I think he could have done the same thing while still modeling the right way to deal with law enforcement.

If he wanted to provoke a confrontation in order to make a point / attract attention (usually a terrible idea but I guess maybe you could make the argument that in this case it would be worthwhile), he could have been extremely firm about his rights but still wanted to have a conversation about some of the other notable people they have detained, and ask their opinion on those people. Make arguments about abstract topics, but not deal in any respect with any questions about him and explain that he doesn’t want to talk about that without a lawyer.

Even that is dangerous. The thing is that having long conversation with the cops and answering all the questions they have for you, even about just random topics, your own viewpoint, what you talk about on stream, all that stuff, ought to be a risk. It’s not that you shouldn’t engage in it because CBP is breaking the rules. It is that you simply should never do it with any law enforcement, good or bad, for any reason once you’re in the crosshairs of being investigated for potential action against you.

I agree with the article author that it sounds like he was just operating from a position of an argument with someone who he wanted to make a point to, generating good content for his stream, that kind of thing. He wasn’t violating the normal guidelines of how is safe to interact with cops on purpose for specific reasons, he was just clueless about what is a good way to do it. Maybe I’m wrong in that. But I agree with the article author that things like counting it as a win that he got them to start to agree with him on some things, things of that nature, is a sign that he’s absolutely out of his depth and should stick with the simple safe guidelines and model the same for his followers.

Haha all good

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.

Yeah, all good. I mean maybe I am wrong, we can talk about it.

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.

Okay so this is actually one of the issues that made me start to say that this is deliberate disinformation, not just people saying some stuff I don’t agree with. The thing is: I don’t think this is actually true. I saw a big article that made this claim, I dug into the details, and it turned out to be one of those “Ship of Theseus” things where, the people they invited were not the Nazis, just some random people with MAGA-type ideas, and they hadn’t expressed those MAGA-type ideas until long after Substack’s dealings with them had been and gone (pre-2017 Matt Taibbi I think was one). Basically, Substack in this aspect did nothing wrong at all. But people wrapped it up like they had sought out Richard Spenser and invited him to the platform and made sure to give him some money to get things started, which is false, and it was weird that people were trying so hard to say that that had happened. What they did was took millions of dollars from VCs and then gave it to good journalists.

Who are you talking about when you say the Substack owners made sure there were Nazis? I want to dig into this a little bit more and where you heard that from.

There’s a whole separate issue of them allowing for real neo-Nazis. I’m probably in the vast minority, but I actually think that was fine. It’s the same like I think Hasan Piker can say whatever the fuck he wants, it’s the same like I think nutomic can have transphobic views if he wants. I think it is fine.

Like I say, I’m probably the minority there.

considered it important to Substack’s future that those Nazis be present and paid.

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.

Just to be clear: Are you saying that they’re in any way promoting or in favor of Nazis? Or just that they allow them on the platform and that’s the huge problem?

I’ve seen the first thing, and I think that’s what you’re saying, but if you are saying the second thing it’s a different conversation.

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.

I don’t think any of this is true. I haven’t seen any indication at all that they’re distorting anything about the blogs that are hosted there, and the very nature of them (as far as I’m aware) makes it pretty difficult for them to start rigging the algorithm to promote one instead of another, or anything like that.

I do think it’s a problem that Substack is a centralized platform. That I will 100% agree with you on. The point being that regardless of whether the current owners are up to anything, there’s the strong likelihood in the future that it will succumb to the inevitable like so many before it.

I think Ghost is probably a much better model, to be honest. On the other hand, because Substack is centralized, they were able to subsidize good journalism to get the ball rolling, and I think that was a really good thing. And, of course, it’s absolutely impossible to keep Nazis off of Ghost either. Actually, even the purge of Nazis that Substack eventually did, would be impossible on Ghost, because its decentralized nature means they would be there to stay if they chose Ghost. It’s more or less impossible to stop, generally speaking. (Which is part of why I agree with Substack’s original stance on it.)

Does this make sense?

Haha I completely missed it. I should have seen it though, yes.

