When I saw this…

My first impulse when seeing the professional critic score compared to the ‘audience’ score was “hmm, this might be worth seeing.” 😀
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When I saw this… It is hard to overstate the importance of trying to use alternatives to oligopolistic companies seeking control what you can see or purchase. Sadly, Amazon is very hard to avoid these days but at least people can seek out competitors in specific areas, such as e-books. The chaps at Creative Destruction Media suggest Smashwords. Highlighting the existence of alternatives where they exist is important. And so it was written. Nothing is now unthinkable. The difference between China’s bureaucratic totalitarianism and our own is now a matter of degree, not kind. The future is a bleak vista. Scientists claim that lockdown cycles will continue for years, and regular reviews of personal freedom look set to become as quotidian as changes in interest rates. Even if Covid-19 does disappear, it will be a brave politician who, in a future NHS winter crisis caused by traditional common-or-garden influenza, refuses to impose restrictions that scientists promise will save thousands of lives. Civil liberties safeguarded during two world wars are now, as they are in China, gifts of the state. Facebook unfriends Australia: news sites go dark in content row – for once I actually like something Facebook has done! 🤣 Twitter competitor Parler is back after having been de-hosted by Amazon, a salutary lesson om how unwise it is to make your business dependent on people who hate you. Seems a good time to introduce a new Samizdata category: culture wars Brian Micklethwait has long observed that a company building a large new vanity HQ is highly corelated with the long march into decline 😀 That said, they have the world’s governments slaughtering their competition, so maybe wait a few years to go short. Stop press: Continental Telegraph seems to be making the same observation. A couple days ago, Russian internet caught on fire, and it is still ablaze. Although Alexei Navalny was already under arrest, instantly judged by the ad-hoc court assembled right in the police department, his team published a 2-hour investigation into Putin’s past, present, connections and all his assets. Here it is with good English subtitles. As of the time of writing, it racked up just under 40 millions views and 2.5 million ‘likes’. No wonder the powers that be everywhere, and not just in overtly repressive places like Russia, want to control what can be said on the internet. |
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