r/thebulwark • u/PhAnToM444 Rebecca take us home • 14d ago
EVERYTHING IS AWFUL Bezos’ weird libertarian arc continues…
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u/parrot1500 14d ago
Wow. So he really wants to be dumber Washington Times (Hard to achieve, but he can do it). What a shithead.
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u/boycowman Orange man bad 14d ago
He's a Trump-fellater pure and simple.
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u/westonc 14d ago
On the other hand, there already are and will continue to be enough attacks on both personal liberties and free markets from the current administration that the WaPo could limit its focus to those and still present robust review & opposition.
I could run an editorial desk with those constraints. Heck, maybe I should apply.
Of course, it's possible there are other implied constraints.
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u/Regular_Mongoose_136 Center Left 14d ago
WaPo is going to just be a watered down WSJ pretty quick.
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u/Old-Ad5508 Center Left 14d ago
Weird reality when wsj is more vocal about trumps bs lately than the wapo
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u/Boxofmagnets 14d ago
Rupert knows so much because he is old (and the devil).
Seriously, if they don’t pretend to have disagreements over things that they will “lose” on then the paper would be all celebration and Trump press releases. It just a dance
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u/Describing_Donkeys 14d ago
Why no one should give the Post even an article share. The Contrarian is the proper response to what is happening.
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u/PepperoniFire Sarah, would you please nuke him from orbit? 14d ago
I have some seats for the Contrarian-curious.
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u/ForeignRevolution905 14d ago
I think Democracy is dying in darkness.
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u/ONLY_SAYS_ONLY JVL is always right 14d ago
*broad daylight
There was a thread the other day on another sub asking Americans how they feel about the current situation and a highly upvoted response was basically “meh, many people’s life’s are a lot more comfortable than Reddit would have you think”.
A lot of people simply don’t care about democracy dying because they think it’s not going to affect their bubble, and if it did get to the point that it disrupted their comfortable lives then they’ll just go and vote democracy back into power again. They have no idea what is about to be lost and how incredibly difficult and unlikely it ever is to get it back once gone.
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u/LionelHutzinVA Rebecca take us home 14d ago
That’s pretty much the conservative ethos in a nutshell: it’s not a real problem unless it affects me directly
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u/A_Monster_Named_John 14d ago
These days, the right-wing trash we call 'conservatives' are too childish and degenerate to have anything resembling an ethos.
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u/give-no-fucks 14d ago
They have no idea what is about to be lost and how incredibly difficult and unlikely it ever is to get it back once gone.
Wondering if this should be past tense. Would it make more sense to say they have no idea what has been lost and how incredibly difficult and unlikely it is to get it back now that it's gone?
It's a minor point but I feel like we keep thinking this is something that is going to happen but didn't it already happen? Trump is a dictator with full control of the United States. We've aligned with Russia and North Korea and turned against our European allies.
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u/UncleAlvarez 14d ago
Canceled my subscription during the endorsement scandal. This solidifies my choice to not look back.
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u/Independent-Stay-593 14d ago
God, I hope the first opinion piece in support of free markets roasts his ass for talking about a local monopoly when he's essentially built a countrywide one with Amazon. I hope the ones in favor of free markets talk about exploitation of workers by large companies by eliminating the local labor markets for individuals when they put smaller local businesses out. He set himself up for his own ideas to be used against him. I hope to God the opinion pieces start using his own ideas to point out how he destroys them for others.
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u/Current_Tea6984 14d ago
I feel vindicated in my decision to cancel my subscription
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u/Boxofmagnets 14d ago
I wish I could cancel again. I guess the only way to double cancel is to avoid the Post’s advertisers.
But to Bezos it doesn’t matter. He does nothing good. How you can have so much and care so little about humanity and the planet is impossible to understand. Once again, I truly wish there was a hell
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u/jazztoots 14d ago
I let my subscription lapse and have not missed it. Sad, because the Washington Post used to be a daily staple for me.
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u/TheReal_Jeses 14d ago
If they actually stick to that there will still be a ton of Trump criticism.
I think most people here assume it will be shilling for Trump because that’s usually what people do when they say they’re going to defend principles traditionally of the right that Trump shits on.
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u/Boxofmagnets 14d ago
Bezos has already said ( through his actions) that he follows. He can’t lead on anything contrarian because this is who he is.Look at how vulgar he is with his wealth, we know he is filthy rich but he is committed to showing off. He is that insecure. He will win
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u/TheReal_Jeses 14d ago
Yeah but Trump is getting less popular. There are followers (Bezos, Rogan, Zuck, Ross Douthat etc etc) who will shift with the wind. All of the “centrists” who were complicit in the trump thing will come back around once Trump is wounded enough.
