Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.
So buying a major newspaper and firing (or putting pressure on) anybody who doesn’t agree with the new owner’s “pillars” is not coercion? Did Bezos get this buff from the mental gymnastics?
PS: surprised nobody mentioned Manufacturing Consent yet, which describes exactly what is happening here, and remains valid in the age of Internet
Everyone should resign. Or strike. Striking would be better
Jeff Bezos Announces Resignation
They had us in the first half, not gonna lie
Instead, he asked Freedom Of the Press to step down.
The fascism is happening.
Took about a month
Billionaire meddling turns a respected paper into a megaphone for personal agendas.
😼😼
The people who previously respected the WaPo are part of the problem.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.
Democracy dies in the free market.
“free” “market”
Who wants democracy, when we can have an anarcho-capitalist libertarian utopia?
anarcho-capitalist libertarian utopia?
I hate that edgelord libertarians are trying to rebrand themselves as “anarcho-capatalist”. Anarchy and capitalism are antithetical to one another. It doesn’t have anything to do with anarchy if you aren’t evaluating hierarchy, and capitalism is literally one of the most hierarchical organizational structures possible.
Fun fact: Conservatism was literally invented by a monarchist in the aftermath of the French revolution trying to find a way for an aristocracy to exist within democracy.
I would like to read more about this shitstain, and why I should throw axes at a printed out image of his face. Name and source?
edgelord libertarians are trying to rebrand themselves as "anarcho-capatalist
Actually, American style " libertarianism" IS anarcho-capitalism. They’ve just been trying to keep that a secret until recently.
Anarchy and capitalism are antithetical to one another.
Yes, and no. Anarcho-capitalism is anarchic in the colloquial “no rules, no order” sense, whereas political anarchy very much isn’t.
The stupidity of the term is what makes it apt, though: the people politically illiterate enough to think that a total lack of regulations and worker’s rights would lead to anything resembling freedom also think that the colloquial definition of anarchy is the politically accurate one.
People voted for the leopards, you can’t say it’s not democracy.
I see this comment a lot, and I legit don’t think we did. I think it’s weird how Elon had this team of hackers ready to go for Doge. The weird, “they’ll never know what we did” comment out of his kid who seemed to be imitating Elon in the Tucker Carlson interview, and Trump’s odd vote counting computers comment has me seriously thinking they hacked it. I think they both had their backs against the wall. Trump with his criminal prosecution, and musk with the starlink investigation.
With Elon, let’s start at the smallest issue. Recently Musk has talked about how he’s like the greatest gamer ever and is ranked super high in a bunch of games. Turns out he’s just paying people to grind those games and boost his ranking. He’s so concerned about being on top that he’s willing to hire people to get a top the leader board and lie about how good he is to stroke his own ego. It’s a very small thing, but points to a larger pattern of behavior for Musk.
Now, onto the Ukraine thing. If anyone remembers, he wouldn’t let Ukraine use starlink for an attack because he was “worried it’d start a nuclear war.” Whether it would or wouldn’t was not up to him as the guy selling Internet satellites to the government. He had provided all the starlink kits to Ukraine during a war to help them, and the US was paying it. He was not supposed to be the arbiter of what they could/ couldn’t be used for. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were going to come after him for treason as he actively aided a (then) adversary through this action.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-ukraine-starlink-russia-air-force-fde93d9a69d7dbd1326022ecfdbc53c2
Trump and Musk had to win, or they were fucked. The guy that worked for Doge happened to make a sketchy ballot counting app which you can read about below that could have been used to disqualify dem ballots.
https://bsky.app/profile/denisedwheeler.bsky.social/post/3lhowh3ijgs2f
Elon has always found ways around the rules. When his company needed money all of the sudden magically the value exploded. I think he was involved in squeezing the stock price up through the use of call options, and once that happened, they were able to raise money in the form of multiple stock sales. You can read this now 5 year old thread that proves itself time and time again. Do I have any proof Elon was behind this? No, but who has enough money to do something like this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/options/comments/hk7nqe/tesla_infinity_call_gamma_squeeze/
When the election came in 2024, Elon gave away (illegally I might add) $100 to anyone who registered Republican. There had to be something nefarious going on there too. I would not be surprised if they thought anyone who took them up on that was only doing it for the free money and wasn’t actually going to vote so they cast ballots in their names. Again, I have no proof, but if anyone would have the will to do something so shitty to win, it’d be him.
As for Trump, Jack Smith said they had enough evidence to convict Trump, and only couldn’t because of arbitrary sitting president rules. They have like a 99% conviction rate for a reason.
