So, I think it’s pretty stupid to argue whether “convicted felon” should be in his opening lede line for Wikipedia.

True though that may be, I don’t think it’s surprising that this would happen, and since making the post I have been falling down a rabbit hole of finding out how Wikipedia is handling situations like this, partly through taking more than a glancing look at the talk pages for the first time ever, and it’s fascinating.

Currently my deepest point of descent is this sub-thread on the Admin board about the “consensus” boxes on top of talk pages being an undocumented and unapproved feature.

Just highlighting the propaganda for those unfamiliar with it. Seemed à propos.

Agreed. And the (probably unintended) irony is that the Berlin Wall was ostensibly built in order to keep the capitalists out. Be careful what you wish for, especially when it’s a wall. They work both ways.

pandoc.org is probably what you are looking for, but you might have to create a custom reader/writer or find one on the internet.

I sometimes forget that this picture exists, and then I happen upon it in places like here and it just smacks me in the face how perfectly it encapsulates the total and utter loss of decorum in politics. I mean it was never perfect obviously, but in past times there was a somewhat reasonable expectation of politicians being civil and them losing their office if they were publicly caught out not to be. It was rare, but it happened. Yet here you have the supposedly “most powerful man in the world” just dropping every pretence and hustling for some company in a flagrant abuse of his office. It’s so brazenly corrupt. And the worst thing is this was just another Tuesday for Trump, mild shit-storm, on to the next fucked up thing he did. Society never even had time to realise what a historic moment this was. It was just dropped on the pile.

Nah, this one was a direct link on purpose. But the edit box swallowed the @lemmy.ca part at the end due to trying user name auto-completion, so thanks for making me re-read the post. Good bot!

Ah with that link it’s easy to track down what happened.

First you go to the community on the server in question: https://lemmy.world/c/alberta@lemmy.ca

Then you click on Modlog in the sidebar: https://lemmy.world/modlog/3835

And since there is pretty much nothing in it we immediately see the entry for your post saying:

reason: Deceptive content. Calling to abuse government system.

Note that when you compare your servers Modlog that entry is missing there, so yes, only removed for people connecting through lemmy.world.

Not sure how appeals work there, you can probably reply to the account that notified you, or go to the !support@lemmy.world community.

deleted by creator

Minors can and have used more or less most of the internet safely. What is most of the internet? Services like Omegle or Chaturbate or Stripchat surely are not on it.

Well that claim is a bit arbitrary IMHO. For one I don’t see a reason to exclude those services you mentioned from being part of “most of the internet”. On the contrary, from what I see all of them are clearnet services, accessible to the public, so this extraordinary claim would need some evidence toward it I would say. Secondly the latter two are explicitly pornographic in nature, so I don’t really see the relevance towards the point of children being harmed by accessing them; They shouldn’t be there in the first place. There is of course a valid discussion about moderation to be had if they are used to distribute CSAM, but that seems orthogonal to the question of parental oversight of minors internet use.

Minors have used social media all this while, and other than what Facebook/Instagram on behest of US capitalist machinery has done to minors, […] most services do not abuse human psychology to this degree.

Again, only according to your arbitrary definition of what “most services” are. Basically all of social media is doing attention hacking, large swaths of of the gaming industry intentionally abuse dopamine cycles to sell worthless “digital goods”, the www is full of dark patterns in large part fuelled by advertisement delivery. I mean Meta is indubitably a front runner in the race of surveillance capitalism, but isn’t that an argument in favour of Omegle in the context of this discussion? Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are much more certainly than Omegle a part of “most of the internet” after all, however you define that, and they are a clear and present danger to children.

However, children’s minds are highly neuroplastic until adulthood, and a lot of the internet is damaging to the psyche of children, which is an entirely different discussion. If that seems like flipflopping, it is because internet safety has various degrees to it and the definition of safety varies from healthy usage to consumerism to addiction to gray area to developing deviant persona and even illegal uses.

