> They very rarely give you enough historical context (for me) to understand what they're talking about

It gave the charts so you could make your own conclusion, so seems like the opposite of what you said for this article.

Any alternatives?

Agree. In the US in particular congress is by far the worst of the three federal branches. Most long term, strategic problems are due to their inaction whether taxes, current account deficits, operationally effective border control, gun laws. Even abortion: it was undone in the judicial branch but the same coterire of supporters know bans will never succeed as as an amendment .. so that's left in the air too without even the attempt to count votes publicly ... that's how chicken they are now that they've caught the bus.

Like a floundering company, the US congress spends most of its time in these modalities:

- trying to convince you they're not part of the DC establishment

- Fund raising off cultural divisions, and exasperation of same for the same goal

- blaming the other side

- blaming congress' culture as polarized hence can't get anything done

- US electorate laboring under the delusion that changing the president is a solution -- maybe helpful at the margins -- but fundamentally unable to permanently circumvent law.

- the far left and right are equally culpable in culture fights while the right is more criminally culpable in how it uses its agency.

And that's exactly right: we're sick of it.

In a floundering company with no product, poor quality control, cost overruns, disdain from existing customers, and non existent cross functional coordination the first thing upper management must do is fire the people unwilling to stop whining, blaming, and take responsibility.

The focus must emphasize customer satisfaction through quality of service/product. In short the BS had to stop. Second focus must emphasize cross functional coordination. In-fighting is a fireable offense. No complicated product is made by one team. It takes coordination.

(I can name any number of examples from books to personal experience where this was done in US corporate history to get people to understand the old way is out).

Right now the US congress far left and right like the BS; it serves their goals. The middle 4 std deviations over the center stand around with their head down, hands in pockets, hoping nobody notices them. It's institutional incompetence.

In the world of belief systems untied to natural law and empiricism, even the Bible reminds: faith (beliefs) without works is nothing but cheap symbolism.

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I think there’s gonna be a pendulum swing in the opposite direction.

Also DEI officers are a thing only at companies large enough to have an HR department. Their entire purpose is to ensure that the company doesn't get sued or fined for making illegal race-based hiring decisions. Once all the big companies have filled that new title there's not much reason to expect lots of job postings for the title: the market is saturated. Even if no company eliminated their DEI officer position you'd still expect the number of job postings to drop! Hiring for new positions follows a sigmoid curve, not an exponential or even linear one.

Is it really intolerance of DEI, or the fact that those jobs are basically horseshit?

It's one thing to incorporate aspects of DEI into company culture and to have policy around it, but do you really need a role dedicated to DEI? I really doubt it. I've worked at a few companies with these DEI officers, and the value they bring to a company is extremely dubious, if existent at all. My last company let theirs go, despite the administration being highly leftist at the time, and it was painfully obvious why. It's insulting to everyone that a DEI officer makes more than a burger flipper considering their cushy duties.

DEI-based roles were destined to fail.

ESG sadly is pretty popular in my country, but at least they have dropped their racism and sexism grift. Perhaps their other ambitions can be useful, but their language manipulation seriously had to go and it will take time until it is gone completely. It simply caused more problems than it solved.

Also those responsible for ESG do not have any disciplinary power over other employees, which was different with DEI. PR of course has slightly different rules.

Still, it should be under scrutiny to not mutate into something more authoritarian again.

As a dev I can ignore ESG completely now and I don't believe I will ever become friends with it. I certainly do not change my language for them, they caused enough damage and I believe polite silence on certain topics on their part would be quite adequate.

It makes it easier to characterise. The way it does so is by eliminating nuance and making a word that doesn't express the opinions that people actually have.

Making it easier to characterise makes the characterisation easier to criticise, but that's not a meaningful target.

Use of unnuanced terminology creates battlefields far away from the positions that people actually care about.

Defund the police is used as a phrase by people who want a well regulated well funded police system. Only a very few extreme people want to eliminate police correctly

Microaggression is used in academia with a degree of specificity but there are those who will use it to mean "Thing I don't like". Dunning Kruger is a non partisan term that is misused similarly.

I don't particularly like the term woke myself but I also tend to agree with Godwin's second law.

Both of those articles reference only a single historical quote using the term, that being the 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys". The way the term is used in the song also isn't the way that is used today, but as a way to communicate to stay vigilant.

It's hard to argue this is inaccurate. The origin of the term isn't really up for debate. And the way the conservative movement uses the term is overwhelming well-documented at this point.

It's usually used to mean identity politics, isn't it? The origin of the word has it's roots in racism, but now it's come to basically mean all forms of identity politics.

I'd like to counter this, but yeah... lots of people just throw "woke" and "DEI" around for everything not good, it's extremely painful to see.

