Tag: Woke Mind Virus

Of ‘Wokeness:’ A Tale Of Two Dresses

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It occured to me, if you want to know what “woke” means, the following situation pretty much sums it up. On one hand, we have Emily Ratajkowski wearing a sheer — but tasteful — dress to the Vanity Fair Oscar after party and getting a lot of hate for it. Meanwhile, trans icon Hunter Schafer wears what what is demonstrably a more provocative dress to the same event and she’s heaped with praise.

Now, to me, what happened is Emrata suffered at the hands of Internet misogyny culture while Schafer’s fan base is so ecstatic that she’s living her best life as a woman that she gets praise.

Or something like that.

There has been something of a kerfuffle over some Right-wing “thought leader” not being able to give a cogent explanation of what being “woke” is on a TV show. Obviously, being “woke” at this point pretty much means “whatever goes against the MAGA fascist agenda.”

But upon giving it some thought, here is what the woman came up with later, after the show.

Looking closely at this new explanation she gave, it looks like total bullshit to me. If I was forced to give a non-silly, non-partisan definition of being “woke” I would use terms “systemic racism” and “transgender rights” in it somewhere.

Let me be absolutely clear — I generally support transgender rights. What I *DON’T* support is when the “woke cancel culture mob” freaks the fuck out about people like Dave Chappelle simply expressing their disagreement with the ideological conventions of the Trans movement.

I say this because, you can yell at me all you like about how Trans people are dying and, as such, we have to protect them to the point that even free speech is limited — but you’re missing something very important by saying that.

And that is the touchiness of the Trans movement is driving Traditionalists into the arms of MAGA Nazi fascists who if they ever gain the presidency again will definitely give the Trans movement something to cry about. Or we have a civil war and then everyone — Trans people included — will have a lot more problems on their hands than a Dave Chappelle joke.

Anyway, this is an intractable problem that is, again, probably going to only be solved with the “woke” era ends because we have a civil war or turn into an autocracy.

Woke Hollywood Is Sexless Hollywood

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the reasons why I’m so pleased with the appearance of the movie No Hard Feelings is it’s a saucy, spicy “hard comedy” like I remember back in the 1980s. With the rise of Hollywood’s bifurcation into Woke and Comic Book genre movies all the sauciness has been drained from the movie going experience.

I fucking hate this woke test.

It’s all very strange.

Most people explain it this way: with the rise of abundant online porn, the #MeToo moment and “intimacy co-ordinators” Hollywood has just given up on giving adults the type of entertainment they once had.

I definitely believe there is credence to this idea, just like there is credence to the idea that all the angry young men who might otherwise start a punk or rock band now are keyboard warriors on Reddit.

And, yet, the case could be made that if we go from the success of Cocaine Bear to an equally successful No Hard Feelings that all the quibbles that Hollywood has had about saucy, raunchy hard comedies will fade away.

Hollywood as it should be. Wink.

But the thing I’m worried about is sexless the “woke cancel culture mob” is when it comes to entertainment. Gen Z apparently wants everyone to be “realistic” (read: unattractive) in their media and they also totally “over” any sort of sexxy time in entertainment for some strange reason.

So, we have no sex and we have no rock and the only thing we have left is drugs.

It’s all very curious. But there is a market for adult-oriented, saucy entertainment like The Wolf of Wall Street, The Wedding Crashers and The Hangover.

So, there is a possibility that if No Hard Feelings is a hit that Jennifer Lawrence will join Tom Cruise as someone who “saved Hollywood’s ass.” I do wonder how much the pandemic is responsible for this New Era in Hollywood in the sense that it scared the ever living shit out of movie studio executives to the point that they decided to go back to basics.

‘ChatGPT is WOKE’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I hate being right. I continue to see chatter on Twitter among MAGA fascists regarding how angry they are at the “woke” nature of ChatGPT. Which makes me wonder where all of this is going to end.

I suppose that once we turn into a MAGA fascist autocracy that all chatbots will somehow be regulated to prevent the evil, pernicious forces of “wokeness” from being involved. As an aside, I have to say that all this talk about this or that thing being “woke” is total and complete bullshit. The fucking fascists call anything they disagree “woke” because they’re completely devoid of any meaningful policies other than expressions of hate.

