The term “woke” started turning up in mainstream discourse about a decade ago as part of the cultural revolution from the top. When this current phase started is debatable, but the term “woke” started circulating around social media in the Obama years, which means we are into the second decade of the woke phenomenon. In fact, it has been around long enough to become a bit dated.
Interestingly, the word and the concept did not originate inside the academy. A century ago, a black blues singer calling himself Lead Belly urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about blacks being falsely accused of rape by whites. The term and concept caught on among blacks as a warning about accepting the reality of white America as advertised and instead accepting the lived reality of black Americans.
In the middle of the last century, upper-middle-class white feminists culturally appropriated the term to criticize what they called the white patriarchy and then woke was off and running in the academy and then society. As with so many things, the managerial class, devoid of any creative or critical thinking, pilfered an idea from black culture in order to pretend to have a culture of their own.
It is why the concept of cultural appropriation was so easily adopted by the people flying the woke flag outside their mansions. They could easily imagine the damage done by frat boys wearing sombreros at their Cinco de Mayo party because they themselves have been pillaging the cultures over which they rule. The culture of the ruling class is a self-critique projected onto the masses.
Putting that aside, the appeal of “woke” to the managerial class, as well as the adjunct professor living in her car, may be caused by something other than cultural barrenness and ideological fervor. When you get past the lunacy, there are traces of the same impulse found in the transcendental movement. There are some strong parallels between the main concepts in both.
That is what the show is about this week. In the first half we cover the two main concepts of what most mean when they use the word “woke”. The second half of the show is a very brief discussion of Emerson and his classic lecture to the Harvard Divinity School, along with a reading from Thoreau. The idea is to see if “woke” is just the current manifestation of the American moral imperative.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Introduction
- What is Woke?
- Lived Experience
- What Is Going On Here?
- Emerson
- Woke As Deformed Americanism
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Before listening to the podcast, I want to present the following question: What distinguishes “wokeness” from what came to be known in the early 1990s as political correctness (PC)? It seems to me that wokeness is just PC on steroids. Wokeness has merely expanded the range of topics upon which folks can point and cry, “Offensive! HATER!” It’s based on the same victimization mongering and modern witch hunting as PC. In similar vein, is there really much difference between DEI (should be DIE — diversity, inclusion, equity) and the Affirmative Action (AA) that’s been around since the 1970s? Isn’t DIE… Read more »
Concur it’s just another click on the ratchet of Genocide White People…
Yeah, I suspect that saying “woke” is just a way to avoid saying “anti-traditional white.”
Conservatives like James Lindsey don’t say “anti-traditional white” because they believe it is wrong to see race and they inadvertently assist our enemies by arguing that our real threat is “communism.” When we insist that our struggle is ideological, we are blind to the raw racial hostility.
But maybe I am wrong. Are there examples of woke that cannot be classified as “anti-traditional white?” One example that Wkathman mentioned is that woke is against excellence in general, which is broader than anti-traditional white.
Sure. Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Walter WIlliams, Ben Carson, the guy who ran the pizza thing for the darker complected. Tiger Moms for the jaundiced-Americans.
Excelling is frowned upon in AINO.
Thanks Steve. With all due respect to the people you named, I don’t believe that they are especially excellent. If they were white, they would be praised, but not considered especially excellent.
Rather, I think that your examples can be better explained as our enemies punishing non-whites who adhere to traditional white norms.
If wokists hated excellence in itself, they would hate excellent non-white athletes, which they clearly do not. Sorry Wkathman, I don’t think you can say they hate excellence.
We have to face that they just hate traditional white people.
I guess. I think a fair share can be attributed to Conservatives glorifying their house niggers, too. Being about half the population, Cons can force Progs to at least address the elephant in the room.
And I certainly agree the bar has been lowered for non-whites. A lot. As good as Sowell is, he doesn’t hold a candle to Hayek or Hazlitt, as I’m sure Sowell would acknowledge. And Hazlitt had no academic credentials at all.
If AA were required for negroes to play in the NBA, Leftists would support it in a heartbeat, excellence be damned.
The chief difference between AA and DIE is that, while the former was done on behalf of negroes, the latter is for all non-whites. Other than that, not much diff.
DIE includes whites as well, the female and/or homo and trans ones, although they are of course lower in the DIE hierarchy than the non whites of the same sex or proclivity.
Well, maybe not all nonwhites. Something tells me overachieving Asians will not be permitted full access to DIE. In addition to the blatant anti-whiteness of DIE, it’s also a program that reeks of bitterness toward excellence in general. It’s all about putting the bottom feeders on top. Got to hand it to leftists — they really are committed to blank slate egalitarianism. They really do appear to believe that people’s positions in life are entirely a matter of social engineering and have nothing to do who genetics or who people are at a fundamental level.
An animas against excellence, decency and normalcy. All part of the Satanic inversion.
“Something tells me overachieving Asians will not be permitted full access to DIE.” Well, it’s objectively true, for one thing, just look at the SCOTUS affirmative action case. It was not brought by Whites. Asians are also resented for being considered “model minorities” – in other words, they came here dirt poor and penniless and unable to speak the language and their kids are insanely successful in one generation. They put a total lie to the premise of DIE and they are hated for it. That said, the Nuremberg regime is not against using Asians as a bludgeon against White… Read more »
Interesting that there has never been an East Asian SC justice, no? Guess none of them are as smart as the Wise Latina and Kween Ketanji…
F*ck the purported ‘model minority. They don’t have White ethics or White culture or White morality. Their women are not demure except when conning young and old White farts. And hapa children are not White.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinese-nationals-arrested-east-texas-193554026.html
They have their own countries. Lots of them.
For some strange reason, everybody prefers to live with the Blue-Eyed Ice Devil…
I was not making a value judgement on model minorities – Korea, China, and Japan are really nice countries at this point, better than the USA in many ways, and they should go home. I was simply saying that the existence of a minority that within one generation became massively successful puts a total lie to the entire DEI ideology.
Asians have an advantage…they score well on tests..But generally whites and asians score much better, and are more intelligent, than other races…
They tried “hate crimes against Asians” for a while, but it never caught on, mainly because the perpetrators were predominantly black.
