There was some part of me that hoped after 8 long years, I wouldn’t have to deal with this same moral gaslighting used as wrapping paper for the dismantling America.
Unfortunately, Obama has a third memoir and all his people are lining up at the gate to swarm into the White House. So there’s another “interview” with mouthpiece Jeffrey Goldberg in which both men, who are as shallow as puddles, pretend to be deep thinkers grappling with the problems of the country.
And offering the expected solutions.
Obama: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.
You’ve seen this quote. It’s as stupid as it is totalitarian. It assumes that there was always an easily distinguishable truth and that somehow, because of the internet, that’s no longer true.
The marketplace of ideas is a ‘marketplace’ because it has different ideas. If it didn’t have different ideas and a debate about what’s true, then the marketplace would become socialist.
That’s obviously where Obama is heading.
And the only answer is censorship.
Obama: I don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible, because this predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it. I know most of these folks. I’ve talked to them about it. The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this, because it’s going to get worse. If you can perpetrate crazy lies and conspiracy theories just with texts, imagine what you can do when you can make it look like you or me saying anything on video. We’re pretty close to that now..
That technology exists. Obama is just, as usual, behind the times despite pretending to be hip.
But let’s set aside the tedious familiar arguments and zero in on the key policy sentence here.
“At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this, because it’s going to get worse.”
Government regulations.
I hear there’s some sort of First Amendment thing out there, but I’m sure that Obama will explain to us that free speech is not “who we are”. But what do you expect from the thug who spied on reporters, and threw a guy in prison for making a movie about Mohammed.
Leave a Reply