Philosophy of Activism & Optics

There are a limited number of memes that a person can promote at a time or because of within their head at a time. If there are a limited number of memes that a person can promote at a time or because of within their head at a time, then one trick that you could get used to get people to stop promoting means that you don’t like is to infest with different means that you are neutral to or like better.

Bringing Up Issues It is important to bring up any issue that is worth resolving. Bringing stuff to attention doesn’t really take focus away from other issues unless it’s truly not important. Bringing attention to something does not need attention takes attention away from the more important stuff that really matters.

Hitler had some interesting ideas about propaganda. He viewed the masses as always being manipulated by one side or another, and so propaganda was essential. He believed that the German propaganda had been terrible in WWI, compared to the other side. So, he had an awareness of human irrationality and mob psychology, but didn’t see that he was caught up in a delusion himself. One of the dangers of using propaganda to manipulate others is that you start believing it yourself.

People that are looking to persuade others are almost certainly not open to having their minds changed on that particular topic. Most people tend to be open-minded on a personal selection of topics, and closed-minded on others.

What else can talentless low-IQ people do, when still want to be activists, yet have low intelligence? Most often, they tend to do mindless protesting like the idiots they are. Or they may just talk to people, which can be effective for converting people one-on-one, but has low impact on greater populations compared to other strategies. These actions work well with their emotions, especially when their emotions are captured by the parasitic memes that they were pursuing, etc. Some somewhat smarter people may write a blog that some people read and share, but their activism outreach is still limited by their intelligence and abilities.

More capable people are often able to do more effective and farther-reaching activism. They tend to write books, run YouTube channels, speak on college campuses and public events, and they tend to be public figure is that many people know about. What I’m trying to get out of here is that the activism that any person is capable doing depends on their intelligence and their skills.

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It’s almost impossible to brainstorm and pioneer ideas solely by oneself these days, because the Internet, books, etc are always out there. It’s difficult to independently come up with things that nobody else has ever thought of, unless you burrow very deeply into things, ideas, and concepts that not many other people (if anyone else) thinks about. The rate of intellectual progress has slowed down.

However, not everybody has to be an original thinker to make important contributions. There’s also a lot of value in doing other things. Most critics are worthless. Rational legitimate criticism is a valuable thing.

• Information Bit Theory
• Industrial Society and Its Future: Some Principles of History

• Opposing Vectors System:

  Modern culture and current social dynamics can be modeled as a huge system of vectors arrayed against each other. Some vectors are logical/textual/ideological, but most of them are not. If one vector starts gaining more prominence, opposing vectors will eventually start pushing back. Sometimes, it’ll be enough to stop social change. Other times, some vectors will overpower the others.

Question: Which one is the most correct, and which ones are the best in different contexts?

Examples of ideologies more thing into less intelligent and less complex understandings of the world:

• Race Realism becoming Race idealism and Racism
• “Intelligence is mainly genetic” becoming IQ fetishizing or IQ obsessing
• Demographic equality morphing into woke propaganda and demographic quotas
• i
• i

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Effective propagandists have to understand what they’re doing. Most meme-posters aren’t posting propaganda to the normies to break down taboos. They’re posting propaganda to each other to feed each other’s delusions. It’s circular, and the meme-spergs become propaganda for the other side. e.g. the SJWs can say “Look at these stupid racists” and they’re right.

– Copy-Edited From Blithering Genius On Discord

Public intellectuals tend to be very mediocre, because if they have any original and important ideas, they threaten the status quo. It’s not just that they will be soft-censored by the establishment, it’s also that ordinary people want their intellectuals to be idea-free. They only want the appearance of intellect, not an actual intellectual. That’s why Hitchens was so popular, despite having no intellectual substance. Sam Harris has slightly more substance, but nothing that threatens the worldview of elites or most ordinary people. Atheism is threatening to religious people, but they don’t really matter. As long as you focus on Christianity, critiques of religion are well inside the Overton window.

– Copy-Edited From Blithering Genius On Discord

There’s a difference between comfortably doing that and knowing that you’re a fraud. Does Pinker know he’s a fraud? I don’t think so. Musk might. Krugman does. But not Pinker. I’m sure even Krugman has rationalizations about his many errors and lies. When you expose a normie’s hypocrisy, e.g. that they support illegal immigration but have locks on their doors, it bothers them. They don’t change their beliefs, but it bothers them. There is a cost to pay. If there was no cost to pay, nobody would vote.

– Copy-Edited From Blithering Genius On Discord

Some potential political policies that seem likely to be widely debated within 20 years:

• What should be done about national debts and deficits? The US Social Security Fund is predicted to be depleted in 2033.
• Fossil fuel depletion and rationing.
• Ban on embryo selection.
• Ban on AGI research.
• Deflation of higher education credentials.
• Ban on Factory farming?
• Reforming age of consent laws to include age gaps?

Related Video: You are the Dead Internet – Luke Smith.

See: The Modern Problems with Conformity.

