At a recent event held by the ADL, entertainer Sacha Baron Cohen ignored situations such as this in his accusations against the heads of social networks empowering prejudice. And this. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu faces corruption charges right now, for influence campaigns likely encompassing online tomfoolery. But when it’s a preferred brand or partisanship or whichever religious symbology, then it’s never disinfo/misinfo, even when the lies are blatant. Only the competition can do bad. When your political party destroys lives, it’s simply been taken out of context, just as when US business interests interfere in foreign governance it is only to spread Democracy. If an entire nation can possibly be evil, it’s probably the one with many hundreds of military bases more than all other nations combined, littered around the globe and largely on stolen land.
It’s vital to note that Netanyahu nor his supporters are Israel or the Israeli peoples. Same with Russia and its citizens, who are not Putin or the wealth endangering their own country. And also with regards to Trump and the interests he represents, which is neither the USA or its citizenry. Although with its purported freedoms, Americans should have been more vigilant. Instead of learning how liberty carries a cost, how sacrifice and salvation are one and the same, a nation wholly susceptible to marketing has been made softest of the planet. It’s no accident that entire groups of people are divided, as the most selfish among us bleed us dry one and all. The billionaires bow to no flag, no church, no ideology but capital. In the west there is no such thing as partisanship, only competing financial interests. Nancy Pelosi herself said at the end of the day they’re all just Capitalists, and the quiet unification to expand the Patriot Act this week proves it yet again despite deaf ears.
They are happy to have xenophobes present themselves as scapegoats to Capitalism. It serves them well for an entire populace to be stupid enough to somehow find logic in Russia destabilizing the west by empowering its biggest Capitalists. It lets the greediest of both countries off the hook for their egos, blaming flags and billions of innocents instead. Americans should revolt. Russians should revolt. Israelis should revolt. Democracies of this modern age are not undone by alternate sociopolitical beliefs. They are sold off from within. Presidents permitted unelected industrialists to write legislation favoring themselves decades before Trump was even born. The progression has been slowly exploring how blatant they can be about it, with Trump finally bursting the seams. Still, the rightwing supporters of racists, sexists and homophobes are basic grunts, destroyed ultimately by the same forces and helplessly too ignorant to know better. The most vile bigots cannot afford the services of Mark Zuckerberg, Robert Mercer, Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey and the rest of the digital feudalists. The ones destroying the world are the ones with means to destroy the world, employing hollow divisions to mask themselves. Even CNN will blame anything but Capitalism for giving the world Trump. Should billionaires give .001% of their holdings to charity, always for tax write-offs/publicity, they get applauded as philanthropists without any consideration for how the accumulation of the rest of their holdings is what created the problems that require assistance. Wealth only saves money by underpaying workers, but over-charging affects everybody. If society stopped normalizing price-gouging and excessive profiteering by capping maximum wages, cost of living could become rational. Instead of monies horded the public would have more to spend. Alas, as corporations are not democracies, granting political authorities to capitalists can only result with one possible conclusion.
It’s nothing but class warfare. They rob all of us, with xenophobes too self-centered to see they’re getting fucked as well. At day’s end the only belief of the Powers That Be is that they own everything, with easily manipulable racists, misogynists and homophobes as cannon fodder to make it happen. Mistaking symptoms for the disease, foot soldiers for generals, it hurts to know you’ll never be rich only because you bought into the marketing. Neither my ego or yours is any healthier than Trump’s. We can cure all these symptoms but the greedy catalyst would still be there. We can remove the trigger-man but the gun’s just waiting to be picked up again. We can un-oppress a demographic but the means for exploitation are still there. This is precisely what Dr King’s Poor People’s Campaign was purposed for, what led to his murder.
The danger is not that these socials appear to allow open speech, because all speech should be protected from legal but not social ramifications. The threat is that they amplify certain messaging for certain audiences while suppressing certain messaging for certain audiences. The threat is in how they expand upon the self-segregation which all social networks are categorically designed for. Our news bubbles and echo chambers, our safe spaces and gated communities. It is ourselves who view competing perspectives as the threat rather than the forces profiteering us all. Self-perception is graffiti on the walls of our prison cells. We each have our own to fret over. It’s necessary to create our own as opposed to allowing mass-marketed artificial cultures to define us, but insisting others humor and share our own self-perception is where all supremacy comes from. As long as our basic human rights to life, liberty and pursuits of happiness are not infringed upon, what we mean to ourselves holds no meaning whatsoever for others, and it is pure arrogance to suggest otherwise. By happenstance the web expedites ego cultivation and ego projection, which undoes any group dynamics yet everyone signs off on the exchange for the imaginary comfort zones.
Meanwhile, the jailers caging us all roam free.