The Media Is Against Free Speech

[reflechissez]

Dude it's a few interlocking hedge funds. Do you not know who controls them? LOL.

"diverse interests" LOL. That's cute. That must be why all the errors and mistakes tilt one way. DIversity of interests.

It wold be like... oh, Bezos buying the Washinton Post, right - which was not in the least criticized by the Left, at all.

Come on, man...

Show your work.

 

[Luce]

Jimmy Dore.

LOL.

Dismissed.

 

[Argent]

When we say we defend a person's right to speak untruths or to lie, what it is is this: "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend [metaphorically] to the death your right to say it." When we talk of the right to speak untruths, we are expressing the idea of John Stuart Mill, that “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." That is the fundamental right of freedom of speech - to say out loud what you think, even if all mankind thinks you're full of shit.

This idea that there is "danger" in freedom of speech is an abomination. It is the propaganda of the totalitarians among us. They want us to think that there is "danger" in people expressing false ideas (or ideas they believer or say they believe are false). That is a pernicious lie itself. It must be resisted.

I no longer believe in defending the right to tell lies, spread conspiracies, and spew hate. We need to demand a higher standard.

Perhaps we have different definitions of a lie and an opinion -- A lie is an untruthful assertion. The speaker intends to cause belief in the truth of a statement that the speaker believes to be false. Hence, a lie involves an intention to deceive. The speaker also implicitly assures or promises the hearer that the statement that is made is true. An opinion is a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.

I can't take the last portion of your post seriously. The evidence of what happens when people have the freedom to lie and spread conspiracies without consequence, especially since lying became the new "truth" beginning in 2016, is all around us. It is an abomination to me that anyone would champion allowing intentional deceit that has, for example, caused more people to die of covid than should have happened. The pernicious lie is that there is no danger in free speech. That is what must be resisted.

edited to clarify: At this point I still support no governmental inference in free speech. However, I do champion the citizens of this country demanding a higher standard from fellow citizens and from organizations with prominence to influence large populations.

 

[iguanaman]

Neither of those things relates to jailing people who speak out about minorities.

Disney is a multibillion dollar company which may lose a sweetheart subsidy its gotten for 55 years.

The anti-Riot law in Florida does not make it "ok" to hit protesters with your car. That's as accurate as calling the new school law in Florida the "don't say gay" bill. In other words, it's not accurate at all. It's a fabrication.

On Monday, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed an “anti-riot bill” into law that, among other things, grants civil immunity to people who decide to drive their cars into protesters who are blocking a road.

That makes it OK with the State if you drive your car into a protestor.

 

[bomberfox]

Is credibility important to you? Do you want to exist on a diet of lies? What do you think happens when people are lied to so often they lose the ability to identify truth? The answer to that last question is what's happening now in the US. Instead of whinging about free speech without consequence, how about we start demanding standards, evidence, facts and instead of spoon feeding people lies, give them evidence, pro and con perspectives and see what happens? Social and main stream media aren't about free speech, they're about profit. Profits are increased in proportion to the drama imbued in their platforms. Media grab benign headlines and turn them into circuses creating an addictive feeding frenzy for crap. Compare an old time news broadcast by Walter Cronkite with what passes for media today. One was based on fact without emotion and today's media is all about raising emotion which overwhelms the ability of its audiences to use reason.

Its like the early 20th century all over again.

 

[bomberfox]

If the audiences don't demand truth and presentation of facts that can be traced for accuracy, then the status quo prevails. I'm skeptical that the audiences have the capacity to realize they are being scammed by myriad media personalities. An example -- Florida rejects textbooks based on inappropriate material but doesn't give examples. Parents hear that on the news and go ballistic that evil publishers were attempting to groom their children for god knows what and yet no one has seen the material in question to make an independent judgment. Parents swallowed the hype with seeing a shred of evidence. Space lasers, magnetic chips in vaccines. For gosh sakes, the damage that crap does is awful. Free speech alone is worth nothing. Free truthful speech is worth something.

