Dominionism is simply a return to the Puritan ethic that the teachings of the Bible should influence every aspect of the world.
I’d agree about dispensationalism, but it’s a stretch to say that people shouldn’t study the Bible by themselves just because an errant doctrine may enter their head. I mean, look at all the errant doctrines of Rome, it hasn’t helped them any.
I want a populace educated in those fields, and there are much betters way to do it than robbing the citizenry. One way might be to agree to work for a company afterwards who might pay for it, another to join the army in exchange for paying for it. Another might be to stop ensuring loans so that prices fall and become attainable to someone working part-time and going to school. Loans become not such a burden then, if you even want them. Lots of ways.
You should compare the actual effective taxation rates. For example, high earners in Norway get taxed about ~8% higher than comparable earners in California but that comes with affordable healthcare, education, and government-backed pensions that people can actually survive on.
So they tax 8% higher than USA's highest tax state?
> affordable healthcare, education, and government-backed pensions
Affordable healthcare, education, and pensions are wonderful things and I want them as well. It's immoral to provide them through the federal government though, it should be done privately through the market.
That is another myth that is floating around the US. CA actually has progressive tax brackets (i.e. the rate changes quite a bit from bracket to bracket) and only few get into the top state brackets, whereas most of the other states that have income tax, >90% of people are in the top bracket as the top bracket is around $10k (looking at https://tax.idaho.gov/i-1110.cfm).
When you consider that there is no limit to the size of a company it is pretty obvious why monopolies form. A lot of markets only really need one company that provides a service or product for the entire economy. With healthcare it is extremely obvious that having one provider is beneficial because you want everyone to be on the same health insurance plan. The problems are that monopolies usually abuse their power so you need put it in control of an accountable entity such as the government.
Consider it from a different perspective: CEOs don't become billionaires because they are multiple times more productive or competent than other people but rather because there is no need for a second equally competent CEO. One CEO is enough to serve an entire market and so all the market power concentrates in the hand of the CEO who can then abuse it for his benefit.
> On the other hand, I don't think it's a healthy situation if companies need to own the entire hardware platform to be safe from another company's whims.
That's the risk you take working on someone else's platform. If you don't like it, start your own or conform to the new, privacy-enhancing features.
The presumption should be making it easy to enable competition, which the current rules don't do. Make it easy for Google to come in and lay fiber on their own dime.
Instead of such an overreach, we should go the other direction towards a freer market. We should get rid of the red tape that lets these cable companies hold a monopoly so that companies like Google can come in and lay fiber at their own expense if they so desire.
Implying "red tape" is the only barrier to entry is a pretty big oversimplification. Also calling it an "overreach" without any justification for that characterization doesn't help anyone.
To extend his point, "red tape" isn't the only regulation-related problem. Don't forget that in many local governments gave monopoly grants to select ISPs. Then there's the "bootleggers and baptists" [1] effect, where well-meaning regulation has a larger anti-competitive effect benefiting extant firms, e.g., requiring would-be ISPs to also serve cost-prohibitive rural areas.
Pretending that extant government regulation is the never the problem is just as bad as pretending it's the only problem.
I never said it was the only barrier, but it is far and away the primary barrier. Google was laying fiber in many cities but the regulatory burden was quite stifling.
As far as justification, it goes the other way around. If you want to interfere in the free market, you need to provide good justification that this problem is not being created by the regulatory environment already. 99.9% of the time, it is.
No, you can't be Twitter, a platform under the law and enjoying all the associated perks, and then censor the New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop. You step into publisher territory at that point and open yourself up to liability. You also can't go and ban the whitehouse press secretary, same deal.
If Twitter would act honorably and allow open conversation, conversations that obviously don't contain death threats, etc, then there would be no need or even desire for an alternate platform.
The problem is that Twitter is acting illegally with its censorship, since it enjoys platform status and all the perks associated, but can ban conservative content.
Everyone should be on Twitter, saying whatever non-illegal political content they want, but they can't because Twitter is disobeying the law.
I'd imagine the owners will, but who knows about the employees. Liberalization in general is happening through the government schools. Pull the kids out, teach them at home or put them in a private school you trust.
“Liberalization” is a massive generalization and I don’t see what connection you’re making between public school curricula and reasons someone might move out of Silicon Valley. It seems a bit silly to do so.
Besides high housing demand and concentrated wealth, what contributed to the way Silicon Valley is today that has anything to do with public schooling?
I'm not talking about why someone might move out of Silicon Valley, but as a response to the gp, explaining that the policies aren't being imported from CA. They're being home grown, in TX, in the government schools.
If the parents value fiscal conservatism and traditional values, they'll pull their kids out of government schools and teach them themselves. This will also strengthen the family bonds, weakening the power of the state to make such bad calls.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
You want to remove this?
So the runners of every forum on the internet will be responsible for content posted?
Not all forums engage in this type of moderation. In fact, most don’t. At some point, moderation turns you into a publisher. For example, book publishers generally work by receiving content from authors, deciding which works they would like to publish while rejecting others, and then using their distribution power to send it out to people around the world.
What part of that process is different from what Twitter is engaging in here?
Really? I'm gonna say that posting pics of your butt on non-porn forums is gonna get you booted from most of them, likewise if you post spam or contraband media. Even on social media where no moderation facilities exist, if one or a few participants are serially abusing the channel and can't be persuaded to stop or leave, the other users will tend to set up a new channel that doesn't include those bad actors and be more careful about who they invite in future.
It sounds like you are complaining about the inability to game the system (in this case the TOS) by demanding that all potential abuses be proscribed in advance or excluded from moderation.
No, we're saying that currently the platforms enjoy unlimited immunity.
Courts have departed from the most natural reading of the text by giving internet companies immunity for their own content. Section 230(c)(1) protects a company only when content is "provided by /another/ information content provider". Nowhere does this provision protect a company that is itself the information content provider.
And an information content provider is not just the primary author or creator, it is anyone "responsible, /in whole or in part/, for the creation of development" of the content. (words of justice Thomas)
Because of Youtube/Twitter/FB selective showing of content outside of the good faith clause, they should be liable, yes. Keep the law, just enforce it. If you're not going to enforce it, you might as well get rid of it.
They currently enjoy unlimited immunity in a way the spirit of the law does not allow. You can't enjoy tax breaks etc. of being a platform and then go and ban content that you don't agree with, but which is not harmful in the way the law lets you do. I.e. the law lets you remove illegal content, but if you are being treated as a platform, you can't just go and, oh, I don't know, not let the New York Post show a breaking story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Exactly. They are either a publisher or a platform. There is no in between. They need to take their pick, and deal with the liability if they want to continue on the publisher path.
> They are either a publisher or a platform. There is no in between.
In the print world there is an in between: distributors, such as bookstores, newsstands, and libraries.
They do not become liable for false claims in books they sell. It is the authors or publishers of those books who are liable. If the bookstore itself produced libelous material, such as in a press release, they would be liable for that.
Book distributors generally will carry any book given them by a publisher, regardless of content. Twitter is engaging in moderation, which puts them not just in the business of distribution. They are playing the publisher role - receiving content from authors and deciding whether or not to publish it. That is the very definition of a publisher. And yes, publishers can indeed be sued.
I’d agree about dispensationalism, but it’s a stretch to say that people shouldn’t study the Bible by themselves just because an errant doctrine may enter their head. I mean, look at all the errant doctrines of Rome, it hasn’t helped them any.