I'm really happy to see how the #RMS situation played out. Not only did he get to stay on the board, but to see such an overwhelmingly stronger support for him then dissenters gives me hope.

Its not that I like or dislike RMS, but the argument against him was so beyond absurd that it is concerning that it got momentum at all. But of course to listen to the detractors you'd think he supported sexual assault or something. Lets just hope these sort of people who will lie and exaggerate a situation in some false sense of "social justice" never become the majority, there are too many people like that already and it is getting in the way of achieving any real lasting social justice when these people are crying wolf louder and louder every day.

#FSF

@freemo There is a deeper reason why the woke tend to believe absurdity and lie about people:The postmodern philosophy underlying their ideology is anti-realist
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For most of us, the concept of “truth” doesn’t seem terribly complicated until we try to define it. Truth is… what’s true—this is actually the first definition for “truth,” paraphrasing a bit, in some dictionaries. Truth is that which is in accordance with reality is another. Philosophers understand that “truth” is a more complicated topic, and people in different schools of thought have different understandings of what truth is. Some, for example, hold that truths must be in some way transcendent of all human contingencies—that which absolutely holds for all people in all times (sometimes in all possible universes). Scientists tend to use a more pragmatic understanding (sometimes called “provisional truths”) that could be rendered as statements about reality upon which we can bet and reliably win. Most people, including nearly all scientists and many philosophers, generally agree that for something to be a “truth” means its having something to do with accurately describing reality.
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The postmodern school of thought, which profoundly informs the Theory of Critical Social Justice, however, does not see truth this way. In fact, it is openly hostile and radically skeptical of these understandings of truth, which might generally be described as being “realist” in orientation because they see some correspondence between truth and reality. Postmodernism is generally anti-realist in orientation, meaning that it does not necessarily see a connection between “truths” and reality. Truths might happen to describe reality, say as the Earth and the Sun describing a dynamic system in which both travel along eliptical orbits around their common center of mass (which is inside the Sun), or not, say as the Sun going around the Earth. Under postmodern thought, both of these understandings are “true” in the cultures that consider them true. That is, postmodern thought sees truth as entirely a matter of human (social) contingencies. This is what the American postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty meant when he wrote, “We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there.”
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Truths, in postmodern Theory, are socially validated statements about reality, which means that they are, ultimately, products of not just the cultures that produce them but of power within those cultures. The French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault described this as power-knowledge, insisting that knowledge claims (truths) are ultimately only expressions of power. This sound strange, but the logic is accessible. What is considered true is decided by people by some social process of validation, the thinking goes, so “truth” is a social and political status conferred to certain ideas, which is then reinforced by their acceptance as true. Simultaneously, “truths” confer (political) power, as “knowledge is power” implies, because if it is accepted that a proposition is true, then people who accept it as such will behave accordingly. Thus, Foucault Theorized that “truths” are socially constructed by the systems of power (and the powerful within them) in society and then used to dominate, particularly in the attempt to maintain their power and exclusive status (see also, hegemony, episteme, and biopower).
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Most of this anti-realist, political understanding of truth (and knowledge) has been imported more or less intact into Critical Social Justice.
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In Critical Social Justice, “truth” is still considered culturally contingent, but because of the strong influence of identity politics at the core of the Critical Social Justice project (which could be said to use critical and postmodern Theories to do identity politics – see also intersectionality and positionality), the relevant cultures are ones rooted in various identities Theorized to be “minoritized.” Thus, “knowledge” and “truth” as we generally conceive of them are considered shorthand for “cis, straight, white, Western, male knowledge” or “cis, straight, white, Western, male truth” (see also, white science, white mathematics, and white empiricism, and also feminist empiricism), which are just one way of knowing. In fact, they’re a particularly bad one because these dominant groups not at all aware of their self-serving biases or limitations of their own knowing system (see also, internalized dominance and meritocracy).
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Thus, on the other hand, Critical Social Justice generally believes in cultural knowledges (e.g., racial knowledge) that have been marginalized by “dominant discourses,” which are deemed to be straight, white, male, able-bodied, thin, Western, Eurocentric, etc. These are believed to arise because different identity-based cultures have different ways of knowing (epistemologies) thus recognize different knowledges, and dominant ways of knowing (e.g., science, reason, logic, dialectic – see also, master’s tools) are believed to have utilized their greater power to unjustly exclude them from the range of “acceptable” ways of knowing and knowledges (see also, epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and epistemic violence).
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-truth/

@Vectorfield A lot of what you have written here is true [sic], but I feel it's also missing the point. One does not have to be anti-realist to see that culture massively influences what is considered true, and that its power over people comes in a big part of it being able to do so. You give the example of the Earth and the Sun, but you had to _very carefully_ word it to actually be correct. If you wrote "the Earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around", which would be considered true by a majority of members of our culture, it would have been disputable.

The insight that you seem to be dismissing (or maybe missing entirely) is that a vast majority of statements made by people are not technical enough to be strictly true. In the wiggle-room that creates cultures can express their power in various ways. SJWism claims that in political contexts the power that is expressed often leads to hurting minorities, a claim for which I would say they make quite a good case. And there is nothing anti-realist in that.

