Originally published at: Substack reportedly in financial trouble | Boing Boing
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I hope Substack can succeed. I’ve started supporting a number of really great writers on it who I love to read. I’m am anticipating incoming enshitification.
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Given their outright support for alt-right fascists I wouldn’t mind too much if they just went away.
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Yeah, when they announced their big push to spotlight writers who were alt-right-friendly, I knew something like this was coming. Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald will be fine, of course – I just hope the other (more talented and less Nazi) writers will survive elsewhere…
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Bari Weiss more Nazi? What groups did they propose exterminating in gas chambers?
To the extent that I “hate” Bari Weiss, then, it is because I am an incorrigible bleeding-heart who gets pissed off when people are glib and dismissive after teenagers bleed to death in the arms of their parents. But there are other, more minor, reasons, to find Weiss a deeply annoying and toxic presence in American political discourse. When she is not whitewashing Israeli government crimes, Weiss’s regular beat is criticism of the alleged excesses of the left, on campus and elsewhere. She wrote an adoring essay about the “intellectual dark web,” repeating the myth that “renegade” right-wing intellectuals are being hounded out of the public conversation and treating people like Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, and Charles Murray as persecuted dissidents without diving into their histories of bigoted ignorance. Weiss ignores the range of opinions that are actually excluded from mainstream discourse, and instead treats the spouters of commonplace right-wing talking points as if they are marginal and persecuted (when they are, in fact, heard nightly on America’s largest cable news channel, and one of them occupies the White House). Weiss is irritating because she portrays herself, and those like her, as martyrs who are “purged” for their opinions, when instead they all receive book deals and profiles in liberal newspapers and magazine. (We at Current Affairs are still waiting for our editorial board’s glossy Vanity Fair photoshoot. If the Weiss theory of discourse is accurate, Annie Leibovitz should be on her way to New Orleans at this very moment.)
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The Nazis didn’t start with the gas chambers. That started years after they had taken power. Anyone who had paid attention in their school history classes would know this.
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Well, if there are no gas chambers, then it’s not REAL nazism, merely sparkling authoritarianism! /s
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Your quick reminder that anyone suggesting anyone else be put in a gas chamber is a big red flag that they’re an asshole no matter their politics.
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If Kinko’s made $9m from the photocopied zine industry, we’d think “huh, good for them”. But anything happening on a screen has to be a totalizing “platform” with a trillion-dollar market cap, or nothing. So instead of Substack being a successful small professional-services business, it’s a failed tech unicorn.
When it collapses, it will probably decimate the nascent industry it charges rent from, even though its actual utility to writers is minor, and they could do just as well with a Wordpress blog and a Patreon account. But I guess that’s how the economy is structured now; you’re either a billionaire or you’re collateral damage, and nothing in between.
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When your business model is, “it’s just blogs again”, I wouldn’t buy stock.
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Poor Matt Taibbi. Now who will give him money for his bad, bad reporting?
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What distinguishes the Nazis are not that they made the trains run on time (like the Italian fascists) nor that they killed a bunch of people (like most groups that made history) but that they set out to exterminate particular kinds of people based on culture (e.g., jews, gypsies, gays) and did so using industrial methods.
Nazis are not your ordinary run of the mill bigots.
Folks like Taibbi are why they are in the hole. Taibbi apparently makes most of his money from Substack, which is why he picked Substack over Twitter. Bad luck for him the way things turned out… he may soon have neither. Maybe he can go to tumblr
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No, no they didnt
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it’s about goals and ideology, not just outcomes. american white nationalist are also not your run of the mill bigots. their desire for an ethnically pure fascist state is the same desire the nazis had… hence the label
( white is obviously not an ethnicity. but it’s what they call it )
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There is a danger in that kind of thinking… believing that what happened under the nazis was unique, or that the bigotry that they employed to justify their actions can only have happened there, and can never happen again, so we should not worry about people using fascistic language because sonderweg is just really naive thinking. It betrays a fundamental lack of understanding about how history works and how the holocaust fits into a large march of European history more generally.
First, less address this ridiculous BS (and thanks @NukeML!). They did not make the trains run on time. One of the biggest lies about the fascists was how fucking efficient they were… nope. Not any more than any other mass society, so we can safely put that shit aside.
Second point… Acts of genocide predate the nazis, even if they were not called that. They looked to the Armenian genocide (we know this because Primo Levi told us that’s what the nazis told him), as well as their own actions previously in southern Africa, as well as from other colonial powers - the British used concentration camps in the second boer war… Plus the British Empires various use of labor camps during the 19th century (in Ireland during the famine, in India during a famine)…
Third, there have been genocides SINCE the holocaust, some of which were directly targeted at a specific group of people - hence they are a comparable type of genocide. Cambodia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and an argument could be made about China during the Cultural Revolution as well… all qualify as acts of genocide and no one who studies this stuff seriously would debate that point.
Fourth, as for where people died in the holocaust, it was not just in the camps. Well over a million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen no where near a camp… and that’s specifically just the Jewish victims - it doesn’t count Slavic civilians for example, who were also targeted (with Soviet citizens being the second largest group of victims of the Nazis).
Last, I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop talking down to my friend @the_borderer who is well aware of this history and doesn’t need it mansplained…
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Because that’s the only standard for being a neo nazi. /s
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Give me a goddamn break. The “alt right” have some very specific people they advocate eliminating by all means possible.
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