The day just isn’t complete without a tiresome retread of freeze peach rhetorical tropes. Oh, it’s “important to engage with and understand” white supremacy. That’s why we need to boost the voices of white supremacists! And give them money!
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Basically: “If we don’t platform the nazis, where will all the hard earned nazi money go?”
What fucking data do they show that deplatforming and demonetizing makes extremist views worse?
we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse
Last I remember, actively demonetizing fringe views like Alex Jones damn near killed their reach. And quarantining on Reddit completely nuked organic reach which was, for a long time, how crazy shit was reaching people.
history shows that censorship is most potently used by the powerful to silence the powerless
In what fucking world do the powerful care about the powerless nazis. What fucking world. Didn’t we fucking fight a world war about this. It’s really fucking cliche to say but holy fuck why the fuck would the powerful ever care about censoring the powerless nazis.
I think it’s important to engage with and understand a range of views even if—especially if—you disagree with them
Shit dude the owner of Substack is not engaging with my view that he’s a fucking witless dishcloth. Kinda hypocritical amirite
The idea that removing someone’s platform makes things worse is just insane.
It’s not silencing them, it’s just removing their reach to spread their horseshit.
It’s not even removing someone’s platform when they’re using your platform to spread their message. Cutting off their internet? That’s deplatforming. Throttling their bandwidth? That’s fucking with their access to utilities (internet should be a utility). Kicking them off your privately-owned site they don’t have a majority ownership stake in? If that’s deplatforming you’re admitting your platform is all about the Nazis.
I do not understand these mental gymnastics tech bros go through.
I’m not sure when deplatforming became a dirty word in the first place. Freedom of speech doesn’t entitle anyone to a platform. It’s not a crime to express whatever views you have, but you may need to bring your own soapbox.
Or maybe deplatforming is bad and an affront to freedom of expression. If that is the case, I will let you know on the next episode of Joe Rogan. If I’m not invited, consider me silenced by the cancel culture mob.
I’m not sure when deplatforming became a dirty word in the first place.
when it started happening to these guys, duh
I’m fully in favor of kicking nazis off of wherever specifically because doing so is censorship, deplatforming, etc, so gotta disagree with you there
It sounds like we only disagree on the specific word we use to describe the act of removing someone from a website so that’s an okay disagreement!
The data is his bussy pain
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Loved the Verge summary. From the subheader:
Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie’s plan to ‘strip bad ideas of their power’ is to profit from disseminating them as widely as possible.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie
Note that Substack quite deliberately went out and hired on the furthest-right voices it thought it could get away with, and paid them massive advances. One reason for Substack’s present financial woes is that a lot of these guys didn’t work out. Our good friend Scooter is one who did, for example. In fact, he was the first to reveal that Substack was recruiting and paying these guys massive advances, while they were still telling the rest of the world that you could just sign up and make a newsletter and money would rain from the skies without mentioning that all Substack’s big successes were being funded and promoted by Substack.
Substack was founded by a chud and funded by chuds, and this is well known. Nobody ever really had an excuse.
Got a link discussing their financial woes? Not disbelieving they have them, just want Schadenfreude.
this is from April, looking for something more recent
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/7/23674178/substack-burn-2021-numbers-bad
Speedrunning the Medium story
except Medium is still around, amazingly
I don’t need to read Substack to understand how these people think. I just need to picture the worst people I went to high school with.
Sadly, thanks to the advent of social media all those people that just would have faded into oblivion now find each other and others like themselves and make everything about them once again.
You don’t even know how well you just described online political discussion.
We are still trying to figure out the best way to handle extremism on the internet. But of all the ways we’ve tried so far, Substack is working the best.
All of this is contemptible but for some reason this quote he pulls is the worst bit to me. It’s so pompous and so arrogant for a tech bro to describe his Nazi funding company as “a way of handling extremism on the internet.” Not even something his company does. Just his company, existing
of all the ways we’ve tried so far, Substack is working the best.
