Full time smug prick
If you read Holocaust survivors memoirs you will learn many things.
During Operation Reinhard the killing centers were unthinkable and also veiled under strict secrecy. The information was so unbelievable that although there was early intelligence out of Chelmno for gassing vans, and later Slovak escapees published a document detailing the operation of Auschwitz-Birkenau II, it was met with disbelief and treated similar to a conspiracy theory. Wartime propaganda made this worse, by spreading so many rumors that people could not know what to believe.
The killing process was so barbaric that even prisoners who had witnessed it while doing other tasks in the camps, were in denial about it, as per their own memoirs. When Rogerie, member of French Resistance / primary witness against Holocaust Deniers, arrived in Auschwitz the first thing the French doctor told him was that the gassings were taking place, and he did not believe it until he saw with his own eyes. Even today are pretty foggy about what exactly happened in and around gas chambers.
The Nazi deception and subterfuge apparatus was so ubiquitous that in lots of cases people thought they were going to take showers. The killing centers were idyllic in appearance, and were made to the last detail to look like innocuous intermediary stops. Nobody escaped these places with the sole exception of the Sobibor uprising, and the Slovak Birkenau escapees. Churchill only came to know about the gassings around the time of the Nazi negotiations with Hungary about deporting Hungarian Jews to Birkenau, which was later in the war. The Sonderkommando photographs were taken during the cremation of the bodies of Hungarian Jews. Those three sources were the only hard evidence about the gassings up to late 1943, I think. It was a very well protected wartime state secret.
This is not to say that there were no rumors about it, nor that it wasn't common knowledge among certain segments of the German population. But, for many Jewish people what we now know was a wild conspiracy theory they thought too stupid to believe. They also had some more everyday shit to worry about. They were facing boycotts, pogroms, malnutrition, and were deported into ghettos and camps. Some were better off, for example in villages, and they didn't want to live as refugees in Ukraine.
Nazis had installed Jewish Councils to take care of such villages, and these councils were selecting people for camps, believing it would be just very hard labor. Wealthier families could pay the councils off to evade recruitment. When Operation Reinhard started the villages were surrounded by Trawniki men in the early hours and they would round up as many Jewish people as they could fit in the trucks. At this point people would start hiding in attics and special hideouts in the homes, while the Nazis started moving vast numbers of people from ghettos into Jewish villages, where they would be soon taken by the Trawniki's to the killing centers.
At this point it would be almost impossible to escape the villages alive. Some survivors report they tried, but not succeed. But people did not have sufficient and/or reliable information to act on before it was too late. Jews from other European countries, like Dutch, Greek, etc, they would ride a train from their hometown and end up in a gas chamber in a matter of days. Most of the victims from outside Poland would have had a few short minutes available to realize what had happened to them.
In fact, nobody talks much about this period apart from survivors. They all express the same concern: Don't let this be forgotten. It can happen anywhere, and it will definitely happen again, if not by the exact same means, by equally barbaric ones. If you read the whole thing from the 1930s prison camps up to Operation Reinhard killing centers you can have a rough idea about how they will go about it.
Probably they will build the deportation camps for illegal immigrants, make gender non-conformity a sex crime, get trans people in the prison labor system, then upgrade many prison to work camps. At the same time by prohibiting transition and denying healthcare they will decimate trans people by suicide or malpractice, and when they have the opportunity, for instance: during time of war, they might as well build gas chambers because deportees are too many to humanely deport, and put trans people and leftists there as well. I mean, they have followed the Nazi playbook to the letter so far, why would they stop now?
Sounds crazy, right? It sounded as much crazy in 1942, but it is true.
“To suggest being LGBTQ+ is the result of mental illness is factually false and pushes dangerous misinformation. Homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, and transgender identities were similarly removed from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of mental disorders in 2019.
“These decisions were based on decades of rigorous scientific research and advocacy, affirming that sexual orientation and gender identity are natural variations of human diversity, not pathologies. Leading organisations, including WHO, [the] American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association, recognise this as fact.
“Allowing such statements to proliferate is more than a policy failure, it actively contributes to a hostile, unsafe environment on Meta’s platforms. It normalises rhetoric that emboldens perpetrators of abuse, harassment and violence, both online and offline.” https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/01/14/meta-facebook-hate-speech-criticism-equality-amplified/
Lavabit
Connection to Edward Snowden
Lavabit received media attention in July 2013 when it was revealed that Edward Snowden was using the Lavabit email address [email protected] to invite human rights lawyers and activists to a press conference during his confinement at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow.[16] The day after Snowden revealed his identity, the United States federal government served a court order, dated June 10, 2013, and issued under 18 USC 2703(d), a 1994 amendment of the Stored Communications Act, asking for metadata on a customer who was unnamed. Kevin Poulsen of Wired wrote that "the timing and circumstances suggest" that Snowden was this customer.[17] In July 2013 the federal government obtained a search warrant demanding that Lavabit give away the private SSL keys to its service, affecting all Lavabit users.[18] A 2016 redaction error confirmed that Edward Snowden was the target.[2]
But what is the status now? Also, I think in the years to come the jurisdiction will also play a role. If the service is in the soil of a country that can subpoeana the encryption keys, then nobody is really safe.
