Given all the people in the current political debate who are very willing to apply the label "Nazi" to a wide range of people who disagree with them, I'd rather put up with there being a few "literal Nazis" on the platform (who I don't subscribe to, so they don't impinge on me) than have an ever-expanding purge of anybody who criticizes the fashionably woke ideologies of the day, or can be tarred with guilt by association with somebody who does.
Yeah, I’m sure that’s where a lot of the support for Substack’s stance on this comes from. It makes total sense. It has been interesting to watch how even people who disagree with Substack often acknowledge that the site leadership is never going to get any slack on this; the pressure is not going to stop. By now, everyone knows that, even the ones who still want Substack to change its policy.
It's said by anti-anti-Substackers that alternatives like Ghost have even fewer restrictions, but haven't been subjected to the same ire as Substack. I assume this is due to Substack's higher profile.
Unfortunately, Ghost's name makes searching difficult and I'm not particularly interested in poking around for literal Nazis on their platform at this time. In theory Ghost would ban Nazis among many other groups if 2.2.g and 2.2.h were enforced in reasonable ways, https://ghost.org/terms/, but such rules have a tendency to be selectively enforced, as Substack is (likely) doing.
>Margaret Atwood argues convincingly that Nazism is widely and unambiguously understood to be an ideology that stands for mass murder
What a finely-crafted and offensive standard. We treat evil like a hedgehog instead of like a fox, to borrow Berlin's model, and we miss much because of it.
She's convincing on simpler terms that Substack should enforce rules if they're going to have them at all- less so that we should be so much more comfortable rubbing shoulders (to whatever extent sharing a blogging platform is "rubbing shoulders," so much more so than using the internet at all- which highlights the real goal of such efforts) with people ambiguously supporting mass murder, or those who hold mass-murderous ideologies yet for whatever reason remain socially tolerable.
>This would only be a small narrowing, and I think it would be the correct call.
Too small a narrowing, perhaps.
I too am glad to not be in a position to choose principle or PR, to not deal with hateful mobs complaining that I'm not doing enough about the hateful mob across the street, and I do not envy Hamish et al or the Cloudflare guy to deal with them. Is this the price we pay for ideological breadth? Voltaire comes to mind, and I fear what comes after if we forget that ideal. GermStack would be a smaller, quieter place than Substack- but I don't think Katz, Atwood, et al would actually like it any more despite the absence of Nazis, given who else might be caught in that net.
Yeah, I found Atwood’s argument on the basis of simple rule enforcement to be much more convincing than her framing with the cartoon and so forth. Substack is not “Flopsy Bunny’s Very Busy Day” and it is not trying to be. Moreover, the site actually does have the capacity to be many things at once in a way that a single book cannot. And, as you note, expecting actual safety would require a great deal more content restriction, if it could be achieved at all.
I suspect Atwood of having become a little too enamoured of her final line, when she ought to have cut the whole framing device that led to it. Such things happen to the best of us.
Sorry for not replying sooner — it’s been a busy holiday period for me! Getting COVID over the last week didn’t help. Apart from that one thing, though, I have mostly been busy with pleasant things, so on the whole the start of the year still comes out pretty good.
Given all the people in the current political debate who are very willing to apply the label "Nazi" to a wide range of people who disagree with them, I'd rather put up with there being a few "literal Nazis" on the platform (who I don't subscribe to, so they don't impinge on me) than have an ever-expanding purge of anybody who criticizes the fashionably woke ideologies of the day, or can be tarred with guilt by association with somebody who does.
Yeah, I’m sure that’s where a lot of the support for Substack’s stance on this comes from. It makes total sense. It has been interesting to watch how even people who disagree with Substack often acknowledge that the site leadership is never going to get any slack on this; the pressure is not going to stop. By now, everyone knows that, even the ones who still want Substack to change its policy.
It's said by anti-anti-Substackers that alternatives like Ghost have even fewer restrictions, but haven't been subjected to the same ire as Substack. I assume this is due to Substack's higher profile.
Unfortunately, Ghost's name makes searching difficult and I'm not particularly interested in poking around for literal Nazis on their platform at this time. In theory Ghost would ban Nazis among many other groups if 2.2.g and 2.2.h were enforced in reasonable ways, https://ghost.org/terms/, but such rules have a tendency to be selectively enforced, as Substack is (likely) doing.
>Margaret Atwood argues convincingly that Nazism is widely and unambiguously understood to be an ideology that stands for mass murder
What a finely-crafted and offensive standard. We treat evil like a hedgehog instead of like a fox, to borrow Berlin's model, and we miss much because of it.
She's convincing on simpler terms that Substack should enforce rules if they're going to have them at all- less so that we should be so much more comfortable rubbing shoulders (to whatever extent sharing a blogging platform is "rubbing shoulders," so much more so than using the internet at all- which highlights the real goal of such efforts) with people ambiguously supporting mass murder, or those who hold mass-murderous ideologies yet for whatever reason remain socially tolerable.
>This would only be a small narrowing, and I think it would be the correct call.
Too small a narrowing, perhaps.
I too am glad to not be in a position to choose principle or PR, to not deal with hateful mobs complaining that I'm not doing enough about the hateful mob across the street, and I do not envy Hamish et al or the Cloudflare guy to deal with them. Is this the price we pay for ideological breadth? Voltaire comes to mind, and I fear what comes after if we forget that ideal. GermStack would be a smaller, quieter place than Substack- but I don't think Katz, Atwood, et al would actually like it any more despite the absence of Nazis, given who else might be caught in that net.
Yeah, I found Atwood’s argument on the basis of simple rule enforcement to be much more convincing than her framing with the cartoon and so forth. Substack is not “Flopsy Bunny’s Very Busy Day” and it is not trying to be. Moreover, the site actually does have the capacity to be many things at once in a way that a single book cannot. And, as you note, expecting actual safety would require a great deal more content restriction, if it could be achieved at all.
I suspect Atwood of having become a little too enamoured of her final line, when she ought to have cut the whole framing device that led to it. Such things happen to the best of us.
Sorry for not replying sooner — it’s been a busy holiday period for me! Getting COVID over the last week didn’t help. Apart from that one thing, though, I have mostly been busy with pleasant things, so on the whole the start of the year still comes out pretty good.