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5 天前That’s it exactly.
The incentives of social media companies like Twitter is to get people using the platform, to scoop up as many billion minutes of human attention as possible.
They figured out years ago that the best way to do this is outrage.
Social media platforms with likes, replies and shares are the perfect place to have opinionated mob battles, and they are addictive.
It stands to reason that as millions or billions of people get addicted to these places, opinionated mob battles become a bigger factor.
‘Woke’ is factually a thing invented by Western capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke – there’s no debate about that.
I don’t know about ‘identity politics’ but /u/quarrk said elsewhere in the thread it’s also a USA export.
Africa has its own racism but it’s absolutely nothing to do with the USA kind.
I remember a comedian talking about how stereotypes exist, we all know them, whether we agree with them a lot the whole audience knows that French people are snooty and eat garlic. And Americans are what…? Yell it out? And the audience yells “Loud”. Right and what else? “Ignorant.”
Everybody knows the USA is ignorant of the world. It is ALL black-white to them. They have no understanding of African racism or Nazi racism or Irish racism. Not only do they not understand how racism works - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/06/whoopi-goldberg-holocaust-remarks-were-born-of-ignorance-not-racism - they actively resist trying to understand it.
Meanwhile you’ve got 100s of 1000s of Tigrayans, Rohingya, Palestinians, dying for ethnic reasons, and no USA analysis of this.
The woke approach to race is so ignorant/oblivious to how racism actually functions in the world that we have an American publicly saying that Hitler was not racist to kill 6 million Jews. They can’t even register the spike on this chart as a thing –
But people all over the world are expected to flip out about African-Americans being shot by police (half of whom are the same ethnicity as them: African-American) because that’s The Spectacle. We have British footballers kneeling because an American was shot… do you really think they would do that for an African?
Gender and sexuality issues… Communist countries are having a back-and-forth political battle. Communist countries empirically are not as woke as liberal Western countries. The Communist Party of China passed law to “resolutely reject abnormal aesthetics such as ‘girly men’” (Chinese source). North Korea isn’t woke. Vietnam has a pretty active political struggle: they in the past few years declared homosexuality ‘not an illness’, then also cancelled the Pride parade.
There are LGBT people everywhere but the equality struggle is in very different stages in different countries. From what I understand, it’s by far the furthest advanced in Western liberalism. Africa is a very big diverse place, but most places I am familiar with you would be beaten up for being gay.