the Anti-doomer crusade some people have been on since before the subreddit feels pretty alienating, ngl. Like, for real, feel free to disagree with any doomer, but it becomes a crusade when your reaction is to forbid doomers and shutdown doomer threads. I remember one especially delusional episode on the old subreddit when Bernie ate shit.
I feel some people are using Doomer to mean a defeatist who is telling everyone to give up and wallowing in pity, i.e., When really it's just having a prediction of the future that is worse than is popularly imagined, particularly involving climate change and political violence. Some people call this pessimism, but again, I'd appreciate if you didn't reduce a rational and justified perspective with a pathological tendency.
I'd like actually if someone could look up how many times is a Doomer being obnoxious and telling everyone to give up, vs a doomer just frankly discussing likely futures and the perspectives and priorities these entail, and getting told to shut up and be more optimistic. You can be a doomer and still be putting the work. I'm a full member of a ML party, I'm on the streets at actions, I've taken the China-pill, and I have a 4.00 GPA this semester with 19 hours of classes, I'm studying to be an Engineer with a Minor in Chinese so I can assist the scientific and social development of China, and I'd appreciate it if after all of that I can come on here and not get pathologized by people who think talking about Collapse is Bad Vibes.
In full self awareness: :jesse-wtf:
Like, I agree bunker mentality is dumb and there's a real limit to "personal" solutions to climate catastrophe such that there's nothing I can expert to do.
But at a certain point, its almost like being told "hey, you're on the Titanic" and then politely asked not to start prying up floor boards to make a raft.
From a broad historical perspective, we've always been in that world. These ideas of a brighter future and a justice society are relatively new and tenuous, easily corrupted or co-opted, and not in easy reach of any generation to date.
And yet look to places like Cuba, like China, like Reconstitution America, like Tito's Yugoslavia, or Bolivia or post-Apartheid South Africa. It isn't as though people aren't trying to reach that world and even periodically making progress.
I think we fluctuate between panic and despair. But the frenetic energy isn't bad on its face. Neither is the sobering return to practicality and realism.
What matters, more than anything, is that we agree on the direction we want to be going and we together in concert towards that future.