Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
It's tough as someone who is a strong proponent for strong civil liberties seeing their philosophy's verbiage being co-opted as such (but the former PM/PMM in me respects game)
> At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip: being afraid of contradictory opinions is the first step in intellectual decline.
In Turkiye, Hungary, a lot of Latin America (notably Mexico, Brazil), Russia in the early 2010s, CEE EU member states (Yes Czechs and Poles, continue to be high and mighty on HN and Reddit until Babis and PiS win again the next couple months thanks to your parents in Brno or Wroclaw), Israel, South Korea, and India, this meant the rise of independent blogs and media - sort of like what Substack is trying but failing to do.
Plenty of senior journalists who felt over-muzzled would split off and form their own independent blog companies and those increasingly supplemented legacy press orgs amongst leadership, because even an illiberal democracy, you need some unbiased info.
Of course, unlike the US, plenty of journalists in those countries have bar licenses and know how to parry judicial overreach.
It also meant the opposition had balls and wasn't afraid to lie if needed as well. Politics is a brawl, not a Socratic session in a Gov94 Seminar, but these are also countries where junior party members from opposing parties beating each up with fists or a tire iron is a rite of passage.
It's amazing how increasingly Orwellian things are becoming under our ever more powerful dictatorial and oligarchical benefactors. Always bringing smiles to the faces of the most willing believers.
The power to impose this new wonderland, is almost within reach. Where before it failed, greater are the possibilities for it to succeed this time around. Nothing to worry about, freedom is for those who deserve it.
Is Substack really failing? I don't have any particular insight into the business as a whole but I do see quite a few prominent political writers on there who seem happy with their traffic and reach.
As a business they are doing decent (kick myself for not participating in one of their earlier rounds, and potentially turbocharging my career).
But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
>But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck.
Well, they're not an independent news organization. It was supposed to be a newsletter service, whatever the pivots.
But in any case, even if they don't have the "news", the breadth and quality of commentary there, one never sees in establisment media. And the option to cut down the shit is trivially easy: just read your subscribed newsletters (in your inbox preferably) and skip any other feed Substack has.
Yeah as a reader and occasional commenter I find Substack to be a great source for interesting and informative writing on a number of topics. I spend a decent chunk of my internet reading time on there and hope the platform thrives.
> If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
Wasn't one selling point of Substack that you could easily leave with your subscribers, so substack writers aren't really for sale and can't be muzzled/deprecated? Or did it change since Substack was launed?
Also are you thinking about specific writer(s)/events when you wrote 'muzzled or deprecated if needed.'?
That's still the case. I've seen a few newsletters I follow move off the platform, one of them just a couple weeks ago. I don't like to see them go though because I think Substack is great overall, much better than competing services.
The Free Press is one of the biggest publications on Substack and they're a small news organization with ~25 people. It seems like Substack is doing well.
Sure it's not hosting full news rooms, but the big names on there who have gone independent seem to have a pretty sizable audience relative to their size.
What liability implications are there? With section 230 there really isn't any. And even without that it's basically impossible to libel a public figure so I doubt there would be much change in terms of politics.
EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC.
Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it.
Hot for HN maybe but not that hot in general. But we all know Dems have a lot of voters who demand ideological purity who will make a huge show of anger if they do something like this. The Dems have a cranky, fractious base and this contributed to their loss IMO.
We've forgotten what politics is. We think it's just about being right and having our rightness rewarded and memorialized by history.
Less than 40% of the adult population has a college degree. Less than 45% of voters have college degrees. Yet we took for granted the ascendence of ideas that few non-college-educated voters have been able to digest and see the evidence for. That it happened at all is pretty amazing, yet our only response has been to whine and moan that it hasn't happened faster or more completely. We could see that a lot of people weren't really getting it, and as long as we thought they were a minority, our response was who cares, they're losing. If they aren't educating themselves and keeping up to date, they're simply bad people and if they're confused and angry, fuck 'em, they deserve it.
It is not necessarily wrong as a moral stance, but it's not a strategy for succeeding in a democracy where those people can tip the balance of an election. As we felt more and more entitled to our triumph and got more and more angry and whiny about the bad people holding us back, surprise surprise, those people decided we weren't the best party to represent them anymore.
If there's any lesson we should take from this, it's that if we hold people in contempt, we can't count on their votes.
There's nothing coherent behind the shift to Trump except mutual contempt. I hope we are getting to a point where we can talk about our own political failings without reflexively changing the subject to the voters' moral failings.
