MudMan

Hah. I can tell.

My politics are real world politics. As in, from lived experience. So no, they don’t line up with your cosplay categories. Because it’s not a football match, or good guys vs bad guys. It’s people’s lives, where what you do has real consequences.

So while I’m way to the left of Biden, I am also not an idiot and precisely because I saw what 4 years of Trump did I am telling you that a second Trump term should be avoided by all means necessary. It’s not even a lesser evil, Biden has done pretty alright, by most counts. But even if it was a lesser evil, Trump is a Netanyahu ally, a Putin ally, a fundamentally incompetent anarchocapitalist fascist, an overt racist, an authoritarian with plans to persecute his political opponents and… you know, an actual rapist. You’d think at least one of those would be disqualifying for anybody not pretending to a be a progressive.

And no, I didn’t “live in anecdote” I live in a whole ass country that was a fascist dictatorship for decades. It’s pretty statistically significant, that.

I’m less worried about what will change if people vote for Biden (which hey, I’m actually pretty sure whatever change happens will be for the better, as it has been this term).

I’m way more worried about waht will change if people don’t vote for Biden.

Also, how do you figure the Palestine situation would have gone under Trump, who is the actual guy who reversed 70 years of foreign policy to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and made West Bank settlements legal? How do you think that situation develops the day after Trump wins again?

See, the difference is that when you protest police violence to a future Biden administration he’ll have at most a political problem to manage for the next election and may feel the need to enforce some change in regulation to address it.

When my parents protested the work camps and death sentences for political prisoners during actual fascism (they were both involved to different degrees with banned socialist and communist organizations) the government found that to be a nuisance at worst, a chance to enact more political cleansing at best, so they sent people like that other guy.

So yes, there is a difference. And yes, that guy sounded suspiciously like Trump and not at all like Biden. By the way, like Trump, he was actually funny and charsimatic. I didn’t hate him or dislike him. This is a weird thing to talk about because cosplayers talk about this as a hypothetical or a disingenous argument for online clout, but I’m telling you about a real person I knew and had a relationship with.

Oh, I can help. My best friend’s grandpa was a cop under fascism. He still had the gun he used to hunt down communists in the mountains. It really painted a picture to hear him talk about it and defend it.

I mean it, go vote for Biden.

As a person from a country that was actually fascist within living memory, the US cosplay left is infuriating.

Go vote for Biden in November. Seriously.

Oh, so it’s even worse. They aren’t trying to get any practical effect, it’s just pointless vandalism that won’t achieve anything. Cool.

Please explain to me how this keeps climate change in the public consciousness. We haven’t spoken about anything even vaguely climate change-related in this entire thread. None of the discourse around it is about climate change. It’s a distraction, at best. It’s the sand the “people and the media” bury their heads in.

I hate the defeatism, too. If it doesn’t do anything, then why even bother? Let the people who are… you know, actually working on it do their thing and get out of the way with the cornstarch and the stunts.

I also don’t get the necessity to be defensive about it. I get to very much advocate for climate change action (and take action myself, by voting accordingly if nothing else) and still acknowledge this was a dumb thing, which is… honestly pretty obvious. Speaking of bad optics that make you lose the culture wars, denying how dumb this was just makes you seem delusional. After all, if climate activists are so obviously wrong about the obviously wrong thing why would they be right about the other thing? There is literally no upside to this.

No.

And you can’t make me.

And since a protest is ultimately an attempt to manipulate an entire people into shifting the national consensus over to your opinion, if I’m refusing to stop being dramatic about the optics of what they did then what they did was an abysmal failure.

That’s the point people are trying to make here. That ultimately this thing is marketing, and that if everybody is pissed at you after your marketing impact you just did bad marketing.

Alright, you want me to tone it down? Here it is toned down: it’s not the puppy coat.

It’s Apple’s hydraulic press iPad advertising.

You do realize that isn’t any better, right?

Nah, when you deface a one-of-a-kind prehistoric monument that not only is of genuine historical relevance and recognizable worldwide but also a key cultural touchstone with deep identitarian components for a whole country you are deep into Cruella territory. In good faith. Genuinely. I’m not even English and I am pissed. You don’t even get the usual excuses about bourgeois art these idiots have used for other stunts like these.

This is literally supervillain stuff. It’s the stuff they put in Superman movies to show he’s gone bad. In the zeitgeist of normal humanity it’s shorthand for “these are the bad guys”, right alongside suspiciously spotted fur coats and shooting your minions for failing to catch somebody.

How anybody wouldn’t get this makes me not only question their ability to socially engineer a planetary revolution of the ways we generate power and consume goods, but the ability to function as an adult and put their pants on in the morning. If I hired a PR consultant to advertise “climate action” and they proposed this I wouldn’t just fire them, I’d sue them for trying to sabotage me. It’s incredibly stupid. Seriously. Genuinely. As somebody who wants these people to actually succeed.

Oh, is it? Man, this is such a Rorschach test of a thread.

Is the point of a protest to be in the news? I guess the clout economy has rotten our brains after all.

I mean, yeah, you can make news by acting like an idiot, in that the people that oppose your cause will thoroughly cover it. It’s not hard to be in the news with a protest, as long as you don’t care why you’re news. Stage a mass murder of puppies to protest against the lack of gun control and I guarantee you’ll get a spot in Fox News every day for a year, very much accompanied of a pro-gun lobbyist commenting the footage.

That may be the core of the confusion here. I’m saying that turning climate change activism into the puppy murder cause is not an effective way to curb climate change. I’m saying that feeling powerless doesn’t make it any more effective at curbing climate change just because it gets news coverage.

