As a counter to your opening point - it certainly helped me. It made me feel safer and I had a sense of justice. Not saying it's the same for everyone or that it's necessarily a good thing but the punishment of the person committing the act helped me to move on.
I think GP might mean that as offense is completely subjective, it's better to let people define "hate speech" etc for themselves rather than having an agenda being pushed by a government or corporate entity.
Generally, you'll use flight levels until either you hit the transition level specified in the approach plate or ATC clears you beneath that level, at which point they'll switch to using feet and give you the QNH (atmospheric pressure at sea level) to calibrate your altimeter.