- Boeing sucks at building stuff: blame woke hiring

- SpaceX has a landing failure: blame DEI hires at suppliers

I wouldn't be surprised if they shout at the sky screaming about woke clouds when they get caught in rain without an umbrella

This comment is probably the most correct reason "woke" has a negative tone now, because they chose to use it as a way to ignore their behaviors or associations that might not be the most empathetic of others, aligning it with this "woke" movement allows them to turn their back on the topic. Hard for those that care about topics to engage in bringing to light when half the Country puts your comment on blast for being too "woke". It's like Idiocracy at it's infancy.

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Technically, didn't they introduce it in 1861?

That doesn't follow if you assume that promotion of an idea is highest when it seeks to establish dominance, and goes away if it becomes hegemonic / the "new normal".

It's not empathy. Gay people (myself included) don't feel "empathized with" when we see gay people reflected in modern advertising. We feel targeted, and rightfully so - people are preying on the unintelligent reactionary masses that empathize with or want to empathize with queer identity. It is fully and wholly virtue signalling - queer media was better when it was an underground identity! At least then the concept wasn't being abused for brownie points by C-suite executives that profit off the manipulation of their audience.

On the flip side, the wanton "wokeness" of the right is equally abusive. Right wing grandstanders say exactly what their party wants to hear, absolve themselves of responsibility ("oh i'm anonymous" or "i don't believe this but it's my right to say it"), and then get thousands of unironic adherents that fully believe in their hyperbolic attention-seeking. It's the exact same mechanism on either side of the aisle, jerking off precisely the same insecurities for almost exactly the same reason.

At some indeterminate point in the future, all Americans will end up being conservative. Not because it's the right choice, but because the way politics are headed nobody will be encouraged to think outside marketing and empty platitudes. We already spend more time defending our echo chambers than we spend engaging with policy.

The Economist is a British newspaper. HQ London, editors British.

That said, ‘America’ is synonymous with the USA in writing and conversation here (and elsewhere in Europe in my experience).

> The Economist originates [...] in the USA

The Economist is a British publication.

Someone will probably downvote you for making the irrelevant mistake saying US vs UK, but your point is absolutely correct that “America” is colloquially the name of the USA, not a continent or set of continents, in both US and UK English.

I suspect OP knows this, and is fighting a battle to try to change how Americans speak their own language — it’s not rare, in my experience, for people in other countries of the Americas to be annoyed by this usage.

No, being permissive of nonsense is what caused the US to arrive at where it is today. The tea party patriots nonsense should have been the end of it.

I disagree.

There is a lot of distracting, dividing, and just trash-tier content in social media that society is only worse off for taking seriously.

Politically divisive articles such as ones encouraging identity politics tend to fall in that category. So do articles with emotionally loaded terms like “woke”. Maybe they are loaded not for us, but we all know they are loaded emotionally for many.

And it doesn’t matter much if many other people engage in it, it is likely healthier for you and society not to.

Now, I agree that maybe “irrelevant” should be grounded in context — it is irrelevant to a discerning reader. It is relevant in society and its discourse, unfortunately.

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It's not even "places" -- not any more. It's driven by the extremely online. Twitter, in particular, is a bazaar of echo-chambers, and most of them push their own political and social agendas. (Left and right, the mechanism is the same.)

People get caught up in it, and then think that those opinions are normal. There is no "normative" frame of reference.

This has, of course, infected politics itself over the past 10 years.

I live in a liberal coastal area, and I can assure you it’s not woke.

There are/were attempts, such as thanking the Indians who lands we stole before every Kraken game.

And the 'Right'.

I don't think I had ever heard of woke before the non-stop talking points from the 'Right'.

It always seemed like a drummed up issue to rile up their, Christian/Holocaust Denier/Civil War Loving, base.

Ala Huxley

The main criticism I’ve always had about it is this: that it’s fake.

Take San Francisco as a prime example. It’s a place full of people who style themselves as progressive or “woke” or whatever but a starter home is unachievable to anyone without an exit event or a $400k salary. It has one of the widest rich/poor divisions of anywhere I’ve ever seen in the USA. Major industries include mass surveillance and addictive forms of media, and I have no idea how anyone who isn’t in a high six figure job can live well there let alone raise a family.

SF is not progressive at all, except in rhetoric.

I doubt many buy into this at all but yes, it shows that there is someone in the pipeline demanding such changes, which are frankly ridiculous. Be it government or some activists doesn't really matter, it doesn't really reflect the opinion of the majority of western consumers.

That liberal parties are being made fun of on topic like gender is a self inflicted fate, especially if such overreaching "education" is spread in completely unrelated products.

So yes, companies should get flak for it until it is corrected.

Need a refresher on how Parties work.

They send representatives to the Convention to vote.

At the convention, anything can be decided. They are NOT the government. They are more like private clubs with their own bylaws.

