Tonight, I heard a piece of advice that was a wake up call. It wasn't good advice. In fact, the advice I heard was so ill-advised and dangerously misguided, it snapped me out of a sense of complacency: "Shut your stupid mouth".

In the poster's defense, the advice, in context, was a tip on how to avoid getting shadowbanned and/or to avoid getting into arguments, but it was the larger understood implication - that people on social media are so incapable of behaving like normal human beings that one must silence themselves to avoid attracting the attention of the worst people imaginable, that made me realize social media has nothing left to offer me, or anyone who's actually interested in offering any real form of self-expression.

But it also got me think about how important the opposite is for the real world: If you don't speak up, people who believe in bad, hateful things, or those who have the worst approach to otherwise legitimate activism, unflinchingly will.

Listen, if you're interested in me or my site, you probably have a fairly progressive worldview, even if it's a form of leftism that is different than mine. If you or I make the grave mistake of keeping silent - especially if you live the United States - it's very possible that the only people who will speak their minds are, at best, insufferably proformative, faux-progressive center-conservatives, or at the absolute worst, the worst, most unrelentingly bigoted and hatefilled MAGA-Dipshits imaginable, and whether it's shitlibs or neo-nazis, there words will be not but hollow virtue-signalling to their fellow shitlibs or neo-nazis.

It's our responcibility to be there to say something, anything of value to counter the kind of performative (and in the case the alt-right shit-dribblers, very bigoted towards anyone who doesn't fit their gross Aryan vision, void of minoritie, and, to be frank, anyone who's very interesting.) bullshit.

So don't you dare shut your stupid mouth, because if you do, some dumbass won't.

stay safe everyone :3