One of the interesting features of the Left becoming over run by woke middle class identity politics is that we have lost the skill to pursue and argue our case.
The addiction to cancel culture and deplatforming by the woke has meant instead of debating the issue and winning people over, the Left simply rely on attempting to win the debate by strangling off any speech they disagree with.
We can see this in the 3 Waters and Co-governance debate were Labour haven’t even attempted to engage and explain to the public what it means and what it entails which is incredibly disappointing seeing as there are extremely good arguments made to defend each one of them.
Janet Wilson touched on this in her latest column looking at the Woke and their cancel culture social media Lynch mobs and notes the example I have always used regarding the Salam witch trials.
Woke dogma is more akin to a belief based religious cult and their inclusion through exclusion cancel culture has led to pure temple politics over Broadchurch appeal. It is identity and representation above all else.
According to the middle class woke, all white people are irredeemable racists, all men are rapists and anyone who defends free speech is a uniform wearing Nazi who hates the Trans Community.
It is alienating as fuck and makes gaining the 51% democratic majority almost impossible.
We have seen Chippy clearly move away from social justice as he pivots towards economic justice (a direction TDB has been arguing for years), and if he is to be successful in leading the next Government, the focus must be on economic gains that are universally shared (because there are numerically more poor white people than poor brown people) while actually making the argument as to why we should do this in the first place.
The Left in NZ have spent far too much time trying to strangle free speech off and play ostracisation games with those the woke blacklist, than actually arguing our case because you can’t win an election by blacklisting everyone!
The Woke have had power and influence over the Left since 2016, it feels like the Wellington Twitter elite are losing that power and influence in 2022 as the political leadership suddenly appreciate how alienating their activism has become.
Poor people in NZ are not sitting around the kitchen table deciding who to cancel for a misuse of pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills.
I’ll be looking at how the woke killed off the political Left in NZ in a special report this weekend.
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You’re correct Martyn, but is it a case of “losing the skill to pursue and argue our case” or is the case itself indefensible?
In essence ‘co-governance’ is a form of racial segregation, and those pursuing it are, to put it bluntly, tribalists or even worse – neofascists.
Historic illiteracy seems to be your ‘achilles heel’ when debating constitutional issues, I advise people that have your train of thought to look past your ill advised comment and become historically literate to cover all the facts pertaining to Co-governance.
He Puapua heralds transformational constitutional change. Labour kept this report hidden till after the 2020 election (including from the Deputy PM Winston Peters).
As Jim Bolgar said the PM (then JA) should come out and say what she means by co-governance and where she intends to take it.
Labour’s failure to do this and label voters racist if they query it, is exactly the woke tactics Martyn is talking about. They have been sneaky and dishonest and Chris Hipkins was part of that. I don’t care what he rolls back, he and Labour have demonstrated contempt for the voters who didn’t want Three Waters (60%). I hope voters remember this come October
The problem for the Blairite neoliberals is they are facing an angry population which holds polar opposite views to their agenda.
Wall Street only rolled out the “woke” demagogy of the Poststructuralists once the neoliberal project (and the Wolfowitz Doctrine) were in danger.
The corporate political donors were absolutely terrified when alternatives began to emerge: Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump. They all had to be crushed, via wall-to-wall disinformation and state intimidation.
They have no choice but to intensify the “culture war”, and dial up the censorship and disinformation. The moment they stop, both parties are toast — the majority of the voters on both sides of the aisle have rejected neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism.
They have to somehow maximise the division and then demoralise any dissenters. Ultimately all discussion of economic alternatives must be shut down, and the public must be told that the only “solution” is war with China and Russia.
I’m lost can you define deplatforming and give examples of “cancellations and blacklists”? And while you are at it what is woke? It seems that woke is applied in many different ways to suit the user’s bias. I think that beneath the rhetoric you are trying to say that the left should be seen to be more concerned with the plight of the “bottom feeders” but are carried away by “the exuberance of your own verbosity”. What about the workers!
he won’t power man because he can’t he just throws around rightard buzz words.
@Power-man
In the contemporary sense woke is a melange of ideologies grounded in a form of cultural conflict theory that says society can best be described as a dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed power dynamics between identities. Commonly accepted domains are race (white/black), sex (male/female), sexuality (straight/gay), gender (cis/trans), colonial (coloniser/indigenous). There are others such as neurotypical/neurodivergent even righthanded/left-handed (I’m not making that last one up).
For the woke purest, EVERY dynamic across any of these dividing lines is oppressive. From government policy to intimate personal relationships. Your collective identities (race, sex, gender etc) go to form your intersectional identity and place you in a social power hierarchy. Oppressor identities have ‘privilege’ which is analogous to original sin. Oppressed identities are analogous to sanctified so victimhood is the highest social status you can achieve.
To see this worldview and sinner/sanctified identities is ‘critical conciousness’
Bundled with critical consciousness is the imperative to fight injustice. Any outcomes that are not equitable along lines of identity are taken as evidence of identity based oppression. However you can have all the identity oppression points in the world but if you do not believe Woke ideology and worse, speak against it you are a heretic. Your lived experience is illegitimate because you have a false consciousness. Conversely you can have all the identity privilege but if you confess your privilege and advocate for woke ideology you are completely acceptable (hence the theatricality of affluent white liberals).
So in reality Woke ideology does not care about identity except as a mobilising ploy, it cares about recruiting believers and smiting heretics. A simple political power game.
These ideologies around race, sex, gender, sexuality emerged from the schools of Critical Theory in American Academia since the 1960s. They can be thought of as Neomarxism with postmodern tools. There is a straight line tracing back through Marcuse to the Frankfurt School and Gramsci. The revolutionary path is to destabilise institutions and society by conjuring and widening cultural fault lines to bring about conditions of revolution. Identity is the tool in this instance.
