People say this type of thing all the time. But really, if someone can’t get along with people online, they can’t do it offline either. The problem with the Internet is that the type of people we all avoid in real life are all online.

I don’t think it eliminates it, but rather adds an additional, new dimension to social interaction that follows completely different rules. Pseudonymous communication being the norm, for example (which of course, contributes to people being assholes online).

But there are still rules and conventions that govern social interactions online, as well as different levels of enforcement. For instance, if I replied to you with a comment full of abuse, then you could block me. Additionally, you, or someone else on this thread could report my comment, which might lead to me being banned from this community. If I went and complained about this ban being the result of power tripping mods, people would be able to check the modlog and call me out on my assholeish conduct. And if I was consistently abusive across communities, someone might contact my instance admins (and if there were many abusive users from my instance and the admins didn’t take action, then other instances might consider defederating from my instance). It obviously functions completely differently to offline communication, but online social relations are just as real as offline ones.

This is one of the reasons why I have been enjoying the fediverse so far. We get to have conversations about how we should handle people acting shitty. Even though big tech also provides ways of blocking or reporting abusive users, there’s a distinct powerlessness due to the lack of transparency and accountability in how moderation happens. And I definitely agree with you that when we look at how the vast majority of people interact online, it does make it easier to not care about people, and to feel more disconnected with society. It’s why I find it so fun and interesting to be in a space where we can have these conversations

Thats the trick. They make laws about “safety” that actually target minorities.

Cannabis ws used widly in medicine all the way up until the early 20th century. When they made cannabis illegal, it was mostly used by latino and “black” communities. Thats why they started calling it marijuana. It made it sound exotic and hispanic. Any “whites” that joined them were seen as less than and charged too, though to an often lesser extent. Since it was mostly effecting minorities, hippies, and “race traitors”, main stream america was fine with it.

It was illegal. The German criminal code has two sections for murder, § 211 Mord (the more severe one) and § 212 Totschlag (the less severe one).

In the original version from 1870, Mord was killing a human being with deliberation (“mit Überlegung”) and Totschlag was any other intentional killing of a human being.

In 1941, notably after it had been pointed out that what they were doing was Mord (Wikipedia), the National Socialists changed the law so that § 211 only applied under specific aggravating circumstances (e.g. cruelty or base motives).

That remains unchanged in the current version (English translation), except for the sentences.

Those murders are still prosecuted today. For example, in 2022 a former secretary at a concentration camp was sentenced to two years on probation for assistance to murder (Mord) in 10,505 cases (the court applied juvenile criminal law since she was only 18 and 19 years old at the time).

On Reddit there should be multiple posts about this in r/AskHistorians. Thats where remember reading about this in detail. If you have trouble finding any of those threads, I can try to link a few.