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Revision as of 22:11, 12 September 2021 editHodgdon's secret garden (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users25,943 edits "Pejorative" section title: template:Checkmark← Previous edit Revision as of 22:30, 12 September 2021 edit undoSangdeboeuf (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users53,365 edits No coverage given non-Right critics seeing Woke activism as a new Puritanism( &c): Article does summarize criticism of the term's use that is not pejorativeNext edit →
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:::::{{tq|]'s imperative about "describing opposing views clearly, drawing on secondary or tertiary sources that describe the disagreement from a disinterested viewpoint"}}{{dash}}I quite agree with this approach. However, none of the quoted pieces are "disinterested". They each have a point of view to advance. That's the whole purpose of opinion essays. The third essay hardly mentions "woke(ness)" at all; Sullivan's use of the term is basically a throwaway which the author, Edsall, does not bother to elaborate upon. --] (]) 23:15, 6 September 2021 (UTC) :::::{{tq|]'s imperative about "describing opposing views clearly, drawing on secondary or tertiary sources that describe the disagreement from a disinterested viewpoint"}}{{dash}}I quite agree with this approach. However, none of the quoted pieces are "disinterested". They each have a point of view to advance. That's the whole purpose of opinion essays. The third essay hardly mentions "woke(ness)" at all; Sullivan's use of the term is basically a throwaway which the author, Edsall, does not bother to elaborate upon. --] (]) 23:15, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
:I reiterate that WP's limiting criticsm of ''woke'' to its use as a slur implies any such critique must be thought impolitely censorious. (McWhorter in the ''Times'': {{tq|"However, anthropological reality is that today, slurs have become our profanity: repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment."}}--] (]) 17:59, 12 September 2021 (UTC) :I reiterate that WP's limiting criticsm of ''woke'' to its use as a slur implies any such critique must be thought impolitely censorious. (McWhorter in the ''Times'': {{tq|"However, anthropological reality is that today, slurs have become our profanity: repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment."}}--] (]) 17:59, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
::I disagree that the article implies that any critique of "woke(ness)" is impolitely censorious, and the article does summarize criticism of the term's use that is not pejorative: We quote several sources critiquing the term's ], including ] and ], as well as ], ] and ] critiquing what the term represents. What McWhorter or anybody else says about unrelated topics is irrelevant. --] (]) 22:30, 12 September 2021 (UTC)


== "Pejorative" section title == == "Pejorative" section title ==

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A fact from Woke appeared on Misplaced Pages's Main Page in the Did you know column on 13 January 2017 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
  • Did you know... that Bloomberg Businessweek asked, "Is Misplaced Pages woke?"
A record of the entry may be seen at Misplaced Pages:Recent additions/2017/January. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Woke.
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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Allyborghi (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Watkina, Abamzai, Ujwalamurthy.


Term becoming internationalized

  1. elespanol.com - 19 series y películas de derechas para escapar del tsunami woke

    Transl.: "19 right-wing series and movies to escape the woke tsunami"

  2. standaard.be - ‘Ik word wat moe van al dat woke-gedoe. Ook mannen kunnen voor vrouwenrechten opkomen.’ Conner Rousseau bekeert zich tot het antiwoke-kamp

    Transl.: "'I'm getting tired of all this woke stuff. Men can also stand up for women's rights.' Conner Rousseau converts to the anti-woke camp"

  3. volkskrant.nl/ - ‘Radicale woke- en genderactivisten .. en wie zich niet aan het ondoorgrondelijke lexicon van de ‘wokies’ houdt, wordt simpelweg opgeheven.

    Transl.: "Antiwoke critics often hardly bother to define concepts like cancel culture or censorship .. those who do not adhere to the inscrutable lexicon of the 'wokies' are simply eliminated."

  4. document.no Minerva går «woke», et konservativt medium begår selvmord' Nylig publiserte kulturredaktøren i Minerva en artikkel som argumenterer for at de av oss som kritiserer woke-kulturen, bør senke skuldrene.

    Transl.:"Minerva goes «woke», a conservative medium commits suicide' Recently, the cultural editor of Minerva published an article arguing that those of us who criticize woke culture should shrug our shoulders."
    Et cetera
    --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 00:29, 6 September 2021 (UTC)--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:01, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

  5. This (from polskieradio24.pl is from 2 days ago.

    "wokeizmu" (od ang. "woke" – "przebudzony", czyli patrzenia na świat przez pryzmat faktycznych i rzekomych nierówności społecznych i rasowych).

    Machine translation: "'vokeism' (from 'woke' - 'awakened', that is, looking at the world through the prism of actual and alleged social and racial inequalities)." Another uses in the article: "a consequence of the 'leftist voke agenda'"

  6. three days ago (from ujszo):

    "Ehhez nyilván hozzájárult az is, hogy a prof televíziós viták sorában állt ki az elvei mellett, közben többször is összetűzésbe került az amerikai „woke” mozgalom aktivistáival, amiért aztán az ún. alt-right, vagyis az amerikai alternatív jobboldal próbált belőle hőst csinálni."