Most people lack awareness about all the other problems in the world. Most people only have a small bubble of the world that they care about, stay updated about, and conduct activism about. Issues that happen outside of their tiny little corner of the world will never get their attention, even if it’d more logical for them to be aware about such issues and to care about them equally to what they’re mainly focused on.

See: Wikipedia: Language Barrier.

When most people think of the “language barrier”, they’re thinking of the hard language barrier. The soft language barrier is more inconspicuous since it’s more complex and difficult to understand. I’ve described it in: “Linguistic Relativity: How Language Influences Thought”.

By contrast, the hard language barrier is fairly easy to understand. Complex ideas can’t spread between people who don’t share a common language. The hard language barrier matters more for activist movements when they are trying to do activism on a global scale, rather than a local one.

Multilingual countries are probably more aware of the hard language barrier than monolingual countries, e.g. the United States. Since many monolinguals are so used to being surrounded by other monolingual people and have no need to know other languages, they never consider that they could achieve greater impacts with translations and/or coordinating multilingual activists.

The ongoing Middle East Enlightenment is an example of inter-language translations that are having a positive effect on the Middle East. Classical Western works are being translated into Arabic, to help enlighten the Islamic World and help them go through their own Enlightenment, in favor of classical liberalism, democracy, individualism, and other Western ideas. There’s been some success with this.

Freedom of Speech and Why It is Important - Blithering Genius.

When there is sufficient social rationality, it is counterproductive to censor (irrational) ideas that the society would ignore anyway. When there is highly insufficient social nationality, censoring irrational ideas could make the society more rational. For example, in East Germany, most East Germans believed in Christianity in the late 1940s, but East German education and culture corrected this. By the late 80s, most East Germans were atheist.

The technology of the modern world also makes censorship easier than ever nowadays. This censorship may be obvious (e.g. getting banned on social media, removal of videos from YouTube, etc) or it may be less obvious (e.g. interfering or impairing the search results on YouTube and Google, automatic censorship, etc).

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

From Wikipedia: Cancel Culture:

Cancel culture, also called call-out culture, is a cultural phenomenon in which people criticize an individual thought to have acted or spoken in an unacceptable manner, and call (typically over social media) for the target to be ostracized, boycotted, shunned or fired. This shunning may extend to social or professional circles—whether on social media or in person—with most high-profile incidents involving celebrities. Those subject are said to have been “canceled”. While the careers of some public figures have been impacted by boycotts—widely described as “cancellation”—others who complained of cancellation successfully continued their careers.

“Cancel culture” is a broad term that embraces lots of different acts and lots of different consequences – boycotts, firing, piling on to someone on social media, refusal to be friends, rescinding a college acceptance or speech invitation, pulling down a statute, taking a book off the curriculum, etc. In some cases, some of those acts might violate someone’s rights. This is especially true when someone has made a contractual commitment to do the opposite, or when a government is acting. Governments have certain duties to be evenhanded, but people lack those duties. Instead, people have freedom, both freedom to choose how to use their property and other resources, and more generally a right to choose who they’ll associate with. Those are core freedoms. We should feel free to argue about how people ought to exercise their freedoms, but always recognize that the freedoms are theirs to exercise.

– https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/cancel-culture-and-freedom/?nab=0

Cancel culture is supposed to provide positive social value for society. It is socially good to cancel people who have done something that is socially bad. For example, the #MeToo movement canceled rapists as a form of punishment.

When most people think about cancel culture, they tend to focus on how it is a form of punishment and how it can be abused.[1] However, cancel culture isn’t merely punishment. Cancel culture is better described as the accumulation of many different individuals exercising their freedom of association. This usually entails many different people re-evaluating their relationships with a person all at once, usually in response to the person’s actions, comments, or beliefs.

Cancel culture isn’t really a new phenomenon, since boycotts have existed throughout history. Cancel culture is just more prevalent and notable nowadays since social media and historically unprecedented moral dogma (coupled by a loss in the power process) have amplified it. Chronologically speaking, there are two types of cancel culture:

• Canceling living people who did something that is now considered socially negative.
• Canceling historical figures who did something that is now considered “immoral” nowadays (e.g. the American politicians who owned slaves, Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World, etc). This one is always counter-productive.

This section is a response to arguments against cancel culture made in Cosmic Skeptic’s 2021 speech and Noah Carl’s 2025 essay, which was written after the Assassination of Charlie Kirk.

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This is true. Cancel culture can cause punishments that seem disproportional to the crimes committed. However, punishments have to be harsh enough to disincentivize socially negative behavior. Often times, people don’t get caught for bad behavior. So from a game-theoretical perspective, the punishment must be bad enough so that when weighed with the probability of getting caught, the outcome is bad enough to discourage people from behaving badly.

Criticizing the severity of punishments is a moral luxury for people of modern times. It’s not a serious problem that needs to be solved either. Especially since “resolving” it would negate the intended effects of the punishment and its severity.

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This is a good argument. It is often better to punish people via the legal system instead. However, in practice, the legal system doesn’t always accomplish what it’s supposed to do. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem easy to reform the legal system either. In the absence of effective legal punishment, social punishment may be necessary.