Of course there are idiots who misinterpret the above as "there is no truth" and become anti-realist, but the intellectual core of SJWism does not seem to be making that mistake.

I don't think that looking at the epistemology of the movement does a good job of explaining cancel mobs. If you want to do that taking a closer look at tribalism and outrage culture does a much better job, and also generalizes much better to non-SJWish cancellations. @freemo

@timorl @freemo I would like to inform you that ideas have consequences, the consequences of radical skepticism and subjectivism are many, to name just a few:
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In the Academy:
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So in the academy- the supposed engine of knowledge production, you have professors and researchers who no longer care about objective reality and dismiss the scientific methodology as tools for white-male-domination, who are only interested in pushing and indoctrinating a certain ideology, then scholarship is transformed into activism. Note that while social sciences and liberal arts are among the most infected departments, the STEM field are not immune. For example( quoting from Cynical Theories):
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「Since 2010, there have been an increasing number of proposals from within engineering, arguing for the use of Social Justice concepts in that profession. One 2015 paper proposes that an engineer should “demonstrate competence in the provision of sociotechnological services that are sensitive to dynamics of difference, power, and privilege among people and cultural groups.” In the book Engineering and Social Justice, published by Purdue University Press, we read many variations on the same theme and a worrisome recommendation: “getting beyond views of truth as objective and absolute is the most fundamental change we need in engineering education.” Meanwhile, arguments have been made that mathematics is intrinsically sexist and racist because of its focus on objectivity and proof and because of disparate outcomes in mathematics education across racial groups. One 2018 paper asserts,
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_Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced, I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge towards a way of being in the world that is guided by first principles—mathematx. This shift from thinking of mathematics as a noun to mathematx as a verb holds potential for honouring our connections with each other as human and other-than-human persons, for balancing problem solving with joy, and for maintaining critical bifocality at the local and global level.」_
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The result of that? The engine of knowledge production becomes broken
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In the Media:
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If the responsibility of a journalist is no longer to speak truth about the powerful and to inform the public faithfully of what is going on(since objective reality is unattainable and truth is whatever the powerful decide is true), but instead, to promote agendas that they deem are moral and righteous, then the media organizations will not spend time on actual news reporting, but instead, create narratives in the service of their agenda. Media organizations becomes propaganda organizations.
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The result of that? Distrust of the media, Alternative realities.
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In the broader society:
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A liberal society is able to exist because it has functional conflict-solving mechanisms that can peacefully mediate the frictions and disputes among different interest groups, which requires the willingness and ability to participate in civil conversations and reasoned debates. Underlying these interactions is the belief that through health and repectul conversations people are able to reach a common ground. But what happens if people think is impossible to have civil discussions because there is no objective standard upon which common ground is built and that people of different indentiy background are unable to communicate with each other due to their different lived experiences (e.g. Standard Point Theory, the belief that knowledge comes from the lived experience of different identity groups, who are differently positioned in society and thus see different aspects of it. ). If subjective feelings (determined by different lived experiences as members from different identity backgrounds) is all that matters, what if your feeling disagrees with mine? If peaceful conversation and negotiation is gone, hobbesian style zero-sum power play becomes the only option.
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I don't think the intellectual core of wokeism can be divided from how wokeism is put into practice, we can not solve the problem if we don't know its root causes, only when we understand what happened and why it happened, can we figure out what is going on and why it's going on, these knowledge then will guide us in dealing with the problem.

@Vectorfield @freemo I think you are still dismissing the main point – a lot of what is considered true in a society _is_ based on the values of the society rather than actual base reality, even in civilisations following the traditions of the Enlightenment.

I also don't think characterizing all the problems you mentioned as stemming from wokism is accurate. Academia doesn't seem to be doing much worse in the wake of SJWs, there are still good publications and shit ones, both in the directly wokish social sciences, as well as much less related fields. Even among the quotes you provided I can see some which might be parts of valid criticism, although it's hard to tell without context. (Others are obviously bullshit, but as I said there are always shit papers.) Most of the problems I have seen in academia are the result of the whole publish-or-perish culture, for which I like to blame Elsevier, 'cause I hate them, but I'm aware this is a systemic problem, with no trivial solution. I sincerely doubt removing wokishness would improve the workings of science in any measurable way.

I also think the main drivers of the change in the media are not related to wokishness, although in this case removing it might improve the situation slightly. It still wouldn't be a long term solution. I strongly suspect the changes for the worse were mostly resulting from the pressure to capture audiences, and thus lower the quality of what they produce, followed by various second-order effects driving reasonable people out of the profession. I am pretty sure this proccess started way before SJWs even existed, although it might have sped up around the same time they came into being, due to the internet becoming more popular (common cause for both).

