The problem in my mind, that the parent is intimating at, is that we confer far too much control to and assume far too much competence and beneficence on the part of physicians.
I am not saying they are a corrupt class, nor would I mean to imply that. But I do think we need to think of physicians as a part of health care, rather than at the top of it.
The entire drug regulation system is predicated on the idea that you have certain providers, namely physicians, who are competent to make decisions, and shifting that decision-making power to those providers protects us from harm.
The opioid crisis has demonstrated that whole paradigm is faulty.
The problem is that no one profession should be entrusted with that level of power or command over decisions.
Imagine, instead, a system where there was no drug regulation. Rather than assuming that physicians were making the best decisions about opioid use and sweeping the problem under the rug, such use would be constantly scrutinized.
We need more competition, and fewer gatekeepers. Gatekeeping means there's only one thing that needs to be breached.
I think Cloudfare made the wrong decision here, but for me the reasons it's damaging to free speech are deeper than "is free speech at the level of government or private organizations?"
There's a couple of ways of looking at this. One is to say Cloudfare is a private company, they were free to make a decision, they exercised that right, and now white nationalists have the right to choose to go to a different provider. Others have the right to do business or withhold business from Cloudfare in response.
Another, though, is to say that Cloudfare is now in a unique position--by the CEO's own admission--and has power over another person's speech as a result. It would be akin to a husband controlling a wife's contacts with others. Sure, the wife could leave, but that's not really a good argument for the husband's behavior being ok; someone is, similarly in the hands of the company somewhat unfairly.
Yet another way to look at it is this: when Cloudfare decides it can and will make content-based decisions, have they now implicitly argued that when they don't remove content, they implicitly support that content, in that it's not aversive enough to remove? Where do you draw the line with that? And if a company nominally accepts that responsibility, does that mean we, in exchange, should allow them to regulate other traffic?
One argument for net neutrality is that while it binds a corporation's hands, it also frees them of responsibility for things they might otherwise be liable for. This was the bargain with phone companies, after all, with common carrier status. No one blames the phone company for supporting white supremacists because they carried their phone calls, but nor do they worry about the phone company dropping their calls because the phone company disagrees with their political position.
My impression is that the CEO of Cloudfare is freaking out at the moment because he realizes he has now made Cloudfare implicitly responsible for the content on its systems, and has opened up an argument against net neutrality. He's essentially saying to the government "please come up with rules that absolve us for responsibility in this situation."
If Cloudfare had simply said "we don't drop clients because of the nature of the content" they would have had a very strong position. Now they've opened a can of worms and have called into question their complicity in the content they carry.
They can't have it both ways: by saying that white supremacist groups are too aversive for them, they have now implicitly said that everything else is not too aversive. This is a very undesirable route to be going in in terms of freedom of speech.
For what it's worth, I also oppose network companies removing ISIS recruitment videos, all other things being equal. Now, if a court decided that the content poster/creator was in violation of some ethical and legal code to such an extent that their right to distribute content should be restricted, that's one thing, but that would require actual due process in a court of law.
I have to confess I've never seen Moonlight, but it's probably at the top of my list of recent films to see. I just haven't had time to watch anything lately.
My one comment is that I think the phenomenon being observed isn't unique to racism or Moonlight or films--I think it's related to a work having a narrow audience and then that audience widening. The observation that "as Moonlight’s acclaim grew, the film’s release widened from 650 theaters (November 18) to 1564 (post-Oscars)" is important.
I've noticed this with blu-rays and books on Amazon as well. I've seen this with certain technical books a lot; initially they are highly rated, and then as word of mouth spreads, and they get introduced as textbooks, and people start mistaking them as introductions to a topic, you start seeing people get frustrated that they aren't what they were looking for, even though the problem is the book was never for them to begin with. I suspect there is something unique about Moonlight, vis-a-vis racism and concerns about "reverse racism" at the Oscars (which in its strict form is undermined by the high critic ratings--you'd have to argue the white guilt extends to critics, who I don't think experienced any change in that one way or another over recent years), but I also think something about going from niche to widely viewed also is relevant.
It would be interesting to compare Moonlight's ratings to other films that had big increases in distribution in a short time, especially those that went from arthouse to widespread distribution. My guess is you would see similar phenomena.
I'm familiar with how to do analyses to examine bias, etc. and as far as I know IMDb doesn't have the fine-grained level of ratings you'd need. For example, you'd want to show that somehow more specific subratings and their relationships with some overall rating changes.
There is rating by demographic, and it would be interesting to see how that might have changed over time--for example, if the demographic groups doing the ratings changed, or if the relationship between demographic and rating changed. I don't think IMDb gives that kind of fine-grained detail.
You could go over the top as much as you want, though--doing topic analysis of written reviews over time, etc.
I am not saying they are a corrupt class, nor would I mean to imply that. But I do think we need to think of physicians as a part of health care, rather than at the top of it.
The entire drug regulation system is predicated on the idea that you have certain providers, namely physicians, who are competent to make decisions, and shifting that decision-making power to those providers protects us from harm.
The opioid crisis has demonstrated that whole paradigm is faulty.
The problem is that no one profession should be entrusted with that level of power or command over decisions.
Imagine, instead, a system where there was no drug regulation. Rather than assuming that physicians were making the best decisions about opioid use and sweeping the problem under the rug, such use would be constantly scrutinized.
We need more competition, and fewer gatekeepers. Gatekeeping means there's only one thing that needs to be breached.