Except it doesn't? One of the reasons usenet is dying is because without some sort of group-global moderation, everyone sees different things.. Newcomers see piles of spam, and when you don't get replies you are never sure is this something you said, or was your message silently filtered out.
It's like a forum where the moderators only ever use shadow-bans. Most people would hate such thing.
Usenet's been on the up trend for years now. It was dying in the '00s and early '10s. Now it's recovering. People are tired of Discord and Reddit, and even Hacker News.
No, I never used usenet via google groups, this was Thunderbird + my ISP's NNTP server. Opening your favorite groups and seeing more spam than new threads was a big reason to quit.
(A second one was lack of support for multiple devices: messages read on laptop would not show up as read on desktop. Funnily enough, Google Groups solves that problem, but I could never stomach their interface)
So there is upstream spam filtering. Thiss seems to contradict what you said: "There is no administrative ostracism. Nobody gets kicked out by brownshirts for expressing their view."
Even if this stupid idea were true, in fact nobody prevents Usenet spammers from reaching those who want to be reached.
If you think that spam is a form of expression, and you're interested in it, all you have to do is post a few articles and use your real e-mail address in your From: header.
Then no overbearing NNTP server admin will stand between you and your spammer friends.
You've sorta got to trust your admin. If you don't, it's really pretty trivial to put up your own server (you can do it from home, you don't need a VPS, you don't even need constant connectivity) and then you just peer with as many servers as you can -- odds are not ALL of them are filtering those critically important posts calling Biden a pedophile or whatever.
Not having a centralized censorship team is a better solution than “Elon will buy it and replace the old brownshirts with new brownshirts”.
(Not expressing an opinion about the content moderators that work/worked at twitter/x; just the organizational structure that led to disaster over there).
Both those solutions are failures, but they aren't at all the only options (look at HN, for example). On a certain scale, public social forums need effective moderators.
I see; I was not aware that there is a specific connection between Nazis and the "brownshirt" term, though it is obviously a reference to some kind of uniform.
> I see; I was not aware that there is a specific connection between Nazis and the "brownshirt" term,
I genuinely appreciate and commend your honesty about the fact that you didn't previously know that.
Separately, it's an unfortunate that even on this forum, the term Brownshirt has been watered down to the point that it's lost its Nazi association completely, much like other Nazi terminology that has been rehabilitated in recent years.
I basically encountered the term only once or twice, in my distant past and have used it maybe as many times. It is not popular.
A Google n-gram comparison of "nazi" and "brownshirt" shows the latter to be vastly rare compared to the former.
I just compared several terms associated with the Nazis: brownshirt,wehrmacht,luftwaffe,hakenkreuz. Their popularity is in the same ballpark.
Luftwaffe is showing a strange resurgence, having overtaken brownshirt.
Brownshirt was on a popularity rise since 1960, but has declined recently. It is now only about 3 times more popular than hakenkreuz, though, which I would think is pretty obscure.
I think people tend to be relatively reluctant to do a dictionary lookup on a rarely heard word that is made of two everyday English words like "brown" and "shirt" and which is easily explained as a fairly obvious metaphor.
To the contrary, they did the right thing by admitting their ignorance in not knowing that Brownshirt refers to a group of Nazis. So the record shows that they were willing to learn. That's something.
In fact, according to a Google ngram and books search, no such term can be attested prior to the rise of the Nazis. There was no single-word brownshirt, capitalized or not, and brown shirt (two words) wasn't used as any sort of idiom referring to an oppressive military though or anything of the sort.
It also seems that a two-word form Brown Shirt also saw some use (in reference to the Nazis).
I think he's equating the different flavors of self professed socialists who get into a tizzy any time someone makes a joke online with Nazism. And also, I think it is deliberately hyperbolic so that only people with a sense of humor will refrain from getting in said predictable tizzy about it.
I think it's funny because it's only to the people the term applies that it isn't funny to draw the comparison. It's like a joke about the people who don't get the joke, it's very meta and it's an inside joke that most people get.
I hope you realize that you have given a link to an encyclopedia to show the definition of a word. The fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 2011, already gave a second definition of brownshirt:
>A racist, especially a violent, right-wing one.[0]
Oxford Dictionary has an even broader definition[1]
As noted by other users, "brownshirt" is also used to describe "anyone in authority."[2]
I actually debated writing "pedantism nazi" instead of "grammar nazi" because I knew you would make that exact argument that grammar is not relevant. I also considered "semantics nazi" but decided against it as semantics is "the study of meanings"[3], but it is clear that you are actually more concerned with creating records of fault and "ignorance",[4] while you allow yourself to define GP's transgression in vague terms like "equate" meaning anything from regarding as equal or equivalent to "comparable"[5]. You claim that the meaning is unambiguous yet this nonexistent second meaning is so prevalent that GP had never heard of the first one.
Using “brownshirt” for anyone in authority is clearly missing the point entirely. There is a reason the brownshirts were eliminated after the nazis came to power. They were violent gangs of nazi thugs operating outside the law to terrorize opponents. When the nazi party came to power they were not useful or necessary anymore, since now the party could just change the law and perform terror through official institutions.
Please stop using that term unless you're talking specifically about the worshippers of Kali who would strangle and rob travelers in India in the 19th century. It does not mean anything else. It can never mean anything else.
Why haven't you asked why I have recast "nazi" into meaning
>A person who is perceived to be authoritarian, autocratic, or inflexible; one who seeks to impose his or her views upon others[0]?
I am not working to recast anything. You conflated a moral argument that one should not use words that reference Nazism in any way with a factual evaluation of the meaning of the word necessarily being the object of that reference. Had you said "the usage of 'brownshirt' to mean 'one who abuses power' is not considered appropriate" that would be a different matter. What you said, however, is factually wrong; there is no equivalence being made between Nazism and "content moderation." That is to say, you should have said that the second definition is not appropriate, instead of denying it's existence to then change the meaning of the sentence such that it is then equating content moderation on private platforms with Nazism. Unless by "equating" you meant "to make comparable" where "comparable" means "an examination of two or more items to establish similarities and dissimilarities." I should mention that Oxford does not have "comparable" in "equating" and the definition of comparable above is almost certainly not what is meant by "equating" in any event.
I personally have never used "brownshirt" to mean "authoritarian." My motivation for my initial post was to show you with a simple double-meaning comment that words can have multiple meanings.
> "They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President."
Al Gore (October 2005), “Al Gore Addresses We Media”
All of the above are misuses of "brownshirt" by people who heard the word and, like I did, neglected to check a dictionary, thereby unwittingly invoking a Nazi reference.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that "brown shirt" nor "brownshirt" was used a metaphor for a person in any kind of role before the 1920's, when it came into use in reference to the Nazi storm troopers.
The "digital brownshirt" term was likely coined by someone who knows what "brownshirt" means; their intent is to express the idea that right-wing bloggers are like Nazis of the digital age. That use does not assigns a new meaning to the "brownshirt" constituent word.
I have seen the word very rarely myself; I passively learned about it decades ago, and have not seen it used since. I used it about once or twice myself. Since that time, I have become more fastidious about looking up unknown words (which has become easier, thanks to mobile devices!) It's highly probable that the person I saw using the term decades ago knew that it was a Nazi reference.
Words for clothing tend to shift their reference to the wearers of the clothing over time. Perhaps it was so ordinary that it never made it into literary record.
That's why the term "spam" was invented to describe USENET spam.
USENET comes from a more innocent time, when few institutions had firewalls, open (SMTP) mail relays were pretty common, and people logged into their systems over telnet.
