[gorpomon]

| Now they put you in jail for memes.

I'm going to nitpick on this line a bit, but bring it back to his core argument at the end. And I'm going to nitpick because in part, lines like this raise my hackles, but also because I think lines like this undercut his own argument:

This type of modern conservatism (which is what this take from George is, and is very tied to a new type of non-religious social conservatism) has lost the plot when it comes to basic justice. Threats in person to people are just plain old crimes. But package them in a funny picture online and it's free reign. Free speech absolutists (not sure that's what George is, but just using this as a broad label) have pretty convenient takes when it comes to the basic rule of law. Often those takes are pretty circumstantial, in some cases they're more than happy to deem speech threatening, but in the vast majority of threatening speech people actually experience, not so much. And remember, if the law is arbitrarily applied, it makes people less interested in a democracy, but they don't seem bothered by that.

Nor do they seem too bothered about the tens of thousands of people who suffer legitimate threats online daily. The social media companies know who those people are, down to what they had for breakfast that day. If we actually dared to, you know, enforce laws around threatening people our jails would be overflowing.

I agree to a very minor degree: you can google "jailed for memes" and find some questionable choices, but to use your voice for those handfuls of situations when literally thousands upon thousands of people are legitimately threatened each day online? I think I can guess what your true intents are: its to further a brutal status quo so you continue feeling good. It doesn't help his argument that the sentence before this line bemoans the end of empire.

And the frustrating thing is that one of his recommendations is kind of good: end the funny money system of business (not sure I agree with the how of the gold standard, but I'd have to defer to others there). But George just undercuts his argument with lines like this about memes, because if you pick it apart it just means he's advocating for the funny money version of enforcing the law. Ah, so George you're not against funny money in principle, it's more like "Funny money for me, but not for thee."