AA and DIE are on the same continuum of thought. People got behind AA because they felt they were “gifting” something to poor people. That it might have shut out whites in the process was simply forbidden territory to even discuss. The West is just that so much in surplus apparently.
It’s still relatively forbidden to discuss the idea that for every negro “lifted up”, a white might be held down or their lives made more difficult. DIE is simply more open that it’s going to cost whites something.
The whole “PC” thing allowed Whites into the situation, provided they “behave”, there is no place for Whites in the woke utopia. It is a continuum though, because the same type of people (and the exact same people, in some instances) who instituted PC speech codes were the ones who engineered the rise of wokeness across society and institutionalized it in the 2nd Obama admin.
And yet there are multitudes of whites who are architects of the Woketopia. They are convinced they will be received in the new Graceland.
The idea of there having been a recent Great Awokening has always been stupid. Someone posts a Kids In The Hall sketch, a clip from PCU, a Frank Zappa or George Carlin quote and calls it “more relevant than ever.” “Wow! They were so ahead of their time!” No they weren’t. They were working with clichés extant then. If they were seers they wouldn’t have been famous. They’d have been insane losers like Nietzsche and Jesus. Republican city dwellers remember the 2008 election night air being filled with African hoots they’d never heard before, so they think that was When… Read more »
The nineties? NO. Long before the 90s. It goes back to the 50s at least. Woke is just a new branding of the same old anti-White hate and a love of all things degenerate. The celebration of Stonewall, for example, which happened in the 60s. The progressive movement goes back to the 19th century.
Preferential hiring based on race by the government goes way back.
About1960 my father was teaching me how to play Hearts. You have to follow suit, so I needed to learn the word renege. He then taught me a second definition: change of shift at the post office.
Since we’re talking about the 90s, I think that’s when the whole panic over the word “niggardly” started. Or was that later? I’d look it up but I’m trying to relax today. The Good People will always find something to take offense at.
Some Chinese lady who was running one of the school districts (IIRC, it was DC) complained that the money they got was “niggardly.” Boy, did the illiterates lose their minds. But I think that was in the late 2000s or the early 10s.
There was a big hullabaloo in Washington DC, where so many of the municipal make-work positions are filled by joggers, over a white man using the word niggardly in a meeting. This took place in 1999.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/niggardly-attitude-to-word-costs-man-job-1.1258732
Yesterday I was reading Yelp reviews of one of my favorite restaurants and came upon this little gem by a reviewer from Santa Fe (natch): “The paintings reek ‘white’ patriarchal dominance with women of color as their entertainment.”
The paintings that inflamed this delicate little flower are typical western prints of cowboys doing typical cowboy stuff and sultry senioritas and cowgirls with their Stetsons pulled down provocatively over one eye. That sort of thing. Not only do these moonbats hate whitey, they detest normal sexuality.
My go-to Mexican restaurant has archive photos of Juarez and Pancho Villa and such “patriots” on the walls. The history of all the Mexican revolutions in pictures if you will. Perhaps I should write a Yelp review? In any event, no employee has been anything than gracious. Money’s funny that way. I even tease the cook. One day he was in, but not working, and introducing his fiancé to the crowd. He introduced me and I looked him in the eye in front of her and said, “How’d an ugly bastard like you get such a good-looking woman to say… Read more »
Aye. Arguably the chief casualty in the Left’s war on sanity is humor, even–gasp!–ethnic humor. The Eastwood film Gran Torino is a pretty good take on this subject.
My God am I happy to be abroad again. I almost cannot FIND a black face on the TV. A few commercials only and from the more ‘woke’ (see what I did there) companies in Western Europe primarily based in UK, Germania, the usual suspects. But even they are few and far between. Most commercials are full of white faces, intact white families selling home products, and hot blonds selling whatever… Good times bros. More’s the pity that I have to go back to the blackety black sewer of DC at all but unfortunately I have a foot in both… Read more »
You find that blackity-black shit in the oddest places too. I watch the YouTuber Tyler Zed. He does comedy bits that poke fun at the Left, feminists, etc… He seems pretty “based” overall. I’ve noticed though, that the little funny videos he plays have been getting blacker and blacker over time. It’s gotten to the point where this week’s show was like 80% black people. Most of these bits are actually funny but his audience is conservative White people in flyover country with a military background. I just can’t believe that his staff can’t find funny videos with White people.… Read more »
I suffer from 90s bias, but it’s probably been coming and going forever. Another bias: as long as there’s feminine and masculine.
Indeed, Affirmative Action has been going strong since the ’70s, but originally it only applied to blacks..Now it applies to any number of “victim” groups, and it applies to almost all jobs that whites used to fill..
Sort of. I don’t know of anyone saying blacks are not sufficiently represented in coal mining or ditch digging or commercial fishing. They are only pushing for AA in careers perceived to be high pay for very little effort.
And when they get sufficient representation on the Board, and destroy the company, they want to get onto other Boards. No one ever seems to notice the pattern.
My favorite radio commercials are those from the National Forest Service advertising with a “Black” accented voice the wonders of the National Forests and how one needs to visit them. So damn obvious…
Truth. When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, (yes, I lost a bet) I saw exactly no POCs. Same with canoeing in the Boundary Waters. (The future Mrs. Steve talked me into it. Sue me.)
So far as I can tell, there are few ways to avoid the diversity better than just getting out in nature.
One of Leftists’ chief neuroses revolves around the refusal of negroes to decamp to Yosemite and strum Woody Guthrie tunes on the DoBro whilst cooking vegan tofu burgers over the electric grill. They experience frequent panic attacks because nuggras, no matter how often cajoled, do not behave like the flabby and pierced Peace Studies chick at Evergreen College.
If I ever meet a group of you guys and we watch TV, I’m going to suggest we play “SBPDL” bingo. The basic idea is to call out when the TV shows blacks doing preposterous stuff like whitewater rafting, camping of course, maybe hang gliding or rock climbing. You should get extra points for things like curling (that weird game where you brush the ice in front of a large sliding stone), ice fishing – really anything involving snow and ice.