We’ve been too busy defending the ability to speak for the worst actors

 

[bomberfox]

Who is Jimmy Dore? Why should anyone care what he has to say? I'm sure there's hundreds (thousands) of youtube videos that you agree with. Are you going to post them all?

Take my advice. Nobody should ever ever care what Jimmy Dore says.

 

[HangLow]

From the NY Post, which was then censored by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and the major media, which then declared, uniformly (with one exception, FoxNews) that it was "Russian disinformation" which is what they got the the majority of Americans to believe, because they follow what's on Facebook and Twitter and Youtube and CNN and ABC/NBC/CBS, and if those "trusted sources" say that the spooks at the CIA/NSA have declared this "Russian disinformation" they believe it, because we aren't supposed to "question" our "intelligence community."

This was a big deal, you know? Washington Post, NY Times and others have done some modicum of reflecting on their behavior, and there isn't a thinking person alive that doesn't think the media ****ed up royally on this one. Only it wasn't a "**** up" - they did it intentionally.

Shit - they still have relatively or supposedly intelligent people on this political debate forum who to this day scoff at the entire story, as if it is meaningly political hokum. Well, it isn't. Whether you like or hate Trump - the story has a significant level of import, and it is not just a "but but but his laptop" issue.

The tribalism of our political debate these days is so bad that the Left can't even acknowledge that the story has merit. They have to uniformly consider it meaningless or debunked.

​

 

[Mina]

Insiders are not normally trying to sell a 9% position. As to the bolded, what does that mean?

And? I said Twitter is selling at a 48 forward PE and is marginally profitable. How does this compare to the other stocks in your chart?


I don't know that and neither do you.

I neither agree nor disagree. As to the bolded, I don't recall saying that.

Why are you so prickly?

Since you don't have any information about the stocks in your chart, you're not really in a position to make an informed assessment. For all you know, those takeover premiums were closer to the lowest price than they were to the highest historical price. Your chart only shows the premium to the price at the time.

No, insiders aren't trying to sell a 9% position, and it's unlikely that Musk could get out of the whole 9% before the market wised up to his "change of plans" and he lost all that premium his pump-and-dump move had created. But even if he can only offload 1% before the price has come fully back down, that would still be a massive profit based on his stock manipulation. As for the bolded language, various studies have tracked how insiders perform, relative to the rest of the market. Even when they do what they're supposed to do, such that you can't prove they traded based on any insider information, they still outperform traders in general by a substantial margin. I think that's partly because when they buy, at least, even if they give the market fair warning they're going to do so, the market still hasn't taken processed the implication of that fully, allowing them an abnormal return. It's tougher to prove that efficiency when it comes to insiders selling, since they can sell for so many reasons, but that's all the more reason Musk could expect to get rid of a lot of those shares before the market reacted fully: auto-trading isn't as keyed to reports of insider sales as insider purchases, so the big algorithm-driven trades wouldn't be expected to react to his sale very quickly, and the price could stay high for a while.

As for the PE ratio, feel free to provide your own data about how Twitter compares to others in the market. But, if you check the historical numbers, you see technology companies actually tend to have HIGHER takeover premiums than other industries, which strongly suggests a high forward PE ratio does not actually suppress takeover premiums. If anything, Musk's offer was even more insultingly low than a non-industry-specific average takeover premium would suggest. So, it came as a surprise to nobody that the Board immediately scoffed.

As for your comment that I don't know what impact the much higher price Twitter had in the recent past had on the Board rejecting the offer, your reply is, obviously, redundant, since my statement already included the word "probably" which clearly indicates I don't know that for sure.

Similarly, when I said that you were welcome to say something, it was weird to reply that you didn't say that, since my own comment would have been nonsensical if you had. The whole point is to frame something you could rightly say that you hadn't actually said.

I don't believe I'm prickly, but if you're very sensitive, I can try to be more tender in my responses to you.

