- Joined
- Oct 22, 2002
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- 38,956
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- Frozen in Michigan
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- Old Fart
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- Don't be a dick.
They have seriously destablized American democracy and now can hold it up to the world as a "failed" system. They avoided pushback from Hillary Clinton from all sorts of things, including bounties on heads of American military. Oh, and Rump tried hard to rehab Russia's position in the world and to withdraw American military presence in the Middle East.
Trump had no part in destabalising American democracy. Facebook did that. Russia figured out how to use Facebook to the benefit first. But they can only do that once. Very quickly culture will adapt and become resilient. Russia won't be able to do it again.
It brings to mind the rise of Nazism and their clever use of radio. The other political parties saw radio as something uncultured for the riff raff and it was beneath them to use it for campaigning. The Nazis saw things differently and exploited it to their best ability. That only worked once. In the rest of the world all political parties copied Hitler's use of radio and it became the standard and accepted way of doing campaigning. The shame disappeared. The same will of course happen to political Facebook campaigning.
It also brings to mind how Obama was an early adopter of begging for money on-line in Kickstarter-like campaigns. Which gave him an edge in the 2008 election. But everybody does that now. So the Dems lost this edge in the next election.
And USA doesn't face uniquely serious problems for democracy, that any other country doesn't face. The real threat to democracy is the fact that production is increasingly robotocised and high-tech. The uneducated are increasingly become un-employable. They're increasingly fighting over fewer and fewer jobs. The poor are feeling the squeeze and becoming angry, desperate and are losing hope for the future. Which makes them vote for people like Trump. But this is an international problem. USA isn't in any way unique. In Sweden the second bigger political party is today the Sweden Democrats, who are just straight up racists. It is a party founded by Swedish Nazi SS volunteers returning after WW2. It's the same everywhere. Putin isn't guilty of creating this situation.
And it doesn't help that the urban well educated middle-class is ignoring these poor people and don't see the problem. Since the wheels of the economy is spinning faster than ever before they think everything is fine, and care more about gender pronouns and racist statues than the exploding opioid abuse in ghettos. Putin is innocent of even this.
This belongs in the political conspiracy theory thread.