> Some of these groups are in Overton mode when we have a trifecta,” he said, referring to the Overton window. The idea, in theory, is that pushing their public policy demands farther and farther left widens what’s considered possible, thereby facilitating the future passage of ambitious legislation.
this honestly sounds like the kind of thing that increases divisiveness and it really needs to stop or be politically punished. People do not like being manipulated.
The progressive activist left destroys everything and everyone. The “internal reckoning” is little more than dysfunctional turf war by individuals who are toxic, but are empowered by left wing identity worship to do WHATEVER they want without consequence. Disagree with a Black organizer over a tactical matter? You’re a racist. Don’t list your pronouns on your email? You’re a fascist. What happened within Sunrise happened and is happening in EVERY nonprofit that isn’t affiliated with right to life or a church, and worse within every government bureaucracy (at least in blue states and cities). Submit to every demand by the left or they will destroy your life, and your organization. The activist left is blood thirsty, relentless, and unhinged. Way closer to Mao than to Alensky.
I generally agree with the arguments presented in the excerpt, but it kind of seems like the author is preaching to the choir (at least with respect to the Slow Boring audience). Is anyone pushing a counter narrative? I’d love to hear, for example, how those involved view their actions in hindsight.
It reminds me of this from Scott Alexander in 2014. Movements are bedeviled by the pathologies of their adherents. Anarchists won't organise well, Communists will have too many meetings and schisms, whatever is the pathology happening in modern institutions is worst in new progressive campaigns.
Does the right have a similar culture of forming activist groups, that then inevitably fracture? I can only come up with two examples off the top of my head: the Tea Party, and more recently, Moms For Liberty. It will be interesting to see how long that sticks around.
I think the right wing versions fail for different reasons, primarily because they tend to be top down donor driven "astro-turf" organizations, or organized around personalities/topical "ideologies". If there isn't enough actual grassroots steam to sustain and/or if the electoral dividends decline or become an actual electoral drag based on the rhetoric and "activism", eventually the donor funding dries up and goes elsewhere tends to be the usual doom loop, and the "base activism" along with the donor funding and organizing tends to follow the zeitgeist of the culture waves into the new directions that are signaled from conservative media and right wing social media. Or the "personality head" fails, or goes out fashion and if organized around, there's nowhere for an activist group to continue towards, like the Tea Party groups of the Obama era, ostensibly formed around "Ayn Rand libertarianism" - once "Ayn Rand libertarianism" fell out of style with the advent of Trump and Trumpism, and the fall of its most prominent avatars in the wake of Trump (Paul Ryan), how does a "Tea Party" styled organized activist set of groups sustain other than to disappear into "something else"?
Speaking of the Tea Parties, great example of the top down donor created "movement": Billed as "grassroots" groups that somehow all "organically" sprung up within weeks/months, with almost identical sloganing, talking points, organizing "how to" memos, and with ready-made domains and applications for 401(c) status (and in the cases of the anti-ACA "town hall rallies", a wealth of luxury touring buses that took "activists" to districts across states), and heavy promotion from Fox News, they seemed to lose steam pretty much after the disappointments of 2012 and 2014, and in the advent of Trump, after burning pretty hot in 2009 - 2012. You'll be hard pressed now to find many "movement conservative" activists still talking Tea Party rhetoric about "Job Creators", "Makers versus Takers", and "activism" around protecting the Big Banks and corporations from regulations and taxes.
