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!
You can't. We can't also be spouting off and calling for people's heads on a stick either, as permitting that kind of talk emboldens the one guy out there that's unhinged enough to do something because he's got 'online backing' even though it's mostly people just venting. I get the punk part. I don't always agree with it, though. I think there's a lot of peaceful ways to make meaningful changes without blowing up a pipeline (Ludwig style) or chaining yourself to a tree.
as an aside, I'm kind of a doomer? maybe? I'm certainly disillusioned with our state of inaction and the way things are headed. It may well be way too late to do much other than brace for impact, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. You'll see me over in /c/reclamation shilling restoration strategies and talk. I think encouraging research and industry to work together is a good way to make changes and more responsibly source our minerals and resources.
Idk, man. shit's fucked, but in the meantime, I'll be chewing gum and trying to stick it in the leaking dam.
I think this is really really important to remember. Conservative media loves to dance up to the very edge of calling for violence because they know unhinged people will take it further. They want the violence and they also want the plausible deniability so they can keep inciting violence without punishment. It's called "stochastic terrorism" and it's exactly how we got January 6 - a certain politician and his enablers using coded language to a mob of his most radical supporters, hoping those supporters would turn to violence, and believing they themselves would be safe from legal consequences because they didn't explicitly order violence.
We can do better. We have to do better.