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--- politics:philosophy:shadowpolitics [2025/03/23 16:25] – [“Antiwoke”, Transgenderism, and Pedophilia] Owen Mellema
+++ politics:philosophy:shadowpolitics [2025/03/30 16:18] (current) – [“Antiwoke”, Transgenderism, and Pedophilia] Owen Mellema
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 The last five groups mix and blend together, at times more distinct from one another, at other times indistinguishable. It’s a huge tangled mess of ideas, often contradictory, but all united in opposition to one thing: “wokeness”. This is what I call the “Antiwoke Right”.
-You’ll notice that I
+You’ll notice that whenever I use terms like “woke” and “antiwoke”, I put them in quotation marks. I do this because the word is really only pejorative, and no one opposed to “woke” can even attempt to give a coherent definition of it. At least with fascism people could point to an actual thing that existed at some point, whereas “woke” is nothing more than the vague notion of a thing. This vagueness is what allows for the “antiwoke right”  to stick together despite being composed of many contradictory notions. “Woke” can, and does, mean just about anything. It means masks, the belief the vaccines work, the idea that the earth is round, the notion that science is the best way to approximate truth, etc. It doesn’t help that many of them are anti-intellectual, meaning many don’t even consider a coherent worldview a worthwhile thing to have. (Furthermore, the plurality of types of rightists lends itself to an incredibly diverse array of notions — which effectively doesn’t matter, because they will ally with each other anyways)
-If the shadow of the “Woke Left” was fascism, then the shadow of the “Antiwoke Right” is so-called degeneracy. “Degeneracy”, like “woke”, is a word that has no meaning, thus, it really is only a gesture at a feeling of disgust, “wrongness”, or general non-conformity.
+While the “Woke Left” mainly critiques power structures, then the “Antiwoke Right” mainly critiques so-called degeneracy. “Degeneracy”, like “woke”, is a word that has no meaning, thus, it really is only a gesture at a feeling of disgust, “wrongness”, decay or general non-conformity. You might notice a big problem with this — people have different opinions on what is disgusting, for instance. One must remember, however, that being a shadow of the Left means that it is the Left’s true enemy, meaning that it is opposed to humanism (the idea that humans themselves have value), and thus they are apathetic about fairness, equality, or human dignity. So, the real shape of the movement is opposition to things that //this group of people finds disgusting//, and that they must also take power, so that their standard of wrongness becomes the true standard of wrongness.
+Consider an ugly person. We can’t help finding the person ugly, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t extend the same cordiality to them as we do to our fellow man. We do this because we believe in the basic notion of universal human dignity, that everyone deserves to be treated equally, on the basis of their actions. It’s difficult to imagine a society in which it would be considered not just socially acceptable to be cruel to ugly people, but socially required, as a form of group participation. Yet, the “antiwoke right” is already engaging in this form of group cruelty. In the same way that we could say to be engaging in “performative virtue” in our treatment of ugly people, it may soon be that we will engage in “performative vice” in our treatment of them. I have called this “vice signaling”.
+In the same way that fascism is the left’s shadow because they are inescapably authoritarian, degeneracy is the right’s shadow because they, themselves, are inescapably degenerate. In the literal sense, this group of people want us to “degenerate” (ie, to regress) backwards, away from the shining beacon of “The West”. Consider, for instance, anti-intellectualism. Part of what made the west so powerful was our beliefs in certain ways of thinking, such as rationalism, and the triumph of reason over blind faith. And yet, the right is increasingly skeptical of the institution of science (critically, they are critical of it without offering a real substitute).
+Furthermore, the idea of degeneracy is, itself, degenerate. It is the base instinct of disgust taking precedence over our higher virtues. In this way we quite literally regress to the level of the uncivilized savage, who acts on emotion without thought. And, of course, it must be pointed out that within the “antiwoke right” there are contingents of people who lack any sort of moral conviction or fiber — in my above dissection of the right, I call this group of people the “amoral crowd”. Even outside of this group, many do not take pleasure in the higher art of the West but rather continue to consume facile forms of entertainment.
+I don’t (necessarily) say this to levy a criticism of the “antiwoke right”, but rather to explain its obsession with degeneracy, and why “the degenerate” is the shadow of the group.