21 Comments
Aug 17, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger

Recently, I visited a gas station in a very small town, and driving down Main St. I observed four rainbow flags. This is post-Pride Month. Three were in front of churches and accompanied various versions of the "all are welcome here" message.

And while I think you've identified some of the greatest problems with wokeism above (no redemption, exploiting real struggles while enlarging definitions to make them functionally meaningless, brokering no dialogue because lack of acceptance = hate), the small town churches made me think about one more thing. The power of the woke movement is that it has allowed the cowardly to feel brave. It has allowed people filled with hate and resentment to feel like they are loving and compassionate. It has allowed the unforgiving to feel morally superior. It has permitted the tribal to feel inclusive. (And if you have any doubt, attend service in a rainbow-flag-all-are-welcome church wearing a MAGA hat.) The oppressors are liberators, and if you're not sure which side you're on, they're ready to send a man into a woman's prison or locker room to force you to choose.

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Aug 17, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger

Great piece. I realize your focus was on the latter half of the essay, but the first half aligns with something I've been working through in my head a lot lately:

WHY?

I'm asking myself this with greater and greater frequency because a lot of the REALLY SMART voices I listen to and read- i.e, not angry blowhards with semi-educated opinions like Yours Truly- are making a point lately of saying, "look, all of this is EMERGENT. This is the natural flow of human systems. Y'all are just fucked up." They're cautioning the thinkers among us to slow down with seeing conspiracies. They've been reminding us that human minds instinctively create narrative (which is true), rapidly assign primary cause with limited available evidence (true again), and engage in weird behavior to protect belief systems and avoid shame (also true); THEREFORE, they say, there's no one "up at the top" doing this on purpose.

I read a lot of Foucault's bullshit and his bullshit friends' bullshit. I've also seen a lot about Gramsci's "long march through the institutions." And, for fuck's sake, you can't unsee anything the WEF tweets about or the awful articles they publish like "Life doesn't have to be happy or purposeful."

All this to say that the topic you're talking about is, in the end, woke ideology and its incredibly poison effects- an ideology that was NOT designed by accident at all, and we have the receipts.

It brings me back to COVID bullshit, which was the reason I got onto substack in the first place- maybe the virus was just the result of terrible lab protocols (involving research that never should have been done in the first place) but there are ABSOLUTELY motherfuckers who saw this unfold, rubbed their hands, and said, "this is our moment, baby."

There ARE people responsible, people have been hurt, and holy shit, someone has to pay.

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Aug 17, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger

Well you put the answer to your own ending question right there in the beginning of the postulate.

"...brook no dissent..."

That is the sum total of the ideology you call woke. It is a reactive beast, picking as prey anything showing weakness. That's why you see this raw aggression from the woke in West, and only there: just like the tantrum-throwing 14-year old snivelling out a "I never asked to be born! You're not the boss of me!" to her parents, the woke are virtually certain their aggression is perfectly risk-free with a high chance of successfully getting them what they currently desire.

Imagine the woke trying their usual tactics and techniques in Turkey, Russia, Morocco or other such places. They might be granted the right to hold protests, they might be granted the right to publish their opinions but the first shove, the first scream in the face of a policeman and it's cudgels-to-the-clavicle time. Thus, the woke always avoids targets ready, willing and able to fight back.

That goes doubly in the West - you don't see any woke protests against the grooming and rape gangs of pakistani/Middle Eastern origin in the UK, do you? Despite it being "cis-het" men conducting regular rapes of underage girls. Because it might "feed racism", because "the real probem is the systemic and structural dispcrepancy of the patriatchical... and further gibberish and gobbledygook."?

No, the real reason is, the ethnic and religious groups involved would retaliate with physical violence, and no-one would stand on the wokes' side, because all normal people would see the grooming gangs as the real problem, no matter if the be pikeys or pakis or plutonians.

Therefore, "...brook no dissent...", not only as the only real principle but also as the overall strategic one - don't pick dissenting targets that can retaliate. Which also tells you how to combat wokeness.

And their ideology makes everything worse precisely because they aren't opposed, forcefully when called for: that means they don't have to evolve. They can successfully remain tantrum-tossing toddlers intellectually speaking.

