Yeah, I used past tense in my comment but the US is still doing a ton of unethical shit (both in Cuba and elsewhere), a lot of which I’m sure we don’t hear about.

Our history with Cuba is shameful, and it’s complete hypocrisy calling them a “sponsor of terrorism” when the CIA literally sponsored terrorism there and we attempted to assassinate Castro or overthrow their government countless times. All of their economic problems are blamed on “communism” despite the massive US embargo and our continued threatening of other countries that do trade with them. Then we get opinion pieces like Opinion: Mexico shamefully joins Russia, Venezuela in backing Cuba’s dictatorship when the UN almost unanimously votes against the embargo again, like they have for 30 years now.

join-lemmy.org has a list of instances you can join. If you just want to look through a list that’s a great place to browse.

If you’re looking for specific recommendations I’d say lemm.ee is great in terms of moderation, they don’t overmoderate and tend not to defederate from many places so users can kinda choose themselves whether or not to block an instance. Dbzer0 is similar, it’s the instance with the big piracy community which .world blocked, and the admin is also great.

Both of those are in the top 10 communities in terms of size though iirc, which ideally people would avoid the biggest instances and join smaller ones to try and prevent centralization like what happened with .world communities.

Lemmy.zip is also great from what I’ve heard, and while it’s not small, it’s top 20 instead of top 10 at least.

I’ve always found that so stupid yeah. “Cop killing” is always painted as this ultimate evil and so much worse than killing a regular person, especially in all the copaganda shows. But theoretically the whole reason cops have so much legal leeway and can use so much force and whatnot is because they’re taking on a risk by putting themselves in the line of duty (even though you’re actually more likely to die as a pizza delivery driver).

Maybe he was on track for that or maybe he would have taken a different path, we don’t actually know. But it doesn’t matter because what did happen is he became radicalized against corporations (or at least corporate healthcare) and took action. What he did and what he believes now are far more important than who else he could have become.

I can’t claim to know your exact situation or anything, but it could be possible that some of what you see as people thinking you’re gross isn’t really that. If you experience enough mistreatment or hate then other things that might have a different explanation can definitely feel related to it. I’m not saying that as a way to try and minimize your experiences or anything, but sometimes it can help to try and find other reasons that people act how they do. If you have a negative image of yourself then it makes sense you’d imagine any sort of negative interaction is because of that, but people are complicated and there’s no saying what necessarily causes someone to do anything.

Either way, the people who would bully anyone are assholes. If anyone mistreats someone because they don’t conform to their specific standards then they don’t deserve to have an opinion on you. I know that it’s easier said than done, but try to ignore those people. Your self worth shouldn’t be based on how jerks feel.

No matter how people act or how you perceive yourself, you are still worthy of love and happiness. There will always be people who find you unattractive for a variety of reasons, just like anyone else. But there are also tons of people who will find you attractive for those same reasons and more. And like I said before, what matters the most at the end of the day isn’t how others feel, it’s how you do. So try to go easy on yourself and remember that one person’s opinion isn’t a fact.

If you want to change something about yourself to make you happy, go for it! But trying to change yourself to make jerks happy will never work, because they can always find something new to criticize.

Hey, I just want to say I’m sorry you feel like this. I know it sucks not being happy with how you look, and it’s hard, but try to step back and look at yourself through someone else’s eyes. You might not be a supermodel, but you know who else isn’t? 99.9% of everyone else. And so what? I find plenty of people attractive who aren’t models, and plenty of models are unattractive to me. And honestly that’s the thing, everyone has different opinions on what is or isn’t attractive. You’ll always be your own worse critic, but try to seperate your personal opinions on beauty from the equation. You aren’t unattractive, you just might not be your type. I remember seeing some of your older posts, and like many people said then, you actually do look good. Dysphoria and self-image problems can make that hard to accept, but don’t let your brain convince you that what some jerks might have said to you elsewhere (or what you imagine people think about you) is more true or important than what people are saying to you here.

