“Woke” remains one of the right’s favorite buzzwords. It means everything and nothing and can be used to describe anything.
So I thought I’d take another one of my periodic look-sees at some things that are being defined as “woke” these days by right wing twitterers.
People complaining about dangerously hot weather:
Home Depot:
Most brands of seasoning:
Democrats, who are also socialists, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
People who want kids in public schools to learn anything other than science and math.
Whoever you want harassed for being too darn liberal:
The armed forces, which might be planning on shooting you if you’re not woke too:
People who might want to milk bulls for some reason:
Disney:
The new Lord of the Rings TV series from Disney+:
Giant corporations:
Giant gay corporations:
People who produce comics that are “woke sjw feminist bullshit.”
People who insert “woke sjw bullcrap” into movies and TV.
People who call Darth Vader sexist, because apparently there’s some kind of debate going on about this:
And finally, speaking of Star Wars:
Unfortunately, thinking is also woke.
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It’s a phenomenon called Reblanding.
This article explains it well.
https://justcreative.com/why-do-everyones-logo-fonts-look-the-same/
(As someone who loves Futura and New Johnston I guess I can’t complain. Although that’s a London thing.)
Just a heads up, Matt–
The series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power isn’t a Disney+ series, it’s from Prime Video, which is part of Amazon Prime.
Thought you might want to know that before any happy fun MRA gents leap on that like starving jackals at a day-old carrion buffet.
What the hell was the context of the Home Depot “unpacking privilege” thing? LOL
Also I don’t think anyone called Darth Vader sexist (I don’t think he even was ever sexist?) because like… even if he had said or did something sexist once, the main problem would be all the murders he did???
Isn’t “fragging” a thing US soldiers did during the Vietnam war to their commanding officers partly/mostly due to having horrible PTSD and just being despairing or mad about their treatment by the military? Like, “frag” isn’t the macho, pro-USA vibe the seasoning people seem to think it is, AFAIK?
At best, it’s like when people use the Punisher as a pro-cop symbol, even though the Punisher is a cop killer in canon. THESE WORDS/SYMBOLS DON’T CONVEY THE MEANING RIGHT-WINGERS THINK THEY DO.
(Also, yes, corporations like to use Pride Month for marketing. You know who else complains about that a lot? ACTUAL “WOKE” LGBTQ+ PEOPLE.)
@M K:
It’s probably more accurate to say that such things aren’t *meant* to convey the meaning Right-Wingers think they do.
A lot of conservatives focus on a few surface elements which have particular emotional resonance to them and discard the rest. It’s why they like Star Trek (original and some of the next-gen era ones), because benevolent militarism, everyone having a specific rank in a hierarchy, pew pew space gun battles, etc. The social issues explored therein either go over their heads or dismissed as a weird fantasy plot with little connection to the real world.
And then when they use symbolism based on surface elements only, the message they’re sending usually comes through to other conservatives loud and clear, and that’s what really matters to them. The fact that liberals get into a tizzy because they totally missed the point is largely irrelevant.
I for one was very excited about the Rings of Power trailer. A small glimmer of fun.
Also living in the UK I would rather put my feet in a bag of cat sick than hear any more about the heatwave of 76. We get it boomers, it was hot once and your youth was fun and carefree! Leave us to our certain knowledge of imminent and irreversible doom.
Woke is just making these people experience cognitive dissonance. They don’t like it because it makes them feel bad about themselves, so instead of engaging in introspection or change, they blame the message. They also don’t want any change from where things were because it makes the world harder for them to process based on rigid principles.
Woke started out as a great word. I saw it used lightly, humorously, by people on the left side of things. Leave it to rightwingers to strip it of all playfulness and render it meaningless. I’ve compared them to the seagulls in Finding Nemo before; they just mindlessly yell words over and over again. “Woke! Groomer! CRT! Socialist!”
Just a correction, The LoTR TV series “Rings of Power” is on Amazon Prime, not Disney+. I would of liked to of watched the series to see what it was like if I had Amazon Prime, despite the fan uproar over black elves and other crap.
