We used to teach people how to spot fascism. Right after the end of the war.
Historically, Trump is a fascist. And I worry that too many of us have forgotten what fascism actually is.
I see that you have linked an article talking about Hillary Clinton and her speech at CodeCon.
This is evidence that you may prefer fascism:
And rest assured, shameless they are. At one point, heedless of the collusion Wikileaks revealed, Hillary blamed bad press for her downfall, apparently fully expecting that the establishment media — supine lackeys that they were — would simply ignore the investigation into her extralegal e-mail server.
The establishment media covered her server relentlessly. They had a lot to go over, because Clinton actually submitted to every subpoena and investigation the government launched into her term as Secretary of State. So there was testimony and stuff going on for weeks resulting in ongoing coverage. Refusing to submit to an investigation is a story once. I mean, Flynn did that…
If I google “Flynn fifth” I get about 2.3 million results. If I google “Clinton Email” I get 51 million results. It’s ridiculous that you would claim the media ignored the investigation.
She adhered to the rule of law and went to every hearing they held. But for some reason, you see the opposite. It’s like you actually think she is a demon or some kind of magical creature:
“Chair — The next odd point was the choice of chairs. Aside from the garish lipstick red colored leather, the shape of the chair itself resembled some sort of therapy device, like something a person struggling with a degenerative spinal condition or a condition like MS or Parkinson’s would use. One wonders if, beneath her Mao jacket, there was some sort of electro-magnetic harness to help keep her posture upright.”
I mean, for one thing, she goes hiking. People have photographed her out on trails, so I fully expect that you will provide evidence for her being helicoptered in as some kind of elaborate ruse to hide her “disabilities”. Even weirder is the idea that you would hold her responsible for the chair she sat in, at an event she was invited to speak at. I mean, everyone is in those chairs. Those were chairs chosen by the people who organized the convention.
I’m not sure why you do this. You blame Hillary Clinton for everything around Hillary Clinton, the air, the windspeed, the color of the chair someone offered her…
And yet, you won’t hold Trump responsible for any of the choices he makes that are actually limiting the rights of citizens. He’s had journalists arrested. He pardoned Arpaio, who also had journalists arrested.
“Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin were taken from their homes in the middle of the night and jailed on misdemeanor charges alleging that they violated the secrecy of a grand jury — which turned out never to have been convened.”
It’s a funny thing: you were so opposed to censorship when I asked people to come discuss Amanda Collins’ piece. But you don’t speak out against a man who arrests people instead of allowing them to exercise their rights and actually has the power to do so.
I mean, this is Chris Cillizza, who hates Hillary Clinton. Surely you’re aware that these things are happening:
“Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.”
If reporters go to prison for publishing classified information, wouldn’t that also catch the reporters who reported on Clinton’s server? After all, some of the stuff was classified and some reporters shared it anyway because everyone else was and it was news. The law has to be for everyone and our president seems fundamentally confused about that fact.
You also seem fundamentally confused about that fact.
You said Amanda was one of your favorite posters here and when I called for official attention from Medium, to her work, you said:
“Despicable to dedicate such a lengthy screed to getting someone booted from a discussion board for an ideological disagreement. If anything it’s the author of this post who should be booted.”
In fact, when we discussed this, you were very intent on replying to something I had not said (bold is me italic is you):
“When did I say she should be booted?
Extremely disingenuous to act as if you don’t know full well that, considering your screed was addressed to the CEO of the site, it would be taken that way.”
Fascinating, right? Because I wasn’t lying: I did not ask for her to be booted. And frankly, I meant what I said:
I am inviting the person who is ultimately responsible for Medium, Ev Williams, to weigh in on what he thinks his responsibilities are.
I’m still waiting on that. Because that is the far bigger problem: we are having all these conversations on large platforms owned by people we cannot see and who cannot possibly reply to all of us.
And we lack clarity about how those choices are made. That also serves authoritarianism, because if we do not know why a person stops talking, we do not know what we are allowed to say.
I do not know if they removed Amanda’s page or if she did it herself. I don’t know if she is a real person or a puppet account. I only know that she was plagiarizing work taken from another site attributed to another author. She also wrote a review of a content spinner, a tool designed to recycle content as if a human wrote it. And finally, her plagiarized work linked back to the original article on another site that was openly white supremacist.
And that is something I would want pointed out to me, if someone was using a space I was ultimately responsible for to do it. Those are choices people should make consciously, not because they are overwhelmed with so many users that they accidentally helped terrorists. We should value the chance to consent to help each other, instead of demanding access to resources we do not own or build ourselves.
But I can understand that this is a lot more complicated. I’m also pro-democratization of tools and resources. People should get to decide what they see and hear, and we should have these discussions in the light, not in secret. Not behind the backs of the people who built the tools we use, but with their consent, so we can collaborate and make those tools better. We should be challenging each other to make our ideas and understanding of the world better, not walling off huge amounts of content with ideological moats to protect our fragile ideas from people who don’t like them.
It may already be too late for that kind of project to succeed. We have never had a culture where so many people could publish so many opinions so easily. And instead of treating that like an opportunity to learn about other people, we seem to be falling into the trap of supporting ideologies that we may not even like or support, just because they are familiar.
