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Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

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Re: Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

#91

Post by npteljes »

xanaxagoras wrote: post #25

As an R. Kelly fan, this does not surprise me all. Once censorship begins it’s easier and easier to follow that well worn path. A lot of people like to mock the idea of cancel culture and pretend that it doesn’t exist - you know, the plainly disingenuous types who will say “they are a private company” out of one side of their mouth while demanding gay wedding cakes get baked out of the other. And sure there are osten…

> out of one side of their mouth while demanding gay wedding cakes get baked out of the other

Sexuality is a protected characteristic, and it's illegal to discriminate people based on such characteristics.

Re: Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

#94

Post by xanaxagoras »

npteljes wrote: post #91
xanaxagoras wrote: post #25

As an R. Kelly fan, this does not surprise me all. Once censorship begins it’s easier and easier to follow that well worn path. A lot of people like to mock the idea of cancel culture and pretend that it doesn’t exist - you know, the plainly disingenuous types who will say “they are a private company” out of one side of their mouth while demanding gay wedding cakes get baked out of the other. And sure there are osten…

> out of one side of their mouth while demanding gay wedding cakes get baked out of the other Sexuality is a protected characteristic, and it's illegal to discriminate people based on such characteristics.

The legality is entirely beside the point, although of note, in the case I referenced the Supreme Court found in a 7-2 decision that it was in fact legal to refuse to bake a cake for that particular gay wedding while being careful not to set a precedent. So your claim here is not universally true. Personally I would have baked the cake.

There is a contingent of the left that is happy when force and coercion are deployed so long as its done in a wider context that benefits their political aims. They argue that a baker must be forced to go against his personal values to further a particular goal that they support, but take up the exact opposite posture as soon as it suits them. For example, Twitter is a private company, of course they can ban you for saying that thing you said that doesn't conform with my political views.

At any rate, I was just trying to gesture towards a growing pack of vocal hypocrites, not re-litigate the baker decision.

Re: Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

#95

Post by xanaxagoras »

rswail wrote: post #39
xanaxagoras wrote: post #25

As an R. Kelly fan, this does not surprise me all. Once censorship begins it’s easier and easier to follow that well worn path. A lot of people like to mock the idea of cancel culture and pretend that it doesn’t exist - you know, the plainly disingenuous types who will say “they are a private company” out of one side of their mouth while demanding gay wedding cakes get baked out of the other. And sure there are osten…

> As an R. Kelly fan... You mean Robert Sylvester Kelly, who was found guilty of one count of racketeering and 7 counts of violation of the Mann Act after a jury trial? The same R Kelly that illegally married 15 year old Aaliyah in 1994? The same R Kelly that is now facing further federal charges of child pornography and obstruction? How is he or his cases in any way relevant to censorship or "cancel culture"? The gu…

His sex crimes are unrelated to censorship or cancel culture. I agree with your non-controversial position that child abuse is abhorrent. I hope he is killed in prison. But I love his music, I still listen to it, and I'm not sorry for that.

The twitter mob against him that harassed Spotify into removing his music from their service is the literal epitome of cancel culture.

1. Take a consensus position (raping children is bad)

2. Repeat it over and over again, loudly, to make your actual point, which is that you are a good person. Not just because you don't rape children, but also because you are bravely amplifying this view that basically everyone holds

3. Make a public demand of a company that is tangentially related to the subject somehow, which if satisfied, will do exactly nothing to help or fix the problem

4. Form a mob of those interested in signalling their own virtue, who may or may not care about the motivating issue, to strong arm said company into compliance

5. Celebrate your hollow victory and briefly feel like you did something important (you did not)

Re: Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

#96

Post by p1esk »

roenxi wrote: post #41
p1esk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? How else would you make geopolitical judgments?

The traditional way has been to organise a panel of bureaucrats and a large diplomatic/informant network spread over multiple countries, where individuals often have multiple decades of experience in their area of the globe. Which still throws up some pretty terrible misjudgements; but that is the baseline for a serious try. Any group who's state of the art information gathering includes having "a PR department" and…

reading the news shouldn't be trying to make moral judgements in countries half a world away

How should we make moral judgments about what’s going on in the world?

How is deciding to be a dumb service in a country when clearly innocent people are dying as a result of official actions of that country not a moral judgment? Or should we just not care?

Re: Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

#97

Post by lamontcg »

xanaxagoras wrote: post #25

As an R. Kelly fan, this does not surprise me all. Once censorship begins it’s easier and easier to follow that well worn path. A lot of people like to mock the idea of cancel culture and pretend that it doesn’t exist - you know, the plainly disingenuous types who will say “they are a private company” out of one side of their mouth while demanding gay wedding cakes get baked out of the other. And sure there are osten…

> As an R. Kelly fan ...

okay i think i just hit enough HN comments for the day already.

Re: Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

#98

Post by kbelder »

datavirtue wrote: post #88
webmobdev wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more of an American thing - the slow and subtle ceding of autonomy and power to corporates, with the expectations that they should behave like country states and be political. It's a very dangerous idea that Americans are being slowly brainwashed into, to repose more and more faith on corporates than their own democracy! This is the kind of thinking that lead to imperialism, with the Dutch East India Company…

I appreciate this point but my take on this is that corporations are running scared of social media...paranoid of normies boycottong their brands. To me this is good and is what was predicted as the next wave of progress by people like William Grieder. Citizens voting with their dollars. Mother's boycotted GE into leaving the weapons manufacturing business in the 1980s. There is an explicit policy against any type of…

>running scared of social media... citizens voting with their dollars.

That's not an unreasonable idea, but the trouble I see is that those two concepts are surprisingly different. The din on social media is not reflective of the general citizenry. Think of almost any issue that the country is split fairly evenly on. How lopsided is the outrage on social media?

Right now, it's a weapon wielded by a minority, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.

Re: Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

#99

Post by lostmsu »

ComradePhil wrote: post #85
lostmsu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That worked well for North Korea.

Russia and NK are not comparable economies. NK has an estimated GDP of 27 billion and a population of 27 million, Russia has a GDP of 1.5 trillon and a population of 145 million (per capita GDP for Russia is an order of magnitude higher than that of NK and very similar to that of China). Russia is perfectly placed to be able to pull that off while NK is not.

Watch GDP of Russia drop to per capita levels much more comparable over a year or two. You can't really produce shit without sophisticated equipment, and Russia is not famous for any.

Re: Spotify made a cowardly choice: to submit to the Kremlin

#100

Post by TheCoelacanth »

kaczordon wrote: post #7

This doesn’t seem any more cowardly than YouTube’s decision to ban RT. Hard to claim to be on the side of free speech when American tech companies are censoring right and left.

Declining to participate in a propaganda campaign supporting an illegal and unprovoked war is not censorship.
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