Discussion How democracy is dying -- Why billionaires prefer disaster capitalism?

Indus

Diamond Member
May 11, 2002
9,752
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https://www.theguardian.com/comment...mp-johnson-nationalists-billionaire-oligarchs

From the article:

Seven years ago the impressionist Rory Bremner complained that politicians had become so boring that few of them were worth mimicking: “They’re quite homogenous and dull these days … It’s as if character is seen as a liability.” Today his profession has the opposite problem: however extreme satire becomes, it struggles to keep pace with reality. The political sphere, so dull and grey a few years ago, is now populated by preposterous exhibitionists.

This trend is not confined to the UK – everywhere the killer clowns are taking over. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán and a host of other ludicrous strongmen – or weakmen, as they so often turn out to be – dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage. The question is why? Why are the technocrats who held sway almost everywhere a few years ago giving way to extravagant buffoons?

The reason, I believe, is that the nature of capitalism has changed. The dominant force of the 1990s and early 2000s – corporate power – demanded technocratic government. It wanted people who could simultaneously run a competent, secure state and protect profits from democratic change. In 2012, when Bremner made his complaint, power was already shifting to a different place, but politics had not caught up.

The policies that were supposed to promote enterprise – slashing taxes for the rich, ripping down public protections, destroying trade unions – instead stimulated a powerful spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation. The largest fortunes are now made not through entrepreneurial brilliance but through inheritance, monopoly and rent-seeking: securing exclusive control of crucial assets such as land and buildings privatised utilities and intellectual property, and assembling service monopolies such as trading hubs, software and social media platforms, then charging user fees far higher than the costs of production and delivery. In Russia, people who enrich themselves this way are called oligarchs. But this is a global phenomenon. Today corporate power is overlain by – and mutating into – oligarchic power.

What the oligarchs want is not the same as what the old corporations wanted. In the words of their favoured theorist, Steve Bannon, they seek the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense.

The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the kleptocrats fleece us, we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists.

The oligarch’s interests always lie offshore: in tax havens and secrecy regimes. Paradoxically, these interests are best promoted by nationalists and nativists. The politicians who most loudly proclaim their patriotism and defence of sovereignty are always the first to sell their nations down the river. It is no coincidence that most of the newspapers promoting the nativist agenda, whipping up hatred against immigrants and thundering about sovereignty, are owned by billionaire tax exiles, living offshore.

As economic life has been offshored, so has political life. The political rules that are supposed to prevent foreign money from funding domestic politics have collapsed. The main beneficiaries are the self-proclaimed defenders of sovereignty who rise to power with the help of social media ads bought by persons unknown, and thinktanks and lobbyists that refuse to reveal their funders. A recent essay by the academics Reijer Hendrikse and Rodrigo Fernandez argues that offshore finance involves “the rampant unbundling and commercialisation of state sovereignty” and the shifting of power into a secretive, extraterritorial legal space, beyond the control of any state. In this offshore world, they contend, “financialised and hypermobile global capital effectively is the state”.

Defending ourselves from oligarchy means taxing it to oblivion. It’s easy to get hooked up on discussions about what tax level maximises the generation of revenue. There are endless arguments about the Laffer curve, which purports to show where this level lies. But these discussions overlook something crucial: raising revenue is only one of the purposes of tax. Another is breaking the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation.

Breaking this spiral is a democratic necessity: otherwise the oligarchs, as we have seen, come to dominate national and international life. The spiral does not stop by itself: only government action can do it. This is one of the reasons why, during the 1940s, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. A fair society requires periodic corrections on this scale. But these days the steepest taxes would be better aimed at accumulated unearned wealth.

Of course, the offshore world the billionaires have created makes such bold policies extremely difficult: this, after all, is one of its purposes. But at least we know what the aim should be, and can begin to see the scale of the challenge. To fight something, first we need to understand it.


