It’s time once again to look at what’s going on in the imaginary world of “woke,” in which I highlight some improbable things right-wingers have declared “woke” in the past week.
Canada:
“Canada Is Transforming Into a Woke Authoritarian Dystopia.” declares Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent. His problem with the Great White North? He seems to be mostly outraged that the “woke” have been vandalizing or simply tearing down statues of Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill, among others. He’s also convinced that laws on hate speech online will be used to censor people like him,
In this new progressive era, “woke” has been substituted for “liberal.” … In Canada, the “liberals” are now tearing down monuments of liberal icons, trampling on religious freedom and embracing censorship. Churches are also being vandalized and burned down. …
[T]his is the result of educating several generations of Canadian children that their race, culture and civilization is immoral and illegitimate. Liberalism is also illegitimate for being part of that civilization.
Oh, and did he forget WHITE GENOCIDE?
Isn’t it fair to say that this force is anti-White, anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-liberal? It is just completely opposed to White people, their existence and the culture and values.
I think he almost slipped into “14 words” territory with that last bit.
Dungeons and Dragons:
“The Woke Are Coming for ‘Dungeons and Dragons,” Kurt Schlichter laments in a rant on Townhall. He’s outraged, even though he provides no evidence of this new “wokeness” and he himself thinks of D&D fans as hapless virginal nerds.
It’s amazing to me that there are people out there who think, “You know, I play a lot of ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ but I’ve been looking for a way to make myself into a more complete loser. And I think I’ve found it! I think we’re going to play ‘Woke Dungeons and Dragons.’ Instead of running around with swords and stuff, attacking people, I think we’re going to sit around and have a struggle session about our feelings about the elf privilege that’s been making things bad in ways.” I don’t understand any of this.
He decides it’s all part of a struggle for POWER — and more.
Why are they doing it? There’s a reason. … Yes, they’re lonely shut-ins who need attention, obviously. Obviously, this is a way for powerless people no one likes who can never achieve anything on their own to try and get something like power and attention, clearly. But it’s more than that. It’s part of a cultural war because they want to invade every institution.
And they have invaded every institution.
They’ve invaded Major League Baseball, the National Football League …
Look, they want to be a part of everything because they want to destroy everything. And they want to destroy you. They want to destroy everything that’s not bizarre because then they get to be the arbiters of truth. They get to be the arbiters of reality. They get to exercise some sort of power that they can’t earn in any other way. ….
Mickey Mouse:
As Disney reopens its various parks worldwide, the tabloid Express notes,
it appears officials have altered the familiar introduction of “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” in a bid to be more inclusive. … Disney have replaced the greeting with: “Good evening, friends.” …
[T]he change was to make sure people of all sexual and gender identities felt “comfortable in the park”.
But the new greeting has been heavily mocked and criticised on social media, with many suggesting the change was completely unnnecessary and branded it as “woke”.
The Michigan State Police:
“Is Michigan Wokifying Its State Police Department?” Jeff Charles asks on Redstate.com. Naturally, he answers “yes” to his own question,
It looks like infesting the military with woke theology isn’t enough. Now, it appears the hard left is trying to sneak its destructive ideology into law enforcement, at least in the state of Michigan. A recent report indicates that the Michigan State Police (MSP) is beginning to adopt some of the tenets of wokeism and include them in their operations. While this first foray into wokeism might seem small, it is not difficult to imagine how far the left might take it as they gain more power.
So what horrible thing have these “hard left” wokesters done to the state police department? They’re asking employees to list their gender pronouns in their emails.
Wait, what? That’s it?
At first glance, this memo might seem silly, but harmless. After all, what harm is there in placing one’s pronouns at the bottom of an email?
It’s that whole slippery slope thing.
Still, it is worth pointing out that the hard left rarely stops at harmless suggestions. It is not out of the realm of possibility that this could just be the first step toward wokifying the MSP. The slippery slope is evident, isn’t it? How long will it be before employees are punished for failing to use preferred pronouns? What if they don’t adhere to the other tenets of woke theology that the department decides to foist upon its workforce?
