01 First Thoughts:

… feeling so much better this morning… no sleep interruption from the dogs, little alcohol last night…

… Heather Cox Richardson mentioned Tucker Carlson… the hairs stand up on the back of my neck… a despicable person… i keep thinking there has to be a way to regulate misinformation, that if we don’t find a way, we are doomed…

… i am increasingly thinking i will remove myself from the services of the big tech companies, google, twitter, Facebook, instagram, etc… yesterday i created a ProtonMail account… i will withdraw from conducting personal business on gmail…

… a micro.blog member posted a quote by Carl Sagan, written in 1996, that is so prescient…

_ “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…_

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”¹

… what is the antidote?… it begins with killing the filibuster and passage of voting rights legislation… it then moves on to legislation to curb the spreading of disinformation, such as a modern day Fairness Doctrine… there are freedom of speech issues with it for sure, but propaganda masquerading as opinion is presently extremely unhealthy to society… one has to be held accountable for spreading demonstrably false information when it is done willfully, maliciously and/or for selfish and political reasons… there should be certain speech, sharing and topics of conversation that are banned altogether, as in Germany and some other European countries, where the ideology and symbology of White Supremacy and Nazism are banned…

… i don’t believe a society can function well with absolute freedom of the individual, there need to be boundaries… a certain amount of individual freedom must be given up for a greater good… the balance of individual freedom vs. greater good should be managed by substantive debate in the public and a continuous review and revision of the curbs, but the curbs need to be there…