Greentext

Nah, another approach is better because it makes you feel superior. That's what the most important thing!

Yeah, you're right, but also, the commenter above isn't just being mean for the sake of it, there is a real issue at the heart of it.

The issue is that having 1 person come around to your side implies the millions that don't and won't.

Some of those people simply don't share any underlying morals in common so that's fine, you'll never see eye to eye in ideas because your goals are ultimately different.

Some of those people also just don't care and/or don't know.

Some people will never care, and that's fine too, but some of those people will care if they do know.

Spreading information to those people is tough when you don't have backing of the govcorp media ecosystem and it doesn't help when the ideas you want to get across are sophisticated, boring and fairly nuanced and require lots of context.

It also doesn't help that this would-be progressive in their ignorance could be damaging to the cause when misinformed, which means that sometimes you have to argue against this person and potentially turn them off the movement forever, because you never really know whether it's possible to sway someone until you do.

That's what makes ignorance trolling or JAQing so effective because progressives will either have to waste time explaining openly to someone who will never agree and only feigns ignorance, or risk being potentially a confrontational asshole with a genuinely ignorant person.

It also doesn't help morale of said progressive when confronted with all that, that many of us simply learned about this information on our own, we never asked anybody of anything, we just explored enough perspectives on issues we cared about until our bullshit-o-meters were finely tuned enough to find truth and construct a path from reality now to future we'd like.

On the other hand, convincing some people who are actually sway-able to not want the world to function like a war crime can be like pulling teeth, people are zealous defenders of their opinions because it reflects badly on their self-esteem if they are misinformed and someone else isn't, especially in the Information Age.

I speak from a progressive viewpoint but it's just as true for any real ideological position, information is the fuel that turns simple moral beliefs into functional ideology.

For as long as we live in a democracy, we need to somehow solve the systemic issue of ignorance at scale without inventing a ministry of truth type situation and being able to effectively counter trolling and JAQing/sealioning while also treating those asking questions with the utmost care and having the emotional stamina to do that when many of us had nothing of the sort.

It's a tough position, even describing it or explaining it is tough enough already when fewer and fewer people even seem to even just read at all.

Then there is often just confusion over what someone open to information actually wants, e.g. the Adam Something guide to dating video he made where he said that teenage and adolescent men want instructions and not philosophical musings on the concept of dating and purpose and approach came as a genuine shock to me, because from my, non-male perspective I can't imagine anyone needing instructions or explanations of that sort of thing.