General Discussion

Last edited Tue Feb 3, 2026, 02:36 AM - Edit history (3)

The guy should be paying far higher taxes. His recent turn as an avuncular billionaire who cares about vaccines is a far cry from his past as a bullying monopolist.

Here are some 1999 news articles from SF Gate:

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Microsoft-Ruled-a-Monopoly-Court-finds-firm-2899336.php

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/microsoft-judge-challenges-both-sides-closing-2801006.php



https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/microsoft-bullied-them-pc-firms-say-2800007.php



Who isn’t pro vaccine anyway except for fringe lunatics that YouTube and Facebook give a platform to? It is the type of insipid issue that should be non-controversial and is made controversial by platforms owned by other oligarchs. That way we waste way too much time on non-issues and ignore economic inequality, deregulation, attacks on the public sector and always of course the destruction of the environment.

It is the type of issue elites use to buy cred.
Gates would never actually take on a social issue like wealth inequality or tech regulation.

What is alarming me enough to post occasionally when I should be offline is something I noticed.

Constant race/gender/religion baiting plus affection for billionaires and other disproportionately wealthy parasites (with ill-gotten gains they never paid for) could be a huge factor in what is breaking society.

This is actually one of the most malicious political worldviews out there - a blank check for billionaires and elites with attacks on everyone else. Blah centrist, counterfeit woke* or Turner Diaries flavored culture wars help this nightmarish machine of earth destruction and wealth redistribution upwards.

And most scarily it leads to a fertile soil for the noxious pseudo populism of MTG, Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer. If the pips squeak after this nightmare, they will be back on steroids.

I was personally affected by these dynamics and it is why checks on these giants as Lina Khan was doing are urgently needed. They are next door to Goebbels.

Yasha Levine had another excellent post on Chomsky. (I swear Yasha is the only reason I can understand humans anymore. He is one of the reasons I gladly abandoned liberalism for the left. He is not for purity but sanity - I dislike dissection of randoms for petty shit along with a free pass for the depraved elite. His piece on the Vampire Castle got that. He also has a warmth that is so human that it transcends the net. The left needs both heart and brain.

I was an unenthusiastic sort of liberal seeing it as the best option. I didn’t know I was unenthusiastic, because I had no reference point for comparison. I thought Chomsky made sense, but he metaphorically left me cold.

And other Greens were always smeared somewhat by the older left. Which totally makes sense now, given how Cato/Koch etc operate. I was more in the Marina Bolotnikova, Christopher Ketcham, Nandita Bajaj, Andy Nikiforuk cluster myself. But overt love of animals or nature for their own sake can be viewed as somehow suspect was my impression. I always thought Paul Ehrlich got a bad rap.

But this newer crop of lefties: Nathan Robinson, Yasha of course, Alec Karakatsanis, Troy Farah, Sam Miller Macdonald, Briahna Joy Gray etc made me embrace my natural home on the left.

I only mention that because lots of other warm blooded animals or disaffected Greens looking for a political home and chilled by Chomsky might be more receptive to people like Yasha who combine heart with a powerful brain.

Left Humanists and Greens are natural allies, but somehow I still feel one should hide that or something.

Larry Summers and Julian Simon are sometimes embraced more. There are too few Matt Stollers, Josh Marshalls, Ed Zitrons(?), Atrioses, Chauncey DeVegas(?), Amanda Marcotte (?), Jill Filipovic etc in liberalism to offset whatever the hell Larry Summers or the mean (double entendre) view of The Atlantic is. That is a Yimby hellscape: Yoni Applebaum, the always awful Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson not to mention the nightmarish Jonathan Haidt and pronatalist Liz Bruenig.

Anand Giridhardas is hard to read. He is not too bad, but he is confusing.

Progressives, i.e. Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra etc. and the Warren faction are of course really cool as the only people from the lefter side to even allowed into non-rabble spaces. I was probably closer to that than liberal. But booted straight back to rabble hell..which makes sense. Oh well…

To be fair, the left has that The Jacobin crowd I find as alarming as Larry Summers. There was a bone-chillingly mechanical piece by someone called Ben Wray in The Jacobin that described abortion rights as “popular”.

It exactly sounded like the left version of what the always awesome Andy Nikiforuk said was a worldview that treats humans like legos. Casey Phillips is another of those guys. And Freddie DeBoer is a terrifying Yimby who advocates for coercion. Slavoj Zizek is unspeakably awful and a “law and order leftist”.):

https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/when-the-pentagon-hoped-noam-chomsky


It is a really good post and I am saving it for a thorough read. But I think one of the points he makes is that we are not a rational species. We aren’t just not taught to think critically, it is actively fostered by confusing dissonance.

Our pseudo elites get it. Which is why a blatantly manipulative thing that insults the internal world of children like “Coalie” even exists. Coalie is an obscenity hatrack posted about in E&E.

This extremely unequal world favors irrational human decision-making. It is not that humans cannot be more rational.

*: I am authentic woke clearly ;-/. No..I just really, really hate billionaires and oligarchs and think they are gaming us over and over again using divide and rule. They are war criminals.
I am not saying humans wouldn’t be stupid or flawed or hateful or prejudiced without oligarchs. But they are making it far far worse.

I try to remember all the left of centre people I have followed to figure out how best to avoid alarming places in the future so my DU journal ends up being a memory dump..since I have to go work.

A political compass!
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-animals-build-a-sense-of-direction-20260121/

At least I put more thought into it than that reductive Flatland adjacent graph I have always hated with libertarianism-fascism as one axis and something clearly unmemorable as the other axis.

I am a failed scientist. While most scientists and physicians are decent (Colbert’s reality has a liberal bias thing), most understandably avoid the cesspool that is political discourse. It has to be forced in some ways, if you are not genuinely combative except in self-defense. But I have seen a few science communicators do a decent job: Clayton Dalton, Josh Silberg, Adam Becker. They seem mild enough to pull it off.
Filtered through say the perspective of The Wired or NY Mag or The Atlantic, Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender or Warren Hern are portrayed as more combative or cliche or unfun than they probably are. And even Dr Fauci was dragged through the mud.

It is why the average person with any common sense learns to avoid what passes for both the mainstream media and rampaging social media mobs. However serious an issue, it can expect to become garbage that draws attention away from the oligarchs and the sorry state of our media (which is now worse with Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong etc in charge). Jon Stewart should totally run…