Bobson Dugnutt 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: What Liberal Media? Axios Thinks Being Neutral Means Kissing Trump’s Ass

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2025 @ 03:03pm

    What truly sucks is that media executives decided to spite Timothy Snyder and obey in advance to own the libs.

  • On the post: Trump Administration Says It’s Going To Start Locking Up Homeless People

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2025 @ 05:57pm

    Public landlords will be their own kind of awful. We have housing projects in the U.S. and their butcher's bills. Or, take Singapore, where 85% of property is publicly owned. It's extremely land constrained, and to get some of that publicly owned housing requires entering a long waitlist and be subject to a heavyhanded paternalism most Westerners have no patience for. The U.S. is kind of emulating Singapore by slouching toward Gilead. The places in the U.S. that lead with population growth and new-home purchases are largely in the South and Texas. These are also the places with the most restrictions on abortions, and the Dobbs decision is just the start to restrictions on family planning, and now porn, and in due time interracial and non-man+woman marriage. High population growth is also making these areas more Republican, so many Americans who move to the Sunbelt are trading their reproductive freedoms for property ownership. As a postscript, I don't write this to justify Republican orthodoxy. One of them will bound to come along and make this same argument as a sincere intent of their belief.

  • On the post: What Liberal Media? Axios Thinks Being Neutral Means Kissing Trump’s Ass

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2025 @ 05:30pm

    In 2024, the working class of all races realigned toward literal fascism (i.e., voted for Trump). If elections were criminal law, Donald Trump voters are accessories.

  • On the post: Mamdani Shows How To Frontrun, Defuse, And Reframe Right-Wing Outrage

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 22 Jul, 2025 @ 07:29pm

    That does not look like award-winning director Mira Nair.

  • On the post: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2025 @ 04:15pm

    Atlantic City is a frightening harbinger of what is to come for the rest of America. (The bubble burst on Atlantic City as the Las Vegas of the east because flights are cheap and frequent enough to get the real thing in Vegas, plus newer tribal casinos in Connecticut snagged the New York City and New England gambling markets. Not a single Trump-branded Atlantic City property survives today.)

  • On the post: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2025 @ 04:06pm

    Bouie's idea scales up to world history for the past 80 years. How did liberal democracy win history for about 60 of those years? When the world was in agreement that "Hitler and the Nazis are bad." Almost all of the world's institutions were built on the foundation of making governments, institutions and cultures inhospitable to fascism. Think about this: After World War II, the victorious Allies made their enemies their friends. Japan and Germany didn't want to avenge their loss; they had to be occupied and rebuilt to where they could have their industrial economies restored over a generation. That's what gave rise to globalization. We're too busy trading and traveling to avenge what happened in the trenches in the 1930s and 1940s.

  • On the post: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2025 @ 03:52pm

    We're living the timeline in which journalism is too important to be left up to journalists.

  • On the post: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2025 @ 03:51pm

    What the media are doing in re Trump coverage has a name now: sanewashing. Mainstream political journalism is no different than hermeneutics.

  • On the post: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2025 @ 02:26pm

    Free speech = hostage taking

    When Mike says:

    "This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we’ve seen this all play out before. When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.
    ... it's what I've warned as Appeals to free speech are usually moral hostage taking. I brought it up over the weekend, and Stephen and a couple of ACs elaborated on it. I note that there's an important caveat between government action and cultural discourse of free speech that involves ideas outside lawmakers and the courts. The hostage-taking aspect applies to the cultural aspects of speech outside the scope of law. Well, Brendan Carr is the exception. He actually has political power, and he's using the power of his office along with the rhetoric of free speech to take hostages to deliver policy wins for Trump. A person who loves free speech defends free speech out of love. The hostage taker's love of free speech is at best instrumental -- their aim is to extract concessions and control the situation.

  • On the post: After Killing USAID, MAGA’s Solution: Reinventing USAID, But Worse

