Slashdot Mirror
Reddit Conducts Wide-Ranging Purge of Offensive Subreddits (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, [Reddit] announced a new policy clarifying its rules against content that incites violence. "We will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people," Reddit administrator landoflobsters wrote. Promoting harm to animals is also against the rules. Within minutes, moderators started to ban a long list of controversial subreddits, including /r/Nazi, /r/DylannRoofInnocent, /r/SexWithDogs, /r/WhitesAreCriminals, and /r/PicsOfDeadKids. The bounds of propriety remain fairly wide at Reddit, however. Commenters pointed out that /r/WatchPeopleDie -- which is exactly what it sounds like -- is still around. Landoflobsters said that site administrators have "no plans to remove it for now." The self-explanatory -- and horrifying -- /r/CuteFemaleCorpses is also still active. Evidently, merely depicting violence is fine as long as people in a subreddit don't glorify violence. In practice, of course, the line between these things is pretty thin. A subreddit devoted to merely discussing violent acts is naturally going to attract people who like to promote violent acts -- especially after bans of related subreddits where those people previously hung out. Reddit's new policy seems like the basis for an endless game of Whac-A-Mole as the Internet's creeps search for new places to exchange disturbing content.
If that's the bar, then when do we hold the eulogy for Slashdot? (Or did I miss it 10 years ago?)
Finally they get some backbone, can't wait for all the simpering fools on /. to whine abut free speech once against where it doesn't apply
If you want reddit to be a platform for hate you should have no issue with any social media being a platform for ISIS or literal nazis
I hope the relevant authorities have been using such filth as a honeypot and keep an eye on some of the people that post and/or consume that shit. Should get their heads examined.
Precisely who are the "relevant authorities" whose job it is to police what people say or read and what do they do if somebody says or reads something they're not supposed to?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
They banned some small subs, but left out bigger ones like communism, anarchy, hittablefaces, antifa, etc
-]Phreak Out[-
I think your view of the world is a tad bit too pessimistic if you think the only reason Reddit is able to stay afloat is because Nazis and people having sex with dogs.
(Or did I miss it 10 years ago?)
10 years ago people were saying the same thing. The only thing that happens more frequently than the death of Slashdot is the year of the Linux desktop.
lucm, indeed.
Precisely who are the "relevant authorities" whose job it is to police what people say or read and what do they do if somebody says or reads something they're not supposed to?
For the most part. But things than might be considered some kind of threat or indicate an illegal action might occur, or libal... That sort of thing.
But you're right, a lot (most?) of the objectionable material may be disgusting but not illegal...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It has been clear for the last year or two they are trying to clean themselves up to be sold to someone. They just are not sure who. They had a pretty sweet system going on. They have been caught a couple of times manipulating the system. Their advertisers HAVE to be saying 'if they can manipulate some stuff down then they can manipulate other stuff up'.
When you build a 'free speech' platform do not be surprised when every wacko shows up and states whatever dribbles out of their mouths.
I vote on Verizon buying them. They seem to be buying every other dying internet company out there.
OMG a business is doing what they want with their own platform as is there legal right! Cue the masses of idiots to defend the 1st Amendment where it doesn't apply.
*cough* #realDonaldTrump *cough*
That's kinda implicit in the definition of a "line".
That doesn't mean you can get away without drawing one at all, though. Not indefinitely, at least.
Reddit was supposed to be the new slashdot, or so anonymous cowherd said.
Reddit is different. It is like a rocky coastline full of little tidal pools where tiny fish pretend they are giant sharks. Their tidal pool is the entire world, full of empty threads with little or no comments. Some of the tidal pools are not bad to dip into to get some specialist info out of but making your life a tidal pool, all the fish swimming in the same direction, in the same circle, really rather pointless, much like Reddit has become in the age of for profit censorship rather than leaving it to the courts and the justice system (yeah I know Reddit managements ego are way above the justice system and the law for the lessor people than Reddit censor). Reddit seems to believe the censoring more people and kicking them off will result in more end users because, I just don't know, they think people like to be censored and attacked randomly by the lamest of SJWs of which ever brand (hitler's brown shirts were SJWs, the Klu Klux Klan are SJWs, social justice activists good - social justice warriors really fucking bad, why can you not understand that the word war and social justice are mutually opposing, you can not win a war, you only lose less than the other guy).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Reddit's biggest problem is lack of real moderation system.
