I truncate your statements because truncation doesn't change context. Like your "it's ok to infringe individual rights" statement. Rights are called rights for a reason. And the reason is that every law-abiding citizen is granted these rights and no one can devoid this citizen of those rights. The only authority that can "warrant" human rights infrigment is a court of law. Which means that as long as a speech is not illegal, it shouldn't be restricted.

If you think of another example of my truncation that "changes context" - name it.

But video's description and comments that mention that video was flagged and removed and later restored, do.

Careful. Someday, a handful of crazies are going to self-identify as zombies, claim to be offended, and get all of those pulled from the App Store too.

If you own a store and choose not to sell a product someone created for any arbitrary reason, how would that be censorship?

It's not that some platforms exclude that's the problem, they have every right to do so. The problem is that the alternative tends to get witch hunted (and shut down) by big government.

If the "arbitrary reason" is political views shown in the product - it's censorship by definition. Regardless if it's a government censoring initiative, or store self-censorship.

How would you solve that problem without infringing upon the freedom of the store owner?

Nevermind, I'm not getting anywhere here. That's fine, I won't beleaguer the point with you any further.

I will leave it on the must positive point that I can, which is that I agree with you on the point of Apple not applying their ruling on this fairly based on their treatment of other publishers. I think the common ground we share is that everyone should be treated fairly within the given constructs of the rules, which luckily is the most salient point pertaining to your original post. As such, it is an important topic for you to bring up. Thanks.

It wasn't so long ago that corporate charters could be revoked, but ever since Lincoln was assassinated, it's been all downhill: privitization of the nation's money suppy, confiscation of gold, erosion of civil liberties, abrogation of Congressional authority, expansion of executive powers and secret councils, and so on and so forth.

The bad news is that we've lost most of the things that were worth fighting for; the good news is that there isn't a whole lot left that they can take from us.

This is why police departments are being militarized and the transition to an all-digital payment system with biometric identification has begun (in India).

They own the food and water that most of us depend on for our survival, and they can shut it off whenever they like.

Militarization of the police only works if they can resist keeping their hands out of that cookie jar, which doesn't seem to be the case based on the persistent tax cuts they keep giving themselves. They can only fund the police on credit for so long. And in the even of a major financial crash they won't be able to fund them in any meaningful way at all. Once that happens it'll put new meaning to the term class warfare. To quote Mark Blyth "The Hamptons are not a defensible position."

You're missing something: the cost of creating debt money = inflation, but inflation is only a problem for those who are paid with this kind of money and are ultimately forced into default. Interest payments = billions of revenue streams of pure profit, because the principal has no tangible value -- it is merely a device.

That is true in the traditionally assumed models but it hasn't held true in reality in recent years. Central banks effectively pumped something like 24 trillion dollars of free money into capital markets and there wasn't a whiff of inflation. If the models held true there should've been inflation to go with that free capital. Europe had negative overnight interest rates, they paid corporations to take money and they still couldn't create inflation.

I agree that effectively monetary markets and their design are simply a construct to facilitate concentration of capital, capital being a stand-in for traditional power structures. I mean when you look at the design of the system it's kind of comical. Government creation of markets essentially amounts to the government telling the investor class (i.e. those who already held power) we will make a currency, we will "lend" you the currency at incredibly low rates and we will borrow it back from you and you and guarantee you a better return than what we lent it to you for. It's a little ridiculous in a sense. Obviously the value of it is that it allows the creation of a market that can be used to facilitate a modern form of serfdom with the illusion of choice attached to it.

Germans, "ignorant fools" that they are, like to save money. lol

That does call into question the methodology used to calculate inflation -- or GDP, for that matter. But regardless, that might suggest that the West is almost at the maximum level of disequilibrium that can be achieved before the system collapses.

It might not call into question the way that inflation is calculated but our ideas of what role inflation plays in markets. The current inflation rate is actually close to what would be expected if you look at interest rates over the very long term.

The problem is that our economic models in the neo-liberal era have been designed solely for the purpose of fighting inflation, because inflation is bad for investors. But the idea of fighting inflation is based on a very limited snapshot of what happened with inflation between the 40s and the 80s and ignores anything before that, which tells a different story. Our financial and monetary policy has been designed to fight inflation risk that doesn't actually exist, at least not in the current economic models. That could change given populist opposition to neo-liberal policies. Of course the "opposition" to neo-liberal policies on the part of populists thus far has been mostly lip service. The only real thing they are doing that goes against it is enacting tariffs, which they more than offset through other means like tax cuts.

https://xkcd.com/1357/