The "anti woke cancel culture critics" are in fact concerned with the inorganic, overwhelming influence that a specific family of ideologies has today over the means of modern communication. Observe the similarity with the left themselves, who are concerned with the inorganic, overwhelming influence that a specific class of wealthy people have today over the means of modern production.
Massive advertising companies banding together to protect a specific narrative is as "free speech" as a bunch of colluding megacorps is "free market". And as much as the left resist the disproportionate influence of oligarchs on economy, the proponents of the actual free speech will resist the disproportionate influence of ESG-driven advertising giants on information.
Or maybe, just maybe, the simpler explanation is that they don't want their ads running alongside that trash.
Not really, because I specifically stated that my response was not about the Musk situation. "Jewish communities hate whites" does sound pretty antisemitic to me.
But so does the equivalent trash of "all whites are racist", which for some reason is a-ok for the advertising companies.
Is it okay with them? Any kind of proof to back this up?
So... free speech? To the extent that advertising is speech, I guess?
I've been pondering a thought that we need to stop treating racism as something like a witch hunt, and analyze it more like poop. Something that will never be eliminated, but rather is everyone's responsibility to minimize. Anyone can get some on their hands by accident, laziness, or dealing with a problem. But you don't come out of the bathroom waving it around and expecting to be appreciated. And if a bunch of people started proudly declaring that they shouldn't have to wash their hands and generally validating each others' slobbery, they'd be rightfully shunned.
This framing has some nice results like the contortions around "reverse" racism and the whitewashing of "positive" racism as "not racism" aren't necessary. If you're engaging in collectivism based on race, that's racism - regardless of whether your intent is "good" or "bad". And sometimes that's inevitable (cf "dealing with a problem"), but that doesn't mean it's ever something to really be celebrated.
After 160 years of the same political party fighting to rebuild racism, generation after generation, people are done hearing the moralizing excuses for why this time Democrats have the magic formula for virtuous bigotry.
Is this serious comment? There was nothing that happened in the parties in the 1960s? Maybe 1964? All of a sudden the people in the south just suddenly decided to no longer be racist, and joined the Republican party fighting _against_ racism?
After the Civil War, they formed the KKK and Jim Crow to circumvent civil rights.
In modern times, they implemented racial quotas then racial preferences, both of which were ruled illegal bigotry by the US Supreme Court. (At Harvard and UNC, just last year.)
The same party who called blacks “super predators” (Clinton) and whose current president described integrated schools as a “racial jungle” (Biden).
The same party whose supporters are in the streets today, chanting genocidal slogans such as “from the river to the sea”.
The former DNC chairwoman just this week mocked the name of someone born in the US with Indian heritage and told him to “go home!”
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4319012-vivek-ramaswamy-c...
That you think the Democrats are anything but persistently racist is a testament to how well propaganda works.
That's pretty much what happened. The CRA (passed despite the opposition of southern Democrats) shifted the social equilibrium away from racism and a segregated society being totally normal and state-sanctioned, and Southern states had to reinvent themselves along different lines. They broadly chose economic freedom starting from the 1980s (despite continuing opposition by Dems, who to this day favor heavy-handed state intervention and a highly paternalistic attitude towards minorities), which is what created the modern Sunbelt.
Eg, this racist policy by Democrats.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-farmers-loan-forgiveness-...
Democrats are also systemically racist to Asians such as at Harvard and UNC.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
I’d encourage you to stop taking your talking points from KKK meetings about how you’re virtuous for engaging in race-based discrimination.
Your modern apologetics for bigotry are as vapid as 1920s Klansmen talking about “protecting their community”.
"you can’t be racist against Jewish people. the definition of racism centers on power not the tone of dermis. read some different books (Mein Kampf, The International Jew) and open up that independent thinking some."
Pat yourself on the back I guess. Your blind hatred of White people has caused you to use literal Nazi rhetoric.
User @breakingbaht said:
> Okay.
> Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
> I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much.
> You want truth said to your face, there it is.
Musk replied:
> You have said the actual truth
And then a bunch of advertisers slashed their Twitter ad budgets, and Musk sued someone else.
Frankly, I couldn't care less about Ben Shapiro's take on Musk's words.
> If I say "Christian Communities hate gays", you'll probably think of one or two specific communities.
That might be true for me, but I'm thinking of "Protestant Christian evangelicals and co." as one community, so...
No, if only to make a point.
> That might be true for me, but I'm thinking of "Protestant Christian evangelicals and co." as one community, so...
Yup. What I expected. I'm positively full of bias, and happy to admit it.
