Perhaps You Should Not Spend All Day Ridiculing Others from Afar

It's not a way of gaining power. It's a way of acknowledging that you have no power and cannot gain it.

It's certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy, which obscures whether or not it's true. It's certainly understandable why they'd think it's true.

TFA cites support for Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy was always a long-shot. They are opposed not just by the entire right wing but a large portion of the left wing that thinks of itself as "centrist", and still has trouble achieving any power. Perhaps that centrist wing would have better luck appealing to its left flank, since they seem to have gotten little traction with the center-right. But that's an uncertain proposition.

Their own choice might be to try to advance the center-left, but that's not a very exciting proposition, especially given the center-left's propensity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Why compromise and still lose -- and even if you win, get only a tiny fraction of what you're after, with no reason to believe it will ever be otherwise?

Your alternatives are revolution, compromise, or nihilism. No surprise that a lot of people, especially young ones, choose the last. It's less work and, as far as they're concerned, just as effective.

Revolutionaries have always been faced with the problem of figuring out how to live with insurmountable odds. For every famous fighter who never gave up and never surrendered, there are a hundred more you've never heard of and who would tell you it wasn't worth the effort.

I wish I knew what to advice deBoer's readers. I myself have always been a compromiser, and pretty disillusioned.

It’s not necessarily so terrible that folks some rungs down the ladder have the chutzpah to call out missteps and empty posturing of those clinging to their perhaps-it-entirely-merited position. (another irksome p-word lurks..!)

But of course we’re talking about folks who do this all day, every day, with soul-twisting depravity. Perfect strawmen for a civilised Substack-style dunking.

In other words… https://www.gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977