Let me divert from Musk specifically for a moment.
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.
You mean when the advertising companies pulled their money from Twitter after its owner said Jews "pushing [...] hatred against whites" was "the actual truth"? Darn those woke hippies at... let's see... IBM!
Or maybe, just maybe, the simpler explanation is that they don't want their ads running alongside that trash.
> You mean when the advertising companies pulled their money from Twitter after its owner said Jews "pushing [...] hatred against whites" was "the actual truth"?
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.
I've been pondering a thought that we need to stop treating racism as something like a witch hunt, and analyze it more like excrement. Not something that's limited to specific people, but rather something everyone has a bit of. Not something that can ever be eliminated, but rather it's everyone's responsibility to mitigate it. 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.
Back to the topic with that in mind - it's "a-ok" because the advertising companies are racist, as they've generally been. Group stereotyping is a deep part of human psychology and therefore a powerful marketing tool. The main things that have changed is what is considered aspirational and high class, and what is considered verboten.
Many racists proclaim people “misunderstand racism” when their different standards for different races are denounced for being racist.
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.
>After 160 years of the same political party fighting to rebuild racism
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?
> All of a sudden the people in the south just suddenly decided to no longer be racist
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.
Yes — the same party has been persistently racist.
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!”
you can’t be racist against white people. the definition of racism centers on power not the tone of dermis. read some different books and open up that independent thinking some.
"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.
Institutional racism happens against white people — and denying that is supporting racism, even by your modern definition meant to minimize the on-going racism of the Democratic Party.
These same companies are noticeably silent over the outpouring of support for Hamas on TikTok and other platforms, or when #KillAllMen was trending on old Twitter.
> that trash
... is defined ideologically, it's the point being made here.
"Jewish Communities" doesn't mean "All Jews", and that's obvious to anyone not looking for a reason to be angry. Muslim communities just bombed the hell out of Israel, and that's not islamophobic to say, because it doesn't implicate all Muslims.
I don't know about that. As a reader, I find that "Jewish Communities" very much sounds like "All Jews" and "Muslim Communities" very much sounds like "All Muslims". If that's not what the authors mean, I'm sure that there are much, much better phrasings.
That may very well be your own bias. If I say "Christian Communities hate gays", you'll probably think of one or two specific communities. When I saw "Jewish Communities" in gp's headline, I immediately thought "oh, the ADL", because they're bigots and don't really hide it.
Everyone has biases, and you're not exempt. If you know that your language might be grossly misinterpreted, consider changing it, if only for your own image.
> 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...
And my point is that "Muslim communities bombed Israel" is not an obviously reasonable statement. If Reuters or AP posted an article with that phrasing, I'd wonder if some party other than Hamas was fighting Israel now. At that point, why not just say "Muslims bombed Israel"? It's technically true but also wildly disingenuous. You'd have to qualify it with a bunch of details in order to make it an honest, good-faith statement.
But it's the literal truth, and using a descriptor on a group of people acting does not attribute the action to all people who fit the descriptor. Not all mammals are dogs, and that shouldn't need to be said.
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.
If you write "Christian Communities hate gays", I will very much read "all Christian communities". And deduce that you're probably spewing nonsense, just as with "Jewish communities" and "Muslim communities".
Also, please do not make assumptions on my biases.
It definitely means that, as a general rule, dogs bite people. It might not mean all dogs, but it's definitely a warning against dogs in general.
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.
You say "that's obvious" but your terminology is ambiguous. I wouldn't say "Muslim communities bombed Israel". To me, that sounds something along the lines of "the predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East teamed up and bombed Israel".
And that's your bias speaking, since my statement is factual. It's perfectly normal, and you can accept that my meaning and your interpretation can be wildly different, therefore accusing me of the worst possible interpretation is unfair.
It's totally fair. If you're going to be intentionally ambiguous just because it's technically correct, we can just assume you're an asshole and extrapolate from there
Maybe an organic overwhelming influence is how there's a lot of gay and Jewish people in musical theater? Unless it's actually an inorganic influence (thanks to the shady machinations of Big Sondheim...)
I've only ever understood "organic" to refer to one of four things:
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
He's talking about the frankfurt school, and its use of the Critical theory (aka the ouija board of social theories that you can analyze any minor difference with as long as you want the outcome to be there's an oppressor/oppressed situation here and it requires a bloody revolution) to foment radicalism and revolutionary violence in any group it can get its hooks into. The schools influences include the greatest hits of 18th and 19th century quackery, including marxism and Freudian psycho analysis, along with special guest, a blast from the past Idealism!
Notable members of the Frankfurt school include Herbert Marcuse who is most known for being one of the three authors of Repressive Tolerance, a 123 page exercise in how to say we need to kill a whole bunch of people until the repression free utopia emerges from the pools of blood, without actually saying we need to kill people outright.
Reminds me a lot of the Let's Go Brandon crowd. The explicit and literal point of the First Amendment is that you're allowed to say "Fuck Joe Biden" loud and proud with no repercussions. Ditto for any other politician. Self-censorship to prove a non-existent point is totally backwards and self-defeating and demonstrates the level of civic understanding at play there.
Let’s Go Brandon became a meme because a news anchor censored the crowd obviously chanting “fuck Joe Biden!” on air.
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.
> It started at an Oct. 2 NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Brandon Brown, a 28-year-old driver, had won his first Xfinity Series and was being interviewed by an NBC Sports reporter. The crowd behind him was chanting something at first difficult to make out. The reporter suggested they were chanting “Let’s go, Brandon” to cheer the driver. But it became increasingly clear they were saying: “F—- Joe Biden.”
> The reporter suggested they were chanting “Let’s go, Brandon” to cheer the driver. But it became increasingly clear they were saying: “F—- Joe Biden.”
They were mocking the news anchor censoring the truth by lying about what the crowd could clearly be heard saying.
I'm just sitting here as a small-l libertarian that's in tune with the concept of logical reductions (eg Turing completeness, NP-completeness, etc), wondering when people will wise up to the idea that sufficiently coercive corporations are indistinguishable from government and vice-versa.
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.
people will wise up to the idea that sufficiently coercive corporations are indistinguishable from government and vice-versa
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.
Ah, here we go with emphasizing the dichotomy. As I said, the important part for comparison is the amount of control being exerted.
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
I just think it's vital to not even mention the two in the same sentence. You seem to agree with me, in one respect, for you cite how you wish to focus on control. I'm all for that.
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.
I said 'sufficiently coercive', because the equivalence is in the limit. Even just one corporation that you can opt out of is a step up from government in many regards. But it can also be a step down in other regards if there are fewer ways to influence that corporation, and the consequences of opting out are significant.
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.
Realistically, I think you're more hitting up on how to convey, than what the actual is. Probably this should be more dynamic, where different audiences receive the same, but differently phrased message.
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.
I'd say the problematic dynamic with assertions like "there is absolutely no difference between men and women" is that they terminate a chain of thought, and then get used as a lemma in support of a conclusion. They're held in place by social consensus [0] rather than a lack of nuance.
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
> sufficiently coercive corporations are indistinguishable from government and vice-versa
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.
As a big-L Libertarian, I totally get where you're coming from. It's spot on - focusing on this government vs. corporation debate is missing the forest for the trees. What really matters is how much power any entity has to stomp on our liberties, whether it's the feds or big tech.
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.
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.