2018-11-07: Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

Follow the adventures of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Fran and Naga in this all-new humorous entry to the growing Poeverse.
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Nosy Neighbordroid
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2018-11-07: Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

Post by Nosy Neighbordroid »

Baeraad
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Re: 2018-11-07: Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

Post by Baeraad »

I have a theory that wokeness was the inevitable result of nerds getting their hands on feminism. Nerds love nothing so much as learning complex systems of rules and trying to apply them to everything. Here's a system of rules that claims to be a flawless playbook for life itself, and it's one of the few things that you can genuinely impress girls by having an encyclopedic knowledge of. Of course you end up with a whole generation of geeks who run around yelling at those filthy casuals who have the nerve not to master the finer intricacies of The Proper Way To Play The Game!

Of course, for some levels of Not Even Trying, you can sympathise with the anal-retentive moralisers being annoyed. Case in point...
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Re: 2018-11-07: Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

Post by dark_lord_zagato »

If they think Snow White is problematic, they should watch the one scene in Neon Genesis Evangelion where Shinji... almost wakes up the princess but not quite... ;)
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Re: 2018-11-07: Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

Post by Imp-Chan »

Baeraad wrote:I have a theory that wokeness was the inevitable result of nerds getting their hands on feminism. Nerds love nothing so much as learning complex systems of rules and trying to apply them to everything. Here's a system of rules that claims to be a flawless playbook for life itself, and it's one of the few things that you can genuinely impress girls by having an encyclopedic knowledge of. Of course you end up with a whole generation of geeks who run around yelling at those filthy casuals who have the nerve not to master the finer intricacies of The Proper Way To Play The Game!

Of course, for some levels of Not Even Trying, you can sympathise with the anal-retentive moralisers being annoyed. Case in point...
This is... believable.

Nerds also like nothing so much as measuring all past events by current rules and conditions, which explains a lot about the bitterness towards activist historical figures. They weren't activist enough to be flawless, and therefore were no good. It's stupid, and fails to recognize the value of progressive change.
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Re: 2018-11-07: Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

Post by Graybeard »

Imp-Chan wrote:Nerds also like nothing so much as measuring all past events by current rules and conditions, which explains a lot about the bitterness towards activist historical figures. They weren't activist enough to be flawless, and therefore were no good. It's stupid, and fails to recognize the value of progressive change.
Well, and oh-so-accurately, said.

On the flip side, however, one of the beefs (of many) that I have with Catholic hagiography is the time-worn tendency to do exactly the opposite, to make a huge deal of the "piety" and "purity" and so on of saints -- who were, in fact, human and therefore susceptible to human failings. The founders of the day-to-day practice of Christianity knew better than to do this; you don't get any more foundational than the Apostle Paul, and he wrote in one of his epistles (Romans 7:19 for reference), "For I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I keep on doing the evil I do not want to do." Were the later "saints" any more holy and pious and so on than he was? Seems unlikely, but they had better press, and have had it for centuries.

Somewhere in between these extremes, there is room for a more reasoned approach to those who drive change.
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Re: 2018-11-07: Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

Post by Forrest »

I prefer to judge people's character relative to their surroundings. What were all of their local contemporaries like? That's the culture that they grew up in and the behavioral patterns that an unthinking person born into that time and place would habitually fall into, so that much of it is on their culture (which I'm happy to judge on its merits, separately), not on them individually. It's differences from that cultural norm that are attributable to the individual's will, because differences from that cultural norm are what take thought and effort.

I feel like a lot of modern-era philosophers (not contemporary, "Modern", like Locke and Descarte and so on) are unfairly condemned by contemporary self-described "post-modernists" for things that were absolutely not unique views of them as individuals, but just the background assumptions pervading their entire societies that they failed to consider and address.

If for example you're born into a society where it's taken for granted that different races (as your society constructs them) are inherently genetically different, and on account of those differences some are morally inferior to others, and you come along and say that the inherent genetic differences between the Negro, Oriental, Aryan, and Savage, even as they influence mental function such as intelligence, should not bear any weight in the felicific calculus of our moral reasoning... contemporary people shouldn't be jumping on you for rolling with the assumed "facts" held by your society, wrong as they are and as offensive to contemporary ears as they are, because that's not your original thought, that's just something you were fed by society and hadn't explicitly rejected. What they should be judging you on is your contribution to the conversation: namely, that any such differences do not bear any moral weight. If it turns out, as it did, that there aren't really such differences at all, your position that such differences bear no moral weight isn't really overturned, and doesn't become offensive, it just becomes counterfactual; the antecedent of your conditional is now known false, but the conditional is still true, and the conditional was your original contribution that you should be judged on, the antecedent of it was just the assumption of your local contemporaries that you hadn't explicitly challenged.
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