    Machine translation: "This was obviously contributed to by the fact that the profstood up for his principles in a series of television debates, while he clashed several times with activists of the American 'woke' movement, for which the so-called alt-right, i.e. the American alternative right, tried to make him a hero."

    --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:43, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

No coverage given non-Right critics seeing Woke activism as a new Puritanism( &c)

  1. gq-magazine.co.uk - Woke or not, the culture wars make hypocrites of us all: Whether it's woke puritanism or anti-woke cynicism, participation in the culture war is also a guarantee of hypocrisy and bad faith. That's because nobody can live up to the standards they set for others
  2. 31aug2021theAtlantic.com (Anne Applebaum): "THE NEW PURITANS: Social codes are changing, in many ways for the better. But for those whose behavior doesn’t adapt fast enough to the new norms, judgment can be swift—and merciless.espite the disputed nature of these cases, it has become both easy and useful for some people to put them into larger narratives. Partisans, especially on the right, now toss around the phrase cancel culture when they want to defend themselves from criticism, however legitimate. But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake. .. "
  3. thos. edsall's 14jul2021 weekly nytimes column: ".. Democrats, if they want to protect their fragile majority, must be doubly careful not to hand their adversaries ever more powerful weapons." Quoting andrew sullivan (although labeled somewhat libertarian, a biden voter/early obama booster): "Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. .. "
    etc.
    --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 01:24, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
    As has been explained many times on this page already, opinion pieces are primary sources. Opinion writers' careers depend on their ability to deliver spicy takes, not sober, reasoned analysis, and this article already cites too many of them IMO. Articles should be based on reliable, secondary sources to avoid giving undue weight to such manufactured outrage. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:55, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
It's not unbiased editors' job to decide whether Woke or anti-Woke sensibilities/outrage are manufactured or legit and Sangdeboeuf's appearance to think it is might reasonably indicate hi/r not belonging on this page. See Misplaced Pages:Impartial: "Misplaced Pages describes disputes." The article at present engages in them via favoring only non-disparaging analyses, whereas good-faith perusals of wp's guidelines en toto would entail screwing obvious skews. You know, denial is more than a river in egypt and willfully ignoring wikipedia:Balance's imperative about "describing opposing views clearly, drawing on secondary or tertiary sources that describe the disagreement from a disinterested viewpoint" and its corollaries throughout the guidelines doesn't enable truthful claims of unawareness such exist.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:31, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
I do think we should describe the non-right critique of 'woke' clearly, drawing on secondary or tertiary sources. Have you come across any? You also appear to be manufacturing a straw man version of Sangdebouef's argument to suggest that they shouldn't participate in this discussion; Sangdebouef did not suggest that it's our "job to decide whether Woke or anti-Woke sensibilities/outrage are manufactured or legit". In fact, in suggesting that we look for secondary source coverage of the view, they are pushing us toward exactly the procedure to avoid making such a decision. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 18:09, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
The editor seems to be hovering over the article: eg I just tried to make a subhead refer to "disparagement" instead of "pejorative" & the claim was made that WP must rely solely on sources that so label it. Come on. Academic inquiry requires that varying viewpoints' airings, pro and con arguments' consideration. Each instance of this is called opinion. 2ndary sources making note of these opinions confer on them so-called notability. If certain editors here believe criticisms of woke socially unacceptable, sure, such prominence given on WP to the designation of all instances of the same as "perjorative" at least makes sense, in that light. But, not from the standpoint of our guidelines which emphasize absolutely stringent neutrality on issues! Indeed, prominence given on WP to this designation as applied all such criticism makes it seem WP -- instead of our following the form: So-and-so argues thus; so-and-so argues thus -- endorse solely "So and so argues thus" but without rejoinder, criticism thereof inferred as socially unacceptable. Per my editorial senses -- and my voice counts -- is that "pejorative" carries baggage of association with eg d*ck or whatever respective sexual organ for a person-perceived-of-as-overbearing of one/another gender...suffix -tard; British; n-word,; boy in reference to a man; blah blah blah: which are allsocially unacceptable. (Or, if ever borderline acceptable, never so in polite company.)--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:33, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
If you continue to feel that Sangdebouef's conduct here is inappropriate, the first step in conduct dispute resolution is to discuss it with them politely at their user talk page. As far as this article is concerned, I think the sources are better summarized by pejorative/derision than disapproval. Your edit made some other improvements that I intend to restore, so thanks. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 18:48, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
It can be seen the, well, the um-teen times section reiterates "Writing in The Guardian, the commentator Steve Rose writes that the political right has "weaponised" the term woke" seems a bit much. Rather than its reading, "the Right", blah blah blah, "the Right," blah blah blah, "the Right"), when unbiased & full-spectrum reportage includes a slew of other criticisms, at minimum, the section should include, by way of balance, such reportages as by journalist-&-historian Anne Applebaum (see my above quote of her), plus utilize such as her as a 2ndary-source providing requisite notability to such nuanced & non-Right opinions about woke of John McWhorter / of such victims of woke outrage as given media coverage by Applebaum (and others) such as Ian Buruma and others).--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:29, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
Applebaum's piece is a polemic, not a reliable secondary source. Further, she is using the term "woke" and "wokeness" – in quotation marks, mind – as a synonym for moral panic in passing. She is not commenting on use of the term by others, as a secondary source would. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:36, 6 September 2021 (UTC) edited 00:22, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
As I have stated already on this page, I don't think the Steve Rose column is a useful source, and I would be fine with removing it entirely. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:18, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
Misplaced Pages:Balance's imperative about "describing opposing views clearly, drawing on secondary or tertiary sources that describe the disagreement from a disinterested viewpoint" – I quite agree with this approach. However, none of the quoted pieces are "disinterested". They each have a point of view to advance. That's the whole purpose of opinion essays. The third essay hardly mentions "woke(ness)" at all; Sullivan's use of the term is basically a throwaway which the author, Edsall, does not bother to elaborate upon. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:15, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
I reiterate that WP's limiting criticsm of woke to its use as a slur implies any such critique must be thought impolitely censorious. (McWhorter in the Times: "However, anthropological reality is that today, slurs have become our profanity: repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment."--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:59, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
I disagree that the article implies that any critique of "woke(ness)" is impolitely censorious, and the article does summarize criticism of the term's use that is not pejorative: We quote several sources critiquing the term's cultural appropriation, including Amanda Hess and Chloé Valdary, as well as Andrew Sullivan, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith critiquing what the term represents. What McWhorter or anybody else says about unrelated topics is irrelevant. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:30, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

