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#15276059
Are you sure?

Educational policies touted by progressives not only didn't improve but seem to have widened the gaps in math attainment among San Francisco students:

Education Next wrote:Are test score gaps narrowing?

Contrary to the district’s spin, the trend towards greater equity is not headed in the right direction. Gaps are widening. Perhaps this trend is statewide and not just a SFUSD phenomenon.

Table 3 supplies the gap calculations from the data above in Table 1, along with a comparison to statewide trends. For example, at the state level, the eleventh-grade Black-White gap grew by 11 points—from 94 to 105—while in SFUSD, the gap expanded by 15 points (from 143 to 158). The Hispanic-White gap provides a more dramatic contrast. The state level gap grew by only 5 points, but in San Francisco, it expanded by a whopping 31 points. Glancing back at Table 2 again will provide context. The 31-point expansion is larger than the 20-point difference in mean scores for Smarter Balanced’s eighth-grade and high school assessments. That’s a big change.

With both gaps, SFUSD evidenced greater inequities than state averages in 2015, and that relative underperformance worsened by 2019. The district’s anti-tracking public relations campaign, by focusing on metrics such as grades and course enrollments, diverts attention from the harsh reality that SFUSD is headed in the wrong direction on equity.


If one looks beyond the US, one can also find aberrations - far worse than most one can see here in the US - of wokes being actively stupid in the pursuit of their goals.
#15276072
Failed policies to address the gaps, which ended up widening them, are indeed a legacy of the woke in San Francisco (among many, many other mistakes).

Or what, if the woke do a bad job running a city they shouldn't be held accountable because city already had problems? The woke don't just denounce inequality, they also push for solutions for it which is why they are elected. Indeed, it's why they are in politics to begin with.
#15276097
Pants-of-dog wrote:Yes, people have obviously convinced themselves of progressive guilt, despite the lack of evidence.

Desantis is quite successful when appealing to the credulity of those who wish to blame "woke".

But why is he quite successful when he does that, @Pants-of-dog? This is the issue we are trying to address.
#15276102
Potemkin wrote:But why is he quite successful when he does that, @Pants-of-dog? This is the issue we are trying to address.


For Desantis, the motives are obvious. More power, more money.

For those who end up believing Desantis enough to give tacit consent to his ploys, it seems to be various different reasons.

One factor I think I may have noticed is that there is a willingness to allow these attacks on groups identified as the Other if and when centrists and liberals feel they would profit or would have their current privileges solidified. In this case, it is simply protecting class interests.

In terms of US history in particular, we can look at the economic aspects. Desantis knows he can target trans people and non-whites because trans people and non-whites do not have the economic clout to threaten him, since both of these groups are disproportionately working class or even poorer.

Solidifying racism against Black people would also have economic benefits for the rich, since it would perpetuate the racism that supports and reinforces the US class system, which uses race as the metric for defining which class people belong to. Again, pretty simple class interests.

There is also probably some sort of psychological mechanism as well whereby Desantis's supporters need some sort of reason or excuse to blame the victims of these civil rights violations for these civil rights violations in order to assuage their guilt. But I find musing about the psychological flaws of others to be an unverifiable exercise in vanity.
#15276103
Pants-of-dog wrote:For Desantis, the motives are obvious. More power, more money.

For those who end up believing Desantis enough to give tacit consent to his ploys, it seems to be various different reasons.

One factor I think I may have noticed is that there is a willingness to allow these attacks on groups identified as the Other if and when centrists and liberals feel they would profit or would have their current privileges solidified. In this case, it is simply protecting class interests.

In terms of US history in particular, we can look at the economic aspects. Desantis knows he can target trans people and non-whites because trans people and non-whites do not have the economic clout to threaten him, since both of these groups are disproportionately working class or even poorer.

Solidifying racism against Black people would also have economic benefits for the rich, since it would perpetuate the racism that supports and reinforces the US class system, which uses race as the metric for defining which class people belong to. Again, pretty simple class interests.

There is also probably some sort of psychological mechanism as well whereby Desantis's supporters need some sort of reason or excuse to blame the victims of these civil rights violations for these civil rights violations in order to assuage their guilt. But I find musing about the psychological flaws of others to be an unverifiable exercise in vanity.

With respect, @Pants-of-dog, I think you’re missing the point. You have described the motivations of DeSantis and his support base. As you say, these motivations are obvious. The question is not what motivates DeSantis, because a few seconds’ thought will tell you that, but why he is successful in boosting his chances in the next Presidential election by targeting the Woke movement. @wat0n’s opinion is that strategic miscalculations on the part of the Woke movement have led them to play into his hands. And I’m finding it difficult not to agree with him. Just because your cause is just and noble doesn’t mean that you don’t have to think like a chess player when confronted with opponents like DeSantis. As I said, DeSantis is smart, opportunistic and self-aware, and he thinks like a chess player, always looking several moves ahead, always planting traps for an unwary opponent to fall into, always thinking ahead with a long-term goal. To beat guys like him, we need to do the same. We need to be less like Freddy Corleone and more like Michael Corleone. After all, wasn’t this the lesson that Lenin taught us? This is the whole point of this discussion.
#15276105
@Potemkin

There is no woke movement. There is a movement for trans equality. There is another one for addressing police slayings of black people. There is another one for the free exchange of ideas in classrooms. But there is no chess player on the side of the woke because the woke are not a single team that can be moved with the strategy and tactics of a mind controlling it all.