Negroids are optimized by evolution based upon their ancestral environment which consisted of a sustained warm climate, food abundance, and aggressive predation from competing animal species. Caucasians are similarly optimized based upon mid/upper latitude environments with high seasonal variation and necessity for innovative and cooperative behaviors in order to survive winter food deprivation. As such, these seminal behaviors are encoded in DNA and cannot be overridden by postpartum thought processes. This is why whites in the Congo and blacks in Sweden are dysfunctional. And this reality cannot be changed via woke indoctrination no matter how many times they sing Kumbaya.
True. However, something tells me the BEID, if so inclined, could turn the Congo into a comparative paradise. The negro in Sweden can only destroy Valhalla.
There’s some evidence supporting that in the Transvaal, Western Cape, and Natal. And in Haiti.
Yes, Rhodesia was a pretty good place, before certain changes occurred.
You do realize you are describing Israel?
Ay-rabs didn’t get out of the iron age until not only did Brits find oil in the ME, but also developed the oil fields for them.Syria and Jordan have significant oil. The closest one can find for parallels to Israel, West Bank and Gaza in the proximity is Lebanon. Israel is the only one to have developed a significant economy.
Why didn’t Gaza develop a tourism industry? Could it be because it’s full of high 60s IQ people?
Smart people produce advanced, civilized societies. Dumb people don’t.
Anthropologist Carlton Coon (yes, real name) wrote about this very subject – how geography and climate played a huge role in how the Five races of mankind evolved (especially how it affected IQ) with two of his (then) landmark books “ The Origin of Race” and “The Living Races of Man”. Long out of print, of course, and probably on every major library’s banned book list because as we all know there are no differences in the races.
Yes, Coon was a worthwhile read, back when Anthropology was a worthwhile subject. Coon was a contributor to encyclopedias, as I recall. The decline has been very steep.
Been a coon’s age since anthropology was worth a crap…
Woke scratches the same itch in the human psyche that gnosticism has throughout history. Reality doesn’t match fantasy, creating an inchoate sense of something wrong. In a real way, woke is just another manifestation of gnosticism. Instead of a dimurge evil deity creating a world of pain there’s a world of inequality created by European white devils.
These ideas have bubbled around in human consciousness for millenia, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, because any human of sufficient intelligence can recognize that the human nervous system is not particularly good at perceiving objective reality, and that therefore there will always be some element of purely subjective experience to every person’s life which needs to be accounted for. It’s bizarre how gnosticism has become a boogeyman over the last decade or so. Primarily for people who believe an officially sanctioned magus can perform ceremonial magic to alchemically transmute bits of wafer and wine into… Read more »
Gnosticism is demonized because it is ultimately nihilistic.
It always turns to death and destruction as the ultimate salvation.
That is true of its woke manifestation too. The embrace of abortion, euthanasia – the hatred of pets etc.
Gnosticism is demonized mostly because of the malformed character and mentality of some folks who adhere to a point-and-shriek religion from Israel.
It’s by the way that one can never go back after figuring out what fisherman Simon Rockhead had done to the couple. It was he or his goons who made them fall down. No holy Breath whatsoever was involved.
Gnosticism is rightly demonized because it hates matter and therefore eventually hates people. Christians tried for over 100 years at peaceful conversion efforts and eventually had to take up arms when they did. Along the way they assisted in suicides, unnatural matings and the like.
Point and shriek is a religion that naturally support Gnosticism.
“…any human of sufficient intelligence can recognize that the human nervous system is not particularly good at perceiving objective reality…”
So what alternative do you propose?
I was pondering this, trying to figure out what he might be talking about, when it occurred to me, if human senses were bad at perceiving objective reality, how would we know?
If reality and human desire were perfectly overlapped, there would be no advancement of the human condition – it would be the Garden of Eden.
Dissatisfaction with the current state of the physical/intellectual/spiritual world is one of the core features of what it means to be human. This disequilibrium creates great things like technology and art, but it also creates pestering busybodies like the Woke Zombie.
Sub pernicious blackguards for pestering busybodies and your post is perfect.
Woke schmoke. Woke is nothing more than repackaged sixties Leftism. Fifteen years ago we were calling it political correctness. At any rate, I find it somewhat interesting, but hardly surprising, that negroes can’t even muster gramatically correct terms for their noxious movements. Woke, black lives matter–just further evidence that white people are carrying an intellectually deficient race, even as that race threatens to drag us down into the murky depths of the salty brine.
I made the same point. Woke is just the latest iteration of progressivism. Progressivism is a revolutionary movement and can never stop. Today it’s tranny kids and DIE and tomorrow it will be something else and DIE. It’s new (not even new) branding on an old deadly revolutionary ideology.
Tell me about it. As a grad student I once had to sit through a lecture on “Spanglish”. About a hour wasted telling me that even Hispanic students had a hard time with their language and how a mixed grammar and vocabulary of English and Spanish was acceptable from our student population and should be accepted in the submitted work of such students at the university level. Even the native Hispanic faculty were aghast and insulted. Examples like “el trucko” (camión) should be considered acceptable in writing and conversation.
Bertrand Shaw is rolling in his grave.
Ah, the ol’ “standardized English is racist” chestnut.
The destruction of standards is the destruction of civilization.
PS–I’m guessing Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw are both rolling in their graves although both were Leftists of a sort.
“I’m guessing Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw are both rolling in their graves although both were Leftists of a sort.”
Damn Ostei, let an old guy make a mistake. You’re definitely off my Christmas list. 😉
Odd though, I knew the name and wrote the other. Crap, it sucks getting old. Near as I can tell, I initially thought “Bertrand Shaw”, but thought, “No it’s Bernard”. Then wrote Bertrand Russell.
This shit’s getting real. 🙁
Just yankin’ yer chain, you ol’ dawg. (-;
“Crap, it sucks getting old.”
Pretty sure it beats the alternative.
Not if you start drooling, or want to keep, up with this group of commentators.
a/k/a “Jonquarius Jones’ Locker”
The Woke are just saying and insisting upon things that have been pushed for several decades in “higher education.” But this was ignored or laughed at by most people. The political class, for whatever reasons, allowed it to fester, and to feed upon a wealth of money that government and foundations provided. N. S. Lyons had an interesting piece on how the Ford Foundation funded extreme and, I believe, sometimes even criminal activity by the Left. I don’t agree with others here that Woke descends directly from Puritanism, Protestantism, etc. The actual Puritans tended to be more grounded in reality.… Read more »
Hindsight is 20/20, I suppose, but how much better off might we now be if, instead of focusing monomanically on global communism, American conservatives had devoted their time, money and effort to safeguarding academia from the postmodern New Left? But they just didn’t have a clue. They had no conception of what havoc the parvenu viper would wreak.
