I don't need no proof, 'cause that's the truth, and I'll drink to that.

 Man, it has been a day, hasn't it? Protests and riots across the country, the president trying to bring the government hammer down on a private company because his feelings are hurt, and the sneaking suspicion that "reopening the country" this soon wasn't a great idea. One upside is the forces of old and evil are sounding dumber than shit in trying to defend what obviously isn't going to work anymore.

 I really don't know where to start. Momma and I had a rather heavy discussion about the George Floyd murder and the resulting chaos that's popped up as a result. Make no mistake, Momma is Mississippi through and through, and one thing about Mississippi is this state digs on some authority. Look at that walking thumb that's the mayor of Petal for another example. Regardless, she's heartsick over this man's murder and understands the rage and anger behind the rioters. She doesn't understand why they would destroy businesses that employ them, but she also doesn't grok that most of those businesses don't pay them enough to live on anyway.

 What she had problems with, however, was my stance that the cops in general don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, and I won't budge on that. They do not. They've spent the last 20 years militarizing and deciding we were the enemy, telling us their safety is more important than our lives, and claiming that they don't even need to know the law. All body cameras and social media has done up until now is show how guilty they are and how little they care about how their actions affect the communities they're supposed to "protect and serve," especially when those communities are black.

 For me, it's like that old Chris Rock bit. I ain't saying people burning down a Target is right. I'm just saying I understand where that anger and frustration is coming from. If nothing else - nothing else - the recent COVID-19 business should have shown us that, without any sort of doubt, the Powers That Be do not care if the people that make their wealth live or die, nor do they care how healthy or happy those folks are. Target pays starvation wages and the owners are billionaires many times over. If the people in that community thought it was worth something, maybe they wouldn't have pulled it down.

 I do think there's something different about this one, especially coming so soon after the egregious subverting of the law we're supposed to follow in the Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor situations. In both cases, the murders were ignored by the legal establishment of the respective areas, almost to the point where they condoned it. Both took months of screaming in the faces of authority to make anyone even look ashamed. This one, well... the guy having his hands in his pockets while kneeling on Floyd's neck as someone filmed him, he had to know that wouldn't go well.

 Protests are popping up all over the country. Someone in Denver actively tried to run some dude over, and people on Twitter are trying to defend it. I do wonder, however, if we're not seeing how the whole "Twitter isn't real life" thing plays out. The mayor of Petal got his ass nailed to the wall by his townsfolk and trying to claim they're all AntiFa. Y'all, there is no AntiFa in a Mississippi town of 10,000. There just isn't.

 Maybe a little more ambiguous is this bit about Trump trying to use government muscle to censor Twitter because they had the audacity to add a link to one of his wacky claims. They didn't even fact check him, much less censor him. They added a link that said "for more information". It was the very least they could do, and he throws the biggest fit we've seen yet. A hundred thousand dead, 40 million on unemployment, and he doesn't budge. Twitter doesn't kiss his ass and he's ready to rain down hell.

 The conservative argument is, apparently, that Twitter shouldn't be considered a publisher rather than a platform and what they did was censorship. The latter argument is obviously stupid and silly, nothing more than another example of Trump's persecution complex and the reason conservatives worship the ground he walks on. The former, though, I wonder.

 I really don't see Twitter as a publisher any more than the telephone line is. It is true, however, that technology has moved too fast for the law to keep up on this note and there are serious questions to be asked. That being said, since the death of Net Neutrality - another thing conservatives have a boner for - it was probably inevitable that things were headed this way. Above all else, Twitter is a profit-oriented business, and anyone who's trying to assign noble intentions to it is whistling Dixie writ large.

 One of the running tropes of cyberpunk is that in a world where corporations control all government, official press and whatall, there's always an underground sort of internet that's For The People. What a lot of science fiction writers never assumed, though, was that the Harvard-educated trust fund squirts who have the cash to develop this sort of technology would be interested in anything but getting their hands on more filthy lucre.

 You'd think after watching Bill Gates for the past 40 years, we'd learn. But no, that's not how it works. Here we are.