Anyway, I am, indeed, in a position to make an informed assessment here. I am a financial analyst, and a lot of what I do is crunch numbers to help with business decisions -- not infrequently in the M&A setting. When I say that if I were on the board of a company like Twitter, I wouldn't want to force shareholders to lock in a price so close to the current low level, by accepting this low-ball offer, that's the kind of analysis I do for a living. Takeover premiums this low are uncommon for a reason.

 

[Mina]

View attachment 67386754​

Just FYI, it's Boggs from Politicalhotwire.

 

[Ren]

Wokesters support the freedom to agree with them.

Anyone else should be forced to shut up.

If you agree with MSNBC or the New York Times, you may express your opinion.

Otherwise, you are expected to keep your mouth shut.

In the coming decades, as this nation changes, Americans will be as censored as the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, etc., are now.

That's only if we let them.

 

[Mina]

That's only if we let them.

I haven't seen anything like support for government censorship from the "wokesters." Yes, sometimes they react pretty aggressively to things they disagree with. And yes, they support the right for private forums to screen out disinformation. But when it comes to censorship in the sense of the government actually trying to silence political speech that disadvantages them, that's really been a right-wing thing lately. For example, you have alt-right politicians like DeSantis trying to punish Disney for their leaders criticizing some Republican legislation. Surely they hope that will scare others into shutting up. DeSantis has also flirted with the idea of using Florida's government to punish Twitter for not agreeing to sell the company at Musk's offered price, which is really about DeSantis thinking Twitter should not be able to have the freedom of association to terminate accounts of people who routinely defy their terms of use. Or consider the right-wing use of nuisance suits to try to chill speech. Like Devin Nunes famously sued Twitter for $250M to try to punish them for not de-platforming someone who was making fun of Nunes by way of an account purporting to be run by his cow. Trump is also a famous abuser of litigation to try to silence his critics.

For my part, I'm less worried about "censorship" that consists of private actions than censorship that uses government power to try to silence points they don't like.

 

[SMTA]

"For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less." - Washington Post columnist Max Boot

You're welcome.

Yup, you have no names, of course

 

[MrNiceGuy]

Show your work.

Vanguard Group owns almost 11%.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management 8%
BlackRock Fund Investors 4.5%
SSgA Funds Management 4.5%
Aristotle Capital Managment, 3%
Ark Investment 2.5%
Fidelity Management and Research 2.15%
Geode Capital Management, Nikkeo Asset Management together have about 4%

Nobody on the Left complained about Mortimer Buckley's company "Vanguard Group" owning 11% of the company. Vanguard has more than $7 trillion - not billion - trillion - in assets. Morgan Stanley has about $1.7 trillion in assets and a market cap of $168 billion. Who owns the largest portions of, say "Morgan Stanley?" Surprise surprise - Vanguard Group, through Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund and Vanguard 500 Index Fund. Vanguard accounts for about 80 million shares of Morgan Stanley and The third biggest own of morgan stanley is This ETF - offered via prospectus by Vanguard Group - https://personal.vanguard.com/us/stocks/prospectus?Ticker=SPY

So, I find it ludicrous to the point of "going to plaid" that the Left is NOW worried about "billionaires owning a major social media company" lol, when they cheered Bezos buying the Washington Post, and they've had no problem with the billionaires that control the damn things now. Musk comes out and says "I think Twitter needs an overhaul and it silences too much speech..." and the Left freaks out and tries to sell us on the idea that Musk is some sort of a Nazi.

 

[reflechissez]

Vanguard Group owns almost 11%.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management 8%
BlackRock Fund Investors 4.5%
SSgA Funds Management 4.5%
Aristotle Capital Managment, 3%
Ark Investment 2.5%
Fidelity Management and Research 2.15%
Geode Capital Management, Nikkeo Asset Management together have about 4%

Nobody on the Left complained about Mortimer Buckley's company "Vanguard Group" owning 11% of the company. Vanguard has more than $7 trillion - not billion - trillion - in assets. Morgan Stanley has about $1.7 trillion in assets and a market cap of $168 billion. Who owns the largest portions of, say "Morgan Stanley?" Surprise surprise - Vanguard Group, through Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund and Vanguard 500 Index Fund. Vanguard accounts for about 80 million shares of Morgan Stanley and The third biggest own of morgan stanley is This ETF - offered via prospectus by Vanguard Group - https://personal.vanguard.com/us/stocks/prospectus?Ticker=SPY