I don’t know, they’ll be arrested in their sleep and sent to the Pronoun Gulag?
We’ve already seen this trend in the United States Armed Forces. At least one service member was fired for speaking out against the creeping Marxism in the military.
Yep, you read that right. A surprisingly large number of right-wing dingbats have convinced themselves that the military has gone Marxist. Because that’s the world we live in now.
It’s not hard to imagine that this same paradigm could be imposed in other police departments across the country.
To a certain kind of right-wing dingbat, there is nothing scarier than pronouns.
More Woke to come in next week’s Week in Woke. Send tips if you spot something relevant!
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They come soooo close to getting it sometimes…
I actually like the whole pronouns in work e-mail trend because I can’t always tell what someone’s gender is from their name, which can make it awkward to compose replies.
Yeah, he’s kinda right, just 180 degrees away from what he means.
Noted liberal icons Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill?
Re: D&D, women were part of creating it from day one, as well as playing. It took almost a full year from the publication of D&D to the earliest case I’m aware of of players using the game to examine personal and social issues. I personally was playing a genderfluid shape shifting wizard who refused consistent pronouns ca. 1990, and nobody remarked on it. Ed Greenwood, principal creator of the Forgotten Realms, the single most popular D&D setting ever, said explicitly when asked that of course the Realms didn’t discriminate on lines of gender or sexuality, except for the places where it’s specifically noted to be otherwise. He went on to point out that a magical equivalent of gender confirmation surgery has been canon in D&D since AD&D first entered the picture, and in what world would trans people not take advantage of such a thing?
In the wake of the discovery of many unmarked graves on the grounds of Indian Residential “Schools” (aka concentration camps), there has been been vandalism of public statues, and vandalism and arson of churches on or near First Nations land. Indigenous leaders have spoken out against such vandalism, but they also understand the rage and despair fueling it. There seems to be a lot of ambivalence within the Indigenous community regarding the Church (and the recent vandalism), and with good reason.
‘Wokeness’ is not anywhere in the picture – hell, not even in the same universe.
OT: can I grouch a bit here over some rude customers I had today?
At my morning job today, one of the regulars – a guy old enough to have grandchildren – decided that it’d be fun for to tug on my pony tail. My hair is about midway down my back, and has something like five hair ties in it, a style I’ve seen sported by bikers and teenaged female softball players, with a tuft on the end. Dude tugs lightly on the end; I protest loudly that I don’t like it, and he just laughs like I’m playing because if he’s playing then I must be too. Or something like that. >:|
At the evening job, a couple comes in and the lady wants to do a split pay on her purchase. Except that instead of paying cash first then card, this company does it card first then cash (tl;dr on that policy is that if the card is declined then it’s less hassle for the company to cancel the sale if there’s only a card involved than to cash out the sale then refund the money if the cash is accepted first). The couple don’t like that doing things like that and act like I’m doing card-first deliberately to p***s them off instead of me following policy. Then after the guy makes his purchase he tells me I shouldn’t be acting rude to the customers just because my mother didn’t have the money for the abortion while carrying me. Didn’t say what I thought about them where they could hear it because I wasn’t interested in arguing with assholes. >:|
So yeah, I just needed to grouch for a moment. Back to your regularly scheduled laugh-a-thon at the anti-woke crowd.
Austin Archer has a message for those people out there squicked by those scary, scary pronouns:
Several generations of Canadian children have been taught that their races and their cultures are illegitimate? So are we just teaching kids that all races and all cultures are illegitimate? Because Canadians come from many, many backgrounds, so in order to teach all Canadian children that their background is illegitimate, we would have to condemn pretty much every human culture.
Unless, of course, Hunter Wallace’s definition of “Canadian children” only includes white kids. Hmmmmm.
D&D was, at least originally, derivative of Lord of the Rings. While LOTR is reactionary in many ways, it’s very, very concerned with power, the abuses of power, a setting where elves abused their privilege in the past that made things bad in ways and the entire plot is centred around how running around with swords and stuff attacking people isn’t the way to defeat evil. I suspect Kurt Schlichter is just unusually unperceptive.
