zlacker

>>crbela+(OP)
The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?

>>kelsey+5g1
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe... It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.

To be fair, he does say the above, which is close enough. The problem with asking "what if they're right" is that there's no single formulation of beliefs shared universally by such large and diverse group, so you can't consider whether they are right or not, only whether each individual expression is.

>>karate+qi1
But there’s this statement as well:

> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…

The whole idea of woke (in the non pejorative sense) is that you’ve done the work to perceive the actual problem.

That statement shows that he hasn’t, which I think undermines the good parts of the essay.

>>rukuu0+Tw1
The entire thing is an exercise in complaining about a thing that goddamn near everyone agrees is bad, then using that to complain about a much larger movement that probably aims to address a lot of legitimate issues, in such a way that you can always retreat if challenged. There's a memed name for this tactic, and it's extremely on display here.

"Well of course by 'the woke' I only meant the ones I'm talking about, and since I'm choosing what that means let's just say part of the definition includes that they think racism is an even bigger problem than it is—whatever amount you think it's a problem, they think it's a bigger one, so even you think they are wrong! So as you can see I wrote precisely and correctly and you're an idiot who can't read."

But in fact it's all nonsense. This whole essay is a bunch of mealy-mouthed gibbering, because it relies so heavily on that kind of thing. It's either saying something boring that 99% of people already agree with, or it's expressing the more controversial (and dumber) thing that's getting everyone here worked up, but accusations of the latter can be deflected by claiming it's only doing the former (in which case, why bother writing it in the first place...?)

Essays like this are one of the few things LLMs are already entirely capable of replacing us for. Bad ones that mostly lack actual content, and don't even really need to be right because they're constructed such that they can't be wrong.