Activism, Memetics, & Optics

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

Al Jazeera has a reputation for publishing “credible” journalism, anti-Western narratives, and pro-Qatari-monarchy narratives. By telling the truth whenever they can or almost everyday, this gives their lies more credibility when they want to make their propaganda (the lies that they want everyone to believe) seem more trustworthy. Trust is a resource which can be built, maintained, depleted, and/or exploited.

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

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

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

Someone created a website (www.jobs.now) to let Americans apply to the market surveys for unlisted H1B-earmarked job openings that have already been given to a foreign applicant. If any US citizen applies to one of these, they legally can’t issue an H1B for it.

See: How can immigration be abused as a political weapon?

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.

In some cases, this idea may also work on a global scale. As an example, a new social media law in Australia in December 2025 forced many social media platforms to start requiring users to provide IDs to verify their ages in some contexts, like Discord. Globalization means that laws in one country can affect entire companies.

Bounties have been used to find tax evaders, law breakers, and illegal aliens. They could also be used to help enforce parental license laws.

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

If E-Verify were implemented, more employers would resort to hiring illegal aliens under the table. This problem could be resolved by having federal agents contact businesses. They would pose as illegals and offer to work under the table for a low wage paid in cash. If the business accepts that offer, then they are prosecuted.

This tactic is useful for preventing corruption.

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.

Political theater refers to political actions, speeches, hearings, or events that are staged primarily for symbolic impact or public perception, rather than to achieve any practical legislative or policy outcome. The “performance” aspect is the point. It sends a message, energizes a base, or shapes a narrative. Participants know the action won’t change anything concrete.

There are two types of political theater: Conflict of Interest (COI) theater and gridlock theater. From the establishment’s perspective, both types of theater are a technique for placating the populace. Theater enables the establishment to maintain high or decent approval ratings.

Gridlock theater occurs when a political faction doesn’t have enough political power to enforce its will on society. For example, if one political party faces a greater or equal number of opposing politicians in a two-party state legislature,[1] the party will fail to execute its agenda. This leads to the party doing performative acts, rather than actual progress in its favor. The participants of gridlock theater may sometimes have no other choice for winning political approval from their base. Other times, they would participate in COI theater, even if they did have enough political power.

When a politician lacks the power to do their agenda, it’s better for them to do theater than to do nothing at all. There is a spectrum between pure theater and raising awareness. Sometimes, drawing public attention to an issue through dramatic means is itself meaningful, especially if it eventually leads to real change.

Some common examples of gridlock theater include:

• Congressional votes that have no chance of passing but force opponents on the record.
• Press conference stunts designed purely for media coverage.
• Lengthy floor speeches delivered to an empty chamber.
• Hearings where witnesses are grilled more for the cameras, than for genuine fact-finding.

All the actions of gridlock theater can be performed as COI theater actions as well. COI theater is more complicated and encompasses a wider variety of actions.

COI theater occurs when the leaders of a political faction have the political power to execute the agenda of the political faction, but they choose not to, or they choose to compromise due to COIs. Unlike gridlock theater, COI theater has a second objective, which is to stay close to the status quo. COI actors want to avoid fundamentally changing anything. COI theater is a sign that the leaders of political movements have different values from the people that they claim to represent.

Gridlock theater is more noticeable than COI theater. It’s easy to tell when a political entity is facing political gridlock. In gridlock theater, a political faction is explicitly competing against an opposing political faction. By contrast, it’s harder to notice when politicians have COIs that prevent them from following their faction’s interests. In COI theater, politicians cannot reveal their true interests or COIs, lest they lose support from their political base, and eventually their political power and privileges. COIs are often concealed from the public. Thoughtful political analysis is usually required to recognize COIs.

Politicians always have to satisfy competing interest groups. It’s thus inevitable that some sort of theater tends to arise across most political landscapes, in order to sufficiently satisfy multiple groups. The establishment itself is also an interest group, so their interests are always prioritized first.

From the naive activist’s perspective, they see COI theater as progress, even when it actually isn’t, compared to what could’ve been done instead. Theater mainly fools unintelligent and/or uninformed people.

