You suggest running away and giving ground to Nazis. Allowing them to platform and mainstream Nazism. First rule of Fascism Resistance is Do Not Comply. Timothy Snyder. You typed up all the relevant information you believed to be needed. Explanations take time. You are very thorough and it’s appreciated. I We Persist to Resist. Substack will have to kill my account like Xlon Xusk did countless times. Ok 5. I think. 🤔 I signed back up under an alias. I we had used our Stephanie Anne Trump name. People thought I was JOKING about being a Trump. 🤦🏻♀️. It’s literally the story of our Life. People don’t believe the words we say.
There was an entire war fought with Nazis over their ideas in which an estimated 15-20 million people died and resulted in the military and political defeat of Nazis and their ideas. One would think that should be enough for the head of Substack.
Thanks for explaining. I'm one of the people who is on Substack because you are, but I'm reaching the jump off point for Substack. I understand that your email list is portable, so I hope that if I jump before you do that our connection isn't severed for very long.
My calculus is this: It's a Nazi bar now, because of the bar owner. That's not going to change. I have to vote with my small beer.
What's with all the profanity and ad hominems on the part of the nominal good guys here in this debate! I'm reading a lot of "shit" language tossed around. Maybe, just maybe, that vehemence can be vented in a different manner?? Shock value grabs attention, true, but there is such a thing as stimulus extinction and all the cursing gets old, tired and banal pretty fast. A good cause, so why self-marginalize? Think!
This isn't a debate. That's sort of my whole point. And if you need nice language to choose a good cause, you, not the language, are the source of that cause's marginalization.
Please enjoy this essay on the difference between profanity and obscenity.
Thanks for the quick response,! No, I view the issue as advocacy. Fascism must be opposed,there's no debate. Tactics are all important. In my younger years I took to the streets and was tear gassed on several occasions, at another time I was held in a pen with my. brothers and sisters and. have the police walking around taking our photographs. These were badges of honor in the old days
and we.too threw f-bombs around liberally. Those were the tactics then. But looking back I see they were faulty. We marginalized and trivialized our selves, but far worse, as its representatives, we trivialized our cause. We actually strengthened the reactionaries and they rose to power on our arrogant contempt for the sentiments of the People. Nixon, Reagan, Trump, the current supreme court-- all owed.to our faulty tactics.. don't let the righteousness of your cause blind you to our mistakes. Don't self marginalize. Consider who you must bring to your side. Think! ..
To attempt a reasonable reply to my own rhetoric: "Ah, the Old Left is heard from! You are all a spent force. Tell your war stories to each other in the nursing home! Your times are not ours. We don't care for your Port Huron statements or your peace symbols. Your times are past. Your tactics were flawed, possibly. But we of this time will decide OUR tactics, not you. You should be the ones to think! For all your protests, all your direct actions, just what did you achieve? NOT A DAMN THING, flower children. Why on earth should we listen to you?
Fair enough. I rest my case and stand by my advice.
One last worth of caution to the new left. It's worth pondering.
Debs was relevant in his time, was jailed, ran for President. He was a man of the people. He really desired their uplifting from forces that oppressed them. In every way he could, he worked to achieve their prosperity, peace, and freedom. Yet his loved people never chose him. He never was elected President. Was Debs wrong or were the people? American progressives must always face this koan. Until we solve it, we are defeated generation after generation. We don't understand the true power. Not understanding it, we again and again repeat our past mistakes.
Are we? I mean, sure, if your goal was Socialist States of America, I guess you could say we didn't win that one, but do you not see any wins by American progressives in all your time on this Earth?
Nothing major I see. But there is incremental progress I think. A
series of small victories, the reactionaries are being pushed back. The conservatives are increasingly losing touch with the people, I hope, as they continue their implosion into marginality.. they have become extremists and the extremes are by definition out on the margins... Like my generation they are being left behind by demographics alone. When the boomers and their children are gone their power should be much diminished. But don't ever underestimate the Right- it's ranks are continually replenished by the young and ambitious and they are sbdolute masters in marketing and gaming the system.