I don’t think it is a different discussion at all, rather it’s exactly the crux of the issue. The psyche of children is vulnerable; How do we best protect it and who is in the best position to effectively do so?

It is fairly known how peer pressure wins over parental control on minor access to internet, so the “parent’s duty” argument is very flaky and invalid. Education on things rest of the society is freely using is not very conducive to children at the age of puberty (12-16), and 18 is supposedly the adult age.

It might not be a definitive argument, but certainly not invalid. A parent is chiefly responsible for the safety, education, and behaviour of their children in basically all other areas of life. This responsibility doesn’t go away because the neighbours kids peer pressured them into throwing stones through a window or drinking alcohol. Why should access to the internet be any different?

So is the argument now going to be letting kids do whatever they want by the time they are 18?

Well yes, but within the confines of legality obviously. That’s literally the status quo in most jurisdictions, isn’t it?!

Or will this be decided upon a combination of evaluation of mental age using tests related to Asperger’s, neurodivergence, ADHD and so on? How frequently will these tests be taken by kids?

Gee I hope not. That sounds like the abyss below the slippery slope. But I don’t think anybody argued for that.

Will there be exposure of the child to concepts like “absolute American freedom” and various forms of consumerism? Because that is what the child will get exposed to, as soon as he/she meets people outside home, or goes to the market with parents.

Again, I don’t see the relevance to the Omegle situation. This is just life, the world is a dangerous place and while society can help by creating laws and such in the end the ones in the best position to safeguard their children according to their own world view will be the parents. Of course that is a duty in which every individual parent will inevitably fail by some metric, but so will society. Case in point, many children will be exposed to “absolute American freedom and various forms of consumerism” inside their own homes already, so if that’s your metric as a parent the only one who could ever protect a child from that is you, by preparing them for their inevitable confrontation with those concepts and hoping they take that lesson to heart.

Their argument comes off as distasteful, even though a whole decade of video streaming exists as proof of Omegle being a key mainstream hub for minor sexual abuse content, with no kinds of methods used by the evasive service owner to combat it. Read the link I supplied in above comments regarding that.

Yeah you claimed variously that it is a key part of Omegle “content”, for which I don’t see much corroborating evidence in the links you provided. Both the BBC story and the NCOSE piece seem to reference the same case of an 11 year old girl using the service unsupervised.

Which leads me to why I’m taking issue with the statement of Omegle having content. It doesn’t in the sense most people would understand that. It revolves around having a conversation with an absolute stranger, and either side of this conversation can record it or publish it. There is no content here unless one participant creates it and distributes it elsewhere than Omegle, or takes other content and distributes it on Omegle. Everything on Omegle is content in the same sense as a phone call is content, to which I would argue it isn’t, at least not inherently. It’s an ephemeral conversation unless a participant records it.

It might be content in the sense argued by the law and the court in the “A.M Vs Omegle” case, but that apparently ended in the motion to dismiss being partly granted and partly denied, which to me as a layperson sounds like a win for Omegle, at least temporarily.

Furthermore you say Omegle and Brooks didn’t do anything against the abuse, but this is in direct contradiction to what Brooks claims in the message in the OP:

Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.

And this is all besides the point that giving an 11 year old unsupervised access to Omegle is kind of the same as letting them out into the shady part of town to talk to random strangers (when you ignore the added risk of physical harm there of course). That’s what the website was principally about, meeting random strangers. And if a parent were to let their child do that unsupervised in offline life we would put at least part of the blame for any harm on them.

The internet wasn’t designed with the safety of children in mind, in fact not with anybodies safety in mind. Saying that it should be is an opinion, but in any case not the current reality. That leaves the majority of responsibility for the safety of children on the parents. And there is a bunch of things they can do, like not giving them networked devices in the first place, or restricting network access with whitelists, or educating them before the parents or others do give access. Yes, this parental control breaks down in social settings, but that is the case for a lot of different aspects of life and I don’t see how purging everything dangerous for children from the public internet is either a possible or even a desirable solution to this problem.