From the rational activist’s perspective, COI theater is a barrier to activism. When a rational activist notices theater, their goal should be to alert other activists that the establishment is distracting the populace from achieving the activists’ goals. The rational activist must explain why real change is not taking place and what should be done instead.

The establishment who implements theater is usually at an advantage. The political establishment has an average IQ between 110 and one and 115, which is higher than the populist average IQ of about 100. Additionally, the political establishment works in politics full-time, so they have plenty of time to think about what they could do to distract the populace in order to balance the competing interest groups. By contrast, the populace usually has to work full-time to support themselves in their families. They usually don’t have the time, education, or intelligence to realize that they are being distracted from becoming aware of more effective strategies and avenues for real change.

Trump’s command of ICE wins a lot of support from his base. Some illegals have been deported, and all illegal arrivals have been prevented. However, most of his support base consists of naive activists. They are too ignorant to realize that Trump is deliberately choosing to not implement the most effective deportation strategy(ies). In actuality, the ICE operations are just theater for winning their support. Trump takes pleasure from how he’s won a lot of support from his base, thanks to the deportations.

Trump’s refusal to mandate more effective methods like E-Verify shows that he doesn’t truly want to expel all or most illegal aliens from the US. At the current rate, not enough illegals are being deported fast enough for all of them to be deported by the time Trump’s second term ends. More likely than not, Trump wants to keep it that way. Otherwise, he would’ve called for E-Verify to be mandated nationwide by now. Trump wants his supporter base to think highly of him. But he also doesn’t want to disappoint the GOP business lobbyists by deporting their entire cheap labor source.

Republicans often don’t do anything even when they have political power (e.g. they controlled the presidency, supreme court, and both branches of Congress in 2017-2018 and in 2025-2026). COI theater seems to be more common among Republicans than Democrats. It feels harder to identify good examples of COI theater among Democrats.

Since 2020, China has repeatedly displayed increased military aggression around Taiwan. The CCP might be serious about invading Taiwan. However, it’s also possible that the military aggression is meant to be political grandstanding. The displayed military aggression appeals to less educated nationalists in the country, which increases the CCP’s approval ratings. But by declining to ever actually invade Taiwan, the world’s current geopolitical order is preserved. The CCP avoids an international war with the world’s greatest military alliance (NATO), which would destroy the country.

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

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. It has the effect of making most (likely) voters believe that the government is doing what it can to enforce good educational standards. 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.

In reality, the “new” legislation is actually almost exactly the same as the old legislation. Each time, there are 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 the common man. However, it does improve the public image of the state government. Since nobody bothers to compare the new legislation with the old legislation, nobody notices.[2] There also hasn’t been any major publicity by any news outlets to point out how the new and old legislation are actually the same.

I’m sure that many other governments probably use a similar tactic, so that news outlets will create 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.

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.

Politicians blame their enemies for their countries’ problems all the time. In the United States, if Democrats are in power, they will blame previous Republican administrations for ongoing problems. If Republicans are in power, they will blame previous Democrat administrations for ongoing problems.

This is an effective tactic that helps make Democrats stay Democrats, make Republicans stay Republicans, etc. However, blaming enemies is only effective for highly partisan and/or less intelligent people (<120 IQ). Blaming ideological opponents probably doesn’t appeal much to centrists or more intelligent people who are more capable of understanding nuances in politics.

The partisan nature of blaming one’s enemies also doesn’t persuade the other side. For example, a Republican is not going to be persuaded by listening to a Democrat who simply blames Republicans for the country’s problems. Clearly, this tactic can only help keep current supporters of a cause. It cannot gain supporters for a cause.

The Internet is far more astroturfed than most people realize. Anonymous platforms are always the most vulnerable to astroturfing. Anonymity is important for securing free speech and showing people’s true honne sentiments. But it also makes astroturfing and fake sentiments possible too.

Everybody is selfish. Every memetic group will do whatever they can to spread their beliefs and values. As a general rule, you can always assume that whenever there are people who can be swayed on a contentious topic one way or another, astroturfing will always occur to some extent on platforms that have many anonymous users. Sound reasoning exists to justify this belief, so we can be confident about it, even if we can’t quantify it.

