What a bizarre fixation for a national paper, the follow-on letter from Will Lewis is even more transparently fixated on the daily appearance of the "pillars" [1]. "Personal liberties" appears to be a new construction that is conspicuously different from "civil liberties", and I think the distinction really speaks to what Bezos wants here. 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.
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.
It's amazing how increasingly Orwellian things are becoming under our ever more powerful dictatorial and oligarchical benefactors. Always bringing smiles to the faces of the most willing believers.
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.
Is Substack really failing? I don't have any particular insight into the business as a whole but I do see quite a few prominent political writers on there who seem happy with their traffic and reach.
As a business they are doing decent (kick myself for not participating in one of their earlier rounds, and potentially turbocharging my career).
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.
>But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck.
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.
Yeah as a reader and occasional commenter I find Substack to be a great source for interesting and informative writing on a number of topics. I spend a decent chunk of my internet reading time on there and hope the platform thrives.
> 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.
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.'?
That's still the case. I've seen a few newsletters I follow move off the platform, one of them just a couple weeks ago. I don't like to see them go though because I think Substack is great overall, much better than competing services.
The Free Press is one of the biggest publications on Substack and they're a small news organization with ~25 people. It seems like Substack is doing well.
Sure it's not hosting full news rooms, but the big names on there who have gone independent seem to have a pretty sizable audience relative to their size.
What liability implications are there? With section 230 there really isn't any. And even without that it's basically impossible to libel a public figure so I doubt there would be much change in terms of politics.
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.
Hot for HN maybe but not that hot in general. But we all know Dems have a lot of voters who demand ideological purity who will make a huge show of anger if they do something like this. The Dems have a cranky, fractious base and this contributed to their loss IMO.
We've forgotten what politics is. We think it's just about being right and having our rightness rewarded and memorialized by history.
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.
Yes I agree 100%. The Dem base has forgotten what democratic politics is. It's not the manifest destiny of moral progress into history. It's building coalitions. It's compromising with people who you deeply, fundamentally disagree with about some things but are willing to support you in others. It's about trying to get a large bloc of people to support something.
As an aside alephnerd, I really enjoy your comments because you actually think about politics as a game with objectives, strategies, and tactics. The way the game is actually played, not the way the kid who took the Political Compass Online Test and played Civ thinks politics should be. Not some sort of moral ideological sounding board. HN and a lot of online fora these days are filled with moralistic shouting and arguments.
Seriously ???? Did you buy JD Vance on "free speech" in EU ? Actually, you should get better information (and a link to the EU Commission website is nothing if you dont read or understand it... it's only the old FUD)
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
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.
>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.
One example is Germany will now arrest you for insulting someone in public or online, including insulting politicians. The UK has had some questionable laws passed as well. Pockets of Europe has much weaker free speech protections than the US does, that much is for certain.
60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws.
> Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case.
I'm not supportive of defamation laws but clearly you (and this journalist) are sensationalizing what happened.
If this happened in America I don't think it would be an issue if a mob killed the judge and jury. Minimizing and justifying this at all should be a permanently disqualifying act. If you think that it's ok at any level, I don't want to share a country with you.
Everything I said was 100% correct, you (and gp) are trying to downplay Germany imprisoning a woman for speaking ill of a gang rapist who was given no jail time.
A major reason why American social media companies flipped support from the Dems to GOP this cycle was because the EU is rolling out the DSA, and felt the Biden admin didn't do enough to push back on this.
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.
Diplomatic pressure from the US against passing the DSA. Or, if it really comes down to it, offers of local amnesty for companies that violate the DSA in the EU. There's a lot to do. The US spends a lot of money on NATO and its influence in the region is a huge lever to do a lot with.
> 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 ;)
The tech companies (mostly Facebook) are responsible for MAGA both times, but there's no amount of ass kissing that would have got them to do the necessary level of pro Dem moderation.
I'm far from able to understand american politics but didn't Dems get far more money in the last election than Republicans? I've read about twice as much? What would big (social media oligarchs/moguls ?) donors flipping back bring about?
That was mostly because ActBlue (the DNC's fundraising platform) is well built while GOP's WinRed is a hot piece of garbage, and donors now sidestep the GOP to create SuperPACs for Trump and Trump-affiliates directly.
What you end up seeing is the GOP raises nearly as competitive as the DNC when you add Trump PACs plus WinRed.
The initial claim was: "There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC."
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.
Opposition in Czech will win because current government fail almost in everything. SPOLU declared themselves as middle right coalition, but implement left politics, ie increasing taxes about 20% for freelancers in last year, keeping almost one od highest inflation in EU, funding useless projects...
No wonder that about 75% Czechs are dissatisfied with current PM Fiala.
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.
Well, our economy is stagnating, and the PM is an academic who looks detached from the real world.
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.
That is a least bothering aspects of opposition to me. Whats frustrate me is how people still believe in politics even though nothing much really change. Debt, taxes and inflation driven by greedy politicans will increase, uneconomical spending and socialism dependence on state rising. Most wouldn't get any penny without fundings from our taxes. Or mortgage. We have ridiculous amount of state employees (highest police members per citizen), heavy bureaucracy, 50 thousand new regulations every year. It's not sustainable both for economy and sake of mind.
Dunno about the parents in Brno or Wroclaw. I read an article on DW with age metrics of the recent election. Guess what demographic voted the for AfD and Die Linke? < 45. Unfortunately this is the new opposition, nazis and commies.
I'm heartened to learn about Die Linke, thank you. I was afraid AfD's only real opposition was an anemic coalition of centrist political parties. Youth are rejecting the status quo, they're done with neoliberalism, for better or worse. Radical ideas are in. If the only radical ideas are on the Right, well - we know how well that worked out for Weimar Germany (or the USSR under Brezhnev.) Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson, and I fear they still won't in 2028. I'm not a Commie, but if the choice is between Nazis and Commies, I'll sing the Internationale.
(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.)
I'm a firm believer in the horseshoe theory, so I'm really not interested in a radical left or a radical right. Give me more Bidens, Harrises, Clintons and Obamas. I'll vote for them every time.
> 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.
At this point it's basically three states deciding the election (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan). Both Biden and Trump won or loss based on those three, and with a ridiculously low margin each time.
It's more than those three states, but I get your point. We need electoral college reform, and we need to uncap the house of representatives like the founders intended. Until then it's going to keep coming down to those purple states with razor thin margins, and safe red/blue states will just be used to run up the popular vote count.
Well yeah, there's North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois too. But they seem to be less likely to be the tipping point, plus AR/NV are too small to undo republican vote in MI/WI/PA which have provided 50 electors to the winner and zero to the loser for the last three elections.
Well yeah I mentioned the last 8-9 years. But a lot of the shift already occurred with Bush: "Bush flipped 11 states that had voted Democratic in 1996: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia" (source Wikipedia); 8 of those have turned very much Republican since then.
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.
> The problem with them is that they are all for the status quo which to the average voter means "more of the same".
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.
My mistake, I took your previous comment to mean you were advocating for more radical government/parties.
> 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.
Whenever I hear "status quo" used as a blind bad thing and justifying radicalism I can't help but observe "your continued breathing" is also the status quo. That is just plain shitty logic.
Huh? The graph in your link shows that AfD is indeed most popular among the parents of the average Reddit user - HN skews slightly older, but still. Scoring highest among 35-44, and in general pretty similar, showing a pretty normal distribution with the mean at ~40yo.
You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
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.
I get where you're coming from, because Hungary was a Communist state until 1989, but ex-MKP (Hungarian Communist Party) cadre joined Fidesz as well as MSZP.
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)
> 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.
I'm not here to argue about the correctness or value of the cake case. I'm just using the case as an example of rhetoric, specifically the rhetoric of "personal liberty" to mean "freedom to discriminate." The cake case became a wedge issue, but we're already seeing similar rhetoric used to dismantle the separation of church and state and enshrine government-sanctioned oppression of protected classes. That is: "if the cake shop doesn't have to serve gay people, then why should my (publicly-funded) school?" [0]
It wasn't the freedom to discriminate. I think that's the point. You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.
> You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.
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.
That is not what the supreme court found at all. In the opinion of the supreme court, they found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted in religious hostility in their evaluation of Masterpiece, and that the commission lacked consistency among similar cases. Kennedy's opinion noted that he may have been inclined to rule in favor of the Commission if it had remained religiously neutral in previous evaluations.
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 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.
> They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer".
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.
The rhetoric around "personal liberty" was not used in the cake case, and was not used to justify discrimination. If the commission had been more neutral then the case, using the same arguments, could had gone the exact opposite. The cake case was ruled based on the performance of the commission in their work as a government entity. The outcome was that Masterpiece won, but the victory was not based on the merit of Masterpiece.
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.
You are literally saying that it is wrong to criticize and organize a boycott of a business for the moral choices it makes.
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.
Inequality continues to rise rapidly. Everyone but the most well off living conditions continue to decline. The wealthy elite need to make stories that distract people from this problem. So they will blame immigrants and "bloated inefficient governments" for the problem. And will push anti-immigration and "personal liberty" and "more free markets" as the solution.
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.
Living standards have absolutely been rising for just about everyone, and continue to do so - for example in terms of income growth[0]. People in all income tiers have seen their incomes grow consistently, albeit not equally.
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.
This is mostly because of housing prices, not unequal distribution of income gains. If you gave everyone more money house prices would just go up more, because houses are being built far slower than the population is increasing.
The people with "too much" (everyone with more than the person saying the phrase "too much", presumably) aside, giving everyone more money will mean house prices will be bidded up and rents will rise, because there is an oversupply of people vs accommodation.
Rising inequality increases asset prices as the wealthy look for more places to invest and extract rent. Gary's economics on YouTube explains this very well, with credentials.
The rich are demonstrably less discerning of every marginal dollar. They will pay more for the exact same asset than someone who is only middle class or lower. This means the rich own everything, and therefore just keep getting richer, because the US abandoned any form of redistribution.
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.
Your link does not support your claim or in fact mention living standards at all. The fact, widely evident to every American not in the upper 20%, is that your paycheck is bigger, your house is worse, your food is worse, your healthcare is worse, your life expectancy is worse, your children’s education is worse, you have less free time, you can take fewer vacations, and you can buy less of what you want.
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.
According to Wiktionary, the standard of living is "the level of income, comforts and services available to an individual, community or society."
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.
Your link shows inequality growing. There is income inequality and wealth inequality and both have been growing. Incomes rise while everything around you gets much more expensive, especially assets.
>we need to substantially raise taxes on the rich and reduce them for everyone else
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?
Many of the problems we face stem directly from inequality itself. For example, the rich have dramatically greater say in our "democracy" due to their ability to fund politicians and lobbyists. They are above the law due to their ability to hire expensive lawyers and shield themselves through corporations. They can use the law as a weapon due to their ability to sue people who can't afford to fight back. Some of them are rich enough to avoid the consequences of destroying huge swaths of society (i.e. Musk with Twitter).
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.
You just literally stated that people can be too poor to buy food on the primary market so they have to set up a secondary market in order to get food.
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.
What percent of your money comes from labor vs capital appreciation? Which is the hand that feeds you?
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.
A hard line between labour and capital seems a bit reductive. My pension is capital. I have some shares, which are capital. I also have the security of a permanent job, paid by someone else to take risks.
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.
> A hard line between labour and capital seems a bit reductive.
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?
Real estate (or more precisely, the land on which the real estate sits) is a completely unique case due to being a resource in inherently limited supply, and arguments which apply to taxing it do not necessarily apply to any other form of wealth.
> I also have the security of a permanent job, paid by someone else to take risks.
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.
Of course. But you at least got paid for your time. That's all you can hope for. Someone who owns a business might well lose all the money they ever put in. That's the risk.
Owners typically don't run a business. Those that do pay themselves a salary. If they don't run a business they are called "investors". Investors typically understand they can lose all of their investment and are in a position where if they do they are fine. This is not true of most people working. Most people working are living paycheck to paycheck. If they fail they are risking far more than an investor in the sense that their life changes. An investor on the other hand already "lost the money" when they wrote a check, and don't need it to survive.
> what level of income and/or wealth constitutes rich and how much should they be taxed?
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.
This! Serious economics papers are always about studying different progressive tax functions. Nobody cares about specific thresholds to separate "the rich" from the rest. It's a moot point because wealth is a continuous variable (approximately Pareto with tail index between 1 and 2, to be precise).
> 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!
Adding to @mempko's comment, in the most recent tax filing season data available, there were tax returns of:
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
If we then break those into the actual groups, and numbers per group, then we find their Average Per Capita Income
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
There are 76,794,954 making $19,936 on average. The filing thresholds are "single, under 65 = $12,950" and "head of household, under 65 = $19,400". Many of the bottom 50% of America would "barely" even qualify to file.
The GINI can be measured before or after taxes. The link you shared is after--this one is used in defense of the metric. A 'before tax' version[3] is invariably used when on offense.
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.
Ok, so you agree inequality is growing and but don't recognize it as a problem. Let me ask you something, when you are buying a house, and you are competing with multi-millionaires and billionaires for the bid, who do you think will win? There are limited amount of real assets available at any given time and wealth inequality means regular people hold less of the assets each year, making them poorer. If the vast majority of people are losing wealth every year, how is that not a problem?
Don't disagree that new wealth is being created, what matters when talking about quality of life and inequality, is who are the beneficiaries of this new wealth? Is it the already wealthy? If so, that's part of the positive feedback loop to drive inequality further. More assets, Yay. Held by fewer and fewer people over time. Boo.
The new wealth is being created BY and FOR the already wealthy. That's literally what capitalism is! New wealth creation is certainly not driven by poor Steve who does not have money to start a new business or market his new IP.
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"
Not sure where you’re from, but here in the US, the wealthy elites love immigration and inefficient governments. Easily exploited workers and a weak government incapable of helping them is a billionaire’s dream. It’s uncanny how similar the past decade has been to the start of the Gilded Age.
> So they will blame immigrants and "bloated inefficient governments" for the problem. And will push anti-immigration and "personal liberty" and "more free markets" as the solution.
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.
Immigrants are not why living standards are declining though. Yes, there are obviously logistic problems when populations grow quickly. However the real issue is inequality not immigration.
What specifically isn't working in what concerns immigration and how has the way immigration was handled in the last 20 years been a failure? Please provide specific examples.
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.
Also, doesn't this just turn WaPo into WSJ that harps on these pillars everyday? This doesn't seem like a very sound market decision either.
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.
I think it's conflating a bit two ideas. Number of outlets vs number of viewers. I feel an argument could be made for either case, selectively.
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.
right I agree. Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly one-sided, though if you fact check the two you'll find that Fox is -heavily- the leader in misinformation. CNN has actually gotten quite a bit more centric and it's easy to spot partisan people who act like they're shills for the Democrats. Another good source is AP News and BBC .
Like it or not, the Overton window in the US did shift last election.
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.
That’s comical considering CNN is the same network that promoted and pushed all of the Trump hoax stories. They also claimed Biden was mentally fit up until that lie was also exposed. CNN has no credibility in the news space.
By "everyone else" you mean literal socialists and communists trying to pretend that they are still on the map and haven't been far outside of the Overton window for at least half a century. Seriously that rhetorical whine is as obvious as unironic use of "Bourgeois" and "Proletarian" framing.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. MSNBC tends to advocate for liberal positions which, while on the left side of right wing, is still a right wing position. You don't see them advocating much for social democracy let alone more extreme forms of socialism.
If we define left wing in terms of the population as a whole, then there is a huge portion of the population that is opposed to neo-liberal & far right positions and there are no major media organizations that represent them. That's the point that I am attempting to make.
