The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
There’s certainly something to that. But in the other direction, there’s the Claudette Colvin vs Rosa Parks anecdote, where (as I understand it) civil rights campaigners declined to signal-boost and take a stand on a case that they thought the general public would be unsympathetic to (an unmarried pregnant teen defender), and instead waited for a more PR-friendly test case to come along. We can’t know the counterfactual, but I see that as a plausibly reasonable and successful strategic decision.
The toxoplasma of rage dynamic is to go out of your way to seek the least PR-friendly test cases, because that’s optimal for in-group signaling. I view that as a failure mode to be kept in mind (while acknowledging that sometimes defending scoundrels is exactly the right thing to do).
There’s certainly something to that. But in the other direction, there’s the Claudette Colvin vs Rosa Parks anecdote, where (as I understand it) civil rights campaigners declined to signal-boost and take a stand on a case that they thought the general public would be unsympathetic to (an unmarried pregnant teen defender), and instead waited for a more PR-friendly test case to come along. We can’t know the counterfactual, but I see that as a plausibly reasonable and successful strategic decision.
The toxoplasma of rage dynamic is to go out of your way to seek the least PR-friendly test cases, because that’s optimal for in-group signaling. I view that as a failure mode to be kept in mind (while acknowledging that sometimes defending scoundrels is exactly the right thing to do).