ganymede

jami has so much potential. just wish it ran a bit more reliable

look deeper, i think he's trolling

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)

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 PR and lawsuit risk

what risk? facebook & others conducted illegal human experiments. this is an enormous crime and was widely reported yet all fb had to do from a pr perspective was apologise.

as we all know, fb even interfered with with the electoral process of arguably the world's most powerful nation, and all they had to do was some rebranding to meta and it's business as usual. this is exactly how powerful these organisations are. go up against a global superpower & all you need to do is change your business name??? they don't face justice the same way anyone else would, therefore we cannot assess the risk for them as we would another entity - and they know it.

So, while i personally disagree for above reasons, I can accept in your opinion they wouldn't take the legal risk.

simpler metrics are enough

when has 'enough' ever satisfied these entities? we merely need to observe the rate of evolution of various surveillance methods, online, in our devices, in shopping centers to see 'enough' is never enough. its always increasing, and at an alarming rate.

local processing of the mic data into topics that then get sent to their servers is more concerning is not much more feasible

sorry i didn't quite understand, are you saying its not feasible or it is feasible? from the way the sentence started i thought you were going to say it could be, but then you said 'not much more feasible'?

Voice data isn't

voice conversations are near-universally prized in surveillance & intelligence. There hasn't been any convincing argument for any generalised exception to that.

I am not sure they could write it off as a bug

it's already been written off as a bug. i didn't follow that story indefinitely but i'm not aware of even a modest fine being paid in relation to the above story. if it can accidentally transcribe and send your conversations to your contact list without your knowledge or consent (literally already happened - with impunity(?)), they can 1000% "accidentally" send it to some 'debug' server somewhere.

Are they actually doing it? It ofc remains to be seen. Imo the fallout if it was revealed would roughly look like this

• A few people would say "no shit"
• Most people would parrot the "ive done nothing wrong so i don't care" line.
• A few powerless people would be upset.

If they truly wanted to have mic access, they could for a long time

agreed

and it would have been known

are you sure?

The reality is it is too expensive

imo this commonly repeated view has never been substantiated.

we've yet to see a technical explanation for why it's "impossible/too expensive" which addresses the modern realities of efficient voice codecs, even rudimentary signal processing and modern speech-to-text network models.

and risky

how so? previously invasive features are simply written off as "a bug". they barely even need to issue some b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶ fines (typical corporate solution to getting caught), that is the level we're currently at:

"whoops it was a bug, we'll switch it off"

"whoops another update switched it on again" (if caught, months/years later)

"whoops some other opt-in surveillance switched itself on again, just another bug ¯_(ツ)_/¯"

as long as they have deniability as a bug, there's almost zero repercussions and thus virtually zero risk. that is perhaps why a company out and talking about it openly is such a no-no. discussing intent makes 'bug' deniability more difficult.

in my experience when reading past the "they're not listening" headlines, and into the actual technical reports, noone has been able to conclusively rule it out. if you know of conclusive documentation, please post.

then there's the "they have enough data already" argument. which is entirely without foundation, as we all know very well: nothing is ever enough for these pathologically greedy entities. 'enough' simply isn't in their vocabulary. we all know this already.

[i didn't downvote you btw]

no idea why you're being downvoted.

you're entirely correct, and i don't interpret you as defending telegram's lack of user protections

(noticing a real uptick in reddit hivemind around lemmy lately, it's depressing tbh)

Everything that’s encrypted is generally more private and secure than the equivalent which isn't encrypted