Its a long read but I do agree with it. Billionaires seem to be above the law and they keep saying filthy immigrants/ muslims are to blame for others woes.
 

nickqt

Diamond Member
Jan 15, 2015
7,535
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https://www.theguardian.com/comment...mp-johnson-nationalists-billionaire-oligarchs

From the article:

Seven years ago the impressionist Rory Bremner complained that politicians had become so boring that few of them were worth mimicking: “They’re quite homogenous and dull these days … It’s as if character is seen as a liability.” Today his profession has the opposite problem: however extreme satire becomes, it struggles to keep pace with reality. The political sphere, so dull and grey a few years ago, is now populated by preposterous exhibitionists.

This trend is not confined to the UK – everywhere the killer clowns are taking over. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán and a host of other ludicrous strongmen – or weakmen, as they so often turn out to be – dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage. The question is why? Why are the technocrats who held sway almost everywhere a few years ago giving way to extravagant buffoons?

The reason, I believe, is that the nature of capitalism has changed. The dominant force of the 1990s and early 2000s – corporate power – demanded technocratic government. It wanted people who could simultaneously run a competent, secure state and protect profits from democratic change. In 2012, when Bremner made his complaint, power was already shifting to a different place, but politics had not caught up.

The policies that were supposed to promote enterprise – slashing taxes for the rich, ripping down public protections, destroying trade unions – instead stimulated a powerful spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation. The largest fortunes are now made not through entrepreneurial brilliance but through inheritance, monopoly and rent-seeking: securing exclusive control of crucial assets such as land and buildings privatised utilities and intellectual property, and assembling service monopolies such as trading hubs, software and social media platforms, then charging user fees far higher than the costs of production and delivery. In Russia, people who enrich themselves this way are called oligarchs. But this is a global phenomenon. Today corporate power is overlain by – and mutating into – oligarchic power.

What the oligarchs want is not the same as what the old corporations wanted. In the words of their favoured theorist, Steve Bannon, they seek the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense.

The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the kleptocrats fleece us, we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists.

The oligarch’s interests always lie offshore: in tax havens and secrecy regimes. Paradoxically, these interests are best promoted by nationalists and nativists. The politicians who most loudly proclaim their patriotism and defence of sovereignty are always the first to sell their nations down the river. It is no coincidence that most of the newspapers promoting the nativist agenda, whipping up hatred against immigrants and thundering about sovereignty, are owned by billionaire tax exiles, living offshore.

As economic life has been offshored, so has political life. The political rules that are supposed to prevent foreign money from funding domestic politics have collapsed. The main beneficiaries are the self-proclaimed defenders of sovereignty who rise to power with the help of social media ads bought by persons unknown, and thinktanks and lobbyists that refuse to reveal their funders. A recent essay by the academics Reijer Hendrikse and Rodrigo Fernandez argues that offshore finance involves “the rampant unbundling and commercialisation of state sovereignty” and the shifting of power into a secretive, extraterritorial legal space, beyond the control of any state. In this offshore world, they contend, “financialised and hypermobile global capital effectively is the state”.

Defending ourselves from oligarchy means taxing it to oblivion. It’s easy to get hooked up on discussions about what tax level maximises the generation of revenue. There are endless arguments about the Laffer curve, which purports to show where this level lies. But these discussions overlook something crucial: raising revenue is only one of the purposes of tax. Another is breaking the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation.

Breaking this spiral is a democratic necessity: otherwise the oligarchs, as we have seen, come to dominate national and international life. The spiral does not stop by itself: only government action can do it. This is one of the reasons why, during the 1940s, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. A fair society requires periodic corrections on this scale. But these days the steepest taxes would be better aimed at accumulated unearned wealth.

Of course, the offshore world the billionaires have created makes such bold policies extremely difficult: this, after all, is one of its purposes. But at least we know what the aim should be, and can begin to see the scale of the challenge. To fight something, first we need to understand it.


Its a long read but I do agree with it. Billionaires seem to be above the law and they keep saying filthy immigrants/ muslims are to blame for others woes.
Oligarchs and their paid-for candidates lament about how the government can't do anything right and when in office destroy the ability of the government to do anything right. They then sell as much of the government and the people's property and rights, for pennies on the dollar, to the billionaires who paid for their candidacy and office.

Oligarchs want to be aristocrats. A tale as old as time. It's the reverse of liberal (small l) democracy, and it's happening in real time.