But, you seem to be getting a little frothy around the mouth. So, maybe try breathing in slowly, breath out slowly, focus on the breath. Examine where the anger is coming from.

> He’s called a “threat to democracy” and that’s laughable considering the Democrat nominee won not a single primary

He's called that not because of anything leading up to the upcoming election, but because of what he keeps saying he'll do after it.

> Remember COVID, the lockdowns, the suppression of dissent?

This occurred under Trump during his first attempt to "poke the establishment in the eye."

> How about the left that used to be opposed to war yet now seem to support continual escalation of the Ukraine conflict?

Because 1) we're bound by treaties to do so (we promised to protect them if they dismantled their nuclear arsenal, which they did). 2) The Ukraine is, according to pretty much everybody with knowledge on European politics, acting as the first line of defense against Russia. It's why so many European countries are also supporting the Ukraine.

> The danger of Russia is directly proportional to how much money can be made from it.

The danger of Russia is there's a dying megalomaniac with nuclear codes and a desire to conquer Europe no matter the cost to Russia.

> I’m not voting for the party that supported school closures, coerced “vaccinations,” and funding endless wars.

So, you're not voting for trump? Again, all of these happened under his watch as president, and many were backed up by his executive orders.

> anyone that has faced two assassination attempts

By his own party, by people who voted for him in the past.

> This election is a simple choice — do we want more of the Snowden-revealed evil of the establishment or do we want to poke the establishment in the eye?

I agree this election is a simple choice, but not the one you proposed. It's the choice between electing someone to power that we can be fairly confident will release that power when the time comes and someone who is, by his own admissions and actions, an aspirational autocrat envious of and enamored with despicable world leaders like Putin.

As for the other issues you raise, as long as democracy survives, we have a chance of addressing them. When we start electing non-democratic leaders to fix our democracy, we have, by definition, lost.

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I associate "wokeness" with what disney does. Putting black people everywhere to show how progressive they are, but being one of the worst corporations that exists.

Israeli atrocities against Palestinians are something that one can criticize independently of Palestinian atrocities against other Palestinians.

Thinking Palestinians should be freed from Israeli oppression does not necessarily mean one agrees with every part of their culture or everything their government does.

The US has got into a place where for most people political opinions are a package deal that you get shipped to you in a box from a major political party. You don't think through each issue and come to a conclusion, that takes too much time, you just subscribe to the bundle of your choosing and accept everything they offer.

Are you strongly pro-life? Well, that comes bundled with an isolationist foreign policy these days, so let's just check that box for you while we're at it.

Are you in favor of gay rights? Well, that comes bundled with opposition to Israel and support of Palestine.

It's not about what makes coherent sense, it's about groupthink.

Palestinians, both gay and straight, are being carpet bombed in Gaza. The Western left tends to support the weak and oppressed. Being carpet bombed is a form of being weak and oppressed.

Also, very strange for you to claim to be a Muslim and then write a searing critique of Islam that would seem to dismiss the humanity of a group (approving of mass killing by bombing) of Muslims because of their religion of Islam.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My post above got flagged, here it is for future readers:

>“Raise your hand if you’re a racist.” Guests may often have broken down in tears when told that their claims to be colour-blind were simply another brick in the edifice of white supremacy

The fact that society collectively thought that not only was this OK, but those voices were the ones to be amplified was hysteria. Anyone who spoke up against this was immediately shouted down and called racist. The fallout from George Floyd and "The Summer of Love" will be studied as a moral panic in the future. People are slowly coming back to their senses. You can only deny reality for so long. Truly Orwellian.

I know this to be true in the macro ... Strangely, I've noticed in my own life a small trend of the most unlikely of people giving religion a try. They talk about it almost as if it's a new "cool" thing. This is in New York City of all places.

When was the last time you attended church and what was the denomination? You’re providing anecdotal evidence, right?

But suppose that your regular bar served absinthe, and offered 12-hour/day child care?!

I'm coming around to the thesis that compulsory education is fundamentally systematic child-care to enable parents to participate in post-industrial employment and labor without needing to be around too much, attempting to raise their bothersome kids at home.

We had "latchkey kids" in the 1980s or so, and nowadays we've got parents ignoring their children at home while working from the kitchen table, or in the den.

With the rise of feminism, "equal pay for equal work", and girlbosses, there's basically nobody left who knows how to raise children, or wants to do it for free (not merely free, but the opportunity cost of skilled employment), so it makes sense for the State to expand public education as much as humanly possible so that children are mostly out-of-the-way and never home, except to sleep.

Don't think you can fault people for engaging in a subject that half the country is willing to sink it for.

Can at least talk about it like "wow, the right is really willing to die for this, what are they on about"

Exactly why I canceled after many years of subscribing