If a miserable old man wants to hatekeep an entire art style then he’s someone that I can safely and happily disrespect.

Rich people like him do not have feelings that matter, he’s wealthy enough to solve real problems but instead he protects his personal legacy and wealth.

Defend capitalism and try to increase the power of the wealthy if you like but I’ll always be on the side of people being free to express themselves regardless of the feelings of a rich old man.

I half agree but also I think with every extra step reddit takes like banning people for upvoting posts that mention Luigi we see more people interested in a freer alternative.

What lemmy needs is some new use cases reddit doesn’t have, I’ve been thinking about making an adversary debate platform that basically just offers a different format to a thread designed to make understanding events easier. Also I want to try making gamified chat modes where the main image is altered based on agreement or disagreement in the thread, basically an info graphic of the thread.

I’d love to make some game experiences on it too, I was thinking of a similar collaborative experience where user interactions in the thread alter the main image gameboard - would be great to use the existing floss infrastructure to make something open and fun.

Seems reasonable and likely, but that’s not what people here want they want an enemy they can pretend is pure evil so they can feel good about themselves

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.

A huge portion of religious people believe that homosexuality is an especially dangerous sin because it’s a social contagion, they see the increased popularity of gay things and the decreased respect for religion as a clear sign that the devil is winning and faithful, godfearing society is collapsing. To an extent they’re right, modern views on self determination and respect for others is anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years - to the faithful it’s like saying the sky is pink or fish live in trees.

There are of course now grifters using homophobia to draw people into their political ideologies but it’s generally people from homophobic families in homoohobic communities that get drawn into it, it’s easy to forget that when you see a twenty something year old kid making homophobic comments it’s likely at his age his dad was going ‘queer bashing’ for fun with his friends and certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to beat up a gay person in a bar or in the street if encountered.

Even big artists like Eminem had deeply homophobic messages in his music, now that’s backtracked and he’s friends with Elton - this isn’t entirely because he’s grown as a person but because at the start of this century it was unconscionable that rap or hip hop could be anything but homophobic. School kids used the word ‘gay’ to describe uncool or disliked things so commonly it was even part of my own vocab despite being raised in a progressive and accepting family in a liberal area.

Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime but it’s not universal, a lot of religious and 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.

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.

It’s a hugely complex issue for me, I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is. Forcing things too hard can be painful for those unready which causes resentment and reaction but holding back and allowing non-violent homophobic behavior to exist in our society is hurtful to those struggling to find snd accept themselves. (For example being 17 and trying to reconcile popular music explicitly talking about how your unexplored sexual desires are disgusting, realizing you have to make the choice between humiliation and self denial - and this is probably a big part of other emotional troubles which can lead to rejection of otherwise sensible social norms leading to unhealthy drug use, self endangering behavior and other things that still have lasting damage to my life to this day)

I don’t know what will solve these complex issues in our society, maybe making certain concessions to mildly homophobic sections of society would stop driving them into full on culture war crusaders? Maybe highlighting that it’s not only possible but probable to be gay and boring would help ease the anxiety? I actually kinda think straight pride type events and companies pandering to heterosexuals could be normalized and accepted more - not in a way that pits them against everyone else but more of a everyone gets a party kinda way. Stop heteros feeling attacked or at least make those who want to paint that picture looking silly.

It’s sad to admit but humanity is naturally kinda selfish and shitty, bigotry and group thinking is as natural and easy to us as breathing while compassion and understanding takes effort and the right circumstances to flourish.

We do need to address certain toxic traits that are bringing things down, hyper negativity is the default as well as intense partisanship to the point where anyone with a slightly unpopular opinion is instantly labeled as an troll, bot, or agent of dark forces - you can see it a dozen times just in this thread.

There is no debate here because anyone who doesn’t follow the groupthink is chased out, the news is super biased because of this but it also spills over in to everywhere.

I think there are too many people that think they should be the dictator of lemmy, we really need to start up voting good posts and useful content rather than knee-jerk down voting.

No sorry I’m not really feeling top of my game today, you ladies have fun without me, I’m going to make myself a spot of lunch and have a sit down.