The dilemma with societal problems is there rarely an easy fix; throwing money at something helps, but does nothing if there's no infrastructure. The fact there is very little investment in making the cogs that help the wheels turn means that on the surface it simply looks like another attempt at evening up that's been pissed up the wall by those people. Those people are essentially anyone who does something that tweaks your nipples; has an opinion that isn't yours; lives a way that you don't like; brings their kids up in a fashion you maybe don't understand therefore dislike it. Those people are anyone and everyone that bigoted people and normal fair-minded cast as different to them and not in a good way.
There are always victims and like it or not, argue against it or don't, it's usually those with less that suffer the most. I've never read the Bible but I'm sure one of its key messages is love thy neighbour and be kind and charitable to those worse off than you. The fact there are exploitative capitalists who call themselves men of whatever god they worship should be mockery enough. And then you factor in the fact you now live in what is essentially an anocracy - a fake democracy akin to a feudal system - crossed with an authoritarian libertarian attitude towards its people, but also a world where there are some utter sociopaths running some of the richest organisations on the planet and you realise that everyone is either a victim or isn't.
I know, that sounds... meh, but that's how this kind of geopolitical takeover is achieved. If you look at the top 27 nations of the world, very few of them have anything you could consider as truly socialist. The Chinese worked out how to merge capitalism with their Maoist brand of communism, which essentially results in an authoritarian regime. Russia is the Soviet Union with coloured balloons and all the 'peaceful' ones are built on burgeoning economies - making money - with little or no regard to the plebs. The Scandinavian countries seem to have a better understanding of the world, but I'll bet you a penny to a pinch of shit if you spoke to the average Scandi in the street, he'd have negative opinions about something other than COVID-19. Hate has been reactivated in even the most benign people and they all have a platform to air it.
The way it has been reactivated was by ramping up the most human of emotions - envy, greed, desire, avarice and hate or simply being different. The catalyst for this was from the internet and ultimately Facebook, because of its reach. Where else can you get gaslighted on an insane variety of subjects, daily, free of charge. Facebook isn't for the people, it is the people. For over 15 years we've been fed memes from unknown groups that simply have told lie after lie until it ingrained itself into the human psyche, giving us strong opinions on subjects we never cared about. Getting us to point the finger, more readily, at someone else. While it existed before, it gave whataboutery the platform to become more important in discussion that to discuss the issue at hand. "The government are making a hash of this." "Yeah, but what about that Labour MP who did something wrong." "Ministers are giving money to their mates." "Yeah but what about that 19 year old single mum who cadges cigarettes off of people on the street, she's on benefits when she should be at work." Purveyors of whataboutery aren't interested in the relative comparisons between a very rich cabinet minister and a kid that has had little or no education into what a real life might be like should she have unprotected sex with an absent twat.
As a brief aside: speaking to two, let's say, anti-Corbyn voters last week I was amazed that they admitted they no longer think all the bad things said about Corbyn were true; that they now know his involvement with the IRA was as a negotiator on the Good Friday agreement, or that his racism was a construct of the press; one even went as far as to say he believed the antisemitism row was all blown out of proportion to paint him in a bad light. Too late now, isn't it? Believe it when it's happening next time and it's happening now to anyone who isn't on the same page as our present regime.
Facebook has normalised everything. I've seen people who will swear they're not racists go blue in the face at Black Lives Matter or footballers taking the knee and instead of just shouting at the dog he now shares those feelings with everyone on Facebook and I can't help thinking he might not have been like this had it not been normalised for people to share their opinions with everyone else, sometimes with bells and whistles on. How about racism on social media - that doesn't seem to carry as much weight as calling a moron stupid or, in the case of my mate Phil from Kent, using the singular term 'cabbage' in an unrelated to mental capacity conversation. He was bullying me for that and got another warning.
Timelines are life lines, and you get a constant snapshot of others and you think they all look at yours. You think you're connected to the world, but Facebook doesn't work like that and I haven't met someone who can actually explain to me why it is the way it is other than 'algorithms'. Aside from the fact that some people simply disappear from your timeline, post often but you never see is a mystery for me, but not as much as the memes floating about designed to do nothing but waste your time about how you can restore your timeline and see all your friends again.
