Thread by @Lidsville

A new year is coming & I think we are long overdue for a society-wide discussion about what's "positive" & what's "negative."

We have media provocateurs in BC calling any citizens who push back at them "negative." Negative" is weaponized to stigmatize dissent & critical thought.

As a friend just said "The 'negative' slur is thought-stopping, gatekeeping nonsense. Bad enough when we have media who don’t understand their obligations re govt, but worse when they engage in rhetoric that tries to stop the public from being informed & questioning state power"

One of Twitter's most positive contributions during the pandemic has been its role as a public square for critical discussion of the way govts & public health agencies & officials have been compromised by business interests and have failed to properly protect public health.

We are in a very strange, propagandic universe when analysis and criticism of the reckless contamination of BC and Canadian public health policy by non-health priorities is "negative."

What is "negativity"? It's time we reconstrue warnings about govt failures as *positive.*

(As an aside, I started this thread earlier with a tweet that linked to the NYmag article on Tr*mp and it went nowhere, making me wonder if Twitter is suppressing a number of media articles? Hence the re-do.)

Media boosters of Bonnie Henry, whose herd/hybrid immunity strategies have failed & prob led to immune systems damaged by Covid for many 1000s of BCers, have tried to stigmatize her critics as not only negative but also conflated our criticism w/ criminal threats by Convidiots

We have a number of things going on here:

A very conservative misapplication of a quasi New Age idea of "positive thinking" which was easily tipped over into a stigmatization of dissent, & a fashy, Trumpian gatekeeping of public critical thinking by certain journalists esp in BC

Then you have this increasingly widespread idea (though I'd say particularly widespread in the white middle class) that legit criticism of govt (what else is Twitter for?) is "negative" Exhibit C:

https://twitter.com/jbal41/status/1606438805552205824

BTW, I'm the least miserable observer of apocalypse around

Without getting into the long, complex, anti-progressive history of the self-actualization movement's "positive thinking" (an offshoot of both Christianity & manifest destiny, more later), we need to flag the privilege behind seeing political engagement as "negative" conduct

We should not be afraid to point out that this enforced "positivity" being pushed on the public by journalists & politicians, and an increasing stigmatization /criminalization of dissent as negative or even violent, shows fascism creep. And no, that's not going too far.

Footnote: I was subject to a New Age/Xian variant of this behaviour by a fellow activist who implied in a group email that those of us warning John Horgan would pass #SiteC on Dec 11, 2017 (which he did) would damage the effort to 'manifest' a good result & we'd be responsible.

In that instance it was a marriage of both a weird perversion of Christian/New Age "manifest your desires" beliefs with deep, longtime NDP partisanship and associated status. I don't need to point out why that type of "positivity" would be toxic to a fight to stop a dam.