Apparently my comment is too long so I apologize for multiples.
"While technically correct, I’ve never understood why this take on free speech is so compelling."
A first pass guess would be this: our concepts and langugae for discussing freedom grew out of an era where beyond government there were few institutions with the power to generally supress speech. The closest, the various churches, were generally strongly attached to governments in the spaces where they had they much power or just as afraid of the government where they weren't. Considering specifically the English speaking world, the Church of England was an arm of the state to the point where the nominal head of both was the same person. The various Protestant sects were under the gun from Church and often state, which lead to much of the early colonization of the US from the United Kingdom.
In fact, this binding of church and state was as concerning as the state limiting speech they are both prohibited by the same amendment to the US Constitution (at least at the Federal level).
The idea that the proprietor of a coffee shop could toss out people who spoke as he didn't like was not so threatening as he had dozens of competitors within a few blocks. Coffee shops were under the control of two or three nation spanning institutions like Starbucks or Caribou with only the few random independents scattered here and there so the coffee shop proprietor had a limited ability to surpress speech in a general way.
"Shouldn’t banks, as private institutions, be free to do business, or not, with whomever they see fit?"
To the limited extend these instituions' growing power has been discussed it is in the limited answer to this question: the idea of the common carrier.
The idea, to the best of my knowledge, comes from the early development of railroads but was arguably most widely applied ni the US to AT&T. When a railroad became the required form of transport for a company to be economically viable they did have the power you describe, to cancel by "de-railroading" and thus the idea of a common carrier was born. Grossly oversimplified it said if you served an area you could not refuse to service a given customer who could pay for the service.
Banks, as monopoly holders on financial services granted that power by governments (there is no such thing as a bank without a government charter) should be subject to a version of common carrier status.
So should social media companies given the degree they've become the public square although the lines on that are much fuzzier in my head than around banking which I have given some thought.
"It might also be good to know that political debanking is not the real problem"
Here I am going to push back. Some of the worst debanking of the past twenty years was political or at least at the behest of the state.
In the early Obama years several bank regulators decided certain businesses were "high fraud risks", principly porn (or adult entertainment more broadly), online gambling, and firearms. Banks were told holding accounts for firms in those areas meant increased regulator scruntiny.
This is a doubly obnoxious effect because it encourages both large and small banks to withdraw services for different reasons. For the small bank having audits go from annual to quarterly or quarterly to monthly is sufficient to bankrupt them so they dump the local gun store owner and his girlfriend who has an only fans page. For large banks it threatens their easy access to lucrative government operations such as bond sales so they dump "Play Poker Online" which simply can't get enough services through a smaller bank.
This also ties back to why we see the state and not non-state institutions as the bigger threat. The banks here were operating not at their own whims but the whims of the state. I suspect the state's goal was firearms but threw in the other two as a bone to the right to claim "this isn't aimed at you guys" as guns alone would be. That and the modern left are much more heirs of American Puritanism than the right.
"The tech and business sectors don’t like the CFPB because the CFPB exists to do the unsexy work of slashing their profits by making sure ordinary Americans aren’t taken to the cleaners by shady mortgage lenders, ripoff crypto rackets, and other monied bad actors."
And I think here you are using language that places the CFPB in Amanda's realm and thus signalling to the right it's a leftie angency that needs to go (I have other issues with it but that's related to how stupidly organized federal financial regulation is, something exposed in 2008 and address by doubling down on the stupid organization). Specifically saying it exists to "slash their profits".
The right immediately hears "the government is reaching into their pockets" and expects just like the income tax it won't only reach into the pockets of the wealthy only. They learned that from the con their great grandparents bought with the income tax.
It doesn't help that the greatest public champion of the CFPB is one of the worst leftist scolds in Congress. That's sad in a way because I own the book she wrote on personal finance with her daughter long before she hit the public eye. Based on it I'd trust her CFPB. Based on her politics since then I'm iffy.
If the CFPB wanted to bolster itself it should have hit two areas that the average people know someone who got screwed: credit cards, especially those targeting low income or poor credit individuals, and home owner's insurance which long ago left the actuarial rails in dropping people outside of diaster zones.
That would be them from being lost among the yet another among the "swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance." In an era where the Department of Agriculture has an office devoted to licensing and inspecting magician's rabbits (which I long thought a myth but I've traced the rules making) eventually the people will want to cut that swarm.
