Jeff Bezos exerts more control of Washington Post opinion
deadline.com
deadline.com
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/jef...
Instead of the obvious problem that Inequality is rising and we need to substantially raise taxes on the rich and reduce them for everyone else to close the runaway gap.
Below $1M NW, you are probably labor. Above $10M NW, you are probably capital. These thresholds come from asking the question "does a conservative estimation of the passive income from these assets replace a wage?" -- below $1M, no, above $10M, yes, feel free to adjust by playing with the assumptions or plugging in wacky edge cases. The point is that incentives determine so much about politics and the incentives of each individual tend to heavily favor one side or the other which tends to translate into politically relevant policy preferences that favor one side or the other.
The tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital. We should fix that. Unearned income shouldn't be taxed less than earned income, for a start. Also, if I can pay property tax on my house, mega-billionaires can pay property tax on their stock pile. But these are details, and focusing too much on details can be a distraction from the root issue: the tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital, and we should fix that.
E.g.
> These thresholds come from asking the question "does a conservative estimation of the passive income from these assets replace a wage?"
Net worth doesn't necessarily generate any passive income. You could own a lot of shares in your business that are temporarily spiking, but you can't sell them for some reason. Net worth is a bad way to think about this, because it makes people think billionaires have billions of dollars in cash ready to be taxed away. When in fact if you want people to pay tax on their stock pile, you're talking about taking their property away from them because of how much the market happens to value it right now. Unlike property tax, which is to pay for the services weight of your property on the local area.
What hard line? The hard line I didn't draw with the "what percent of your money" formulation?
> Net worth is a bad way to think about this, because it makes people think billionaires have billions of dollars in cash ready to be taxed away.
If it's not cash it can't be taxed? I brought up real estate as a counterexample to the entire stable of "it's tooo haaaaard" arguments, and that's the weakest of them. I was expecting something taller, like the liquidity argument. But real estate comfortably refutes them all and you didn't even try to deal with that.
> you're talking about taking their property away from them
The government wouldn't hesitate for a second to take my property when they are taxing me waaay heavier than mega billionaires. Why the fuck should I be the slightest bit sympathetic to the sanctity of their literal entitlement?
Some people put property rights on an altar and treat them as a fundamental principle, but here's the thing: property rights (at their worst) have been used to institute and defend literal slavery. If you want to put them on an altar, if you want to treat them as a fundamental principle rather than a tool to economically link investment with return, I'm going to make you own that and defend it. Do you want to go down that road?
So you believe, if a company is failing (owners took the risk and are failing), your job is secure? How? You do realize they can fire you at any moment. Job security is a myth. You risk taking a job just like a investor betting on a company.
But they still risk all their capital as well. If you take a loan and use it to open a restaurant, are you taking more risk than an employee who's paid?
This doesn't seem that complicated.
There doesn't need to be a crisp threshold. Progressive taxation without treating labor income as more heavily taxed than generic income which in turn is more heavily taxed than capital gains would be a good start.
Then the people who care only about money and power can divide and conquer.
> divide and conquer
The problem with these solutions is that the math doesn't add up.
Either there are too few rich people in reality, and even if you can collect 200 percent from them - it won't affect the overall picture (and in the end there will be even fewer of them, and you'll have to raise taxes for everyone).
Or, if we expand the category of rich - a poverty funnel is created, where taxes on the "rich" protect the "super-rich" from competition. What difference does it make that you have to pay 90% if all the money is yours, because no one will invest in competing with you, since success will bring them 10%, and failure will take everything?
Everywhere in the world, the rich pay less. Even in countries with formally progressive tax rates, there are a huge number of subsidies and programs that in the end of the day boil down to the fact that the effective tax rate for the rich is lower (even if this means simply reducing their competition so that they get more money and pay a "progressive" tax on it).
Because the problem is not inequality, the problem is poverty. And any measures that discourage production in the end of the day increase poverty. For this reason, any construction of socialism always ends in hunger. Because what difference does it make what just and fair distribution system you came up with if your production fell ten, a hundred or a thousand times because of such a system?
While there is truth is what you say about simply redistributing money is going to directly get people the goods and services required since that is not directly production.
It does have second order effect of changing the weighting of what society produces. If people are too poor to afford food why would you bother to grow it.
Taxing should be about keeping winner take all effects in reasonable check to keep markets actually functional for a good proportion of the participants.
There is no such thing in economic as "people are too poor to afford food". Growing food - is like in the start of economic chain, if people can't afford food - they starting to grow it themselves, and unaffordability disappears. Food can be unaffordable only if you hinder the production of it with your "smart" and "fair" taxation system, for example like socialists do.
Certain areas are too densely populated to produce food.
Typically, you need land to grow food or keep livestock, many poor don’t own land.
That said, it is unlikely to dip that far.
I probably should have been more clear in my statement and put "farmers" instead of "you". It wasn't really a statement about food but about market access and participants ability to signal demand.
You second statement is just boringly stupid.
This is objectively false.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
> Instead of the obvious problem that Inequality is rising
I'm old enough to remember when progs all shrieked that poverty was the big scary problem. Capitalism solved that with minimal expense. You know that scary 15% in poverty figure you hear during election season? That's based on census income data, which excludes ~90% of all welfare programs, even CASH programs like refundable tax credits!
So with poverty overwhelmingly sorted, they've moved on to inequality! But even calculations of income inequality are doped up--high earners incomes are counted BEFORE taxes, and low earners BEFORE benefits. Keep that in mind whenever progs advocate for more welfare spending--even if you give it to them, they won't count it! They exclude it from the very calculations which they use as evidence of the need for ever more spending!
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSN40188
And
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
And
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
You aren't looking at the right data. This is why it's so hard to educate the public about this, even intelligent people on HN get it wrong.
Sure, wealth inequality is growing, but this isn't a problem, it's merely an emotionally resonant issue. The left love it for the same reason they lofted the 'poverty' banner for so long--it's a Philosopher's Stone. This particular stone hails from a failed German novelist and promises to transmute other people's money into votes!
Regardless, median income[0] and median net worth[1] are rising and poverty is in the doldrums--points which make it difficult to make an honest argument that we are in need of radical change.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-before-t...
>There are limited amount of real assets available at any given time
This is correct.
>and wealth inequality means regular people hold less of the assets each year, making them poorer
This is not. New wealth is constantly being created. There isn't a fixed amount of pie on the table.
How much of the money made by the Harry Potter Franchise went to JK rowling vs her publishers? Supposedly she got a 15% royalty rate, which is considered "High"
That should be revealing on it's own.
- Market prices: ~15% annualized increase over the last two years
- House prices: 5-7% annualized increase
- Gold: 10-12% annualized increase
- Compared to GDP growth of only 2.1-2.7% annualized
If GDP growth is only 2.7% while the wealth of the top who own assets is up 15% annualized, where is the 12.3% coming from? It's coming the bottom.
We live in an economy that has wealth redistribution. It's being distributed from the majority to a small minority.
In other words, yes the pie is growing, but the slice of a the top 10% of the pie is growing much faster.
Top 1% Top 5% Top 10% Top 25% Top 50% Bottom 50% All Taxpayers
Number of Returns 1,535,899 7,679,495 15,358,991 38,397,477 76,794,954 76,794,954 153,589,908
Average Income Taxes Paid $653,730 $187,468 $108,251 $50,963 $27,891 $667 $14,279
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $6,182,180 $7,745,525 $10,613,602 $13,191,209 $1,531,038 $14,722,247
1 2-5 6-10 11-25 26-50 51-100
Number of Returns 1,535,899 6,143,596 7,679,496 23,038,486 38,397,477 76,794,954
Income Taxes Paid (Millions) $1,004,063 $435,594 $222,966 $294,234 $185,068 $51,225
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $2,309,785 $1,563,345 $2,868,077 $2,577,607 $1,531,038
Average Tax Rate 25.9% 18.9% 14.3% 10.3% 7.2% 3.3%
Average Per Capita Income $2,521,256.28 $375,966.29 $203,573.91 $124,490.69 $67,129.59 $19,936.70
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...
That's the crux. It's the same in almost all developed countries, we all have been getting more income, but most of us are not getting richer. The widening of the scissors is becoming more and more obvious, because even middle incomes suffered hard during the cost of living crisis, and continue to suffer.
For example, Kennebunkport is a very fucking wealthy town in Maine, including having a large vacation property for the Bush family. My father's entire business as a half retired contractor is predicated on rich, gay, techbros moving here from California and just throwing money at him until stuff is built. He can literally double a project price overnight, and they give him a bottle of $200 wine for it. The same is true of many businesses in the area.
This is one of the reasons nobody builds lower class housing. Profit is usually percentage based. Why would you build ten starter homes, and work your ass off pleasing a bunch of poor people who have to be careful with their money because even getting a loan nowadays is stupidly difficult, when you can just build a couple mcmansions for the same output effort, where a bunch of rich fucks will come in and buy it in cash, for above market price, no questions asked, so you don't even have to build it well because the rich people are buying vibes and dreams, not an actual house, and they will happily eat a much higher profit margin per product.
Large income disparity means that people stop serving the lower market, because Wall St won't invest in something that doesn't make line go up as much as just treating rich people as idiots that will pay stupid prices for things.
This "makes sense", or at least is obvious when you remember that at a certain point of wealth, you have more money than you know what to do with, and you still cannot buy even a single extra second of time with infinite money, so spending time being discerning with your purchases is explicitly a waste.
The US was #1 on the Human Development Index in 1995, and is now #20, sandwiched between Slovenia and the UAE.
What your link does show is widening income inequality.
Levels of income have risen. Comforts and services available are not as simple to measure as income, but consumption (a decent proxy) is also trending upwards.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.TOTL.CD?location...
