Stephen T. Stone 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Mamdani’s Win Shows That Believing In Something Beats Performative Hatred

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Nov, 2025 @ 01:40pm

  Leadership is about leading people by convincing them of your vision.

  I know I’ve probably made a few too many pro wrestling references here lately, but allow me to make one more by quoting the late, great, too-cool-to-hate “American Dream” Dusty Rhodes:

  [W]hen you walk behind, and you're not a leader, then the view never changes, baby! The view never changes, baby! The view never changes!

  Leadership isn’t about having followers⁠—it’s about going first. It’s about having the brass balls to take the first step, even if no one is behind you when you do it. Mamdani was a virtual unknown when he took his first step into the mayoral race, but he took that step with a solid strategy in mind. He was prepared to show people a new path and lead them down it. Rather than be a walk-behinder, Mamdani drove forward as a leader and showed people that it’s okay to think we can accomplish good things again. Andrew Cuomo lost because he wanted so bad to be a leader again, but he couldn’t do anything to really lead people to his vision. (And if he had a cohesive vision at all, it wasn’t as good as Mamdani’s.) He listened to people who told him “you can’t lose” and “the Muslim can’t beat you” instead of people who probably told him “you need to drop out”. He got led around on a leash by consultants and rich motherfuckers, and after he got his ass kicked in the primary, he let those people keep leading him around until he got his ass kicked in the election. The view never changed, baby. Mamdani showed us a better view. He blazed a trail for New Yorkers to follow. I can only hope he’s as good at his job as he was at his extended interview for it, because damn, he was really fucking good at that.

• On the post: The Simulation Is Collapsing

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Nov, 2025 @ 12:42pm

  All the article seems sure about is that what the Trump regime was doing isn’t working.

  And if the GOP doesn’t learn from the mistakes made this year (like still focusing on transgender issues as if that’s going to win every election going forward), the “blue wave” in 2026 is going to be huge.

• On the post: Bari Weiss And The Tyranny Of False Balance

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Nov, 2025 @ 12:19pm

  The analogy is framed as if a Nazi (or a racist or a sexist) wanders into a bar and gets served it’ll inevitably lead to the bar being taken over.

  The analogy hinges not on such a person being served once, but on that person being served regularly and being treated as no worse than anyone else in the bar despite being an open bigot who openly says bigoted things out loud. The whole point of the analogy is that if you give the bigot a place where they feel safe to be a bigot, they’re going to invite other bigots to hang out with them there because the owner doesn’t (seem to) have a problem with bigots. That is what drives non-bigots/“low-key” bigots out of the bar: They won’t want to hang out there because they don’t want to hear that bullshit while they’re drinking.

  the further part of my point is that nasty people often go places and are openly nasty and those places don’t fall into nastiness themselves as a result

  And they avoid doing that by either kicking out the nasty people or threatening them into behaving (e.g., “stop being an asshole or you’re getting the boot”). You can curate your community or your community can curate you.

  in the real world of not-Tech dirt-comment threads, there are idiots in a whole range of places that aren’t actually taking them over

  And again, most of the time, that happens because the people who run those places are prepared to either give assholes the boot or tell them to behave under threat of giving them the boot. It’s why we talk about Twitter becoming a Nazi bar: Musk unbanned more than a few of them after buying Twitter and he currently follows, interacts with, openly courts, and boosts the profiles of numerous right-wing/alt-right dipshits on his “everything app”. His bar became a Nazi bar because he openly welcomed them. That means the Nazi bar analogy is about an owner who, at best, doesn’t give a fuck about Nazis hanging out at his bar.

  to curate your community you have to start asking them what their beliefs are

  Not really. If you see someone with a visible Nazi tattoo on their arm or a swastika pin on their lapel, that doesn’t really need you to do a fucking L.A. Noire interrogation where you Press X To Doubt the bullshit that Nazi tells you to claim they’re an “ironic” Nazi or whatever. The analogy isn’t about people who might hold bigoted beliefs but keep that to themselves so they can move about in society. The analogy is about people who are open and avowed bigots to the point where they advertise their bigotry on their sleeves (literally or metaphorically). Giving them a safe space to espouse/advertise that bigotry will only welcome more of it. If you won’t curate your space, your space will curate you, so you better choose which one of those you’d prefer before the choice is made for you.

