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Notes -
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-russell-brand-caroline-dinenage-mps-twitter-b2415346.html
https://twitter.com/CountDankulaTV/status/1704607541852844072/photo/1
I think that it is important. But I am at loss of words so I am not even sure where to begin to make it effortpost. It is outrageous, indefensible and at first I though it was satire.
Do think this is rogue action? (my guess no), Will there be punishment for the MP for overstepping greatly any boundaries? (also no).
It seems terrible in that allegations are enough to demonetize someone who earns income from the internet meaning their ability to fully defend themselves (legally and in court of public opinion) is curtailed.
I hope Dame Caroline is accused of something, loses her income streams as a result, cannot defined herself, and goes to prison for something of which she is innocent.
Edit: I don’t know if Brand is innocent, guilty, or somewhere in between. I do know that what Dame is doing is wrong.
If you want to nationalize a content hosting platform that no one is allowed to be kicked off of, or set up a decentralized Tor-alike platform with no moderation possible in principle, or etc., I am 100% in favor.
If we're going to use for-profit private companies as markets, then I don't know, the invisible hand of the market pretty much determines what happens, and a lot of consumers don't like people they think are probably rapists.
It seems just fundamentally incompatible to me to want these platforms to both be private for-profit enterprises governed by market forces, and to enshrine absolutist free-speech principles. I mean, it would be nice if that was something the market did on its own, but obviously it doesn't.
That's why we have a government with a constitution and a Bill of Rights, because those are the things that won't happen spontaneously if things are left to market forces alone.
Something that increasingly sticks in my craw is modern socprogs appealing to the "invisible hand of the market" whenever something like this happens - that is, when they're not accusing free markets of being corrupt, predatory, immoral, unsustainable, and demand more "ethical" dictats to be handed down from authorities.
If the accusations against Brand are made public, and his audience decides to give him 0 dollars the next morning, that is the invisible hand at work.
If a group of journalists, activists, and politicians bypass audience response and go straight to spooking management to cut him off, that is preempting feedback from the market. You are not letting the hand do its thing; you are calling God and demanding he intervene precisely because your faith in letting the market decide doesn't exist.
As if the decisions and personal preferences of Youtube, Rumble, Amazon, Steam constitute 'the market', and all the rabble like you and I don't count. As if those people (their CEOs or their beuraucratic layers that weigh in on these controversies) are what we are referring to when 'let the market decide' is invoked.
"Jeff Bezos doesnt like Confederate flags because racism, and now he has banned their merchandising on his storefront! See, you free-market right-wing capitalists? The market decided! You have literally nothing to complain about unless you're a hypocrite. Consumers are rejecting your racism."
That's been a decade-long refrain by now, and it has not gotten less idiotic or obfuscatory (by intention, I've come to believe). I'd wager that all these attempts to cut people off from their sources of income, to appeal directly to a storefront's management to have something taken off the shelf, to algorithmically suppress 'bad content' and 'bad people', are actually driven by fear. The fear that if you went hands-off and let the chips lie where they fell, progressives would have to face the truth that their shit is not as popular as they think it is, and oh gawd these peddlers of hate, sexism, racism, PUA-ism, COVID misinformation, election denialism might have more appeal than us! Or at least enough to make us sweat.
That must be psychically turbulent to experience, so best take steps to avoid that scenario. Just cut off some heads and say "Consumers were begging me to do it! Nothing unnatural occurred at all. Im just following the will of the people". And it really explains everything between the night of Trump's 2016 win and what we see today.
It kinds of sounds like you are implying that CEO's shouldn't try d to guess where the market is going and adjust their strategy ahead of time, they should wait until they've already lost a bunch of money and brand equity and then scramble to correct afterwards.
That doesn't seem like an efficient way to run a company, or a market.
Or, alternately, you are implying that large billion-dollar CEOs make their business decisions based on their personal moral ethics instead of what they think will make them the most money, to which I can only reply with an appropriate meme.
The market's not perfectly efficient, but it's more efficient than that. If there were some massive consumer demand for racism and accused rapists and so on and so forth, then all the right-wing social media startups that try to provide a platform for it wouldn't keep fizzling out into embarrassing clouds of nothing.
That's not a reply, that's empty mockery, both low-effort and needlessly inflammatory.
While you're reasonably good at padding the wordcount, I'm increasingly concerned with what I can only characterize as a continuing pattern of low effort posting. You show up to contradict people, including people who have put a lot of careful evidence and argument together, but about half the time you post there's no substance at all in your reply--just, well, hollow sneering. You dress it up well! And tone matters, here. But keeping just to the edge of the rules is not the goal. The goal is discussion, and one thing that undermines productive discussion is disingenuous or sneering engagement.
Combined with your username, this sort of thing pings the troll-o-meter really hard. Maybe... aim for quality rather than quantity? Aim less for policing other people's wrongthink, and aim more toward contributing your own actual thoughts?
But certainly don't post shit that boils down to "my response to you is only disdain." If that's your response to an idea, then you have failed to adequately steelman your interlocutor.
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