Readers may recall Peter Boghossian’s hilarious Sokal hoax against Woke journals and the subsequent efforts in academia to fix him good.
He had two co-hoaxers, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, who have a book, Cynical Theories, coming out, featuring the Woke dumpster fire engulfing universities.
Meanwhile, Lindsay has a blog keeping track of Woke folk and other unfunny crazies, where he says he himself might have started off the 2 + 2 = 5 crazy, intending only to explain to someone how the Woke think:
“Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. If that is granted, all else follows” -George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four
Occasionally in the course of human events it becomes necessary to have explain something no one would ever have expected to have to defend. In the present moment, we find that circumstance to be the case and that thing to be that two and two do, in fact, make four. Further, it must be reasserted, against all reasonable expectation, that this claim about the sum of two and two being four is not merely some subjective determination or, more insidiously, an assertion of hegemonic power. So it is that such a need might arise in such a time in which irrational subjectivity becomes so desperate to defend and assert itself that no truth, no matter how simple or basic, can be considered safe from the ravages of people who have a vested ideological interest in its being wrong.
I have to confess responsibility for this bizarre moment, which in some sense might be one of the greater achievements of my life thus far. There’s an excellent case to be made that I have led a significant number of professionals who definitely should know otherwise—as effectively every six-year-old in a community with a school does—to dig deeply into tortured defenses of the proposition that two and two do not make four.
James Lindsay, “2+2 Never Equals 5” at New Discourses
It started out as a private text dialogue about why postmodernist can’t stand the idea that 2+2=4.
Anyway, to get back to the story, I proceeded to take this thought from my messages to the public in the form of a “Woke Mini,” a line of satirical quips roughly imitating dictionary entries with the goal of exposing and highlighting the inanity of the Critical Social Justice worldview. One of them is for the entry “2+2=4,” and it reads:
“2+2=4: A perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values.”
I tweeted that particular card for the first time on June 8 of this year, and, hopefully, you get the joke. It seemed humorous enough and made my point, so I was content with it, as were many of my followers. What I underestimated, however, was the fact that in cutting far too close to the bone, I had inadvertently introduced a conceptual virus into the Woke Matrix. What happened next is what led us to the present moment in the course of human history.
James Lindsay, “2+2 Never Equals 5” at New Discourses
And, he says, the Woke bought it! Then things got really nuts:
From here, the entire “2+2=5 discourse” really started to get silly. Activists desperate to satisfy Shraddha Shirude’s demand to find a way to make “2+2=5” into “a true statement” employed a number of positively stupid tricks and manipulations.
To quote a few examples:
“There are two factories. Each factory has 2 fully operational machines, as well as half the parts to build another one. If the two factories were joined into one and the two halves of parts were built together, there would be 5 total machines. A case where 2+2=5.”
No, a case where 2.5+2.5=5, which everyone knows is true for the exact same reason that 2+2=4.
James Lindsay, “2+2 Never Equals 5” at New Discourses
Red the whole thing but not while drinking coffee.
But remember, Lindsay might be having fun. But the Woke are coming for the disadvantaged kids in school, denying them the right to learn real math.
See also: And then they came for 2 + 2 = 4
and
What to do when the Woke come for you