Woke Ain't Woke

Listening to Stanley McChrystal talking about the multiple definitions of woke, and the difference between being an extremist who is reflexively accusing, versus being a person who is alert to the racial, sexual, and ethnic aspects of issues, it occurred to me that the woke have become insensitive to these nuances.  I should say some of the woke, and perhaps the noisiest of them. If you have made up your mind what you are going to find regardless of the data, you cannot be said to be sensitive, alert, or awake to those issues. You have in fact gone to sleep. The usual irony.

The idea immediately resonated with me, because we see this in so many other places. Schools move gradually to noneducation and even anti-education (see JMSmith at The Orthosphere for that one), Christian churches empower Pharisees, social science research strives to report only what it thinks it already knows, militaries become increasingly able to win battles but lose wars. It is Conquest's Third Law of Politics in action. (Isegoria's whole essay on that is fun.) The movement is being taken over by those who want something other than the original goals.

The woke have had a considerable victory on their initial goal, then.  We have an America where people do consider these nuances pretty regularly. Not everyone and not always, yet it is clearly part of American life now. That they have doubled down on the anger after having won at least a partial victory is revealing, suggesting that they had some other motive for entering into advocacy - virtue signalling, personal guilt, desire to punish, lack of constructive skills, something. We know that these are present in the group, along with some nobler motives, but it is pure guesswork when it comes to individuals, so I advise you not to fall into that trap.