The Woke Pendulum
How I understand Wokism
Why did the Woke movement explode in the 2010s?
Why do oppressed groups sometimes prevail, and other times, the traditionalists do?
How should we understand debates like those of transgender people in changing rooms and sports competitions?
What does the future hold for the Woke movement?
Wokism is turning out to be one of the most powerful political forces in the Western world. It will be a defining factor in the upcoming US election and is crucial to understanding most European politics today.
If we distill the debate:
One side (let’s call them “woke”) abhors that there is systemic discrimination: Some groups oppress other groups, and we should eliminate that discrimination (“social justice”) by pushing for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The starkest way they might put it is that old white males oppress women, immigrants, LGBTQ+, people of color, and other marginalized groups.
The other side (let’s call them anti-wokes, or AWs) argues that the cure is worse than the disease: A lot of types of discrimination have disappeared already, and current DEI proposals have side-effects that make them counterproductive. The starkest way they might put it is that women, immigrants, LGBTQ+, and others now have more advantages than white men, and that this is both unfair and bad for all in the long term.
So who is right?
I’ve resisted entering the culture wars for a very long time, because it’s a fraught topic: Culture wars consume people, and entire careers and lives are built, consumed, and broken by them. Since I will never fully dedicate myself to them, I have very little to win and much to lose: Many of you may disagree with my takes and leave.
They’re also very complicated: When so many people disagree so vehemently for so long, it means they’re both right in some ways. Figuring out how the two sides are compatible means being very precise on where they go wrong, and that takes a lot of effort.
But the goal of Uncharted Territories is to understand the world of today to help nudge it in the right direction, and it’s impossible to do that without forming an independent opinion on culture wars. And there’s a dearth of good, neutral analysis on the topic: Everyone has an opinion and is pushing their own agenda. Everyone is subject to confirmation bias. So I do think I have something to add to the conversation: Not because I have no biases, but because I’m aware I have them and actively fight them, deliberately trying to find the right and wrong on both sides.
So this is the first article on the topic. If you want me to continue writing about it, please support my work: That way, I’ll know my opinion on the topic is valued, and that will make me continue.
How did we get where we are today?
The 4 Steps of Social (In)Justice
1. Inequality Emerges
Historically, a typical source of inequality is that men wield power over women. This is standard in the animal kingdom, where reproductive mechanics result in males having more strength than women and using it to control female reproduction.
Another big source of inequality appears every time one group physically prevails over another, the way every human society has ever done. Many groups disappeared, others were simply subjugated. One of the most famous examples emerged in the 15th century, when Europeans started sailing the world, establishing colonies, and developing their industries, which resulted in Whites prevailing in most countries, and maintaining power to this day in Europe, the Americas, Oceania, and a few other places.
Other examples include Chinese Han over Uighurs and Tibetans, European Russians over Siberians, Turks over Armenians, Arabs and Turks over Kurds, and many more.
Majorities also tend to yield power over minorities. In some societies, they are more accepted than others, but when they aren’t, they suffer. Examples are LGBTQ+, redheads, albinos, gypsies, left-handed people, religious minorities…1
2. Inequality Becomes Oppression
It’s very human that the groups that have power use it for their own advantage:
Men used their power over women to hold most positions of influence. Women were relegated to a secondary role, mostly breeding. This remains highly visible today in traditional Arab Muslim countries.
Winners of conflicts oppress losers, like in slavery in the US, Israelis over Palestinians in the West Bank, Hindus and Buddhists over Muslims in India and Burma, and all the examples I cited above.
Majorities oppress minorities, like when LGBTQ+ were (and many still are) harassed or killed by heteronormatives, or when they had to remain in the closet to preserve their careers and social standing.
3. People Fight Oppression
Humans don’t like unfair inequality for evolutionary reasons, so when these types of oppression become unbearable, movements emerge to fight back.
In most cases, these movements lose: The ones in power have a vested interest in continuing the discrimination, so they don’t redistribute power to the weak. What determines when an oppressed group is able to rebalance power? I’m not sure, but it appears to be mostly cultural:
The kings of Spain expelled Jews and outlawed Islam at the turn of the 1500s, but they also outlawed slavery.
The British Empire first embraced slavery, and then rejected it and actively fought it.
