No, you are right. Look at the prison camp in Cuba. A terrible thing, created in a moment, and over 8 years and Obama could not get rid of it.
All kinds of stuff is going to get fucked up.
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And let’s not forget Rome was kind of a democracy for about 500 years before they went despotic.
I had always hoped we could outdo them. 
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I tend to use Rome as a bad example of a Republic, not as a democracy. The patricians controlled way too much of the power.
Need to read Mary Beard, though, in order to confirm or deny my suspicions.
Plus, as antebellum senators loved to point out, they had slaves.
Democracy is more about who controls the power more than the means of doing so.
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I nearly screamed at you. good I didn’t, I mixed up horseshoe theory and horseshoe plan, the latter a propaganda lie akin the incubator story before the 1st Gulf War.
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I get what you’re saying, and that’s cool - I’m totally a Rule of Law fan, as anyone who’s read my occasional diatribes will attest.
But totalitarians simply sweep it all aside. They find the fissures, the cracks that weaken the foundation, then they work on it, and eventually, pulverise it - psychologically, pseudo-legally, however. They simply, and literally, kill the opposition.
That’s why this is the edge of a precipice. We live in an age where we can identify, without ambiguity, the signals and signs that give rise to the awfulness.
So be on your guard, friend. Be alert, vigilant, smart and wise - don’t let the ball start rolling down the slope.
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I read through the proposals on the link and, quite frankly, they’re TechnoUtopian nonsense - they will have little, if no, impact in the real world because they assume that Internet users and US citizens will react rationally.
The basic problem is that journalism has been constrained by various constituents that might get upset - advertisers that can pull dollars, governments that can impose regulation, organizations that can organize advertising boycotts, readers that can revolt, and individuals that can sue for libel.
With the Internet, all those constraints, which kept journalism focused on digging for facts and putting them in context for readers, has completely broken down. The Internet is open and free, without any real threats against content providers. Readers are simply living in bubbles of their own choosing and, rather than revolt, they unfriend, unlike and go where they can get content they want to hear. Media ownership is so concentrated and “too big to fail” that an organized boycott has little effect except on a specific show, like “Rush Limbaugh”. And, most importantly, since anyone can create “fake news” and it can spread like wildfire, libel laws are ineffective.
Technology will not solve this problem - only action by human beings will.
The major social media and web companies have to take responsibility for the content they offer. Google and Facebook, in order to be corporate citizens in a democracy, have to stop taking ad dollars from racist and “fake news” outlets.
Social media companies have to stop collecting data that advertisers use to target particular racial, political, and cultural demographics. For example, Facebook profiles me - a white, gay, middle aged male - as identifying as Black because I “liked” the NAACP and have occasionally posted articles about Black issues. This profile has put me in a “bubble” where I receive much more news and ads dealing with Black issues than my other white friends.
If this is happening to me, just what kind of world is a white racist seeing when they log on to social media?
I have other ideas - respected newspapers and magazines banding together in ad networks that would allow them to offer content without paywall restrictions, for example - but I have little hope that any of this will happen.
The constraints that kept journalism honest have completely been broken down by technology. The genie is out of the bottle and greed by social media companies, corporate media outlets, and advertisers themselves have taken the bottle and shattered it.
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@anon61221983, I just wanted to thank you for your engagement in this discussion. It means a lot to me that you took the time to discuss why Hitler and the Nazis did not come from the left side of the political spectrum.
For the record, the “Hitler came from the left” bullshit was, and is, still injected every now and then into the political discourse in Germany, mostly probingly. It is still very toxic, and manages to trickle down to lunchtable discussions. But it used to be more effective to discredit the left. Nowadays, nearly only extreme right-wingers accept it as an “alternative fact”, and people who argue this publictly are either trying to disrupt discussions, or to ensure support from those nationalist asshats who are actually affronted if you tell them that they are neo-fascists.
[Edit, also FTR: I argue that comparisons to the Machtergreifung still fall short, and that we should be very careful not to draw strong parallels between the Trump administration and the Nazis. It doesn’t help to win back the people who voted for a nationalistic populist for a represenative democracy. Learning from history does include to learn to refrain from simple name-calling and demonisation. We need to learn how not to polarise discussions. And I want to thank you, again, for the civil and informed discussion above.]
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He simply orders something. Happened before:
Torture was illegal in the USA because it signed international treaties that said so. Along came Bush and Rumsfeld. They gave the orders, people did what they were told (just following orders, you know). When someone asked the wrong questions they just made up some silly excuses and said "We got reasons but they’re secret because national security " and everyone was fine with it.
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Yup. Awful, isn’t it? There were no big influential marches, there was no screaming counter-reaction. There was criticism, sure, and upset, sure. But basically, they made us all complicit through our failure to do anything about it.
Maybe we believed the idea somewhat that the captives might be dangerous, that there must be some legitimacy behind their imprisonment - even though we became aware of rendition. Shit, they made a movie out of that story. Big budget.
