Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
Is it?
I'm perfectly fine with doing a capital strike on Laura Ingraham's, or Tucker Carlson's, television shows. Who isn't? Why does that make Nate/Glenn correct to shun all "censorship" (lol) of this nature?
And like, this is not the complaint Nate/Glenn are making, at all:
Sorry bobman, I think this is a Bad Post.
This is the key line from Bruenig's piece:
Quote:
Remember: Capital is capital; it is not your friend. Conservatives are learning this the hard way, and those on the left shouldn’t forget it, even when companies happen to decide the best bet is the morally correct one.
The point being made here is that big companies have the de facto ability to police certain kinds of speech through boycotts or capital strikes or whatever you want to call it. That is, by and large, an ability we've chosen to deny our regular, democratically-ish-elected government. If the police dragged Tucker off to jail for being a racist, I think most people would still at least be a little concerned. (I understand that there's a hot new meme summarizing the work of Karl Popper trending that maybe says otherwise, but put that to one side for the moment.) It's at least worth considering whether it is a good thing that this power, which we think is too dangerous for the government to be trusted with, is being wielded by a bunch of big companies, especially if your ideological position is that big companies are very bad. There are plenty of valid reasons to say that this is fine and good. For example, you might believe that the reason for free speech protection is that you don't want the government to entrench itself by suppressing criticism, so it's fine for other actors to have that type of power, since they aren't conflicted. (Although, if you think big business is in bed with government and capital needs to be ejected from its hegemonic position in society, this should maybe be less persuasive?) (Kind of a sidebar, but an interesting thought experiment that was clarifying for me about these types of questions:
link.) The least good reason to be OK with this is that the particular person feeling the brunt of corporate power happens to actually be bad.