In fact, the entire "movement conservatism" has shifted gears into a much more "populist" direction in the Trump era, mainly on the notion of punishing corporations and finance firms for being "too woke" and ostensibly has leaned a lot more into a protectionist view of jobs and manufacturing, which is a huge departure from the heady days of the Ayn Rand fetish of the implied virtues of the wealthy against the working class to an inversion where the GOP claims to be the party of the "working class" and "anti-elite", "economic libertarianism"/corporation "Uber Alles" including the "Corporate Free Speech" bit that Mitt Romney sunk himself into (my how that's changed in the Trump/DeSantis era!), gung ho free tradeism (with the implied punishment of the hated labor unions), etc rhetoric so apparently strongly expressed as genuine "grassroots" beliefs in the Tea Party era, but were almost all shivved by late 2016 into "something else" which coincided with the fall of the "Kochtopus" as a powerful right wing organization to boot. And not that I believe that the actual Republican Establishment and donor base has shifted into these "populist" positions so much as discovered that it doesn't need the base to "believe" in these goals and positions so much as it needs to bend to the base "populist" rhetoric while pushing for the same ole' in the background (which was the entire essence of the Trump Presidency) - and the entire essence of the contradictions of "Trumpism" that plays at populism rhetorically while Trump is still in the background talking about a second term that would be open to the hated cuts to SS and Medicare *even while he continues to campaign that he won't*, and why the singular piece of legislation from Trump's first term was a giant corporate tax cut, accompanied by tons of carve outs for stuff like wealthy private jet owners, private golf course owners, etc ; P
And I think what happened there was that big donors and top political organizations like the Kochtopus were looking to harness the deep anger and resentments on the Right over Obama's election into more "productive" channels (i.e. the belief that a Republican resurgence and opposition could not be legitimately sold to "normies" that was formed primarily around opposition to Obama that would heavily hit a lot of racial "no go" zones that were actively being expressed by the actual grassroots at the time) *and* just happened to neatly align with the donor interests of the time (mainly, avoiding a New Deal II in the wake of the Housing Crash and Great Recession of 2008) - but the slogans, rhetoric and goals around this "economic and small government libertarianism" were donor imposed and not really what was motivating to the actual "grassroots" so much as providing a convenient organizing point and focus, which for the grassroots, conveniently aligned with electing much more culturally conservative Republicans to oppose Obama much more vocally and belligerently - the advent of the "Fox News Star politician" who was much more aligned with the conservative media driven base rhetoric than the "old guard" of ostensibly also as "conservative" but more "politically polite" Republicans that the GOP donors preferred, but who were no longer viable in the Obama era to the Republican base who wanted Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and the Fox News evening punditry essentially as their politicians rhetorically and otherwise that they wanted to see "go to war" against Obama and the emerging "Democratic majority". But once those goals were achieved (the 2010 elections) and delivered declining results (the subsequent elections), the passion for organizing for severe cuts on Medicare and SS and top end tax cuts subsided (as not being "true" base goals), and then Trump entered the room to fill the "real" populist energy the Tea Party groups were harnessing (and one positive point I will give to Trump is somewhat disconnecting the GOP base from GOP economic "conservatism" orthodoxy on the notions of the social welfare state, even if Trump is not really dedicated to this one way or the other, he did reveal the shallow connection that Republican base voters have to most - if not all - Republican "orthodoxy" vis a vis "small government" and "economic libertarianism").
Second, I think another pitfall of right wing "activist" groups tends to be corruption or the fall of the heads at the top - see what is happening with CPAC currently with Matt Schlapp. Even the NRA experienced a pretty large drop off of small donors when all the corruption was revealed from Wayne LaPierre (though it still remains a heavy weight lobbyist org). But lots of other groups, like "Build The Wall" headed by Steve Bannon, where it was discovered that Bannon was living large off the "wall" money while barely funding a mile of actual wall, falls under their own weight eventually because of the seemingly inherent self-dealing that comes with right wing fundraising and organizing. Would that it would eventually happen to Trump and his PACS :/
So, I think we'll see similar with the current groups de-jour: Moms For Liberty has not been the rousing success electorally it has billed itself as being the answer for returning the "suburban mom voter" demographic to the GOP. And it is also an "activist" organization that is mostly top down and created by Republican Party operatives with weaker support at the base. I'm going to guess that as the base moves on from the book banning and school board "activism" into whatever the next culture war will be (or gets bored with the expectation of accomplishing actual results once in power and dealing with the backlash vs winning elections, and/or disillusioned with the losses), M4L will probably begin fizzling here in the upcoming cycles. Particularly if it seems like there isn't a political bang for the buck from a donor POV (the "Youngkin delusion" of the complete failure of Youngkin to flip VA red in 2023 on the strength of the "parents' rights" crusade) may hasten its demise (or evolution into the next culture war).
