Originally a comment by Artymorty on And what about toast, and earthworms?

I’ve seen this a lot, the condensing of all ostensibly progressive causes into a great, faceless ideological black hole. The logical endpoint of the moral-bidding-war meltdown that is “wokeness” is that it becomes a singularity: to those inside, it’s a realm of infinte virtue. To everyone else it looks literally pointless. “Woke,” both the word and the movement, always had not-so-subtle transcendental, spiritual connotations: a shade adjacent to nirvana.

The city-funded community centre at the heart of Toronto’s gay village provides a great example. About 20 years ago they put up a mural on the side of the building which loomed over the heart of the neighbourhood. It depicted a middle-aged leatherman, shirtless but clad in fetish gear — black German police-style visor cap, leather harness, chaps, black boots, etc. — next to a teenage girl straining to crush her breasts into a binder. The message was clear: adult men’s fetishes and distressed teen girls’ trans identities are to be the community’s new areas of activist focus.

And sure enough, that was exactly what we saw the community centre focus on in the ensuing years.

Credit where it’s due: they do pick apt murals. Just a couple years ago the leatherman-with-trans “boy” mural was replaced with a new one, just as prescient as the first was in capturing the cultural mood inside the building: now it’s a raised fist — a universal symbol of righteous protest — filled in like a quilt with patches that depict the “progress” flag, various shades of the colour brown (skin tones, one presumes), animal hide prints (animal rights?), blue waves (the environment), and miscellaneus patterns whose symbolism I can’t decipher. That tracks with the direction “wokeness” is going: an incoherent melding of anything anyone claims to be a virtuous cause into one big nondescript fist of self-righteousness.

I’ll bet that the people who work inside that community centre think they’re at the epicentre of all virtue, that their noble mission has naturally expanded from serving gays in the time of rampant AIDS and gay bashing, to LGBT outreach, to LGBTQ+ propaganda, to 2SLGBTQQIA++ hysteria, and now at last they’ve arrived at righteousness in its true, pure form, having transcended individual causes.

I know for a fact that the gay people who live and work in the neighbourhood have little or no use for the community centre’s services anymore. I am one such gay person, and I wouldn’t darken their bloody doorstep. This “community centre” offers nothing to me but insults and condescension.