James Woods - Scratch a Liberal and you will find a Fascist

[Uncle Gizmo]

 

[AccessBlaster]

 

[Pat Hartman]

Good luck suing Twitter James Woods. They will probably be protected by the Supreme Court. But I would still love to see class action suits against all the social media companies. Except that there needs to be a way to push back the penalty onto the people who caused the problem at Twitter before Musk took over and stopped it.

Suing the government would be better but they have to allow it I think. We talk about the first amendment and Congressional committees "investigating" pretty much everything but somehow, there are no perp walks and nothing changes. Republicans talk a good game but always back down in the end, especially if you call them names. People who are Democrats lie to Congress and the FBI and walk with impunity. Only Republicans ever get charged and prosecuted with these charges.

When the government violates your civil rights, exactly what recourse do you have? I can't see any. All I see are people bankrupted by having to hire lawyers to defend them against bogus charges just because they were stupid enough to walk through an open door one fateful day in January.

 

[Isaac]

ULTIMATE solution for the long term = break up the monopolies.

Else we'll just be penalizing and spanking and fighting them for eternity.

The ultimate solution for all badly behaving monopolies is to be broken up so that competitors can arise and the half the country that despises the former monopoly can just up and pack their bags and head to the new competitors.

Will that cause at least to some degree that everyone has their own isolated echo chamber? Yes, probably. But the alternative is probably worse--declaring arbitrarily that the government can regulate every company that becomes big enough to not have competitors, which worries me.

I'd rather just keep using antitrust type philosophies to break them up. I'd LOVE to see 10 different phone operating systems with 10 different "Play/App stores" run by people with varying worldviews.
Just like retailers and markets.

 

[Pat Hartman]

break up the monopolies.

Manufacturing goods is different. Breaking them up is easy and productive since it allows competitors to grow. In the case of monopolies like Twitter and FB, breaking them up does nothing positive. They simply separate into echo chambers which is far worse since from that point forward no one will ever hear what the other side has to say. Every town has 2 or more town squares. You go to yours. I'll go to mine.

Musk has the right idea. He has to stop the bias from within. What should eventually grow up around the search engines and social media companies is competitors who offer "filters". The "filters" need to be controllable by the public and there can be no hidden filters behind the scenes. EVERYONE needs to understand that filters are always biased even when you choose the filters yourself. The bottom line to every filter should always be published date so that the newest stuff pops up the list.

No member of a group can be silenced without cause. All those people now working on creating new filters and shadow banning people, need to move into customer support so that everyone who is silenced in any way, has a hearing within 48 hours and can appeal the decision to a higher level.

Much of the data collection currently going on has to stop. PERIOD. Then what remains can only be stored anonymised so that YOU can never be identified based on your searches or buying or geographic location history.

No search engine or social media platform can be free. Everyone who wants to search or post must pay an annual fee. Since we are talking about hundreds of millions of members, the fee can be very small. One dollar per year is fine. Having to provide a CC to sign up will make it easy to track down bots. Advertising should be limited. Maybe a new class of websites will evolve that let you find products you are interested in. Google and the others are terrible at this.

 

[Isaac]

That sounds reasonable, I'm no legal or business expert on monopolies.
Musk DOES have the right idea, I just worry that how long can we expect our luck to last? what if he got hit by a bus tomorrow, and Soros bought Twitter? How about the Play store and the Apple store? We can't hope for a fair minded person to take over all of them, hence I feel breaking them up is the only "guaranteed" way - guaranteed because then we know for a fact that some conservatives will also start similar companies and actually them be able to compete for once. But who knows.

My hope for the short term is that what Musk is exposing is exposed deep and wide and raw enough to shock people's consciences and make them actually WANT a fair system and demand a fair system, including for conservatives...but I worry that Musk is just a bandaid on a problem, and a bandaid that may dissolve at any time.

 

[Pat Hartman]

How about the Play store and the Apple store?

Do you think there would not be rioting in the streets if either of them stepped in and tried to squash Twitter at this point? Brazil would probably send troops given that we meddled in their election.

You can break Apple up and they should have been forced to divest themselves of the app store long ago. Same with Google. Talk about restraint of trade. We should also apply a 100% tariff on any iProduct manufactured in China because Apple collaborates with the Chinese government to suppress freedom in China. The search engine should be split from the rest of Google. Google should be prevented from selling ANY piece of information that can be tracked to an individual or even household. Then ALL Google filters must be public and companies must be allowed to compete for the filter market since no one wants to have to wade through totally unfiltered results. People should be forced to fess up and pick a path for filtering as their baseline. Left, right, balanced, TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). There should be a rating system for all "reporters", "bloggers", and "talking heads" so you know how biased their reporting is. You can't stop people from having a bias but at least you can make the consumer aware. We rate movies and keep "adult" TV until after 9 at night. But now we let Disney groom our children????? What has gotten into the public?

The problem with Twitter and Musk is unintended consequences. I can't believe that Musk didn't think of this or that he is so altruistic that he is OK with destroying himself and Twitter as well as his other investors in his effort to get out the truth. When the lawsuits start flying, is Musk the one getting pelted? Even if it is technically Twitter, unless there is some way to deflect the incoming so they hit the people who corrupted Twitter, I'm afraid Twitter will go under.

 

[Isaac]

Yeah our society has gotten really sick. I remember when I was much younger I spent $100 on an American girl doll for my daughter. she was maybe 3 or 5 and it was her 'dream'. It was one of the most expensive toys I'd ever gotten her and I could barely afford it.
Just read an article yesterday showing a book that American Girl markets to 12 yr old girls encouraging them to question their gender, figure out if they might want to be something other than a girl, and even to use puberty blockers.

As I always say, people claim conservatives' "slippery slope" arguments are needless hysteria. (like a few years ago when we were accused of expecting some enormous sexual sickness to emerge and were told Hey man, the gays just want to marry, what's your problem".

Now look at us. We're inviting kids to drag shows and trying to convince kindergartners to exchange their vag***'s for pen***'s.

Guess the conservatives were right after all - where did it all lead? An enormous sexual sickness gripping our society that makes Iran in comparison almost seem reasonable.

 

[AngelSpeaks]

Do you think there would not be rioting in the streets if either of them stepped in and tried to squash Twitter at this point? Brazil would probably send troops given that we meddled in their election.

You can break Apple up and they should have been forced to divest themselves of the app store long ago. Same with Google. Talk about restraint of trade. We should also apply a 100% tariff on any iProduct manufactured in China because Apple collaborates with the Chinese government to suppress freedom in China. The search engine should be split from the rest of Google. Google should be prevented from selling ANY piece of information that can be tracked to an individual or even household. Then ALL Google filters must be public and companies must be allowed to compete for the filter market since no one wants to have to wade through totally unfiltered results. People should be forced to fess up and pick a path for filtering as their baseline. Left, right, balanced, TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). There should be a rating system for all "reporters", "bloggers", and "talking heads" so you know how biased their reporting is. You can't stop people from having a bias but at least you can make the consumer aware. We rate movies and keep "adult" TV until after 9 at night. But now we let Disney groom our children????? What has gotten into the public?

The problem with Twitter and Musk is unintended consequences. I can't believe that Musk didn't think of this or that he is so altruistic that he is OK with destroying himself and Twitter as well as his other investors in his effort to get out the truth. When the lawsuits start flying, is Musk the one getting pelted? Even if it is technically Twitter, unless there is some way to deflect the incoming so they hit the people who corrupted Twitter, I'm afraid Twitter will go under.

Pat, Musk is a smart guy. If he allows Twitter to crash then he probably knows exactly what impact it would have on his taxes.