Also, we should consider that when our definition of a good person includes the rapid assimilation of new information and ideas, the ability to be a good person is not evenly distributed. We're only a tiny way towards building a world where that ideal isn't elitist and exclusionary. A lot of people were not raised with that definition of moral goodness. Acting in good faith, they did not equip themselves with the necessary skills, because they thought they could be good people without them. What we're demanding from them now is that they either exercise intellectual skills and habits they don't have, or they speak and believe in obedience to those of us who have them. I don't see a good way around it, but we shouldn't be surprised if they're unhappy about it.
Yes I agree 100%. The Dem base has forgotten what democratic politics is. It's not the manifest destiny of moral progress into history. It's building coalitions. It's compromising with people who you deeply, fundamentally disagree with about some things but are willing to support you in others. It's about trying to get a large bloc of people to support something.
As an aside alephnerd, I really enjoy your comments because you actually think about politics as a game with objectives, strategies, and tactics. The way the game is actually played, not the way the kid who took the Political Compass Online Test and played Civ thinks politics should be. Not some sort of moral ideological sounding board. HN and a lot of online fora these days are filled with moralistic shouting and arguments.
Seriously ???? Did you buy JD Vance on "free speech" in EU ? Actually, you should get better information (and a link to the EU Commission website is nothing if you dont read or understand it... it's only the old FUD)
Right now, the POTUS is so much reducing freedom in US that it's enough for him to say that it doesn't like something (like DEI) for a lot of companies to trash DEI in the hope to please him. And it's enough for the WaPo to change what will be the content of its "opinion" pages...
And EU is the one reducing freedom ?????? You should really wake up guys
You can find TONS of examples of people in Europe being jailed or having cops come to their house for something they said on social media. In some cases for things as simple as criticizing a politician.
Here’s a high profile one, but I can find you plenty more examples.
>On 25 May 2018, Robinson was arrested for a breach of the peace while live streaming outside Leeds Crown Court[170][174]
“Breach of peace” means he was saying something that they didn’t want him to say. This is a real curtailing of free speech.
>companies to trash DEI
DEI is often racist and many of its implementations in modern companies violate the civil rights act. Companies are correct to be ditching it because it poses a big risk for discrimination lawsuits.
I actually spoke with lawyers about this very recently and reverse discrimination lawsuits are a booming business right now because there are so many clear cut examples of violations of the civil rights act.
One example is Germany will now arrest you for insulting someone in public or online, including insulting politicians. The UK has had some questionable laws passed as well. Pockets of Europe has much weaker free speech protections than the US does, that much is for certain.
60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws.
> Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case.
I'm not supportive of defamation laws but clearly you (and this journalist) are sensationalizing what happened.
If this happened in America I don't think it would be an issue if a mob killed the judge and jury. Minimizing and justifying this at all should be a permanently disqualifying act. If you think that it's ok at any level, I don't want to share a country with you.
Everything I said was 100% correct, you (and gp) are trying to downplay Germany imprisoning a woman for speaking ill of a gang rapist who was given no jail time.
The initial claim was: "There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC."
And that reason has nothing to do with J.D.Vance having any concern at all about free speech and personal freedom. Not just zero of it, his goal is to remove both. He would love Europe to become fascist which is incompatible with both.
What does not contribute to the conversation is to pretend otherwise. To pretend that he has a point or any other meaning then to grab power and punish dissent.
A major reason why American social media companies flipped support from the Dems to GOP this cycle was because the EU is rolling out the DSA, and felt the Biden admin didn't do enough to push back on this.
Social Media organizations like FB/Meta and Google have historically been some of the largest donors to the Dems, and their flip was a massive reason why 2024 went the way it did.
Vance has been consistently lobbying against the DSA over the past few weeks, and that's where his "free speech" argument is coming from.
I don't really care one way or the other, but I care about ensuring that large donors who flipped from D to R return to the D fold.
Diplomatic pressure from the US against passing the DSA. Or, if it really comes down to it, offers of local amnesty for companies that violate the DSA in the EU. There's a lot to do. The US spends a lot of money on NATO and its influence in the region is a huge lever to do a lot with.
> what's the argument for trying to ram US social media right wing propaganda into an unwilling Europe, while banning tiktok?
To get the tech oligarchs back on the Dems side of course, just like alephnerd said above.
> while banning tiktok?