They’ve actually been doing this for a while. There is a whole ecosystem of engagement and publicity, what type of content draws reward financial and social, and it has collided several times with the legal system and it usually is not pretty.

The only real recent examples that come to mind are Johnny Somali and Ruby Franke, but I know there are more. Caution, if you decide to look into Ruby Franke be aware that it’s real fucked up (child abuse motivated by religion and the can-do-no-wrong star power of the influencer.) Johnny’s fucked up, too, but for the most part he was mostly hurting himself.

The equation “Substack = Nazis” is textbook political misinformation: A thing with a technical grain of truth, entirely missing the point and then dishonestly presented, for the purpose of splintering and confusing the left and getting them to attack each other. I suspect it is deliberately promoted by enemies, because while it has a technical little fig-leaf of truthfulness, it bears so little resemblance to anything real or relevant and is a convenient way to shit on one of the chief leftist platforms for thought and journalism, and leftists love nothing more than a contest of “I am so pure that I hate this thing that everyone else likes because it’s actually evil and I’m super clever and informed so I can see that and you can’t and I’m the first one.”

I guess it is possible that people came up with this all on their own as a purity-test (actually I do think that the original campaign which persuaded Substack to get rid of most of the Nazis, was that), and it’s just a general leftist self-own because of that tendency. I do feel like it’s pretty likely that it has started coming in in some way from outside though. When this argument is presented in print form, it often has so many hallmarks of propaganda or slanty dishonest framings associated with it that it’s hard for me to think that it is entirely self-created organic purity testing gone awry.

Here was my conversation about the details of the underlying Substack Nazi issue the last time it came up. I don’t have a lot to add to it: https://ponder.cat/post/1721638/1949850

Hey, look, I found some.

But to address your request for more information on that admittedly poorly chosen example: that was at the start at the Russian invasion, so I don’t have the source readily available. It might have been Jacobin or a YT geopolitical analyst based in Europe.

Not what I asked. I asked you for general reliable sources about the world, since your international friends are in touch with them and all read them and they’re 100% up to speed on things that idiot Americans are not aware of. I want to know these sources, not this specific claim, but just in general. Surely you want to help me not be a blithering idiot in my news consumption anymore?

IDK, maybe your answer is “YouTube and Jacobin.” I do watch YouTube and I’m familiar with Jacobin.

I come to Lemmy for conversations that are fun, funny, thought-provoking, and helpful. So, on that note, I’m out. Enjoy your day.

Seems to me like you come to Lemmy to snidely insinuate weird pro-Russian points of view, and then become super-friendly and say it was all a big misunderstanding, brother, when someone calls you on it, and then say it wasn’t important and flee into the darkness when asked for details. I stand behind my rudeness to you, it seems like it was well-earned. You’re welcome to defend “US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel,” if you want to, but since you don’t want to, have a wonderful evening.

even I said “WAT,” i.e. my disbelief regarding conclusions at which some people outside the US arrived.

That’s not what you said. You said that it was, more or less, a universal consensus outside the US that the US had manipulated events in Ukraine to weaken the EU, because they couldn’t stand having the EU around because it was a real democracy. So much so that you’re a “blithering idiot” “out of the loop” “depth and breadth of ignorance” and so on because you don’t see it that way because you consume US media, whereas the whole rest of the world knows that that’s going on. Right?

That assertion (that it’s universally believed outside the US, not even touching on whether it is true) is absolutely wrong. And then, you said “WAT” about your own reaction to it, but also seemed to take it very seriously, comparing it favorably to your own ideas which you were very negative about.

Would you care to elaborate on how I called commenters here misinformed?

You said “us,” as in “it becomes very difficult for us to be anything other than idiots”.

I feel like you are digging for an argument that doesn’t exist.

If you would like more clarification or elaboration, rather than making assumptions, I’m happy to discuss.

Okay, sure. Maybe that’s fair. So tell me: What are these reliable sources that your more wise and knowledgeable international friends read, what’s some of what they tell you about geopolitics and the war in Ukraine? Specifically as pertains to “US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel.” Since you’ve identified the idea that that is not happening as the “blithering idiot” viewpoint by contrast, maybe you can help me out of my idiocy by helping and elaborating.

