No matter how unjust it’s been, the only imaginable way out is to somehow let him “save face" what ever that means in this situation.

It is literally a cliche of geopolitics for the mighty empire to continue the senseless and horrific war against some small country that’s effectively defending itself, year after year, because of this logic. But then in the end to reluctantly agree to the “unimaginable” way out (saving face with some kind of explanation that literally no one believes), because at the end of the day, the simple physics of the situation will allow nothing else.

I more or less agree with you about Putin’s logic and mindset actually. My overall point is there is more than one country and leader in the world that can be stubborn. The defenders are often more stubborn, at the end of the day, it turns out (to the shock and confusion of the attackers who thought they had a monopoly.)

So what they’ve done in Ukraine is completely unjustified? In your opinion?

This is just bait lol

Get a room you two

Sure, it would be nice if Russia simply left Ukraine, but put yourself in Putin’s position - it’s a complete non-solution. You don’t fold after going all in. It’s an incredibly naive thing to say

This is exactly the kind of logic someone would use to justify either of the examples I brought up. Exactly.

The fact that he really doesn’t want to stop killing innocent people, and so he would have to pay the “cost” of doing something he doesn’t want to do, isn’t a justification. I would actually really like for him to be arrested on that ICC warrant and try to explain this exactly logic at the Hague. I think it would be great. I would support him using that defense, I think it would be wonderful to see. People could decide whether to accept the logic, and then whether to hang him or not depending on whether they bought into it as a good reason for continuing to kill innocent people on an industrial scale.

Yeah, I get it. You’re not wrong.

No, it’s on par with telling someone “Well, you shouldn’t keep driving drunk then” or “You should 100% stop contacting her and move on if she keeps instantly blocking you on every new platform you try on.” Certain actions really are under voluntary control. We’re not telling Russia they really need to shape up that GDP if they want the world to take them seriously. We’re asking them to stop deciding to kill innocent people. Seems legit. The obstacle is that they really want to, and they’re reluctant to stop.

(The analogy is flawed because there’s no real equivalency between driving drunk and maybe rolling the dice on killing one family, and yourself, versus doing it to members of a million families. But the simplicity of the solution is the same.)

Holy shit

I’m not watching this entire thing, but it’s bad. I watched some sections and holy shit.

The first random thing I happened upon was Hasan talking about trans issues, overtalking someone from the chat who disagreed with him and demanded evidence which was literally open on his screen at the time, called them transphobic (?), then banned a trans person who chimed in to say that yes they agreed and Hasan was doing a bad job arguing for trans issues, and then spent extensive time berating them on stream, wishing bad things on them in the future…

I honestly can’t even do it justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdCFycPw3fI&t=575s

Holy crap man. I generally sort of discount people trying to find reasons to nitpick some leftist voice, because pretty much everyone has some kind of imperfection and whatever, it’s fine, we don’t need to constantly be shedding allies because fuck anyone who ever did something allegedly etc etc whatever. Anyone can have a bad day if they’re on streams a ton of the time… but this is bad. And it makes me not surprised at all if he has the same type of super-confident wrong take on geopolitical issues.

Edit: Also, by far the saddest thing is the nonstop scroll of people cheering him on and celebrating this person getting banned, just whizzing by in the chat. Shit is fucked. Our society is in a bad state.

Not really. The two have nothing to do with each other.

“The Chinese government shouldn’t have shot all those people in Tienanmen Square.” “Yeah, but you have to remember Western imperialism.”

“The Khmer Rouge shouldn’t have killed a quarter of their country’s population.” “Yeah, but you have to remember the Vietnam War.”

“Ireland shouldn’t have covered up for sex-abusing priests.” “Yeah, but you have to remember Protestant oppression of the Catholics…”

The whole premise is nonsense. I do know people from outside the US who took this attitude to Putin, I can think of specific ones of them that I talked with about Putin and they told me I was an ignorant American, more or less, and Ukraine’s not innocent and the US intentions in Ukraine are not good either. They thought it was hilarious that I was all heated up about Putin and (in their minds) not heated up about the US government doing more or less the exact same thing in their region of the world for the last several decades.

