Comment on Toxic comments are associated with reduced activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia

• Candelestine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  My main gripe with essays like this is the lack of sound ideas on how to realistically move forward. “If everyone would…” just isn’t good enough, and won’t be without a cataclysmic upheaval or extraordinary luck.

  The spread of ideas like these is very easy to manage. You provide an easier to understand scapegoat and lean on people’s laziness and mild preferences. Jewish people, for instance, have been extremely convenient for this, much to their detriment.

  You can’t educate people that hate education and complex thinking, either. How could we resolve this?

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  • fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That essay’s purpose was to lay out the problem; it’s pretty dated now and wasn’t as common in public discourse as it is now, but it still holds up for articulating the situation itself. I give people this one for what to do: effectiveactivist.com/intro/. People are building the world they want to see in the ways they can, consciously and unconsciously, premeditatedly and opportunistically. It is never the act of one person; it is a trend of actions. Act local, think global. en.wikipedia.org/…/Think_globally%2C_act_locally

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    • Candelestine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Lot of interesting stuff in there, thank you. I’ll have to dig through it at some depth later.

      I will say one thing though. We may not have that much time. Progressive activism is fantastic, when you have a democracy. I think in order to preserve our democracy in the coming decade or two, however, we’re going to need a very political approach, the exact kind decried in the Harvard essay.

      Just to avoid the risk of descent into large scale violence. Because I personally just don’t see the trends towards extremism stopping soon. Not that a counterfactual like this is good for much. We’re in unprecedented conditions, though.

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      • fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period Oh yes, history does repeat. There is a boom and bust cycle here; regardless, you can only do what you can do, and if that is how you know you need to do it, go that way. Mine is teaching; I am too passive and weird for politics. I’ve got too many health problems for being a boots-on-the ground person. I am a small group 1:1 person. So, I could not compete there, but maybe I can motivate others to do that or get them to make good voting choices, or otherwise. That’s what that guide is all about—finding your niche where you could do the most good, then seizing it.

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