excellent writeup

i agree with alot of what you said and will try to hit a few key issues and hope i can add something to the excellent perspective you’ve cast.

The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.

exactly, they know its a very useful mechanism to accumulate power. so imo we should constantly remind ourselves - they’d be doing this anyway. if homosexuality didn’t exist or was non-viable for this, they’d be onto something else. they’d have used any topic to get what they want. (you could ofc have a metadiscussion about why certain topics are more powerful than others. but thats a different discussion).

anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years

another critical point, as you correctly identified, this is how christianity has become, not what christianity was even purportedly about. if you take the actual words attributed to jesus in the bible, afaict never said a god damn thing about being gay trans whatever. according to their own book - after centuries of fucking with the bible - it STILL says the greatest commandment of all is to love your neighbour as yourself and you can’t judge cos you’re all fuckin sinners afterall.

so it’s all hypocrisy built upon hypocrisy , basically typical “there are 5 lights” bs. in other words it has all the fingerprints of a propaganda pathology not an expression of positive spirituality.

Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime

yeah to that end i think the OPs timeline of 40 years was a bit optimistic, or we at least have to recognise that represents a cross-section of OPs experience which wasn’t necessarily universal 40 years ago. that said i feel there has been a backslide in the last say 10-15 years)

conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.

tbh i think thats because its probably both at the same time, its a documented soviet technique to covertly fund two sides of an issue to control the outcome. not picking on the soviets btw, just that they did a great job perfecting these kinds of things, wrote it down and then the power structures keeping them secret began to collapse and the methology leaked to the public.

we see this in a simpler form where corporations invest in pride month and also unironically heavily invest in homophobic organisations, (so i guess it doesn’t always have to be a cold war operation for powerful entities to effect control via seemingly conflicting interests).

and in what is presumably a less consciously aware context, consider how jk rowling veils her attacks on the trans community behind a thin veneer of “caring about gay people”. i’m strongly of the belief if she’d been born 50 years earlier she’d be jumping on the homophobia bandwagon instead of the currently “trendy” transphobia bandwagon.

to say another way, not everyone pretending to be our friend has our interests at heart, infact sometimes they’re just trying to accumulate power by taking the positive stance on this issue - probably for no other reason than the negative position won’t currently yield them as big a return.

and this can lead to eg. conservatives becoming outraged about a stance taken by someone who is vocal and politically motivated, but who has no business speaking on our behalf, then conservatives end up feeling like they’re “under attack from the homosexuals” when it wasn’t even a homosexual who said it!!

next the conservatives says some hateful thing in retaliation, people respond to that and it spirals…everyone loses (except perhaps the actual perpetrator). this is definitely a flaw in human thinking where our tribalism clouds our perception, we feel under attack and in the heat of the moment incorrectly assess which side someone is taking (or even that there’s only 2 sides, when in life there’s probably rarely ever only 2 sides).

Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.

again, its probably both? tbh i don’t think that laziness is the only explanation for the woefully shoehorned characters we’re currently getting. honestly its fucking insulting (to us, not the biggots - though the biggots might feel insulted too?). as you mention its a profitable cash grab, and i’m sure it hasn’t escaped their notice that a certain type of aggressively half-arsed inclusivity will provide alot more value to them from the hysteria it generates vs actually doing it ‘right’ in a sensitive and compassionate way, which might actually lead to healing.

if healing is what they actually wanted i think it’d look very, very different than how it currently looks. and the kindest interpretation is they’ve realised it’s more profitable short-term to produce hysteria instead of healing.

compare in contrast to what i still think (despite modern news) was a great example of inclusivity characters with the lesbian main characters in buffy:

in 1999 no less, it showed a lesbian couple in bed and instead of a cheap sexiness grab, they’re literally sitting up in bed reading & having a mundane conversation. no sexualisation of the lesbian relationship as something existing only for hetero male gratification, or out attacking heteros. just plain, believable real life characters living a boring normal part of their life. so yes i very much agree that the boring normality is a very powerful thing. surely ALOT more positive overall than aggressive hysteria.

In summary my take-aways are:

• their MO is to use a scapegoat, they’d be attacking someone vulnerable, regardless of whom

• not everyone pretending to be our friend actually wants to help us

• hysteria is sadly apparently more profitable (short term) than healing

A positive note?

I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is

i really don’t either, though something think how homosexuality has been hijacked in modern perception (by that 1000 years of fake christianity as you mentioned). in eg. parts of ancient societies, men could love men and women could love women, someone could be a third gender, and it wasn’t even a thing to get upset about it, because it was just normal life. why do we suffer when they didn’t even know they were supposed to be suffering?

extremely good question to ask OP.

thinking on it right now, perhaps Moon (2009)

deleted by creator

can you please explain further what you mean? it could be interpreted a number of different ways.

i’m not sure if this is your point or not? but there is obviously overlap between each of those groups, there’s black sixpack dads, and poor/middle class lgbqti etc etc

anyway imo none of this revived division appears organic. there’s always going to be the odd biggot, but afaict the majority of modern biggots are being indoctrinated and radicalised by an organised media effort (and our leaders are either complicit or ‘inexplicably’ powerless at protecting us from it). for sure these radicalised biggots should do better, but we’re also talking about average people going up against billion dollar propaganda machinery. it’s certainly asymmetrical warfare.

governments have all shifted more to the right on average

it appears to be the case. though afaict none of it appears to be organic.

