
Fascism and the Historical Irony of Facebook’s “Fake News” Problem - shalmanese
https://medium.com/initialized-capital/fascism-and-the-historical-irony-of-facebooks-fake-news-problem-d744b05045fd#.b926mqmgb
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danschumann
Except Trump is not the Hitler figure, he's the American figure. The Nazis of
today are inspired not by trump, but by the democrat created phantoms of who
they say trump is, this article included.

If no one ever called trump racist, we wouldn't have inspired alt right
groups. They are the irony of the left's failed smears.

Another thing Hitler did was turn children against their parents. The Nazi
youth put society above family. You see more democrats disowning children for
voting trump than the other way around. Bernie is a socialist. Trump has a big
beautiful family.

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ionised
Bernie is a social democrat.

I swear the word 'socialism' has lost all meaning through repeated misuse.

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slededit
He says "democratic socialist". I would take your reversal of the phrase to be
related to the democratic party, though perhaps I'm reading too much into it?

Even then he's called himself a socialist without any qualifiers before:

"﻿When I ran for the Senate the first time, I ran against the wealthiest guy
in the state of Vermont. He spent a lot on advertising — very ugly stuff. He
kept attacking me as a liberal. He didn’t use the word ‘socialist’ at all,
because everybody in the state knows that I am that."

politifact has some nice analysis on it: [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/article/2015/aug/26/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/article/2015/aug/26/bernie-sanders-socialist-or-democratic-socialist/)

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ionised
I've kind of proven my own point there haven't I, by not even remembering
correctly how Bernie described himself!

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slededit
I always took his qualifier as distancing from himself from the dictatorships
that usually implement socialism. Most Americans think the economic and
political system are the same thing. History has shown that to be somewhat
true in practice, though logically they are not tied together.

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sk1pper
Hah, and to add to the irony, the servers that host all of this stuff run an
OS designed by a bunch of hippies.

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keeptrying
__* This makes engineers reluctant, but necessary, brokers of public
discourse. __ __

" Turner: I don’t envy engineers or executives at tech firms. They’ve been put
in the position of being legislators for our public debates. America’s
architecture for such debates — Congress, the courts, the executive branch,
and to some degree, the press — was built in the 18th century. But the
conditions of public discourse have changed, and the speed at which those
conditions are changing has accelerated too."

I don't think our craft has quite figured what to do about this.

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farright
The problem with the comparison is that the left also has blood on its hands.
The self righteous zealotry of the progressive movement is as comparable to
China's cultural revolution, as Trump's populist appeal to Whites is to
fascism. That is, there are real parallels and real concerns on both sides. We
can't just act like the only danger comes from the political right.

Here's a nice piece of fake news I saw circulating among my progressive
friends on facebook: [http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/22/controversial-cnn-
chyron/](http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/22/controversial-cnn-chyron/)

