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.

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.

Idk, joking around and feeling relatable are pretty good strategies for making a jury feel more sympathetic to the defense. And as other people have said with how high profile this case being calm and good on camera is important. So far I’ve thought he seemed great.

I’d honestly even say killing Bin Laden was less morally acceptable than killing Thompson tbh. One had 0 additional casualties, and one was preceded by a war which fucked the entire middle east, created multiple power vaccuums, killed thousands of civilians, and involved literal warcrimes.

I mean honestly the being knee deep in blood because a revolution started after one guy was acquitted for killing a CEO sounds way more like a movie plot to me but idk.

Regardless, the point of that wasn’t that “the CEO is dead, now everyone is saved!!!” Right now we literally have a situation where a dictator was removed from power in Syria. The outcome of that is still unknown, and could turn into something worse or something better, time will tell. But either way no-one is really saying “how dare they violently overthrow the government, don’t you know that violence is bad”, because that would be a stupid reaction to Assad being removed.

In any of these situations saying that the person using violence to respond to violence deserves to be imprisoned doesn’t make sense. Luigi Mangione would not be someone I’d feel unsafe walking past in the street, so why should they be locked up? The point of a prison system should be preventing someone from committing crime again, but I wouldn’t be worried about that in the case of Mangione so it makes no sense to sentence them to prison.

I also don’t want a violent revolution to come from this. Some violent actions leading to a government making large reforms as a concession to avoid further violence is something that happened all throughout history, and is how we got the New Deal. Something like that coming out of actions like this would be great, but my ideal system of change is more based on mutual aid and setting up dual power to allow people alternatives to replace corporations or weak government programs. But if a violent revolution does happen, it still doesn’t make sense to blame the people being oppressed and not the corporations doing the oppressing.

Imagine if someone was living in a dictatorship. The dictator was passing laws and policies leading to thousands dying yearly. They were embezzling funds from the country and stealing money from citizens, putting them in debt and leading to all the consequences that would entail. They increased the prices of essential goods like medicine in order to skim off the top. They never directly killed anyone, all of the pain and suffering and death they caused was due to policies that technically seperated them from the outcome, being enforced by courts, banks, police, hospitals, and prisons. And they also never broke any laws. Sure people died, or were forced into debt causing them to lose their homes, but all of that was allowed since they helped make the laws.

You’ve heard stories of other distant countries which don’t have these problems, but your country spends a considerable amount of time and money to convince you that those other governments are worse or impossible. Even so, the people tried voting this dictator out, but they rigged the elections so that no matter the outcome they still kept power. Some tried leaving, but all the neighbouring countries have the same type of government, so it was futile.

If in this situation someone kills the dictator very few people would believe that the assassin should be in jail. They didn’t kill someone because they were violent or dangerous, they did so out of desperation and a desire for improvement. This assassin won’t be a threat to any other citizen, only to other dictators doing the same thing. Why imprison someone who was fighting for a better future?

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 actually kinda feel that someone like Bernie may have had enough youth appeal to have a somewhat organic version of that happen. During the 2016 primaries, a decent amount of memes and online talk were spawned by him/his campaign.

Definitely agree that delivery is extremely important though, campaigning on helping workers while appearing elite and out of touch just makes people consider you a liar or to be looking down at people.

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.

With Mangione’s action having the “capability to inspire a variety of extremists and grievance-driven malicious actors to violence,” the NYPD encouraged companies to increase precautions and security for executives.

Isn’t this straight up saying that Mangione is the assassin? Obviously innocent until proven guilty has always been bullshit, but where’s the bare minimum “alleged” at?

My rebuttal to that is what if he set up a news website instead? Like I said in a previous message it’s not that hard to make a fake news site. It has a higher barrier to entry sure, but not one that’s impossible, anyone with a moderate amount of web design skills or like 50 bucks and access to fiverr could probably get one built for them.

In that case you’d get an article from it posted, read it/read the about us page, probably Google the name/authors name, and see that it’s non-existent and remove it. With substack the process is really the exact same, so banning substack specifically just feels arbitrary.

Also, specific sites known for extreme bias or disinformation are already banned right? So why isn’t substack handled the same way? There aren’t that many independent journalists on Substack people would be posting, I can think of like 2 or 3 sites I’ve seen. Any opinion piece would be banned for being an opinion piece anyway, regardless of where it was posted from originally, substack or otherwise.

Plus with these substack blogs, it’s not even something you can enforce without opening the article to see its on substack anyway. The URL for the ones ran by independent journalists don’t have any reference to substack in them, so you need to open it up and look at the site, which at that point taking an extra 15 seconds to check if it’s reliable isn’t that much more effort. And if you don’t need to open it because you recognize the URL, then you should also know whether that URL is for an actual journalist or someone spreading misinformation.

Basically it just feels like substack sites aren’t a unique problem that doesn’t also exist with “regular” websites which may or may not have misinformation or extreme bias.

Yeah I don’t blame you for the specific rules in News, I feel like the main point of disagreement we had was your reasoning for not allowing substack articles doesn’t really make sense to me. But regardless, we were definitely speaking past each other somewhat, so sorry about that.

I did assume you were a News mod by mistake, so sorry about that.

My overall point though is just that News seems to be inconsistently applying a rule which isn’t even really specified anywhere, and it would be nice if it was either clarified as a rule that any substack is banned, or not having substack alone as a grounds for removal, so that in the future anyone who posts an article from a reliable source that happens to use substack can’t just have it and any conversations arbitrarily removed.