But let’s assume that the legal system can and does punish people appropriately and proportionally according to their wrongdoings.

It’s still impossible to control how people feel about others and how they want to express themselves. Cancel culture, perhaps better termed as “consequence culture”, is a consequence of many different people re-evaluating their relationships with others. Cancel culture isn’t just about punishment. It’s also about individuals exercising their freedom of association. For example, if an employer doesn’t want to be associated with an employee who supported political violence on social media, then he should be free to fire the employee and disassociate with them. The employer has every right to do what he must to express himself and show that he does not condone the (former) employee’s statements or actions.

Additionally, even if a person is cancel cultured, they can still do things to restore their reputation to some extent. For example, they could issue an apology or condemnation for bad things that they’ve previously said. Depending on the action(s) or statement(s) in question, many people are often willing to forgive wrongdoers who repent. Nobody is perfect, and everybody has their flaws. Punishments that can subside after apologizing are also arguably better than legal punishments, because they’re more flexible. By contrast, legal punishments tend to be fixed lengths that can persist even after a person has apologized, even when this is sometimes the main thing that matters.

Contrary to Cosmic Skeptic’s criticism, I don’t think it’s necessary for cancel culture to have clearly defined punishments and consequences. Dealing with the consequences of one’s behavior is just part of life. And cancel culture isn’t something new either. Social punishments have existed for literally all of human history. I don’t think it’s practical nor possible to eliminate it.

Instead, the much more important thing that matters is when cancel culture is used. I’ve argued that that can be defined by appropriate norms. The main problem with cancel culture these days is that it’s abused to silence politically incorrect truths, to erase history, and sometimes even to harm the reputations of innocent living people by spreading outright lies (e.g. Nick Sandman, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, etc).

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This is true, but sometimes, friends and enemies are clearly defined. People are always going to cancel their enemies if they can get away with it.

The Israel-Palestine example that was mentioned by Noah Carl is worth considering. It is a topic where people have different values regarding which side they support, rather than different beliefs. Both sides have committed violence against the other. People should be canceled for supporting violence. However, it’s debatable about who started the violence. I have greater favoritism towards Israel, but I would say that both sides are at fault for committing violence against each other. I don’t think it’s reasonable to cancel people over supporting Israel vs Palestine. But some people will disagree, so this is a gray area.

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For the second argument in Carl’s essay, it is very much in favor of the Western tradition to cancel people who support murder and violence. Canceling people who support murder helps to prevent future murders by showing that murder is socially unacceptable. Violence and support for violence should never win social approval, nor should we let it pass.

Cancel culture applied towards historical or non-living people should be considered as well. Some of the main examples include the American politicians who owned slaves in the past, people who supported race realism and/or eugenics, etc.

For starters, there is nothing for society to gain from canceling people who spoke in favor of the truth. This automatically eliminates the validity of canceling many people. Canceling dead people is also often an attempt to erase history.

The first rationale for canceling wrongdoers is to prevent wrongdoings in the future. People only stop doing undesirable behaviors when living people are punished. When dead people are punished, this does not deter anyone from doing undesirable behaviors. Canceling dead people thus does not accomplish the rationale for why people should be punished at all.

The second rationale for cancel culture is that people have a right to exercise their freedom of association. While people can disassociate from dead people who don’t share their values, this is often counter-productive to rationality. Past actions were caused by different conceptions of morality, which were caused by having different technologies available. It does not make sense to cancel people when basically everybody would’ve done the same things if they grew up in the same culture with the same technologies and circumstances. Once again, it’s not acceptable to cancel people for having different values.

Lastly, it’s often not possible for anybody to predict what will be socially acceptable in the future. So hypothetically, it could be that nobody will be safe from potentially getting canceled in the future. And if everybody could potentially be canceled for doing something bad in the future, then what good does cancel culture accomplish?

Cancel culture usually doesn’t seem to hurt famous people in the long-run, especially if: 1. they have enormous influence, and 2. what they said/did was harmless enough for people to forget about it over time. The Access Hollywood Tape hurt Donald Trump’s reputation. However, most people don’t remember nor talk about it these days. Despite the massive public outrage at the tape’s publication, Donald Trump managed to win two US presidential elections, and he still has a strong support base. Cancel culture is ineffective when (political) events just get memory-holed over time.

By contrast, canceling a person with relatively small influence will hurt them a lot, especially if it hurts their employment opportunities. Cancel culture is probably the biggest negative consequence of getting doxxed, aside from any potential legal consequences.

Canceling people who have controversial values could be used to lessen a person’s influence. As an example, Steve Godfrey has tried to cancel Inmendham for supporting child pornography. I dislike any influence that Inmendham has, but canceling him just for being in favor of child porn[2] makes it harder to draw attention towards more rationalist critiques of his worldview. It would be more productive to explain why Efilism is irrational or not uniquely rational. Ignoring Inmendham’s other arguments just because he supports child porn is both an Ad Hominem Fallacy and a Red Herring Fallacy. Cancel culture is counter-productive in this case because Inmendham’s influence is not being reduced for the right reasons. It’s also worth noting that this is a case that revolved around different values. Our guideline that cancel culture is unacceptable in this situation held true once more.

