Comment by jauntywundrkind
15 hours ago
pretty impressive how quickly Ellisons managed to make this whole situation suck and reek badly. they'll turn down the heat & stuff the frog back in the pot, then crank the heat up a bit slower this time, but there is just going to be such endless utterly preposterous censorship and algorithmic biasing for the right wing & ultra capitalist agenda, on and on now.
incredible beyond words that this was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. letting the us government set up whatever arraigned marriage it felt like for buying a social network is some wild meddling with businesses. and here we are, with the ultra capitalists doing exactly what they want to with one of the most popular social networks.
excellent write up for this absolute madness of a court decision, TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
Capitalism is when bad things happen. And the more badder they are the more capitalism it is!
I don't think the parent said it was. This is clearly closer to mercantilism, given the degree of government involvement.
They've claimed this is the result of or at the behest of 'ultra capitalism'. I don't even mind hyperbole--call it fascism if you want--but at least use the dimensionally-correct terms. This is like when people call everything 'neoliberal'.
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This was the logic the West used throughout the life of the Soviet Union but for [Cc]ommunism.
Arguably people still do this with 'socialism'. Calling everything communism is now a bit _too_ cliche.
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I’m reading “ultra-capitalists” here as “those that control an extreme proportion of capital” rather than “those who believe really strongly in capitalism as a system”, though tbf that venn diagram may well be a donut…
Technically, Venn Diagrams don't show _degree_ of overlap :)
Although re your actual point: the current admin only gifts things like this to a chosen few; a small subset of those with extreme capital. So it seems much more appropriate to call it cronyism, or some such thing, rather than capitalism in the sense of merely controlling capital.
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I recently saw an interesting explanation. The point was, that capitalism is not (just) an economical system. It's a system of power in which capital can (and almost always does) overrule everything else. If you take this stance, capitalism is to blame for all the good and bad things that happen in the capitalist country. Democracy is just the way how capital rules.
Aren't all country-scale (economic, governance, etc.) systems also 'systems of power'? It's not like the most powerful people of the USSR didn't leverage that system.
Whatever the rules are, people end up adapting to and gaming them to entrench and grow their own position, typically at the expense of everyone else.
> It's a system of power in which capital can (and almost always does) overrule everything else. ... Democracy is just the way how capital rules.
That’s a contradiction.
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