> Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
"Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty.
"Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions.
The solution was trivially easy: go to another cake shop that doesn't not have such an objection, but that wouldn't be heroic enough.
[0] https://www.aceprensa.com/english/united-states-approves-fir...
That is your opinion,but that was not the opinion of the Supreme Court. They found that the Colorado statute in question was based on religious hostility and therefore discriminatory against the cake shop. (That is, the "personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer.) Agree or disagree, I encourage you to read the full opinion.
Moreover, there is no law against "compelled custom work." Had the cake shop discriminated based on the customer's race, rather then their sexual orientation, the refusal would have been illegal.
They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer". The Court explicitly avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise.
But 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.
But we're here to discuss the rhetoric in the right around "personal liberty." The cake case is an example of using that rhetoric to justify discrimination, which is exactly what happened. That is the effect of the SCOTUS decision, regardless of whether they used those words verbatim.
It is similar to when a criminal case get thrown out because investigators messed up and mishandled evidence. It says nothing about the merit of the case.
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.
But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
Well, they're not an independent news organization. It was supposed to be a newsletter service, whatever the pivots.
But in any case, even if they don't have the "news", the breadth and quality of commentary there, one never sees in establisment media. And the option to cut down the shit is trivially easy: just read your subscribed newsletters (in your inbox preferably) and skip any other feed Substack has.
Wasn't one selling point of Substack that you could easily leave with your subscribers, so substack writers aren't really for sale and can't be muzzled/deprecated? Or did it change since Substack was launed?
Also are you thinking about specific writer(s)/events when you wrote 'muzzled or deprecated if needed.'?
Yup. Just more doublespeak.
Remember "free enterprise"? Sounds awesome right? Yes, please, gimme some more of that freedom.
Imagine my surprise apon learning the "free enterprise" advocates actually meant freedom from consequences.
The power to impose this new wonderland, is almost within reach. Where before it failed, greater are the possibilities for it to succeed this time around. Nothing to worry about, freedom is for those who deserve it.
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.
EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC.
Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it.
[0] - https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Less than 40% of the adult population has a college degree. Less than 45% of voters have college degrees. Yet we took for granted the ascendence of ideas that few non-college-educated voters have been able to digest and see the evidence for. That it happened at all is pretty amazing, yet our only response has been to whine and moan that it hasn't happened faster or more completely. We could see that a lot of people weren't really getting it, and as long as we thought they were a minority, our response was who cares, they're losing. If they aren't educating themselves and keeping up to date, they're simply bad people and if they're confused and angry, fuck 'em, they deserve it.
It is not necessarily wrong as a moral stance, but it's not a strategy for succeeding in a democracy where those people can tip the balance of an election. As we felt more and more entitled to our triumph and got more and more angry and whiny about the bad people holding us back, surprise surprise, those people decided we weren't the best party to represent them anymore.
If there's any lesson we should take from this, it's that if we hold people in contempt, we can't count on their votes.
There's nothing coherent behind the shift to Trump except mutual contempt. I hope we are getting to a point where we can talk about our own political failings without reflexively changing the subject to the voters' moral failings.
Also, we should consider that when our definition of a good person includes the rapid assimilation of new information and ideas, the ability to be a good person is not evenly distributed. We're only a tiny way towards building a world where that ideal isn't elitist and exclusionary. A lot of people were not raised with that definition of moral goodness. Acting in good faith, they did not equip themselves with the necessary skills, because they thought they could be good people without them. What we're demanding from them now is that they either exercise intellectual skills and habits they don't have, or they speak and believe in obedience to those of us who have them. I don't see a good way around it, but we shouldn't be surprised if they're unhappy about it.
Right now, the POTUS is so much reducing freedom in US that it's enough for him to say that it doesn't like something (like DEI) for a lot of companies to trash DEI in the hope to please him. And it's enough for the WaPo to change what will be the content of its "opinion" pages...
And EU is the one reducing freedom ?????? You should really wake up guys
60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws.
I don't buy JD Vance's argument, but I am fine sacrificing the EU if it means Dem-turned-GOP donors (especially on the Tech side) return to our party.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-woman-given-harsher-senten...
> 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.
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
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.
You can find TONS of examples of people in Europe being jailed or having cops come to their house for something they said on social media. In some cases for things as simple as criticizing a politician.
Here’s a high profile one, but I can find you plenty more examples.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson
>On 25 May 2018, Robinson was arrested for a breach of the peace while live streaming outside Leeds Crown Court[170][174]
“Breach of peace” means he was saying something that they didn’t want him to say. This is a real curtailing of free speech.
>companies to trash DEI
DEI is often racist and many of its implementations in modern companies violate the civil rights act. Companies are correct to be ditching it because it poses a big risk for discrimination lawsuits.
I actually spoke with lawyers about this very recently and reverse discrimination lawsuits are a booming business right now because there are so many clear cut examples of violations of the civil rights act.
And that reason has nothing to do with J.D.Vance having any concern at all about free speech and personal freedom. Not just zero of it, his goal is to remove both. He would love Europe to become fascist which is incompatible with both.
What does not contribute to the conversation is to pretend otherwise. To pretend that he has a point or any other meaning then to grab power and punish dissent.
What does this mean? What does the US VP have to do with EU law?
Social Media organizations like FB/Meta and Google have historically been some of the largest donors to the Dems, and their flip was a massive reason why 2024 went the way it did.
Vance has been consistently lobbying against the DSA over the past few weeks, and that's where his "free speech" argument is coming from.