Edit: Rephrasing

Let’s set aside the veracity of the US manipulating geopolitics in the UA/RU war

Let’s not. That’s the exact point at which you departed from accuracy into fantasy-land, and what I was taking note of.

Can we all agree that the US has a long history of fuckery when it comes to stomping out anything it doesn’t like or isn’t in line with corporate interests?

Yes, 100%.

Even if the independent journalist were absolutely presenting the truth, it’s still feels like tinfoil hat shit because of how severely we’re inculcated by “trustworthy” news sources in the US.

I like to think I’m a teeny bit media- and news-savvy, but damn… most days I really feel like a blithering idiot.

This is an impressive type of sophisticated negging whereby you criticize yourself as a way to implicitly criticize the reader, and tell them they’re an idiot.

Most of Lemmy and most of the content on Lemmy isn’t from the US as far as I’m aware. This whole media blackout you’re talking about is a very real thing for most US people, but it simply won’t apply on Lemmy or the sources that are usually prevalent on Lemmy. For example I host some news sources on rss.ponder.cat; four out of the top five of the popular ones are non-US sources.

If you are telling the truth about your self-assessment, I would really urge you to re-examine that leap you took from “most US readers are misinformed” to “most of the people in these comments are misinformed” and definitely the one you took to “US is skillfully manipulating the Ukraine situation, and definitely not fucking it up because they don’t care about much of the issues involved all that much, except insofar as their friends can sell tons of weapons to all parties involved.”

Talking with my longtime acquaintances and friends in CA, DE, VN, and JP, the conversations invariably become “Did you hear about [current event causal factors]? This is super obvious, and here is [their reliable news sources].” Well, shit.

Tru dat

For example, the one that really blew me away was the US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel.

Lolwut

Never change, lemmy.world. Your opinions are always a magical adventure.

Bro… 😢

Just to get back to some of the other points from earlier:

From what I heard the military has only gotten more authoritarian as time went on

The military has gotten a lot more diverse since around the year 2008. Authoritarian-ness, in my limited knowledge about it, seems like it’s kind of waxed and waned as decades have come and gone. Maximum during the Spanish-American war, World War 2, War on Terror, and then at a a minimum during Vietnam, the Bonus Army time, the Ed Snowden / forever war days. It did reach a peak around the time of the War on Terror, which is why I thought it was weird that you singled out Obama in particular. I don’t think seeking congressional authorization or not really has the slightest bit to do with how individual ground troops or mid-level commanders are going to react to stuff when Posse Comitatus issues start to come to the fore as they seem moderately likely to in the near future. There are some other issues which I think will impact people’s thinking much more.

I’d wager modern Hugh Thompsons would either find the military insufferable and leave or would be eventually broken by the system like everyone else, which would explain why you used an example from Vietnam rather than a more recent one from the war on terror.

Eddie Gallagher was reported repeatedly by his fellow SEALs. The other frontline troops seemed to think it was a much bigger problem that he was committing war crimes than the brass did, although he was eventually court-martialled. It’s not really clear to me whether they fucked up the prosecution accidentally or on purpose, but regardless, he wasn’t really punished, but the other soldiers definitely seemed to think that he should be.

The massacre at Haditha seemed like it was generally approved of by everyone involved. As was Abu Ghraib. Like I say, I think early-2000s war on terror era was pretty much the recent peak for authoritarianism.

As a broader point, about getting broken by the system, I just don’t think it works that way. I think the main thing is, how awful of situations do you get put into (the right kind of trauma will trigger almost anyone to become a violent maniac), and how much ethics and trust seem like they’re on display from the people around you and above you. How hard does the darkness go, and how much light can you see to counterbalance. That’s my personal take on it. I feel like it’s a very individual thing. I do think that people can have individual reactions to wide societal issues: Are you sucked into the Trumpworld view where killing Democrats is okay because they support pedophilia and they tried to attack Trump who did nothing wrong? Are you horrified by watching ICE commit atrocities? Have you seen people you respect get pushed out of the brass by politics? That kind of thing. But I don’t think that any military with any type of training can really stamp out that individual level reaction. As far as I know, they actually try to lean into it when they do propaganda during training, motivating people to see the world as “enemies are threatening your family, that’s what you’re fighting for” “we’re your brothers you can trust us,” that kind of thing. Because they know that at the end of the day, people are doing to do what they decide to do. I think that’s why the authoritarian bent waxes and wanes, too, because events and perceptions shift over time, and the reaction of the soldiers goes with it.