Looking at yourself you’ll see every flaw, every detail of yourself that you can criticize or compare with others. But when others look at you, I promise that’s not what they’ll see. They’ll just see you, and the happier and more confident in yourself that you are, the better you’ll look to them. Being yourself and being happy about that will do miles more than anything else to improve how both you and other people see yourself.

Trying to fight things like this alone can be hard, so if you’re able to do so, I’d recommend trying to speak to a therapist. They’ll be much better at helping articulate things than any random comment online could. If you can’t do that then reach out to the comments offering to talk. I’d always be down to, and while I can’t personally offer much advice in the way of makeup or clothes or stuff like that, I’d be more than happy to just chat or help out with anything I do know about.

If nothing else though, I hope you can try and look at yourself through an outside perspective. When you see a stranger on the street you won’t scrutinize them for features of their body you dislike, so why should you do that to yourself? All that will do is magnify those thoughts, so try to find the elements of yourself you are happiest with and internalize those feelings instead. They don’t even need to be physical, they could be clothes, skills, personality traits, events, whatever. Try to celebrate anything and everything that makes you happy to be you.

It’s crazy how many articles I’ve seen that just casually imply or outright say he did it.

“Candidate for elective public office in the state of Missouri” could be read either as can’t be a candidate on the ballot in Missouri or can’t be a candidate for a state position. It depends on if it means [candidate for public office] in Missouri or candidate for [public office in Missouri].

I don’t like how laws are always written very formally like that, I feel like English (or any language tbh) is able to be misinterpreted easily enough as is, and the stilted way it’s used in legal speak just leads to questions and misunderstandings like this. I’d much rather they be written as plainly as is possible and in ways that attempted to remove ambiguity instead of add it, though a lot of the time that’s the point I imagine lol.

Saying the crime was “broadly condemned” in the same article about the flood of money and support he’s received, with a large section of said article being about the praise given online, is an interesting way to frame things.

I think he’s just kinda an ordinary person who grew up privileged. He has fairly standard techbro style libertarian beliefs, but he also has criticisms of some of the influencers he watches, and didn’t seem to like Peterson very much. He also seems to be an environmentalist, and I think he seemed to have become more anti-corporation based on the manifesto released (obviously assuming he did it).

Him being a privileged but ordinary guy who still got radicalized reflects a lot more strongly on the plight of everyone who isn’t one of the owner class. It doesn’t matter that he was relatively wealthy, he still wasn’t one of them.

Honestly, at this point I’m not convinced that Trump will be significantly worse for Palestine than Harris would have been. Neither one is going to stop sending weapons, and the stuff Trump supports are so extreme that Israel wouldn’t want to do them anyway, like nuking Gaza. Either way in 4 years I can’t see the US being the reason anything changes there.

I’m also talking about specifically the uncommitted movement and protests at the DNC, which were meant to get Biden and then Harris to support an arms embargo. The consequence promised by those protests was losing voters, so if that didn’t happen it would mean that the Democrats could see these as empty threats and safely ignore them.

There are only so many times you can say “vote for me because the other candidate is so much worse” before people get tired of voting against their interests just to prevent someone else who is also against their interests just more so. Either way you’re voting for something you don’t support, and eventually people will give up. Blaming voters for a candidate losing and not the candidate for abandoning voters doesn’t make sense. It’s not the voters job to represent a candidate, it’s supposed to be the candidates job to represent their voters.

Oh yeah 100%, I don’t place the blame solely on the US or the USSR, it’s on both. I don’t like any state, US and USSR included, and imperialism isn’t exclusive to capitalist states. The USSR is way too demonized in the US education system though, it gets treated as some ultimate evil of history, only responsible for bad things, when it wasn’t really doing anything the US wasn’t also doing.

I mean personally I do vote every election I can, but people did change how they voted after protests were ignored. The pro-Palestinian protesters and the uncommitted movement during this 2024 election had a basic demand they wanted met, that was ignored by the Harris campaign and some number of them didn’t vote because of it. And yet a lot of people blamed the protesters for Harris’s loss (of Michigan at least), even though that is literally changing your vote because a protest didn’t get her to change her position.