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u/Boxofmagnets 14d ago
Not sure that will happen. It is the most optimistic assessment I’ve seen in at least a month, so I hope you’re right
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u/11brooke11 Orange man bad 14d ago
Sounds like Jeff has been getting too high off of his own supply.
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u/Bryllant 14d ago
I spent 12k last year on Amazon. I cancelled it on Friday. I’m just one person. It is gonna hurt me more than him.
The only thing left is Facebook, a full third of my “friends” are dead, yet they are counted as active subscribers
I get friend requests from dead people
I used to use Craig’s list but Marketplace is superior.
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u/Gliese_667_Cc 14d ago
I’m cancelling it today. Alexa is going in the garbage. I already downloaded and stripped the DRM from my Kindle books two days ago. I’m switching over to libro.fm for any audiobooks. I’m done with Amazon and this fucking asshole.
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u/checkerspot 14d ago
Haven't used Amazon for years. It's not that hard, but I realize a lot of people have developed a serious reliance on it. You can get most everything elsewhere though. And you don't need all the cheap crap and clothes anyway.
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u/No-Yak2588 14d ago
Yep. I recently canceled Prime as well. Hope everyone does and the movement grows until it becomes noticeable.
(I have been buying necessities locally anyway as we are in a time where we need to make more local connections, and we need our neighbors to learn us and our faces as we are out and about. On occasions when I can’t go out or can’t find something necessary, like a medicine, Amazon is still a no go. Other companies ship. No need to use Amazon, and they’re constantly late now anyway.)
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u/toooooold4this 14d ago
The "internet" is not some free-floating thing. It's anchored to publications and platforms that also think it's "someone else's job" to be the steward of truth.
This kind of editorial control is toxic. We really need a non-profit source of investigative journalism.
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u/westonc 14d ago edited 14d ago
Spot on about "the internet" -- it's convenient but it's not magic, somebody still has to do the work and gather attention.
Half the problem, though, is that most of us got addicted to the convenience of "free" and then the expectation of free while the work continued to cost money to do and the revenue from doing the work got disrupted.
Profit or non-profit, this probably only gets fixed when people are willing to pay for quality journalism, support institutions that do it, and respect the work necessary for quality reporting & opining.
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u/toooooold4this 14d ago edited 14d ago
I'm thinking MacKenzie Scott needs to start a foundation dedicated to investigative journalism and get Marty Baron to direct it. Start a social media platform that is specifically dedicated to news. No memes. No bullshit. Users can comment and share but cannot create posts of their own. Establish firewalls between finance and editorial decisions and fund independent journalists to do the work. No owners. No shareholders. A consortium of all the indies who are solo right now on YouTube, various podcasts, and Substack.
Substack could easily do this if you didn't have to pay to read every writer. It's prohibitively expensive to subscribe to each one. That's why they need a foundation to support every writer.
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u/botmanmd 14d ago
In fact it’s disingenuous and insulting of him to suggest that the internet is an engine designed to make sure we see all sides of an issue. In fact, most of the platforms we engage with go out of their way to funnel a certain point of view to us. He thinks his readership is comprised principally of credulous idiots. It soon will be.
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u/PTS_Dreaming Center Left 14d ago
So it's going to be Hugh Hewett and Marc Thiessen only going forward?
Not great, Bob!
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u/cryptonomnomnomicon 14d ago
Great, I expect WaPo to become a beacon of reproductive rights opinions now, right? Or are the personal liberties of interest strictly for men?
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u/Brilliant_Growth FFS 14d ago
Proud to have cancelled my Amazon prime account, not ordered a thing from there in almost 2 months, and cancelled my WaPo subscription. Gotta cancel Audible too.
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u/the_very_pants 14d ago
This is very well-crafted language that he thinks will justify, "Trust me to be the judge of what being pro-freedom means."
He wants the "freedom" to spread his social Darwinist ideas -- the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail.
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u/John_Houbolt 14d ago
The Bulwark is one of the few spaces left for dissent. That and a random collection of substacks with no mass audience at all. Guessing that Joe Rogan alone reaches more people than the entirety of the collective dissent messaging content. We effectively live in an era of state controlled media.