Take for example what you and the NCOSE argued for, age verification. The state of the art for that on many explicitly pornographic services is a simple dialogue asking if the user is of legal age in their jurisdiction. The infrastructure to do otherwise, which would require a governmentally issued digital ID of some kind, doesn’t exist in most countries let alone globally. Never mind the implications this would have for user privacy. Some services use a certain identifier so that their service can be automatically filtered, but that again leaves the parents with the responsibility to set up and maintain said filter. And in the end there will not be a way around that at all, unless you purposely rebuild the internet with a level of control it simply is not engineered to provide currently.

You should be able to see clearly that I am quite interested in such discussions without the moderator part.

Well the one who brought that into the discussion was you. Not to diminish your efforts, but I stand by what I said on the matter earlier.

Minors can use most of the internet safely.

I beg to differ. Minors can’t safely use the internet at all, it’s the internet. Every depth of the human psyche is mirrored onto it, and frankly any guardian letting a child onto it without at the minimum strong primers on its dangers is derilict of their duty. Which might have been excusable 20-30 years ago when everybody was confused about what the internet even is, but not so much in 2023.

If you make another deranged argument like that, you will get the banhammer.

Just for clarity, I’m not the person you said this to, but I think if you are out here threatening people with bans over a rhetorical question, you might want to take a break. Nevermind the disconnect between you saying you haven’t used it at all but purpoting to know exactly what kind of “content” was on it these last years, when it didn’t even really have content in the usual sense of the word.

Well sorry. No offence intended.

I think you misunderstand. The way Wikipedia uses the word is the original usage, so only funny if you don’t know about it. Applying it to bar fights and such is the tongue-in-cheek usage.

From Latin belligerans (“waging war”), present active participle of belligerō (“I wage war”), from belliger (“waging war, warlike”), from bellum (“war”) + -ger (from gerō (“I lead, wage, carry on”)).

This is literal fake news. Climate change is certainly a thing. Flowers blooming in Antarctica currently is not.

Uhm, your own source says differently though?

While a 2022 study did find a global warming-related expansion in the range of two Antarctic flowering plants, the photo does not show those plant species.

Okay, thoughtful argument but still…

Well thanks, however this compliment seems a bit like a poisoned chalice considering the rest of your replies.

Who gets to decide when to use violence then? For what reason? When is it okay and when is it not? What is the line?

We have been through this, the line is that it has to be a last resort. FYI, this concept is literally enshrined in our constitution:

Article 20
[…]
(4) All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order if no other remedy is available.

You say it’s okay when people have opinions that you disagree with. Granted, those options are really very shitty opinions, but they’re that: opinions. This person you’ll be punching hasn’t hit you, hasn’t attacked you. He said or displayed things you don’t like.

No, I say it’s okay when people have opinions that are a clear and present danger to a tolerant society. Again, we have been over this, it’s know as the paradox of tolerance. What these people do is attack civil society by abusing its rules, and you seem to propose we let them without keeping violence as a last resort, except for immediate self-defence of your person. Saying for example that all Jews or Muslims should be killed or that refugees deserve no asylum is technically an opinion, but it is also an attack on human rights and civil society. And you should stand up to that, if you deem it necessary with violence.

And yes, answering intolerance with intolerance seems like circular logic, because it is. That’s why it’s called a paradox. But IMHO you should consider that we are talking about something where our language, also a system of circular logic by the way, breaks down.

So where is the line? You can punch him if he displays a swastika?

Well this one is easy in Germany at least, because it’s literally illegal. I’ll report them to police and they will get up to three years in prison for it pursuant to § 86a of the criminal code (display of anti-constitutional symbols).

How about me displayjng a swastika, you punch me and oops, it’s a religious symbol from India…

Those are usually turned the other way and not displayed at a 45° angle. Nazi iconography is in most cases clearly distinguishable from Hindu and Shinto iconography, and if it’s not you can ask first. I will say however that when you claim to display an Asian religious symbol while being white, having a shaved head, wearing a bomber jacket and jump boots, I’m not inclined to believe you.