• On the post: The Simulation Is Collapsing

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Nov, 2025 @ 11:37am

  2028 is too early to tell, but I think this bodes well for 2026. The people who swept Trump into office in 2024 were mostly low-info voters who believed Trump when he said was going to bring prices down. They can see that prices haven’t gone down⁠—and that the GOP is actively making things worse by refusing to end the shutdown (among other things). If Republicans refuse to work for the common American and keep trying to enrich themselves and their rich-ass puppeteers, they’re going to lose hard in the midterms.

• On the post: The Simulation Is Collapsing

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Nov, 2025 @ 11:34am

  Trump posted cryptically: “AND SO IT BEGINS.”

  Not for nothing, but it wasn’t all that cryptic. He posted that soon after Zohran Mamdani, whom Trump had repeatedly referred to as a “communist” leading up to the election, was projected to win the mayorship of New York City by pretty much every major news outlet. “It”, in this case, refers to the Trumpian fantasy of Mamdani instituting communism across NYC⁠—or maybe the more racist fantasy of Mamdani, a Muslim and a self-labeled democratic socialist, somehow enacting “Sharia law” (which is rooted in conservative ideas like controlling women) in NYC.

• On the post: What’s Left Of The FBI Gets Back To Turning Teens Into Terrorists

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Nov, 2025 @ 08:44am

  Giving people the rope to hang themselves isn’t entrapment. Where it becomes entrapment is when the FBI induces/coerces people to do something they weren’t otherwise going to do. Buying everything needed isn’t inducing them to do something they didn’t want to.

  That’s the whole point, though: Would these people have seriously considered planning a terrorist attack of their own volition if the FBI hadn’t intervened and offered them guns and whatnot? The FBI is responsible for a lot of the “terrorists” in their “we foiled a terrorism” cases because it does a lot to create a terrorist where none would have existed but for the actions of the FBI.

  I don’t see an issue with locking in something that is actually chargeable, as long as it’s not coerced.

  Again, that’s sort of the point here. How hard did the FBI push Said into going through with an attack, and how hard did it try to push him into abandoning his plans? Were they interested in preventing a terrorism or were they interested in padding their arrest numbers and getting headlines? I know it’s easy to sit back and trust the FBI did the right thing here. And if Said was genuinely not going to back down, yes, the FBI was in the right to arrest him. But I’m left to wonder how hard the FBI really tried to push him away from doing a terrorism. And I can’t trust what the FBI says on the matter because…well, look at their history of making nukes out of sparklers.

• On the post: NC GOP Threatens ProPublica: Drop This Story Or We’ll Call Trump To Punish You

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 06 Nov, 2025 @ 08:14am

  Even if you did, it wouldn’t matter. No such slur would have the same level of cultural “bite” as the ethnic slurs for people of color.

• On the post: NC GOP Threatens ProPublica: Drop This Story Or We’ll Call Trump To Punish You

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2025 @ 04:56pm

  They might also see a email like that one and think “oh cool, this can be Exhibit A in the lawsuit we’re going to file if they decide to fuck around and find out”.

• On the post: NC GOP Threatens ProPublica: Drop This Story Or We’ll Call Trump To Punish You

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2025 @ 01:57pm

  waow

• On the post: What’s Left Of The FBI Gets Back To Turning Teens Into Terrorists

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2025 @ 09:34am

  My first thought when I heard the initial news about a foiled terrorist plot was “I wonder if this is another case of the FBI making terrorists where none would exist but for the intervention of the FBI”. At this point, the assumption is so safe to make that it should be everyone’s first thought when they hear about this sort of thing.