Tangent:

Compare to other ideas-movements. Initially they all were very immature, utopian, irrational, and wilfully blind and stupid, destined to be deadlocked in dogmatic defintion of doctrinaire doggerel. Since society put pressure on them, they either evolved and became more and more a functional part of society, or remained puritan and fundamentalist in the face of said pressure thus staying firmly on the outside away from power, influence and recognition.

The people advocating popular democracy where initially seen as about as rational as punk spouting anarchist slogans while sporting his tartan-patterened pre-torn bondage pants would be today. Today, democracy occupies a positon of being [True] to an ontological degree for most of us. Look at today's libertarians: still puerile, still dogmatic, still only capable of arguing by regurgitating quote-mined quips from historical people - because the majority of them refuse to grow up, ideas-wise, and accept the Game for what it is, refusing to understand that ideas to exist in evolutionary competition: the only measure of an idea is its practical inception. And they lack even the modest success of the european socialist democracies - they can't even organise commune-level arrangements without it devolving into looking like after Glastonbury festival before clean up.

Whereas he woke succeed due to utilising a century of leg-work having been done by others (romantics, humanists, liberals of all sorts mainly) and due to being useful for those in power and possessing Grand Design-style ideas for the future.

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Aug 17, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger

I may be biased and I might quibble about terminology but I think you are getting towards something concrete here, RR and well done.

Not read the book, nor anything of his despite consuming SF by the lorry load when younger. Will hunt it out. Ta.

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Ender’s Game is my favourite SF books too. I like the rest of the series too, but that one is the best.

I have a few trans friends. All but one think that this woke movement is hurting them. They think it’s entirely disingenuous.

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Aug 17, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger

"Disagreeing with a proposed methodology to achieve a goal is not the same thing as disagreeing with the goal itself."

Yes!

https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/equal-knowledge

Regarding authenticity: Hans-Georg Möller has an interesting idea ("You and your profile"): having left the era of authenticity (and before that, of sincerity) we are now living in the era of profilicity.

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Aug 17, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger

You may be onto something with the 'authenticity' angle. WRT "racism", you might find interesting the book "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" by John McWhorter.

As for the 'trans' agenda, in my own attempts to make sense of it, I can't help but wonder if it's a patriarchal reaction to the recent feminine (not feminist) forces/energies rising up in today's world. Meaning, more people waking up to, and fighting back against, the harms of patriarchal structures that have dominated society for so long. So, this infiltration of women's spaces, and sports, and very existence, is how the patriarchal power structure is attempting to quash the 'rise of the feminine/fall of the masculine' phenomenon currently taking place.

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I'm as bemused by all this trans stuff as the next sentient being. But two other 'a' words, in addition to authenticity, strike me as helpful in making sense of what's going on in the UK. The first is abstraction - like other highly ideological causes that have arisen in recent years, a disproportionate focus on identity is only possible in an affluent western society; in poor countries day to day life tends to keep people rooted in material concerns. The other word is anger - you know how it is when you're dealing with an angry person and you're 'wrong' regardless of what you do or say? The trans discourse has that quality and, as such, I suspect is a proxy for other, deeper social emotions.

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The bathroom issue is a difficult one to tease out.

I used to work for a fairly large software company near Silicon Valley (oldsters may remember Borland, the maker of compilers and related stuff). One of the long-time tech writers there announced (via email, if I recall correctly) to all the employees in the building that he was transitioning to female and that he'd be using the bathroom in the basement to avoid making women uncomfortable. This made sense to me, but at the same time it did cause me to ponder the issue, and I wasn't able to come up with a way to decide the right action in cases like this. There are instances where the right action seems clear (e.g., big brutes with XY chromosomes should not be messing with women's swimming competitions). But there are gray areas where it's not clear, as you say.

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Aug 17, 2022·edited Aug 18, 2022

“GIMPS”

Did POGROM not focus group well, or are they complementary terms?

(I’m not even going to touch FAPP … so to speak.)

But on to the substance:

What you term authenticity in this context became a concern for me even before the great trans efflorescence (“GTE”?). I’ve long been troubled by rise of the culture of being offended along identity-group lines, and the instrumentalization of that offendedness, always with some censorious or ostentatiously prescriptive intention.

At the same time, I never want to shut myself off from hearing from people who are *authentically* offended by some cultural artifact, both because feelings matter, and different perspectives springing from different backgrounds can indeed be illuminating.

(cont’d in reply)

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