Doesn’t matter for my locale though, people here usually chose to just not display it outside of temples to avoid this obvious misunderstanding.

Who gets to decide who to punch? WHO?

The one doing the punching. If it was justified will be decided by the courts, as you said. And yeah, unless you have a very good reason you will probably be convicted of assault, since the state claims a monopoly on violence. However some would argue, including me, that sometimes the only way to defend the existence of civil society lies outside its rules. It’s called civil disobedience.

Nazi’s exist as much as roman legionaries exist. The Roman Empire is gone and so is Nazi Germany. That somebody would love to be one is a different thing. I’d love to be a samurai but those too no longer exists. Slapping a label on it doesn’t change that. I can dress up and play one but that’s not the same. There are neo-Nazi’s out there for sure, wannabees. There are no Nazi’s.

Yeah ok, first off the time frame and circumstances are a little different here. The Roman Empire and the samurai caste have been gone a bit longer than Nazi Germany. Every single member of those organisations is long dead. This is not the case for Nazis, and they had ample opportunity to pass on their ideology to later generations, which they did. There aren’t, to my knowledge, any large groups of people self-identifying as Roman legionaries or samurai, except for LARPing purposes. There are however a lot of them seriously self-identifying as Nazis. I don’t see what you or I would gain by denying that they are.

Secondly, to classify them as neo-Nazis instead of actual Nazis, and maintaining that there is a relevant difference in that regarding their level of intolerance towards other groups is bonkers. In context, i.e. whether they present a clear and present danger to civil society, it’s a distinction without a difference. And if you want to hold on to this ridiculous premise this entire discussion is kind of pointless.

You seem to be of the persuasion that liberal democracies aren’t endangered by fascism or other forms of totalitarianism anymore, I fail to see why that would be the case. On the contrary, history teaches us that this is a constant danger. There is a reason the principle of defensive democracy was made into law by a lot of nations after the second world war.

Stop with the dumb slogans. Everybody knows that Nazi’s were bad and “punch a Nazi” only leads to assholes calling others they don’t like Nazi’s.

It also leads to Nazis being punched. I don’t think we will reach agreement on this, so thanks for the - mostly - respectful discussion. At the risk of being accused of using dumb slogans again, I’ll leave you with a quote from a German pastor who was put into the concentration camps for his believes:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
— Martin Niemöller

Nur zur Info, du kannst auf Lemmy Bilder direkt einbinden mit folgender Markdown-Syntax:

![Alternativtext für Screenreader und so](https://link.zum/bild.jpg)

Man beachte das ! vorne vor dem [](), sonst wird es nur als Link mit Text statt Adresse angezeigt.

Recognising sarcasm depends a lot on tone of voice in spoken conversations, thus a tradition in internet discussions has developed to put a /s behind the statement that is intended to be sarcasm. The slash is in imitation of closing HTML tags, i.e. it is to be read as “end of sarcasm”. Putting it behind instead of before the sarcasm grants the added benefit of many people still falling for it at first.

I agree that attempts at enlightenment should always be the default option. Not least because of the passage I purposely quoted along, that separating first and second degree of intolerance is an intractable problem.

I get your point that being called a Nazi while you are not isn’t fun. This rhetorical move is known as a “Totschlagargument” in Germany by the way (literally translated: manslaughter argument, i.e. it kills discussion). Maybe don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater though, and keep your only way of effectively resisting against them, abhorrent though it may be.

Case in point…

the vast majority of them are just followers going with shit they got from Facebook, some personal bad experiences, shit they learned from their parents, etc. It’s not easy to talk with them, make them understand that hey have warped view of the world

These sentences are literally applicable to historical Nazis, just replace Facebook with pamphlets and radio. And this is the sense in which I mean that their ideology is far from dead, there are plenty of people that espouse fascism in general or Nazism (as in national socialism) specifically today. They all have their subjective reasons and none of them matter in the end, because their conclusion is fascism, an inherently inhumane ideology.

make them understand that hey have warped view of the world, but if at the end of the conversation they see even a tiny about of light, it was worth it.