The Right: The market should be free to decide.
The Market: Decides
The Right: OUtrAgEOuS
Safer.
Well, they handed out activists' metadata in the past, for the French authorities. In their position of an e2ee provider who controls both ends as a default, they are in a position where the can fuck people over. This is exactly what Snowden described as someone pointing a gun at you while saying "Relax, I am not gonna use it against you."
So much for safety.
Ah, and my original point was: it is either safe or unsafe, the word saf_er_ means nothing during a genocide.
Oh, outch, what a blow to all the First Amendment absolutists of Lemmy, who chose to stand up to EFF and Techdirt. Here are some more arguments against X/Meta put in the most coherent of ways.
There is no democracy without free media, and no free media without democracy.
Down with the corporatist power grab. NO PASSARAN
It send a chill down my spine nonetheless
The little man does some heavy lifting
Well, then them part of the problem, aren't they.
Have a look at this analysis. The author shows that this is a very weak response to the deeper underpinnings of the "nothing to hide" argument. After all, you cannot argue people's personal preferences.
I think one of the ways to go, with everything happening right now, is that Meta can infer who is gay and/or had aborted a pregnancy and hand these predictions over to an ultranationalist secret service. So, your personal indifference to privacy amounts to a genocidal police state for your fellow citizens.
Very good paper indeed. Some of the arguments made (eg risks from data aggregation) can be found in more mature form in legal analyses of the EU's GDPR.
At this point the ones preaching against trans liberation are the same ones that will take away your union protections. This is the long and short of it.
The premise of this meme is overly simplistic. Effectively equating a social media platform with a website hosting specific beliefs.
Here are, from the top of my head, some ways Big Social is different, regardless of country.
- Hosting a platform with millions or billions of users.
- Exploiting algorithms that mine sensitive data to an invasive degree.
- Control the flow of information, to a very granular degree of precision.
- Experimentally collecting behavioral data in response to said control of information.
- Modeling user's life expectancy, sexual orientation, political beliefs, consumer patterns, terminal illnesses.
- Selling said data and model outputs to private insurance companies as well as police states.
- Addicting users to withdraw from real life, and get hooked to their screen where they can happily serve the company for data mining.
I hardly think that any of the above should be gauged by the standards of individual rights to free speech. Even corporate entities viewed as individuals with a right to free speech.
This is something else entirely, and whoever owns it, out of whichever country must have their ass regulated off.
Even harder than the EU did.
Operations of this type and size should be eventually dismantled. They are inherently antisocial, corporatist, and totalitarian in their conception and daily function.
Sometime ago I started a discussion about the "Role of Attrition" in the effort to dismantle Big Social enterprises Here it is
Off-topic here, but for those already familiar with the history of the Red Army Faction, this is such a bad misnomer. (It assumes that someone has never heard those weird sounds before. And/or know the story.)
This is not an universal truth.
Nazism is explicitly deemed unworthy of respect in some legal systems, like Germany or the UK. MAGAs, white supremacists, and alt-righters are objectively too close to nazism, therefore their opinions are unworthy of respect to start with.
There is also the paradox of intolerance. If you let these people in, to respect their opinion, they will take over and deprive people of the right to live. They don't play by tolerant society's rules, so they they don't get tolerated.
The value is having a society that is tolerant of diversity of opinion.
Here is the opinion of the scientific consensus on transgender people, which is have been so for years, if not decades.
We have been harassed, bullied, doxxed, and banned for bringing those up in all major social media platforms. TERFs, white supremacists, misogynists, racists, have always gotten away in these platforms with punching down on leftists, African and Caribbean reparations activists, feminists, and queer people. They were protected by equally bigoted moderators under the guise of entitlement to their opinion, at the same time that all these other opinions are bashed and framed as "overstepping".
This is in line with what the EFF and Techdirt, which are both vocal First Amendment absolutists, have already said that what X and Facebook do now is in fact amplifying hate speech and effectively suppressing the free speech of gender and sexual minorities.
And this has been the situation for years, take for example the online harassment of feminists .
It is a deeply systemic bias, due to centrist indoctrination in broader society, that it is the leftist and inclusive spaces that are called out for lack of diversity for responding to harassment and bigotry, when the voices and lives of people are simply dominated and evacuated in major platforms without an iota of moderation and responsiveness to punch-down harassment.
Let alone that in the light of the most recent developments, which consolidates the above tendencies, makes the timing of the tolerance argument even more ironic and dishonest.
I think the problem is in the opposite direction. Society is too ideologically homogeneous in being against socialism. The major narratives are controlled by nation-states and corporations, social media are infested with political advertisement and propaganda.