So, I find it ludicrous to the point of "going to plaid" that the Left is NOW worried about "billionaires owning a major social media company" lol, when they cheered Bezos buying the Washington Post, and they've had no problem with the billionaires that control the damn things now. Musk comes out and says "I think Twitter needs an overhaul and it silences too much speech..." and the Left freaks out and tries to sell us on the idea that Musk is some sort of a Nazi.

Those aren't "interlocking hedge funds."

 

[MrNiceGuy]

Those aren't "interlocking hedge funds."

They are interlocking, as I pointed out - referring their ownershp, where Vanguard owns 11% of Twitter outright, and then also owns the biggest chunk of Morgan Stanley, which is the third largest Twitter shareholder - that's what I mean by interlocking. Not all shareholders are, strictly speaking, "hedge funds" I'll give you that. I was using the term loosely. BlackRock Advisers is a hedge fund, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hedge_funds (see it on the list of Hedge Funds in that link)

Check out this article here - https://commonreader.wustl.edu/how-a-company-called-blackrock-shapes-your-news-your-life-our-future/

Together, BlackRock and Vanguard own:



• Eighteen percent of Fox.

• Sixteen percent of CBS, and therefore also of Sixty Minutes.

• Thirteen percent of Comcast, which owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and the Sky media group.

• Twelve percent of CNN.

• Twelve percent of Disney, which owns ABC and FiveThirtyEight.

• Between ten and fourteen percent of Gannett, which owns more than 250 Gannett daily newspapers plus USA Today.

• Ten percent of the Sinclair local television news, which controls seventy-two percent of U.S. households’ local TV.

• A large unspecified chunk of Graham Media Group, which owns Slate and Foreign Policy

And, as I noted above BlackRock and Vanguard own like 15% of Twitter, too, plus the shares they own by owning parts of the other shareholders, like Morgan Stanley.

BlackRock was already working hand in glove with the U.S. government. BlackRock was the firm chosen by the Obama Administration to clean up after the 2008 financial meltdown, buying up toxic assets the Fed was not legally allowed to purchase. BlackRock executives were the ones who proposed the economic reset that went into effect in March 2020, when the central bank forsook its historic independence and agreed to join monetary policy with fiscal policy. BlackRock had proposed this in 2019, but COVID created the perfect opportunity: an emergency for which an “independent expert” could be appointed by the central bank to avoid fiscal crisis. BlackRock was appointed the independent expert. It also won a no-bid contract to manage a $454 billion slush fund, leveraging it for more than $4 trillion in Federal Reserve credit. So BlackRock is playing both sides, buying mainly its own funds on behalf of the central bank.

BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, angled for the position of Treasury Secretary when it looked like Hillary Clinton might be president. He served briefly on an advisory committee for Donald Trump and was heavily promoted to be Treasury Secretary in the Biden Administration. Fink’s former chief of staff at BlackRock, Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, is now deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Former BlackRock executive Brian Deese is Biden’s top economic advisor; former BlackRock executive Michael Pyle serves as chief economic advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris.

But, yeah - Elon Musk is the danger. LOL.

I swear, people just are nuts these days.

 

[reflechissez]

They are interlocking, as I pointed out - referring their ownershp, where Vanguard owns 11% of Twitter outright, and then also owns the biggest chunk of Morgan Stanley, which is the third largest Twitter shareholder - that's what I mean by interlocking. Not all shareholders are, strictly speaking, "hedge funds" I'll give you that. I was using the term loosely. BlackRock Advisers is a hedge fund, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hedge_funds (see it on the list of Hedge Funds in that link)

Check out this article here - https://commonreader.wustl.edu/how-a-company-called-blackrock-shapes-your-news-your-life-our-future/

Together, BlackRock and Vanguard own:



• Eighteen percent of Fox.

