It’s a broad label for anything they don’t like (LGBTQ+, feminism, DEI, etc.), but doesn’t “woke” mean you are awake? Would that imply that things that are not “woke” or are “anti-woke” are “asleep”?

Then they go on about conspiracies (“climate change is not real”, “deep state”, “5G is harmful”, “vaccines cause autism”, the list goes on unfortunately…) where they’re claiming that you need to “wake up to the truth”. Surely they don’t consider “woke” to be “the truth”, so shouldn’t they call it something like “asleep”, “sleepy”, “snoozy”, or similar?

I needed to use a lot of quotation marks there…

  • Coco@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    It’s from the 30s, actually.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

    Implies waking up to the systemic violence and oppression and beginning to do something about it.

    Then it began being used as a bad thing because people were understanding systemic harm and those in power did not like it.

    Overuse the word, make it mean nothing, remove its power, push the people back into oppression.

    • nialv7@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      Yeah, but then the neoliberals appropriated it to mean things like changing corporate logos to rainbow colors during Pride month while doing absolutely fuckall for the marginalized.

      • Coco@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 hours ago

        Correct.

        Those in power overused the word and made it mean nothing.

        Neoliberals are a part of that.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      21 hours ago

      Overuse the word, make it mean nothing, remove its power, push the people back into oppression.

      Conservatives have really been leaning on this tactic a ton lately.

      Unfortunately, it seems to work every time.

      • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au
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        4 hours ago

        Liberals have been the ones doing it, which is why no one cares or fears being called a Nazi, racist, bigot, -phobe, fascist, or any of the other overused leftist favourite names to call anyone who doesn’t agree with them anymore.

        It was working, it radicalised their loyalists and scared a lot of regular people into submission, but like you said - overuse, especially when it was clearly not appropriate, made the tactic less and less effective.

    • adry@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      same happened with anarchism. I bet someone will come reply to me, saying that anarchism is actually bad because it means “chaos” and “no laws”, yada yada.

    • SacralPlexus@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      There is an interesting precursor from the election that made Lincoln president. There were groups of young people forming “Wide-Awake” clubs and demonstrating.

      Source