Comment by voakbasda
5 days ago
The government is not going to regulate them, any more than they are going to fix the countless other cartels that operate with impunity.
5 days ago
The government is not going to regulate them, any more than they are going to fix the countless other cartels that operate with impunity.
Lina Kahn had the mandate but took too long. She did not appreciate the urgency or limited time with which she had to put together the cases.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
American labor unions are fed up with big tech and both parties are trying to court them.
Actions speak louder than words, and there has been no real action for my entire gray-haired life. Politicians can talk all they want about anti-trust reforms, but both parties equally have lots of members with vested interests in these cartels and who profit from the status quo. I think that ultimately overrides the will of the people more often than not.
> Lina Kahn had the mandate but took too long.
She didn't "take too long," she did all she could as long as she could, and is still doing it. The problem is that she was opposed by both political parties and the administration, for whom she was a token to hand to the Bernie and AOC people so they could sell out without being called sellouts.
If Biden had promoted Khan not only would she have had vastly more success, but he would have won the election - demented or not. Instead, if you listened to his press conferences, you would have no idea that she existed. He did not support her. He was a tool for financial scammers his entire career. His tiny little state was to domestic financial scams as Ireland is to worldwide tax dodging.
> Both the Democratic and Republican parties have lots of members who are fed up with big tech.
Few members, with no power. All of the leadership is on the big tech payroll. It's the population which hates big tech, and their opinions don't matter.
https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
The public are also easily movable over time and under great pressure. The public have become aggressively pro-Big Pharma and Free Trade globalists in a single generation. Libs have become militantly pro-FBI and CIA anti-Soviet warriors. They literally revived the 50's anti-Commie language to describe everything they didn't like, and worship The Lincoln Project, David Frum, and even goddamn Bill Kristol which I never thought would work. It's literally the same generation that reviled them and anyone who would tolerate them just 20 years ago.
They didn't even have to die for success of the submissiveness revolution. They just had to keep watching, and consuming. And you had to threaten their jobs, all the time.
Defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Having a theory of power that doesn't unrealistically imagine a control over government which one demonstrably doesn't have is not "defeatism." Limiting yourself to only one impossible way of doing things is more insidious than learned helplessness, because they can give you a dramatically scripted mini-game to fool yourself into thinking that you're progressing. See slacktivism.
The trouble with controlling the government is that nobody actually does. Nobody will ever get it to do everything they want, or everything it "should", or anything like that. It's a giant uncoordinated bureaucracy full of inefficiency and perverse incentives. Relying only on the government is a time-honored way to die with regrets.
This is not the same as being unable to affect it at all. It can very easily go from being hot garbage to being flaming toxic waste in a tornado when the only people who show up are the ones trying to steal from everyone else.