The right of women to vote slowly spread through the 20th and 21st century, in a very long process.
Other processes happened later and faster, like the acceptance of gays and lesbians in Western countries—a process still ongoing elsewhere.
Many types of discrimination still exist, some of which are not even registered as oppressive. Examples include people who are fat, disabled, short, less intelligent, or uglier than others.
Some of the most famous examples of fights against blatant oppression in the US are:
The feminist movement, initially focused around the right to vote
The anti-slavery movement that sparked the Civil War, and later the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s
The more recent right to marry for LGBTQ+ people
4. Reactionaries Fight Equality Covertly
Even when formerly oppressed groups prevail over traditionalists2, these traditionalists will continue fighting back. But they can’t do it in such an open way, so they do it covertly.
In the US, after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery came the Jim Crow laws. These were fought in the Civil Rights movement, and racism retreated to the shadows, but didn’t disappear.
In the US, women earned the right to vote in the early 20th century, and were legally allowed to work, but still couldn’t easily find work, mainly because of societal norms. This changed dramatically during WWII, and female work normalized over the following decades.
The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, but covert sexism was still rampant, as illustrated by the gender pay gap, the Glass Ceiling, the #MeToo Movement, or the lower representation of women in statistics, like in medical research. The more overt laws and regulations banned this type of sexism, the more covert it became.
5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4 Ever More Covertly
At each round of conflict between those who wield power and the rest, power gets renegotiated. Generally, in Western countries, this has meant equalizing power.
That’s why we talk about the four waves of feminism:
1st wave (1800s to 1920s): Stop the most blatant sources of sexism. Stop treating women like property, and instead give them obvious rights like the right to vote.
2nd wave (1960s to 1980s): Laws should be the same for men and women, because women should have the same rights as men. Women should also be able to determine their reproductive rights.
3rd wave (1990s-2000s): It’s not just about the law and equality of rights, but what should be culturally accepted. Women should be able to express themselves as they want, be themselves. Women from minorities (intersectionality) should receive special protection.
4th wave (2010s-today): Fight back against more hidden types of sexism. MeToo, rape culture, intersectionality, trans rights, all catalyzed through social media.
The same is true for the rights of Blacks in America:
The fight against slavery in the Civil War. Like for women, the goal was to simply be considered a human being.
The fight against Jim Crow Laws through the Civil Rights Movement, to gain full equality in the eyes of the law.
The fight against more covert racism—like police brutality, through cases like Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, and the uproar caused by the more recent death of George Floyd.
In Western societies we are currently at the stage where we’re fighting mostly covert discrimination, and we must realize this is a completely different type of fight.
The Fight Against Overt Injustices
When you fight blatant oppression, people know it exists, they don’t deny it. They just don’t empathize with it. The entire challenge is to create this empathy.
This is rather easy from a communication perspective: Expose the oppression viscerally and appeal to people’s humanity.
In the US, racism was exposed through early examples like that of La Amistad in the 1830s, when a group of enslaved Africans aboard the Spanish ship revolted. After being captured by the U.S. Navy, the Africans were put on trial in the US. The case highlighted the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, and public empathy grew for the Africans, who were ultimately freed. The case further fueled the abolitionist movement in the U.S.
Another example is the Memphis Massacre of 1866, just after the end of the Civil War, when dozens of Blacks died, many more were injured, raped, or robbed, and all Black churches and schools were destroyed.
The brutality of the massacre, combined with reports of the violence, helped shift Northern public opinion and strengthened the push for Reconstruction policies that safeguarded Black rights, including the 14th Amendment, which protected blacks against racist state-level policies.
One more example: The Selma to Montgomery marches in the 1960s and the brutal treatment of activists like John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. created a groundswell of empathy across racial lines.
The fight is much harder with covert injustices.
The Fight Against Covert but Common Injustices
You don’t see covert injustices easily.
It’s only when you look under the hood that they are revealed.
But for that, you first need to uncover them, and that’s not easy. It’s not just about reporting what everybody knows. It’s about reporting many cases, over and over, until people realize there is a systemic problem.
That was the power of the MeToo movement. Everyone knew there was some harassment and sexual abuse against women. What people didn’t know was that it was rampant. It’s not a coincidence that the movement got supercharged when actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter:
It was not the existence of the problem that was in question, it was the magnitude.
