mdex

There's the overall creepiness of hordes of data containing your entire online history being used for the sole purpose of predicting what you'll buy and manipulating you into buying it.

But I think there's more to it than that:

It's customary in trade to not have hidden costs or unintended consequences of using your product, anything otherwise is dishonest. And insisting a product is "free" while having hidden schemes to extract value from customers is scam-y.

Then to say ad-hoc that its a "fair compromise"... but if it was a "good deal" why not be upfront about it, why try to hide it? "You should've read the EULA." Well, a bet a bunch of people being targeted/tracked by Google & Facebook are children, many too young to consent, some maybe even too young to even read...

Has reading national news or keeping up with politics ever benefit you in a real life scenario? If so, in what way?

Also, what do you think of Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent'?

The ridiculousness of your social contract idea, is that a contract cannot be binding if it was made on your behalf, before your birth, without your consent. Implied consent is lunacy especially when there's lots of people saying "I do not consent", to which you must reply, "Oh you're just too stupid to know what's good for you".

Before you get upset and too emotionally invested, I will say I am not against government or the state. This is like accusing irreligious people of being against Christianity. I'm not against government, but I cannot in good faith use government's own language to describe the actual, material function of government.

Words like "public good", "social contract", these are propaganda words with more of a religious and spiritual connotation than any truth grounded in reality. They are lofty ideas invented by men trying to justify the French revolution. There's definitely value in their ideas and worldview, but mistaking an ideology or worldview for actual reality, is childish.

Government does not exist to serve society, it exists to preserve the state.

Public services -- healthcare, schools, roads -- all those things are great and helpful to society but the government does not give them to us to "serve the public".

Public services exist for one reason, and for the same reason a birdfeeder exists. A birdfeeder exists to keep the birds all in one place (to study them). Similarly, public services exist to keep us all in one place, to make us more easily accessible, so we can be more easily taxed, and more easily controlled. By giving us public services and a good quality of life, we are willing to give up even our own lives in the preservation of our state, and to kill other humans living under a different state, like the Vietcong, who were doing nothing more than trying to defend their own system against invaders.

The public services government provides, almost always come to us through granting lucrative and over-priced government contracts to their own powerful donors and wealthy associates. Notice how after leaving office, politicians always go work for a big corporation that donated to their campaign and was recipient of government contracts, grants or tax-breaks.

The alternative to government is government. There's no way around it. Anarchy creates a void which is filled by another government. I'm fully aware of that.

But making government more fair means acknowledging the ACTUAL functions and purpose of government. Being naive about those functions doesn't help anyone but the people who seek to exploit and take advantage of us under the guise of "serving the public">

People who believe government exists to serve us will inevitably cede unreasonable, arbitrary, and vaguely defined (unlimited) power to the government under the false assumption that government intends to use these powers for our benefit.

You see this all the time where a party expands the role of govt, then complains when the next party gets elected and uses this same power for something they don't like. It practically happens every election cycle.

My argument was in response to the idea that government is a business, I said that rather than a business, government is more similar to a protection racket. Not that governments are exactly the same as protection rackets, which seems to be the words you're accusing me of writing.

You are afraid that if we think of governments in a skeptical or cynical way, we must then be advocating for anarchy. That's an emotional argument and it has no place in an intellectual conversation.

Mafia actually does protect your business from thieves, and from government tax collection. Just like government, mafia wants to be the only one with a monopoly on using violence to collect money.

And I'm well aware that a vanishing government simply means another government or gang will take over. I'm not advocating anarchy or some utopian ideology.

Understanding what government is and does, does not mean one wants to abolish it.

However, thinking that government exists to serve the people is foolish and naive. Making a fairer government demands an understanding of how it actually operates, that way you do no cede vague and arbitrary power to government under the assumption "they will only use it for good"

Neither the NYT or Washington Post questioned the Bush admin and intelligence communities claims about why the USA was going to war with Iraq even though it was public knowledge that the 9/11 attackers were all Saudis and it had nothing to do with 9/11. But the media helped them spin the Iraq war as part of the war on terrorism, even though Iraq was not exporting terrorism to the West, not until after they destabilized the region by taking out Saddam.

Instead, the NYT wrote an article about how dangerous Saddam's WMDs were and how he was supporting terrorism, even though it had nothing to do with 9/11. Nowadays they defend themselves by saying "everyone agreed at the time". It's not true.

Mainstream media is a rubber stamp for corporate and state interests, just propaganda. They rubber stamped Bush's war's just like they rubber stamped Obamas, they will probably rubber stamp Trump's too. Yes, they also contain true information, but they are still just corporate/state propaganda.

If they aren't willing to fact-check the govt for an issue as serious as going to war, especially with all the red-flags that were out there, like the fact that Colin Powell, a year prior to holding up anthrax in congress as "proof" that Iraq had WMDs, was giving speeches a year earlier claiming there was no evidence Saddam was making WMDs. Like the fact the Bush admin certainty about WMD was far greater than the actual intel communities claims. No one fact-checked them.

I have a suspicion that the mainstream media writers purposely under-resarch their stories so they can get the story out as fast as possible & minimize liability for libel.

Libel laws say that if you write something about someone that you believe COULD be true, it's not libel.

So imagine you are a writer who discovers a sensationalized claim you really want to print. But it could be completely false.

If you fact-check it, and it turns out to be false, now you know it's false. You could be liable for libel if you decide to print it.

However, if you don't fact-check it, you get to print the claim because you sincerely believed it could be true. Also, you get the advantage of getting the story out quicker, and you can always change it later if someone complains.

It doesn't matter if they correct it after they've already sold the lie. The damage is done and most people won't read the correction.

After 9/11, New York Times wrote an article about how dangerous Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were. MSM just takes Bush/Obama admin + intelligence communities claims at face value. It is supposed to be their job to fact-check govt, but instead they are just a rubber stamp for govt propaganda. The only admin they have been capable of properly fact-checking is Trump admin and that's only because their corporate sponsors & donors are anti-Trump.

When the intelligence community makes a claim, media fact-checks that claim by asking the SAME intelligence community to verify.

If they aren't willing to put in the work to be trustworthy, there's no reason to give them any trust.

They do operate 'kinda' like a business:

They charge rents (property taxes), protection fees (taxes for military/police), and collect royalties on every good bought or sold on their turf (sales tax).

The only difference between them and a business is that government gets your money by force (by threatening imprisonment if you don't pay). A business must use persuasion & manipulation to get your money.

However, since govt. uses force to collect revenue rather than voluntary payment for goods/services, they more closely resemble a mafia (protection racket) than a business.

Oh I see what you mean. Does this change if you don't use any of Google's products ie. web browser, youtube or search engines?

I don't use any social media, how is that ineffective?

This makes sense because 90 year olds are just about the only demographic still buying cableTV.

I completely agree. One legal change that needs to happen to preserve the free market: company with a habit of employees using social assistance should not get tax breaks (or any other help) from the government. The taxpayer should not be subsidizing the paycheck of Amazon employees. The burden is on Amazon to pay their employees a competitive wage, it's their problem not mine.

Otherwise they have no incentive to pay their employees a competitive wage.

Without competitive wages you have no free market, you just have a corporate welfare state, where the cost of paying workers is taken from the workers themselves thru taxation. That's basically what some UBI shills want. They want state taxation and welfare to replace the onus of corporations to pay competitive wages to employees.