Misleading clickbait heading, article mentions that 4 years of blog content were blanket deleted and then randomly implies that certain tech issues were targeted among all the other (also-deleted) posts.
The posts in question are public and available here: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog
In fact, the headline kind of underplays the significance -- everything in that time period was deleted! Including posts critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI Companies, among everything else that was deleted.
If they're archived offline, then no, not necessarily. But they'd be on the hook for being able to reply to a FOIA request in a timely manner, and I'd bet dollars to donuts they didn't even try to verify if backups were made.
A FOIA request won't make them put the blog posts back up. They just have to provide you with a copy. And they can charge a fee to cover the cost of doing this. So, given that the posts are already publicly available, it seems like a waste of your time and money.
The paper trail that can be made available and/or added as evidence or a factoid in a historical record. Maybe with enough accounts people will find a way to avoid a repeat in the future. Maybe/maybe not, but they definitely won't know to change anything if there is no record of it being an issue in the first place.
It's still valuable to point out that the crimes of this administration are crimes. They aren't going to stop doing them until they are stopped. But framing their crimes as expected implies they are normal and of no particular consequence.
This one thing is, all by itself, worthy of impeachment and prison sentences for the people who abetted it. Add it to the list, and don't downplay even the small ones. If we're going to come out the other side of this every one of these violations matters and will need to be accounted for.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there actually were any penalties. Turns out there are. Among others:
Whoever, having the custody of any such
record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper,
or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies,
or destroys the same, shall be fined under this
title or imprisoned not more than three years,
or both
A different section allows prison terms of up to 10 years, but only if the "market value" of that data is high enough. I'm not sure if this data actually has a market value, but it is still a legal requirement to preserve.
Can you please be more specific about which administration you mean? This investigating administration, or this investigated administration? They are both equally worthless to me, but I could be convinced to care.
The part where they keep having judges reject the spurious arguments? People are getting rehired because Trump broke the law firing them. USAID was ordered to be reopened because they broke the law.
It’s not perfect, or enough, but we should stand up for the rule of law rather than trying to score Internet points by cynically conceding it.
I’m not saying anything about this is good, but I do think there are a lot of people who think following the law is important and we can use each and every one of them. Blatantly ignoring the law is how they lose suburban middle class voters and we don’t need too many of them to flip elections.
In many respects the rule of law was broken long ago through judicial activism.
The whirlwind we face today is an inevitable outcome from the consequences of those choices.
There are specific components required by a rule of law which are not met. It was conceded by past generations that still hold political power today as a cohort.
Edit: Do feel free to not believe me and in doing so dig into the details and prove me wrong.
A "rule by law" is the system that lacks the components required by a "rule of law". This former is the same as any totalitarian or fascist state.
Given the time horizon of case resolution, when you can find more than 3 instances of failures relating to the judicial branch within a few years, in each court, where the components are not true, then its failed. 3 is sufficient to be statistically significant within a short time horizon.
Not a pleasant thought, but neither is burying your head in the sand thinking it will be better that you not see something, while at the same time choosing to become meat for the hungry lion that you didn't want to see.
What if the article was titled __FTC Removes Posts Critical of Kroger, Albertsons__? That is an alternative that is as accurate as the current one and sends a very different message. Telling a selective subset of the truth is just a barely clever form of lying.
I never commented on the subject of the article because I don't come here to engage in political flamewars. I will continue not to comment on it, but rest assured that you have absolutely no idea what I am angry about. Having engagement driven clickbait on the front page is bad for the entire site.
If your only comment is dissuading people from taking the content of the article seriously (oh, and lying by saying the content is still available!), you are leaving a political comment. But, okay!
A good time to check how Trump's Crypto assets are going ... You know, the untraceable virtual money that can be transferred back into real money. NOT to say that a person like that would be transactional.
When technofeudal corporate owners don't just capture the regulators but install lackeys in service of them. This is a natural progression towards authoritarianism and corruption.
It has been theoretically tamped down with independent agencies and watchdogs.
What's happening isn't just business as usual, it's unusual. The last president we had that openly defied the courts and the law was Andrew Jackson. And even he wasn't so brazen.
What we are finding out is that rules don't mean anything without enforcement and the US had a particular unaddressed threat in a party that doesn't care about the law and an executive agency filled with sycophants.
What the Trump admin is doing was supposed to be resolved with impeachment and removal from office. Fat chance republicans will react accordingly.
