>"Surely if the case for the damage caused by smoking / drugs / climate change / platforms were to be made clearly and undeniable, people would not need to be told to stop using it, They just would."

Smoking - undeniable, but addictive. Yet despite the difficulty in quitting, smoking is in decline. Many smokers have tried to quit. They don't need more hectoring, they need support.

Climate Change - Broad consensus is not the same as undeniable. Rapidly becoming undeniable. Change is happening, belatedly, and perhaps too late, but it is occurring.

Drugs - Far too broad a category to be undeniable in practically any aspect. Definitely disagreement on the correct course of action on every aspect.

Platforms - even more nebulous. Harms are alleged for many platforms but those claims are still a long way from being undeniable, yet the exodus from certain platforms would suggest that people leave when they feel the need.

>And at some point, it just becomes tiresome to always have to debate this, you know ?

Forcing your will on others because getting them to agree with you has become tiresome, does not seem to me, to be a productive way to change minds.

> (How long can you can keep debating with people who think that aspects of fascism / Putin's behavior is good ?)

As long as it takes, with reason, information, and compassion.

>Anyway, I will keep publicly shaming the kind of developer scum who in 2025 still uses the likes of GitHub / Discord / LinkedIn, and doesn't even have the decency to admit there might be something problematic with them.

I struggle to see the difference between shaming and bullying. Declaring people to be scum because they use a service you have a problem with just alienates them. When you have provided a list of services that includes so many people you declare to be scum. You have done even more than that. You have alienated yourself.

I would like to think that I stand on my principles. I have never had a FaceBook or LinkedIn account. I do not, however, vilify those who make different decisions from myself.

An odd aspect of much of this how I have always thought of myself as a very left-wing person, yet I found myself increasingly distant from people proclaiming themselves to be left-wing. The principles I value that leads to me to feel left wing are compassion, inclusion, freedom, and support. I can't reconcile those values with people who declare themselves to be lefties to seem to be so opposed to them.

Recently someone posted a George Orwell quote on HN.

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

Now it seems a lot of people do their bullying in the name of fighting Fascism while seeing Fascism in the myriad forms of things theey disagree with.

One of the characteristics that led Steve Rogers to be selected for Captain America was his answer to the question

"Do you want to kill Nazis?"

His response,

"I don't want to kill anyone, but I don't like bullies; I don't care where they're from."

The writer of those lines had a message about what it meant to be a good person.

Please have compassion. Instead of calling-out or publicly shaming, have a one-on-one conversation, listen and understand their position, explain your own.