The true left is not woke

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Very interesting woman. Not particularly surprising that wokedom has adopted much of its ideology from a rabid, unapologetic Nazi. Explains a lot.

The true left is not woke:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRPvedl ... nel=UnHerd

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Wokism is not 'the left', it has destroyed 'the left'.

Stay tuned for the rise of fascism and see the wokies weeping and wailing and blaming everyone but themselves.

[Gary Childress]

Interesting interview. She seems very delighted and happy with herself. In the end, progress seems to me like little more than burying what is no longer viable, like an elderly person who has outlived his or her usefulness to those around him or her or an appliance that has been worn out and goes to the landfill. I wonder if there is progress or just repetition. Repetition is little more than reproducing what is much the same over and over again. Of course, we think we're evolving toward something "optimal" so we may be "optimistic". But I wonder if it might be that there is no utopia. There is only now. And if we can't endure now, then we won't be able to endure others around us who are not "optimal". Maybe we're all just people no matter how you dress us up or what credentials we are given. Sometimes it seems like those who learn from the past still repeat the same mistakes. If that makes me "amoral" then perhaps I am at least less judgmental than some.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Interesting interview. She seems very delighted and happy with herself. In the end, progress seems to me like little more than burying what is no longer viable, like an elderly person who has outlived his or her usefulness to those around him or her or an appliance that has been worn out and goes to the landfill. I wonder if there is progress or just repetition. Repetition is little more than reproducing what is much the same over and over again. Of course, we think we're evolving toward something "optimal" so we may be "optimistic". But I wonder if it might be that there is no utopia. There is only now. And if we can't endure now, then we won't be able to endure others around us who are not "optimal". Maybe we're all just people no matter how you dress us up or what credentials we are given. Sometimes it seems like those who learn from the past still repeat the same mistakes. If that makes me "amoral" then perhaps I am at least less judgmental than some.

What does any of that have to do with the price of fish?

[Gary Childress]

Interesting interview. She seems very delighted and happy with herself. In the end, progress seems to me like little more than burying what is no longer viable, like an elderly person who has outlived his or her usefulness to those around him or her or an appliance that has been worn out and goes to the landfill. I wonder if there is progress or just repetition. Repetition is little more than reproducing what is much the same over and over again. Of course, we think we're evolving toward something "optimal" so we may be "optimistic". But I wonder if it might be that there is no utopia. There is only now. And if we can't endure now, then we won't be able to endure others around us who are not "optimal". Maybe we're all just people no matter how you dress us up or what credentials we are given. Sometimes it seems like those who learn from the past still repeat the same mistakes. If that makes me "amoral" then perhaps I am at least less judgmental than some.

What does any of that have to do with the price of fish?

A person doesn't need to worry about the price of fish if one knows how to catch them without paying for them.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Interesting interview. She seems very delighted and happy with herself. In the end, progress seems to me like little more than burying what is no longer viable, like an elderly person who has outlived his or her usefulness to those around him or her or an appliance that has been worn out and goes to the landfill. I wonder if there is progress or just repetition. Repetition is little more than reproducing what is much the same over and over again. Of course, we think we're evolving toward something "optimal" so we may be "optimistic". But I wonder if it might be that there is no utopia. There is only now. And if we can't endure now, then we won't be able to endure others around us who are not "optimal". Maybe we're all just people no matter how you dress us up or what credentials we are given. Sometimes it seems like those who learn from the past still repeat the same mistakes. If that makes me "amoral" then perhaps I am at least less judgmental than some.

What does any of that have to do with the price of fish?

A person doesn't need to worry about the price of fish if one knows how to catch them without paying for them.

You've already made it clear how much you hate women.

[Gary Childress]

What does any of that have to do with the price of fish?

A person doesn't need to worry about the price of fish if one knows how to catch them without paying for them.

You've already made it clear how much you hate women.

Have I? Can you refresh my memory? I can't recall everything I've typed over the course of my time on this forum.

[Agent Smith]

Now I know how it all began. However there's a significant difference between the two - discernible using the right filter - and the choices on offer - a chance vs. whatever the other side's offering - are, if 5 more minutes were spent on considering them, adiaphora.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Where has it ever been a 'left' policy to say that a bit of lippy turns a man into a woman?

[commonsense]

Very interesting woman. Not particularly surprising that wokedom has adopted much of its ideology from a rabid, unapologetic Nazi. Explains a lot.

The true left is not woke:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRPvedl ... nel=UnHerd

Does wokism enter from the right?

[Flannel Jesus]

As we can tell on this very forum, there's a wide range of what "woke" might mean.

