President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Am I the only one who thinks government punishing a business for exercising its right to free speech is a really serious fucking problem? At the same time it bans books; ends tenure; threatens teachers in the classroom; rewrites history in its textbooks?

Where are all our five-alarm 'cancel culture' handwringers?

 

So unfair!

For Trump's GOP, Crossing Lines Has Few Consequences

 

blue checks and balances

 

With land grants, subsidies, patents, tariffs, taxes, protection of shipping and the building of national infrastructure, the US government has been incentivizing business and industry since the founding.

Promoting the general welfare is a tangle of competing interests certainly, but punishing speech seems to me much worse than giving the local WalMart a zoning tax break.

 

While I am sympathetic (and largely in alignment) with @Azrael's take, I'm pretty sure of two things: 1) if one did a "way back" search 'round these parts, one wouldn't have too much trouble finding many, many instances of posters advocating fiercely for this or that corporate entity to be punished similarly, the only difference being the ideological stripe of the one dishing out the punishment; and 2) this will ultimately end, quietly, with Disney not being punished at all.

 

There's a difference between individual criticism of corporations, or even collective actions like boycotts (never work, we're not a boycott-minded people) and government actions to do the same. If some person decides not to use Amazon because of its anti-union stance (who would do that?) it's protest. If the government uses its power to harm Amazon for no other reason than some Amazon political statement, that's suppression. But I agree with quant that nothing's gonna happen to Disney. That the law doesn't go into effect until next June is the tell.

 

I guess I'd argue that most of those instances - Hobby Lobby, say, or Chik-Fil-A, FoxNews etc - call for public boycotts rather than government censure or intervention. So I'm in agreement here with Mr. Gee.

Disney may or may not benefit - or suffer - from the changes the governor seeks.

That said, all the other insults to free speech on the part of Florida's government seem to go beyond political theater.

 

I'm going to beg all of you not to refer to me as "Mr. Gee" in your posts. I have enough daily reminders I'm fuckin' old, thank you.

 

Sorry ... "Studly Gee" is just too hard to type.

 

It's a huge problem. The media is not covering it like what it is, which is also a huge problem. And it's a bigger problem because this man's going to be president in 6 years.

 

Aren't you the poster who frequently argues that "politics meddling" churches should be stripped of their tax exempt status?