Nate K
11-26-2008, 10:31 AM
There's been a lot of threads come up recently where some people have figured our flaw as a movement is our lack of public relations.. or candy for the dummies if you know what I mean..
At first I was against this idea because candy for dummies goes against what I believe we should represent as a movement. But the past couple days I've learned it does not have to be candy necessarily as much as it just has to taste and look good.
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First, let me address a growing mentality I'm seeing on the forums. It is a stubborn, absolutist, rigid and narrow-minded outlook on things and it is a REAL danger to getting anything done. What do i mean by all those adjectives? People believe so deeply in their "libertarian principles" and philosophy that they have formed irrational fears of anything that might possibly go against these rigid beliefs. I'll give two recent examples of this I've seen through my threads..
Fear of organization. There is terribly terrifying fear here among some members that we may organize as a movement. Ideas associated with organization have been shunned, authors of those ideas ridiculed, insulted, etc. (myself included). For whatever reason, somewhere in the absolutist libertarian dogma there must've been a passage about the need for lack of organization..
Fear of a platform that new recruits and current members can go to. Namely, an upgrade to the CFL. To propose such an idea "must" mean that you believe in centralization! This is ridiculous considering it has nothing to do with centralization. All of my opponents to this idea associate the idea with the word "national" campaigning, when it is not "national" any more than it is local. When you go canvassing, you will at some point refer people to a website where they can learn more.. and ideally have a decent first impression. Campaignforliberty.com? Quite a bummer for them when they find the limited functions the site has to offer if they want to get involved.
These are just a few i've noticed recently, I could go on but you get my drift..
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It should be obvious to some of you that these narrow tactics are not good for what we may call "public relations", the necessary evil in politics. But public relations does not have to be evil. What we lack is welcoming newcomers and reaching out to those who've joined before and left for whatever reason. Some of us, believe somehow that if they work strictly locally, without any communication system besides telephone and telegraph, that we will attract all kinds of support if we just "work hard enough". I'm here to tell you it isn't about how hard you work but how smart you work. The simple fact is that if we want to get the public on our side, they will likely be directed to ONE source through literature, ads, whatever, and these newcomers should have an incentive to read, get educated, return to the site and get involved.
Some of us here maintain a rigid yet idealist belief that we can suddenly turn everyone we meet at the time of giving them a slimjim, to a responsible, well-thinking citizen who just wants to learn all about us. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. There's a lot of people out there that we often call "sheeple", remember them? For some reason these same sheeple become principled americans who we trust to go home and google all of the things they may have heard from us. It just doesn't happen.
If you want to accomplish anything with the public, we need to have better public relations. And that means phasing out the rigid idealistic attitude that we can turn everyone into a principled libertarian if we just work hard enough. We need to start thinking in terms of how we are viewed by the public.
At first I was against this idea because candy for dummies goes against what I believe we should represent as a movement. But the past couple days I've learned it does not have to be candy necessarily as much as it just has to taste and look good.
-------
First, let me address a growing mentality I'm seeing on the forums. It is a stubborn, absolutist, rigid and narrow-minded outlook on things and it is a REAL danger to getting anything done. What do i mean by all those adjectives? People believe so deeply in their "libertarian principles" and philosophy that they have formed irrational fears of anything that might possibly go against these rigid beliefs. I'll give two recent examples of this I've seen through my threads..
Fear of organization. There is terribly terrifying fear here among some members that we may organize as a movement. Ideas associated with organization have been shunned, authors of those ideas ridiculed, insulted, etc. (myself included). For whatever reason, somewhere in the absolutist libertarian dogma there must've been a passage about the need for lack of organization..
Fear of a platform that new recruits and current members can go to. Namely, an upgrade to the CFL. To propose such an idea "must" mean that you believe in centralization! This is ridiculous considering it has nothing to do with centralization. All of my opponents to this idea associate the idea with the word "national" campaigning, when it is not "national" any more than it is local. When you go canvassing, you will at some point refer people to a website where they can learn more.. and ideally have a decent first impression. Campaignforliberty.com? Quite a bummer for them when they find the limited functions the site has to offer if they want to get involved.
These are just a few i've noticed recently, I could go on but you get my drift..
-------
It should be obvious to some of you that these narrow tactics are not good for what we may call "public relations", the necessary evil in politics. But public relations does not have to be evil. What we lack is welcoming newcomers and reaching out to those who've joined before and left for whatever reason. Some of us, believe somehow that if they work strictly locally, without any communication system besides telephone and telegraph, that we will attract all kinds of support if we just "work hard enough". I'm here to tell you it isn't about how hard you work but how smart you work. The simple fact is that if we want to get the public on our side, they will likely be directed to ONE source through literature, ads, whatever, and these newcomers should have an incentive to read, get educated, return to the site and get involved.
Some of us here maintain a rigid yet idealist belief that we can suddenly turn everyone we meet at the time of giving them a slimjim, to a responsible, well-thinking citizen who just wants to learn all about us. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. There's a lot of people out there that we often call "sheeple", remember them? For some reason these same sheeple become principled americans who we trust to go home and google all of the things they may have heard from us. It just doesn't happen.
If you want to accomplish anything with the public, we need to have better public relations. And that means phasing out the rigid idealistic attitude that we can turn everyone into a principled libertarian if we just work hard enough. We need to start thinking in terms of how we are viewed by the public.