• On the post: Fox News Fell For AI-Generated Rage Bait, Rewrote Story To Pretend It Didn’t

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2025 @ 06:03am

  “SNAP recipient” means ” black people” or “immigrants” to them

  Which is a grand irony when you consider how the demographic with the largest enrollment into SNAP is white people.

• On the post: Symbolic Strength More Important Than Facts When It Comes To Misinformation

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2025 @ 06:01am

  People seem way too willing to believe in bioengineering of viral weaponry. I blame the Resident Evil franchise. Fuckin’ Umbrella, man…

• On the post: Symbolic Strength More Important Than Facts When It Comes To Misinformation

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2025 @ 05:59am

  Do you think we should plan another 2 years of masks and distancing on the hope we may wipe out another flu strain?

  I mean, it couldn’t hurt. The only real problem with masking was with how too many people got too annoyed with having to put up with some mild physical discomfort for the sake of keeping other people out of harm’s way.

  the masks where mostly about political theatre, since they did a much better job of preventing transmission then preventing infection.

  Wait. If they did a better job of preventing transmission, wouldn’t that be a good thing? I mean, that was the whole point of masking: to help prevent transmission of COVID-19.

  3 months after mass vaccinations became common here we had a mass infection in a underground nightclub, supposedly they where 100% freshly vaccinated, its believed that 85-90% became infected.

  Yeah, so, guess what? Vaccination isn’t a foolproof safeguard against infection. You can get the flu shot and still get the flu, after all. But a vaccine makes sure your body is ready to fight the disease from infection onward, which means that if you do catch it, you’ll be spared the worst effects of the disease. Would you rather have no vaccine and Long COVID or a vaccine and what might effectively be a bad case of the flu for a weekend?

  Misinformation, that covid could have transmission outdoors,

  Part of the scientific process is testing hypotheses to learn new information and see if it proves a hypothesis true. Any information we thought we had on COVID back when the pandemic first began would be tested and studied to make sure it was legitimate. COVID having transmissibility outdoors is one of those bits of info that was eventually studied and proven wrong⁠—at least in the sense that COVID “hung in the air” for long periods of time if people were outdoors.

  Misinformation, that wearing a mask was effective at preventing infection.

  See above.

  Missinformation that a covid vaccine was at traditional vaccine levels of preventing infection.

  Again: Vaccines don’t necessarily prevent infection. They can do that, but there isn’t a 100% guarantee against infection from any vaccine⁠—especially when people don’t take measures to mitigate the spread of the disease (like getting vaccinated, masking, and avoiding people when one is knowingly sick) because our culture is so fucked up.

  Misinformation that you could catch covid through a window or through air conditioning.

  That…is one I’ve never heard before. Where did you dig that one up, some nutter’s blog about how chemtrails are giving us autism so we don’t see the Illuminati working together with the reverse vampires?

• On the post: Symbolic Strength More Important Than Facts When It Comes To Misinformation

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 04 Nov, 2025 @ 01:57pm

  As far as Covid-19 disinformation is concerned, the biggest BS story was that the virus emerged in the city with the biggest lab naturally, and lab involvement was a coincidence.

  Can you offer evidence that backs up the implied claim of COVID-19 being a man-made virus that was leaked, accidentally or otherwise, from the lab in which it was made? I’m willing to consider such evidence if it’s credible and toss aside reasonable doubts about that conclusion if the evidence supports doing so. But if all you have are deflections on the level of “you must be a dumbass if you think it wasn’t a biological weapon”, you can move along and peddle your conspiracy fantasy somewhere else.

