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.

Jehovah is a Lovecraftian monster with strong PR.

“You don’t understand. This guy, pardon my French, goodness gracious. He whipped my ass like a money-changer. I’d be getting side-eye from every motherfucker in the eighth circle. You’d think I put them far enough from the gossips! You’d think!”

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.

Hilarious, after the tortuously long road Xenia took to get there.

30-year copyright, no exception.

Dead people don’t need incentives.

Jesus Christ, the usability nightmare of this website is worse than the goofy animated GIF they think is an exaggeration.

www.wired.com##.sticky-box to get rid of the autoplaying video go fuck yourselves, www.wired.com##.journey-unit__container to get rid of the assorted gigantic flyover bullshit.

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.