So what if they don’t, if they remain blind in the face of the light that is humanism? If they remain intolerant even after being confronted with the error of their ways? I’d argue, and you would seem to agree, that violence is the only real option left in that case, because the other option is surrendering society to them and their misguided ideology. These people can vote, Hitler was elected by people such as this. Some of them are in positions of power right now.

So to extend your conclusion: Violence is bad, but it is also necessary sometimes. As a last resort, yes, but still.

Veering off to what you said earlier and expanded on in a sibling comment:

Nazi’s don’t exist. They haven’t existed for about 80 years now. What do exist are people with varying degrees of being a racist cunt.

Sorry, but this is just wrong. Denazification in Germany stopped pretty much with the upper echelons being brought to justice in the Nuremberg trials. Both German states had a metric shit-ton of actual Nazi war criminals in their administration, because they needed administrators due to the cold war shifting geopolitical priorities, and they had to use the ones available. There was a criminal trial against a former concentration camp secretary happening last year (because there is no statute of limitations on genocide, she was 17 at the time apparently), although given her age and health it might indeed have been the last one of those. But over the decades the career of quite a lot of high-ranking German officials stumbled upon their past as Nazis, on either side of the iron curtain. They weren’t magically exterminated on victory day, quite the opposite actually, many found their way into the power structures of the victors, sometimes poisoning them from within.

And there are literal Nazis in the current generations too, here in Germany as well as abroad. People who espouse Mein Kampf and all that kind of shit. Who say Hitler was right. Granted, the general movement mostly mutated into a white supremacy idea rather than the “Arian” (i.e. German) people being the master race, so maybe not all of them are Nazis in the strictest sense of the word, “Nazi Classic” if you will; But the ideology is there, it’s fascist, and many of them worship actual fucking Nazis and follow their ideals.

And while all of those people already deserve to be fucking punched just by virtue of being whatever somewhat coherent definition of Nazi you may apply, for many of them it’s also the only recourse you have, because words will simply not convince them.

So in conclusion “punch a Nazi” is a valid statement of political discourse in my opinion, as long as it uses an appropriate definition of what a Nazi is (i.e. a fascist, racist, national socialist, etc. pp.). Notwithstanding the fact that you were apparently mislabelled as one in some online discussion.

This person was just as intolerant as a Nazi themselves and didn’t even realize it.

No they weren’t, this is what Popper defines as intolerance of the second degree. Taken from the German wiki page because this aspect is better explained there than in the English version (translated with deepl):

In intolerant people, Popper distinguished two categories:

1. intolerance of the first degree: intolerant of a person’s customs because they are foreign.

2. intolerance of the second degree: intolerant of a person’s customs because they are intolerant and dangerous.

Popper therefore rejected universal tolerance:

“Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unrestricted tolerance leads with necessity to the disappearance of tolerance. For if we extend unrestricted tolerance even to the intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant social order against the onslaughts of intolerance, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them.”

However, since we as human beings are not capable of knowing the true motives of our counterparts, a fundamental, unsolvable problem now arises: It is difficult for an outsider to distinguish whether a person who expresses intolerance belongs to the first or second degree.

In other words the intolerance against Nazis is justified because they are the ones being intolerant in the first place, and sometimes this is the only way to fight them on that.

I’ll grant that this is disregarding your premise of Nazis not existing, but to be quite honest if I may, that’s a pretty stupid premise. The Nazis did exist, they were the poster child for intolerance of the first degree, and their ideology is far from being as dead as they are.

Well the problem with defeatism is that it’s a self-fullfilling prophecy. If you believe everything is lost you will not try to enact change.

Now I acknowledged already that it might well be too late, but I also maintain that there isn’t enough certainty in that prediction to base your actions around it.

So the reason to not be defeatist is twofold. There might be a chance to reverse or at least lessen the impact of climate change, and by being defeatist you are robbing yourself and future generations off that chance.

Well not with that attitude. Defeatisms doesn’t become you my friend.