And then the 2022 invasion happened.

And as soon as it was apartment blocks and hospitals blowing up, power plants, shelling Chernobyl, kidnapping kids and taking them back to Russia, they all of a sudden got real fuckin’ quiet about Putin kind of being an admirable guy because, what the hell at least he’s trying to stand up to the US instead of getting fucked around by them or else making corrupt deals like everyone else. They weren’t stupid or naive about what a war like that meant, who was paying the horrifying price, or how much or how little it was doing to solve American imperialism anywhere else in the world. And so they were shocked and horrified, watching the scale of the suffering. They didn’t want to try to do little backflips to connect it to some kind of noble cause somewhere else that it was supposedly in service of.

Any other reaction, honestly to me, means you are at best some kind of sheltered and elitist person, some kind of person who feels like making excuses for innocent people dying because you want to cling to some pet theory. As the person in Hasan’s chat very succinctly alluded to, I would never make that kind of excuse on behalf of the US, or for Israel or any other horrifying state-power entity that’s doing awful things and spreading around propaganda about it. So why is Hasan doing it? That’s fuckin’ weird, don’t do that.

I don’t really have a problem with someone being a streamer or being successful. I was always kind of on the fence about Hasan (still am actually), I like him because he is a strong leftist voice and maybe I should not be nitpicking him here. This is the first really dumb thing I’ve heard him say.

I guess I see him, after seeing this, as similar to Joe Rogan for the left: He’s actually generally sensible, he has a very loyal audience who mostly lines up with his political leaning, but he talks about complex issues without really understanding them (or apparently even trying to), which makes him vulnerable to saying or promoting total bullshit by accident. Case in point…

I mean it is kind of a dick move to spy on downvotes and then demand that someone respond to you. The dude is wrong as hell, but I do agree with the overall principle that not every vote needs to be subject to someone getting interrogated as to why they voted that way.

Their shock at finding out that it works that way is, of course, why the currently Lemmy UI is badly designed because it creates the illusion for people that their votes are private. They definitely should not do that.

Admins have way too much information on Lemmy.

No, users have way too little information on Lemmy. This whole distinction between “the admins, who see secrets and control the flow of information” versus “the users, who are only allowed to know what we tell them, and have to follow our rules” is a holdover from corporate structures of web service. For the most part, it has no place in the future I would like to see.

The technology makes it impossible to hide the votes. So don’t hide the votes. It’s okay, as long as people know that’s what is going on. But anything that creates that kind of lord-and-peasant dichotomy should be minimized as much as possible within the realities of how things are going to get hosted. Admins can read DMs. So end-to-end encrypt the DMs. Mods and admins can make deletion and bans. So put the users in control of who’s allowed to “moderate” their individual feed (this is one thing that as I understand it Bluesky actually did very right), don’t partition everything into spaces where at all times the “users” are powerless to overrule someone trying to control their feed for them. And so on. You get the idea.

That’s my opinion, others might see it differently, but I really don’t get why they copied all elements of the Reddit model when a lot of them have no place (or don’t even make sense) in a federated network.

It’s ridiculously stupid. In my opinion. Actually making the votes private would be fine. Making the votes public but making sure everyone knows that would be fine. Trying to pretend they’re private, and hiding them in the UI but making it an open secret that they’re not private and anyone who knows what they’re doing can look at how other people are voting, is textbook harmful security-by-obscurity misleading your users.

It kind of goes with their authoritarian mindset I guess. “Don’t question me, I don’t have to be honest with you about what’s going on, just shut up and go back to your UI which has only the features I allow you to have. Mine has a little dropdown that can look at the votes. Yours doesn’t. Get back in your box. All the good users won’t look outside what I tell them to.”

The Lemmy creators thought votes should be private, and didn’t respond meaningfully to people who tried to tell them that Lemmy votes are not private.