I got the sense that Lina Kahn was a thorn to Harris as well, otherwise she would've committed to Kahn's FTC instead of leaving it ambiguous and not campaigning on her successes.
Khan made a lot of good regulatory changes, and some good litigation (like RealPage), but a lot of the litigation was frankly counterproductive and/or badly handled.
Splitting Chrome off of Google and making it so that Firefox can't get search engine royalty payments is not going to lead to societally useful outcomes. And voters don't give a shit about it either. The FTC could have had much more impact if they were focused on, say, healthcare, health insurance, preventing private equity from owning (and closing) so many hospitals and chains and nursing homes, etc. They did some of that but it was very clear that big tech was the focus.
And I'm not against taking on big tech even a little bit, but you kind of have to have a plan for the desired outcomes, and it doesn't feel like there was much of one.
Not just FTC. The CFPB, USAID, NHS, Department of Education, Research funding to colleges, the list goes on. Anything Elon Musk has no use for is getting shut down.
It's not just "has no use for", but he's seeking revenge for being regulated. FTC for telling him he can't do securities fraud, FAA & FCC for telling him he has to launch rockets responsibly, etc.
Thats not really planned in Project 2025, more likely any large tech company that bent the knee to Trump will be exempt, but we shall see.
At the same time, the document discusses how large tech companies influence politics, and can harm individuals.
> Conservative approaches to antitrust and consumer protection continue to
trust markets, not government, to give people what they want and provide the
prosperity and material resources Americans need for flourishing, productive,
and meaningful lives.
> At the same time, conservatives cannot be blind to certain
developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private
sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as free
speech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans,
particularly children. Many, but not all, conservatives believe that these develop-
ments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects of
antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.
> At the same time, conservatives cannot be blind to certain developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as free speech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans, particularly children. Many, but not all, conservatives believe that these develop- ments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.
That's a CYA if I've ever seen one.
They couldn't care less about government-private sector collusion. It's literally the dream of the tech Neo-feudalist crowd. Before the idea of "private property" came about in Enlightenment-era England, some guy owned everything, and the commoners labored for his enrichment. Since capitalism - at least as we've interpreted it in America - means consolidation of massively-capitalized corporations which control more numerous and diverse markets, that's kind of the endgame when one removes the ability of the government to stop such consolidation.
The question is, if nothing is done, who will it be?
There's a conflict between destroying all government, corrupting it for personal gain by a given elected official, and corrupting it to serve a given owner of a given megacorp.
Somewhere along the way ethics, morals, truth, and serving We the People was lost.
How much did you donate to the Trump campaign? Shouldn't the Trump administration serve their supporters? Shouldn't they pay more attention to the supporters who support them more (in $$)?
You are arguing for despotism; the patronage model outlined in The Dictator's Handbook and detailed in The Logic of Political Survival (both by Alistair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita). This is incompatible with a functioning republic.
Unless you are giving trump literally millions of dollars, that doesn't matter.
How much he cares about your opinion is directly proportional to the money you give and could give him. When competing with a billionaire, 0 -> $100,000 is basically meaningless.
That's the MO of both parties in the US. During the last campaign the Democrats bombarded me with E-mails begging for money. They never asked for my opinion and never mentioned anything they were planning to do. The message was "Vote for me or the world will go under"
Sorry, he's not president of the Republicans... He's president of the United States, and should be serving everyone in the country to the best of his ability.
If you're not being sarcastic, that's a really wild belief you have...and I'm really hoping it's not widespread.
You are right about not prentending this is a “both sides” issue, but for the wrong reason. There is only one side. Two colors but one side. When the blue team is in power, it somehow fails to do all the things that its voters want. It is meek and pitiful. Because it is not serving the blue voters. It is serving its backers and its backers want what the red team wants. So when the blue team is in power it magically fails at everything. Whoops! I guess blue team people are just ineffective liberal losers. When the red team is in power it does whatever it wants, because what it wants publicly is what their backers want.
To add a bit more, if Schumers behavior doesn’t prove it I don’t know what does. The leader of the blue team in the senate voted red at the first and most consequential opportunity.
Funny, while there were a couple of things I may not have loved...the vast majority of her enforcement actions I thought were quite good for the average American. Heck, the enforcement on banking fees alone was huge for the average person.
