saw this item on the hellbird site a short while ago

https://twitter.com/goldengateblond/status/954461696302526464

tl;dr version: Facebook will be letting users vote on what news sites are trustworthy because Zuckerberg says he's "uncomfortable" with the company making that decision for itself "in a world with so much division"

like, is anyone fucking surprised that the most famous of the new masters of the Universe is too chickenshit to make an ethical decision?

but really this sort of thinking is everywhere, on every level

everywhere, a frightening number of Americans' answer to having to make ethical decisions about other people is to ask someone, _anyone_ to make the decision for them

take that Linux weenie that Laurelai and I were tangling with earlier

he had an infallible answer to all observations about how impenetrable and shitty his beloved "free software" has become: it's not his problem. he's a volunteer, it's not his job to make his software work for anyone but him and his pals. if you don't like it, make your own.

there's absolutely no way you can make a baby like that understand that he's part of a _community_. if he were just having a LAN party with his geek chums and making shit that nobody else but them used, ok, fine, then who cares whether anyone else can use it? but that's _not_ what's happening, even though he wants to pretend it is.

up to a point, because he also wants bragging rights about how Linux gets used by all the big boys. like so many people he wants to claim the advantages of community without actually putting in any work to be a good citizen of one.

like, no wonder Western society is racing backwards to the safety of authoritarianism and outright fascism

most folks simply have no idea how to make hard decisions on their own, our society has utterly failed to give us any training in how to be ethical when nobody's around to enforce it

everywhere people resort to appealing to authority

someone in your community accused of sexual abuse? "oh, uh, well, we're not comfortable deciding for ourselves, we'll only act if there's an actual criminal conviction". running to the fucking _cops_, basically

liberals are _really_ fucking bad at this. they want to believe they're fair and enlightened and all that but really they've just vested an imaginary impartial civil authority with the ability to make these decisions for them

(so now their way of fighting Trump is to cheerlead an FBI investigation from the sidelines. again...running to the fucking cops)

@chara related: people not willing to believe electing trump would result in truly horrible actions because "someone" wouldn't let that happen. My dudes...... That someone is/was y'all voters. It's like this magical belief in a system of justice divorced from the reality of what builds and supports such a system.

@odinsdream oh yeah! and it's not just people who _voted_ for Trump with some bizarre justification that they didn't really think he'd _win_, or that if he'd win he'd be prevented from doing much damage. this also applies to the Democrats who didn't think Trump, or more properly what Trump represented and why he was a force to be reckoned with, would require hard work and effort to defeat. again the magical belief was there, that the system would do the work for them. all they needed to do was make fun of Trump for not being rich enough, or whatever

@chara @odinsdream I mean, if I'm not mistaken, their game plan is still "At least we aren't Trump" which is. just. real. bad.