TLDR: right wing/conservative groups tend to fall from corruption/failure at the top and the fact that they are top down created. If they don't capture correctly "deep driven" grassroots grievances and goals and/or if they fail to peg a lot of consistent wins, they tend to fizzle and get replaced by another "thing" that does, again Tea Party -> Trump. The difference with left wing organizations that are legitimately founded *by* and around grassroots hard-core beliefs but are being somewhat sabotaged in those goal aligned missions by the demands that the individual mission needs to "solve" a much broader set of "intersectional" goals and activism before it can focus on its primary goals, with the results we're seeing.
Not sure that it's a perfect parallel, but Gun Owners of America is a gun rights group that was formed in opposition to the NRA out of concern that the NRA was too pro-law enforcement/pro-gun control.
Does anyone have any lefty orgs who they think have been successful in pushing their agenda while avoiding infighting? (even if you disagree with their cause)
This q goes out to those of you who expressed a certain amount of schadenfreude at seeing the Sunrise implosion.
Although it was on a different scale, I used to do wildlife habitat restoration volunteer work on the weekends, and the leader put together the workgroup by using 1/4 regulars, 1/2 intermittent participants, and 1/4 first-timers. Best work I've ever done. With very few exceptions, we all got along great. There was one trip where it was all regulars, and we all got on each other's nerves.
So I've become a proponent of assembling workgroups so there are a few dedicated old hands, some people that know the work and the people, and a few new people to teach.
I would say more professionalized groups, like the Sierra Club, though their goals are now out of step with what’s really needed. The ACLU is widely perceived as leftwing.
I’m not sure the current craze with starting an organization where anyone can start a chapter, which is then not answerable to any other chapter, is a good idea. It’s obviously a great way to get started. You can get a lot of members really fast, and everyone gets to pick the thing they are most passionate about.
I just know for the organization that I got really involved in, Indivisible, our focus was meeting with local lawmakers to pressure them. And we got those meetings! But they repeatedly asked us to work with multiple chapters so we could just have one meeting with a coherent agenda, rather than dozens of chapters each demanding their time. Which seemed self-evidently better to me, but nobody else wanted to do that.
I'm the guy who always kind of pushes the anti-anti-woke line and this piece, and others like it, have given me pause. I still find the woke and anti-woke equally annoying but it's getting harder and harder for me to pretend that the wokites aren't seriously damaging things.
Most of Sunrise's goals are alienating to me, but nevertheless I find this infuriating. It's like your left tackle choosing to Nancy Kerrigan your QB when there are 20 seconds left in the 4th quarter and you have no timeouts and it's 1st-and-Goal from the 9. What the hell are you idiots doing?
At the basic level of language, this article is saddening. "F" this and all that "Sh*t". I know that standards around language are looser these days, but shouldn't the leader of a large organization giving a formal interview be able to clean up his language a bit? Expand your vocabulary!
Because I forgot to include this: I also have found it a good rule in life to never trust an organization that uses Slack. You never hear about a meltdown in MS Teams.
I recently learned at a conference session on digital security that Slack has pretty much no security. Oddly, Facebook Messenger has very good security.
Right, but how many NGOs and media companies need large SharePoint storage and Azure server time? Not many. And such orgs also probably use Apple products.
Seems something like a super-charged, internationalized version of what Grim, describes.
FWIW, here's the quote the tweet is based on
"""
"Actually, we shouldn’t be talking about ourselves anymore, but only about Palestine," she says. By "us," she means the climate movement. "War against people is also always war against nature," she says. "There can be no justice without an end to the genocide against the Palestinians."