It’s not making anybody aware of the issue who already isn’t, because everybody is already aware of the issue. It’s not explaining anything about the issue to anybody, because all we’re talking about here is the stupid stunt. It doesn’t convince anybody who was neutral or hostile to the cause because they came off as complete idiots at best, malevolent assholes at worst.

So I guess my answer to your question is that even if the jet thing did nothing it still was more effective than this. Because it’s not about being in the news, it’s about making effective action more likely to happen.

This is such a clarifying post.

It’s not about being useful, it’s about feeling useful. It’s about the impotent frustration of feeling you’re not having an impact being channeled through a media stunt whether or not it in fact changes anything, or even if it makes things worse.

That is what’s going on here, I think. Strategic thinking about this is slow and involves a long road and political concessions and compromises and getting involved hands-on with very out-of-sight things for a long time. This takes a second and it makes it to the news, so it feels like something got done, even if it wasn’t the case.

And that’s 21st century activism in a nutshell, basically.

Oooh, oooh, I got one.

I went to multiple protests after the Iraq war and got my Iraq war-supporting government to immediately plummet in support and lose the next election. It was nice. No harmed irreplaceable monuments that I remember. The marches I attended were entirely peaceful, as well.

Did the other thing achieve any of that?

I’ll say the jets were effective in that I don’t like the jets while I am primed to try to physically stop you from doing the other thing if you try it in front of me. And I already agree with the underlying point already, so imagine how the normies that don’t think about this at all feel.

“Ah, a cartoonish self-parody of activists defacing a monument I’ve spent my entire life feeling a sense of kinship with, I feel compelled to rethink my stance on this dry, complex political issue”. That’s a bold pitch for a PR stunt.

Oh. No, I meant the strip, not the activists. The implication is that we’re all so dumb that we end up underwater but we’re still complaining about how the activists were assholes. For the joke to work, the stunt itself needs to be pointless. If the stunt was indeed to “provoke action against climate change” the strip would make no sense. The premise of the joke requires the action it’s defending to be useless.

So yeah, to me this transmits that a) the author thinks the action itself did not work and was not going to work in the first place, and b) the author thinks we’re getting angry about it instead of taking action against climate change because we’re dumb and we don’t get it, so the action was fine, it’s our fault.

It’s the children who are wrong, but also we’re entirely powerless, but it’s because everybody is stupid except for us, only the activism is to make everybody else stop being stupid only it can’t work becasue of how stupid you all are. Impotence and Skinner-esque arrogance for a tasty mix of surreal kafkaesque self-contradiction.

Your “we” and my “we” are probably not the same, I’m afraid. I’m not shocked that the difference in context would result in a difference of perception, but I’d argue that you guys would need an overhaul on the regulations and safety nets thing regardless.

Well, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about here, specifically. There was an application of technology that bypassed regulations put in place to manage a previous iteration of that technology and there was a period of lawlessness that then needed new regulation. The solutions were different in different places. Some banned the practice, some equated it with employees, some with contractors, some made custom legislation.

But ultimately the new framework needed regulation just like the old framework did. The fiction that the old version was inherently more protected is an illusion created by the fact that we were born after common sense guardrails were built for that version of things.

AI is the same. It changes some things, we’re gonna need new tools to deal with the things it changes. Not because it’s worse, but because it’s the same thing in a new wrapper.

And beyond getting charged it’s the optics. I am from a place where you’re less likely to get shot by police and where serious charges are not likely to come from protesting (at least back then, it has gotten worse). But even then the marching orders were that if cops charge or disrupt the protest that’s good optics, if the protestors riot unprompted that’s bad optics, which should be pretty straightforward to understand.

The dictionary definition I was going for is: “The quality or condition of being impotent; lack of strength or power”.

Oh, spare me that rhetroric. Protestors in the 90s and especially the 2000s felt just as disenfranchised. That’s how you end up protesting in the first place. And those were the nice ones. The stories my parents could tell you about the 60s and 70s.

It’s not like “don’t be an idiot” is a struggle only now. I was in protests back in a different millenium where the smart ones were already standing in front of cops and bank windows to stop the idiots from throwing rocks at them and spoiling the whole thing.

The despondent “you just don’t get it” online discourse is pretty new, though.

Man, the way this channels a mix of “it is the children who are wrong” and sheer impotence is hitting me hard. I mean, it really explains so much about modern activism.

Every industrial transition generates that, though. Forget the Industrial Revolution, these people love to be compared to that. Think of the first transition to data-driven businesses or the gig economy. Yeah, there’s a chunk of people caught in the middle that struggle to shift to the new model in time. That’s why you need strong safety nets to help people transition to new industries or at least to give them a dignified retirement out of the workforce. That’s neither here nor there, if it’s not AI it’ll be the next thing.

About the linear increase path, that reasoning is the same old Moore’s law trap. Every line going up keeps going up if you keep drawing it with the same slope forever. In nature and economics lines going up tend to flatten again at some point. The uncertainty is whether this line flattens out at “passable chatbots you can’t really trust” or it goes to the next step after that. Given what is out there about the pace of improvement and so on, I’d say we’re probably close to progress becoming incremental, but I don’t think anybody knows for sure yet.

And to be perfectly clear, this is not the same as saying that all tech disruption is good. Honestly, I don’t think tech disruption has any morality of any kind. Tech is tech. It defines a framework for enterprise, labor and economics. Every framework needs regulation and support to make it work acceptably because every framework has inequalities and misbehaviors. You can’t regulate data capitalism the way you did commodities capitalism and that needed a different framework than agrarian societies and so on. Genies don’t get put back in bottles, you just learn to regulate and manage the world they leave behind when they come out. And, if you catch it soon enough, maybe you get to it in time to ask for one wish that isn’t just some rich guy’s wet dream.