This New Way Is Nothing New

I'll start with this: "I really don't know what we should do about any of this."

I know we have to do something. I know we have to get better, as individuals, at sorting through the information landslide that hits us every fucking day in order to reject the bullshit which comprises the majority of it, and take whatever tiny nuggets of truth we can find, compare notes and see if we can make a little progress here and there.

But we've been making it a Buyer Beware proposition. And we're seeing what a fucked up world we get when we just throw it all up in the air and let nature take its course.

BTW - have you seen "nature" lately?

Without something human - something like honor and conscience and a solid grasp of the greater good in the context of an ethical framework, nature is a horrifying thing. It's fucking brutal. We all become nothing more than predators and prey, without regard for anything but our own immediate gratification.

And so we devolve - we revert to the crap we had to put up with on the playground in elementary school, where the tough guys ruled and anybody who crossed them took a beating.

We have to learn all over again to get out of the mindset in which we allow ourselves to be manipulated at a visceral level, which is what tough guys like Trump and Putin and Mussolini and Franco and Idi Amin and a thousand others have done forever.

Then along come these recent revelations about how Facebook has been used for the kind of brainwashing and radicalization that everybody and his fuckin' uncle have always known was happening, but that The Lizard King (aka Mark Zuckerberg) swears he either knew nothing about or that he was steadfastly standing up for the free speech rights of his user community blah blah blah.

Frances Haugen on 60 Minutes:

"It feels like a betrayal of democracy"

When we refuse to get together to acknowledge a premise based in verifiable fact, then we've made it all but impossible to do the work necessary to give us any chance to arrive at a conclusion that's true, which in turn makes a functioning democracy all but impossible.

My contention at this point is that The Lizard King has decided he's immune from the negative consequences of his complicity if the republic is toppled. I think he believes he'll be one of the plutocrats who gets to run the show - cuz that's pretty much what he's doing now - so he's convinced he wins no matter what else happens to the rest of us.

That's where our Clear-Eyed Pragmatic Both-Sides-Balanced-On-The-Knife's-Edge Capitalism has brought us.

And here's the big fat juicy rationalization they're using:

"Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true."