27 Comments

This is well done. Would love to see you add a row for Israel and Jews.

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This is excellent. I’d recommend some additions to the crime section: Michel Foucault as an elect (Discipline and Punish is all about the oppressive nature of modern prisons), data on # of unarmed black people killed per year as taboo, and saying defunding the police makes black peoples less safe as taboo. Woke crime views exploit the emotion of every tragic interaction with cops to the point where any contextual statistics are triggering.

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Nov 11, 2021Liked by Peter Boghossian

Just sent this to my kids in college! Thanks!

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Nov 11, 2021Liked by Peter Boghossian

This is very enlightening. Thank you!

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Jun 27, 2022Liked by Peter Boghossian

Excellent work, can we add abortion as well?

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Thanks a lot for pulling this excellent resource together.

One point I’d like to make: As a phobia is an irrational fear, having concerns about gay/lesbian activists’ positions does not equate to homophobia (i.e. an irrational fear of homosexuals and homosexuality). Same goes for concerns about, for example, transgender and Islamist activists’ positions and, respectively, transphobia and Islamophobia. I appreciate your efforts to clarify what the woke (i.e. illiberal left) mean when they use certain words and terms. I think we should also be careful not to accept debate on the basis of those words and terms, as woke definitions tend to prevail in the current culture and thereby allow people to infer meaning to the motivations behind our positions that are in fact not at all there.

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Wonderful. Suggestion that it be reformatted, perhaps in two pages, and made available as a PDF. I tried to print it and the bottom and top were cut off and the remaining print was miniscule. I am going to become a paid subscriber today by the way. Important voice!

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While demonization of any group is abhorrent, as the ex-wife of a man who identified as female starting in his mid-thirties, after fathering our two sons, I find that even telling what happened factually (he secretly engaged in behavior directly putting me at risk, aided by 2 mental health practitioners, for a couple of years) is often characterized by those in the woke columns as "hate." In fact, my own normal reaction to my then husband's sudden, outrageous demands of how I identify myself included his demonization of me.

I'd like to see these questions debated:

1. Does the ex-wife of a transgender identifying individual have the right to tell her story of being lied to and put at risk for sexually transmitted diseases when he cross-dressed secretly?

2. Considering there is no psychological measure tested and proven to predict which cross-sex identifying individuals will change their minds after "transition," do the diagnosing mental health practitioners have the obligation to tell their patient that there is no way to know if "transition" including surgeries might be regretted after 7 years?

3. Are educated, cultured and civil people obligated to equate the words sex and gender?

Ute Heggen, author, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022)

uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com

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This taxonomy is a work of genius, Peter and Michael! If I had time, I would be tempted to map it to the Covidian cult catechisms (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-covidian-a-time-travel) …

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I agree with Frederick. It is possible to have sincerely held religious beliefs that are incompatible with supporting gay/lesbian religious marriages and gender as a social construct while not being bigoted or phobic. We need to be careful to build bridges with traditional faith communities, not alienate them. Again, that doesn't mean we necessarily agree with them. Whatever happened to mutual respect instead of smears or labels, as the woke are want to do?

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"I want to be crystal clear about something: bigotry and racial discrimination are real and they have no place in society. Yes, there is ongoing racism. Yes, there is ongoing homophobia. Yes, there is ongoing hatred of trans people. These are morally abhorrent and we all need to work together to bring about their end."

I would not be so sure of any of those affirmations.

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I would have thought that the reason fewer people die in natural disasters would be due to the improvement in rescue and medical technologies and so would not have thought this to be a relevant marker regarding climate change. Likewise, that category would also include earthquakes and tsunamis, neither of which to my knowledge have been associated with AGW.

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I think there is a confusion between elect and saviour class. Other than that this looks like an excellent summary.

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Mar 11·edited Mar 11

I think of one more categorie:

Religion.

Guilty Devils: Roman Catholic Church, Zionism, The Balfour Declaration, The State of Israel, The Crusades, United States-Israel alliance, Judeo christian civilization, Western Imperialism in the Middle East and the Americas.

Sacred Victims: Islamic revolution, Iranian revolution, Palestian revolution, Palestinian people, Intifadas, the kufiyya, indigenous movements, native peoples, Wiphala flag, Pachamama

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Well done! A very concise and factual description of those fields mimicking faith in God.

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I agree with much of this, the FBI crime statistics have long exposed the hypocrisy of BLM. But I find that others have demolished woke ideas more convincingly. For example Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal, Gross & Levitt, James Lindsay, Heather Mac Donald, and Joanna Williams, to name a few. That list makes for a long read but I found them worth the time. Woke is worse than you think. It is actually undermining America and the West’s superiority (well-deserved for discovering and inventing everything useful) by allowing mediocrity to infest our academic institutions. There is only one winner here: China. I am afraid I have to give you 0/10 on the climate. Read the IPCC reports, the most plausible projections are that we’re heading for 2.5-3.5°C global warming by the end of this century (sorry, more reading). Let’s be more STEM, that means privileging objectivity over subjectivity and politics (right or left). The worst thing is to be tribal, where we defer to our group’s opinions against our more informed and better judgement. Top marks for promoting nuclear energy. As does Bill Gates in his book ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’. The Greens are obsessed about being anti-nuclear, the result is Germany is having to restart its coal power stations. How mad can you get? Greetings from Switzerland.

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