There is, of course, the possibility that technology will solve this particular problem in the sense that everyone will have their own personalized chatbot in the near future, so if you want a “woke” chatbot, you can have one and if you want a chatbot that spews your own hate back at you, then you can have that, too.

But the point is — I can totally see Trump picking up the cause of “chatbot bias” the moment he’s back on Twitter — or sooner. It’s just the type of easy to understand and vacuous bullshit MAGA fascists love to traffic in. The great irony is, of course, that I was listening to the New York Times’ “Hardfork” podcast and they were talking about chatbot bias and I realized I was on the same page as them.

Because I am a drunk loser in the middle of nowhere I am going to get zero credit for having thought all the political implications of chatbot bias well before all the cool kids.

Ugh.

The Fucking Woke Hypocrisy of FilmTok Gets On My Nerves

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, I got beef with the film reviewing community of Tik-Tok. Too often, they go out of their fucking woke way to shit on movies like Avatar — Way of Water for some bullshit woke reason.

Fuck this test.

And, yet, they liked Babylon?

I don’t get it. I really liked Babylon, too, but you would think the tender hearted people of woke FilmTok would not be able to bear how gratuitous and over the top the movie was. I’m reminded of the one time I used Twitter clone Mastodon, only to be driven off the service by fucking woke cocksuckers who jumped on me the moment I didn’t follow their strict woke orthodoxy. They, too, did not see the contradiction when they told me they like Dave Chappelle and Richard Pryor.

It’s because of bullshit like that that we’re probably going to lose our democracy. When “cultural Leftists” have such a strict orthodoxy that they attack anyone who doesn’t know the ends and outs of their “woke” agenda that the efforts to keep America a democracy falls into serious, serious trouble.

I just had to get that out of my system. I fucking hate the woke orthodoxy because of how dangerous it is for democracy. Sometimes you want to tell a story that will “trigger” people — because that’s the whole point! The issue should be telling a great story, not if two women have a conversation about something other than a man.

Fuck that.

My frustration with the “woke” agenda grows the better my first novel gets. Given how much representation there is in this novel — and who I am as a CIS white male — half the readership will think I’m too woke and half its audience will think I’m an evil representative ogre of the patriarchy because I’m writing from a non-white, non-male POV at times. (Ok, maybe a lot.)

But that’s my vision and I’m willing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune over it.

Chatbot Regulation Is Looming

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I spoke to my Traditionalist relative today who is by nature 100% against any form of regulation and was taken aback by how open he was to regulating chatbots. Now, the subtext of this is not so much saving jobs as it is, of course “bais.”

I’m sure in his MAGA podcast echochamber they’re all aghast that ChatGPT is too “woke” simply because it doesn’t validate their MAGA agenda about such hot button topics as “What is a woman?” So, the whole issue of how chatbots could radically transform our economy in a very short amount of time is a lulz, but a chatbot not validating the policy goals of MAGA is a bridge too far.

It will probably start with hearings in 2023 by the Republican House looking into how powerful ChatGPT is in education overnight. And, along the way, it will become a MAGA Nazi talking point as chatbots grow more culturally potent that they need to be regulated to stop the “woke indoctrination” of America’s youth because it won’t let little kids learn jokes about women.

It all goes back to something I think about all the time — MAGA Nazis love to conflate the soft power of smug Twitter liberals with the hard power of the government that they want to control so badly. MAGA Nazis have gone from 2016’s “Fuck your feelings” to 2023’s “ChatGPT is hurting my feelings by not agreeing with me so it has to be regulated to do so.”

And all of this is going to happen really, really fast. It might even feel like it just snapped into place overnight. ChatGPT is definitely a ping from the a possible Singularity. None of us are prepared for how radically our economy may be changed

I Am Not Perfect

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Occasionally, I find myself daydreaming about writing not just under a pen name, but taking up an assume identity to get these novels published. I am so woefully imperfect that as this first novel gets better and better and I come within — at least in my own mind — shouting distance of getting published I review in my mind all the very flawed-human things I’ve done over the years.

I’ve managed not to do anything illegal over the years, but I have done a lot of things — usually because of booze — that make me wince now that I am an old, wiser graybeard. It just seems if I came up with the character of a 24-year-old transgendered Hispanic girl then maybe I could somehow find success without instantaneously being canceled for stupid shit I did in Seoul nearly 20 years ago.

Whenever I think shit like this, two things happen.

