English commentators have been extremely exercised about 'wokeness' recently, to the extent of setting up a news TV channel to push back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_News
Although positioned as a recent development, in reality this is absolutely nothing remotely new. The same class of commentators have been railing against 'PC gone mad' for decades. It's the same mix of fear of change and chinese-whispered 'you couldn't make it up' urban legends e.g. Baa Baa Green Sheep and Banning Christmas.
I have watched a bit of GB News, it was fairly unremarkable.
I have seen a strong response to them by a group "Stop Funding Hate" who have put pressure on advertisers to boycott the channel.
Given how little time the channel has been running, and that it includes former BBC presenters such as Andrew Neil, I find this fairly censorious.
If they abide by the rules by Ofcom, where they are required to maintain "due impartiality", I don't mind if people want to talk and investigate what is important to them.
I don't mind either, it's fairly tame stuff. But ultimately it's yet another outlet banging on about 'wokeness', despite the fact they say there is too much of that. In fact I suspect they'll have their own brand of woke and cancel culture. They'll boycott Ikea for pulling their ads, and cancel people who don't wear poppies.
You appear to be finding GBN guilty of something they:
a. Haven't done
b. Are strongly against
... on the belief that wokeness and cancel culture is nothing beyond generic "fear of change", despite the fact that they were on air less than 72 hours before a malicious radical left organization started trying to destroy them completely by lying to their advertisers. IKEA has by the way now recognized that they were lied to.
That seems like a pretty large mis-understanding of the situation. When people rail against wokeness and cancel culture, they mean things like this.
They are being pressured to withdraw their custom, based on, arguably, unfounded accusations of GB News spreading hate. A viewpoint that many don't share.
One of the advertisers, COOP, recognise this is an issue, so they have a policy to "Not seek to affect the editorial independence of publications or channels".
They declined to withdraw their custom, as they knew to do so would be censorious.
Other companies might find it expedient by acting as censors in the short term, but others, like COOP, seem to realise it's unwise to withdraw commercial contracts under pressure from an activist group campaigning against alleged speech that they don't agree with.
"Woke" has become an annoying catchphrase. However, the underlying phenomenon is all too real, as a glance at https://www.thefire.org, which is a non-partisan organization, will show you. I've certainly seen plenty of creepy, authoritarian speech-policing.
Fyi, the founders of GB news are both Americans. Its an American import. I am sure there is a market for it sadly. But don't lump that bs on us English please :)
I think its important to recognise that all these groups, from GB news to the brexit campaign are NOT ground swells of public opinion. They're moneied interests, often foreign, using cash to change politics and bypass democracy...
>>brexit campaign are NOT ground swells of public opinion
There was a referendum recently that proved you wrong. Perhaps reflecting on why the EU was so unpopular would be more productive than blaming fictional foreign interests and low information voters.
Actually, it makes my point: the whole Leave campaign was foreign funded, filled with lies and controlled by rich right wing interests. And it worked.
Decades of fake news about the bendiness of bananas, pushed by loss making media made enormous numbers of people honestly believe the EU wanted to eat their babies...
>And yet it had the whole mechanism of a right wing government working against it.
No it didn't. The only reason the vote was called was because the majority of that government demanded it. The current Conservative PM campaigned for it. There are a long list of senior tory party members who pushed it, dozens of former ministers etc.
>So to summarise your position
Please don't strawman my position for me.
Fyi, I have no problem admitting Bojo won fair and square despite thinking he's a disgrace.
> No it didn't. The only reason the vote was called was because the majority of that government demanded it. The current Conservative PM campaigned for it. There are a long list of senior tory party members who pushed it, dozens of former ministers etc.
I just wanted to butt in about this point. The Lib Dems at the time also wanted a referendum on EU membership if they won, the theory being that if the Lib Dems won, it would signal that a referendum would pass remain very easily and would give a strong mandate to the pro-Europe types for further integration.
Over the last 60 years the Tories and Labour have had a wide range of views on Europe, and with euroscepticism and europhilism and euroantipathy present in both of them in meaningful measures. Certainly some of the tories in government at the time were eurosceptics and wanted the vote because voting out was the eurosceptic wet dream(which came to pass). I don't know David Cameron personally but my impression of him is that on balance he was probably closer to Nick Clegg on Europe than Bojo, else he wouldn't have left so immediately after the vote. I think like Democrats who were rooting for Trump to be the Republican nominee, he was blissfully overconfident in the result and asked a question he really didn't want the actual answer to.
