Both are valuable and unlike you I’m not scolding people for doing either. Helping people in your community is also just good from a non-political perspective.
But unironically, yes Will Stancil has had a larger impact through his twitter account than his irl political campaign. No one here is Will, but on a smaller level this likely applies to most of us. It’s just basic economies of scale.
The bolded seems, again, straightforwardly true. Will has 90 thousand followers. He can probably reach a lot of people, some of whom will be persuaded by his arguments.
You or I, or thick cut, would be so lucky. Our best bet is to go out and speak to a handful of people every once in a while, and maybe we would persuade someone. Or, which I think is thick cut’s point, we could also then get involved with locally organized mutual aid type things, and try to make a real difference in our own little patch of the world, and that impact would ultimately reach farther and wider than any retweeted meme we could figure out on twitter.
to be clear there are only like 6 people total that are worth following in my business, the rest is just chatter, so there are only 2 of them on linkedin.
just goes to show all these dudes with daddy issues you can make a trillion dollars and he’ll still not pick you
Except they don’t count guys like Trump and Musk as “oligarchs.”
What? No. Getting off the platform reduces its importance staying on it increases its influence. It’s the opposite of what you think.
It will continue to be influential while journalists are there and they have every incentive to stay.
I see this very often and am just noting it in response to your post.
So often people try to attribute rational ideas to Trumpists (or really any third party) to square the circle and resolve seemingly irreconcilable beliefs, or actions seemingly irreconcilable with beliefs (and assign people to the category of “crazy” when this cannot be plausibly done). This is basically what Daniel Dennett identifies as “The Intentional Stance.” We generally attribute beliefs to others based on what it would be rational for them to believe, including a whole panoply of background beliefs it would be “rational” for them to have. We do this to dogs, thermostats, people, whatever. However, many people, or all people in some situations, do not even have “standard” beliefs in some kind of verbal, propositional sense, they simply react to the world based on some general, often entirely underdeveloped, framework and then articulate beliefs afterward if asked.
From a third-person perspective you can assign to me an infinite number of “verbal” beliefs, such as my “belief” that the average screwdriver is smaller than the average couch. However, I have never entertained that belief until now–it was never in my head–even if I would act as if it’s a deeply held belief if faced with a situation where it were relevant or I had to explain myself.
I say this because when we attribute beliefs to others we need to “verbalize” them in some kind of concrete way, using commonly understood words that have, if not a precise meaning, a generally understood meaning among informed members of a language community. So much effort in trying to explain Trumpists is trying to offer some kind of rational mode of analysis, but I think this just fails because they don’t understand government, society, the constitutional role of the president, the history that led us to the present, etc.
I don’t have a highly developed point here, that would take a lot more work, but what I see in Trump and apologists is not so much some A-B-C rational process, even if it involved not classifying some oligarchs as “oligarchs”, but just more primitive and emotive reactions that need to be explained in terms of deeper motivations (“supporters good, immigrants bad; hate them liberal pussies; Jesus is Lord and he will save me and has chosen Trump as his vehicle”). The “beliefs” these people have are downstream from their barely articulated, even to themselves, “worldview”. They are not coherent because they are not explicit or well informed. This is what the anthropologist Arlie Russell Hochschild unhelpfully calls their “deep story.” What a liberal sociologist learned from spending five years in Trump’s America | Vox I would say it’s an account of why the world is a conspiracy against them, as articulated by Fox News, etc, and that explains the condition of their lives.
I would note that in trying to understand fascism as a political philosophy it seems to mostly be like this. It’s not so much an actual political philosophy as an expression of how one might want the world to be, along with blame and efforts against those presumed to be interfering with it being that way (when the real cause is more akin to reality just being reality). This leads to fascism ultimately being the vaguest political program possible, such as “make America great again!” or “I will be your retribution” which means literally nothing but appeals to the emotional longing of people who feel alienated by the world. That is why Trumpism is an ideology by and for losers and those, generally losers themselves, who grift off them.
But they did go against Elon on the H1B stuff.
if we vote harder we beat the nazis i guess. you’re pissing into the wind by your pointless protest vote, is what I think. it’s not a good or strong argument.
What’s the other platform then?
This is thoroughly not true. The Nazis’ rise to power was enabled by cynical fools who though they could use the Nazis for their own ends, but the Nazi elite, especially outside the military, were extremely all-in on their ideology.
Encouraging right wingers to be violent is not a good plan.
Normally don’t agree with Micro but 100% agree with this. The same people who can be convinced to go all Robespierre on the Koch brothers could just as easily be convinced to do some Pol Pot “anyone with glasses thinks he’s smarter than me and should die” on me. I’m not going to jump on the leopards eating faces bandwagon even if I think I could direct the leopard to a face I would enjoy watching him eat.
Imagine thinking Will Stancil is some great example for how to fight the absolute tidal wave of hell that is coming our way. Some of you guys have really lost the plot.
I’ve gotten my share of “don’t always agree with”, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a “normally don’t agree with”. I may have to challenge you with a list of all my takes and see if you really agree with < 50%. I think I have an awful lot of totally uncontroversial opinions.
What about left wingers?
It’s more true for right wingers because they won’t pick those targets and worshipping violence for its own sake is already something right wingers do. I don’t encourage anyone to be violent though. For one, I don’t trust anyone’s judgement that well.
Yep. People mostly don’t accept political violence as a regrettably necessary means to a desired political end. The violence (at least fantasizing about it) is the ends, and the politics are just a means to justify it.
