MAP Forum

WandersGlade wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 9:33 am

Joel wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 7:24 am I don't know, it is difficult. For me personally, I'd love to make slow moderate progress using valid science and smart dialog, with the well-being of children being the priority. At the same time we can see on many examples, that it is not always the valid science and moderate positions what wins, at least temporarily, and trolling on Twitter and canceling people for different opinions can have some success. I don't like it, but have to accept it.

If that can't change, there's no future anyway. Misinformation and populism have to be checked. Crazy/misinformed people need to be reined in and excluded from serious political discussion. There's no point trying to change the opinion of the Twitter mobs that have continuously been dragging society further towards anarchy. The minds that we have to change are those in positions of responsibility which, by definition, wouldn't let their views or actions be influenced by Twitter.
I think you might be underestimating just how out of touch with reality and worthless the majority of the opinions of people on Twitter are. Both right wingers and left wingers constantly spread disinformation and shallow/ill-informed takes. It's time for hyper partisan midwit edgelords to stop driving society off of a cliff.

I don't think it's just Twitter. The world is incredibly polarized. It's even spread to the MAP community, which is one of the core issues Mu seeks to address.

I'm not one of those "OMG Trump is so evil!!!!" people, but any world in which he is favorite to be re-elected president is a world that has a serious problem with extremism.

WandersGlade wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 9:33 am I think you might be underestimating just how out of touch with reality and worthless the majority of the opinions of people on Twitter are.

I don't think so. I am not on any social media, not even as a reader, and I contributed to this thread to support your position/views, actually. However, I am aware that I may be wrong, and I acknowledge that it is possible that actions that I naturally disagree with may actually have a positive impact.

Joel wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 5:28 pm

WandersGlade wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 9:33 am I think you might be underestimating just how out of touch with reality and worthless the majority of the opinions of people on Twitter are.

I don't think so. I am not on any social media, not even as a reader, and I contributed to this thread to support your position/views, actually. However, I am aware that I may be wrong, and I acknowledge that it is possible that actions that I naturally disagree with may actually have a positive impact.

Sorry. I don't have anything against you. It's just I've gotten into a lot arguments on social media; when I said that I didn't mean it as an attack on you, though I can see how it would have come across that way.

BLueRibbon wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 2:34 pm I don't think it's just Twitter. The world is incredibly polarized. It's even spread to the MAP community, which is one of the core issues Mu seeks to address.

I agree. Consensus building is very important, both within and outside of the MAP community, in my view.

I'm not one of those "OMG Trump is so evil!!!!" people, but any world in which he is favorite to be re-elected president is a world that has a serious problem with extremism.

I don't actually care about Trump's personality, but another Trump presidency would be disastrous, not just for America but for the whole world.

Joel wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 7:24 am I don't know, it is difficult. For me personally, I'd love to make slow moderate progress using valid science and smart dialog, with the well-being of children being the priority. At the same time we can see on many examples, that it is not always the valid science and moderate positions what wins, at least temporarily, and trolling on Twitter and canceling people for different opinions can have some success. I don't like it, but have to accept it.

I'm definitely not of the opinion that ragebaiting is a "better" approach to calm dialogue. However it can be more effective.

People are going to hate us anyway. People still spewed hate towards Allyn Walker, who wasn't even a MAP and was espousing very moderate views in our favor. Even without delibately doing so, Walker became an instrument of ragebaiting. The content of ragebaiting doesn't even need to be extreme, it's more about choosing spaces where the message is more likely to be amplified. 22 million people who are mostly antis seeing a message is better than 22 sympathetic people seeing a message. The first fight is for visibility.

Harris Mirkin called it "The Ideological Struggle: The Battle to Prevent the Battle"
https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/mirkin_frame.htm

But as BLR posted here: https://forum.map-union.org/viewtopic.php?t=19 we can't forget the message. It's fine to get attention but that attention should not be attention that conflates us with child abusers. Meanwhile, I think the current "normalization" rhetoric is, in fact, the right kind of attention (even if much of it is negative). Normalization paints us as a group that sees ourselves as worthy of rights. People will get mad about that because they don't want us to have rights. But let them be mad.

I was actually watching a documentary video about Harvey Milk and how gay rights shifted in tone between the early 70s and late 70s. The early movement focused on the "right to privacy" and the later focused on "pride". The early activists actually got angry at the pride activists because they thought that they shouldn't be drawing so much attention to themselves. I kind of sense that tension in the MAP community now. Those who want to quietly avoid drawing attention to themselves and those that want their rights to be in the spot light (with the inherent risk that things could get worse).

I just don't see intending to get people angry changing people's minds. I think it's better to take people aside behind the scenes and respectfully make your case; or else put people in a position where they bite the bullet of defending MAPs/MAP-adjacent interests for some other reason (e.g. https://fstube.net/w/v8f3bpfy2MgRT7czspWPfq). You want people to start to think of MAPs as part of the in-group, rather than reinforce the view that they are the out-group.

PorcelainLark wrote: ↑Sun Aug 18, 2024 10:58 am I just don't see intending to get people angry changing people's minds.

I don't think this either. Getting people angry (which can be done simply by saying "I'm a MAP and have rights") gets us on their minds. Once we're on their minds we can start to change their minds.

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Bu ... /&sid=0270

This Australian politician was getting angry about MAPs in the Senate last year. Do you know what that also means? A bunch of people heard about MAPs in the Australian Senate. It also means there's a record of MAPs being talked about in the Australian Senate.

Of course we shouldn't be upsetting people ALL the time. But it has a role. Though as I said we don't even really need to try to do it.

Fragment wrote: ↑Sun Aug 18, 2024 3:25 pm

PorcelainLark wrote: ↑Sun Aug 18, 2024 10:58 am I just don't see intending to get people angry changing people's minds.

I don't think this either. Getting people angry (which can be done simply by saying "I'm a MAP and have rights") gets us on their minds. Once we're on their minds we can start to change their minds.

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Bu ... /&sid=0270

This Australian politician was getting angry about MAPs in the Senate last year. Do you know what that also means? A bunch of people heard about MAPs in the Australian Senate. It also means there's a record of MAPs being talked about in the Australian Senate.

Of course we shouldn't be upsetting people ALL the time. But it has a role. Though as I said we don't even really need to try to do it.

I don't have a problem with upsetting people if it's just a side effect of people noticing we exist. In such a context it would be on them because we've always existed whether or not they were paying attention.