>>No it didn't. The only reason the vote was called was because the majority of that government demanded it. The current Conservative PM campaigned for it. There are a long list of senior tory party members who pushed it, dozens of former ministers etc.
Everyone on the right (includong the PM) was free to campaign and vote as they liked. Some were Remain, many leave. Both sides were equally funded by the state.
I'm not sure how that equates to "the whole mechanism of a right wing government working against it".
If that were the case why call the vote? Why fund leave at all? Why not make some effort to dispel the fake news and foreign interference?
The weird need to pretend this was an underdog/rebel/persecuted minority? The same happened with trump supporters. What's the deal here?
That's obviously untrue, unless you think the UK Government sent out a leaflet recommending Leave as well as Remain?
>> The weird need to pretend this was an underdog/rebel/persecuted minority
I wouldn't say persecuted and obviously as it turned out a majority as they won the referendum, but they can certainly be classed as the underdog when you have the government of the day, the BBC, big business, the Bank of England all against Leave.
In all your comments you have been confidently wrong. Maybe take a few minutes and go back to the facts?
And again you've made the disproven claim that the government were against brexit. Only now the BBC, big business, BoE and Big foot were all also against you?
I don't get this. The more facts contradict your claim, the more you double down.
So what's really going on here? Is brexit really just a giant troll brigade? Because it clearly isn't about reality...
The page you linked to actually contradicts what you said. Both campaigns got £7m, but the government spent an additional £9m on it's own pro-remain leaflet titled "Why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK."
From the webpage you showed: "The government is spending an estimated £9 million sending pro-Remain leaflets to all UK households. This is on top of what the official campaign groups on either side of the debate will get in public money, which includes a free mailout."
£7m+£9m is more than £7m.
>> And again you've made the disproven claim that the government were against brexit.
Quoting from the leaflet PUBLISHED BY THE GOVERNMENT:
"The Government believes the UK should remain in the EU. This leaflet sets out the facts, and explains why the Government believes a vote to remain in the EU is in the best interests of the people of the UK."
>> I don't get this. The more facts contradict your claim, the more you double down.
You are completely wrong, to the extent of sounding like you're living in a parallel universe. The UK government was so strongly against Brexit at the time that not only was it formally and officially committed to the campaign to remain but the moment it became clear the government had lost, the Prime Minister and Chancellor both resigned. This is all a matter of incredibly well documented public record.
As it happened, the foreign interest were properly documented in the parliamentary "The Russia Report" of 2020 (and not only). I don't think we can ignore any of this in good faith.
yet Boris is selling seats in the House of Lords to Russians and they tried to stop the release of the report. So to assume they didnt have a hand in editing the findings is perhaps putting too much faith in the UK government. And right now, any, is too much.
The wilful cognitive dissonance on the part of the British establishment, and "sunlit uplands" types is remarkable.
Demanding statues remain up so "history is not forgotten", then making moves to ban the discussion of unfavourable history, such as the legacy of empire and such, Churchill's policies during the Bengal famine being the classic example.
The entire ideology is so inconsistent that it can only seem like it might work if you wilfully ignore vast swathes of evidence.
Britain’s imperial past and present provide a perfectly adequate explanation for the UK’s relative prosperity. It seems entirely understandable that proponents of the ideology only want some of the history to be remembered.
Otherwise, too many voters might get the idea that the UK is some kind of dishonest, nasty little island nation built on, and still benefiting from, slavery and imperialism. It’s probably a bit harder to remain in power with a program of advancing domestic inequality to the descendants of the beneficiaries of that imperialism.
I don’t think that this is a problem that just the UK has – many industrial imperial powers have the problem of how to contextualise their relative wealth. Once you start asking if it is right for the beneficiaries of those policies to have kept their wealth, solutions like serious wealth redistribution start to get proposed. It’s just that in the UK, there is a tendency for reactionaries to look almost comical to even their deepest opponents.
Race is a relatively new dimension in this conversation, largely imported from the USA. Conventionally, English society is divided by class, not race. The roots of class are in land ownership. And how far back must we unwind that to achieve equity?
> Race is a relatively new dimension in this conversation, largely imported from the USA. Conventionally, English society is divided by class, not race.
Absolutely, and the class structure in the UK is very still prevalent and cohesive. I also add that the beneficiaries of the slave trade and imperialism were predominantly one class, with a few crumbs dropped.