What does this have to do with Israel? Why are you censoring Israel and Jewish? How does the removal of this content from the FTC mean citizens are not allowed to critique monopolies? I dislike this administration as much as the next guy but your comment isn't making much sense in my head
My point was related to free speech, and these incidents are all infringing on it. Unless you don't consider censorship in the removal of these blogs, or similar incidents, as attacks on free speech. I am censoring it to protect myself from repercussions. You might not be paying attention...
Sure, there are a lot of concerning happenings related to free speech as of late. This particular article isn't one. The removal of content from a government website isn't in-of-itself a free speech issue
I don't think they made the point particularly well but I do understand their frustration. Semi-professional pedants can pare away context until each individual issue is isolated, unrelated to all the other problems, and so individually not that big a deal.
But The Problem here is a powerful far right movement has seized control of the american government and is dismantling all the parts of it that don't serve their neosegregationist policy goals, while they use anything they can as a weapon against their enemies.
Those other problems they mentioned are also this problem. There's really only one problem, though it is a very large one. But talking about each of these details as if they are somehow smaller problems that can be solved independently is foolish.
Except these are blog posts. They are not on the for-front of the gov. website. Why remove old posts that are critical of these companies? Why now? I truly believe those who are hit with censorship can look at it dead in the eye and attempt to rationalize it. Clearly the cited companies have donated to the current admin. And very clearly, actions like these are a testament to how far these donations got them. Here's a tip. I agree there are many incidents right now that are concerning. And perhaps, an isolated incident like this would not be of concern in any other time. But we are living in difficult times, and my point stands, given these incidents are not isolated. You cannot cherry pick issues you agree with and others you disagree with. If you are not concerned by all of these incidents, then your moral compass might be very different from mine.
Yes, I'm 100% in agreement that this is a small part in an incredibly concerning wave of information censorship, free speech infringements, ect. I was just pressing to see that connection made :)
I might have gone too far off. I apologize, taking my anger on here is not constructive. I am just dumbfounded at some of the dots that are connecting, which are making me feel very uneasy. You are right, that if this was but an isolated incident, free speech would not be at stake. But not even 2 months into this administration, and some very concerning incidents made me uneasy.
>I am censoring it to protect myself from repercussions. You might not be paying attention...
Just a note that if everyone here knows you mean Israel when you type "Isra-l" (and Jewish when you type "Jewi-sh"), so does whoever you believe to be protecting yourself from.
Israel really wants the whole world to conflate "Israeli", "Jewish" and "Zionist", but it is a lie.
Is there data to support that it is a lie? I don't personally know any Jews who are unsympathetic to Palestinians, but the percentage of Jews who are anti-zionist must be tiny. That makes sense, given the problems Jews had before Israel existed (like 1/3 dying in WWII)
It depends on how strongly you interpret “zionism”.
It’s true “Israel should be a country” has broad support. But a majority of Jewish people oppose the current government, and a majority say Israel is not essential to Jewish identity.
It just seems a bit delusional to justify strong anti-zionism by saying it's 'orthogonal' (horrible word) from Judaism.
It's true the concepts are orthogonal, but in the real world, if someone is railing against zionists, they implicate the vast majority of jews.
That isn't necessarily a problem (if a view is wrong, it's wrong whether one person or 1000 people hold it) but it's Israel/Palestine... people get so angry and use rhetoric about 'zionists' that sounds ugly - at least, if one remembers the term applies to most of the world's jews.
Those stats seem correct.
It just seems a bit delusional to justify strong anti-zionism by saying it's 'orthogonal' (horrible word) from Judaism.
The point I was, a bit clumsily, trying to make in that part of my comment was that your stats, while correct, probably still leave most jews sympathetic to zionism. The reason I was nitpicky about that is that some Palestinian activists (apologies for implying I meant you) justify creepy uses of the term 'zionists' by casting doubt that it applies to most jews.
Is it that hard to understand why so many jews moved to Israel? It's not primarily for supremacist or religious reasons, since the waves of immigration follow the holocaust, and various episodes of persecution and programs in Eastern Europe and throughout the whole Middle East.
Why do you need data for a philosophical distinction?
Because the philosophical distinction is not the only factor. Eg: philosophically, men can be feminists, but if I were to put up 'Feminists are evil' posters at my workplace, it matters that, in reality, many more women are feminists than men.
I expect most Emacs users are computer programmers. Does this mean that computer programming is, in some sense, inherently related to Emacs? Does it make sense to conflate "programmers" and "Emacs users"?
