lukes26

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.

It definitely seems to be yeah, given the number of reposted tiktoks I've seen, and the facebook unitedhealthgroup laughing emoji ratio, and all the videos that corporate media are clutching their pearls over. There are tons of comments in Ben Shapiro's videos on the subject that are cheering on the death of a CEO, despite his attempt to paint this as only the "violent left". When Ben Shapiro's viewers disagree with him you know the feeling is widespread lol.

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.