• JacobCoffinWrites
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    11 months ago

    Just wanted to say thanks, I’ve read a lot of your posts and appreciated them.

    My cards on the table, I’m absolutely against letting perfect be the enemy of good. I’m sick of people bickering over the right way to fix things rather than just doing something, even something small.

    There’s a very twitteresque theme of endless nitpicking that I imagine is intended to showcase the speaker’s exceptional values that I have been glad to find mostly absent from this instance (it’s part of why I bounced hard off r/solarpunk back when. Nothing anyone did or shared was ever good enough or even a step in the right direction, nothing but utter perfection was sufficient for some of the members over there. There’s always room to strive for improvement but it’s exhausting reading about how nothing is ever good enough, so much so that it’s also a favorite tactic of conservatives trying to kill any conversation about change. It turned conversations about replanting land and solar initiatives as bleak and nihilist as the endless stream of bad news around climate change. They could always find something; any effort at improvement was secretly pointless or outright bad.

    Hope is supposed to be what sets solarpunk apart.

    I think it’s important to remember that this instance will be many people’s first exposure to the genre/movement, and that lots of people are coming to this space from different places. Trying to kick them out or shout them down because they haven’t reached the correct level of advanced veganism is going to cost us allies who might have gotten there eventually (or who might improve the world even if they don’t). I think people can do good while not doing everything perfectly and that at this point, we should encourage any progress we can get.

    I wish them luck in finding or making a place where they won’t have to see this kind of thing. I think tailoring the instance to meet their demands (and they’re always only ever demands) won’t make the place more effective.

    And if I’ve been unfair, well, I probably have. These complaints are bubbling up from far more interactions than with the folks in just this post, they just hit a very familiar theme.

    • Treevan 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
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      11 months ago

      You’ve worded it well and, personally, agree strongly with your points. You’ve also used one of my favourite quotes, “perfect/good”, so I instantly like you.

      I don’t believe I’m entirely suited to this community because I don’t believe in the hope of fixing everything that is broken. But I do like everyone here because, in my eyes, they’re trying to do something about it. The perfect is the enemy but we can strive towards the perfect by discussion, experimentation, and feedback.

      “However, I continue to try and I continue, indefatigably, to reach out. There’s no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference - but how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort.” - Isaac Asimov

      • paracel@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Sorry I’ve replied to another comment of yours but I’d just like to ask you why you aren’t vegan (which you presumably aren’t). Again sorry I’m badgering you a bit but you interest me

        • Treevan 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
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          11 months ago

          Because my work requires leather boots and leather gloves.

          I’m mostly vegetarian but will eat invasive deer kill when provided, will eat meat off other people’s plates if they are going to chuck it (farmed meat, whatever it is out of respect for animal). I also live on a working community and there is a dairy of 2 cows and I have drunk milk and eaten cheese (despise dairies though). There is also goats and cows around, and I have 2 male ducks that we keep that were going to be killed. Kids have pet rats.

          While I wear leather, I can’t cross that line. Plus everything else means I’m not a vegan. Can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good though. If someone paid me in meat from an animal they slaughtered (I’ve been paid in kept beeswax before which is not vegan), I wouldn’t say no. Milk from the small dairy in a coffee, wouldn’t say no. Free food, probably wouldn’t say no.

          Hit me up in a DM/PM next time.