Most people in the US have not encountered the 'left'. Democrats, do have progressive wing but in general they are center-right/right while Republicans are far-right at this point. (Even ignoring the Nazi salutes at Republican rallies).
> 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.”
By putting the thumb on the scale doesn’t mean they never say anything negative. Even Fox News will occasionally criticize Trump. It means being more careful about not being overly critical
And therefore, any argument that there is some kind of liberal bias is false (whether from Trump or Bezos). That's my point.
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.
If a bunch of news outlets all share a certain viewpoint that doesn't actually help them get viewers, maybe it's just because that viewpoint reflects reality and not because of some grand conspiracy. Assuming reality is consistent, you should expect news sources to agree on most of the facts on most things, and not because of a bias towards anything other than what a "fact" is
CNN definitely isn't left leaning. Debatably even MSNBC is largely more liberal than left leaning.
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.
And American left is pretty right by European standards. The democrats as a whole would definitely fall under the right camp here. Mostly the neoliberal one.
Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America.
That was true 15 years ago - especially with Merkel/Obama/Cameron - but a lot has changed since then.
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?
Would you consider Germany's CDU/CSU to be close to the republicans in the US? I pegged them more as being Democrat's equivalents. Macron is also more of a US democrat then a republican.
Is an odd fit I would have him with Labour. In canada he would lead the NDP.
That’s tricky- I’d say the modern CSU/CDU & Macron are closer in social policy to the Democrats but economically closer to the Republicans.
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.
> 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.
Employee ownership isn't that weird though? Most top execs get paid mostly in shares and options. Employees often have this option too. In a socialist view there would be no stock market at all.
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.
That wasn't what was happening. Suppressing protest with soldiers - which is usually justified by dictators with the excuse of 'order' - is extreme and anti-freedom.
That was what was happening. In Minnesota, the governer and future Democratic VP candidate, Tim Walz, sent in the national guard to stop it.
The paradox of government force, and the need to manage that paradox, has been one of the foundational questions -- the foundational question to some -- of liberal philosophy since its first writers. Freedom isn't just freedom from the government, it's also freedom from others who might hurt you and destroy the place you live.
It's worth pointing out the Minneapolis police department completely abandoned the city to let burn.
supposedly idealistically opposed parties doing something that is in the sense of the argument doesn't prove the argument. Walz might very well have been just as wrong
There were riots. Every store window in my wife’s office block was broken. During the Freddie Gray riots Governor Hogan called in the Maryland national guard and it was the most popular thing he ever did: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/27/402639082...
A few smashed windows is not a riot, nor nationwide riots, nor requiring doing what Cotton advocated. Popularity is certainly not at all a reason to suppress liberty.
I witnessed some of the 'riots'; what I saw was perfectly safe except for a very small physical area - maybe spots of, very approximately, 50 sq ft - and even there you were probably safe.
There was no danger to the public, some danger to some windows. I've seen worse in team victory celebrations. I saw much worse at the Capitol, where they were beating people and some died.
Destruction to the built environment is an offense against society. 25 people were killed in the riots and there was $2 billion in property damage. My neighborhood in Baltimore never recovered after the Freddie Gray riots. Our fro-yo place had the windows smashed in and closed. The coffee shop on my wife’s office block never reopened. The harm to the public lasts long after the rioting is over.
You didn’t see worse at the capitol, because that was a riot at a government building and private sector people were not at risk.
> Destruction to the built environment is an offense against society.
If someone crashes into a streetlight, is that an offense against society? Obviously not.
> 25 people were killed in the riots and there was $2 billion in property damage.
In the entire country? And is there a source for it?
Sorry about your fro-yo and coffee. The places I know have long forgotten the 'riots'.
> private sector people were not at risk.
People died. Does it not matter because they worked for the government? How about the democracy and government of people in the private sector? I think boiling it down to property is much too convenient.
> > If someone crashes into a streetlight, is that an offense against society?
> If you do it on purpose, yes.
Well I guess "an offense against society" is undefined, but that is an extreme reaction. There are matters of degree in everything, and those degrees are everything. The state prosecutes lots of crimes, from shoplifting to mass murder - to call them all "an offense against society" becomes meaningless.
> > Does it not matter because they worked for the government?
> Yes.
Killing people doesn't matter if those people work for the government. Wow.
>> If someone crashes into a streetlight, is that an offense against society? Obviously not.
That’s literally what it is. That’s why the court case is styled State/Commonwealth/People v. Streetlightcrasher. You can quibble about whether the government “is” society but that argument makes you sound like a fringe libertarian.
It sounds like you don’t understand what the word “offense” means. The literal meaning of offense is a crime. If you crash into a street light and damage it (purposely, probably also negligently) then it is literally an offense against society.
Can you really make these claims when streamers for months were showing people looting? What about chop? What about that federal courthouse in Portland?
My city had 100s of stores ransacked with groups of cars with 100s of people all working together. Say what you want about opportunists - riots happened.
What about it? Did it burn down? How many were injured?
> streamers for months were showing people looting
It's interesting that people criticize the professional news media, then believe whatever they see on social media.
> riots happened
I expect some did, depending on the definition of riot, but that's not 'nationwide rioting' and a call to use the military to suppress the great majority of peaceful protests.
There was rioting in many major cities and it was absolutely appropriate to call in the national guard to put a stop to it. My family didn’t leave Bangladesh to put up with third-world behavior like that.
Protest isn't third-world behavior, and part of being in the US is not restricting other people's liberties - regardless of your personal preferences and outrage.
If they are harming others or causing significant material damage, that's another story, but even that is a matter of degree (especially the latter).
Are you saying those topics were covered fairly and honestly by legacy media but also including Twitter(before it became X) and Facebook? Maddow still pretends that all of the former were false stories and Russian disinformation when it’s been established the contrary was true. Additionally USaid is now known to have assisted with the actual disinformation
> doesn't always and necessarily present the views of those who control it...?
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".
Imagine believing that, not only after living past age 5 where you start to develop a complex model of reality beyond "what seems simple and straightforward is true", but after growing into full adulthood and recognizing what is widely known to be profitable in "news"—which is selling a narrative to a target audience.
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.
I thought it was that way in original Lockean formulation but basically that’s what materialist Bezos seems to care about. Maybe if you asked him about freedom from being hacked by Saudis he might have a different approach.
Civil liberties are generally liberties that are explicitly guaranteed, e.g. in a constitution, while personal liberties are generally anything that's not explicitly banned, so there's a definite shift of emphasis.
> 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."
All you did was link to the wikipedia article on dog whistling. Do you have a source that actually substantiates your claim about the phrase "personal liberties"?
If he meant it to be identical to "civil liberties", why didn't he just say that? Using a less common term seems like it would have to be intentional, so he must have meant _something_ by it.
I wonder if there is some sort of breach of fiduciary duty or securities fraud claim here.
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.
You used some big terms that I just had to take a cursory glance at to get the meaning of but it sounds like if what you’re describing ever picked up steam it would set an ill precedent and benefit the spirit of polarization that I think you’re trying to oppose.
This is a very big change at the Post. For decades they have dutifully aired competing perspectives from the political left and right as well as major international players of different stripes. Now all of that will end. It seems future op-eds will be written only by a carefully curated pool of sanitized Post staff.
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.]
> For decades they have dutifully aired competing perspectives from the political left and right as well as major international players of different stripes.
I'd say they were clearly on the left since ~2017, but had other perspectives as well.
Is that still true? Fox, WSJ, Politico, Washington Post etc. - so many are taking on conservativism. Even 'moderate liberals' are becoming 'conservative-lite', to show how open minded they are and bring people together.
NY Times the main newspaper and it mostly aligns with the left. Not sure what’s confusing about that. The others aren’t the main newspaper of that city.
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?
> NY Times the main newspaper and it mostly aligns with the left. Not sure what’s confusing about that. The others aren’t the main newspaper of that city.
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.
Yo. Ask any person what is the main newspaper of Nyc and I bet they don’t say “Ny Post” or “Wall Street Journal”. It is a true observation. Now go to Ricketsville, Nebraska and ask if their newspaper aligns with their political views. I bet it does.
By your own admission of the LA Times this was a recent shift, so it was true before.
That’s my point, most people in the US naturally tie 1 city to 1 newspaper even though there may be multiple. That newspaper is usually representative of the view points of the majority of the population.
At this point if you have any commitment to the truth, you will have a "leftist" bias.
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].
> At this point if you have any commitment to the truth, you will have a "leftist" bias.
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.
Reality is independent of experience and opinions - that's the point. 'Leftist' opinions match reality better - e.g., climate change, Ukraine, vaccines, crime, etc. etc.
Reality means different things to each side. It reminds me of the old "Reality-based community[1]" quote by an aide to the G.W. Bush administration, widely attributed to senior advisor Karl Rove:
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'.
This school of thought is still alive and kicking among Republicans: Reality is what we conjure up as we do and say things--it's not some concrete, discernible thing that can be observed.
The idea of competing perspectives from the political left and right is majorly under attack. In 2020, the NYT fired the editor who oversaw the opinion page for publishing the perspective of an influential senator who had the ear of the president. WaPo had similar internal debates, with many staff members loudly objecting to the publishing of perspectives from the political right. There's an school of thought that says when you can't win, you should try to lose as painlessly as possible. This change looks a lot like that.
> 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).
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.
That's what he says, but most of his announcement is obvious falsehoods and propaganda. Why should we trust him? Obviously he intends to use his power to get what he wants, without regard to anyone else's perspectives.
Note that they rejected an advertisement criticising Elon Musk, for example. That's not a news article, but it definitely looks biased.
Changing strategy was inevitable. They lost 90% of readers between 2021 and 2024. It would be a dereliction of duty for the owner of the company to continue business as usual in such conditions.
They lost most of those readers due to an alarming shift rightward in tone and coverage. Not Fox News right but certainly further right than they have historically been.
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.
If you start out being popular among people who prefer one approach to reporting and opinion, and unpopular among people who prefer something entirely different, and then you incrementally move away from what you used to do, at the same time as the second group of people have plenty of other options to choose from ... this is precisely what you'd expect.
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.
It looks like a bunch of billionaires are establishing exactly what they purport to end, cresting that swamp they said they would dry. Makes you wonder how much of those allegations were true in the first place.
> This is a very big change at the Post. For decades they have dutifully aired competing perspectives from the political left and right as well as major international players of different stripes
> I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’
This is a concerning statement. It's the kind which is made by those who believe they are being generous and fair while they aren't. This is how people surround themselves with "yes men". I fear that is connected to the predicament we are in, and this infection exists in many corporations. It's hard to fight. We want validation while many "yes men" are just trying to survive (but some are manipulative). But this always results in the death of a business. Too big to fail just means a slow death because the environment discourages competition. Ironically the environment Bezos is creating while claiming to be encouraging. It might even be sincere. As adults we still feel young, is this also true for businesses?
>This is how people surround themselves with "yes men"
>But this always results in the death of a business
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!
I think you're conflating a different issue and making mole hills out of mountains.
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.
Op-eds aren't supposed to be that way, though yes many have become that. They are supposed to be experts opining about things related to their expertise. Such as a well known computer scientist opining about the field of computer science. This is useful communication to the general public and plays a valuable role in news.
There's a million shades of grey. The bad actors only want you to see black and white
The FCC's Fairness Doctrine only ever applied to broadcast radio and television, and was justified based on the limited supply of spectrum. It never applied to other types of media for which supply and distribution is effectively unlimited. Anyone can make a movie or build a new social media app. Traditional broadcast is kind of dying; younger people almost never consume OTA broadcast radio or TV.
"democracy is sacred and there is no higher value"
and
"people who vote poorly shouldnt be allowed to vote"
are said so often, and so closely together, that I think people just actively lie to themselves about what democracy is. If you want a smaller group of elite educated people doing the decision making, you're looking for a republic.
In the United States tests of competency were historically used to prevent certain racial groups from casting the ballot. They were explicitly banned by the Voting Rights Act in 1965, rightfully so. It's far too easy to abuse.
No one said equity was going be easy. Sometime you have to do the hard thing now to solve the problem in the long term.
Not saying poll taxes or tests are the solution, but a much tougher standard for running for office could be, such as requiring a PhD to hold office - literally making the highest intelligence a requirement. There are also ways to eliminate corruption and other negatives in a system.
Holding a PhD has only a very loose correlation with intelligence. And there's no evidence that the most intelligent people make better political decisions. They tend to be overconfident.
There's nothing interesting about the "republic" part.
All democracies have something things that make impossible-to-hard for majoritarian legislating to affect. The US is no different in that respect, other than the precise things that are deemed out of reach of the majority, and how hard it is to change that.
The US is a federal representative loosely-democratic (but some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others) republic in theory, and a rough plutocracy in practice.
Greater structural barriers to the franchise makes it less of any kind of democratic anything even in theory.
Direct Democracy was always a bad idea, because unqualified people exert influence. It’s why we are a Republic. The only influence one needs in government is through a representative. That’s it. You don’t need a representative to execute the laws. Why does the public even vote for a President? The President isn’t supposed to represent the public. That’s the job of the literal Representative. Senators shouldn’t represent the public as well.
The founding fathers had it right when they created an electoral college that wasn’t decided by a popular vote. The electoral college should be a bunch of PhDs, of any field, selected by sortition. That’s it. That’s how you get smart people to design government.
Let's be honest. He nailed on the head the main drawback of democracy. That the wrong people also get to vote. And the horror - even win elections and get their way sometimes.
What he missed is that everyone has different ideas about who exactly the wrong people are.
Democracy is at least partially a social "technology" for avoiding civil wars. You have to let the "wrong" people win elections occasionally. If they ever become convinced that winning elections is impossible then they'll fall back to violence to get their way.
This is a general observation about human societies, not a dig at any specific US political faction.
> If they ever become convinced that winning elections is impossible then they'll fall back to violence to get their way
Unfortunately, in reality, they believe the election is rigged, win the election, and still believe that elections are rigged so next time they don't win, its definitely rigged.
just like driver’s license there should be an age limit to voting rights. few question why you have to be 18 to vote. why 18? today’s 14-year olds are on average infinitely more mature than 14 year olds in say 1950. if someone was to say you are voter when you start high school half of this country would go batshit crazy. a different half would bark if we put an upper limit on voting rights but both make sense. take brexit for example - this was a decision that affect the FUTURE of UK. why would anyone sane say “lets have bunch of 80 year olds who are one foot in the grave make this decision for the people that will have to spend their entire lives with the consequences of that decision…” it is same for any election, elections matter and elections have consequences and old people shouldn’t be involved in making these decisions :)
People should be able to have a childhood free from the hostile information environment of the politicised world. I'm all for youth enfranchisement, but we need to ensure it doesn't come at the expense of childhood.
That said, kids not having a say in things that directly affect them… I can't think of any arguments against kids getting to vote on "think of the children" measures.
Zero chance of that happening unfortunately. The current Supreme Court would consider restrictions on corporate media ownership a violation of the first amendment, much like restrictions against unlimited campaign donations and restrictions on discriminating against non-Christians.
Jeff Bezos himself could be considered a mega-corporation.
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.
Apparently there are a lot of people confused about this, but no, Amazon does not have ownership over the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos bought it with his own personal funds using an LLC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#The_Washington_Post
And surely there is no relation between Bezos and Amazon so the part about "This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media" is obviously false.
The distinction is not wholly useless, since it provides a frame whereby we can interpret this as evidence that the corporate veil is fictive, and that the "evil corporation" problem is actually caused by evil individuals.
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.
