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Privileged? You have to be a certain kind to person (ie, not marginalised) to be able to ignore politics
To have a dispassionate conversation about it - they aren't perfect antonyms. The woke movement and the antiwoke movement don't oppose precisely the same things and neither of them have a definitive definition any longer, mostly due to the overuse of the terms over a long time.
For example people will use anti-woke unironically but you rarely see anyone use woke genuinely and with passion any more. Infact anyone who does would seem dated and ridiculous now to seriously request without irony to consider being woke.
Why do you need to label everything?
Curmudgeon, perhaps. Or at least curmudgeonly.
Or choose from something here: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/curmudgeon
Among those, "crank" stands out. This is usually someone who holds a (often provably) wrong, unconventional or unpopular opinion and insists that their way is the right way and that everyone else is wrong.
Cranks can be right, which a crank will hold onto dearly and use in their arguments, even if the considerable majority of cranks turn out to have been wrong.
On the other hand, cranks tend to beat their metaphorical drum a lot more than someone who simply refuses to pick a side and keeps their trap shut.
Probably some flavour of anti-woke.
You described people who are anti-woke and the question is whether they're also anti-anti-woke.
what would be the non-woke and non-antiwoke thing then? woke has been bastardized by conservatives to hell as they see something not racist or bigoted is not "white, male, straight, patriarchy". woke was originally use by african americans to have "Waken up". being neutral isnt exactly good either.
Depending on where on the bell-curve you perceive "woke" and "anti-woke", you could go from absolute pot stirrer to (more like where I place them, seeing both extremes as not affecting me at all... I don't even consider these terms.) Level headed, middle of the road.
Well you may wish to dismiss them, but its not unreasonable position for someone to take. Some people may genuinely believe the woke / anti woke argument is an irrelevance and distracting from more important issues. In fact that nay be the whole point - a distraction from the rest of the mess.
Similarly in the US, saying both sides are crap and disengaging reflects the state of the US political system. Two parties have corrupted the system in their favour for decades. Its a nonsense to believe politics fits neatly into one camp or the other. And its a nonsense to say everyone must choose one or the other or they're in the wrong.
When your only option in an election is voting for whichever party is the lesser evil, its no longer a democracy. And its unsurprising that people dont want to waste time talking about the non-choice.
I think in a lot of ways it's the right that has made identity political and it works for them really really well especially in a binary political system. The right wing only has to be 1 thing to 1 group of people, while there are 100s of left wings and intersections.
The only way you believe that is how it works, is if you're already buying into the framing of the "Anti-Woke", "Anti-Empathy", Anti-human. You're imagining a world where it all begins and ends in Republican or Democrat.
I want you to think real hard. Most Democrats, can't stand each other. There's like half a dozen different factions, and the only thing that they all agree on, is we should probably not intentionally destroy our lives, homes, and futures, condemn our children to die and ultimately wipe humanity off the face of the Earth. We're stuck, working with a bunch of idiots who keep undermining every positive thing we try to do, and I will stand with you always to oppose them someday. But right now, we have a bigger problem. Because this isn't a fight between right and wrong. This is a fight between "Right, Wrong, Good, Bad, and Ugly" vs "The End of Everything".
You're right, Democrats aren't a solution. They're a stop-gap. They're a play for time and we have to come up with a better answer in the meantime, because they will fail. Their true policy is they have no real policy because they are such a big tent they have no coherent message. They're just opposed to ending everything.
So yeah, if you take the Republican framing of this being a clash of two principled, moral, coherent world views, it seems reasonable to say neither of them seem to fix anything. It's not though. It's the chaotic mess of everything that might be on one side, vs endless silence on the other.
I guess it depends on the scope of your question.
Woke, inclusivity, and all that stuff mean nothing if it is not backed up by actions, people can say all the right things and still be assholes, just as someone can live their life and do what they can to help others without ever getting political or having the theory or words to back it up.
I grew up as a late Xer, on the cusp of the Oregon Trail generation, George Carlin's "don't vote it only encourages them" made a lot of sense at the time when the choice seemed to be Neo-Liberalism or Conservative. We also saw our Boomer parents 70s activism turn to 80s greed and excess, so the tune out, do drugs grunge, goth, rave, and emo eras made sense.
I think it's naive not to be somewhat cynical when every corporation puts out rainbow flags during Pride Week / month, and then do nothing the rest of the year, or when police decide they want to march in Pride Parades.
I think people also get caught up in false equivalents, that just because there is shit on one side, it doesn't mean that the whole is shit. The side that is not as inclusive as it could be or might have some hateful members, but is overall will to learn and adapt, is not the same as the side that is hateful at its core. For example, I don't understand TERFs, in some ways people that get called TERFs have done important work for the feminist movement, I believe some are coming from a position of misunderstanding. However, there are some on the right who have jumped on trans exclusion and call themselves feminists, which serves the right to sow divisions or the appearance of division within the left or those working towards inclusion.
I'll start with the TL;DR, they're probably bootlickers. To be decidedly less brief:
"Woke" is so stupid in how it is used and meant.
The original colloquialism was about being genuinely aware of what is happening and "awake to reality" with an almost Matrix-like connotation to it. Enlightened, in a sense.
Now it means a tumblrista who has more hair dye than actual sense and is overly concerned with how they feel versus reality. That is, if you are to ask the person in question. And that character assassination doesn't come from nowhere if we're being perfectly honest with ourselves.
Anti-woke at this point is associated with fascism in a distinctly similar misrepresentation of the original term, though perhaps still a bit more appropriate. Gotta be brain-dead or asleep to be okay with fascism after all, so it isn't perhaps as far off the mark.
The person OP describes exists in several instances of the fediverse as well, just wearing a different uniform and flying a few very specific flags. Ultimately they are all secret bootlickers. They secretly worship the strongmen because it allows them to outsource the difficult task of thinking to somebody else who views the world in as simplistic a manner as they do. "That's not a real thing because I don't experience it" type energy, so belittling/dehumanizing/othering/criminalizing/persecuting groups becomes okay in either active ways or "doesn't affect me, why should I care" ways in equal measure.
Again, it is important to note who ultimately comes to the defense of these voices and the commonalities they have with straight up fascists. The person you describe may very well vocally support anti-fascist ideologies at first blush, and yet there's still some authoritarianism in their slant. Like I said, more than happy to relegate their thinking to some form of "greater power" that still views them as the useful idiot. "Well its working just fine for me!"
Yep, keep licking the boot.
bOtH sIdEs are crap, but you must pick your favorite turd.
It's not pessimistic, friend, it's realistic. Why ever would you expect our political system to stop being as it has been for our lifetime? It's just dumb. You can work for change, but some cynicism is healthy.
I'm politically active, I've run for office, volunteered, and vote in every election.
Re those who want to stay uninvolved, you're just going to have to deal with it. Some people are taking care of their sick parents. Some are raising crazy kids. Some are fighting mental illness. Some are working three jobs. They're doing their best, if you don't like it you can lump it.
normal, if something doesn't effect you at all why should you care about it? (your friends being distressed does effect you, probably)
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