Politics

I’m starting to feel like having a particularly leftist environment where the most frequent message is “we’re fucked the there’s nothing we can do about it” mostly just works to prevent the people who might actually get together and do something from doing anything at all.

admittedly, i suspect most people on Lemmy who can do something already are, but yes it's very annoying that the pervasive sentiment seems to be "everything is getting worse, nothing is getting better" as if this is serious politics

The more I look at the kind of messaging I see on this platform, the more I think maybe it isn’t great. It’s a lot of demotivating, depression-inducing, defeatist gloom and doom and far fewer calls to action than I remember seeing on other platforms in previous conservative administrations.

You are right that we ought to be posting less gloom. There is a lot of unhelpful rhetoric out there already, I've even seen 'sticking it out til the midterms' and that's not the kind of defeatist nonsense people need to hear.

As a Gloomy Gus myself I could do better about making this a brighter place to inhabit, you gave me something to think about.

For what it's worth, I don't think anyone's doing it intentionally. It's just very easy to be upset right now. The world is a mess.

I hear you though. We absolutely need to work on this.

Apologies, I do not mean to be discouraging anyone from actions that they can take. Whatever people in and around NY/ NYC can do on a practical level to facilitate his removal, I am all for.

We have ample reason to be discouraged, but I’m not sure targeting the only block of voters and potential activists who might actually both give a shit and be educated enough to get something to budge in order to inflict depression is a good strategy.

To be frank, I don't think that Beehaw is or can safely be a space for organizing activists, and I don't think it has the reach to be having any kind of external impact. Apart from it being at a very high level a space for left-oriented folks to talk, I think Beehaw is different things to different people, and that may or may not include being an impetus to real-world action. For me, it's definitely a space to escape from the stress of being surrounded by conservatives in my day-to-day, and sometimes that escape may end up being more venting than rallying. ~~I have probably been more negative recently than I could be, but I don't think it's useful or healthy to simply pretend at, or certainly enforce, positivity.~~

I have been pretty disheartened and negative recently, and I will work to not project that here because I don't want to and never intended to be pushing my own stress onto others (yourself included), and seeing as I clearly have, I apologize.

the kind of things we’re signalling to the rest of the left... may be actively making the situation worse.

Not to make light of the situation, but I can't tell if you or I think things are more dire. :P

Yeah I've also been really frustrated by this attitude. My advice is to look for local groups of activists and see what you can do to help. Being part of a local coalition can be a very motivating thing and even just being in their discord or matrix servers or whatever can be a good way to get information. I found a local trans activist group that has a user providing daily political bulletins on what kind of stuff is going on around the city. Talking with these people and seeing what is going on feels a lot more optimistic and tangible than the stuff I see posted here

Gov. Hochul is the only route I can viably see to Adams being removed, and I hope she is brave enough to take that step.