Is this ideological contradiction bothering you? Well, unfortunately the world is full of these. Norway is a huge oil and gas exporter and yet maintains very stringent standards on its domestic usage. Why do they profit off exporting O&G to countries with less state capacity to manage the externalities of O&G? Well them's the shakes. Pick your priorities. For me, I'm fine if tech companies stay unregulated if I don't get 4 more years of MAGA politics. I'd prefer neither 4 more years of MAGA politics nor unregulated tech companies but I also want to build affordable condos in Beverly Hills so ;)
The tech companies (mostly Facebook) are responsible for MAGA both times, but there's no amount of ass kissing that would have got them to do the necessary level of pro Dem moderation.
I'm far from able to understand american politics but didn't Dems get far more money in the last election than Republicans? I've read about twice as much? What would big (social media oligarchs/moguls ?) donors flipping back bring about?
That was mostly because ActBlue (the DNC's fundraising platform) is well built while GOP's WinRed is a hot piece of garbage, and donors now sidestep the GOP to create SuperPACs for Trump and Trump-affiliates directly.
What you end up seeing is the GOP raises nearly as competitive as the DNC when you add Trump PACs plus WinRed.
Opposition in Czech will win because current government fail almost in everything. SPOLU declared themselves as middle right coalition, but implement left politics, ie increasing taxes about 20% for freelancers in last year, keeping almost one od highest inflation in EU, funding useless projects...
No wonder that about 75% Czechs are dissatisfied with current PM Fiala.
Opposition is even worse. They do what public surveys and Babis (the leading oligarch here) tells them to do. I expect lowest voter turnout because quite a lot people don't see any point in voting. Which is ok for me. We need rethinking about current approach of giving our responsibility to unknown electorate.
Well, our economy is stagnating, and the PM is an academic who looks detached from the real world.
There are also obvious struggles within Brussels whether the unrealistic eco-plans are going to be at least watered down or no, and the EC is still trying to push them through as much as possible.
In that environment, a "media-talented" oppositional politician who professes mild Euroskepticism is going to have an easy time winning.
That is a least bothering aspects of opposition to me. Whats frustrate me is how people still believe in politics even though nothing much really change. Debt, taxes and inflation driven by greedy politicans will increase, uneconomical spending and socialism dependence on state rising. Most wouldn't get any penny without fundings from our taxes. Or mortgage. We have ridiculous amount of state employees (highest police members per citizen), heavy bureaucracy, 50 thousand new regulations every year. It's not sustainable both for economy and sake of mind.
Dunno about the parents in Brno or Wroclaw. I read an article on DW with age metrics of the recent election. Guess what demographic voted the for AfD and Die Linke? < 45. Unfortunately this is the new opposition, nazis and commies.
I'm heartened to learn about Die Linke, thank you. I was afraid AfD's only real opposition was an anemic coalition of centrist political parties. Youth are rejecting the status quo, they're done with neoliberalism, for better or worse. Radical ideas are in. If the only radical ideas are on the Right, well - we know how well that worked out for Weimar Germany (or the USSR under Brezhnev.) Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson, and I fear they still won't in 2028. I'm not a Commie, but if the choice is between Nazis and Commies, I'll sing the Internationale.
(Yes, I know that Die Linke aren't literally Communist, and I know AfD aren't literally Nazis, but Die Linke descended from the legal successor of a Marxist-Leninist party, as AfD descended from the legal successor of a neo-Nazi party, so I think my analogy holds.)
I'm a firm believer in the horseshoe theory, so I'm really not interested in a radical left or a radical right. Give me more Bidens, Harrises, Clintons and Obamas. I'll vote for them every time.
> Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson
Biden won in 2020 pretty resoundingly, so the lesson they learned from 2016 was enough to win decisively in 2020. Parties don't stay in power indefinitely, conditions change and incumbents all across the world — not just the US — lost in 2024.
At this point it's basically three states deciding the election (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan). Both Biden and Trump won or loss based on those three, and with a ridiculously low margin each time.
It's more than those three states, but I get your point. We need electoral college reform, and we need to uncap the house of representatives like the founders intended. Until then it's going to keep coming down to those purple states with razor thin margins, and safe red/blue states will just be used to run up the popular vote count.
Well yeah, there's North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois too. But they seem to be less likely to be the tipping point, plus AR/NV are too small to undo republican vote in MI/WI/PA which have provided 50 electors to the winner and zero to the loser for the last three elections.
