It is nothing less than exhausting to watch how people who frequent various types of social media have been driven to devolve into the worst humanity has seen in a long time short of causing physical harm to each other. I have watched as a couple of local FB groups that I used to just monitor for local information go down to the gutter on almost every single post.
People who live locally and send kids to some of the same schools say the most vile things imaginable to each other. I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).
I am convinced that this has played a part in the insane behavior we have witnessed during the protests of the last several weeks. I have no problem with protests of any kind and for any reason. It's important to be heard. However, when the behavior turns criminal, with destruction of property, private or public, violence beatings and full-on anarchy, well, there is no society on earth and across history where that is considered legal or even acceptable behavior. Even stuff like invading restaurants and yelling at people with megaphones inches away from their ears.
It's only a matter of time until those on the receiving end of this behavior respond with equal or greater (likely greater) brutality. Where do we go from there?
Notice that I am not taking any sides here. These statements apply to all players in this sick game, regardless of affiliation.
And then you have politicians and professional manipulators pinging segments of the population into resonance every day in support of political goals. Political goals, BTW, don't necessarily align with what is good for a country or a region. All they align with is being elected, reelected, obtaining or maintaining power. They could not care less about any of us.
And so, the internet, that thing that most of us thought would bring forth a new age of enlightenment is being weaponized in unimaginable ways. If there was a bill to shutdown Facebook and Twitter tomorrow I would vote for it ten times if I could. As I have said in other posts, they should be shutdown until they can prove their algorithms stop driving people into dark caves of hatred and outrage. That's all they do.
The have optimized their platforms to shove someone into whatever it is they are looking for deeper and harder, without regards for what the content can be. No problem if you are researching home remodeling or how to sail, huge massive problem if you are clicking through political crap (which is usually negative and hateful) and end-up in a deep dark cave of hatred. I've written before about a couple of members of our family who have been driven so far and deep into these caves (one on the left, the other on the right) that it is now impossible to pull them out. It's a drug, and we are powerless against it.
I am for small government. Definitely. However, there are cases where use of force through government is justified. I believe this to be one such case. These companies need to be put on hold until they become good citizens of the world and that needs to happen very soon.
> I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).
I believe they are aware, because I sometimes read various country's leaders and diplomatic corps on twitter, and it's very clear that some of them word things in ways that show they're speaking to a global audience, and some of them word things in ways that show they're preaching to the choir back home.
> Sure Americans have always thought it was acceptable to spend trillions destroying property and killing people as long as it was done on foreign soil “to bring democracy”.
That's so far fetched as to be silly. You mean "always" as in rarely have Americans agreed with that, and it didn't occur in the style you're implying until after WW2. The US military had very rarely left its own shores until WW1, and not in a huge & sustained way until WW2 and thereafter. The US didn't even have a proper standing military capable of leaving its shores leading up to WW2, it had to be rapidly assembled.
The US was an isolationist heavy nation culturally until after WW2, the globalization superpower era.
Vietnam was so popular & acceptable (ie not at all) among Americans it helped cause a severe cultural revolution.
The American people overwhelmingly do not want involved in foreign wars: they get ignored by the globalist war & meddling hawks. And now when a populist isolationist in Trump tries to leave Syria or Afghanistan or Germany, bring troops home, and pull back on the military industrial complex and its foreign adventurism, the globalists (in both parties) lose their minds and try to stop him. It's all hilarious in a farcical sort of way.
Let’s look at the last 40 years. We funded Osama and the Sandinistas in the 80s, the second Iraq War and Afghanistan to start.
Unless there are a lot of Americans being killed, no one cares.
If Trump were truly trying to pull back on the military industrial complex, he would cut military spending on weapons that goes to private industry - especially weapons that the military doesn’t even want - and finally close some of the military bases that military leaders are suggesting but the civilian government keeps open as a make jobs program.
> "Limited in their experience of Europe as a whole, and living entirely within the German circle of thought, most of our writers believed that their best contribution was to strengthen the enthusiasm of the masses and support the supposed beauty of war with poetic appeals or scientific ideologies.
... Poems poured forth that rhymed Krieg with Sieg and Not with Tod. Solemnly the poets swore never again to have any cultural association with a Frenchman or an Englishman ; they went even further, they denied overnight that there had ever been any French or English culture. It was insignificant and valueless in comparison with German character, German art, and German thought. But the savants were even worse. The sole wisdom of the philosophers was to declare the war a “bath of steel” which would beneficially preserve the strength of the people from enervation. The physicians fell into line and praised their prosthesis so extravagantly that one was almost tempted to have a leg amputated so that the healthy member might be replaced by an artificial one. The ministers of all creeds had no desire to be outdone and joined in the chorus, at times as if a horde of possessed were raving, and yet all of these men were the very same whose reason, creative power, and humane conduct one had admired only a week, a month, before."
(sometimes two minutes hate doesn't pay off: Bismarck used the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Dispatch#Incident leak to sucker[1] the french into declaring war, in much the same way that a toreador waves the cape to citar, to provoke a charge from the amygdala, not the cortex, or the same way that Kenobi suckered Vader by turning off his light sabre)
People who live locally and send kids to some of the same schools say the most vile things imaginable to each other. I have no clue if they realize they are doing so with their full identity on display to the world (a lot of people have no sense of privacy settings and so their entire FB profile and posts are there for the world to see).
I am convinced that this has played a part in the insane behavior we have witnessed during the protests of the last several weeks. I have no problem with protests of any kind and for any reason. It's important to be heard. However, when the behavior turns criminal, with destruction of property, private or public, violence beatings and full-on anarchy, well, there is no society on earth and across history where that is considered legal or even acceptable behavior. Even stuff like invading restaurants and yelling at people with megaphones inches away from their ears.
It's only a matter of time until those on the receiving end of this behavior respond with equal or greater (likely greater) brutality. Where do we go from there?
Notice that I am not taking any sides here. These statements apply to all players in this sick game, regardless of affiliation.
And then you have politicians and professional manipulators pinging segments of the population into resonance every day in support of political goals. Political goals, BTW, don't necessarily align with what is good for a country or a region. All they align with is being elected, reelected, obtaining or maintaining power. They could not care less about any of us.
And so, the internet, that thing that most of us thought would bring forth a new age of enlightenment is being weaponized in unimaginable ways. If there was a bill to shutdown Facebook and Twitter tomorrow I would vote for it ten times if I could. As I have said in other posts, they should be shutdown until they can prove their algorithms stop driving people into dark caves of hatred and outrage. That's all they do.
The have optimized their platforms to shove someone into whatever it is they are looking for deeper and harder, without regards for what the content can be. No problem if you are researching home remodeling or how to sail, huge massive problem if you are clicking through political crap (which is usually negative and hateful) and end-up in a deep dark cave of hatred. I've written before about a couple of members of our family who have been driven so far and deep into these caves (one on the left, the other on the right) that it is now impossible to pull them out. It's a drug, and we are powerless against it.
I am for small government. Definitely. However, there are cases where use of force through government is justified. I believe this to be one such case. These companies need to be put on hold until they become good citizens of the world and that needs to happen very soon.