Radical advocacy organizations all have this problem. Their supporters are revolutionaries. Trying to explain the value of incremental change to a revolutionary is often impossible. If the leadership does this, they lose members, and then lose power. So leadership has to balance it. Give the revolutionaries hope of a revolution and then cut deals to make incremental change quietly.
In May 2019 I took my middle-school daughter and some of her friends to St. Paul for Minnesota's youth climate protest, one of the rallies happening across the country that day. Walking to the capitol building with thousands of young people was inspiring, and I felt hope. But then we got there and the speeches started.
As I recall it, there was almost no discussion of actual policy goals related to climate change; there might have been some talk of stopping pipelines, but that was it. There was, on the other hand, a lot of discussion of identity. Young people were heralded as the first BIPOC leaders of local climate groups. They didn't talk about what they were going to do as leaders; the important thing was the fact of leadership by someone who was a minority. Speakers talked about intersectionality and the disparate impact of environmental harms on minorities. The dubious claim was made that a European-style garbage incinerator in Minneapolis is evidence of systemic racism--never mind that there's no good evidence it's a source of pollution at all, much less that it contributes to climate change, and that it's situated in a neighborhood of young, mostly white, professionals.
When the speakers on the program were through, the microphone was open for anyone to offer comments. A young white man took the opportunity to suggest vegetarianism as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A following speaker, a white woman, lambasted this comment as racially insensitive. She yelled that it failed to consider that many BIPOC people don't have the economic resources to buy healthy vegetarian options, and it might be contrary to their cultures.
Maybe a reduction in eating animal products is a good way to fight climate change, and maybe it isn't. In any case, it was just about the only concrete idea for addressing the actual issue that anyone offered all afternoon. But rather than a discussion of it on the merits, it was angrily shut down as being racist.
I had a similar experience in 2016 after Trump's election. Freaked out by the result, I went to a local Indivisible meeting where "action plans" and the like were supposed to be discussed, but it turned into an open-mic competition about which racial group was about to be harmed the worst by Trump. It soured me on activist culture and everything I've seen in the years since has only dimmed my view further.
I kind of get the impression that for a lot of people in the climate movement, climate change something that we really need to address. But it's also an opportunity to get some of their less popular policies passed if you link them to climate change policies because if we're in a climate change emergency, you can't just refuse to pass a climate bill because it's got some provisions that are from the nuttier end of the social justice movement.
The thing about stuff like this is that it often turns off people with technical expertise to help come up with realistic policy solutions. And we need more people who can do the calculations to determine what effect each policy is likely to have.
There have been many thousands of words written in the paper about people talking about the garbage burner and not a lot of the people quoted are willing to point out which direction the literal wind blows. They are afraid :(
Basically orgs of a left-wing valence are too influenceable by staff manifestos, and when this information was exposed they all found themselves exploited by staff. Probably this doesn't happen at right-wing orgs because they believe in hierarchy generally, so newer staff are more easily fired/disregarded.
This is an important point. Having activist agitators causing shitfights is one problem, but it’s easily managed in a sane workplace. The agitator gets fired when everyone reports them for missing the slack. These tactics only work when the organisation’s foot soldiers give manifestos credence.
> Some of these groups are in Overton mode when we have a trifecta,” he said, referring to the Overton window. The idea, in theory, is that pushing their public policy demands farther and farther left widens what’s considered possible, thereby facilitating the future passage of ambitious legislation.
this honestly sounds like the kind of thing that increases divisiveness and it really needs to stop or be politically punished. People do not like being manipulated.
The progressive activist left destroys everything and everyone. The “internal reckoning” is little more than dysfunctional turf war by individuals who are toxic, but are empowered by left wing identity worship to do WHATEVER they want without consequence. Disagree with a Black organizer over a tactical matter? You’re a racist. Don’t list your pronouns on your email? You’re a fascist. What happened within Sunrise happened and is happening in EVERY nonprofit that isn’t affiliated with right to life or a church, and worse within every government bureaucracy (at least in blue states and cities). Submit to every demand by the left or they will destroy your life, and your organization. The activist left is blood thirsty, relentless, and unhinged. Way closer to Mao than to Alensky.