So, as others say, I believe it is sorta uninformed and middle-of-the-road fallacy to find a corner of the internet where you can speak your mind without being harassed by white supremacist trolls, and say we need more diverse views.
Right wingers have (had) Parlel, Gap, TruthSocial, now they have X, and Facebook, where they were also dominating and harassing in the past. No leftists and/or genderqueer person would survive a day at these platforms.
But Lemmy being primarily/explicitly leftist is the problem, and you suddenly are alarmed for echo chambers. This is not quite fair, now is it.
As for Lemmy per se, I don't think it is too homogeneous. I debate centrists and liberals every other day. And recent discussions showed that the amount of latent transphobia in the site is shocking, with people knowing next to nothing apart from 4chan/MAGA talking points.
How can this happen after all these years of activism and outreach. It is because of the ecosystem of echo chambers in the broader communications and media landscape. This discourse never reached those people.
Considering it was the position of major medical and professional organizations, it shows that the pathology lies with the existing social media and broader media enterprizes, with a prominently selective messaging.
Do I need to say that this led to widespread science-denialism for which mainstream platforms are clearly to blame?
If your inquiry is honest, then the only explanation is that the propaganda apparatus works so well, that the (relative) absence of the dominating narratives makes you anxious that you entered an echo chamber, when in fact you probably have been in an echo chamber so far.
That more like coalmine canary than dead man switch. Also, if you happen to be arrested on a weekend or get tangled/hooked up then you will have no way of cancelling it. Then all hell breaks loose.
For me, Lemmy was a place where I mostly found like-minded people. Even if we don't always agree (and we shouldn't) I have had some genuine feedback to the thoughts that haunt me or tickle me. Nevertheless, I was surprised at the interinstance drama which I mostly ignore. And I think that the base probability of transphobia is higher than the sidebar rules would implicate. I am always surprised when I see naive and uninformed takes.
Although I do have found a place to share such thoughts with less harassment and backlash than Reddit, there is some unearned harassment and hating here as well, eg there are some consistent downvoters, to the effect I have a single downvote to anything I post.
Although I think that here in Lemmy I enjoy a higher probability of getting thoughtful responses and well-intended humor to what I post, I feel that a number of people I have interacted with me were highly prejudiced I was a troll or a bad faith actor.
This lack of trust to other users is one of the greatest achievements of fascists and spooks, and they have successfully used it with freedom movements everywhere.
I was also surprised at how conservative the privacy community is. Compared to the amount of radical content posted on every other topic, I find myself among those who think that c/Privacy actively discourages newcomers from developing advanced privacy and anonymity skills.
The privacy thing and some aspects of the Democrats situation pre- and post- election make me think that there is some "manufacturing of consensus" bad faith actors among us. This can lead to disbanding of any project, so we need a solid mindset, in which we assume good faith, but have exact methods for handling disagreement and genuine questions, but also look out for bad faith actors and take steps to build healthy online communities for anarchist and communist free and private software enthusiasts.
Afterthoughts
- The sitewide rules ask us to assume good faith, be civil, and discuss thoughtfully. As it happens, we fail to adhere, and I am to blame as well. I am quite uncivil to people I disagree, but it is often forgiven because a lot of other people are cheering. This makes us a stupid crowd by the way.
- As a Disclaimer, I switched sides wrt to Democrats. Although I had chosen not to post anything pre-election, I was like "Quit this nonsense and vote Democrats already". I was radicalized after the election, and now think that Democrats are lobbying grifters and can stuff it.
Actually the "International Jewry" bullshit is very much like the "removedism/Gender Ideology/DEI" shit we see today: If you replace "Aryan" with "White/American" as well, it is pretty much the exact same thing. This started gradually taking over the state apparatus, with many Germans jumping on the train around 1936. By that point people would be sarcastic and cynical towards the attempts of the state to be more "Aryan", but at the same time the Jews were construed as alien and curious, and Germans would stop meeting them, so they were made into an out-group first, then vilified.
A good source on this that does not focus on the Holocaust per se is A Social History of the Third Reich.
If you consider that the "Hitler's prophecy" was uttered in 1939 and several more times after that, but it didn't even make front pages, then yes. But keep in mind not all historians agree on that. Some say that the "vernichten/ausrotten" (exterminate/kill) rhetoric was ubiquitous in Hitler's, Himmler's, and Goebels' speeches, and that German people knew where this was going. I am not decided yet, and I want to believe the first, but I have read strong arguments about the Nazis having been explicit in their genocidal plans from the very start. (eg Jeffrey Herf "The Jewish War")
Not everyone can emigrate. Some people are too poor to emigrate. Even then, and I keep on the Holocaust story, the Saint Lewis incident shows that people were not welcome to emigrate (in the US, which is no coincidence), and they were sent back! In the US some people think that the federalist situation will allow states (California etc) to keep doing their thing, but the fascists now have the federal government, and the militias. So we don't know for how long the progressive states will continue be free. Then if you speak for actually emigrating abroad, that would be even more difficult for quite a lot of people.