Hi Hive account@kennyskitchen! I'm sure that, being a member of the #informationwar community, you're a fan of freedom of thought and speech. I believe that we have these things, and others, in common. While I am sure there's a lot we can disagree on, I'm rather anti-authoritarian myself. It is right and good for you to hold the opinions that you do and for me to hold mine, and for us to share them with each other and understand each others' worldview. Accordingly, I'd like to speak on a couple of things:

On VHEMT

While it's a really controversial opinion, it is true that VHEMT holds that the best possible outcome for the planet and the Universe in general (and even for humans themselves) is for the remaining humans to "live long and die out." It's a really morbid and unpleasant conclusion, and I don't blame you for taking issue with it. Antinatalism is a dark, sad, and existentially horrifying worldview, which is why so many who hold that view rely on an extremely dark sense of humour to process it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of compelling arguments for this view, but I think the one that rings most true to me is this: life which is never created, can never suffer. And unfortunately, for the majority of lives-- for all but the most lucky of us-- life will be filled with suffering.

But while it may sound vile to you, members of VHEMT are not violent or even particularly pushy and, having escaped a cult myself years ago, I certainly couldn't call it a cult by any means. It's pretty much just a bunch of people taking a vow of childlessness. I don't think many of them actually expect most people to follow along. I think it's mostly a social support structure for people who decide they cannot, in good conscience, have children... in a world where the social norms of our society encourage, support and even demand us to reproduce. Full disclosure: while I am not a card-carrying member or anything, I'm currently childfree and plan to stay that way, and as I implied above, I think they have some pretty solid points.

On Hive account@pharesim

I'm pretty sure the "sociopathic socialist" part is a joke of sorts. Having met him personally and spent some time together, I can say that he is a kind-hearted and all-around decent person. He does, like many normal decent human beings, have limited patience and a tendency to resort to ad-hominem attacks when he runs out. Really though, he's an interesting mind who's great to just sit down and have a beer with and talk about things. Honestly, I wish all of us would do more of that kind of thing. I'm personally getting sick of the modern trend toward the death of rational discourse, in favour of everyone painting each other as smooth-brained idiots or evil sociopaths all the time. Seriously, I'm losing my patience with it. Aren't you?

On Hive account@curangel

Hive account@curangel is primarily a community of manual curators, who are entirely responsible for the upvotes the account makes. Downvotes are managed completely separately from upvotes, technically by a whitelisted subset of delegators, but these days mostly by Hive account@azircon specifically. Hive account@pharesim provides a large portion of the delegated stake, however, he is quite hands-off with regards to both curation and downvotes (though he tends to support the respective parties in their decisions). Another disclosure: I am involved in Hive account@curangel, mostly on the technical side but I also participate in administrative discussions.

Personally I have long wished for a way to delegate downvote power separately from upvote power, because if I had my way about it, Hive account@curangel wouldn't have gotten involved in downvotes at all. There have been plenty of times I have personally disapproved of the way downvotes have been used and I have raised these concerns and they have been heard. However, it is clear to me that the dominant portion of stake supports the current downvote habits, so I have largely recused myself from those discussions now. I only wish that Hive account@curangel the curation project and Hive account@curangel the downvote hammer could be separate entities. It is unfair to our curators that their hard work is rewarded with so much animosity, simply for being associated with downvoting activity they have zero control over. Alas, the way our blockchain works, this simply is not possible for now, so it's a moot point.

Other thoughts

On this entire COVID-19 era, no matter what you believe, or what is real, I think we can all agree that it's been an absolutely horrible time. Emotions have been high and remain high. People do and say some vile things to and about each other. This includes me. Some are fearful and/or grieving for lost loved ones; some are feeling smothered and grieving their loss of autonomy, and they're blaming each other for the way that things are.

But I believe that this, too, shall pass... the world is slowly beginning to move again, and we are making moves toward the old normal. Borders have opened and remain open; as it often happens, new variants are reported to be more infectious but less severe.... in my experience, the vaccinated and unvaccinated, masked and unmasked, have begun to tolerate one another in physical space once again. As whatever COVID-19 was (we'll never all agree) inevitably fades into irrelevance by whatever means it does over however long... I hope that the virtual spaces will soon follow, and that we can manage to abandon our battle stations, and treat each other as human beings again.