The clear subtext in your examples is "Jews" (not "some Jews"), "Muslims" (not "some Muslims"), "Christians" (not "some Christians"). A racist (or variant thereof) will not say "all Jews"/"all Muslims"/"all Gays"/... , they'll just casually namedrop "Jews" (or even a single Jewish personality), "Muslims" (or even a single Muslim personality), "Gays" (or even a single Gay personality), and use this as a dogwhistle.
Also, please do not make assumptions on my biases.
Now, transpose this to human beings. The message we're commenting is a warning against Jewish Communities, i.e. I can't think of any reasonable way to interpret it other than as antisemitism.
> that trash
... is defined ideologically, it's the point being made here.
And then perhaps contrast it with some concrete organic, overwhelming influence examples. But that's a bonus.
1. Chemistry
2. Farming/food (under one of various specifications)
3. An oddly-named composition technique in which phrases of music are built up using musical "Lego blocks", championed by Beethoven (and used by Sondheim, btw)[1]
4. I didn't do my research but I'd like to exhibit superiority to some other thing/group. (Otherwise, that other thing is more precisely described as "astroturfing," "fraud," "shills," etc.)
1: this used to be a bit superior, but it's old and obscure now so I grandfathered it in
Except companies don't communicate with each other and coordinate strategy.
They all saw the Media Matters report and individually responded.
What “specific family of ideologies”?
What “specific narrative”?
If it is so specific, surely you could say what it is…
People were mocking actual censorship in the media, by repeating the phrase — often accompanied by “fuck Joe Biden”, as in the numerous tracks about the meme. Which were also censored at first (eg, on iTunes).
How you got from that to “self-censorship to prove a non-existent point” is mystifying.
https://apnews.com/article/lets-go-brandon-what-does-it-mean...
So, no, the crowd was not "censored" by a news anchor.
The adoption of "Let's Go Brandon" as a euphimism for "Fuck Joe Biden" may well have been tongue in cheek, but it wasn't mocking media censorship.
They were mocking the news anchor censoring the truth by lying about what the crowd could clearly be heard saying.
Just like I said.
Arguing over this false dichotomy uses up all the air in the room, when we should actually be focusing on the amount of control being exerted. The richest person in the world has plenty of options to speak his mind, regardless of big advertisers no longer doing business with him due to his apparent views. Whereas I'm actually more supportive of the ability of the original poster to post his racist diatribe while not being censored by Twitter [0], if for nothing else than so these racist shitheads don't think too hard before outing themselves.
[0] Not that this is even a concern with the current "X" for this particular type of content.
I will 100% agree that large-corp is a threat to democracy, and specific freedoms. But indistinguishable? Come on.
A government can prevent you from speaking your mind, via legislation and the judicial branch. In terms of raw power, they have the capability to throw you in jail, they can detain you, they can prevent protest, pass laws to make your specific actions literally result in incarceration, they have armies, and police, and state spies, and on and on and on.
Corporations may sometimes avail themselves of some of that power, but it is still the state wielding it. Corporations by themselves have little direct power, compared to states themselves.
And yes, corporations will perform tasks for the state, and the state will sometimes perform tasks for corporations. But that's not my point.
My point is, having a large corporation does not immediately provide for a massive army at the direct control of a CEO. It's just not indistinguishable, at all.
So yes, looking at the specific powers of each entity is a good idea. Just.. keep it in perspective.
Jail is certainly a pretty strong deterrent. But it's actually not as strong as say not being able to eat. Which is contingent upon there being enough competition [0] between providers of food such they can't exercise coercive power. And the surveillance industry has been steadily destroying that open market dynamic we take for granted, for example "the unbanked".
And thinking about coercion in hard discrete terms is fallacious as well. If the government illegalizes some thing, whereas cooperating corporations just make doing that thing such an uphill battle that most people don't do it, the net effect is quite similar. Resist the temptation to think "sure but you can still opt out", because while that can work for a handful of things that really matter to you, this won't actually change much. And conversely, you can actually still do anything the government has declared illegal if you're willing to possibly pay the price.
[0] or more accurately - not too much collusion. these are different measures
But each of these two controlling aspects of our lives, are different entities, with different ways to address, rebuke, curtail, and prevent that control. And the control they each exert is unique. This is why I replied, for even though you stated you didn't want to focus on the dichotomy, you brought it up, and waved it away, stating it was not relevant for this discussion.
But it is. It is, because each of these entities must be fought in unique ways.
I think we mostly agree here on the large points. It's just nuance we're debating.
There are of course differences in the ways you can "address, rebuke, curtail, and prevent that control" based on the specific details of the entity - just as there are stark differences between democracies versus dictatorships, and publicly traded corporations versus privately held. And when we're talking about pushing back, those details should certainly be mentioned.
