But no one can tell us what it is...

How can this amorphous concept be the cause of the fall of not only social morals, but the degrading of our education system, and it causes the collapse of banks?

What the Fuck? What is Woke?

 

According to The Cambridge English Dictionary

WOKE
adjective
UK
/wəʊk/ US
/woʊk/

Aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.
_-----------------


Then the MAGA crowd got hold of it and turned it into something completely different....

Though some of them struggle to tell you what it is...

https://youtube.com/shorts/0hsg5mz18ew?feature=share

 

Woke hasn't done any of those things lol. You're taking what a republican thinks it means and running with that. Woke especially has nothing to do with banks or their currant condition.

 

First great title @anon_de_plume . That gave me my first chuckle of the morning.

Second this thread is off to a great start. Especially noting how to the right words have no meaning. Like socialism, communism, and now woke. In the US treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans depend on low information voters they can convince to vote against their own interests. And the way they do that is to constantly play on their fear which then leads to hate and anger. So knowing their voters are low information and less educated using just one word is a way to reach them.

And what we are actually seeing now is the use of that pattern. Not too long ago "socialism" was the fear invoking buzzword. The left are socialists and just look how terrible that is in other counties. But the problem is too many people did look and many other countries that could be described as social democracies were better off than the US. And then the obvious flaw. It begged the question. So you hate "socialism" then you must also hate Social Security right?

So the treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans had to up their game and stated accusing the left of being "communists." The left wants to make the US communists and just look at how terrible that is in communist countries. And the problem with that was when people did look for communist countries they couldn't find one. And the incorrect examples they did provide were third world counties that were poor to begin with.

Which is why they have now seized on "woke" as their fear invoking buzzword. Which is a good one. All they have to do is tell their low information voters "woke" is not only something to fear it also means that the left wants the country to be "woke" and that means they are going to take things away from you and give it to someone else. And the beauty of "woke" is they can constantly say it but never have to define it. That means everything on the let is "woke."

Which is why we haven't seen any of the usual right wing members even show up on this thread yet even though its a good discussion because they are terrified someone will ask them to define woke and they can't. And they would end up looking like this.


Conservative Author Totally Freezes Up When Pressed to Define ‘Woke’




The Hill
Finally, someone asked the question.

During a Tuesday interview on The Hill’s online program Rising, conservative author Bethany Mandel was stumped when co-host Briahna Joy Gray pressed her to give a definition of the word “woke,” which has been used incessantly by the right to criticize all things vaguely liberal.

Mandel spent much of her chat with Gray and libertarian co-host Robby Soave promoting her new book Stolen Youth, which she co-wrote with fellow right-wing columnist (and Ron DeSantis superfan) Karol Markowicz. The book’s premise largely centers on the belief that the far-left has indoctrinated today’s youth with racial ideology, *a “victimhood” culture, and “gender madness.”

Gray, a left-leaning commentator and former Bernie Sanders adviser, argued that there is indeed a recent movement which posits there’s a “cultural cache that’s emerged of hierarchies of oppression” within the education system. At the same time, Gray said she’s seen “frustration” with that language across the political spectrum, and wondered how Mandel sees this solely as “a war” being waged by the left on conservatives.

“Because framing it that way when I think this is a broad concern that a lot of folks have a problem does also recreate** this kind of victim paradigm, where you have people saying we're being under attack by the left instead of kind of coming together and trying to resolve what I think is a broadly understood phenomenon.” the Rising host added.

While saying she hoped that “parents of all political stripes” would pick up her book, Mandel claimed that “this is sort of a woke reimagining that is very, very, far-left.” Additionally, she asserted that “only 7 percent of Americans consider themselves very liberal, and probably fewer of them consider themselves woke.” Gray, however, wasn’t going to just leave it there.

“What does that mean to you? Would you mind defining woke?” Gray pressed. “It’s come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

Mandel, unfortunately, was unable to get on that same page.

“So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um,” the conservative writer stammered before presciently adding: “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.”

A struggling Mandel continued: “I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define, and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Um, sorry, I—it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”

While Gray told Mandel to “take your time,” Soave jumped in to offer his guest a bit of assistance.

“I mean, everybody is weighing in against wokeness,” Soave declared. “Like we do some of it on this show as well. It’s definitely something you know what it is when you see it.”

