Pokery on Wokery

You’re probably all aware of the quote on pornography in which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart didn’t define it but, rather, famously stated “I know it when I see it”. This was back in 1964.

The term “woke” is a bit like that. It’s not so easy to define, but we all know it when we see it. It’s also quite hard to avoid thinking of woke as a kind of synonym for “batshit crazy” - and with good reason :

Whatever one’s thoughts on the rights and wrongs of the Israel/Palestine situation, this shouldn’t be one of them. It’s nonsensical. You might as well say ice cold purple lizard hats means free Palestine.

This, of course, is just one of the thousands and thousands of examples of woke gibberish that we could choose from.

It is this seemingly never-ending stream of maniacal moronicity that can be conveniently categorized as ‘woke’.

Here’s another recent example from The New York Magazine which lays out the ‘moral’ case for child transitioning. It’s a long read and a somewhat incoherent mish-mash of all sorts of ideas, and there are lots of eyebrow-raising quotes. Here are just 2 examples from the article (there are sooooooo many to choose from) :

Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.

And

But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right. Yet we let this happen every day . . .

The author argues that anyone, regardless of age, should be able to choose their sex (and/or their gender), and that the state should pay for this. Apparently this is a health issue, although I have no idea why it is, or why my taxes¹ should pay for the expensive ‘treatments’ required to sustain this merry-go-round of sex/gender choice.

It’s clear to the majority, I think, that the author is a sandwich short of a picnic, or several strokes short of an orgasm, but in both these instances, the reproductive ‘justice’ and sex-swapping jamboree, there’s a fundamental commonality. This is true of all the woke gibberations of which these are just 2 examples.

I believe that the majority of people who might describe themselves as ‘woke’, or who subscribe to these various social ‘justice’ fads, are good people. They are consciously trying to “do the right thing”, as they see it.

Unfortunately, as the Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux said in the 12th century :

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions

The problem isn’t with the desire to do good; that’s a noble thing. The problem is that we’re not all that good at actually doing good sometimes.

We tend to get a bit myopic. We saw this during the Covibollox farce. We focused on ‘preventing’ covid harms to the exclusion of everything else. None of what was done actually worked, but good people thought they were doing the right thing in supporting all of the blithering idiocy. They just forgot, or didn’t understand, that in trying to be good with respect to a ‘pandemic’ they were doing evil in all sorts of other ways.

Families were broken, businesses closed, important diagnoses delayed, children’s educational development devastated, and these were just some of the terrible consequences of trying to “do the right thing” when it came to covid.

The problem with the whole ‘woke’ set-up is that it bakes this kind of myopia right in at the outset.

We end up with a society that focuses on black rights to the exclusion of the rights of other races (ask Asians wanting to get into an Ivy League college). Or we focus on trans ‘rights’ to the exclusion of women’s rights. Or we focus on illegal immigrant rights to the exclusion of citizen’s rights. Those sorts of things.

We’re trying to ‘be kind’ to those who we perceive to be disadvantaged - which is not at all a bad impulse.

It is not a bad thing to want to help those in distress, be that financial or emotional or whatever. But the hard part is doing that in a way that does not inadvertently cause distress to others. Still harder to find a way that actually helps in the long run.

The whole ‘woke’ ethos is to be ultra ‘compassionate’ and ‘empathetic’ to those perceived to be un-privileged or ‘oppressed’ in some way, whilst having precisely no compassion or empathy whatsoever for those judged to be privileged or deemed to be in an ‘oppressor’ class. In fact, it’s often worse than this; those placed in the privilege/oppressor category are often actively hated.

The foundational basis for woke is not, in my view, either compassion or empathy, but opposition. It is an ideology that sets people in opposition to one another.

Once you have set up this binary (perhaps the only binary the woke will admit to exist) of oppressed and oppressor you can then set about painting the oppressors as evil, vile, terrible, and deserving of hate. It doesn’t matter that they might, in actuality, be very decent human beings - they’re in the ‘oppressor’ class and must be brought down.

