suliman's blog

our backyard is starting to stink

It seems like the past few months have seen Bearblog gain a lot of traction among a subset of people that I had hoped to have left behind on shitty platforms like X, Meta and TikTok. Entering the Discover feed, even and sometimes especially the Most Recent tab—a place I had recommended lots of friends to check more often on grounds of it being more authentic—feels like playing minesweeper. I’ve read an increasing amount of wilder and more insidious posts on this platform than elsewhere that has gotten significantly worse in just the last three months. It may have been just the continuation of the rightward turn in Western politics or something else. Either way, they’re here and their bullshit is literally flooding the zone with itself.

I have taken it upon myself to hide blogs liberally, but that doesn’t seem to help much. Granted, I’m only sitting at around 21 hidden blogs out of hundreds, but I’m close to giving up on my own filtering keeping up with this. I resent clicking on mildly interesting titles just to be cognitively assaulted with the most batshit crazy bullshit there is. I just don’t browse the feed anymore. For me to do so would be an act of deliberate self-harm as I’ve already read way too many posts, espousing ideas that you’d normally find on X or 4chan, to think otherwise. My friend Mono tried to spark a conversation politely by first complaining about the problem and defining a solution for himself. And yet some of these people that inspired his post took it upon themselves to turn this into a conspiratorial victimization of the kind you’d only see in Ba’athist Syria, Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. How ironic for xtoblog [archive] to compare the Bear Blog community ousting her to that, when her rhetoric that prompted it [archive] is straight out of the Nazi playbook. For someone with “Never stop thinking.” at the top of their blog page, you sure don’t think for yourself.

This goes way beyond what this woman is out here saying. She is a nobody and this post won’t help her become a good person. But I’d like to address everyone else, a growing pool on this site, who agrees with her, with this: We don’t owe you our time. We don’t owe you the mind space you assume for yourself. And most of all: you are not an oppressed minority. Most governments in the world agree with you because they love the boot you project onto the resistance against it to be stomping on lesser humans, just not you. Your ideals, that are supposedly so fringe, are indeed fringe, just not in the halls of power. The internet is filled with loud lunatics and automated bots alike that espouse your ideas that are an insult to life itself. And you know why? Because the same people you lend your ear to as the single source of truth tend to control the means of information dissemination.

To you, this might be a repressed opinion on a fringe website; to me, this is self-protection from a latent ideology that classifies humans into those worthy and those unworthy of a dignified life. I am not a state that adheres to your free speech rights, and neither is Bear Blog, so you’re free to be a douchebag elsewhere. I don’t need to read blogs that proclaim European and/or white supremacy, espouse Eurocentrism and propagate fascist ideals of protecting the homeland from invading subhumans like me.

I was going to abstain from naming and shaming the few blogs I had decided to hide from my feed, but I decided to make the exception for the worst offender. You’re leaving? Good riddance! Hope more follow in your footsteps.

P.S.: My friend Pirate wrote a bit of a more well-rounded send-off for xtoblog’s public meltdown that's well worth a read. And to the center of attention, xtoblog: I read your post in full and, quite frankly, way too many of your posts for my own good.

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