"Pejorative" section title

The use of the term by opponents of perceived wokeness is best summed up as "pejorative". According to the sources cited:

Among conservatives, 'woke' has been adopted as term of derision for those who hold progressive social justice views.In the six years since Brown’s death, 'woke' has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology This framing of 'woke' is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.n culture and politics today, the most prominent uses of 'woke' are as a pejorative — Republicans attacking Democrats, more centrist Democrats attacking more liberal ones and supporters of the British monarchy using the term to criticize people more sympathetic to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.Some people say being woke is a sign of awareness to social issues, others whip out the term as an insult It has become a common term of derision among some who oppose the movements it is associated with, or believe the issues are exaggerated.
  1. Smith, Allan; Kapur, Sahil (May 2, 2021). "Republicans are crusading against 'woke'". NBC News.
  2. Romano, Aja (9 October 2020). "A history of 'wokeness'". Vox.
  3. Bacon, Perry Jr. (17 March 2021). "Why Attacking 'Cancel Culture' And 'Woke' People Is Becoming The GOP's New Political Strategy". FiveThirtyEight.
  4. Butterworth, Benjamin (26 June 2021). "What does 'woke' actually mean, and why are some people so angry about it?". inews.co.uk.

"Denigration" and "derision" mean belittling, attacking, ridiculing. This is far more than just "disapproval" or "criticism". --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:36, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Looking with of approval on"even-handed" journalism while squinting at-style journalistic pieces of ]as mere "polemic" reveals an attraction for uncomely wp:Censoredness/systemic bias, with the only lens, allowed in our tertiary coverage, one superficially aligned with the false dichotomy ofObjectivity versusPartisanry: the Orwellian sieve by which this article's become skewed such that wokeness cannot be associated with self-censorship unless such criticism is tarred with a partisan-political brush of "on the Right wing".--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 22:42, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
No, the sieve, as you call it, is whether that viewpoint is covered in secondary or tertiary sources with a disinterested viewpoint, per WP:BALANCE. Applebaum's essay is hardly "disinterested", and is not even primarily about the term "woke" or "wokeness". I was not aware that NBC News was considered ersatz 'left'-leaning and/or woke. Care to elaborate? --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:47, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
I'm game. You're not unaware that NBC News's (hattip, the Media Bias/Fact Check website) ideological bias trends toward the "Center-Left" (along w/ what this website's rates: "High" factuality). Yet you blinker yourself from non-polemic reporting by journalist and Pulitzer-prize winning historian applebaum, whose open, ideological biases indeed trend instead toward the center right (as least per the nytimes's michelle goldberg, who says, fwiw, these same "were shaped by the lived reality of Soviet Communism").--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 00:05, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Media Bias/Fact Check is an amateur website, not a professional fact-checking organization. Are you arguing that NBC News is somehow too biased to be used to evaluate due weight? --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:08, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Applebaum's concluding paragraph reads:

Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre. Democratic principles like the rule of law, the right to self-defense, the right to a just trial—even the right to be forgiven—will wither. There will be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to expose us.