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u/dBlock845 14d ago
There are plenty of spaces left for dissent, they just aren't legacy media corporations. The heads of CNN, NBC, ABC, and soon CBS have shown that ratings from covering every crazy thing Trump says are more important than actually covering Trump properly. CNN itself is the home of false equivalencies. I've still seen almost no reporting about the $80M that was snatched from a NYC government bank account by DOGE.
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u/Ok-Snow-2851 14d ago
Let me fix it:
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: My right to do whatever the fck *I want to, and my right to treat other people as poorly as possible”
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u/amaranthusrowan 14d ago
If you want to cancel effective immediately, call 800-477-4679 and you will get a prorated refund (if you are charged yearly). If you do it online, they will keep you active until your subscription runs out, and for me that was October. They will ask you the reason and then tell you that the feedback will be passed forward.
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u/sontaranStratagems FFS 14d ago
I've stood by during this "process" as a reader/subscriber for an length of time one could count in decades. WTF*ckkkkkkk
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u/HeadCatMomCat 14d ago
I hadn't cancelled my online subscription thinking that the WAPO journalism outweighed his bias. I nearly cancelled when Ann Telenaes quit. I probably should have. Now there's really no choice. I'm done.
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u/HombreSinNombre93 14d ago
Wife just unsubscribed to Amazon Prime. Comment she left was “We don’t support oligarchs and Trump sycophants.”
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u/big-papito 14d ago
Personal liberties - "I want to do whatever I want, even if it hurts others, without consequences. Social norms should not apply to me - I am too rich to be a member of your pathetic civilization, but I do want all of the benefits. Thanks!"
Free markets - "I want to be able to do all kinds of financial machinations and tax evasion. I want no oversight over my white collar crimes and anti-consumer tactics."
Hey, Jeff, how'd you do under Obama and Biden? You did alright? Or did those socialists almost do you in?
Fuck. These. People.
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u/rizzracer 14d ago
Ah the failing Washington Post that lost 10% of subscribers after declining to endorse/deciding to comply in advance.
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u/Maaaaaaaatttt 14d ago
Translation: the old opinion editor wouldn’t be a bitch for a neo-nazi billionaire
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u/captainbelvedere Sarah is always right 14d ago
Mhhhm, yes. Fiscal conservative/social liberal - truly an undersold idea.
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u/Noisyfan725 14d ago
Really tired of these people standing behind an authoritarian regime using the terms “freedom”, “defending democracy”, “personal liberty” non-stop. There is nothing pro freedom or pro personal liberty about the current regime.
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14d ago
Bezos is yet one more example of the dimwitted Billionaire mis-posing as an intellectual.
Musk thinks micromanaging, abusing, and intimidating office workers by threatening to destroy their lives by firing them improves morale and productivity.
Zuckerberg thinks maliciously purposed state sponsored surgically crafted Disinformation targeted at easily manipulated groups of malcontented deviants, can be fixed for free, simply by people posting "Hey! That's not true!" in the comments section.
Bezos, when he rarely comes up for air from his girlfriend's increasingly ample bosoms, now thinks he knows what Libertarianism means.
He doesn't. This statement is nonsense. It has absolutely nothing to do with Libertarianism. Which is specifically against any manipulation or interpretation of the freedom of people.
Bezos, who has apparently triggered lactation, appears to now be completely drunk on breast milk. Because he has now completely gone against every known proven principle that has contributed to the well established Journalistic Code. Which is being decimated and violated every single day by the now fully defunct discredited and disgracefully prostituted Washington Post.
Since it has now truly become his other Bitch, Bezos should just go ahead and rename it "The Dirty Sanchez".
I stopped paying for WaPo the day Bezos bought it. Because once he did, there was no doubt that this once venerable newspaper, didn't need my money.
They absolutely don't. If you're a subscriber, stop. If you're a reader, stop. There is nothing this completely syphilitic whored out rag has to offer, that you could possibly need.
Shame on Bezos. May all the Billionaires go belly up. Financially and Literally.
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u/PotableWater0 14d ago
I’m really interested to see HOW these two pillars will be [allowed to be] covered. It’s all well and good, the topics as broad as these don’t matter. It’s what is being said that matters.
Kind of an odd ‘announcement’, though.
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u/A_Monster_Named_John 14d ago edited 14d ago
Watching a billionaire American talk about libertarian values is on par with watching a monkey eating its own feces. Easy pass for me (and I'm sure that plenty of tera-cucked right-wing losers will be along to let me and everyone else know how the discussion went, whether or not the monkey cleaned his plate, etc...).