But I suppose the thing that bugs me the most about Facebook is now it has taught us all how to be horrible to each other again; to be negative to imagine every hateful human out there is a bot, is the fact that as someone who is angered by ignorance and hate, I'm usually the one who ends up in the 'new and improved' Facebook jail, while the ignorant racist who doesn't wear a mask and won't have 'that shit' put in his arm gets to continue spreading misinformation about something that can kill you and is never challenged or stopped. I called one 'stupid' and spent 24 hours unable to do anything other than look.
The thing that made me sit up and pay attention was when Phil from Kent got a warning for some banter with me. This was swiftly followed by a 12 hour ban which he slept through most of. That was for some other bit of banter with friends. He then got another ban, this time for calling someone 'stupid'. The conditions were almost exactly the same as mine. Now, it's something my late mate Si Spencer talked about, the fact the right wing Facebookers are a tight bunch, they report posts en masse to get them removed, whereas people like him, me and Phil from Kent do not have hordes of likeminded people who will do the same to their inflammatory sic ridden diatribes. There's also the algorithm, which latches onto you once you've violated; it's like Facebook's Big Brother sitting on your shoulder telling you to leave the nasty boys alone and post fluffy cat memes. It's saying it knows you're a possible insurgent and therefore it is taking responsibility to ensure I can't spread sedition across the internet.
It's not even isolated to me and two friends, when the latter posted about his experiences - on Facebook - about 75% of the many responses, people I know, or through association and who, mainly, I would regard as decent charitable people, had also been sanctioned and many of them for calling out a wanker. This could be the most insidious of methods to ensure the current regime stays where it is. I'm not suggesting that we should all be able to call people names, but the algorithm doesn't work like that, it looks for what it can construe as either bullying, harmful, hate speech or against their vague community standards. Someone tried to sell a load of ammunition on my Mushroom page and Facebook told me they had no problem with it. Four times, Facebook has removed content from my page without telling me until after the event at people trying to sell drugs. That's fine, drugs are illegal in many places and I would have removed them and banned the poster myself, but ammunition, such as hollow-tipped bullets are fine, especially on a mushroom page?
There are now people out there frightened to speak their mind, even in the most restrained manner for fear of having Facebook removed from them. What a fantastic drug? It keeps you calm and quiet, you get fed whatever they want you to and you're grateful for it. It carries on teaching you to be prejudiced and resentful, yet forgiving and accepting and gradually turning your belief system into something that few political parties can relate to. Let's not even go into the world of Facebook private pages, which allows you to post literally anything without fear of being sanctioned, because they are private, invite only rooms and Facebook can't even see what's happening. How dangerous is that? How come Facebook never gets mentioned when WhatsApp and Zoom and SnapChat and whatever the latest craze is are always being looked at under the microscope? You could organise a terrorist insurgence through a group named Fluffy Bunnies; literally.
Yet, we're not allowed to tell people with dangerous and wrong beliefs that they're idiots, because, you know that's worse than selling ammunition. And, yes, I know, calling them idiots doesn't change anything, you could make them swallow the truth and they'd still throw it back up all over your new shirt, but it makes you feel superior until you're made to feel like the guilty party and sent to your room.
Of course, you could simply report anything from these nutjobs in the hope that something sparks the ire of the algorithm.
However, if you ever decide to leave Facebook, it will have as much effect on the rest of the world as one grain of sand from a beach going missing and because of FOMO, even if you don't have it, you dip back in until it hooks you again, you just have to play with restraint because you're being watched for being a decent person and Facebook really doesn't want decent people using it for anything other than to be fleeced by scammers, spammers, data harvesters and dodgy advertisers. Facebook doesn't even answer to governments and treats them with such an indifference it boggles the mind and if nothing else, that should tell you that Mark Zuckerberg thinks he's more important than anyone else on the planet and frankly, he's barking mad.
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