I think people struggle with the fact that it's not a legally so. However, per the article, Bezos is exerting power over WP because Amazon lost contracts to Microsoft (due to WP being critical of Trump). Their balance sheets may not be aligned, but their interests are.
And if Bezos toes the line and does things that Trump likes, then Amazon may benefit.
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.
if the Fairness Doctrine was implemented for the Internet and you had a Democrat leaning political blog you would have to give equal time/space to MAGA narratives on your site. That's what you want?
I think if you are going to claim fair coverage, then yes. If you are going to openly say you are for one side or the other, then okay. Having a tag line like "fair and balanced" without the balance or being fair then no.
The fairness doctrine does not require equal time. It requires you to dedicate some amount of time to controversial topics, and then give some amount of time to opposing parties within those topics.
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.
Or you could do what Ezra Klein did a couple of days ago and get a mentally ummm not all there member of the other side and let them free associate the entire interview.
The Fairness Doctrine was never found incompatible with the First Amendment. It was removed by a politicized FCC. The topic was taken up by the Supreme Court and they did not find that it violated the constitution, quite the opposite actually.
When applied to broadcasters using licensed public resources under Federal jurisdiction, yes. When applied to privately-operated Internet sites that readers have to go out of their way to access, no.
The biggest issue with US media is allowing for opinion to be mixed with news. Essentially everything is opnion, everything is biased in some way. If you look at the other side of the pond you have news outlets reporting news without stating opinion, and highlighting multiple view points. Then there are separate talkshows where people around a table discuss news and other actualities. Doesn’t mean there isn’t bias in the news outlets, because they can still choose not to report on something - but generally it is fairly in the middle.
Ownership limits are only effective in a pre cable / internet world. Now one media company located anywhere can be seen by customers everywhere. So what do you do? You can't have the government tell people what to watch. If you try to restrict a company to broadcast on only one channel e.g. radio / social media / streaming it's a clear violation of freedom of the press.
This is strikingly ignorant of how the fairness doctrine was used in practice historically, like for example Nixon using it to suppress dissent about the Vietnam War by threatening networks airing coverage he didn't like.
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?
It also, more importantly, basically required you to platform a crazy person to argue for a side if there was no rational or reasonable take for that side.
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"
The primary benefit of taxing the shit out of billionaires is not actually the revenue it produces, but the fact that it means that we don't have billionaires.
"People with more money than God own and influence media" has historically not been a recipe for social stability.
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
This line of thought really encapsulates the problems with purist free markets. What happens if someone who doesn't believe in those ideals uses the free market to simply buy up news media and push the opposite narrative? Regulated media doesn't produce perfect outcomes, but it does produce better ones.
The thing is, there really is no such thing as a "free market" as most who are in love with the term envision
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
> Replace "free market" with "competitive market"—what most people actually want when they talk about free markets
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).
The problem with competitive market ideals is that money is a positive feedback loop. The more money you have, the more you set the rules, the more money you get, ad finitum until eventual money singularity.
Capitalism is useful, like fire is useful. You just need to be careful to keep your fire under control and doing useful things.
Yes and part of it being a _free_ market is that you don't have to trade with these people.
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.
Yes, everyone has their own agenda. The idea of the thing is pretty straightforward though; Companies succeed or fail on the merits of their product. The government shouldn't seek to give undue advantage except insofar as to incentivize things we as a society care about (eg. carbon taxes). Prices are the arbiter of resource allocation, and should almost never be controlled or subsidised.
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.
> Regulated media doesn't produce perfect outcomes, but it does produce better ones.
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?
I disagree. The quality of news media is massively better today. I have access to much more and higher quality information than I would have in the 80s. E.g. I was able to watch live combat footage of the war in Ukraine right as it happened. I have access to peer reviewed research just with the click of a button. I can discuss the news with other people right here on HN. A highly regulated media oligopoly with massive barriers to entry is a terrible system compared to what we have today.
> E.g. I was able to watch live combat footage of the war in Ukraine right as it happened.
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.
> Telegram and Reddit are not high quality media...
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).
They're a media company; that is what they do. The difference is that Reddit is a lot more transparent about what is going on. The real question is what media channels do you believe are not publishing opinions in exchange for money or favours? Because most of them would be. There is no way the coverage of US politics is organic in the major corporations; it is too uniformly unhinged.
Reddit having flaws doesn't make it low quality. The baseline for media companies is well below sea level.
1. Reddit is NOT open about media manipulation. At all. And, no offense, but the idea that even most people can get quality news from that website is ridiculous. For example, the narratives around the reality of the situation on the Ukrainian frontlines are completely and totally wrong on that site. I had to go to Ukrainian media and military sources through Substack and elsewhere to get a non-propagandized sense of things. If you got your news from Reddit, you’d be completely and totally wrong. And I see this in the real world all the time: woefully misinformed people literally repeating word for word arguments they read on Reddit instead of distilling information from a myriad of reliable sources into independent and realistic viewpoints.
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.
> 1. Reddit is NOT open about media manipulation. At all...
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.
Not OP but, the political polarization, governmental dysfunction, and eventually the rise of an extremist right wing government can be at least partially attributed to the deregulation of media - specifically the repeal of the fairness doctrine which requires that public broadcasters air both sides on controversial topics of public importance. This was done in the vain of deregulation, but if we want a “free market” for media, why not deregulate the air waves? May the most powerful transmitter win …
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.
Yeah, it's clearly the formation of the Tea Party that was the trigger for severe change. But the mechanism through which the Tea Party ideology was disseminated was.. Fox News and conservative radio, which could not have existed in the same state before the Reagan era.
You haven't argued anything more substantive the other way. I'm speaking colloquially here, if you want a robust argument, you're not going to find it from me right now. This is just a conversation, not a dissertation. If you don't want to engage in it, that's fine. But let's not overdramatize what is happening here right now, which is a basic conversation about intuitions and principles.
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.
> You haven't argued anything more substantive the other way.
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.
>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!
When has that ever happened? The only time someone can control all the media is if the market is highly regulated. Otherwise I can literally go and start up a newsletter pushing free market views and it'll eventually overtake the competition if they persist in being stupid and advancing stupid views.
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.
"The only time someone can control all the media is if the market is highly regulated."
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.
> 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.
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?
Not the person you’re replying to, but there used to be regulations limiting ownership of radio & TV stations in the US. When these regulations were lifted in the 1990s, it resulted in one company (Clear Channel) going on just such a buying spree.
> Otherwise I can literally go and start up a newsletter pushing free market views and it'll eventually overtake the competition if they persist in being stupid and advancing stupid views.
...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.
So the Fox was forced to respond to competitive pressure from a new entrant. Companies are fighting over customers. Sounds like exactly how a competitive free market is supposed to function.
The person I was replying to seemed to think that the competitive free market would push news organizations away from "being stupid and advancing stupid news".
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.
>What happens if someone who doesn't believe in those ideals uses the free market to simply buy up news media and push the opposite narrative?
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.
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!).
I'm going to be honest; How is Amazon seeking to do this? Are they suppressing other online competitors? I'm sure they buy lots of competition, but that doesn't stop someone else from setting up shop.
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)
One example of market power abuse they engage in is requiring the price listed on their website to be the lowest offer that a merchant can list. You can't list a product on their page and then have a discount for that product on your own page.
Shopify runs on AWS so if Amazon is trying to take control of all online shopping they sure are awful at doing so. They actively enable some huge number of non-amazon online retailers to exist.
Seeing Bezos advocate for free markers is a massive dissonance, until I remind myself that he hasn't said what they should be free of. Bezos would like to be free to run competition out of town, force brutal terms on suppliers, all that sort of thing.
“Free markets mean the best product always wins out. It just so happens my subsidiaries make the best product in all markets. Read about why in the Washington Post.” - Bezos, probably
Bah. This is like saying "I support the idea of DOGE but am opposed to their methods".
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.
tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push, the same thing applies even to newspapers in Germany. You can clearly see that all of them do favor a certain view. Yes some of them look more open to alternative views, but they still favor something.
>tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push
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.
I feel like every time I have a conversation with someone who believes in free markets, it becomes clear that they've confused the ideas of free markets and perfect competition.
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.
> 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
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.
Free market where Big tech thrives and wants even fewer regulation, does seem to be dirty indeed. Just speaking of the IT field where I do know a thing or two, without regulations, none of these companies would even disclose that they have had a data breach.
It depends on how 'free markets' and 'personal liberties' are defined, but as Bezos is adopting the nationalist propaganda, we might expect the definition used by others who adopt that tone, that the wealthy elite should have unlimited freedom.
That position is widely supported in the professional news media, including the Wall Street Journal.
The idea of a free market should be dirty. Free markets are not a good thing for anyone but select capitalists. People benefit from regulated markets, where excesses and foul play are curbed for the public benefit. Bezos is advocating for free market ideas because he wants to run a monopoly, so he benefits directly from this position. For him it’s not idealism but pragmatism. For us it’s a nightmare position that will end in higher prices, worse service, worse working conditions, and less competition.
Is he honest about it? Based on his alignment with the Trump administration, "personal liberties and free markets" sounds like some heavy doublespeak to me. Is the paper going to be writing more articles about the othering of trans people and suppression of immigrant rights[1]? Somehow I doubt it.
Yeah. I’d bet the farm on the % of so-called ‘libertarians’ not wanting you to change your gender marker as being…quite high. Let alone crony capitalists.
> Truth be told, it does feel like free markets have become a bit of a dirty word in both political realms recently;
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.
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.
I have been a Post subscriber (in a Post-subscribing household) for almost fifty years, and my consumption of the opinion pages has gradual declined over that period. I just wish the news content was back to what it once was.
Before the classified advertising all disappeared to the Internet. In the 1990s, the Post had a larger newsroom, and published more news. Now the Metro section has fewer but larger articles, often enough not really news in the old sense.
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!”
Mathias Döpfner, head of Axel Springer, and at least some of its publications, such as Politico, now push the right wing propaganda.
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."
I don't have one handy but when he first bought it and got pushback about concern that he would be pushing his liberal agenda (ironically) that was his response.
Best I can find is “But the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.” https://archive.is/BpcDZ
He might claim otherwise but hard to argue that the values aren’t changing when the opinion editor is resigning.
I have always felt that the elite control the big news organizations. Hearst, Bezos, all of them are the wealthy. They gobble up smaller news organizations and align each with their editorial preference. Bezos is the new Hearst.
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.
We've been saying for a while that "Democracy dies in darkness" wasn't just a motto, but a business plan. This is just accelerating it and making it explicit.
> 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.
this is complaining about the state of nature dressed as political commentary. perhaps Mr Swinton could show an example of a society that would satisfy his definitions, but he cannot, because his complaint amounts to the fact that the world is flawed and no system is a utopia.
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.
This, and reading through many of the comments on this thread, remind me of Politico's excellent article (from 2017) on the subject of how media evolved into what it was then (and what it is today). Until I read this article I did not understand how we got here.
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.
Things in the US are getting scarier and scarier every day that passes.
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...
I don't think it's unusual for an owner to exert influence over the opinion section. Bezos is a hypocrite for saying he wouldn't take a heavy hand with the paper when he bought it, and for pretending now that he's doing this for any other reason than not being willing to forego political favors. He sucks, and can't be trusted. But that's also always been true of the opinion sections of newspapers, which in the end are just a wordier version of the poorly-reasoned hot takes you can get for free just by reading this comment.
How do you get to be a billionaire and still need people to coddle your ego?
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.
Good example of how ideology (and motivated reasoning) really clouds people's thinking.
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.
I'm gonna ignore the first part because I've found on the internet people don't agree on what "free markets" mean.
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.
You're misunderstanding or strawmanning. You don't need a business to be free, obviously, and no not everyone that's free has a business (???). But that's different from being forbidden from making one.
The concept of a business can only exist within the context of a myriad of laws (property law, contract law, etc) all of which require violent enforcement or the threat thereof, ie reduction in personal liberty.
> You can't have free markets without personal liberty
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.
Don't look at what he says but rather what he does - that is, at how he says it, because that is how the Washington Post will say things going forward:
* 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.)
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.
>Google was created with the help of NSF and MDDS/CIA grants etc.
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.
Do you not realize you've been programmed to look for a specific group to blame instead of thinking?
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.
Ya I find it interesting I feel like the nerds have been pushed aside by the mainstream. Social networks for instance were a lot better when it was just nerds.
Nerds were required on the early internet for community building - to run IRC and TS and phpBB. These days everyone has these tools. But as with the media monopoly dying, this is not a strictly better or worse thing, it's just different. And generally I like it when we get rid of gatekeeping.
Nerds wield potentially vast collective bargaining power if we refused to contribute to the systems that exploit our expertise and labor for the benefit of the ownership class. We could simply drop out and support one another with all our surplus time. Easier said than done, of course, but at this point I have to dream of bold alternatives to keep myself sane. The status quo and its present trajectory are just too unthinkably broken to have faith in incrementalism while the accelerationists are punishing us for our complacency in replacing rotted, unsustainable systems.
> "Bezos also made clear that alternate views will not appear on the pages."
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.
That was close to the question many were asking when her remarks broke:
"She said 'we' lose control.....who is 'we'?" Nobody on HN seems interested in digging deeper on that. It's only when the despicable shady scumbags are aligned with Trump that it becomes a problem.
Remember the days when he had just bought the paper and said: "No I have nothing to do with it, they just needed the money", me neither, such silly things I say...
My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" is effectively a safe refuge from having to directly confront the reality of what's happening right now.
> My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" effectively steers the Post away from engaging with issues of immediate concern.
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.
Exactly. It allows him to speak in tongues while the right wing carries on with its agenda.
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.
Bezos didn’t get where he is from just the free market. He got here because he was fortunate enough to have parents who could give him a $250k seed round.
As someone who actually values freedom consistently and not depending on the whims of money. This 180 from the tech main characters that just yesterday would've been pushing the most aggressive of censorships is so laughable.
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.
I assumed owning a newspaper is some sort of billionaire trophy. I haven't read newspaper in like 30 years and I can't imagine why I ever would in the future. Same goes for the digital properties. If you are actually paying attention to any particular issue it's pretty clear how nonsensical most reporting is. How badly do you need to be misinformed?
It's basically a "Pig Butchering" scam. Get people to give you a little time and attention, and then reward them with whatever they're looking for. Then after you've gotten as much trust as you're going to get (fattened the pig), change the game to extract as much value as you can from them (butcher the pig), regardless of any long-term bridge-burning.
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.
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.
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.
Part of the problem is that "the left" is not a monolith. I regularly interact with a part of the left who sincerely believe both that "trans rights are human rights" is the key, defining issue of the decade and that critical race theory absolutely should be taught in schools.
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.
I have a hard time believing that 5% of people knew what CRT was before the right made it an issue and redefined it.
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.
The fact that you refer to CRT as a dirty word that shouldn't be taught in schools is puzzling to me. Covering how slavery has affected our country seems like a no brainer thing to include in a curriculum.
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.
From where I sit, every time the left does something e.g. affirmative action, unhinged illegal immigration, or some other woke thing, they try to soften it, deny it outright, or change the subject, similar to what you're doing
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?
Oh I should've said "ideologues" instead of "ideologes". Namely, the people who keep hammering this shit in newspapers
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
What are your solutions to these issues? All I see is ranting at others, which doesn't solve the problems.
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.
You can't really use statistics to determine for me what's an issue to me. It's pretty subjective. That's not reactionaryism, that's me as a voter doing a cost benefit analysis. Which frankly is the only rational way to vote
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.
Woke didn’t do anything that’s just propaganda and what they want you to think.
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
"Woke" is a meme, not a political orientation or a coherent bloc that can take concerted actions. And for what it's worth, plenty of old white men venture capitalists made tons of money selling DEI to the Fortune 500.