It’s also common for people to coordinate as meat puppets before astroturfing, in order to get around community rules and restrictions and make media that’s supportive of their causes seem more organic. It’s not always possible to know when this is happening, but we know that it happens. There are reports when people have seen people talking about in private Discord servers, leaked DMs, leaked insider info, etc.

The best way to prevent astroturfing is to prohibit anonymity on Internet platforms. Granted, even mandatory non-anonymity might not be enough to prevent astroturfing, since people can still coordinate behind the scenes as meatpuppets.

Bots now account for over half of all internet traffic – TechRadar.

Anonymous groups pay people to astroturf Wikipedia without disclosing paid editing. Wikipedia allows anonymous user registration, and the reasoning above applies. This is precisely why Larry Sanger proposed that Wikipedia admins cannot be anonymous.

Reddit obviously astroturfs everything to be left-leaning. While reddit already has a young, left-leaning audience, there’s a feedback loop between the site’s astroturfed content and its audience. The most blatantly obvious case when Reddit purposefully astroturfed was when they pushed net neutrality on literally every subreddit across the website that they possibly could by shilling it via fake users and bot-inflated vote counts. Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign is known to have done a lot of astroturfing across social media.

The account location reveal feature on the X social media platform in November 2024 revealed that many influential, purported MAGA and American political accounts are based in foreign countries, rather than the United States. This is surprising, but it makes sense. Social media can sway the views of the people, which can influence election outcomes in favor of foreign governments. Read More: Elon Musk’s X Begins Labeling Account Locations, Revealing MAGA Division Is Being Pushed by Foreigners.

The meat industry pays people to manipulate social media.
Related: Inside big beef’s climate messaging machine: confuse, defend and downplay.

All of this can make one wonder just how much of social media and the broader Internet are deliberately fabricated. I’m certain that there’s far more cases beyond the ones listed here and on Wikipedia; I’m just unaware of them. It’s difficult to quantify astroturfing, and it definitely depends on the topic. Political topics, conflicts of interest, and any topic that has the potential to affect a company’s bottom of line are the most likely to be fabricated and deep faked.

Since astroturfing works to some extent (hence why people do it), it can potentially have the effect of swaying fencesitters onto the astroturfed side. This further complicates the difficulty of quantifying astroturfing, since there may not be any way to distinguish and quantify: 1. genuine believers, 2. astroturfers, 3. astroturf-dupped people.

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”

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”

Wikipedia can give potentially any person the same amount of power as a journalist. That power is sustained over a long period of time, compared to a journalist’s article that dies off with the news cycle. If you have something you want the world to know more about, it’s the best way to inform people. The credibility of Wikipedia’s reputation backs you up.

There is a strong correlation between how many pageviews an article has, and how many other articles link to it on Wikipedia.

Given the high amount of trust that people put into LLMs, increasing the accuracy of their output, and using better data input could do a tremendous amount for this world by providing people with more correct information. A little bit of human work can have a huge impact.

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

Read: Cancel Culture: Freedom of Association with Negative Connotations.

The threat of cancel culture can be used to suppress popular, heretical opinions. Although there are many benefits to expressing heresy, the privacy disadvantages are enough to outweigh most heretics’ willingness to be open about their beliefs.

Cancel culture can be used to support any political movement. The social power of cancel culture depends on the scale and number of people who participate in the canceling. While that is something to consider, there’s no reason for any movement to not use cancel culture on any scale that they have available to them.

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 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.

It is effective to spread anecdotes for similar reasons to the viral video effect.

From what I’ve seen, this tactic has been effective for encouraging people (especially conservatives) to support deporting illegal aliens. I always lots of news headlines spread within conservative internet circles about how illegal aliens have caused crimes or deaths of American citizens.

This tactic has also encouraged many left-wingers to be more supportive of student loan forgiveness.

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

Read: Wikipedia: Identifiable Victim Effect.

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

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.

