woke means “something i’m afraid of”, while communist means “something im afraid of because it might help people”. they are very similar, but there are subtle differences.
“woke”, used in a US political context (and not as the past tense of “wake”, as from sleep), doesn’t have any meaning in the first place. It’s made-up propaganda noise invented by the far-right. I refuse to parse any sentence containing the word, from the media, because that sentence is guaranteed to contain right-wing propaganda, if only obliquely. I certainly won’t utilize the word in any political way myself - that would mean that I accept as legitimate the propaganda machinations of the right-wing. And they are pure festering slime, so no.
Woke originated in black communities and has held a few meanings over the years. In a political sense, it just refers to having an awareness of social issues.
I will agree with you though that it is meaningless today. The conservative propaganda machine thoroughly destroyed it by conflating it with any and all culture war garbage.
I love interpreting they’re comments with the original definition because it’s so true. “Anti-woke” means they hate the idea of being aware of how the world works.
tl;dr: words like woke and labels like communist have lost all meaning
woke means “something i’m afraid of”, while communist means “something im afraid of because it might help people”. they are very similar, but there are subtle differences.
I feel that’s been true since at least the fall of the USSR.
“woke”, used in a US political context (and not as the past tense of “wake”, as from sleep), doesn’t have any meaning in the first place. It’s made-up propaganda noise invented by the far-right. I refuse to parse any sentence containing the word, from the media, because that sentence is guaranteed to contain right-wing propaganda, if only obliquely. I certainly won’t utilize the word in any political way myself - that would mean that I accept as legitimate the propaganda machinations of the right-wing. And they are pure festering slime, so no.
Woke originated in black communities and has held a few meanings over the years. In a political sense, it just refers to having an awareness of social issues.
I will agree with you though that it is meaningless today. The conservative propaganda machine thoroughly destroyed it by conflating it with any and all culture war garbage.
I love interpreting they’re comments with the original definition because it’s so true. “Anti-woke” means they hate the idea of being aware of how the world works.
childish gambino in his song “redbone” has a line in it that says “stay woke!”
I once saw a blog post comment accusing the author of being woke, and then later in the rant he said the author needed to wake up