• Sixteen percent of CBS, and therefore also of Sixty Minutes.

• Thirteen percent of Comcast, which owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and the Sky media group.

• Twelve percent of CNN.

• Twelve percent of Disney, which owns ABC and FiveThirtyEight.

• Between ten and fourteen percent of Gannett, which owns more than 250 Gannett daily newspapers plus USA Today.

• Ten percent of the Sinclair local television news, which controls seventy-two percent of U.S. households’ local TV.

• A large unspecified chunk of Graham Media Group, which owns Slate and Foreign Policy

And, as I noted above BlackRock and Vanguard own like 15% of Twitter, too, plus the shares they own by owning parts of the other shareholders, like Morgan Stanley.



But, yeah - Elon Musk is the danger. LOL.

I swear, people just are nuts these days.

Are you just now discovering that mutual fund companies own lots of stock on behalf of individual investors?

What does "owning outright" mean? Compared to what?

 

[MrNiceGuy]

Are you just now discovering that mutual fund companies own lots of stock on behalf of individual investors?

What does "owning outright" mean? Compared to what?

Oh for god's sake. Vanguard directly owns 11% of Twitter. But through it's stock ownership of 80 million shares of Morgan Stanley, it has indirect ownership.

It's like if you owned 1000 shares of Ford stock, but then you also had control of an LLC which owned another 1000 shares of Ford stock.

What are you even arguing?

 

[reflechissez]

Oh for god's sake. Vanguard directly owns 11% of Twitter. But through it's stock ownership of 80 million shares of Morgan Stanley, it has indirect ownership.

It's like if you owned 1000 shares of Ford stock, but then you also had control of an LLC which owned another 1000 shares of Ford stock.

What are you even arguing?

uh...no. It doesn't work that way. Vanguard does not have "control" of Morgan Stanley.

 

[trixare4kids]

Oh for god's sake. Vanguard directly owns 11% of Twitter. But through it's stock ownership of 80 million shares of Morgan Stanley, it has indirect ownership.

It's like if you owned 1000 shares of Ford stock, but then you also had control of an LLC which owned another 1000 shares of Ford stock.

What are you even arguing?

I doubt she even knows...

 

[Gnosis]

whiny right winger. YOu know everything you believe is complete bullshit, so whine about fake news and bias. You don't have the right to lie and pretend its the truth. And as typical, completely bastardize what free speech means. Same pathetic tired nonsense reiterated over and over and constantly proven to complete nonsense. Anyway, troll away, its all you know how to do

Sorry you people don't care about facts and every one of your shitty beliefs is wrong, and you people are always on the wrong side of history no matter how much you act like terrorists

I was hoping someone would put this as well as you did as soon in the thread as you did. "Free speech" has become the kkkult's code speak for blatant, demonstrable lies. If they want to stop being banned from social media, maybe they should learn how to tell the truth.

 

[reflechissez]

I doubt she even knows...

Ah...the uninformed ankle biter strikes again. Keep up the good work!

 

[LouC]

I no longer believe in defending the right to tell lies, spread conspiracies, and spew hate. We need to demand a higher standard.

Perhaps we have different definitions of a lie and an opinion -- A lie is an untruthful assertion. The speaker intends to cause belief in the truth of a statement that the speaker believes to be false. Hence, a lie involves an intention to deceive. The speaker also implicitly assures or promises the hearer that the statement that is made is true. An opinion is a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.

I can't take the last portion of your post seriously. The evidence of what happens when people have the freedom to lie and spread conspiracies without consequence, especially since lying became the new "truth" beginning in 2016, is all around us. It is an abomination to me that anyone would champion allowing intentional deceit that has, for example, caused more people to die of covid than should have happened. The pernicious lie is that there is no danger in free speech. That is what must be resisted.

edited to clarify: At this point I still support no governmental inference in free speech. However, I do champion the citizens of this country demanding a higher standard from fellow citizens and from organizations with prominence to influence large populations.