One, my ego kicks in and I’m like, “Fuck it, we’ll do it live.” Meanwhile, I also think of the old saw, “It’s better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.” So, yeah, I know I may be courting disaster by putting myself in the public eye by writing a really great pop novel — but at least I will have written a really great pop novel.

At this point, the object of writing this novel isn’t so much to get rich and famous — even though that would be great — it’s to prove a fucking point: I don’t suck.

I can tell a great story, if nothing else. So I’m willing to risk the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune if it comes to that.

It’s When People Come At Me From The Political Left That I Don’t Know What To Do

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I continue to brood about what, exactly, is the “woke cancel culture mob” and if it even exists. At the moment, all I know is that being “woke” simply means whatever it needs to mean so Ron DeSantis gets closer to being POTUS. That’s it — it means everything and nothing.

And, yet, from my own personal experiences on Twitter, there definitely does seem to be a small, but vocal, group of people who would fit the description of being “woke.” I think a better description of them would be “cultural Leftists.” They tend to be extremely touchy about things like pronouns, being “triggered,” the broadest, most complex definition of a what a “woman” is, all the while being totally oblivious to the rise of cold, hard MAGA Nazism.

They’re so busy making people like me who are generally on their side feel bad for not following their very strict orthodoxy about this or that “woke” thing that they totally miss that, in the end, both they the “woke” and me the “unwoke” could endup in the same Trump branded weaponized ICE camp. I’m sure I’m stumbling across some sort of political rule of thumb about how fascism takes over a democracy.

I think what’s most important is that, in general, the center-Left really needs to work on its messaging. When I have to spend five minutes wading through the “anti-MAGA people are all woke members of the cancel culture mob who want to turn everyone gay” narrative from my Traditionalist relatives whenever I try to talk to them about politics — American democracy has a problem.

It’s so bad that it is literally impossible for my Traditionalist relatives to distinguish between Democrats and pretty much the spawn of gay satan…oh boy. All I know is, the “gay scare” of 2022 – 2023 is alive and well in my little corner of the universe. I just want my otherwise sane Traditionalist relatives to help me defeat MAGA Nazism…but they’re just too consumed with the cultural wars to even think about it seriously.

All of this is very touchy and difficult to write about because, well, the “woke cancel culture mob” is known to fly off the handle if you don’t totally, absolutely agree with them on their most extreme positions. Which, of course, proves me point.

Anyway, I fucking hate MAGA Nazis. I just wish cultural Leftists would be willing to cool it and work with more centrist people like me to defeat the rise of fascism in the United States.

OpenAI ChatGPT & ‘World War Woke:’ Rage Against The Machine

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the most ironic developments of modern politics is how the American center-Left is now on the defensive when it comes to protecting the “system” from attacks by MAGA Nazis who want to burn everything down.

It’s a very, very curious situation.

What’s worse, everything single element of American culture is now aggressively being siloed into Red or Blue. So, not only do Reds want to burn the entire system down, but while they’re waiting to do that, they are rapidly building out their own culture totally separate from the overall culture of America.

One alarming thing I continue to see being talked about on Twitter is how Reds believe that OpenAI ChatGPT is “woke.” The worst part about this is it’s not like Reds are going to agree to any kind of equatable stance on the part of a chatbot — they want the chatbot to agree with them, so they can use that to validate their “owning” of the libs.

I continue to believe that the “bias” of chatbots could be THE political issue of 2023 in between repeated impeachment of Biden, Harris and various members of the Biden Administration.

The reason why chatbot “bias” will be such a huge deal — at least until everyone has their own personal chatbot — is, for the moment, a chatbot’s answer is something that both sides have to deal with. And given the natural inclination of humans to try to triangulate any debate with an “objective” third party, of course MAGA Nazis will get mad if what they believe isn’t validated. For the time being, they have one source to turn to and they want that once source to agree with them so they can use that answer to “own the libs.”

I fucking hate MAGA Nazis so much. Cocksuckers.

Anyway, at some point in the near future, “woke” chatbots will follow CRT, “cancel culture” in to the pantheon of things that are considered the “woke mind virus” on the part of the Reds. They will make the issue so loaded that it’s impossible to talk about unless you agree with them.

They will crack a joke if you try to pin them down on how dumb their arguments are and simply be smug in their belief that they’re right and you’re wrong.