Is news really activism? Will this place be the change u wanna cause? - eviltoast

Yeah I get it, everything fucking sucks and sometimes we get a win. I’ve been here for 30 minutes tops and I can’t remember half of the headlines I’ve read, can you? There’s like no engagement on any of the posts here and there’s probably a dozen aggregators that post the same shit you’re looking at.

Shit that was written to nickel and dime you somehow, or lower down the food chain in an academic format for people actually paid to solve problems.

Leave the articles to the climate scientists and policy makers: This instance needs a place for people who get shit done, people who wanna change themselves and their immediate communities. We don’t have enough of that, anywhere.

  • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    I agree, OP. There ought to be rather than news boards, more boards on Activism, Direct Action. I don’t actually know what activism can do for climate change in the U.S. right now. But if there was a community that non-stop posted Laws, Bills, and really substantial changes, and also activist news like stories about Greta that would be a start?

    There’s an organization called Strong Towns that talks about how to organize bike lane and other urbanist proposals for American towns. I wonder if that is our way in to activism on climate change.

    There are also orgs. that check the receipts on companies that are polluting and those that aren’t, companies that are greenwashing with carbon credits and carbon offsets. We could get a real climate boycott list made, and make demands about what those other companies need to do.

    The Green Infrastructure act or whatever in America is written in such a way that it makes sense for every new factory or tower building to take advantage of totally renewable energy. They will if communities make them, otherwise fossil fuel lobbyists will slow down this progress.

    I have heard very strong dogma saying asking people to be vegan for climate reasons is gatekeeping, but I wonder if this is a way in. If good rhetoric can be made, good cookbooks sent their way - perhaps this would activate liberals.

    Overall Solarpunk as a movement is super dreamy and makes persuasive art and design for climate-robust city and town design. Seeing solarpunk art really helped click it into place in my brain that the way we design the world is exacerbating the problem.

    I guess what I’m saying is community boards are better suited to collaborative content creation than news. We can do activism by making persuasive art and rhetoric on and offline, and we can highlight rallies and marches just as quickly as we can highlight news.

    • silence7@slrpnk.netM
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      1 year ago

      The big challenge with direct action and online is that systems like lemmy record a lot of what you do. When you’re planning direct action, it tends to be illegal, and creating a record of your plans like this is a really bad idea.

      If you’re going to do that, set up a group chat on Signal with disappearing messages enabled and keep the number of people involved to no more than seven or eight to limit the risk of infiltration.

      • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Fair enough. I would never do anything illegal! I meant more beginner friendly direvt action such as protests, phone banking, emailing reps. And telling people about worrying bills. I’m no Just Stop Oil activist. Still you have a great point, even protest planning needs to be kept out of the public eye.