Big Tech Taking Advantage of a "Tragedy"

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We now have the Sam Harris take:

There still exist other, smaller web hosting companies besides just the Big Tech biggies. For example, my site uses DreamHost.

Parler was using Amazon (one of the biggies), and was recently shut down by them. It wouldn't surprise me if some right wing billionaire were to come to Parler's rescue and create a new hosting company just for Parler and similar sites.

EDIT: Be that as it may, I agree with your larger point that the increasing centralization of Internet services is a problem.

Tulsi Gabbard earning even more of my respect.

She certainly does come across as a voice of reason. I'm tempted to have a look at her locals page (I'm already a member on a law related page on locals) - I just wish there was a way to "preview" it before joining, to see what the focus\direction it is going in before signing up there.

It's a shame she wasn't the Democrat nominee last year for President, as she appears to be a much more "uniting" person, compared to Mr Biden and Ms Harris who both comes across as divisive - It will be interesting to see how their actions increase or decrease the divide between "left" and "right" over the coming years.

I watched the Democratic primaries with interest and it was really interesting to see what got amplified and turned down. Even trying to be generous and say that Gabbard and Yang were just seen as too young and inexperienced, the whole flow of the rest of the stage just didn't lend the impression that it was about ideas - for example even Warren looked like a significantly better choice than Biden, yet for some reason this is how it shook out and the take away seemed to be that the hosts, camera crews, and media in general were all heavily instructing the viewer on who to pay attention to and who to ignore.

Bret Weinstein mentioned this recently in a discussion, I believe it might have been Triggernometry (Constantine and Francis) where he was effectively relaying the same thing I saw - ie. that what we have 'looks' like representative democracy except that it isn't, that the broader system - at best - sometimes mirrors the interests of the people when the interests of their funding is congruent with that but for the rest of the time it's off, and also while it may look like we've had (previously at least) a relatively amicable presidential campaign that it was the primaries where most of the dirty deeds were done in terms of who the two front-runners would be. Yeah, no kidding.

She is. She supported Bernie Sanders and thinks the Green New Deal is a great idea, if a little vague.

How about some Vaush.



He had another video too on whether big tech has too much power.

Would that be the same Vausch who has on multiple occasions stated he sees nothing wrong with people possessing pornography which involves minors? (Just seeking to clarify if it is the same person, or someone else going under the same name...)

I think that you must have the wrong person, he has never said that. In fact in one of the videos I think that he might even criticised the existence of things like loli stuff on Twitter.

Gabbard is an awful person, a political extremist and an idiot.

Awful person: she’s a transphobe, an apologist for dictators, and she has a long history of dodgy positions on foreign and social policy, and she didn’t support the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Political extremist: she’s consistently on the lunatic fringe of the left, she supports “Medicare for All” and the “Green New Deal” which are both completely stupid ideas despite nice names (and Gabbard explicitly supports the worst parts of them, like banning private insurance and nuclear power), she supports GMO labelling, and she’s a transphobe with a long history of social conservatism.

Idiot: well I think this has been covered.

Broadly speaking, the Democratic Party prefers good people to bad people, moderates to extremists, and smart people to idiots. Gabbard never stood a chance. If you think she would have been more unifying than Biden then you don’t understand American politics. Sure her conservatism might appeal to conservatives but it would also be offputting to most leftists and all moderates.

The case is stronger for Facebook and Twitter, but businesses have the right to turn away customers for any reason, provided they don’t discriminate or victimise. For example, it would be wrong (both legally and morally) if they turned Elizabeth Warren away because of her advocacy for gay rights. However, while it might be morally wrong for them to discriminate against her because of her stances on healthcare or fossil fuels or whatever, it is something that they should be allowed to do all the same. It’s exactly the same as customers boycotting a company they disagree with - companies should be allowed to boycott customers they disagree with. It’s nothing to do with religion, and equal protection laws still apply.

How do we describe discrimination or victimization? If I don't want black people in my business establishment, I've now violated the Interstate Commerce Clause here in the USA. A Muslim cab driver refuses to pick me up because I've been to a bar...is it his religious right to not pick me up for (possibly) having consumed alcohol, or discrimination against me and other people who don't practice or abide by his interpretation of his religion?

Plus, you really can't compare small brick-and-mortar shops that have a limited consumer base to mega corporations like Google, and Facebook, and Twitter, and the other "Tech Giants." One, we're in "cyber space." Two, these are mediums of communication, not small, little establishments with physical service attributes. Three, like casting a giant fishing net, they've set themselves up to be the only player in the market. When any Tech Giant can de facto control the means of communication, they've attained too much power in that given space. The comparisons of multitude-reaching Google with millions of clients and no true competition doesn't compare to one woman at one particular beauty parlor with a limited customer base.

If you told me Warren had been banned from 90+% of all beauty parlors throughout the USA, it may be a different story. As is, your comparison falls very, very short.

And boycotts only work in a free market where there are other establishments. When one MONOLITH is the only player, the free market is no longer free.

Remember, only a handful of people could ever find that one beauty parlor. With the Tech Giants, they "own" and control the market. They're the "only game in town," and not even comparable to your analogy.

The way I have heard it, people should choose a career that they can perform their job. A cab driver should reliably be able to see that picking up people who have been drinking should be obvious, so such a person who might have an objection to consuming alcohol should be able to understand that they might not be able to perform duties.