If a considerable number of people hated 'VS Code users' enough to kill them, which surprisingly is not the case, then, yes, rhetoric about 'the evil programmers' would raise legitimate concerns. This would especially be true if it were taboo to complain openly about 'VS Code users'
The point about Israelis and jews is perfectly valid. I probably know more about the country of Israel than plenty of jews in the UK (and I don't even know that much).
With zionism, it's a little different: a person is a zionist by virtue of simply holding an opinion, and it's an opinion I have to imagine most jews hold.
I don't know...I grew up in the southern US. There were plenty of people I knew who were evangelical but very pro-israel. Primarily so the end times would be brought on.
At least around me, Christian Zionists are by far the majority.
That's an excellent point that hadn't crossed my mind. When I hear people discussing 'zionism' it never occurs to me they might be thinking of evangelical zionists. In my neck of the woods, where evangelicals have no presence at all, they probably aren't. In the South, they may well be.
Edit: this kills me to say, because the way people discuss 'zionism' still creeps me out, but my argument was wrong. Since there is a substantial number of evangelical zionists, you were right to say jewish and zionist shouldn't be conflated.
I get it and I also feel quite weird about it. I always have to be careful when reading somebody's comment that mentions Zionism to see if they're just spouting conspiracy theories, if it's actually grounded in reality, or do they just hate Jewish people...
I wouldn't at all be surprised if it came out in 30 years that Proton was a CIA front all along, similar to Crypto AG. The CEO's outburst felt like the mask slipping a bit. Excuse me while I adjust my tinfoil hat.
I would't put it beyond them to create these kinds of companies, but doing so upfront is a huge gamble if you don't know for sure what is going to take off. It would seem to be much more efficient to just sit and wait until some company becomes well established and then infiltrate them using agents, compromised supply chains or plain and simple warrants combined with gag orders.
Intelligence networks can manufacturer their own hype, and often, there's no independent company that steps up. I'm sure some of the attempts go bust, but there a couple of first-party Intelligence-community fronts that succeeded https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/fbi-s-encrypted-phone-p...
Misleading clickbait heading, article mentions that 4 years of blog content were blanket deleted and then randomly implies that certain tech issues were targeted among all the other (also-deleted) posts. The posts in question are public and available here: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog
>Misleading clickbait heading
In fact, the headline kind of underplays the significance -- everything in that time period was deleted! Including posts critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI Companies, among everything else that was deleted.
>The posts in question are public and available here: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog
The deleted posts in question are not available there, because they were deleted. Blog jumps from December 2020 to March 2025.
Isn't this in violation of records keeping requirements?
If they've genuinely deleted them, then yes.
If they're archived offline, then no, not necessarily. But they'd be on the hook for being able to reply to a FOIA request in a timely manner, and I'd bet dollars to donuts they didn't even try to verify if backups were made.
If you're willing to potentially make an enemy, opening such a FOIA request might be worth doing.
Why? If you want to read the old blog posts, you can find them at the Internet Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250122132931/https://www.ftc.g...
Because the Internet archive isn't under a legal obligation to prove they have public documents available for the people who pay taxes.
It's not about just reading them, it's about being sure they're not trying to erase public information that they should have.
A FOIA request won't make them put the blog posts back up. They just have to provide you with a copy. And they can charge a fee to cover the cost of doing this. So, given that the posts are already publicly available, it seems like a waste of your time and money.
If they can't do it, you can try to interest a US Attorney in charging them with a crime.
It won't work, but at least you could say you tried to apply the law. That's worth something.
> It won't work, but at least you could say you tried to apply the law. That's worth something.
What is that worth?
The paper trail that can be made available and/or added as evidence or a factoid in a historical record. Maybe with enough accounts people will find a way to avoid a repeat in the future. Maybe/maybe not, but they definitely won't know to change anything if there is no record of it being an issue in the first place.
What about the last 6 weeks makes you think that has a bearing on anything anymore?
It's still valuable to point out that the crimes of this administration are crimes. They aren't going to stop doing them until they are stopped. But framing their crimes as expected implies they are normal and of no particular consequence.
This one thing is, all by itself, worthy of impeachment and prison sentences for the people who abetted it. Add it to the list, and don't downplay even the small ones. If we're going to come out the other side of this every one of these violations matters and will need to be accounted for.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there actually were any penalties. Turns out there are. Among others:
Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both
A different section allows prison terms of up to 10 years, but only if the "market value" of that data is high enough. I'm not sure if this data actually has a market value, but it is still a legal requirement to preserve.
The mango in chief has literally just said the courts don't apply to him and it appears he's correct.
