Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse


View: https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1364946882833842189?s=20


We are living in a time of bad metaphors. Everything is fascism, or socialism; Hitler’s Germany, or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Republicans, especially, want their followers to believe that America is on the verge of a dramatic time, a moment of great conflict such as 1968—or perhaps, even worse, 1860. (The drama is the point, of course. No one ever says, “We’re living through 1955.”)

Ironically, the GOP is indeed replicating another political party in another time, but not as the heroes they imagine themselves to be. The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.

I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes.
 

View: https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1364717237601411072?s=20


It has become an article of faith among some that the big social media sites engage in "anti-conservative bias" in their moderation practices. When we point out, over and over again, that there is no evidence to support these claims, our comments normally fill up with very, very angry people calling us "delusional" and saying things like "just look around!"

But they never actually provide any evidence. Because it doesn't seem to exist. Instead, what multiple looks at the issue have found is that moderation policies might ban racists, trolls, and bigots, and unless your argument is that "conservatism" is the same thing as "racism, trolling, and bigotry" then you don't have much of an argument. In fact, studies seem to show that Facebook, in particular, has bent over backwards to support conservative voices on the platform.
 
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