Breach? What Breach?

Ladies and gentlemen, please stay calm.  What I'm about to tell you may shock and possibly enrage you.  But it's true. 

Yes, there was no breach of data at Facebook.   Nope.  None at all.  To call what actually did occur a breach is simply either naivete or outright propaganda.

Here's why.  Facebook is a thriving business that collects detailed information on every single user member, stores it, and then sells that information to other business concerns that require it.  For this, it makes an enormous profit.  It also sells advertising that is mated with users' personal interests, which is displayed on the particular page that that user is viewing.  For this it makes another enormous profit.

When the Democrat party, working for the Kenyan's reelection, needed a way to ascertain potential voters' political trends in 2008, they went to Facebook, who, as a matter of standard operating procedure, simply sold that data to the DNC.  No problem, congress, that's the business we're in.  

But when Cambridge Analytica, working for the Republican party and Donald Trump's campaign,  needed a way to ascertain potential voters' political trends in 2016, they went to Facebook, who, as a matter of standard operating procedure, simply sold that data to the RNC.  No problem, congress, that's the business we're in.  

It's ingenious, in a way.  While other data mining companies like Google and Amazon engage in stealth in their data collection methods, Facebook comes right out and asks users for it.  Right up front.  And  normal folks, most of whom love to talk about themselves, were eager to willingly provide detailed and intimate information about themselves, and upload that personal information to a public forum read by billions of people.  Facebook users completed detailed profiles of themselves, complete with sexual orientation and current domestic partnership information.  They breathlessly supplied a detailed list of their favorite books, movies, music, hobbies and interests.  They posted personal opinions, political leanings, and just idiotic and inane stuff freely.  And they "liked"  other users' ramblings.  Just so there would be no question as to who was actually posting this personal information and opinions, Facebook users added photos of themselves, along with their friends, family, colleagues, and even pets.   And they uploaded a lot of them.

All voluntarily.  Willingly.  Eagerly.  

Now, when this comes to light through a lopsided political revelation, these same folks are shocked - shocked! - that goofy little Mark Zuckerberg is actually Big Brother, watching - censoring and tracking - not only them but everyone they know!  One wonders if folks were thinking:  "What's the worst that could happen?"  Maybe.  You post your identity on the Internet and what did you think Facebook would do with it?

So it's off to Congressional hearings Marky-Mark must go, to testify that, well, this is the business we're in, but we just don't want the conservative right to be privy to any of this valuable and marketable information. 

In fact, we'll do whatever we can to censor their homophobic, racist, Islamophobic, misogynist, gun-loving hate speech, so as not to offend the more delicate left leaning members of our Facebook family.  And it's why we're shopping for lobbyists in Washington, DC right now, to ensure we can buy - er, persuade - congress to abide by our way of thinking.   We want to make sure that Facebook remains an open forum for all those who subscribe to our approved speech and thought.

So.  There was no breach.  Only selected preferred users are allowed access to data from our business model, certainly not improperly channeled to Cambridge Analytica to benefit the right.

Whoops.  Facebook stock has fallen 14% as of this writing.  That represents a $100 billion loss in market worth.  Advertisers are running for the tall grass.  And users are rethinking the ramifications of the Internet equivalent of the high school "slam book."

Well, maybe that's the rough justice that the market applies to those who would take advantage.  Hear that, Google and Amazon?

Spare Not The Rod

Andrew Breitbart once said politics is downstream from culture.  What he meant is that in our modern society, culture determines our politics, not the other way around.  And he may be right.

Consider the nonsense and tragedies in our lives today:  mass school shootings, insane 7th century cultists running around beheading everyone they can find, live steaming suicides on social media, social justice warriors executing anyone who doesn't think as they do, unchecked illegal immigrants causing crime, disease and general mayhem across the land, racists calling for the extermination of white people, and other dystopian events. It's a mess out there.

As Talking Heads' David Bryne famously asked, "Well, how did I get here?"  How indeed.  Let's look at that.  Was it the non-existent white privilege in western culture and philosophy that caused all this?  Many in the regressive left will tell you so.  Perhaps it was toxic masculinity, as the shrill harpies in the so-called feminist movement will enthusiastically attest.  Or was it guns in our culture, maybe?  But no, it was none of these.  Those are merely scapegoats of a cancerous mindset in our culture that worships oppression and victimhood.  And that is not unintended, I might add.  The regressive left is intent on bringing down the structure of western civilization, and we're now tasting the fruits of that poisoned tree. 

The root philosophy in western thought is self determination.  Self reliance.  Self responsibility. Belief in the guidance of a higher intelligence; a higher good.  And these are the principals that the left has been - and still is - attacking and seeking to destroy.  They seek to replace our ancient, traditional value system with anthropolatry, broadly defined as the worship of man as god.

In approaching and defining society in this way, the first casualty of western thought is the demise of ethics.  Regressives scoff at the notion of an intrinsic "good" or of a rival "evil."  In their view, the self is center, the higher good is communal.  Aleister Crowley put it succinctly:  "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."  Those who would take exception to this stance are thereby  "oppressors" who must be defeated, and the anthropolatrists - the regressives themselves - are "victims."  Not a very inclusive philosophy, is it?

The next casualty is responsibility.  If there is no higher good other than self, then there is no need for ethics - the acknowledgement of good and evil (or "bad") - and thus no need for "discipline."  So for decades, the left has frowned on discipline as an affront to individual freedom brought on by authority figures - parents, teachers, cops - the ever present oppressors.  What has been the result of that?

The result is a generation or more of people who cannot cope with life as it is.  They can't deal with the crises in their lives, or rejection, or an opinion differing from their own, or restraints on behavior.  It's someone else's fault they feel ostracized, disenfranchised.  They become insecure in themselves, and then fall into self loathing.

Is it any wonder they need pharmaceutical support?  Or that they take up weapons to exact revenge from innocent and unknown folks, for some demonic imagined slight?  This lost generation, called snowflakes in part because of their delicate psychological condition, may never come to reality.  They live in a dark world where nothing is fair, where the deck is stacked against them.  They don't realize only they have the key to their own happiness.  But in anthropolatry, there can be no happiness; unfairness is perpetual and needs to be punished.  That's a pretty bleak outlook.

But to reverse this regressive thinking, we as a society should take a lesson from this failed experiment in total permissiveness, and ensure that life's lessons - good and bad together - are not lost, but exist to be experienced, to build character, resolve, respect, and yes, self sufficiency.  Ironically, the character traits and pursuits the regressive left despises most are the very ones needed to correct society's current unsteady course.  

So what is needed is more God, guns, white western culture, and toxic masculinity.  Oh, yeah.  And discipline.