Apart from having nothing to do with wokeness per se, this is self-evidently rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims, not "reporting". If that's not a polemic then I don't know what is. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:17, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Applebaum's reporting needs inclusion.
Stakes of the current culture wars pale in comparison with the 1930s', I'd guess; however, there are concerns that are important for thinkers to address. Even though I think that a whole lot of insights can be drawn from many conclusions reached by Richard Delgado et al...but, that said, there are certain troubling aspects of this societal fervor as well. I personally analogize them to certain criticisms leveled at the encounter groups movement, which I recall as having being quite popular in the 60s/70s. Fromthe bluelinked wikiarticle's criticism section: "Encounter groups are also controversial because of scientific claims that they can cause serious and lasting psychological damage. One 1971 study found that 9% of normal college students participating in an encounter group developed psychological problems lasting at least six months after their experience." But, things worked out; over the decades, lots of methodologic tweaks became insttituted various types of group therapy -- and the world's progressed on. Fine.
Returning more to the topic of your reply. First an epigraph. "Mainstream Media Recirculation of Trust-Reducing Social Media Messages," Christensen & Lovett & Curiel, July 6, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211023931 - ".. When viewers encounter ideologically-confirmatory information, they are less likely to validate it (Edgerly et al., 2020; Edgerly & Vraga, 2020), and when they encounter ideologically-disconfirmatory information, they are more likely to respond by doubling down on ideologically polarized beliefs and doubting the credibility of the message’s source (Anderson & Auxier, 2020; Feldman et al., 2020; Levendusky, 2013; Slothuus & de Vreese, 2010; Taber & Lodge, 2006)." And, I don't think anybody is automatically immune from this, me, you, anybody. Nonetheless, I believe your editing on this page suffers because you're apparently unaware of a certain blind spot, due the foregoing. In fact, if my feelings discomfort is an important consideration, I'll even reveal to you that your statement just made with concern to ms. applebaum actually caused me slight naseau. And, this I promise you and I'm not saying this just for effect. Whatever your professed rationales for the sieve employed in this present circumstance, its effect (as felt in my gut!) profoundly illustrates the very kernel of the problem at hand. Which is -- when the boots hit the ground, so to speak -- an apologist for soft totalitarianism question whether ms. applebaum fabricates her quotes of mcwhorter and of such of her other interviewees or not ...... Whereas, it was ms applebaum who'd made her name as a historical researcher by documenting the subtle ins and outs of its real mccoy of its hard variety: 19jun2020NewYorker: "he Holodomorthe famine that befell Ukraine in the years 1932-33. Current scholarship estimates that just under four million people died. They did not pass away from natural causes. The best and the most detailed English-language study of the subject is Red Famine, a 2017 book by Anne Applebaum, who demonstrates that starvation was a deliberate policy, enforced by Stalin through the requisition of crops and other products and the widespread persecution, deportation, or even execution of the non-compliant."
As mentioned, I believe the most straightforward way to determine sieves' rationales is examination of patterns that might uniformity show up in their effects. Yours is to find without fail, when criticism of woke results from an analysis, polemic, and, in analyses whose underlying premises subtly support it, reporting. The NewYorker: "It wasDuranty who, in brushing offJones's account of the atrocities, blithely explained to Times readers, 'You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs'—one of the most shameful phrases in the history of the newspaper. The eggs were human beings. //P// "This determination not to know, or to look away when the facts admonish our beliefs, is among our most durable frailties."
I'm in sympathize with duranty here, feeling certain his sieve was sincerely arrived at/applied. Didn't help, his squinting at jones's reporting, even though it was jones who'd been over the ground, even though the latter's conclusions were unfortunate to end up at odds with the former's altruistic hopes toward the construction of a better world.
Please reconsider.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:09, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Applebaum's piece is not "reporting", as I've already explained. What would we even include? That social-media ostracism is not always a matter of "woke" vs. "not woke"? That's the extent of her discussion of woke(ness); to imply anything else would be clear original research. Personal discomfort is just another way of saying "I don't like it". -- Sangdeboeuf (talk) 03:09, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
The process by which gains of wokeness are made sure in great measure will be catalyzed by allowing to hear and consider cases -- as documented by historians! -- that involve the ideologies' at-present's excesses. Is that counterintuitive? That: a zero-level ideological setpoint with regard to the harboring of criticism of wokeness actually hinders its settling into a more progressive and more-liberalistic form?
I'm at a five. The present zeitgeist & tumult was inevitable, with the rise of the Nones and all. Me? Close to a None but self-identifying as philosophically Buddhist and with, as I said, on a zero-to-ten scale of woke to its anti, self-rating at a five. In any case, history documents (OK, John Turner agues) how it's the modulated style of the Puritans' less-than-PURE-"'TOTAL'itarianism" that was partially embryonic -- (and we'll include, as well, the Puritans' promotion of liberal-arts education -- think: Harvard/Yale/Dartmouth) of American-culture's development of Liberalism. And: What's gonna happen with woke ferment is it's eventually gonna be looked back upon with nostalgia and celebrated -- another name's being attached to it; see: John McWhorter -- by analogy with Americans' talking about the Pilgrims and not the Puritans, per se, around Thanksgiving time: liberal institutions by then having found some aggregate means to mute the ideologies' otherwise inherent insistence on utmost conformity. And how's that going to happen? Listening to those harmed by the ideology's at-present excess. Thus "zero" criticism of wokeness is really a hindrance of this progressive/more-liberalistic transformation's happening.
Our article's chosen lens is linguistic. But it falls short of detailing the term's semantic shift.
What shift? I haven't read McWhorter's book, but the 1st graf of its publisher's blurb concludes "ow has the conversation on race in America gone so crazy? We’re told read books and listen to music by people of color but that wearing certain clothes is 'appropriation.' We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being Black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we'll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labeled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion—and one that's illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist" --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:06, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
Historians document history in scholarly journals of history, not in popular opinion magazines. I'm not seeing any concrete suggestions here for improving the article. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:43, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
Whether some journalist is left, right, or center, their piece's reaching a conclusion contra an idealized homogeneity as extolled in-the-long-march-to-wokeness does NOT negate its journalism. That Anne Applebaum is a critic of wokeness is very easy to ascertain. Quoting her book (from 2 pull-outs in david klion's 11jan2021thenation review): ".. a generation of far-left campus agitators who seek to dictate how professors can teach and what students can say .." // ".. the instigators of Twitter mobs who seek to take down public figures as well as ordinary people for violating unwritten speech codes .."
(If sensitive readers may shudder: I'll tell them to put your head between your knees; they'll be OK.)
(...Anyway, correcting stuff quoted somewhere above, per theguardian's n.cohen, Applebaun's no longer of the right. "Applebaum has left the right, and stopped voting Conservative in Britain in 2015 and Republican in the US in 2008" - um tho, okay, cohen doesn't explain how applebaum supposedly "!votes" BOTH UK/States'-side.....) nytimes: "Applebaum deserted the Republican Party in 2008"
theguardian's (Nick Cohen)
"'Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy,' Applebaum says, and explains why better than any modern writer I know."