What do you see as the essential differences betwixt them?
Any worthwhile answer to that question would require a full-fledged essay. However, at root, the key difference is that while Marxism revolved around dialectical class conflict as the motive force of historical change (progress), postmodernism argues that progress, if such a thing even exists, can only be realized by supplanting the “master narrative” of western civilization with the hitherto marginalized narratives of non-whites, criminals, perverts and women. That’s a fancy way of saying white civilization must be replaced by subaltern savagery.
Or, to boil it down further, Marxism’s emphasis is economic, postmodernism’s is linguistic and cultural.
So we are not talking about Frankfurt School and its offshoots? Pretty sure that was where it needed to be nipped in the bud. Once that had been allowed to gain a foothold, it metastasized.
The Frankfurters actually flamed out pretty quickly. They competed with mainline Marxism for a while–based out of Columbia University–but by the mid-60s had become disillusioned with the possibility of Marxist revolution, and saw capitalism is something like a permanent structure. What’s more, they condemned campus radicals as leftwing fascists–an accurate description–and withdrew from radical politics altogether. And Max Horkheimer actually became a conservative later in life! After ca. 1965 Marcuse was pretty much soldiering on by his lonesome.
Not sure I agree Frankfurt fizzled out. I think it’s more accurate to say it evolved into what is inaccurately called Cultural Marxism. In a way, it’s kind of like the way the Dems evolved in, what 40 years from Tip O’Neill to Kamala. Tip would not recognize the Dem party of today.
What people call cultural Marxism is actually postmodern fascism. I used to make the same terminological mistake, by the by.
To the extent that Marx wanted to flatten the world’s society, along with it’s economy, he’s on the side of woke. Communism is not just economic, but a whole way of viewing the world. I would put into into modernism, also a whole way of viewing the world, largely without God and mostly concerned with material goods. I’m sorry to say that I consider the monomaniac need in the West to stamp out communism to be the fight of insignificant differences. International capitalism doesn’t see God and His will, doesn’t see a human spirit, doesn’t see anything except that maybe… Read more »
To be charitable, I guess that we could say those “conservative” politicians were short-sighted, focusing on economic issues and the Cold War. If they were seriously worried about Communism, one would think that they’d be seriously concerned about the similar ideologies that were mushrooming in western education, which we Cassandras tried for decades to warn about. I guess it’s dangerous to assume what was in their hearts, and as you said, hindsight is 20/20, but the warnings were there. I think that some of those politicians were way too concerned about how they would be painted as “authoritarian,” etc., like… Read more »
here is my attempt at a definition of Wokism: it is a feed forward progressivism, mainly in the sphere of identity politics(race, gender, lgbtq). It calls for radical action, and is distinct from earlier forms of progressivism in that it is dogmatic and does not admit of empirical or evidentiary analysis of its tenets and issues, which are taken as axiomatic. Those who challenge it with empiricism are regarded as its political enemies immediately and by definition. E.g. police are by definition racist and black victims are most likely innocent. The fact that proportionally more whites are killed by police… Read more »
My understanding of woke is that it is the more extreme offspring of political correctness and following a pattern that leftism always goes more extreme with time until stopped by force. Often ny force from among their own ranks, not us. The Jacobins went off the deep end and Robespierre jumped the shark until they stopped him. The Bolsheviks did the same until Stalin stopped the leftist escalation. And PC went off the deep end into woke. I think it’s a trait of narcissistic virtue systems that you escalate to outdo your rivals in “virtue” and that spirals out of… Read more »
J. Burden has several shows where the great historian Bagby discusses The Great Awakening. You can clearly see the connection between these deranged cultists and the ruling regime. What is interesting is that these movements, like all such cults, had at the top deranged perverts using sexual liberation and degeneracy as another means of control. I think Z once used the best descriptor of this ruling regime: Judeo-Puritan. In any case, the Burden/Bagby discussions are incredibly enlightening as are other series they have done including those on slavery. They are well worth the time and well worth sharing with people… Read more »
I have argued that the waves of progressivism are an extension of the Great Awakening phenomenon. Maybe a better way to put it is the explicitly Christian revivals and the ideological waves share the same noumenon.
the waves of progressivism are an extension of the Great Awakening phenomenon …which was a manifestation of Luther’s great mistake which is a derivative of Romanist Trinitarianism which was (skipping a step maybe) derived from Israel’s national chauvinism. I know how much you loathe the libertarians, but one of their most well known writers pointed toward some uncomfortable truths about “Western” civ and its perennial toxicity. His remarks about the Reformation can be especially illuminating. For instance, he portrays the Anabaptists as one especially pernicious manifestation of the Protesters’ aversion to human habits. Acc. to this author, there were two… Read more »
“Romanist Trinitarianism”
The chronic inability of particularly English Protestant descendants to call us “Catholic” is pretty hilarious. I never grew up with it myself.
That said, it is handy that modernity lets people bash on defacto standard (like it or not) of Catholicism, er “Romanist Trinitarianism” and all the protests from it. After all, we’re living in Lake Wobegone, where every armchair theologian, like every child, is above average.
That’s a really good point. The American Lutheran Church in its merger in the early ’60s solidified their social justice stance. Vatican II and the mid-60s social justice reforms to the Methodists’ Book of Discipline did not spring into being after the Civil Rights Act passed, but were years in the making.
The church was laying the groundwork for the ’60s ideologues, and I think it’s not too cynical to say it’s because the church had been taken over by ideologues.
I’m not conversant with the evolution of other sects, but it would not surprise me to find similar.
