"And that show—I don’t remember at the time feeling particularly provocative. And so the natural evolution of language is often a good thing. The forced evolution of language in a way that feels like it comes down from some really sanctimonious, prissy commissar is not a good thing. Although I just said that, we have to remember that there actually was no commissar. People, I think—in reaction to stuff that really annoyed them, the kind of people who made their identity around opposition to wokeness—they almost had to inflate its danger to match the scale of their annoyance. Rather than something that, like, really bugged them or really seemed obnoxious, it had to be totalitarian. It had to be something that was remaking all of the systems of our society, which I just don’t think was ever really true. But anyway, there was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society, systemic injustices that were really thrown into high relief for a lot of people by the election of Donald Trump."
It's in print at the link, but it's a podcast — listen here. The part I quoted... I don't think you could understand just hearing. I had to read it twice even to feel that I might have figured it out. I read it twice, but more importantly, I've copied it here and I'm noting that I think it's complicated, and I display it for you to make of it what you will.
My favorite part was the sanctimonious, prissy commissar who doesn't actually exist. We need more fantasy characters in our mental life. Why not the sanctimonious, prissy commissar?
I love 30 Rock. It was subtly provocative in that the evil conservative was the most interesting, generous, and thoughtful character while the good liberals were all vapid narcissistic mediocrities. There were a couple blackface episodes that Tina Fey pulled from streaming for no good reason--artistic cowardice. I didn't like that.
And in that sense--the blackface episode sense--I think Goldberg underplays the danger of woke. One way or another, it actually did undermine everything and sought to control everything. That no one directly defends the word "woke" anymore doesn't mean we no longer face the a threat from the ideas that it represented.
Left wing ideas never die, no matter how many times they fail. They just get repackaged. Liberals are incapable of admitting they were wrong, of going back and rethinking their positions. They always conclude they didn't try hard enough. Real communism has never been tried.
The future is filled with rude awakenings. No one is immune, least of all parents. I think it's cute that the future these middling intellectuals dreamed of for themselves and their children (they, of course, come first) may be destroyed as an act of defiance and rebellion by many of their own offspring.
"Hell no I won't do what you tell me!" - Rage Against The Machine
Seems like Goldberg is thinking linearly, recalling that 30 Rock really wasn’t offensive but then she is defending wokity, the groupthink that does insist humor like those shows is something to take offense to. The problem with wokism is it closes, one might say epistemically closes, one’s mind to alternate points of view, ruling them out of bounds without the benefit of hearing them. In fact it denies that there is any benefit to hearing other points of view.
I’m so old I remember Liberals selling the university experience as a way to purposely expose oneself to new and different points of view. Hell, they assigned us “breadth” courses for the expressed purpose of provoking such exposure. And they were so self-righteous about it they didn’t even realize my essays were making fun of the very premise of the course they taught.
Jack: Well, well, well, Lemon . . . Stephen’s a good man. He’s on partner - track at Dewey, and he’s a Black. Liz: A black? That is offensive. Jack: No, no. That’s his last name. Stephen Black. Good family. Liz: Oh yeah, of course. Jack: A remarkable people, the Blacks. Musical, very athletic, not very good swimmers — again, I’m talking about the family.
That paragraph is not complicated, it is rambling academia-speak crafted to provoke confusion and emotion to suppress ratiocination.
Like most of what comes out of academia, and she just took academia to the media room (not calling it "news" anymore). If you apply the factors of studying, in essence reverse engineer it into an outline, it all slips away as fluff.
Seems like she's saying, Yeah, okay, wokeness was gross, but it was a well-intentioned reaction to Trump and his supporters who threatened to stop all human progress, so it was totally understandable, but it wasn't really all that bad and anyway it's over now so let's move on.
Michelle Goldberg's column is just a wordy version of that stupid XKCD cartoon that the small minded use to justify their speech policing. You either don't try to control how others speak, or you're totalitarian to a meaningful degree. Affecting shock at the things people said 15 years ago when you were an adult and enjoyed it at the time just demonstrates you bathe in the mindless current of fashionable taste and are happy to be carried wherever it leads.
The ADL and people who run Google, Facebook, and social media aren't "Pissy" or "Sanctimonous". Go watch Herr Stamer in the UK, and you'll see he's not "Pissy" either. They're hard-nosed, angry totalitarians who hate the people they are censoring.