In the context of the comment and this article, imperialism and slavery are central. I think you understand why there is a backlash against any kind of redress for slavery, you only have to consider what is at stake: it’s not such a great leap from tackling race inequities to tackling class inequities – and didn’t those ideas get buried already?
I also believe this is true in the US, and why there is similar reaction to race inequities being raised: it’s no coincidence civil the rights movement and socialist movements were interlinked. In the US, the lives of poor white people don’t matter so much, either; that is not to deny that there is not and has not been a substantial race element too.
There is this idea that the US is a classless society, but it still has a class of wage labourers and a class of bourgeois – along with the inevitable class that mediate between the two but are actually the former. It looks remarkably like the UK class system today, with the key difference being the aristocratic remnants in the UK.
> The roots of class are in land ownership. And how far back must we unwind that to achieve equity?
Land ownership, inheritance and distribution are fascinating topics, especially when considering equity on a global scale and how the utility of natural resources has changed.
Land reform in the UK was itself a substantial political theme throughout the 20th century, and we still see elements of it resurface in debates on housing policy and environment, even if the blatant inequities are conveniently ignored.
I think the practicalities of the unwinding are actually central to the key point of all this: what do we do about it?
Litigating history to try to work out who is benefiting from a historical injustice is almost infinitely complex.
Race and class and other identity categories have extremely fuzzy edges. Everyone will have a bad actor somewhere in their group. Nobody is pure victim or pure oppressor.
> I think the practicalities of the unwinding are actually central to the key point of all this: what do we do about it?
I don’t think you can unwind – you can create a more unfair or less unfair society, but even how you measure fair is to be debated in a context where money buys both influence and reach.
It’s not just the class- or race-inequities – it’s the whole ideology: the alternative explanations, the justifications and what look like churches surrounding it.
> Litigating history to try to work out who is benefiting from a historical injustice is almost infinitely complex.
It’s also very backward-focused, and very subject to interpretation. Not to mention it is taking place in a world where the publishers tend to be owned by members of the class that stands to lose the most.
It’s also not just a historical injustice: it is perpetuated and maintained to this day. Some would argue that the maintenance of such statues is offensive. To me, statues have always marked people who were important to the state – and slave traders and colonisers were. A friend once remarked that there was seldom a statue that didn’t deserve all the abuse it got from birds.
> Race and class and other identity categories have extremely fuzzy edges. Everyone will have a bad actor somewhere in their group. Nobody is pure victim or pure oppressor.
Absolutely – in fact they’re largely abstract when you factor in phenomena like albinism and environmental changes for race alone, without even getting into "scientific" racism. Defining class results in substantial reports that have a few interesting observations, but don’t really provide a definite result.
I have almost certainly directly benefited from the imperialism. I don’t think it agrees with my values, but I don’t really see an alternative beyond a sort of tolerated hypocrisy.
> Britain’s imperial past and present provide a perfectly adequate explanation for the UK’s relative prosperity.
Citation needed. Slavery does not explain the industrial revolution. In fact, expensive labour, plus cheap coal, does a better job. My citation: Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective.
GDP seems a flawed metric when discussing plunder: of course country A forcing country B to mine or farm will increase the GDP of country B.
I believe it requires either supremacism, inconsistency or hypocrisy to argue that land ownership at home should be sacrosanct whilst the rest of the world is fair game.
I’m actually not arguing for one thing or another, but I do have a side. I’m fine with overt supremacism or racism, though both run counter to my values.
As if having an “imperial past” is merely the result of some unenlightened policy decisions, rather then the product of endeavour, resilience, ingenuity and cultural brilliance.
I actually consider this the most honest critical reply, even if it runs counter to my values – so I upvoted it.
I don’t believe that the policies were unenlightened, or accidental, or coincidental. I think they were the result of immense effort and cunning, driven by a different set of values that are intrinsic to and still maintained by a certain class today. I believe they originated in the class system as a way to justify the privilege, and I don’t think they ever went away.
The level of ingenuity to pull off what was done, and then to create an ideology and a set of scriptures to justify and entrench it for centuries is absolutely fascinating at both a historical and anthropological level. It’s also a in a context of immense human suffering and loss of life that it cannot be separated from.
