The on-going scourge of Social Media

The wife and I made an escape last weekend. After three months of work from home, of only making one trip per week. to the grocery store, wearing my mask. we decided that we needed to get out of the house, more specifically, I needed to get out of the house.

So we decided to pack our bags, our masks and around 2 gallons of hand sanitizer to make the trip to our "local" casino in Lake Charles.  We spent a fun weekend gambling, losing, eating good food, drinking good wine and cocktails, sitting in a pool cabana on Sunday, and generally just having a grand time.

Yes, we wore our masks, we had sani-wipes and used them to disinfect every machine that we sat down to, and we wore our masks for the most part, except if we were sitting at the bar drinking and playing video poker, at which point it seemed a little silly to keep them on when we'd have to touch them repeatedly to pull them down and keep drinking.

Was there a risk of contracting COVID-19?  Yes, probably so. But at some point we have to return to living life in the safest way possible, but we do need to get back into the swing of things and start being productive again. Virus gonna virus, we just have to adapt to our new realities.

We need human interaction, we are social animals after all.

What I did notice is that, after 3 months of lock down, my human interaction compass was mightily skewed by the cesspool that is social media.  If you believe Twitter, every conversation surrounding race etc. is fraught with anger, name-calling, one-upmanship and online "owns".  Drop the mic moments seem to be the goal, and there's no room for nuance. no room for those little moments in Houston interaction that allow for understanding.  Twitter. especially is a cold, brutal place full of awful people whose only reason for existing is to injure others. Not physically, they don't have the guts to do that, but there are different ways to ruin people's lives. You know about "SWATting" and you've certainly heard of "cancel culture" by now, these are just some of the ways bad actors on Twitter go about stifling debate.

Twitter is where the "Karen" meme revealed itself, and it's where the worst of humanity is placed on a pedestal to be mocked, knocked down and humiliated, where mob-rule is the rule and the powers that be seem little inclined to police their huge bot problem.  The government's "solution" to this is to cudgel them into submission, or extinction, by removing their "platform" privileges and making them responsible for what's posted by their users.

Like any government response, this is not going to work, it's only going to push cancel culture underground where, in my opinion, it becomes more dangerous.

The good news is that regular, decent society still does not operate like social media society but the gap is getting smaller., mainstream media reporters, too lazy to work their beat, scour social media for unvetted memes and broadcast them nationally, without question, and without applying journalistic principles such as verification and corroboration. This is leading to social media creep into polite society and, unless we do something to stop this, we're going to live in a society where mob mentality rules, and rule of law goes the way of the Dodo.

It's a big problem.  We're still, just, in a place where decent humans can have a polite conversation on difficult issues without resorting to cancel culture and mob anger.

Humanity needs to keep that, or we're going to regret that it's gone.

2020: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Firstly, and this might come as a shock to you, I'm an upper middle-class Caucasian male.  As such I'm not going to use this format to lecture you on how you should feel about the Black Lives Matter protests that are currently ongoing.  I'm not going to tell you how to feel about it, I'm not going to lecture you on what you're doing wrong in thinking about it.

I'm just going to say that I have no idea what minority, especially Black, Americans are going through but I understand they are angry and empathize with their feelings that nothing has been being done about it for quite some time, decades even.

I will also say that THIS is why we have the 1st Amendment, to allow the people to gather and protest the government and ask for redress from grievances. 

So, some good can come from this. We can have some change, the demilitarization of our police force for one, a re-look at some of the policies that allow police to use smaller charges as smoke-screens for blind-searches for bigger crimes, for an end to no-knock raids and for meaningful change withing the criminal justice system.  Ending qualified immunity for the police would also help (and might do the MOST to help FWIW).

Harder to end is going to be the Blue Line. The idea that police protect their own, that some will look the other way when a crime by other officers happen, that's a bigger issue that's not going to be resolved by a politician giving a speech, or passing a law.