But I have come accross "Pissy" podcasters while listening to podcasters talk about old movies. Goddamn, every time some old movie star (Gene Kelly or Rock Hudson or whoever) goes after the girl, they screech about how "weird" and "Creepy" it is. Its also upsets them that every women in the old classics isn't a "Strong woman" who "takes charge" and beats everyone up.
And the old TV podcasters aren't any better. I turned off one podcast after the suppposedly straight men doing the podcast, had the vapors over beautiful space aliens showing up in mini-skirts and go-go books. The "sexism" was too much for them.
Same as "Family Ties," where the conservative Alex was the most interesting character. They didn't make that mistake with the reboot, "Modern Family" where they made the conservative kid physically unappealing, and used the name "Alex" for the hot daughter.
Falco, in the US, is better remembered for "Rock Me Amadeus." In the US, "Der Kommissar" was a hit as an English language cover by After the Fire a couple of years later. It is the latter version you still hear on US radio- I wasn't even aware that the song was Falco's until I found it on Youtube about a decade ago.
"But anyway, there was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society, systemic injustices that were really thrown into high relief for a lot of people by the election of Donald Trump."
"Systemic injustice" is woke-speak for class struggle, and like Critical Race Theory, it's a subset of Critical Theory concepts. Double virtue signaling points are awarded for blending it with Trump-hate.
It's like for all her alleged education she never got around to reading Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" but even if she had, it's just another how-to manual for the Left.
@tim maguire, + 1. This is probably why lefties migrate to academia. Out in the real world if the bridge falls down you don’t try to replace it with the same bridge design using the same sort of materials and built the same way. Out in the real world you’re expected to learn from things going wrong.
I told you guys back in the day that this woke shit was just a phase but you refused to listen. The chicken little attitude runs deep in the human psyche. That's okay, someone needs to swing the pendulum and not everyone can has the mental capacity to estimate fast fourier transforms on the fly in real time and remain calm.
That is you see the whole purpose of the algorithm to keep you in that panic of fight or flight mode which destroys your serotonin and testosterone and keeps you in a constant state of anxiety. It's the perfect attitude for the mass marketing of impulse buying of needless trinkets and bobbles made a n China
The imaginary commissars. So, all those DEI and Human Resources hires over the last 25 years that imposed woke speech codes, White Privilege mandatory training sessions and gender pronoun checkboxes on law firms, corporate offices and healthcare institutions were an illusion? Or are we just not allowed to call them commissars?
Wokeness needs no defenders because it has become institutionalized. Sure, a few red states eliminate university DEI programs, and activists go after small-fry companies like Deere. X offers a bit of counterpoint. SCOTUS supposedly crushed reverse discrimination, but not really. Woke personnel is everywhere. Woke race and sex taboos prevail. Only a few very brave people are consistently and seriously anti-woke in public--e.g., Charles Murray, "Facing Reality."
"ere was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society"
But that's the lie! It wasn't, and isn't, an attempt to correct systemic injustices. No one can explain how it could possibly do so and when pressed the people who claim this fall back to something like "why are you making such a big deal about it, just be nice!" The real goal is an exertion of power, forcing others to submit to your will.
How can you miss something that isn't gone? Wokeness is stronger than it ever was. It's just that many people don't like to call it "wokeness" anymore.
The democrat candidate for president is the one who said “everyone needs to be more woke.” I’m not sure why Howard is declaring it over. Although he’s at least as authoritative as Goldberg.
Sometimes some people felt legitimate discomfort at things they heard. But sometimes people were pushed into saying some things and not saying other things by dictates that came from who knows where? Reducing that social force to a caricature makes it possible to deny it, but it was there.
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Sanctimonious prissy commissar Michelle Goldberg.
Imagine if they had discovered All in the Family !
I love 30 Rock. It was subtly provocative in that the evil conservative was the most interesting, generous, and thoughtful character while the good liberals were all vapid narcissistic mediocrities. There were a couple blackface episodes that Tina Fey pulled from streaming for no good reason--artistic cowardice. I didn't like that.
And in that sense--the blackface episode sense--I think Goldberg underplays the danger of woke. One way or another, it actually did undermine everything and sought to control everything. That no one directly defends the word "woke" anymore doesn't mean we no longer face the a threat from the ideas that it represented.