Go pick a random programming thread, and you'll find people having meaningful conversations without having the courtesy to upvote eachother. When I find those types of discussions, I usually just upvote everyone in the thread and silently move on to lurk in another thread. They were all contributing, but everyone's trying so hard to be right that they won't give anyone else credit for contributing, even when they're both half right and half wrong, or when they're clearly just stating a valid but unpopular opinion. This is especially bad in r/cpp lately for some reason.
Next, go pick a random frontpage discussion and see people getting thousands of upvotes for literally repeating the parent comment verbatim. Remember the infamous disco ball thread? That still happens every day to a lesser extent.
p.s. I stopped posting publicly on reddit because helping teach someone occasionally results in a downvote brigade for the entire thread. Instead, I just PM help to newbies that posted enough to let me know they're actually trying to learn and not just begging for homework help.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Limited speech is free.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Peopl...
I hope the relevant authorities have been using such filth as a honeypot and keep an eye on some of the people that post and/or consume that shit. Should get their heads examined.
Precisely who are the "relevant authorities" whose job it is to police what people say or read and what do they do if somebody says or reads something they're not supposed to?
Police, FBI, Etc. If someone makes a death threat verbally in a mall, the idea is for them to find out, catch the perpetrator physically, and send them through the courts. If someone makes a death threat via text post on a forum, same basic shit should happen. It's not actually more complicated than that. Though there are some dynamics of policing that become more apparent after you've watched all 5 seasons of HBO's 'The Wire'. Fiction, of course, but one wonders about how much of policing reality inspired that fiction. Be forewarned, you may encounter no small amount of offensive 'lockerroom talk'.
Policing infers they restrict or control what people say. Reading what is in plain sight to look for suspicious characters is no worse than sitting on a corner watching a group of masked men.
Nope. Not a single one. I am not clicking any link associated with story!
I stole this Sig
the more fun the freedom of speech supporting US competition attracts.
:)
If a site just wants to offer government policy, political press conferences, positive big studio movie review, tourism news..
Whats the point of using a social media site if people don't get to comment on policy, movies, news, history, music, arts, culture, sports?
Users have to stay 100 % positive in how they write about a movie?
Freedom of speech, freedom after speech is what made the internet fun and allowed some US sites to keep growing.
Many nations did not have that freedom to post and respond.
Thats why the US brands attracted so many users.
Freedom is a great product to sell globally. Why alter the only aspect that allows a US social media site to be better and more fun than most of its global competition?
Once a site gets extra boring why return? Follow the fun and rediscover the joy of using the internet on much better sites
Read movie reviews by a section of fun, smart people? Freedom of choice, freedom of expression allows for a fun site.
Read the only movie review that was allowed on a very boring site?
Who gets the clicks? Who gets the views? Who gets the links? The site with the fun, creative and smart people talking about movies?
The boring site with the "approved" review a few approved 100% positive comments...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
+2 Insightful? Hardly.
There are sites years older (fark.com comes to mind) that threw out their dumpster fire residents, and those people just take up residence somewhere else, so 4chan is the path of least resistance unless you're into furries or child porn, and those creeps go to 8ch.
Just like a every other social media network before it, Livejournal threw off it's creeps, so people migrated. DeviantArt threw out its's creeps, and they migrated. 4chan threw out it's creeps, and they migrated. reddit is throwing out it's creeps, and they migrate.
Slashdot hasn't done anything to throw out it's creeps, and that's largely because the subject material is high-level nerd interest moderated by humans, rather than the unmoderated cesspool that *chan sites are. reddit is actually moderated rather well as long as you're sticking to fandom and local communities. Where reddit falls apart is in attracting advertisers to pay for it's hosting cost. So like Youtube/Google (who has a very shitty ad policy in general (they will stop showing ads if you show a censored cartoon butt) is the one calling the shots in advertising.
Other than spammers, nobody bothered us when we used alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque for this purpose.
For the record, I was in no way responsible for the "Di Death Pic" hoax... but I know who was, an a.b.p.g regular. It was an accidental hoax anyhow, it was not meant to be taken seriously. We didn't know lurkers would forward it without the disclaimer.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
For the most part. But things than might be considered some kind of threat or indicate an illegal action might occur
If the police have enough time to investigate every post that has a 0.000001% chance of being a real threat, then we have way, way too many police.
or libal...
