OP's article TLDR: "Nazis are bad, Nazis are on Substack, Substack should deplatform them."
I find it difficult to imagine that expressing opposition to the most universally-opposed people on the planet counts as "Gratifying to intellectual curiosity". Gratifying, perhaps, but involves about zero intellectual curiosity.
Maybe try this one on Facebook or Twitter instead?
I dunno. The author drops 'Nazi' a dozen times or more before the footnote that clarifies its usage as the modern, political pejorative rather than describing actual Nazi activity.
I'm sure that sort of shit is there, somewhere, but this article does not actually deliver the goods.
It doesn’t escape notice that the hit piece against Substack mentioned in both links in this comment thread came from the NYT, an organization that slanted news in favor of actual Nazis running up to the war [1] and has recently rehired a pro-Hitler reporter [2].
Having read many thousands of Substack articles, I’ve seen recommended content from a wide swath of the political spectrum from many countries but never anything Nazi related.
Given the history of Platformer, it's likely they are trying to stir up and monetize outrage. It’s also worth pointing out that Casey is currently working for the NYT as host on the Hard Fork podcast. With the on-going collaboration, this attack on Substack seems incredibly disingenuous and hypocritical.
I cannot stress enough that I think your second bullet is missing the point by a country mile. The Substack post is specifically talking about Nazi viewpoints, not "bad" viewpoints for some shifting definition of bad. And because we're talking about Nazi views, I think your first bullet then falls apart, too. There's no new scrutiny required for Nazi views because we've already done that work.
Additionally, Substack is allowing the monetization of (and thus profiting from) Nazi viewpoints. That's more than "shining a light on it".
> At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics.
> Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket.
> Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.
> Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to “publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.
Except that these are “actual Nazis” who have shown up. We’re talking about publications that, in some cases, use terms like “national socialist” and “reich” in their name and/or bio.
This article is mostly not about Nazis (search for it, it shows up once, and just one out of a number of examples). I'm a bit baffled why you think it is.
I like the part where the author mentions having heard “you can’t argue with Nazis!” and then just sort of wanders off into theoreticals about being polite or whatever.
I was really confused about what the author’s actual experience was like until I realized that this was published by some sort of think tank. This whole article is basically a big bongrippy, chin stroking hand-wave about the importance of Decorum.
Props to whoever got paid money to write this silly piece. Whoever is funding this stuff clearly has too much money to interface with reality and it’s a good thing that they’re (hopefully) being fleeced to the max by writers that are happy to churn out drivel
The Daily Stormer is literally named after a Nazi propaganda newspaper[1]. Describing the web site's viewpoint as "Nazi" or "fascist" isn't even an insult -- it's a plain fact.
I think explicit Nazism is banned on SubStack - at least I have not yet seen any example of a literal Hitlerian National Socialist Aryan Ubermensch newsletter on that platform. This issue is the expansion of the term 'Nazism', which seemingly today can be applied to 'the other side' no matter the content of the argument. We have all seen opposite sides in an argument accuse each other of Nazism with both actually seeming to mean it.
How do you ban this, who does the banning? Content moderation is a really hard problem, anything other than a legalistic position is over reach
Daily Stormer (which is honestly so crazy I couldn't tell if it was a parody)
If you examine the Nazi ideology, it really is at a psychotic level of cynicism. They don't care if you are a true believer, or if you're doing it for the lulz, or if you're a psychopath whose incentives happen to align. So long as you go along, it's fine.
If you go far enough left on the political spectrum, you arrive at the same place. (The rapists and murderers were made into bosses in the Gulag.) However, for some reason, speech that is almost as vile from the left is given a softer treatment.
This article is way, way too based to be posted to HN but kudos to disgruntled phd for doing so.
I’ll also point out that the recent “sub stack has a nazi problem” tirade is coming from people like the authors example of the $50k/year school IYI. They aren’t old enough to have seen actual nazis.
Furthermore, with a growing economic inequality there will be more of these so-called “nazis.” It’s a symptom of a problem, and not the problem in itself.
It’s posturing and signalling by pampered babies who need to be slapped around a bit with a large trout.
The article left out those details. The book itself says "Sometimes they're called Nazis. Other times, they're the far-right or alt-right". It also associates Nazis to Christians.
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