media and journalism
Gavin Newsom takes on economists and the media to claim that residents pay more tax in Texas and Florida.
Photo below - California Governor Newsom photobombs the Yamaha music booth at Austin's SXSW music festival. During his campaign stop there the governor claimed Texans pay more in taxes than people in California. I would never have predicted this.... Open Question March 11: Free Speech, but who draws the lines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdx9n317Wpw
Free speech rules and culture today have a huge impact on the future:
Tech companies + algorithms determine who gets heard in 'public'... so government vs citizen doesn't touch today's real power struggles
AI: when you can clone anyone’s voice or face, what’s protected and what’s harm?
Political shifts: old arguments on who's defending or restricting speech (and why) don't hold, making it a topic where fresh thinking actually matters. Eg: The political left (eg ACLU defending neo-Nazis' right to march) used to be standard bearers, where now, the left is more likely to argue that unregulated speech causes real harm to marginalized communities.
This conversation will inform a live interview tomorrow with Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the leading free speech advocacy and litigation organization in the United States. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has led FIRE since 2001, growing it from a six-person operation to a 120-person powerhouse, and is the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt)
#openquestion
Here’s how I look at it. Free speech today can’t really be separated from media. The question isn’t just “do we have free speech?” it’s “do we actually have a free press anymore?” Most journalists aren’t operating in some pure marketplace of ideas.... Open Question March 11: Free Speech, but who draws the lines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdx9n317Wpw
Free speech rules and culture today have a huge impact on the future:
Tech companies + algorithms determine who gets heard in 'public'... so government vs citizen doesn't touch today's real power struggles
AI: when you can clone anyone’s voice or face, what’s protected and what’s harm?
Political shifts: old arguments on who's defending or restricting speech (and why) don't hold, making it a topic where fresh thinking actually matters. Eg: The political left (eg ACLU defending neo-Nazis' right to march) used to be standard bearers, where now, the left is more likely to argue that unregulated speech causes real harm to marginalized communities.
This conversation will inform a live interview tomorrow with Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the leading free speech advocacy and litigation organization in the United States. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has led FIRE since 2001, growing it from a six-person operation to a 120-person powerhouse, and is the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt)
#openquestion
As I suspected there would be a BOT behind this. The Bot outlines numerous treatments of my statement without asking me to clarify. Speech belongs and is owned by Individuals, recall, We, the People.... Lies, Lies, Lies. There has never been a President, or a cabinet, or an administration in the history of America who's whole political platform, value system and political action exists and thrives on toxic lying until now.
I personally think the shamelessness and sheer volume of lies is new, and alarming. I also think the vehemence people have on both sides of Trump, both idolization and demonization, is not good. Trump may be uniquely high in textbook narcissism.... Experiment: How is whatever's happening serving the greater good? If we zoom out long enough, we can often see that massive setbacks created foundations for evolution. Eg:
- The great oxygenation wiped out almost all life on Earth, but also created the atmosphere.
- The extinction of the dinos paved the way for bigger mammals—and eventually humans.
- Industrialization put tons of people out of work and polluted like crazy, but coincided with some of the greatest quality of life increases in recorded history
- In Trump and a Post Truth World, Ken Wilber suggests that Trump’s 2016 win was one manifestation of evolution taking a step backward to correct the way the “Green meme” went unhealthy—because the one thing that Trump was coherent about back then was being anti-pluralistic.
What’s a thing in the world that you don’t like right now, and think is a huge step backward, that might also be a step forward? How so?
By design, this is an unverifiable experiment from a third person perspective. Since we can keep zooming out + everything is interconnected, we’ll probably never know for sure, even if we live for thousands of years.
But by design, this is verifiable from a first person perspective: Does your experience improve or change in any way by the experiment? How so?
(note that this doesn't ask you to deny any suffering—such as the horror of the oxygenation event's great extinction, or stop trying to make things better. Like everything, this perspective can be misused. "Everything happens for a reason" is usually dismissive, "if there were a reason for this in the long run, what might it be?" is additive. Like allowing versus expressing, it's not about bypassing the difficulty but rather creating a larger container for it. Freedom comes through acceptance rather than resistance.)
#TTT
I have another perspective on this, and I realize it may not be popular. One thing I’ve learned is that politicians—across the spectrum—often bend the truth. Both the left and the right are part of the same system, and each side has its own narratives.... Disasters as Political Fodder. Recently, a family member asked me if I knew about the LA fires. I said "yes, it's terrible". And they said "and they've proven that the fires were started by immigrants." I burst out laughing derisively and said "yes, if they'd just shoot all the immigrants, everything would be fine." It was not one of my finer moments, as sarcasm does't invite connection or understanding. It invites the opposite, actually.
When the plane and helicopter collided over the Potomac River a couple weeks ago, killing everyone, immediately the news was about the incompetence of air traffic controllers and the increasing treachery of flying brought on by lowering standards and selecting unqualified minorities and women for air traffic controller jobs. This was without any data, any analysis, that indicated air traffic control was at fault. There was a dumb, affirmative action policy put in place years ago, that was then abandoned years ago. That's what the news highighted.
The Left uses disasters as fodder for their purposes as well. They aren't in controll of the narative right now, so I'm writing about what's here. Politics are wicked. I remember that, after the election, I was going to sit back and watch the political theatre unfolding while eating a metaphorical bowl of popcorn. I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do, as what's happening is distressing, but I can't find any political action that would be effective.
What I do know is that the investment of our time in people, through Relatefulness and Uptrust, is real, powerful, joyful work for something good and true. I am resting on that.
I think that not-knowing is mostly what we are now. Even if I try to keep up daily with reading the news, commentaries, and political journalists, I know I'm not privvy to most inside political information, and likely wouldn't understand it if I was.... Attempted Trump Assasination- Was he actually hit by a bullet?
(meta commentary: I imagine the future of uptrust will host more conversations of this nature… so let’s see how we navigate it) On Saturday, former president Donald Trump was the target of an attempted assassination....