Libel is a civil matter, and the police have no business getting involved in it.
So much for the 'you don't like it leave' procensorship talking point. https://voat.co/v/announcement...
Similar to Sauron, Voldemort, Bannon etc, saying Dullard Trump's name out loud opens a gateway through which his stupidity can enter.
Some of what they post is illegal, so it's law enforcement's business. Some of it could open them up to being sued too, and in some countries the state can take an interest on behalf of citizens under certain circumstances.
For example, the subreddit posting pictures of corpses is likely breaking some privacy laws in Europe. Yes, dead people have some right to privacy too, as do their families who probably don't want Reddit users masturbating over images of their recently deceased relatives.
The bestiality board likely has posts discussing criminal activity, possibly conspiracy to harm animals or something.
Not saying that I agree with all this, merely that there are laws covering this sort of thing. I actually posted a story from the BBC about this sort of thing in the UK, but the submission system is broken and randomly marks stories as spam these days.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You have unrealistic expectations of what a business will do to protect free speech. On the individual level it's likely that someone high up in the organization will decide they don't want to host that stuff, like someone high up at Cloudflare decided they didn't want to provide services to Nazi sites. On a corporate level they can't exist on their own, they need ad revenue, they need sales revenue, they need hosting and peering.
And the real kicker (for you) is that Reddit's purges work. They move most of the asshats over to the Voat cesspit and the majority of Reddit users find that there is less trolling and abuse on the 99.99% of boards that are not affected.
https://arstechnica.co.uk/scie...
What you need is some billionaire to run a free speech site at a loss. But even then you won't be happy, because it will be like Gab or 8chan - small, few people pay any attention to it and it quickly becomes an echo chamber for extremists rather than a paradise of reasoned debate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, they got rid of the "whitesarecriminals".
Ministry of truth. Remember:"War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"
And listen to me. I tell the truth. All others are lies and fake news. My news is the true news. It is the best news. You'll see.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The year of the Linux Desktop is now. Linux is just called Android.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"So Reddit's been wiped?"
Oy Vey! SHUT IT DOWN!
Is still alive and kicking it seems.
More accurate: "Reddit makes the news because some crazy The_Donald lunatic killed his dad. As a response, Reddit decided to close down several (but totally unrelated) subreddits... again"
Seems to happen every 2 or 3 years. Nothing new here.
1. The folks interested in these things will definitely find other places to congregate, but here's the key: possibly not at reddit. Which is reddit's goal.
2. In terms of it being Whac-a-Mole, it shouldn't be too hard if they implement a user-based reporting / flagging system. Let your users flag suspect subreddits, then every day a reddit employee looks at the top few "most redported" and determines if they meet the criteria for removal. Users who abuse the flagging system lose the ability to flag.
I don't set my phone up on my desk very often. The year of the Linux hand held was a few years ago when Android overtook the iPhone in market share, but the year of the Linux desktop is probably never coming.
Precisely who are the "relevant authorities" whose job it is to police what people say or read ...
Podesta. and Harvey Weinstein of course. duh. Haven't you been keeping up with the news?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
...."Offensive" according to WHO? We're turning into China or North Korea folks. Little by little. Remember "freedom"? We're losing it little by little. It's the pussification of America.
Conservatives want less government. Interesting that liberals think that we want government control of anything.
Conservatives claim to want less government, but in fact whenever they have power they expand the powers of government.
(I think you may be confusing conservatives with libertarians, who would prefer a corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.)
I adblock reddit.
It's like the old adage about TV being a vast wasteland. It's not. It's a mirror. How you view it is reflection of yourself. If you can't find something redeeming on TV (or streaming) then you simply never bothered to look.
Same goes for reddit.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In what way is Six Apart a Russian company? It is a Japanese company that acquired Livejournal and then sold that to a Russian company (SUP Media). Six Apart is still not a Russian company.