Left wing ideas never die, no matter how many times they fail. They just get repackaged. Liberals are incapable of admitting they were wrong, of going back and rethinking their positions. They always conclude they didn't try hard enough. Real communism has never been tried.
The future is filled with rude awakenings. No one is immune, least of all parents. I think it's cute that the future these middling intellectuals dreamed of for themselves and their children (they, of course, come first) may be destroyed as an act of defiance and rebellion by many of their own offspring.
"Hell no I won't do what you tell me!" - Rage Against The Machine
Married With Children! Perish the thought....
It's the ascendancy of feelings over stuff men are interested in. Now it's men saying screw it, have fun with your cat.
It alarms me how many politicians and columnists seem to be prepping for a war on free speech.
Seems like Goldberg is thinking linearly, recalling that 30 Rock really wasn’t offensive but then she is defending wokity, the groupthink that does insist humor like those shows is something to take offense to. The problem with wokism is it closes, one might say epistemically closes, one’s mind to alternate points of view, ruling them out of bounds without the benefit of hearing them. In fact it denies that there is any benefit to hearing other points of view.
I’m so old I remember Liberals selling the university experience as a way to purposely expose oneself to new and different points of view. Hell, they assigned us “breadth” courses for the expressed purpose of provoking such exposure. And they were so self-righteous about it they didn’t even realize my essays were making fun of the very premise of the course they taught.
Good God. 'Rap' is bad enough, but Kommissar über 'rap' in the mother tongue.... That's just plain mean.
They're not 'prepping', they're executing. See: UK internet thought police arrests, and Brazilian Twitter/X judges.
The episide on GE's Six Sigma initiative was one for the ages...but really only for a very niche audience subgroup.
We are training out children not to need the First Amendment.
Jack: Well, well, well, Lemon . . . Stephen’s a good man. He’s on partner - track at Dewey, and he’s a Black.
Liz: A black? That is offensive.
Jack: No, no. That’s his last name. Stephen Black. Good family.
Liz: Oh yeah, of course.
Jack: A remarkable people, the Blacks. Musical, very athletic, not very good swimmers — again, I’m talking about the family.
Goldberg is evil and stupid who cares what she thinks
That paragraph is not complicated, it is rambling academia-speak crafted to provoke confusion and emotion to suppress ratiocination.
Like most of what comes out of academia, and she just took academia to the media room (not calling it "news" anymore). If you apply the factors of studying, in essence reverse engineer it into an outline, it all slips away as fluff.
Ah falco brings back memories
Although I just said that, we have to remember that there actually was no commissar.
it's Always Important to REMEMBER, that the commissars insist that we ALWAYS say that there actually was no commissar.
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/i-reject-their-normal
Folks in the UK would like a word with Ms. Goldberg on what she thinks won’t lead to totalitarianism.
Seems like she's saying, Yeah, okay, wokeness was gross, but it was a well-intentioned reaction to Trump and his supporters who threatened to stop all human progress, so it was totally understandable, but it wasn't really all that bad and anyway it's over now so let's move on.
Michelle Goldberg's column is just a wordy version of that stupid XKCD cartoon that the small minded use to justify their speech policing. You either don't try to control how others speak, or you're totalitarian to a meaningful degree. Affecting shock at the things people said 15 years ago when you were an adult and enjoyed it at the time just demonstrates you bathe in the mindless current of fashionable taste and are happy to be carried wherever it leads.
there actually was no commissar
Worse. There are memetic engineers.
Althouse tried to avoid cultural appropriation.
"Left wing ideas never die, no matter how many times they fail. They just get repackaged." Truer words.
Why do so many people on the left like to deny communism and communism cruelties?
remember syme, in 1984, he was a dutiful drone till his kid turned him in
The ADL and people who run Google, Facebook, and social media aren't "Pissy" or "Sanctimonous". Go watch Herr Stamer in the UK, and you'll see he's not "Pissy" either. They're hard-nosed, angry totalitarians who hate the people they are censoring.
But I have come accross "Pissy" podcasters while listening to podcasters talk about old movies. Goddamn, every time some old movie star (Gene Kelly or Rock Hudson or whoever) goes after the girl, they screech about how "weird" and "Creepy" it is. Its also upsets them that every women in the old classics isn't a "Strong woman" who "takes charge" and beats everyone up.