This trope is getting tiring to be honest. There are very clear issues with immigration in many countries. The issue is that for the last 20 years when these issues where brought up, the main parties just dismissed them and ostracized anyone who dare bring up the subject.
This failure to address the problem is what is fueling the rise of the far right everywhere except in 1 country, Denmark. Why? Because they actually decided to listen to their constituents and do something about it. Is it perfect no? But if you look at the result of their action, the far right in Denmark is comparatively low compared to many other European countries.
It's time for the leaders of many countries to stop pretending that problems don 't exist and acknowledged that the way the immigration issue was handled for the last 20 years is an utter abject failure.
There is a very interesting article that can be found here: https://dnyuz.com/2025/02/24/in-an-age-of-right-wing-populis...
Like I said, it's not perfect and even they know that.
I live in an European capital and haven't seen any of these issues that immigration is supposedly creating. AFAICT theses issues only exist in the minds of people, and thus in the media.
Regardless, let's say I'm wrong and immigration is indeed creating some issues. Are these issues really so important relative to other problems a state might have that they command the amount of attention immigration gets?
I call bullshit, it's purely a wrong skin color problem.
This move seems likely to alienate subscribers (both for potentially being against their ideology, and more importantly, for implying lack of freedom of expression that customers would demand from a newspaper). It is also likely to lose them talent. The move seems to benefit bezos personally by using the newspaper as a mouthpiece, even if the newspaper itself as a business is damaged in the process.
Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different when it was Bezos' benefit to placate the progressives?
Of course it doesn't.
> Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different
It wasn't a delusion, it was.
It's generally been the policy of editorial pages to print a diverse set of opinions pieces that contradict each other. And that aren't under control of the owner, look up the term "editorial independence".
This isn't a question of being "under a delusion", it's simply how American newspapers have traditionally operated because it was good for business.
Media owners have generally prioritized making money, not "presenting their views".
This is so elementary that anyone can see it. It's commonly mentioned in precisely the mainstream "respectable" publications like WaPo.
There's almost certainly industry jargon and marketing models for it, and technical terminology and decades of documentation about it, if I were to ask any LLM what the words and concepts are.
It's always funny to hear about media bias with obvious very large alternatives available. It was very eery hearing about the Media's supposed Liberal biases through the 2020 and 2024 election campaigns with Fox News fully dominating viewership numbers [1]. And now here we go again with print media.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...
If we assume, for example sake, the country is exactly 50% left and 50% right, it makes sense that Fox, as the sole 'big' right wing news would dominate ratings.
Then you have CNN and MSNBC as left leaning outlets, so they outnumber Fox, but split viewership. According to the link above, if they merged, they'd have about the same viewership as Fox, which makes sense.
In reality, CNN and MSNBC ideologically agree as much as FoxNews and Newsmax in that they don't. And CNN especially invented optimizing coverage for attention over viewpoint consistency (esp between 2000 and 2015).
But if we pretend that only those three exist(obviously they don't, you have ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, and many, many more), it's not necessarily wrong to say that media has a liberal bias, since '67% of stations are left leaning.' It just leaves out the fact that nobody really watches them in numbers.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-p...
> What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should [CNN chief executive] Jeff Zucker be replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”
That’s just like asking for evidence that Chinese media isn’t biased about saying anything negative about the government.
Jeff Bezos wanted the Washington Post to go soft on Trump. Here are concrete examples of his interference:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/25/jeff-bezos-killed-washington...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/washing...
Now your turn.
Are they not in favor of Democrats? How is that left leaning?
I.e. to someone else, Fox News isn't advocating to deport all non-whites, therefore they're just the right side of the left-wing blob.
In real life, left-wing means left-wing relative the population, not relative to you personally.
So many comments trying to compare to Europe, or try to excise liberal from left seem to miss the point.
When an election so divisive picks a side, there's your new baseline. Not what it was last year. Not what CNN did in the Clinton years, or what it's claiming to do today.
As I see it we have one major right wing news network in America in the form of Fox; along with some smaller ones like One News Network and talk radio. We have several centrist news networks like CNN and ABC. We have several neo-liberal news sources like the New York Times.
However, we have no truly left wing mainstream news and only one major network (MSNBC) that is marginally left wing.
So it seems to me that America's media is biased towards the right whether you are counting number of outlets or number of viewers.
Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America.
No he wouldn't, have you seen his policies? He is more left wing than even Scandinavian countries, he wants the Employee funds that Sweden tried in the 80s and never went back to because it was too extreme left for them.
The Scandinavian countries aren't very left wing. They're just very rich so they have lots of money for welfare programs. But they're pretty anti immigrant. I would consider Spain more left wing.
The European right and American right essentially speak from the same ideology. As the Republicans have moved away from free markets, free trade and immigration. Trump, Farage, Weidel and Le Pen could all work happily in coalition together.
The European left has become so fractured that it's hard to make clear comparisons. Which German political party would Bernie Sanders want to join of SPD, Greens, or Die Linke? In the UK would he work with the SNP, Labour or Corbyn?
Is an odd fit I would have him with Labour. In canada he would lead the NDP.
Looking at the CDU’s manifesto I think it’s overall more palatable to the Republicans. As the Democrats would likely never support corporate tax cuts or cannabis restrictions.
https://www.cdu.de/app/uploads/2025/01/wahlprogramm-cdu-csu-...
What have Bezos or Lewis said that indicate 'personal liberties' differ from 'civil liberties'? I don't see it in the cited article.
I haven't heard that. Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties?
Good question. This use of the term has become a popular dog whistle [0] in right-wing circles. It would take a bit of research to see how it was coined in its current form. They know that when you say "personal liberty," you really mean "my liberty is more important than your civil rights."
I expect it to stay exactly the same
It was already like this before, it's just afaik the pillars weren't publicly acknowledged
What were the previous pillars? Social justice and progressive ideology. "Diversity of opinion" matters now all of sudden?
Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
It's tough as someone who is a strong proponent for strong civil liberties seeing their philosophy's verbiage being co-opted as such (but the former PM/PMM in me respects game)
> At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip: being afraid of contradictory opinions is the first step in intellectual decline.
In Turkiye, Hungary, a lot of Latin America (notably Mexico, Brazil), Russia in the early 2010s, CEE EU member states (Yes Czechs and Poles, continue to be high and mighty on HN and Reddit until Babis and PiS win again the next couple months thanks to your parents in Brno or Wroclaw), Israel, South Korea, and India, this meant the rise of independent blogs and media - sort of like what Substack is trying but failing to do.
Plenty of senior journalists who felt over-muzzled would split off and form their own independent blog companies and those increasingly supplemented legacy press orgs amongst leadership, because even an illiberal democracy, you need some unbiased info.
Of course, unlike the US, plenty of journalists in those countries have bar licenses and know how to parry judicial overreach.
It also meant the opposition had balls and wasn't afraid to lie if needed as well. Politics is a brawl, not a Socratic session in a Gov94 Seminar, but these are also countries where junior party members from opposing parties beating each up with fists or a tire iron is a rite of passage.
But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
Well, they're not an independent news organization. It was supposed to be a newsletter service, whatever the pivots.
But in any case, even if they don't have the "news", the breadth and quality of commentary there, one never sees in establisment media. And the option to cut down the shit is trivially easy: just read your subscribed newsletters (in your inbox preferably) and skip any other feed Substack has.
Wasn't one selling point of Substack that you could easily leave with your subscribers, so substack writers aren't really for sale and can't be muzzled/deprecated? Or did it change since Substack was launed?
Also are you thinking about specific writer(s)/events when you wrote 'muzzled or deprecated if needed.'?
Yup. Just more doublespeak.
Remember "free enterprise"? Sounds awesome right? Yes, please, gimme some more of that freedom.
Imagine my surprise apon learning the "free enterprise" advocates actually meant freedom from consequences.
The power to impose this new wonderland, is almost within reach. Where before it failed, greater are the possibilities for it to succeed this time around. Nothing to worry about, freedom is for those who deserve it.
EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC.
Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it.
[0] - https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Less than 40% of the adult population has a college degree. Less than 45% of voters have college degrees. Yet we took for granted the ascendence of ideas that few non-college-educated voters have been able to digest and see the evidence for. That it happened at all is pretty amazing, yet our only response has been to whine and moan that it hasn't happened faster or more completely. We could see that a lot of people weren't really getting it, and as long as we thought they were a minority, our response was who cares, they're losing. If they aren't educating themselves and keeping up to date, they're simply bad people and if they're confused and angry, fuck 'em, they deserve it.
It is not necessarily wrong as a moral stance, but it's not a strategy for succeeding in a democracy where those people can tip the balance of an election. As we felt more and more entitled to our triumph and got more and more angry and whiny about the bad people holding us back, surprise surprise, those people decided we weren't the best party to represent them anymore.
If there's any lesson we should take from this, it's that if we hold people in contempt, we can't count on their votes.
There's nothing coherent behind the shift to Trump except mutual contempt. I hope we are getting to a point where we can talk about our own political failings without reflexively changing the subject to the voters' moral failings.
Also, we should consider that when our definition of a good person includes the rapid assimilation of new information and ideas, the ability to be a good person is not evenly distributed. We're only a tiny way towards building a world where that ideal isn't elitist and exclusionary. A lot of people were not raised with that definition of moral goodness. Acting in good faith, they did not equip themselves with the necessary skills, because they thought they could be good people without them. What we're demanding from them now is that they either exercise intellectual skills and habits they don't have, or they speak and believe in obedience to those of us who have them. I don't see a good way around it, but we shouldn't be surprised if they're unhappy about it.
Right now, the POTUS is so much reducing freedom in US that it's enough for him to say that it doesn't like something (like DEI) for a lot of companies to trash DEI in the hope to please him. And it's enough for the WaPo to change what will be the content of its "opinion" pages...
