Michael Moynihan
speaker
842 appearances
21 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Michael Moynihan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it's certainly not going to get better if they continue to prioritize all of these kind of social programs over the actual things that you need in order to live in this region at all.
I keep thinking about the fact that California is a place where they plan to do things like outlaw cars that run on gasoline, like these really sweeping, ambitious prohibitions that are aimed at transforming the nature of the state itself and trying to capture the future. It would be wonderful.
if they adopted that sort of approach to fire mitigation, like something audacious and aggressive that they continued to talk about year over year. I mean, California is, I mean, we, I live in Mill Valley, California now. Mill Valley is similarly at very high risk of fire and actually has a pretty aggressive approach to these things, but is subject to a lot of the same sort of concerns.
We certainly have our fire season every single year. So it's something that is on people's minds regularly. But there is obviously a need for much more than what's being done currently.
And I think a lot of people hear talk of sort of climate change in the context of these conversations about wildfires and imagine that mitigating climate change is kind of enough to address this, in which case doing something about fossil fuels will perhaps help to mitigate this problem. And it just, it does not. It is not nearly the same thing.
And you actually do need more of a serious focus on this. The other thing that I think a lot about now is, is at what point, if they don't do something dramatic and audacious, they have to just stop rebuilding in certain places.
Because if you won't do the things that are necessary to make it feasible to live there in the long run, then perhaps you just kind of give this space back to the wild and allow it to have this natural process. These fires rage annually. It's crazy to think about.
Yeah, I mean, it's obviously not an illegitimate concern to be worried about the diversity of the forest, obviously. But it is a matter of having some sort of qualified concern for those things and actually attacking the issue in a very serious way. And unfortunately, this is a decades-old problem, as Matt already alluded to. And it's not something that has only become an issue since 2014.
So the fact that there are these particular moments where the current thing is some unique set of social concerns, whether it be environmental concerns or it be something related to race and racial justice, the fact that there are all of these other distractions is important and noteworthy
But it's also the case that they manage to find these distractions because it is easier to govern by expressing this continuous concern for these peripheral issues that don't have any meaningful consequence for most people's lives than it is to actually be held accountable for trying to address the tangible concerns that these communities face, whether it be homelessness or the persistent threat of wildfires, as the folks of L.A.
are finding out right now.
What color is the vagina? A couple words too long there, Matt.
Describing themselves as the first response. Yes. Yes. The greatest heroes, the greatest champions of internet freedom are the fact checkers. You know what's funny? I haven't talked to Mark. I haven't talked to like Jeff Bezos, but I have traveled in a lot of circles with some of the people that they've been friendly with.
Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel are people who have known Zuckerberg for years, were early involved in Facebook and were on the board for years. I think there's plenty of reason to believe.
That a lot of people have over the course of the recent years done many things that they didn't really believe that they should be doing, but they did it out of fear or concern that they simply couldn't get away with pushing back against certain things and they feel newly liberated. to actually push back and assert a bit of power and say, yeah, we're not going to do those things anymore.
And I think, Megan, you were correct to flag early on that it was not a good idea for Facebook to begin fact-checking political ads, not a good idea for them to outsource responsibility for trying to fact-check the videos that Stossel or anyone else is posting and then flagging them formally Corporately, because there's just way too much opportunity for that to go badly for you.
But when you're guided by people internal to you who are interested in wielding power towards political ends, not merely in the interest of fairness and policing misinformation and disinformation, nearly always with a particular political slant. it's going to result in plenty of bad things for you. It'll hurt your brand in the long run. And that is actually what folks have seen in recent years.
So it is nice to see the pendulum swing back. I do suspect a lot of that happens to be related to culture. And I hope that we can actually...
do this in a way that's a bit more stable i think there are plenty of criticisms that one can raise with respect to something like community notes but it does seem to me that it is infinitely better than what facebook chose to do when they again outsource responsibility for this to these ostensibly independent organizations that in many instances have these political biases it is far better to have a transparent process that actually gives people the sensibility
that about what those underlying concerns are related to the articles and to make it broadly available and open. And just like in the last election, we saw some of these betting markets give us some of the best information about where the election was likely to go Community notes processes work something like that. So there's plenty of reason to think that that could be a very healthy thing.
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