The GOP has a target. America is at risk. Not from communism. Not from Russia. Not from taxes. Not from regulations.
Their message: The danger is wokeness.
Republicans have a new, centralizing target to unite the anti-elitist populists and the remaining establishment "RINOs:" Wokeness. Republicans agree it is bad. Back in the 1990s we heard of "political correctness." Many thought it fussy and overly polite, and it was a subject of jokes. "Chair," not "Chairman." "Administrative Assistant," not "Secretary," and especially not, "my girl." Most people went along.
It is different now. Republicans are in counter-revolution mode. Their message is that open-mindedness has gone too far. The transgender community is the easiest target, with a GOP message that woke liberals treat gender transition as normal personal choice, not freakish:They are destroying women's sports. They are pedophiles, out to groom and seduce our children! The populist message is that racial affirmative action means that Whites are now the ones unfairly treated, which reverses tradition and expectation. Moreover, women get promotions the man deserves. And Christians aren't respected. And Trump supporters are stigmatized because they don't want a COVID vaccination. It fits the overarching theme of resentment of liberals and financial elites. The GOP is Charlie Brown: "How come everybody's always picking on me."
We see signs of backlash from the left, too. Bill Maher voices it. I hear rumbles from Democrats that maybe Democratic leaders pushed Al Franken out of the Senate too quickly, too unfairly. They were too afraid of criticism. Maybe a little bit of due process would have been appropriate. I hear complaints too, from within academia. I hear voices from people generally in sync with changing cultural expectations. They complain that people on the forefront of an anti-racism, gender-fluid, diversity-equity-inclusion movement have gone crazy. They are extremists. They are moral scolds. They are ideologues. They ignore biology. They ignore reality. They are the American Taliban.
Michael Trigoboff reads this blog and comments on it. He worked in academia. He lives just outside Portland, Oregon.
Why I Fight Wokeness
I write code. I started my career in 1970, went to graduate school in computer science/artificial intelligence until 1978, worked for others until 1988, worked as an independent private software developer until 2001, and taught computer science at a community college until this past June. Now I work as an online tutor for people learning to write code.
I know what it takes to write code. I am very good at it. I am also quite good at teaching other people to write code; see the ratings on RateMyProfessors and Wyzant if you are curious.
The world of code has totally objective standards: your code has to work; it has to be small and fast. These things are measurable, and there is no debate about how to measure them. High-quality code is crystalline and elegant. Code of that quality can be like what’s said about how to tell if someone is a genius: their discoveries are “obvious,” but they are only obvious after the genius discovers them; no one else could figure them out until the genius came along.
My success in this field has been the result of working hard to achieve the ability to live up to these objective and difficult standards. No one can succeed in this field without doing that.
But then along comes wokeness (aka critical social justice ideology), telling us workers of the world of code that we are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and deplorable unless the people succeeding in our field completely match the demographics of this country and “look like America.”
The people saying this to us are typically liberal arts majors who couldn’t write a piece of code to save their lives and who have been taught to believe that there’s no such thing as objectivity. They come originally from the humanities, which they have totally conquered, and now they are gunning for the STEM fields.
Here’s a quote from a widely distributed publication promoting “equitable mathematics instruction:”"This workbook provides teachers an opportunity to examine their actions, beliefs, and values around teaching mathematics. The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture (Jones and Okun 2001; dismantlingRacism 2016) with respect to math. Building on the framework, teachers engage with critical praxis in order to shift their instructional beliefs and practices toward antiracist math education. By centering antiracism, we model how to be antiracist math educators with accountability."Woke ideology is infiltrating computer science departments at leading universities across the country.
Wokeness tells us to forget equality and emphasize equity instead. They reject equal opportunity (equality) and propose the substitution of equal outcomes (equity) instead. Every student should succeed, they insist, regardless of innate ability, level of interest, or willingness to work hard.
The proponents of woke critical social justice ideology often use this picture to illustrate what they want:
All we have to do, they claim, is provide every student with what they need, and then every student will succeed. But what if some student needs a box containing 30 extra IQ points or determination to work hard or an intense interest in writing code? Where am I going to find a box like that? The college where I taught didn’t seem to have any of those boxes around.