Gray, for her part, then asked her co-host to define “wokeness,” prompting the Reason writer to claim that “it’s the tendency to punish people formally or often informally for expressing ideas using language that is very new that no one would have objected to like five seconds ago.”

Anyway, Mandel’s inability to give a clear-cut definition of conservatives’ favorite buzzword did indeed go viral on Tuesday, with one Twitter video garnering over 4 million views as of publication.

And while Republicans have spent the past couple of years waging a war on “woke,” a recent poll found that a solid majority of Americans see the term as a positive and that it means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.”



https://news.yahoo.com/conservative-author-totally-freezes-pressed-034641526.html


*That one needs its own footnote because its part of the psychological projection constantly used by the right falsely accusing others of what they are guilty of themselves. The left thinks they are always victims.

**And that lie just jumps off the page when it is pointed out that in reality it is the right that consider themselves the poor poor pitiful me eternally wounded little snowflake victims. And we see that all day eve3ry day on this forum.

 

If you tell a lie long enough does it become true?

 

Huh?

Ok, not claiming ownership of anything or any word. I'm just trying to figure out why the right has glomed onto this word and distorted the fuck out of it, and then try to use it to explain why everything evil in their world is because of this "word", one they can't even define...

 

No but as the Nazis knew if you tell a lie big enough and often enough it creates the illusion of truth and that is one of the things we are facing now. Constantly lying and employing psychological projection where they falsely accuse others of what they are actually guilty of themselves is the strategy and method of operation of treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republican. And it has two benefits for them one immediate and the other more long range. The immediate benefit is that they use their lies and the right wing false propaganda noise machine to try and out shout reality. And it is so loud at the very least it creates confusion about what is true or false.

But the longer range is if they tell a lie loud enough and often enough it can create the illusion of truth. People hear it often enough to start to believe it. And that is a real problem and danger for our society. Just like it was in Nazi Germany.

@shootersa actually posted a very interesting and informative article about that which actually shows ways to guard against the illusion of truth.


How liars create the ‘illusion of truth’
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(Image credit: Getty Images)

By Tom Stafford26th October 2016

Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford.
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists something like this known as the "illusion of truth" effect. Here's how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like "A prune is a dried plum". Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn't true (something like "A date is a dried plum").

After a break – of minutes or even weeks – the participants do the procedure again, but this time some of the items they rate are new, and some they saw before in the first phase. The key finding is that people tend to rate items they've seen before as more likely to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not, and seemingly for the sole reason that they are more familiar.

So, here, captured in the lab, seems to be the source for the saying that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. And if you look around yourself, you may start to think that everyone from advertisers to politicians are taking advantage of this foible of human psychology.




But a reliable effect in the lab isn't necessarily an important effect on people's real-world beliefs. If you really could make a lie sound true by repetition, there'd be no need for all the other techniques of persuasion.



The 'illusion of truth' can be a dangerous weapon in the hands of a propagandist like Joseph Goebbels (Credit: Getty Images)

One obstacle is what you already know. Even if a lie sounds plausible, why would you set what you know aside just because you heard the lie repeatedly?

Recently, a team led by Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University set out to test how the illusion of truth effect interacts with our prior knowledge. Would it affect our existing knowledge? They used paired true and un-true statements, but also split their items according to how likely participants were to know the truth (so "The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth" is an example of a "known" items, which also happens to be true, and "The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth" is an un-true item, for which people are likely to know the actual truth).

Their results show that the illusion of truth effect worked just as strongly for known as for unknown items, suggesting that prior knowledge won’t prevent repetition from swaying our judgements of plausibility.

To cover all bases, the researchers performed one study in which the participants were asked to rate how true each statement seemed on a six-point scale, and one where they just categorised each fact as "true" or "false". Repetition pushed the average item up the six-point scale, and increased the odds that a statement would be categorised as true. For statements that were actually fact or fiction, known or unknown, repetition made them all seem more believable.


Repetition can even make known lies sound more believable (Credit: Alamy)

At first this looks like bad news for human rationality, but – and I can't emphasise this strongly enough – when interpreting psychological science, you have to look at the actual numbers.

What Fazio and colleagues actually found, is that the biggest influence on whether a statement was judged to be true was... whether it actually was true. The repetition effect couldn’t mask the truth. With or without repetition, people were still more likely to believe the actual facts as opposed to the lies.

