What can we do to change this? I don't think chapo.chat will ever be huge, but it would be nice for it to be consistently active.
What can we do to change this? I don't think chapo.chat will ever be huge, but it would be nice for it to be consistently active.
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we have the idea that there’s great idealist distance in time and space for political belief: but people already agree with leftism, they just don’t know it. Anyone is capable of changing their minds to any other position at any point in time. There is no real distance.
We should generally try to position ourselves relative to the truth, not lies, and not waste effort imagining that the same socdem pipeline exists in the same way now that we’re off Reddit.
People will use Chapo.chat if it’s fun and distinct from Reddit, which is miserable and dying, so I think what we should be doing is trying to cultivate a socialist experience to draw out this contradiction. We can be smart/fun proles without the dogmatic elitism of “leftist politics” or any of the angry internet fascist vibes that makes everyone pissed off and guarded.
We can pull people straight from neoliberal and idealist mindsets much faster as the community grows if we give them the materialist truth, which they all want, and which is exclusively ours.
also Chapo.chat seems active to me, but maybe Hot by default would look better to users coming from Reddit?
I don't think this matches reality, and it certainly runs counter to any sort of empirical research on the subject. One example of this is the consistency principle, which has been extensively researched, and shows that people strongly desire to match their beliefs with what they've done or thought in the past. Anecdotally, I'm sure we've all had those conversations where someone agrees with you on every step of the way up to a logical conclusion, but then rejects that conclusion anyway. Shit, this is so common there are at least two memes about it (from Friends and SpongeBob).
We have to put in real effort to change people's minds, and that includes careful consideration of the best ways to pull them leftwards. Too much too fast is a real thing. If you say "Stalin committed literally zero crimes" here you can have a rational discussion about the merits and shortcomings of the USSR; if you say it to anyone who's not an extremely-online leftist they're just going to tune you out.
Okay, fair point, but what if you can completely validate what they’ve done or thought in the past with therapeutic and relativistic psychoanalysis, provide systemic explanations for faults, re-education, pharmacology, changes in material conditions, new social media environments... yes, real effort. Always struggle. Ideas can change quickly.
You can absolutely persuade people -- it just takes time, though, and effort. And throwing them in the deep end (e.g., "Stalin committed literally zero crimes") is a risky strategy at best, and a losing one for most people in most environments.
I absolutely agree.
My favourite part of The Tempest is when the dark sorcerer Prospero drowns all of his magic books.
That’s why we say we treat Stalin and Lenin and Mao fairly. They were all complete fucking assholes. Stalin a lot, Mao probably less so, Lenin barely at all - truly the Gonzalo archetype.
i think a lot of people have stopped coming here, check the megathread comment numbers
People shit on SocDems and DemSocs... but I used to be very reactionary... and the MLs never appealed to me back then, in fact I used to laugh at them and "destroy" them at debates... but the SocDems and the DemSocs got me to change my mind.
The SocDem pipeline is an important part of building the left, or any community... CTH included.
I come here and there are a few shit posts, but it seems like some of the more factionalist members are just too aggressive towards people who may not be as far along as they are.
It serves to drive people away, rather than making them change their minds.