A few thoughts on the latest round of White Guilt discussions

[The Good Reverend Roger]

There's no point being an activist for any cause, because:

1.  Activism now requires an infinitely regressive set of purity tests.  You wear the entire uniform or GTFO.
2.  If you are found wanting in the above tests, then you are worse than an active opponent.
3.  Nothing you do is good enough to qualify you as an "ally", which is apparently itself now a bad word.
4.  Some activists are inherently less equal than others.
5.  Slurs are made by Bad People.  "Jokes" are made by the Good People.  They may appear to be slurs, but that's just your privilege talking.

There are a few benefits gained by avoiding activism:

1.  You don't get a pat on the head and a condescending sneer from college students (I don't hate college students and in fact admire education, but I can see where the hate comes from), because your life experiences since the Johnson Administration are obviously useless in the face of a few humanities classes.
2.  You don't have to change your entire language every 6 months to conform to the latest version of Correctness™.
3.  You don't have to tolerate the very same slurs you'd never dish out.
4.  You are actually allowed to smile and be happy occasionally.
5.  No culture guardians rapping you on the forehead.

Now, none of this is to say you shouldn't CARE about things and maybe try to make things BETTER or IMPROVE the world around you.  If you don't do these things, then you're basically wasting space.  But to become an activist is to surrender your identity and your will to someone else's standard of what's right and what's not.  And all you get out of it is a stupid Greenpeace tee shirt maybe, and the snickering and sneers of the people you foolishly "allied" with.

Fix shit.  But do it on a personal level.

[East Coast Hustle]

Fuck yes.

[LMNO]

Fix shit.  But do it on a personal level.

Brushing with Troofpaste right here.

[Elder Iptuous]

activism does seem awfully exhausting.

[Cain]

It's also worth considering activism, as a lifestyle falls prey to the same problems as the protest subculture - lots of noise, little in the way of victories, better at politicking amongst their own than using said methods against their purported political enemies.

If a military campaign were run the way some protest and activist groups are, their leaders would be hung for incompetence, and rightly so.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It's also worth considering activism, as a lifestyle falls prey to the same problems as the protest subculture - lots of noise, little in the way of victories, better at politicking amongst their own than using said methods against their purported political enemies.

If a military campaign were run the way some protest and activist groups are, their leaders would be hung for incompetence, and rightly so.

Yep.  The reward for being a successful (ie, "alpha") activist is that nobody listens to you anymore, because everyone gives up on trying to meet an unattainable, ever-shifting standard.

Because it really isn't about The Cause.  It's about control.  YOU must behave in accordance with MY ethics.

It's also about calling out relatively minor things (war bonnets) that may in fact be offensive or just plain silly, in order to avoid taking active steps to alleviate your own guilt (Repatriation is RIGHT, but will NEVER happen even partially.  Outside of Canada.).

[The Good Reverend Roger]

activism does seem awfully exhausting.

That's because it's a bunch of energy used to control members, rather than accomplish anything.

At least as far as I have seen.  See:  Occupy "general assemblies".

[Sita]

This pretty much sums up what I think.

I've seen recently with a friend what happens to a person when they get caught up in a cause/become an activist. They start seeing everything as an affront to whatever they're on about.

[P3nT4gR4m]

This pretty much sums up what I think.

I've seen recently with a friend what happens to a person when they get caught up in a cause/become an activist. They start seeing everything as an affront to whatever they're on about.

Learned the rule at college. Plain and simple - activist = annoying wanker. Spent 3 years of my life there, surrounded by every dumbass crusader under the sun from class war thru all men are bastards to save the fucking whale. Never, in all that time, met an exception to the rule. This was good enough for me but thanks anyway, Roger for digging a bit deeper. It's interesting to examine the root causes of these phenomena from time to time.

[Dildo Argentino]

You will call me a pedant and worse again, but, while I agree with the general gist of everything here, I think there is a misuse of the words "activism" and "activist" here.  I am sensitive to this sort of issue because I grew up in a country where I had the opportunity to go to school with very large pictures of Marx (and his buddies, or fellow-triumvirates, as we thought of them in those days, Lenin and Engels), and where the society we lived in was routinely called "socialism" - when in fact it was nothing but. It was a sort of deeply corrupt, pervasively feudal planned-economy capitalism.

So I think what you are describing is why not to join the things that usually get called "activist organisations",  but which are in fact mutual appreciation societies often with fairly rough initiation rites. These things are always like pyramid-schemes: they butress the egos (and often also the bank accounts) of the people forming the core at emotional (and often also financial) cost to the periphery.