If they’re currently retconning it as “Lemmy votes are not private and never were,” then that’s a step in the right direction I guess, but the fatal flaw was ever following the Reddit model where votes are “supposed” to be private for real. Because as you note it is impossible to do in an ActivityPub system. A lot of people when this was first being discussed, pre-lemvotes, were objecting strongly to the idea of making votes public, because they liked pretending they were private and just not paying any attention to the fact that they weren’t. I think mbin still refuses to display downvotes for this (stupid) reason.

(Actually, Piefed did what I thought was a brilliant solution, creating new actors to send out votes with that were different from the comment actors, so that individual users could vote from Piefed and admins could check into it but the votes would not be trivial to associate with the users. IDK why they abandoned it but it seemed like a pretty clever way.)

As long as we’re talking about privacy issues on Lemmy, I’m pretty sure that isn’t true. I strongly suspect that it would be possible to set up a tool that would post image links, or even just track the accesses for your own avatar, in a way where you could statistically be pretty confident of associating IP addresses with usernames after participating in Lemmy for a while (correlating people accessing your avatar image with replying to particular people’s comments and then them replying to those comments, sending DMs to particular people from a not-very-much used account, something like that.)

I think modern versions of Lemmy can proxy images to reduce this, but it’s hard enough to do robustly that I would bet that there is some kind of way the information leaks out. It’s really hard to prevent this kind of thing even if you’re trying hard to make it difficult and the Lemmy devs don’t seem to be trying all that hard.

I don’t even think image proxying is on by default in Lemmy, although I just checked and this Piefed instance is doing it.

This isn’t really a Lemmy badge of approval or anything, although it is a little interesting. They suck up literally every single thing they can get their grubby little mitts on.

If I were in a conspiratorial frame of mind, I might think that there are people who are trying to push the “Substack = Nazis” narrative, by spreading it around in contexts where the “official” content of their message is actually something different, which is usually a lot more effective at spreading the gestalt you’re trying to spread around than just spamming “Substack = Nazis” everywhere.

The whole framing of the underlying freakout, that if Substack sent you a push notification about somebody’s blog, they’re obviously endorsing it, and it’s “being pushed algorithmically” by Substack, and look, here’s this very visual-picture-friendly juxtaposition of the Nazi logo in a Substack notification, even if the actual accusation is being walked by to “I think they should ban Nazis and this shouldn’t even be an issue” (which would be a fair thing to say) and “I’m alarmed that they took VC money from some pretty suspect people at different points in their history” (which would be a fair thing to say).

But, that’s not what they lead with. What they lead with is “don’t take any action” (they did take action), “‘oops, all nazis’ notifications issue” (not even sure what that means, but Substack is overwhelmingly leftist obviously, not “oops all nazis”)… you get the idea. There’s some other innuendo stuff in there, implying that “free speech” is just a cover because Substack loves Nazis so much that they’re hosting a ton of solid left-wing journalists and providing them funding, just so they can have a handy excuse to host this one Nazi blog with 768 followers, which is the real goal.

Ask me if I’m salty about this whole conversation lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy (I just learned about this one and since then I’ve been seeing it everywhere; Lemmy people love to do it it seems like)

from content on their site, that they full control

They don’t. Or, rather, to exactly the degree that Google “controls” the mail servers that forwarded the spam email to you.

Anyway, you seem to be grasping the point I was making now, so great. Anyway, to me, the bottom line is: It’s better to let people talk. I federated with Hexbear and lemmy.ml, too (or did, back when I had a server of my own, sniff), for exactly the same reason. It’s not Substack’s fault that there are Nazis in the world, and in this particular case and framing, I don’t think moving them to some other segregated platform does anyone any good. I actually think it helps the Nazis a lot to separate them from the main flow of information exchange. I realize I’m in the minority in thinking all of this.

The best way to combat that is not having Nazi shit.

