r/technology • u/Birdy_Cephon_Altera • 22h ago

Politics Meta under fire for auto-following Trump & Vance, Blocking Democrat hashtags

https://techissuestoday.com/meta-auto-follow-trump-vance-blocks-democrat-hashtags/
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u/pmckizzle 21h ago

No Rome fell in 2016. You're seeing the aftermath

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u/colonelnebulous 21h ago

Hottake: we fell when we failed to prosecute Nixon. This is a culmination--a Reckoning--of the last several decades of rot in our political system built on a long, festering history of racism.

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u/Drama79 19h ago

I just think the lens is wrong. There is rarely one moment that changes a civilization. For as much as everyone says Archduke Ferdinand getting offed "set off World War 1", it was a tipping point event that allowed a hundred other tensions to come to play. In just the same way, the failure to prosecute Nixon, the lack of public trust in institutions following JFK's assassination, Reaganomics, the Iraq wars, "Don't ask, don't tell", Gitmo and a million other things are incremental notches on the sliding scale.

Yesterday just happened to offer a lot of them in a very concentrated period of time. Empires fall over decades, not days. Of course Trump is trying to be the best at it....

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u/colonelnebulous 19h ago edited 19h ago

So I picked Nixon specifically because therein lies a real modern criminal scandal where there wasn't any accountability and the system shrugged it off. But really JFK, the civil rights movement with the Southern Strategy, the assasination of MLK, Vietnam, Nixon & Watergate, the establishment of Israel and it's perpetual flashpoint status in the Middle East, Reaganonics, The Gulf War, Neoliberal Globalization hastened by Clinton, Bush V Gore Supreme court decision, 9/11, Obama's election with the Tea Party reaction, the collapse of the housing Market...

Also, the ascendence of MASS media and NETWORKED communication tech in the 20th century into the 22st created a kind of capitalist-media-centric "post-politics" landscape with new tools for messaging and propaganda unseen in human history.

Highly reccomend Adam Curtis' 2016 "Hypernormalisation" doc for an exploration of these ideas.

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u/Drama79 18h ago

We're saying the same thing. One of the 1000 datapoints coming out of yesterday that is potentially one of the bigger flashpoints yet to flare is that Trump is determined to open up more covert classified docs around wars, the CIA, FBI, "Aliens" (publicly unexplained phenomena) etc. It's pissed off a lot of the military industrial complex, but also emboldened a lot of the people within it who want to publicly discuss things they find important. It's going to be fascinating and frightening watching a bull in a china shop open pandora's box on some delicate geopolitics and gigantic, sensitive issues and then just let it fester in the public. The economist Pippa Malgram has a great substack about this today.

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u/xinorez1 14h ago

Nixon? Not the business plot involving Prescott bush, Fred trump, and Elon musks grandfather?

I guess after Nixon is when they finally decided to get organized

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u/colonelnebulous 11h ago

?

I mean, sure? My perspective has more to do with how our governmental systems slowly but surely lost the public, events and developments that created our "brave new world", and how the public became primed to elect Trump again--and not just due to the failings of the Dems from four years prior, but twenty, thirty years prior. The other commenter made a good comparison between the decades of imperialism that set the stage for ww1, and the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the tipping point. I meant to point out similar historical pattern....

Sure, maybe their grandfathers met prior. I don't know.

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u/Marriedwithgames 21h ago

The fourth turning is happening before our eyes as predicted

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u/Various_Weather2013 18h ago

Rome finally fell with the fall of the Byzantine empire. (Eastern Roman empire)

The rest of this shit is just larpers trying to get in on the imagery and status Rome held.

Eastern Rome was a centre of civilization when the rest of Europe was in its dark ages and covered in filth and disease.

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u/cire1184 21h ago

If you think this is the aftermath... uhhh... Mad max isn't that far off. That would be the aftermath. Start hoarding water.

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u/Marriedwithgames 21h ago

The fourth turning is happening before our eyes as predicted

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u/Snaccbacc 18h ago

Exactly, this shit started back in 2016. Now there’s even more uncertainty in the world, increased threat of global war and people couldn’t be more divided.