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.

Libertarians are mostly just neoliberals who are upset they’re not allowed to be more psycopathic.

Their new utopia will tear itself apart with greed, drugs and sex abuse just like all the old ones.

The mothers may not even have been alive and medical staff simply can’t evacuate premature babies and all the ICU equipment needed to keep them alive.

This story is absolutely going to be used as “look how inhuman and barbarous these Palestinians are, good thing we’re genociding them” and your comment is exactly what they’re looking for.

But the reality is that if you shoot and bomb civilians, then threaten to bomb the hospital they’re being treated at, this could happen anywhere in the world.

They weren’t leaving babies to die and rot 6 months ago because they weren’t being shelled and shot at and if they weren’t being shelled and shot at now, they wouldn’t have left those babies either.

Then either make your comment and eat the downvotes or just don’t make the comment at all. You’re functionally complaining that a Facebook anti-vax group isn’t listening to your science.

Regardless, there is an important distinction.

You can argue all you like that political systems like communism and socialism may have lead to things like corruption, famine, wars and genocide but ultimately, the people who support those systems are seeking a fairer way to run society for all people and believe in it despite its history.

Head over to the far-right and the genocide is the point. They want “undesirables” to be killed, enslaved or completely repressed.

You don’t need to look to the military either.

Coca-cola experimented with subliminal advertising to see if they could mind control people into buying their products but for some reason we think they wouldn’t stoop to manipulating social media, the Clockwork Orange reprogramming system that we pin our own eyelids open for.

To block AI from hoovering up all our data, without paying them.

That’s not how greed works, nor how reddit works.

The only time they’ll do something that reduces profits is when they’re confident it will mean more profits in the near future (and they can’t figure out a way to have both).

That’s why they were happy to platform mask off neo-nazis, the dangerously stupid and communities dedicated to getting as close to child pornography as possible without technically breaking any laws and why they waited until the last possible moment to pull the plug on them.

Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

Well, eventually.

When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.

He also isn’t going to do anything about slurs on the platform, unless they can be used against him.

I honestly can’t imagine being so self-absorbed that I felt entitled to choose death for other people.

Of course, it’s apologist bullshit anyway, which means you’ve had a single thought about it and decided “job done”.

Most people being murdered in America aren’t being killed with that level of premeditation. Someone (usually a man) has a gun on their person or laying around their house, they lose control of their emotions, then they shoot someone.

People don’t tend to have a cup of acid in their bedside drawer but in the extremely likely event acid attacks became even a fraction of gun deaths, you have my full support to change the laws to address it.

Because I’m not on a death cult.

Yet with all these amazing weapons of mass destruction in their pantry, every single domestic terrorist just goes and buys a gun instead.

I’m sure the executives over at Chlorox are thrilled to hear that if radicalised psychopaths started killing and maiming thousands of people a year with their products, you’d fight to protect their profits.

But I’m not interested in solving every vague act of violence you’re able to inflict on the people in your imagination, I’m interesting in solving the violence that is happening right now, to real people, using a specific tool.

That’s incompatible with corporate greed. They will look at a billion transactions for $0.05 and start thinking “What if each of those was $0.50? Or $5.00? Or $50.00?”.

Without a regulating force (such as laws or consumer power that isn’t just neoliberal lies) , it will always grow to absorb every available dollar it can.

And realistically, charging people 0.045€ for the service they actually use won’t make them nearly as rich as charging people $50 each month for the $3 dollars they use.

They’ve already done the maths to prove it. It’s why it’s never happened.

With any change on the site formerly known as Twitter, there are 3 lenses to examine it through:

1. Reducing the massive financial loss that Musk will almost certainly take
2. Amplifying the voice of the far-right
3. Stroking the ego of the man child who owns it

This is probably mostly 1. He’s looked at the number of users and said “what if they were dollars?”.

But like you say, there’s probably a bit of 2. Reactionaries are more likely to hand over a dollar for a Truth Social with outside their choir to abuse.

It probably won’t dissuade bots and astro-turfing, but it will make it pay-to-play, with the richest welding the most influence. That’s definitely 3 since by any other metric besides money, Elon is average.

