The Atlantic is now your one-stop shop for all your favorite hot takes!

Being in total lockdown seems to have given our brightest minds time to wander farther off the reservation than ever before, and The Atlantic wants to hear from them. Recently, the Internet gave the once-venerable source of lengthy pieces about the manliness of sailing the collective gas face when it published a "think" piece essentially saying, Maybe what we need is more fascism?

I guess to appease people fond of the other extreme of tenured idiocy, come now law prawfs Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods to argue that AKSHUALLY totalitarian government surveillance and censorship are GOOD.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

 The authors' premise is that because privately owned corporations do this to some extent anyway, we might as as well give the government -- which, the authors forget to mention, has the power to seize property and imprison and execute people -- all the keys because of the three R's: Russians, Ring, and 'Rona.

Goldsmith and Keane provide a bit of the old false equivalence:

These and similar developments are the private functional equivalent of China’s social-credit ratings, which critics in the West so fervently decry. The U.S. government, too, makes important decisions based on privately collected pools of data. The Department of Homeland Security now requires visa applicants to submit their social-media accounts for review. And courts regularly rely on algorithms to determine a defendant’s flight risk, recidivism risk, and more.

And also a bit of the old assuming facts not in evidence:

The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply. [Emphasis added.]

I'll leave it to the good people of the Commenteriat to marinate on this. Meantime, I've got to finish up my own Atlantic submission: a think piece explaining how, actually, primogeniture ensures the divine right of kings stays within only the purest bloodlines.