Hard truth: You're never going to 100% eradicate racism. In a perfect world yes, it would be possible but this is not a perfect world and we are not perfect animals. You cannot police minds, even minds holding beliefs as fundamentally wrong as this, thinking that a person's worth is contingent on what color of skin they were born with. There will always be lesser animals among us. How we deal with this is going to say just as much about us as it does about them.

My hope is that something meaningful, fair and just comes out of this. My fear is that the solution is going to be built out of anger and opportunity instead of justice and fairness. America has a pretty sad track record in the Western Hemisphere of tearing down old regimes and putting in place something sensible that works.

Our biggest problem is our reliance on both the Republican and Democratic Parties to run our political system. We've co-opted our democracy not to corporations, but to two groups of influence-peddlers who's primary goals are score-keeping and dividing up the Country in the false hope of gaining a "Permanent Majority".  Because of this we forget the greatest truism in America:  "It's US (the People) versus THEM (The Government) when it comes to protecting our rights.

I can hear people now: "But the Government is there to protect our rights."

This is not true, our rights are there to protect us from the government, full stop. The Government can only protect our rights IF our rights come from the government.  And if they did, what the government provided they can take away.

Granted, there are times when flawed government policy strips people of their rights, which is why we have the Justice System, and why (despite what people say) the War Between the States was fought so long ago*.

At the end of the day however, it's the provision of the people to stand up to the government and demand their rights be recognized, which is what you're seeing today in these protests that are spreading across the globe. Man does not grant rights, they are natural, given by whatever higher power you believe in. They cannot be stripped away by government unless the people are compliant and give their permission to have them taken away.  This is true, obviously, in cases where force is not invoked to remove rights. That's a post for another time**.

Again, my purpose here is not to lecture you on how to feel about that. I have my feelings, you have yours, and those people out there marching have theirs.  And they're doing a very effective job getting their message across.

Do I have worries?  Of course I do.  I'm concerned about the rumblings of military deployment to try and quell the violence. The military is not a scalpel it is a broad sword. I am concerned that our tendency to turn things from discussions and dialogue into a lecture is going to result in backlash. This issue needs meaningful discussion, not a dressing-down of anyone who looks or thinks differently.

This feels like a key moment in history. It feels as if we have a perfect storm of circumstances, COVID-19 lock-downs and the resulting economic collapse, have freed people from the trappings of work and are allowing this to continue longer than it normally would. That means that this will go on longer than the normal news cycle and, with an election upcoming, some legislation might be passed by a Congress with an eye on re-election.  That legislation is almost certain to be partisan and rife with unintended consequences but I think something gets done.

Which leads me to my last point:  The solution to this issue is not simply electing more Republican or Democratic politicians, depending on your political point of view.  Many of the atrocities that have happened have taken place in cities under Democratic rule. Many of the legislative drivers of these problems have sprung from Conservative State Houses and Washington D.C. 

Anyone telling you that the solution to this problem is to "Vote Blue" or "MAGA" is simply regurgitating the advertising campaign of two of the biggest money collecting agencies in the US today. 

The answer to all of this is to elect politicians who espouse workable policy goals with which you agree. Then, and this is the tricky bit, to hold them accountable by un-electing them if they don't produce.

If they are successful and advance policies you like? Then by all means vote them back for a 2nd term. But if they don't?  It's up to the citizenry to vote them out, even IF that means casting a vote for the other "side". This is where, as a society, we have failed. It's also why we're still looking at Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnel's ugly mugs on TV cameras still.

That is what we need to change, and it's also why we continue to fail because we have not, as a society, shown a propensity to wish to do that.  Until we do meaningful change is never going to happen, no matter how many protests we decide to hold.

*Despite what we hear the "Civil War" WAS fought to eradicate slavery. The "State's Rights" that were being contested was directly related to that.  And yes, I do think that having Confederate monuments in the US is odd. It's one of the odd instances in history where the losers got to tell their tale.

**Slavery was a taking of rights by force. Anyone who says otherwise is being ridiculous. True 'fascism' (not the politically convenient meaning we use today) is the deprivation of rights by force, as is communism, and "seizing the means of production" FWIW but people do not want to recognize that depending on their political leanings.