Careful. This sounds a lot like encouraging people to take personal responsibility of their consumption habits. That’s literally fascism. We need government regulation to stop us from doing things, that’s freedom.
Someone might throw the Mr. Gotcha meme at you.
It’s people not being educated anymore to tolerate divergence of opinions and, a lot more worryingly imho, not being able, because of that lack of proper education, to listen to nuanced thoughts and ideas and to be able to understand that we can disagree without having to hate on one another.
What’s most worrying to me is that people don’t even know why they AGREE with the opinions they agree with. For example, most people would agree that bigotry is bad (which it is), but they don’t know how to argue about it.
They’ve got the moral instinct, sure, but zero intellectual grounding. And that’s a problem. Because when people don’t understand why something is wrong, they’re just one propaganda push away from accepting a new definition of “bigotry” that serves whoever’s in power.
We’re seeing it happen in real time. People repeat opinions like they’re reciting scripture - no thought, no critique, just blind agreement. And now, even asking people to think critically about why bigotry is wrong is seen as suspect. It’s an immediate failure of purity testing. You’re not supposed to arrive to the conclusion that bigotry is bad by thinking for yourself, you are just supposed to keep repeating the correct slogans. That’s not just lazy, it’s anti-intellectualism, the exact kind of mental rot that populism and fascism thrive on. That’s exactly the kind of bullshit that got USA in the state it is right now.
I have literally been called a fascist for telling people to think for themselves.
I actually did scroll past that.
You are the problem, and so are the people who upvoted you without at looking for themselves at all.
My point is that we can’t rely on parental oversight only because some plain won’t… and in your case, even actively trying may fail (it’s not your fault). And there’s always going to be loopholes in every system. Clever kids will get by most verifications, and if they don’t, that’s likely to mean the verification gets too invasive to be worth it. The best, though not perfect system is to have parental oversight + impartial verification + platform responsibility. This will reduce but not eradicate the problem.
Great idea, let’s get parents to raise their kids.
Now, how do we suddenly make them actually do that? Last I checked this idea has been around about as long as people have been around but it’s still not happening.
Parenting matters, but it’s not the only layer of protection. We don’t rely solely on parents to keep kids from walking into bars or buying cigarettes, we have laws and systems to back them up. Why should the internet be different?
Despite our current parliament sucking ass, I still have some general trust in my country’s government (and culture). So with that in mind:
Our government bodies already have my basic data. Healthcare, census etc. and we use our online banking services to verify identity when accessing the data. It’s simple, and extremely widely used. I really don’t see why it would be so hard to make a relatively simple service that just gives sites that need to know a yes or no answer on if I’m over 18. They don’t need to know my birth date or any other information.
Not let a government or age verification authority know whenever a user is accessing 18+ content
This should be possible but of course the question is if one trusts the government to actually uphold this. Again, with my background, it’s a bit easier for me to speak.
Make it difficult or impossible for a child to fake a proof of adulthood, eg. By downloading an already verified anonymous signing key shared by an adult, etc.
You’ll never patch all the holes. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. In a perfect world, parents would actually parent their kids and monitor their internet use. Access to adult content doesn’t even come close to being the biggest problem in many cases where some kids parents are fucking up their duties. Drugs, gangs, petty (and not so petty) crime comes to mind. Collective responsibility would be great but since we don’t live in a perfect world where everyone can just agree to a good idea like “take responsibility of your kids”, I’ll settle for trusting a democratic government to have some capacity to pick up those that fall.
I happen to agree with age verification laws. This is a tangent but I would also go a step further in saying that MAINSTREAM internet should not be possible to use without verifying that the user is a real individual person. This would be another yes/no question via a service. Outwardly they don’t have to reveal their identity but even JizzMcCumsocks needs to have a backend verification as a real person. Basically, if any government member uses some service with their own name and has a verification about that, that service must also have a way of verifying that any user is a real person. We have given Xitter way too much power and at the same time, allowed anonymity. Meta services too of course but I think Xitter is one of the worst due to easy and straight forward use. Humanity has shown that we are not equipped to handle the kind of (mis)information flow there is in these spaces. Spaces such as Lemmy can and should operate in full anonymity, as there are natural barriers to entry here, plus it’s less appealing when it’s not even really intended for the kind of use mainstream social media sites are. Here we have a collective and individual responsibility to account for the anonymity and the challenges it brings.
You realize the OP is doing a melodramatic bit, right? It’s funny, at least to me.
You say that they are full of false assumptions but your arguments against them hinge on the assumption that they have been asking for banning for words. Can you point to a single instance where he says this?
Dude.
You are literally arguing for the right to be mean to others without consequences.
If they don’t have meaningful power, then neither do people who would abuse any space they’re in, rendering moderating wholly pointless. But people sure don’t like that idea.
I don’t think OP is suggesting we sympathize with the ideology or the harm it causes. There is a vital distinction between empathy as an alignment and empathy as a diagnostic tool.
Understanding the cognitive or mental health mechanics that lead to radicalization isn’t about giving someone a ‘pass.’ It’s about having the clarity to see the situation for what it is. If we don’t understand the ‘why’ behind how people are manipulated, we can’t effectively dismantle the systems that recruit them.
True compassion in a political sense isn’t about being ‘nice’ to someone spouting hate; it’s about having the clarity to address the root cause of the behavior rather than just reacting to the symptoms with more hate. It’s possible to hold a boundary against someone’s actions while still being mindful of the human vulnerabilities that landed them there.
The fact that they still exist in an authoritarian system hardly argues in favor of them.
No hard feelings :)
Not sure what theme you’re using but at least for me the default one makes it a bit hard to separate replies. I still like it most of all for just lurking.
You’re making quite a lot of frankly weird assumptions.
Find a single line from me where I’m saying that people who don’t engage in rational discourse shouldn’t be kicked out.
In fact, have a honest think. How much of your response is based on a knee jerk reaction instead of actually looking at what I’ve been saying in this thread?
I think it’s fine to look at general biological markers and categorize people for healthcare reasons. Most of the time being in the ballpark works for most people. Maybe in the future we can have some full body scan thing that picks up the optimal healthcare setup for each individual but in the meanwhile, we’ll go with what we got.
But that doesn’t have to have shit to do with their internal experience of themselves, or how the social environment should react to them. And I reiterate: “most people”. Meaning there’s going to be outliers and that’s okay, and they’ll need more individualized care. Being abnormal is normal.
Start building what works now, where you are.
Every reform you like started as people organizing. The second the state touches it, it turns care into control. Prisons, cops, “rehab”, all began as community ideas. Now they’re cages.
Anarchy isn’t “no system.” It’s systems we control. Local, adaptable, replaceable. The state just standardizes failure.
You personally don’t have to. Always plenty of people out there willing to do it for you.
You mean the direct quote of Popper that you yourself referred to? You didn’t read the very piece of text you told me to read?
Then be clear about the rules. I have 0 problems with people creating communities with very clear rules on what is allowed and what isn’t. I wholeheartedly welcome that. What I take issue with is when people claim to have open discussion, or the space is for “rational discourse”, or “anarchist” discourse etc. but then ban everything that doesn’t very exactly align with the mod ideology.
If most people waving the anarchist flag would admit they’re just doing it because it’s cool but actually, they just want to be the authoritarians in place of the authoritarians, that would be fine. I’d happily avoid them. Problem is that when they don’t admit it, they drag down the whole anarchist ideology because they are misrepresenting it.
Some people really can’t detect sarcasm without the /s, huh.