Carlin's comedy peaked during near the era that I think most consider the Golden Age of America. Times have immeasurably changed since then.
On the tech side of things Google has recently been hit by multiple anti-trust lawsuits, and lost them all. That's perhaps even less telling than the evidence presented. They brazenly and actively conspired to kill or buy any and all competition, but they've become so large (and so important to the US intelligence agencies) that they'll get nothing more than the most gentle slap on the wrist, relative to their scale. The moral of the story seems to be don't cheat, but if you're going to cheat - cheat relentlessly, ruthlessly, and take it to an extreme - and it might just become worth it.
Politics has become similar. Politicians have become way better at their jobs in modern times than in Carlin's era. Their "job" of course is just to get elected. It turns out that actually having a platform or popular ideas is far less useful than making people hate and fear 'the other guy' enough. When you rely on hate and fear, people will even actively vote for people they despise simply because 'it's the lesser evil.' With modern politicking even Reagan-Mondale would have still been a 50/50 coinflip and Regan would be an imminent threat to American democracy, and Mondale would want to turn your kids gay. Actually if we reached the modern era of divisiveness and stupidity in Carlin's time, there's a real chance America, certainly as we know it, wouldn't even exist today.
>They brazenly and actively conspired to kill or buy any and all competition, but they've become so large (and so important to the US intelligence agencies) that they'll get nothing more than the most gentle slap on the wrist, relative to their scale. The moral of the story seems to be don't cheat, but if you're going to cheat - cheat relentlessly, ruthlessly, and take it to an extreme - and it might just become worth it.
The moral of the story to me is that the government doesn't give a crap what you do so long as it's good for them. Google only got punished, and even then it was a big "show" with no results not because it did wrong, but because it so flagrantly violated the law the government got pissed that it was being made to look a fool. They didn't really want to "punish" google because it was their buddy and they found it useful, they just wanted the appearance.
On the tech side of things Google has recently been hit by multiple anti-trust lawsuits, and lost them all. That's perhaps even less telling than the evidence presented. They brazenly and actively conspired to kill or buy any and all competition, but they've become so large (and so important to the US intelligence agencies) that they'll get nothing more than the most gentle slap on the wrist, relative to their scale. The moral of the story seems to be don't cheat, but if you're going to cheat - cheat relentlessly, ruthlessly, and take it to an extreme - and it might just become worth it.
Politics has become similar. Politicians have become way better at their jobs in modern times than in Carlin's era. Their "job" of course is just to get elected. It turns out that actually having a platform or popular ideas is far less useful than making people hate and fear 'the other guy' enough. When you rely on hate and fear, people will even actively vote for people they despise simply because 'it's the lesser evil.' With modern politicking even Reagan-Mondale would have still been a 50/50 coinflip and Regan would be an imminent threat to American democracy, and Mondale would want to turn your kids gay. Actually if we reached the modern era of divisiveness and stupidity in Carlin's time, there's a real chance America, certainly as we know it, wouldn't even exist today.