And yes bad actors will use that as cover to cut out officers the majority might not want.
Until we have a real conversation that leads to a concept of non-state public space and its correct shape and size it's going to be hard to prevent the swarms followed by the chaining sawing of the swams that ignores how they got started.
"I’ve lived in dictatorships. Actual, official ones. And they’re not as bad as all that."
This is quite true. But I think in it you hit on another reason Amanda is feared more than crypto-con artists.
Amanda wears the face not of authoritarianism but totalitarianism. I agree with you, her masters have no interest in totalizing control over thought as well as actions. They just want to turn a buck and as soon as Amanda costs them bucks they toss her.
But to the guy in the cubiggcle having to listen to corporate training about how he's evil for birth factors and knows if he speaks up Amanda will come down on him the difference isn't that important. This is especially true when the next corporate training tells you to report via the ethics hotline someone who disagrees with that in a private Facebook post (and, yes, as a worker at a bank I got bother of those trainings in 2020 and 2021. The later has since disappeared).
That guy in a cubicle knows that he won't get bit by a cryptoscam or a shady mortgage broker (or regrets getting a shady mortgage in 2007 which he knows he could have kept up on but couldn't get normally due to credit history), but he doesn't like having to keep silence when told how bad he is. Sure, he might be wrong about not getting bit (he probably is and if he isn't it's because he learned the hard way) but they aren't making screwing him for posting a frog meme on Facebook.
And I think that's another reason Amanda getting canned is getting cheered. They average guy thinks everyone in the government is an Amanda and the Amandas have done a lot of work to create that, work DOGE is exploiting. There is a reason they started at USAID and not the DoD. The savory version is they needed to build political capital with easy targets to take on the DoD. The unsavory version is they needed to build political capital with easy targets to take on the CFPB, the SEC, etc.
Both can and probably are true.
"Libs perfectly teed up Trump by convincing a normie-infused majority that they needed him to make them go away. Now, Trump is teeing up…whatever the hell will come next."
That's pretty much true but here is the thing, Trump et al need to deliver.
A few months back a video was posted to Twitter of people filling potholes because the city couldn't be bothered. The poster make sure to point out this wasn't a heart warming story about people taking action but about people having to do what their taxes were supposed to pay for because they were being robbed by the city (Compton if memory serves).
I think Trump et al will be forgiven removing the CPFB if potholes get filled. For one, people, rightly or wrongly, think they won't get scammed but they know when hitting a pothole that got bigger but they didn't realize because it's night and the streetlights are out on every other pole and winding up with a broken axel.
Government action has its own Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and people aren't going to care about cryptoscammers if the street might as well not be paved.
I can hope Trump et al are savvy enough to realize that. And while I think many around him have bad motives and goals as well as good I do think they have some good intents, maybe more than the majority of the aristocracy they're displacing even if just from the "avoid being at the end of a lamppost and rope assembly" which is where we'll probably be if they aren't.
The problem is hope is not a plan and even plans don't survive engagement with the enemy. That plus the fact the old aristocracy from Amanda to the CIA aren't likely to go without a fight and I can't help but think we didn't avoid violence, we at best punted it down the road a year or two (although there is a general strike being planned on the left which might bring it sooner).
In real dictatorships it is easy to follow the rules for the most part. They are usually clear and well known, even if they aren't officially laid out, and are usually only narrowly restrictive.. What we've had in America this last decade is a dictatorship of vibes that is constantly changing and encompasses every facet of life. In that way, it is more akin to totalitarianism than authoritarianism... which is why people vote for President Trump. They'll take an authoritarian who will take it to the totalitarian left... and from a personal liberties perspective, that actually makes a lot of sense, especially when you're part of the outgroup being targeted by the modern US cultural "Red Guards".
Apparently my comment is too long so I apologize for multiples.
"While technically correct, I’ve never understood why this take on free speech is so compelling."
A first pass guess would be this: our concepts and langugae for discussing freedom grew out of an era where beyond government there were few institutions with the power to generally supress speech. The closest, the various churches, were generally strongly attached to governments in the spaces where they had they much power or just as afraid of the government where they weren't. Considering specifically the English speaking world, the Church of England was an arm of the state to the point where the nominal head of both was the same person. The various Protestant sects were under the gun from Church and often state, which lead to much of the early colonization of the US from the United Kingdom.
