FCC to Appoint a Babysitter to Make Sure CBS Isn't Anti-Trump | Hacker News Reader

FCC to Appoint a Babysitter to Make Sure CBS Isn't Anti-Trump

gizmodo.com

37 pointsevan_18 comments

And the noose around our necks continues to tighten.

The USA has a strong tradition of freedom of speech an free press which strictly forbids prior restraint. It's good to see that media organizations vociferously defend their right of free press, and that we have bureaucrats that take their oaths to the Constitution seriously, and are impartial, not letting themselves be influenced by the executive officer himself. The founding fathers would approve and be proud of this arrangement! They fought a revolution against arbitrary monarchs!

Shouldn't be that hard, just reuse the same babysitters used to make sure CBS wasn't anti Biden.

Hard to find words for how disappointing capitalism is sometimes. Must do this merger deal despite abdication of constitutional rights. Mannah is more powerful than ethics.

So "capitalism", in your book, is what happens when a dictatorial government puts a gun to your head and tells you what to say or print. Got it.

Paramount sought this arrangement out, it wasn’t forced on them. They wanted approval for a merger because it would be financially lucrative. The price was millions of dollars and political oversight.

They could have just not done the merger.

Or Trump could have just not threatened to sue them over complete BS, which is the root cause of this particular debacle.

But he did. And they responded in the deplorable fashion. This about what has happened not what didn't.

True enough, there are no good guys in this story. But I get a chuckle every time some young edgelord blames "capitalism" for everything from the Holocaust to the heartbreak of psoriasis. Don't fall into that trap, there's enough of that feckless goofiness on Reddit.

At the end of the day this is a government-caused problem, in which a lack of meaningful antitrust enforcement is being leveraged by a Republican personality cult. Which makes it a voter-caused problem. We are getting what we deserve, good and hard.

Well, consider that for a lot of us "a lack of meaningful antitrust enforcement" is the -direct- result of the tendancy of power to be accrued to trusts under capitalism.

I have heard a variety of explanations for how those things aren't connected, but almost always seem to me to be a "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

I mean, I think the majority of capitalists at the bottom of the pile are indeed "getting what they deserve", but the reason they deserve it is because they are naive capitalists. The rest of us are just dealing with what the folks who have all the capital decided to do to us.

Well, keep on raging against that machine, I guess. I suspect the War on Capitalism will go about as well for the left as the War on Drugs went for the right.

It'll probably go a bit better than your war on folks posting stuff you disagree with online, I guess.

(Shrug) It's more fun than yelling at the sky about the unfairness of various social constructs, human impulses, and abstract economic systems.

But yes, to your point, about equally effective.

Have fun. It's a hard world and we gotta do what we can to enjoy it.

It's kind of neat to see the rhetorical move, for sure.

Like first it's not capitalism, then it is capitalism but "it is what it is".

Well, I have empathy for that position or I might describe it as "feckless goofiness".

I still feel better knowing that this situation is not how the world has to be even if I don't have the power to make it better. I'll take that enjoyment when I can.

I'm unfamiliar with the word "mannah". What does it mean here?

Humorous way of saying money. Like ‘murica!

Is it closer to "manna" or to "moolah" in meaning?

Yeah, you could say that, a bit more on the sarcastic side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com