The one truth spoken by Kurt Schlichter here.
Also ‘hard left’? I thought we were all soft effeminate “soyboys”? Or fat ugly feminists?
@Fishy Goat
Is it the proximity of finding the graves that triggers that, I wonder? Because near here there is an indigenous population that was exterminated to basically nothing, 20-30 members, the agriculture of the area built by their enslaved population (which was then killed), just, you know, egregious history all too common in America. That indigenous population is now the largest employer (of white people as well as tribal members) in the area and just sponsored all of the area July 4 celebrations, which is some real grave if I ever saw it. They pour hundreds of millions of dollars into community projects that benefit white people who probably would have awful things to say about them, if we’re honest. But they would have absolutely every right to campaign for the destruction and/or just burn down the venerated museums of their oppression. People walk over the graves of their ancestors to get married and titter about it. Like… it ain’t good. I wonder what causes protest in some places and not in others?
@ Redsilkphoenix
Wow, damn. I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m endlessly surprised by the things people find it ok to say to strangers. I don’t even know where they come up with this sort of thing.
They’re called murder hobos for a reason.
Hypno Mickey is inferior to Hypnotoad. And Hypno Badgertoad.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v615/dieticons/hypnobadgertoad.gif
I guess this is a good thread to mention that I’ve always hated the term “woke”. It just reminds me of a truncated version of the equally condescending and insulting “Wake up, sheeple!!!” that I saw spewed out everywhere when I first quit religion. Implying that you are “awake” and “enlightened” while everyone else is “asleep” or ignorant is the height of arrogance. And now the right-wingers have adopted it as a pejorative, making me hate it even more.
More relevant to the thread:
If this is the first time they’re whining about Disney, have they never heard of “Gay Days”? And yeah, that new phrase is sooo terrible, I felt oppressed just by reading it. For real, these chucklefucks complain about lefties being the ones getting offended over nothing? Talk about your manufactured outrage!
Cops are still shooting unarmed black people at a disturbingly high rate, but one department asking people their pronouns suddenly means they’ve gone full SJW. Quick, somebody call the heads of BLM and tell them it’s over, we won.
Again, I can never take these people seriously when they whine about fragile little snowflakes. Clearly their fee-fees are the most easily bruised of all.
@Redsilkphoenix
Tell creepo you don’t take kindly to workplace harassment, and next time you’ll report him. (Can you report “regular” customers?)
This sort of seems apposite. It will probably provoke similar comments about ‘woke’ culture anyway.
But artist Teresa Margolles is to have one of her works feature on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth in 2024. It will be based around face casts of 850 trans people. I’ll see if I can find out how you volunteer in case any UK based mammotheers fancy being immortalised. Well, for a bit anyway; it’s actually designed to disintegrate over time.
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/VQWhmzmLR4DD5Q
It will be preceded by this piece
That’s by Samson Kambalu. And I bet that winds a few people up too. More here if you want to find to why.
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/antelope-mayor-of-london/jAVxRpJsLUELoA?hl=en
Oh, and in case people whinge about such stuff being ‘foisted’ on the public; it’s a public vote.
https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/arts-and-culture/current-culture-projects/fourth-plinth-trafalgar-square/fourth-plinth-commission-2022-and-2024-artist-shortlist/fourth-plinth-commission
And it’s always fun when people complain about how the new stuff isn’t in keeping with the existing statues to ask them who those statues actually feature.
Charles Napier
Henry Havelock
His bit about D&D seem mostly because for him, people cannot dream of a world where violence isn’t the main solution.
D&D is, at its core, a world where applying a sufficent amount of violence can solve all problem. The attraction of that is that there *is* a “simple” solution to every problem. “simple” as in, you know how to do it, even if the actual execution can be very hard. Compare and contrast with real world, where actually finding out what we need to do is relatively hard, and comparatively execution of said plan is easier.
Also, the “canon” way to change gender in AD&D is a cursed item, designed to *involuntary* change sex (useable exactly once and not identifiable as such). I think he is a bit projecting his modern belief on his old action here. D&D wasn’t hardcore sexist back in the day, but it certainly wasn’t too progressive either.
