Most Democrats remain staunchly neoliberal. They won’t slash the funding to hurt black people but they will slash funding if it means there’s more public funds for them to shove into their own pockets.

Better than the fascists and racists, but not by nearly enough.

It’s depressing how difficult it is to imagine an alternative universe where Kurt could have made it to 40 and still been Kurt.

Maybe somewhere out there was a 90s with better solutions to mental health problems then “just do heroin until you can’t stand it any more then kill yourself” and we’d have a few thousand more artists running around.

But would it have been enough? I feel like he’d hate the world we built.

Corporations psychopathically wrung every penny they could from his life, art and obvious misery. They didn’t show the slightest remorse for their part in his tragic, lonely death, instead just revealing in the feed frenzy it caused and the millions it put into their bank accounts.

But even after watching them feed artists into the woodchipper over and over again, we still didn’t burn it down. We didn’t even get angry. We just let the neoliberalism wash over us, settling into it like a lukewarm bath.

He couldnt stand racism, homophobia, fundamentalism and toxic masculinity. He was angry, hurt and disillusioned so he wrote poetry and music and put it into the world.

Now the angry, hurt, dissilussioned kids just make far-right memes because a social media exec decided letting them get groomed was worth it for 14c worth of ad impressions.

I just don’t see how he could have made it here, watching everything he hated packaged up in plastic and sold to the world, unable to even hide away with his little family because for a few years he was the hot new product.

i have to say as well that freedom breeds freedom and better and more intelligent people as well.

I have no objection to freedom itself, I object to that freedom being used to turn vulnerable people into domestic terrorists.

The reality is that this kind of absolutism simply doesn’t work. While on paper it would be wonderful if we could scrap every law to maximise personal freedom, we all know that doing so would just hand society to arseholes.

I don’t think that we need witch hunts or bulllying to build safe instances, just intelligence.

While it’s technically possible that it could turn into a witch hunt or bullying, it’s more likely to be used as an excuse by the arseholes.

There’s no shortage of people on social media claiming “the left just call everyone who disagrees with them nazis” while simultaneously spouting opinions that perfectly align with the opinions neo-nazis have held for 40 years. Only the vocabulary changes, morphing from “undesirables” to “SJWs” to “woke”.

Often, it’s not a honest mistake either. One of the most popular topics in far-right Discord channels is “how to redpill people”, which involves strategies like obfuscating their actual opinions and playing the victim.

Now my opinion about your last point is that there’s hate speech everywhere, not just from your right, your left is pretty extremist as well, and pretty full of assholes. Assholes are everywhere.

Sure, but let’s not pretend they’re in the same league.

Tankies can be assholes, but they’re pushing communism because they believe it would be a better, fairer society for everyone, despite it usually ending in corruption, starvation and executions.

Meanwhile over on the far-right, genocide is the point. They think that society would be better for them if they could kill and enslave minorities and women. That’s a level far beyond calling people names.

As always, the rule of thumb is think for yourself and don’t be an asshole.

Sounds good, doesn’t work. That’s why COVID saw reactionaries pushing conspiracy theories that could have come straight from Elders of Zion and spitting in peoples faces.

The wider net you let them cast, the more vulnerable people they’ll catch.

Sounds good to me since there are genuinely bad people on social media, often using it as a platform to groom more reactionaries and extremists.

Corporate social media has always been slow to react to these groups and they often take the stance of “as long as they don’t go fully mask off” in order to preserve as many ad impressions as possible.

With the community in control, they can act much faster to limit astro-turfing and hate speech, pushing the far-right back into the obscure shitholes of the internet.

I think its a massive improvement. Reddit did next to nothing about astro-turfing and vote manipulation. Lemmy gives people the tools needed to detect inorganic content.