It’s also why it took so many cases of Black people dying at the hands of policemen3 for the problem to really burst into the zeitgeist after the particularly shocking footage of George Floyd’s treatment before his death.
The problem is that you need to uncover each of these cases independently, and they need to consistently reflect the hidden discrimination.
It takes time for this to happen, but when it does, it happens suddenly.
That’s because, for people to coordinate, it’s not enough for people to know something. People must know that everybody else knows.
A lot of this has happened over the last 10 years. But why? It’s not a coincidence: It’s the Internet.
Before, the media had gatekeepers—including lots of old white men. They lost much of their power as private individuals increased theirs thanks to social media. Even if many of these stories were reported, they were reported as individual events. Remember: It’s not enough for one person to know. Everybody must know that everyone else knows! Social media gave us this power.
Of course, it was social media combined with phones: This dramatically increased our time spent consuming media, and also put cameras in the hands of billions. Now you couldn’t just shoot somebody in the back and claim he was attacking you. Someone’s handheld video would show the truth.
Phones and social media spread extremely fast, and with them the Woke movement. It has been so strong, sudden, and widespread in the West that many habits have been transformed. And that brings us to today.
The Woke Pendulum
When something like the MeToo movement emerges, the experience of oppression is so widespread that people change their default, from assuming that there is no oppression to assuming that there is always oppression.
This is actually useful early on: Indeed, injustice is so widespread that assuming it’s everywhere will reduce cognitive load and accelerate action. There might be some false positives, but only a few, and society considers their cost worthwhile to overturn the overall injustice.
An example of that is what happened in the wake of the MeToo movement. Since it started in Hollywood, the first targets were the extreme examples of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, both clear sexual predators who forced and even drugged women to have sex with them. Focus on other sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nassar, and R. Kelly followed soon after. All convicted or dead in jail.
At the other extreme were cases like that of Aziz Ansari. After some texting and a date, a single woman accused him of pressuring her into sex. When she declined, he accepted and she left. When she later manifested her discomfort during the exchange, he apologized. There was no lawsuit and no legal repercussions, but he was still canceled because of the allegation.
This, of course, is not the same as serial rape4, but what mattered to society at the time was to continue the narrative of oppression, so that the many true cases brought to the public didn’t suffer from unfair questioning and heavy pushback.
This is understandable: In a situation like this, when you don’t know what really happened, you have to decide whether you want more false positives (people wrongly accused of sexual misconduct) or false negatives (people who don’t dare accuse an aggressor of sexual misconduct out of fear). Indeed, I assume that, to this day, a majority of women who are harassed do not speak up.
I have had my own experiences with this topic. Twice in my professional career, women’s complaints about sexual harassment reached my ears. In each case, I personally talked with the women, trying to understand what happened and encouraging them to report the harassment. In both cases, they shared what happened but declined to formally raise concerns. I have also spoken with a judge who dealt with these types of cases, and he noted that a majority of women who are harassed probably don’t sue.
So society was making a tradeoff, saying that some false positives were OK as long as they supported fewer false negatives—provided that cases against sexual harassment were always taken seriously. That’s why many voices defended Ansari5, but overall he was ostracized, and although he continued working, it was more and more in the background.
In other words: The Woke Pendulum swung from a place where nothing was oppression, to a position where everything was oppression. This was a useful overcorrection for society as a whole.
But then the pendulum went too far.
Liberal Social Justice vs Social Justice Fundamentalism
The ever amazing Tim Urban puts it really well. There are two types of social justice: liberal and fundamentalist.
Liberals think some groups are oppressed by things like racism and sexism in laws and culture, which breaks the promise of a liberal society. For social justice to happen, we need to revise laws and culture.
Fundamentalists think there’s a struggle between privileged and oppressed identities, where the privileged identities oppress using all types of tools: politics, economics, culture, institutions, language, morality, science… Oppression is everywhere in everything and is purposeful. As a result, the only solution is to eliminate the rights of the privileged, so they are disempowered and social justice can finally take place.
This splits the woke / social justice movement in two: One group that values freedom and equality and wants pure meritocracy, and one that tries to reverse discrimination and squashes dissent and cancels people to achieve it.