Trump and Musk are absolutely petty enough to bend / break rules and laws to get what they want, and are going to go all out to avoid prison. I strongly believe that this is not what we voted for, and we are going to be stuck with this the rest of our lives because what is happening cannot be undone, and they will cling to power as long as possible to avoid facing any consequences. They will break everything and fire anyone who was involved in any way shape or form in any of the investigations and will break the system beyond repair to ensure that they remain in power. Elections are still going to happen, but they will never be voted out.
That’s a very well written comment, and Elon and trump certainly have committed more crimes than we can count, but the polls before the election were all pointing to the same result, so trumps victory wasn’t a major upset. I don’t think they hacked the election, I think the people are that dumb.
There is no such thing as a free market.
I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away.
That is termination, not resignation.
Fucking scumbag.
Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.
this is a very interesting sentence to find in a post that outlines the ways in which the opinion page will be losing some of its editorial freedom.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
It’s also gotta be one of the worst sentences I’ve ever read, yikes. Maybe get an editor to look it over.
They did. They just looked at it and said “hell yes” while sweating profusely.
He’s basically making the exact same argument as Faux News did, 30 years or more after anyone reasonable realized that they were blatantly lying.
We recently got rid of our subscriptions and canceled Prime. Wish we had done it much sooner, but better late than never.
For those on the fence on quitting Amazon: you can still use the website and shop, just search for the manufacturers website on stuff you want and purchase direct from them.
You know, like going to a book store and ordering the books you find there from Amazon.
Also even if something very specific that you want isn’t available outside of Amazon, that’s all the more reason to definitely not buy it and message the manufacturer/seller and let them know why you’re not buying it. Boycotts will sometimes mean not buying something you really want to buy, that’s working as designed.
Y’all, stop buying shit from Amazon, completely. That’s where you start.
Bezos has money because we continue to give it to him. So, the first order of business is to simply stop spending money with him.
As in, forever.
Find an alternative vendor, or even schlep on down to a physical store if you need to.
“V0te with ur d0ll4rzzz!!!”
Do you actually think the next best option is actually good? There is no escape from capitalism.
Last time I looked at Amazon’s books, their retail arm was barely profitable. Most of their actual profits came from AWS.
Azure (MS) or GCP (Google) are the alternatives.
Or if you want to avoid Big Tech altogether, there’s DigitalOcean, Akamai, Linode, IBM, Cloudflare, and a handful of other point providers.
You have to be careful as some providers and PaaS use AWS under the hood.
For example Heroku is essentially a nice skin over AWS.
if you want to avoid Big Tech altogether, there’s … IBM
If I had been drinking anything when I read that it would have ended up all over my screen.
IBM used to be big. They still are, but they used to be too.
Would love to see a really comprehensive list of sites that aren’t garbage AI slop scam alleyways that would help cover the goods and services that Amazon acts as a one-stop convenience for. I don’t want to support Amazon, but I also don’t want to get scammed by handing out my credit card info to any old shopping site.
Feel free to add more suggestions in your own replies.
I’ll start :
Electronics : B&H Photo - owned by religious folks so hours of operation are a little odd sometimes, but overall good customer service, fair prices, reliable shipping
Grocieries : Central Market - HEB’s high-tier store chain for high-quality groceries, instead of Whole Foods
Kitchen supplies : Webstaurant - Wholesale store for things like home kitchen goods and supplies, as well as things like flatware and dishes
B&H photo isn’t just “owned by religious folks”. They staff everything above the warehouse exclusively with Hasidic Orthodox Jewish men.
Afaik they aren’t tied to supporting Zionism. They had some problems a decade ago with safety standards and union busting.
And their website won’t let you order anything on the Sabbath, which drives me insane. I’m not expecting anyone to be working on the weekend, but computers don’t need to take breaks!!
Bezos can get fucked.
And not in the good way.
Maybe it’s time for people to start submitting Opinion pieces detailing how we can use the free market to make companies regret discontinuing their DEI programs or Pride merchandise, or telling how bodily autonomy and control over one’s reproductive equipment is a central pillar of personal liberty.
Editing to add: in the event your submission is rejected, consider adding an opener such as: “This article was rejected by The Washington Post despite meeting their criteria of focus on the free market (or personal liberty).” And then submitting it to one or several of their competitors. Even the ones that aren’t any better, pitting their competitive instincts against their conservativism.
Your mistake is assuming that these people actually care about “free” “markets”, “personal liberty”, etc.
Oh I still think it would be interesting to try, and once rejected send the items to their competitors with the prompt “rejected by WaPo despite being about the topics they claim to support.” After all, I can only cancel my subscription once, but making sure others are aware of this enshittification might lead them to cancel theirs as well. Whether it’s by my item being published or by sparking a followup story by a competitor doesn’t matter to me.