I wouldn't have minded Socialism. It is a scare word the Right trots forth year after year, but isn't it just another word for fairness? When you and your sister sit at a table and your mother puts a cake in front of you and says, "Divide it." Is it fair that the bigger of you two, take the lion's share? That's all that Socialism ever seeks, the fair distribution of utilities and justice. I wouldn't mind a socialist America at all. And no, it wouldn't be the Socialist States of America, it would still be the USA, just a kinder, gentler version.
The thing about "defeat nazi ideas in the marketplace of ideas" always leaves out is that the whole fucking world put nazi ideas on trial and found them abhorrent enough to put most of the nazis to death. I'm pretty sure we soundly defeated nazi ideas last time they were given a marketplace.
Though to push analogies further, unlike the finality of a trial (after appeals are exhausted, anyway… cue Hamlet to say something about the law's delay), the marketplace is always ready to serve up a sequel.
You said exactly what I was feeling/thinking much better.
It's been a lifelong dream for me to be a writer and when the opportunity landed in my lap earlier this year, I went for it. I found a fucking amazeballs community here that gave me so much support and inspiration and where my biggest cheerleaders when I announced that two of my stories had been accepted for publication next spring. I still have my day job, but I've spent the past few days taking down my work. I'll keep writing and submitting stories but I'm not going anywhere else for now. Like you, I'm furious at Substack for forcing my hand.
Very well written. I'm following you to see if you come up with a new platform, as I'm moving soon as well. My gramma had a saying "If you lie with the dogs, you'll end up with fleas."
I'm leaning towards self-hosting. Although the friction is a bit more than just a migration like "from Substack to XYZ", it also removes any possibility of that target platform sliding down the enshittification slope. With RSS still working, software that can automatically send out emails, and OSS podcasting packages, I'm thinking it's possible to self-host both blog and podcast. Then again, I'm just one small voice, just a gamer who shares their joy every now and again, not my income, so that is possible for me to do.
Most of what I would say has been said above. I’ll be following you wherever you go, because I think what you have to say is really worth reading. I am disappointed in Substack and its principals. I’ll leave and not look back.
Simplistic and aspirational thought: Too bad we can't each of us reading here open a substack on why the Nazis are horrible and write daily about that. What platform isn't going to be going down the X-hole at some point? (I think I am just summarizing here what others have said, I just read the post.)
I absolutely want to keep reading you so even though I have been quietly unsubscribing from a lot of substacks I'm keeping this one so I can find out where you go.
I'm trying to solve this problem for myself, because tinyletter is shutting down and I decided to move in the new year. and then substack went and pulled this shit and thanks for doing it before I shuffled my subscribers over here? but I don't know where I can put 998 subscribers (literally that's the number) anywhere that isn't going to *cost me money* to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year to write them a note once every six months. I might as well ask for their mailing addresses and buy stamps, honestly.
I honestly don't know. I have been looking around and basically everyone wants $20-45 USD a month because I have 1000 subscribers and they're offering all this stuff that I don't use. or I could use them, I suppose, since I'll have them anyway. But I don't really...want to? I just want to write an email, promise i'll write another one sooner than the last time, and then...not do that.
Take a look at Mailerlite. They have a free plan and I *think* it was still free for around 1000. I'm on the cusp between 500-1000 so I'm pretty sure I looked at those numbers and it was free. Also interested because I'm considering integrating direct sales into my program in 2024 and Mailerlite is supposed to integrate nicely with BookFunnel (for an ebook delivery mechanism).
I also really like how Ken White put it. It's really worth noting that Substack's response isn't just bad in the usual ways, it's also insulting... well, let's be honest, in the usual ways. This isn't about censorship or free speech and they damn well know it. But if they just came out and said "content moderation is too hard" or "we really aren't bothered by nazis using our service" it'd be a bad look, so they have to piss on our shoes and tell us it's raining. Really shitty stuff.
I’ve been seeing a lot of “content moderation is too hard” responses all over the internet lately. I have been wondering if we have finally hit the point where too few people remember the before times, when actual people had editing, moderation, publishing, and fact checking as an actual job with pay. Somehow people are now willing to accept “but we were able to print money by declaring that none of those jobs were necessary, so we should never have to adjust our policies” as a response.
