Gregory's ServerThe fact that someone did something tells you nothing about whether they *chose* to do so - to understand whether someone was coerced or made a free choice, you have to consider the power relationships involved.
Conservatives hate this idea.
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 Jobs that pay starvation wages exist because people want to work full time for so little money that they need food-stamps just to survive. Intervening in any of these situations is "woke paternalism," where the government thinks it knows better than you and intervenes to take away your right to consume unsafe products, get maimed at work, or have your jaw broken by your husband. 7/ Which is why neoliberals insist that politics should be reduced to economics, and that economics should be carried out as if power didn't exist: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five Nowhere is this stupid trick more visible than in the surveillance fight. For example, Google claims that it tracks your location because you asked it to, by using Google products that make use of your location without clicking an opt out button. 8/ In reality, Google has the power to simply ignore your preferences about location tracking. In 2021, the Arizona Attorney General's privacy case against Google yielded a bunch of internal memos, including memos from Google's senior product manager for location services Jen Chai complaining that she had turned off location tracking in *three* places and was *still* being tracked: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#goog 9/ |
They want to live in a neat world of "revealed preferences," where the fact that you're working in a job where you're regularly exposed to carcinogens, or that you've stayed with a spouse who beats the shit out of you, or that you're homeless, or that you're addicted to Oxy, is a matter of *choice*. Monopolies exist because we all love the monopolist's product best, not because they've got monopoly power.
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