281–290 of 481 posts
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The real evil is people willing to pivot any discussion to whatever topic they think is more important, destroying a platform for open discourse.
Castigating someone else's opinions as the destruction of open discussion is the height of irony.
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I wouldn't ask what's so progressive about censorship, but why have progressives seemingly embraced it? or at least distanced themselves from a more firm defense of free speech.
Which progressives have embraced censorship?
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Castigating someone else's opinions as the destruction of open discussion is the height of irony.
It's condescending to plainly try to change the topic to what the poster thinks the issue "really is." As a bald assertion, it's threadshitting.
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Its becoming much harder to be an organization that in some way does not benefit from larger corporations. Asking anyone to first get their funding right then get their free speech right is not the right order IMO although in an ideal world it would be great. What if the funding takes a long time to sort out? Don't do free speech until then?
Pray tell how this is a free speech issue. Open Markets is free to go say their piece elsewhere. Why are they entitled to speak freely under New America?
Is it a joke?
This isn't a problem with Google, it's a problem with the establishment left in the United States. There's no genuine, credible anti-corporate voice in American politics. The reasons why are many, but of course they typically distill down to the incredible power of money to influence people, of which this is an example. The side-effects of there being no credible labor party in our political system manifests, in part…
There's one anti-corporate idea that I've always thought was interesting but AFAIK isn't discussed by anyone: small-corporation libertarianism. In general libertarians are too concerned with government but almost all of them (plus neoliberals and many financially conservative folks) can agree that competition is at least one of their most important economic tenants. Competition is balanced against economies of scale…
The reason we switched off of it, was around that time, the idea was the allow more consolidation at the expense of competition.
The rationale was that the American marketplace was already significantly competitive, to the point that market growth was labor constrained, as opposed to today, where it is capital constrained. So by allowing more merges and decreasing overall competition, you could achieve multiple simultaneous goals. You could lessen the labor constraint on the market, allowing faster growth and more capital accumulation at the expense of labor, but without significantly impacting quality of life for the laborers. Additionally, the decrease in competition and increased allowance of outsourcing and international IP enforcement was expected to (and did) lower the cost of goods for many American products.
The end result was: The rich got richer. Everyone saw the price of goods drop (or the quality of goods increase, or the rate of inflation drop). And big companies became larger, faster, with minimal impact on quality of life for everyone.
The problem, is we've been doing that for 40 years now. We're back to a capital constrained economy, but capital interests have been keeping us pursuing the above agenda as if nothing has changed. Its absolutely a ripe time to go back to the pre-70s ideas about trust busting and etc, in the name of increased, local competition, as opposed to the current ideology of increased corporate merger in order to achieve greater economies of scale.
At least, this is how it was explained to me. I'm just a dev : )
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Schmidt was pretty clear in his book that he believes his business success is an indicator of virtue, and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture. It's a disturbing notion and I've never understood why people weren't more concerned about it. If every significant avenue of communication used by people is controlled and censored by a group, no matter who i…
> and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture. It's a disturbing notion and I've never understood why people weren't more concerned about it. Because they're pushing the progressive agenda, so who in the media, government, or academia is going to stand in their way? As far as those parties are concerned, Google is doing what corporations "should" do.
Well, the media largely only cares for agendas that fit their advertiser's preferences. Their advertiser's preferences are dictated by what they think will help their business... they're not particularly concerned with the nature of any particular agenda, only whether an agenda benefits them.
The government is the largely similar, but rather than advertisers it's political parties balancing appeal to their donors, lobbyists and other powers. To a minor degree also to their base, but hand-waving and obscurantism tends to limit this need.
Academia increasingly does seem pretty screwed up (STEM isn't free of issues, but the really nutty stuff is mostly in the 'humanities'). I suspect firing Damore will probably sate their blood-lust for a while.
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Isn't this, like, cynicism completely decoupled from reality? Google invests a lot of money and time in a myriad of projects with altruistic motivation. Google summer of code, $100 Million per year for non-profits, OSS releases such as tensorflow or Chrome, google.org and on and on. Of course you can say that this is motivated by PR objectives. But then you're creating a situation where they couldn't do anything righ…
> Google summer of code Trains and evaluates young engineers either for them to hire or to work in their ecosystem > $100 Million per year for non-profits PR, taxes, and as the article describes, leverage. > OSS releases Giving things out for free helps pull everyone into your ecosystem. > Of course you can say that this is motivated by PR objectives. But then you're creating a situation where they couldn't do anythi…
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It's condescending to plainly try to change the topic to what the poster thinks the issue "really is." As a bald assertion, it's threadshitting.
Whether or not it's condescending, it's not "destroying open discourse", that's absurd hyperbole.
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Which progressives have embraced censorship?
parent poster is likely referring to the right to sit in your office all day spouting pseduoscientific essays on why 20% of your coworkers probably should not be working in the job they have.