The sheer arrogance of this quote is really something to behold. It’s “working the best” by what metric, exactly, sir? And who’s the “we” that have tried various ways so far, because it’s certainly not ‘people on the internet,’ many of whom have developed ways of dealing with Nazis which are significantly more effective than the substack method of ‘literally give them money to use our platform’
Hell, even 4chan deals better with the neonazis than Substack, as 4chan doesn’t fucking pay them.
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But of all the ways we’ve tried so far, Substack is working the best.
the fucking neoliberal stank on being this loud and proud about consistently doing nothing about nazis
…is what I’d say if this piece of shit wasn’t fucking paying them in direct proportion to how effectively they’ve spread their Nazi shit onto the internet using his terrible fucking blogging platform
god fucking damn I am so tired of these mediocre men controlling every popular part of the internet. when the fuck did it become no longer normal to just ban fascist fuckheads and all their friends on sight? nah I know the answer: when someone realized there was money in catering to the worst fucking people on the planet
that is the cuntiest tech quote I’ve heard in a while. “Of all the things we’ve tried so far…” as if he invented the gated community he probably grew up in,
I learned from my grandfather that bullets were the answer to Nazis.
I’m not a traditionalist, but I don’t think there’s any moral reason to let confirmed Nazis speak freely, or spend a lot of time not full of bullets.
Yes, there’s plenty of legal reasons. But anyone claiming moral reasons is full of shit.
Pretty sure Jesus would agree with you.
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Just a point of hair-splitting; can they be literal Nazis if the ‘party’ was a thing of the past and a different country? Are they perhaps ‘neo-Nazis’?
Not arguing, just curious.
you’ve put more thought into categorizing nazis than the people calling themselves nazis have
Gotta have a hobby.
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Ok. Fine. They are Nazis.
Where are the bullets?
the bullets, guns, and training to use both effectively are overwhelmingly in the hands of fascists, some of whom outwardly self-identify as nazis
Mmmm. I’m not entirely sure about that. But for the sake of a lack of argument, I’ll agree with you.
this is from 2021: Substack handing buckets of cash to big-name transphobes.
https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay
Scott Alexander talked in 2020 about how Substack offered him enough money to quit his highly-paid psychiatrist job and write coy race science there instead:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/
why were all these people still there in 2023
Food, housing, clothes, education, healthcare and leisure? You don’t deserve them for just being born.
A Substack account, though? That is your inalienable God-given right as an existing human being.
I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But
I think it’s important to engage with and understand a range of views even if—especially if—you disagree with them. Hanania is an influential voice for some in U.S. politics—his recent book, for instance, was published by HarperCollins—and there is value in knowing his arguments.
“Wait wait hold on guys, this abhorrent fascist genocidal white supremacist transphobic sexist holocaust denying Nazi was published by Harper Collins. Harper. Collins. That means there is value in hearing his perspective on my podcast!”
Other books published by super elite publishing company Harper Collins (if you have a book with them it kinda makes you a big deal politically I guess!):
- The Dolly Parton Activity Book: An Unofficial Lovefest
- Duck, Duck, Dinosaur: Bubble Blast
- The Wild Uknown Tarot Deck and Guidebook
- Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Eastern & Central North America
- What is Poop?
What is Poop?
a miserable little pile of secrets. but enough talk… have at you!
(╯°□°）╯︵🍷
[loud death noises]
🍷💥
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“I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views.”
Hamish’s “nazis are not my favorite” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the T-shirt
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We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts. As @Ted Gioia has noted, history shows that censorship is most potently used by the powerful to silence the powerless
oh no, where these wittle powerless nazis will go? they are only backed by the likes of Thiel and Malofeev
Organizations who try to silence and censor writers are the ones who have a real Nazi problem.
you see, the real nazis were antifa all along
As Elle said in her letter: “We are still trying to figure out the best way to handle extremism on the internet. But of all the ways we’ve tried so far, Substack is working the best.”
We have investigated ourselves and found no problems. Any further criticism will be dismissed
Katie Notopoulos writes about the economic incentives for substack to keep Nazis:
Also links to a post signed by a bunch of prominent substackers who are just fine with the policy as it stands. Contains the usual suspects of Bari Weiss, Edward Snowden, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger: https://substack.com/home/post/p-139757629
Good to have on hand if you find any of them linked so they can be avoided