And EU is the one reducing freedom ?????? You should really wake up guys
60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws.
I don't buy JD Vance's argument, but I am fine sacrificing the EU if it means Dem-turned-GOP donors (especially on the Tech side) return to our party.
You can find TONS of examples of people in Europe being jailed or having cops come to their house for something they said on social media. In some cases for things as simple as criticizing a politician.
Here’s a high profile one, but I can find you plenty more examples.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson
>On 25 May 2018, Robinson was arrested for a breach of the peace while live streaming outside Leeds Crown Court[170][174]
“Breach of peace” means he was saying something that they didn’t want him to say. This is a real curtailing of free speech.
>companies to trash DEI
DEI is often racist and many of its implementations in modern companies violate the civil rights act. Companies are correct to be ditching it because it poses a big risk for discrimination lawsuits.
I actually spoke with lawyers about this very recently and reverse discrimination lawsuits are a booming business right now because there are so many clear cut examples of violations of the civil rights act.
And that reason has nothing to do with J.D.Vance having any concern at all about free speech and personal freedom. Not just zero of it, his goal is to remove both. He would love Europe to become fascist which is incompatible with both.
What does not contribute to the conversation is to pretend otherwise. To pretend that he has a point or any other meaning then to grab power and punish dissent.
What does this mean? What does the US VP have to do with EU law?
Social Media organizations like FB/Meta and Google have historically been some of the largest donors to the Dems, and their flip was a massive reason why 2024 went the way it did.
Vance has been consistently lobbying against the DSA over the past few weeks, and that's where his "free speech" argument is coming from.
I don't really care one way or the other, but I care about ensuring that large donors who flipped from D to R return to the D fold.
What you end up seeing is the GOP raises nearly as competitive as the DNC when you add Trump PACs plus WinRed.
Not any more, it's been made quite clear that's over and is now an extortion racket against Ukraine. Long term consequences of this are unclear.
Again: what's the argument for trying to ram US social media right wing propaganda into an unwilling Europe, while banning tiktok?
To get the tech oligarchs back on the Dems side of course, just like alephnerd said above.
> while banning tiktok?
Is this ideological contradiction bothering you? Well, unfortunately the world is full of these. Norway is a huge oil and gas exporter and yet maintains very stringent standards on its domestic usage. Why do they profit off exporting O&G to countries with less state capacity to manage the externalities of O&G? Well them's the shakes. Pick your priorities. For me, I'm fine if tech companies stay unregulated if I don't get 4 more years of MAGA politics. I'd prefer neither 4 more years of MAGA politics nor unregulated tech companies but I also want to build affordable condos in Beverly Hills so ;)
this is fine if he really means it. This is the most important thing we get from the Constitution recognizing our rights as humans. It remains to be seen if it's really just to copy what what Musk is doing at X which is amplifying far right posts along with enragement (engagement) posts, and he deamplifie everything else.
- free markets
this is worrisome. it sounds to me like they want free markets for billionaires and their arm twisting of the current Congress and Trump, and -NOT- actually giving lower and middle class an equal chance in "free markets", because it can't be free if corps are allowed to run hog wild over rights, monopolies, and colluding between each other to dominate markets.
> Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
"Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty.
"Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions.
The solution was trivially easy: go to another cake shop that doesn't not have such an objection, but that wouldn't be heroic enough.
[0] https://www.aceprensa.com/english/united-states-approves-fir...
That is your opinion,but that was not the opinion of the Supreme Court. They found that the Colorado statute in question was based on religious hostility and therefore discriminatory against the cake shop. (That is, the "personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer.) Agree or disagree, I encourage you to read the full opinion.
Moreover, there is no law against "compelled custom work." Had the cake shop discriminated based on the customer's race, rather then their sexual orientation, the refusal would have been illegal.
They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer". The Court explicitly avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise.
But we're here to discuss the rhetoric in the right around "personal liberty." The cake case is an example of using that rhetoric to justify discrimination, which is exactly what happened. That is the effect of the SCOTUS decision, regardless of whether they used those words verbatim.
It is similar to when a criminal case get thrown out because investigators messed up and mishandled evidence. It says nothing about the merit of the case.
But I don't see how the logic is wrong in my equivalent example. You can't ban people from your shop based on protected characteristics - everyone should be able to buy the same things from you, but that doesn't mean you can enforce that people do custom work for you. Maybe that statement works really well here, but breaks down in other examples, but that was my interpretation of the validity of the case.
It's not wrong, it's literally the free market FFS. People are mad at the cake shop for denying business to gay people, and they do not care whether it's legal or not. If it is suddenly legal to employ literal children, I will boycott places that do it, regardless of the law, because the law is not the be all, end all of morality
"But but but it's legal" has never been an acceptable excuse for doing something morally wrong. If christians are upset that lots of people consider it morally wrong to treat gay people differently, they should consider that it's okay people do not agree with them, and that the US legally protects people who have different values than you do, and that's an important part of freedom. Banning me from boycotting the cake shop that doesn't serve gay people is literally against my freedom of association.
Christians have done the same thing for decades. Porn is protected speech, but that hasn't stopped them from literally advising the president, on both sides of the aisle, for decades, to ban it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...
Funny how it's just good christian values when they do it, but "cancel culture" when they don't like the free market outcome.
Like any other non-Western European and North American country, politics in the CEE is very much about those networks and connections you cultivated - not really ideological - and almost everyone mid-high level in Hungarian politics today started their careers in the 1990s.
Politics in much of the CEE amongst that generation appears much more mercenary than ideological.
Anecdotally, I've heard the biggest reason my Hungarian coworkers parents voted for Fidesz was largely because of the cash benefits they would provide before elections - same as Bolsa Familia in Brazil, TOKİ in Turkiye, and Freebies in India (all illiberal democracies have a similar form of patronage politics, this is a very incomplete list)
The public didn't want to hear that and gave supermajority to Orbán for the next decade and a half.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demo...
You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
(Yes, I know that Die Linke aren't literally Communist, and I know AfD aren't literally Nazis, but Die Linke descended from the legal successor of a Marxist-Leninist party, as AfD descended from the legal successor of a neo-Nazi party, so I think my analogy holds.)
> Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson
Biden won in 2020 pretty resoundingly, so the lesson they learned from 2016 was enough to win decisively in 2020. Parties don't stay in power indefinitely, conditions change and incumbents all across the world — not just the US — lost in 2024.
So while the number of swing states has reduced a lot in 2016, the strength of republicans in the south hasn't changed a lot since 2000.
Not too get too political but if the these people had done their jobs in the first place, there would be no Trump in the WH presently.
The problem with them is that they are all for the status quo which to the average voter means "more of the same".
See the current compete U-turn from the German conservatives who less than 24H after being elected decided to break their main campaign promise and renege on doing what they said they would do.
The far right and the far left are not growing in a vacuum, they are growing because people are getting tired of being lied to.
what kind of promise was it?
I vote for them because they represent change and progress at a steady, measured pace — not stagnation and status quo. You're discounting big campaign achievements like Obamacare and Biden's infrastructure plan.
I look at what we are seeing today. Trump is more powerful than he as ever been. In Europe, European-skeptic parties are rising, the far right and the far left are rising as well and the center is slowly crumbling.
Those are facts. So the question is why are the center right/left politicians not acknowledging the problems and trying to find adequate solutions? Why do they let the far right and the far left being seen as the ones who are/will be doing something?
The horseshoe theory is real. If you look at France, the far left and the far right merged their votes and forced the previous government to resign.
If that is not a sign that something is seriously wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
> I look at what we are seeing today. Trump is more powerful than he as ever been. In Europe, European-skeptic parties are rising, the far right and the far left are rising as well and the center is slowly crumbling.
> Those are facts. So the question is why are the center right/left politicians not acknowledging the problems and trying to find adequate solutions? Why do they let the far right and the far left being seen as the ones who are/will be doing something?
>The horseshoe theory is real. If you look at France, the far left and the far right merged their votes and forced the previous government to resign. If that is not a sign that something is seriously wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
I don't disagree with you. I want to be glib – not to you, but just in general – and say that it's simply a marketing problem, and that Biden/Obama have had strong policies, but fear sells better than hope.
For Obama specifically, he has and had the chance to be the face of the left, center-left, democrats, whatever you want to call it – the opposition – but he has continually failed to even appear to challenge the far right. It's disappointing that, for one of the best orators of our time, he's essentially hidden himself away and stayed on the sidelines, only emerging to endorse candidates every election cycle like it's Groundhog Day.
I suspect he does it out of fear of being accused of seeking a third-term (despite Trump openly flirting with that idea multiple times this month alone); or as an attempt to lie low and protect his legacy in the history books. But we're living in an era where the far right doesn't hesitate to rewrite history, and Trump continues to systematically destroy that legacy piece-by-piece.
I don't understand why people give a pass to Communism when it caused an order of magnitude more suffering than Nazism.
No wonder that about 75% Czechs are dissatisfied with current PM Fiala.
https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/politici...
Opposition is even worse. They do what public surveys and Babis (the leading oligarch here) tells them to do. I expect lowest voter turnout because quite a lot people don't see any point in voting. Which is ok for me. We need rethinking about current approach of giving our responsibility to unknown electorate.
There are also obvious struggles within Brussels whether the unrealistic eco-plans are going to be at least watered down or no, and the EC is still trying to push them through as much as possible.
In that environment, a "media-talented" oppositional politician who professes mild Euroskepticism is going to have an easy time winning.
Join a local party and observe how the discussion is not really centred around screwing their voters over, hopefully.
My take was about as yours before I tried to do something and realized how hard it is.
Say it with me: "Domain-Specific Knowledge."
