A great example of woke imperialism was a recent foofaraw in which a woke tried to cancel someone for naming a protocol “AAVE”. The idea was that the authors of said protocol were insufficiently diverse because they didn’t know that “AAVE” stood for African American Vernacular English in the US. Now, the thing is that the word Aave is a Finnish word that means ghost, and the authors of the protocol were Finns, and it was a great word for what the protocol actually did (namely flash loans that could disappear in a second).

So, what this actually represented was Woke American chauvinism in the name of tolerance. A citizen of this gigantic global empire, the American empire, was using woke language to assert authority over some poor Finns as insufficiently respectful of the people his fellow Americans had once oppressed. Quite a trick: America’s history of slavery used to justify America’s present of imperialism! And again, this is similar to a Soviet soldier filling the ear of an Estonian civilian with the story of how Russian capitalists had once grievously oppressed Russian workers, a problem which Comrade Lenin solved with their glorious October Revolution…and that’s why they rolled the tanks into Tallinn. A non sequitur logically, but a useful tool ideologically.

and why might organizations adopt self-defeating woke positions?

It seems fair to say that there is a silent constituency, even a majority, within these organizations that does not support the mob and its methods. Why are they allowing the Woke to take over? There’s an increase of generic human capital relative to specific human capital. You don’t need to be trained on your firm’s computer system; you can navigate based on your experience with interfaces that are familiar on the Internet. People are not tied to organizations as closely as they were a couple of decades ago. They are not motivated to put up resistance when a determined minority of Wokesters tries to take over.

2023-07-03: Woke nonsense is destroying biology

Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication.
Campaigns were launched to strip scientific jargon of words deemed offensive, to ensure that results that could “harm” people seen as oppressed were removed from research manuscripts, and to tilt the funding of science away from research and toward social reform. The American government even refused to make genetic data—collected with taxpayer dollars—publicly available if analysis of that data could be considered “stigmatizing.” In other words, science—and here we are speaking of all STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)—has become heavily tainted with politics, as “progressive social justice” elbows aside our real job: finding truth.