#performative wokeness

[anoonimthepoorchad]

Hi, guys!

As you may know, I am Ukrainian. I live in Kyiv. I have lived here since I was born and I love my country with my whole heart.

I see a lot of misinformation under the tag "Ukraine". Most of it comes from American people, who try to explain the conflict in their own words. They can't. It's impossible to explain if you haven't lived here. There are too many influences on this conflict. You keep looking from an american perspective, which is not crucial in understanding the conflict.

For example, have you ever had you language forbidden? Like straight up forbidden by the law? It happened to Ukrainian language a lot of times thought our history. And who did it? The Russian Empire. And it's not the end of it. The genocides, the assimilation, the deportation. Have you even researched Ukrainian history?

You do not uplift Ukrainian voices enough. And you should if you care about what's happening. If you don’t do it, you're just doing a performance of your support and activism.

Lucky for you, I am a Ukrainian person! And I am DYING TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS. I scored 191/200 points on my graduation exam in history, so you can suppose I know something about Ukrainian history.

If you stand for Ukraine, uplift Ukrainian voices. Educate yourself. Learn Ukrainian history. Ask Ukrainian people

Update: it's been a long time since I first wrote this message. It feels like at least a lifetime ago, but today it's exactly 4 months since the war began. Since this post is one people reblog, I wanted to add the main charity link for people who want to donate. Also I post about Ukraine and news from Ukraine regularly on my blog, so stick around, if you'd like.

https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/

[whitechicksfan]

It’s funny when proshippers are politically progressive because hypothetically I could publish a racist, pro-segregation fanfic full of stereotypes and slurs from 100 years ago and yall would be forced to defend it

[the-most-humble-blog]

<div style="white-space:pre-wrap">

<meta scrolltrap-level="blacksite truth-rendition">

<script>

ARCHIVE_TAG="CULTURAL DISTRACTION DETONATION"

EFFECT: ego collapse, rage paralysis override, reallocation of moral bandwidth

TRIGGER_WARNING="moral decay, media distraction, global suffering, western outrage addiction"

</script>

🛑 TRANSMISSION BEGINS:

SYDNEY SWEENEY, AMERICAN EAGLE, AND WHY ONLY PRIVILEGED SOCIETY THINKS THIS IS CONTROVERSIAL.

Newsflash:

The parents of children starving to death in Gaza don’t give a shit about American Eagle.

Or Sydney Sweeney.

Or her jeans.

Or your offended tweet.

Or your podcast about media semiotics.

Or your trauma-informed academic lens on eugenics.

They’re busy trying to keep their child from choking on dust in a collapsed hospital hallway.

While you’re arguing about the optics of denim.

Let’s break this down.

Because this isn’t about Sweeney.

This is about you.

You — the performative outrage addict.

You — the attention economy’s favorite battery.

You — the cultural commentator who thinks a TikTok post about “optics” is revolutionary resistance.

You thought you were resisting the machine.

But you are the machine.

Because it needs your rage.

And it needs it directed at the wrong things.

You’re not “calling out injustice.”

You’re subcontracting your emotional labor to meaningless topics

so you don’t have to feel the ones that might break you.

Because if you actually let yourself feel what’s happening in Gaza right now?

You’d have to shut up.

You’d have to stop posting.

You’d have to sit in the brutal fact that you are

safe,

fed,

free,

while someone else is

starving,

orphaned,

trapped.

And that’s not a vibe.

So instead, we create a playpen for the privileged:

“Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ad might be eugenics-coded.”

“She smirked too long on the word ‘genes.’”

“This is harmful.”

Is it?

Or are you just addicted to finding things that let you feel like a hero —

without ever risking anything?

Let’s run the simulation:

👖 A girl in tight jeans says “genes are passed down.”

🤖 Twitter calls it white supremacy.

📈 American Eagle’s stock surges.

😑 Gaza still doesn’t have clean water.

This is the economy of distraction.

Weaponized offense, monetized outrage, pretend activism with premium subscriptions.

It lets you feel morally superior while scrolling past actual corpses.

