Signal is moderation.

Generating signal is moderating noise. The first moderator of any message is the person converting ideas into language. Understanding the interplay of how messages get moderated by the various layers they pass through is what media literacy is.

I miss when signal-to-noise ratio was common parlance of the Internet.

Making usable spaces is tough work, but having worthwhile content drowned in an ocean of noise is seemingly the default of corporate controlled media anymore, so much have they abandoned paying attention to what they publish. That you don’t know who is editorializing and moderating the places you frequent and have opinions on the job they’re doing says to me that you’re not doing the work that being media literate requires, which is all the more important when so much of it is generated content with no consideration given to reality.

If you look back at panel 2, there’s a potential third one to research

You know who look like whales? Problem spenders who spend far beyond their means, and are preyed upon by predatory business practices that use psychological manipulation to encourage people to spend as much as as they can. Like, I’ve literally watched video game developer conference talks where a dev explains in great detail and depth on how to hijack human psychology to milk every last dollar they can. Whales stopped being “those who can afford to spend” a long time ago.

If you vote with the hope that it will fixes problem by itself, you won’t get very far. Voting is sort of the end of a political process, the other end starting in people building political movements. For your vote to mean something, you have to be voting with a political project. So, focus on the political projects: start building the structures that protect people first, without relying on the government’s approval. Support your communities of care and build your mutual aid networks. Don’t wait for it to be delivered from on high, get with people who also care about the things you care about and start using what you have to build what you can.

Because you’re complaining about people who you believe don’t vote the way you want them to (in this case, not casting a vote). I mean, if you want to do the same thing you’re criticizing people for, then you must at least believe that you are subject to that criticism. You think they’re harraunging you for voting for someone while not visibility engaging in putting in the work. How is complaining about those people any different?

Let me be clear: the Democratic party and particularly the Biden campaign is failing hard at giving people something they want to vote for. They have gone all in on being a protest vote against Trump, and that’s not very exciting, especially given the strong misgivings people have about the Biden Administration’s role in supplying the weapons used in Gaza. Like, what is the Democratic Party planning to do to reach someone in Southeast Michigan who lost relatives to weapons Biden’s admin sent to Israel? Who voted “uncommitted” in the primary because of that? Because I haven’t seen anything besides “Trump would kill more of your family” which rings awfully hollow. This is in a state that was fairly key to Biden’s previous victory. So, what work is being done on the ground to reach out? Like, that’s the sort of things that actually need, like, visibility campaigns, so if that work is being done, why aren’t showing off the work they’re putting in?

The way I see it, so much online arguing is devoted to people complaining that “do-nothings are complaining about how I plan to use my vote!”. There is so much more that can be done outside of elections and GOTV that spending all our efforts solely on the elections is a grave misuse. You think the people complaining about people voting for Biden and Trump are sitting on the couch and not doing anything? Encourage them to get out and do the things that make it so we don’t have to vote for the same horrible dichotomy every four years. Are they doing the work? Encourage them to give visibility to the work they’re doing (or the work people like them are doing). Stop complaining about how people handle dealing with bad choices in a system that isn’t really responsive to them.

If only people here bothered to try and understand how nuanced actual politics are and that shit can’t be simplified so easily just because you happen to think in simple terms.

What outcomes they get from not voting really depends on what they’re doing outside of electoral politics. I get it: you’re really invested in the election and maybe have went all in on the outcome of Biden v. Trump, and, to be fair, it’s a damnably important election and Trump getting the seat again will do a ton of damage.

But you know what I learned from previous elections? No matter how much I personally care, or personally do, I might still wind up living under a Republican presidency bent on making my life worse. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna throw my hands up and say nothing can be done.

Building on-the-ground support networks and working together to build enough political power to make waves in elections is where it’s at, as far as I’m concerned. I’m concerned about the outcomes of the elections, certainly, but the better we’re able to help each other, the less impact an election (and therefore someone not voting) has.

You realize that voting alone is very nearly politically irrelevant? Especially if your vote is reducible to an anonymous voting bloc? That most of the work that goes into making your vote mean something happens well before election day? Like, just voting on election days, no matter how many off-year election cycles and special elections someone votes in, if they aren’t participating in an political movement that is properly reflective of their vote, then their share of political power is merely given over to someone else. The places where someone’s vote has the most impact are the places where they’re treated as an afterthought.

Like, consider the electoral college, and how the votes break down in most urban areas (which tend to be where most Internet users live). The margins in most urban areas tend to be very much in Democrat favor, so spending all your resources to win a few more votes (or even stop a small amount of votes being lost) does not actually result in very many, if any, additional EC votes. You could focus exclusively on a presidential race for unpopular candidates and pour all your effort into that for marginal value.

Or you could realize the top of the ballot is of limited value and in fact can be severely abridged by the down ballot races if overlooked(if we need reminders of “Vote Blue No Matter Who”'s shortcomings, please reference Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema), and realize that browbeating people into voting for a particular candidate instead of getting people engaged about things they care about is a way to burn out your political powerbase.

