In re a thing I have seen boosted to the echo chamber a bunch of times:
"America,"
America's not here right now, can I take a message?
"We have 11 months to stop a dictator."
Sounds like a serious call to action! Go on...
"Voters must take Trump seriously"
So... "Do nothing for 11 months, then on one particular day in November, do the thing that you were going to do anyway." Gotcha. I'm on it!
PSA: This is how you write a call to action:
"Vote, and vote for Biden, or you will be living in a fascist dictatorship. Even if you think Biden sucks, not voting for him makes it more likely that Trump will win."
1: action, 2: reason, 3: explanation.
Literally *everybody* who will see your post already agrees that Trump should not be president. But some of them *might* still have stupid ideas about the whole voting thing.
@kentborg@social.tchncs.de @jwz@mastodon.social They need to understand that voting for the better candidate is necessary in order to buy the time needed to change the system. Perfect is the enemy of success in politics.
It's going to be an uphill battle to get changes to our system that will free us from this first past the post GOP/DNC broken system if we re-elect Biden, but it's not even going to be a ghost of a chance under Trump who's an open fascist and is already laying out his plans to gut what's left of our broken democracy.
If they don't understand that, we need to make them understand.
We spend the time during the campaign trying to push Biden more progressive, but we have to give him our vote in the end. It's a game of chicken with him because the DNC has been operating for years under the (mistaken) belief that they don't have to actually earn our votes... and unfortunately now, they've painted us into a corner, and it's not so mistaken anymore. But Biden has also made some surprisingly progressive choices (mixed in with some really fucking stupid ones), which means we can pressure him in a progressive direction. If Trump's elected, there's no chance in hell of that happening.
It's on those of us who understand the stakes to educate everyone the fuck else here. But it's also on us to do what we can to help clear roadblocks. People who aren't voting because they don't see the difference between the two? They need to be educated. Those who aren't voting because voter purges, polling place closures, lack of access to mail in ballots, early voting, etc etc, they need help to overcome those obstacles.
@deathkitten so I try to mean this helpfully, but the tone of your reply comes across as yet another case of proposing to talk AT people instead of to them, with this sense of educating at them instead of discussing and convincing them, meeting them in the middle.
There are different types of people, and the ones who are open to being educated are probably already on your side. The others won't respond well to being educated, but instead need to be invited over.
That's a problem I see all too often in the world, folks with the best of intentions engaging rhetorical strategies that end up counterproductive, actually turning off the very people they need to convince.
@volkris@qoto.org My intention isn't to talk at people, but there are people who aren't going to listen no matter how we try to reach them, and attempting to engage with them can end up being a waste of time.
Part of the challenge here is recognizing who's potentially open to a dialog, or who will benefit from seeing the hateful rhetoric shutdown, and engaging appropriately.
For an extreme example, if Uncle Bob is fully entrenched in his bigotry, no amount of inviting him into a conversation will change his mind, but maybe Aunt May is too afraid to challenge him because she still loves her brother and she's worried about the path he's taken in life. If you speak up against him, Aunt May could feel empowered to speak up as well. And Cousin Jimmy might have gotten a few too many neo-nazi recommendations on youtube, but doesn't have enough information to counter balance their reasonable sounding justifications for their hate, and maybe watching the conversation between you, Uncle Bob, and Aunt May might give him a chance to start analyzing what those videos have been telling him and help open him up to a conversation.
This topic is a really complex one, but we also can't assume that only people who are already on your side will listen when we speak. Lecturing someone isn't going to win them over, but letting them spew hatred without challenge runs the risk of them drawing someone else in. There isn't an easy solution, and it's hard work even with training in psychology and a deep understanding of the people involved. All we can do is our best here.