* Alphabet is calling Trump’s bluff. They may have concluded, with justification, that Trump is too weak and ditzy to actually go after his enemies and press an anti-trust case. The risk here is that even if the Democratic Congress and the Republican cucks can slow or thwart anti-trust prosecutions, the financial robustness of these companies is regarded with a jaundiced eye by many investors. They are running a risk that simply initiating the actions, even if they don’t go anywhere, could trigger a bloodbath as the smart money cashes out its chips and heads for the exits. There is something of a gamble going on here that Trump won’t do anything that would trigger a 2008 style Wall Street collapse. Either way, the scorpion can’t resist stinging the frog, even knowing what will happen afterwards.
* If Google does not play its cards right they will run into issues down the road when they try to launch things like driver-less cars and AI. Without the government’s and public’s cooperation, they will never be able to operate. The Justice can also block future mergers which it probably should anyway.
The internet is a cash cow but the technological edge they have is fleeting and consumers can change literally at the click of a button. Once it all comes out that they have been spying on our peccadilloes and using the information to overturn democracy they will be the once cut out of the future.
* The (somewhat questionable) Matthew Shepard story got hundreds of times the ink as did Jesse Dirkhising’s murder. Because the latter was dog-bites-man.
Heck, Gary Trzaska’s murder in Buffalo on the same night as Shepard’s got a microscopic amount of coverage in comparison. Five black teens beat a white queer to death? That’s just another Friday night in Buffalo.
* Last week, its YouTube unit demonetized numerous conservative channels, apparently after being bullied into doing so by one journalist.
Sure, “one journalist” — the ADL and other Jewish organizations are and have been the ones pushing hardest for censorship — the one homo journalist was just a convenient pretext to deflect blame.
Assuming the action against GOOG moves forward, it will be interesting to compare the language GOOG uses to defend their censorship campaign against ‘hate’ to the language the Supreme Court used to uphold racial discrimination affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger.
* I think once the bodycam footage came out, the police slaughter of Daniel Shaver story did generate a fair amount of public interest. (Recall that it was the girlfriend’s video of Castile bleeding out that was the vehicle for mass hysteria in what otherwise would have been a he-said-she-said text story.)
The NYT et al. declining to cover Daniel Shaver is an active, not a reactive decision. There is a chicken and egg dynamic, or “Megaphonics” as Steve calls it. By not promoting the story (in particular by not inserting it into their Opinion piece outrage machine) the story doesn’t generate buzz. By promoting a story, the story does generate buzz. So the “newsworthiness” of these events is still fairly self-fulfilling, and it is not really accurate to say that “white men shot dead” “don’t generate enough ‘clicks’”. They could, if the Megaphone holders chose to promote it.
Anyhow, most of these papers abandoned the profit motive long ago and are now run by ideologues backed by billionaires, so they don’t really care what the public is interested in.
* If it came to be known that Police make mistakes of judgment in high intensity situations involving suspects of all colors including white men, it would be much more difficult to maintain the narrative and political mobilization useful for fringe coalition politics.
I don’t think it’s much more complicated than curating the information that forms the daily news cycle in such a way as to conform to their politics and worldview.