This suggests that the Post will effectively become just another municipal newspaper that happens to be in located the US capitol, rather than a source of national scope news. This giant shift in strategy will surely decrease the paper's market size and reputation for breaking news (as it did with Watergate and Snowden).
I suspect this also portends a big reduction in the paper's commitment to investigative journalism, something that IMO, is truly irreplaceable (especially since investigations at the NY Times have faded into a mere shadow of what the Post has long been in that endeavor. They did a rotten job at reporting Snowden's revelations, for example.)
[BTW, I was a subscriber to the Post (and a long time reader before that) but cancelled in protest when Bezos suddenly pulled the Post's endorsement of a presidential candidate in 2024. Now I guess I'll stay away forever.]
Seems an odd choice to combat that loss by apparently shifting further right. You are never going to get large numbers of Fox News consumers to read WaPo. They have been told for decades how far left the Post is and that it can't be trusted.
Bezos needs a hobby I guess.
WaPo was viewed as a liberal, slightly left-of-center newspaper that did excellent investigative reporting. It therefore was all but ignored by those whose preferred version of the news is presented by e.g. FOX News.
As it has taken some subtle and some not-so-subtle steps to move away from its reputation, that has done nothing to encourage FOX News viewers to read it, and a lot to discourage its former audience from continuing to do so.
So one "side" has declined, and the other "side" has no reason to increase.
Just as with Musk and Twitter, controlling the narrative and pushing an agenda is worth far more than any balance sheets could show.
Bezos's decision doesn't impact the news side, which reports on breaking news. The paper's editor in chief made a public statement backing that notion.
Note that they rejected an advertisement criticising Elon Musk, for example. That's not a news article, but it definitely looks biased.
I'd say they were clearly on the left since ~2017, but had other perspectives as well.
It’s not a rule or law but an observation and it does seem pretty accurate.
I’m not sure what you’re asking, I don’t read the LA Times, was it bought out by a known right-wing wealthy person or something?
The NY Post and Wall Street Journal are among the main newspapers in NYC.
> I don’t read the LA Times, was it bought out by a known right-wing wealthy person or something?
The owner has openly killed left-wing editorial and supported the right (including Trump).
> It’s not a rule or law but an observation and it does seem pretty accurate.
If you can find evidence for it. It doesn't seem true in NY or LA.
By your own admission of the LA Times this was a recent shift, so it was true before.
In NYC that's probably so, but only if you force them to pick only one.
What, are you going to report on Trump claiming that Ukraine started the war uncritically? That Haitians are eatings pets in Ohio? That vaccines cause autism? C'mon.
The Overton window shifted right in 2016, I don't think the paper's line moved much. But no more, the billionaires are here to ensure nothing will get in the way of their sweet, sweet tax cuts [1].
This is some grandiose appeal that's shared by both sides of the political coin. People generally assume that reality matches their experience and opinions.
Reread the examples I gave and defend them, or show me some as egregious as these ones coming from Biden or Harris.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts?wprov=sfla1
We must've read two different WaPos.
> I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’
> Bezos corp speak
I think you are conflating a "business yes man" with a "newspaper angle yes man". It is fine for a major newspaper to endorse certain values, and distance themselves from others! It's fine because it's a big country with a lot of newspapers!
A paper, or journalism, is much more sensitive to these issues than a typical business btw. Because as you can imagine, once readers distrust a news source it is very hard to repair that reputation.
A written variant of a FoxNews talking head telling viewers how/what to think about $topic...
There's a million shades of grey. The bad actors only want you to see black and white
I hope the US brings back fairness doctrine. Or if not, force these companies and all their parent/subsidizes to own no more than 3 Media companies.
By media I mean: Radio, TV, Cable, Streaming, Movie Production and Social Media.
Which, if you're going to argue against someone's position, I'd think it best to get that position directly from them, rather than building a strawman to beat down.
Not just "no," or "Hell, no," but fuck no.
What mega corporation is the Washington Post part of?
Trump sees "friends" and "enemies" [0], and doesn't care about actual ownership of shares. "Bezos is a friend and sorted out that WaPo mess, so I'll cut him some slack and kill off that Amazon anti-trust thing" is something we can all picture Trump saying.
[0] Obviously I have no idea what he actually sees or thinks, but this picture seems to match his public pronouncements.
My instinct is that Evil Man theory is as simplistic (and wrong) as Great Man theory: there's probably some better explanation that this also provides evidence for, that I'm missing.
And I'm sure Jeff Bezos is so pure he'd never use his power over WaPo to help Amazon!/s
We're at the point where the personal wealth of oligarchs such as him has begun eclipsing the wealth of all but the very largest corporations. His own personal wealth would rank him somewhere around 60th on the Fortune 500.
"People with more money than God own and influence media" has historically not been a recipe for social stability.
The predecessor law was used int the 1930s to close non English language radio stations in Chicago and FDR used it to threaten people criticizing the New Deal.
You could go on and on with examples of abuse by administrators of both parties. The fairness doctrine violated the first amendment and was garbage.
As an exercise, imagine applying it to a story about climate change. Now image Trump’s FCC gets to decide what is fair. Do you really want that?
The fairness doctrine would be just as godawful as the Debate between Kent Hovind and Bill Nye. It only serves to legitimize crazy outliers.
The problem with Fox News is not that they don't have the fairness doctrine, the problem is that your average american has so little media literacy that they can't recognize that Fox News is absolute horseshit, and that a company that has multiple times had to admit to a judge that they willfully lie to their audience should not be trusted. Republicans love to bitch about how bad CNN is as a "liberal" media source but educate liberals do not watch CNN because they once asked a physicist if MH370 could have disappeared into a black hole, and other utterly insane and clearly not journalism things. OAN and Newsmax currently exist. There is no equivalent for "liberals". A bunch of extreme right wing youtubers were found to be paid by RT, ie literal Russian State Propaganda outlet, and none of them lost their audience. There isn't a communist state funded liberal equivalent.
But apparently most americans didn't learn how to evaluate a media source, like at all, which is weird because we spent a couple classes in the library learning exactly that, along with learning how to use boolean operators to better search google for example. We were even tested on it.
But I guess all the kids who thought english class was worthless didn't pay attention, and now believe "Truth of media" === "How much it confirms my biases"
Truth be told, it does feel like free markets have become a bit of a dirty word in both political realms recently; I'm not going to complain too much about Bezos advocating for it, we could use the help.
I guess it remains to be seen just what kind of views they end up pushing, rather than what he says he wants to push :P
that's not the issue here though. Bezos is directly ordering the opinion editor to tow a certain line, and that is not a common practice at any reputable newspaper I am aware of (which is why the responsible editor, David Shipley immediately quit). I am German and I have friends working in the news sector. A corporate shareholder trying to dictate the topics would be considered a breach of ethics. Pretty sure that's the case at highly regarded newspapers in the US too.
To Bezos, a market controlled by a single large capital allocator is a free market. Unless the allocator is government of course (unless there's subsidies to apply for!).
The idea to me is strange; I shop on Amazon, but also dozens of other online websites. It's really not hard to buy from some place other than Amazon if you desire.
Many of the same effects that make it extremely hard to set up eg. competing social networks are not present for online shopping - There's plenty of shipping companies, so you can ship anywhere in the world without capital investment; You can set up an online shop and send it to anyone, you don't need to have a huge customer base to make money (relatively speaking, obviously you need customers)
You just throw this out there as a statement of fact without backing it up beyond citing one hypothetical failure mode of a free market for media. Here's a dueling hypothetical: what happens if the state that is in charge of regulating the media gets taken over by someone who doesn't believe that media should hold elected officials accountable and they prevent the media from covering their actions negatively?
Now that we've evened out the "what happens if"s: On what basis do you say that regulated media produces better outcomes? Because you say so? Is there evidence in favor that you can cite?
Make an argument in favor of regulated media producing better outcomes or don't, but all I've seen here so far is you and OP asserting a dogma.
You attacked the other poster's claim with a hypothetical. I rebutted yours the same way. Begging for "proof" is beyond the scope of this conversation.
Correct. I provided a dueling hypothetical precisely to illustrate that they had not provided an actual argument. I didn't intend to argue the other way—I honestly haven't formed an opinion on the topic—I just intended to point out that confidently asserting dogma isn't useful or meaningful.
What you call intuitions and principles I call dogmatic beliefs, and dogma is uninteresting to discuss in a mixed-dogma forum like this: it just devolves into a shouting match.
Well, you were the one who came to the conversation and basically did the 'shouting down' thing rather than substantively engage in anything. All you did was express your disbelief in the lowest form possible, so I'm not sure what you're really complaining about besides your own contributions here. Be the change you want to see!
That said, correlation does not imply causation, and I'm unconvinced that the polarization we're seeing now traces back that far. Pew's research [0] shows that in '94 only 21% (Rep) and 17% (Dem) of each party held a "very unfavorable" opinion of the other party. That number had barely shifted by '02, with both parties still well under 25%, but then steadily started growing from '02 on.
The timing of that is more suggestive of the internet being a cause (if we're going to try to pin it down to one media-oriented cause, which is probably a bad exercise to begin with) than it does of the fairness doctrine, which was repealed back in '87.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-...
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-...
Since the Fairness Doctrine was struck down, we've had nothing but bad media outcomes.
If you want to know more, Noam Chomsky wrote the book on this, called Manufacturing Consent.
I agree that this was interesting to do, but Telegram and Reddit are not high quality media. Some people with high levels of media literacy can distill the information gained through such channels to understand the world, but a lot of people cannot. Most people still use legacy media (even if it is through digital channels) as primary sources. And those legacy media sources are worse than ever.
