Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service.
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909
and slowly build it’s powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement.
In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don’t try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
Sure. So she helped to build a political movement—centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
It’s not about publically complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight evil people. It’s about building effective communities with good norms.
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
people are largely too impatient
That may very well be a serious problem. But it’s an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the “fight the evil or build better new communities?” one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam’s complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he’s said amount to trivializing something that shouldn’t be trivialized. It’s entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he’s “not signalling that he cares”.)
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and slowly build it’s powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement. In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don’t try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
Sure. So she helped to build a political movement—centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
That may very well be a serious problem. But it’s an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the “fight the evil or build better new communities?” one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam’s complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he’s said amount to trivializing something that shouldn’t be trivialized. It’s entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he’s “not signalling that he cares”.)