The new episode of Radiolab, "What's Up Holmes," is required listening for anyone interested in the great American experiment with freedom of speech; Oliver Wendell Holmes eventually comes to the conclusion that there is "a marketplace of ideas" and that nearly all speech should be allowed-- good ideas will rise to the top of the marketplace, win the competition, and the truth will prevail . . . and while this has become an American ideal, the metaphor may need some revision-- marketplaces need rules, regulations, and referees because while marketplaces can occasionally work, they can also produce pollution and uncontrolled externalities; they can create monopolies and arbitrage and collusion and unfair trade practices and great inequality; they can poison the water supply (or factual information) and-- when deregulated enough, they can lead to Enron or the mortgage crisis or any of the other stupid crashes created by our idiotic and evil hardline right-wing voodoo economists/politicians that have been having their way with this country, it's laws and marketplaces and its unions since 1980 or so . . . anyway, the takeaway is that if you are stupid enough to get your news on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media, you need to realize that marketplace is broken and lies, propoganda, and misinformation compound and spread much fast than logic, reason, and the truth . . . my advice would be to AVOID TWITTER AND FACEBOOK . . . because if you go there, you give those platforms power to pollute the information-sphere and the marketplace of ideas, but-- despite the fact that I crushed at tennis AND the NYT mini today-- who's going to listen to me?
2 comments:
Everything I know I learned at SoD.
which makes it odd that you always beat me at the mini.
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