This shows something fundamental about how we update our beliefs – repetition has a power to make things sound more true, even when we know differently, but it doesn't over-ride that knowledge

The next question has to be, why might that be? The answer is to do with the effort it takes to being rigidly logical about every piece of information you hear. If every time you heard something you assessed it against everything you already knew, you'd still be thinking about breakfast at supper-time. Because we need to make quick judgements, we adopt shortcuts – heuristics which are right more often than wrong. Relying on how often you've heard something to judge how truthful something feels is just one strategy. Any universe where truth gets repeated more often than lies, even if only 51% vs 49% will be one where this is a quick and dirty rule for judging facts.


The illusion of truth is not inevitable – when armed with knowledge, we can resist it (Credit: Getty Images)

If repetition was the only thing that influenced what we believed we'd be in trouble, but it isn't. We can all bring to bear more extensive powers of reasoning, but we need to recognise they are a limited resource. Our minds are prey to the illusion of truth effect because our instinct is to use short-cuts in judging how plausible something is. Often this works. Sometimes it is misleading.

Once we know about the effect we can guard against it. Part of this is double-checking why we believe what we do – if something sounds plausible is it because it really is true, or have we just been told that repeatedly? This is why scholars are so mad about providing references - so we can track the origin on any claim, rather than having to take it on faith.

But part of guarding against the illusion is the obligation it puts on us to stop repeating falsehoods. We live in a world where the facts matter, and should matter. If you repeat things without bothering to check if they are true, you are helping to make a world where lies and truth are easier to confuse. So, please, think before you repeat.


https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161026-how-liars-create-the-illusion-of-truth

 

Here's a deeper dive into the fallacy and phoniness of "woke." And exposes it for hat it is; make believe.

Bethany Mandel and the makebelievers

John Stoehr
March 16, 2023



Bethany Mandel Facebook



Straight away "woke" means antiracist – or, more broadly speaking, anti-bigotry of whatever degree and kind. That's the Ur-meaning of it. Anyone saying they're antiwoke is saying they're anti-antiracist.

The word is getting a lot of attention today on account of an author who wrote a whole new book criticizing the waves of wokeness crashing across the land but could not define the word when asked.

Georgetown political scientist Don Moynihan, on quote-tweeting a clip of the interview with illiberal author Bethany Mandel, summed up the barrenness of it all. "This seems like a solid basis for a massive political backlash that uses state power to silence dissenting voices."

READ MORE: Watch: Conservative stumbles when asked to define 'woke'

While "woke" used to mean something, before it was hijacked by the illiberals, quibbling over it seems like a trap. We can argue about the meaning of the word all day, but most of that energy is likely to fall along partisan lines. That there's no there there is beside the point.

We should see "woke," not as signifying a concrete meaning, but as a mirror. It reflects back at the illiberals their imagining of the world. It reflects how they imagine themselves and their enemies. We can say, as many have said, that Mandel wrote a book about a concept she can't define. We can also say she wrote a book about makebelieve.

Makebelieve is key to illiberal projects around the globe.

Makebelievers pretend, as children do, that the world is something that it isn't. They makebelieve that they are the victims of some kind of conspiracy of dark, secret, malevolent forces against which they must pass laws to protect themselves and "their way of life." If you ask what these dark, secret, malevolent forces are, the reply is going to be like Bethany Mandel's. And anyway, you're spoiling all the fun! Nothing ruins the makebelieve like a spoiler insisting on reality.

READ MORE: 'Sorry, it's hard to explain': Right-wing pundit ripped for hating 'wokeness' without being able to define it

They make stuff up and they make stuff up – until something comes along that sounds just plausible enough that the madeupstuff does not sound so madeupstuffable. It sounds so real, almost dangerous. Yeah, that's it! It's exactly what people who makeupstuff want!

Yes, like children. The difference is that make-believers can pass laws enforcing gender, pass laws radically expanding access to firearms and pass laws that silence antiracists who, they say, are part of the anti-makebelievers conspiracy, which the makebelievers made up. These makebelievers also have friends who like to makebelieve that they are police officers upholding law and order. They makebelieve that the world is out to get them, but not if they get the world first.

