The fascist noose tightens

I thought it right sporting of the folks at Apple to check every iPhone for child porn. After all, only somebody with something to hide would object to such a generous offer.

Problem is, once they can look at your pictures, they'll be copying and storing lots more than porn. Did you take some pictures of those impressive pot plants your kid has growing in the back yard? There just might be parties in the big world of law enforcement who would be happy to pay Apple for that kind of information. Apple could give them the whole package, right down to where you live and work and what you do for fun.

At the same time, we've got vaccine passports popping up all over the world. The preferred format being pushed everywhere is for these to be kept on your smart-phone, because everybody takes that with them everywhere all the time anyway, right? And if they don't, they'll want to start soon, because as everyone knows, it'll be so much more efficient and convenient, and only a selfish bastard would refuse to cooperate.

A lot of folks are with the program already. They bank on their phones, pay bills on their phones, pay for their order at the Timmies drive-thru on their phones, leaving a digital footprint with every step they take, and every step becomes "data" that Google or Apple or one of the other techno-fascist overlords can sell as they please.

Or use against you.

It's not hard to imagine that if you're pegged as a trouble-maker, somebody will come and visit you about those pot plants. 

What is fascism?

That's a word that gets tossed about a fair bit, fascism.

But what does it mean?

Nobody seems to know. The old school guys want to direct you to Gramsci's prison notebooks, but I wouldn't recommend that... unless you're in prison too and have as much time to read them as Tony had to write them.

We've been hearing the word more often since the advent of the Trump era. A lot of folks who never gave the question of fascism any thought pre-Trump suddenly got woke and realized America was in the clutches of a fascist dictatorship.

Or almost.

Or something...

They're not wrong, but it's got little or nothing to do with white supremacist 45 sitting in the White House today. White supremacist 44 wasn't much different when measured by policy outcomes.

So what is fascism?

Not sure, but when the interests of FacebookTwitterGoogle align so perfectly with the interests of the war profiteers at BoeingLockheedMartin, and when the guy who owns the Washington Post does hundreds of millions in business with the CIA, maybe some of us aging radicals should lay off the ganja for a spell and try and make some sense of it all.


It's not looking good.