“Vatican II and the mid-60s social justice reforms to the Methodists’ Book of Discipline did not spring into being after the Civil Rights Act passed, but were years in the making.” Vatican II was a desperately needed reform, all of it common sense. The people I find rejecting Vatican II today are doing so from a modernist frame. Not giving a darn if you understand Mass or Latin, but wanting an authentic “experience” is the same impulse as thinking that guitars are an authentic “experience” because they speak to you. It’s the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I, the… Read more »
Vat II was a rejection of traditionalism. The Mass had for centuries been between the priest and Jesus. Traditional Latin Mass has the priest mostly facing the altar, not involving the congregation. It was the selfishness of modernity which insisted on involving the congregation rather than them being mostly spectators.
That’s why some Catholics think the Holy See has been vacant since Pius XII. Sedevacantism or something like that.
The Latin Mass is unintelligible to the modern English speaker. Latin was the 2nd language of the West, it’s place like English, until about the mid 19th century. Mass is not new age mediation, but a public prayer which requires all of the congregation to mentally participate. It is first and foremost communication. It requires the ordered use of language, rather than indulging in superstitions about language. Which way the priest faces is totally irrelevant. Ad orientum is simply a discipline that has no meaning in the West. (Most who insist on it have no idea what the symbolism even… Read more »
Wokeness is like porn, you know it when you see it.
Crap. So you are saying I’m never going to know what Wokeness is? 😉
wokeism today is cover for the same old thieving and displacement
the m.o is always the same: dig into obscure features of American history, shoehorn them into some narrative of inevitably and progress, get the blacks on board and have them create major distractions, and when everyone is squabbling amongst themselves proceed with the heist.
I don’t think it’s much different than sending blacks out to create a diversion that draws in the cops to one side of town while you rob the bank on the other
That’s been going for nigh unto 70 years.
Woke is just the latest name and latest tenets of the modern progressive movement which started in its current form in the 1950s. Progressivism is a revolutionary movement which can never really stop. It has survived multiple generations and will continue until they are physically stopped.
I agree that mystery is what you don’t know and possibly can’t know. I’m OK with that, patient about it. Seems to really bother a lot of people, though. They have to know, need all the answers, end up fetishizing and worshipping it, because it freaks them out imo. Hence weird mystery cults and occult stuff, magical thinking that tries to conjure answers where there aren’t any. Just leave it alone, don’t cause more problems!
Excellent point. What many on this side of the great divide possess is patience. It’s what allowed us to step back from the Covid regime and understand that letting things play out was the best course of action. On the other hand, the woke crowd was all-in on the restrictions. Why? Because (and I think it was our host who pointed this out at the time) they wanted to “make it go away”, a child’s instinct when dealing with a challenge. For whatever reason, we have a finely developed ability to delay gratification. They don’t. And so they rush headlong… Read more »
What are attachment and aversion if not two great fires burning furiously within every impatient fool?
I think that’s true and largely a good thing. But will the DR recognize the moment for action when it comes?
Sean McMeekin, in his recent history of Communism, emphasizes that the severe social damage of the World Wars did a lot to open up opportunities for Communism to do its damage. I think there’s something to this, as a partial explanation also for how Woke eventually got established. America had weird religious sects and utopian experiments for a long time, but these never took off on a large scale. Most Americans, including those in New England and other Puritan heartlands, were too conservative and pragmatic. Calvin Coolidge is a good example of a latter-day Puritan, among many others of his… Read more »
The appeal is the appearance of the spiritual.
The women who follow it continue to be miserable because there is nothing spiritual about it whatsoever.
There is no God, no actual authority, no real texts and no fixed notions about anything beyond a visceral opposition to fixed notions.
There is only unearned guilt and endless repentance with no possibility of salvation or even peace.
Bowden would have called this a pseudo-religion of modernity.
I’ve never actually met anyone who described themselves as woke. There should be an intuition within any reasonably intelligent person that to describe oneself as woke is to claim a moral superiority that one might not have. Intelligent people just don’t do that. If I ever meet someone who claims to be woke, I’ll know that I’m dealing with someone who’s gone full-retard. I’ve had fantasies of meeting such a person, and then claiming that I’m the one who’s woke and they’re not and then watching the horror on their face as I explain my beliefs. I probably wouldn’t do… Read more »
Are you near a college campus?
You should be able to find a wokester there.
Their brains haven’t matured yet so they’re allowed a certain amount of silliness. I have no interest in debating someone who’s gone full-retard. As for their instructors, to repeat myself, I have no interest in debating someone who’s gone full retard.
But I take your point, lol.
Tom-
Well, if you do manage to find one locally I’m pretty sure you could produce the meltdown you described above in short order.
Ben Shapiro made his living for a while finding dumb college kids and making them melt down. That shtick has been overdone, and changes nobody’s mind.
“…and changes nobody’s mind.”
Sad, innit? When not even facts and reason affect your worldview…
I’ve only ever heard “woke” used in self-description by boomer black nationalists and white academics awkwardly copying those guys. I think the last time it happened was in about 1995. What repopularized the term was anonymous internet racists using it to describe themselves. Heavily ironized wigger rhetoric was big on early 4chan, probably because Jim Goad did it. Some of our guys still try it, adopting slang/memes from the dumbest other guys, but they do it all weird now and just seem gay (literally). Anon being “woke to the JQ” brought back the word, and it mutated over years of… Read more »
The word itself, as used, is ebonics. In the absence of negros from english speaking countries, white people would not say stay woke or get woke, they would say stay awake or wake up. This doesn’t mean negros created the idea, new ideas aren’t exactly their strong suit, it just speaks to the fetishization of the negro among whites who propound this “concept.” Nor is “woke” entirely about the negro, rather, the thing all of its “tenets” have in common is their repugnance to and aggressiveness against a traditional white family. Who would be against that, and why?
I’ll listen to the episode later, but for now I have a request/question before the comment section fills up:
Does anyone actually have some links to Haitians eating pets or anything like that? I’m not on Twitter (and you can’t even lurk thanks to Musk) or Telegram, I haven’t found much on Rumble/Odysee, and the search engines just turn up Rachel Maddow type “umm actually” stuff.
So can someone help a bigot out?
