Dismissive dickwad behavior is good, actually - if you’re dismissing Nazis. Or anyone else who deserves a blunt rejection. It is fine and valid to deny people civility, when their rhetoric is inherently abusive. Respect and patience have limits.

Swearing at people absofuckinglutely has its place in online discourse. If not for the assholes themselves - then for the people they’re trying to fool.

Anyway.

Discworld has a few parallel threads. Release order starts with The Colour Of Magic, which is fun and short, but not exactly top-notch material. See explanatory flowchart. Those first few novels have a real Season One vibe.

The traditional introduction seems to be whichever book catches your eye. Or whichever you happened to find first, if you’d heard good things about the series. That’s how I wound up reading Ringworld by Larry Niven, because cultivating your interests in the 90s was a much fuzzier experience.

Apropos of little - how long ago did Sean Hannity say he’d get waterboarded?

Good old ethical Microsoft.

Honestly I miss reddit circa 2015. Obviously before The Idiot and half the world lurching toward fascism - but also back when “fuck off, Nazi” was treated better than being a goddamn Nazi.

The proliferation of “civility” is poisonous to online discourse. It is always the wrong metric. Trolls love being polite monsters. r/Politics even went a step further and demanded all opinions be taken in good faith. Do those idiots know what trolling is? Do they not understand bad faith… as a concept? It only works because people mistake it for good faith. Demanding everyone do that is a gift to trolls.

Moderation requires common-sense identification of who’s being an asshole. It’s never about no-no words. If a script could handle the job, we would let it.

Lemmy has far too many communities with rules going ‘never be rude to anyone ever!!!’ and then zero enforcement when someone calls you a cunt for gently correcting their grammar. That is the worst of both worlds. Anyone sincerely trying is going to hold back from just dealing with assholes appropriately, like an adult, but those people are then left with no recourse against pointlessly toxic shitheads. I don’t want a screaming match. I want words to matter.

Also if you enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett has a similar deep snark. Discworld’s a whole mess of books but you can kinda jump in anywhere. I recommend Guards! Guards! or Going Postal. He did Good Omens with baby Neal Gaiman, and they’d write chapters separately, then throw out every joke they’d bought thought of.

It is a right bitch that the reason to leave is 100% the bastards in charge. The community was fine. (Okay, giant asterisks all over that, but you know what I mean. The community was not the cause for masses walking away with a sea of middle fingers lit by burning bridges.)

I’m not here because it’s better. I’m here because fuck Spez. And fuck enshittification. Fifteen years and these greedy incompetents made it impossible to come back without feeling like betrayal. The only reason I’m not deleting anything is that I don’t do that shit. Nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.

Elmo did us the favor of turning his stolen harassment engine into an all-stick-no-carrot experience in a fucking hurry.

Yeah this thread is 70% sad-sack life stories, 10% Sports Almanac financial advice, and 20% popping around the corner with a rainbow flag yelling SURPRISE!

You ain’t straight.

Fantastic. Gluing together Unicorn Engine and Wine has been on my to-do list for longer than I’d care to admit, so I’m thrilled someone else is tilting at this windmill.

30-year copyright, no exception.

Dead people don’t need incentives.

Blackwater, Facebook, Twitter.

They had.

Dull.

You forgot to say anything.

There are plainly websites where Simpsons porn is openly available. If it was as illegal as actual images of child abuse, I cannot imagine where you think they’re hosted. Secret wizards on the backside of the moon would still get raided by the FBI. In practice, that law’s inclusion of drawings is unenforceable nonsense, because - as I keep telling the idiot who I assure you I am still bickering with - drawings are not children.

Child rape is different from drawings.

Child rape is worse than drawings.

Any argument to the contrary, on any basis, no matter how dry, is kinda fucked up. Saying so, to him or to you, doesn’t mean I’ve engaged in some campaign to silence him, or prevent others from considering his position. It means I’ve judged his words on their merit and I expect he’s just an idiot.

I am not joking when I say this person has contradicted their own hair-splitting within one sentence. They will outright sneer as if I have imagined all claims of equivalence… in the same comment as insisting two wildly different problems are by-definition the same thing. Dude legitimately failed at argumentum ad nuh-uh. And I spotted this trajectory from the outset. Unless you feel I’ve tricked him into adopting this position, it was always right there in his mind, and that was in evidence.