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2025 @ 01:57pm

    A better question is how much money is Elon losing for his firms. The big problem of Elmo getting up his own ass about his performative genius is that a significant portion of his companies' market caps are tied to Elmo's personal charm. Tesla would be a niche carmaker were it not for Elon Musk. Tesla is positioned as the Apple of cars, largely because the carmaker's identity and Musk's identity are intertwined. Musk didn't invent the electric vehicle, but he did take over Tesla with the tech money he made and his superficial charm. Tesla's sales are plummeting all over the world, and Tesla drivers are now finding that they practically can't give their cars away because the used-car values have fallen hard. Ironically, Tesla is now becoming a starter EV because used ones are comparatively affordable right now. The $44 billion Nazi bar remodel of Twitter, by some estimates, destroyed 80% of Twitter's value. That is assuming there's even an $8 billion buyer who wants XTwitter knowing that the brand and its community is so utterly toxic. Twitter has also created splash damage for social media as a whole, devaluing Facebook, Snap and TikTok as well. Elmo's purchase of Twitter might have been a tipping point -- the disengagement since 2022 was large enough that it pulled down engagement for social media as a whole. There are also long-term trends that don't look good. Much of the disengagement is coming from the youngest users. The <29 demographic is either not engaging in the first place, dialing down their usage, or deactivating their accounts. Social media is also plagued with platform decay. Most social media accounts aren't platform-exclusive, and individual users are brands in the same way literal brands are brands. A lot of content that isn't spam or AI slop is turning social media into what Tom Eastman quipped as five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four. Circling back to Elmo, though, what we really should worry about is if the U.S. government ends up looking like Tesla or X. The world won't end if Tesla or X are shut down -- after all, we will still be able to drive and communicate. If the DOGE kludge wrecks the U.S. government's electronics payment system, we're not going to be able to work or even keep the lights on or the water flowing. We're looking at wheelbarrows of cryptocurrency to buy a loaf of bread.

  • On the post: After Killing USAID, MAGA’s Solution: Reinventing USAID, But Worse

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2025 @ 12:01pm

    'The Rhetoric of Reaction'

    Conservatives have three ideas: perversity, futility and jeopardy. Economist Albert Hirschman published "The Rhetoric of Reaction" in 1991 to illustrate that conservatives' arguments against change fall along three themes: perversity (by making things better, you make things worse), futility (things are the way they are because they must be, and whoever or whatever can't be helped shouldn't be helped) and jeopardy (life is not without trade-offs and any progress made sacrifices a previous accomplishment).

  • On the post: 15 Republican AGs Urge The Supreme Court To Make Providing Affordable Broadband To Poor People Illegal

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 03 Mar, 2025 @ 01:06pm

    Koby is a professional contrarian.
    Wait, someone is paying Koby? They should demand a refund.

  • On the post: Trump’s Dept. Of Education Sets Up Online Anti-DEI Bitchfest Portal

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 03 Mar, 2025 @ 01:01pm

    In another time, this would be called lynching.

  • On the post: Trump’s Dept. Of Education Sets Up Online Anti-DEI Bitchfest Portal

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 03 Mar, 2025 @ 01:00pm

    Moms for Liberty is a three-word group that lies about every word in their name.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 03 Mar, 2025 @ 12:52pm

    (At least) Two reasons. Another, one that started taking root after the late 1840s in Europe, is that the state (government) should be downstream of the nation (ethnic groups), and in turn, the governments need land to call their own. Sure, about 80 years following these revolutions those sentiments curdled into what we now know as fascism, but circa 1848 you had restive ethnicities who were challenging their subordinate statuses among monarchies and empires.

  • On the post: Musk Fires The People Actually Doing What DOGE Pretends To Do

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 03 Mar, 2025 @ 12:20pm

    Until now, noone has been able to answer that question.
    Except for the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, the Congressional Budget Office, inspectors general, the controller's offices of each federal agency ...

  • On the post: Musk Fires The People Actually Doing What DOGE Pretends To Do

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 03 Mar, 2025 @ 12:02pm

    Putting the government in charge of preparing people's tax returns is a good idea actually

    As the subject line says, if the government were in charge of doing people's taxes for them, it would be vastly more efficient and fair than the current kludge we go through. Several years ago Vox did an article about how taxes work in Japan. Over there, its treasury does exactly that. The government prepares the citizens' taxes for them, and it's the citizens that audit the government's work. The government mails out a tax return, and the taxpayer checks it. If there's a dispute and the taxpayer notices too much tax was paid, there's a remedy process. Yet very few tax forms end up disputed. What is especially silly about the U.S. system is that, with an act of Congress, the IRS could easily switch to this system. The IRS is already one of the U.S.'s largest employer of accountants, and more importantly, the IRS has most individual and corporate taxpayers' data already. If you get a W2, the taxes have already been collected and the data had been transmitted to the IRS and the state tax authorities. Corporations already file reports and pay taxes at regular intervals.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 02 Mar, 2025 @ 11:46pm

    Red and blue states? Coincidence? There are no coincidences no more.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 02 Mar, 2025 @ 11:46pm

    Brunchlords in the wild

    Karl Bode's brunchlords is catching on. AI gadfly Ed Zitron used it during his guest appearance on Adam Conover's "Factually" podcast.

  • On the post: Jeff Bezos Frees WaPo Opinion Pages Of The Personal Liberty Of Expressing Their Opinion

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 01 Mar, 2025 @ 08:51pm

    How is someone else happening to have the same morals and therefore being in agreement “you taking them hostage?”
    For leverage.

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