No one seems to be able to see that decimating the real people corps and replacing them with AI or nothing at all has not appreciably improved our culture. Of course, there are ways it has, because voices that were kept silent, like LGBTQIA and people of color, did benefit from the loss of bad gatekeepers, and that benefitted the culture as a whole. And yet, there is a case to be made that real people may be more flawed but they are also more flexible to follow cultural changes and ethical lines and nuance.
But the “it would be impossible to correct this Nazi problem because it’s too hard for our nine-people-run-the-site-and-we-want-to-get-paid-like-900” people make me feel old and get-off-my-lawnish.
I come from a world of skepticism, and I'll tell you: bad ideas being extinguished in "the marketplace of ideas" because they suck isn't a thing.
Pretending psychic surgery is just another idea - one that has nothing to debate, because it's not real - hasn't meant its end. Neither has letting diet-cures for COVID hit the mainstream, or letting homeopathy have its share of the platform. When James Randi literally showed people how psychic surgery "worked" and explained it was a con on The Tonight Show, NBC was swamped with people demanding to know how to contact the psychic surgeons.
I've had frikkin' LATRILE come up in conversation as a cure for cancer despite being known as bullshit for decades. Likewise orgone. Sitting these beside valid science, as if they carry equal weight, is lunatic. But there are people agitating for exactly that, despite them being repeatedly defeated in the "marketplace of ideas".
Hucksters and con-artists know how they can make their money, and they want as large a populace to draw from as possible. "Putting them on platforms to expose them" is a lie.
You suggest running away and giving ground to Nazis. Allowing them to platform and mainstream Nazism. First rule of Fascism Resistance is Do Not Comply. Timothy Snyder. You typed up all the relevant information you believed to be needed. Explanations take time. You are very thorough and it’s appreciated. I We Persist to Resist. Substack will have to kill my account like Xlon Xusk did countless times. Ok 5. I think. 🤔 I signed back up under an alias. I we had used our Stephanie Anne Trump name. People thought I was JOKING about being a Trump. 🤦🏻♀️. It’s literally the story of our Life. People don’t believe the words we say.
WWII taught us how to handle Nazis.
There was an entire war fought with Nazis over their ideas in which an estimated 15-20 million people died and resulted in the military and political defeat of Nazis and their ideas. One would think that should be enough for the head of Substack.
Also wanted to add I enjoy your writing so much that if you choose to move elsewhere, I would follow.
Thanks for explaining. I'm one of the people who is on Substack because you are, but I'm reaching the jump off point for Substack. I understand that your email list is portable, so I hope that if I jump before you do that our connection isn't severed for very long.
My calculus is this: It's a Nazi bar now, because of the bar owner. That's not going to change. I have to vote with my small beer.
What's with all the profanity and ad hominems on the part of the nominal good guys here in this debate! I'm reading a lot of "shit" language tossed around. Maybe, just maybe, that vehemence can be vented in a different manner?? Shock value grabs attention, true, but there is such a thing as stimulus extinction and all the cursing gets old, tired and banal pretty fast. A good cause, so why self-marginalize? Think!
This isn't a debate. That's sort of my whole point. And if you need nice language to choose a good cause, you, not the language, are the source of that cause's marginalization.
Please enjoy this essay on the difference between profanity and obscenity.
https://armoxon.substack.com/p/profanity-and-obscenity
Thanks for the quick response,! No, I view the issue as advocacy. Fascism must be opposed,there's no debate. Tactics are all important. In my younger years I took to the streets and was tear gassed on several occasions, at another time I was held in a pen with my. brothers and sisters and. have the police walking around taking our photographs. These were badges of honor in the old days
and we.too threw f-bombs around liberally. Those were the tactics then. But looking back I see they were faulty. We marginalized and trivialized our selves, but far worse, as its representatives, we trivialized our cause. We actually strengthened the reactionaries and they rose to power on our arrogant contempt for the sentiments of the People. Nixon, Reagan, Trump, the current supreme court-- all owed.to our faulty tactics.. don't let the righteousness of your cause blind you to our mistakes. Don't self marginalize. Consider who you must bring to your side. Think! ..