I generally agree with the arguments presented in the excerpt, but it kind of seems like the author is preaching to the choir (at least with respect to the Slow Boring audience). Is anyone pushing a counter narrative? I’d love to hear, for example, how those involved view their actions in hindsight.
It reminds me of this from Scott Alexander in 2014. Movements are bedeviled by the pathologies of their adherents. Anarchists won't organise well, Communists will have too many meetings and schisms, whatever is the pathology happening in modern institutions is worst in new progressive campaigns.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/
Does the right have a similar culture of forming activist groups, that then inevitably fracture? I can only come up with two examples off the top of my head: the Tea Party, and more recently, Moms For Liberty. It will be interesting to see how long that sticks around.
I think the right wing versions fail for different reasons, primarily because they tend to be top down donor driven "astro-turf" organizations, or organized around personalities/topical "ideologies". If there isn't enough actual grassroots steam to sustain and/or if the electoral dividends decline or become an actual electoral drag based on the rhetoric and "activism", eventually the donor funding dries up and goes elsewhere tends to be the usual doom loop, and the "base activism" along with the donor funding and organizing tends to follow the zeitgeist of the culture waves into the new directions that are signaled from conservative media and right wing social media. Or the "personality head" fails, or goes out fashion and if organized around, there's nowhere for an activist group to continue towards, like the Tea Party groups of the Obama era, ostensibly formed around "Ayn Rand libertarianism" - once "Ayn Rand libertarianism" fell out of style with the advent of Trump and Trumpism, and the fall of its most prominent avatars in the wake of Trump (Paul Ryan), how does a "Tea Party" styled organized activist set of groups sustain other than to disappear into "something else"?
Speaking of the Tea Parties, great example of the top down donor created "movement": Billed as "grassroots" groups that somehow all "organically" sprung up within weeks/months, with almost identical sloganing, talking points, organizing "how to" memos, and with ready-made domains and applications for 401(c) status (and in the cases of the anti-ACA "town hall rallies", a wealth of luxury touring buses that took "activists" to districts across states), and heavy promotion from Fox News, they seemed to lose steam pretty much after the disappointments of 2012 and 2014, and in the advent of Trump, after burning pretty hot in 2009 - 2012. You'll be hard pressed now to find many "movement conservative" activists still talking Tea Party rhetoric about "Job Creators", "Makers versus Takers", and "activism" around protecting the Big Banks and corporations from regulations and taxes.
In fact, the entire "movement conservatism" has shifted gears into a much more "populist" direction in the Trump era, mainly on the notion of punishing corporations and finance firms for being "too woke" and ostensibly has leaned a lot more into a protectionist view of jobs and manufacturing, which is a huge departure from the heady days of the Ayn Rand fetish of the implied virtues of the wealthy against the working class to an inversion where the GOP claims to be the party of the "working class" and "anti-elite", "economic libertarianism"/corporation "Uber Alles" including the "Corporate Free Speech" bit that Mitt Romney sunk himself into (my how that's changed in the Trump/DeSantis era!), gung ho free tradeism (with the implied punishment of the hated labor unions), etc rhetoric so apparently strongly expressed as genuine "grassroots" beliefs in the Tea Party era, but were almost all shivved by late 2016 into "something else" which coincided with the fall of the "Kochtopus" as a powerful right wing organization to boot. And not that I believe that the actual Republican Establishment and donor base has shifted into these "populist" positions so much as discovered that it doesn't need the base to "believe" in these goals and positions so much as it needs to bend to the base "populist" rhetoric while pushing for the same ole' in the background (which was the entire essence of the Trump Presidency) - and the entire essence of the contradictions of "Trumpism" that plays at populism rhetorically while Trump is still in the background talking about a second term that would be open to the hated cuts to SS and Medicare *even while he continues to campaign that he won't*, and why the singular piece of legislation from Trump's first term was a giant corporate tax cut, accompanied by tons of carve outs for stuff like wealthy private jet owners, private golf course owners, etc ; P
