self awareness that you suck doesn’t redeem you from sucking

the real deep state was all the oligarchs we empowered along the way

“member” here represents that a ship is 1 among 200 of the 600 shadow fleet ships

we’re all mad here

this is what our authorities are trying to get back to

doesn’t make him not an absolute bastard

thanks! i was sure there had to be somewhere

i call it sleepwalking. the worst part is the most dangerous sleepwalkers think they’re awake

Ukraine’s just the new afghanistan i guess. always getting invaded. everyone who’s not there just going “oh no. how tragic. something must be done”

something is not done.

then the outrage machine moves on to something else

where has 9 digit locals?

it’s my personal style. i’m not going to change it. i do it to honor someone

everyone everymorning everywhere, tbh. even if your world does not feel authoritarian today, it can tomorrow with just one charismatic power hungry sicko. they export their allies when their form of fascism dies off in a place. the nazis survived via operation paperclip. the neoliberal fascists that defined the last era of the century in our country were sent to Ukraine to “help” them. when the era of MAGA ends, their mid ranking terrorists will go to some other humanitarian disaster inflicted by one of the imperial powers that exists as their neighbor. always the host country welcomes them gladly because they’re on the brink of total devastation, but always these exports are snakes waiting to bite.

when we the people are finally free, it will be because our inheritors figured out what we could not: there is no useful nazi. war is how they survive. they convince you you must give them some amount of power to thwart their allies at your gates. the only true cure for nazism comes from rejecting them from society entirely and never allowing them to form their own elsewhere.

nazism is too dangerous to let survive.

the issue is they never cared if they were deporting someone who had done something wrong. ice is all about enforcing white supremacy. allways was. but they used to have to hide it. now they can just fucking do it. so now they’re getting rid of everyone who threatens the white supremacist hegemony. in her case her crimes are being physically attractive and intelligent

you have to find balance. the holocaust survivors who taught me how to resist an authoritarian taught me you absolutely must rest, take time to take care of yourself and your family, and mourn your losses. but that period of rest must never be forever. you can’t survive if you simply choose to wait it out. but you also can’t survive if you break yourself fighting back early in the fight

I’m excited for both Piefed and MBin. Both projects are progressing rapidly and have communities that seem to have their heads and hearts in the the right places

I wanted to make sure I sat down and really replied to you before because I generally like your takes and respect you as a person, and a quick reply from my phone would be impossible as a medium for replying to your thoughtful and well stated argument. I think we are approaching the question of “Is Substack a problem” from two different angles. I think I and the threadstarter (though I’m just assuming, everyone on Earth and on earth is different, and they may have different reasons from me for thinking what they think) are less concerned with “are there Nazis on Substack” as a purity test and more concerned with “What do the owners of Substack gain from control of our media sources.”

My issue with Substack isn’t that there’s Nazis on there, it’s that Substack’s owners made sure they were there, and made sure they got a cut of the revenue sharing scheme. People put up a stick and Substack responded by deplatforming those nazis, but it didn’t changed the fact that Chris Best, Hamish Mackenzie, and Jairaj Sethi considered it important to Substack’s future that those Nazis be present and paid. All three of those people are still present in Substack’s leadership. The thing with mass media, is that the true master of the mass media is not the person putting a message out there, it’s the owner of the media machine that decides what values get promoted, demoted, and what contexts those messages appear in. The owners of the Substack media machine have demonstrated themselves to be tolerant of intolerance. Even if they’ve adjusted their algorithms and platformed people, the fact remains that as a person who does a lot to analyze the propaganda value and biases present in a media mechanism, Substack appears compromised until those three are removed from the equation.

The question I find myself asking is what views do they hold, what do they tolerate, and how long until they find a new way to promote those views or allow someone to co-opt their waveforms to broadcast their message to us. I find myself thinking that the only ethical stance to take with Substack is “If you can get your news from somewhere else, do.” To be clear, this is not an endorsement, either, of print, radio, or television on the whole as a superior way of finding journalism. Journalism is always at battle with media. Journalists can only ever truly co-opt a waveform to get a message to the recipient. Right now I think the best methods of doing this are on self-hosted blog feeds like It’s Going Down, Anarchist News, Propublica, and a few other examples that simply aren’t coming to my mind right now. And yes, the outlets I’ve picked off the top of my head bias towards an anarchist world view because that’s how I see the world. However, all media is biased, and I particularly appreciate those outlets for being up front with who they represent, what they think of the world, and what that leads them to think about the facts. Of the media outlets I follow closely, Propublica probably fits the most closely with someone who seeks “objective truth” as much as it is even possible for such a thing to exist.

I guess ultimately, what I’m driving at, is that it is my view that Substack, like Medium, is a captured outlet. It can only ever show you a distorted version of the truth that serves its holders of power, who are ultimately aligned with the techbroligarchs that are strangling all of us. Substack, may be of the techbroligarch platforms the least abundantly abused, much as how people view Bluesky as being “woke twitter” even though Bluesky is still owned by a techbroligarch and better alternatives to exist. I do however, sometimes accept that a good piece of journalism is simply exclusively on Substack, and I must accept this, much as how sometimes I put a playlist on Spotify because Spotify still has the best social features, even though I loath Spotify and all that it stands for. But I don’t think discouraging people from promoting Substack as a platform is ultimately a purity test. I think it’s just a valid concern about our future.

if nobody wants them, they’re not worth $800million

there was a time when it would have been. i remember when you treated anything from the last 3 years as recent. i am old now

republicans wanted us uneducated so we’d be easier to manipulate. now those chickens have come home to roost. our populace is easily manipulated by russian propaganda

Counterpoint, the great society party wants to return us to 160 years ago when a man was allowed to own some people. If that means throwing a bunch of other things out, him and his crowd are fine to do it