“Does anyone actually have some links to Haitians eating pets or anything like that? “ I can’t find much except a full court press denying such has occurred. However, in a world of lies, one must remember: “The absence of evidence is not, evidence of absence!” I don’t have a dog in the fight, but I do have a life experience wrt such a cultural “exchange”. I’ll relate and you decide. Way back when, we were having a carfuffle with a smallish country called Vietnam. 😉 Toward the end, I was managing a dorm on campus as a graduate student—such provided… Read more »
I’m at the point now where the full court press denial is, in fact, a tacit admission that it is true. Just like the Biden laptop. If there was something that hurts the regime and was actually, objectively false, they just ignore it.
The Haitians are coming here, totally unassimilated, they bring their culture, and that includes catching, consuming, and sacrificing local animals. It’s just obviously true.
They do protest too much. Far too much.
Of course it’s true.
I had a friend training to be a pilot with whom I flew during one of his flights to get flight-hours for further certification. We flew over a city with a large African minority (not anymore) and one could easily see the difference from the air between African and European areas, and the sharp demarcation line between them. They don’t plant trees. They don’t plant gardens. They don’t pick up their own trash. They don’t maintain anything. Systemic land use patterns are obvious when one steps back and looks at the forest not just a tree within it. I later… Read more »
Just an explanation of “Haitian” resorts. They are leased/owned/maintained by the cruise lines and keep most all Haitians *out*! The ones let in to work are carefully vetted. Similarly, the Dominican Republic vigilantly ferrets out Haitians who sneak into their country. You can’t ride a bus there and not be stopped for a “paper please” request. Only A,Eric and are so stupid as to allow them in their country.
Along those lines, do you think pages torn from the torah to wipe an illegal Haitians bottom will generate any outrage, or your carefully assembled art collection won’t be used to warm up an illegal Nigerian’s supper? Just as we did not respect the history and traditions of the people we conquered, our traditions and respect for our history won’t mean anything to the new invaders. A Saudi illegal gives not a damn for Christmas decorations, nor does the Oregon Trail or the Plymouth Rock mean sheet to a Venezuelan lookin’ to get high and get off with Tiffany.
Or worse, they can *adopt* your most sacred traditions and holidays and by ripping the soul from them, mock you for all eternity. Something similar to the Japanese “celebrating” Christmas (?) with the secular trimmings of hats, trees, costumes and the like comes to mind.
Quite amusing only because Christmas in the US is already a mockery and simply a holiday to justify conspicuous consumption. But I’m sure there are other traditions not so removed yet from our consciousness.
“do you think pages torn from the torah to wipe an illegal Haitians bottom will generate any outrage”
Of course it would. And, of course, a Bible would not. But a Koran? You know the answer.
Not so sure about that. Negroes, every form of them, are at the apex of the Left’s social hierarchy. And that means there is nothing they can do, even to other Leftist constituencies, that will generate blowback.
I’m not saying the lefties or darkies would revolt. Only the subset of the populace who are members of the ultra-violent versions of the “religion of peace.” C.f., Charlie Hebdo.
It would for me. I’ve seen Torah scrolls from temples and they are often a work of art. Huge, ornate, and often passed down for generations—even in the US. Think of how ancient manuscripts were copied and embellished by Christian monks in the Medieval monasteries to get an idea of what they represent of Western history.
Am I Jewish? Hell no, but I know when my enemy is attacking me through other, rather indirect means.These people are simple barbarians and are every civilized people’s enemy.
Right. I don’t think anyone is arguing the Torah wouldn’t inspire outrage, if only from the Lindsey Gramnesty wing. I’m just saying the Bible would not. For most Christians, simply because its just a copy of the word, not the Word itself.
“Meh. I can download another copy for free. Let’s see you wipe your ass on 1s and 0s.”
To make things interesting, let’s set 0 to -100kV and 1 to +100kV.
“Dance, MFer, dance!”
I don’t get the downvote. A guy shoving a taser up his bunghole and pulling the trigger? “Ride the lightning!” I’d buy a truckload of Gideon Bibles just to watch it. Pretty sure each one would be funnier than the last. “Bet this one isn’t stupid enough to do it, too. Bwaha-ha-ha-ha, he was!”
Like Larry the Cable Guy says, “That there’s funny, I don’t care who you are.”
Just for the record, I’m not saying beer would not be involved.
Pick your critter and your turd-world savage:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/us/bald-eagle-hunt-nebraska-trnd/index.html#:~:text=Two%20men%20in%20Nebraska%20have%20been%20cited%20after,to%20a%20news%20release%20from%20the%20sheriff%E2%80%99s%20office.
https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/immigrant-was-cooking-swan-amid-bird-bodies-6627412.html
https://nypost.com/2024/09/07/us-news/animal-sacrifices-on-the-rise-in-queens-its-open-season/
Again, ecology, environmentalism, and conservation are very, very, very white things. It is not without irony that most of those who sloganeer and pretend to support those fine goals also want to import ignorant savages who will devastate the environment without hesitation.
Take a page from the Left: the truth does not matter at all, only the effects of repeating the story counts.* The Left is melting down not because the story may be false, but because it has the effect drawn attention to the Great Replacement, smack dab in the middle of a presidential election, nonetheless. “Left” is used very generally here and encompasses pretty much all the Establishment Republicans and the rest of the Regime, who also support the Great Replacement as a means to boost sales and devalue labor and to eliminate “whiteness.” Take note that the GOP’s actual… Read more »
Here is 911 audio of a geese killing incident in Springfield:
https://dougbillings.us/liberal-agenda/illegal-immigration/leaked-911-call-springfield-residents-report-haitians-with-geese/
We are approaching the point of “the geese were overpopulated and nuisances, so the Haitians were helping out the town.”
Amplifying this story was just another Regime self-own and reveals how hapless and lost it is without total narrative control. Granted, we are on the brink of WWIII and they are keeping a lid on that.
JD-
To me, mne of the most mystifying and sickening aspects of today’s zeitgeist is the total Western ignorance that we are seconds away from nuclear war.
The 80s were imperfect, but at least people were concerned about dying in a nuclear holocaust. There was a real sense of relief when arms limitation treaties were put in place.
Now?
All normies care about are sportsball, maxing the credit cards, and driving like lunatics.
Contemporary Americans are scary and totally divorced from reality. It is terrifying.