But when a pendulum goes too far in the other direction, it always swings back.
The Woke Pendulum Swings Back
The same judge who told me that the vast majority of women who suffer from sexual harassment don’t sue also told me in an informal conversation that about 60% of accusations against men for sexual harassment are probably false. Of course, this is one person’s subjective perspective communicated in an informal conversation, so I wouldn’t take the number at face value. Rather, my take is that the number of false accusations is probably substantial. So we’re not where we were before, but maybe more here:
All these things can be true at the same time now:
There are many more accusations of sexual harassment today than there were earlier
The number of true sexual harassment instances has probably dropped, because now it’s less accepted socially, and because the risk of consequences is much higher
The number of true accusations of sexual harassment might have also increased, simply because there are more reports, even if there are fewer cases
But the number of total accusations might have grown faster than the number of true accusations because some women abuse their newly-gained power, or simply because behavior that would normally be acceptable in other circumstances is now unacceptable.
Suddenly, once the false positives start being very common—that is, when fundamentalist social justice goes overboard and causes its fair share of victims—many things happen:
Weaker support for Wokism
Scope Creep: As blatant problems get resolved, existing organizations start tackling less obvious problems
Backlash: The groups traditionally in power start fighting back more intensely
Defection: People in the traditionally oppressed groups agree with anti-wokes, and switch allegiances to support full fairness
Intersectionality Conflict: Alliances between oppressed groups fracture, because their newly-gained power puts them at odds with each other.
Here are a few instances of each:
1. Weaker Support for Wokism
As liberal social justice split from fundamentalists, cancel culture weakens:
The focus on discrimination starts shrinking:
And reverse discrimination in academic admissions also shrinks. Of the top 45 US universities, only 9% required SAT/ACT scores in 2020. As of 2024, that number grew to 39%.6 The MIT just released its admissions data after adding back test scores, and the share of Blacks dropped by ⅔ from 15% to 5%, Hispanics from 16% to 11%, and Asians went up from 40% to 47%.
2. Scope Creep
When an organization is created to solve a problem, that problem becomes the organization’s raison d’être. It can’t exist without it. The people working in these organizations will tie their beliefs, their identity, and their livelihoods to that problem. So what happens when the organization solves the problem? Do the workers disband the organization? Do they leave their colleagues with whom they fought for so much? No. The more typically human thing to do is to find another adjacent problem to solve, and continue fighting.
An obvious example is of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals including transsexuals to their minority group to form LGBT. This then evolved to LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, 2SLGBTQ, and when scope creep became impossible to track, it was all swept into a “+” sign.7
3. Backlash
When inequality is harder to spot, or is more difficult to link back to discrimination, or when inverse discrimination appears, the legitimacy of the movements will be weaker, and people will fight back. For example:
A strong anti-immigrant sentiment is pervading the US and Europe.
The US Supreme Court recently overturned Roe vs Wade, which had federally protected the right to have an abortion.
In 2023, the US Supreme Court also held that all types of discrimination are illegal in college admissions, overturning Affirmative Action.
The debate that emerged during the opening ceremony of the Olympics might not have happened a few years ago.
Opponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been much more vocal and have achieved a chain of successes, including Chris Rufo’s attacks on Ibram X. Kendi and Claudine Gay, who had to step down from the presidency of Harvard University.
After Budweiser paid a trans actress to advertise Bud Light, a boycott by American conservatives caused sales of the beer to drop. Eventually, the holding company’s stock went down by 20%, and the (Mexican) beer Modelo overtook Bud Light as the most sold beer in the US, ending Bud Light’s 20-years reign.
4. Defection
There is a sharp political divide between married and unmarried women in their political stances. In the US, all groups but unmarried women tend more toward voting Republican (which tends towards anti-woke).
Fewer women identify as feminists
Tradwives support gender roles in marriage
Black thought leaders increasingly speak out against wokism. Examples include Thomas Sowell, Candace Owens, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Larry Elder, and Jason Riley. One of their main concerns is that social justice fundamentalists (usually White) see Blacks as victims rather than agents, and that prevents them from progressing.
5. Intersectionality Conflict
Some women are opposing trans rights, arguing that they impinge on theirs. Two examples are the concern about being exposed to trans people in bathrooms and changing rooms, and the desire to separate trans women from biological women in sports. One of the groups supporting this is TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists), and JK Rowling—the author of Harry Potter—has been outspoken about it.
