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 think the biggest issues with the gilded age PotD was that a lot of them hurt innocent people, or had collateral damage which hurt everyone in the case of a lot of the bombings. Not all of them by any means, but when innocent bystanders got hurt or killed it made the deed a lot less supportable. Plus there's just something about a health insurance CEO that makes literally nobody like them lol.

But like I said, News currently has multiple recent posts from multiple different substack blogs. One of which was posted by FlyingSquid, a moderator of the WorldNews community.

If the blog is private, from a unique URL, and is run by an independent journalist or group of journalists, how is that any more effort than checking any other type of website? I could steal a HTML/CSS template for a news site right now, whip up a site where I post misinformation, and buy a domain for like 10 bucks, and you'd have to go through a lot more effort to verify it as legit than it would take to open the substack blog, click about, and copy the name into your search engine.

If an article is by something like apnews then yeah it doesn't take much effort to check, but if it's by some other random page, like a lot of the posted articles are, you'd need to check it at least once before you knew it was fine, so what specifically about substack makes it a problem?

I can definitely see why someone not as well versed in anarchist history could believe that, or if they specifically meant against the insurance industry. Either way though, I think it's important for people to know about that history of violence that led to meaningful social reforms. So many Americans think that workers rights, civil rights, and everything short of the ~~abolishment~~ rebranding of slavery was won through voting or peaceful protests.

Too many people believe that somehow a state has some divine morality granted to it, and justice can only happen within the confines of said state. No moral act can be carried out without the government sanctioning it, and any miscarriage of justice by the state is an abnormality.

There may be a monopoly on violence held by states against their people, but this doesn't give them some inherent right to be the ultimate arbiters of justice. Something being legal does not make it moral, and just because an act is illegal doesn't make it immoral.

I mean .world 100% sucks lol, and people should definitely move off it, but I'd also like people to move off .ml or any other general purpose instance since centralization on any one instance can cause issues imo. I'm considering switching off of .ee for the same reason. I think it makes more sense to have specific instances for specific things, so that the admins of one instance can have more domain specific knowledge ideally.

.world specifically does seem like they can't go more than a few weeks without some kind of drama though lol.

I mean at this point it's whatever, but I did post it in News originally. It got removed for not being a "reputable news source" based on the modlog, but the current post about it in the same community is from Gizmodo, which is fine, but the only source they have for the manifesto is literally this link.

I get that it's on a substack, but just because a journalist publishes using substack and not some other web template (even though the site is their own URL, and the author is an independent journalist who worked at several fairly well known news orgs) doesn't mean it's not reputable. It just feels very arbitrary.

Also you guys clearly don't seem to ban substack, since there are multiple posts currently up that have been posted a day ago in one case, and 16 hours ago in the other, one of which is literally also from ken klippenstein. So why is it fine sometimes but not othertimes? I don't necessarily have an issue with a broad ban of any substack link (even though I personally think that would be kinda dumb), but that fact that it's so inconsistently enforced isn't good.

Yeah based on his goodreads and other social media he's definitely more of US style Libertarian or conservative. He tweeted some stuff about wokeness and DEI, some of the new athiesm junk about how athiests replace Christianity with worship of social issues, and seemed to like Elon Musk. He also didn't seem to be fully committed to the ideology though, he had real criticisms of Jordan Peterson and he seemed to be an environmentalist. He honestly just kinda seems like a normal, if privileged, person. He has a mix of political ideas, some which don't necessarily mesh, and is willing to criticize some of the people he agrees with.

But if anything him being someone who seemed to like CEOs, who grew up pretty wealthy, being radicalized by the industry is kinda a stronger message about how unless you're one of the corporate elite you don't matter to them.

Yeah, I don't actually know too much about him, this is the first I've seen of him afaik (though I definitely could have read his stuff and not realized), but as far as I can tell he's pretty consistent with factual reporting. It did strike me as weird it was removed, like I get it's technically a substack page and all, but it's not like some random guys blog, and it's still the only reputable source for the full manifesto I've seen.

That one is unconfirmed at best, it might be real, but there are several parts of it that don't really make sense.

According to the bluesky thread they're talking to regulators now and are still planning on suing. Hopefully they do and something good comes from it.

https://xkcd.com/1706/