@ M K
I don’t know anything about the Punisher, but I find it odd that some consider Batman movies to be pro cop. I wonder what movies these people watched, since the ones I watched revolved around a police department so corrupt and useless a mentally ill multibillionaire decides to dress up in a Halloween costume and fight crime. In the Christian Bale movies most of the time the only cop Bruce can trust is Gordon, whose lies about the events in one movie were a major plot point in another.
That comic thing goes back to “The Rippaverse”… Which is as far I can tell a vanity project that a Blaze propagandist crowdfunded (apparently on their site for maximum lack of transparency).
I as an evil woke am all for them being competition to Comicsgate in the quest for parting the “own the libs” fools from their money.
EDIT: Mind you my biggest exposure to this was an Actual Fandom video that he made because the “fans” apparently took it on themself to yell RACIST at him for daring to tweet that one of the characters’ costume reminds him of a different (established) character’s.
Yeah I cannot for the life of me imagine what anybody thinks is particularly “woke” about the Rings of Power trailer. It shows like two or three (quite light-skinned) PoC among the hobbits and elves, but every other aspect of it seems to be absolutely standard Middle-earth fantasy universe. The narrator even refers to humankind in general by the non-gender-inclusive term “Men” in accordance with standard Tolkien usage, which I would have thought would have had the anti-“woke” contingent absolutely wetting their pants with glee.
(And tbh I don’t think Tolkien himself would even have been particularly fazed at the inclusion of some darker-skinned people among his mortal races, though he might have found it more problematic in the case of Elves. After all, although Tolkien was deliberately retconning a hypothetical ancient saga from the point of view of medieval white northwestern Europeans, and building into its universe the same baseline levels of tribalist xenophobia that appear in actual texts of the period, he also knew perfectly well that ancient and medieval European ethnic segregation was not at all absolute, and that there were plenty of diverse ethnic groups that occasionally intermingled. He even built such ethnic diversity into his narrative with peoples like the Druadan and Beornings and Dunlendings. If you had asked Tolkien whether an occasional Southron from Near or Far Harad, or an Easterner from Rhun or someplace, might have ended up in the Arnor/Gondor region and left some phenotypic traces, I’m sure he would have confirmed that of course they might. People have always done that.)
I am sure much of the panic on the right is that they don’t want to admit corporations are doing “woke” things because that’s where the money is. Being seen as anti-woke can seriously hurt a corporation’s bottom line, where right-wingers lack the buying power and boycott-discipline to make corporations cater to them.
Yeah I saw someone claim wearing sunscreen is “woke”
Get skin cancer to own the libs
All of Darth Vader’s underlings were men. He was definitely not an equal opportunity employer.
FRAG OUT FLAVOR BLUE LINE LIME PEPPER is so anti pronoun that FRAG OUT FLAVOR BLUE LINE LIME PEPPER doesn’t even seem to have a functional noun in FRAG OUT FLAVOR BLUE LINE LIME PEPPER’s name.
Or maybe FRAG OUT FLAVOR BLUE LINE LIME PEPPER is just pre-ground black pepper with a lil bit of lime?
The graphic design makes me think the former but either way that’s a hard pass from me.
@Kimstu
I was going to say something similar, but you covered it. I would just point out that as an Anglo-Saxonist, Tolkien knew that in Old English the word ‘man’ means adult human. Adding suffixes to designate gender, ‘gar-‘ for spear-wielders, usually people with penises, and ‘wif-‘ for people who wove, usually people with vulvas. ‘wif-man’ became woman, and also wife, while ‘gar-man’ lost the ‘gar-‘, leaving us with the indeterminate ‘man’. I don’t know when they lost their spears, it must have been most discombobulating…Of course, the association of sex, gender and social role are conflated in many societies and early mediaeval English kingdoms were no different, and Oxford professors born in the 1800s had their baggage of misogyny. Still do, as far as I can tell. At least, that’s what I understand to be the case, it’s been fifteen to twenty years since Tolkien and Old English were special interests and I forget details, so correct me if I’m wrong. I was fascinated by his use of language as a foundation for world building and story. Still am, to a certain extent; I’m reading a book called The Science of Middle Earth, or something like that, about all the different disciplines Tolkien drew on for his world building at the moment, it’s quite fascinating, if a little dense, and since it was originally in French, I think some of the translation might be a bit off. I also maintain that there should be more volcanoes in Mordor, or at least in the vicinity.
