As is the case with too many words today, “opinionated” no longer implies what it has always meant before. Presently, it means simply to have an opinion, for as the norm having an opinion has been surpassed by repetition and left on the side of the road somewhere behind us, where it might be found only as a curiosity.
Our society takes for granted how often that which is legal can too often be immoral, and how that which is moral can too often be illegal. I think the most shocking thing about Trump relates to this, in how naturally he conveys the normally rare likelihood of “illegal” and “immoral” becoming synonymous. People are shocked into silence by the wealth of causes for objection with which he oozes, that the flood of examples drown out that core, inner conflict.
I question authority because it has never in my life provided me with any just cause for trusting it. If power corrupts, then none should have it. The Nazis were not defeated by well-meaning persons looking for employment opportunities in their ranks. The middle ground is the weakest point to any bridge. The Freemasons lost their footing because platforms concerned chiefly with degrees rather than content will invariably collapse. When metaphors turn real, idioms go idiosyncratic. There was a time in my 20s when I wanted to get officially excommunicated by the Roman-Catholic Church. I’d have worn that like a badge of honor. Now I want to be somehow charged by the International Criminal Court. Neither carries any actual ramifications.
The greater portion of the tens of trillions in USA national debt is owed to foreign business interests, to foreign governments. But sure, let’s wall off the borders and throw trade embargoes at everyone but the nations which execute their own citizens. Every military base of every nation on the planet, their domestic bases and foreign bases, combined are outnumbered by USA military bases. Not by 20 or 30, but by hundreds upon hundreds. I’d prefer the USA left the UN, which would never happen as we insist on influencing foreign governments. And they would never expel us for our foreign policies which lead to so many refugees, because they are frightened by the hundreds of USA military bases within THEIR borders. The world could unite against us and get clobbered in a day. They could come to collect what is legally owed and we would blow them to smithereens. But we sell the threat of The Foreigner, as though our lives depended on it, when ultimately it is the continuance of our own irresponsibly self-serving natures that depends on it. We alone have the means to cause global heartache and we alone have the means to stop global heartache. And the pathos carries down to local communities. Who has the resources to cause the biggest scandals, to blockade full media coverage and dissuade the criminal investigations? “Might makes right” is the mentality of murderers, of rapists, and of USA foreign policy. If bad things can only happen to bad people, the fact of so many numbers of homeless and hungry around the world still can only mean that the world is predominately evil.
For any given Presidential election, only half the country votes. Voting requires a photo ID. Thanks to interdepartmental torridness with those vixens down at the DMV, half the population are in the FBI’s facial recognition database. It’s the voters. Facebook must have sold Cambridge Analytica comparable controls over user experiences as HUD previously charged it with granting to landlords. Third party scapegoating is bupkiss because Cambridge Anaytica would have been *entirely powerless* in controlling user experience without said tools. Read this HUD link, and imagine those same controls sold to a specific political initiative. And realize a federal judge has decided that 5 billion dollars is the price of a Presidential election, to say nothing of the Brexit referendum. This is literally what just happened.
Propaganda is news/tech platforms owned by western billionaires pushing the line that persons other than western billionaires might have opportunities to influence news/tech platforms owned by western billionaires. They’d know it if they’re the ones selling it. It was never just about selling private information. It was about manipulating information. The federal government knew this. Imagine the party you oppose purchasing tools capable of limiting and distorting what millions of users might see and experience. Downplayed across the corporate media spectrum because Neocons and Neolibs come together when lucrative. Robert Mercer, billionaire Neocon owner of the Cambridge Analytica parent company and Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire Neolib spokes-model of Facebook. Making scapegoats of competing foreign business interests, because both parties, wealth-accumulating enterprises masquerading as political ideologies, rely on the same methods, forever incapable of thinking outside the one and same box that is Capitalism. Gerrymandering will never be made illegal because both parties fundamentally depend on imaginary factions.
National and international politics boil down to competing billionaires. The only reason Epstein is public now, is because at some point he cock-blocked another billionaire. Nothing whatsoever to do with what’s right or wrong, but with who can con the bigger slice of apple pie. When money talks so loud it’s doing all the talking and becomes the universal language, the one and only thing that can bring down a billionaire is another billionaire. Like Bernie Madoff before him, Jeffrey Epstein is a token sacrifice, cut out by bigger players with bigger egos. Whose sins are incomprehensibly worse, worse even than the maligned holder of an opinion.