Freedom of speech is quite fragile. It is also something to be cherished. I reject that "classic unalienables" (sic) should be taken as exceptions. As despicable as I find NAMBLA, I choke down my revulsion and resist the call to censor them. But if they arrange/facilitate pedophilia, that is not free speech. There is a line between speech and criminal acts. Hate crimes laws muddy criminal acts. To beat a gay man, tie him to a fence and leave him to die in the Wyoming cold is a crime for their acts, not because they were homophobes. To drag a black man to his death chained to a pickup truck in Texas is a crime for those acts, not because they were racists. There is no need to clasp at our pearls, swoon, and define exactly what are the "classic unalienables" to be exceptions.
>Reddit seems to believe the censoring more people and kicking them off will result in more end users because, I just don't know, they think people like to be censored and attacked randomly by the lamest of SJWs of which ever brand Reddit's whole thing is being upvoted or downvoted by the crowds. It's not outright censorship, but groupthink is the dominant force there, as it is on slashdot.
In the main subs, groupthink tends to go against SJW.
Furthermore, for fucks sake, you're making an idiotic slippery slope argument. First line, they banned them for allowing calls for violence. THAT'S A BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE FROM LETTING SJW RUN THE SITE.
corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.
Nice Strawman. It is exactly wrong too.
Remember who grants Corporate Charters? It isn't the Corporation, it is the Government. As a Libertarian, I have a simple solution to Corporate malfeasance, the Corporate Death Penalty. I also support the incarceration of Corporate Boards and CxOs when systemic abuses occur. If both of those were real legal options after a court decision, you'd find a lot lot less of the kind of crap you see today.
As a Libertarian, I support laws that protect people from harm done to them. That is the purpose of government, not control and regulation which actually causes harm.
Here is a simple test. When government fails, who pays? When Corporations fail, who pays?
THAT, in a nutshell, is why I support way less government. Most of the problems we see in Corporations are caused by government rules that prevent competition.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The crime isn't what they read, it's what they do after they read it. Setting up a honeypot lets you identify these people and watch for when the crimes do occur. I thought that would have been obvious... But it sounds like you are more angry that Twitter is refusing to promote violent ideologies.
libertarians, who would prefer a corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.
Nice Strawman. It is exactly wrong too.
Unfortunately, it's not a strawman. It is the elephant in the room for libertarian philosophy. Governments limit corporate power. Without governments, there would be no limits on corporate power. Once corporations own everything that can be owned, this is dictatorship. Game over: corporations own everything, you do what they tell you.
Remember who grants Corporate Charters? It isn't the Corporation, it is the Government.
Exactly. Governments are the limit on corporate power
As a Libertarian, I have a simple solution to Corporate malfeasance, the Corporate Death Penalty.
Show me one citation -- just one single citation-- to a libertarian source suggesting that "the corporate death penalty" is something that is considered a good idea anywhere in libertarian philosophy.
But: a citation to somebody other that yourself.
Android isn't really used on the desktop though
Every Goddamn chance I get!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Lawful speech people don't like is still free speech.
Announcing a new policy is fine.... disrupting communities and purging content within hours of the announcement is not.
The proper thing is to allow those subs time to modify their rules and require submissions to conform to the new policies or
decide to move elsewhere WITH REASONABLE NOTICE, As in 30 days notice, not 5 minutes notice.
Its been interesting to read that apparently some of the limits reddit instituted last time (amid much controversy and gnashing of teeth) were in reducing hate speech.
The take-home to me is that groups online should define and enforce their standards; doing so will determine what sort of people participate and whether the site is a "cess pool". Seems obvious now.
So what, you want the courts to investigate and subpoena Twitter for these peoples identities? How much louder will you be hollering when *that* happens? Also, "for-profit censorship"... Lol
I don't think you even are a libertarian, or for that matter even know anything about it; it just gives you an excuse to troll on the internet.
Either way, libertarians would be opposed.
Well, that's nice that they would be opposed,shame they wouldn't be able to do jack shit about it.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Isn't it interesting how the anonymous coward is demanding that someone keep an eye who is posting what to the internet?
Health insurance? You know the US pays twice as much, per capita, and total, for health insurance as the next country on the list, Norway. Libertarianism actually is costly, and highly dangerous.
As for college, the countries that give taxpayer funded college are running rings around the US. China, Germany, even Chile, and Russia are curb-stomping the US economically, because they make new things. The US doesn't anymore, and you can partially thank the Libertarian ideals of funding nothing for that.