On top of that the digital channels are massively astroturfed, especially those whose consumer base are in the west. For example, the state of the war as described by Western-targetted media vs. Ukrainian-targetted sources differs greatly. Same applies for the Hamas-Israel conflict. We need high quality and impartial (for some definition of impartial) sources to complement the raw feed for people with lower media literacy. Substack is great but not enough when Fox News and MSNBC exist.
Says who? Back in the day people made a big deal about how Wikipedia was a low quality source of information until it turned out to be by far the best public repository of information humanity has ever seen and one of the best institutions ever built for neutral and informative coverage of various issues.
Reddit is a fantastic resource too. It sometimes gets long-form discussion involving domain experts and is much better at representing multiple viewpoints than any pre-internet media channel (which, given the bias of the major subreddits, is pretty amazing).
Matter of fact the owners of the platform take part in astroturfing as a part of day to day business — see the moderation takeover.
Reddit having flaws doesn't make it low quality. The baseline for media companies is well below sea level.
2. Again, the situation that we’re in is not natural, it is a reality that was created by political and ideological extremists. You’re talking about insane levels of media corruption as if it is a natural and unavoidable phenomenon, but it’s not. We can change it.
You just linked an entire article with, realistically, some pretty detailed analysis of how the Harris campaign was interacting with Reddit. There are details of what was said, who said it, where it was said, how much was said. Experiments were conducted. Dates, times and strategies are being publicised.
Link me that for the Harris campaign's interactions with CNN or the New York Times. There is nowhere near as much information floating around as far as I have seen - people have to guess.
> had to go to Ukrainian media and military sources through Substack and elsewhere to get a non-propagandized sense of things.
I'm just going to pick this up on the way through - that is not the right move; Ukraine is in an active war! There is little hope their media is reporting things accurately. Countries in war, particularly losing wars, are notorious for presenting a warped view of the war situation.
And there are strong suspicions that the Ukraine media is a wing of the US propaganda machine, one of the things that came up during USAID was the remarkable amount of foreign funding for media that flows through Ukraine [0].
> You’re talking about insane levels of media corruption as if it is a natural and unavoidable phenomenon, but it’s not. We can change it.
It is and you can't. The only thing that has changed in recent years is that there are alternative voices being heard that are alerting people to just how bad the media situation is. I'm not seeing any evidence the quality of the media has changed in the last [insert time period], but wow the amount of transparency has jumped up since around the 2000s.
[0] https://imi.org.ua/en/news/oksana-romaniuk-90-of-ukrainian-m...
Free market views aren't better because they have some theoretical purity; they work much better than all the other options. Anyone who approaches the world trying to get the best results will end up with strong free market views. The free market is almost a magic fountain of wealth and prosperity. The people who want to improve the world are hard ones to shut up; they keep talking. And they don't even need to be in contact with each other to figure out market principles - they're matters of observing human behaviour, not learned ideologies.
...or so one would hope. The fact that Fox News had to go back to supporting Trump because they were losing people to Newsmax unfortunately seems to be a counterexample.
That would be an example of the market pushing towards "being stupid and advancing stupid news".
This is exactly what is called a "market failure": Where the natural market forces push companies into making decisions which are bad for everyone -- bad for themselves, bad for their customers, bad for society as a whole. That's exactly what regulation is meant to address.
After WW2, no doubt in part after seeing how the Nazi party used broadcast medium to subvert discussion, the FCC instituted what they called the "Fairness Doctrine", which "required holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints." [1] This was eliminated in 1987.
Imagine how different the world would be if both Fox News and MSNBC were required to have people on both sides of the aisle have their say about all the political hot topics; and if Fox News didn't have to worry that doing so would cause an exodus to Newsmax, because Newsmax (perhaps once they reached a certain size) would be required to do the same thing.
That's not true at all. Someone can simply buy all the media, and the free market will not correct that as long as that person has the wealth to persist.
The free market has a large number of failure modes, as evidenced by the fact that every free market in the world has some regulations of some sort. Antitrust foremost among them. Pretending it does not is just adherence to dogma.
Do you have an example of that happened in real life? Not just a hypothesis. When was a person being wealthy enough to buy all the media?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHeartMedia makes it sound like this was any old media company and ended up going bankrupt.
You can only buy "all the media" when there is a high barrier to entry, and with the internet, the barrier to entry is basically zero.
ALL markets are BORN of regulations. A market is what emerges when you lay some shared ground rules: here's what a pound is, here's a standard currency, here's some laws about commerce, here's a court system for mediating disputes.
So the question isn't ever really about free or not free—it's what are the rules and who sets them
99 out of 100 times the people spending money pushing the virtue of a "free market" really just want to be the ones setting the rules and steering them in their favor
Replace "free market" with "competitive market"—what most people actually want when they talk about free markets—and suddenly a lot of what Bezos is going to argue for stops making sense
That people seek to use an idea to garner support for their agenda without embodying that idea is nothing new. Just see current American politics.
I wish this was recognized more widely. I feel like the public versus private thing is kind of a red herring; the real issue is competition and cultivating it. Sometimes this means the public intervening in various ways (to support individuals in their skill development and ability to take risks, or break up monopolies, offer a competitive alternative in a public service, etc.) and sometimes it means the public stepping out (as when public regulations stifle true competition or a public service exerts too much control over pricing and services).
Capitalism is useful, like fire is useful. You just need to be careful to keep your fire under control and doing useful things.
I also note that the examples of regulations you give are all regularly agreed upon voluntarily without some higher (i.e. state) power telling them to.
Financial markets have conventions, for example, because they're useful, not just because some lawyer in an agency says jump.
Haven't we seen for the last 10 years exactly what will happen in this situation? I mean, not through the free market, but the deep state pretty much had complete control over the narrative of 90% of the media, from Covid to border policy.
And the stronger the control, the less trust people have in these media, and at the end of the day the election results are no longer decided by who is clearly supported by 90% of the news media, but by who came to Joe Rogan's podcast.
That somehow a lack of regulations is fair because it allows markets to adjust to supply and demand and come to an equilibrium. And modern economists who use actor-based simulations have shown that unregulated markets are typically not "perfect markets".
But the reality is that a market with a monopolist does not do this. In fact, the closer you get to a pure monopoly, the more a price will approach one where consumers get none of the economic surplus and there is a large economic dead-weight loss.
Unsurprisingly, the tech giants who are monopolists talk a lot about "free markets" in this way. But people who work in tech should probably refrain from using this term so that we can get rid of these superstitions.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/post/191606/tom-homan-ocasio-cortez-...
This is my single most important heuristic for filtering news. Facts in the present and the past matter. Predictions about the future have very little value.
Jon Stewart said it better. This whole show is 10/10 but linking to the most relevant timestamp: https://youtu.be/CuDcTyCq8nc?si=eiVXnJkfMxPGPv5k&t=812
Oddly, I'd say its basically only Trump attacking the idea in any significant way, with the strong advocacy of tariffs. It remains bizarre to me that conservatives have seemed happy to throw away generations of advocacy for free trade.
I don't expect Bezos to contradict him either.
There's more rhetoric nowadays around things like rent controls and profit caps, both of which I view as very destructive to the mechanisms of market allocation. I think it's a divisive issue though since there's no real home these days for people with those views (that is, (neo)liberal economics); the right is insane and the left have a large, very progressive segment which they have to pull back on.
That position is widely supported in the professional news media, including the Wall Street Journal.
The motivation for DOGE is not efficiency. It is destruction of the federal civil service and destruction of oversight for Musk's business empire.
I don't believe Bezos' motivation is honest. For God's sake, he is saying "I will silence opinions that do not align with my own; I am narrowing the intellectual capacity of this organization".
It's also loaded. He doesn't give examples of opinion pieces or a trend of speaking against free markets (so-called) or personal liberties.
It is now the personal opinion section of Jeff Bezos. Look what money can buy.
Back to when? 1970s?
He might claim otherwise but hard to argue that the values aren’t changing when the opinion editor is resigning.
Döpfner: Are you upset if the Post journalists are writing critical stories about Amazon?
Bezos: No, I’m not upset at all.
Döpfner: Did or would you ever interfere?
Bezos: Never. I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red. It has nothing to do with … I don’t even get so far… I just don’t want to. It would feel icky; it would feel gross. It would be one of those things when I’m 80 years old I would be so unhappy with myself if I had interfered. Why would I? I want that paper to be independent. We have a fantastic editor in Marty Baron. We have a fantastic publisher in Fred Ryan. The head of our technology team, a guy named Shailesh, is fantastic. They don’t need my help in the newsroom for sure. First of all, that’s also an expert’s job. It would be like me getting on the airplane and going up to the front of the plane and saying to the pilot, “You should move aside — let me do this!”
Here's a column by John Harris, "founding editor and global editor-in-chief": "Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He's Still Trying To Be a Good One.": "The most consequential presidents divided the nation - before “reuniting it on a new level of understanding."
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/21/harris-col...
What is needed is more local news, and for the populace to prefer local. Bring back the daily town newspaper by email. We spend so much time looking down at our phones across the world that we fail to see the news happening right in front of us.
The News Corp masthead The Australian (https://www.theaustralian.com.au) is basically a propaganda rag for Rupert Murdoch.
Every day there are opinions, and every day the opinions are the same.
> There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
In fact his central complaint, that we are slaves, is the same exact lesson taught in the story of Genesis from the oral history that predates Judaism.
He is complaining that in life, we are cursed to work. You know, "the fall." A problem for every human since we became aware of the existence of the future.
This isn't some cutting insight into the downfall of American society, it's just a complaint that the world is unfair.
Well guess what? Get used to it. It's unfair in every system. This one is one of the more fair systems, though.