Canceling Richard Stallman for having said inappropriate things or behavior may be good for condemning behavior that we don’t support. But I don’t think it makes sense to cancel someone who has been so important and influential for helping the Free Software Movement. It’s thanks to Stallman that we have the gcc compiler, GNU Emacs, GNU software, etc. Aside from and in spite of all his personal flaws, he was probably the most qualified guy to lead the Free Software Movement. He should be condemned and/or punished for doing inappropriate things, but I would say that his canceling went too far, until it winded down to some extent.

Note: I may list more examples when I hear about them.

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

It seems that the best that can be done to prevent cancel culture from being abused is to define some norms for legitimate uses of cancel culture. Similarly, there is a set of rules for legitimate warfare, which were established by the Geneva Conventions. The rules on legitimate warfare are broken all the time. It’s basically up to the honor system and independent volition of anybody wants to choose to follow them. In practice, the rules don’t stop people who are determined to break the rules from breaking the rules.

Defining acceptable norms for cancel culture is like defining acceptable rules for war. Ideally people should try to follow them, and everybody insists that people should follow them. It’s ultimately inevitable that someone will break the rules, and there’s not much that can be done about it. The main benefit to defining the following norms is to set precedents. We need to define good social behavior, before we can strive for it.

I think these are reasonable criteria for defining acceptable and unacceptable cancel culture:

• It is unacceptable to cancel people for speaking the truth. Examples: James Damore, race realists, etc.
• It is unacceptable to cancel people who merely have different values, provided that their values aren’t socially destructive.
• It is acceptable to cancel people who spread lies and slander. Examples: Alex Jones spreading the Sandy Hook false flag shooting conspiracy theory, spreading lies about Charlie Kirk’s assassin, etc.
• People who support violence can and should be canceled. Examples: People who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the murder of Brian Thompson, etc. This discourages further violence.
• Cancel culture should not be applied to people who lived under different social norms in the past. It’s more productive to judge people by contrasting their actions and accomplishments against the norms of their time.
• Cancel culture should not be done merely for virtue signaling or social status. Cancel culture should be motivated by a desire to improve society, not a desire for personal gain.
• Cancel culture should not inhibit freedom of speech.

These norms make some presuppositions which are clarified in the next section.

See: Wikipedia: Fact-Value Distinction.

These criteria require distinguishing truth from value. In most discourse, people fail to accomplish this, so truth and value are mangled together, even when they shouldn’t be.

In cases where not everybody agrees on what the truth is, the appropriate action should be to debate the truth. If one side refuses to debate, then they are wrong. If the truth is on their side, then they shouldn’t have any problem debating and defending it.

When people are spreading false information, it’s usually better to refute them and explain why they’re wrong. If they still don’t stop spreading lies, even after being decisively proven wrong, then it can be socially beneficial to cancel them. Of course, this depends on the severity of the lies. If the lies aren’t too severe, then canceling must be done with discretion. Often times, people will promote false ideas on one topic(s), while promoting true ideas on other topics. This creates gray areas regarding when it’s appropriate to cancel people, as far as truth is concerned.

People should not be canceled for having different values because everybody has different values in a society. A successful society is supposed to align everybody’s values, so that people will cooperate with each other peacefully. It’s also possible for people to make rational arguments for defending their value judgments. People cannot do this when they are at risk for being canceled for expressing their values.

As with all actions involving value, the effects and benefits of cancel culture actions are difficult to measure. In spite of this, I see no reason to believe that cancel culture is ineffective or harmful when it’s used appropriately. False information harms society. When liars are punished, the truth prevails and fewer people believe in false ideas. When people who support violence are punished, violence is discouraged. The benefits of cancel culture are less clear for gray areas, so we shall consider them.

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By all this criteria, most cancel culture by leftists is unjustified because:

• They cancel people for expressing different values.
• They cancel people for speaking the truth, just because it hurts their feelings.
• They cancel people as a means to avoid rational discussions.
• They aren’t willing to debate and defend their conception of the truth when people disagree with them.
• They often justify canceling people for “hate speech”. For example, promoting ideas like race realism supposedly promotes violence, according to their views. However, there is no logical implication between these two. Promoting truth claims does not promote violence.

Sometimes that can be difficult, but these are some good general guidelines:

1. If a person is misidentifying the causes of the problem(s) that they are concerned about, then that indicates that they never bothered to think enough about what the problem actually is. If one doesn’t understand the problem, then they don’t have any solutions. If they don’t have any solutions, then they’re only virtue-signaling. Real activism has to be rational, informed, and have effective solutions.
2. If a person is proposing ineffective solutions that won’t solve the problem(s) (e.g. ineffective solutions to climate change), then they’re not an activist, or at least not an effective one. It’s rational to label people as idiots and virtue-signalers, if they propose ineffective solutions that won’t work.