Which gets us to the fundamental and toxic error at the basis of wokeness: an insistence on this proposition:"Every talent and ability is distributed randomly and evenly among all the different subgroups of the population."50% of programmers aren’t women? Sexism! 13% of programmers aren’t black? Racism!
How do the woke know that this proposition is true? They don’t. They just want it to be true.
And if someone (Charles Murray or James Damore for instance) questions the truth of this proposition, they do everything they can to hound those people out of the public discourse and cancel them.
We would be better off to not even think about this proposition. It’s too divisive. But the woke are not willing to avoid this issue; they demand that we act as though we already know the answer to the question, even though we don’t. This isn’t science; this is dogma.
There are those of us who believe in intellectual integrity and the necessity of competence and excellence in the practice of the crafts we have devoted our working lives to. We refuse to kowtow to this woke dogma that threatens the very basis of our fields.
If someone writes code that doesn’t work, their race or gender identity is irrelevant. Computers do not know the demographic characteristics of their programmers. When they refuse to run incompetently written code, it’s not out of prejudice against the programmer. When the bridge falls down, sensible people do not blame the bridge for prejudice against its designer.
I don’t care what color or sex you are as long as your code works. I am willing to stand by that. I am willing to fight for it. Equal opportunity.
And that’s why I fight wokeness.
24 comments:
I want to react to the woke people say and think… Not all woke people say and think those things. I consider myself woke, just as I consider myself liberal, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t value competence, think if women are underrepresented as coders it’s because some woke thing is not happening. Maybe I’m like the racist who states they are not racist even though they support the kkk. I do think some wokeness stuff goes too far, but it is the extremes I object to in wokeness. Being considerate of others seems a worthy position. The banning of math textbooks is an example of the extreme in the other direction.
As an aside coding will probably be done by AI most of the time so it won’t matter the sex of the coder 20 years from now. I guess we can worry about the wokeness of AI in the future, but I get tired of the wokeness labeling in all directions.
I will not read this reactionary guest blog. I can easily get the same angry, regressive attitudes from right wing media (Faux News, talk radio and elsewhere). Anyone who reads the comments posted on this blog already knows that the guest blogger is your typical, very entitled, angry white American male.
Another white American male, a sociologist, wrote a book on the subject, "Angry White Men." (The author, who is an academic at the university level, is Michael Kimmel. He has written many other books with fascinating titles, including "The Guy's Guide to Feminism" and "The Politics of Manhood."
I might read the comments to see if the guest blogger receives any blowback.
I forgot to include the subtitle of the book: "Angry White Men, American Masculinity at the End of an Era."
Equity is the quality of being fair and impartial. That’s not a bad thing. For hundreds of years, Blacks were enslaved in the U.S. After emancipation, they remained subjugated through terrorism, segregation, voter suppression, etc. Today, the disparities between Blacks and Whites in wealth, incarceration rates, access to health care and other measures persist. African Americans are still being shot for driving, jogging, walking and shopping while Black. They still have neither equity nor equality.
‘Woke’ is a term originally coined by Black Americans in the early to mid-1900s. It referred to the need for awareness of the potential for racist violence as a Black person in America. Over time, it evolved into its current dictionary definition: “Aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice.” Republicans have twisted it into a racist dog whistle. You have to wonder what they object to more, the ‘facts’ or the ‘racial justice.’
Anti-woke hysteria is a backlash to our changing demographics, but it won’t prevent change. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Change takes a long time, but it does happen.
Anonymous, whoever they might be, is it basically channeling this attitude. 😀
It seems to me that Michael Steely is not disagreeing with anything I said. I don’t disagree with a lot of what he said.
I can’t tell whether MS is actually accusing me of racism in his comment, or if he has just chosen to talk about things he cares deeply about that don’t intersect very much with what I was talking about.
My experience in academia tells me that I would have been accused of racism for saying what I said in my guest post. James Damore got fired from Google for saying similar things. In academia, responding by alluding to racism has become an advanced form of the art of the veiled threat.
Ok Michael I just had a bad wokeness experience. Fantastic photos of those large tree photos by Darius Kinsey that are in the Whatcom museum in Seattle. Photos taken 1906. Some people were saying it was wrong to romanticize cutting down trees. THAT is wokeness gone wrong.
