How's it hanging, Hive? Everything tight and tick-free?
As the title suggests, that thing happened this week, and for some odd reason, I feel compelled to talk about it. Tread lightly with me, among the land mines of physical threats, political correctness, and conspiracy theories, as I spin a tale that already sound so fucking boring I'm probably driving people over to Twitter.
Forget what I said before, hang on to your asses as we free-fall through some free-thinking freestyle free speech.
So, the context is this. My attention was drawn to a thread in which some guy, we'll call him Whitey, was claiming that racism didn't actually exist. Whitey asserts that 'racism' is just a made-up slur to make white people quiet down when they're telling the truth, or acting too free, or doing what was right. I'm a guy who's given a little bit of thought to what is right and wrong, so I thought I'd chime in with my $.02.
I replied that I was a white guy, and I was calling Whitey a racist, and I asserted that my statement was true. I also said that if I saw Whitey, I'd punch him in the face, because it would be the right thing to do. I wanted to know if Whitey would think I was being racist.
I didn't get to find out, because Whitey must have immediately squealed to the Twitter police. Next time I logged in, my account was suspended.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to miss my Twitter account. The only reason I ever got a Twitter account was so I could see what the journalists of the world were still up to, but over the last couple years, everyone outside of the mainstream has been shadow-banned, or straight up suspended. Now that I've found Hive, with it's growing community of people from around the world just aching to talk about what's going on around them, who needs Twitter anyway?
What strikes me as a little off about the whole affair, is that this isn't the first time I've told someone on Twitter I might punch them in the face. They never seemed to mind before, and a few of those people were a few nuts short of a fruitcake. I've been slapped on the wrist for language, but nobody seemed to mind if I threatened to get slap-happy.
I think more sinister forces are at work here. See, for the last three months or so, I've only logged on to Twitter to shill for Hive. I think they pushed this guy's dumbass thread at me, knowing I couldn't keep my mouth shut, just so they would have a reason to get rid a guy who kept telling his less than 200 followers to ditch Twitter and check out Hive. Maybe I should have asked that guy if he wanted to step outside and run his mouth.
Does it sound crazy? Yes, I'll admit it does. Do I really believe that's why I got suspended? No, but that's what they want me to believe. Would Twitter, and the rest of Mainstream Social Media prefer that Hive stayed secret? They do if they want to keep their profit margins.
Now, don't get the wrong idea, I'm not a particularly violent person, and I do not advocate for violence as a first response. I do however recognize that there are some instances where violence, or the threat of violence, is actually the safest course of action. If you don't believe me, you've never had 3 guys try to kidnap you because your friend burned them for an ounce of weed.
It's one of those uncomfortable things that nobody really likes to talk about. 'Violence doesn't solve anything' is another one of those lies that most of us get told a lot when we're young. I don't know about the rest of you, but the people who told me that usually corrected my bad behavior with violence. I didn't get black eyes or cracked ribs (not at home, anyway) but I saw the limp end of a couple belts and the wide end of more than a couple wooden spoons. For not solving anything, it solved problems like 'quit playing with matches' or 'quit taking dishes outside' really effectively. I was already beginning to suspect that adults were mostly full of shit by age 4.
By now, some of you may be thinking 'cycle of violence', 'acting out', 'troubled home', and other such overused psycho-babble. I say overused because the concepts do have validity, like diagnoses of OCD or ADHD, but like so many other terms people hear on the news, or in their favorite TV drama, people use them more as a means to dismiss behavior they would rather not examine than to accurately describe what's going on. If you don't believe that, then you've never seen how vehemently people with actual disorders will deny their disorders.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere. If you want a post with a point, you'll have to look outside of my rants. Things don't necessarily have to have a point for you to learn things from them. When I was young and bored, sometimes I would just crush rocks with other rocks. There was no point at all, but I learned a lot about rocks.
Speaking of how violence doesn't solve anything, didn't Twitter decide to end my threat of violence with the intellectual violence of removing me from their platform? I hear ya, Twitter... 'We do not tolerate threats of violence (wink wink)'...
If I had exercised some intellectual violence, hacked Whitey's account, and changed his profile pic to a BernieBro meme and his pronouns to shee-IT, I'd probably be bragging about it on Twitter right now. Sometimes threatening violence will get you in more trouble than being violent.
If I wrap this up quick, I might keep it under 1000 words. Thanks for stopping by, now follow me or I'll punch you.