So while it is true that Desantis is good at using this “controversy” for his benefit, it is large portions of his audience that he is outwitting rather than some opponent.
#15276107
Potemkin wrote:With respect, @Pants-of-dog, I think you’re missing the point. You have described the motivations of DeSantis and his support base. As you say, these motivations are obvious. The question is not what motivates DeSantis, because a few seconds’ thought will tell you that, but why he is successful in boosting his chances in the next Presidential election by targeting the Woke movement. @wat0n’s opinion is that strategic miscalculations on the part of the Woke movement have led them to play into his hands. And I’m finding it difficult not to agree with him. Just because your cause is just and noble doesn’t mean that you don’t have to think like a chess player when confronted with opponents like DeSantis. As I said, DeSantis is smart, opportunistic and self-aware, and he thinks like a chess player, always looking several moves ahead, always planting traps for an unwary opponent to fall into, always thinking ahead with a long-term goal. To beat guys like him, we need to do the same. We need to be less like Freddy Corleone and more like Michael Corleone. After all, wasn’t this the lesson that Lenin taught us? This is the whole point of this discussion.


I would add Trump himself also plays the same game.

Now that he's being matched within the GOP, he's now changing his tune possibly because his anti-woke credentials are already firmly established so he's trying to see if he can get some GOP moderates to win the primary:



Furthermore, when centrists and even some leftists are turning against wokes then the issue isn't just that they annoy right wingers.
#15276108
Pants-of-dog wrote:@Potemkin

There is no woke movement. There is a movement for trans equality. There is another one for addressing police slayings of black people. There is another one for the free exchange of ideas in classrooms. But there is no chess player on the side of the woke because the woke are not a single team that can be moved with the strategy and tactics of a mind controlling it all.

So while it is true that Desantis is good at using this “controversy” for his benefit, it is large portions of his audience that he is outwitting rather than some opponent.

I grant you that there is no Lenin figure in the Woke movement, and nor could there be. They don’t even have a Scargill figure. Lol. But the Woke activists, both individually and collectively, seem to be constitutionally incapable of avoiding elementary blunders and strategic miscalculations. If they achieve some small local success, they seem to become giddy with excitement, and push their advantage too far. And if they suffer some local setback, they seem to be plunged into the depths of defeatism and despair. This makes them seem to their opponents to be simultaneously fiendishly powerful and contemptibly weak - in other words, the perfect material for the villains of a conspiracy theory.

All of the above, it seems to me, just underlines how right Lenin was to insist on a centralised and disciplined party as the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle. Otherwise, we risk being defeated in detail by the reactionaries. Which has happened before, again and again and again….
#15276109
@Potemkin

Desantis has no need to parade woke activists in front of the crowd in order to use them as villains. In fact, he does better when woke is deliberately kept vague. His supporters can then provide their own villains.

Nor does he even need to actually defeat them. Many of his laws have been successfully challenged in court (costing taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees by now), but he can be defeated and still present himself as the defender against this ill defined threat.
#15276115
Pants-of-dog wrote:@Potemkin

Desantis has no need to parade woke activists in front of the crowd in order to use them as villains. In fact, he does better when woke is deliberately kept vague. His supporters can then provide their own villains.

Nor does he even need to actually defeat them. Many of his laws have been successfully challenged in court (costing taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees by now), but he can be defeated and still present himself as the defender against this ill defined threat.

DeSantis may well be merely tilting against windmills like Don Quixote, but most politicians do that - they know that their support base is as crack-brained as the man of La Mancha, and have little choice but to humour their lunacy if they want to be elected to high office, which they do. But why make it easy for him by being crack-brained ourselves?
#15276119
When you ignore the majority in favour of the minority, and then they get annoyed as vote for idiots to change things, then you have only yourself to blame.

A lot of people are getting really annoyed at the idea that all white men are racist misogynists, according to the Woke mind-virus, and that being masculine is seen as toxic. A lot of people are getting pissed off that being a woman is simply someone saying that they are one, and ignoring biology, in favour of a Trans-ideology.

