Neoliberal Totalitarianism – Poor trump got de-platformed

As a Kiwi who has been living abroad for over 20 years, I have become somewhat detached from my homeland. In an attempt to stay connected, or more like reconnect, to New Zealand, I have joined several Reddit subgroups about New Zealand, including my hometown of Hamilton.

In case you’ve missed any of the growing number of posts on this blog, you can check out the Contents post to find them in some sort of order or chronology and/or organisation by topic or location.

While, politically, I’m somewhere left of Bernie Sanders and to the right of Gandhi, I have also decided to checkout r/ConservativeKiwi (but not join it) partly to know what Conservative Kiwis are thinking (personally I think Jacinda Ardern is awesome, whether compared to Boris and Donald or not) and also to find out whether there is any madness fermenting and festering in the Rightwing of the New Zealand political spectrum.

Today I happened upon a link to a blog post titled:

‘Neoliberal Totalitarianism’

The post was talking about how bad it was that all of these different tech companies were banning or limiting trump, including, and this is a little bit weird, Tiktok, Spotify and Shopify…

There were questions about whether trump even had accounts on all of these platforms. Some of the other commenters on the thread had a sense of humour and mentioned that trump is ‘Top Tier’ on OnlyFans (basically a porn site, for those that don’t know)

In general, I’m not a fan of cancel culture, but I don’t think it’s Neoliberal Totalitarianism…

Did Johnny Depp deserve to lose his role in the next Fantastic Beast film? I think not. He’s already been financially and publicly punished. And in my opinion, Amber Heard was the abuser in that relationship. Now for serial abusers like Kevin Spacy and Harvey Weinstein on the other hand, that’s a different story.

But I digress…

In this case, trump certainly deserved to be de-platformed from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

In recent weeks he has repeatedly questioned and delegitimised the US presidential election and has pretty much encouraged a coup attempt, in addition to the long list of other mental shit that he’s done and posted over the last 4+ years.

So I’m glad that Zuckerberg has finally grown some hair on his nuts.

This article went on to compare tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter with the oppressive regimes of Nazi Germany and the Chinese Communist Party.

Calling out the so-called ‘Tech Tyrants’ of the 21st Century…

‘The logic is to abnormalise violence as much as possible, with the intent of making it unthinkable for any of their victims to use it against them. Neoliberal totalitarianism achieves its power through absolute control of the media matrix’

Abnormalising violence… That seems like a really good thing to me! Hasn’t trump been normalising violence for the last 4 years? And how are you supposed to use violence against a tech company anyway? They exist on our computers and phones and in the cloud. How about you just don’t use them if you don’t like them? You have a choice!

The author went on to say

‘the only major difference between the neoliberal totalitarians of 2020 and the Nazi/Communist totalitarians of 1940 is that today’s tyrants are more subtle’

So both have the same body count though? Yeah, I thought so…

Naturally, my response was the following comment:

Great Article! Comparing a total DICKtator being de-platformed with actual oppressive regimens that killed millions of people! Oh, terrible terrible neoliberals! What has the world come to? Enjoy your avocado on toast…

I’m not quite sure why Avocado on Toast seemed an appropriate retort, but it seems that the writer of this piece has a pretty cushy life, with an absence of violence. My comment got three upvotes compared to the 7 the post got, so I feel like my work was done there.

There is this idea that the media is dishonest and that the tech companies control us and have some deep agenda.

Sure, the media is dishonest. But there is a spectrum of dishonesty, and it’s something that we can actually check up on.

Groundnews is an app that aggregates news from (All?) the different sources and highlights blindspots (news stories that haven’t been covered in one spectrum or the other). I’ve been using the app for at least the whole of 2020, maybe longer. The biggest blind spots I’ve seen have been on the right, with under-reporting of news stories that were not kissing trumps ass. The Centre and Left reported more or less the same stories. The Right didn’t run the stories at all.

Here is an example screenshot of the Blindspot for Left and Right from Groundnews:

Or on the other hand, where stories weren’t run by the Centre or the Left, but only on the Right. These stories were from a bunch of ‘news outlets’ that I’ve never heard of, that on closer inspection turned out to be some VERY Patriotic American blogs reporting scandalous news stories with PROOF and EVIDENCE of (for example) Election tampering (that later turned out to be baseless). And then I recognised an Outlet in the mix, OAN. One America Network… I wonder why none of the other News Agencies picked this up?

This is not to say that the Left doesn’t have its own blind spots, but to me, it looks much more like a minor media bias than outright deception. When we really look at who is dishonest, it seems to be so much more the Far-Right. But that won’t surprise anyone who isn’t in the Far-Right.

As for the Tech Companies trying to control us and having their deep-state agenda with us… I might be naive, but don’t companies exist to make money?

Isn’t that what Capitalism is all about?

So aren’t those tech companies just about selling us more stuff?

If they are collecting data from my phone, surely it’s so that they can serve me more ads and sell me more shit that I don’t need?

I just don’t believe that there is some global conspiracy to control the population of the planet, a conspiracy that includes Covid-19 and the vaccine, Bill Gates, Hugo Chaves and George Soros…

Aren’t we already controlled? Aren’t we already happily consuming everything that they’re serving up? Haven’t we already made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world? What else can he want from us?

Although now that I think about it, haven’t most of us been home for most of the last year, watching Prime and shopping on Amazon? Maybe it was Jeff Bezos’ plan all along!

The next instalment of the Musings of an Expat Kiwi is coming soon!

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