First off. Thank you for your comment. As a white European I need to hear these perspectives and I don't hear them enough.
Your comment reminded me of those email signatures that say something like, "Please think of the environment before you print this." Do they actually accomplish anything or do they just annoy people?
We need to weigh the real impact of actions against their potential annoyance. Because otherwise we're turning people off to the goals we're trying to achieve.
There was recently an environmental action in my city to stop traffic with a banner during a busy Sunday when lots of people were returning to the city. The activists did it because they wanted to get people to notice and care about the environment. The motorists were of course very annoyed and many of them posted on social media about this. Does annoying a bunch of motorists work towards saving the environment or just alienate people who could have been your allies?
There's a similar dynamic happening here.
A name was changed.
The change annoyed some people. Some people were not annoyed.
Lol, "let's spread awareness of climate change by causing a bunch of cars to idle unnecessarily"
Society needs to take a stronger position against virtue signaling type behavior that has a facade of benevolence while being ineffective. Doing something ineffective for the right reasons is worse than doing nothing at all: it wastes productive energy and will to act on those reasons.
To your point though, itβs not just that some people are annoyed but that some people become aware of the absurdity of it all and attribute that to even more measured, less absurd critiques/initiatives and disassociate from even healthy aspects of a debate. Seeing the excesses drives a desire to disassociate.
A complete tangent, but when I interned at Toyota, they had a sign on the large inkjet plotter equating cost of abandoned prints per year to number of manufactured Highlanders.
Your comment reminded me of those email signatures that say something like, "Please think of the environment before you print this." Do they actually accomplish anything or do they just annoy people?
We need to weigh the real impact of actions against their potential annoyance. Because otherwise we're turning people off to the goals we're trying to achieve.
There was recently an environmental action in my city to stop traffic with a banner during a busy Sunday when lots of people were returning to the city. The activists did it because they wanted to get people to notice and care about the environment. The motorists were of course very annoyed and many of them posted on social media about this. Does annoying a bunch of motorists work towards saving the environment or just alienate people who could have been your allies?
There's a similar dynamic happening here.
A name was changed.
The change annoyed some people. Some people were not annoyed.
Nothing else happened.