This was so awkward I had to check if you were joking but nope, actual conservative who got his feelings hurt and retaliated with the two most generic right-wing insults there are.

I could teach your entire personality to a bird.

That instance is still out there for you to go and join, if you choose to do so. You could even join another “general purpose” instance that had lost its mind and decided that “advocating genocide to fix the problems of straight white men” was somehow general purpose.

It’s just as easy to argue that you are forcing hate groups on to people because you would rather individually block them.

To put it bluntly, I find it difficult to believe that people advocating “just block it” aren’t just doing the usual far-right thing of trying to manipulate people into platforming them.

At best, they haven’t thought through how inadequate a “just opt out” strategy is.

Should we all start messaging you daily photos of our hairy assholes? You can just block the accounts if you don’t want to see them. That way, users who do want daily hairy asshole pics aren’t impacted by a “don’t send explicit photos to unconsenting people” policy, which apparently makes the platform better.

Should it?

The overwhelming majority of mass shooters currently plaguing America are young, male and far-right. They didn’t just wake up one morning as extremists.

The story always reads basically the same. Loneliness, frustration and/or disillusionment made them vulnerable, they stumbled upon the far-right claiming they had answers and were lead down the path of extremism by memes, algorithms and social media groups.

Given that, why should they be platformed at all? Why make the default “if you don’t like it, just block it” rather than “if you want to read it, join their shithole servers”?

While we might not be “kindergarten” any more, there’s definitely users who are in early highschool and users who are vulnerable to cults.

That said, I don’t see hexbear being nearly as dangerous because unlike neo-nazis, state violence isn’t the goal.

Take the murder and enslavement out of modern Nazism and there’s nothing left, because murder and enslavement was the point. Take the murder out of communism and socialism and you’ve got a fairer, less exploitative society because a fairer, less exploitative society was the point.

If only you could stack “wage theft” on the back of a dodge for a social media photo op and brag about how the criminal behind it is being refused bail.

Just because somebody stole food because they’re an asshole doesn’t mean that everybody who steals food is an asshole.

We don’t actually know which is true here, but we do know that it’s far more likely someone is stealing groceries because the wealth inequality horrorshow has grown even more perverse in the last year.

Nevertheless, rather than defending an unnamed person from potentially reprehensible police, you defended the police and an unnamed retail store from a potentially reprehensible person.

I hope you’ve got shares in a grocery chain because it would be deeply pitiful if you weren’t even doing this out of self-interest.

A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years.

Sounds cheap.

That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.

If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.

But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.

Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.

Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.

The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.