Hate to break it to you, but "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs" has been stacking far, far more bodies over the past ~125 years.
Yes, its comparable to communism, they're both far up on the leaderboard, with religion.
There's something between those extremes that works very well and produce societies that are great for all people, regulated markets and socialised democracy.
In many regards USA has more regulations than the Scandinavian countries do, so isn't really a freer market. So that difference isn't about number of regulations but just taxation rates.
Depends on which regulations you look at. Employment isn't heavily regulated there as they have strong unions and contracts tailored to their specific needs that would otherwise be ill served by broad strokes regulation. Then they have strong regulation in environment, food, drugs, etc.
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.
It remains to be seen what he means by it in practice. It is possible many will be pleasantly surprised at what emerges.
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:
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.
Of course you aren't. But if you weren't deliberately dense, you'd see that Bezos didn't give a definition of personal liberty. He just told them that it matters, and they should write about it every now and then. One would think that in the US writing about personal liberty would not raise any controversy, but here we are.
Thinking of social anarchists. Extremely "left" in many regards by North American standards, and pushing towards being about as pro personal liberty as you can get.
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.
As an anarchist, we are for absolute personal liberty. But when we hear "personal liberty " followed by "free markets" pushed by a billionaire, it's clearly right wing propaganda. There are no right wing anarchists.
Hopefully my comment doesn't make it appear as though I disagree.
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.
The combination of “personal liberty and free markets” as a description of an ideological orientation is not merely exclusively right-wing, its pretty much a defining slogan of the American pro-big-business corporate capitalist Right (one of many segments of the American Right.)
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.
Definitely not, but it's possible to focus exclusively on liberties that the right wing prefers.
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 amazing how right-wing billionaire figures have captured social media platforms and news media outlets, such as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X, Jeff Bezos's takeover of The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong's takeover of LA Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s continued control of Fox News/Sky News/WSJ/NYPost, Mark Zuckerberg's recent rightward shift on FB/IG, and yet the right keeps yelling about George Soros. The propaganda networks on the internet are mostly rightwing with lots of surrendering to Russian/Chinese influence.
> It's amazing how right-wing billionaire figures have captured social media platforms and news media outlets, such as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X, Jeff Bezos's takeover of The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong's takeover of LA Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s continued control of Fox News/Sky News/WSJ/NYPost,
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.
I think the point of GP is not that media control is new, it is that a big part of media control is right-wing and yet right-wing people keep saying that media are owned by left-wing. And of course, facts and reality are left-wing fake news and misleading info are free speech when it's convenient to them.
One thing that is curious to me is that the "free market" appears to only be "free" once you've amassed a certain amount of capital, which you can then expend to defend your enterprise from any number of legal challenges (some spurious, some real) and also comply with any number of governmental regulations (some spurious, some real). Even so, it's not so much that I distrust the phrase "free market" as it is that I think that for whatever reason, we, common Americans, are not allowed to take advantage of the "free market". Many "anti-capitalist" Americans haven't even ever experienced anything close to a "free market".
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.
> 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
I know what you mean, and I agree that innovation can and does happen without a profit motive. In the context of the paragraph, I was talking more about the cultural and decision-making environment within SpaceX and Blue; they're a lot closer to (and in many ways even freer than) the "wild west" days of old NASA, as opposed to the NASA of today, where hiring/firing/structuring/contracting are all under endless heaps of red tape that make it extremely difficult to get anything useful done. (For context, I work for a NASA contractor, initially on site at JSC within the ISS program and now remotely for the Artemis program.)
> 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.
Might as well be, it’s not the doing of a single party but it’s pretty much just become the lever of a few at this point, people simply don’t matter unless they are able and willing to pay for representation
I’m whatever about it though, will be interesting to watch crumble
Not according to Twitter files. Twitter under Dorsey and later under Agarwal was quite enthusiastic and eager about pushing the government narratives and suppressing dissent. They even deplatformed a sitting president. I get that you probably liked it back then, but let's be real here. Twitter neither was in a position to deny any requests, nor did it have any inclination to do so.
According to Dorsey, they didn't want to block Trump, they caved in to advertiser requests.
"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."
Agreed. Inequality is out of control. Let's tax regular people less, and those making hundreds of millions and billions much more. We must close the gap for the sake of the vast majority of people.
USA is turning every day more and more into a totalitarian state, the newspaper owner feel (and in truth are) obligated to get into the trump's cult or else take the risk to loose on important government contract, get lawsuit or worse.
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.
The thing is that you think this only started with Trump and that it wasn't happening with the previous Democrats. It was, you just agreed with the totalitarian state when it went your way.
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.
> 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.
Sounds rather similar to what The Economist purports to support (or at least used to) but with more of a tilt towards personal liberties. That's open to interpretation but could be pro free speech, pro gun rights, pro reproductive rights, pro LGBT.
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."
it is so, so demoralizing to see how lacking in critical thought so many of you are. i choose to hope those who leave such callous comments are stupid 20-somethings like me, but i know it isn't true.
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.
What a bizarre fixation for a national paper, the follow-on letter from Will Lewis is even more transparently fixated on the daily appearance of the "pillars" [1]. "Personal liberties" appears to be a new construction that is conspicuously different from "civil liberties", and I think the distinction really speaks to what Bezos wants here. 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.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/jef...
> "Personal liberties"
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.
> ...a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
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.
It's amazing how increasingly Orwellian things are becoming under our ever more powerful dictatorial and oligarchical benefactors. Always bringing smiles to the faces of the most willing believers.
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.
Is Substack really failing? I don't have any particular insight into the business as a whole but I do see quite a few prominent political writers on there who seem happy with their traffic and reach.
As a business they are doing decent (kick myself for not participating in one of their earlier rounds, and potentially turbocharging my career).
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.
>But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck.
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.
Yeah as a reader and occasional commenter I find Substack to be a great source for interesting and informative writing on a number of topics. I spend a decent chunk of my internet reading time on there and hope the platform thrives.
> 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.
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.'?
That's still the case. I've seen a few newsletters I follow move off the platform, one of them just a couple weeks ago. I don't like to see them go though because I think Substack is great overall, much better than competing services.
When a newsletter moves off Substack, can they take their incoming links and SEO mojo with them? If so, how does that work?
They seem to be getting muzzled less than they did on the legacy media platforms that they left to go to substack.
The Free Press is one of the biggest publications on Substack and they're a small news organization with ~25 people. It seems like Substack is doing well.
Sure it's not hosting full news rooms, but the big names on there who have gone independent seem to have a pretty sizable audience relative to their size.
They're enshittifying like medium did before them.
What liability implications are there? With section 230 there really isn't any. And even without that it's basically impossible to libel a public figure so I doubt there would be much change in terms of politics.
> What liability implications are there
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-...
Hot for HN maybe but not that hot in general. But we all know Dems have a lot of voters who demand ideological purity who will make a huge show of anger if they do something like this. The Dems have a cranky, fractious base and this contributed to their loss IMO.
We've forgotten what politics is. We think it's just about being right and having our rightness rewarded and memorialized by history.
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.
Yes I agree 100%. The Dem base has forgotten what democratic politics is. It's not the manifest destiny of moral progress into history. It's building coalitions. It's compromising with people who you deeply, fundamentally disagree with about some things but are willing to support you in others. It's about trying to get a large bloc of people to support something.
Your party can't handle no dissent. Not internally and really go to emotional temperature tamptrum if the see outsiders.
As an aside alephnerd, I really enjoy your comments because you actually think about politics as a game with objectives, strategies, and tactics. The way the game is actually played, not the way the kid who took the Political Compass Online Test and played Civ thinks politics should be. Not some sort of moral ideological sounding board. HN and a lot of online fora these days are filled with moralistic shouting and arguments.
Seriously ???? Did you buy JD Vance on "free speech" in EU ? Actually, you should get better information (and a link to the EU Commission website is nothing if you dont read or understand it... it's only the old FUD)
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
> Did you buy JD Vance on "free speech" in EU
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.
> Did you buy JD Vance on "free speech" in EU ?
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.
One example is Germany will now arrest you for insulting someone in public or online, including insulting politicians. The UK has had some questionable laws passed as well. Pockets of Europe has much weaker free speech protections than the US does, that much is for certain.
60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc
Germany sent a woman to prison for calling her rapist a pig, for a longer sentence than the rapist received.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-woman-given-harsher-senten...
From the article you posted:
> Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case.
I'm not supportive of defamation laws but clearly you (and this journalist) are sensationalizing what happened.
If this happened in America I don't think it would be an issue if a mob killed the judge and jury. Minimizing and justifying this at all should be a permanently disqualifying act. If you think that it's ok at any level, I don't want to share a country with you.
That comment could have been simply "Looks like I was misinformed. Thank you for the correction"
Everything I said was 100% correct, you (and gp) are trying to downplay Germany imprisoning a woman for speaking ill of a gang rapist who was given no jail time.
After reading a closer source (machine-translated), I apologize, especially since the issue is media literacy.
Your comment was near enough to the facts that I was wrong to be a scold.
* https://archive.ph/vml0k German newspaper
* https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57108 random English discussion of source
Thanks for backing this up with more evidence. It's a graceful move to acknowledge a mistake.
I also thought the GP was just throwing fire. But after reading more into the matter, I'm a little too disgusted to dig anymore.
This did happen, in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana when someone badmouthed the sheriff. No one killed anyone though.
> if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles
What does this mean? What does the US VP have to do with EU law?
A major reason why American social media companies flipped support from the Dems to GOP this cycle was because the EU is rolling out the DSA, and felt the Biden admin didn't do enough to push back on this.
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.
And do what exactly? Sanctions against the EU for not allowing social media poison while at the same time banning Chinese social media?
Diplomatic pressure from the US against passing the DSA. Or, if it really comes down to it, offers of local amnesty for companies that violate the DSA in the EU. There's a lot to do. The US spends a lot of money on NATO and its influence in the region is a huge lever to do a lot with.
> spends a lot of money on NATO and its influence in the region is a huge lever to do a lot
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?
> 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 ;)
The tech companies (mostly Facebook) are responsible for MAGA both times, but there's no amount of ass kissing that would have got them to do the necessary level of pro Dem moderation.
I'm far from able to understand american politics but didn't Dems get far more money in the last election than Republicans? I've read about twice as much? What would big (social media oligarchs/moguls ?) donors flipping back bring about?
That was mostly because ActBlue (the DNC's fundraising platform) is well built while GOP's WinRed is a hot piece of garbage, and donors now sidestep the GOP to create SuperPACs for Trump and Trump-affiliates directly.
What you end up seeing is the GOP raises nearly as competitive as the DNC when you add Trump PACs plus WinRed.
JD Vance harps about that to make it harder to see what he really is - fascist in the process of remove the freedom.
How does this contribute to the conversation any more than accusing him of having eyes for the furniture?
The initial claim was: "There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC."
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.
Opposition in Czech will win because current government fail almost in everything. SPOLU declared themselves as middle right coalition, but implement left politics, ie increasing taxes about 20% for freelancers in last year, keeping almost one od highest inflation in EU, funding useless projects...
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.
Well, our economy is stagnating, and the PM is an academic who looks detached from the real world.
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.
That is a least bothering aspects of opposition to me. Whats frustrate me is how people still believe in politics even though nothing much really change. Debt, taxes and inflation driven by greedy politicans will increase, uneconomical spending and socialism dependence on state rising. Most wouldn't get any penny without fundings from our taxes. Or mortgage. We have ridiculous amount of state employees (highest police members per citizen), heavy bureaucracy, 50 thousand new regulations every year. It's not sustainable both for economy and sake of mind.
> Whats frustrate me is how people still believe in politics even though nothing much really change. ... greedy politicians ...
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.
Dunno about the parents in Brno or Wroclaw. I read an article on DW with age metrics of the recent election. Guess what demographic voted the for AfD and Die Linke? < 45. Unfortunately this is the new opposition, nazis and commies.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demo...
Resistance of the top of the demographic mushroom colonising the stem can't by definition of the situation be democratic. All hail the gerontocracy.
I'm heartened to learn about Die Linke, thank you. I was afraid AfD's only real opposition was an anemic coalition of centrist political parties. Youth are rejecting the status quo, they're done with neoliberalism, for better or worse. Radical ideas are in. If the only radical ideas are on the Right, well - we know how well that worked out for Weimar Germany (or the USSR under Brezhnev.) Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson, and I fear they still won't in 2028. I'm not a Commie, but if the choice is between Nazis and Commies, I'll sing the Internationale.
(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.)
I'm a firm believer in the horseshoe theory, so I'm really not interested in a radical left or a radical right. Give me more Bidens, Harrises, Clintons and Obamas. I'll vote for them every time.
> 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.
At this point it's basically three states deciding the election (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan). Both Biden and Trump won or loss based on those three, and with a ridiculously low margin each time.
It's more than those three states, but I get your point. We need electoral college reform, and we need to uncap the house of representatives like the founders intended. Until then it's going to keep coming down to those purple states with razor thin margins, and safe red/blue states will just be used to run up the popular vote count.
Well yeah, there's North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois too. But they seem to be less likely to be the tipping point, plus AR/NV are too small to undo republican vote in MI/WI/PA which have provided 50 electors to the winner and zero to the loser for the last three elections.
How many elections do you remember and followed closely? These things shift all the time.
That's only true if the period of analysis is extremely, extremely short.
Well yeah I mentioned the last 8-9 years. But a lot of the shift already occurred with Bush: "Bush flipped 11 states that had voted Democratic in 1996: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia" (source Wikipedia); 8 of those have turned very much Republican since then.
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.
> Bidens, Harrises, Clintons and Obamas
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.
> German conservatives [...] decided to break their main campaign promise and renege on doing what they said they would do.
what kind of promise was it?
Tighter border controls.
> The problem with them is that they are all for the status quo which to the average voter means "more of the same".
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 am not discounting anything.
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.
My mistake, I took your previous comment to mean you were advocating for more radical government/parties.
> 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.
Whenever I hear "status quo" used as a blind bad thing and justifying radicalism I can't help but observe "your continued breathing" is also the status quo. That is just plain shitty logic.
> but if the choice is between Nazis and Commies, I'll sing the Internationale.
I don't understand why people give a pass to Communism when it caused an order of magnitude more suffering than Nazism.
Doubt this will hold if you adjust by number of years in power/population under control.
I'm not giving Communism a pass, I'm picking the lesser of two evils. Also, because the Nazis would have sent me to the gas chambers.
Because they were living in the West, not subject to the USSR sphere of influence, so they pretty much don't know Communism? Here's a summary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
Huh? The graph in your link shows that AfD is indeed most popular among the parents of the average Reddit user - HN skews slightly older, but still. Scoring highest among 35-44, and in general pretty similar, showing a pretty normal distribution with the mean at ~40yo.
You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
- personal liberties
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.
Didn’t the left’s lies in Hungary pave the way for Orbán’s ascent?
I get where you're coming from, because Hungary was a Communist state until 1989, but ex-MKP (Hungarian Communist Party) cadre joined Fidesz as well as MSZP.
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)
I meant Gyurcsány and the tapes.
The tapes didn't contain lies, but the harsh truth. Gyurcsány addressed the lack of performance of his government.
The public didn't want to hear that and gave supermajority to Orbán for the next decade and a half.
>> "Personal liberties"
> 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.
[0] https://fedsoc.org/case/masterpiece-cakeshop
Considering that the cake shop won their case, but still got attacked and dragged in the mud for their rights, not the best argument.
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.
