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comment by tla
tla  ·  3428 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Cop Killed A White Teen And The #AllLivesMatter Crowd Said Nothing

It's more than that. It's the expectation that you have to expend a certain amount of effort, money, time, or other resource to be allowed to consider yourself an activist, or your opinion valid. Your working poor individual with two minimum wage jobs still consumes media and has valid opinions, but none of these resources to spare. All they can afford to do is "slacktivism" and it's not because they're slack. Dismissing hashtags movements, even ones like #Kony2012, as slack or lazy is literally dismissing the voices who cannot meet a certain arbitrary investment criteria.

Fuck that noise.





empty  ·  3428 days ago  ·  link  ·  

weren't most of the #Kony2012 people middle class white kids who were being duped by a 30-something white guy to try to stop a dictator who was already dead?

tla  ·  3428 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't particularly care. Kony2012 is kind of a red herring in this discussion.

empty  ·  3427 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I see. You've changed my opinion on the validity of using the "slacktivism" concept. Giving a voice to those who wouldn't otherwise have the resources to make their voices heard is worth a kony2012 every now and then.

tla  ·  3427 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Indeed. I don't believe there is a such thing as signal with zero noise.

empty  ·  3427 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I really like this analogy. Usually when I make analogies to "signal-noise ratio", I'm thinking of comprehensibility (or lack thereof). But that usually only applies to one speaker/author/whatever. Your analogy is referring to something that's abstracted over individuals, something that's closer to how political ideas spread.