Hey hey that is a bit on the nose for HN
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
I won't spoil it. It is well worth reading. I'll just say that I firmly believe in the protections afforded to the press by the US constitution. I also believe those who penned these protections never intended for them to be used and abused as they have been for years.
Look up the article Washington Post published on the fictional DOGE chief - Amy Gleason.
It's absolutely clear to anybody with a brain, that Musk is running DOGE and they just named a random person, because courts forced them to.
And yet, WaPo is happy presenting a profile of said Amy as if all was normal.
This is Russia / North Korea level of compliance with what the Dear Leader says... But then US recently voted along Russia and North Korea on the UN resolution regarding Ukraine so...
> Billionaire intends to turn popular newspaper into personal propaganda outlet.
It'll be very interesting to see how both employees and customers react and evolve over the next few years.
Same with leaving the shithole that is "X," but slightly less inconvenient.
Fuck you, I'm disgustingly rich! I don't care about your opinions. I am numerically, objectively killing it. I'm going to paint all of the mailboxes in town teal just because I can and it's my eldest kid's favorite color.
What part of you is still stuck in freshman year of highschool when that girl laughed at you for having a crush on her, or just for liking turtles? Just fuckin let it go man.
Personal liberty and free markets are in direct conflict with each other. Free markets require private property, which requires enforcement through violent aggression (or the threat thereof).
Free markets and private property might be justified for any number of (other) reasons, but "personal liberty" isn't one of them.
In the same way, personal liberties aren't a thing if are are unable to establish your own business
For the second part you don't need a business to be free. As a simple counterexample: I wouldn't say that human ancestors hunting and gathering in the savannah weren't free (they had literally no governmental limits) and it would take an absurd stretch to say they owned a business.
I literally just explained why the exact opposite is true. Not a proactive conversation if you’re not going to engage at all with what I said and just talk past it.
* He uses the current popular propaganda of the right-wing business elite - especially in Silicon Valley - claiming his positions "proud" and patriotic and implying inescapably that people who disagree are anti-American.
* He also uses the current businessspeak: When a top editor quits, Bezos projects uncaring disregard for any negative implication and instead he aggressively claims it was his idea and he wants it to happen, a way of making himself look invulnerable to criticism, powerful beyond restraint. (That trick should look familiar to everyone by now.)
* His claim that the news media needs a voice supporting these positions is obviously false, as they are probably the most widely supported positions supported by the most powerful people. But he brazenly makes the claim anyway with no care for its truth, only its power.
* Absent is any serious examination of the merits. The whole thing is all BS and propaganda.
And that's what we may expect to see from the Washington Post going forward: BS and propaganda. It's an aggressive embrace of those things, and a disregard for serious thought, fact, or merits. His message isn't about free markets or patriotism, but that Bezos and the Washington Post have made this their mode of communication, that he can brazenly lie and mislead and nobody can stop him - like so many others. (It also suggests that Bezos blows with the prevailing cultural winds.)
From nerds, niche, to Oligarchs.
From breaking boundaries to limiting alternatives.
From rebelling against the status-quo to become the status-quo.
The nerds now become the slave.
Look up all the shady stuff companies like Intel were doing in the 90s, from IP theft to outright bribing companies to avoid their competition (which was better). Apple and Microsoft were starting to polish how to lock in users. Google was created with the help of NSF and MDDS/CIA grants etc. It's not all rebels and outsiders.
Nerds to Oligarchs.
Things are so dire than Yann LeCun wrote a post on LinkedIN regarding grants cuts.
Chinese scientists who have lived in USA for 40+ years migrated to China to lead researchers just because The Administration decided to pick on minorities.
Of course this is not a problem specific to those in tech. It's just that we are the group that built the prison we now all find ourselves in.
Why would you blame tech workers? They're just another brainwashed mass that works for a living. If I were to suggest a wrong solution - I'd at least blame the finance sector.
Blaming doesn't solve anything because once you're done with your witch hunt - the problems remain. The systemic problem remains. We need systemic solutions and those require thinking, not reaching for a pre-made solution you've been brainwashed to reach for.
Until people recognize modern society to be a complex system that requires thinking to operate, there will be no meaningful progress. We're still operating under the system of I take people willing to dish out violence and go around bullying everyone in sight. I then take the plundered resources and tell nerds to go do their nerd shit to make me a complex society that works wonderfully.
It doesn't work. Not because nerds realize working for power hungry dummies is stupid but because we're destroying the planet and regular working people worldwide hate us and we have to work hard to barely keep the thing from falling apart. Constantly lying to everyone and yourself once you realize the fucked system you're in is exhausting, so it doesn't work. But please realize - the answer isn't to blame anyone. It's to find solutions and that takes thinking.
Sure, it's Bezos' private company, and people are free not to subscribe to WaPo. So it's not restricting free speech. But it's very telling that more oligarchs are trying to control the _flow of information and ideas_ to the masses. A key requirement of fascism.
People only notice this problem when the oligarchs that they don't agree with are doing it.
https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/hillary-clinton-warns-...
When Hillary outright said as much last year it wasn't even a blip on HN's radar.
Why? I'd say those issues are of immediate concern to many, especially insofar as they are used as euphemisms to describe the goals of the American political right.
Oops, I edited my post while you were responding. I'll let your quote represent what I originally wrote, which I think was in the same spirit. Sorry about that.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-p...
I hope people who disagree with these people remember that corporations and politicians are not their friends, instead of simply asking for them to wage wars against the opposing political team.
From the oligarchs' point of view, none of these users or services are going to be valuable anymore once AI automates the bulk of the economy (AI companies are strongly expecting this in the 2030s), so now's the right time to start "butchering" some pigs. In this case, shameless support for Trump in exchange for political sway for Bezos, regardless of the ramifications for the brand or customers.
In game theory terms, this the tail-end of a game of iterated prisoner's dilemma, where people start betraying each other after years of cooperation. And if AI progress accelerates, so will this.
Maybe woke went too far and that’s the old white man’s revenge?
We are probably fine on a 100 year horizon. But the next 10 years. Oh boy.
From where I sit on the left, the right wing is extremely effective in making people believe the left is a parody of itself.
For instance, the left does have stronger support for LGBTQ issues than the right, but it isn't the primary issue. I'm sure "Build Back Better" investments in infrastructure involved 100x the attention and resources that LGBTQ issues did. But right media pushes stories multiple times a day about how the left is trying to turn your little Johnny into Janie. There are fewer than ten M->F trans athletes in college sports [1], but it is nearly a daily news item. The the casual news viewer (most everybody) their impression watching their news is that the only concern of Democrats is to advance a LGBTQ takeover.
Same thing with CRT. Same thing with Benghazi. Same thing with Hillary's emails. They pick an issue and hammer it, hammer it, hammer it. And it doesn't stay stuck in the right wing mediasphere. It becomes part of the "national conversation" and so mainstream media has to report on it too.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5046662-ncaa-president-tr...
These people do in fact believe the things that the right says they do. And they were in fact working for many years prior to this past election to push their worldview into the wider cultural sphere. I'm not pulling this from the media, I've literally sat in rooms where people planned how to use school curricula to build acceptance for both these ideas.
There are other parts of the left that aren't that way, and you're correct that the right benefited immensely from making the left seem like it was a monolith. But that part of the left that pushed these ideas so hard so fast actually does exist and actually did fuel the fire.
CRT was a legal and social theory trying to explain why the civil rights laws passed in the 50s and 60s hasn't eliminated various forms of racial disparity. It wasn't something taught in grade schools and high schools. But CRT was redefined to encompass just about any bogeyman issue.
Just to refresh my memory so I wasn't talking out of my butt, I went and skimmed the wikipedia article about the history and meaning of CRT. It is an academic theory, not something grade schoolers would ever encounter (unless you use the redefined meaning, such as having a book in the library where there is a mixed race couple in the story).
The second part of my response is that you are conflating what the left leadership is saying/doing vs what some randos you know are saying/doing. In a similar way, it is like shooting fish in a barrel to interview people on the street about some topic, either left or right, and produce hours of content showing that people are idiots. Such videos are all over the internet and I avoid them. What is important is what the people with the levers of power are saying/doing.
I'm not actually taking a stand for or against, just emphasizing that the right didn't make this stuff up. It sounds like you agree with me on that—this is a very real subject that people really do feel is important.
No, that people on the Left care about these issues is not the core of your comment. The person you replied to was saying there are issues that most voters would see as frivolous, but the right does a good job of hammering the left on so it seems like it's all they care about. These are issues like trans athletes in sports. Most people don't give a shit, including a lot of trans people, as keeping these issues in the news cycle just brings them unwanted hostility and attention.
But you countered with people wanting to teach about the effects of slavery. That doesn't seem frivolous at all, especially to non-white people. It doesn't fit with the other examples, as it's hard to imagine removing slavery from precedented curriculum being anything but a racist attempt to slowly erase the history of a voting bloc that has historically undermined the Right. The fact that they make CRT, again, a dirty word, is a testament to the power of Fox News.
Why you are not taking a stand for or against that is beyond me. It's patently evil work by the right
The best lies contain enough truth to seem credible.
I could run a newspaper that only reported crimes committed by people named Steve. Even if it was 100% true, it would give the impression that people named Steve are a threat. I know this is silly, but imagine a racial/ethnic/religious group instead. One can lie by what is not reported as much as by what is reported. Here is an example.
Remember the Clinton email scandal? She deleted 30K emails that she said were person, not job-related. I can understand why people who despise her think there must be terrible secrets in there. That is the truth part. Some news organizations and politicians pushed this story daily for years and dragged into congress to repeat testimony about it demanded that this was a terrible crime and she should be locked up. But those same people didn't say a peep when it was found out that the Bush WH had routed 22M emails through the RNC email servers using non-.gov addresses as a means of avoiding the legal requirement to retain records. [1]
I would be willing to bet my life savings that Fox et al reported on the Clinton email story at least 100x as much as on the Bush story. I'd be willing to bet the same amount of money that the average Fox viewer has no recollection of the Bush story because they probably never heard it or it was too fleeting. I'd be willing to be a large amount of money that people who watched CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC or read the WaPo or NYT also have far less awareness of the Bush email scandal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
The 'right' redefines these words to mean something else and demonizes them.