I'm not here to argue about the correctness or value of the cake case. I'm just using the case as an example of rhetoric, specifically the rhetoric of "personal liberty" to mean "freedom to discriminate." The cake case became a wedge issue, but we're already seeing similar rhetoric used to dismantle the separation of church and state and enshrine government-sanctioned oppression of protected classes. That is: "if the cake shop doesn't have to serve gay people, then why should my (publicly-funded) school?" [0]
[0] https://www.aceprensa.com/english/united-states-approves-fir...
It wasn't the freedom to discriminate. I think that's the point. You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.
> You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.
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.
That is not what the supreme court found at all. In the opinion of the supreme court, they found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted in religious hostility in their evaluation of Masterpiece, and that the commission lacked consistency among similar cases. Kennedy's opinion noted that he may have been inclined to rule in favor of the Commission if it had remained religiously neutral in previous evaluations.
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.
Fair enough - I didn't know that.
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.
> They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer".
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.
The rhetoric around "personal liberty" was not used in the cake case, and was not used to justify discrimination. If the commission had been more neutral then the case, using the same arguments, could had gone the exact opposite. The cake case was ruled based on the performance of the commission in their work as a government entity. The outcome was that Masterpiece won, but the victory was not based on the merit of Masterpiece.
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.
The fact that it won is only stronger condemnation of the state of things.
You are literally saying that it is wrong to criticize and organize a boycott of a business for the moral choices it makes.
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.
It's very much like an echo of the old Wall Street Journal Opinion motto "Free Men and Free Markets".
Yeah, I mean is he in favor of breakups of monopolies, in particular his (former kinda) company? That's what free markets need to function.....
Inequality continues to rise rapidly. Everyone but the most well off living conditions continue to decline. The wealthy elite need to make stories that distract people from this problem. So they will blame immigrants and "bloated inefficient governments" for the problem. And will push anti-immigration and "personal liberty" and "more free markets" as the solution.
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.
Living standards have absolutely been rising for just about everyone, and continue to do so - for example in terms of income growth[0]. People in all income tiers have seen their incomes grow consistently, albeit not equally.
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...
> albeit not equally.
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.
This is mostly because of housing prices, not unequal distribution of income gains. If you gave everyone more money house prices would just go up more, because houses are being built far slower than the population is increasing.
We don't give everyone more money. Just the people who don't already have too much.
The people with "too much" (everyone with more than the person saying the phrase "too much", presumably) aside, giving everyone more money will mean house prices will be bidded up and rents will rise, because there is an oversupply of people vs accommodation.
Rising inequality increases asset prices as the wealthy look for more places to invest and extract rent. Gary's economics on YouTube explains this very well, with credentials.
The rich are demonstrably less discerning of every marginal dollar. They will pay more for the exact same asset than someone who is only middle class or lower. This means the rich own everything, and therefore just keep getting richer, because the US abandoned any form of redistribution.
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.
Your link does not support your claim or in fact mention living standards at all. The fact, widely evident to every American not in the upper 20%, is that your paycheck is bigger, your house is worse, your food is worse, your healthcare is worse, your life expectancy is worse, your children’s education is worse, you have less free time, you can take fewer vacations, and you can buy less of what you want.
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.
Link says the numbers are adjusted to 2023 dollars and a three person household.
I saw that, yet all the above remains true. Income, even after inflation adjustment, isn’t the same thing as living standards.
According to Wiktionary, the standard of living is "the level of income, comforts and services available to an individual, community or society."
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...
Income can grow (even inflation-adjusted, real income), while standard of living falls.
Your link shows inequality growing. There is income inequality and wealth inequality and both have been growing. Incomes rise while everything around you gets much more expensive, especially assets.
also the culture war is perfect for this, it gets people who would otherwise agree on many issues to fight over trivialities and nuances etc...
Yes - the strategy is to get the people who care about doing what’s right to fight amongst themselves.
Then the people who care only about money and power can divide and conquer.
>we need to substantially raise taxes on the rich and reduce them for everyone else
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?
Many of the problems we face stem directly from inequality itself. For example, the rich have dramatically greater say in our "democracy" due to their ability to fund politicians and lobbyists. They are above the law due to their ability to hire expensive lawyers and shield themselves through corporations. They can use the law as a weapon due to their ability to sue people who can't afford to fight back. Some of them are rich enough to avoid the consequences of destroying huge swaths of society (i.e. Musk with Twitter).
You are being just as dogmatically blind.
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.
>If people are too poor to afford food why would
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.
You just literally stated that people can be too poor to buy food on the primary market so they have to set up a secondary market in order to get food.
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.
Being poor + a natural disaster absolutely causes famines with real deaths.
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.
Why would you need to raise taxes on everyone in that scenario? That's not clear.
what level of income and/or wealth constitutes rich and how much should they be taxed?
What percent of your money comes from labor vs capital appreciation? Which is the hand that feeds you?
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.
A hard line between labour and capital seems a bit reductive. My pension is capital. I have some shares, which are capital. I also have the security of a permanent job, paid by someone else to take risks.
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.
> A hard line between labour and capital seems a bit reductive.
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?
Real estate (or more precisely, the land on which the real estate sits) is a completely unique case due to being a resource in inherently limited supply, and arguments which apply to taxing it do not necessarily apply to any other form of wealth.
> I also have the security of a permanent job, paid by someone else to take risks.
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.
Of course. But you at least got paid for your time. That's all you can hope for. Someone who owns a business might well lose all the money they ever put in. That's the risk.
Owners typically don't run a business. Those that do pay themselves a salary. If they don't run a business they are called "investors". Investors typically understand they can lose all of their investment and are in a position where if they do they are fine. This is not true of most people working. Most people working are living paycheck to paycheck. If they fail they are risking far more than an investor in the sense that their life changes. An investor on the other hand already "lost the money" when they wrote a check, and don't need it to survive.
This is a great answer, thanks!
> what level of income and/or wealth constitutes rich and how much should they be taxed?
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.
This! Serious economics papers are always about studying different progressive tax functions. Nobody cares about specific thresholds to separate "the rich" from the rest. It's a moot point because wealth is a continuous variable (approximately Pareto with tail index between 1 and 2, to be precise).
> Everyone but the most well off living conditions continue to decline.
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!
Adding to @mempko's comment, in the most recent tax filing season data available, there were tax returns of:
If we then break those into the actual groups, and numbers per group, then we find their Average Per Capita Income There are 76,794,954 making $19,936 on average. The filing thresholds are "single, under 65 = $12,950" and "head of household, under 65 = $19,400". Many of the bottom 50% of America would "barely" even qualify to file.[dead]
That's now how you measure inequality. Look here.
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.
The GINI can be measured before or after taxes. The link you shared is after--this one is used in defense of the metric. A 'before tax' version[3] is invariably used when on offense.
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...
Ok, so you agree inequality is growing and but don't recognize it as a problem. Let me ask you something, when you are buying a house, and you are competing with multi-millionaires and billionaires for the bid, who do you think will win? There are limited amount of real assets available at any given time and wealth inequality means regular people hold less of the assets each year, making them poorer. If the vast majority of people are losing wealth every year, how is that not a problem?
Not him, but I will reply on his behalf...
>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.
Don't disagree that new wealth is being created, what matters when talking about quality of life and inequality, is who are the beneficiaries of this new wealth? Is it the already wealthy? If so, that's part of the positive feedback loop to drive inequality further. More assets, Yay. Held by fewer and fewer people over time. Boo.
Yes, wealth is constantly being created, however let's look at the facts
- 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.
The new wealth is being created BY and FOR the already wealthy. That's literally what capitalism is! New wealth creation is certainly not driven by poor Steve who does not have money to start a new business or market his new IP.
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.
One simple chart to rule them all.
https://archive.is/ZFnAT
Not sure where you’re from, but here in the US, the wealthy elites love immigration and inefficient governments. Easily exploited workers and a weak government incapable of helping them is a billionaire’s dream. It’s uncanny how similar the past decade has been to the start of the Gilded Age.
> So they will blame immigrants and "bloated inefficient governments" for the problem. And will push anti-immigration and "personal liberty" and "more free markets" as the solution.
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.
What specifically did Denmark do?
They implemented tighter immigration controls, they spread the new immigrants around for better integration amongst other key changes.
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.
Immigrants are not why living standards are declining though. Yes, there are obviously logistic problems when populations grow quickly. However the real issue is inequality not immigration.
What specifically isn't working in what concerns immigration and how has the way immigration was handled in the last 20 years been a failure? Please provide specific examples.
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.
It's only the opinion section. It just seems like a pivot to a business paper, perhaps shifting to more competition with the WSJ.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=civil+libertie...
Also, doesn't this just turn WaPo into WSJ that harps on these pillars everyday? This doesn't seem like a very sound market decision either.
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...
I think it's conflating a bit two ideas. Number of outlets vs number of viewers. I feel an argument could be made for either case, selectively.
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.
CNN is not relentlessly partisan in the same way that Fox and MSNBC are. Keep pushing on that Overton window, though. It's a good hustle.
right I agree. Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly one-sided, though if you fact check the two you'll find that Fox is -heavily- the leader in misinformation. CNN has actually gotten quite a bit more centric and it's easy to spot partisan people who act like they're shills for the Democrats. Another good source is AP News and BBC .
The only host that is centric is Scott Jennings. The other hosts are clearly far left.
Like it or not, the Overton window in the US did shift last election.
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.
That’s comical considering CNN is the same network that promoted and pushed all of the Trump hoax stories. They also claimed Biden was mentally fit up until that lie was also exposed. CNN has no credibility in the news space.
> MSNBC as left leaning
Are they not in favor of Democrats? How is that left leaning?
They're leaning left from the perspective of the extreme right. To everyone else, they're just the leftmost portion of the rightist blob.
By "everyone else" you mean literal socialists and communists trying to pretend that they are still on the map and haven't been far outside of the Overton window for at least half a century. Seriously that rhetorical whine is as obvious as unironic use of "Bourgeois" and "Proletarian" framing.
This is clearly incorrect. MSNBC is pretty strongly left / progressive.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. MSNBC tends to advocate for liberal positions which, while on the left side of right wing, is still a right wing position. You don't see them advocating much for social democracy let alone more extreme forms of socialism.
If you set your 'center' at your personal position, instead of the center of the population as a whole, you get weird results.
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.
If we define left wing in terms of the population as a whole, then there is a huge portion of the population that is opposed to neo-liberal & far right positions and there are no major media organizations that represent them. That's the point that I am attempting to make.
Most people in the US have not encountered the 'left'. Democrats, do have progressive wing but in general they are center-right/right while Republicans are far-right at this point. (Even ignoring the Nazi salutes at Republican rallies).
CNN owned by TimeWarner/Discovery is also pivoting toward not publishing anything negative toward Trump.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-p...
What's an example of that pivot from CNN's website today?
From the citation
> 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.”
Okay, but what's a real world example of that happening on CNN's website today?
A real world example would f what didn’t happen? Putting your thumb on the scale is a lot more subtle.
That’s just like asking for evidence that Chinese media isn’t biased about saying anything negative about the government.
Or you could simply find plenty of criticism of Trump on CNN's website which would invalidate the concern.
By putting the thumb on the scale doesn’t mean they never say anything negative. Even Fox News will occasionally criticize Trump. It means being more careful about not being overly critical
So.. CNN is doing good, well sourced journalism?
Are you really defending CNN when I just posted citations of the boss wanting to be careful not to offend Trump?
You still haven't provided a single example that the desires of the boss are actually being reflected in the operation of CNN.
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.
https://www.tvinsider.com/1171396/cnn-trump-jim-acosta-wolf-...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/cnn-plots-bury-anchor-trump-04315...
And therefore, any argument that there is some kind of liberal bias is false (whether from Trump or Bezos). That's my point.
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).
Well, from your viewpoint, sure.
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.
The problem is that none of those stations are left leaning. At most they are centrist/liberal.
If a bunch of news outlets all share a certain viewpoint that doesn't actually help them get viewers, maybe it's just because that viewpoint reflects reality and not because of some grand conspiracy. Assuming reality is consistent, you should expect news sources to agree on most of the facts on most things, and not because of a bias towards anything other than what a "fact" is
CNN definitely isn't left leaning. Debatably even MSNBC is largely more liberal than left leaning.
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.
And American left is pretty right by European standards. The democrats as a whole would definitely fall under the right camp here. Mostly the neoliberal one.
Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America.
That was true 15 years ago - especially with Merkel/Obama/Cameron - but a lot has changed since then.
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?
Would you consider Germany's CDU/CSU to be close to the republicans in the US? I pegged them more as being Democrat's equivalents. Macron is also more of a US democrat then a republican.
Is an odd fit I would have him with Labour. In canada he would lead the NDP.
That’s tricky- I’d say the modern CSU/CDU & Macron are closer in social policy to the Democrats but economically closer to the Republicans.
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-...
> 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.
Employee ownership isn't that weird though? Most top execs get paid mostly in shares and options. Employees often have this option too. In a socialist view there would be no stock market at all.
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.
> At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip
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?
Exactly.
It's high time we stop being surprised by the seeming oblivousness/stupidity of our rich folks.
Say it with me: "Domain-Specific Knowledge."
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It was in 2020, James resigned. The opinion piece by Tom Cotton called for a overwhelming show of force against protesters.
> nationwide riots
That wasn't what was happening. Suppressing protest with soldiers - which is usually justified by dictators with the excuse of 'order' - is extreme and anti-freedom.
That was what was happening. In Minnesota, the governer and future Democratic VP candidate, Tim Walz, sent in the national guard to stop it.
The paradox of government force, and the need to manage that paradox, has been one of the foundational questions -- the foundational question to some -- of liberal philosophy since its first writers. Freedom isn't just freedom from the government, it's also freedom from others who might hurt you and destroy the place you live.
It's worth pointing out the Minneapolis police department completely abandoned the city to let burn.
supposedly idealistically opposed parties doing something that is in the sense of the argument doesn't prove the argument. Walz might very well have been just as wrong
There were riots. Every store window in my wife’s office block was broken. During the Freddie Gray riots Governor Hogan called in the Maryland national guard and it was the most popular thing he ever did: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/27/402639082...
A few smashed windows is not a riot, nor nationwide riots, nor requiring doing what Cotton advocated. Popularity is certainly not at all a reason to suppress liberty.
I witnessed some of the 'riots'; what I saw was perfectly safe except for a very small physical area - maybe spots of, very approximately, 50 sq ft - and even there you were probably safe.
There was no danger to the public, some danger to some windows. I've seen worse in team victory celebrations. I saw much worse at the Capitol, where they were beating people and some died.
Destruction to the built environment is an offense against society. 25 people were killed in the riots and there was $2 billion in property damage. My neighborhood in Baltimore never recovered after the Freddie Gray riots. Our fro-yo place had the windows smashed in and closed. The coffee shop on my wife’s office block never reopened. The harm to the public lasts long after the rioting is over.
You didn’t see worse at the capitol, because that was a riot at a government building and private sector people were not at risk.
> Destruction to the built environment is an offense against society.
If someone crashes into a streetlight, is that an offense against society? Obviously not.
> 25 people were killed in the riots and there was $2 billion in property damage.
In the entire country? And is there a source for it?
Sorry about your fro-yo and coffee. The places I know have long forgotten the 'riots'.
> private sector people were not at risk.
People died. Does it not matter because they worked for the government? How about the democracy and government of people in the private sector? I think boiling it down to property is much too convenient.
> If someone crashes into a streetlight, is that an offense against society?
If you do it on purpose, yes.
> Sorry about your fro-yo and coffee. The places I know have long forgotten the 'riots'.
There’s tons of evidence that riots lead to long term depopulation of the neighborhoods where they happened.
