The Washington Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, is exiting as the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, steers the section in a libertarian direction.
In an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday, Mr. Bezos said that Mr. Shipley was stepping down amid a narrowing of the opinion section’s focus to defend “personal liberties and free markets.”
“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”
In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.
I mean… This paper is done right? Is anyone still reading this?
I haven’t read it since he bought it because obviously this would happen.
These guys think liberty is them having the freedom to dominate others
Minimizes coercion?
From the guy who coerces his employees to piss in bottles to be able to make insane delivery speeds?
From the guy who has a 20 year history of employees crying at their desks from being coerced into overwork?
If this wasn’t such a slap in the fucking face it might be funny.
Now that the fascist won, the billionaires can go mask off safely. Huzzah huzzah.
Thanks 49.whatever% of America.
Thanks 49.whatever% of America.
*22.7%. Of 340 million people only 156 million chose to vote, and of those only 49%ish voted for the Nazi’s.
No. Nobody who saw everything that Trump had done previously, and what he said he would do if elected again gets to hide behind an “I didn’t explicitly vote for him” excuse. Trump is going to cause untold suffering across the globe and your own country. And I don’t care if voting was hard.
While that is true, if we’re going to go into that, I’m putting those who chose to sit back and allow fascism over doing the least possible thing to prevent it in with the rest of the fascists, which would make the number much worse than 49.whatever%.
If you were prevented from voting, it’s one thing. If you said “What’s the point?” and opted to turn on your favorite sitcom over taking 30 minutes out of your day, you’re not much better than the chuds casting a vote for fascism.
21% is under 18. Closer to 30% of Americans of voting age voted for the Nazi.
For-profit media empires have been telling staff this for decades, they’ve just never felt bold enough to publicly brag about it.
Thanks 49.whatever% of America.
49% of Americans who chose and were not denied the ability to vote.
Bezos wouldn’t know freedom or liberty if it came up and slapped him in the face
I don’t know. Billions of dollars can buy a lot of fucking freedom and liberty. But only for him.
Billions of dollars can buy a lot of fucking freedom and liberty.
Not really. You can free yourself from many societal restrictions, but you can never be free from who you are and what you’ve done with your life. Nor can you be free from the social climate in which you exist.
Money can buy a lot of freedom, but it’s like an asymptote. The closer you get to complete freedom, the more you realize that it’s impossible to obtain, especially in modern society.
Can it? On paper they should be enough for people to get out of the hamster wheel a millions time over, but the oligarchs all managed to trap themselves in their own guilded cages with shiny gold plated hamster wheels. The dysfunction that allows people to become billionaires and still sleep at night also prevents them from ever being free.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I had even a reasonable fraction of a billion dollars, I would fuck off to the Bahamas with my wife, a yacht, and an entourage of young ladies and men of questionable moral character, and you would never hear from me again.
You are right that they are broken people.
Or Libertarianism for that matter. As any actual libertarian would be focused on leading those like him off to the guillotine.
This is the only correct response. Unfortunately, my yearly subscription renewed just before he flew his fascist flag last year.
I debated cancelling before and just waited since my sub also renewed just before. I pushed the button today, though. Fuck Bezos.
Every corporate media conglomerate is a shill for capitalism and the state.
Yes. Literally all of them. They won’t show you news or opinion that clashes with the views of their shareholders.
If you want real news. Stop consuming corporate media.
And consume what? alternative media? I can tell you in Canada, Facebook is pretty popular, especially for X/Y gen, and in Canada meta does not publish any news from corporate media (newspapers, news tv channel, etc) but only from “alt media” and it’s full of conspiracies, fake news, far-right propaganda, and things like this. Facebook is a cancer to information in Canada. I still trust CBC/SRC and some Canadian corporate media even knowing it may be editorialized like LCN/JdM.
Nonprofit journalism.
https://www.trustworthymedia.org/list-of-independent-media/
It really is nearly this simple.
My only go-to is ProPublica at the moment. There are also individual blogs that are good news sources and if you can parse the fnords in wire services you can generally rely on basic facts being presented in a fucked up way, which would necessarily be reinterpreted.
If true, does that mean he’s going to stand up against any attempts Trump makes to trample on personal liberties? As I recall, when he spoke at the Libertarian Convention, their reaction indicated they remembered what they (and he) really stand for.
I’ve got a feeling that “personal liberties and free markets” means something different for billionaires than it does for normal people.
Personal Liberties: Billionaires cannot be stopped from doing what they want.
Free Markets: Billionaire owned companies cannot be regulated.
Bezos portrait.
Surely “personal liberty” will include respect for bodily autonomy of all people, and support for free markets will be deeply understanding of the pressures that cause migration and empathetic to the migrants.
RIGHT?
Yay, we all have the personal liberty to choose oppressive employment conditions over literal starving, as the low cost of considering humans disposable and the increased profits from untempered collusion and/or monopoly abuse means that only oppressive employers will have any leverage in the “free” market! YAY!!!
I wouldn’t be sad if he fell off the earth at high velocity. Or eaten by a lion.
What after they sabotaged the Kindles.
It turns out you don’t need darkness to kill democracy. You can do it in plain sight.
