It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter.
Of course I think maybe what we are seeing is the activist arm of what I've heard called "conspiritainment." It's a way for people to LARP as activists at no real inconvenience to themselves. They get to feel self righteous at no real cost.
It also feels a bit like the domestic version of what I've heard Africans call "white savior tourism" where people from the West go to Africa to fill their Instagram with how they are saving the world.
Picking a real issue usually means confronting and speaking truth to power. That often has real life consequences. Attacking windmills (even literally! that is a thing too!) does not.
Edit: I once heard an investigative journalist and PI make this joke: "How can you tell if a conspiracy theorist is right?" "Check for their name in a missing persons database."
I dunno,
Anti vaxxers are definitely going against power. (Not to mean they are correct)
I think call conflating 'white saviour tourism's with this phenomena is missing the point.
We live in an age where basic trust in authority has eroded. The erosion is perfectly rational. We've seen large corporations manipulate the media in crazy Orwellian language.
We've become accustomed to PR stooges going on media outlets and blurbing new speak and falsey truths .
This in tune with weaponizing of almost all form of discours, meaning we are almost always at a debate where our goal is to annihilate the other person ability to convince, rather than find common grounds. Have left us totally detached from truth. Not in a sense of total objective truth, but in the sense of common ground for discourse even though we don't agree on everything.
Anti vaxxers , anti 5g, flat earthers, regardless of the validity of their claim, are a symptom of this.
1. We can't blame them for not trusting authority, when authority is found lying again and again.
2. They formed a social construct where common ground , i.e. truth, finally exists.
I believe this is an epistemological crisis. Not just virtue signaling, or a weird form of entertainment
> It's a shame that so much activism is spent on nonsense and even outright destructive nonsense. All that energy could be going toward improving things that matter.
I did not vote on it, but this is obvious pablem. An analysis of "why" is an interesting question, but aiming for platitudes repeated throughout every age in every society, is the epitome of discussion "noise".
Of course I think maybe what we are seeing is the activist arm of what I've heard called "conspiritainment." It's a way for people to LARP as activists at no real inconvenience to themselves. They get to feel self righteous at no real cost.
It also feels a bit like the domestic version of what I've heard Africans call "white savior tourism" where people from the West go to Africa to fill their Instagram with how they are saving the world.
Picking a real issue usually means confronting and speaking truth to power. That often has real life consequences. Attacking windmills (even literally! that is a thing too!) does not.
Edit: I once heard an investigative journalist and PI make this joke: "How can you tell if a conspiracy theorist is right?" "Check for their name in a missing persons database."