I find the woke culture an almost comical clash between the overt and implicit values of globalism and neoliberalism. I view it with a fascination, and it’s not from some position of superiority. I’d like to believe in the ideology, because I think I’d be so much happier, but I’ve always asked too many questions. Again, I consider the possibility I’m intellectually incapable of understanding some fundamental truth. The supremacist angle – not meant as a pejorative – seems the closest I can get to it, but I find that nearly all paths rely on post hoc ergo propter hoc, and it again puts me in a position of being better than others. And yet, fundamentally, do we all not have a sense of superiority: does our own individual survival not come ahead of another’s – outside of kin?
I don’t believe we are qualified to know the impact of imperialism without knowing what the world would have looked like without. From a cybernetic point of view, imperialism appears as though it can only have reduced the variety of the planet, and seems to me a negative – but this is assuming that industrialisation would have happened by another means. Imperialism also arose in multiple forms, leading me to believe it was inevitable, and I suspect other imperialist powers may have seized the opportunities left behind – but this seems a weak justification for what I consider amoral behaviour.
I wonder, however: if the asymmetry were reversed would maintain your position? Were you on the receiving end of might-is-right imperialism, would it still be a position you would hold? Kudos if so, but it’s not for me.
I realise that I was fortunate to be born into an imperialist country, and to be able to be an immigrant in another imperialist country. I drive a car. I can live with that and not agree with the things that ostensibly led to what I benefit from, and put me in the position of privilege to be able to even think about these things.
The same characteristics that animate imperialists to commit unjust acts, namely aggression, cruelty, apathy, racism, seem to be in good supply amongst all peoples of the world. The characteristics that led to Britain’s rich cultural heritage must therefore be something else. At any rate, the National Trust should be celebrating and preserving this heritage - the stately homes, estates, cathedrals, bridges, galleries, art works, statues, monuments, libraries, manuscripts, etc - for the people of Britain (and the world) to enjoy, rather than neglecting and denigrating it in favour of guilt-mongering.
OT but their aggressive pursuing of revenue gets my back up. They have cash assets somewhere in the region of £1b and yet they continue to squeeze every last drop out of those visiting the properties they were gifted to look after on behalf of the nation.
They have recently installed ticket machines at a isolated beach car park near me, the car park and beach has no facilities, not even a dog poo bin!
I let my membership lapse several years ago and have no intention of renewing it.
> What’s wrong with woke? The word has been around a lot longer than you might think. An event in Harlem in the 1920’s, which ran from 5.00pm to 5.00am was called The Stay Woke Ball, the meaning simply to stay awake.
Indeed, I woke up this morning...
That usage is surely far older than the '20s and I doubt that would surprise anyone.
But I don't think that is the usage in 'Stay Woke Ball': Wiktionary lists obsolete usage of 'wake' as 'To sit up late for festive purposes; to hold a night revel'; to me 'stay woke' there sounds like 'stay sat down' and similar, which is dialectal (British, at least) English for essentially the same as 'stay sitting down'.
I think you are misunderstanding 'To sit up late...'. This doesn't mean literally to sit, it means to stay up late, regardless of the position in which you do this. Very few revels(parties) would include sitting as the main attraction. So in this case the stay woke ball, being held overnight would indeed mean stay awake for the night, when you would otherwise be sleeping.
No, actually I completely glossed over the 'sit up' part of that definition. My choice of 'stay sat down' as an example was a complete coincidence.
What I meant was just that it's another example of seemingly ungrammatical 'stay <verb in simple past>', but one that's in reasonably common modern usage, and thus that the meaning of 'woke' in 'the stay woke ball' is in the 'to stay up revelling' usage, not (merely, obviously it's necessary) 'wake up and stay in that state' usage.
You're talking about the word's usage as a verb (the past tense of "wake", ie "I woke this morning"), the article mentions its usage as an adjective ("to be woke").
The quoted example is from the article, and it gives the meaning as 'to stay awake', i.e. verb.
I realise the section heading is talking about the very modern adjectival slang usage - I just disagree that the 'older than you might think' argument that follows is correct, or that if so it has any value (since even the article seems to acknowledge its a different usage to the modern slang).
> The quoted example is from the article, and it gives the meaning as 'to stay awake', i.e. verb.
Yes, but it uses it in "stay woke" not "I woke this morning".
> I just disagree that the 'older than you might think' argument that follows is correct, or that if so it has any value (since even the article seems to acknowledge its a different usage to the modern slang).
I agree, it's not the modern usage as it doesn't have the same meaning, but I think the article means that its usage as an adjective is old, not that the usage with its current meaning is old. Which I guess makes it very debatable if "the word" has been around for that long.