I don't really care one way or the other, but I care about ensuring that large donors who flipped from D to R return to the D fold.
What you end up seeing is the GOP raises nearly as competitive as the DNC when you add Trump PACs plus WinRed.
Not any more, it's been made quite clear that's over and is now an extortion racket against Ukraine. Long term consequences of this are unclear.
Again: what's the argument for trying to ram US social media right wing propaganda into an unwilling Europe, while banning tiktok?
To get the tech oligarchs back on the Dems side of course, just like alephnerd said above.
> while banning tiktok?
Is this ideological contradiction bothering you? Well, unfortunately the world is full of these. Norway is a huge oil and gas exporter and yet maintains very stringent standards on its domestic usage. Why do they profit off exporting O&G to countries with less state capacity to manage the externalities of O&G? Well them's the shakes. Pick your priorities. For me, I'm fine if tech companies stay unregulated if I don't get 4 more years of MAGA politics. I'd prefer neither 4 more years of MAGA politics nor unregulated tech companies but I also want to build affordable condos in Beverly Hills so ;)
Like any other non-Western European and North American country, politics in the CEE is very much about those networks and connections you cultivated - not really ideological - and almost everyone mid-high level in Hungarian politics today started their careers in the 1990s.
Politics in much of the CEE amongst that generation appears much more mercenary than ideological.
Anecdotally, I've heard the biggest reason my Hungarian coworkers parents voted for Fidesz was largely because of the cash benefits they would provide before elections - same as Bolsa Familia in Brazil, TOKİ in Turkiye, and Freebies in India (all illiberal democracies have a similar form of patronage politics, this is a very incomplete list)
The public didn't want to hear that and gave supermajority to Orbán for the next decade and a half.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demo...
You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
(Yes, I know that Die Linke aren't literally Communist, and I know AfD aren't literally Nazis, but Die Linke descended from the legal successor of a Marxist-Leninist party, as AfD descended from the legal successor of a neo-Nazi party, so I think my analogy holds.)
> Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson
Biden won in 2020 pretty resoundingly, so the lesson they learned from 2016 was enough to win decisively in 2020. Parties don't stay in power indefinitely, conditions change and incumbents all across the world — not just the US — lost in 2024.
So while the number of swing states has reduced a lot in 2016, the strength of republicans in the south hasn't changed a lot since 2000.
Not too get too political but if the these people had done their jobs in the first place, there would be no Trump in the WH presently.
The problem with them is that they are all for the status quo which to the average voter means "more of the same".
See the current compete U-turn from the German conservatives who less than 24H after being elected decided to break their main campaign promise and renege on doing what they said they would do.
The far right and the far left are not growing in a vacuum, they are growing because people are getting tired of being lied to.
what kind of promise was it?
I vote for them because they represent change and progress at a steady, measured pace — not stagnation and status quo. You're discounting big campaign achievements like Obamacare and Biden's infrastructure plan.
I look at what we are seeing today. Trump is more powerful than he as ever been. In Europe, European-skeptic parties are rising, the far right and the far left are rising as well and the center is slowly crumbling.
Those are facts. So the question is why are the center right/left politicians not acknowledging the problems and trying to find adequate solutions? Why do they let the far right and the far left being seen as the ones who are/will be doing something?
The horseshoe theory is real. If you look at France, the far left and the far right merged their votes and forced the previous government to resign.
If that is not a sign that something is seriously wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
> I look at what we are seeing today. Trump is more powerful than he as ever been. In Europe, European-skeptic parties are rising, the far right and the far left are rising as well and the center is slowly crumbling.
> Those are facts. So the question is why are the center right/left politicians not acknowledging the problems and trying to find adequate solutions? Why do they let the far right and the far left being seen as the ones who are/will be doing something?
>The horseshoe theory is real. If you look at France, the far left and the far right merged their votes and forced the previous government to resign. If that is not a sign that something is seriously wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
I don't disagree with you. I want to be glib – not to you, but just in general – and say that it's simply a marketing problem, and that Biden/Obama have had strong policies, but fear sells better than hope.
For Obama specifically, he has and had the chance to be the face of the left, center-left, democrats, whatever you want to call it – the opposition – but he has continually failed to even appear to challenge the far right. It's disappointing that, for one of the best orators of our time, he's essentially hidden himself away and stayed on the sidelines, only emerging to endorse candidates every election cycle like it's Groundhog Day.
I suspect he does it out of fear of being accused of seeking a third-term (despite Trump openly flirting with that idea multiple times this month alone); or as an attempt to lie low and protect his legacy in the history books. But we're living in an era where the far right doesn't hesitate to rewrite history, and Trump continues to systematically destroy that legacy piece-by-piece.
I don't understand why people give a pass to Communism when it caused an order of magnitude more suffering than Nazism.
No wonder that about 75% Czechs are dissatisfied with current PM Fiala.
https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/politici...
Opposition is even worse. They do what public surveys and Babis (the leading oligarch here) tells them to do. I expect lowest voter turnout because quite a lot people don't see any point in voting. Which is ok for me. We need rethinking about current approach of giving our responsibility to unknown electorate.
There are also obvious struggles within Brussels whether the unrealistic eco-plans are going to be at least watered down or no, and the EC is still trying to push them through as much as possible.
In that environment, a "media-talented" oppositional politician who professes mild Euroskepticism is going to have an easy time winning.
Join a local party and observe how the discussion is not really centred around screwing their voters over, hopefully.
My take was about as yours before I tried to do something and realized how hard it is.
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.