Sometimes, a single viral news story can have huge impacts. Some examples:

In December 2020, following a New York Times exposé of non-consensual pornography and sex trafficking, payment processors Mastercard and Visa cut their services to Pornhub. Pornhub then removed all videos uploaded by unverified users, reducing their total content from 13 million to 4 million videos.

In December 2025, a viral video by YouTuber Nick Shirley ignited new allegations of social services frauds at Somali-American daycare centers and health care companies. Shirley previously built a following with anti-immigrant videos. The Trump administration froze all federal childcare payments to Minnesota, and new state and federal investigations and legal proceedings were initiated in response to the video’s publicity. As a consequence, Tim Walz withdrew his 2026 bid for a third term as the governor of Minnesota.

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

Ideas don’t always compete on an even playing field. If questioning the Quran in Afghanistan will get your head cut off, there isn’t a free competition between the memeplexes of Islam, Christianity, and atheism. When the majority of the population punishes nonbelievers in X, the conformity impulse reinforces both belief in X and the practice of punishing X heretics. Society can enter a stable equilibrium from which escape is difficult.

The fate of X doesn’t necessarily come down to how many people believe X, but how many people are willing to fight for X. If you’ve ever been to a conservative conference, you might have noticed that the most common question people ask is, “What can I do to help if I’m not in a position to be public about my views?” Leftists never ask this question–they just fight for what they believe in. Modern conservatism fails to inspire large numbers of people to sacrifice for the cause. Even if the left and the right were otherwise evenly matched (which they aren’t), leftists would still win in the long run because they care more.

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

Leftists who oppose enforcing immigration enforcement have been flooding the ICE tip line with fake tickets/reports in order to waste their time and prevent them from enforcing immigration laws. Likewise, ICE block is an app that people can download to report sightings of ICE officers, to alert illegal aliens of their presence, so that they can run away. People who support enforcing immigration laws can do the same tactic of flooding the ICE block app with fake tickets/reports, in order to make the app useless.

Also see: Massachusetts officials place fake tickets on cars to discourage street parking during winter storm.

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.

See: Linguistic Relativity: How Language Influences Thought.

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.

See: Inter-Memetic Adaptive Coherence.

Proactive activism is a stronger and more effective form of activism, compared to reactive activism. However, it also requires that a meme occupies a slot in the mind of any proactive activist.

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

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

New Year’s resolutions are a form of periodic reactive activism, since most New Year’s resolutions are not kept. If effective measures are made to actually achieve the New Year’s resolutions, then they would be considered proactive activism. Memes and traditions that are done on a periodic non-daily basis, whether that be yearly, monthly, weekly, etc are best described and classified as periodic, proactive activism.

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: Quantity Negotiation – Thoughts On Economics.

Civil disobedience may be effective or ineffective. This mainly depends on the power of the government, the government’s willingness for brutality, and the collective power of the people. Obviously, civil disobedience does not work when the government is more powerful and willing to do whatever it can to suppress rebellions and acts of resistance. Civil disobedience generally only works when a humanist government is in power.

After World War II, Mahatma Gandhi consistently opted for non-violent protests. One such tactic that Gandhi used was encouraging people to not pay fines when they were imprisoned for petty misdemeanor like crimes. Many Indians filled up the prisons and refused to pay the fines. The prison population became so high that the British authorities eventually started letting the Indian prisoners leave, without them having to pay any fines or prison time. Given the social system and circumstances that Gandhi was faced with, the nonviolent methods worked.

See: Rethinking Democratic Reform: Big Tent Strategy.

Sometimes, moderates are coerced into compliance or swayed into tolerance by their more extreme counterparts. This only works if the more extreme ideology is more logical and coherent than the less extreme ideology, regardless of its truth or falsehood.

The best example of this is how the woke left sways liberal humanists into being woke-leaning. Another example is that Fundamentalist Muslims are a lot more coherent in their interpretation than the average Muslim, so some moderate Muslims are swayed into following (some of) their ideas.

In some sense, this is similar to quantity negotiation. But it’s not the same thing, since it involves ideology, rather than quantities or lists of demands.