Jacob Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, cautioned in a Blue Sky thread that the case involving a Maryland man the U.S. government acknowledges was "wrongfully deported" has reached a "crisis moment."In March, Kilmar Ábrego García was accused of being an MS-13 gang m...
Would you rather people stop dissenting online?
If dissenting online makes them feel like they are doing enough to not act IRL, yes.
Revolutions don’t just spontaneously materialize from nothing, they grow from riots, that grow from peaceful protests, that grow from people complaining to each other in social settings. None of the early steps are sufficient, but they are the type of things that are necessary for the end result. There is no world where less dissenting online leads to more direct action.
People dissented online a lot in Russia ten years ago
And that grew into protests and riots, so… what’s your point?
Hey guys, guess what. Authoritarianism isn’t trivial to beat. All the other authoritarian states in the world aren’t just full of lazy people who didn’t use the one simple trick. Turns out both propaganda works and a lot of people are actually scared of being murdered or sent to a gulag.
But again, you get none of that if you try to skip the first steps.
If the conclusion is that a revolution is necessary then protests and riots are obviously insufficient. Which means that posting is not the correct path, particularly because it seems to be very lacking in building irl community, though it is effective at convincing posters that their engagement is “doing something”. It isn’t, aside from enriching tech oligarchs through their attentional engagement
Reread the comment, because you’ve entirely missed the point.
If the goal is to simply build towards protests and riots then that is a foolish goal because protests and riots are insufficient
If the goal is to build something larger than that, then different methods are required
This guy has no idea what nuance is.
The Boxers lead a rebellion in China and failed horribly, accelerating the very thing they were trying to stop. Guess rebellings is bad too.
What a bad faith argument.
I feel like that’s unlikely and that a lot of the people dissenting online are the same ones who are protesting, calling their lawmakers, etc.
Also, it’s not like any of the IRL stuff has been effective yet anyway. Online dissent probably gets seen by more eyeballs than any one protest sign or IRL action that doesn’t end up with the person doing it being arrested or killed (and thus unable to continue resisting this administration), so if it really is an either/or situation I think online dissent is more effective than IRL peaceful protest or writing yet another letter to my lawmakers.
That all said, I really don’t think it is an either/or situation, so I think we can and should be encouraging all the kinds of dissent.