Some women also oppose Islam in the West for its sexism. Ayaan Hirsi Ali might be the most famous to do this, but many European female politicians are vocal about it: Giorgia Meloni (Italy’s Prime Minister), Marine Le Pen (whose party won the most votes in the last French Europarliament election), Alice Weidel (co-chair of the German AfD party), Päivi Räsänen in Finland, Ebba Busch in Sweden, and many more. Groups like Ni Putes Ni Soumises, who fight against violence targeting women, have risen to prominence in France, notably for their strong stance against the sexual oppression of women in Muslim communities.
Blacks are voicing their opposition to some groups within the LGBTQ+ movement, despite the fact that several founders of Black Lives Matter (BLM) identify as queer. Examples include Dave Chappelle’s comments against transgender people in The Closer, Black rappers disparaging LGBTQ+ people, Kanye West or Candace Owens attacking Jews, the Nation of Islam attacking women and LGBTQ+ groups, or simply organizational conflict between BLM and LGBTQ+.
Indigenous groups are entering into conflict with immigrants in the US and Canada. Indigenous activists argue that immigrants can perpetuate colonial legacies by settling on stolen land, even as they themselves face marginalization.
Where does all this leave us?
Where We’re At and Where We’re Going
We come from a world where there was a lot of overt oppression. In many areas, this was replaced by covert oppression, which is harder to fight. Now, the fight is even harder, because in many places the covert oppression has been eliminated or even reverted. Blanket statements are finished. We can’t react to single instances of events portraying an alleged inequality: They might not be representative of systemic oppression. Sometimes, our intuitions will be right. Sometimes, they will be wrong. So where does unfair oppression persist? How do we fight it? What inequalities are not due to oppression? How do we create a fair system where everyone who has the ability and the desire can thrive?
To answer this, we must change our questions and seek data.
For example, we shouldn’t ask “Do women suffer sexual harassment?” but rather “In what situations do women still suffer sexual harassment? What (or who) causes it? How do we prevent these root causes?”. When we think of measures against sexual harassment, we should ask: “These measures might cause negative side-effects. Are the side-effects worth the benefits? Are there ways we can eliminate the side-effects?”
We should also avoid stating things like: “Women are still discriminated against in the workplace because there is still an income gap and few women in boardrooms”, but rather “How are women still discriminated against? What income gaps are explained and which ones remain unexplained? For those we understand, do we want to reverse them or are they legitimate? If we want to reverse them, how do we go about achieving that?”
With regard to police brutality and Blacks, we should look at stats in depth. Some critics of BLM say that Black-on-Black violence is the lion’s share of Black deaths, that Blacks cause the vast majority of homicides in the US, and that there are fewer than a dozen killings of Blacks at the hands of White cops every year. Others suggest that the high numbers of Black-on-Black violence are caused by poor reporting of data in rural areas, where there are many more Whites.
For transgender people in women’s changing rooms, we should ponder what transgender people want, but we should also consider the cost incurred on women, like the possibility of sexual harassment. As such, stats like What is the typical predisposition of transgender people to abuse women sexually? become crucial.
This is hard. Looking at all this data is not simple. And it doesn’t help that most people don’t look at data and then reach conclusions, but rather reach conclusions and then look to the data to support their positions. This means that the next few years are going to be even more tense, with even more debate and conflict between different minorities and interest groups.
So how are we supposed to make sense of all the noise?
Maybe each time we hear a fact that reinforces our beliefs, we should actively ask ourselves: Hold on, this reinforces my view. But many others don’t agree with me. What are they seeing that I’m not? Maybe you can do that with ChatGPT.8
Or maybe, if you think this cautious and data-driven approach is valuable, you can support me and I can lean more on this topic.
This is my current, honest take on the situation based on available data. If something I wrote angered you, consider it might be a reflection of your biases, as I have no goal of antagonizing anybody. Rather, share with care and warmth your perspective in the comments. I’m more than happy to read and react to comments that are constructive. Conversely, I will delete ad hominem attacks and ban the authors.