What's funny, is that Liberals call it for what it is, while conservatives, who've had their skulls shit into by Limbaugh and Friends (low-level new-money oligarchs) for decades "think" that somehow it's the liberals causing this, because, uh, well, we need to give the oligarchs more tax breaks because, uh, jobs and stuff.

Oligarchs, who care not for democratic (small d) rule, or a government that works for the people rather than themselves, believe a working government is a waste of time and money, and treat it as such.

This shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who's ever paid attention to history, or current politics.
 

UNCjigga

Lifer
Dec 12, 2000
24,802
9,003
136
What's funny, is that Liberals call it for what it is, while conservatives, who've had their skulls shit into by Limbaugh and Friends (low-level new-money oligarchs) for decades "think" that somehow it's the liberals causing this, because, uh, well, we need to give the oligarchs more tax breaks because, uh, jobs and stuff.
If you fully subscribe to this author’s viewpoint, then you need to recognize that liberals are also vilifying certain oligarchs, while giving others less scrutiny. No, we’re not as bad as the right wing nut jobs screaming “SOROS!!” while letting dark money Koch outfits takeover their party. But we still go after the Kochs, oil tycoons, bankers and big pharma execs while giving Bezos and Zuckerberg free reign over our data. Oligarchs on either side of the political spectrum our benefiting from inept government at our expense.
 
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nickqt

Diamond Member
Jan 15, 2015
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If you fully subscribe to this author’s viewpoint, then you need to recognize that liberals are also vilifying certain oligarchs, while giving others less scrutiny. No, we’re not as bad as the right wing nut jobs screaming “SOROS!!” while letting dark money Koch outfits takeover their party. But we still go after the Kochs, oil tycoons, bankers and big pharma execs while giving Bezos and Zuckerberg free reign over our data. Oligarchs on either side of the political spectrum our benefiting from inept government at our expense.
Not every billionaire uses their money to decrease democracy so to increase their own wealth and power. And Zuckerberg isn't some ally just because he isn't a blathering racist.

What oligarchs are trying to do is take over governmental functions so they can run their own little fiefdoms, effectively making everyone else a serf. Zuckerberg is about to launch his own company scrip.

At this point, oligarchs are so close to getting aristocracy that some are just outright running for office themselves. Look at the President.

Also, look at how many cabinet-level positions are open, effectively making the President the de jure head of various government agencies. A feature, and not a bug, of a right-wing authoritarian government.
 

glenn1

Lifer
Sep 6, 2000
25,383
1,013
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Tl;dr. Basically if the choice is the “oligarchs” skimming the nations wealth or that wealth being given to the poor then let the oligarchs have it.
 

hal2kilo

Lifer
Feb 24, 2009
23,331
10,236
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Tl;dr. Basically if the choice is the “oligarchs” skimming the nations wealth or that wealth being given to the poor then let the oligarchs have it.
Can't have the loser get a break. They deserve their lots in life.
 
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Moonbeam

Elite Member
Nov 24, 1999
72,327
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Tl;dr. Basically if the choice is the “oligarchs” skimming the nations wealth or that wealth being given to the poor then let the oligarchs have it.
You don't understand poverty. Poverty says if I have to suffer then you will too. Burn it down. no?
 

1prophet

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2005
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What's funny, is that Liberals call it for what it is, while conservatives, who've had their skulls shit into by Limbaugh and Friends (low-level new-money oligarchs) for decades "think" that somehow it's the liberals causing this, because, uh, well, we need to give the oligarchs more tax breaks because, uh, jobs and stuff.
Which liberals are these, surely not the ones that helped pave the road for Trump.