> Does it not matter because they worked for the government?
Yes. This is America, not Europe: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
> > If someone crashes into a streetlight, is that an offense against society?
> If you do it on purpose, yes.
Well I guess "an offense against society" is undefined, but that is an extreme reaction. There are matters of degree in everything, and those degrees are everything. The state prosecutes lots of crimes, from shoplifting to mass murder - to call them all "an offense against society" becomes meaningless.
> > Does it not matter because they worked for the government?
> Yes.
Killing people doesn't matter if those people work for the government. Wow.
>> If someone crashes into a streetlight, is that an offense against society? Obviously not.
That’s literally what it is. That’s why the court case is styled State/Commonwealth/People v. Streetlightcrasher. You can quibble about whether the government “is” society but that argument makes you sound like a fringe libertarian.
I think we are getting into a philosophical debate of literalism. Other than that, nobody would call it "an offense against society".
It sounds like you don’t understand what the word “offense” means. The literal meaning of offense is a crime. If you crash into a street light and damage it (purposely, probably also negligently) then it is literally an offense against society.
offense: an illegal act; a crime
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/offen...
That's what I meant by literalism.
Can you really make these claims when streamers for months were showing people looting? What about chop? What about that federal courthouse in Portland?
My city had 100s of stores ransacked with groups of cars with 100s of people all working together. Say what you want about opportunists - riots happened.
> chop
?
> federal courthouse in Portland
What about it? Did it burn down? How many were injured?
> streamers for months were showing people looting
It's interesting that people criticize the professional news media, then believe whatever they see on social media.
> riots happened
I expect some did, depending on the definition of riot, but that's not 'nationwide rioting' and a call to use the military to suppress the great majority of peaceful protests.
There was rioting in many major cities and it was absolutely appropriate to call in the national guard to put a stop to it. My family didn’t leave Bangladesh to put up with third-world behavior like that.
Protest isn't third-world behavior, and part of being in the US is not restricting other people's liberties - regardless of your personal preferences and outrage.
If they are harming others or causing significant material damage, that's another story, but even that is a matter of degree (especially the latter).
That was bad. This is also bad.
No it’s not. Riots are bad. Free markets are good.
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Hell, look at how grey the parent comment is.
Getting downvoted for stating something blatantly false isn’t censorship.
Are you saying those topics were covered fairly and honestly by legacy media but also including Twitter(before it became X) and Facebook? Maddow still pretends that all of the former were false stories and Russian disinformation when it’s been established the contrary was true. Additionally USaid is now known to have assisted with the actual disinformation
Implying any publication with a financier/owner and an editorial staff doesn't always and necessarily present the views of those who control it...?
Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different when it was Bezos' benefit to placate the progressives?
> doesn't always and necessarily present the views of those who control it...?
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".
Imagine believing that, not only after living past age 5 where you start to develop a complex model of reality beyond "what seems simple and straightforward is true", but after growing into full adulthood and recognizing what is widely known to be profitable in "news"—which is selling a narrative to a target audience.
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.
Bezos would like to go back to the original draft of the Declaration of Independence about the pursuit of property.
What do you mean by this in practice?
I thought it was that way in original Lockean formulation but basically that’s what materialist Bezos seems to care about. Maybe if you asked him about freedom from being hacked by Saudis he might have a different approach.
I personally read it as a 'wants slaves back' insult/accusation.
Yes that is also included.
> "Personal liberties" appears to be a new construction that is conspicuously different from "civil liberties"
What have Bezos or Lewis said that indicate 'personal liberties' differ from 'civil liberties'? I don't see it in the cited article.
Civil liberties are generally liberties that are explicitly guaranteed, e.g. in a constitution, while personal liberties are generally anything that's not explicitly banned, so there's a definite shift of emphasis.
> personal liberties are generally anything that's not explicitly banned
I haven't heard that. Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties?
> 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."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
That's interesting. I didn't know how it was being used.
All you did was link to the wikipedia article on dog whistling. Do you have a source that actually substantiates your claim about the phrase "personal liberties"?
If he meant it to be identical to "civil liberties", why didn't he just say that? Using a less common term seems like it would have to be intentional, so he must have meant _something_ by it.
I wonder if there is some sort of breach of fiduciary duty or securities fraud claim here.
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.
Jeff Bezos completely owns the Washington Post - there aren't any external shareholders that could be harmed, or are owed a fiduciary duty.
Ah, my bad, I thought it was public and he had the majority.
You used some big terms that I just had to take a cursory glance at to get the meaning of but it sounds like if what you’re describing ever picked up steam it would set an ill precedent and benefit the spirit of polarization that I think you’re trying to oppose.
This is a very big change at the Post. For decades they have dutifully aired competing perspectives from the political left and right as well as major international players of different stripes. Now all of that will end. It seems future op-eds will be written only by a carefully curated pool of sanitized Post staff.
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.]
> For decades they have dutifully aired competing perspectives from the political left and right as well as major international players of different stripes.
I'd say they were clearly on the left since ~2017, but had other perspectives as well.
Arguably any main newspaper of a city of any size would obviously align with the beliefs of the residents of said city.
How does that explain the NYT and WSJ (and NY Post) in the same city? The current LA Times?
It doesn't. The above proposition is demonstrably untrue. Journalists in general are left-leaning.
Is that still true? Fox, WSJ, Politico, Washington Post etc. - so many are taking on conservativism. Even 'moderate liberals' are becoming 'conservative-lite', to show how open minded they are and bring people together.
NY Times the main newspaper and it mostly aligns with the left. Not sure what’s confusing about that. The others aren’t the main newspaper of that city.
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?
> NY Times the main newspaper and it mostly aligns with the left. Not sure what’s confusing about that. The others aren’t the main newspaper of that city.
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.
Yo. Ask any person what is the main newspaper of Nyc and I bet they don’t say “Ny Post” or “Wall Street Journal”. It is a true observation. Now go to Ricketsville, Nebraska and ask if their newspaper aligns with their political views. I bet it does.
By your own admission of the LA Times this was a recent shift, so it was true before.
> Ask any person what is the main newspaper of Nyc and I bet they don’t say “Ny Post” or “Wall Street Journal”.
In NYC that's probably so, but only if you force them to pick only one.
That’s my point, most people in the US naturally tie 1 city to 1 newspaper even though there may be multiple. That newspaper is usually representative of the view points of the majority of the population.
At this point if you have any commitment to the truth, you will have a "leftist" bias.
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].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9yx7e13ryo
I guarantee you the vast majority of people reading this will end up paying more taxes under whatever plan the Republicans pass.
Yep, and they still approve of it. Literally brainwashed.
> At this point if you have any commitment to the truth, you will have a "leftist" bias.
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.
Reality is independent of experience and opinions - that's the point. 'Leftist' opinions match reality better - e.g., climate change, Ukraine, vaccines, crime, etc. etc.
Reality means different things to each side. It reminds me of the old "Reality-based community[1]" quote by an aide to the G.W. Bush administration, widely attributed to senior advisor Karl Rove:
This school of thought is still alive and kicking among Republicans: Reality is what we conjure up as we do and say things--it's not some concrete, discernible thing that can be observed.1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
That resonates with Kellyane Conway's "alternative facts" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts?wprov=sfla1
Notice I put leftist in quotes, at this point it's more about how the right is fully divorced from reality than anything related to the left.
Reread the examples I gave and defend them, or show me some as egregious as these ones coming from Biden or Harris.
The idea of competing perspectives from the political left and right is majorly under attack. In 2020, the NYT fired the editor who oversaw the opinion page for publishing the perspective of an influential senator who had the ear of the president. WaPo had similar internal debates, with many staff members loudly objecting to the publishing of perspectives from the political right. There's an school of thought that says when you can't win, you should try to lose as painlessly as possible. This change looks a lot like that.
> 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).
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.
That's what he says, but most of his announcement is obvious falsehoods and propaganda. Why should we trust him? Obviously he intends to use his power to get what he wants, without regard to anyone else's perspectives.
Note that they rejected an advertisement criticising Elon Musk, for example. That's not a news article, but it definitely looks biased.
Changing strategy was inevitable. They lost 90% of readers between 2021 and 2024. It would be a dereliction of duty for the owner of the company to continue business as usual in such conditions.
They lost most of those readers due to an alarming shift rightward in tone and coverage. Not Fox News right but certainly further right than they have historically been.
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.
Indeed, with his wealth the financial success of the paper is irrelevant.
Just as with Musk and Twitter, controlling the narrative and pushing an agenda is worth far more than any balance sheets could show.
Right wing news is popular in America, I don’t think this could be the main reason why they had such steep declines.
If you start out being popular among people who prefer one approach to reporting and opinion, and unpopular among people who prefer something entirely different, and then you incrementally move away from what you used to do, at the same time as the second group of people have plenty of other options to choose from ... this is precisely what you'd expect.
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.
WaPo dropped 10% of its subscriber base in just the one week after the endorsement debacle in October. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/29/washington-pos...
It could be. If their reputation changed slower than their content.
Right wing media is popular. Right wing news is a niche. See the WSJ and National Review, now WaPo. Not much other news.
for decades they have been a mouthpiece for the CIA and the deep state. Bezos is clearing house.
It looks like a bunch of billionaires are establishing exactly what they purport to end, cresting that swamp they said they would dry. Makes you wonder how much of those allegations were true in the first place.
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I had gotten the impression we weren’t supposed to denigrate each other as animals in this community.
not my best comment, but I can't delete it now.
> This is a very big change at the Post. For decades they have dutifully aired competing perspectives from the political left and right as well as major international players of different stripes
We must've read two different WaPos.
It is just Bezos corp speak way of saying he fired him without sounding negative.
It is also Bezos corp speak for “Who wouldn’t want to be a dog on my lap? I’ve got room.”
Now I’m imagining that basset hound clown car video where they all pile out of one doghouse but on his lap.
>This is how people surround themselves with "yes men" >But this always results in the death of a business
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!
I think you're conflating a different issue and making mole hills out of mountains.
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.
Aren't we talking about op/ed here? I'm not a newspaper reader, but always assumed op/ed of any publication was a dumpster fire of biased opinions.
A written variant of a FoxNews talking head telling viewers how/what to think about $topic...
Op-eds aren't supposed to be that way, though yes many have become that. They are supposed to be experts opining about things related to their expertise. Such as a well known computer scientist opining about the field of computer science. This is useful communication to the general public and plays a valuable role in news.
There's a million shades of grey. The bad actors only want you to see black and white
This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media.
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.
The FCC's Fairness Doctrine only ever applied to broadcast radio and television, and was justified based on the limited supply of spectrum. It never applied to other types of media for which supply and distribution is effectively unlimited. Anyone can make a movie or build a new social media app. Traditional broadcast is kind of dying; younger people almost never consume OTA broadcast radio or TV.
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> they’re the problem because they vote
You may want to rephrase that.
"democracy is sacred and there is no higher value"
and
"people who vote poorly shouldnt be allowed to vote"
are said so often, and so closely together, that I think people just actively lie to themselves about what democracy is. If you want a smaller group of elite educated people doing the decision making, you're looking for a republic.
A functioning democracy requires competent participants, how is this controversial? Otherwise we might as well just have RNG decide.
In the United States tests of competency were historically used to prevent certain racial groups from casting the ballot. They were explicitly banned by the Voting Rights Act in 1965, rightfully so. It's far too easy to abuse.
No one said equity was going be easy. Sometime you have to do the hard thing now to solve the problem in the long term.
Not saying poll taxes or tests are the solution, but a much tougher standard for running for office could be, such as requiring a PhD to hold office - literally making the highest intelligence a requirement. There are also ways to eliminate corruption and other negatives in a system.
But we have to decide what we value first.
Holding a PhD has only a very loose correlation with intelligence. And there's no evidence that the most intelligent people make better political decisions. They tend to be overconfident.
It's not particularly controversial. Also, my definition of "competent" is correct.
Isn’t the US a democratic republic in practice?
There's nothing interesting about the "republic" part.
All democracies have something things that make impossible-to-hard for majoritarian legislating to affect. The US is no different in that respect, other than the precise things that are deemed out of reach of the majority, and how hard it is to change that.
Yes, but if you think some vast swath of voters should be able to participate in the election of representatives, you're ditching the democratic part.
The US is a federal representative loosely-democratic (but some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others) republic in theory, and a rough plutocracy in practice.
Greater structural barriers to the franchise makes it less of any kind of democratic anything even in theory.
Direct Democracy was always a bad idea, because unqualified people exert influence. It’s why we are a Republic. The only influence one needs in government is through a representative. That’s it. You don’t need a representative to execute the laws. Why does the public even vote for a President? The President isn’t supposed to represent the public. That’s the job of the literal Representative. Senators shouldn’t represent the public as well.
The founding fathers had it right when they created an electoral college that wasn’t decided by a popular vote. The electoral college should be a bunch of PhDs, of any field, selected by sortition. That’s it. That’s how you get smart people to design government.
Let's be honest. He nailed on the head the main drawback of democracy. That the wrong people also get to vote. And the horror - even win elections and get their way sometimes.
What he missed is that everyone has different ideas about who exactly the wrong people are.
Democracy is at least partially a social "technology" for avoiding civil wars. You have to let the "wrong" people win elections occasionally. If they ever become convinced that winning elections is impossible then they'll fall back to violence to get their way.
This is a general observation about human societies, not a dig at any specific US political faction.
> If they ever become convinced that winning elections is impossible then they'll fall back to violence to get their way
Unfortunately, in reality, they believe the election is rigged, win the election, and still believe that elections are rigged so next time they don't win, its definitely rigged.
just like driver’s license there should be an age limit to voting rights. few question why you have to be 18 to vote. why 18? today’s 14-year olds are on average infinitely more mature than 14 year olds in say 1950. if someone was to say you are voter when you start high school half of this country would go batshit crazy. a different half would bark if we put an upper limit on voting rights but both make sense. take brexit for example - this was a decision that affect the FUTURE of UK. why would anyone sane say “lets have bunch of 80 year olds who are one foot in the grave make this decision for the people that will have to spend their entire lives with the consequences of that decision…” it is same for any election, elections matter and elections have consequences and old people shouldn’t be involved in making these decisions :)
People should be able to have a childhood free from the hostile information environment of the politicised world. I'm all for youth enfranchisement, but we need to ensure it doesn't come at the expense of childhood.
That said, kids not having a say in things that directly affect them… I can't think of any arguments against kids getting to vote on "think of the children" measures.
We didn’t miss that.
Supposedly, there were almost equal proportions of votes for Trump across all ages.
https://apnews.com/article/election-harris-trump-women-latin...
Zero chance of that happening unfortunately. The current Supreme Court would consider restrictions on corporate media ownership a violation of the first amendment, much like restrictions against unlimited campaign donations and restrictions on discriminating against non-Christians.
Looks like the old "they're a private company, they can do what they want" chestnut is coming back around. Whoever could possibly have foreseen this?
> This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media.
What mega corporation is the Washington Post part of?
Jeff Bezos himself could be considered a mega-corporation.
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.
It puts him in the top half of countries, just below Croatia, by national net wealth.
Amazon, yes?
Apparently there are a lot of people confused about this, but no, Amazon does not have ownership over the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos bought it with his own personal funds using an LLC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#The_Washington_Post
And surely there is no relation between Bezos and Amazon so the part about "This is what we get allowing mega-corporations control our media" is obviously false.
It is literally false in this case, yes. The corporation has no control over WaPo, even though the same individual has some control over both.
Some control?
This is a practically useless distinction.
But a pedantically, technically accurate one, just on brand for this site!