But activism, I think, is an apt word to descibe something else. I think activism is first and foremost the name of a personal philosophy that is opposed to apathy and navel-gazing. Its core notion is that what you do, your activity, matters. I think sabotage, ridicule, memetic warefare, the sort of thing that quite a lot of PD seems to be about, spannering the works - that is what I think of when I think 'activism'.

[Juana]

There's no point being an activist for any cause, because:

1.  Activism now requires an infinitely regressive set of purity tests.  You wear the entire uniform or GTFO.
2.  If you are found wanting in the above tests, then you are worse than an active opponent.
3.  Nothing you do is good enough to qualify you as an "ally", which is apparently itself now a bad word.
4.  Some activists are inherently less equal than others.
5.  Slurs are made by Bad People.  "Jokes" are made by the Good People.  They may appear to be slurs, but that's just your privilege talking.

There are a few benefits gained by avoiding activism:

1.  You don't get a pat on the head and a condescending sneer from college students (I don't hate college students and in fact admire education, but I can see where the hate comes from), because your life experiences since the Johnson Administration are obviously useless in the face of a few humanities classes.
2.  You don't have to change your entire language every 6 months to conform to the latest version of Correctness™.
3.  You don't have to tolerate the very same slurs you'd never dish out.
4.  You are actually allowed to smile and be happy occasionally.
5.  No culture guardians rapping you on the forehead.

Now, none of this is to say you shouldn't CARE about things and maybe try to make things BETTER or IMPROVE the world around you.  If you don't do these things, then you're basically wasting space.  But to become an activist is to surrender your identity and your will to someone else's standard of what's right and what's not.  And all you get out of it is a stupid Greenpeace tee shirt maybe, and the snickering and sneers of the people you foolishly "allied" with.

Fix shit.  But do it on a personal level.

1. Bullshit.
2. Bullshit.
3. I said I don't like the word. That has nothing to do with anyone else.
4. Bullshit.
5. What the fuck does that even mean?

1. Y'know, I'm in a shitty mood and should probably get off PD for the day before this turns into an argument, but I'd appreciate it if you'd stop taking passive aggressive swipes at me. If you're mad at me, please, talk to me directly.
2. See three above. I don't especially like the word, even though I'm fully aware that LIKE-ing the word is the source of the problem and can be transferred to any other replacement.
3. Oh my god. Insulting individual behavior is not the same as slurring an entire group. Christ.
4.
5.

[Dildo Argentino]

Oh, and I forgot (your pessimism, Roger, is contageous!): I actually think what we usually call "Good Deeds" (you know: being nice to people for no particular reason at all, helping with luggage, holding doors, providing information in a reasonable and understandable tone, toleration for minor mistakes that routinely happen to all of us, anyway, apologising easily and forgiving easily, praising the praiseworthy and raising a polite and respectful objection to the objectionable, suffering fools gladly - those are also pretty close to activism these days.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Oh, and I forgot (your pessimism, Roger, is contageous!): I actually think what we usually call "Good Deeds" (you know: being nice to people for no particular reason at all, helping with luggage, holding doors, providing information in a reasonable and understandable tone, toleration for minor mistakes that routinely happen to all of us, anyway, apologising easily and forgiving easily, praising the praiseworthy and raising a polite and respectful objection to the objectionable, suffering fools gladly - those are also pretty close to activism these days.

That's not activism, that's just being a decent fucking person. Activism is an 'ism'. It's assholes wearing teeshirts and getting right in everybody's face about whatever righteous bullshit they want to be seen to be crusading against. An irritating subgenus of attention whore whose only redeeming feature is that they're really easy to wind up into paroxysms of frothing indignant rage which can be hilarious if you're that kind of bored.

[Faust]

There is activism, and then there is Activism™


Activism™ is a handful of people fighting about who is standing where at the top of a pyramid.

At the top it gets hard to see those struggling at the bottom, the multitudes form a sea that's scary and gives you Vertigo. 

Its easier to focus on those directly above and below you, zone in on those local differences.

Although to the desperate observer from the teeming masses below the difference is so small it's impossible to see, but its probably better not to worry too much about that.

[Elder Iptuous]

i don't happen to agree with Garbo on the trigger topic at hand, but this now seems to be overstating things a good deal, and has gotten a bit caustic, imo.
Roger, no skin off my back and i'm not harping here.
Garbo, i'd just like to distance myself from any animosity since i posted here, but don't intend any offense.