The postmodern influences are largely employed as rhetorical tactics. For example Woke is relativist claiming that there is no objective value system or truth. What matters is ‘my truth’ or ‘lived experience’ or standpoint epistemology. In addition the intersectional power heirachy carries a taboo on ‘punching down’ so criticising anyone seen to have less privilege than you do is ‘problematic’ which is why it is fine for women (1 dimension of oppression) to criticise, or ‘punch up’ to men (1 dimensions of privilege) BUT women cannot criticise Trans women (2 dimensions of oppression).
However while claiming there is no objective truth woke ideology simultaneously claims the dichotomy of identity based power dynamics is true and that ‘my truth’ or subjective truth is not legitimate if your identity is oppressor (sinner) or you do not believe in the ideology (heretic).
The woke fixation with the cultural conflict theory ‘grand narrative’ and that it largely fails to address socio-economic concerns, unless downstream of identity, are reasons, among many, why woke ideology is generally disliked by both Marxists and Postmodernists. Lack of socio-economic critique makes it very easy to game the system which is how far-left fringe academia less that 2 decades ago has been embraced by neoliberalism and gone mainstream. Woke ideology gives rise to a kind of anti-politics where advancing anyone who is not male/white/straight/cis feels highly progressive but does nothing to challenge the underlying systems of neoliberal power. This gives rise to virtue theatre and woke washing of corporations (such as Amazon going all in on BLM while union busting and extremely bad working conditions for blue collar workers who happen to be disproportionately black and brown).
Woke is a cuckoo in the progressive nest.
If you are really interested in finding out about woke, I suggest you read Joanna Williams book how woke won.
It is not other peoples job to inform you.
Many examples of cancellation. Google Whittaker’s chocolate bluebird employee, Charlie Chaplin play Chch students production, SUFW whose talks about a piece of legislation that would effect women having to go to the High Court to be able to hold some meetings in public libraries.
LINO: the party of the woking class. The Greens too.
Advocating for the right-wing again Pope, Fully paid?
The funny thing is people truly believe the Chipster will defeat/hold Wokeborg.
Lipstick on a pig springs to mind.
Voters should remember that as education minister, Chippy oversaw the introduction of maatauranga into the science curriculum, an radical gender ideology in the guise of “Mates n Dates”.
He should’ve introduced spelling judging by your post… ” an radical “
That’s pendantic.
*pedantic* Bobblehead
It were a joke
Pope Punctilious 11. Thanks for the reminder about the radical gender ideology. It’s pernicious, claws at the innocence of childhood, can prematurely sexualise, and has the legislative ability to not just demonise, but imprison concerned parents.
Meanwhile, pupils fall behind in the basics like maths, science, and reading, skills which they need in real life. These are the politicians who are also responsible for kneecapping the Commissioner for Children, against all advice.
Foxy fake news
https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Science/Learning-area-structure
https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Science/Achievement-objectives
100% Pope
The Greens need to debate Labour and right more instead of being a lap dog and cancel anyone they disagree with. Therefore makes sense to have the best debater as leader. Which isn’t either of the current two leaders.
Before another brain fart on 3 waters / 5 Waters / floodwaters remember the government has been earnestly helping the housing market for years now, and made everything much worse. Now under investigation from the UN as kids grow up in hotels that are worse than the private, cheap, large rentals that they used to have access to. That is because NZ housing policy is politically and profit driven not practically driven. Now some of the 1 million dollar show houses for Kainga Ora are unliveable as they fell off their foundations after 3 years in the floods.
Aucklanders have already spend a fortune on many brain farts aka Council Controlled entitles which took money out of Aucklanders hands to transform our water and transport at huge cost and with consultants galore (CEO on $600k+ salary) and everybody told us what a good job water care were doing. NOPE.
Co governance and 3 waters is more of the same. It is going to make everything with water thousands of times worse and more expensive and divisive.
Government and councils already made the problems worse by non democratic resource consenting, bizarre and stupid consenting to get more houses that they then encourage people from overseas to live in, while shafting those in the community. Watch the outcome of Dome Valley Dump at environment court to see how it is really going to work.
Locals know that working 50 hours per week at the meat works/bakery, starting at 4 – 6am before the public transport even gets there for minimum wages is not going to be a good job prospect. Years later a lot of the people working these manual jobs are on ACC and left the job.
Industry are still whining how they can’t get people and the government gives them more slave families from overseas knowing that there are huge scams, the people are paying for the job and not being paid properly (and even if they are it is very poor wages) and the cycle continues.
Fix NZ for those who live in NZ now. Make the houses and jobs and education available to them first and then work out how to engage with them to do the jobs. Only migrants with expert skills and with incomes at $160k+ in NZ should be allowed to live here… as that is the level that apparently you need to be able to afford a good standard of living in NZ. Too much money is spent on overseas recruitment and the prospects arriving seem to be getting poorer and poorer.
Nurses are leaving NZ and get TRIPLE the wages in OZ – clearly NZ government need to have pay parity with OZ to stop nurses going overseas, not get in more migrant nurse families who then leave 3 years later….. or are not nurses but support aids who are pretty much useless but require housing, health care, transport, social care. More and more unqualified people are making up the numbers in hospitals and mistakes are on the rise as is the rise of the hospital waiting lists. You need qualified people to bring it down and quality people are not attracted to NZ wages and conditions.
+1
Well said.
Everything you said is what is happening and MPs know it too..but …’crickets’ and lone tumbling weed roll by…
Banner – Commenters with critiques refuse to be sent to Coventry!>>>…gag snort gag gasp gag. Women are women, not poorly evolved men – or Vice Versa!>>>gag gasp gag etc.
…are we even allowed to say blacklist…???
No, for obvious reasons.
The correct term is naughty list.