• On the post: Bari Weiss And The Tyranny Of False Balance

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 04 Nov, 2025 @ 12:36pm

  The analogy depends on the idea that having one of those will inevitably lead to an attempted takeover

  And if you give the bigot a safe space to openly be a bigot (which will likely drive away customers who aren’t and don’t want to be around bigots), that takeover becomes much more inevitable. The whole point of the analogy is that the bigotry is out in the open⁠—that the Nazi is openly being a Nazi. If you don’t kick them out, you’re effectively saying “Nazis are welcome here”. You might be okay with that; your non-Nazi customers, on the other hand…

  one guy down at the end of the bar spouting dumb things doesn’t lead to the Munich Beer Hall

  Say he comes back every day to spout the same dumb bullshit without you doing anything to stop him. How long do you think your regular customers would put up with that before they decide having to hear a bigot rant and rave every day is too high a price to pay for going to your bar?

  the analogy does suggest is that bars start vetting the political attitudes of their customers

  Not really. Plenty of conservatives don’t espouse openly bigoted rhetoric and plenty of liberals don’t put Totenkompf tattoos on their body. If you get someone with visible Nazi tattoos and/or a penchant for saying racial slurs out loud, I don’t see the problem with kicking them out⁠—and that’s because you’d be doing it to keep your bar from becoming a place where that kind of bullshit is acceptable. You can curate your community or your community can curate you⁠—it all depends on what community you want, so think wisely before you decide what you’re willing to accept. The decisions you make, and the actions that follow, show the world who you really are. You can hide that truth from others if you’re clever, but you can never hide from yourself.

• On the post: 60 Minutes Edits Donald Trump Telling Them 60 Minutes Should Edit Donald Trump Talking About How 60 Minutes Paid Him For Editing Kamala Harris

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 04 Nov, 2025 @ 11:33am

  they edited Kamala to make her look sane and sober

  Please provide evidence that Kamala Harris was psychologically impaired, drunk, or both when 60 Minutes interviewed her. I’ll wait.

• On the post: 60 Minutes Edits Donald Trump Telling Them 60 Minutes Should Edit Donald Trump Talking About How 60 Minutes Paid Him For Editing Kamala Harris

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 04 Nov, 2025 @ 11:32am

  the man has never experienced being loved a day in his life

  From everything I’ve heard, his father mostly treated him like shit when he was a kid. Combine that with the wealth Trump inherited and the power he amassed as a public figure⁠—complete with flunkies who would never dare tell him “no”⁠—and the multiple wives (one of whom he assaulted and later credibly accused him of rape). Then look at how his own kids all but beg for his approval like man-children, to the point where they either don’t recognize or can’t admit their father is also a man-child. Not only does the man not know what love truly is, he doesn’t know how to give any love but a performative, surface level “affection” that can be withdrawn if he’s made upset. What’s sadder than that? A lot of other rich and powerful people are equally as broken and equally as immature. Look at Elon Musk. He might say he loves his children, but consider that after the attempt on Donald Trump’s life during his 2024 campaign, Elon started bringing one of his younger sons with him everywhere he went in a way that suggested he was using the child as a human shield. The man doesn’t know “love”; he knows a performative version of “affection” that lasts only as long as his children follow his wishes. That’s what happens when you give shitloads of money and power to narcissists: They make a show of displaying what they think love is supposed to be. But deep down, they believe love is given from others to them instead of given from them to others. They’ll never understand what love really is. They are all the worse off for it.

• On the post: 60 Minutes Edits Donald Trump Telling Them 60 Minutes Should Edit Donald Trump Talking About How 60 Minutes Paid Him For Editing Kamala Harris

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 04 Nov, 2025 @ 11:21am

  No wonder he hung out with Jeffrey Epstein.

• On the post: Symbolic Strength More Important Than Facts When It Comes To Misinformation

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 04 Nov, 2025 @ 09:56am

  You guys literally said it was impossible for it to have come out of a CCP lab

  Impossible? No. Highly improbable? Yes.

  [Fauci] lied about masks.

  And yet, mask-wearing during the pandemic helped wipe out an entire influenza strain in the US. Mask-wearing may not 100% prevent you from catching or transmitting COVID (or any other airborne disease), but it’s better than wearing nothing at all.