To the extent that people like Charles Murray have been hounded or canceled, it's pretty hard to muster any sympathy. Let's not forget that Charles Murray openly advocates the notion that there's a disparity of intelligence between the races due to genetics, which leads to differing outcomes. That my friend, is pretty much racism 101, and is totally unsupported by mainstream science. It is supported however by virtually all racists and white supremacists. Gee I wonder why?
Maybe just maybe, Michael Trigoboff should think through the implications of the picture he so quickly dismisses and attempt to put himself in the shoes of someone who was not born with any boxes to stand on. Unfortunately due to intentional systematic racism and sexism that has been official policy in many parts of government and society, there are many classes of people who have been purposefully denied the ability to even acquire a box through hard work.
If Michael actually did believe in equality of opportunity as he claims, then it shouldn't be hard to understand that when things like 50% of programmers aren't women, and 13% of them aren't black are true, that is a BRIGHT RED FLAG that equality of opportunity is NOT being achieved. And despite what Charles Murray might claim, it's not because of genetics. It's because classes of people, whether sorted by race or gender, and been intentionally denied and discouraged from pursuing things like computer programming. If you're actually into equality of opportunity, it should matter to you when the statistics that would show equality of opportunity exists are out of whack.
Again there is literally 0 science that shows a disparity of intelligence between races or genders. There is however mountains of evidence that show people have been denied equality of opportunity. To the extent that woke people are willing to point this out, and work to change such a system, I am proud to be counted among there number. And I am proud to oppose the viewpoint of someone like Michael who appears to be just another conservative who's afraid to openly proclaim his racist views, and instead uses the woke dogwhistle to virtue signal his fellows of his true feelings.
Its pretty sad, and I would hope that one day Michael Trigoboff might be able to find just a bit more empathy in his heart.
If Mr. Trigoboff can’t tell whether I was accusing him of racism, it’s a pretty good clue that I wasn’t. My point was that there’s nothing wrong with being ‘woke.’ Republicans have incorporated it into their culture war, distorting 'woke' and 'CRT' into code words intended to foment fear and loathing among their base. It sounds like MT's concerns are more of an academic freedom issue.
Writing code for certain kinds of people brings them into a world of structure and determinism which is comforting and predictable. Great complexity can be achieved with intellectual elegance and purity. It is indeed a satisfying and useful art form and is a great way to make a comfortable living. Unfortunately, outside of the confines of the computer world, there is little deterministic or predictable in the messy real world. Digital computers can only approximate the analog world, forever limited by the need to quantize reality. I have worked with and admired many programmers over my working life. I can even write simple code for microcontrollers. Many programmers in my experience have difficulty navigating the weird and inscrutable ways that human power structures evolve and interact. Human politics and relationships are ever changing and twisting in unpredictable and sometimes novel ways. I’m a boomer and am also uncomfortable in a world where you can no longer comment on a female colleague’s dress or smile. I work part time in a university environment where I am required to take periodic classes on sexual harassment or micro aggressions. Yikes! But I get that the world of business and academia are evolving and changing. I’m sometimes amused but rarely offended.
Rafe is doing exactly what I talked about in my guest post: he is claiming via his “bright red flag” that talents and abilities are evenly distributed among the various racial and ethnic groups. He is demanding that we believe this, and is willing to tar anyone who doesn’t swear allegiance to that proposition as “racist.”
I have a firm position on this proposition: I don’t know. And furthermore, I think it’s divisive and destructive to even bring this issue up. I would be happy to leave it alone, but wokeism demands that we take the “approved” position.
Rafe claims that the existence of any difference in abilities and talents between various racial and ethnic groups is “totally unsupported by mainstream science.” When you look at the persecution leveled at Charles Murray over the course of his life, it’s clear that no mainstream scientist would dare to even think of doing research in that area. We have no reliable science in either direction on that question.
Rafe would probably agree that there is prejudice in this society against people of Asian descent. But Asians are highly overrepresented in computer programming, and plenty of them are immigrants or the children of immigrants who were not given large numbers of “boxes.” Rafe’s assertion of prejudice in computer programming is strongly contradicted by this inconvenient fact.
