VirtualOdour

It feels like everyone is desperate to loose, if someone came up with a contest where winning cost you a lot of money and was nothing but pain and suffering then the race would look exactly the same as it does between dema and reps.

OK but have you ever been to western Europe and eatern bread? Because I've spent a lot of time in the US eating bread and it's not like European bread, not at all.

But American bread is crazy sweet and very unbreadlike compared to European bread, I split my time between both and first thing I do when I get out of the US us have some proper bread.

'I sit online all day pretending to be a teen girl and getting into dirty chats with strangers, it's OK though because I'm doing it to stop the creeps...'

Oh no, they didn't protect a rich corporations profits! How cruel!!!

Yeah they want corporations to own styles so the rich can be more powerful, the rich push this sort of propaganda out endlessly

Yeah when I was young most the weird anti vegetarian talking points that got thrown at me endlessly were things like 'but if you were on an island without vegetation you'd have to eat meat' but there was a point where it switched to bad nutrition 'you can't get protein from vegetables!'

I would point out that since I've never eaten meat and am healthy and strong that's obviously not true and so they'd revert back to innane stuff like 'mice and foxes get killed during harvesting' or 'plants can feel pain too'

Now though it's evolved into weird alpha male podcast drivel, I hear stuff like 'beans make you feminine' and 'we need beef protein to create masculine hormones' and it's always backed by complex jargon from people speaking like doctors but who can't answer basic biology questions like what do the kidneys do.

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.

I started on Debian potato and used pretty much every distribution at sone point, often three at a time. I've used Ubuntu for the last five years because it's easy, stable and upto date. I know people get very minmax about their choice of os and I love that but yeah we need to remember when we say it's 'fine' or 'good enough' that yeah it's not race tuned or weaponised or whatever special builds people are making but ita still much much better than windows.