About when R.-wing - "Even when she was young, you could see the signs of the inquiring spirit that has made her a great historian. She went to work as a freelance journalist in eastern Europe while it was still under Soviet occupation and too drab and secretive a posting for most young reporters. She then made a standard career move and joined the Economist. But it was too dull for her liking and she moved to the Spectator in the early 1990s. The dilettante style of English conservatism charmed her. 'These people don't take themselves seriously and could never do serious harm,' she thought, as she watched Simon Heffer .. competeEnoch Powell impersonation. She came to knowRoger Scruton andJohn O'Sullivan. They had helped east European dissidents struggling against Soviet power in the 1980s and appeared to believe in democracy."

"Heretics make the best writers. They understand a movement better than outsiders, and can relate its faults because they have seen them close up. Religions can tolerate pagans. They are mere unbelievers who have never known the way, the truth and the light. The heretic has the advantages of the inside trader. She can use her knowledge to expose and betray the faithful."

I'll be referencing Applebaum and McWhorter as "centrists" in text contributed to our article's (ersatz) criticsms-of-woke §.--18:08, 11 September 2021 (UTC)--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 22:14, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
So Appelbaum is no longer a historian, but merely a journalist? In that case her opinion carries little weight. The above is the epitome of improper synthesis. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:31, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
Bill Keller, its former executive editor, in the Times: "Applebaum, an American journalist who lives mostly in Poland, has earned accolades (including a Pulitzer Prize) for prodigiously researched popular histories of the Cold War, the Gulag and Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine." So, per Keller, at least, a historian like Applebaum can also perform journalism. Delving a bit into such a phenomenon's possible ins and outs, I happened across a Warren Bovée who makes the distinction (and his not "one without a difference"?) per my paraphrase, between the journalism of writing with the assumed or professed objective of helpings readers -- via communication of pertinent and accurate information -- to make good decision about what must be done or avoided concerning whatever issue or issues of the day; with the history writing that's done with the allegedly broader objective of providing understanding of event(s) -- its/their particulars of interest/whys/hows -- for its own sake. "As events discussed by historians creep closer and closer to the present, a temptation tags along to apply historical knowledge to the solutions of contemporary problems. If historians give way to this temptation, however, they edge into the domain of journalists. But journalists also face their own temptation. They may fall short of the practical goal that is their reason for being." Applebaum to Kirkus Reviews: "What is the interaction of political ideas with people’s lives? And how do people manipulate and use ideas to shape reality, for better or for worse? That theme is the same in everything I’ve written." Per Bovée, at least, I dunno if this is more purely history or journalism. (Maybe it would depend on the context: book-length Pulitzer-winning history of Ukrainian victimization by iron-fisted collectivization vs. The Atlantic-magazine spot-journalism Re victims of woke outrage?)
Historian/journalist/both...whichever's the case, Why would Applebaum's/anyone else's investigatory journalism preclude information so obtained/communicated being used as sourcing on Misplaced Pages?--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 23:53, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
Because none of these sources say anything about Applebaum's (or McWhorter's, or any journalist's) political leanings vis-a-vis their view on "woke(ness)", whatever it is. Any such inference made in article text would be original research. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:29, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
_1._ W rgd Applebaum'spolitical-spectrum position: I've observed that she does seem to extoll some flavor or another of political centeredness. As for "cites": Regarding those interviewed in her Atlantic investigative piece, she wrote "All of those I spoke with are centrist or center-left liberals." Then there's her wapo opinion piece "Want to Reinvigorate Centrist Politics in 2019? Fight Corruption." The nytimes's Keller felt it informative to include (in his review) how it is that she'd "deserted the Republican Party in 2008" (and the Guardian's Nick Cohen to include the information, as well, of her having "left the right, and stopped voting Conservative in Britain in 2015 and Republican in the US in 2008". The Nation piece mentioned's title is "Anne Applebaum and the Crisis of Centrist Politics" -- et cetera. So it seems fairly uncontroversial to label her as centrist, fwiw. Are there citations to the contrary? I'll google mcwhorter in a sec.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:03, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
_2._
dec2020standfordmag