And the old TV podcasters aren't any better. I turned off one podcast after the suppposedly straight men doing the podcast, had the vapors over beautiful space aliens showing up in mini-skirts and go-go books. The "sexism" was too much for them.
Same as "Family Ties," where the conservative Alex was the most interesting character. They didn't make that mistake with the reboot, "Modern Family" where they made the conservative kid physically unappealing, and used the name "Alex" for the hot daughter.
Falco, in the US, is better remembered for "Rock Me Amadeus." In the US, "Der Kommissar" was a hit as an English language cover by After the Fire a couple of years later. It is the latter version you still hear on US radio- I wasn't even aware that the song was Falco's until I found it on Youtube about a decade ago.
History is the story of rude awakenings. Like when the Etruscans had those beautiful, undefended Mediterranean villas.
Outstanding writing and I'll say it again: Alec Baldwin is perfect at playing assholes.
"But anyway, there was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society, systemic injustices that were really thrown into high relief for a lot of people by the election of Donald Trump."
"Systemic injustice" is woke-speak for class struggle, and like Critical Race Theory, it's a subset of Critical Theory concepts. Double virtue signaling points are awarded for blending it with Trump-hate.
It's like for all her alleged education she never got around to reading Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" but even if she had, it's just another how-to manual for the Left.
ADL?
Trump is like duct tape, he can be used to fix any bad Leftist idea.
@tim maguire, + 1. This is probably why lefties migrate to academia. Out in the real world if the bridge falls down you don’t try to replace it with the same bridge design using the same sort of materials and built the same way. Out in the real world you’re expected to learn from things going wrong.
I told you guys back in the day that this woke shit was just a phase but you refused to listen. The chicken little attitude runs deep in the human psyche. That's okay, someone needs to swing the pendulum and not everyone can has the mental capacity to estimate fast fourier transforms on the fly in real time and remain calm.
That is you see the whole purpose of the algorithm to keep you in that panic of fight or flight mode which destroys your serotonin and testosterone and keeps you in a constant state of anxiety. It's the perfect attitude for the mass marketing of impulse buying of needless trinkets and bobbles made a n China
I find it ironic that the quote in the title uses an interjection to which many people would say “you shouldn’t say that”.
It probably wasn't as provocative back then as it is to a young person watching today, but yeah, it touched the taboo. And did it well.
Great!, I thought . . . let's hear some Tav.
Wrong Falco, sorry.
Howard hit the cannabis early I see.
The imaginary commissars. So, all those DEI and Human Resources hires over the last 25 years that imposed woke speech codes, White Privilege mandatory training sessions and gender pronoun checkboxes on law firms, corporate offices and healthcare institutions were an illusion? Or are we just not allowed to call them commissars?
Wokeness needs no defenders because it has become institutionalized. Sure, a few red states eliminate university DEI programs, and activists go after small-fry companies like Deere. X offers a bit of counterpoint. SCOTUS supposedly crushed reverse discrimination, but not really. Woke personnel is everywhere. Woke race and sex taboos prevail. Only a few very brave people are consistently and seriously anti-woke in public--e.g., Charles Murray, "Facing Reality."
"ere was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society"
But that's the lie! It wasn't, and isn't, an attempt to correct systemic injustices. No one can explain how it could possibly do so and when pressed the people who claim this fall back to something like "why are you making such a big deal about it, just be nice!" The real goal is an exertion of power, forcing others to submit to your will.
"You may miss wokeness."
How can you miss something that isn't gone? Wokeness is stronger than it ever was. It's just that many people don't like to call it "wokeness" anymore.
Just look at that Blake Lively story above.
It would be better if there was an actual Kommissar. Unfortunately wokism is more widespread than that.
The democrat candidate for president is the one who said “everyone needs to be more woke.” I’m not sure why Howard is declaring it over. Although he’s at least as authoritative as Goldberg.
Sometimes some people felt legitimate discomfort at things they heard. But sometimes people were pushed into saying some things and not saying other things by dictates that came from who knows where? Reducing that social force to a caricature makes it possible to deny it, but it was there.
Cancel Culture is the Commissar. A mob of online Stasi to keep you in your place only expressing good think.
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