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This week, we cover Liz Warren’s plan to break up the big tech companies, Ilhan Omar’s latent (or maybe not so latent) anti-Semitism from the perspective of an actual member of her district, and chat about the Democrats boycotting of Fox News for one of their upcoming debates. Oh, yeah — we’ve also got the great Andy McCarthy on Manafort, Cohen, and what to expect on seemingly perpetual soon-to-come Mueller report.
Music from this week’s episode: Mayor of Simpleton by XTC
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Love the filler material at 19:00.
You can explain a lot of what the big tech firms do, by positing that they pander to whoever can hurt them.
They pander to progressives because progressives can hurt them while, as Rob lectures us, conservatives “don’t do that”; i.e., have unilaterally disarmed themselves. Thus, the more biased these firms get, pro-progressive and anti-conservative, the safer they are from government meddling.
For the same reason, they pander to China far more than they do to the U.S. government.
Well as Trump said, it is just business.
D’oh. This has now been fixed. Delete the version you have (if you had previously downloaded it) and re-download it to get the corrected version. For those of you that already have it, enjoy a little window into how the sausage is made.
If a Ricochet podcast listener were to toss his UNTUCKit shirt onto his Burrow lounge chair, brush his teeth with a Quip, climb onto his Casper mattress, draw back his Boll & Branch sheets, snuggle under his Calming Comfort blanket, queue up a Calm.com sleep story, and drift off to sleep inhaling Molekule-purified air, would the singularity finally be achieved?
Only @jameslileks is qualified to answer this question.
I’m glad I got it early, I enjoyed the unedited technical screw-ups.
No. Just boundless peace and ease, and the satisfaction that you are living better than J. D. Rockefeller.
But he had more money! you say. True. And that’s why robinhood is the –
Sorry, force of habit.
Do something about the grand censors of twitter, youtube, facebook, and places like that is what people like Glenn Reynolds have mentioned. About your only alternative is to go a place like gab.ai and be called an Nazi. The Left even goes after your financial resources, preventing a person from using things like paypal and Master Card as a way to declare you a non-person.
Your phone or electric company can’t cut you off for thinking the wrong way. Should companies like these be about to do such things? It’s all quite funny when your freedom of expression has not been banished, but you’ve got 25-year-old uber-Leftists who bow down to the Southern Poverty Law Center who hate conservatives, religion, and even innocent websites like Prager University.
The Left controls Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the (government funded) universities, most of urban big business, even many religious-founded organizations, and the mainstream media. In fact, apparently conservatives can get throttled on websites just for using the acronym MSM, the mainstream media.
I’m not sure what I would do, but conservatives have to protect the First Amendment and legal money transfers before those are squashed too.
You should have Glenn Reynolds, a libertarian, on the podcast sometime.
Ah, but she had to go to robinhood.com AND lendingtree.com to afford all the other stuff! Singularity, here we come!
Predictive description by @peterrobinson of how 2020 is shaping up:
“I, Donald Trump, may be a man of low character and disreputable past, but ladies and gentlemen, I am all that stands between you and them…”*
The only part of that depiction that seems questionable is the use of the first person for the initial concession. I expect it will fall to others to make this full argument in the third person (as they did the last time). He will concur in the first person with the final claim.
*p.s. “… and they are worse.”
I don’t remember everything about Trump’s Charlottesville comments but I thought something else he did, which set the Left off, was that he didn’t accept the lie that Antifa are heroic people fighting the Nazis of today. Trump saying there were bad people on both sides was as bad as his misconstrued good people on both sides statement.
He’s been on before, but not in a long time. Good idea!
‘The Left controls Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the (government funded) universities, most of urban big business, even many religious-founded organizations, and the mainstream media. In fact, apparently conservatives can get throttled on websites just for using the acronym MSM, the mainstream media.
I’m not sure what I would do, but conservatives have to protect the First Amendment and legal money transfers before those are squashed too.’
As Bill Whittle points out it’s like they have to go around covering up the windows wherever they see a light shining through and they’re constantly on the lookout for new openings to be covered up.
Fortunately Trump is not a member of the “Thank you sir may I have another” school of conservatism.
I would insert “… (though an angel compared to Bill Clinton or JFK) …”.
It is a conservative thing to protect free markets and competition. If Google and Facebook each control 40% of online ads, should a conservative be concerned? Yes. Should a conservative take action? Not yet. Should Google and Facebook work together to crush the other 20%, should a conservative take action? Probably. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts free markets.
@jameslileks – What was the name of the binkie sponsor? Don’t we normally see the ads for the sponsors posted somewhere in the thread? I like heavy blankets. Which is weird. But wanted to check them out.
