So there are a few topics that came up lately that I think would be nice to discuss with members of this community.
Basically this is part of writing a Code of Conduct for our instance and I think we need to talk about some specific type of posts:
Doomers
Naturally the themes discussed in our communities are attracting a lot of climate doomer comments and I would say we also have a significant number of “recovering doomers” here as community members.
Earlier this week I considered closing the /c/collapse community on SRLPNK, because it is not actively moderated and attracts a lot of these types, even though ex_06 (who asked me to have their account re-activated, but not as an admin) originally intended it to be more of a psychological self-help group for people trying to get to terms with the likely loss of many things that defined their life so far.
While the typical doomer could probably need some psychological support, they are usually still in a stage of grief that makes them lash out and not engage in a constructive exchange how to make the best of the current difficult situation we sadly find ourselves in.
Mostly I have been doing temporary bans for such doomers to cool down and not spread their doom and gloom endlessly in our communities, but I think we need to come up with a common idea how to deal with this better.
Discussing civil disobedience
aka Direct Action or the other man’s “Eco Terrorist” (yeah right…).
Obviously this is a topic many climate activists find themselves more and more confronted with and you might already be involved with a group engaged in such actions of civil disobedience. And lets not forget about the punk in Solarpunk either :)
However, obviously this is a public web-site and thus easily monitored by law-enforcement and other people that might be interested in reporting such discussions to the local authorities. Thus to protect this service and also our users from themselves we can’t really allow planning discussions with specific targets or generally calls for action against specific persons to happen here out in the open (or in the semi-public direct messages).
Obviously, we can never condone violence against persons, but aside from that please be careful with discussing climate activism on the clear-web and rather use fully end to end encrypted means with people you can trust!
However this has obviously a large grey area and people might have stronger views on what should and should not be discussed here.
Absolute Vegans
Vegans are obviously welcome on SLRPNK and I think we can all agree that strongly reducing the consumption of animal products is a worthy goal.
However, there are some very opinionated (online) Vegans / animal rights activists that (intentionally or not) are indistinguishable from trolls and generally very toxic to deal with. Please don’t feel personally attacked by this, but I think we need to come up with something regarding this in our code of conduct.
So these were the three topics I had in my mind lately, but feel free to discuss others as well.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on this!
And significantly that doing anything is better than doing nothing, even if we’ve already crossed a point of no return. While the earth will not get better in our lifetimes, it can very certainly get worse. Giving up, while less selfish than profiteering from the climate crumbles (I saw that term in another comment and I like it and I’m going to keep using it) as many of the most profitable companies are, is still a selfish act. I think there’s an argument to be made that it also links up with eco-fascism and eco-colonialism, but I’d need to do a bunch of work and research to see if there is one, so it’s just a gut feeling.
I think we need as part of our code of conduct something about if reading the climate news bums you out so much you don’t know what to do (and I suspect we’ve all been there) then go sprinkle some native wild flower seeds some where, go for a walk, try to find a pollinator and say hello, eat some local fruit, look at your municipality’s bus map, anything that gets you in touch with your inner hopeful and joyful climate advocate. The news sometimes is a bummer, and the fact it bums you out means you care. But you can’t feed that bummer part of you. You need to feed the part of you that envisions a better future and wants to do something to make the bummer feelings less of a bummer.
This whole thing won’t get fixed all at once. It’s going to take all of us doing lots of small things that add up. And some of it is going to be advocating not doing business with those super profitable companies. But look… We’ve all bought something from amazon we couldn’t get closer because we’re broke. In those moments you are the exploited worker you advocate for