Here’s a little exercise for you:

Search your own feed.

Count how many posts you’ve made this month about Sydney Sweeney.

Now count how many you’ve made about famine.

Go ahead.

I’ll wait.

It’s not that you don’t care.

It’s that you don’t want to feel helpless.

So you construct emotional sandboxes with labels like:

problematic tone-deaf damaging we need to talk about this

Because “talking” is the safest substitute for doing.

Meanwhile, the world is on fire.

And you’re over here holding a protest about denim metaphors.

Here’s the part you don’t want to hear:

Controversy is a drug.

And you are high.

Not just high — you are dependent.

You need something to be outraged about.

Something that feels safe to attack.

Because if you really looked at evil?

The real kind?

The kind that drops bombs on schools

and cuts off humanitarian aid

and sends bulldozers over makeshift shelters?

You’d collapse.

So instead, you collapse over a fucking jean ad.

Let me put this plainly:

Sydney Sweeney is not the villain. Your cowardice is.

You’ve been given the ability to speak freely —

to broadcast ideas

to challenge injustice

to amplify crises

to move people

to raise awareness

to start revolutions

to provoke action —

and you used it

to dissect

a 10-second

denim commercial.

Your ancestors didn’t fight for this.

The entire modern attention economy is built on this parasite:

A media fragment drops

It offends no one in any real way

But someone labels it problematic

That triggers an echo loop

The outrage becomes its own story

The original issue vanishes

Meanwhile, actual evil

goes unchallenged

because you’re too busy

calling a jeans ad fascism-adjacent.

You know what’s actually fascist-adjacent?

Ignoring genocidal famine to argue about branding tone.

That’s the real pipeline.

The same people foaming at the mouth about Sydney Sweeney’s ad?

Ask them to retweet a Palestine aid fund and you’ll hear:

“That’s too political.” “That’s too divisive.” “I’m not informed enough.”

But a blonde in denim says the word “genes”

and suddenly you’re a goddamn PhD in history, genetics, and trauma-informed critique.

Sydney Sweeney isn’t the problem.

The problem is that you’re bored, safe, and numb. And you mistake stimulation for justice. You mistake discomfort for danger. You mistake branding for genocide.

Let’s test something:

Would you rather:

A) Save a child’s life

B) Write a viral tweet about problematic fashion campaigns

If you’re honest — brutally honest —

your dopamine would rather go with B.

Because B gets likes.

B gets engagement.

B gets you invited to podcast panels and Discord discourses.

A just gets you silence.

And maybe a $5 recurring PayPal deduction.

The parents of starving children in Gaza

do not care

if you think a white girl’s jeans ad was problematic.

They care if you remember they exist.

They care if you amplify the pressure.

They care if you fight for aid.

They care if you give a shit.

You don’t need to cancel Sydney Sweeney.

You need to cancel your addiction to the wrong villains.

So let me break this scrolltrap wide open:

Every second you spend dissecting soft controversy is a second evil wins.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

Every reblog, every thinkpiece, every joke thread

about the Great Jeans Apocalypse of 2025

is a missed chance

to focus the fire

on the real monster

devouring the planet.

You are not helpless.

But you are misdirected.

By design.

Outrage is easier to sell than nuance.

So you are being sold.

Your emotions are leveraged.

Your attention is weaponized.

And if you don’t course-correct,

you will live your entire life

as a highly engaged participant

in a reality show

while the actual world burns behind the stage.

Choose better.

Point your rage in the right direction.

Save your fury for systems, not slogans.

Don’t be another cog in the Outrage Entertainment Complex.

You were born for more than this.

And the starving deserve more than your apathy.

Act like it.

Reblog if you feel like perspective f==king matters.

---

🧠 Read more respect-coded doctrine and emotional architecture at:

👉 https://linktr.ee/ObeyMyCadence

🛡️ Masculine polarity. Scrolltrap psychology. Unforgiven words.

🚪 Warning: This one broke relationships. On purpose.

