Saur's Fifth Blog

Sorry love but they actually are. Maybe it's a dumblr thing from a shadow ban? I dun know. But they are restricted.

Deadly stabbing attack against Jews in Haifa.

That part was not in the Jose Martinez Cobo definition of indigenous peoples.

Ironically the reason it was add was to prevent indigenous people from achieving self determination.

Really saying the quite part out loud, huh.

TIL Egyptians aren't indigenous to Egypt, Ethiopians aren't indigenous to Ethiopia.

But the Boers are indigenous to South Africa now, which is weird to think about.

Irish in Ireland are probably gonna be sad to hear that they aren't indigenous to Ireland.

Wonder how this will go over in places like Turkey.

I mean, first of all, it's easy to trace "woke" back to 2014 and BLM, to the hashtag #staywoke. I mean, know it's older, but that's how it made the jump from AAVE to Internet lingo. It was used completely unironically in Internet lingo for a while.

But the bigger point of criticism is: If PG traces it all back to political correctness of the 1980s and early 1990s, he should make more of an effort to explain where PC went and why it came back.

Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness. Unfortunately this was an illusion. Within universities the embers of political correctness were still glowing brightly. After all, the forces that created it were still there. The professors who started it were now becoming deans and department heads. And in addition to their departments there were now a bunch of new ones explicitly focused on social justice. Students were still hungry for things to be morally pure about. And there had been an explosion in the number of university administrators, many of whose jobs involved enforcing various forms of political correctness. In the early 2010s the embers of political correctness burst into flame anew. There were several differences between this new phase and the original one. It was more virulent. It spread further into the real world, although it still burned hottest within universities. And it was concerned with a wider variety of sins. In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which could be made to stick.

Why the pause? It warrants an explanation!

Between 1992 and 2012, you could still talk about IQ, you just couldn't talk about IQ to humanities students. But when political correctness became more and more of a force to be reckoned with, it caught some people completely by surprise. Early on in the 2010s, several activist and tech/hobbyist groups successfully fought attempts of ideological takeovers. I remember failed feminist takeover attempts of open source projects and activist groups, and then a couple of years later, another attempt was launched and the people who resisted the first time just quit.

Instead of developing antibodies to external pressure, many groups were weakened by every subsequent attack of the PC brigade.

When Donglegate happened, and when Rails conferences were cancelled for lack of gender diversity (which in during the heyday of Geek Feminism really meant cis women), many people were genuinely surprised by the discourse. I knew many men who were just as appalled as I was by the bro culture of "Perform like a porn star with CouchDB" and "OPSEC rule #5: Don't fuck Swedish women!" But even these people were caught off guard by the sensitivity and intensity of the activism.

Then in 2013, there was a wave of "online communities aren't fun any more" and "activism isn't fun any more" and "our movement is eating itself with infighting" and "abusive people in our movement are using political purity as cover to push out people over personal differences". Tumblr hit peak discourse, but tumblr social justice culture/callout culture soon became a meme.

they did not have free wifi, and I was out of data, so I asked if they had a paper sign in that I could use instead; the receptionist made me try again several more times before begrudgingly looking up the file and printing me out a copy. she also made sure to let me know that this was not just inconvenient for her, but inconvenient for me, as I would be bumped backwards in line.