To some people, saying "we shouldn't criminalise homosexuality" is a "woke" thing to say. However to many of us, that's very much not in the "woke" category. To many of us, "woke" means something far more extreme than that.

To a lot of people, "woke" simply means "whatever is more left than I am". So to someone who accepts homosexuality but not trans rights, supporting trans rights is woke. To someone who supports trans rights but doesn't think trans women should compete in women's sports, people who support that are woke.

It's a nebulous word that just exists relative to the person saying it, which is why it's not really a great word choice for philosophical conversation. Two people using the word are not necessarily talking about the same thing.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

It actually just means, 'Sociopath who is as thick as pigshit but with ample rat cunning and an exceptionally highly developed sense of self-interest'.

Glad that's sorted.

[Consul]

Very interesting woman. Not particularly surprising that wokedom has adopted much of its ideology from a rabid, unapologetic Nazi. Explains a lot.

"Even stranger than the progressives' embrace of Michel Foucault is their fascination with Carl Schmitt, though little in their styles was similar. As political scientist Alan Wolfe argued, "Schmitt's ideas loom so large over the contemporary left that one need not even refer to him in order to be influenced by him"."

(Neiman, Susan. Left Is Not Woke. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023. p. 70)

Carl Schmitt rejects liberalism, liberal (constitutional & parliamentary) democracy, universalism, cosmopolitanism, and humanism; and there is a certain overlap of his anti-liberalist and anti-universalist views and the ones of the Woke, who I call the New New Left [NNL] (= the postmodernized successor of the New Left of the 1960s/70s). However, I see no sufficient justification for your statement that "wokedom has adopted much of its ideology from a rabid, unapologetic Nazi," or Wolfe's statements that "Schmitt has become something of a hero to the postmodern left," and that "Schmitt’s ideas loom so large over the contemporary left that one need not even refer to him in order to be influenced by him." He is certainly a hero and major theorist of the New Right (the Neofascists); but Neiman's general assertion that the Woke/NNL have a "fascination with Carl Schmitt" is an exaggeration. How many Woke/NNL theorists actually mention Schmitt in their works and explicitly deal with his political philosophy in an affirmative way? There may be a subconscious or unacknowledged Schmittian influence on wokeism, as Wolfe suggests; but Schmitt cannot be "a hero to the postmodern left" unless they are conscious of him and his thought.
(The situation is different with regard to Heidegger, who strongly influenced Foucault.)

Let's take a look at what Wolfe writes:

"Oddly enough, Schmitt fascinates thinkers on the left as well as the right. It is not that left-wing thinkers have any sympathies with Schmitt’s Nazism. But Schmitt was, if nothing else, the twentieth century’s most powerful critic of liberalism, and for leftist thinkers who view liberalism as too moderate politically and excessively thin philosophically, Schmitt’s unapologetic attacks on just about everything in which liberals believe are bound to seem refreshing. To the extent that there is a revival of Schmitt’s ideas taking place in Europe and the United States, it is not because of what is happening on the right. It is because Schmitt has become something of a hero to the postmodern left.

The sources of this revival are varied. Telos, a journal founded in 1968, the same year in which GRECE came into existence, at first dedicated itself to bringing Marxist critical theory to American audiences before starting a campaign in the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt’s legacy. Impressed by Schmitt’s critique of liberalism and contempt for Wilsonian idealism, Telos published, and showed significant appreciation of, the theorists of the European new right, including de Benoist and Miglio. If Telos is relatively obscure, Schmitt also features in the thinking of some of the most influential and representative works of the contemporary left, including Empire, a best-selling neo-Marxist manifesto by Duke University English professor Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, an Italian radical who had served prison time for insurrection against the state; the ideas of Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most influential of contemporary postmodern philosophers; and the books of Slavoj Zizek, the dazzling wordsmith and leftist polymath from Slovenia. Radical thinkers have a special affinity with the Schmittian idea of the “exception”: not for them the normal politics of parliamentary give-and-take, not at least when, according to the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Schmitt’s state of exception, originally formulated during the terrible years of the twenties and thirties, “has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment.” The exception will always be more interesting than the rule for those who slide toward the political extremes, whichever extreme it happens to be.

Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction has been as popular on the left as his notion of the exception. The Concept of the Political, for example, figures especially prominently in the writings of Chantal Mouffe, the Belgian-born post-Marxist political philosopher teaching at the University of Westminster in London, who describes Schmitt, in the course of just two sentences, as “brilliant,” “pertinent,” “rigorous,” and “perspicacious.” “Many people,” Mouffe writes of her decision to engage with such a prominent Nazi theorist, “will find it perverse if not outrageous,” yet, she continues, “I believe that it is the intellectual force of theorists, not their moral qualities, that should be the decisive criteria in deciding whether we need to establish a dialogue with their work.”