At this point I’m legitimately worried about that guy failing Piaget metrics. Whatever diplomacy you want me to extend to people by default, it has been spent.

I don’t believe you’re physically capable of self-consistently stating what you think your point is. You’re somehow not equating these things you just said are defined as the same thing. You’re sneering as if noticing that definition - which you block-quoted - is some kind of delusion.

All while projecting emotion in a way that’s almost as ironic as your constant parroting of the phrase “reading comprehension.”

Is it difficult to use the internet without object permanence?

No possible definition of child sexual abuse can include drawings, no matter who writes it. That’s not what those words mean.

Drawings… aren’t children. It is literally that simple.

And if you think any of this is identically illegal to actual photos of child abuse - one, there’s a whole network of shamelessly public US-hosted sites for you to turn in and be a national hero, and two, you might be wholly incapable of remembering what you’re arguing. Whether you think these things are equivalent oscillates between letters.

What you’re asking for is what I’m very obviously doing, here. Again: “shutting someone out” does not mean the talking stops. I am almost pathologically inclined to continue bickering with someone, for the sake of a potential audience.

This ding-dong’s false equivalence is equally obvious. They’ve contradicted their contrary insistence within the same sentence as some of those insistences. Most recently they’ve blamed it on the laws where this study took place. Last I checked… Stanford is in California. American laws do not say diddly fuck about drawings of Bart Simpson’s dick. There’s public-facing sites where you could find one in a heartbeat. The FBI is not out a-hunting them. Their legal troubles will mostly come from the Walt Disney Corporation.

Not that any country’s laws could possibly make child… sexual abuse… materials… somehow include computer renderings of fictional characters.

If we want a polite and civil discourse, everyone needs to make an effort.

Why is that the highest goal?

The creeping demand for “civility” above all else is a detriment to conversational honesty. That doesn’t mean anything-goes. Screaming escalations and blatant trolling are not the same thing as identifying bullshit and saying ‘that’s bullshit.’ Saying so is not polite or civil, but surely it’s important. Rules saying otherwise have been a gift to bullshitters. Moderation never comes down hard and fast enough on their fallacies, abuse, and manipulation, compared to how mods pounce on direct call-outs. Even in language and tone that would scarcely raise eyebrows face-to-face. As if ‘do you still beat your wife’ is ambiguous, but ‘hey, get bent’ is inexcusable.

Long ago and far away, the point of reference was a cocktail party.

Most forums are not debate clubs, or kindergartens, or any other equivalent scenario where a quiet ‘what are you fucking talking about’ would get someone ejected. They’re indoor-voice banter. Constructive, ideally, and sober enough to side with well-spoken rationale over ingroup posturing… but somewhere that ‘here’s why you’re wrong, jackass’ will be judged on ‘why’ more than on ‘jackass.’

And sometimes the person you’re talking to is obviously drunk or stupid or both, but you can keep calmly telling them how they’re wrong about everything that comes out of their mouth. Debate is not what’s happening. Civility won’t help. But you can keep it reasonable, and frankly, that’s better.

“They’re up-front about the false equivalence,” says chronic clue-dodger.

No possible definition of child sexual abuse can include drawings.

Tell me otherwise in the same breath as insisting you’re not making that false equivalence. Apparently my patience is limitless when the lie is that fucking obvious.

edit: Hang on, the obvious lie disguised a stupid lie. What country do you think Stanford is in? Drawing Bart Simpson’s dick is not illegal in America. You could do it right now, in MS Paint, and e-mail it to the FBI, and they’d just formally tell you to go fuck yourself. Which would obviously not be the case with ACTUAL “child sexual abuse materials,” being evidence of abusing a flesh-and-blood child.

The guy here saying CSAM and drawings are the same keeps insisting he’s not saying that and then immediately saying it again. I’m still here calling him a stupid bastard. As often as he needs to hear it. Again: if you’re worried about the thread stopping, I am not your concern. But I’m not about to give dolts like that some undue fair shake, after the fifth time they sneer “reading comprehension!” in response to rubbing their nose in the inescapable meaning of the words they keep saying.

Sometimes you get assholes no matter what you say.

That’s not why I value blunt honesty, in some contexts, but it’s a counter to the most common criticism of blunt honesty. Bending over backwards to appease unreasonable people is worse to do and worse to read than someone barging in to accurately and lucidly call bullshit.