And that’s also skipping over however many people didn’t show up because of other positions she changed, like healthcare, fracking, the border, etc. And I do get it, I know Trump will be so much worse, and like I said I did vote, straight Democrat down ballot like I always do. But if the point of a protest is meant to show that a group of people is unhappy and you’re losing their support, having that group turn around and vote for you anyway means that you can just ignore protests.

And again, I know I’ll probably need to keep saying this, I voted for Harris. But the fact that the lesson a lot of the DNC is seemingly taking from this is that they should go more centrist just boggles my mind, because the point of people not showing up to vote for her after they protested and were ignored is literally that going more centrist and ignoring your base will lose democrats elections.

It’s no surprise though, the DNC receives a ton of corporate donations so why would they seriously support policy that hurts those donors income. Like Josh Shapiro condemning the killer and those who supported them, and thanking the police who caught him in PA isn’t surprising when he received $10,000 dollars from UHG in 2023 (the second most of any candidate). This is what people mean when they say voting is pointless, even if you somehow voted in a senate of 100% democrats, a house of 100% democrats, and Bernie Sanders as the president, they wouldn’t support a proposal for something like single payer healthcare because most of the other democrats in the house and senate get money to not support major reforms like that.

I mean the US has been consistently aggressive against Cuba, and while I hate the idea of mutually assured destruction, when it was the accepted strategy to get a country to stop fucking with you, it makes sense that Cuba would want the ability to threaten that against the US unless it stopped trying to overthrow their government. Plus the US literally just armed 2 countries near the USSR, so it’s not like it was an unreasonable escalation by the USSR or anything, the US kinda did it first lol.

Yeah, the point of a peaceful protest is meant as a neutral option, just to show that a large group exists who has some demand, and if the demand is not met it will escalate, either via disruption to the economy with strikes or disruption to society with violence. It shouldn’t be blamed on protesters if it ends up escalating that way, because the protest was meant as the warning. Most people wouldn’t blame a country that has repeatedly warned a neighbor to stop annexing it’s land for fighting a war with them. If the country never went farther than warnings then they would all be empty threats. Somehow protests are thought of differently though, and if one turns violent it’s blamed on the protesters and not the government for basically completely ignoring every protest movement in recent memory.

But again that’s my point. The amount of effort you had to put into determining whether the news source was valid was fairly high the case of the African news site. But if that was published on substack instead, the amount of effort would be the exact same, you’d still need to look up the site and see that it had no history. You’d need to look up the phrases, and see that they were copy pasted from other articles. Nothing about that site would have been any different in terms of moderation if it were substack based instead.

And like you said, in most cases it’s easy enough to spot disinfo with a google search or two, or checking the domain. But that would be true with substack too, you could to the exact same check you do for those sites for substack ones. Something like kenklippenstein.com is a unique domain, and should check out in the domain registry if you check. And if you google his name, his wikipedia article will show up and confirm he is a reputable independent journalist who posts on his substack page.

So if you’re willing to expend that effort on moderating other sites, blocking substack specifically is nonsensical imo. You’ve already admitted the amount of work you’re willing to put into verifying news sites which were previously unknown to you is fairly high, which is good. I respect the fact that you want to thoroughly investigate a site before declaring it unreliable. But if the acceptable amount of work is already such a high threshold, why is substack different?

Whether an article is on substack or not the process of checking it is the same. You can do a domain registry check, you can google the author and the name of the publication, you can copy segments from the article into google to see if they’re stolen. Nothing about the article being published on substack changes the moderation workload compared to any other site.

Like I said, my core question is what about substack specifically makes the actual process of moderation more difficult? That’s the part I don’t understand about your reasoning behind the ban. All of the examples of moderation you’ve given me so far just seem to reinforce my argument, that substack being banned is illogical, and choosing to allow it would not have a noticeable effect on moderation while allowing a wider variety of sources and independent journalists to be shared.

Exactly, so if one of those articles was posted, how would you tell it was disinformation? You’d look at the article, see the name of the outlet/website, Google it, and it would either pop up with results saying it’s a Russian disinformation campaign, or would have no results online if it was new since it was just created and hasn’t been reported on.

