@PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au looks like were syncing now!

just trying to force this community to sync.

I wonder if BT blocks VPS IP ranges. I bet that’s it.

I appreciate your perspective. As for ML at a minimum I know they are trying to combat Sinophobia which is a rampant and pervasive issue, but we don’t need to rehash that stuff. I agree with you about the lying stuff. NYT has a long history of doing just that. Post 9/11 they were the primary pusher of the fake WMD story. I guess for me, I have to at a minimum entertain the anti-west perspective when people here will defend the NYT and the BBC as objective and principled journalism, while they regularly manufacture consent for Israel. It makes you wonder what else are they are covering for and what other stories your not hearing.

Also, I’m not sure what might be happening but not a single thread from the sub has synchronized with ml. Same with lefty stacks. Hard to know on whose end the issue is manifesting. At least my comments seem to sync.

The broken RSS is odd, I’ve tested them in miniflux and they seem fine. Not a huge deal really. Maybe its because they’re substacks attached to a domain instead of the substack domain? The subdomain versions just redirect back to their respective domains.

I find your position on adding value fair regarding Caitlin Johnstone. She is a bit of an agitator, and at times its more cathartic to read her posts because she’s often saying how I might feel, even if I couldn’t express it at the time. Her posts as news though have less value I’d say. It’s more commentary then anything.

As for the comments on propaganda, I find the word has lost a lot of its meaning, and is often used as “something I won’t investigate/will dismiss out of hand” (I’m not saying you are doing that either.) Instead I tend to focus on bias. Everyone has a bias, and all news has a bias. Some people are aware and even admit their bias, some have never bothered to confront their bias. The same is true with news/media.

Geopolitical Economy Report has a bias and its rooted in the works of Radhika Desai, who wrote “Geopolitical Economy” (a very interesting analysis of geopolitics focusing on the US and its monetary policy over the decades). I think they have great insights into world geopolitical affairs, which are rooted in critical theory.

I did see your post about the NYT and you had already removed it by then. I’m fine with the editorial choices you make ultimately, it is your time and money at the end of the day, so I’ll respect your choices. MintPress has a similar bias to Geopolitical Economy Report, in that they take a critical position on geopolitics. I don’t read them as often, but I felt they had good coverage regarding the US TikTok ban when that was in the news. The NYT has a bias as well, as we both know, and I think as long as we are aware of the bias, then its fine.

I think instead of focusing on not spreading ‘propaganda’ it might be more productive to be upfront about a publication’s known bias and encourage readers to read it critically.

But that’s just my outlook on news and bias. Again, I’ll defer to your judgment, since you keep the lights on.

Thanks again for the community to manage. I’ll leave a comment after this so you can mod me (waiting on posts to federate). I did see the instructions for adding feeds. Seems easy, I’m familiar with command line style interactions.

No other thoughts at the moment.

Thanks for the reply! I’ll take you up on that community, that’s a very cool idea. I’ll double check stuff before I add anything and see how many posts per week a feed generates and open a thread here if the volume seems high so we can discuss it. We can call it lefty_news, that works fine for me.

I’m not sure if smbc is hosted somewhere else or not, but now that you mention it, it sound familiar. I’ll search around for that one.

Thanks again!

As an aside, I had this thought about the instance and was curious what your opinion was.

Does it make more sense to have each post locked, to encourage cross posting to local communities?

That’s how I engage with the instance, but not sure about others.