  The vaccine had negligible (low single digit %) effects on BOTH infection and transmission rates (that is a verifiable, scientific fact)

  Show me the peer-reviewed studies that back up your assertion of fact. I’ll wait.

  it’s only meaningful effect being severity of disease, mostly in the elderly

  You say that like it’s a bad thing that elderly people got less sick if they contracted COVID after getting the vaccine. Are you a death cul—I mean, Republican, by any chance?

  you are still whining that people do not believe you

  Well, who else are we going to believe: hucksters selling horse dewormer and people who think Tylenol causes autism?

  The “misinformation” was often correct.

  Name five instances in which the “misinformation” was proven to be 100% correct in the face of contradictory “information”. Make sure to cite credible sources; right-wing media, conspiracy fantasists, people who revel in their open ignorance, and your ass are not credible sources.

• On the post: Symbolic Strength More Important Than Facts When It Comes To Misinformation

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 04 Nov, 2025 @ 01:47am

  It's definitely part of the reason they voted for Trump. He tells them a story about how the government⁠—and the Democrats, by extension⁠—have made the lives of undocumented immigrants, queer people, and [insert any more Repugnant Cultural Others here] better at the expense of “hard-working Americans”. He tells them a story about how things would be better if he could grab the levers of power and get rid of things like DEI and regulations and [insert any more conservative bugaboos here] so “real Americans” can be “unleashed” to make the country great again. Whether he’s got any data or studies to back up his stories doesn’t matter; the vibes are what drives people to believe him, especially if they line up with their view of the world. But it’s also a bit deeper than mere storytelling. Trump saw how to dupe Republican voters: Lying works, lying while giving them a scapegoat works even better, and lying while giving them a scapegoat and tacit permission to be openly awful people worked so well that he won two out of three elections with that approach. Trumpists want so badly to lash out at what they feel are cultural “chains” holding them back. He gave them permission to shittalk the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion; he gave them license to attack “wokesters” who tried to “force their beliefs” on everyone by way of asking for a little personally considerate language/treatment; he gave them sanction to generally not give a shit about communities and society in general, especially not the poorest members thereof. For all that is wrong with that son of a bitch, his ability to spin a story that gets the ignorant on his side is unmatched by anyone else in the GOP. (That’s a problem for the GOP, by the way.) The grand irony of our current political situation lies in how both parties have effectively made their platform “we’re the opposite of our opponents”. While the GOP has an actual plan to go with that contrarianism (Project 2025), the Dems only seem to have “we oppose Trump and everything he does”, and that alone isn’t a compelling platform. Zohran Mamdani might win the mayoral race in NYC because he talked about actual plans he has for the city and the values that those plans represent. While he talked about opposing Trump and whatnot, it wasn’t a centerpiece of his mayoral campaign⁠—nor should it have been. His use of social media to frame the narrative of his campaign has worked so well that the DNC would do well to examine why it worked and try to apply those lessons to their own campaigns. (They won’t, but still.) Narratives drive everything we do. We tell ourselves stories⁠—about ourselves, about others, about any- and everything⁠—all the time. Crafting a good narrative out of boring data takes either an incredible level of skill honed over years of work or being born a natural bullshitter. Trump falls into the second category, which is why he’s so good at making people think he’s being profound and intelligent when half of what he says is puffery (e.g., “the best [x]”) and “we’ll see what happens”–type deflections. Could Dems do the work to counter that kind of bullshitting? Yes. Will they? Not if they keep listening to the bozos who tell them to keep trying to win Republican voters by tacking to the right. Oh, and not for nothing, but a fun observation: The Dems could do worse than taking inspiration from pro wrestling in regards to campaign speeches and such. Give me a Dem who can cut a promo as good as Dusty Rhodes’s “Hard Times” and I’ll show you a Dem who fucking gets it. Of course a political speech should have some substance, but the best talkers in pro wrestling understand that the best promos tell a story that make people give a shit about seeing whatever match the promo is building up. That’s how you end up with a promo like “Cane Dewey”. Politics is all about narratives. The Dems need to learn that even with facts and figures and data and all that good shit on their side, they need to tell stories. Taking inspiration from Mick Foley may not be the best idea, but it sure as shit isn’t the worst.

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