There are other explanations for what the woke refer to as “disparities.” Consider the gender equality paradox. It turns out that women in societies that have loosened enforcement of gender roles have lower female participation in tech jobs than societies where gender roles are rigidly enforced.
Why would this be? When I was teaching at the community college, one of my colleagues in the computer science department was a woman who had grown up in India, where gender roles are rigidly enforced. She once told me that her choice in life was either go into computer programming or become a slave in her mother-in-law‘s house. Not surprisingly for a very bright person like her, she chose computer programming.
But in places where gender roles are not rigidly enforced, women have many more choices and personal preferences more easily come into play. This may well be biological: males tend to be more interested in things; females tend to be more interested in people. I personally know four very bright women who had successful careers in computer programming but then left the field because they “wanted work that was more involved with people.“ I have read more articles than I can count written by feminists who had children and were chagrined to notice how much their little boys were interested in trucks, and their little girls in dolls.
Computer programming is a totally objective field. Either your code works or it doesn’t; either it runs fast or it doesn’t; either it uses memory sparingly, or it’s a memory hog. Programmers are, and should be, evaluated on the quality of their code (and the content of their character), not the color of their skin. Computer programmers are in incredibly high demand at the moment. Any organization that refuses to hire a good programmer out of prejudice against their race or other characteristic is leaving talent and money on the table.
Rafe concludes his post by calling me a lot of names. He is “proud to be counted“ as woke, and seems to be totally down with the woke tactic of character attacks towards anyone who disagrees with them.
Michael, talents and abilities ARE distributed evenly among racial and ethnic groups, not to mention between genders. If you want to read an informative article that discusses the difference in genetics between races, look at this resource https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/genetic-study-shows-skin-color-just-skin-deep-180965261/
To say that there is no reliable science "in either direction" is either a lie, or a statement made from immense ignorance. Murray is just one in a very long line of scientists (with varying levels of actual adherence to decent scientific practices) who has attempted to conclude there's a genetic difference that makes blacks dumber, or asians smarter at programming, or any other number of purely racist stereotypes.
Differences in skin color really are just skin deep genetically speaking. Pretending that you "don't know" is a 100% racist cop out. You're clearly a smart person, at least in terms of computer programming, who has unfortunately been brainwashed by the likes of folks like Charles Murray. Again for folks who aren't familiar, Charles Murray is a leading proponent of "intellectual" arguments that are used by white supremacists and racists world-wide to justify keeping a status quo that does NOT allow for equality of opportunity for ALL people.
To the extent that it's even worth taking any more of my time to respond to you, I do agree that people of Asian descent face discrimination and prejudice, like literally all other minority groups, so on that at least we agree.
In regard to your anecdotal evidence that women are interested in people and men in things, I'd say total hogwash. People of both genders are interested in a wide variety of pursuits and subjects, however similar to systematic racism that has denied opportunities to black folks since this country's founding, there are societal and cultural norms that discourage women from entering STEM fields. If that makes me the dreaded WOKE to see that, acknowledge it, and it call it out, then so be it. I have a daughter in elementary school and I'll be damned if she won't have the exact same opportunities as my son, regardless of what people like you Michael, think her natural inclination is.
This will more than likely be my final comment on this blog Peter. Giving free rein in a guest post to someone like M.T. who is spouting thinly veiled racist dogwhistles is not my cup of tea, and as much as I appreciate your observations, I'll be finding other things to do than engage with posts that seem like they could've been ripped directly from the comment section of The Gateway Pundit.
Rafe has some good points. For instance Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, uses racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the Black and Latino communities, women and the poor. A guest poster defending him and then attacking his critics isn’t a good look for this blog.
Well, thank you, Rafe, for giving the blog a shot. I thought it possible that some people would abandon the blog if I showed the public what some people think, i.e. what is out there. I have read enough of your comments that I didn't think it would include you among them, but now I realize.