If you get real fancy, you can even realize that losing a particular election is mitigatable by on the ground action, and building political structures that don’t rely upon the government to do all the hard work and never be out of the political favor of the party in power.

I was there for it, and watched it happen. I’m familiar with the sort of people who popularized the idea that Social Justice is something to be derided. I’m not too keen on basing my idea of what is bad social justice on the definition that comes to us from the people who thought journalistic malpractice was based on who Zoe Quinn’s ex was mad at.

See, doing the work, I see a lot of people pushing back online saying “but are you going to vote for my candidate for the promise of maybe one day doing the work you’re doing”? Like, genuinely, I’ve been being asked if I’m voting for Biden in 2024 for years, as if the only thing that matters is the election. Caring about a very specific election for four years is not all that distinguishable from only caring once every four years. And when the alternative political power structures try to express what little political power they have, the establishment runs back to “but if you don’t vote for us regardless of what we do, the other guys will be worse”. Even when there are examples of doing something as “awful” and “dangerous” as withholding an endorsement in an election year can be shown to be actually effective and get actual good work done (see: the UAW holding off on endorsing Biden until he actually went to bat for them and helped get landmark contracts passed). Should we considet the Biden or Bust crew that’s been beating the drum the past four years just as disposable and unable to effect change they demand?

Treating Bernie Bros and SJWs as interchangeable is a new one to me (overlapping, I suppose, but I remember some quite rabid anti-SJW Bernie Bros and visa versa), but I’ll grant you that both camps get hit with the keyboard warriors when they’re online, regardless of how active they are in meatspace.

And I’m less trying to defend them as I am calling out the absolute futility of trying to do activism beyond visibility and outreach campaigns online, and judging someone’s political efficacy based solely on their online output.

If we want to build movements that actually, y’know, have political power to do something, it takes a lot more offline work (even if the online work can shine a light on good offline work)

And yet you’re conversant in the idea of SJWs and keyboard warriors. Where did you come by that idea, and who are these people whose political existence is so sharply limited to online discourse?

How are you verifying the existence of these keyboard warriors who only whine? I know plenty of people politically active in my community who also have a penchant for arguing online. It is somewhat more difficult for me to verify the behavior of people who I only know online, owing to the fact that I can only tell what those people do by what they post and what makes it way to my feeds.

Perhaps you should consider people as more than what they post on social media, especially given how many of those platforms have a financial interest in showing you things that make you mad. I don’t see much political relevancy in the sentiment that the problem with the current political climate is that people aren’t voting hard enough, but if you’re committed to complaining online that people spend too much time online complaining and not enough time voting harder, then I wish you luck.

From the sorts of things I’ve seen, it’s anyone with “blue hair and pronouns”, particularly if they have had a particularly viral moment that can be easily inserted into “Woke SJWs OWNED” clip compilations. Typing on a keyboard doesn’t make for very good visual content, but I suppose posts clipped to show how cringe SJWs are is probably what you’re referring to.

Somehow, I doubt you have a full picture of their political activities based only off what someone else was able to turn into ragebait.

I don’t know how you got “only focused on the presidential election for four years” fromy previous post.

That would be the context of the thread you were responding to. As in:

Maybe if the SJWs would fucking pay attention in between elections and not pout and withhold their votes on Election Day…

And, yeah, limiting the focus to visibility campaigns on social media does mean that the focus is limited to visibility campaigns. So, you know, don’t do that. There are plenty of orgs doing lots of work, and complaining about this poster’s visibility campaign or that poster’s lack of practical activity on social media is an exercise in second-ordrr futility. Expect activity other than visibility campaigns in places where activity other than visibility campaigns can actually happen, and not on social media where they mostly can’t.

I bow to your clearly highly nuanced take of checks notes “people who care about social justice are a bunch of whiners who are bad at politics”.

If they are “SJWs”, the claim isn’t really that they aren’t politically active, is it? In fact, the claim is that they aren’t spending the four years between presidential elections focused on the next presidential election. As it happens, if you are building political power, spending all that time and energy focused on a single national race is almost certainly a waste of resources. So, what’s the claim here? That “SJWs” spend far too much time concerned about the actual lives of people to engage in “enough” political advocacy to convince a preexisting party to handle those issues instead?

I think it makes far more sense to do the work and advocacy that is required to make people’s lives better directly, and thus have built a popular movement that the major parties want to jump on the bandwagon of, rather than spend years trying to convince these lumbering facets of the establishment that they should do the work instead.

What an absolutely deranged claim. What is it that “SJWs” are advocating for that you think is invalid? Because if it’s something along the lines of “they should stop advocating for an oppressed group of people” you should really consider what it means to try to build political power. Unless you’re going for “if we give the billionaires more stuff, maybe they’ll let us have medical care, as a treat.”

Ah, yes, the perennial take of “only those I deem socially acceptable should be allowed at pride”. Happy Pride Month, everybody! Remember to leave all the parts of you that make people uncomfortable in the closet!