I agree with GP, prior to today's ouster the implicit pillars were social justice, feminism, metoo, mental health, or LGBT. Pretty much every piece of media coming out of these institutions has been consistently cramming this worldview down people's throats since around 2017. Whatever this shit is, I'd rather just hear billionaire propaganda and see every one of these ideologes get canned
And I don't consume right wing news either, I've been reading the NYT for the past 5 years and that alone was enough to convince me things need to change
You use the language of the right as if it is truth. For example, "unhinged illegal immigration' is a characterization of the right, not what I've ever seen someone on the left advocate for.
Why would you want things like human rights of LGBT people, protection of women from sexual abuse and coersion, the freedom of women to be equals in our society, or justice for minorities - why would you want those 'canned'? What will we do about those issues?
But to address your points
> human rights of LGBT people
Most of the contention here is around the T. I don't really have an opinion. I'm not changing my voting pattern because of such a small demographic
> protection of women from sexual abuse and coersion
And now we're living in the world of guilty until proven innocent. E.g. donglegate. Enough is enough
> justice for minorities
Which in practice means officially racist and sexist policies directed towards white and Asian men because they're considered "less favorable" demographics. I think the fundamentally dishonest way this issue in particular is framed is enough to completely delegitimize anything else they're saying. Consider me a single issue voter on this issue moving forward
> For example, "unhinged illegal immigration' is a characterization of the right
Well, it's technically illegal, right? And compared to other Western countries who actually have borders, it's technically unhinged. "Undocumented migrants" - what does this mean? It's just a dishonest euphemism that tries to legitimize the situation
Regarding "unhinged" immigration, you haven't said anything that indicates people on the left support it (whatever it is - the hyperbole masks any real meaning).
> other Western countries who actually have borders
Other Western countries have similar immigration problems - it's a major issue in the EU, for example.
I don't see issues, I see "issues". What people have done to solve them is a bigger issue for me than what they're trying to solve. E.g. affirmative action, another cute euphemism
> you haven't said anything that indicates people on the left support it
It's common knowledge? The summary left position in the US is to give a path to legal status, it creates a moral hazard that incentivizes more illegal immigration. And the typical rhetorical strategy is to try to play dumb or downplay that this will happen
> it's a major issue in the EU, for example.
Which, for the most part (e.g. Germany, the one in the news right now) is legal immigration
That's convenient, but there's not much support for it. For example, abuse, exclusion, widespread discrimination against minorities and women is well-established. It's just a lazy argument - called reactionaryism - to deny it all without offering a better solution.
I think most reactionaries know they are wrong, and know that analysis and solutions on the left are probably accurate and optimal, and then choose to let people die or suffer rather than do any hard work or stand for anything. Look at Kennedy denying measles as significant.
Frankly I think this insistence that people vote against their own self interest more reactionary than the alternative. Like insisting that people reject sense for nonsense. Religion essentially
> that's me as a voter doing a cost benefit analysis. Which frankly is the only rational way to vote
Great. As I said, abuse, exclusion, widespread discrimination against minorities and women is well-established, for example. Those are very high costs.
You're falling for it. In America right now, there are basically three political alignments in terms of how they orient themselves around domestic political problems:
- PseudoFascist Right (current people holding power): this is largely a collective of misinformed or uninformed people who are are feeling the severe effects of wealth inequality and have been duped into thinking the cause is their (equally destitute) neighbor rather than the talking suits who don't pay taxes.
- Less Radical Right: these people call themselves "democrats" or "centrists". They are essentially only interested in maintaining existing political power and the prevailing order. They also don't want to do anything about wealth inequality, but rather than try and blame it on people of a particular race, gender, etc. they invert the message and point to other actual disparities and problems, sometimes they make concessions and solve some of these issues, but even this is rare.
- The Remnants of the Left: These are the people who recognize wealth inequality as the underlying root of domestic problems. They actually want to address wealth inequality, but they have the least power, because America's political system has been co-opted by the wealthy through mechanisms like lobbying.
The whole "did the left go too far with woke" is a strawman being adopted by the "Less Radical Right" after their recent election loss. They hope to use this as an excuse so that, when they are up for re-election, they can still avoid solving the actual problems or addressing the actual concerns (wealth inequality) of much of the left. The core of the problem is that representatives are directly incentivized against their constituents because they get their palms greased by those "American citizens" called corporations.
There’s just a ridiculous amount of bad actors out there and they’re all extremely motivated. There is opportunity there. This is the gold rush for them and it’s what they’re good at.
Can you say the same for the good honorable people out there? There is a handful of them, but the extremely outnumbered and who out there is even motivated like the opposition? An 80 years Bernie sanders
So let billionaires and corporations do whatever they want for profit, even if they kill people.
There's something between those extremes that works very well and produce societies that are great for all people, regulated markets and socialised democracy.
US also has strong regulation in some aspects, but its less impactful these days due to regulatory capture, those were created when the free market was for example killing babies with unpasteurized milk, and tried to avoid doing that due to cost by putting formaldehyde in it instead. Free market believers want to go back to that age where companies are completely unregulated and hired guns to break up unions and believe this wont happen again. What regulations do is put everyone on the same playing field, so there's isn't one milk company that can lower costs by not pasteurized its milk.
Bezos comes out of the oval office and mumbles: "dumb old asshole!" Zuckerberg overhears it and reports to Trump. Next meeting, Trump asks him:
- Who did you mean by "dumb old asshole", comrade Bezos?
- Biden, of course, comrade president.
- And who did YOU mean by that, comrade Zuckerberg?
Arguably social anarchists have a different read on what personal liberty is and should be compared to, say, Ayn Rand. It might not be the best comparison, but I think the gist of it is true. Heaps of leftists value personal liberty.
This entire situation reads to me as extremely corrupt and—almost ironically yet not surprisingly at all—more likely to be harmful to personal liberties of many while beneficial to very few.
Free market coming from Bezos' mouth is a laughable concept. He will do everything in his power to nullify competitors while squashing the liberties of his own employees. Nothing about this is sincere.
I guess we'll see whether Bezos is willing to promote the liberty of a business to hire based on DEI criteria if that's what it prefers, or of individuals to marry people of the same sex. Or any of the other liberties that the right wing doesn't like. Given the recent closeness of Bezos to Trump, I suspect we won't see anything like that, but maybe he'll surprise me.
It’s no less of a clear, specific ideological marker in the US today than “Blood and Soil” in 1930s Germany.
But its interesting how those trying to sell this as not ideological are just ignoring the “free markets” part.
I wonder if the approved op-eds on personal liberty will include Trans and Abortion rights? Will it include the right to organize?
This article does suggest Shipley wanted a more balanced, "both sides" approach to the opinions section, which I agree with Bezos is shortsighted and sort of shallow:
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309725/jeff-bezos-wash...
On the other hand, it's difficult for me to imagine David Shipley leaving over that alone if there wasn't something pointed or questionable about what Bezos was suggesting. Also, if Bezos' recent interventions are any guide, he isn't exactly pushing for greater freedom of speech, or more rigorous critique, at the Washington Post — there's a "liberty for me but not for thee" kind of sense to his actions.
If Bezos wanted to turn the Washington Post into some kind of Reason Magazine with a primary news arm attached to it, it wouldn't be the worst thing in my opinion for me personally. But I'm skeptical of his vision without more evidence: for one thing, if he wanted to come out swinging, he could have made his vision clear.
At the billionaire level, it's easy to think about the relative successes of SpaceX and Blue Origin; as they are held privately, they can hire, fire, and structure themselves without worrying about federal regulations or shareholder obligations. That is, of course, the only reliable way to get yourself into a footing that permits innovation past the status quo. These companies are, in a sense, proving that the "free market" can act on the aerospace industry to drive down prices (cost of a Falcon Launch or a Starlink connection) and to increase technical capacity at a brutal pace (Starship projections on mass-to-orbit). But the cavernous pockets of their billionaire owners also protect them from the rest of the "market", by which I mean their competitors waging corporate and legal warfare against them.
My primary complaint about the status quo of the US market, i.e. "only-billionaires-get-to-seriously-push-the-needle-in-innovation" really makes more sense when one considers the price of medical supplies. The EpiPen costs $500 for what I bet is less than $10 in materials and labor, even counting the strict standards its manufacturers are obliged to conform to in terms of batch creation and ingredients tracking. (A piece of metal in the aerospace industry is always more expensive than a piece of metal in the residential construction industry because it must always be possible to trace its pedigree.)
But surely the chemical process to manufacture epinephrine is easily known, and the injection molding and assembly techniques needed to make and inspect the EpiPen is trivial in a modern supply chain that can provide OLED TVs for a pittance. So why don't we have two dozen scrappy American firms competing against Pfizer's Meridian Medical Technologies to produce adrenaline auto-injectors? Does it really take a billionaire to make a company that can produce a product that can actually cause the "free market" to act on the prices of emergency allergy medication? It certainly feels that way, especially when the main out-of-pocket pharmaceutical supplier that appears to be to putting a dent in out-of-pocket medicine pricing is... GoodRx, owned by Mark Cuban.
I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but I believe the principles about which I allude to are accurate: even thought the "free market" is indeed a civilization-defining socioeconomic technology that helped give America its exceptional power, the market is not free unless you are a billionaire. It would be nice if Bezos' new Washington Post Opinion column was focused on extending the benefits of the "free market" back down to the masses, as it was in some industries during some eras of American history, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.