Your new film starts out on election night. Donald Trump wins, and you ask the question, “How the fuck did that happen?” The genius of the film, in my opinion, is that this documentary about Trump centers on Flint, and Trump really isn’t the cause of Flint’s troubles at all. He had almost nothing to do with Flint. The real turning point of the film comes with Obama going to Flint during the campaign, and drinking the water there. That is a terrible moment, and it explains so much about how Trump got elected.

https://www.thenation.com/article/michael-moore-how-democrats-paved-the-way-to-trump/
Michael Moore: How Democrats Paved the Way to Trump

Michael Moore: Well, I live in Michigan. I don’t live in the bubble of Los Angeles. I didn’t grow up in a city like New York where the media treated Donald Trump either as a joke or tabloid fodder, where many years ago they gave him an affectionate nickname: ‘The Donald.” They didn’t do their job, and he got to continue breaking the law, discriminating against black families in his housing units, treating women the way he treated them. I’m not of that world. I come from out in that flyover place. I also had the benefit of not really going to college. I used to feel really bad and ashamed about it. I only lasted for a year, and at a commuter campus. The whole college was in one building in Flint. So I wasn’t conditioned to think of things the way liberals and people on the left do. I live in that other world, where I watched The Apprentice. If we were able to ask everybody listening to this right now, “How many of you watched The Apprentice every week when Donald Trump was the host?” I’m guessing not many would say “I did.”

JW: I didn’t.

MM: Of course you didn’t. You don’t waste your time with crap like that. You went to college, and you’re an enlightened, educated person.

JW: Aw, shucks.

MM: That’s a good thing. That’s a compliment. But I didn’t grow up that way. I watched what the majority of my fellow Americans watch. But here was the beauty and the genius of The Apprentice, and I think this will help answer your question about how I knew what was going to happen on that election night. I’m not Cassandra. I’m not Carnac the Magnificent. I am not going to make other predictions in this interview with you.

I know people who worked with Trump on The Apprentice. It took them literally days to get him to say his lines right, just the simple line, “You’re fired.” Because he’s never fired anybody. He’s never said, “You’re fired.” Because he’s Donald Trump. He has some henchmen do that job. He has Don Jr. or Eric do that job.

It’s like what happened on the Billy Bush bus: after Trump said what he said, he went to get off the bus to meet the pretty woman that was standing out there, the woman he was taking his Tic Tacs for. He takes the two steps down to the bus door. He’s inside the bus, right? And he doesn’t know how to get out. He thinks the way to get out is to knock on the door. So he knocks on the door, from the inside. I looked at that, and I thought, “This guy’s never ridden a bus.”

JW: I think you’re onto something here.

MM: He literally doesn’t know how to get off a bus. And he’s never fired anybody. They had to get diction people and acting coaches to get him to say, “You’re fired.” But the genius of the show is that each week he would fire the jerk on the show. America would watch that, and they would go, “I know that jerk. He’s in the next cubicle.” “He works on the line with me here.” There was something cathartic about watching Trump go, “You’re fired,” because everybody wants to do that to that a-hole who is sitting next to them at work. In the first season, the final episode had 44 million people watching. Compare that to last month, when the highest-rated show was The Big Bang Theory on CBS. It’s a sitcom. It had 17 million viewers. Trump had 44 million. He became a beloved figure. This is something that the Democrats, the Clinton campaign, and our fellow liberals and lefties, didn’t know and didn’t understand. Because they didn’t watch the show.

JW: Your new film starts out on election night. Donald Trump wins, and you ask the question, “How the fuck did that happen?” The genius of the film, in my opinion, is that this documentary about Trump centers on Flint, and Trump really isn’t the cause of Flint’s troubles at all. He had almost nothing to do with Flint. The real turning point of the film comes with Obama going to Flint during the campaign, and drinking the water there. That is a terrible moment, and it explains so much about how Trump got elected.

MM: Well, it was the most painful part of the film for me personally. I love President Obama. I voted for him twice. So far, to this point in my life, he’s the best president that we’ve had. But in the making of this film, I realized that, as awful as Trump is, the day before Trump became president wasn’t really a great day for the tens of millions of people living in poverty, the tens of millions of people who are functionally illiterate because of the conditions of our schools, and so on. Trump didn’t just fall out of the sky. We helped create Trump. We were an unwitting Dr. Frankenstein—we collectively, because the Democratic Party, in ways that I’m sure that they regret, was helping to pave the way for him.
JW: And Flint provides a microcosm of how the Democrats paved the way for Trump.

