The Quuuuuill

because sometimes the power goes out

We less of slid like a fun water slide and more of jumped off an airplane, both middle fingers raised, directly into the ocean of it.

“we don’t negotiate with terrorists (unless they’re white)”

counterpoint: wattaburger in texas is very popular

Fuckin’ putz thinks he’ll get a more comfortable prison cell because he collaborated with the regime. Didn’t learn fuck from his own history.

He’ll be so fuming mad there will be 9 strong questions

yeah but past behavior is indicative of what kind of person someone is

yeah but you can get better hush puppies almost anywhere (disclaimer: i’m southern)

you must be going to different longs johns silvers than any of the ones i’ve been to. i haven’t been in years, but it’s really a “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me multiple times over the course of my childhood because my dad fell in love with you and THAT’S IT no more chances”

the real deep state was all the oligarchs we empowered along the way

literally just handing state secrets to a rogue nation

I wanted to make sure I sat down and really replied to you before because I generally like your takes and respect you as a person, and a quick reply from my phone would be impossible as a medium for replying to your thoughtful and well stated argument. I think we are approaching the question of “Is Substack a problem” from two different angles. I think I and the threadstarter (though I’m just assuming, everyone on Earth and on earth is different, and they may have different reasons from me for thinking what they think) are less concerned with “are there Nazis on Substack” as a purity test and more concerned with “What do the owners of Substack gain from control of our media sources.”

My issue with Substack isn’t that there’s Nazis on there, it’s that Substack’s owners made sure they were there, and made sure they got a cut of the revenue sharing scheme. People put up a stick and Substack responded by deplatforming those nazis, but it didn’t changed the fact that Chris Best, Hamish Mackenzie, and Jairaj Sethi considered it important to Substack’s future that those Nazis be present and paid. All three of those people are still present in Substack’s leadership. The thing with mass media, is that the true master of the mass media is not the person putting a message out there, it’s the owner of the media machine that decides what values get promoted, demoted, and what contexts those messages appear in. The owners of the Substack media machine have demonstrated themselves to be tolerant of intolerance. Even if they’ve adjusted their algorithms and platformed people, the fact remains that as a person who does a lot to analyze the propaganda value and biases present in a media mechanism, Substack appears compromised until those three are removed from the equation.

The question I find myself asking is what views do they hold, what do they tolerate, and how long until they find a new way to promote those views or allow someone to co-opt their waveforms to broadcast their message to us. I find myself thinking that the only ethical stance to take with Substack is “If you can get your news from somewhere else, do.” To be clear, this is not an endorsement, either, of print, radio, or television on the whole as a superior way of finding journalism. Journalism is always at battle with media. Journalists can only ever truly co-opt a waveform to get a message to the recipient. Right now I think the best methods of doing this are on self-hosted blog feeds like It’s Going Down, Anarchist News, Propublica, and a few other examples that simply aren’t coming to my mind right now. And yes, the outlets I’ve picked off the top of my head bias towards an anarchist world view because that’s how I see the world. However, all media is biased, and I particularly appreciate those outlets for being up front with who they represent, what they think of the world, and what that leads them to think about the facts. Of the media outlets I follow closely, Propublica probably fits the most closely with someone who seeks “objective truth” as much as it is even possible for such a thing to exist.

I guess ultimately, what I’m driving at, is that it is my view that Substack, like Medium, is a captured outlet. It can only ever show you a distorted version of the truth that serves its holders of power, who are ultimately aligned with the techbroligarchs that are strangling all of us. Substack, may be of the techbroligarch platforms the least abundantly abused, much as how people view Bluesky as being “woke twitter” even though Bluesky is still owned by a techbroligarch and better alternatives to exist. I do however, sometimes accept that a good piece of journalism is simply exclusively on Substack, and I must accept this, much as how sometimes I put a playlist on Spotify because Spotify still has the best social features, even though I loath Spotify and all that it stands for. But I don’t think discouraging people from promoting Substack as a platform is ultimately a purity test. I think it’s just a valid concern about our future.

Counterpoint, the great society party wants to return us to 160 years ago when a man was allowed to own some people. If that means throwing a bunch of other things out, him and his crowd are fine to do it

except not really tho

reread i9-8. and i mean reread the entire thing. not just the part where you stopped reading last time

i don’t. i’m saying this next wave is going to be even worse. even shittier than the current crop.

exactly. this new wave of ICE will be dumber, more violent, and more fervently loyal to 47

and where and how will they be trained? think about this when you encounter someone acting in alignment with ICE. you can’t train that many people in that short of time and expect them to behave right

Being an onion writer must be an absolute nightmare right now

that strongly worded letter will contain upwards of 12 strong questions. that way you’ll know he’s taking this serious