Well yeah I mentioned the last 8-9 years. But a lot of the shift already occurred with Bush: "Bush flipped 11 states that had voted Democratic in 1996: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia" (source Wikipedia); 8 of those have turned very much Republican since then.
So while the number of swing states has reduced a lot in 2016, the strength of republicans in the south hasn't changed a lot since 2000.
Not too get too political but if the these people had done their jobs in the first place, there would be no Trump in the WH presently.
The problem with them is that they are all for the status quo which to the average voter means "more of the same".
See the current compete U-turn from the German conservatives who less than 24H after being elected decided to break their main campaign promise and renege on doing what they said they would do.
The far right and the far left are not growing in a vacuum, they are growing because people are getting tired of being lied to.
Whenever I hear "status quo" used as a blind bad thing and justifying radicalism I can't help but observe "your continued breathing" is also the status quo. That is just plain shitty logic.
> The problem with them is that they are all for the status quo which to the average voter means "more of the same".
I vote for them because they represent change and progress at a steady, measured pace — not stagnation and status quo. You're discounting big campaign achievements like Obamacare and Biden's infrastructure plan.
I look at what we are seeing today. Trump is more powerful than he as ever been. In Europe, European-skeptic parties are rising, the far right and the far left are rising as well and the center is slowly crumbling.
Those are facts. So the question is why are the center right/left politicians not acknowledging the problems and trying to find adequate solutions? Why do they let the far right and the far left being seen as the ones who are/will be doing something?
The horseshoe theory is real. If you look at France, the far left and the far right merged their votes and forced the previous government to resign.
If that is not a sign that something is seriously wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
My mistake, I took your previous comment to mean you were advocating for more radical government/parties.
> I look at what we are seeing today. Trump is more powerful than he as ever been. In Europe, European-skeptic parties are rising, the far right and the far left are rising as well and the center is slowly crumbling.
> Those are facts. So the question is why are the center right/left politicians not acknowledging the problems and trying to find adequate solutions? Why do they let the far right and the far left being seen as the ones who are/will be doing something?
>The horseshoe theory is real. If you look at France, the far left and the far right merged their votes and forced the previous government to resign.
If that is not a sign that something is seriously wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
I don't disagree with you. I want to be glib – not to you, but just in general – and say that it's simply a marketing problem, and that Biden/Obama have had strong policies, but fear sells better than hope.
For Obama specifically, he has and had the chance to be the face of the left, center-left, democrats, whatever you want to call it – the opposition – but he has continually failed to even appear to challenge the far right. It's disappointing that, for one of the best orators of our time, he's essentially hidden himself away and stayed on the sidelines, only emerging to endorse candidates every election cycle like it's Groundhog Day.
I suspect he does it out of fear of being accused of seeking a third-term (despite Trump openly flirting with that idea multiple times this month alone); or as an attempt to lie low and protect his legacy in the history books. But we're living in an era where the far right doesn't hesitate to rewrite history, and Trump continues to systematically destroy that legacy piece-by-piece.
Huh? The graph in your link shows that AfD is indeed most popular among the parents of the average Reddit user - HN skews slightly older, but still. Scoring highest among 35-44, and in general pretty similar, showing a pretty normal distribution with the mean at ~40yo.
You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
this is fine if he really means it. This is the most important thing we get from the Constitution recognizing our rights as humans. It remains to be seen if it's really just to copy what what Musk is doing at X which is amplifying far right posts along with enragement (engagement) posts, and he deamplifie everything else.
- free markets
this is worrisome. it sounds to me like they want free markets for billionaires and their arm twisting of the current Congress and Trump, and -NOT- actually giving lower and middle class an equal chance in "free markets", because it can't be free if corps are allowed to run hog wild over rights, monopolies, and colluding between each other to dominate markets.
I get where you're coming from, because Hungary was a Communist state until 1989, but ex-MKP (Hungarian Communist Party) cadre joined Fidesz as well as MSZP.
Like any other non-Western European and North American country, politics in the CEE is very much about those networks and connections you cultivated - not really ideological - and almost everyone mid-high level in Hungarian politics today started their careers in the 1990s.
Politics in much of the CEE amongst that generation appears much more mercenary than ideological.
Anecdotally, I've heard the biggest reason my Hungarian coworkers parents voted for Fidesz was largely because of the cash benefits they would provide before elections - same as Bolsa Familia in Brazil, TOKİ in Turkiye, and Freebies in India (all illiberal democracies have a similar form of patronage politics, this is a very incomplete list)
> Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
"Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty.
"Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions.
I'm not here to argue about the correctness or value of the cake case. I'm just using the case as an example of rhetoric, specifically the rhetoric of "personal liberty" to mean "freedom to discriminate." The cake case became a wedge issue, but we're already seeing similar rhetoric used to dismantle the separation of church and state and enshrine government-sanctioned oppression of protected classes. That is: "if the cake shop doesn't have to serve gay people, then why should my (publicly-funded) school?" [0]
It wasn't the freedom to discriminate. I think that's the point. You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.
> You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.
That is your opinion,but that was not the opinion of the Supreme Court. They found that the Colorado statute in question was based on religious hostility and therefore discriminatory against the cake shop. (That is, the "personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer.) Agree or disagree, I encourage you to read the full opinion.
Moreover, there is no law against "compelled custom work." Had the cake shop discriminated based on the customer's race, rather then their sexual orientation, the refusal would have been illegal.
That is not what the supreme court found at all. In the opinion of the supreme court, they found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted in religious hostility in their evaluation of Masterpiece, and that the commission lacked consistency among similar cases. Kennedy's opinion noted that he may have been inclined to rule in favor of the Commission if it had remained religiously neutral in previous evaluations.
They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer". The Court explicitly avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise.
But I don't see how the logic is wrong in my equivalent example. You can't ban people from your shop based on protected characteristics - everyone should be able to buy the same things from you, but that doesn't mean you can enforce that people do custom work for you. Maybe that statement works really well here, but breaks down in other examples, but that was my interpretation of the validity of the case.
> They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer".
But we're here to discuss the rhetoric in the right around "personal liberty." The cake case is an example of using that rhetoric to justify discrimination, which is exactly what happened. That is the effect of the SCOTUS decision, regardless of whether they used those words verbatim.
The rhetoric around "personal liberty" was not used in the cake case, and was not used to justify discrimination. If the commission had been more neutral then the case, using the same arguments, could had gone the exact opposite. The cake case was ruled based on the performance of the commission in their work as a government entity. The outcome was that Masterpiece won, but the victory was not based on the merit of Masterpiece.
It is similar to when a criminal case get thrown out because investigators messed up and mishandled evidence. It says nothing about the merit of the case.
You are literally saying that it is wrong to criticize and organize a boycott of a business for the moral choices it makes.
It's not wrong, it's literally the free market FFS. People are mad at the cake shop for denying business to gay people, and they do not care whether it's legal or not. If it is suddenly legal to employ literal children, I will boycott places that do it, regardless of the law, because the law is not the be all, end all of morality
"But but but it's legal" has never been an acceptable excuse for doing something morally wrong. If christians are upset that lots of people consider it morally wrong to treat gay people differently, they should consider that it's okay people do not agree with them, and that the US legally protects people who have different values than you do, and that's an important part of freedom. Banning me from boycotting the cake shop that doesn't serve gay people is literally against my freedom of association.
Christians have done the same thing for decades. Porn is protected speech, but that hasn't stopped them from literally advising the president, on both sides of the aisle, for decades, to ban it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...
Funny how it's just good christian values when they do it, but "cancel culture" when they don't like the free market outcome.
Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
It's tough as someone who is a strong proponent for strong civil liberties seeing their philosophy's verbiage being co-opted as such (but the former PM/PMM in me respects game)
> At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip: being afraid of contradictory opinions is the first step in intellectual decline.
In Turkiye, Hungary, a lot of Latin America (notably Mexico, Brazil), Russia in the early 2010s, CEE EU member states (Yes Czechs and Poles, continue to be high and mighty on HN and Reddit until Babis and PiS win again the next couple months thanks to your parents in Brno or Wroclaw), Israel, South Korea, and India, this meant the rise of independent blogs and media - sort of like what Substack is trying but failing to do.
Plenty of senior journalists who felt over-muzzled would split off and form their own independent blog companies and those increasingly supplemented legacy press orgs amongst leadership, because even an illiberal democracy, you need some unbiased info.
Of course, unlike the US, plenty of journalists in those countries have bar licenses and know how to parry judicial overreach.
It also meant the opposition had balls and wasn't afraid to lie if needed as well. Politics is a brawl, not a Socratic session in a Gov94 Seminar, but these are also countries where junior party members from opposing parties beating each up with fists or a tire iron is a rite of passage.