Ok I know you and Skies are having it out right now, but I'm going to interject my two cents again, I'm bored and watching really depressing social dramas for a law class so I got nothing better to do at the moment.wulf3n said:
I've done a lot of this kind of thing in my life, I mean a whole lot, pretty much comes with being a social worker, LGBT, feminist, children's welfare, worker's rights, poverty, spousal abuse, etc. etc. etc. Like you just mentioned, your major mistake was saying "many" it's a fuzzy term and heavily implies that that you are trying to delegitimize anyone that boycotts Mr. Card as a fad follower who doesn't actually care that much for gay rights in general, at best it sounds dismissive, at worst, it looks like your basically attacking anyone that wants to boycott the movie.
Boycotts are not a stable thing, they come from many sources and can form in many ways, a boycott can change as it loses or gains popularity, but any boycott with enough people in it usually follows a general model. At the center, you've got people who make up the organizers and advocates. These are the people that do this kind of thing for a living or as a major volunteer effort: professional bloggers, staff in various advocacy groups (in this case, staff and organizers from major LGBT groups), professors (usually of the liberal arts variety), community organizers, social workers, and many others. Basically these people make it their job to spread information on issues they are passionate about, if a boycott is getting traction on a major issue, you're going to have a core group of people organizing and setting up things like protests, media attention, and outreach; these aren't spontaneous events and usually revolve around people with the time and dedication to do this way way more than on a single instance of an issue. Don't mistake this for intricately planned leadership though, even at the core level, these things can still be little more than unintended consequences, a blog post here, a little blurb on a University website there.
The next level out (imagine it as a circle with smaller circles inside it getting towards the previously mentioned core), you've got the dedicated people. Volunteers or staff, these are the people that make up the primary circle of your efforts. These are the passionate people, generally focused on a single issue like gay rights, these are your regulars. The people you can count on to follow up on any issue they are passionate about. In volunteers cases these people dedicate the time they can, maybe they can't participate all the time, but they will generally try to be genuine contributors to the cause they believe in. Between your organizers and your regulars, these are the people you'll see often showing up at protests or on the news when these types of issues gain traction. This is where a lot of the initial word of mouth comes from when a boycott starts.
The next level you've got your allies and participants. People who have commitments and lives, but genuinely want to help. These are the people, you've generally wrangled in from previous outreach efforts, they've stuck around because they believe in the issue your representing. Anything at this point or past is going to have high turnover, internet forum advocacy is easy, but eating up a chunk of a person's time to ask them to help spread information on your chosen target is difficult, people have lives, and even gay people have careers and families, they can't always dedicate significant chunks of time to anything you ask. These people generally specialize a bit more, for example people that will reliably show up to gay marriage rallies, but don't have the time for much else.
I can go on but I'll skip to the relevant part, at the outermost ring of this onion o' activism, you've got the uninitiated and the hangers on. These are the people that have been pulled in by whatever your current effort is, in this case, the Card Boycott. As I said before, a lot of people have been boycotting Card for decades, now that the Ender's game movie is coming out, many of those inner layers are trying to raise awareness to inform people about Mr. Card's views and actions. People on the outside see that information and decide to spread it around. Some people will indeed make rash decisions or support something superficially, it is the job of those inner layers to educate these people on why they are boycotting Mr. Card, as well as raising other issues relevant to their movement. In this case, Card is a good demonstration of the kinds of people still arrayed against gay marriage advocates. The idea is to take some of these uninitiated and to either educate them to make them better advocates for their beliefs and ideal, or to inspire them to take a greater role in advocacy and participate in future initiatives.
So yes, some people do treat boycotts as a superficial do-nothing way to score social justice points. To equate that to "many" does a disservice to the time and effort so many people put forward, to share their ideals and beliefs with the masses. Advocacy and activism are an involved process, a boycott rarely just springs from nothing with no organization or guide, anything like that, that hopes to get anywhere, requires dedication, belief, and passion from many people involved. Just like Mr. Card has his organization that dedicates itself to banning gay marriage, so too does the LGBT community have it's counterpoint, with a lot of people donating millions of dollars and millions of manhours of volunteer time every single year in order to try to accomplish its goals.