"spent nearly a decade writing foryet calls himself 'a cranky liberal Democrat.' His career upends the portrait of the moderate as a humdrum, fence-sitting mix of liberal and conservative. .. his viewsinspire the question: What is it like to be a Black moderate in America's culture of partisan extremes? .. Steven Pinker .. describes him as 'America’s foremost popular explainer and commentator on language.' And if McWhorter’s work has a through line, it might be language's constant evolution. .. Pullumranks him as one of 'the top two or three public linguists in the world,'[: 'John’s original and unorthodox ideas about race and politics led linguists (so many of whom are left-wing liberals) to see him as too conservative,' .. American political theorist Mark Satin .. describe McWhorter’s views as 'an arguably radical middle perspective.' As for calling himself 'a cranky liberal Democrat,' McWhorter says, 'I will take issue with things that don’t seem to make logical sense to me even if they go against the orthodoxy of the side that I consider myself to formally belong to.'"

standfordmag - cont.: "McWhorter .. signed 'A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,' .. speaking to the New York _Times_, McWhorter said that he'd recently heard from more than 100 professors and graduate students, most of whom he described as being left of center, who feared suffering professionally if they aroused the ire of the far left. Addressing how McWhorter has himself come under fire, Pinker .. says, 'The fact that he is an independent thinker and a rejecter of all ideologies, doctrines, dogmas and party lines has led to occasional labeling as a political conservative, but this is lazy pigeonholing ..' penned an essay in the Atlantic in favor of revising the definition of racism to include societal racial disparities such as unequal access to health care or super-markets, 'because it is indisputable that racial disparities stem from bias-infused barriers.' He reminds us that .. the more complex definition is 'shared by legions of people, especially educated ones, across our nation'" --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:16, 12 September 2021 (UTC) 30apr2021nytimes - Dr. McWhorter is a linguist who has written extensively about both race and language mcwhorter: .. concern has been transferred from the sexual and scatological to the sociological .. Generation X grew up when overt racist attitudes came to be ridiculed and socially punished in general society. Racism continued to exist in endless manifestations. However, it became complicated — something to hide, to dissemble about and, among at least an enlightened cohort, something to check oneself for and call out in others, to a degree unknown in perhaps any society until then. .. For Americans of this postcountercultural cohort, the pox on matters of God and the body seemed quaint beyond discussion, while a pox on matters of slurring groups seemed urgent beyond discussion.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:10, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Applebaum's essay uses the word "woke" a total of three times, and none of them clearly describe what she's talking about. Applebaum clearly objects to "modern mob justice" but it is not at all clear that Applebaum wishes to paint with such a broad brush as to describe "woke" in this manner. In fact, she goes out of her way to create a nuanced picture - you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake - and that's two of the three total uses of "woke" in the entire piece. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 17:32, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Linguist McWhorter has already laid out the semantic shift whereby woke replacement for political correctness. The mob justice Applebaum laments is shorthanded by the term (not in its earlier meaning of awareness but in this shifted meaning). I'll return with pertinent applebaum 'cites.'--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:10, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
Linguist McWhorter has already laid out the semantic shift whereby woke replacement for political correctness. The mob justice Applebaum laments is shorthanded by the term (not in its earlier meaning of awareness but in this shifted meaning). This is the literal definition of prohibited synthesis - you cannot take two sources which say two different things and combine them to create something which neither of them says directly. That Applebaum doesn't say what you apparently wish she had said is not something you can fix by appeals to what McWhorter says. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 19:44, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
Although I note here on Talk that the distinguished scholar of language sees (Geez, how could anyone not!) the word's semantic shift, the fact of historian/journo Applebaum uses the shorthand term with the same meaning as he analyzes for it (in her lament -- even as this is nuanced by implied acknowledgments that the rising tide as fueling the described "mobbing" concerns resentfulness about very-real social inequalities, et cetera) is coincidence, with their identical meaning discernable by contextual reading comprehension.
Talkpage commentary does not equate to inept article-space description of this shifted meaning by McWhorter, Applebaum, or the-foreign-language-sources-within-a-Talkpage-thread-above, etc. See this quote from wp:SYNTH): "Here are two paragraphs showing more complex examples of editorial synthesis. They are based on an actual Misplaced Pages article about a dispute between two authors, here called Smith and Jones. This first paragraph is fine, because each of the sentences is carefully sourced, using a source that refers to the same dispute:

checkY Smith stated that Jones committed plagiarism by copying references from another author's book. Jones responded that it is acceptable scholarly practice to use other people's books to find new references.

This second paragraph demonstrates improper editorial synthesis:

☒N If Jones did not consult the original sources, this would be contrary to the practice recommended in the Harvard Writing with Sources manual, which requires citation of the source actually consulted.

The Harvard manual does not call violating this rule "plagiarism". Instead, plagiarism is defined as using a source's information, ideas, words, or structure without citing them.
--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:41, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
WP:SYNTH does not apply to talk pages, but unless there is a concrete suggestion for improving the article, then this thread is a waste of everyone's time. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:38, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

A new "hays code"?

Mostly off-topic speculation & quotes by random writers of opinion essays, blogs, etc. – not useful. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:46, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
  1. McWhorter's nytimes piece about woke's semantic shift, pos to neg, along with this latter's meaning's involving a close association with new regimes ofself-censorship

    (First, the following's from his 2016 book): "Why do civilized euphemisms such as disabled so often get reclassified as quaint or even insulting?Why is it so hard to truly accept that there is a 'dialect' called Black English? Why does William Powell in The Thin Man say that he is going to round up all the sus­PECTS instead of the SUS­ pects? (I’m sure you’ve always wondered about that!) Why have emoticons caught on to such a degree?This book will answer all those questions. The answers require understanding a mere five ways that language changes. The question is not whether a word will undergo one or more of these processes, but which ones of them it will go through.
    _______
    *from nytimes review: "I loved 'Words on the Move,' but it’s possible I am suffering from Stockholm syndrome. I keep saying to people who aren’t particularly interested, 'Let me list the five ways that new words are — and always have been — created out of old ones. First we must consider modal pragmatic markers.'" (_Me_: Q. Hmmm-so then what are these 5 ways, hmm? A. : (1) expanding (2) contracting (3) receiving emotional colorings (4) becoming their implications And, this, via "meaning creep, by analogy with the term mission creep—bit by bit, new shades creep into what we consider the meaning of something to be, until one day the meaning has moved so far from the original one that it seems almost astounding.")

    McWhorter believes "words referring to issues societal or controversial .. will often need replacement about once a generation." More:

    "white kids sound a little Blacker in casual speech than their parents .. 'Stay woke' on white people's T-shirts is a sign of coming together. .. A white college friend, very much of the left, usedwith a quiet sprinkle of irony, but sincerelya certain complex of leftist beliefsobviously the proper ones for any reasonable person to have .. The result will be resistance .. 'Woke' has just undergone the same processhow we got from 'politically correct' to 'wokethe path from 'crippled' to 'handicapped' to 'disabled' to 'differently abled.'"