You really think Slashdot is still full of intelligent people and not mindless drone posts? Have you ever looked at an archived shot of how amazing this place used to be ten years ago?
When was the last time you saw an actual industry expert like John Carmack chime in on a post here?
Yeah. Exactly.
In case you didn't know, he (and many experts) used to.
What the TV reflects isn't the viewer, it's the average viewer.
DeviantArt threw out its's creeps
DeviantArt threw out DeviantArt?
Who has jurisdiction?
NY State Police? NYC?
Which federal police? US (FBI)? Russia (KGB)? Chinese?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
You have unrealistic expectations of what a business will do to protect free speech.
Lets not be quite this confused; when a business chooses what you can say on their website, that is literally them defending their free speech. Why is that so hard to comprehend?
At some point, it'll just be a few niche communities and corporate-approved content. Just like Digg 4.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
If you look long enough, you probably will find laws against almost anything that someone might wright. Is that a reason to outlaw writing?
I understand why Rusty was so pissed but yeah, his reaction killed kuro5hin.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The idea that government can compel people to participate in a free and open economy (Obamacare) isn't liberty, it is fascism. Because once a government can compel people against their own conscience is a violation of the basic tenants of liberty.
Is Obamacare 'Slaver' as a Libertarian would claim, or is it a commons? If people are truly able to opt in to every aspect of society, then there really no such things as commons.
Take a park as an example. A public park is paid for by taxes collected from everyone, and is available to be used by everyone. Buy if you allow people to opt in to each and every government program ala cart, isn't then the park owned by the select few that chose to allocate their 'tax' money for it? Moreover, unless there are rules that prohibit non-contributors from using a commons, then what incentive is there to personally fund anything? Why not just let others fund it, and use the commons for free? If only the contributors can use each commons they give to, haven't you just in effect created a corporation that owns private property?
Public healthcare is the exact same thing. If you aren't getting everyone to contribute to lower costs, then you are just creating another private health care plan. Libertarian idiots howl about taxes being slavery, they are not, UNLESS you have no option to choose another society to be a part of. You can renounce your citizenship at any time you wish and emigrate to a country where the rules are more to your liking. Slaves do not have that option.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Where reddit falls apart is in attracting advertisers to pay for it's hosting cost.
Why is that? Lack of imagination? Advertisers love targeted marketing, especially if you can reach the target at the moment they may be open to making a purchase. Reddit is a place where people self-segregate themselves into targetable groups. You don't need to rely on Facebook or Google's guess of what their users are interested in. Each reddit has fairly obvious indicators. Domino's Pizza should be all over r/whoarude. Canon and Nikon could be advertising on the various photo-related reddits. GoPro and Red Bull on r/holdmybeer.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Nowhere is (self-) violence against rednecks more glorified and "physical (self-) harm against an individual or group" more celebrated!
Just junk food for thought...
This isn't a free speech issue. If you can't say what you want on Reddit, either find some place else or set up your own website and advertise it. (It's easy to set up websites on AWS, and presumably other services.)
Free speech has never included the right to use somebody else's podium. Freedom of the press has never included the right to own your own printing press.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I agree with the other poster stating that libertarians preferring corporate dictatorship being a strawman. A corporation is almost entirely reliant on the government enforcing rules which allow it to exist. Specifically the enforcement of contracts. I am also a libertarian and I do not support the existence of a limited liability organization, or corporate "personhood". If you are an owner, you should have liability. There should be no corporate shield. Personal responsibility at its finest. Would this mean that mega sized business would never form, or that the economies of scale we see might not flourish? Possibly however I don't care, and anything which shields individuals from the cost of choices they make is unnatural and has no place to be enforced through violence as all things done by the government are.
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Good job Reddit, that'll really give those NAZI's a black eye. ....wait.
Fark didn't just purge trolls, they purged their entire community. That place isn't even a shadow of its former self.
I asked for a citation showing that this is a libertarian position, and you respond with an essay justifying your personal opinion.
You missed the part where I asked for
But: a citation to somebody other that yourself.
