Wokefolk

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A Trinity College club disinvited Richard Dawkins when they found he'd spoken against Islam. The change is that now it's not enough to hate Christianity-- you must also keep quiet about Islam. General atheism is no longer a safe leftwing opinion to advocate publicly, tho you are *required* to hold it privately, unless you are an Arab or otherwise have an ethnic background for which Islam is considered an appropriate decoration.

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Rod Dreher in Evil Progressive Adoption Politics passes along these comments from someone:

The latter pillar, the reduction of all human relations to plain power dynamics — literally the Leninist “ Кто? Кого?” concept — conceives of a parent-child relationship exactly as it does a boss-worker relationship, or a ruler-ruled relationship. What normal people perceive as welcoming a child into their homes in the course of an adoption, these ideologues understand as an acquisition or a conquest. (Here see Dr Ibram X Kendi’s now-infamous tweet, endorsed by fellow racial essentialist Richard Spencer, characterizing the “colonizer” quality of the Barrett family’s adoptions.)

In the Chinese-adoption sphere, these are almost entirely young women in their twenties, who profess progressive politics, and will often acknowledge that they came to their critique — of their own parents and families — in the course of ideological indoctrination at college. Sustained engagement with this cohort reveals fairly quickly that the overwhelming majority of them appropriate the jargon and concepts of progressive race- and power-obsession to engage in re-litigation of entirely ordinary personal passages. Questions of self, meaning, parents, and nascent adulthood that rightly occupy the attention of anyone from ages 15 to 25 are subordinated to the rigid ideological strictures — and pre-ordained answers — of progressive cant.

For those willing to go down the rabbit hole, search for a Facebook group called Transracial Adoption Perspectives. It isn’t the only progressive transracial-adoption group out there, but it is the one most popular with the Chinese-adoption community. (The other big one, simply called Transracial Adoption, has a Group Rules list jam-packed with identitarian jargon, “lived experience” and all, that must be seen to be believed.) Then search for a Facebook group called TAP 101: this is the introductory / indoctrination group where one must spend several weeks before permission is granted to join Transracial Adoption Perspectives. Only after demonstrating willingness to acquiesce to progressive concepts and rhetoric in full — and, for adoptive parents, to submit to what is effectively ritualistic humiliation and formal reprogramming — does the inner sanctum open up.

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Everybody trusts big corporations most, then government, then individuals, even though most people would probably *say* the opposite. We know this because they pay lots of money to big corporations for products whose quality they must trust and they are surprised and dismayed if a company doesn't keep its promises.

More generally, though, people very often say they believe things when their actions show they do not (I define "believe" as meaning opinions that determine action, rather than what people say, and distinguish it from "thinking I believe" even if that thinking is sincere).

A general phenomenon of huge political importance is that many people do *not* use their personal experience in forming their stated beliefs, and many of them do not even use it in forming their true beliefs. With corporations, people ignore how Amazon always delivers the goods when they give Amazon money in their stated beliefs about corporate ethics, but they actually trust Amazon much more than an individual or a mom-and-pop online outfit. In other cases, even their true beliefs are at variance with personal experience. Covid-19 is the great example. I know so many people who are deathly afraid but who don't know anybody within 50 miles who has died, been hospitalized, or even had symptoms worse than a cold-- or, in some cases, don't even know anyone who's tested positive. People are convinced they're surrounded by white supremacists, even though they've never met one. That other people and they themselves are racist, even though they can't detect it except with an implicit bias test. That food X is bad for you in immediate, obvious, ways, even though they've had lots of personal contact with it and never seen the bad effect.

Close study of Bacon's Idols of the Mind would help. People get caught up in false paradigms to the extent of ignoring not just scholarly evidence, but their own eyes.

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