Friday, December 13, 2024

Wokeness

Wokeness is often identified with non-national/non-religious identity politics. It claims that under the guise of equal rights for all kinds of marginalized identity groups, a claim to power is enforced by authoritarian means. 

 Red Baron is appalled by the extent the wokeness has reached. Anyone who criticizes 'woke' theories that advocate for the oppressed automatically makes common cause with the oppressors. This divides the world into strict categories of good and evil, and wokeness exerts moral pressure to silence its critics. 

 Even in a factual debate, criticizing wokeness is impossible because it makes itself irrefutable: It rejects scientific objectivity as a fairy tale of white, patriarchal, Western-individualistic knowledge production. Michel Foucault should have already stated that every claim to truth, including that of science, is nothing other than a claim to power. 

 And even worse. Wokeness scrutinizes every even thoughtless statement for political correctness, and if it doesn't meet the standard, it is denigrated as hate speech. 

In his lecture at the Museumsgesellschaft  Science and Freedom of Opinion in the Whirlwind of Contemporary Cultural Wars, Prof. Rainer Asch discussed the limits that wokeness imposes on freedom of opinion in science. Do scientists have to bend politically correct, for example, when justifying the financing of their research projects? Isn't this opening the floodgates to hypocrisy because the proposed project could fail without great overcautiousness in the wording?

Universities feel compelled to establish professorships or academic positions dedicated to critical race theory, diversity (LGBTQ+ studies), and social justice in inclusivity and that critically assess how language and behavior impact marginalized communities. These institutions develop a life of their own.

Cancel culture can erase parts of our history, such as renaming the Eberhard Karls University ofTübingen. Canceling the founder's name for Eberhard Karl was an anti-Semite like many of his contemporaries.

For Red Baron, above all, the corruption of the German language is an abomination. It all started with the Green Party, which introduced the gender starlet in November 2016. What is simply called migrants in English will become one word in German, too, using a starlet: Migrant*innen

This would "correctly" address the two genders, Migranten (male) and Migrantinnen (female). When written, it is ugly, but what is worse is when speakers on television try to pronounce the starlet, inserting an artificial pause between Migrant and innen

You may think that English-speaking people don't have the same problems as Germanophones. However, there is gender madness at Brighton and Sussex University Hospital (BSUH). It is the first hospital in the UK to formally implement a gender-inclusive language policy for its maternity services department, now known as "perinatal services."
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