But, OK, so you have an ad-hoc, jury-rigged fix to corporate power suggesting that a very powerful corporation could have its power curtailed by individual citizens suing in court, nonwithstanding that the corporation has, to first approximation, roughly a billion dollars to spend on lawyers, and thus the only "people" who could possibly afford such a suit would be other corporations. So, in your lawyertopia we have corporation-to-corporation death battles, with the most well-funded corporations killing the smaller ones. I don't think this is much of a fix for anything, actually, but the main point is that this is your opinion, not anything in libertarianism (other than the fact that I have often heard libertarians suggest that lawsuits are the way to solve most of the world's problems).
By the bye, you said earlier that libertarians want less government, but I'll point out that the "corporate death penalty" doesn't currently exist, and thus you're proposing expanding the power of government, not shrinking it. You just happen to propose expanding it by making lawyers more powerful.
Corporate power is not dependent on corporate "personhood".
Tumblr going to remove the numerous rape videos they're hosting?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
(I think you may be confusing conservatives with libertarians, who would prefer a corporate dictatorship with no government oversight.)
"Corporate dictatorship" is an oxymoron. If an organization is behaving as a dictatorship then they are either a government (if they are claiming "legitimacy") or a criminal organization, not merely a corporation.
Why do you say that? Libertarians say that on my property, I am allowed to require you to obey my rules. If "my property" expands to include the areas you are trying to live in, I become a dictator. That's not an oxymoron.
What, you say you can just move somewhere else? You're making an assumption that other places will always continue to exist, and won't get swallowed up by corporations. And you're saying you have the resources to move elsewhere.
The first rule of money is that people with money use it to get more money, and people with more money use it to control essential goods and services. The more essential goods and services become controlled by monopolies, the less liberty individual people have. In the end case, corporations control all the essential goods and services, own all the property, and individual people control nothing, own nothing, and have no rights other than what corporations grant them.
A perfect dictatorship-- one person owns everything-- is also a perfect libertarian society.
the year of the Linux desktop is probably never coming.
Maybe. But installing Linux on a new desktop used to be a weekend ordeal. Now it's a 20 minute process (at least with Fedora) including the specialized nvidia drivers update and picking a new desktop wallpaper.
lucm, indeed.
2006 called, they want their unreliable survey website back
lucm, indeed.
Regulation is literally the ONLY thing that has ever protected people from harm by the rich.
It is also, the only viable option that has ever been PRPOSED to do so.
It's possible there is another thing that can, it's possible it's better than regulation - but since, in all of human history, nobody has yet managed to think of - let alone implement- this hypothetical thing, I'll accept the downsides of regulation in the meantime rather than the uncountable deathtoll that all deregulation inevitably produce.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The end result of libertarianism (if it can somehow avoid degenerating into feudalism as it always has before) is one corporation (or possibly even -just one single man) owning literally every square inch of land on earth, and every resource within it - and all of humanity effectiely enslaved to the one true owner of all, and since property rights are absolutely sacrosanct in libertarian thinking - absolutely no way to ever change that situation.
Coincidentally - it also provides the perfect thought experiment to the question of whether it's good to limit levels of economic inequality. Not unless the idea of living in a world where one person owns everything that exists sounds like a bad idea to you. After all if THAT level of inequality is not tolerable - then you've conceded that there IS an intolerable level of inequality - and now we're only arguing about where that level is, you can no longer argue that it doesn't exist.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Dude bro, look out! There's a fascist under your bed, and Vlad Putin is hiding in your closet!
Corporate power depends entirely on the government enforcement of their artificial rights. For example, no monopoly could exist without a government protecting it from competitors entering the market.
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Corporate power depends entirely on the government enforcement of their artificial rights. For example, no monopoly could exist without a government protecting it from competitors entering the market.
Good lord, learn a little bit of economics beyond that bare-bones summary you got in high school social-studies class, please. Even Adam Smith knew better than that, and he wrote his book 240 years ago.
Some monopolies can be made by government enforcement, but by no means all. Economies of scale, for example, create natural monopolies: a smaller entity can't compete against a larger one if the cost of production is dominated by an expensive factory and the marginal cost per unit is small. (Note that in the decreasing cost to scale case, free-markets aren't even Pareto efficient!)
And, even WITHOUT economies of scale, large corporations use their power to drive small competitors out of business by selling at a loss until the less-well-funded entities go bankrupt (they then make their money back after they have driven everybody else out and can charge monopoly prices).