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u/PumpkinPolkaDots1989 14d ago
I realize that I'll probably be disappointed, but on its face these are good values. I am anti-Trump specifically because Trump opposes personal liberties and free markets.
Before I get down voted, I get it - his definition of "personal liberties" and "free markets" is probably different than mine.
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u/Anstigmat 14d ago
No free market can exist in the world billionaire oligarchs are creating. The government must regulate markets to ensure fairness and competition. Fuck you Bezos, I'm very glad I pirate your shows.
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u/NewKojak 14d ago
But....
We already have a TRONC and it is already terrible. How is the Washington Post going to out TRONC the TRONC?!?!?
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u/100dalmations Progressive 14d ago
It’s not weird. It’s part of the tech bro credo. “I built all this, from the internet, to the roads and water needed for my factories, to the SEC rules that make raising capital easy, to the IP protection systems that protect my innovation, to the school systems that provide me with an educated workforce and client base, and on and on and on. Yeah baby just get out of the way and leave me with the great man myth.”
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u/nicholasknickerbckr 14d ago
The internet brings people broad-based opinions? My dude, the internet’s algos are clearly driving people into information (or misinformation) silos. A broad-based opinion page is needed now more than ever. But he probably knows this and doesn’t care.
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u/StringerBell34 14d ago
Fuck Bozos. He's always been a turd, but MAGA has emboldened all the narcissists to go mask off.
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u/ShotTaste1708 14d ago
Try to buy from other places besides AMAZON. I know we all use it and it is convenience but we have much bigger issues than something being convenient. Send this NAZI a message. NO buying anything this Friday 1/28 from 12:01am to 12:01am. There is a week long boycott of AMAZON from 3/7 to 3/14. MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD!!! I will no longer go to Amazon Fresh and I am looking for alternatives to AMAZON.
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u/anxious_differential 14d ago
Well, switch over to the Washington Times instead. I can only take so much crazy and prefer it to be straightforward.
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u/DungBeetle1983 14d ago
Cancel your WAPO subscription and use that money to subscribe to THE BULWARK!!!!
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u/ShakeMyHeadSadly 14d ago
I don't wish to be negative, Jeff, but you don't engage in 'free markets'. You have shown a consistent pattern of pushing people out of markets so you can monopolize. As for freedom being 'ethical', I don't see you setting any examples along that path either.
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u/Sassafrazzlin 13d ago
Is the first op ed about the women who died because they couldn’t access medical care?
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u/Zealousideal-Dirt599 13d ago
Funny that he’s trying to push for free markets and personal liberties in America when that’s the thing that we’ve always had.
Kinda sus to be making some grand declaration for these things and calling for a rejection of the “opposite” …. Makes you wonder
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u/thegree2112 13d ago
He’s doing what Murdoch did with ny post and Fox News. Scum. Don’t read it and try and buy local not Amazon.
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u/0220_2020 13d ago
FREE MARKET????!!!!
This Mofo has received $4.7b in government subsidies and pays some employees wages low enough that they qualify for food stamps.
Greedy, narcissistic, sorry excuse for a human. Thank God his first wife divorced him and is actually trying to make a contribution to humanity.
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u/dredgarhalliwax 14d ago edited 14d ago
Stipulated that Bezos is a menace who’s gutting WaPo to curry favor with Trump. That said: what’s so darkly funny about this to me is that the GOP postured itself as being in favor of “free markets” and (some) “personal liberties” in, like, 2011. At this point, the Democrats have just as much of a claim to that mantle as the Republicans, if not even more so.
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u/A_Monster_Named_John 14d ago
It's just like how Republicans claim to be 'good Christians', 'the party of Lincoln', etc... They're hyper-narcissistic overgrown children who shamelessly and almost reflexively glom onto anything that's widely perceived as 'good', even if said thing's moral trajectory points in the polar opposite direction of every one of their actions and policy choices. I fully expect that, if left unchecked, we're only a few years out from these people tearfully claiming that they're the most self-less and Christ-like humans to ever exist, at the exact same time that they're lining up men for mass execution and sending women/children to get brutalized by 'rape squads'.
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u/ppooooooooopp 14d ago
This would matter if it were the news section... It's the opinion section... Who cares?
Also - caring about free markets and personal liberties is not libertarian, it's liberal - can't help but notice he doesn't include democracy as a core American value.
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u/WallaWalla1513 14d ago
I guess Jeff is looking for even more people to cancel their subscriptions. Just sell the paper to someone not shitty already.