But my point of emphasizing the similarities between the two large categories is to preempt this all too common pattern of people justifying corporate oppression by framing it in terms of voluntary association, while turning a blind eye to the actual coercive dynamic. I'm sure we do agree on a lot of things, but honestly your first comment is ripe with laying the groundwork for such type of justification. Corporations can certainly prevent you from speaking your mind - for example a geographic-monopoly Internet provider that censors based on content. The next step in the argument is of course "you can still speak your mind, just not using their infrastructure", but given that the sheer majority of speech is online today, that reasoning is specious - it's deliberately ignoring the power the company is actually wielding.
Or coming at it from the other direction - if it's definitionally impossible for corporations to exercise coercive power, then why is accumulating such power one of the tenets of business ("build a moat"), and why are so many people so damn interested in having certain corporations perform censorship?
An uncomfortable truth is that the main thing preventing corporations from having their own full-blown armies is the bona fide government. This circular dynamic is why I've come around to viewing freedom as a kind of logical reduction yin-yang rather as a unidirectional gradient - if the bona fide government disappeared tomorrow, the net effect would actually be the loss of much freedom, as those other aggressors would no longer be kept in check. Big-L Libertarianism sidesteps this by just asserting that having a singular military is one of the few necessary functions of government, but it's not clear why such an exception should only apply to one single topic when that same circular dynamic applies at other levels of abstraction.
Here's an example. Discrimination. Here's a factual phrase: women are less intelligent than men. That's not discriminatory, what is discriminatory, is if I use a minor deviation in averages, to look at $random_woman, and presume she is less intelligent than $random_man.
For example, there are many women that are more intelligent than many men.
My point is, we've had to "dumb down" discrimination, by trying to claim, in many respects, there there is absolutely no difference between men and women. This has led to detrimental outcomes for women, a key example being that as most medical volunteers are men, many models of the brain are predicated upon the male, and therefore? As people say "why, there's no difference between the male and female brain!", it has actually harmed women's outcomes.
I am concerned about the parallel here. That the more we lump things into mega-categories, the more positive outcomes for nuanced groups is lost. And that means that the best solutions may be unavailable, for if they cannot be applied to "overall group", then they may be deemed useless.
I know you're not advocating any of this. And I know your goal is to just ensure people fully understand the risks.
But my point is, much as the fight against discrimination has been whittled down to "there is no difference!", because the stupids cannot understand nuance, you seem to be in a trap of having to whittle down to no-nuance, for the same reasons.
Which is sad.
Hypothetically I can see this happening with my argument, but I'm only imagining more checked-out cynicism. Maybe you see how it's poised for something worse?
What I do commonly see are arguments in the vein of "it's impossible for a company to be coercive", which I'd say is the same exact dogmatic pattern you're describing. They're used to justify a state of affairs, and then offer a fallacious solution like "go start your own company". The wishful thinking here seems to be based on emphasizing the distinction between corporate power and government power [1], which is why I think it's useful to point out the commonalities.
[0] like only now that the mobs have passed, can you use this spicy but technically correct example
[1] see the common trope of people asserting that freedom of speech only pertains to the government, when it's just a general concept and the government-specific bit is the legal framing of the first amendment
The richest guy can say whatever he wants; he's got the means to bypass the usual channels. But what about the average Joe? That's where our concern should be. It's not about agreeing with what's said, but making sure everyone can say it. We need to keep our eyes on the real issue: preventing anyone, government or corporate, from getting too much control over our free speech. It's all about that freedom, not getting bogged down in who's the bigger threat.
It is the current state of the US, but I think it's not inevitable and more due to the circumstances of the US. Regulating billboard usage and advertising limits reach. I'm not sure if this is necessary, but a better online platform ecosystem with rich filtering capabilities could help. Lobbying is harder to curb, since corruption is corruption, but it can probably be done. I think then the big issue is if the corporations amass a private military or something, since they can't artifically extend their voice that much.
Huh, I'm lost? Can you cite an example?
To be clear, "___ is a lunatic and advocating for bad things" is a criticism.
"___ is a lunatic and their message should not be permitted" is limiting speech
No. That advocates for limiting speech, but is not itself limiting speech. If I say meat should be banned, that doesn't actually prevent you from eating a burger. The distinction here is important.
Point is, I got lost in the parent's gyrations.
Yep, to often when i see these anti woke, cultur war, anti cancel culture critics.
What they are actually doing is attacking people's free speech and defending the authoritarians that are actually trying to limit speech and other rights.
They convinced themselves that free speech should protect them from criticism. When criticism is free speech.