The paradox of tolerance needs to be required reading.

I can agree with limiting moderation to the topic of the community, as suggested. This actually over time has a de-radicalizing effect, as the Nazi gardener gets tips from a Jewish Pumpkin farmer… Etc. As they say do not let them expouse their politics, and there is merit to this point.

But not all things are alike. The issue with calling someone online a “removed” isn’t that we’ve become softer, it’s that people with mental illness and mental handicap took offense to their name being pejorative.

And saying “all ideas are equal” is the way you get overrun by bad actors. Every forum ever can tell you. No, nazism is not something we will entertain debate on, because it’s not a topic for debate. It’s a mantra of hatred, and any “debate” in an impersonal online forum only serves as a platform to spread fallacies and racism. Forming actual community bonds in other areas, or in person, may de-radicalize a Nazi, but debating them never will. It will only loudly spread their claims to new listeners.

With that, I believe that every human’s opinion is valuable and important, and most crucially, equal. There is no point in having some people’s opinions be more important than others. That is the essence of discrimination.

Hahaha, nooo. People can actively disqualify themselves from having a worthwhile opinion. Discrimination is treating them as a priori irrelevant - or writing them off entirely, forever. But we can identify some known motherfuckers. They don’t automatically deserve equal time.

Respect can mean deference to authority and respect can mean extending basic courtesy. Both forms can be lost. All people are born equal in dignity and rights, but a lot of shit happens after that. People can do and say things so awful, we will take most of their money, or put them in a concrete room for a significant fraction of their life. No shit we can mark some opinions as less valid than others.

Whether the shift from everyone being fine with being called names to a place where you’re gonna get “cancelled” when you say a bad word you didn’t even know was bad is positive, I am not going to judge.

Okay, this guy’s just a dolt.

I am obviously not shy about casual vulgarity and blunt labels - but intolerable directed abuse has always permeated the internet. Just acknowledging that women use computers has been a running sexist joke since the Usenet era. To say nothing of homophobia, even as gay communities emerged and thrived.

“Winding people up” or “giving them a hard time” has always been two-thirds bad-faith time-wasting horseshit, and one-third actual emotional violence that causes real-life harm. You don’t get to pretend that’s not real when it’s the core of your fucking blog post. Having to bicker about whether you’re a fascist is almost necessarily less damaging than bickering about what someone meant when they called you a long-established slur.

Harassment and bullying and trolling are all variations on the same asshole behavior that makes real people fucking miserable so you can feel smug. That tribalist chest-beating garbage emerges everywhere humans interact. Nothing warms my blackened heart quite like knowing “cancel culture” scares the shit out of those people. Consequences! For your actions! Imagine that!

Yeah yeah yeah, vigilante justice gets overdone and guilt by association is garbage and blah blah blah. Everything good can be abused in bad faith. All efforts against that chest-beating tribal conservatism must strenuously guard against being used to create new competing hierarchy. God knows the fascists are parroting that rhetoric (as they always fucking do) to pull of the same old bigoted harrassment. But the louder those monsters make grandiose complaints, or squeal ‘this just proves me right!,’ the more I know that we found a way to hurt them. Nothing else will make them change.

Growing up in the internet of mostly the 2010s,

The spaces you hung out in were run by suburban assholes who imagined they were the default and anyone different was wrong. That straight / cis / male / WASP monoculture did not mind throwing around bigoted insults because it was the background radiation that chased off everyone else. And - you were a child. Normalcy is whatever you’re used to. Your 2010s-era childhood is where my millennial ass would point to horrifying trends becoming unmistakable. And any proper greybeard would know my AOL-era childhood internet had white supremacists too cocksure to bother disguising themselves.

You think stuff was everywhere because you had no experience, and once you learn it’s not everywhere, you insist it must have changed.

I definitely am not a fan of how seemingly weak people online, especially teenagers, have become.

Nevermind, I’m downgrading this person from dolt to asshole. Motherfucker grew up on the mean streets of 4chan and thinks that can’t possibly be what toxicity is like, because the frog cartoons said politics come from other people. Maybe they’re fine on all their private political beliefs. Don’t know. Don’t care. If your attitude toward people trying to make the internet less hostile is to call them weak and decadent and an existential threat (why’s my dog barking?) then blaming ‘kids these days’ isn’t even the dumbest part.

Congratulations on your built-different childhood.

Now grow up.

Whether the shift from everyone being fine with being called names to a place where you’re gonna get “cancelled” when you say a bad word you didn’t even know was bad is positive, I am not going to judge. I definitely will say it made the internet… different.

“I can’t be a bigot with zero consequences anymore, and that makes me sad.”

I haven’t seen that “all opinions are equally valid” take since, what, 2012? Wow