They could have him on for roughly 20 minutes, seeing as how everyone who’s allegedly talked to him in the past few days has managed to snag that much time with him.

It does fully apply to The View.

Except for the fact that the FCC itself said more than 20 years ago that it doesn’t.

the idea that poor past enforcement should lead to poor future enforcement is ridiculous

The idea is that the FCC said the law didn’t apply to The View, so enforcement was basically a null point until the current FCC decided to carry out Trump’s wishes and attack any talk show that didn’t show absolute fealty to Dear Leader at best and begrudging respect to him at worst. This situation isn’t about enforcing a law for political fairness and you know it isn’t.

Did it ever occur to you that just hate America?

No. Because I don’t. What I hate are the people currently in charge of America⁠—the GOP, the dudebro tech oligarchs, and the Christian nationalists who want to turn their conservative religious beliefs into law⁠—and how they’re stripping everything good from the country in favor of enriching themselves. What I hate is this idea that I can only love my country if I never question its leaders, their motives, or the stories they want me to believe about this country.

The Founding Fathers owned slaves. One of the Founding Fathers provably raped one of his female slaves starting when she was 14 years old. The US government killed millions of indigenous Americans as it settled the land that is currently the United States. That same government condoned chattel slavery, wrote inequality for non-whites into the law after slavery was abolished, interred Japanese Americans during World War II for no reason other than their ethnicity, and fought tooth and nail against full equality for queer Americans. You can argue that I’m being totally unfair and only pointing out “bad parts” of American history. You’d be full of shit, though. History has a lot of “bad parts” that can’t be ignored⁠—because if you’re reading the history of your country and you’re not seeing “bad parts”, you’re reading propaganda.

I’m critical of this nation and its leaders because I know it can be better. It should be better. But so long as we get shitheads in charge who genuinely believe “religious fascism is the best idea” and “empathy is bullshit because everyone should only ever be out for themselves”, we’re not going to get anything better. (Same goes for people who believe “nothing good is ever going to happen”.) The United States of America is a deeply flawed country; if you think I should ignore or stop trying to correct those flaws because it’s “un-American” to even say “America is flawed”, you’ll need a better argument than calling me “un-American”. I won’t ignore the bad parts of history just because they make you, a jingoistic fascist, uncomfortable as fuck. Live with your impotence, then die mad about it.

Sad thing is, I could see it working.

But by the logic in the OP, when those were new, they should’ve inevitably led to abuse, no? The thesis is that these laws will always be abused, so why weren’t these?

Because the laws and limits that I mentioned were more narrowly drawn than the ones in the law mentioned in this article. Defamation has a tighter definition, and covers a much narrower amount of speech, than would a law designed to stop “gender-based political violence” that also allows for censorship of speech based, apparently, on vibes alone. Now yes, the courts could expand the limits of defamation law or loosen what counts as defamation under the law. But they’re not doing that, at least here in the States. Even the Supreme Court, stacked in favor of wealthy conservative fuckheads as it is, refuses to go “yep, time to make shittalking right-wingers a thing that can’t happen any more”.

A world where Humphrey’s Executor gets tossed or the 14th amendment goes 5-4 is not a world where you can rely on precedent.

Granted. That said: Even this shit-ass SCOTUS hasn’t completely ignored precedent in favor of fascist bootlicking. (Not that they haven’t tried…)

To the extent that we’re going to win (and we are going to win), it’s because we’re going to be riding thermostatic backlash back into power and enacting consequences after the fact.

So long as the people elected to enact that backlash have the balls to do it, anyway. But yeah, Woke 2.0 is gonna be fucking wild to see when AOC becomes president. 😏

Like I said: no one worth a good god’s damn.

Is this really any different from when Apple removed the floppy disk drive from their computers?

Yes? The iMac had an optical drive. You could still buy physical media for it. And if you still needed a floppy drive, you could get an external one and connect it via USB.

I feel like you really didn’t think this comparison through.

This announcement came on the same day as their announcement that the PS3 and PSVita digital stores are being shut down, and a few days after they announced they’re removing access to some legally-purchased movies.

It significantly complicates the narrative.

How?

Is this really any different from when Apple removed the floppy disk drive from their computers? Or is it any different from all laptop manufacturers removing CD drives from their computers.

The difference is that Apple and laptop manufacturers didn’t remove software that users paid for from those machines.