemy for the masses to hate.
Fraser Orr
“…the scriptures where a set of axioms, to be taken on faith, and then from these one can derive other ideas through a process of rational deduction. Something that is, depending on how you define it, a process of free will.”
Exactly so. Lutheran theology is built on the same process, the same principles of reason applied to Scripture, that Aquinas adapted from Aristotle in the 13th century. Not exactly a “flesh robot” understanding of humanity.
“I don’t speak German but I am curious what word he used for ‘cannot’.
He is reported to have said, “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen.”
“…or more explicitly “I’m not going to do otherwise because it would violate everything I believe and I couldn’t live with myself.”
Yes. Exactly so.
A very interesting discussion of Lutheran theory of “free will”, but if you hope to convince Paul Marks, you are going to be disappointed.
As for this:
It might interest you to know that the distinction between inability and unwillingness maps rather neatly onto Leibniz’s distinction between physical necessity and moral necessity:
An agent acts under ‘physical necessity’ if it responds to stimuli, under ‘moral necessity’ if it chooses the best course of action.
The ‘necessity’ in ‘moral necessity’ comes from the fact that, usually, there is only one best course of action (for a given criterion of optimality); and therefore the choice is (usually) entirely determined by the state of the environment, together with the criterion of optimality.
This ‘necessity’ has nothing to do with causality as commonly understood, and therefore it is a form of compatibilism distinct from that of Hobbes, and i believe even Hume. (Actually, Paul Marks is close to Hobbes and Hume in being unable to see the difference.)
Leibniz was a Lutheran, i believe.
Actually, the distinction between physical and moral necessity seems implicit in Bishop Bramhall’s position in his debate with Hobbes; but Leibniz introduced the terms, to the best of my knowledge.
Philip Scott Thomas, Fraser and Snorri – I respectfully disagree.
Martin Luther was clear that he was a predestinationist – humans, to him, could not will anything good (nothing at all) – if they appeared to do so, this was because God had intervened.
Everything, according to Dr Luther, was predetermined by God – although he did NOT accept the logical consequence of this, that sin (murder, rape and so on) is predetermined by God, i.e. that God is the author of sin as humans (not being human beings – God being the only free will being, the only subject rather than just object) could NOT have chosen to do other than they did.
So whilst Martin Luther and John Calvin differ on some matters (for example church music and the interiors of churches) on this basic philosophically point – they were of like mind.
As for Compatiblism – perhaps neither Martin Luther or Thomas Hobbes tried this particular dodge (the claim that humans are morally responsible for their actions even if humans are NOT persons – i.e. are not free will beings who can choose to do other than they do, the basis of the Criminal Law in both Roman and Common Law jurisdictions), but David Hume does seem to have tried this dodge (the philosophical equivalent to “having your cake and eating it as well”).
Kant and William James may have been wrong about many things, but they were correct to condemn David Hume, in the strongest language, for this dodge.
In case anyone thinks otherwise, I am in no way attacking the modern Lutherian Church (churches – as there are several of them).
They have quietly abandoned many of the teachings of Dr Luther – that Jews should be savagely persecuted, that women must be wives or whores, and so on.
It would be a great mistake to confuse any church today with the teachings of this 16th century person.
The importance of Dr Luther is in his philosophical influence on later thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, although Mr Hobbes made very radical changes to the position of Dr Luther – most notably in quietly removing God from the picture (God was the very centre of the position of Dr Luther) – Mr Hobbes never formally admitted to being an atheist (it would have been dangerous for him to admit that) – even Mr Hume did not formally admit that (although it is obvious that he does not believe in the soul – not even in the non religious Aristotelian sense of personhood).
To Dr Luther there is one being (one “I” one free will person) in the universe – God.
To Mr Hobbes and Mr Hume there are no beings in the universe – none at all.
They all deny their own personhood – but Dr Luther does NOT deny the concept of personhood, to him there is one person who really does exist – God.
By the way – the political position of these men is tied to their philosophical position.
Dr Luther famously (or infamously) not only supported the unlimited power of the Princes (even to reduce to serfdom people who had not been serfs before) – he even at least seemed to teach non resistance of Christians to Ottoman (Islamic) conquerors – at a time when Europe was under deadly threat, to Dr Luther the Greeks and so on should do nothing to overthrough their evil overlords.
Mr Hobbes infamously made a political philosophy out of submission to despotism, and Mr Hume made his indifference to political liberty rather clear in such essays as his one on the Euthanasia of the Constitution.
However, all this makes perfect sense if one shares their philosophical opinions – if human beings do not really exist (if moral agency is just an illusion) then tyranny does not matter, it is not violating moral agency – because, according to this position, moral agency does not exist.
Logically the extermination of these human shaped non beings would not matter either.
Paul: You are way out of your depth here.
Don’t know about James, but the consensus seems to be that Kant did not “condemn” Hume: he “condemned” Leibniz. And Kant made a fool of himself in this: he failed to understand Leibniz’s reasoning… like Paul.
Paul Marks –
Disagree with me, respectfully or otherwise, as much as you wish. You are still mistaken.
I once asked you asked you, several years ago, what of Luther’s work you had read. You said that you had read The Babylonian Captivity in translation. My first Masters degree, on the other hand, was in Luther’s thinking, sweated out over 3-1/2 years spent learning both medieval German and Latin (both of which languages I have, regrettably, allowed to lapse many years ago). I believe I know whereof I speak.
To say “Martin Luther was clear that he was a predestinationist – humans, to him, could not will anything good (nothing at all) – if they appeared to do so, this was because God had intervened” is to indicate that you know
little of Luther’s theology. And to say that Luther and Calvin were of like mind is even more to betray an extraordinary ignorance of the theological arguments of the time.