MM: We all know that more people vote in a general election than in a primary. But the Democratic primary in Flint in 2016 had a turnout much larger than the general a few months later. Nobody has bothered to look at that or ask why. I do, in this film. And the reason isn’t because people in Flint decided there was no difference between Trump and Hillary. Nobody took that position. It was because the Democrats actively depressed the vote. First, in the primary debate in Flint between Hillary and Bernie, the DNC gave Hillary the questions in advance. When that was revealed a month or two later, the people of Flint, the mothers of the kids poisoned by lead in the water, the people who had stood at the microphone to ask a question that they thought that she was hearing for the first time, when they found out that it was rigged, many people in Flint, and certainly the people that were there at the debate, felt used as props by the Hillary campaign and by the Democratic Party.

Then one month after the debate, President Obama comes to Flint and drinks the water and says the water’s fine. But it wasn’t fine, and everybody knew it was still poisoned, and nobody could understand why he would do this. That was like a knife in the heart to the people of Flint. So on Election Day, the turnout was much lower than it had been in the primary. And Trump carried Michigan—by 10,000 votes. And it’s not just Flint. All over this country people felt that the party of the people has let them down.

JW: You find a lesson here—for November.

MM: Look, we’re not going to fix this problem if we don’t own up to our own mistakes. We have to do this differently if we’re going to be successful in getting rid of Trump. We can no longer vote for people who call themselves Democrats when they are people like Bill Clinton, who is responsible for everything from NAFTA, to his Defense of Marriage Act making it illegal to marry somebody that you love, to mass incarceration of black people through drug laws. All those things began with a Democrat. They really weren’t upended when another Democrat came into office in 2009.

Right now we’re close to the edge of the cliff with Trump, and with our democracy. So everybody, everybody, has to vote on November 6, and everybody has to bring five, 10 people with them to the polls, and they’ve got to vote for a Democrat. The good news is we have so many good progressive Democrats on the ballot. There are so many women on the ballot in November, so many young people, so many people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the ballot, all across the country. Let’s all make a commitment to not let this happen again.
 

DrDoug

Diamond Member
Jan 16, 2014
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In the real world, your statement actually means:

'Basically if the choice is the “oligarchs” skimming the nations wealth or that wealth being given to the workers who they have been underpaying for decades then let the oligarchs have it." You're just using the rich guys tactic of "the lazy, undeserving poor are after our money" and "The Democrats are going to take our money and give it to the people we have taught you to fear, hate and despise!"

Unless you're one of those wealthy guys screwing us all over, you're getting screwed too. So keep defending them and screwing yourself and everyone else over, just to pwn the poor, you Great White Knight for the Wealthy.
 
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cytg111

Lifer
Mar 17, 2008
23,049
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Oligarchs and their paid-for candidates lament about how the government can't do anything right and when in office destroy the ability of the government to do anything right. They then sell as much of the government and the people's property and rights, for pennies on the dollar, to the billionaires who paid for their candidacy and office.

Oligarchs want to be aristocrats. A tale as old as time. It's the reverse of liberal (small l) democracy, and it's happening in real time.

What's funny, is that Liberals call it for what it is, while conservatives, who've had their skulls shit into by Limbaugh and Friends (low-level new-money oligarchs) for decades "think" that somehow it's the liberals causing this, because, uh, well, we need to give the oligarchs more tax breaks because, uh, jobs and stuff.

Oligarchs, who care not for democratic (small d) rule, or a government that works for the people rather than themselves, believe a working government is a waste of time and money, and treat it as such.

This shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who's ever paid attention to history, or current politics.

Not every billionaire uses their money to decrease democracy so to increase their own wealth and power. And Zuckerberg isn't some ally just because he isn't a blathering racist.

What oligarchs are trying to do is take over governmental functions so they can run their own little fiefdoms, effectively making everyone else a serf. Zuckerberg is about to launch his own company scrip.

At this point, oligarchs are so close to getting aristocracy that some are just outright running for office themselves. Look at the President.

Also, look at how many cabinet-level positions are open, effectively making the President the de jure head of various government agencies. A feature, and not a bug, of a right-wing authoritarian government.