In fact, this binding of church and state was as concerning as the state limiting speech they are both prohibited by the same amendment to the US Constitution (at least at the Federal level).
The idea that the proprietor of a coffee shop could toss out people who spoke as he didn't like was not so threatening as he had dozens of competitors within a few blocks. Coffee shops were under the control of two or three nation spanning institutions like Starbucks or Caribou with only the few random independents scattered here and there so the coffee shop proprietor had a limited ability to surpress speech in a general way.
"Shouldn’t banks, as private institutions, be free to do business, or not, with whomever they see fit?"
To the limited extend these instituions' growing power has been discussed it is in the limited answer to this question: the idea of the common carrier.
The idea, to the best of my knowledge, comes from the early development of railroads but was arguably most widely applied ni the US to AT&T. When a railroad became the required form of transport for a company to be economically viable they did have the power you describe, to cancel by "de-railroading" and thus the idea of a common carrier was born. Grossly oversimplified it said if you served an area you could not refuse to service a given customer who could pay for the service.
Banks, as monopoly holders on financial services granted that power by governments (there is no such thing as a bank without a government charter) should be subject to a version of common carrier status.
So should social media companies given the degree they've become the public square although the lines on that are much fuzzier in my head than around banking which I have given some thought.
--continued--
"It might also be good to know that political debanking is not the real problem"
Here I am going to push back. Some of the worst debanking of the past twenty years was political or at least at the behest of the state.
In the early Obama years several bank regulators decided certain businesses were "high fraud risks", principly porn (or adult entertainment more broadly), online gambling, and firearms. Banks were told holding accounts for firms in those areas meant increased regulator scruntiny.
This is a doubly obnoxious effect because it encourages both large and small banks to withdraw services for different reasons. For the small bank having audits go from annual to quarterly or quarterly to monthly is sufficient to bankrupt them so they dump the local gun store owner and his girlfriend who has an only fans page. For large banks it threatens their easy access to lucrative government operations such as bond sales so they dump "Play Poker Online" which simply can't get enough services through a smaller bank.
This also ties back to why we see the state and not non-state institutions as the bigger threat. The banks here were operating not at their own whims but the whims of the state. I suspect the state's goal was firearms but threw in the other two as a bone to the right to claim "this isn't aimed at you guys" as guns alone would be. That and the modern left are much more heirs of American Puritanism than the right.
"The tech and business sectors don’t like the CFPB because the CFPB exists to do the unsexy work of slashing their profits by making sure ordinary Americans aren’t taken to the cleaners by shady mortgage lenders, ripoff crypto rackets, and other monied bad actors."
And I think here you are using language that places the CFPB in Amanda's realm and thus signalling to the right it's a leftie angency that needs to go (I have other issues with it but that's related to how stupidly organized federal financial regulation is, something exposed in 2008 and address by doubling down on the stupid organization). Specifically saying it exists to "slash their profits".
The right immediately hears "the government is reaching into their pockets" and expects just like the income tax it won't only reach into the pockets of the wealthy only. They learned that from the con their great grandparents bought with the income tax.
It doesn't help that the greatest public champion of the CFPB is one of the worst leftist scolds in Congress. That's sad in a way because I own the book she wrote on personal finance with her daughter long before she hit the public eye. Based on it I'd trust her CFPB. Based on her politics since then I'm iffy.
If the CFPB wanted to bolster itself it should have hit two areas that the average people know someone who got screwed: credit cards, especially those targeting low income or poor credit individuals, and home owner's insurance which long ago left the actuarial rails in dropping people outside of diaster zones.
That would be them from being lost among the yet another among the "swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance." In an era where the Department of Agriculture has an office devoted to licensing and inspecting magician's rabbits (which I long thought a myth but I've traced the rules making) eventually the people will want to cut that swarm.
And yes bad actors will use that as cover to cut out officers the majority might not want.
Until we have a real conversation that leads to a concept of non-state public space and its correct shape and size it's going to be hard to prevent the swarms followed by the chaining sawing of the swams that ignores how they got started.
