That describes a huge fraction of today's protestors and activists, which is why despite many things in the world sucking I rarely take today's "activism" very seriously. It's mostly activism-as-entertainment for trustafarians.
The irony is that your comment only emphasizes the severe disconnect between relatively wealthy & employable 'techies' versus the rest of the struggling recession-hit population.
It's hard to understand how life has changed since 2007 when, coming from a tech-related field, one generally doesn't suffer the everyday hardships that most Americans endure [1].
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/poverty-in-a...
What these people are doing is basically LARPing. IndyMedia is their big LARPing portal site where they pretend to be radicals. Fuck these people.
Is it their fault they thought about the future and picked tough but useful majors?
Is it their fault that hipsters chose art, history, women studies and other (financially) useless stuff, just because that's what they liked to do?
Is it their fault that hipsters feel entitled to a high paying job?
My problem is with the entitlement and the attacks on the people who chose financially more successful professions.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE LOVE LOVE art. I just don't think our society has so many gifted artists. I've taken many art classes in college and most art students sucked, truly sucked at art. There were objectively great artists among them, but I'd say fewer than 10%.
Too many young people are fed "you're a special snowflake, you can be whatever you want to be" bullsh*t for years, and most fall for it.
The average salary expectation for someone who does calligraphy for four years is much lower than a CS major. On the other hand, I can name several large companies in the area that succeeded by not dismissing the humanities as useless.
http://stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Apple-Tech...
I never once saw them protesting for higher wages for the underprivileged, health care, or anything else that actually matters to poor people.
They were for the most part not poor. They were white middle class pseudo-artists engaged in an entertainment activity. I love the phrase "poverty tourism."
I realize that you were just giving examples, and I'm not doubting that these poverty tourists exist. I am just saying that we (and many others) agree that there are enough things in the world that suck, including the state of the issues that you mentioned, like healthcare for the poor. So, my question is: if we find the current crop of activists to be lacking, then why aren't we doing better or more ourselves? Where is the "true" activism?
Reminds me of the response to Occupy. Everyone stood back and criticized their lack of organization, cleanliness, etc. Yet, nearly everyone agreed that things sucked (including banksters, bailouts, etc.). How is it that an entire potential movement was derailed by such trivial matters as where these guys were pooping? How did the collective energy of so many end up redirected away from "better" activism and into criticism of the activists?
So they either don't exist or don't really matter to anyone.
My point is that these and some of the other examples I gave are clueless bullshit LARPing issues of the faux-left and are not relevant to actual disadvantaged people, poor people, or minorities. The faux-left does these groups harm by stealing the spotlight and bogarting the discussion, drowning out any actual protest from people who are really struggling with issues that matter to them.
OK, not to take this to a discussion about chemtrails, but I'm not sure I'd be so cavalier about claiming that they don't matter, any more than I would be about saying that they do. BTW, if the U.S. government is involved in such a somewhat massive, radical, and obviously covert anti-global warming campaign, then that's a story in itself.
>My point is that these and some of the other examples I gave are clueless bullshit LARPing issues...
I absolutely understand where you're coming from with that. Not saying I agree completely, but I hear your point.
So, moving beyond that, my question/point is the corollary: where is the "true activism"? If, as you say, the faux-left does disadvantaged groups real harm by bogarting the discussion, etc., then where are the "real" activists?
The question is not just an indictment of those of us who see the problems but sit on the sidelines; it's a question about a society that seems almost exclusively able to generate only such sensationalized, vapid activism as you describe. This, even when we can describe the problems and their importance. Why do you think that is?
I think that's a complex question.
The simple reason: I think most of the people with real grievances are too busy trying to make ends meet. Meanwhile people with financially underwritten agendas and/or trustafarian types who don't have to work have plenty of time to dominate the conversation.
But there are deeper issues too. At one time those so-called "trustafarian" types did campaign for workers' rights, higher wages, etc. Now they mostly campaign for trendy eco issues and other ideological issues that have little relationship to reality and no relationship to the plight of the poor. I don't know if that's intentionally constructed or a product of some sort of breakdown in social communication, but that seems to be the way it is.
The cynic in me says this: in reality these people hate the poor. The poor are dirty, uneducated, and worst of all often harbor conservative/religious social values. Moreover empowering the poor and raising their standard of living is in conflict with environmental goals of reducing resource consumption. Who wants to use more energy and land and what-not just to take care of a bunch of rednecks and brown people? That's why activism today is basically a LARP where overprivileged mostly-white children of baby boomers try to re-live their parents' glory days and where trustafarians with dreads try to show off their street cred to get laid with cute hippie chicks. That's why they pick trendy issues that don't help or in a few cases might actually hurt the poor (e.g. limiting new construction).
I think there's a bit of truth in the cynical view unfortunately.
What's the solution? For starters, I really think people should ignore "activists" that have no skin in the game. Ask yourself if they really know what they're talking about. Are they actually affected by the issue? If not, they may well be thrusting themselves into an issue for reasons that have more to do with fashion statements and scenesterism than genuine concern or well-informed efforts to improve anything.
Take GMO foods for example, an issue I've repeatedly used as an example of a trendy LARP-protestor hobby horse. I do take protestors of GMO foods seriously when they're farmers that have been wrongfully sued for patent infringement by biotech companies, and I group that under the whole problem of patent law abuse and patent trolling that also affects the software industry. So there are people who protest GMO foods that ought to be taken seriously. But the yuppie larvae who are convinced they're going to kill us all because some quack web site says so? Fuck them. They're just clogging our informational arteries with irrelevant fear-mongering bullshit and detracting from the real issue at hand.
So let's say we do that. Ignore the LARPers, but listen to the victims of IP law abuse. That leads us somewhere the LARPers never do, namely somewhere productive and empowering, since it means that those farmers can and should make common cause with those who campaign against software patents. Now we have something that has real political meaning, a real coalition to actually get something meaningful done that can help real people.
A rather untenable assertion, based on my own lengthy and up-close observation of e.g. Occupy at its peak.