-Looks out window. Lawn’s engulfed in flames. Closes window shades.-
“All better.”
I mean, if there’s not anything I can do beyond dumping a thimble of water on the fire six months from now I’d rather just die happy.
Two things
- Politics is for Power provides a pretty good model for thinking about this https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Politics-Is-for-Power/Eitan-Hersh/9781982116798
There’s a lot of political hobbyism on social media in general and Lemmy is really bad for it. Take for example the constant Elon Musk rage bait. No one is doing anything productive with that information. They’re just getting mad
- Social media, in general, isn’t a good way to get informed. It makes you feel really in touch but when a lot of the time you’re getting biased and polarizing that is often as enraging as it is unproductive
We treat politics like entertainment and it’s making our politics worse. Personally I try to limit my exposure to politics that I don’t think will be productive. It might feel like the most important thing in the moment but it’s often a huge waste of time
You make some great points. I’ve seen this in action locally - it’s a tiny minority who actually make the effort to change things and they have an amazing success rate, in part because they are often unopposed. The barrier to entry is deceptively low. I think I’m going to read that book.
Perhaps I’m old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what’s actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, “Hang the sense of it,” and keep yourself busy. I’d much rather be happy than right any day.
- Douglas Adams
There is a global authoritarian campaign to undermine democracies across the globe, the US is not the only country having serious trouble right now.
Tbf, Lemmy is a place to unwind for many people, we have enough boring exhausting shit going on irl.
It’s a link aggregator, if you don’t like politics you’re in the wrong format of social media.
Better post about how doomed you are, that’ll fix it.
But for real, some of the communities I’m in have a rule about not posting about negative stories without adding a way to take action, a way to contribute, etc so that it’s not just doom scrolling negativity. Bad news is everywhere and it’s easy to find, anyone can do that.
Taking those bad feelings and channeling them towards something other than wallowing in how bad things are is the important part, not posting and reading. Someone who reads one bad news story a week and calls their representative about it is doing infinitely more than someone who reads every negative story out there to stay “informed”.
Yeah, the doomposting is intense on Lemmy. I’ve taken up a policy of just downvoting any negative posts I see, even if I like the post otherwise, just to tamp down the negativity a bit around here.
The best and worst thing about Lemmy is how niche we are. It keeps out the “mainstream”, but unfortunately we’re easily inundated by perpetually-online doomers.
Also, I would recommend blocking users moreso than communities. Once you start looking for it, you realize that like 90% of these posts are made by just a few people/bots.
Yes.
Downvoting isn’t “negativity”, it’s a method for users to define what does and does not contribute to the content of the platform. By downvoting this content, I’m voicing my opinion that negativity is overrepresented on Lemmy, and encouraging (however slightly) more positive content to be posted.
Yeah. I just take a quick peek at their comment history to see if I should just block them. Works great.
I plead with you to check mine just a wee bit longer,
i paid someone a compliment back in the day.
Plus, your writing style is adorable!
I find that switching to my ‘subscribed’ feed and sorting by newest weeds out 95% of the doom and outrage. Most single-topic communities are really positive. You very occasionally get a itinerant doomer or naysayer coming out of the woodwork and being rabidly cynical, but in something like a gardening or saxophone community their comment always just looks silly and out of place and is usually easy to ignore.
Also, I would recommend blocking users moreso than communities. Once you start looking for it, you realize that like 90% of these posts are made by just a few people/bots.
I wish there was an easy way to block everyone from an instance, like *@shittylemmyinstance.poop or something. Yeah, I do have one instance blocked to avoid the content, but the posters seem fine, but there are a few where blocking users one at a time is like whack-a-mole.
Good question, I suppose I’m being negative about negativity.
Honestly, feel free to downvote, you have my blessing lol.
If you make a decent negative argument, in a perfect world it should be an upvote.
“If”, tho’…
Tell ya what, you up vote it and I’ll down vote it and all should be right in the world.
Yeah the /all feed legitimately seems to be mostly yank politics, and has felt that way for months. Real tired of hearing about them 😴
And you think we’re not sick of hearing y’all cry about sunak and what labor is doing rn???
Plenty of your comments are you crying about seeing America exist. What you’re crying about right now in this comment us yanks have been dealing with while your elections brewed.
Or what about Brexit? Do you realize we don’t give a fuck? We still hear about it. That bitch of a king, I could go on and on.
It’s almost like when you partake in global communities you’ll hear about shit
The Political Propaganda machine in the US is now at full steam given how near their Presidential Election is, so we get innundated with “vote X” and “X is great” posts along with “Y is bad” ones.
Advertising has become so abusive that you can’t browse anymore without and AdBlocker, and Political Propaganda is just a more manipulative form of advertising, often pushed by people deeply emotional bound to “their club” (funnilly enough, I also avoid Sports stuff, as it suffers from exactly the same problem) hence far more insiduous and aggressive.
Then to make it even worse, this electoral cycle in the US is all about doom-mongering with not a single message of hope or a bright vision for the Future: in other words, everybody is selling Fear, which at least in traditional Advertising is uncommon.
Telling people to vote is not propaganda it’s a call to action, the one that is a duty to all citizens regardless of country.
You keep using that word far too generally which takes away from your message.
Lastly, it’s not just annual doom mongering. I’m so sorry you have to see it but it’s a big fucking deal and completely unprecedented for us as an entire goddamn country. Our political plights do NOT just boil down to more advertising.
We are fighting for our rights and those of us less fortunate. We’re talking not just freedoms but lives. This is not hyperbole, people are dying and more will die and suffer if we do not shout and scream about it.
I’m sorry our election isn’t easier for you to ignore goddamn. Your final line of how there isn’t a single iota of hope just shows how full of complete shit you are. Shame on you for lying like this.
Bullshit!
If it was about “just vote” you wouldn’t care who for.
That post of yours is such a perfect example of that very sleazy political propaganda I was talking about that the very first paragraph is already deceitful misrepresentation.
Then follows the customary use of political slogans from the Book Of Vote Lesser Evil: it’s “unprecedented” vote - again - “fighting for our rights” and, most hilarious of all for the “less fortunate” (trully beyond belief in a country with a grand total of 4 national politicians who are leftwing, and the rest being overwhelmingly hard-right ultra-neolibs or far-right fascists).
The whole thing reads like somebody who has swallowed the Cool Aid and is giving themselves an excuse to pester everybody else, all very similar to religious nutters proselytizing.
From the outside it’s like watching the Russian Elections but for a country with a Power Duopoly instead of a Power Monopoly, complete with people in their minds boosting way out of proportion the small differences between those two cheeks of the same arse that pass for Political Parties, to convince themselves they actually have a choice (lest they realize having the country governed for the many, not for the fatcats, is never going to happen in that electoral system and they have to do something about it) in some kind of country-sized Stockholm Syndrome.
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
lemmy is more US-centric than reddit and twitter combined.
If you came to lemmy to escape the anarchy and chaos that is Trump, you best be turning around.