--continued--
"I’ve lived in dictatorships. Actual, official ones. And they’re not as bad as all that."
This is quite true. But I think in it you hit on another reason Amanda is feared more than crypto-con artists.
Amanda wears the face not of authoritarianism but totalitarianism. I agree with you, her masters have no interest in totalizing control over thought as well as actions. They just want to turn a buck and as soon as Amanda costs them bucks they toss her.
But to the guy in the cubiggcle having to listen to corporate training about how he's evil for birth factors and knows if he speaks up Amanda will come down on him the difference isn't that important. This is especially true when the next corporate training tells you to report via the ethics hotline someone who disagrees with that in a private Facebook post (and, yes, as a worker at a bank I got bother of those trainings in 2020 and 2021. The later has since disappeared).
That guy in a cubicle knows that he won't get bit by a cryptoscam or a shady mortgage broker (or regrets getting a shady mortgage in 2007 which he knows he could have kept up on but couldn't get normally due to credit history), but he doesn't like having to keep silence when told how bad he is. Sure, he might be wrong about not getting bit (he probably is and if he isn't it's because he learned the hard way) but they aren't making screwing him for posting a frog meme on Facebook.
And I think that's another reason Amanda getting canned is getting cheered. They average guy thinks everyone in the government is an Amanda and the Amandas have done a lot of work to create that, work DOGE is exploiting. There is a reason they started at USAID and not the DoD. The savory version is they needed to build political capital with easy targets to take on the DoD. The unsavory version is they needed to build political capital with easy targets to take on the CFPB, the SEC, etc.
Both can and probably are true.
"Libs perfectly teed up Trump by convincing a normie-infused majority that they needed him to make them go away. Now, Trump is teeing up…whatever the hell will come next."
That's pretty much true but here is the thing, Trump et al need to deliver.
A few months back a video was posted to Twitter of people filling potholes because the city couldn't be bothered. The poster make sure to point out this wasn't a heart warming story about people taking action but about people having to do what their taxes were supposed to pay for because they were being robbed by the city (Compton if memory serves).
I think Trump et al will be forgiven removing the CPFB if potholes get filled. For one, people, rightly or wrongly, think they won't get scammed but they know when hitting a pothole that got bigger but they didn't realize because it's night and the streetlights are out on every other pole and winding up with a broken axel.
Government action has its own Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and people aren't going to care about cryptoscammers if the street might as well not be paved.
I can hope Trump et al are savvy enough to realize that. And while I think many around him have bad motives and goals as well as good I do think they have some good intents, maybe more than the majority of the aristocracy they're displacing even if just from the "avoid being at the end of a lamppost and rope assembly" which is where we'll probably be if they aren't.
The problem is hope is not a plan and even plans don't survive engagement with the enemy. That plus the fact the old aristocracy from Amanda to the CIA aren't likely to go without a fight and I can't help but think we didn't avoid violence, we at best punted it down the road a year or two (although there is a general strike being planned on the left which might bring it sooner).
In real dictatorships it is easy to follow the rules for the most part. They are usually clear and well known, even if they aren't officially laid out, and are usually only narrowly restrictive.. What we've had in America this last decade is a dictatorship of vibes that is constantly changing and encompasses every facet of life. In that way, it is more akin to totalitarianism than authoritarianism... which is why people vote for President Trump. They'll take an authoritarian who will take it to the totalitarian left... and from a personal liberties perspective, that actually makes a lot of sense, especially when you're part of the outgroup being targeted by the modern US cultural "Red Guards".
Excellent point re totalitarianism vs authoritarianism. Wish I'd considered it more carefully before I published!
Only an idiot would give up their rights for nothing.
You should give Russia a try out. Maybe, you'll get a chance to visit eastern Ukraine.
It's easy to smear the left as totalitarian. It’s a lot harder to make an actual argument.
Basically said everything I already think.
I love the complete lack of specifics. You are the straw man.
Of course, giving up your rights for nothing is brilliant. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were wonderful!
Russia sucks as a country, but Putin is the man!
Poor Elon Musk. Amanda has run amok at Tesla. She’s so powerful. Poor helpless white males are so scared.
Must blindly follow Trump. Buy his crypto currency. Nirvana.
Amanda is a white lady that took your jobs and has superiority over you. And no man should allow that. So glad DEI is over.