There are many topics I’ve considered exploring here: the wage gap, immigration, the rise of the right in Europe, the value of diversity, consent. Should I explore them? What do you think? This is one topic where money speaks louder than words, because many people are just virtue-signaling, so I’ll judge how much I should invest in this based on how many people subscribe to Uncharted Territories premium, which is where most of these articles will be, for obvious reasons.
I’d include disabled people here, but with a few caveats: First, unlike the other minorities mentioned, disabled people are by definition less able to contribute to society on average. Part of the inequality of treatment they receive is a direct consequence of that. Second, disabled people can come from any family, which means they have suffered less systematic oppression, as no family was spared, and support for their rights could come from anywhere. Third, their disability frequently produces pity in others, who will tend to support them.
There’s a lot of overlap between anti-wokes, traditionalists, and reactionaries, but they’re not quite the same thing. Anti-wokes or AWs are specifically opposed to wokism. Traditionalists are people who like the way things have always been. Reactionaries are people who fight against the progressives who want to change the world too much or too fast.
Just a sample, from Rodney King to George Floyd:
Rodney King (1991) – Beaten by LAPD officers, sparking the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Malice Green (1992) – Beaten to death by Detroit police officers during a traffic stop.
Amadou Diallo (1999) – Unarmed, shot 41 times by NYPD officers who mistook his wallet for a gun.
Patrick Dorismond (2000) – Unarmed, shot by undercover NYPD officers during an altercation.
Timothy Thomas (2001) – Unarmed, shot by Cincinnati police officers, sparking riots in the city.
Ousmane Zongo (2003) – Unarmed, shot by a New York police officer during a raid.
Timothy Stansbury Jr. (2004) – Unarmed, shot by an NYPD officer on a rooftop.
Sean Bell (2006) – Unarmed, shot 50 times by NYPD officers on the morning of his wedding.
Oscar Grant (2009) – Unarmed, shot by BART police officer in Oakland while handcuffed.
Aiyana Stanley-Jones (2010) – 7-year-old girl killed by a Detroit police officer during a raid.
Ramarley Graham (2012) – Unarmed, shot by NYPD officer inside his home.
Rekia Boyd (2012) – Unarmed, shot by an off-duty Chicago police officer.
Kendrec McDade (2012) – Unarmed, shot by Pasadena police officers who were responding to a robbery call.
Trayvon Martin (2012) – Unarmed, shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch member; while not a police officer, his case highlighted racial profiling.
Tamir Rice (2014) – 12-year-old, shot by Cleveland police while playing with a toy gun.
Eric Garner (2014) – Unarmed, died after being placed in a chokehold by NYPD officers.
Michael Brown (2014) – Unarmed, shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement.
Akai Gurley (2014) – Unarmed, shot by NYPD officer in a stairwell.
Walter Scott (2015) – Unarmed, shot in the back while running from a police officer in South Carolina.
Freddie Gray (2015) – Died from spinal injuries sustained while in police custody in Baltimore.
Samuel DuBose (2015) – Unarmed, shot by a University of Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop.
Alton Sterling (2016) – Unarmed, shot by police while pinned to the ground in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Philando Castile (2016) – Unarmed, shot by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop while complying with orders.
Terrence Crutcher (2016) – Unarmed, shot by police after his car broke down in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Jordan Edwards (2017) – Unarmed, shot by a Texas police officer while leaving a party.
Stephon Clark (2018) – Unarmed, shot by Sacramento police in his grandmother’s backyard, holding a cell phone.
Botham Jean (2018) – Unarmed, shot by an off-duty Dallas police officer in his own apartment.
Atatiana Jefferson (2019) – Unarmed, shot through her window by a Fort Worth police officer while she was at home.
Ahmaud Arbery (2020) – Unarmed, shot by armed civilians in Georgia while jogging; his case prompted arrests after nationwide outcry.
George Floyd (2020) – Died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for over 9 minutes, sparking global protests against police brutality.
It is also on the grey area of standard courting practices since women have an incentive to portray themselves as chaste, so they routinely signal their lack of interest in sex, even when in fact they’re interested. In any case, I’m not judging Ansari’s behavior—that is beside the point today. What I’m highlighting is the massive gap between the behaviors of people like Weinstein and Ansari, and how they fall in polar opposites of the law.