    Re censorship:"omething 'problematic'in modern usage so often implies not just that something is abstractly a problem but also that it ought to be classified as inconsonant with civilized sensibility and cordoned off from it in some way. Especially on the left, 'problematic' is being drawn onto the treadmill to step away from the stodgy, menacing, backward associations that the word 'censorship' has taken on, while engaging in what many would treat as the same project."
    Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:04, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
  2. robt tombes (cambridge historian) - "A far more insidious ideology — if it can be called an ideology — is extending a deadening grip not only over the educational system, but over our whole cultural life, and this time especially in the English-speaking world whose attachment to intellectual freedom has proved feeble. We tend to call it 'wokeness' " --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:49, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
  3. david denby (2016) - "after 1934, when censorship seriously came into effect, more imaginative people made better movies and still scored at the box office. Censorship can cripple, inhibit, and destroy, but, in forcing artists to invent, it can liberate ./. Thomas Doherty insists that the Lord-Quigley document—which became the Hays Code—was not 'a grunted jeremiad from bluenose fussbudgets, but a polished treatise representing long and deep thought in aesthetics, education, communication theory, and moral philosophy.'" --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 22:05, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
  4. winter2020claremontreviewofbooks (William Voegeli-sen. ed.) - Upon realizing that their Twitter feed is not their country, many solipsists will withdraw, transferring their allegiance from the real country that has betrayed them to the artificial one that respects and affirms their every idiosyncrasy. Others will react with anger, grimly determined to transform their country into their Twitter feed—and do so by any means necessary. The latter will, at the same time, impose ever more stringent loyalty oaths on their Twitter feed, creating a 'turbocharged tribalism,' in Ms. Lewis’s phrase, where the 'stridency of highly polarized voices online…has a chilling effect on less engaged and less confident tweeters.' --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 23:39, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
  5. +more mcwhorter (from july): "language policing has reached a near fever pitch, out of a sense that labeling common terms and expressions as 'problematic'—that is, blasphemous—is essential to changing society." The "Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center" @-brandeis "teaches us to not refer to people as survivors of a traumatic experience because it implies that what they went through is their essence" but-to "describe them as having experienced or been impacted by something bad." "ell someone who has been a victim of racist abuse that they really ought to phrase it as though they have merely experienced it" No. "To be sure, the list specifies that some people may prefer the terms now being battled" "allowing terms such as victim to be used when rhetorically powerful"--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 00:47, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
  6. There is traditional liberalism. Then there is the following POV expressed in Vox. "BothWeiss andSullivan are frequent critics of the modern left’s position on identity issues; in their departure letters, they both describe their publications as in thrall to a rising tide of left-wing censorship sweeping the country’s media.Abstract appeals to 'free speech' and 'liberal values' obscure the fact that what’s being debated is not anyone’s right to speech, but rather their right to air that speech in specific platforms like the New York Times without fear of social backlash." Yet, it seems sometimes that only Vox's prism's allowed reflection on the pages of Misplaced Pages!
  7. Andrew sullivan jun2020: "To be woke is to wake up to the truth — the blinding truth that liberal society doesn’t exist, that everything is a form of oppression or resistance, and that there is no third option. You are either with us or you are to be cast into darkness." "The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep.The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the 'successor ideology' to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls 'moral clarity.' He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity."
  8. Looking for answers to how calling a trough, a trough* has become untenable <Despite the usual phrase's Classical provenance it's fashionable to avoid it>, I find the answer in the journo Will Storr. From ed west's review: "'When a high-status individual does something,' Storr writes, 'our subconscious copy-flatter-conformprogramming is triggered and we allow them to alter our beliefs and behaviour… We mimic not just their behaviour but their beliefs. The better we believe, the higher we rise. And so faith, not truth, is incentivised. People will believe almost anything if high-status people – whether priests, generals, actors, musicians, TikTokkers – suggest them.'"
  9. Hence, per Misplaced Pages-approved reporting, the triad of liberal linguists & thinkers mcwhorter, pinker , and chomsky all three are< takes a beat >right wing, as well as the kneejerk deletion when nuance is attempted to be brought to WP's overgeneralization of this sobriquet in questioned.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:12, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
    ______
    *npr.org - "University of Vermont's Wolfgang Mieder in his 2002 case study Call a Spade a Spade: From Classical Phrase to Racial Slur: 'To call a spade a spade" entered the English language when Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus in 1542.'Mieder concludes his case study with the argument that 'to call a spade a spade' should be retired from modern usage: 'Rather than taking the chance of unintentionally offending someone or of being misunderstood, it is best to relinquish the old innocuous proverbial expression all together.'" --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 21:23, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
  10. anti-wokester Peter Boghossian's tweet from within the last hour: >>>>>"I've been deluged with requests to appear on conservative media regarding my resignation fromU. And yet, I don't consider myself a conservative. I've received zero requests for interviews with liberal media. I’d enjoy having a conversation with you."<<<<<--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 22:00, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
See Misplaced Pages:No original research. One can cherry-pick a handful of opinion writers and label them "anti-wokesters" as well as "liberal" or "centrist", but this does not outweigh the descriptions cited to reliable, secondary sources. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:08, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
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