But think about it. Even small companies will self-censor in fear that the government will act against them. Every company exists in hope of being big enough that they could have a target on their back. Yes lemmy operates at a scale that it can be considered a personal project and will likely stay at that scale. But that’s not the majority of social media. Maybe it was a bit of a joke on my part to say Lemmy would be targeted. But I don’t think it’s ridiculous that American business owners should think woah the government will intentionally wreck me and try to sell me off to their friends if there is some 100% legal and reasonable conversation on my platform they don’t like.
Either there are principles to protect you or there aren’t. The fact that we have a politician openly saying we attack companies to buy them cheap or ask for half should be pretty fucking scary to anyone who owns a business.
The Eastern European countries for a long time were said to lack economic development precisely because of corruption. This is exactly the kind of interaction with government that caused that. The idea that it doesn’t matter because they are big and I am not doesn’t work. In the long run small businesses will be more vulnerable if the principle doesn’t stand that the government can’t attack you and sell you off to their friends. If that principle is gone then it’s gone.
And Donald Trump saying “We destroyed your business so we should get half of it” is a very scary precedent. You know that’s what the Israeli settlements do. The will burn the olive groves of neighboring land owners and then say, your land is worthless, sell it to us for a quarter of it’s original value. You are now in ruin you will need the cash. They will often do it in the night, but I saw video evidence once of an altercation where they were openly burning a farmer’s field in the day time right in front of him. But there was an IDF soldier ready to shoot the farmer if he tried to defend his fields physically. An entire family’s future going up in smoke because someone else wants a deal on buying land not by producing anything of value themselves but by destroying things.
In a lot of ways TikTok is an American company. To operate here it has to be structured and registered in the US. It just has foreign investment. If they can do it to TikTok (single out a company) they can do it to American companies. They just have to find some secondary reason to dislike you. Is Lemmy next if we say Free Palestine on here? All so that Israel can have their Labensraum.
If they had attempted to overthrow the government don’t you think they would have gone in armed? This is the problem with the internet being politically bifurcated. The claims on both sides for what is reality get more and more disconnected over time. The echo chamber only rewards those who make claims beyond what has already been claimed and never rewards those who make a correction. Each echo chamber then has a steady velocity toward madness.
I posted this to a few places. If you want to see what different places on the net think:
https://goatmatrix.net/c/USPolitics/DrjNYLpSU5
That is a fair point. I suppose it is a weak argument to say that the government should do something else well instead, because it currently doesn’t. But more broadly government shouldn’t be placing serious penalties on anything that doesn’t have definite harm that has occurred on a definite victim.
Fining you for speeding sure. But castration or even jail longer than six months, I’m going to need to see an actual victim with a substantive harm where but for the accused’s specific actions they would have not been harmed (proximate cause).
But people think with emotions and can be told to dislike this or that person (sometimes fairly but often unfairly) and then people will support any level of penalty suggested thereafter.
More amendments we need. It should be easier to pass amendments that restrict government where the majority agree, strong majority to grow powers. Yet another amendment we need.
But it could also be an absolute check protecting persecution.
In theory due process would protect them. Personally, in the same vain, I don’t like qualified immunity. I think government officials and workers should be owed a slightly higher level of due process to protect against political targeting, but should also face higher sentences because as a member of government they should have a higher respect for the law if they are convicted.
Qualified immunity prevents that and so do pardons for government mis-actions.
And also a reminder that Switzerland flirted with actual nazism. Remember that whole “neutral” during WWII thing. That was really finlandization of Switzerland from western powers. They operated inside the German economic block.
So telling a swiss company that Trump is a nazi and association with anything even 0.0000001% a nazi would be outside of what you’d expect for a Swiss is kind of funny.
The only thing Nazi-like about Trump is his support of Israel committing a genocide against people who are in the way of Israel’s Lebensraum.
What we found out was that wiping an entire civilization or culture off the map was a lot harder than we realized. We couldn’t unseat the existence of an agrarianist regime with the level of economy you would expect from a country with no water access, even after we applied 50% of what our current debt was at the time to do it.
These leaders may have had the same thought you did, that at that time we had that capacity. But it was shown to be a bluff.
Shouldn’t it be tens of thousands of dollars? So it’s like $2,000 dollars and $40 bucks?
Are you saying something is going to be uncovered?
Yes. It’s literally not a suggestion from me. I worry it reads that way. It’s more like saying it is pointless to plug one hole in a sive. Either plugging all the holes in the sive is worth it and you do it, or it’s not and you don’t. But people who demand that we plug one hole in a sive either are stupid or have a different motive. If you want to look at the other motive possibility look at who is angling to buy it.
But other things have influence too. If Russia bans Youtube are we going to call them draconian for it? Saying we are going to ban something because we ended up with political outcomes we didn’t like that we don’t want to spread is what authoritarian regimes do.
Addendum: If you were to not single out a single company and actually address the fear at play you wouldn’t even single out the app store. You would ban any chinese company from distributing any networked software in the US. That’s what an actual law would look like instead of making a law blatantly making rules for one entity. That would be a pretty intense law, but at least it would address the fear that’s being claimed, be logically consistent, and apply the same rules to everyone. The question would be if that juice is worth the squeeze. That’s not something I’m trying to sell or not sell. Other people can think about that. But the absurd wackamole version is ruled out of making sense.
If anything it makes congress come off as stupid. We’ve got Rs and Ds on this issue. And maybe we can drop the tribalism for one second and have a cogent take away from this for once that correlates with observed reality. Maybe, congress by in large is stupid.
This is also very critical because Trump is very anti-intervention, except when it comes to Israel. Anything for them says Trump. Someone has to counteract that.
Mandatory porn re-education camp for you.
I think a lot of those criticisms are fair. But blame for aids as if the president is some god whose fault it is that nature exists says a lot about the role presidents take in our mind. It isn’t healthy.
I should make a crypto currency and call it Condoms?