@moregeekthan
I think this is a big part of the reason for their constant repetition of “Get Woke, Go Broke” and similar mantras. They have to keep reassuring themselves that they are really totally the majority and not a bigoted outlier.
I don’t recall Vader being notably sexist. The Empire as a whole, sure, but Vader was all about the violence. And Anakin was madly in love with a Senator/Queen, he didn’t have a problem with her being powerful.
I don’t think any of my seasonings have pronouns, what with being inanimate objects. Even the ones I get from what they’d call a “woke” provider. Looks to me like heavy virtue signaling with the giant letters and graphics, and the actual content (lime and pepper) at the bottom in tiny letters. And “frag”? They’re in favor of military/cops shooting each other?
Joanne Harris must have had her tongue firmly in cheek. The GQP and their Tory toadies are always trying to find significance in reshuffling letters, so let them wonder about murderous alien teddy bears.
Companies seem to have gotten ever more “woke” during the past few years (even with recession and plague), which means they’re making money at it. Corporations have no social conscience, profits are all, so ‘wokeness” must be bringing in the bucks.
And yet the righties keep telling people to “wake up!”
@Chibigodzilla:
FRAG OUT FLAVOR BLUE LINE LIME PEPPER is so anti pronoun that FRAG OUT FLAVOR BLUE LINE LIME PEPPER doesn’t even seem to have a functional noun in FRAG OUT FLAVOR BLUE LINE LIME PEPPER’s name.
Or maybe FRAG OUT FLAVOR BLUE LINE LIME PEPPER is just pre-ground black pepper with a lil bit of lime?
I’m reminded of the attempt a while back to market specifically Christian salt—evangelicals having taken offense at the lack of an equivalent of kosher salt:
https://jonathanturley.org/2009/03/08/seasoning-with-the-saints-blessed-christian-salt-challenges-kosher-salt-for-the-palates-of-the-faithful/
(An old Livejournal correspondent of mine, from an Ashkenazic Cohen family, pointed out that kosher salt is called that because it’s used in the koshering—the blood removal—of meat; it’s not inherently sacred and nothing special needs to be done to it, as long as no treyf animals get into it during processing. Nor would there be any sacrilege involved in a Gentile’s using kosher salt to crust their shrimp or pork roast.
She also noted that kosher-salted meat would’ve been good enough for Mary to cook and Jesus to eat, but apparently not for Bizarro Christians.)
It’s obvious some snowflake got his fee-fees hurt by Penzeys and their open disdain for Republicans.
The Home Depot one does look a bit simplistic, in that they don’t seem to distinguish between definitions and examples. For instance, I don’t think cops exist to protect me, but I have white privilege because I’m white! But the problem with the writing isn’t “wokeness.”
Pronouns on spice bottles? Okay, I’ll bite. I picked up the first spice jar I could reach. Here’s what it says on the front:
Phew. No pronouns in that. But there’s French. Maybe French is a woke language. You never know!
It never seems to occur to these people that if everything around them is changing (movies, tv, games, comics, everything) that maybe THEY are the odd ones out. The corporations they moan about (and yes, there are things to criticize) are not going to do all this for a tiny minority of people, they’re doing it because that is the way the world is progressing and these clowns hate that they’re being left behind.
@Ninja Socialist: Some of them do notice that they’re not the majority. They just think that people are told “you will watch woke media and you will like it [implied threat]” and then the majority obeys like the good little sheep they are. So they’re brave souls standing up against ([{Them}]), whoever they think is “corrupting” everyone else: Deep State, Socialists, Satanists, Globohomo, Big Trans, Teh Jeeeeeewwz, or any or all of them at once.
Is that what “kosher” is all about? Bronze Age middle easterners discovered that meat could be preserved and kept safe to eat longer by salting it, didn’t have the germ theory of disease, and decided that God must be blessing anything touched by salt or something?
Interesting.