I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn’t free to run. But there are several things to consider:

I don’t mind paying for services, but I now have 20 different services. Each one is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while giving me a minimum in return.

I also accept that those services are not free to run, but realistically, these companies aren’t just trying to cover their operating costs, they’re trying to further line the pockets of executives and shareholders.

And its never enough for them. I could give Twitter $100 a month and they’d still sell my data for a few extra pennies. I could give YouTube an unlimited supply of servers and bandwidth and they’d still show just as many ads.

We will never get the cost living under control until this corporate greed is addressed because no matter how much money we pay people, there’s an army of psychopaths ready to milk them of every cent.

So fuck em. They can have an extra dollar when they can prove it will actually end up in the pocket of an employee. Otherwise, the richest man in the world can fund his own little reactionary pet project.

They dismiss it because it’s bullshit. Every stop on the slope is not inevitable.

In this particular case, why is the pro-gun community able to prevent changes to gun laws – despite those laws being deeply flawed and with only a minority of Americans supporting them – but somehow unable to prevent the floodgates after that?

The response the gun lobby wants to hear is “they gubbermint won’t do it because they’re scared we’ll shoot them!” but it’s pure bravado. Grossly negligent gun laws haven’t prevented the American government from doing things to its citizens that would make China blush and the pro-gun crowd didn’t even change their vote, let alone sacrifice their lives to prevent it.

Because everything is a bullshit slippery slope to them. “Oh you want to get rid of the second amendment? What’s next? The first amendment? The fourth?”

Nope. Just the second. It’s repealing an amendment, not dabbling with heroin. They’re not going to say “oh why not, maybe one more”.

Making the “responsible” part of “responsible gun owner” mandatory is not going to cause the collapse of civilisation.

If any of those (conspicuously unnamed) household items were used to kill even half as many people as guns, there would absolutely be legislation to reduce the public safety risk.

If that legislation failed as routinely as America’s gun laws do, it would be improved or replaced until it worked.

Isn’t it lucky where that slippery slope starts?

It doesn’t start before guns, with things like high explosives, despite them being arguably “arms” and inarguably more useful in a tyrant-overthrowing war.

And it doesn’t start after guns with knives and all the other things you’re sure they’re going to take, even though they could have taken them at any point in the past 20 years.

Nope, the slippery slope starts exactly at the point it cuts into the profits of the gun lobby and the convenience of reactionaries, the moment they “grab guns” by introducing things like “licenses issued at the completion of a background check, safety and operation test and demonstrated ability to store safely”.

The pro-gun community sure hit the jackpot there.

Edit: Oh also, it was the modified rifle that was considered a “machine gun”, or the specific device made from a shoelace designed to convert it to full auto. This is so fuckwits can’t circumvent laws against fully automatic weapons, carrying and selling devices to illegally modify the weapon and then claiming “but its not on the gun so it doesn’t count!”.

That entire linked blog post could be completely undermined by adding the word “part” to the initial letter.

The thing is, if 3D printed guns were a significant problem (and not primarily just an excuse to do nothing about failing gun laws), your situation would still be a massive improvement.

Domestic terrorism is planned. At some point, every mass shooter has thought about how they could kill the most people, with the least effort and lowest chance of failure.

And of course when they can walk into a gun store and buy cheap, semi-automatic weapons on a whim – even with a long history of red flags – that’s exactly what they do.

Sure, maybe they could kill more people with a bomb. But they’d have to learn how to build one, then actually build it without being caught or blowing their hands off. On top of all of that, there’s no for-profit death cult for explosives so many of the most effective tools will bring men in suits to your door.

The reality is if they had to buy, build and tune a Voron, then print a gun, then clean up the spaghetti and print another gun, then test the gun wouldn’t explode in their hands many of them simply would just try and stab people instead (or better yet, just do their suicide without taking innocent people with them).

Means reductions has been proven to reduce suicide rates. Mass shootings are a form of suicide.

This proposal is just an awkward attempt to address an issue early, because they can do so without the gun lobby sicking their lawyers and reactionaries on them, who are the ones pushing "Why bother with gun control when you can just 3D print full auto weapons?“ in the first place.

What a shame that would be