There really needs to be granular NSFW settings on Lemmy, or more correctly I need to improve my Rust so I can go and implement it myself instead of bitching about it!

I’m not anti-porn but I don’t want it mixed in my normal content. Other non-sexual NSFW stuff is fine 24/7, artistic nudity is fine 24/7, but I don’t want to see outright porn unless that’s what I’m specifically looking for!

Scared people for the most part. While I’m not American myself I grew up in an adjacent (Calvinistic Baptist) worldview and I cannot emphasise enough how much fear plays a role in that worldview. It’s pretty much a socially transmissible anxiety disorder in my experience, the evangelical worldview is ironically very well evolved to spread from one person to another because it directly hijacks your scepticism by upping the stakes too high for your brain to process it properly. You’re not allowed to express the fear though because that would be evidence you’re not really saved.

I’m not making excuses for them at all, I mean I’m very aggressively pro-LGBT rights and I grew up in that world so it’s definitely possible to escape it. What I am saying though in the spirit of ‘know your enemy’ is that in many cases these people from age five upwards will have been taught they are utterly disgusting in the eyes of god and deserve after they die to forever be tortured gruesomely beyond the power of English words to express because they were born human and are therefore guilty of original sin. These people see themselves as having been measured by the supreme creator of the universe and been found personally, individually beneath contempt. The only way you can escape your completely just fate of being eternally consciously tortured is if God predestined you to be saved and you’re one of the limited few that Jesus’s sacrifice actually applied to, in this world most of humanity exists only to be burned for the glory of God and if you ever fall away from the worldview you were never saved to begin with.

Again, I’m in no way excusing their bigotry which I loathe especially deeply having seen it at closer quarters than most. This is what we’re dealing with though from a purely practical point of view, if you or I are wrong then we’re just wrong but if these people are wrong then they will suffer a fate many times worse than death. This is why encounters with evangelicals are really intense for the most part, and why they’re so needlessly horrible from a secular perspective. While they’d never admit it in a million years the ideology is pretty trauma-driven for many of its adherents whether it’s the fear of hell, fear of losing their entire community even though they don’t believe any more, fear of rejection over some stupid theological difference (this lot make the revolutionary left look broad-church by comparison when it comes to factionalism) or any of the other fears that sound completely insane outside of that community but subjectively are very real.

Here’s an opinion that’s actually unpopular rather than simply controversial: domestic flights in the UK other than to Northern Ireland (which isn’t on the same island so fair enough) should be forbidden on the grounds their contribution to climate change cannot be justified.

Instead we should renationalise the railways by letting the franchises expire without renewing them and expand their capacity as far as we can. Instead of pissing around with HS2 we fuck the NIMBYs over with an Act of Parliament which they can’t swat away or delay and extend it all the way up to Scotland.

If someone is lobbying for climate change denial then they’re guilty of something morally akin to treason, but it’s not treason itself because instead of just betraying just their country they’re betraying their entire species.

Neither are scams but the UK is fond of permanently doing temporary things. Income tax in the UK was first imposed as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic Wars but after Waterloo it was never repealed since it brought in so much. Same sort of deal for the 70 mph national speed limit, it was a temporary measure in the 1960s apparently in response to someone caning it down the motorway in an AC Cobra and as we know, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

To be fair if nobody can get rich from it the fediverse is probably going to stay a much nicer place than the rest of the internet. Profit motives are fine when you’re dealing with strangers but they always add an element of dishonesty to communities of people you intend to stick around with in my opinion, there’s no good faith when my presence is being monetised any more than a farmer has the best interests of their livestock in mind.

Yeah living through the fifth once-in-a-generation crisis in this generation is powerful left-wing propaganda.

Yeah our problem is that our voter turnout is too geriatric, not our politicians. More young people need to vote.

This is still a ‘frog and the scorpion’ kind of situation I think, Meta is fundamentally predatory and incapable of good faith as a matter of collective psychology and culture. They’re a direct analogue of Big Tobacco and should be as welcome in the Fediverse as a diagnosis of the Ebola virus in my opinion.

Bloody hell it's amazing how desperate this marketing attempt is. I've got an AI that'll blow your faces off with its output but I can't show you because, well, your face will resemble Gus Fring after several weeks in an acid bath. I can show you if you pay me a Huffmanian sum for API access though, but only if you sign an NDA and promise not to say mean things about us.

Yeah Meta are a scourge. If I had a friend who worked for them I’d look down on them the same if they worked for Big Tobacco or lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.

I decided to jump before I was pushed and binned off Apollo the weekend before the strikes started. This place existing made that jump a lot easier I think!