prokopetz:

philippesaner:

prokopetz:

Now it’s time for everybody’s favourite game: does this person really think every realistically attainable outcome is equally bad, or are they just an apathetic jackass trying to frame total inaction as the moral high ground?

Usually the latter. Sometimes they’re trying to promote pursuing a totally unattainable outcome, though, which I can respect a bit more.

Nah, even that can be a rhetorical trick. It’s a particularly popular one among self-labelled progressives – it works like this:

1. Pick an injustice that’s at least one of a. so colossal and entrenched that it’s difficult to identify any individual contribution that might help to combat it, or b. so totally removed from your sphere of influence that you can’t meaningfully engage with it in the first place. Some broad class of institutional violence that’s happening on the opposite side of the planet is a popular choice, since it satisfies both criteria at once.

2. Declare that fighting this injustice is the sole priority, and that any lesser social ill is a frivolous distraction. Critically, even injustices that are subsets of your chosen target must be dismissed in this fashion, because allowing the possibility of attacking the problem piecemeal short-circuits the next step (see below). Insist that anyone with more attainable goals is “part of the problem”, either because they’re (allegedly) capitulating to the system, or because they’re distracting attention and draining resources from the “real” fight.

3. Now that you’ve got a cause you can’t do anything about, and you’ve established that you can’t reasonably be expected even to think about any
lesser injustice until that cause has been decisively conquered, you’ve
freed yourself from any obligation to do anything at all.

Best of all, you can still claim the moral high ground by framing yourself as the only one with the courage to recognise the true face of the enemy, and score bonus pathos by making a huge production of how hard it is to be
so utterly committed to such an “impossible” cause.

It’s a neat little system, innit?