Now imagine the same scenario, but it’s a link to a substack based article. In order to check if it was disinfirmation, you’d look up the name of the outlet it claims to be, and it would either pop up with results about it being misninformation or have no results about it online.

In either case the effort to check if it’s disinfo is basically identical and the same amount of effort.

If instead of straight up disinfo you’re worried about too many blogs being posted that aren’t news, then all you’d need to do to check if it was news or not was just read a bit of the linked article, same as if you wanted to check if a random NYT article, for example, was an opinion piece or not.

So again, my real question is what about substack specifically makes the actual process of moderation more difficult?

If a substack article is posted it’s not too hard to verify if it’s legit, and you can even be more strict about what constitutes a valid substack link compared to what constitutes a valid “regular” news link, which I think makes sense to do. The number of substack articles posted doesn’t really seem like an issue either, since like I said barely any seem to be posted and removed each week. And either way if a substack blog is posted you either need to know and recognize the URL, which at that point you should also know whether the URL is for a blog or actual reporting that just happens to use substack, or if you don’t know the URL you need to open the link to check anyway, so why not spend maybe an extra minute to see if it’s legit first?

Again though, my point is if I wanted to push a political agenda, and do so in a way that would be time consuming to verify, I could do so by making/buying an HTML and CSS template, buying a couple domains for pretty cheap, getting chat-gpt to write me some fake articles to add content to the site, and then posting them as sources in something like Politics.

If I did that, the way to verify would be looking up the authors name, and seeing if it makes sense. Either the author won’t exist online and then you can remove it to be safe, or they will but they don’t work at “HDR News”, or “HDR News” won’t turn up in any other results because it’s made up.

There isn’t any inherent accountability to any website, it’s very easy to buy a domain and host a static site for free, and like I said, the barrier to entry is higher sure, but if someone wanted to do a disinformation campaign successfully they’d be better off pretending to be a real news website and not a blog anyway.

If instead someone posts a substack blog that’s just an opinion piece, it would be fairly easy to see that, just by opening the link and looking, the same as if someone posted a NYT opinion piece. How many news sites post editorials or opinions that you don’t want as a source too? Again, looking at the modlog those seem to be removed about as frequently as people post any substack article, opinion or otherwise.

And yeah, you can’t have a list of every single substack blog to reference/memorize, but you honestly can’t do that with websites either, since like I already said it’s not hard to buy a domain and host a misinformation news site.

The analogy you gave with “we ID anyone under 30” also doesn’t really fit. By outright banning substack its more like “We don’t serve anyone under 30.” In order to be what you said, the rule would have to be something like “substack is allowed but has a stricter standard required to be accepted as a source”, which I think would be very fair.

If this were something like tumblr, then yeah obviously it shouldn’t be accepted as a source. But since multiple reliable journalists do use substack as their host, it’s a lot less justifiable to outright ban it. All that does is lead to a bias towards corporate media which can afford web developers and hosting costs, and away from small, independent journalists that may be willing to report something that doesn’t get as much coverage, or gets biased coverage, by other, larger sources.

I mean a news site that doesn’t actually exist, full of fake articles, or just opinion pieces, or AI generated garbage, or straight up lies meant to trick people.

What’s the difference between that and a random substack blog with the same type of content? Presumably neither would be allowed, so why is the fact that one is substack based relevant? Either way it’s full of lies or opinions, and doesn’t constitute a reliable source for a post.

And if it did have actual reporting, same question. Why does the fact that the reporting was published via substack make it not allowed? The quality of the information is the same either way.

The fact that you have a list of non-allowed sites is kind of my point. You still need to verify when a new site is posted you aren’t familiar with, or if someone is trying to post misinformation via a site like Breitbart you recognize it and remove it.

So no matter what you need to spend the effort to moderate the sources posted. Why is substack banned in that case? Even without substack being allowed you gave me a list of multiple sites you (rightfully) don’t allow, as well as a site you only just learned about and banned the other day. So why would substack change anything in that case? Looking through the mod log substack links aren’t posted very often so it wouldn’t really be that much of an increase in effort, and just gets rid of potentially valid sources of news for no real reason.