Hands up, I didn’t march. I was busy having kids. As the fact that torture was taking place slowly became clear, it came at a gentle enough pace that there was no ‘shock!’ moment. It just became part of accepted reality, and the people in the orange jumpsuits … well, they kind of de-personalised them, hid them away.
Oh and then we had the financial crash to deal with. That was bad.
But it shows us just how easy it is to get a nation of people to not assault the government over its actions and policies.
We mostly all went along with it. Which is the big damn risk now.
The people is lazy-minded. Lazy and soft.
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Alright wait, wait, hang on some of us haven’t read it…
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My bad. I’ve made the appropriate edit above.
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A decade. I’m spitballing a decade to get rid of the trumpian elements and methods of operation currently being flexed.
Not to mention that we’re not even close to being under the same economic conditions as pre-WWII Germany. 5% unemployment rate doesn’t quite gin up the rioters/protests like 25%+ will do.
And I’d argue that the pushback we’re seeing against trump’s bullshit EPA/ARS gag (among the other, similar attempts) is opening evidence of a similar sort of civil disobedience.
A woman who’s writings should be studied far and wide. To paraphrase a sarcastic comment I’ve heard elsewhere, the powers that be will most certainly change once the populace stops protesting politically and starts readily, happily accepting every piece of disinformation the regime chooses to share (NOT).
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I don’t know, but I know it’s not any shade of white.
/rimshot
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What could make this idea a real possibility? And what are your other ideas? As has been mentioned above, the threads here at the BBS are virtual workshops. Let’s see what we can brainstorm together.
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It will be a critical decade, too, one in which automation will put tens of millions out of work with no other option to maintain the modest middle-class lifestyle they’ve become used to. That real unemployment level, if not reaching 1930s depths, will still become permanent if the government’s attitude continues to be “you’re on your own, pal.” That expansion of the unneccessariat in turn could result in a governance situation worse than our current one.
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I agree with your sentiment, that trump will simply DO and his sycophant retinue will swallow accordingly. However, “everyone” was not fine with it then, or now, and the people who were not fine with it wrote their representatives, protested, etc. etc.
Further, you’ll notice that the prior occupant of the White House ran and won, if not primarily, then certainly as a strong secondary, on stopping the USG’s use of torture. The ACLU’s thoughts on Obama’s work (PDF):
President Obama categorically disavowed torture when he came to office, and closed the secret CIA prisons where so much of the abuse took place.
So no, everyone wasn’t fine with it.
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I totally want to buy my tires there.
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Outstanding and infuriating read–thanks for that.
Ronny Ray-Gun’s ignorance/apathy regarding AIDS along with his secret war down south (and all the horrible trappings that went with it) only serve to inflate my fear at trump’s ascension. And we’re seeing it already, as trump ignores the fallout from the storms down in GA–14 dead so far:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/22/us/georgia-storms-fatalities/index.html
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It would require a complete re-think of the industry’s business model, structure and culture. Currently, each of these reputable outlets have their own in-house ad sales departments, which compete with those of other reputable outlets for advertiser dollars. The ad sales depts, while playing a critical role in funding the editorial operations, also tend to exert a bad influence on editorial product (e.g. insistence on sensationalism and dumbing-down to drive traffic, pushing for advertorial content, attempts to spike stories critical of advertisers, etc.). This happens at serious and reputable outlets a lot.
So getting the outlets to sign on to a unified ad network would require their closing their in-house ad sales units. Those guys would not go easily, especially since a lot of C-suite executives at media outlets come from sales rather than editorial (where the layoffs and buyouts usually happen).
There would have to also be a move away from the current model of media consolidation and its “synergies” (translation: more layoffs and buyouts, fewer voices and viewpoints, billionaire publishers calling the shots and setting the agenda) and a return to stand-alone papers and magazines. I doubt Rupert Murdoch or the guy who owns Tronc will be happy about editorial seeing an alternative to their way of running a newspaper.
Assuming this could happen, the ad network’s system would have to be very effective (think Amazon’s or Google’s level) in its targetting, with all participating outlets agreeing on how the algorithms work. That’s not easy, either, because as we’ve seen reported here big-data algorithms can contain biases that create unfair or broken results.
In that regard, they’d also have to agree on how the payout mechanism works and try to avoid the trap of the most sensational and click-baity outlets reaping the lion’s share while other, more serious and “boring” participants lose the ability to pay their staffs. Perhaps part of the ad network’s revenues (10-20%) can be earmarked for a pool meant to be distributed to the less popular but still important outlets – make it 50% and all participants will have less incentive to go sensational.
Those are just a few thoughts. It’s possible, but there are hurdles and interesting solutions that can result from figuring out the best way to jump them.
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Thanks! I like the out-of-the-box thinking.
So you know, I was responding to a new poster, someone who created that long, thought-out post as their introduction to this forum. I was hoping to encourage further participation. But I’m glad you jumped in too, because we need all the good ideas we can get!
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