Let me give you a concrete example.

Matt Walsh is an illiberal podcaster. He's also a man-child. He said the following recently: "This is … about pointing out a real and extremely successful effort to demonize a certain group of people and to erase their achievements. We hear so much about groups being erased for their achievements. That's only happening to one group, that is, white men. The only group of people that are being erased in any kind of meaningful way, historically, are white people."

So much fun!

So much imagination!

Anyone who knows anything about American history knows this claim – that "the only group of people that are being erased in any kind of meaningful way, historically, are white people" – has nothing to do with anything about American history. It's all madeupstuff!

As I said, makebelieve is essential to illiberal projects around the globe. China does it. Russia does. So does Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Making up stuff is, matter of fact, so important that slush-funded bureaucracies are established to guarantee a reliable supply of it. In China, it's the "Central Propaganda Department." In Soviet Russia, it was "the Politburo." In America, it's "Fox News."

Even better, here in these United States, a competitive news business gives reporters incentive to pretend to believe the makebelievers if only to bring more attention to the madeupstuff for the purpose of turning a handsome profit. Makebeleive isn't just fun! It's lucrative!

Because it is so essential, it's not surprising that a lot of the makebelieve produced by bureaucracies has a familiar ring to it.

Edward Luce wrote that Vladimir Putin's best hope of winning Ukraine is "for NATO's resolve to collapse and America's supply of money and weapons to dry up. A Trump or DeSantis presidency would be Russia's likeliest chance of disuniting the West."

The columnist doesn't use "makebelieve" but it's what he means.

Putin's "training as a KGB agent who can manipulate perceptions is relevant. The danger is not that he will cause America's electorate to change its vote. … The risk is that the Kremlin leader will further cement the view on the Maga right that Russia is the global champion of their anti-woke cause. Russian flags and T-shirts proclaiming 'I would rather be a Russian than a Democrat' are a regular sight."

So we could say that Bethany Mandel and the other makebelievers don't know what they are talking about when they talk about "woke." Or we could say they have quite a lot in common, indeed share the same goals, as illiberal projects around the globe, including Russia's.

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis and right-wingers falsely blame wokeness and diversity for SVB collapse



https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/bethany-mandel-and-the-makebelievers/

 

A woke person is someone who thinks it is acceptable to prevent Charles Murray, and those who who agree with him, from expressing their opinions on college campuses.

Woke people complain about censorship. Nevertheless they think books by Charles Murray, Professor J. Philippe Rushton, and Jared Taylor should not be included in high school libraries.

 

woke
Originally intended to mean "alert to civil rights issues" or "takes an enlightened approach to civil rights", its meaning has changed. It is now associated with adopting an obsessive, blinkered or deliberately obtuse approach to certain civil rights, particularly in relation to equality. It refers to an approach which is overall and on balance harmful to society, ignores context and counterpoints, and is ignorant of the wider ramifications of the position taken.

Under the pretense of being politically correct, the "woke" person is, ironically, asleep, in that they are ignorant of or unconcerned by the harms caused by their actions. Such harms may include:
• damage to freedom of expression and freedom of association
• the diminution of comedy, and artistic license in music, to the point that it becomes dull
• stifling of conversation
• fear of expressing an alternative opinion or calling out that which is evidently nonsense
• feelings of being browbeaten, helpless and living in a dystopian society
• diversion of societal focus away from more pressing issues affecting society
• the breakdown of language and societal structures
• discrimination and prejudice against others with particular characteristics - typically those who, in a particular location or organization, are in a majority - under the guise of improving equality and acting on behalf of the minority.

The "woke" person may be acting in their own self-interests to achieve their own ends.

 

Wonder what he thinks of Ron Desantis "cancelling" anything related to diversity is ok?

I don't really care if he answers, I'm pretty sure I know his answer...

 

Well there you have it. You just proved how correct @anon_de_plume's title is.
Here a woke, there a woke, everywhere a woke, woke!

This is truly laughable contradictory drivel which of course you won't reveal where you got it because I am betting the source is more laughable than the drivel.

Did you even bother to try and read this nonsense?

 

Case in point!

 

I can make no sense of this whatsoever.

 

I "Woke" this morning. I guess I have just offended the entire group of so called conservatives.
Tomorrow I will "Wake" up and offend my dogs.