And I think what happened there was that big donors and top political organizations like the Kochtopus were looking to harness the deep anger and resentments on the Right over Obama's election into more "productive" channels (i.e. the belief that a Republican resurgence and opposition could not be legitimately sold to "normies" that was formed primarily around opposition to Obama that would heavily hit a lot of racial "no go" zones that were actively being expressed by the actual grassroots at the time) *and* just happened to neatly align with the donor interests of the time (mainly, avoiding a New Deal II in the wake of the Housing Crash and Great Recession of 2008) - but the slogans, rhetoric and goals around this "economic and small government libertarianism" were donor imposed and not really what was motivating to the actual "grassroots" so much as providing a convenient organizing point and focus, which for the grassroots, conveniently aligned with electing much more culturally conservative Republicans to oppose Obama much more vocally and belligerently - the advent of the "Fox News Star politician" who was much more aligned with the conservative media driven base rhetoric than the "old guard" of ostensibly also as "conservative" but more "politically polite" Republicans that the GOP donors preferred, but who were no longer viable in the Obama era to the Republican base who wanted Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and the Fox News evening punditry essentially as their politicians rhetorically and otherwise that they wanted to see "go to war" against Obama and the emerging "Democratic majority". But once those goals were achieved (the 2010 elections) and delivered declining results (the subsequent elections), the passion for organizing for severe cuts on Medicare and SS and top end tax cuts subsided (as not being "true" base goals), and then Trump entered the room to fill the "real" populist energy the Tea Party groups were harnessing (and one positive point I will give to Trump is somewhat disconnecting the GOP base from GOP economic "conservatism" orthodoxy on the notions of the social welfare state, even if Trump is not really dedicated to this one way or the other, he did reveal the shallow connection that Republican base voters have to most - if not all - Republican "orthodoxy" vis a vis "small government" and "economic libertarianism").
Second, I think another pitfall of right wing "activist" groups tends to be corruption or the fall of the heads at the top - see what is happening with CPAC currently with Matt Schlapp. Even the NRA experienced a pretty large drop off of small donors when all the corruption was revealed from Wayne LaPierre (though it still remains a heavy weight lobbyist org). But lots of other groups, like "Build The Wall" headed by Steve Bannon, where it was discovered that Bannon was living large off the "wall" money while barely funding a mile of actual wall, falls under their own weight eventually because of the seemingly inherent self-dealing that comes with right wing fundraising and organizing. Would that it would eventually happen to Trump and his PACS :/
So, I think we'll see similar with the current groups de-jour: Moms For Liberty has not been the rousing success electorally it has billed itself as being the answer for returning the "suburban mom voter" demographic to the GOP. And it is also an "activist" organization that is mostly top down and created by Republican Party operatives with weaker support at the base. I'm going to guess that as the base moves on from the book banning and school board "activism" into whatever the next culture war will be (or gets bored with the expectation of accomplishing actual results once in power and dealing with the backlash vs winning elections, and/or disillusioned with the losses), M4L will probably begin fizzling here in the upcoming cycles. Particularly if it seems like there isn't a political bang for the buck from a donor POV (the "Youngkin delusion" of the complete failure of Youngkin to flip VA red in 2023 on the strength of the "parents' rights" crusade) may hasten its demise (or evolution into the next culture war).
TLDR: right wing/conservative groups tend to fall from corruption/failure at the top and the fact that they are top down created. If they don't capture correctly "deep driven" grassroots grievances and goals and/or if they fail to peg a lot of consistent wins, they tend to fizzle and get replaced by another "thing" that does, again Tea Party -> Trump. The difference with left wing organizations that are legitimately founded *by* and around grassroots hard-core beliefs but are being somewhat sabotaged in those goal aligned missions by the demands that the individual mission needs to "solve" a much broader set of "intersectional" goals and activism before it can focus on its primary goals, with the results we're seeing.