Surely there is also a difference between not wanting to service a gay person, and not wanting to service a gay person who themselves would discriminate against a gay person. If not legally then socially. Considering that the right already like to look to examples of legal precident where one could not be made to make a gay wedding cake if it went against their morals. Under those lines it is pretty much hypocrisy to then complain about privately owned platforms not allowing their actions.

Some of my own thoughts on these:

- Sports is indeed a place where women's rights and trans rights are in a zero sum contest and it needs to be worked out amicably.

- Syria was a hot mess, to the degree that there were people fighting for their freedom there were far more who were fighting over whos Islamic theocracy it would be.

- Impeachment of Donald Trump - I'm hoping that's not on the Steele Dossier. If so it probably says little to nothing about her actual position on Trump.

While I do think some of the Green New Deal stuff is naive I'd have to learn more about her engagement with it. For banning nuclear it seems like the world is going to SMR's, possibly Thorium, as steps between classic fission reactors and whenever fusion might properly land (some of the solid containment stuff looks interesting). If she was against those I'd want to know why, with the way that a lot of people just want to blanket remove nuclear my guess would be that she's lacking expertise in this area and probably caving to the typical social pressure of that position.

In general a lot of the stuff that she seems iffy on is stuff that Democrats generally look iffy on to conservatives and in a lot of cases she's one of the more tolerable, adding that she shows signs of having her own opinions and going against the grain where necessary (might be wrong plenty but gets there honestly - which seems much preferable to people who live by the party and lobbyist playbook). While I was much more excited about Yang generally she seemed in some sense to fit the more (political compass) 'liberatarian' quadrant of the left and I think a large part of what we've been contending with is a massive national pissing contest between authoritarian right and left which has choked the political process and put us in a position where we mostly have people in office which are good at zero sum games - that tends to be people with more authoritarian orientations.

While I'm not going to argue that she's perfect it seems really clear that she really annoyed certain people in power (bringing this up less as a selling point but to her being 'evil'), it turned into a massive MSM smear campaign, and it is in most cases people don't have the opportunity to vet every detail, they tend to still at least cautiously take the MSM talking points seriously though in some cases if it's something or someone they no nothing about they'll let it sail right through unexamined - Peterson was an example of no one knowing the name one week and two weeks later knowing that they were armed with everything that they needed to know about him - that he was anti-trans, misogynist, and alt-right friendly somehow. Getting smeared by the MSM doesn't change that she isn't perfect just like Candace Owens getting smeared doesn't make her accurate or knowledgeable. In Tulsi's case though the didactic overreach - ie. 'Everyone agree that she's evil' - seems deeply orchestrated, it also suggests that for whatever flaws she does have it's probably more her unwillingness to follow the script that's the problem.

I might add on foreign policy - at some given point the idea of having a Chipotle and Starbucks on every street corner in the world or a CVS and Walgreens staring at each other cattycorner, while to some degree it hasn't been the worst goal and over a significant stretch of time like in the late cold war and early post cold war era it seemed important to both nail down the victory of free market over authoritarian communism and then somewhat later as a hedge against the causes of terrorism, it's running into the same law of diminishing returns at this point that woke activism and rights movements are. At a certain given point you hit real, nasty, and ugly complexity - both in terms of human motivation, differences in cultures, and you also get to where rules of physics (to some degree including how much money you have to do what) hit home. You also have the open question of how much of how much building McWorld together should be giving other countries the tools to succeed as such vs. putting boots on the ground. It seems like boots on the ground, I'd say flying drones as well, needs to be a much less knee-jerk proposition because we're getting to where the world has been getting more democratic, what we're dealing with now are increasingly better conditions around the world (first world seems to be getting messier from social media, MSM, and in the US a culture that doesn't understand that unemployment happens to good and even hard-working people).

In there are some of the places where I think the global intervention policy breaks down, and add to this that it isn't a moot point that certain industries make hand over fist on money spent in that situation and their benefits have been suggested to burn something like $10 US tax dollars for every $1 earned by those companies. That's where the vehicle that got you somewhere turns around and bites you and you have to know when and how to turn the tap off. Similarly I've noticed a lot of people who are fierce Trump critics generally leave his foreign policy alone. He was a train wreck as a president yet it seems like for the most part he successfully left that project in more capable hands than his own.

When Big Tech is complicit in an attempt to violently overthrow the legitimate government of the United States, then it certainly warrants a very serious discussion about the power and influence of Big Tech in modern society.

Keep in mind, though, that Big Tech have just chosen not to be complicit in an attempt to violently overthrow the legitimate government of the United States... an attempt which - based on the active and threats across the US - may still be ongoing.

And it has already been demonstrated that the planning of these active and ongoing threats have been undertaken either on Big Tech's own platforms (Twitter) or on a platform (Parler) hosted by Big Tech (Amazon).

Incidently, German chancellor Angela Merkel has just echoed the criticism of Twitter's decision to ban Trump, as she doesn't believe a private company should hold such power.

... but if the US adopted the government regulation of social media in Merkel's Germany (which is much, much, much, much, much more strict than the US*), then it is very unlikely that Trump and his supporters would ever have been given as much leeway by Big Tech in the US as they have up until the Neo-Confederate attack on 6 January 2021.

*Up to a €50 Million fine for failing to remove illegal content.