Can you please be more specific about which administration you mean? This investigating administration, or this investigated administration? They are both equally worthless to me, but I could be convinced to care.
The part where they keep having judges reject the spurious arguments? People are getting rehired because Trump broke the law firing them. USAID was ordered to be reopened because they broke the law.
It’s not perfect, or enough, but we should stand up for the rule of law rather than trying to score Internet points by cynically conceding it.
And then as the folks who were deported saw. They say "fuck the courts" and do it anyway
America is in a terrifying end-game for democracy
I’m not saying anything about this is good, but I do think there are a lot of people who think following the law is important and we can use each and every one of them. Blatantly ignoring the law is how they lose suburban middle class voters and we don’t need too many of them to flip elections.
In many respects the rule of law was broken long ago through judicial activism.
The whirlwind we face today is an inevitable outcome from the consequences of those choices.
There are specific components required by a rule of law which are not met. It was conceded by past generations that still hold political power today as a cohort.
Edit: Do feel free to not believe me and in doing so dig into the details and prove me wrong.
A "rule by law" is the system that lacks the components required by a "rule of law". This former is the same as any totalitarian or fascist state.
Given the time horizon of case resolution, when you can find more than 3 instances of failures relating to the judicial branch within a few years, in each court, where the components are not true, then its failed. 3 is sufficient to be statistically significant within a short time horizon.
Not a pleasant thought, but neither is burying your head in the sand thinking it will be better that you not see something, while at the same time choosing to become meat for the hungry lion that you didn't want to see.
> the rule of law was broken long ago through judicial activism
unless you have some specifics and produce them, this is classic FUD
Erasing history is an important tool in normalizing the (current, and many more planned) authoritarian abused of the Trump regime.
Delete everything is a good cover up if just want to delete certain posts but don’t want to make it too obvious
[flagged]
The fact that they deleted everything over a 4 year period instead of just a subset made you less angry?
Would you mind explaining why?
Because it's not particularly targeted to benefit certain companies.
It benefits companies who broke the rules more.
What if the article was titled __FTC Removes Posts Critical of Kroger, Albertsons__? That is an alternative that is as accurate as the current one and sends a very different message. Telling a selective subset of the truth is just a barely clever form of lying.
It's crazy to me that you seem more angry about a headline than the fact that 4 years of public government data was deleted.
To answer your question, your hypothetical title would have me feeling exactly the same as I do now: angry that the data was deleted.
I never commented on the subject of the article because I don't come here to engage in political flamewars. I will continue not to comment on it, but rest assured that you have absolutely no idea what I am angry about. Having engagement driven clickbait on the front page is bad for the entire site.
If your only comment is dissuading people from taking the content of the article seriously (oh, and lying by saying the content is still available!), you are leaving a political comment. But, okay!
Google and Apple will have to up their bribing to stay competitive in this new environment
A good time to check how Trump's Crypto assets are going ... You know, the untraceable virtual money that can be transferred back into real money. NOT to say that a person like that would be transactional.
No need, just get some new board members...
"How Joel Kaplan became Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted political fixer" - https://www.ft.com/content/7a68fd7b-cae3-48ea-83bc-777731013...
When technofeudal corporate owners don't just capture the regulators but install lackeys in service of them. This is a natural progression towards authoritarianism and corruption.
I feel like the corruption part has been well and alive forever
It has been theoretically tamped down with independent agencies and watchdogs.
What's happening isn't just business as usual, it's unusual. The last president we had that openly defied the courts and the law was Andrew Jackson. And even he wasn't so brazen.
What we are finding out is that rules don't mean anything without enforcement and the US had a particular unaddressed threat in a party that doesn't care about the law and an executive agency filled with sycophants.
What the Trump admin is doing was supposed to be resolved with impeachment and removal from office. Fat chance republicans will react accordingly.
Hockeystick curve for corruption right now though.
@dang Semi-related but why are posts about Trump firing FTC Commissioners being removed/dead
https://archive.is/xFwdN
I got the sense that Lina Kahn was a thorn to Harris as well, otherwise she would've committed to Kahn's FTC instead of leaving it ambiguous and not campaigning on her successes.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/24/kamala-harris-lina-...
A lot of Harris donors wanted Khan gone.
Khan made a lot of good regulatory changes, and some good litigation (like RealPage), but a lot of the litigation was frankly counterproductive and/or badly handled.