For Mouffe, the really important point is that The Concept of the Political is, in much the same way Giorgio Agamben views the state of exception, “more relevant than ever.” We live in an era of pluralistic conflict in which people belong to groups with radically different identities and conceptions of the good life, she believes. No formula can be found to resolve all these differences, and no procedures exist for domesticating them. Mouffe therefore proposes to think with Schmitt against Schmitt; she agrees with him that efforts to resolve or paper over deep disagreements is “a dangerous liberal illusion which renders us incapable of grasping the phenomenon of politics,” even if she is not prepared to go all the way with Schmitt in abandoning liberal democracy. Liberalism, in her view, is blind to politics and Schmitt, for all his faults, was not. The working class, the stigmatized, the oppressed—they should not settle for liberal proceduralism but should fight back against the powerful forces by revitalizing the political, a strategy that Mouffe advocates but leaves frustratingly vague.

Schmitt’s ideas loom so large over the contemporary left that one need not even refer to him in order to be influenced by him. One of America’s best known academic theorists, Stanley Fish, who writes about an impressively wide variety of subjects, has never devoted an essay to Carl Schmitt. Yet significant traces of Schmittism can be detected in nearly everything he does write. Like Schmitt, Fish is preoccupied, even obsessed, by liberalism, and while he may write something here or there about conservatives, he has never shown any particular interest in conservatism.What fascinates Fish about liberalism, moreover, is exactly what drew Schmitt to the subject: the conviction that liberalism is both dangerous and impossible at the same time; indeed, Fish believes that liberalism is dangerous because it is impossible, holding out possibilities to accommodate different points of view that it can never realize. Examine any liberal principle—free speech, academic freedom, religious tolerance, race blindness—and, according to Fish, you will immediately discover that its presumed neutrality is at best a sham and at worst a clever ploy.

Since Fish acknowledges with refreshing honesty that he applies the same rhetorical strategy to all liberal principles, any one of them can be used to illustrate his argument. Academic freedom therefore offers a representative example. Rest assured, Fish tells his readers in The Trouble with Principle, that he is all in favor of academic freedom. It is the arguments used by liberals to defend it that fuel his critical energy. Advocates on behalf of academic freedom claim they are open to all points of view. “However,” Fish continues, “if a form of speech or advocacy will not offer itself for discussion but simply declares itself to be the truth to which all must bend, academic freedom will reject it as illiberal.” Liberals, in short, just as Schmitt claimed, say that they are neutral between different points of view when in actuality they are trying to impose one point of view—their own—on those who disagree with them. “It’s a great move,” Fish concludes, “in which liberalism, in the form of academic freedom, gets to display its generosity while at the same time cutting the heart out of the views to which that generosity is extended.”

Not only is the liberal commitment to principle impossible to realize but, again echoing Schmitt, Fish writes that “many bad things are done in its name.” Were liberals to present themselves for what they are—people with a passionate point of view—they could have arguments with people whose passions lie in other directions. But this is not what liberals do. Instead of defending their politics, they pretend that they have no politics. (Here, then, is one difference between Schmitt and Fish: to the former, liberals are apolitical; to the latter, they are hyperpolitical.) They hide behind words—“fairness,” “impartiality,” and “justice” are some of them—that are totally devoid of substantive meaning. When liberals, aware, as others are not, of the game they are playing, then rush in and identify their substantive positions with these presumably neutral standards, their true disingenuousness reveals itself: they gain the unusual advantage of capturing not only the low ground of policy but the high ground of procedure. An ideology ostensibly dedicated to fairness thus becomes inherently unfair, forcing its opponents, if they are to make a substantive case for their view of the world, to appear to be against impartiality, mutual respect, due process of law, and all the other good things that everyone, irrespective of their political views, is almost supposed to admire. If liberals were honest—which in Fish’s view they never are—they would, to continue with the example of academic freedom, simply say that “the presence of Marxists on campus is beneficial to education and the presence of bigots and racists is not, and that’s all there is to it.”

(Wolfe, Alan. The Future of Liberalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. pp. 139-42)

[Consul]

"Oddly enough, Schmitt fascinates thinkers on the left as well as the right.…”

(Wolfe, Alan. The Future of Liberalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. pp. 139-42)

For example, New Right thinkers find the political ideas of neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci interesting.

[Consul]

Does wokism enter from the right?

No!