To attempt a reasonable reply to my own rhetoric: "Ah, the Old Left is heard from! You are all a spent force. Tell your war stories to each other in the nursing home! Your times are not ours. We don't care for your Port Huron statements or your peace symbols. Your times are past. Your tactics were flawed, possibly. But we of this time will decide OUR tactics, not you. You should be the ones to think! For all your protests, all your direct actions, just what did you achieve? NOT A DAMN THING, flower children. Why on earth should we listen to you?
Fair enough. I rest my case and stand by my advice.
One last worth of caution to the new left. It's worth pondering.
Debs was relevant in his time, was jailed, ran for President. He was a man of the people. He really desired their uplifting from forces that oppressed them. In every way he could, he worked to achieve their prosperity, peace, and freedom. Yet his loved people never chose him. He never was elected President. Was Debs wrong or were the people? American progressives must always face this koan. Until we solve it, we are defeated generation after generation. We don't understand the true power. Not understanding it, we again and again repeat our past mistakes.
"we are defeated generation after generation."
Are we? I mean, sure, if your goal was Socialist States of America, I guess you could say we didn't win that one, but do you not see any wins by American progressives in all your time on this Earth?
Nothing major I see. But there is incremental progress I think. A
series of small victories, the reactionaries are being pushed back. The conservatives are increasingly losing touch with the people, I hope, as they continue their implosion into marginality.. they have become extremists and the extremes are by definition out on the margins... Like my generation they are being left behind by demographics alone. When the boomers and their children are gone their power should be much diminished. But don't ever underestimate the Right- it's ranks are continually replenished by the young and ambitious and they are sbdolute masters in marketing and gaming the system.
I wouldn't have minded Socialism. It is a scare word the Right trots forth year after year, but isn't it just another word for fairness? When you and your sister sit at a table and your mother puts a cake in front of you and says, "Divide it." Is it fair that the bigger of you two, take the lion's share? That's all that Socialism ever seeks, the fair distribution of utilities and justice. I wouldn't mind a socialist America at all. And no, it wouldn't be the Socialist States of America, it would still be the USA, just a kinder, gentler version.
The thing about "defeat nazi ideas in the marketplace of ideas" always leaves out is that the whole fucking world put nazi ideas on trial and found them abhorrent enough to put most of the nazis to death. I'm pretty sure we soundly defeated nazi ideas last time they were given a marketplace.
Though to push analogies further, unlike the finality of a trial (after appeals are exhausted, anyway… cue Hamlet to say something about the law's delay), the marketplace is always ready to serve up a sequel.
One substacker I follow (OK Doomer) moved to ghost... you should check her out...
You said exactly what I was feeling/thinking much better.
It's been a lifelong dream for me to be a writer and when the opportunity landed in my lap earlier this year, I went for it. I found a fucking amazeballs community here that gave me so much support and inspiration and where my biggest cheerleaders when I announced that two of my stories had been accepted for publication next spring. I still have my day job, but I've spent the past few days taking down my work. I'll keep writing and submitting stories but I'm not going anywhere else for now. Like you, I'm furious at Substack for forcing my hand.
Good luck in whatever you decide to do.
Very well written. I'm following you to see if you come up with a new platform, as I'm moving soon as well. My gramma had a saying "If you lie with the dogs, you'll end up with fleas."
I'm leaning towards self-hosting. Although the friction is a bit more than just a migration like "from Substack to XYZ", it also removes any possibility of that target platform sliding down the enshittification slope. With RSS still working, software that can automatically send out emails, and OSS podcasting packages, I'm thinking it's possible to self-host both blog and podcast. Then again, I'm just one small voice, just a gamer who shares their joy every now and again, not my income, so that is possible for me to do.
Good luck to you in 2024!
To follow up on my prior post:
Different levels of writing for different readers?
* What has a Nazi done for me lately?
* Review the fallacies in Heidigger's intro to Nazism in his unpublished seminars.
Most of what I would say has been said above. I’ll be following you wherever you go, because I think what you have to say is really worth reading. I am disappointed in Substack and its principals. I’ll leave and not look back.
Great essay, thanks.
My understanding is it comes down to their funding model. VC funding means they must make money and cannot afford to be principled.
