And we’re done!

One of my favorites.  Dave Barry’s yearly recap.

Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2019

Impeachment. Brexit. Greenland. Can we say anything good about this year? Nah.

This blog is itself a protest against the abuses of today’s commercial Social Media.  The article below from Fast Company magazine goes a long way toward explaining what is wrong with companies like Facebook.

The real reason why Facebook and Google won’t change

Facebook, Google, and other masters of the surveillance economy have bred a virulent mutation of capitalism, which explains why they aren’t interested in addressing their many scandals

If you want to know why Facebook won’t “censor” Nazis, terrorists or anyone, it is because these are sources of their profit.  That is all.  From the article:

Facebook and other surveillance capitalists don’t want to harm you, but they gladly extract data from your pain. They don’t care if you’re happy, though they’re determined to fabricate the lucrative predictions that spring from your joy. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it in ways that they can transmute into profit. Once you understand this, it’s not hard to see that every Facebook action that triggers outrage is simply a predictable consequence of this economic perversion’s basic mechanisms.

I consider the biggest problem in America (and perhaps the world) is the influence of money in politics.  Democracy and Capitalism have always had a difficult and confusing relationship.  While democracy tries to ensure each individual an equal amount of influence in the affairs of state, capitalism does more or less the opposite, concentrating political power in the hands of a few, based on wealth.  The end game here eliminates both capitalism and democracy, with a very small number of people owning and controlling everything.  This has gone by many names in many places over the centuries, but it has been more the rule than the exception in mankind’s history.

America seems to be heading down this path.  As money begins to equal political power, the “one dollar one vote” replaces “one man one vote” and we head back to the territory of Kings, tsars, dictators, Caesars, emperors and all the other types of systems  that feudalare essentially feudalism.  Great if you are king or someone very close to the king, but not so great for the everyone else.

What prevented this up until now, at least in America, was a limit on how much money could be pumped into the political system.  As that has eroded, so has democracy, in the sense that the things people really want to spend their tax dollars on are seldom even discussed.  Below is an article on what might have been the death blow to the sort of democracy Americans enjoyed during my lifetime. From Salon:

The Citizens United ruling broke American democracy at the start of the decade. It never recovered