Splitting Chrome off of Google and making it so that Firefox can't get search engine royalty payments is not going to lead to societally useful outcomes. And voters don't give a shit about it either. The FTC could have had much more impact if they were focused on, say, healthcare, health insurance, preventing private equity from owning (and closing) so many hospitals and chains and nursing homes, etc. They did some of that but it was very clear that big tech was the focus.
And I'm not against taking on big tech even a little bit, but you kind of have to have a plan for the desired outcomes, and it doesn't feel like there was much of one.
RealPage was DoJ. As was the Google search litigation where DoJ proposed Google divest Chrome.
Which is by way of saying, the FTC and Chair Khan were not responsible for those.
She was incredibly popular and people wanted more, Harris didn't capitalize on this, she did the opposite.
https://techoversight.org/2024/09/25/khan-kanter-poll/
Yeah, mostly for the good regulations, not for the lawsuits.
Yes, but the fact that Harris cared more about her donors interests than what people wanted, lost her the election and bought us Trump.
(along with everything else published during the Biden administration)
I repeatedly encourage everyone to look the network state to see what is unfolding before their eyes.
Am I right to understand this is signaling an end to the FTC, or at least on what concerns it harnessing the will of the tech giants?
Not just FTC. The CFPB, USAID, NHS, Department of Education, Research funding to colleges, the list goes on. Anything Elon Musk has no use for is getting shut down.
It's not just "has no use for", but he's seeking revenge for being regulated. FTC for telling him he can't do securities fraud, FAA & FCC for telling him he has to launch rockets responsibly, etc.
He paid good money to the Trump campaign, and this investment is now paying off. Thank you for your vote!
That's the message I got from it.
Thats not really planned in Project 2025, more likely any large tech company that bent the knee to Trump will be exempt, but we shall see.
At the same time, the document discusses how large tech companies influence politics, and can harm individuals.
> Conservative approaches to antitrust and consumer protection continue to trust markets, not government, to give people what they want and provide the prosperity and material resources Americans need for flourishing, productive, and meaningful lives.
> At the same time, conservatives cannot be blind to certain developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as free speech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans, particularly children. Many, but not all, conservatives believe that these develop- ments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...
> At the same time, conservatives cannot be blind to certain developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as free speech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans, particularly children. Many, but not all, conservatives believe that these develop- ments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.
That's a CYA if I've ever seen one.
They couldn't care less about government-private sector collusion. It's literally the dream of the tech Neo-feudalist crowd. Before the idea of "private property" came about in Enlightenment-era England, some guy owned everything, and the commoners labored for his enrichment. Since capitalism - at least as we've interpreted it in America - means consolidation of massively-capitalized corporations which control more numerous and diverse markets, that's kind of the endgame when one removes the ability of the government to stop such consolidation.
The question is, if nothing is done, who will it be?
There's a conflict between destroying all government, corrupting it for personal gain by a given elected official, and corrupting it to serve a given owner of a given megacorp.
Somewhere along the way ethics, morals, truth, and serving We the People was lost.
How much did you donate to the Trump campaign? Shouldn't the Trump administration serve their supporters? Shouldn't they pay more attention to the supporters who support them more (in $$)?
You are arguing for despotism; the patronage model outlined in The Dictator's Handbook and detailed in The Logic of Political Survival (both by Alistair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita). This is incompatible with a functioning republic.
Keep going until you hit “no taxation without representation” and you will have come full circle.
The US needs California. California does not need the US.
Unless you are giving trump literally millions of dollars, that doesn't matter.
How much he cares about your opinion is directly proportional to the money you give and could give him. When competing with a billionaire, 0 -> $100,000 is basically meaningless.
That's the MO of both parties in the US. During the last campaign the Democrats bombarded me with E-mails begging for money. They never asked for my opinion and never mentioned anything they were planning to do. The message was "Vote for me or the world will go under"
Sorry, he's not president of the Republicans... He's president of the United States, and should be serving everyone in the country to the best of his ability.
If you're not being sarcastic, that's a really wild belief you have...and I'm really hoping it's not widespread.
"serving everyone in the country"
That's long over. Whoever wins by 1% believes they have the mandate to only cater to their constituents (which is mostly wealthy donors)
I'd like some concrete examples of that happening in the Clinton, Obama, or Biden administrations.
I wish Obama acted like he had a mandate and just pushed through his agenda...
Instead we had BS like the parliamentarian saying "no you can't do that", and the Democrats would simply drop it.
Last time the Republicans had pushback from the parliamentarian they just replaced him with somebody that would do what they wanted.