To be clear i am against this model and its implications
Simplistic and aspirational thought: Too bad we can't each of us reading here open a substack on why the Nazis are horrible and write daily about that. What platform isn't going to be going down the X-hole at some point? (I think I am just summarizing here what others have said, I just read the post.)
I absolutely want to keep reading you so even though I have been quietly unsubscribing from a lot of substacks I'm keeping this one so I can find out where you go.
I'm trying to solve this problem for myself, because tinyletter is shutting down and I decided to move in the new year. and then substack went and pulled this shit and thanks for doing it before I shuffled my subscribers over here? but I don't know where I can put 998 subscribers (literally that's the number) anywhere that isn't going to *cost me money* to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year to write them a note once every six months. I might as well ask for their mailing addresses and buy stamps, honestly.
https://buttondown.email/pricing $9 for 1000 but it jumps to $29 1000-5000. Buttondown offers free easy migration FWIW. Many features.
yeah. the problem is that i said I had 998 subscribers, so i got some joins and now I have 1003 subscribers.
I haven't tried it, but many recommend it.
Maybe Mailerlite? I'm looking at it.
I honestly don't know. I have been looking around and basically everyone wants $20-45 USD a month because I have 1000 subscribers and they're offering all this stuff that I don't use. or I could use them, I suppose, since I'll have them anyway. But I don't really...want to? I just want to write an email, promise i'll write another one sooner than the last time, and then...not do that.
Take a look at Mailerlite. They have a free plan and I *think* it was still free for around 1000. I'm on the cusp between 500-1000 so I'm pretty sure I looked at those numbers and it was free. Also interested because I'm considering integrating direct sales into my program in 2024 and Mailerlite is supposed to integrate nicely with BookFunnel (for an ebook delivery mechanism).
I also really like how Ken White put it. It's really worth noting that Substack's response isn't just bad in the usual ways, it's also insulting... well, let's be honest, in the usual ways. This isn't about censorship or free speech and they damn well know it. But if they just came out and said "content moderation is too hard" or "we really aren't bothered by nazis using our service" it'd be a bad look, so they have to piss on our shoes and tell us it's raining. Really shitty stuff.
I’ve been seeing a lot of “content moderation is too hard” responses all over the internet lately. I have been wondering if we have finally hit the point where too few people remember the before times, when actual people had editing, moderation, publishing, and fact checking as an actual job with pay. Somehow people are now willing to accept “but we were able to print money by declaring that none of those jobs were necessary, so we should never have to adjust our policies” as a response.
No one seems to be able to see that decimating the real people corps and replacing them with AI or nothing at all has not appreciably improved our culture. Of course, there are ways it has, because voices that were kept silent, like LGBTQIA and people of color, did benefit from the loss of bad gatekeepers, and that benefitted the culture as a whole. And yet, there is a case to be made that real people may be more flawed but they are also more flexible to follow cultural changes and ethical lines and nuance.
But the “it would be impossible to correct this Nazi problem because it’s too hard for our nine-people-run-the-site-and-we-want-to-get-paid-like-900” people make me feel old and get-off-my-lawnish.
I come from a world of skepticism, and I'll tell you: bad ideas being extinguished in "the marketplace of ideas" because they suck isn't a thing.
Pretending psychic surgery is just another idea - one that has nothing to debate, because it's not real - hasn't meant its end. Neither has letting diet-cures for COVID hit the mainstream, or letting homeopathy have its share of the platform. When James Randi literally showed people how psychic surgery "worked" and explained it was a con on The Tonight Show, NBC was swamped with people demanding to know how to contact the psychic surgeons.
I've had frikkin' LATRILE come up in conversation as a cure for cancer despite being known as bullshit for decades. Likewise orgone. Sitting these beside valid science, as if they carry equal weight, is lunatic. But there are people agitating for exactly that, despite them being repeatedly defeated in the "marketplace of ideas".
Hucksters and con-artists know how they can make their money, and they want as large a populace to draw from as possible. "Putting them on platforms to expose them" is a lie.
He also came on the show and obliterated Uri Gellar. When the heck is Houdini gonna come to the seance🤪.