Not sure that it's a perfect parallel, but Gun Owners of America is a gun rights group that was formed in opposition to the NRA out of concern that the NRA was too pro-law enforcement/pro-gun control.
Does anyone have any lefty orgs who they think have been successful in pushing their agenda while avoiding infighting? (even if you disagree with their cause)
This q goes out to those of you who expressed a certain amount of schadenfreude at seeing the Sunrise implosion.
Although it was on a different scale, I used to do wildlife habitat restoration volunteer work on the weekends, and the leader put together the workgroup by using 1/4 regulars, 1/2 intermittent participants, and 1/4 first-timers. Best work I've ever done. With very few exceptions, we all got along great. There was one trip where it was all regulars, and we all got on each other's nerves.
So I've become a proponent of assembling workgroups so there are a few dedicated old hands, some people that know the work and the people, and a few new people to teach.
I would say more professionalized groups, like the Sierra Club, though their goals are now out of step with what’s really needed. The ACLU is widely perceived as leftwing.
I’m not sure the current craze with starting an organization where anyone can start a chapter, which is then not answerable to any other chapter, is a good idea. It’s obviously a great way to get started. You can get a lot of members really fast, and everyone gets to pick the thing they are most passionate about.
I just know for the organization that I got really involved in, Indivisible, our focus was meeting with local lawmakers to pressure them. And we got those meetings! But they repeatedly asked us to work with multiple chapters so we could just have one meeting with a coherent agenda, rather than dozens of chapters each demanding their time. Which seemed self-evidently better to me, but nobody else wanted to do that.
Ha, ironic for an organization called Indivisible.
Employ America/pro-full employment groups more generally?
Unions generally.
I'm the guy who always kind of pushes the anti-anti-woke line and this piece, and others like it, have given me pause. I still find the woke and anti-woke equally annoying but it's getting harder and harder for me to pretend that the wokites aren't seriously damaging things.
Most of Sunrise's goals are alienating to me, but nevertheless I find this infuriating. It's like your left tackle choosing to Nancy Kerrigan your QB when there are 20 seconds left in the 4th quarter and you have no timeouts and it's 1st-and-Goal from the 9. What the hell are you idiots doing?
Crazy Eddie.
The visual of that analogy is hilarious
At the basic level of language, this article is saddening. "F" this and all that "Sh*t". I know that standards around language are looser these days, but shouldn't the leader of a large organization giving a formal interview be able to clean up his language a bit? Expand your vocabulary!
These people are such idiots lol
I have found it a good rule in life to never trust a person who authors a "manifesto."
Because I forgot to include this: I also have found it a good rule in life to never trust an organization that uses Slack. You never hear about a meltdown in MS Teams.
I recently learned at a conference session on digital security that Slack has pretty much no security. Oddly, Facebook Messenger has very good security.
That’s because it’s a more expensive product. Most organizations that use Slack aren’t paying for Enterprise.
Companies using MS Teams seem to mostly be in STEM business. Most STEM people, especially those not in academia, are not politcal protestor-activists.
LOL! I work in higher education (although as professional staff, not as faculty).
I think it’s more companies that are already bought in to the whole MS Office / SharePoint stack.
Right, but how many NGOs and media companies need large SharePoint storage and Azure server time? Not many. And such orgs also probably use Apple products.
What do you want, we're a Linux shop!
Reminds me of this Noah Smith tweet from last week (complete with Lrrr meme) about Palestine hijacking progressive causes like climate change
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1727032345948274816
Seems something like a super-charged, internationalized version of what Grim, describes.
FWIW, here's the quote the tweet is based on
"""
"Actually, we shouldn’t be talking about ourselves anymore, but only about Palestine," she says. By "us," she means the climate movement. "War against people is also always war against nature," she says. "There can be no justice without an end to the genocide against the Palestinians."
