The term “woke” is getting tossed around a lot lately.
I notice that it’s particularly popular with blokes with cars as fb profile pics who use it quite broadly to describe anything they don’t like.
The ‘culture war’ debates are so asinine and redundant it’s amazing that people get caught up in it.
Partisan outrage contests on both sides that changes no ones opinion and solves absolutely nothing.
Agreed, but there is undoubtedly a new puritanism asserting itself: A new age of insufferable protestants obsessed with salvation who can't just mind their own thoughts and words -- they have to regulate everyone else's thoughts and words as well. At least with the Catholics -- they have their own problems -- but at least they know they can uphold the ritual once a week and get back to afternoon siestas Monday to Saturday. Give me southern Europe any day. Way too much missionary energy in the society these days from people who think they're irreligious but are painful religious cliches. It's been done before: It was called the 17th Century.
Also, 3 weeks -- what a joke!
I don’t disagree with the ideological Puritanism stuff.
Not everyone on the left is into cancel culture though.
I guess like not everyone on the right is a raging xenophobe.
Anyway, go Tiges am I right?!
It's all quite interesting seeing the same patterns come and go -- until they reach your front door anyway. Personally, I don't get too worked up about it.
The aspect I find most interesting at the moment is that the puritanical cast of mind is nowadays divorced from religion in peoples' minds but is nothing but religious residue, so if you ask people why they are behaving like all sorts of zealots from the past they will come up with all sorts of cunning rationalisations for their behaviour (as we all do), when they're simply behaving unconsciously like their forebears and deeming themselves secular and fresh.
Add to that a sort of Orwellian Newspeak that's doing the rounds at the moment -- case in point, the modern term 'equity'. Equity is simply the return of 'equality of outcome' marketed under a new name. The debate over equality of outcome was closed long ago: Most people could see the appeal of equality of opportunity, but almost everyone came to see that equality of outcome was at best unrealizable and at worst necessarily (and demonstrably) totalitarian and undesirable. Fast forward half a century and it's back, but sneakily. And it's not a substantial idea either: The way it's taught in schools and universities is with memes and pictures of different sized children standing on different sized boxes according to their height. Lesson there: If you can't win a mature debate with substantial ideas, wait a while and contest an infantile debate with non-ideas and symbolism. (George Carlin: "I leave symbols for the symbol-minded.")
Which is more infuriating -- hard left or hard right? Hard to say. Probably hard right - they always seem unapologetically sadistic and brainless. Either way, chuck 'em all on a spaceship together so the rest of us can get on with our lives.