Banning Nazi shit, especially if you are now taking a ton of money from standard silicon valley VCs, is the first step towards banning all “antisemitic” shit. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away. I think I actually had this exact conversation specifically about Substack with someone, at great length, a few years ago, and they were pointing to Germany as an example of how it should work (banning Nazi shit), and I pointed out that the same laws could easily be used against pro-Palestinians, and they all told me I was crazy.

AND OH, LOOK WHAT HAPPENED IN GERMANY

We’re probably not going to see eye to eye on it. Whatever. Anyway: I’m not in favor of Nazis. I’m in favor of left-wing platforms. I’m noticing that you are not taking the standpoint “We need to get the Nazis off Substack, because it’s a good thing, but the Nazis are horrifying.” That would actually be totally reasonable to me even though it’s not my opinion. You’re taking the standpoint “Fuck Substack all the homies hate Substack,” apparently, which I have a problem with. Or that seems to be your stance. Am I wrong? Maybe so, if so tell me.

I don’t like policing people’s speech, even when literal Nazis are involved. I’m probably in the minority on that. But I just don’t like all the disingenuous ways of attacking Substack that all seem to boil down to some pretty dishonest framings… everything you’re saying now, I think is more or less reasonable, we just don’t agree on it. As long as you’re not saying “SUBSTACK IS PROMOTING NAZI BLOGS ON PURPOSE BECAUSE THEY’RE NAZIS,” as some people seem to be, I think we good.

Are you under the impression that someone at Substack manually reviews every notification that goes out, for every user-generated post / blog? I feel like you failed to grasp the essential point I was making. Yes, comparing it to “Google is sending me push notifications about herbal supplements!” is precisely the analogy I’m intending to make. You are aware that those email notifications are also push notifications, sent to you by Google, based on user-generated content, right?

I have no idea what youre on about with the URL

Seems pretty straightforward to me. Is there a better way I can explain it to you, do you have any questions about the explanation? What part doesn’t make sense?

I have no idea if Substack is planning to take this blog down (actually I kind of doubt it, now looking into it more). But it seems like you’re failing to grasp really incredibly simple things that I’m saying, which makes me kind of not trust your overall judgement about what the far more complex issue of what the right overall judgement and opinion to hold towards Substack is.

Are you under the impression that a person at Substack manually reviews every notification about every newsletter that gets sent out? It would be surprising to me if that was how it worked.

The URL has a “1” at the end, which usually means someone lost their account the first time and is now making a new one. I can’t really make sense of how old the “1” version of the account is or if there used to be one without it. The blog hasn’t been deleted yet, which sure isn’t great, but I’m fairly sure that the people at Substack didn’t make this blog or deliberately take pains to make sure it exists in any way.

I mean, you do understand that when I get a gmail notification about herbal Viagra, that doesn’t mean Google has gone into the herbal supplements business, right? And in general how platforms generally work? As I understand it (and tell me if I’m wrong), their currently policy is to ban Nazis and this one should be gone soon. Maybe I’m wrong, I’ll check back in a couple days and see what happened with it.

Honestly, it makes infinitely more sense to think that this is a fuck-up that is being spun to sound like a deliberate decision by internet trolls, than to think that Substack has decided to start sending literal Nazi propaganda to their users on purpose.

Also, they just took more funding from Marc Andeerssen in their most recent $100 million funding round 13 days ago, so your TL;DR is also all fucked up.

I mean, not from him personally, any more than they did from Kim Kardashian or Skims, the apparel company. I do agree that lots of VC money flooding in is a significant problem, just because it’s usually (almost always) a corrupting influence in the long run. That doesn’t mean that “Substack has a Nazi problem” all of a sudden becomes validated.

seeing more nuance than “A16Z investment is a necessary, end of story! No discussion allowed!” does not make one a purity obsessed leftists

Aw, jeez, you’re right. I hate discussion and I hate nuance. You got me. That’s exactly a really good summary of what I was saying.

The piece about Substack making nazi blogs to stir up drama was not meant to be taken seriously

Ah, yes, Schroedinger’s leftist. “I was just joking! Unless…? Also, BTW, Substack’s got a Nazi problem.”