@Viscaria:
If we consider that “educating several generations of Canadian children that their race, culture and civilization is immoral and illegitimate” is exactly what was done to the indigenous population, than yes, much of the current anger is a direct result of that (and that a lot of children were killed by that “education”), but that’s probably not what the OP meant…
ETA— And I just noticed that Dalillama and Moggie already picked up on this ahead of me.
The Disney fan forum I hang out on hasn’t even noticed the “ladies and gentlemen”->”friends” thing yet, and this is a forum where I see regular arguments over whether trans people should just put up with being misgendered at Disney because “the world doesn’t care about your feelings”. (Which is both generally really mean and completely against everything Disney tries to put into their parks. Disney World does care about your feelings! That’s how they get their money!)
Also, my experience with modern tabletop RPGs is that they’re more mature about sex now – not saying anything about relative quantity, but the games I’ve been looking at recently have notes like “Sex is a normal part of many people’s lives, but it can also be a very volatile topic for your players! Make sure to talk to your players about how far they’re comfortable going and set up a way to end the scene immediately before introducing sexual elements into your game.” You didn’t see that back in the day. Either the game didn’t mention sex at all, or it was utterly sleazy about it? Also, nobody sits around talking about elf privilege for hours unless that’s what they want to do with their game. Our most recent campaign was about stopping the Church of Tiamat from taking over the kingdom, but if someone else wants to play elf-privilege games, what’s it to me?
Ninjad by @Moon Custafer
@Redsilkphoenix: I used to work with the general public too. Most of them are fine, but I got this steady drip of people who clearly think “tease the staff” is an admirable hobby.
Have some baby lemurs.
@Mog
D&D is derived much more from Lieber, Moorcock, and Howard than from Tolkien. Gygax and Arneson weren’t LotR fans, but enough of their players were that they shoehorned some Tolkien elements in there.
@Ohlmann
Ed Greenwood has written for D&D since 1979, I suspect he’s a greater authority on the history of the game than you are.
OT, but the vaccination program in Ontario seems to have stalled. The unvaccinated count is hovering at about 1/3, with the both-doses population just over 28%. These numbers haven’t changed in a week now.
The strange thing is, I have an appointment to get my second jab fairly soon, so the current vaccination rate can’t be zero. But it’s low enough not to show up at all in statistics truncated to four significant figures, it seems.
I’m worried about this. Case counts are currently fairly low (under 3K province-wide, typically about 200 new cases and 250-300 recoveries a day lately) but as we’ve already seen in some other countries getting complacent means getting clobbered by delta.
We need to get back to where the unvaccinated count was dropping by about 1% a day. And then speed it up even more.
@Dalillama : if that’s for the first part, I refer to the original poster in the post. I don’t think Greenwood is against finding solution other than violence.
If it’s for the trangender but, clearly it’s absolutely out of the question that he is self-aggrandizing himself. D&D didn’t had the worse excess of the time, but it did have some, including ridiculing transgender peoples and casual racism. The first part is exactly why I am suspicious of his claim.
Saying that he wasn’t trying to go out of his way to antagonize minorities is fair. Saying he introduced canonical way to become transgender make me skeptikal at bestn *especially* since the way to do that were litteral curses.
A new Lego Star Wars set of Boba Fett’s spaceship, the Slave I, is simply named “Boba Fett’s Spaceship,” and the meltdown has been predictable in both its intensity and its distance from reality.
The main takeaway is that “Disney is renaming Slave I to be woke,” when all that has happened is a toy used a descriptive name that far, far more kids and parents are likely to recognize – Slave I is one of the many, many things in Star Wars that never get named in the films and shows themselves, and Lego has a long practice of releasing sets with descriptive names like “Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter” (“it’s a TIE/adv v1!”).
But obviously THIS one is an attempt to be “woke,” and avoid the word “slave” hurting the liberals delicate little feelings, which are not strong and tough like those the guys working themselves into a frothing rage over the name of a Lego set.