Well, my argument was that it wasn't an adjective, but the same dialectal form as 'stay sat', which I hadn't thought of as being an adjectival usage of 'sat'.
It seems you're right though, it's a 'predicative' adjective, as in 'he is sat over there' or 'he is awake'.
Anyway, Wiktionary's first entry for it is literal adjectival usage, in the 'African-American vernacular, or slang', which assuming correct would make for a more compelling (to me anyway) 'older than you might think' argument, if it presumably just crossed over from that into the figurative usage, and only that took off more broadly.
I think here the concept of Wokeness has been somewhat muddled and hijacked of late, and this has created/allowed a bit of push back against the perception of what woke is becoming.
With regard to previous owners of some national trust properties having committed deeds we are no longer comfortable with. I know. I don’t need that pushed down my throat when I’m trying to enjoy a nice family day out in a pretty place. I see no purpose to that. I think most people feel the same.
If I understood the article correctly, there was a report on past slavery and colonialism links to NT properties published on the website. I'm not sure that I would consider this a barrier to people enjoying an outing at such a property.
Yeah, I think you have to actively engage the 'system 2' analysis part of your brain when reading media stuff, and consciously try to extract the facts from the outrage and triggering, even from traditionally 'reliable' sources. It's kind of hard work but otherwise you just get manipulated too much.
English tax dollars pay for an unfathomably large amount of money preserving antiquity, much of which was flat out stolen from other nations or came on the backs of slaves.
The whole “give one inbred family billions of dollars per year to maintain their long-since-neutered monarchy” scam always impresses me. As if the Trump family convinced tax payers to give his family a couple of billion dollars every year for the hell of it.
Monarchies are the greatest scam ever perpetrated on modern republics. Spend a few hundred years invading, colonialising, conquering, raping, pillaging, committing genocide, destroying countless civilizations and enslaving many millions.
In the end, the taxpayers are forced to keep ensure you and your heirs remain billionaires without having to do more than wave your hand at a public appearances and attempt to stay out of the tabloids.
(I prefer using dollars because it has a more vague meaning of currency whereas the word “pound” has 30 meanings and uses on Wordnik. The English language sucks, but I digress.)
I've banned this account. Would you please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with? It's not in your interests to post like this, regardless of how wrong or bad or annoying other comments are or you feel they are. You might as well pee in a swimming pool, dump your garbage in your own yard, litter in city parks, and destroy your own ecosystem. What sense does that make?
I'm happy to see the National Trust start embracing history instead of pageantry. I had an argument with a volunteer guide years ago who was absolutely adamant a stately home was built with no connection to slavery, despite being built in the 18th century by a 'maritime trader' who owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean. It had the same air as hearing a communist party member doggedly insisting people loved living in East Germany.
It looks like millennials (including me) are grasping the nettle of our history. It is partly because of ubiquitous university education, and partly because of the simple fact of distance from the cold war. The National Trust will come with us eventually, it is just a matter of whether or not it is held hostage by bunting-and-pints nationalists for decades first. I hope its board remains brave enough to present our history as facts rather than costume drama.
It looks as if millennials including you have a rather inflated sense of your own newness and importance. I was taught about slavery in the 1980s. Large numbers of British people fought slavery in the 1780s. 19th century Britain spent around 2% of its GDP on the prevention of slavery.[1]
[1] Chaim D Kaufmann and Robert A Pape, "Explaining costly international moral action: Britain's sixty-year campaign against the Atlantic slave trade", International Organization 53, 4 (1999), pp. 631--668.
We're just on one side of a culture war. The elder generation (no prizes for guessing which one) appears to have descended into fantasies about WW2 and the empire and it is being left to the young to try to be honest. There is no suggestion that we are the first; rather, I suggest our victory over the apologists might be starker and more final. Perhaps wishful thinking.
That itself seems like a fantasy, based on an immature worldview of goodies who know the Truth versus deluded baddies. How exactly are the young more honest than previous generations? What is this coming victory, exactly?
The general impression I get from the sudden burgeoning wokeness in the UK is that a lot of people were somehow able to reach their 20s thinking that the world was largely a Disney film. Then when they found out, maybe at university, maybe just through mainstream media, about the horrors of history, it shook them to the core.
Although positioned as a recent development, in reality this is absolutely nothing remotely new. The same class of commentators have been railing against 'PC gone mad' for decades. It's the same mix of fear of change and chinese-whispered 'you couldn't make it up' urban legends e.g. Baa Baa Green Sheep and Banning Christmas.