I live in her district. I think Omar has just gotten rewarded for babbling about progressivism with that sexy, powerful voice she has. No one ever called her on it if she said something that wasn’t cogent or was controversial until now. It was like a feedback system. She doesn’t think about any of this stuff, like AOC pretends to or does to some extent. And then like someone mentioned, you check off another Progressive box box because she’s Muslim.
I’ve been told by people that watch a lot of her videos from Minnesota legislature that she just babbles like a bad Hugey Long impersonator all the time.
I caught the tail end of our morning talk show guy, Andrew Lee on Fox news this morning, and he says she’s going to get primaries, thank God. She’s good for the Republicans but I can’t take it anymore.
The Andrew Lee interview should be very good if they post it.
Internet giants like Facebook and Google are in an odd position.
Companies providing traditional shared platforms of communication (like sending mail or making phone calls) have no responsibility for what message you express and no censorship role.
Companies providing traditional publishing (e.g. of books and articles) do carry legal responsibility for content and do have edit and filtering control, and they must compete with each other.
What is to be made of a situation where giant companies providing a shared platform (e.g. control over all Twitter messaging, or all Facebook communications) do not have legal responsibility for content and yet have the freedom to censor and exclude?
What if, for example, Twitter could censor all they like, but they had to open their network to competing companies that could also allow their own customers to send and receive “twitter” messages to anyone using twitter, just as Twitter members do? Compare that to competing phone companies enabling phone calls to anyone with a phone.
@ericb Well done, sir.
This is the Andrew Lee interview. three and a half minutes.
Are Minnesotans surprised by Rep. Ilhan Omar’s controversial comments? https://video.foxnews.com/v/6012020362001/
We’ll post it momentarily. Stand by.
Trump is not a member of any school of conservatism.
It is genuinely funny to me the Ricochet podcast, with its two NeverTrump-ish hosts and one reluctantly Trump-supporting host, play -unironically- William F. Buckley’s statement that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard in their intro. They then proceed to express their utter bafflement as to why conservatives could possibly want to break the power of the large tech companies (“don’t the rubes understand that’s a *progressive* position?!?!??”). Haha… good stuff.
And *of course* importanting thousands of Somali Muslims has changed the landscape of the electorate: are we honestly supposed to believe that a progressive sixth generation WASP member of the DFL would regularly and publicly express rank antisemitic tropes and single-handedly shift the national Democrats’ Overton Window on acceptable discourse about Israel and Jews? Hmm… if only there were a test-case we could compare this situation to, like maybe a continent who shares our civilization and has been importing thousands of Muslims into their liberal democracies for decades… wish there was some way to observe how this might all play out. Oh well, people can still buy alcohol in that neighborhood, so everything is fine.
I am frustrated by conservative media folks insouciance in the face of big tech media, and now banking, oppression. “They are private businesses” is their reflexive answer as if that ends the argument. They almost refuse to hear. This is how they got Trump. They refused to hear on immigration. Rank and file conservatives are alarmed and for good reason.
This is exactly right, and you can’t explain it to anyone. I am convinced that the Fed and the financial system make people need socialism or populism. Conservatives and libertarians don’t stand a chance because peoples agency is constantly being eroded by big government and big finance. The media is effectively all pro-statist all of the time. Excuses and support 24 / 7.
I really wish some sugar daddy would support former Rep. Jason Lewis to start a podcast to discuss this stuff. He’s already proven he can do it on the radio. Decades.
Go on, I’m listening; the connection is . . . ?
The population of the 5th district is 708K; the Somali population is about 27K.
No, I don’t, which is why they’ll be replaced by people who are Very Concerned about Palestine.
That’s not the best mischaracterization of my views and writings I’ve seen, but it’ll have to do, I guess.
Here’s my unpopular opinion (at least in these parts): Americans are rightly concerned, and growing more so, about the surveillance economy. I actually think Sen. Warren is onto something here, and that the other candidates will latch onto this. Rob and James poo-poo-ing this just shows me they’re out of touch on these issues. Warren didn’t say this, as far as I know, but the issue with Amazon to me isn’t the retail operation, it’s the Cloud Services division. That’s where the surveillance part of the business is housed, and leased out to every other tech giant. It’s way too much power in the hands of these businesses. Don’t tell me to be OK with it because I clicked through a 20-page user agreement that I’d need an attorney to understand properly. (In the case of FB, all because I wanted to see the photos my sister-in-law posts of my niece and nephew on the opposite coast!) And no, I’m not on Twitter, and I think it’s a silly waste of time, with way too much pointless drama attached.
There needs to be a way to participate in social media, online banking and shopping, and similar utilitarian services, without giving up this much of my privacy. It is becoming too dear of a price to pay. And no, I don’t think that’s anti-conservative. Aren’t we the original “leave-me-alone” proponents?
ETA: monopolies are inherently anti-capitalistic. They function without the check and balance of market forces. Thus TR was right to bust them up.