100% shoegaze fits the bill perfectly for OPs request. i’d add slowdive to that list

there’s some great, highly independent shoegaze on yt

also, some Dandy Warhols & Brian Jonestown probably fits the bill, eg. this track

The planet does

The planet which happens to be where we live and borrow atoms from to make our physical bodies?

Poisoning the planet is poisoning ourselves.

Where do you think that CO2 is even coming from? It doesn’t magically teleport into the air. It’s coming from the very pollution sources we’re talking about. In one year ~89% of CO2 pollution came from emissions sources which are harmful to us and other life.

Stop poisoning ourselves == stop poisoning the planet.

The mentality that we can somehow magically separate one from the other suits the polluting industries very well.

Notice how public discourse goes round & round in a lively show, but never seems to get anywhere?

This is strawman public discourse, and its largely by design.

Stop thinking, worrying and especially talking about climate change.

Instead talk about pollution & poison

Everyone can see it. It can’t be denied or handwaved or debated away.

STOP POISONING OUR AIR, WATER AND SOIL.

WE NEED THEM TO BREATH, LIVE AND GROW OUR FOOD. (duh)

aye exactly. since voting is apparently a big thing now, if we have to work within it, some ideas might help such as mentioned above where hackernews prevents downvoting replies to you.

some other ideas

• permit upvoting but downvotes require a textbox reply (imo downvoting without a valid explanation is just noise, and we want signal over noise right?)

• self posts not being upvoted (all posts start at 0)

• i really like how lemmy shows both up & down rather than final value only on alot of other sites

• no voting until you ‘earn your stripes’. not perfect, but somewhat helps at keeping voting within domain expertise.

eg. i ‘fucking love science’, but just because an answer feels nice to me on nuclear rocket surgery doesn’t mean my vote should count. let alone be equal to someone with expertise

how so?

check here for some basic examples. eg. it can be used to leak info from one context to another.

there’s ofc legit uses for it too, which is why i argue for user intervention.

chromium based browsers behave like that if I’m not mistaken

i may be wrong? but my understanding is they’ll currently limit resources, but execution still takes place? that’s definitely useful, but my argument is for for an option where CPU resources be limited to 0 in background (without user intervention).

background/defocused tabs are ‘paused’ by default.

paused meaning no runtime execution of scripts or anything else.

firstly, there’s always some security and plenty of privacy mischief around focus.

secondly, it’s almost always wasting cycles, so its just wasteful of resources and energy.

ofc with some option for you to eg. right-click on a tab and mark it as ‘runtime in background’ or something, for webmail or messengers etc which you do want runtime.

but it should essentially be whitelisted.

i’ve actually played with this in the firefox debugger and it essentially appears feasible so really hope this feature comes oneday - or i finally get some time to look into making an addon for it.

probably an unpopular view but tbh i think voting has ruined modern forums

firstly its much much easier to game, and for big platforms to fake

but more to the point, voting makes excellent sense when the topic is something with a clearly provable right/wrong answer. eg. technical questions are ideal for voting, where the wrong information does belong at the bottom because its simply wrong and in most cases most people can easily verify if it works or doesn’t work.

instead we get voting for everything now, so it merely becomes a poll of opinions not facts, but unfortunately our monkey brains sees the numbers and somewhat equates emotions with facts.

oldschool forums ALREADY HAD a poll feature, so when we wanted a poll we could get one. now everything is a poll, and when everything is a poll nothing is especially meaningful.

imo honor is roughly a synonym for integrity.

yet integrity means different things to different people.

and people also mistake honor with pride.

Gesturefy

just installed now, seem great so far. ty

not fav, but deserving a mention is Sabine Hossenfelder she’s certainly weighed in on topics she probably should’ve stayed out of. But her ability to cut through science/physics bs is pretty high. As with everyone, you have to take and leave certain perspectives they offer.

as someone who was among those early to point out the incoming dangers of bots manipulating discussion,

i’ve recently begun to think i’ve massively underestimated the extent and breadth of bot manipulation of public perception

but the dome is round, yeah? :>

We need holidays and celebrations for all cultures.

It’s harder to be racist when you’ve got the day off because of someone’s cultural celebration.

not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but if anything this news paints linux deployment in an even better light.

true kindness would be to not demonise and ban entheogentic medicines with thousands of years of contemporary peer review in the sickening pursuit of corporate greed