"""
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-potential-rift-in-the-climate-movement-what-s-next-for-greta-thunberg-a-2491673f-2d42-4e2c-bbd7-bab53432b687
This is infuriating.
The Monocause.
Stuff like this happened in 2021. Remember Kirsten Gillibrand trying to turn everything under the sun into "infrastructure?"
Book excerpts are interesting but maybe 10% as interesting as a Matt post.
Radical advocacy organizations all have this problem. Their supporters are revolutionaries. Trying to explain the value of incremental change to a revolutionary is often impossible. If the leadership does this, they lose members, and then lose power. So leadership has to balance it. Give the revolutionaries hope of a revolution and then cut deals to make incremental change quietly.
Reeducation might help. As in "reeducation camp".
What odd coincidences.
In May 2019 I took my middle-school daughter and some of her friends to St. Paul for Minnesota's youth climate protest, one of the rallies happening across the country that day. Walking to the capitol building with thousands of young people was inspiring, and I felt hope. But then we got there and the speeches started.
As I recall it, there was almost no discussion of actual policy goals related to climate change; there might have been some talk of stopping pipelines, but that was it. There was, on the other hand, a lot of discussion of identity. Young people were heralded as the first BIPOC leaders of local climate groups. They didn't talk about what they were going to do as leaders; the important thing was the fact of leadership by someone who was a minority. Speakers talked about intersectionality and the disparate impact of environmental harms on minorities. The dubious claim was made that a European-style garbage incinerator in Minneapolis is evidence of systemic racism--never mind that there's no good evidence it's a source of pollution at all, much less that it contributes to climate change, and that it's situated in a neighborhood of young, mostly white, professionals.
When the speakers on the program were through, the microphone was open for anyone to offer comments. A young white man took the opportunity to suggest vegetarianism as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A following speaker, a white woman, lambasted this comment as racially insensitive. She yelled that it failed to consider that many BIPOC people don't have the economic resources to buy healthy vegetarian options, and it might be contrary to their cultures.
Maybe a reduction in eating animal products is a good way to fight climate change, and maybe it isn't. In any case, it was just about the only concrete idea for addressing the actual issue that anyone offered all afternoon. But rather than a discussion of it on the merits, it was angrily shut down as being racist.
It was disheartening.
I had a similar experience in 2016 after Trump's election. Freaked out by the result, I went to a local Indivisible meeting where "action plans" and the like were supposed to be discussed, but it turned into an open-mic competition about which racial group was about to be harmed the worst by Trump. It soured me on activist culture and everything I've seen in the years since has only dimmed my view further.
I kind of get the impression that for a lot of people in the climate movement, climate change something that we really need to address. But it's also an opportunity to get some of their less popular policies passed if you link them to climate change policies because if we're in a climate change emergency, you can't just refuse to pass a climate bill because it's got some provisions that are from the nuttier end of the social justice movement.
The thing about stuff like this is that it often turns off people with technical expertise to help come up with realistic policy solutions. And we need more people who can do the calculations to determine what effect each policy is likely to have.
There have been many thousands of words written in the paper about people talking about the garbage burner and not a lot of the people quoted are willing to point out which direction the literal wind blows. They are afraid :(
Away from people, or towards?
Away from the neighborhood that everyone claims to be extremely concerned about.
Basically orgs of a left-wing valence are too influenceable by staff manifestos, and when this information was exposed they all found themselves exploited by staff. Probably this doesn't happen at right-wing orgs because they believe in hierarchy generally, so newer staff are more easily fired/disregarded.
This is an important point. Having activist agitators causing shitfights is one problem, but it’s easily managed in a sane workplace. The agitator gets fired when everyone reports them for missing the slack. These tactics only work when the organisation’s foot soldiers give manifestos credence.
Well, I’m sure being called a RINO doesn’t help.
The Right has the "one weird trick" saying people aren't sycophantic cult followers of Trump.