Bari Weiss, Caitlin Flanagan, Ashleigh Banfield, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Maher…
Some minorities like Blacks tend to perform worse than average in these types of tests, while others such as Asians overperform. Eliminating the requirement of these scores allowed underperforming minorities to have a higher chance at reaching college.
This scope creep has put gays and lesbians at odds with transsexuals in some circumstances, because the conflict between women and transsexuals translate in weaker support from women to the LGBTQ+ group altogether, as an intersectional conflict
Here’s an example that worked reasonably well for me: “I am seeing a lot of debate around the wokism of the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris. Please research the two sides thoroughly. Then, create an imaginary conversation between intelligent people on both sides, trying to defend their perspective and convince the other that they're right, always in a thoughtful and respectful way.”
Thank you for taking a swing at this topic. Either you are very brave, or haven’t been badly bitten. I appreciate your neutrality (always do), but this is also where the line between awareness and advocacy becomes a chasm.
As an executive in a mid-sized company around the time of the George Floyd event, I felt I was in a unique position to facilitate an open conversation about DEI. Having been in a long relationship with a black woman and considering many of my close friends were LGBTQ+, and my role as a design leader, steeped in empathy and curiosity, I thought I’d be seen as an advocate. I quickly learned that my race (white), gender (male), orientation (straight/CIS), and role (VP), made me the symbol of inequality and a target to educate.
The reality is that I was naive and unaware of my unconscious biases. I hadn’t actively fought for DEI before that moment, and everyone in the room knew it. Being a “friend” is different than being an advocate. And my position amongst an all white, mostly male exec team was the product of countless opportunities stemming from my good fortune at birth.
While my “awakening” to my own role in this complex topic brought new levels of awareness, the true value came with advocacy and action. And it was through that work that a clearer picture of inequality emerged. One reason this issue is so fraught and polarizing, is because for most, it lives in the realm of the unconscious.
Honestly, this is disappointing. I'm used to read reasoning from first principles here, which implies getting your facts rights, but this is all over the place.
1) "When so many people disagree so vehemently for so long, it means they’re both right in some ways."
I'm honestly surprised I even have to explain why that's clearly a false assumption. This sounds like a caricature of the centrist dogma of "truth is somewhere in the middle".
So let me give you numerous examples :
- Some people still think the Earth is flat more than 2000 years after it's been proven to be spherical. But okay, let's say this is a fringe belief, and let's see some common ones.
- Some people still deny climate change is real even though scientists started to talk about it in the 80s
- As you said yourself in previous content, the anti-vaccine movement is as old as vaccines.
- Slavery took about 100 years to be abolished after the abolitionist movement started
- The health risks of tobacco were known in the 50s, but was denied till the 90s
- Women's right to vote took somewhere around 70 years
Do I continue ? Disagreement doesn't mean one side is right.
2) "Many types of discrimination still exist, some of which are not even registered as oppressive. Examples include people who are fat, disabled, short, less intelligent, or uglier than others."
Not even registered as oppressive, are you serious ? To me, this alone tells me you didn't take the time to hear any progressive argument in the last 10 years at least.
Literally ALL social progressives I know are aware all these discriminations are oppressive (maybe to the exception of being less intelligent, probably because this one has a lot of consequences even in a vaccum). Like this is social progress 101.
3) Then there's the very simplistic explanation copy pasted from Tim Urban.
He took YEARS to write a book on the culture war, managing to make it... 80% made of a critic of the left. It took me only a few hours of research to disprove most of what he states as facts, that honestly I stopped respecting him altogether. How can you spend so much time and just not fact check ?
The only reason is to be politically biased, and starting from an opinion and then ignoring facts. Which is fine, as long as you don't pretend to be neutral.
This is reflected in the schematics you've inserted in your post. You take them as face value, and I honestly can't understand why (maybe just respecting Tim you didn't reflect on it ?).
"there are two types of social justice" : sounds like a bit of a simplistic opinion with no nuance, which is surprising. But after all, I understand the need to simplify. What's most troubling is calling them liberal vs fundamentalist : it's very obviously painting one side as unreasonable, which frees you to actually listen to the argument.
And then you proceed to do so : let's just label the whole thing "one that tries to reverse discrimination and squashes dissent and cancels people to achieve it". This is like a copy-paste of far-right propaganda.
