It has come to my attention that at is all to easy for activists to gain large amounts of followers before people are able to point out that they are false, money raising, not acting for the cause, decisive, narcissistic, or a whole host of other things. There are also things in activists political pasts that should be known by people who support them or who are questioning their support of them.
Probably contrary to everybody’s expectations by this point, this is not actually an attack on activists. It is a request for clarity in a complex and ever increasing unsubstantiated world. It is based on a conversation I had with a person on Twitter which went somewhat like this,
“I disagree w/ her comments re the “leaked” prison footage, but other than that have seen no particular reason to distrust her motives.”
To which I gave reasons to distrust the persons motives and they replied with,
“:TBH I don’t care if she has personal motives. We all do.”
Basically a waste of time and something that happens very often. Reality exists to justify belief and not the other way around. If the argument is challenged or disproved it just moves onto another basis through a constant shifting of the goal posts.
Now, the problem is that the person I was trying to say they should be questioning has done and continues to do a whole lot of stuff that I consider extremely shady. Unfortunately, they have also gathered enough followers that getting through the group-think will be extremely hard, if not impossible, and in the mean time a lot of these people are donating money to a person who doesn’t appear to be who they say they are.
And the money is a problem. A lot of activists are making money through their activism. For instance, one minor activists bitcoin wallet (not the sole source of income) had earned on average $25,000 per year. People don’t want to let go when that sort of money is involved and the danger here is that activism becomes the same as what it is usually trying to fight, problems caused by money and power.
Think of the church, how many televangelists do you think would shut down donations if they couldn’t prove God existed? They get money from those donations. It would be a lot easier for them to continue saying that God exists than to give up a source of income and have to tell everyone that it doesn’t.
So how about an Activist Central, or as I called it once Activist?. Instead of having to argue with each individual you pointed them to a place where people could put of proof of their worries and accusations. Obviously there would have to be fairly strict limits to what people could put there otherwise all sorts of looneys and corporate profiteers would leap in. But, in my case at least, if there is good evidence for the claims I am making about the person, it would be great to be able to get them certified on a website for other people to see.
Worried about an activist? Are they always asking for money even though they don’t seem to need it? Check on Activist Central! 🙂