Stop pretending this is a "both sides" issue.
You are right about not prentending this is a “both sides” issue, but for the wrong reason. There is only one side. Two colors but one side. When the blue team is in power, it somehow fails to do all the things that its voters want. It is meek and pitiful. Because it is not serving the blue voters. It is serving its backers and its backers want what the red team wants. So when the blue team is in power it magically fails at everything. Whoops! I guess blue team people are just ineffective liberal losers. When the red team is in power it does whatever it wants, because what it wants publicly is what their backers want.
Well said. No notes.
To add a bit more, if Schumers behavior doesn’t prove it I don’t know what does. The leader of the blue team in the senate voted red at the first and most consequential opportunity.
Imagine paypigging a politician.
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Funny, while there were a couple of things I may not have loved...the vast majority of her enforcement actions I thought were quite good for the average American. Heck, the enforcement on banking fees alone was huge for the average person.
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What does this have to do with Israel? Why are you censoring Israel and Jewish? How does the removal of this content from the FTC mean citizens are not allowed to critique monopolies? I dislike this administration as much as the next guy but your comment isn't making much sense in my head
My point was related to free speech, and these incidents are all infringing on it. Unless you don't consider censorship in the removal of these blogs, or similar incidents, as attacks on free speech. I am censoring it to protect myself from repercussions. You might not be paying attention...
Sure, there are a lot of concerning happenings related to free speech as of late. This particular article isn't one. The removal of content from a government website isn't in-of-itself a free speech issue
I don't think they made the point particularly well but I do understand their frustration. Semi-professional pedants can pare away context until each individual issue is isolated, unrelated to all the other problems, and so individually not that big a deal.
But The Problem here is a powerful far right movement has seized control of the american government and is dismantling all the parts of it that don't serve their neosegregationist policy goals, while they use anything they can as a weapon against their enemies.
Those other problems they mentioned are also this problem. There's really only one problem, though it is a very large one. But talking about each of these details as if they are somehow smaller problems that can be solved independently is foolish.
> I don't think they made the point particularly well but I do understand their frustration.
Sure. I was mostly just nudging them towards an argument that fits within the context of the article
Except these are blog posts. They are not on the for-front of the gov. website. Why remove old posts that are critical of these companies? Why now? I truly believe those who are hit with censorship can look at it dead in the eye and attempt to rationalize it. Clearly the cited companies have donated to the current admin. And very clearly, actions like these are a testament to how far these donations got them. Here's a tip. I agree there are many incidents right now that are concerning. And perhaps, an isolated incident like this would not be of concern in any other time. But we are living in difficult times, and my point stands, given these incidents are not isolated. You cannot cherry pick issues you agree with and others you disagree with. If you are not concerned by all of these incidents, then your moral compass might be very different from mine.
Yes, I'm 100% in agreement that this is a small part in an incredibly concerning wave of information censorship, free speech infringements, ect. I was just pressing to see that connection made :)
I might have gone too far off. I apologize, taking my anger on here is not constructive. I am just dumbfounded at some of the dots that are connecting, which are making me feel very uneasy. You are right, that if this was but an isolated incident, free speech would not be at stake. But not even 2 months into this administration, and some very concerning incidents made me uneasy.
>I am censoring it to protect myself from repercussions. You might not be paying attention...
Just a note that if everyone here knows you mean Israel when you type "Isra-l" (and Jewish when you type "Jewi-sh"), so does whoever you believe to be protecting yourself from.
Self-censoring is giving in.
> outed by Jewi-sh donors
Tones of racism
It is possible to criticise Zionism - and call out Israel for its racism and apartheid -without being racist ourselves.
Israel really wants the whole world to conflate "Israeli", "Jewish" and "Zionist", but it is a lie.
We have no problems with people's ethnicity nor religion
We have a problem with war, colonisation, ethnic cleansing and the re-emergence of apartheid
It depends on how strongly you interpret “zionism”.
It’s true “Israel should be a country” has broad support. But a majority of Jewish people oppose the current government, and a majority say Israel is not essential to Jewish identity.
On the extreme end, 1 in 10 support BDS, and Jewish anti-zionist grouos exist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_anti-Zionist_...
Those stats seem correct.
It just seems a bit delusional to justify strong anti-zionism by saying it's 'orthogonal' (horrible word) from Judaism.
It's true the concepts are orthogonal, but in the real world, if someone is railing against zionists, they implicate the vast majority of jews.