As with most things, there is such a thing as a happy medium or middle ground that most people can agree to. When the Pendulum of Progress swings too far, too fast, there is an effort to bring it back the other way. People like DeSantis take advantage of this, and make Bills(they are not laws, yet) that on the surface look reasonable, but can be taken to extremes as much as the ideology they seek to contain.
#15276120
Potemkin wrote:DeSantis may well be merely tilting against windmills like Don Quixote, but most politicians do that - they know that their support base is as crack-brained as the man of La Mancha, and have little choice but to humour their lunacy if they want to be elected to high office, which they do. But why make it easy for him by being crack-brained ourselves?


Yes, and there probably are some people targeted by Desantis who have acted without strategy or tactics. It is difficult to easily recall an example.

Looking at it in those terms, CRT scholars were simply teaching obscure grad level law classes when they were all of a sudden demonized and turned into scapegoats. There seems to be no clear example of any poor behaviour on their part that opened the door to Desantis’s stunts.
#15276211
Pants-of-dog wrote:What does “woke” mean?

In my experience, it is a pejorative used to dismiss an idea. It also seems to imply that the issue is not really a problem, but is only seen as a problem by progressive people who love being offended.

Now, this is obviously not the way Black people in the USA have been using this term for almost a century. But since that particular definition is not confusing, I am ignoring it except as an example of how terms originated by Black people in the USA are often twisted when accepted by “mainstream culture”.

And now it has morphed into a sort of rallying cry for the right. Whoever can accuse the woke mob of being the bad guys will be able to turn this into votes and power.

I consider the use of the term " woke" , by the hardline right , to be an example of a loaded buzzword. Such thought terminating cliches are characteristic of the tactics of cult mind control.
With emotionally charged buzzwords and euphemisms, renamings, chants, mantras, and even hashtags, pernicious gurus are able to instill ideology, establish an “us” and a “them,” justify questionable behavior, inspire fear, gaslight followers into questioning their own reality… essentially everything a cult needs to do in order to gain and maintain power. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/06/10515566/cult-language-cultish-amanda-montell
“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” https://freedomofmind.com/use-of-words-loaded-language-and-thought-control-of-believers/
@Potemkin , and @Tainari88 , while I am not myself a Latter-Day Saint / Mormon , I have read The Book of Mormon, largely motivated by the Republican presidential nominee at the time, Mitt Romney, being one. I had wanted to see what influence it might have upon his political sentiments, and much to my surprise, I found the politics of the BoM to be to the left of Harry Reid even. https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=51308137&itype=CMSID , https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/4/23/1204156/-I-m-a-Mormon-liberal-and-here-s-why
Fasces wrote:Who's trying to 'cancel' Renaissance art? :eh:

@Fasces This happened down at a Florida charter school. The principal was even fired in the process. I first heard of this case, which reached international headlines, from this video.
#15276214
Godstud wrote:When you ignore the majority in favour of the minority, and then they get annoyed as vote for idiots to change things, then you have only yourself to blame.

A lot of people are getting really annoyed at the idea that all white men are racist misogynists, according to the Woke mind-virus, and that being masculine is seen as toxic. A lot of people are getting pissed off that being a woman is simply someone saying that they are one, and ignoring biology, in favour of a Trans-ideology.

As with most things, there is such a thing as a happy medium or middle ground that most people can agree to. When the Pendulum of Progress swings too far, too fast, there is an effort to bring it back the other way. People like DeSantis take advantage of this, and make Bills(they are not laws, yet) that on the surface look reasonable, but can be taken to extremes as much as the ideology they seek to contain.

Absolutely.

What's the saying?...."People will vote for fascists if only a fascist will make the changes people desire".

Everyone is so PC these days that they're afraid to call a spade a spade and do the things that need to be done because the woke wingnuts will try to cancel them if they don't tow the line. Enforcing border/immigration laws = "omg you're a racist". People with dicks shouldn't compete in sports against biological women = "omg you're a transphobe".
#15276220
Unthinking Majority wrote:..."People will vote for fascists if only a fascist will make the changes people desire".


Whoever said that seems happy to live in a society where people desire what fascists can give them.

If the alternative to being happy with fascism means being called “woke” and being vilified, then so be it.
#15276221
Pants-of-dog wrote:Again, not a single example of wokeness creating a negative impact has been provided.

It is a manufactured controversy.

And the fact that so many have fallen for it is not surprising.

Drag queens reading to kids is offensive to me and I am a gay man.

This kind of "trend-following" that calls itself part of the Woke movement... does harm to the gay community by suggesting that tolerance and acceptance of homosexuals... leads to drag queens reading to children all over the Western hemisphere at the same time and in all news sources.

Likewise, cancelling guest speakers because of their non-Wokeness, leads to more ignorance, and denies students the chance to confront these narratives with logic. Cancel-culture is like meeting an idea in the OKAY corral in order to shoot it because "this town ain't big enough for me and this-here idea varmint!"

Woke culture shows how easy it is for the 1% to degrade our social capital and reduce the social conversation to silliness. The same thing happened to Weimar Germany - its healthy left-wing culture was reduced to garbage like this so that it was easy to hate.
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