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"I'm not reading all of that" is a bad kneejerk response, but if my eyes glaze over by paragraph 2 then I think something as fallen apart in the writing as well. Structure, formatting, and presentation do matter if I can't figure out what point someone is trying to make then I can't follow along. I'll happily read a 6000-word essay if enough thought has been given to its structure and to the points it's trying to make that it's digestible and interesting, but I very much doubt that I could read a rant of the same length, or even half.
"Effortpost" needs to mean that effort went into it, it can't just a synonym for long.
yea most people literally don't even THINK about formatting and brevity, holy shit. speshully reddit
imo even stop using grammar if necessary, get point across
"red bad, green good" is unironically better than unspaced 10-line paragraph saying the same thingalso misspelling common words but still making them recognizable is good. less space and it activates the brain more
When castro raised the literacy rate in Cuba he was actually oppressing the population because then they could be subjected to effortposts
Remember when Tucker Carlson or whoever actually claimed this unironically?
In fact, I've seen this in a few places. "Cuban literacy is bad actually because it's just so they can read propaganda."
If you intend to be a "professional revolutionary" then you need to read as much as possible. There is no excuse otherwise.
If you don't, if you're intending to be a "dumb guy socialist", you need to listen to the "professional revolutionaries" when they're talking about something.
I know people aren't stupid.
See this is what mean. Some things aren't able to be said in span of a catchphrase. That isn't self-aggrandising or insufferable, It's just the way the world is. Some subjects are complicated and sometimes condensing things down to a soundbite simply isn't possible.
I disagree. Slogans have worked in the past, but when it comes to leftist theory and the materialist reality of 2021, capitalist propaganda has done too good of a job of brainwashing people.
With only the most basic concept of these things and all context stripped out, people fill in the rest with the nonstop propaganda they constantly absorb, and boom - you come out the other side with Gommunism killed billions and Gulags were exactly the same as Nazi concentration camps.
Last year when I was being radicalized, I sent my wife what I thought was relatively harmless positive info on the USSR (it was really mostly just pastoral images that were meant to combat the "in communist Russia, everything was gray and everyone wore the same clothes" narrative) and she had a breakdown because she knew I was a good person and didn’t understand why I was sympathetic to the USSR. It scared her because she thought Stalin killed millions and the Gulags were death camps. And that’s from a (at the time) progressive DemSoc liberal.
It took a couple long phone calls (I was away with my family because a family member had terminal cancer) to give her the context and talk through some of the propaganda and systems in place to uphold capitalism and multiple long articles being sent to her (including the CIA reports) about the Gulags being mostly full of ordinary criminals, the amount of food they got, the expectations of work in them, etc. before she was able to wrap her head around it all, and even then she was still shook.
A Koan wouldn't have changed her mind. Long-form discussion and writing did.
That's not to say you need to jump to throwing every volume of Das Kapital at people on the street. You can start from a basic place of anti-capitalism, and slogans and whatever else might get people to agree but without taking the time to go beyond that, there will be a limit to their class consciousness and revolutionary participation.
There's a reason that literacy is always one of the first things emphasized and achieved in communist societies.
(inb4 I get hit with the TL;DR)
btw I just experienced the perfect counter to this - try talking about communism in the comments on a leftist or anti-capitalist tiktok with a 100 character limit and you'll very quickly see the limits.
"Oh so you just want everything stolen from people then."
"Capitalism is more fair than socialism and Communism"
Please counter those statements in a meaningful way in 100 characters.
"I don't know what that means"
"They deserve it because they create jobs"
Well they gave me the job, the business needs to make money too, or else I won't have a job anymore.
His money isn't liquid, if he cashed it all in the entire economy would collapse.
I do get the idea, I just don't think you'll convince anyone because their propaganda-riddled brains just move to the next excuse.
"Yeah but the owners won't have an incentive to keep the business open if they don't make money"
"My retirement is in the stock market so if Bezos cashes out then other people will and I'll lose everything"
This is shit I see again and again when I try to argue the same points your making. It doesn't work in short form.
I would say left ideas persist because there are many, many, many examples of well-constructed, long-form writing that you can point people to if they actually show interest in learning from short word count interactions.
maybe some things cant be boiled down to single sentences, because some ideas need the understanding of previous ideas to be clear.
we have a true power for detecting when someone has lost the plot and is running off at the mouth
like this comment
I think yes for people who claim to be leftists, gotta put the work in and know wtf you are talking about at least a bit. But for people we are trying to convince or radicalise we should be able to make stuff easy to grasp and digest quickly. Not cos they dumb but just reluctant to spend the time, plus social media has destroyed everyone's attention span (maybe i have no source for this)
unfortunately if we actually want people to go to the left 'learn to read asshole' isn't a good entry point, but i understand your frustration, which is basically with people who are willfully ignorant. it'd be nice if we had something to present to thse people that's a bit easier to understand. pretty sure i've heard right on this site that even che was on record saying that a lot of marx went over his head.
Countertake: you should be able to explain things in a short sweet and syrupy paragraph. Unless the other person asks for more details, sending an essay to what was previously a riffing poop time muttering just makes you exhausting.
It depends.
lol the most frustrating response, right? But it really does depend on who wrote the long thing and who is asking me to read it. If it's some rando on reddit or something who wrote his personal manifesto and is expecting me to read it, I'm probably going to pass unless there's something right at the beginning that draws me in or it's about something I'm particularly interested in. There's a higher level of trust here that whoever wrote the long thing is writing in good faith, so I'm more likely to read it.
Oh good, I was thinking, "'It depends' is just 'well akshually' by another name but it's really my opinion, so here it goes."
I also think trying to use the journalist's idea of the inverted pyramid is probably a good idea. People may not read all the way to the end, but you may get the most important information to them at the beginning at least.
Not that I have any room to talk, given that I have written absolute WALLS of text on here.
Sometimes that's a kneejerk reaction to non-meme content.
Sometimes that's a critique of overwritten, underformatted walls of text.
- Use bold (and use bold italics on this website because the font barely makes bold or italic stand out by themselves)
- Use that fucking enter key
- Allow people to skim. Make the point visible to different levels of engagement and familiarity. I might know or agree with half of what you're saying already
- Say something interesting up front
- Use astersik-space to make bulleted lists
People who write long shit often get mad that people don't want to read their long shit. But everyone writes long shit. There's billions of pages of long shit. Billions. If I had the "attention span" you wanted, I would die of thirst in front of my fucking computer.
non-meme content
the most degenerate late capitalist phrase I've heard in weeks
If you're deep enough into leftism to be posting on chapo dot chat, you should be willing to do a little reading sometimes. Being able to read long shit and even respond to it is the big strength of older style forums, as opposed to twitter/tiktok/etc
Anti-intellectualism is a predictable and comprehensible reaction to bureaucratic elitism and the removal of power from the masses to be wielded by technocrats.
If you want to deal with anti-intellectualism, you also have to deal with the intellectuals who create the public discourse that make it so easy to be anti-them.
Mao I think has a line "no investigation, no right to speak", which sounds nice in practice (not even that really), but dropping that line on someone is a surefire way to get someone who has not investigated to start speaking even louder.
If you want to deal with anti-intellectualism, you also have to deal with the intellectuals who create the public discourse that make it so easy to be anti-them.
Mark Fisher innocence project
When possible, which should be most of the time on here. Posting should be easy to engage in my view.
Proofread and stick to the message. It’s more respectful and a good writing exercise too. Reading takes time and people value that, so make sure it’s worth it is all I’m saying.