(also, it's well documented the right actually cancels way more than the left. I've documented that while arguing with a friend after reading Tim's book : https://apprendrelaphoto.notion.site/Cancel-culture-d-extr-me-droite-b94f092d748c41158e29a59e999f2e8a?pvs=4)
It's also amazing to me you don't realize that the definition of "social justice fundamentalism" is literally the same as the definition of "liberal social justice".
"certain illiberal systems and norms" is a very vague definition from a time where it had not been studied well yet. "politics, economics, culture, institutions, language, morality, science" ARE these systems and norms.
Another thing that's obvious to me is this schematic shows on the left side something that's evolving with society and its understanding, and on the right side something that stayed the same since 1965. Do you think in ANY science, and even ANY part of how we understand the world, it's better to stay at the level we were in 1965 ?
It goes against everything you've written before.
4) "The same judge who told me that the vast majority of women who suffer from sexual harassment don’t sue also told me in an informal conversation that about 60% of accusations against men for sexual harassment are probably false. Of course, this is one person’s subjective perspective communicated in an informal conversation, so I wouldn’t take the number at face value. Rather, my take is that the number of false accusations is probably substantial."
Seriously ? One person makes up a number, and then you also make up "false accusations are probably substantial" ?
Why didn't you take just 30 seconds to research data before just stating something wrong ?
I mean, it's easy : https://consensus.app/results/?q=What%27s%20the%20number%20of%20sexual%20assaults%20false%20accusations%20%3F&synthesize=on&copilot=on
5) And then, we have the usual "I'm a centrist but I'm curiously only critiquing the left" stance, which is basically : "the real reason for conservatives to fight against social justice is because the left went too far".
Of course the right pushes back, but they push back anyway, because guess what : they're reactionaries ! They will always push back. They don't push back because "the woke pendulum went too far". They push back because of their values.
Wokism is just a buzzword they instrumentalize to discredit the notion of empathy, exactly like they did with "political correctness" before that, and also "special interests", "bleeding heart liberal", "radical", "multiculturalism", "commie", "unamerican", ...
The right-wing rhetoric to frame progressive movements as threats to traditional values or education, to portray social justice advocates as overly sensitive or irrational, to claim that efforts for inclusivity actually suppress free speech or diversity of thought, and to using terms like "political correctness" or "wokism" to create a perceived divide between "ordinary people" and a "liberal elite" are as old as politics.
This is absolutely not new, and for some reason you're 100% falling for it, as did Tim Urban.
I'm appalled that such intelligent people can fall for something so obvious honestly.
Are there people on the left with no subtlety at all who will cancel anyone for anything ? Yes, because guess what : there are stupid people with no nuance everywhere ! Some people make it part of their identity, and then they stop thinking. Most people for most things actually.
It's not representative of the whole movement, nor the actual policies put in place, nor the actual reality of remaining discriminations.
Why focus on that ? Why not focus on the MANY ways right-wingers have appallingly stupid opinions ? This is a side where just "having a mostly female cast in a movie" is "too woke".
6) The whole "scope creep" thing is also a huge misunderstanding of the left. OF COURSE the scopes widens, when people realize other discriminations they weren't aware of. As you said yourself, there are several waves of feminism, and probably more to come. That's how progress work : the bigger and most painful issues first, and then people focus on the next one. THAT'S THE POINT.
The idea of progress is that it never ends.
7) "When inequality is harder to spot, or is more difficult to link back to discrimination, or when inverse discrimination appears, the legitimacy of the movements will be weaker, and people will fight back."
First : is the inverse discrimination in the room with us ?
Second : the Supreme Court is not the people. The people are actually largely in favor of Roe v Wade (65% of them). Why not do that quick google search ? There's no excuse for that.
8) Which baffles me is I actually 100% agree with your conclusion of asking more precise questions. I guess it's your go-to way to do things for any issue (and it's a good go-to), but considering everything you're stating before, I'm afraid of what's next honestly. I have rarely read such a badly researched post from you.
And even if I'm getting heated, I only write all this because I respect your work. I wouldn't take the time otherwise. I've read way worse, and generally I just close and never read the same author again.
But how can I trust that you will not "reach conclusions and then look to the data to support their positions" ? Because that's for sure how it looks like here.