The distinction is not wholly useless, since it provides a frame whereby we can interpret this as evidence that the corporate veil is fictive, and that the "evil corporation" problem is actually caused by evil individuals.
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.
> The corporation has no control over WaPo, even though the same individual has some control over both.
And I'm sure Jeff Bezos is so pure he'd never use his power over WaPo to help Amazon!/s
I think people struggle with the fact that it's not a legally so. However, per the article, Bezos is exerting power over WP because Amazon lost contracts to Microsoft (due to WP being critical of Trump). Their balance sheets may not be aligned, but their interests are.
And if Bezos toes the line and does things that Trump likes, then Amazon may benefit.
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.
Bezos fully owns WaPo personally. It is not under Amazon
The answer is not giving the government even more power to decide whether what is published is “fair”.
if the Fairness Doctrine was implemented for the Internet and you had a Democrat leaning political blog you would have to give equal time/space to MAGA narratives on your site. That's what you want?
I think if you are going to claim fair coverage, then yes. If you are going to openly say you are for one side or the other, then okay. Having a tag line like "fair and balanced" without the balance or being fair then no.
The fairness doctrine does not require equal time. It requires you to dedicate some amount of time to controversial topics, and then give some amount of time to opposing parties within those topics.
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.
Or you could do what Ezra Klein did a couple of days ago and get a mentally ummm not all there member of the other side and let them free associate the entire interview.
Either way, it's not compatible with the First Amendment. Come up with something else to try.
The Fairness Doctrine was never found incompatible with the First Amendment. It was removed by a politicized FCC. The topic was taken up by the Supreme Court and they did not find that it violated the constitution, quite the opposite actually.
When applied to broadcasters using licensed public resources under Federal jurisdiction, yes. When applied to privately-operated Internet sites that readers have to go out of their way to access, no.
Not just "no," or "Hell, no," but fuck no.
If that's what it takes to get 50% of the US to not be forced fed only one side by dipshits. Yup.
The biggest issue with US media is allowing for opinion to be mixed with news. Essentially everything is opnion, everything is biased in some way. If you look at the other side of the pond you have news outlets reporting news without stating opinion, and highlighting multiple view points. Then there are separate talkshows where people around a table discuss news and other actualities. Doesn’t mean there isn’t bias in the news outlets, because they can still choose not to report on something - but generally it is fairly in the middle.
Ownership limits are only effective in a pre cable / internet world. Now one media company located anywhere can be seen by customers everywhere. So what do you do? You can't have the government tell people what to watch. If you try to restrict a company to broadcast on only one channel e.g. radio / social media / streaming it's a clear violation of freedom of the press.
This is strikingly ignorant of how the fairness doctrine was used in practice historically, like for example Nixon using it to suppress dissent about the Vietnam War by threatening networks airing coverage he didn't like.
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?
It also, more importantly, basically required you to platform a crazy person to argue for a side if there was no rational or reasonable take for that side.
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"
The funny thing about Fox News to me is that it’s such a bogey man in some crowds, but they only get about 3 million viewers on their best days.
The primary benefit of taxing the shit out of billionaires is not actually the revenue it produces, but the fact that it means that we don't have billionaires.
"People with more money than God own and influence media" has historically not been a recipe for social stability.
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At least he's honest about it.
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
This line of thought really encapsulates the problems with purist free markets. What happens if someone who doesn't believe in those ideals uses the free market to simply buy up news media and push the opposite narrative? Regulated media doesn't produce perfect outcomes, but it does produce better ones.
The thing is, there really is no such thing as a "free market" as most who are in love with the term envision
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
> Replace "free market" with "competitive market"—what most people actually want when they talk about free markets
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).
The problem with competitive market ideals is that money is a positive feedback loop. The more money you have, the more you set the rules, the more money you get, ad finitum until eventual money singularity.
Capitalism is useful, like fire is useful. You just need to be careful to keep your fire under control and doing useful things.
Yes and part of it being a _free_ market is that you don't have to trade with these people.
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.
Yes, everyone has their own agenda. The idea of the thing is pretty straightforward though; Companies succeed or fail on the merits of their product. The government shouldn't seek to give undue advantage except insofar as to incentivize things we as a society care about (eg. carbon taxes). Prices are the arbiter of resource allocation, and should almost never be controlled or subsidised.
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.
> Regulated media doesn't produce perfect outcomes, but it does produce better ones.
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?
Pretty simple: the quality of news media in the U.S. was better prior to the Reagan admin which deregulated it.
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 disagree. The quality of news media is massively better today. I have access to much more and higher quality information than I would have in the 80s. E.g. I was able to watch live combat footage of the war in Ukraine right as it happened. I have access to peer reviewed research just with the click of a button. I can discuss the news with other people right here on HN. A highly regulated media oligopoly with massive barriers to entry is a terrible system compared to what we have today.
> E.g. I was able to watch live combat footage of the war in Ukraine right as it happened.
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.
> Telegram and Reddit are not high quality media...
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).
Reddit is a platform that is openly and intentionally opening itself up to astroturfing. https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...
Matter of fact the owners of the platform take part in astroturfing as a part of day to day business — see the moderation takeover.
They're a media company; that is what they do. The difference is that Reddit is a lot more transparent about what is going on. The real question is what media channels do you believe are not publishing opinions in exchange for money or favours? Because most of them would be. There is no way the coverage of US politics is organic in the major corporations; it is too uniformly unhinged.
Reddit having flaws doesn't make it low quality. The baseline for media companies is well below sea level.
1. Reddit is NOT open about media manipulation. At all. And, no offense, but the idea that even most people can get quality news from that website is ridiculous. For example, the narratives around the reality of the situation on the Ukrainian frontlines are completely and totally wrong on that site. I had to go to Ukrainian media and military sources through Substack and elsewhere to get a non-propagandized sense of things. If you got your news from Reddit, you’d be completely and totally wrong. And I see this in the real world all the time: woefully misinformed people literally repeating word for word arguments they read on Reddit instead of distilling information from a myriad of reliable sources into independent and realistic viewpoints.
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.
> 1. Reddit is NOT open about media manipulation. At all...
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...
Not OP but, the political polarization, governmental dysfunction, and eventually the rise of an extremist right wing government can be at least partially attributed to the deregulation of media - specifically the repeal of the fairness doctrine which requires that public broadcasters air both sides on controversial topics of public importance. This was done in the vain of deregulation, but if we want a “free market” for media, why not deregulate the air waves? May the most powerful transmitter win …
https://fair.org/extra/the-fairness-doctrine/
Thanks for providing an actual argument!
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-...
Yeah, it's clearly the formation of the Tea Party that was the trigger for severe change. But the mechanism through which the Tea Party ideology was disseminated was.. Fox News and conservative radio, which could not have existed in the same state before the Reagan era.
All the other circumstances. Your hypothetical is the exception proving the rule.
And again I ask: why is my hypothetical the exception proving the rule while their hypothetical is sufficient to prove that they're right?
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 haven't argued anything more substantive the other way. I'm speaking colloquially here, if you want a robust argument, you're not going to find it from me right now. This is just a conversation, not a dissertation. If you don't want to engage in it, that's fine. But let's not overdramatize what is happening here right now, which is a basic conversation about intuitions and principles.
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.
> You haven't argued anything more substantive the other way.
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.
>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!
When has that ever happened? The only time someone can control all the media is if the market is highly regulated. Otherwise I can literally go and start up a newsletter pushing free market views and it'll eventually overtake the competition if they persist in being stupid and advancing stupid views.
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.
"The only time someone can control all the media is if the market is highly regulated."
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.
> 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.
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?
Not the person you’re replying to, but there used to be regulations limiting ownership of radio & TV stations in the US. When these regulations were lifted in the 1990s, it resulted in one company (Clear Channel) going on just such a buying spree.
Did they buy all the media? A company going on a buying spree doesn't say much about how big they got.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHeartMedia makes it sound like this was any old media company and ended up going bankrupt.
Post-soviet Russia. The U.S. gave oligarchs the billions to do it too!
How can you buy all the media when anybody who wants to can come along and start new media?
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.
Can someone buy up every single server so that no one can publish anything on the web?
> Otherwise I can literally go and start up a newsletter pushing free market views and it'll eventually overtake the competition if they persist in being stupid and advancing stupid views.
...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.
So the Fox was forced to respond to competitive pressure from a new entrant. Companies are fighting over customers. Sounds like exactly how a competitive free market is supposed to function.
The person I was replying to seemed to think that the competitive free market would push news organizations away from "being stupid and advancing stupid news".
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
That competition resulted in a shift in ideology -- not based on principles but on $$$. That's not good.
Incredible.
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>What happens if someone who doesn't believe in those ideals uses the free market to simply buy up news media and push the opposite narrative?
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.
When he killed the Harris endorsement, that sent a stronger signal than endorsing her.
Hard to take calls for endorsing the free market seriously from someone so clearly trying to form a monopoly on online shopping.
This should be a top level comment.
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!).
I'm going to be honest; How is Amazon seeking to do this? Are they suppressing other online competitors? I'm sure they buy lots of competition, but that doesn't stop someone else from setting up shop.
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)
One example of market power abuse they engage in is requiring the price listed on their website to be the lowest offer that a merchant can list. You can't list a product on their page and then have a discount for that product on your own page.
Shopify runs on AWS so if Amazon is trying to take control of all online shopping they sure are awful at doing so. They actively enable some huge number of non-amazon online retailers to exist.
Creating a monopoly is the end goal of free markets?
Seeing Bezos advocate for free markers is a massive dissonance, until I remind myself that he hasn't said what they should be free of. Bezos would like to be free to run competition out of town, force brutal terms on suppliers, all that sort of thing.
“Free markets mean the best product always wins out. It just so happens my subsidiaries make the best product in all markets. Read about why in the Washington Post.” - Bezos, probably
When he says "free markets," what he means is "unrestrained oligarchy."
Free from anything that stops him extracting all surplus value from consumers and suppliers both.
Bah. This is like saying "I support the idea of DOGE but am opposed to their methods".
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.
tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push, the same thing applies even to newspapers in Germany. You can clearly see that all of them do favor a certain view. Yes some of them look more open to alternative views, but they still favor something.
>tbf most newspapers have a certain agenda to push
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.
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I feel like every time I have a conversation with someone who believes in free markets, it becomes clear that they've confused the ideas of free markets and perfect competition.
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.
> 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
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
Free market where Big tech thrives and wants even fewer regulation, does seem to be dirty indeed. Just speaking of the IT field where I do know a thing or two, without regulations, none of these companies would even disclose that they have had a data breach.
It depends on how 'free markets' and 'personal liberties' are defined, but as Bezos is adopting the nationalist propaganda, we might expect the definition used by others who adopt that tone, that the wealthy elite should have unlimited freedom.
That position is widely supported in the professional news media, including the Wall Street Journal.
Bezos doesn't want free markets, he wants "great for AWS and Amazon" markets.
The idea of a free market should be dirty. Free markets are not a good thing for anyone but select capitalists. People benefit from regulated markets, where excesses and foul play are curbed for the public benefit. Bezos is advocating for free market ideas because he wants to run a monopoly, so he benefits directly from this position. For him it’s not idealism but pragmatism. For us it’s a nightmare position that will end in higher prices, worse service, worse working conditions, and less competition.
Is he honest about it? Based on his alignment with the Trump administration, "personal liberties and free markets" sounds like some heavy doublespeak to me. Is the paper going to be writing more articles about the othering of trans people and suppression of immigrant rights[1]? Somehow I doubt it.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/post/191606/tom-homan-ocasio-cortez-...
Yeah. I’d bet the farm on the % of so-called ‘libertarians’ not wanting you to change your gender marker as being…quite high. Let alone crony capitalists.
> Truth be told, it does feel like free markets have become a bit of a dirty word in both political realms recently;
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.
It depends.
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.
The left has a progressive segment that is very vocal online. I have yet to see that translate into much power or influence in national politics.
If you liked "Books, but from the Internet" you'll love this genius founder's latest invention: The Cato Institute Blog but You Have To Pay for It
Nah, the Cato Institute Blog has articles worth reading and, in general, a pragmatic and nuanced take on most issues.
I have been a Post subscriber (in a Post-subscribing household) for almost fifty years, and my consumption of the opinion pages has gradual declined over that period. I just wish the news content was back to what it once was.
> I just wish the news content was back to what it once was.
Back to when? 1970s?
Before the classified advertising all disappeared to the Internet. In the 1990s, the Post had a larger newsroom, and published more news. Now the Metro section has fewer but larger articles, often enough not really news in the old sense.
I'm so glad that he promised that his ownership would never affect the editorial decisions...
Interesting - do you happen to know a citation?
Mathias Döpfner, head of Axel Springer, and at least some of its publications, such as Politico, now push the right wing propaganda.
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...
I don't have one handy but when he first bought it and got pushback about concern that he would be pushing his liberal agenda (ironically) that was his response.
Best I can find is “But the key thing I hope people will take away from this is that the values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.” https://archive.is/BpcDZ
He might claim otherwise but hard to argue that the values aren’t changing when the opinion editor is resigning.
I have always felt that the elite control the big news organizations. Hearst, Bezos, all of them are the wealthy. They gobble up smaller news organizations and align each with their editorial preference. Bezos is the new Hearst.
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.
We have something like this in Australia.
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.
Very much like the Washington Post opinion section was, just for the left
WaPo was more establishment than left. You were not seeing pro-Palestine editorials from WaPo, rather quite the contrary.
A large contingent of the US has been tricked into thinking that the centre-right establishment is somehow left wing...
We've been saying for a while that "Democracy dies in darkness" wasn't just a motto, but a business plan. This is just accelerating it and making it explicit.
John Swinton, 1883:
> 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.
There seems to be a lot of political circles wanting to return to the late 1800s. I'm personally not one of them.
> We are intellectual prostitutes.
Hey hey that is a bit on the nose for HN
Venmo me for a full length discourse, Melville and Hawthorne are extra.
this is complaining about the state of nature dressed as political commentary. perhaps Mr Swinton could show an example of a society that would satisfy his definitions, but he cannot, because his complaint amounts to the fact that the world is flawed and no system is a utopia.
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.
Bezos isn't Goebbels, but he did just confirm two things: 1. He has confirmed that he exerts some editorial control 2. He intends to exert more of it.
If that wasn’t clear already when he suppressed the Kamala backing months ago.
This, and reading through many of the comments on this thread, remind me of Politico's excellent article (from 2017) on the subject of how media evolved into what it was then (and what it is today). Until I read this article I did not understand how we got here.
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.
Things in the US are getting scarier and scarier every day that passes.
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...
Could you give us a link to the article?
I don't think it's unusual for an owner to exert influence over the opinion section. Bezos is a hypocrite for saying he wouldn't take a heavy hand with the paper when he bought it, and for pretending now that he's doing this for any other reason than not being willing to forego political favors. He sucks, and can't be trusted. But that's also always been true of the opinion sections of newspapers, which in the end are just a wordier version of the poorly-reasoned hot takes you can get for free just by reading this comment.
In this issue: a lecture on individual liberty from a supporter of the party that wants to ban abortion nationally.
you have no freedom of speech to publish opinions opposing (as decided by me) freedom of speech.
That's how freedom of speech works. It is free from government persecution.
[dead]
Bezos's letter was nice but a little wordy, I had chatgpt give me an executive summary:
> Billionaire intends to turn popular newspaper into personal propaganda outlet.
There is nothing more Bezos than Bezos expecting people to still pay, in order to read his propaganda.
Hah, the whiplash must be tremendous for some of the employees, and even for some of the customers.
It'll be very interesting to see how both employees and customers react and evolve over the next few years.
