Sunday, March 05, 2023

Today's News: "Being Woke" = "Being Kind"

My husband and I were talking tonight and he asked "Exactly what is 'Woke' anyway?" 
Hmm, good question.  Coincidentally, I have been reading some stuff just today about it, and here it is. 
First, a few cartoons I found about how crazy the anti-woke MAGA is getting:




But defining Woke isn't difficult -- here's a succinct tweet from Bob Rae that describes the definition pretty well: And now, the hysterical MAGA reaction: In Dan Rather's substack Steady tonight, he and Elliot Kirschner ask "Does Anti-Wokeness Resonate?":
In our bifurcated bubble-induced political ecosystems, trends can pop up, escalate, and reverberate with such ferocity that those who are exposed to them see them everywhere. But it is unclear how much they escape the echo chambers to permeate society at large.
These thoughts come to mind around a term that has become so ubiquitous in right-wing political and media circles it might as well have its own show on Fox News. The term is “woke” ... [which] originated in African American English to mean an “awareness of racial and social justice.” But it has since been appropriated by the political right as a cudgel to attack any reckoning around the injustices and inequalities of American history and society. These “anti-woke” crusaders love saying the word with the winks, sneers, and glee that their political ilk had once reserved for railing against “political correctness.”
If you happen upon a Republican campaign rally, “woke” probably competes with words like “the” and “a” for total number of utterances. And there is no level of shame in how low pandering politicians will stoop in warning of the purported dangers of “wokeness.” Nikki Haley, the supposedly sober-minded and serious Republican presidential candidate, recently said “wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.” Remind us again how many people have died from wokeness as compared to COVID?
Yes, just like the Marvel Universe and the Star Wars Universe, there is now a MAGA Universe that is creating its own hysterical version of reality: On the Canadian side, here is a great photo of Canadian MAGA that Brittlestar describes very well: And this: Speaking of hysterical over-reactions, in other news of the day, Hershey's Chocolates are being targeted by Canadian MAGA for daring to use a Canadian transgender woman as one of the women in their International Women's Day "her/she" campaign. 
Honestly, these MAGAs are nuts. CBC reports:
A social media campaign by U.S.-based chocolate giant Hershey's has garnered both a hateful response and a loud chorus of support after a call to boycott the brand's chocolates over ads featuring a Canadian transgender woman.
For International Women's Day, Hersheys Canada has released five limited edition "HER for SHE" chocolate bars, featuring the faces of five women to "shine a light on women and girls who inspire us every day."
The chocolate bars feature Autumn Peltier, an Indigenous rights and water activist, Naila Moloo, a teenage climate innovator, Rita Audi, a gender and education equality activist, Kélicia Massala, the founder of Girl up Québec and Fae Johnstone, a transgender activist and the executive director of consulting firm Wisdom2Action.
The campaign was meant to celebrate women and note the ongoing fight for equity, according to Hershey's. It is donating up to $40,000 to Girl Up, a group that focuses on women's equity.
When the HER for SHE bar launched on March 1, Johnstone posted that she was honoured to be featured.
In the social media campaign video, the 27-year-old raises an eyebrow, twirls and talks about creating a world where people live in "public space as their honest and authentic selves."
"I hope this campaign shows trans girls they can dream big and change the world, too."
After #BoycottHersheys started trending, she posted Thursday, saying it "shows just how far we still have to go in the fight for feminist liberation and trans rights."
"I'm not going anywhere. I'm not shutting up. I will always stand up for women and girls, cis and trans."
"Spurring an international campaign to boycott a chocolate company definitely wasn't on my list of predictions for 2023," she quipped.

Yes, there's lots to chuckle at MAGA about, with these crazy goings-on -- but MAGA hate isn't really funny, is it.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Earlier this year, indigenous groups demanded that universities revoke the honorary doctorates given to law professor Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a white woman who identifies as Cree. They accused her of stealing their identity, and the CBC provided weeks of sympathetic coverage. In the 2019 election, four federal candidates were dropped by their parties for falsely identifying as indigenous. Yet when women complain that Hershey's is misogynistically promoting a man who identifies as a woman for International Women's Day, they're accused of being hateful transphobes by the CBC and other media outlets. Let's at least have some consistency - either appropriating an oppressed group's identity is wrong or it's not.

As women pointed out in the ratio that followed Hershey's announcement, only men could oppress women for thousands of years, then turn around, put on a dress, claim to be the most oppressed group ever, and demand inclusion into everything set aside for women's safety, privacy, pleasure, promotion and fair competition. When women object to being gaslit, they're hit with the DARVO playbook: Deny the misogyny, Accuse women of being TERFs and transphobes, Reverse Victim and Oppressor. The CBC article is a perfect illustration.

If you go to the original Hershey's tweet, you'll see the company's being ratioed, not by a hoard of anti-woke rightists, but by mostly lefty women objecting to the misogyny of promoting a man on women's day - a man with a history of tweets calling women "bitch" followed by a knife emoji and demanding women be silenced. If Hershey's wants to promote Johnstone, then do it during trans awareness week, not International Women's Day.

7:53 am
Cathie from Canada said...

Thanks for your comment but I disagree -- transgender women are women who previously had to live in a male body and I am glad our medical science has reached the point that it can give people the opportunity to transition to the gender they know themselves to be. Human rights are not a zero-sum game - it takes nothing away from me to recognize Johnstone's rights.
The issue of Turpel-Lafond, and others who claim Indigenous heritage but aren't actually Indigenous, is still a different situation I think - some are consciously lying, others may have really believed themselves to be Indigenous.

10:18 am
lungta said...

Woke is an adjective to place your argument on the winning side without actual reality or logic or thinking.
Transgender women are every cell still masculine. When Johnson parades "her penis" in a woman's changing room because "she" feels ok
"she" is violating every bio-woman who is forced to see or think about it.
Costuming, harmful drugging and self mutilation and sterilization and the removal of any source of sexual satisfaction are not really any sort of cure for your "feelings" of dysphoria.
If you identify as woke you have found refuge and legitimacy for a single personal problem and now feel you are right about everything.
My motto is "wake up the woke"

1:03 pm
Cathie from Canada said...

Thanks for your comment lungta, but I disagree. Johnstone isn't "parading" herself anywhere, and her existence isn't violating anyone else's rights either. You aren't describing the medical trans treatments accurately.
Live and let live - that's all anyone wants.

9:56 pm

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