rglullis

A perfectly appropriate post to the community, downvoted like it's spam. What is the problem here?

everybody shrugged it off and/or moved on. That’s acceptance.

Sorry, that's a non-sequitur. Aside from his bootlickers and the already extremist voices, there might have a good amount of people trying to downplay it, or trying to excuse him for it, but no one in the mainstream looked at what he did and argued that it should be acceptable to go around making Nazi salutes.

If more people had started doing it after he did it, you'd be totally right. But after all the backlash it was clear that he didn't get any support there.

Anyway, I feel like arguing over specific actions is not helpful when the Overton Window is more about shifts in cultural trends. I'd take the surge of "trad wife influencers" much more seriously as an example of "right shifting" than any controversy over what Elon or any asshole billionaire did or did not do.

If that was unacceptable by the mainstream, he wouldn’t have been able to keep his ceo positions or get his department

The mainstream has no direct influence over the Tesla board, and the ones that do have influence over the board are also interested in destroying the democratic institutions as much as possible.

But we are animals who can recognize and control whatever urges we have. We don't need to act on them. It might feel cathartic to be able to compile some huge list of BS made-up by a troll, but more likely than not the troll simply will not care. At best it's your time and energy being wasted with someone that does not deserve it, at worst is just a place that will amplify the toxicity that is already too prevalent here.

Anyway, I was never a fan of drama communities and I really wish we toned down on the Fediverse "meta-discussion". For an outsider, this type of community seems like an excellent source of material to justify why the Fediverse is not a friendly place.

Are you saying that it has become (a) politically acceptable and (b) by the mainstream to make Nazi salutes?

Of course you can find an extremist minority that would support any type of absurdity, but the Overton Window is about mainstream values. To say that the Overton Window is going right because of Musk's factoids is as baseless as saying that it has gone left because of Jaguar's latest campaign ad.

Let's be real for a moment: imagine you are a high school kid growing up in the 90s and you hear rumors about one of your teachers being gay. There is a good chance most parents would be surprised at this, and even that some would be concerned about it. Today this is a nothing burger. Same if one of the classmates was raised by a single mom, or their parents were divorced.

Similar about usage of recreational drugs. We went from "I smoked but I didn't inhale" in the Clinton's years to "Of course I inhaled, the point was to get high!" from Obama and the biggest scandal around drugs nowadays are around vending machines for edibles close to school.

Depictions of non-traditional nuclear families were still frowned upon, today we make fun of Seinfeld and Friends as "the sitcoms where everyone was white".

Any news about conflict in the middle east were always framed in terms of "terrorist attacks" in Jerusalem, nowadays the discussion is whether or not there is genocide in Gaza.

I have no doubt that the polarization is increased and that the extremes are getting further and further apart, but there are so many things that would be considered taboo then and are completely acceptable by the mainstream today, it's impossible to look at all that and think mainstream society has regressed.

The Overton Window is about what is "politically acceptable by the mainstream", not the values defended by the majority view. Pick anything that is openly discussed today on NBC and tell me how it would fare on Carter's time.

Oh no, there are idiots in the internet! Let's engage and let them live rent-free in our heads!

FYI, I don't think we are supposed to sympathize with https://xkcd.com/386

I for one still don't understand the point of browsing by /all, and I understand even less why some people who are not following a community feel the need to go around pontificating and downvoting anything they don't like, as if they were training some algorithm.

And the funny thing: it's super easy (barely an inconvenience!) to make Lemmy work in a way that communities ignore/reject any activities that were created by non-followers.

I could make a list of 100, per year, but by making that kind of anchoring you just showed how you are the extremist one who is out of touch with reality.