Republicans have a duty to their nation to provide a counter balance of power and they cannot use dogmatism as an excuse for staying put.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
The people in power today in the Federal government are the Republicans, with the exception of the House of Representatives.
It may be that the people in power will make it harder in the future for the opposition party to win, but at a grassroots level there is still substantial traction for a moderate/conservative party.
They knew who Trump was all along [1], but they stuck by him nevertheless. There are bound to be consequences for that kind of poor judgment.
1: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lindsey-graham-nominate-tr...
Basically all of the resulting right-wing media empires that were built still exist!
I'm unsympathetic to the "we need a right-wing social network where our death threats don't have to get moderated" argument, so let's see if a few more attempts that are in more good faith get blocked by Apple before I care too much there...
The problem with how far these big chunks of their voter base have gone into extremism is that it really undermines their complaints about being treated unfairly. If I'd predicted even a year ago that people would get shot storming the capital over unsubstantiated claims of fraud that Trump himself had stirred for the better part of a year I'd have been mocked even by "moderate" Republicans as having "trump derangment syndrome" and told I was being unfair to Trump by assuming he would act so badly... and yet here we are. At some point we have to start dealing with Trump, and his base, for who they actually are now, not just in idealistic terms of "Repubs and Dems are the same, just on opposite sides."
In practice that means everyone else - voters who don’t vote republicans - are getting screwed out of fair representation.
And the trend is only accelerating because each incremental increase in power is leveraged to entrench minority rule. For example:
- Conservative supreme court suspended the Voting Rights Act, freeing states to deploy previously illegal voter suppression tactics against Black voters.
- Senate majority leveraged to pack federal courts with partisan judges, making it harder to challenge voter suppression in court.
- State legislature majorities leveraged to deploy extreme gerrymandering, further entrenching unrepresentative seats in the US house of representatives.
- State legislature majorities leveraged to weaken voter protection laws, and lower the requirements for transparency in campaign financing. This in turn entrenches an electoral advantage in both state and federal elections (which are run by states).
- Leverage state executive power to further weaken voter suppression. A recent example of this is the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, where the Republican secretary of state was also a candidate, and purged record numbers of voters from the rolls in majority democrat districts; warned the public about a “suspected hacking attempt by the democratic party” on the official government website; oversaw record numbers of voters turned away in democratic districts; etc.
In summary, the data shows that Republicans are simply not popular enough to justify their current hold of power. They owe their victories to a systematic strategy of minority rule, which is inherently anti-democratic.
1. Franklin Graham 2. Dan Bongino 3. Fox News 4. Ben Shapiro 5. Dan Bongino 6. Ben Shapiro 7. Dan Bongino 8. TWICE 9. The New York Times 10. Ben Shapiro
Source: https://twitter.com/facebookstop10/status/134939331795225395...
If FB was overwhelmingly left leaning, why are almost all of its most popular posts from right wing outlets?
You’re extrapolating a lot here. Silicon Valley employees support Democrats, therefore any censorship Silicon Valley firms do is at the orders of the Democratic Party? Show the evidence of that.
Ignoring what the (largely powerless) ground level employees of the tech giants do, the chief execs of these companies lobby both Democrats and Republicans. No matter who is in power, money talks. I suspect that’s why even though there’s a huge amount of evidence that folks like Ben Shapiro have violated FB rules for gaming the feed there has been no action taken. FB has spent the last four years courting Republicans, now they’ll court Democrats.
That’s the real problem but it’s certainly easier to pretend it’s a party-specific problem that would solved if only the other people were in charge.
Quite the hyperbole without any evidence. Where is the evidence that they have demanded for censorship? Or have done so in the past where a democrat has censored a social media website? Absolutely none.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/4/21549859/twitter-suspend-...
Have they called out for censorship of things that were critical of them? No? Did they have a committee to investigate that?
Did they meet for dinners with Facebook executives? Oh wait, the Republicans were the one that did that.
The latter doesn't seem to be a problem and also looks to be the case here.
I'm exhausted of these conspiracy theories of "the other side doesn't like me", and offering absolutely zero proof/evidence of their claims. "Somebody did something I don't agree with, so there must be a hidden agenda." The problem is that anyone that believes in these conspiracies will absolutely not listen to counter-evidence. To them, it is all just part of the cover up. I'm not saying give up trying to counter them, but it is absolutely tiring.
Edit: Hit submit too soon
If you'd commented on the substance of the person's argument instead of attacking them personally based on ideology, I think your comment would have done much better. You could have even presented evidence from the persons twitter feed on this topic and used that to further clarify their opinion and how you felt their opinion in more context was wrong.
Not that that helps the original poster's point. The Democrats have been mad at FB and Twitter for much longer than the Republicans have!
Fox News has been moving left & was the first network to call Arizona for Biden very early as a suppression tactic. Conservatives are moving to Newsmax, OAN, & independent journalist outfits.
This is nonsensical. How is a call after after voting has ended a "suppression tactic"?
The talking point you're probably looking for is "polls were skewed intentionally as a suppression tactic" but even that's not so compelling given 2012's miss in most of the late polling in favor of Romney.
The call was before voting had ended. Does it make sense to you now?
> The talking point you're probably looking for is "polls were skewed intentionally as a suppression tactic"
Given widespread distrust of pollsters, I'm not sure effective polls are at suppression. Biased polling are effective at propping up certain media narratives.
No, it wasn’t. AZ polls closed at 7pm local time, Fox’s call was ~11:20pm EDT, which is 20 minutes after any polling locations in the Navajo Nation (which uses daylight time) closed, and 80 minutes after those in the rest of the state closed.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-18/facebo...
And former FAANG execs filling the Biden transition team, e.g. Zaid Zaid, Christopher Upperman, Rachel Lieber, Deon Scott:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/30/biden-transition-fa...
Silicon Valley overwhelmingly supports Democratic politicians. But Silicon Valley is also one of the most welcoming ears for the kinds of reforms that would upend the current party system, to wit proportional representation and non-plurality voting. That's a pretty big asterisk: nobody in North Korea can get away with promoting reforms that would destroy the party system!
It's also worth noting that the reason that Silicon Valley appears to, by their silence, always support the status quo, is because the tech companies know you hate them. Having the motto "Don't be evil" implies an understood risk of being evil. FANGMOAT knows that if they support any dramatic reform, there is a severe risk of a backlash effect that reduces support for that reform.
As such, the idea that tech companies serve as a power projection mechanism for the Democratic Party is in my opinion a coincidence of temporarily aligned motives and not a true ideological alliance. Tech company employees support the Democrats for a variety of reasons, but, in particular, many become pro-immigrant by meeting a few of them and most understand that climate science is not a conspiracy.
Then of course there are the actual harmful effects of social media on human beings as distinguished from supposed communist infiltration. That generates plenty of resentment as well.
Then there's the fact that in many cases tech companies make products that are ultimately used by employers to track and control their employees ("business intelligence") and which serve as opaque arbiters of things like paychecks, time clocks and tax forms. This isn't Google, of course, but tech companies serve as a mascot for the digital revolution at large, hence the mythology surrounding Bill Gates. Many if not most of the annoyances of computerization get blamed on the tech industry, fairly or not.
The fact that Silicon Valley overwhelmingly supports the Democratic Party - at North Korean Levels of popular support (search twitter on the fec.gov [1]) - and the Democratic Party is now responsible for regulating Silicon Valley makes it chilling when the demands for censorship by the Democratic Party are followed.
The Democrats have the power now and they will use it to suppress any opinion they disagree with.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/how-to-res...