I quote FoxNews a lot. I write about Republicans. I get far more feedback face-to-face from people who think I am too liberal/Democrat. They say I am unfair to Trump. I disagree. I think my contempt for Trump is well founded. I am personally pretty aligned with center-left Democrats, or maybe left-left Democrats, but I will admit that I think Democrats acted too quickly on Al Franken. He didn't help himself much, though. The triggering event was the obviously staged photo as people returned from a USO tour. She played the hot babe. He played the fat comic. The photo was a gag, not an offense, in my judgement. When the woman said she was offended, a heartfelt apology from Franken would have been appropriate and enough, in my judgement. Apparently others disagree. I would like to think people can talk about these things and work out boundaries.
Anyhow, Rafe, one more comment. A college classmate who posts here, the historian Constance Hilliard, wrote a book "The Mis-measurement of Man." It is curious because it is a history of an idea, the idea that Blacks have lower IQs than Whites and that they have bigger penises. The two ideas are linked in the minds of researchers. She charts how penis-size anxiety turns into cherry picking and misinterpreting mental ability.
Anyhow, I hope you consider putting me back on your reading list sometime, or propose a guest post. You don't need to read this blog to write a guest post for it.
Peter Sage
Historically, racists, misogynists, anti-Semites and the like have put a lot of energy into justifying their racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, etc., because they enjoy immensely their position and privilege in social hierarchies. They will never willingly give that up.
I do not believe that race or sex determine the level of ability or talent in individuals. And, as I have previously said a number of times today, I would be happy not to talk about aggregate racial differences at all, but wokeness requires that we swear allegiance to their preferred position on this issue.
I linked reputable research from a liberal media source showing that in societies where gender norms are not enforced, women’s participation in STEM fields is lower. Since Rafe agrees with me that Asians face discrimination, I wonder how he would explain their overrepresentation in computer programming.
I have had many female students and students of ethnic/racial minorities who were excellent at computer programming. I was happy to have them in my classes and did my best to help them learn to write code. In 20 years of teaching, I was never accused of prejudicial discrimination against any of my students. Rafe’s daughter would have done fine in one of my classes if she possessed the talent, the interest, and the willingness to work hard.
For those of you who are absolutely sure that Charles Murray is a horrible racist, I suggest you listen to this Sam Harris podcast and see if you still think so afterwards.
I said Rafe had some good points, particularly about the likes of Charles Murray, but that was before I saw his last comment. I agree with Peter that it’s good to get outside our bubble, although it's hard to take more than 5 minutes of Fox Noise. The problem is, if we hope to mount any kind of offensive against the post-truth madness that’s taken possession of an entire political party, we need to monitor the bullshit it’s based on and not just passively await the results, as too many did on Jan. 6.
Factcheck: Charles Murray’s most notorious work, The Bell Curve, is all about eugenics – America’s oldest justification for bigotry and racial inequality. That’s why he’s become such a hero to the far white.
That people are so quick to condemn Charles Murray, without having read a single word he wrote, is a prime example of how propaganda can triumph.
I challenge everyone who has been so quick to condemn Murray: listen to the podcast I linked to. See if your predetermined beliefs are strong enough to withstand an exposure to the truth.
Sam Harris started out believing very bad things about Charles Murray based on the propaganda. By the end of the podcast, he was apologizing to Murray for having been taken in by it.
When you drive through various neighborhood and observe the schools located in these areas. you realize who gets the money and doesn’t for teaching supplies and educational opportunities. The air conditioner doesn’t work but the football budget is well padded, the school has computer classes but the auto shop class has been dropped. When you teach students from the hood with inadequate tools, it is very difficult to awaken the poverty of bleakness and indifference to the glories of knowledge . They deserve to be stupid because they do not grasp the opportunity of a free education. So obvious.
The basic premise of The Bell Curve is that lower test scores and anti-social behavior is at least in part due to genetics, i.e. racial inferiority. Sorry, but that's pretty much the definition of racist, and so are those who swallow it.
One of the premises of The Bell Curve is that genetics are significant, and we need to take them into account if we want to design our policies well.
Do we view the overrepresentation of Asians in computer programming as a problem that needs to be fixed, or a fortunate result of our liberalization of immigration policies?
Listen to the podcast.
When can we expect a guest post from the Grand Wizard of the KKK and the current leader of the American Nazi Party?
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