I want you to know that I am treating your concerns seriously and have been writing a response, but it is already 5000 characters long and I need to eat dinner, so I hope you will allow me the courtesy of replying in time without assuming that I am either conceding or disregarding your comment.

No, you didn’t. You gave a hypothesis and then justified with assumptions, providing absolutely nothing concrete to support them beyond “trust me bro”.

Give me any kind of data to support the claim.

And I have no interest in trolls looking to bait me with insults, so I’ll do us the favor and just block you from my side instead then.

I continue to wait for examples from comparable scenarios that support the claim being made.

I’m sorry, but this just feels naive to me. We aren’t in a simple world with clearly defined teams and easily recognizable allies, and not every well-meaning idea towards progress is going to be a good one. We need to be able to discern viable action from not, and we need to remember that the actual opposition wants nothing more than for us to waste on our time on futile efforts so we’re too fatigued to fight the real fight.

I’m sorry, but some of you need to more realistic and more pessimistic.

No thank you. I’m going to instead continue to rally against treating adults like coddled children and placating them in ways which dis-motivate them from actual collective action by convincing them that they’re already doing collective action. And I’m going to keep criticism bad ideas because good intention alone is not enough. I don’t give a shit about making people feel good or participating in the latest fun leftist trend, I care about meaningful impact.

Feel free to block me if your find your feathers unable to be unruffled.

🚨 BEING

🚨 LOUDER

🚨 AND

🚨 MORE

🚨 PASSIVE

🚨 AGGRESSIVE

🚨 DOESN’T

🚨 MAKE

🚨 YOUR

🚨 POINT

🚨 MORE

🚨 VALID

Show me the impact. Give me examples of comparable protests and show me the real world verifiable and measurable impact which they have resulted in.

My argument is that the scope and scale of this protest renders it moot. These are real factors.

And paying your monthly rent with established due dates is non-comparable to additional discretionary spending which is tracked in market quarters. Not to mention the fact that tons of us have had to give our landlords rent checks late tons of time before and the overall impact is the goddamn same.

So again, show me the relevant example of comparable impact and I’ll concede. Otherwise, I’m going to keep rightly telling you that your performative protest is about your own feelings rather than any actual impact.

I’m looking at things like this through the lens of: There are people who want to start doing something. This is something. It’s a start, for someone, maybe a lot - not an end.

It’s not though. It’s the illusion of a start. Hell it doesn’t even encourage collectivism because it is an entirely individual and isolationist protest. You make no connections, you further no interests, you do literally nothing aside from pat yourself on the back for participating in a viral trend.

Yes, no shit you can’t cross the English Channel without getting your feet wet, but dipping your toes in from the shore is never swimming. That the two both take place on the beach does not make them equivalent.

My point remains that we gain nothing by coddling adults like children and telling them they’re doing good works when they aren’t. We’re past playtime; this is grown up time. Either put on your big boy pants and come to the table or shut the fuck up because all you’re (I’m speaking in generalities here, not about “you” personally) doing is muddying the waters and distracting from real efforts and making people feel like they’re already doing the necessary actions that they just simply aren’t.

Literally any action is better, and again, just because an idea has good intention doesn’t make it beyond criticism. Acknowledging and discussing the reality isn’t “shitting on” something, and the suggestion that it is is driving towards ignorance that benefits noone.

Furthermore, I don’t need to know how to repair a roof to identify a leak. Instead of trying to fight my suggestion that this is meaningless, why don’t you try instead to prove with any kind of verifiable reasoning or evidence that this protest will be impactful. Give me some kind of source that supports this idea that doesn’t fall down to “I think” or “it might.”

You guys are the ones making the claim here - that this protest is viable. Fucking back it up.

But this continues to ignore the entire crux of the argument - if you’re supposed to give me $100 on Wednesday but don’t give it to me until Thursday, by Friday I’m still holding $100. Period. End of discussion.

I don’t know why we keep pretending there is more to this. There isn’t.