I cancelled my subscription and moved on with my life. I get my dose of economic centrism from the Economist.
Same with leaving the shithole that is "X," but slightly less inconvenient.
Not WaPo, but chuckr is back at Meta because of the political shift. Chuckr is well-known for being a firearm enthusiast.
Wow, he's gonna get a shock. Meta is a very different place than FB was.
Bezos: Media's responsibility is to bootlick the boss.
How do you get to be a billionaire and still need people to coddle your ego?
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.
Easy, he can't crave money anymore, so he craves feeding his ego.
Or he just wants to make the world a better place, and you don't see eye to eye on the best way to make that happen?
Not funny.
Good example of how ideology (and motivated reasoning) really clouds people's thinking.
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.
You are wrong here. You can't have free markets without personal liberty.
In the same way, personal liberties aren't a thing if are are unable to establish your own business
I'm gonna ignore the first part because I've found on the internet people don't agree on what "free markets" mean.
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.
You're misunderstanding or strawmanning. You don't need a business to be free, obviously, and no not everyone that's free has a business (???). But that's different from being forbidden from making one.
The concept of a business can only exist within the context of a myriad of laws (property law, contract law, etc) all of which require violent enforcement or the threat thereof, ie reduction in personal liberty.
> You can't have free markets without personal liberty
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.
You are right and are being down voted because ideology clouds people's judgement.
Don't look at what he says but rather what he does - that is, at how he says it, because that is how the Washington Post will say things going forward:
* 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 an outsider’s perspective it’s hard see any difference in the viewpoints of the NYT, WaPo and the WSJ.
It's very interesting to see Tech from the mid 90s all the way to today.
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.
That's a lot of mythologising.
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.
>Google was created with the help of NSF and MDDS/CIA grants etc.
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.
Yea, China would never pick on minorities! China #1!!
Blame the tech workers who have been so dazzled by dollar signs that they no longer look at their moral compasses. I belong in this group as well.
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.
Do you not realize you've been programmed to look for a specific group to blame instead of thinking?
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.
Then stop belonging to that group. Today.
I'm quite a fan of the theory that we can culturally blame the Big Bang Theory TV show for a lot of this: https://www.tiktok.com/@hasandpiker/video/747250130374315550...
Ya I find it interesting I feel like the nerds have been pushed aside by the mainstream. Social networks for instance were a lot better when it was just nerds.
Nerds were required on the early internet for community building - to run IRC and TS and phpBB. These days everyone has these tools. But as with the media monopoly dying, this is not a strictly better or worse thing, it's just different. And generally I like it when we get rid of gatekeeping.
The hot people are now in charge, just like everywhere else.
Nerds wield potentially vast collective bargaining power if we refused to contribute to the systems that exploit our expertise and labor for the benefit of the ownership class. We could simply drop out and support one another with all our surplus time. Easier said than done, of course, but at this point I have to dream of bold alternatives to keep myself sane. The status quo and its present trajectory are just too unthinkably broken to have faith in incrementalism while the accelerationists are punishing us for our complacency in replacing rotted, unsustainable systems.
Good luck with that, i'm gonna indulge in various vices to dull the cognitive dissonance and work in the machine to feed my kids.
Mid 90s: Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, ... wasn't much different. Just fewer people online.
From anti-establishment hacker to omnipresent AI surveillance enabler. Yay!
> "Bezos also made clear that alternate views will not appear on the pages."
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.
> 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.
Please refresh my memory as to when "oligarch Hillary" was owner, and held control of, a large media company or social media network.
That was close to the question many were asking when her remarks broke: "She said 'we' lose control.....who is 'we'?" Nobody on HN seems interested in digging deeper on that. It's only when the despicable shady scumbags are aligned with Trump that it becomes a problem.
Once you screw up there is a temptation to screw up more and more in the same way ....
Remember the days when he had just bought the paper and said: "No I have nothing to do with it, they just needed the money", me neither, such silly things I say...
My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" is effectively a safe refuge from having to directly confront the reality of what's happening right now.
> My opinion is that "personal liberties and free markets" effectively steers the Post away from engaging with issues of immediate concern.
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.
Exactly. It allows him to speak in tongues while the right wing carries on with its agenda.
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.
Bezos didn’t get where he is from just the free market. He got here because he was fortunate enough to have parents who could give him a $250k seed round.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-p...
He was a finance guy during the tech boom. He could have gotten the capital somewhere else.
And yet he didn't....
This is more a bootstraps vs. handouts argument not free-market vs non free-market
As someone who actually values freedom consistently and not depending on the whims of money. This 180 from the tech main characters that just yesterday would've been pushing the most aggressive of censorships is so laughable.
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.
The tech main characters discovered that there’s not that much money in honor. But manipulating the masses could be a very profitable venture
hey, jeff, you shouldn't say this aloud
I assumed owning a newspaper is some sort of billionaire trophy. I haven't read newspaper in like 30 years and I can't imagine why I ever would in the future. Same goes for the digital properties. If you are actually paying attention to any particular issue it's pretty clear how nonsensical most reporting is. How badly do you need to be misinformed?
It's basically a "Pig Butchering" scam. Get people to give you a little time and attention, and then reward them with whatever they're looking for. Then after you've gotten as much trust as you're going to get (fattened the pig), change the game to extract as much value as you can from them (butcher the pig), regardless of any long-term bridge-burning.
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.
Another indicator that the time of capitalism is over and the time of techno-feudalism has begun. All hail the algorithm, may it be satisfied.
Things are moving fast and breaking.
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.
> Maybe woke went too far
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.
"Maybe woke went too far ..."
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...
Part of the problem is that "the left" is not a monolith. I regularly interact with a part of the left who sincerely believe both that "trans rights are human rights" is the key, defining issue of the decade and that critical race theory absolutely should be taught in schools.
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.
I have a hard time believing that 5% of people knew what CRT was before the right made it an issue and redefined it.
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.
The fact that you refer to CRT as a dirty word that shouldn't be taught in schools is puzzling to me. Covering how slavery has affected our country seems like a no brainer thing to include in a curriculum.
Case in point.
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.
> Case in point
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 right didn't make this stuff up".
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...
> These people do in fact believe the things that the right says they do
The 'right' redefines these words to mean something else and demonizes them.
From where I sit, every time the left does something e.g. affirmative action, unhinged illegal immigration, or some other woke thing, they try to soften it, deny it outright, or change the subject, similar to what you're doing
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're wrong on all points, especially since a lot of the legacy media during Trump's first term had no problem sucking up to him.
> I don't consume right wing news either
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?
Oh I should've said "ideologues" instead of "ideologes". Namely, the people who keep hammering this shit in newspapers
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
What are your solutions to these issues? All I see is ranting at others, which doesn't solve the problems.
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.
> What are your solutions to these issues?
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
> I don't see issues, I see "issues".
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.
You can't really use statistics to determine for me what's an issue to me. It's pretty subjective. That's not reactionaryism, that's me as a voter doing a cost benefit analysis. Which frankly is the only rational way to vote
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
I didn't use statistics or suggest using them.
> 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.
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Woke didn’t do anything that’s just propaganda and what they want you to think.
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
"Woke" is a meme, not a political orientation or a coherent bloc that can take concerted actions. And for what it's worth, plenty of old white men venture capitalists made tons of money selling DEI to the Fortune 500.
Moreover, from my POV, “woke” is often pronounced with a hard R.
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A recent Russian joke:
Bezos comes out of the oval office and mumbles: "dumb old asshole!" Zuckerberg overhears it and reports to Trump. Next meeting, Trump asks him:
(hint: this is a re-purposed joke about Stalin)People who oppose these moves like "I don't like when visible billionaires own our news services, I much prefer the invisible ones" bewilder me.
>Focus Will Be On “Personal Liberties And Free Markets”
So let billionaires and corporations do whatever they want for profit, even if they kill people.
not what was said at all
What was said then? Do you believe that the free markets concept never got anyone killed?
Hate to break it to you, but "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs" has been stacking far, far more bodies over the past ~125 years.
Yes, its comparable to communism, they're both far up on the leaderboard, with religion.
There's something between those extremes that works very well and produce societies that are great for all people, regulated markets and socialised democracy.
In many regards USA has more regulations than the Scandinavian countries do, so isn't really a freer market. So that difference isn't about number of regulations but just taxation rates.
Depends on which regulations you look at. Employment isn't heavily regulated there as they have strong unions and contracts tailored to their specific needs that would otherwise be ill served by broad strokes regulation. Then they have strong regulation in environment, food, drugs, etc.
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.
Just about everything in this world has gotten someone killed. Do you believe in allowing the sale of coconuts knowing they kill people yearly?
I think you misspelled "to push right wing dogma"
"Personal liberty" is not exclusively a right-wing idea.
It remains to be seen what he means by it in practice. It is possible many will be pleasantly surprised at what emerges.
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.
Perhaps you should re-familiarize yourself with the Pledge of Allegiance.
Ironic you bring that up, because there was a time in America where the Supreme Court had ruled that children could be forced to recite it.
Can you be more specific? Do you mean the history or the content?
"With _liberty_ and justice for all"? This should be pretty bipartisan IMO.
I’m still not sure what you mean. Do you mean that Bezos’ definition of Liberty aligns with the pledge of allegiance?
Of course you aren't. But if you weren't deliberately dense, you'd see that Bezos didn't give a definition of personal liberty. He just told them that it matters, and they should write about it every now and then. One would think that in the US writing about personal liberty would not raise any controversy, but here we are.
Say more?
Thinking of social anarchists. Extremely "left" in many regards by North American standards, and pushing towards being about as pro personal liberty as you can get.
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.
As an anarchist, we are for absolute personal liberty. But when we hear "personal liberty " followed by "free markets" pushed by a billionaire, it's clearly right wing propaganda. There are no right wing anarchists.
Hopefully my comment doesn't make it appear as though I disagree.
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.
The combination of “personal liberty and free markets” as a description of an ideological orientation is not merely exclusively right-wing, its pretty much a defining slogan of the American pro-big-business corporate capitalist Right (one of many segments of the American Right.)
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.
What billionaires mean by "personal liberty" usually is, though.
Personal liberty for me, but not for thee.
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Definitely not, but it's possible to focus exclusively on liberties that the right wing prefers.
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.
>"Personal liberty" is not exclusively a right-wing idea.
I wonder if the approved op-eds on personal liberty will include Trans and Abortion rights? Will it include the right to organize?
Or how about immigrant rights, what with the DoJ going after AOC for hosting a webinar?
the irony of censorship in the name of "personal liberty". Grade a doublespeak bullshit
It's amazing how right-wing billionaire figures have captured social media platforms and news media outlets, such as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X, Jeff Bezos's takeover of The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong's takeover of LA Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s continued control of Fox News/Sky News/WSJ/NYPost, Mark Zuckerberg's recent rightward shift on FB/IG, and yet the right keeps yelling about George Soros. The propaganda networks on the internet are mostly rightwing with lots of surrendering to Russian/Chinese influence.
> It's amazing how right-wing billionaire figures have captured social media platforms and news media outlets, such as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter/X, Jeff Bezos's takeover of The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong's takeover of LA Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s continued control of Fox News/Sky News/WSJ/NYPost,
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst
I think the point of GP is not that media control is new, it is that a big part of media control is right-wing and yet right-wing people keep saying that media are owned by left-wing. And of course, facts and reality are left-wing fake news and misleading info are free speech when it's convenient to them.
It's simple: Using right-wing thinking to drive business decisions means more profits.
One thing that is curious to me is that the "free market" appears to only be "free" once you've amassed a certain amount of capital, which you can then expend to defend your enterprise from any number of legal challenges (some spurious, some real) and also comply with any number of governmental regulations (some spurious, some real). Even so, it's not so much that I distrust the phrase "free market" as it is that I think that for whatever reason, we, common Americans, are not allowed to take advantage of the "free market". Many "anti-capitalist" Americans haven't even ever experienced anything close to a "free market".
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 mostly agree, but have a quibble:
> 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
I know what you mean, and I agree that innovation can and does happen without a profit motive. In the context of the paragraph, I was talking more about the cultural and decision-making environment within SpaceX and Blue; they're a lot closer to (and in many ways even freer than) the "wild west" days of old NASA, as opposed to the NASA of today, where hiring/firing/structuring/contracting are all under endless heaps of red tape that make it extremely difficult to get anything useful done. (For context, I work for a NASA contractor, initially on site at JSC within the ISS program and now remotely for the Artemis program.)
> ...once you've amassed a certain amount of capital, which you can then expend to defend your enterprise from any number of legal challenges
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.
> 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.
"Bezos also made clear that alternate views will not appear on the pages."
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
Bezos is not a part of US government, thankfully.
Assuredly, but this does appear to be a move to appease an administration that has signaled it will attack an unfriendly press.
Just like Biden administration did before
Might as well be, it’s not the doing of a single party but it’s pretty much just become the lever of a few at this point, people simply don’t matter unless they are able and willing to pay for representation
I’m whatever about it though, will be interesting to watch crumble
Nor was Dorsey's Twitter?
That very much was a part of the government. They were receiving orders directly from the White House, same as now, I suppose.
They received requests, many of which were denied. Not part of the government.
Not according to Twitter files. Twitter under Dorsey and later under Agarwal was quite enthusiastic and eager about pushing the government narratives and suppressing dissent. They even deplatformed a sitting president. I get that you probably liked it back then, but let's be real here. Twitter neither was in a position to deny any requests, nor did it have any inclination to do so.
Yes according to the Twitter files. https://x.com/davidzweig/status/1607384015731888135
> They even deplatformed a sitting president
That sounds like literally the opposite of following government narratives?
By "government" at that time I mean the DNC / DeepState that twitter was entirely subservient to before Musk bought it.
The DNC, a private organization, is the government, but the sitting POTUS is not…
Curious!
https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1598833927405215744
According to Dorsey, they didn't want to block Trump, they caved in to advertiser requests.
"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...
Not true according to their own press release: https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension
You know that the "Twitter Files" were carefully curated to to craft a certain narrative, right?
Well, dont want to be labeled as lugenpresse.
Let me say the unpopular and evil: no individual should control assets of more than 100 million USD.
Run /s
Agreed. Inequality is out of control. Let's tax regular people less, and those making hundreds of millions and billions much more. We must close the gap for the sake of the vast majority of people.
Problem is those who love to tax will eventually tax regular people more and more.
I really don't think many people set taxes because they love to tax. They are a means to an end, not an end themselves.
To achieve that you basically need an ordinary people's government. Ah, another hot topic. Run /s
Definitely no offsprings of billionaires should inherit $100M. This is against any merit discussion.
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USA is turning every day more and more into a totalitarian state, the newspaper owner feel (and in truth are) obligated to get into the trump's cult or else take the risk to loose on important government contract, get lawsuit or worse.
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.
The thing is that you think this only started with Trump and that it wasn't happening with the previous Democrats. It was, you just agreed with the totalitarian state when it went your way.
Hopefully you learn, but I doubt it. Trump/Elon bad and all that, right?
I never said it all started with trump but trump is the current head of government and he is pushing much harder than previous government.
I have never seen for instance Biden or Obama close one make fascist salute.
> 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.
You can't seriously say seriously say that Canada and France are authoritarian government because of COVID lockdown.
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.
Sounds rather similar to what The Economist purports to support (or at least used to) but with more of a tilt towards personal liberties. That's open to interpretation but could be pro free speech, pro gun rights, pro reproductive rights, pro LGBT.
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...
it is so, so demoralizing to see how lacking in critical thought so many of you are. i choose to hope those who leave such callous comments are stupid 20-somethings like me, but i know it isn't true.
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.
Tilting at windmills.