It’s by design. Decades of welfare dygenics, forced integration and cognitive dissonance, and mind-numbing “entertainment” as well as soul destroying porn. What else could this population be by now? Look at what it’s been fed by their betters; look at the intentions of their betters. Satan couldn’t have done a better job.
Why not adopt a short time preference? I’ve been long time preference my whole life, building my house over more than a decade out of cash flow, saving for my kids’ college, half the downpayment for a house and extra to start a business if they wanted, plus my own retirement, and for what? So I could be taxed to pay for a crapton of foreigners, plus people who rent their lifestyle, never bothered to pay more than the minimum payments on their bills, and probably pay off their college and buy them houses?
I’m the idiot.
Yep, you’re (we) are more and more the idiot as time progresses. Our striving to save and be independent of the “system” simply makes us a bigger target for rapacious government—what can you obtain from the poor, except their vote (for our money)? As I’ve noted previously, 80% of the wealth in this country resides in the top quintile of the populace, really the top 10%. However, to be really rich and powerful—like the ability to buy protection from politicians’ rapacity—requires one to be a “deca-millionaire” ($10M in wealth or greater). In the United States, it’s estimated that approximately 0.03%… Read more »
The mass importation of Haitians is all part of Guvner DeWine’s critical geese-abatement initiative.
“Does anyone actually have some links to Haitians eating pets or anything like that?”
Don’t care, doesn’t matter. Don’t want them showing up for Thanksgiving either way.
You want them? You be you.
It’s not about wearing the hair shirt. It’s about feeling good about yourself because you abet the project to turn the gummint into a hair shirt mandate enforcer.
One of the original Transcendentalists was Orestes Brownson, at one time a Unitarian preacher and well known for his writing. But he convered to Catholicism, critiqued the Transcendentalists, and passed into obscurity. His ideas illuminate today’s Zcast. https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/why-orestes-brownson-believed-the-us-needed-the-church-4158
If I ever do a show on Transcendentalism, I would have to talk about Brownson. The disappearance of the transcendentalist, despite their enduring influence, is a fascinating topic in itself.
Religious and “spiritual” movements, which inevitably involve a political crusade, are the American substitute for cultural “blood and soil” nationalism. Because Americans have no organic unity, it must be manufactured through a compulsory universal faith, of which the woke mind virus is just the latest example. In the last century, even conservatives tried to get in on the act with their cult of Lincoln. The silver lining to the ethnic fracturing of America is that this penchant for religious mania will probably dissolve in the coming tribal hostilities, or at least take on a more particularist character. I might even… Read more »
I too have enjoyed watching liberals confound the conservatives who explain our plight as the result of wokism with the accusation that “you can’t even define what wokism is!”
While they initially choked on the liberal’s accusation, they eventually did come up with a definition.
They now say that wokism is creating imaginary divisions between people, who would otherwise be united, by dividing people into classes of victims and oppressors. These conservatives are desperate to avoid the fact that the oppressors are always traditional white people.
C’mon guys, the attack is racial and you are useless until you can admit it.
“Woke” or “politically correct” has been around a long time. At least as 60 years ago when cranks were saying that America really belongs to the Indians, IQ tests are a means of racial oppression, no one can say one culture is better than another, and a wife with a loving husband and children is oppressed.
The problem is 60 years ago it was relatively few cranks, but those in power said it; and KEPT saying it. I’m talking those in REAL POWER; not those transient whores and puppets we call politicians.
I mean, reading the history of religion in America, the fact that social justice is the current iteration of Yankee Puritanism just leaps out of history. It is the called the Great Awakening after all.
There’s a reason episcopalians and other calvinists have fastooned their churches with rainbow flags.
Woke indeed is a modern iteration of Puritanism. It seeks conversion and purification, and as I understand it, the transcendentalists did not seek converts and focused on the individual rather than a mass movement.
Would that it were that contained. Last time I was in the Twin Cities, Pride flags were everywhere. Lutheran (even Wisconsin Synod, which surprised me), Catholic, Methodist, obviously, but there were a bunch of ones I’m not exactly sure about. One I think was some kind of Jewish temple, one was I think Romanian Orthodox. The only one I’m sure of is I never saw one on a mosque.
I guarantee you that you didn’t see Pride Flags on every church. I don’t know why the surprise on the Wisconsin Synod. My understanding was that it was only the Missouri Synod was even remotely conservative.
You are right. Not every church. But representing most of the sects I was aware of.
And, yeah, seeing the Pride flag on the Missouri Synod surprised me because they allegedly were the last traditionalist holdout of the Lutherans. Maybe Missouri Synod, too, but I didn’t see any of those. They aren’t very thick on the ground in Minnesota.
seeing the Pride flag on the Missouri Synod surprised me…
Oops. I meant, of course, on Wisconsin Synod churches.
the ruling class has adopted wokeness as a reason to rule. Considering livy, Rome seemed to have the need to give a moral account of conquest too. While it’s not so femmy as wokeness, Rome’s reasons, repeated many times in Livy, at worst was “spreading civilization and law”. The closest to simple xonquest for conquest sake was for “the glory of Rome”. somebody or some group has to rule. That’s a human truth. So there seems to be a kind of gravity that pulls towards ruling, for good or ill. at this point for me, it has to start with… Read more »
Does it matter where woke came from? I just don’t see how it does anymore.
What we should be focused on is what’s next ……
What’s oriental about it is that it’s self-annihilation. Rules, forms, and the inner fascist, I’ve heard it called. Talking mystery and knowing life, have a NDE, catch a glimpse of eternity and survive to tell about it. There’s an experience lol. Actually, don’t, but I have. I learned two things. Life is the opposite of death, which is to say it sets things to order, even fights to order. Life is the ‘inner fascist.’ Also, that I live for my family and friends— my people. It was my buddy yelling at me somewhere back there that brought me back. Saw… Read more »
Won’t pressure you…
What do you mean?
“…Lead Belly urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about blacks being falsely accused of rape by whites.”
A bit outside today’s missive, but the above got me thinking. Given our (male) current insight into female hysteria, manipulation, and just plain lying to exact power and revenge over men. I wonder just how many Black males were lynched over such accusations in the past. If White males get railroaded today as they do via such (unproven) accusations, now much worse for a Black in the past?