That isn't necessarily a problem (if a view is wrong, it's wrong whether one person or 1000 people hold it) but it's Israel/Palestine... people get so angry and use rhetoric about 'zionists' that sounds ugly - at least, if one remembers the term applies to most of the world's jews.
No one said that though, not in this thread.
And I’ve given you stats that say you’re wrong.
Not OP... But here is the ADL saying being anti-zionist is a form of antisemitism: https://www.adl.org/resources/article/anti-zionism-antisemit...
You really have to bury your head in the sand to not see that being conflated in any media organization with ties to the ADL in their reporting.
Really disgusting way of sewing division.
...but no data showing it's a lie.
Why do you need data for a philosophical distinction?
Political Zionism (to be specific) is odious philosophically
Right up there with the Afrikaans of South Africa and their racism
And, theologically Jewdaism is fundamentally opposed to driving people from their homes, for it was done to them (by the Egyptians)
The political Zionists of Israel are evil hideous creatures. You do not need data you need knowledge of current events and a heart
A basic knowledge of Jewish theology will illustrate they are heretics as well
Is it that hard to understand why so many jews moved to Israel? It's not primarily for supremacist or religious reasons, since the waves of immigration follow the holocaust, and various episodes of persecution and programs in Eastern Europe and throughout the whole Middle East.
Because the philosophical distinction is not the only factor. Eg: philosophically, men can be feminists, but if I were to put up 'Feminists are evil' posters at my workplace, it matters that, in reality, many more women are feminists than men.I expect most Emacs users are computer programmers. Does this mean that computer programming is, in some sense, inherently related to Emacs? Does it make sense to conflate "programmers" and "Emacs users"?
If a considerable number of people hated 'VS Code users' enough to kill them, which surprisingly is not the case, then, yes, rhetoric about 'the evil programmers' would raise legitimate concerns. This would especially be true if it were taboo to complain openly about 'VS Code users'
I mean there were people on the ADL payroll who didn't agree with the way they were conflating the terms, and the groups involved: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/05/adl-pro-israel-...
The point about Israelis and jews is perfectly valid. I probably know more about the country of Israel than plenty of jews in the UK (and I don't even know that much).
With zionism, it's a little different: a person is a zionist by virtue of simply holding an opinion, and it's an opinion I have to imagine most jews hold.
I don't know...I grew up in the southern US. There were plenty of people I knew who were evangelical but very pro-israel. Primarily so the end times would be brought on.
At least around me, Christian Zionists are by far the majority.
That's an excellent point that hadn't crossed my mind. When I hear people discussing 'zionism' it never occurs to me they might be thinking of evangelical zionists. In my neck of the woods, where evangelicals have no presence at all, they probably aren't. In the South, they may well be.
Edit: this kills me to say, because the way people discuss 'zionism' still creeps me out, but my argument was wrong. Since there is a substantial number of evangelical zionists, you were right to say jewish and zionist shouldn't be conflated.
I get it and I also feel quite weird about it. I always have to be careful when reading somebody's comment that mentions Zionism to see if they're just spouting conspiracy theories, if it's actually grounded in reality, or do they just hate Jewish people...
Exactly
"Jewish" describes a race (usually a cultural construct, but Jews seem quite fierce about maintaining the family ties through the millennia)
"Zionist" is the political idea that jews should go to Israel... Ok, but it is a cool place full of people already
"Political Zionism " is the odious idea that there should be a Jewish state in Israel. Odious in that it deprives others of rights based on race
We call that "Apartheid"
'Odious' is a bit too harsh considering what drove most Jews back to Israel was 2000 years of inquisitions, pogroms and a holocaust.
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I think you misunderstood my point entirely. I don't disagree with much that you said above.
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I wouldn't at all be surprised if it came out in 30 years that Proton was a CIA front all along, similar to Crypto AG. The CEO's outburst felt like the mask slipping a bit. Excuse me while I adjust my tinfoil hat.
I would't put it beyond them to create these kinds of companies, but doing so upfront is a huge gamble if you don't know for sure what is going to take off. It would seem to be much more efficient to just sit and wait until some company becomes well established and then infiltrate them using agents, compromised supply chains or plain and simple warrants combined with gag orders.
Intelligence networks can manufacturer their own hype, and often, there's no independent company that steps up. I'm sure some of the attempts go bust, but there a couple of first-party Intelligence-community fronts that succeeded https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/fbi-s-encrypted-phone-p...