The Exigent Duality
Can't See Past Their Noses - 17:30 CST, 6/06/19 (Sniper)
I'm part way through this Crowder video from yesterday, and am shaking my head in disbelief at how much of an unprofessional circus Google is. Let me sum it up:

"Look, this video has 'Muslim' in the title! I'm going to spend a whopping twelve seconds copying and pasting the URL into Outlook, then send it to Steven Crowder's actual professional attorney, who has the know-how to sue my company's ass off, as an example of why we removed said Steven Crowder from our 'partners' program-- without having watched the video."


"Alphabet" is a $137 billion company, and this is the kind of Mickey Mouse-league behavior they engage in? Unbelievable! It re-affirms what I wrote in this post from a couple of weeks ago. I think these companies are so arrogant and hubristic that it's going to take a serious day of reckoning in an actual court of law-- maybe even the Supreme Court, where they will be forced to declare "public square" versus "newspaper" status-- to set them straight.

When people base their entire livelihoods on the legal contract that is your "terms of service", and you can't even give them return contact information-- not even kidding, just watch the aforelinked Crowder video-- or articulate coherently how they violated the terms in the first place, then that's a flat-out contract violation-- enforcement of which even Libertarianism suggests is one of the isolated valid functions which the State apparatus performs.

The other thing I want to bring up is that a friend at work asked me about "Google Stadia", and I explained that one of my concerns was that Google would censor which games are allowed on their platform. "That game deals with the American Civil War and has slaves in it? Nope! That's 'hate speech' because it might make some random person uncomfortable!" Or, heaven forbid, what about a game with overt right-wing political viewpoints expressed by an NPC, or as part of a game's story? "Call of Duty" and "Splinter Cell" are thematically nationalistic ("Us" from country A, versus "them" from country B), would those be allowed? And on and on it would go.

Google is worse than Stalinist Russia or modern-day China in terms of how loosely they define-- or fail to!-- their censorship. Companies can change, but given the evidence so far, for anyone who cares about artistic license or expression, Google becoming the dominant force in game streaming would be the medium's worst nightmare.

The third and final thing I want to say about this topic is: who the hell are these weasels pushing for this, and how could they possibly have so little wisdom, that I wouldn't even trust them to do a grocery shopping run for me if I handed them a list?

There's that old adage, "first they came for XYZ, but I wasn't XYZ so I didn't care, then they came for me..." And that's all very valid and true! And then there is the historical track record of public censorship, which inevitably ends in people being physically tossed into gulags. And that's a valid argument too. But a lesser discussed point is this: change can never happen if people aren't made uncomfortable! I know this is a cliched example, but it's true: suggesting that slavery was evil made lots of American Southerners uncomfortable one upon a time. But if everyone is sealed in their stupid little bubble chamber, isolated from "uncomfortable" ideas, the world turns into "Fahrenheit 451".