This is a very deliberate program. It is no accident that the already loaded terms oppressed and oppressor were used.

Those who can be persuaded that they are compassionate and empathetic are also persuaded that the ‘oppressor’ is not worthy of any human consideration.

One of the clearest examples of how this works is the case of JK Rowling. JKR has consistently over the years championed the cause of women. You may have thought, before things became all transmogrified, that she looked a bit on the ‘woke’ side herself. But she started to assert the rights of women based on a biological understanding of what a woman is. The result has been that she has been subjected to the most extraordinary campaign of hate and abuse. Real visceral abuse and hatred including death threats and people wishing her to be raped.

When did supporting the rights of women, based on their actual sex, become such a “hateful” position to adopt? When those who denied the trans-fantasy got put in the “oppressor” category.

By putting someone in the “oppressor” class, you’re giving people permission to hate them. Woke, then, is a particularly vicious and ugly ideology that ultimately generates hatred, not the all-compassionate, all-empathetic, world the woke believe they are ushering in.

The author of the The New York Magazine piece clearly believes that kids are being oppressed by moves to restrict their ‘freedom’ to choose their sex. It matters not that, scientifically, one cannot actually change sex, it’s enough that kids are being ‘prevented’ from realizing their desire to change sex. We are, it seems, supposed to accommodate these desires and doing otherwise is an act of oppression.

It’s not enough that we pay lip-service (or pronoun service) to these ideas. No, the entire health apparatus must be made to accede to these desires - which, as the author acknowledges, might only be ephemeral. But that’s OK, because in the author’s mind one should be able to ‘change’ sex as and when one desires and to flip-flop throughout one’s life between the sexes.

It has been argued by those who want to ‘queer’ society that the notion of childhood innocence is entirely a social construct. But just because something is a ‘social construct’ does not automatically mean it is a bad thing!

Even if we accept that childhood innocence is entirely a social construct (which I do not) it does not follow that attempts to preserve that innocence, to cherish it, are oppressive or bad for kids.

A childhood is irreversible.

If you screw it up you can’t go back and fix it. Most parents do a great job, often in difficult circumstances. Some, of course, do not. One of the disturbing features of the ‘queering’ of society, and the queering of young minds, is that the idea is put into the minds of the young that the home, the place of love and sanctuary, is actually a place of oppression and abuse. The various online forums for ‘trans’ issues all seem to argue that, if the parents do not immediately ‘affirm’ their kids, they are abusive and should be cut out from the lives of the child.

The thousands of hours of love, devotion, and sacrifice, that any parent willingly gives to their child, count for nothing against the onslaught of this poison.

The foundational sickness at the heart of woke operates here too. Kids are set in opposition to their parents.

Take almost any example of ‘woke’ and no matter the flowery and fluffy phrases used, the gushing empathy, and you’ll find this attempt to set people against one another.

This is why I reject ‘woke’. Not because of the claimed empathy or compassion, but because, fundamentally, it’s about creating division.

This is why I rejected a lot of feminist thinking. Not because women did not have a point, because they did, but because it sought to set men and women in opposition to one another.

If you take a peek at almost any woke screed you’ll see it’s all about dismantling this, or de-constructing that, or tearing down something else. It’s all in ‘attack mode’. None of it is about finding ways to improve what we have - what we have is automatically assumed to be oppressive and bad.

Not everything is bad, but neither is it all good. We need to figure out which bits work well and which don’t work so well, but woke myopia has already made the judgement. It’s all bad, rooted in oppressive systems, and must be dismantled.

When you artificially put someone, or something, into an ‘oppressor’ class you lose the opportunity to see that person, or thing, in the ‘whole’ - warts and all.

I’d rather not spend my life looking at the things that divide us, but on the things we share, good and bad.

1. Or, in an insurance-based health model, why I should be paying a higher premium because all of these treatments have to be included