if I’m not wrong the trend of “Military Operations Other Than War” started with Obama

https://listverse.com/2017/05/28/top-10-unauthorized-us-wars/

In My Lai, Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between US troops and Vietnamese civilians, and told his men to shoot the Americans if they tried to advance. No one questioned it. The US army tried to give him a medal for heroism in conflict with the enemy, part of their general cover-up, and he told them to get fucked. Eventually, they relented, halfway admitted that what he did was right, and gave him a medal for what he actually did. A lot of people at the time thought he was a traitor but he’s a free man now with his medal, and his name is in all the books. They court-martialled the commander most responsible for the massacre, although he didn’t really get punished.

The Vietnam Veterans Against the War did some of the most hard-hitting resistance to the war.

Everyone’s an individual. The US army is comprised of every color of the rainbow all the way from total MAGAs who want to kill Arabs and Democrats and are just waiting for someone to tell them to, all the way to whole platoons of Hugh Thompsons. It is fairly likely that a lot of how this all shakes out will come down to which faction becomes the consensus faction.

Edit: Oh, also, you’re showing your hand a little bit, saying that Obama was when the ship sailed. Not that he did much of anything to stop anything, he killed plenty of people, but there was one clear specific moment at which the ship sailed, and it wasn’t Obama.

I’m actually a little bit glad that they are dropping the pretense. ICE is sure as shit not law enforcement anymore.

The US army obeys the president (mostly), they’re not supposed to be involved in this. They are actually supposed to tell the president to get fucked if he tells them to.

The National Guard, on the other hand, obeys the applicable governor, and they are absolutely supposed to intervene for stuff like this. The system is actually designed with a good bit of sense in some respects. We might sort of be at the point where they should be involved, but definitely in the pretty near future, one of the better timelines involves the state cops and the National Guard putting up organized armed resistance to the escalations that ICE tries to do. I actually would really like to see the little squads of “I can’t show my face I snatch PhD students with asthma” tough guys in a conflict with either of those agencies. That carries that added benefit, also, that if we make it to the other side intact the people who gave ICE their orders can absolutely pay a price for having taken part in a rebellion against the United States.

There are of course other timelines…

You’re not wrong. Somehow, though, even that deeply corrupt process has managed to out-democracy the unfathomably more corrupt process that leads to which elected leaders get into office and what they do with it.

Somehow, when it comes down to it, “Do you want abortion to be legal” can still receive a resounding “yes” from the people of the state. Putting extra layers in the way of that happening is still a bad thing I think even though the underlying process is subject to the same swampy awfulness that the whole rest of the thing is subject to.

I don’t think it is for the right reasons. Whatever she says, I think she is opposing it because she hates Jews, not because she cares about Palestine or free speech. For example I suspect that making it illegal to boycott Russia, she’d be all for.

should fail

I’m going to to stop you right there. I do actually agree with you 100%, I’m just saying that “no one can prove I didn’t do this action for X innocent reason” falls apart in how the actual law is actually applied (and regardless of whether the law is being applied for a reasonable reason in the first place, which of course this one is not).

A lot of things in legal-world can actually work this way. Intent matters. So if you’re distributing a document that calls for boycotting Israel, that can be illegal (I mean… arguably, I guess, under this awful law). If you’re in charge of a purchasing agency, and you suddenly drop all your Israel-aligned contracts, that can be illegal. If you’re denying mortgages to people of a certain color, that can be illegal.

No one can stop you from the individual actions, but if someone can prove that it was part of a coordinated effort to achieve one particular goal (which it kind of has to be coordinated in order to achieve any impact) then it can be illegal.