Yes yes yes yes yes..... And the threat from the east is exactly that knocking on our door.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
12,973
7,891
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If you fully subscribe to this author’s viewpoint, then you need to recognize that liberals are also vilifying certain oligarchs, while giving others less scrutiny. No, we’re not as bad as the right wing nut jobs screaming “SOROS!!” while letting dark money Koch outfits takeover their party. But we still go after the Kochs, oil tycoons, bankers and big pharma execs while giving Bezos and Zuckerberg free reign over our data. Oligarchs on either side of the political spectrum our benefiting from inept government at our expense.


I partly agree - insofar as I don' t trust Bezos and Zuckerberg any more than the Kochs. But I'm not sure about 'either side of the political spectrum', because I don't really see the distance from Charles Koch to Zuckerberg as a "spectrum". For starters the apologists for Zuckerberg et al are at best 'the centre', and for another thing I don't really think politics is a simple line from left to right anyway, it's multidimensional and rather chaotic. I mean, Trump and the Kochs, while both the enemy as far as I'm concerned (as is Zuckerberg) are far from in agreement with each other. Koch is not at all happy with Trump's trade-wars.

There are many different 'sides' in politics and they don't arrange themselves into a simple line.

I agree with both Monbiot and Moore, but I distrust 1prophet for the way he works so hard to attack liberals rather than the right.
 
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senseamp

Lifer
Feb 5, 2006
35,785
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Who are apologists for Zuckerberg? He is not very liked, even in Silicon Valley. But it's also the case that the right is attacking social media platforms for filtering their propaganda. Private platforms have a First Amendment right to decide what content they want on their websites, an Congress is explicitly banned by the First Amendment from doing anything about it.
 

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
12,973
7,891
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Who are apologists for Zuckerberg? He is not very liked, even in Silicon Valley. But it's also the case that the right is attacking social media platforms for filtering their propaganda. Private platforms have a First Amendment right to decide what content they want on their websites, an Congress is explicitly banned by the First Amendment from doing anything about it.

OK, to be fair I'd have to go away and look up exactly where I've gotten the impression that many centrist liberals are a bit soft on Facebook and Zuckerberg, because a general impression is all that it is, and I'm sure it's not universally and consistently the case.

Though one thing that comes immediately to mind is Nick Clegg - our paradigmatic centrist liberal - going and getting a job as the PR flack for Facebook.

As far as the phoney 'censorship' row goes, the right have been going on about private media companies being able to decide which voices they feature and what they say for centuries, so obviously they look a bit ridiculous when they start complaining now.
 

Jhhnn

IN MEMORIAM
Nov 11, 1999
62,365
14,681
136
Moore got this part wrong & bought into the bullshit-

First, in the primary debate in Flint between Hillary and Bernie, the DNC gave Hillary the questions in advance. When that was revealed a month or two later, the people of Flint, the mothers of the kids poisoned by lead in the water, the people who had stood at the microphone to ask a question that they thought that she was hearing for the first time, when they found out that it was rigged, many people in Flint, and certainly the people that were there at the debate, felt used as props by the Hillary campaign and by the Democratic Party.

Nobody had to tell Hillary there would be a question about Flint water at a debate in Flint. She already knew it, as did everybody & their dog. Sheesh. It's the same with the death penalty question. You know, as if Hillary hadn't staked out her position long before. It wasn't the DNC, either, but rather Donna Brazile who worked for CNN at the time. Dunno what the fuck she thought she was doing, but it wasn't good.

His observations about The Apprentice are quite prescient, however. OTOH, believing that Trump the role & Trump the person are the same thing is like believing Johnny Depp is Captain Jack Sparrow.
 
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pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
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99.9% of us never even got to play to begin with. At the start of Monopoly, everyone starts out with the same amount of cash.

The last game of Monopoly I played (decades ago) I managed to go through the entire game without ever landing on anything I could buy, indeed without ever having any opportunity to make a decision. I went last and my die rolls meant I ended up just following the others round the board, every turn landing on something another player, who had got there before me, had already bought - so all I ever did was pay rent to others, till I went bust. There was nothing I could do about it, no amount of 'skill' would have changed the outcome.

That's pretty much a perfect example of the point the game was originally-designed to make. The system is rigged against those who started last, or who are just unlucky.

(It also makes it a crap game design, as any game-designer would probably tell you - any game where those with an early lead have a huge advantage is not a fun game).