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One of my least favorite genres of social media post:
EPISODE 1: At last, Foo Bar is politician who shares my personal ideology based on [three things they said]! The hero we’ve been waiting for!!
EPISODE 2: Oh no! Foo Bar is a horrible person because of [three other things they said]! Their poisonous ideology is completely explained by [deeply held stereotype about an entire political party]! I knew it all along!!
I just…ugh. Every part of this.
Paul’s Very Short Analysis of the Previous Post:
- Politicians are people.
- Political parties are coalitions.
- Both people and coalitions are messy and internally inconsistent.
- It’s best to treat politicians and parties as tools (not sports teams, not angels/demons, not heroes).
@inthehands sports teams are also coalitions of people and also messy and internally inconsistent
@aubilenon
True enough! Yet somehow tethering one’s sense of personal identity to a sports team ends up doing less global damage.
@inthehands Sure, but only because they don't matter.
@aubilenon
I mean, isn’t that the whole point of sports? That it’s just a game?
@inthehands 100% agree with the first three, but I'd like to gently dispute that last one, because it's actually kind of dangerous.
Tools are things you have some modicum of direct control over.
Politicians and parties are not tools. They're capricious, unreliable and often actively hostile counterparties in an ongoing adversarial negotiation. Implying that voters in any way "control" policy simply by voting, i.e. without additional activism, agitation, protest, etc, is demonstrably incorrect.
@darcher
“Implying that voters in any way control policy simply by voting, i.e. without additional activism, agitation, protest, etc, is demonstrably incorrect.”
It’s a really good fucking thing I don’t think that, then, isn’t it?
@inthehands ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm just responding to "politicians and parties are tools" as a statement about how politics works.
And it's also a good thing we're just a couple of bozos chattiing about politics on social media, where nobody gives a rat's ass what either of us think. If we were actually trying to organize people, the way we thought about our goals, and the way we phrased our messages would actually matter, for a lot of reasons.
@inthehands I agree with this analysis, but also realize it’s hard to do when parties and politicians think and act the same way about their constituents.