As the years go by, Jonathan Turley seems to be working hard and harder at shedding his credibility and integrity. His commentary on #BLM and his comparisons to the NRA scandals are wild stretches at best. msn.com/en-us/news/opi…
Turley expresses no distinction or understanding that while the NRA is a distinct corporate political body, #BLM is an amalgam of associated grassroots movements. That makes all the difference in the world. So, he's inept, or dishonest, or all of the above.
And while Turley desperately tries to connect scandal to the movement, he has made no effort to connect the entities and persons he identifies as related to the so-called scandal to the actual movement itself.
So, it's less of an intellectual analysis and more of a hit piece.
It seems that he's bound and determined to ingratiate himself with a political ecosphere that oddly seems noncommittal to accepting him. Turley has publicly conducted himself as the smartest guy in every room he's in, but this opinion piece is pretty stupid.
It's been exactly 50 yrs. since congress passed the ERA, yet it remains unratified. It's lack of ratification is more than symbolic. It underscores practically all of the inequities of life that are reinforced through obsolete norms, customs and purported "values."
So, when we look across the board, the picture is crystal clear. When you consider the attacks on abortion, pay equity, health care treatment and coverage disparity, voter suppression and nullification, and a host of other issues...
...nothing makes the culture and deliberate subjugation of women clearer than the stubbornly willful refusal to acknowledge women as fully human and equal than the lack of the ERA.
What's also apparent is the utter confusion and chaos in the courts. For instance, I'm old enough to remember when Hobby Lobby and other corporations were granted the right to enforce their will on employees under the guise of religious freedom. msn.com/en-us/news/opi…
At that time the court found that it was essential that corporations maintain religious freedom (although I have yet to meet a "religious" corporation) regardless of the corporation's impact on the religious belief of the employees.
Yet today in the United Airlines case less than a decade later, employees are ironically permitted to enforce their will on corporations allegedly because of religious freedom for the sake of political narratives and objectives convenient to and in line with rightwing ideology.
The Spotify CEO has it all wrong. He apparently sees the company's controversy as a "news cycle" and thus temporary. And because managing content means spending money and accepting responsibility, they won't even consider it within their business model or scope.
What he either ignores of could care less about is Rogan's antics affect people's lives and deaths. It's not a passing fad. Some people take that seriously, especially those who have lost loved ones to #covid racist or homophobic violence, and are having their rights denied.
Therefore, while some people may leave the platform eventually to return, some never will. Spotify will forever wear that stigma.
No matter what they do or claim, all social media companies want the same things:
1. Take in as much information as possible, 2. Sell information and access for a profit, 3. Not take responsibility for the information they handle, and
4. Minimize or eliminate competition whenever and wherever possible while generating unlimited growth.
When their business practices do harm to the public, the government needs to step in because only the government has the mandate and authority to protect the public good.
All business chafe against regulations, restrictions and guardrails. But the whole point is to protect the people, not provide space unfettered behavior for corporations. That's why regulations exist.
Race and racism are artificial constructs that we're always intended to divide. And no matter how you cut it, racism always cuts to the advantage of the racist.
Here's at least part of the reason:
I just listened to someone explain how under the European conceptualization of racism, while Nazism treated - treats Jews as an inhuman sub-race and themselves as a superior race - some Jews consider themselves to be white.
Whereas, the same individual explained that the Americanized version of racism is somewhat different, despite the fact that white supremacists still perpetuate hate against Jews. Therefore, racism may be perceived and applied depending on where you are and who applies it.
It's ODD how just this week alone we're violence and toxic hateful talk about black female judges, bomb threats against HBCUs, disparate firing and hiring in the NFL, a black man's murderers trying to cut deals on their sentences, howling against CTR black...
...history, classic books about black history or about the Jewish experience like Maus are removed from libraries and classrooms while people remain silent about To Kill a Mockingbird and Mein Kampf, voter nullification stemming from outrage at black voters...
...and controversy on The View - and that just scratches the surface.
But white supremacists, their enablers, and apologists pretend that there's no racism here, nothing to see. The want everyone else to believe that they're the ones being hyperbolic and hysterical.