</div>

[jonskory]

white people need to understand that all your posts about standing with us, and supporting us (us being poc as a collective) and whatever literally means fuck all if you don't do anything.

are you ignoring posts about racism because the language is too aggressive? [see: the use of 'you' as opposed to 'we] are you only interacting with posts about racism written by white people? are you making these loud proclamations on your blogs (and tagging every damn shit in sight, which just looks performative as fuck and clogs up our tag; i don't CARE what you have to say as a white person, i literally don't!) just ease your own conscience and so you can appear woke?

i can't tell you the amount of times i've scrolled past long ass essays on this app of white people now realizing their place on the racial hierarchy. in 2021. after how many information is out there, and how much theory and papers have been fucking handed to y'all. (this is about grown ass adults btw. there are 15 year olds on here who are more educated in these topics than y'all are, that shit's embarassing).

i can't tell you how i annoyed i've gotten because it's the fucking equivalent to a white person crying in front of me because they realized that the world is racist.

whoop de fucking doo, welcome to the real world. i don't really care if i sound rude because it's annoying and it does nothing for those of us of color on this site. it doesn't help us in anyway. and the worst is when y'all come onto OUR posts and post your white tears there. what the hell is that supposed to accomplish? what the fuck is the purpose? how does that help us in any way?

and it kinda really pisses me off that those posts crying about realising that racism exists will get thousands of notes and that posts talking about actual racism, and how it works - especially in online spaces - written by actual people of colour, get a fraction of them with the added touch of harassment by the same white ppl btw, because we managed to hurt your little feelings.

[bingoboingobongo]

im gonna go on a real long rant here.

cancel culture in and of itself is not "bad". the main idea of cancel culture, holding people accountable who are not typically held accountable, is not a bad idea. at. all.

the problem with cancel culture is that the people partaking in it tend to act really stupidlu. like really, really stupid. i hate to say it but they are acting like idiots. cancel culture by nature is a judge of someone's character. it is an insanely nuanced conversation that frankly, social media and the people using it are not equipped to understand.

for some reason, avid social media users and cancel culture enthusiasts have this inane belief that the world is black and white. good and evil. just and unjust, but that's not how it works.

good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. someone could do something terrible in the past but be a great person now, or a they could have been a great person in the past but do a terrible thing now.

take the whole "taylor swift carbon emissions" drama that's going on now. everyone's getting so bent out of shape because somehow they've all fallen into the belief that just because she wears sustainable clothing or promotes women's rights means she's automatically a great person and can do no wrong.

or even the "will smith-chris rock" drama that happened a while ago. is it objectively bad to slap someone, yes. but does that make will smith an inherently bad person? not necessarily.

the problem with cancel culture happening almost exclusively on social medias like tiktok and twitter is that these platforms are quite literally not built for the kind of nuanced conversations you need to be having when you're judging someone's character.

you can't decide whether someone's a good or bad person in like 280 characters, and even for the people who are involved in cancel culture that do understand nuance, it's significantly harder to communicate it through text and online mediums.

not to mention that people change. im not saying that "time heals all wounds" or something like that. it is 100% valid to approach someone with a grain of salt based on what they did in the past, but the key is that you're approaching them with a grain of salt, not a whole carton of it.

one of cancel culture's favorite things to do is dig up problematic things people did in the past and then lord it over their heads and use it as an excuse to view them exclusively based on what happened in the past, but the unfortunate truth is that people can change. people can grow. and something they did when they were sixteen or whatever shouldn't be used to judge their character as a whole.

another problem is that people don't understand the extenuating circumstances that are in play when people do problematic things. one of my favorite expressions is "it's an explanation, not an excuse" and it is so true here. yes a lot of people do stupid things when they're young, but the difference is that they're not young in the same social standards as we're experiencing right now, the social standards they experienced when they were young were probably significantly more conservative and less liberal.

people don't realize that we're really living in a new age of activism, and that a lot of the stuff we see, instagram infographics, tabloid headlines, and of course, cancel culture, didn't exist or weren't widely popular when a lot of these people who are being persecuted by cancel culture were kids.