I wonder if that's part of the Silicon Valley secret sauce - there seems to be a gentleman's agreement not to sue startups.
> So why don't we have two dozen scrappy American firms competing against Pfizer's Meridian Medical Technologies to produce adrenaline auto-injectors?
The FDA approved the first generic auto-injector in 2018.
Sure, but the length of the time it took, plus the lack of any pressure on the price of name-brand EpiPens, is a huge problem, in my view. The legal barriers to market entry should be exclusively technical (i.e. can you prove that your process meets consequential technical standards), and right now they're quite removed from that.
> That is, of course, the only reliable way to get yourself into a footing that permits innovation past the status quo.
The space race was a very govt driven thing, and there was a ton of innovation. Govt also funds (funded?) a lot of basic science. "innovation" can happen outside the free market, and might happen more "reliably" when there's no interfering profit motive
So glad the US finally got a government focusing on freedom of speech .. And you know, not pressuring companies and the press to do their bidding /s
"But [the Trump ban] was right for the business, because if we didn’t act on it, we probably would have lost all our advertisers, which would affect the business and stock price. But it was wrong for the world and the internet, given the fact that we could do it in the first place. No one should be able to do that."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...
> They even deplatformed a sitting president
That sounds like literally the opposite of following government narratives?
Curious!
I’m whatever about it though, will be interesting to watch crumble
Run /s
Tight media control and media empires are nothing new. I would recommend you to read about William Randolph Hearst [0] and his media empire in the late eighteen hundreds and watch the movie Citizen Kane.
Self censorship is the worst censorship of them all, every totalitarian state does that because it doesn't cost anything but a few threat and exemplary case, and since the news are controlled by very few people there it's easy for the state to pressure them to do the right thing.
I think that 60 or 70 years ago you had many newspaper owned by small companies, very decentralized. You wouldn't have been able to do that but now every news paper, television and social network are owned by very few.
If you can't rely on professional to report on the news, and if people are forbidden to express themselves (i mean real educated opinion) on facebook, twitter and maybe tiktok you have effectively suppressed one's opinion reach.
then when people don't have the possibility anymore to voice their opinion, what prevent you from completely shutting down their voice ?
i'm probably being over dramatic, trump never expressed anything about violating usa constitution. like taking a third presidency mandate or not having the people vote for him for the next election, he didn't have close collaborators make fascist salutes to test population outcry (or lack of).
free press is always one of the first target with the army of any government that try to turn a democracy into a totalitarian state.
Seeing how every big company donated to trump investiture and now how they bow to him. All of them, microsoft, apple, amazon, meta, oracle. i think he succeeded in making the usa technology, social and news companies his own puppets.
Hopefully you learn, but I doubt it. Trump/Elon bad and all that, right?
I have never seen for instance Biden or Obama close one make fascist salute.
I've seen Biden be the most authotarian president of the 3 with his COVID policies (shared by authoritarian govs across the world, and I don't mean Saudi, but France or Canada) but that's definitely supported by partisans.
I also saw Obama expand on Bush's war crimes and civil rights erosions with cheers instead of criticisms.
But people like you are fixated in alleged symbolism. In looks and form instead of function.
Forgive me if I don't take "this difficult times we're living" democrat types seriously when they can consistently criticise governments.
You've lost your moral high ground.
Even in America, 71% Americans agree it was necessary.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/poll-majority-of-americans-say...
> But people like you are fixated in alleged symbolism. In looks and form instead of function.
Don't generalize me because you don't know me, I'm not even American, republican or democrat.
Merely an history aficionados with interest in totalitarian government.
Some Bush Obama and also Biden decision were arguably bad and authoritarian. The unjustified war on Irak being the biggest one imo.
They did unconstitutional spying of everyone including American citizen communications, which is already bad enough.
But with American policy you got to look at facts, only facts because everything is so biased there.
COVID lockdown, which you criticize, what is the state or individual interest ? As far as I know it made people like you angry, not good. Its only benefit was to save lives. The government didn't benefit from it.
Trump threatening every tech company to get them to follow his own agenda and donate money, who benefit ?
Giving Elon musk who was never elected but also a major tech company leader, who supported him during the election, a strong position into the American administration, who benefit ?
Every totalitarian government has to rely on a minor but endoctrined part of the population to be able to sustain itself. I had never heard of the 'proud boys' and like with other candidates, either republicans or democrats.
Blaming all the country's failure on a few selected individuals, immigrants currently, in the past century it could have been the Jew or on another continent the kulaks.
I mean there is a lot to think of when you're watching trump and open a book about history.
Btw there is no moral high ground to have here, it's not a dick competition but 2 people speaking on the internet.
Not just because of that but definitely was one great example. You also have them jailing people over extremely authoritarian things like speech and "founding telegram".
> Even in America, 71% Americans agree it was necessary.
- majority in the US agreed to go to Iraq too.
Propagandized masses being authoritarian along with governments doesn't really change my point. Specially if dissent is punished, not tracked properly and disincentivized.
> Some Bush Obama and also Biden decision were arguably bad and authoritarian. The unjustified war on Irak being the biggest one imo.
> They did unconstitutional spying of everyone including American citizen communications, which is already bad enough.
Did? They codified many of those actions into law. So did other countries. But you will pretend Trump bad and totalitarian displaying a complete trump derangement syndrome while pretending you're well versed on the subject.
> But with American policy you got to look at facts, only facts because everything is so biased there.
> COVID lockdown, which you criticize, what is the state or individual interest ? As far as I know it made people like you angry, not good. Its only benefit was to save lives. The government didn't benefit from it.
You sound like someone who is not really prepared to argue about this if covid policies only has an upside of "saving lives in your mind".
Economies were destroyed. Freedoms destroyed. Health services like cancer checkups halted. The hygiene theater took over every aspect. Constitutional rights swept. Dissidents attacked by the state. Speech laws eroded. Nuremberg guarantees of health safety and not being compelled into medical experiments ignored.
You later talk about corruption but are absolutely unable to think that corruption existed during covid years. It just "poof", dissappeared.
> Trump threatening every tech company to get them to follow his own agenda and donate money, who benefit ?
Dude. I feel you're absolutely not ready to talk about this. I'm not even trying to be a jerk. Maybe gather your thoughts with an LLM and a pen first.
> Giving Elon musk who was never elected but also a major tech company leader, who supported him during the election, a strong position into the American administration, who benefit ?
Yes. Corruption can happen. The fact that you think this is something particularly unique to Republicans even you seemingly claim you don't is laughable.
> Every totalitarian government has to rely on a minor but endoctrined part of the population to be able to sustain itself. I had never heard of the 'proud boys' and like with other candidates, either republicans or democrats.
Lol. Groups forming responding to partisan violence against them is very typical. Obviously the media decides who is evil and who isn't. When people were giving speeches in universities groups of opposing parties/ideologies would come in to "bash the fash" and that naturally creates a cycle of violence
> Blaming all the country's failure on a few selected individuals, immigrants currently, in the past century it could have been the Jew or on another continent the kulaks.
Strawman. Also, migrants get blamed when they "don't vote right" like it happened with "Latino" voters this time around. The amount of vile and discrimination was ironic. Trump hates migrants is just the typical piece of propaganda. The same that people use in Europe when you argue against illegal immigrants as an immigrant.
> I mean there is a lot to think of when you're watching trump and open a book about history.
Dude. English is clearly not your main language nor is it mine but you need to do better. "Read a history book" is a 14 year old quip. You're one more partisan hack who claims side A is the worst ever and push the simplest of failed partisan narratives while brushing of years of recent history. You're not ready to have this conversation.
> Btw there is no moral high ground to have here, it's not a dick competition but 2 people speaking on the internet.
Nah. It's a very unprepared propagandized person with poor English saying "poor boys and Elon bad covid policies only help people, you angry, read history book"
for instance :
> Every totalitarian government has to rely on a minor but endoctrined part of the population to be able to sustain itself. I had never heard of the 'proud boys' and like with other candidates, either republicans or democrats.
> > Lol. Groups forming responding to partisan violence against them is very typical. Obviously the media decides who is evil and who isn't. When people were giving speeches in universities groups of opposing parties/ideologies would come in to "bash the fash" and that naturally creates a cycle of violence
The "proud boys" and other white supremacist group backing up Trump are on another level that the usual partisan violence in the states.
IMO Antifa are as despicable but i haven't seen them invading the Capitol. On the other hand, i have seen Trump supporters on the January 6 attack the United States Capitol, invade it, leading to the death of several people.
is that even comparable ?
> Dude. I feel you're absolutely not ready to talk about this. I'm not even trying to be a jerk. Maybe gather your thoughts with an LLM and a pen first.
just like usa politics i judge the facts not the talking, and so far you don't want to be a jerk but keep acting like a jerk.
I can see the hate through your comment.
"Dude. English is clearly not your main language nor is it mine but you need to do better. "Read a history book" is a 14 year old quip. You're one more partisan hack who claims side A is the worst ever and push the simplest of failed partisan narratives while brushing of years of recent history. You're not ready to have this conversation."
Take a deep breath, and tell me seriously that all things considered, you don't believe that Trump isn't pushing to turn the USA into a totalitarian regime.
From their 2009 about us:
"What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? 'It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position.' That is as true today as when former Economist editor Geoffrey Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favoring penal reform and decolonization, as well as—most recently—gun control and gay marriage."
https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231949/http://www.econom...
you are adults. you are the ones in charge, you have been alive for thrice as long as me, and it's left you addled, heartless, and stupid.
soon, not soon, but sooner than me, you will die, alone and filled with regret, in tatters, scorched by the fires you dismissed.
morons.