3. If a person is exaggerating the problem, then they’re a virtue-signaler, not an activist. Wokists tend to exaggerate the problems of many other social issues as well.

   A true activist would be concerned with understanding and promoting the truth.

4. If a person criticizes the actions of others, while not improving their own actions, then they are a hypocrite and a virtue-signaler. For example, a person may criticize the environmental footprints of other people, while doing nothing to reduce their own footprint (consumption of resources and pollution). Genuine activism should not be hypocritical.
5. If a person is virtue-signaling or fearmongering because they have a conflict of interest (e.g. a conflict of interest regarding climate change) (and hence personally benefit from people worrying about such issues), then they’re not a true activist, especially if their actions benefit from remedying problems, rather than actually solving them. It’s more likely that they’re just yet another selfish person who is seeking to promote their interests, even if that entails misleading people.

Generally speaking, most (peaceful) protests usually fail to achieve their intended outcomes. The political and social power of protesters is usually too diffuse to influence most powerful people’s decisions. Powerful people also don’t usually give up their power voluntarily, hence why protests don’t usually persuade them to do so.

There are some notable counter-examples (e.g. the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the George Floyd protests (mixed success), 2016 Icelandic anti-government protests), but even in such cases, it seems that their goals were likely to eventually be achieved anyway and/or that other factors made the protests largely unnecessary.

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Invasive Protesting Is Even Worse Than Regular Protesting
Let’s consider the 2023-2024 pro-Palestinian protesting and the associated tactics as an example:

Supposedly, the most successful outcomes that could arise from such protests is that even greater virtue-signaling happens to the point where enough public pressure is applied against the federal government to make them stop supporting Israel, but that’s not what happens.

The most important thing to remember is that these temper tantrums are too idiotic to be effective. They don’t hurt Israel in any way, nor do they help Hamas or Iran in any way. On the contrary, they rally people who support Israel to their cause.

More importantly for those of us not in Israel: they kill the brand of institutions which tolerate them. The leftist universities which allow this thuggery are losing credibility, and influence over Western society, with every headline you see about this. And that’s great news. Do stupid things, win stupid prizes.

Unfortunately, most people live in echo chambers nowadays due to the modern problems of conformity. From personal experience, I hypothesize that there are probably some receptive people who are trapped within in various echo chambers who are capable of escaping them if they are exposed to the truth. If we want to have an elevated chance of persuading those people (however few they may be), then we might need to try popping some bubbles and echo chambers for the greatest social outreach for our movement as possible. We may get censored for doing so, and it may not be worth the effort since the chances of persuading people is always so low. But it is something that could be tried.

If this strategy is attempted, it may be most effective to write essays and create videos for persuading people who are trapped such ideologies. It depends on how this method is done, what/which groups are being penetrated, etc. In most cases, this is probably an ineffective tactic.

There might be ways to make this tactic more effective, but I’m not sure what they would be. I think about this a lot, since I know that it’s a major barrier to activism. I used to believe that this is ought to be an effective strategy for that reason. But now I’m not so sure after gaining more personal experience and becoming more black-pilled. The black-pilled truth might be that there is no general, effective way to get around it.

Video: Social Media as Social Control - Luke Smith.

Every social platform and most political system effectively function akin to skinner boxes. They give people the illusion of believing that they’re free thinkers, when everybody’s information and thoughts are actually being constrained by the designs, censorship, and social nature of the platforms. This is both an obstacle to activism, as well as a leading cause of ineffective activism.

Most of the ideas that people come up with for fixing things like fixing the academy, raising the birth rate, boosting economic prosperity, etc, are ideas that seem to work within their frames of thinking. They don’t expand their frame of thinking to realize that it may not be necessary to have so many academics in the first place, a low birth rate could be okay, or there are actually deeper economic issues which caused the effects that were seeing. Most people don’t think on higher levels. And often times, they’ll only think about what benefits them personally, rather than what would benefit society the most as a whole.

They are only proud of their ideas because the ideas seem to give them moral superiority, not because they’re well-thought out. And if they think their ideas are well-thought out, it’s only because they haven’t thought enough, are just ignorant, or are too dumb to think more deeply. Some examples:

• People may say that politicians should lower taxes to boost economic growth, but they ignore that taxes can’t be low for everybody, especially when government spending is high, there is a high government deficit and government debt, and there were actually better ways to boost economic prosperity.
• People may also say that the country should do more fracking, but they ignore that the world has a finite oil supply, and that it would be better to stop relying so much on cars.
• People often say that Congress should get funding to this for that, but Congress wouldn’t need so much emergency relief funding for natural disasters in the first place if people would just stop building urbanizing and living near hurricane, flood, or earthquake prone areas. This would be easier to accomplish if Congress didn’t subsidize insurance for natural disasters, which is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

It’d be nice if we could have a society that fixes problems before they happen, instead of after they happen. Unfortunately, most people are only inclined to do the latter since the former option requires thinking on a much higher level than what most people can do. We live in a determinsitic, cause-and-effect universe. Since people have selective attentions, they tend to only focus on things after they happen. For most people, there has to be something that causes them to think about those problems in the first place.