It’s hard to answer that question for those of us who weren’t around back then. Nevertheless, given what I know about women, it’s safe to say that at least some of those melanin-deprived gals who accused Blacky in the past were not wholly honest. Ladies, especially young ones, crave two things in particular: attention and sympathy. And many of them don’t mind engaging in all manner of duplicity to secure those two commodities. Back when the whole “believe all women” (BAL) nonsense was erupting around 2017 or so, I actually went on Facebook (ashamed I ever had an account!) and… Read more »
The “Believe All Women”/”Listen & Believe” crap happened around the time I was finishing college at the same time BLM hysteria was rising. To this day, it’s still hard for me to forgive women, even though as Jesus would say: “they know not what they do”.
The, “women are wonderful,” effect is very real.
Addendum: My BAL abbreviation should have been BAW; how did I make that mistake? Additional Addendum: It’s a bit silly that Compsci is getting downvoted for his post. Does dissident-style racial awareness require that we partially (or even substantially) blind ourselves to female nature? Compsci did not suggest that ALL white female accusers of blacks in the past misrepresented the situation. He merely voiced the suspicion that some percentage of those accusers didn’t tell the truth. Perhaps anything that can possibly be construed as sympathizing with blacks is severely frowned upon in certain quarters. It seems to me, as men,… Read more »
Yep. That’s about what I was getting at. An example might be that a woman who caught “jungle fever” back then and was found out might cry rape and get that poor bastard lynched. Hell, happens today all the time even without race considerations conflating the issue.
Another way to look at it is to extrapolate the current astronomical negro rape rates backward. If you do that, you must conclude the vast majority of those accusations were true.
There’s a reason rape is not classed as a hate crime, ya’ know…
Consider this too, though: back in the day, it was shameful for white women to willingly engage in intimate relations with black men. Can you really doubt that at least some small percentage of women caught having such relations decided their only way to secure their reputations was to claim that the sex was nonconsensual? As I mentioned above, women crave attention and sympathy; I didn’t mention something they abhor: disapproval of the herd. As to the “current astronomical negro rape rates,” some unknown percentage of those rates are likewise inflated by female dishonesty, probably much more black female dishonesty… Read more »
In any judical regime there will always be a certain percentage of justice miscarried. I suspect the percentages in the case of negro lynchings weren’t sufficiently higher than any other forms of summary justice, including the lynchings of whites. And what’s more, no instances of injustice ping lower on my Give-a-Dam’ Meter than that of American negroes.
The fact that plenty of white men were lynched is a very conveniently forgotten part of the historical record. As to your final sentence . . . essentially agreed, especially when it comes to a matter (lynchings) that was a nonissue by the time I was born. Here’s a few good questions for progressives: Why are whites the only group of people that are on the hook for the alleged crimes of their ancestors? Why do we insist on holding whites to such absurdly higher moral standards than we do other races (ESPECIALLY blacks)? Or do progressives believe that whites… Read more »
Right. To my mind, perhaps the most iron-clad proof of the Left’s anti-white racism is its radically different standards for historical judgment. Every tribe that has existed committed outrages and atrocities, and some of them more per capita than whites. Despite that fact, the only atrocities modern historians dwell upon are those committed by whites, and especially the ones committed against non-whites. Everybody else gets a free pass. And the flip side of this is that although no race has made anywhere near as many contributions to human flourishing as whites, those contributions are ignored whenever they’re not confiscated and… Read more »
Lynchings were not solely reserved for Blacks. A significant portion of lynchings were of non-Blacks.
The most famous documented such lynching was that of a Jewish person in the South, Leo Frank, in 1915, after his death sentence was commuted by the Governor. You can looking it up. Lots of pictures and commentary from witnesses.
Yep. I have no reason to believe coal burning is a recent evolutionary development.
What better way to rebel against daddy?
Steve. Well, if “cutting off your nose to spite your face” is a reasonable way to rebel, I guess…. On the other hand, I’d advise to settle for a tattoo. Better to mar your body, than lose your soul.
Agreed. I’m not saying the whole “daddy issues” and “patriarchy” crowd are “rational”, just that they exist.
So what? Save your concern for White men.
That is in effect a concern for men, White and Black. Never let your hate fog your perception of reality. What happens to one may happen to another.
No, the two are not the same. Blacks have a documented history of violent rape, and every black who is able finds a stupid White c*nt to open her legs for him. White men who even look sideways at women get accused of rape. It’s a social status issue. I don’t care if one out of 1,000 blacks is/was ‘falsely’ accused of rape. Not my people, not my problem. And White men ought to know better than to make common cause with blacks, even against woke White women.
The issue is not Black men raping White women. Never was. The issue is women making false accusations against men (of any race) and being believed without proper verification. The BAW issue elaborated upon at length by Wkathman.
This is the essence of my admonishment against such hate. You inevitably miss the big picture and come to conclusions that are mistaken, or at least not considered fully. As in your reply.
“White men ought to know better than to make common cause with blacks, even against woke White women.”
There you go again. If you can’t distinguish friends from enemies…
I will definitely go so far as to say that if we are going to bother with having government courts and all, they should probably at least give a passing nod to effecting justice.
Otherwise, why not just go with the Red Queen’s “Sentence first, verdict afterwards!”
Oh, wait. Red Queen justice is what we have, isn’t it?
Never mind.
Well, this seems a topic all to itself and I was hesitant to initially delve into it for fear we’d go down a rabbit hole to no avail. One sort of logic expressed here could be interpreted as saying: Black men are inordinately prone to rape—especially White women. Therefore *all* accused men are probably guilty if the women declares such. A specific to the general sort of fallacy. Perhaps the better rabbit hole would be to discuss if a “faulty” justice system is better than *no* justice system. And whether the precept of “better to allow 100 guilty persons to… Read more »
OK, but *no* justice system is not an option, any more than Utopia is. Once people perceive there is *no* justice system, they will create one in its stead. And it’s not likely to be anywhere nearly as kumbayah as the current one is.
You are such a fucking retard lmao
Save your vitriol for those who deserve it.
Replying only because I feel obliged to reply to any downvote I cast.
Anyone with half a clue understands why I downvoted you. Make an argument, fine. If not…