Finally the broader society thing is closest to the truth, but this is also where you ignore the main message of SJWism. If the interactions in society were really based on a common ground being reached through reasoned conversation, then there would be no problem. The main point of SJWism is that these interactions claimed to be based on civil discussions, but are inherently biased in ways dictated by the culture. From this point of view, a very radical position would be that the breakdown of these discussions is a good thing. Most SJWism I saw does _not_, however, take that position (although the pop radical version certainly sometimes does). They mostly want to help people identify these biases as problems, and offer some partial solutions. I do agree that even this approach damages some institutions, some of which are not even that broken in the first place, but I think without other factors this would be healthy for the system as a whole. This post is getting long and it's late here, so I'm not gonna go into these other factors, sorry, ask me again if you want to know what I think.

I also agree that practice cannot be disconnected from theory in this case, but I also appreciate some of the practical results of wokism, so I guess we differ here.

@timorl @freemo I think you're getting me wrong, what I am not saying is that wokeism is the cause of all our problem today(I think it's the symptom of our problem, just like trump). What I am saying is that one of the intellectual roots of wokiesm, that is, radical skepticism and subjectivism, hostility towards reason and facts, is a very important contributing factor to the problems we have, including wokeism. Yes, I don't think by simply removing wokeism we are going to fix the problem in the academy, because the academy have lost their commitment to truth first, then they are captured by these wokeish idea second. Yes, I don't think getting rid of wokeism in the media would be the long term solution, for as long as the reporters and columnists have no interest of telling the truth as it is, it's just a matter of time before they take on an another narrative, probably more wild and abusrd. And while the environment for public discussion can be improved for a while if wokeism is gone, It's still impossible to build the common ground if people continues to believe that there is no object reality that preceds our emotions, feelings, cultural influences, that you have your reality, and I have mine. If people fail to build their consensus on the very basics of the physical and social world, there is no way they can move forward, and they can't deal with the problems facing their civilization.

@Vectorfield @freemo Then I think our main disagreement is how much wokism is hostile towards facts. I think there is a clear intellectual subcurrent within the movement that is, but it's also unfair to describe the whole thing as hostile to reason. At its core, wokism is pointing out a widespread bias in patterns of thinking and its political implications. From this perspective it's even part of the greater project to correct our biases, although it's more of a political endeavour, rather than an intellectual one. It clearly could be a much better movement, mostly if the anti-realist subcurrent was weaker, but I believe that in the end it is making the world a better place in more ways than it is damaging it.

@timorl @freemo It's one thing is to make a claim based on statistics and facts about widespread bias that may have affected our judgement. It's quite another to assume that just because one belong to a specific identity category, he is inherently biased, or racist, misogynistic, etc, which is exactly what the woke ideology thinks.
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Quoting from Delgado and Stefancic,
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_What do critical race theorists believe? Probably not every member would subscribe to every tenet set out in this book, but many would agree on the following propositions. First, that racism is ordinary, not aberrational—“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country. Second, most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material. The first feature, ordinariness, means that racism is difficult to cure or address. … The second feature, sometimes called “interest convergence” or material determinism, adds a further dimension. Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it._
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(Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (third edition) by Critical Race Theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. )
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Quoting from Robin J. DiAngelo,
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_**Being good or bad is not relevant.** Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture. All of us are socialized into the system of racism. Racism cannot be avoided. **Whites have blind spots on racism**, and I have blind spots on racism. Racism is complex, and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback. **Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. Bias is implicit and unconscious.**_
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(Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism)
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And
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_One of the key contributions of critical theorists concerns the production of knowledge. Given that the transmission of knowledge is an integral activity in schools, critical scholars in the field of education have been especially concerned with how knowledge is produced. These scholars argue that a key element of social injustice involves the claim that particular knowledge is objective, neutral, and universal. **An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that objectivity is desirable or even possible.** The term used to describe this way of thinking about knowledge is that knowledge is socially constructed. When we refer to knowledge as socially constructed we mean that knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it._
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(Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, second edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2017, p. 53.)
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And
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_“we do not intend to inspire guilt or assign blame… But each of us does have a choice about whether we are going to work to interrupt and dismantle these systems [of injustice] or support their existence by ignoring them. **There is no neutral ground**; to choose not to act against injustice is to choose to allow it.”_ (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. xxiv)
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_“Critical theory **challenges the claim that any knowledge is neutral or objective**, and outside of humanly constructed meanings and interests.”_ (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 187)
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_“Critical social justice perspectives:_
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_**There is no neutral text**; all texts represent a particular perspective_
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_**All texts are embedded with ideology**; the ideology embedded in most mainstream texts functions to reproduce historical relations of unequal power._
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_Texts that appeal to a wide audience usually do so because they **reinforce dominant narratives and serve dominant interests**”_ (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education) (p .210)
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_“Our analysis of social justice is based on a school of thought know as Critical Theory. Critical Theory refers to a body of scholarship that examines how society works, and is a tradition that emerged in the early part of the 20th century from a group of scholars at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany”_ (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 25)
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_“Efforts among scholars to understand how society works weren’t limited to the Frankfurt School; French philosophers (notably Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Lacan) were also grappling with similar questions… This work merges in the North American context of the 1960s with antiwar, feminist, gay rights, Black power, Indigenous peoples, The Chicano Movement, disability rights, and other movements for social justice”_
(Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 26)