It’s really stupid to create jobs for the sake of people having jobs. But what’s even dumber than that is when someone says that we should create jobs for the sake of people having jobs, and they complain about how work is necessary for a society to function.

Converting / Persuading people to a different ideology should be thought of as a numbers game. You probably won’t convince most people, but if you spread the ideas out to enough people, eventually you will have a large audience if the ideas are reasonable good, and there’s a decent supply of people who are particularly receptive to them.

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Common methods used for activism include:

• Community building
• Artivism
• Communities of practice
• Conflict transformation
• Cooperative
• Cooperative movement
• Craftivism
• Grassroots
• Guerrilla gardening
• Transition movement
• Lobbying
• Media activism
• Culture jamming
• Hacktivism
• Internet activism
• Peace activism
• Non-violent resistance
• Peace camps
• Peace vigil
• Moral purchasing
• Petition
• Political campaigning
• Propaganda
• Guerrilla communication
• Protest
• Boycott
• Demonstration
• Direct action
• Performance Theater
• Protest songs
• Sit-in
• Strike action
• Hunger strike

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

Video is a powerful medium. People respond to it emotionally and intuitively. Seeing is believing, so to speak.

A person viewing the George Floyd death video would naturally empathize with the dying black man who appeared to be begging for his life. They would naturally see him as a victim, and the man kneeling on his neck as an oppressor. The man kneeling on his neck was white, and he acted in a way that seemed cruel or indifferent. It was easy to interpret the event as an instance of “racist police brutality”, especially since (1) the video only showed the end of the encounter, and (2) people have been conditioned to believe the myth that blacks are unfairly targeted by racist police.

Video is an important type of evidence, but unfortunately it can be very misleading. You experience video as if you are experiencing the event yourself. Watching videos creates a false impression of direct knowledge, and that impression is subconscious. You feel that you know something by direct experience, when in fact you have acquired fake knowledge from fake experience.

The problems with video are amplified by mass media and social media. For a video to be propagated, it must engage our emotions. Our brains evolved to learn abstract general knowledge from the information of direct experience. Our brains did not evolve to process information from videos that have been cherry-picked to generate emotional reactions.

Direct experience is a good source of information about reality, or at least about the aspects of reality that you interact with. Fake experience is not a good source of information about reality. If we feed fake experience into our brains, we will acquire fake knowledge.

As a medium, video almost always gives us a biased sample of specific events. If you wanted to get an accurate view of police interactions with black people, you would have to watch an unbiased sample of videos of such interactions. If you watch 10,000 randomly selected videos of police interactions with black people, then you will have accurate knowledge about such interactions. If you only watch a few videos of such interactions, and those videos were cherry-picked to support a narrative, then you will have false knowledge, but you will feel very confident in that false knowledge.

For most things, including police interactions, it isn’t practical to watch 10,000 randomly selected videos, or even 100. Luckily, there is a better way to develop an accurate understanding of reality: statistics. If you look at statistics on police interactions, you can acquire accurate knowledge about them (as long as the statistics are accurate).

Unfortunately, most people aren’t very good at abstract thought. Many don’t even understand averages and percentages. They will care more about a single death captured on video than a million deaths in the abstract.

– Blithering Genius, “George Floyd and the Madness of Crowds”

Likewise, there are many reasons Muslims care more about Israel/Palestine than about Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs aside from the alleged hopelessness of the latter situation:

• Arabs are the same ethnicity and speak the same language as Palestinians.
• Arabs have lost several wars to Israel and consider this a “humiliation”.
• Israel is located at the heart of “Dar al-Islam”, the region of the world Muslims have traditionally ruled.
• Israel maintains control over the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, generally considered the third holiest site in Islam.2
• China prevents incriminating videos coming out of Xinjang, whereas we regularly see footage of Palestinian victims.

– Noah Carl, “A response to Richard Hanania on Arab militants”

A lot of people saw the 2020 George Floyd video that made them intuitively think that all cops are bad. However, the 2021 body cam video of the cop who encountered Gabby Petito and her boyfriend a couple weeks before her death was saw by millions of people. It caused many of those people to realize that most cops are good people.[3] So if the public has a negative impression of something from watching a video, then making a viral video that makes people think the opposite that could help counteract the earlier viral video.

Fun fact: After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Stalin ordered the recent film “Alexander Nevsky” to be withdrawn from circulation, due to its German-Russian conflict. Once Operation Barbarossa began, Stalin ordered the film to be shown every day in all Russian cinemas.

An underappreciated thing about Substack is that it has slow virality. For social media, people have to churn out content, because it is forgotten after three days. By contrast, blogs allow people to put in serious effort into making a properly good piece, and it will keep getting read for years. This is a great thing for both readers and writers. I wish more people leaned into making few but exceptional pieces.

Preference Falsification seems related to astroturfing.

Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting a preference under perceived public pressures. It involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the underlying privately held preference (or simply, a public preference at odds with one’s private preference). People frequently convey to each other preferences that differ from what they would communicate privately under credible cover of anonymity (such as in opinion surveys to researchers or pollsters). Pollsters can use techniques such as list experiments to uncover preference falsification.

The term preference falsification was coined by Timur Kuran in a 1987 article, “Chameleon voters and public choice.” On controversial matters that induce preference falsification, he showed there, widely disliked policies may appear popular. The distribution of public preferences, which Kuran defines as public opinion, may differ greatly from private opinion, which is the distribution of private preferences known only to individuals themselves.

Kuran developed the implications of this observation in a 1995 book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. This book argues that preference falsification is not only ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. It provides a theory of how preference falsification shapes collective illusions, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Collective illusions is an occurrence when most people in a group go along with an idea or a preference that they don’t agree with, because they incorrectly believe that most people in the group agree with it.

– Wikipedia: Preference Falsification.

The former director of the World Values Survey, Ronald Inglehart, argues that “exceptionally rapid changes in Individual-choice norms are occurring in high-income societies because conformist pressures have reversed polarity”. Once you reach a tipping point where more than 50% of a population adopts a new belief or value, suddenly, the powerful force of conformity begins working against the old orthodoxy. Because many people take their cue about what to believe from the majority, minority beliefs fight a steep, uphill battle until they win the allegiance of 51% of the population. Once they make it to that point, winning another ~20% happens almost automatically.

To see this phenomenon in action, you can plot attitudes toward gay marriage over time. From 1999–2010, American support for gay marriage rose by 9 percentage points (from 35% to 44%). After passing the 50% mark in 2011, support rose by 18 percentage points in the following eleven-year period (from 53% to 71%).

Higher IQ is associated with greater neuroplasticity in adulthood. The minority who remain open to changing their minds later in life will disproportionately be cognitive elites.

– Nathan Cofnas, “Beating Woke with Facts and Logic”

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As of 2024, 24% of Americans agree with Darwin that our species arose through naturalistic evolution, 37% are young earth creationists, and 34% believe in intelligent design. But if you watch Hollywood films, read newspapers, go to an elite university, or work at a tech company, you would think that approximately 99% of Americans are in the first group. Because the elites accept Darwinism, that’s the only view that has any real cultural influence.

– Nathan Cofnas, “Beating Woke with Facts and Logic”

See: Quantity Negotiation – Thoughts On Economics.

The Population Bomb was published by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, and The Limits to Growth was published by Donella Meadows in 1972. These two books caused a lot of people to worry about overpopulation, until public support declined for multiple misguided reasons.

The Selfish Gene was published by Richard Dawkins in 1976. Unfortunately, it is largely responsible for making a majority of educated people (especially people who are educated about biology) believe in kin altruism. Although Blithering Genius released a response book, Debunking the Selfish Gene, in December 2022, it is so far failing to become popular. More could be done to promote its popularity, but the window for changing people’s minds on this may be too late. It doesn’t seem as if there’s enough time to promote selfishness before the collapse happens.

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick was released in 1989. It shaped how a lot of people think about Chaos Theory.

The Bell Curve was published by Charles Murray in 1993. It promoted a lot of discussion about innate differences in intelligence.

Hypothetically, future landmark books may be able to shape public opinion. However, this will probably be harder to do in the Internet Age.

Related: When Will The Race Taboo Disappear?: Somebody needs to write the Magnum Opus - Seb Jen.

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.

How to Litigate the Left-wing Riots - James Weitz.

The Right is wasting opportunities to bankrupt left-wing organizations that train or encourage protesters to commit crimes, including blocking traffic, that result in injuries to third parties.

To stop some projects, you only need one red light. But to make a project go, you need at least 100 green lights.

Each political faction, e.g. environmentalism, has different jobs within it. Just like each army whether American or Russian has different jobs within it. A hot woman holding <ideology> flag is a very obvious role. Just like how Kiara holding a Communist flag gives a lot of power to the Communist ideology faction for spreading its influence. Or Lauren Chen and Lauren Southern bringing power to right-wing groups.

Reagan once gave a speech in 1980 that fooled people into thinking he didn’t use a teleprompter. It impressed a lot of people. Obama was nothing without his teleprompter.

Bloggers can avoid getting negative comments on their blogs if they do not share their blogs or places to receive overwhelmingly negative and unproductive comments. Besides avoiding notifying a user multiple times, another reason why it’s better to edit existing reddit comments than to make multiple comments is that it could give dissenters and idiots multiple opportunities to downvote your comments, which would decrease your karma faster.

Video: What is the Consoomer’s Liturgical Calendar? – Luke Smith.

Unfortunately, the potato is a huge symbol for Idaho, which encourages its consumption, even though it is not a particularly healthy food to eat for most people who have modern lifestyles. To promote a healthier lifestyle among Americans (especially among Idahoans), Idaho should find a different symbol to represent itself, besides the potato.

See: Linguistic Relativity: How Language Influences Thought.

See: Thoughts On Democracy: Big Tent Strategy.

