So it’s a purity test? Many people are just wired to reject this conformist line of thinking from the very starting point. You’re saying, let’s all do this pointless activity so we can see who has an attitude problem. It reminds me so much of how children are treated in schools or churches, and I really chafe at it. I couldn’t care less about your nominal cause or sense of self-righteousness, it’s the attitude and behavior of you imagining your fellow citizens are children that strikes me as offensive and drives resistance. I don’t doubt your good intentions but this way of thinking about solutions (your tools) is rather poisonous and places the banner under which you use them in pretty bad company.
I'm not sure this benefit of the doubt is merited. A lot of people participate in these shenanigans either performatively or because it gives them license to attack and feel good about it. Anecdotally, I've encountered far more people for whom the motivation is one of these two than I have for whom it's pure good intentions. Those few with genuine good intentions are usually also engaging in other good acts that actually matter and for which they don't get social credit for.
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
Deliberately? No, of course not. But it's a good way to tell where people stand, nonetheless. And I can tell right now that you personally feel much more strongly about opposing woke excesses than you do about opposing genuine racial injustice. So the performative nonsense has done its job.
Said another way, I also feel much more strongly about opposing woke excesses than I do about opposing genuine racial injustice--expressly since I very much support opposing racial injustices and do not find the master/main debate as a genuine racial injustice.
What do you mean "Deliberately, no"? It is intentionally so, just as you had no trouble describing and then eagerly applying with exactly the kind of wrong-headed witch-hunting logic these exercises predictably inspire. Make no mistake - the problem and criticism here isn't with a cause that's bigger than you and noble.