if they lived in a neighborhood or community that was predominantly one race or group of people, they didn't have as many resources as we do right now to know what is offensive and what isn't.

now this is not to say that any of the things that these people did is right in any way whatsoever. not at all. it's an explanation of why they did something they did, but not an excuse. most, if not all, of the things these people did are objectively bad things, but you can't let that be a judge of their entire character.

does this mean you can't be wary of these people? no. if i meet someone and my friend tells me they're notorious for smacking people in the face, yeah im definitely gonna protect my face around them, but it's not right for me to judge them and deem them solely as a face slapper. maybe they're a face slapper but they also have a passion for woodworking. or maybe they were just taught that slapping people in the face is how you show love.

it sucks but people are complicated. people change, circumstances change, viewpoints and opinions change, and if you're judging someone by one thing they did that doesn't make you woke or an activist, that just makes you naive and jaded.

another thing is that nine times out of ten, people partaking in cancel culture don't have all the facts. at the end of the day, you are an outsider in the lives of most celebrities. you don't know the details or the nuances of their relationships, of their thoughts, of their actions, etc. and so frankly you can't come to a just or correct conclusion when you're not dealing with all of the facts. and one of the factors of "dealing with all of the facts" is actually letting the person being canceled share their side.

the problem is that as people cancel more and more "prestigious" people, the people being canceled are less likely to see what's going on, or if they don't have social media then there's a good chance they're completely unaware of what's happening. and if the person you're "canceling" has no idea that they're being canceled or is unable to tell their side of the story or at least give an explanation than you're not canceling them. you're pretty much just trash talking them behind their back.

people on the internet are simply not capable enough and frankly shouldn't be able to play judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to judging people's characters. if you're going to have a conversation about canceling someone, please for the love of god don't do it on twitter or tiktok, and if you do then you better be prepared to have a thread of like a hundred tweets so you can properly discuss all the nuance needed in this topic.

in conclusion, the world is not black and white. you wouldn't (and really shouldn't) judge yourself in black and white, in terms of completely good or completely evil, so why should you do the same to celebrities? learn to see the grey in the world. stop living in a binary of good and evil. it's not helping us and it's definitely not helping you.

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

We need to get past the woke identity politics controversies in movies and just point out they’re shit. That way they can’t hid behind that crap anymore and you kill them.

[gyrrakavian]

[musclesandhammering]

This is a personal opinion but if writer thinks that making a character female to make them unique and stand out more isn't really much of a feminist writer

Definitely agree with this, because

a.) The entire premise of making a character female so that they’re “different” and “stand out” implies that they’re the only female character- or either they’re one of very few female characters- which is very problematic, considering women are always under-represented and mishandled in superhero stuff anyway.

and

b.) If the writer is specifically relying on a character’s gender to make them stand out, that’s a pretty good indication that they don’t really have any other defining characteristics. Which, again, a massive problem with women in superhero movies- especially marvel movies- is that the writers always make them as bland and shallow as possible. And these writers think they’re being progressive and pro-woman, but like… they’re actually doing the opposite?? Like male characters get fully fleshed out personalities and complex motivations, but women should be excited just to have a female character in the equation at all? Yeah, no. It’s just such a lazy cop-out.

and

c.) (I’m gonna get burned at the stake for saying this) This is a bit off-topic but this phenomenon with shallow female characters in action movies is just another extension of the shallow pseudo-progressive variant of identity politics that’s become popular in the U.S. lately. People seem to care more about the gender/sexual/racial/etc identity of certain figures than they do about their actual substance. For example: there was an election not that many years ago where a horrifying number of people apparently thought that a corporate establishment war-mongering fossil fuel-supporting big pharma-loving donor-shmoozing candidate was more progressive than a leftist anti-war pro-green Medicare For All-backing lobbyist-rejecting candidate simply because the first one was a woman and the second was a man. Go figure.

My point is, there are ways for writers (and people in real life tbh) to introduce diversity into their movies/shows that don’t rely entirely on a character’s diversity as their one defining trait. Because, you know, minority people in real life are real actual human beings that have unique personalities outside of being members of a minority.