Friday, December 9, 2016

CORPORATE SJWs DECLARE CULTURE WAR 2.0

After losing the elections to Donald Trump the Left are at a loss what to do next. Once upon a time businesses understood that politics has no place in the work environment, but not any longer. Board Rooms are currently populated by politically motivated CEOs acting not as captains of industry, but as officers in the army for social justice.

UPDATE: The Left having lost the elections to Trump are besides themselves what to do next? Conceding defeat as a peaceful transition of Government within a democratic framework requires, is not in their nature. There's nothing wrong with the ideology, so the struggle will go on. Enter Walt Disney, the producer of the new Star Wars movie with an entirely new approach to the story, and Kelloggs Cornflakes plus 78 other companies withdrawing their ads from "white supremacist Breitbart". The Right retaliate with a counter boycott and hash tags.



Dec. 4, 2016

(LONG-READ) RETHINKING LIBERTARIANISM AFTER KELLOGG'S WAR


Libertarian ideas are under pressure. The notion that Government is inherently evil, whereas private enterprise can't go wrong; and that corporations are the emanations of individual people with property rights, is not necessarily true as private businesses become larger, extending their power over Governments as well politicians and activists vying for political influence. The case of Kellogg's against Breitbart has opened up this can of worms, requiring the Right to rethink its premises. Principles are meant to be basic laws of nature, but they must always be put in context and must be subject to moral evaluations and common sense experience, or they become rationalisations. Virgil, in a long-read entitled "The Left’s Long March, Enabled by Corporate America: Ten Things to Know About Kellogg’s War Against Breitbart" (source) goes into detail. (Sign the petition!) Whereas the Reagan era was about the classic Left versus Right struggle, the Left having now coopted international private enterprise means that the present dichotomy has shifted to globalism versus national grassroots interests. Here's a sample.

9 — Crony Capitalism isn’t just about making windfall profits—it’s also about naked political power. 
For a long time, the political right has understood that governments can be oppressive. And in addition, the right has further understood that when governments and corporations get in bed together, the resulting “crony capitalism” can be costly to both consumers and taxpayers. Yet now the right must come to a further realization: Crony capitalism can deprive the people of more than money; it can deprive them of their freedom. And in the course of this suppression of liberty, companies can be just as guilty—or even guiltier—than the government. To be sure, it’s almost always the government that has the muscle and the weapons to put the literal iron in the iron fist. 
So as a result, some conservatives cling to the view that it’s all the government’s fault—that companies are blameless in the actual oppression. And yet that view is naive, because in a complex economy, governments rarely act alone. They almost always act in cahoots with some private interest, however parasitic. We are all familiar with the efforts of solar-panel makers to legislate and litigate a cheaper alternative—that is, hydrocarbon production (oil, natural gas, coal)—out of existence. And yet such political action is almost benign, compared to what’s been happening in the American West, where private investors have been actively colluding with the Obama administration and other Greens to push ranchers off their land by force. It’s a brutal, even deadly process, as Virgil has detailed here, and here. 
So with all that as a backdrop, we can see more clearly what the left has been doing to digital free speech: Today, it’s giant corporations, as much or more than the government, that have been acting as “progressive” thought police. And yet these corporate bigs insist that they aren’t technically censoring anyone, because they’re not a government entity; it’s the state that’s silencing the voices that they don’t want heard. Yet when corporations control all the platforms necessary for speech, the stifling effect on an individual’s free speech is nevertheless the same, whether it comes from a private entity or a public entity. 
We might recall, for example, what ESPN did to baseball legend-turned-sportscaster Curt Schilling. And it all happened to Schilling without any of the usual-suspect self-declared champions of the First Amendment batting an eyelash. Yet while the PC left was cheering Schilling’s dismissal, too many on the right failed to comprehend the full implications of the sacking: Namely, that an attack on free speech is an attack on free speech, period. And the source of that attack, public or private, is less important than the attack itself. (More) 



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