Again, my argument isn’t that scale and scope don’t exist, it continues to be that any number times zero is still zero. Period. You are being led astray into feeling impactful so as to dissuade you from meaningful impact. This isn’t harmless, and this isn’t without intention.

When politicians see you gathered outside their offices, you’re right, they can absolutely close the blinds and ignore you. But at least they understand you care enough to make a stand and they have to put in the intentional effort to ignore it. When the powers that be see shit like this first off they don’t even have to ignore it because it’s literally nothing and will resolve itself in the books literally in the same week. They don’t see people who care enough to take a stand, they seem people who wanted to participate in a trend.

I’m past feeling obligated to keep going around in circles while you try to convince me that just sticking your toes in the water will somehow ever help you cross the English Channel, but I do feel inclined to clarify one point:

… feel free to criticize me …

I haven’t. I disagree with the particular tactic you’ve expressed, because, as I said, I think that gatekeeping participation is counterproductive.

I don’t think you have criticized me and wasn’t trying to claim you have, but I do see how this reads that way. My point was only that good intent doesn’t absolve us from criticism and that I hold myself to that same standard. I do think you were attempting to undermine my point with your whataboutism as if the state of my participation would somehow have any material impact on the substance of my argument, but I don’t think you were outright criticizing me and don’t want you to think that I think that either.

Do it for a week and logistics starts getting fucked up.

Yes, change the entire nature and scope of the protest and it might be impactful, I agree with you.

Do it over a weekend and no tickets get sold to a show.

…do you think people are still primarily buying event tickets from in-person box offices same day?

But it doesn’t have marginal impact. It has zero impact. Whether you spend money on Thursday or Friday, the bottom line is the same. We are starting from the false premise that this has any impact, when the smallest amount of critical thought renders that false immediately.

Yes, get the hell out and stand in front of government offices with signs. Make noise. Be seen. Do anything other than pretending keeping your items in your shopping cart for one additional day has any impact.

Because unlike my question yours is irrelevant. Whether I’m out every day or not, hell even if everyone is out every day, either way this “no buy day” will still remain entirely non-impactful and entirely self-congratulatory.

We need to spend less time coddling people and trying to massage away their legitimate anxieties and more time focused on having grown up conversations with people like adults about the realities of our situation - even when said reality is starker than a couple warm-fuzzies can solve.

But to answer your whataboutism anyway: daily? No sir. But I have been out in the streets, and I will continue to do. And I will continue to encourage useful collective actions while reminding you that I can only participate in the collective part of collective action, as I am not myself a monolith; critiquing individual efforts is wildly different than critiquing collective organizing effort. But to be clear, feel free to criticize me because unlike defenders of this wasted effort protest I do not believe that the mere goodness of my intentions makes me beyond criticism.

So back to the question posed to you - the suggestion that anything less than full support is the same as opposition is bullshit. First off we’re leftists - we have reason, logic, decency, literally all the immutables on our side - we don’t have to default to ignorance and happy feel good platitudes. Telling people that they’re wasting their efforts, not prohibiting them, isn’t opposition, it’s respecting them enough to talk to them like grown ups instead of placating them like children.

A million times zero is still zero. We gain nothing by entirely performative action. Start somewhere, but make it somewhere meaningful.

So anything less than full endorsement is opposition?

People are free to waste their time, but telling them they’re wasting their time is not prohibition from doing so.

I’m not opposing; feel free to continue these meaningless protests. I’m just refusing to participate in the performative part where we pat ourselves on the back and act like this is accomplishing anything.

Feel free to waste your effort, just don’t expect praise for it.

And likewise some are going to mistakenly thing this meaningless impact is meaningful and feel fatigued and defeated when they quickly realize it’s all just self-congratulatory.

I too can present convenient hypotheticals

I might agree if I believed there was any viable impact here, but even 1mil multiplied by zero is still zero.

Boycott permanently.

March on your capital, daily.

Refuse to perform work.

Close your bank accounts and open credit union accounts instead.

There are hundreds of actual actions; that I didn’t list them doesn’t automatically make your shitty option good.