For years, the McDonald’s restaurant chain had been under pressure from environmentalists to serve meals in something greener than the polystyrene clamshell. Suppose McDonald’s had decided unilaterally one day to make the switch. “This is an example of our deep environmental commitment,” the company spokesperson might have announced. “Paint the Golden Arches green!” As always happens when companies claim credit this way, the activists would have been furious and the public would have been skeptical.

Instead of following the typical course, McDonald’s entered into negotiations with the Environmental Defense Fund (now called Environmental Defense). They negotiated an agreement under which McDonald’s committed itself to abandon polystyrene, and EDF committed itself to police the switch, to hold the company accountable. At their joint announcement, the McDonald’s spokesperson said relatively little, while the EDF spokesperson called it a victory for the environmental movement. When reporters asked the McDonald’s rep if he agreed that this was a victory for environmentalists over his company, he said – the words almost catching in his throat – “yes.” Others at the company let it be known that they weren’t even sure the switch was environmentally desirable. But they were sure that environmental groups and the majority of customers wanted them to switch, and McDonald’s intended to respond to their demands.

The result: Environmental groups that might otherwise have attacked the change as too little too late, as more symbolic than real, as “greenmail,” took credit for it instead. More than a decade later, McDonald’s still ranks high on lists of environmentally responsible companies.

– Peter Sandman, “Accountability and Credit”

The Appearing To Lose Strategy has a lot of similarities to the Quantity Negotiation Strategy, even to the point that it could be considered a sub type of the Quantity Negotiation Strategy.

Trump’s huge tariff reduction on 2025 April 9 from ridiculously high levels down to 10% tariffs on all countries could be seen as a case of the Appearing To Lose Strategy.

At the beginning of each year, there is a US State Government (I won’t say which one) that passes “new” educational laws to make it seem as if the State government is actively trying to improve public education for its citizens. This gets a lot of publicity in state and local news outlets, and it has the effect of making most (likely) voters believe that the government is doing what it can to enforce good educational standards.

In reality, the “new” legislation is actually almost exactly the same as the old legislation, with just a few unimportant words changed here and there, so that the government can have plausible deniability that they aren’t actually changing anything. Replacing the old legislation with the same legislation as before doesn’t help anyone, although it does improve the public image of the State government, especially if nobody notices, which tends to happen when there’s no major publicity to point out how the new and old legislation are actually the same. I know someone who worked for the State Government who told me about this, but they could not make a public statement about this, for confidentiality reasons.

I’m sure that many other governments probably use a similar tactic, so that they create news headlines to make the public believe that they are serious about improving the public’s well-being. Sometimes, there’s actually not much of anything that can be done to improve some issues. Other times, there are effective reforms that could be implemented, but they never get implemented since they don’t have the support of the naive, ignorant people.

From the public’s perspective, a good way to prevent this from happening and unfairly benefiting the incumbent government would be to require all legislation to be written in a formal language. Any time changes are made to existing legislation, a program could compare the two legislation documents and summarize the differences.

In the video, Right-to-repair signed into law in Minnesota - we won! - Louis Rossmann, the narrator said that the manufacturers hate it when each state has different laws. So, when his proposed law is rejected in one state, he simply tries to pass it in another state.

The theory is that if you even get even one state to pass a right-to-repair law (even some nobody state, like Alaska), then it would be really expensive for a business to satisfy that state separately from the rest of the country. Thus, they would essentially be forced into de facto satisfying state legislation or product warnings nationwide. For example, the “this product has carcinogens” warning for Californian residents is displayed to product consumers in every state, not just California. The mind share of the Californian warning is huge. Everyone recognizes it.

Hypothetically, every iPhone could be legally required to display warning messages, similar to tobacco packaging warnings, e.g. “This product contains components known to the state of Alaska to be anti-right-to-repair”. Even better, if a second state, (e.g. Hawaii) passed similar legislation, then business would have to reprint all the labels. If consumers saw the change and reacted “Woah, now it’s known to the states of Alaska and Hawaii?”, then they might start to think more about what they buy.

Besides right-to-repair and harmful substances/components, this tactic could also be effective if companies were required to list the resource and environmental impacts of their products, which could help raise environmental awareness.

Endorsements can help any activist, but they usually aren’t something that the activists can control themselves. Whether or not activists get important endorsements tends to how well their ideas are able to appeal to people with power or influence.

When people (especially politicians) endorse a candidate who is running for political office (e.g. endorsing Trump for president of the United States), sometimes they’re doing so not so much to voice support the candidate (if at all), but moreso to virtue signal to people and their voters about their political positions and supposed beliefs. Many Republican congressmen actually hate Donald Trump, but they still endorse him anyway because they know that that’s what a majority of their voters and constituents would favor.

Hypothetically, any activist organization or political candidate could buy and endorsements. However, I would be skeptical of any organization that does that. Buying endorsements isn’t genuine support, is questionable and suspicious, is arguably a waste of campaign or donation money, and it can also indicate dishonesty and corruption.

Note: This section is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.