That's an old view of the republican party. They were staunchly against gays, and the democrats didn't exactly embrace gays, but they didn't want to make their lives miserable for being gay.
But, we have a new republican party now - one that is centered on Trump at the moment and is entirely concerned with the economics of the middle/working class. I'm glad to see that's here. I've always been conservative leaning, but couldn't countenance being a republican because of their old social views which I thought to be completely backwards.
Now that they've dropped that, and (I think) embraced identity differences, I am more than willing to throw my hat in with them.
have you looked at the positions of the current candidate for VP? the various "bathroom" laws, as currently exhibited in Carolina?
the republicans, especially the evangelicals amongst them are pro LGBT. what. the. hell.
trump's speech got praise by david duke. the grand-wizard of the KKK, in case that isn't clear.
and this is the republican party platform. thiel right in the middle of it. pro big government, how else will you deport 11mio people, enforce law and order and build that wall?
People always drag out david duke, but how many Republican offices did that guy ever hold? ZERO.
Meanwhile, how about Democrat Robert Byrd who was an ex-KKK segregationist that was in the senate for FORTY YEARS!
Democrats are the part of slavery and segregation. They fought for slavery, they fought for segregation, they voted against the civil rights acts. TIL.
This is a bit of a backhanded-compliment. People are genuinely surprised, if they don't know the history, that the republican's weren't the party of slavery. Just meditate on that fact for a moment.
A) Duke has nothing to do with the republican party. It's not intellectually honest to keep bringing up David Duke as a proof-point that Republicans are racist when you dismiss that only six years ago there was a KKK grand cyclops in the Senate as a Democrat.
B) I don't think Trump is racist. It may also shock you that, despite being the party of the slavery and segregation, I don't think Democrats are racist either. In fact, I am fine having a long political discussion about ideas without ever labeling the other side with a scary name.
That's exactly how he plans to help the working class no? I don't want to get in to whether it will help, just pointing out that you're basically saying "my biggest problem with Trump is the part of his platform you find redeeming".
The Republican party has hardly dropped its old social views. Its 2016 platform[1] continues to call for a ban to same-sex marriage, and goes so far as to say that LGBT persons should not be entitled to anti-discriminatory protections. This is despite an attempt by more socially moderate Republicans to craft a more inclusive platform[2].
Its nominee may be an unconventional Republican, but the GOP is still the Grand Old Party.
"If you are single and earn less than $25,000, or married and jointly earn less than $50,000, you will not owe any income tax. That removes nearly 75 million households – over 50% – from the income tax rolls. They get a new one page form to send the IRS saying, 'I win,'"
"All other Americans will get a simpler tax code with four brackets – 0%, 10%, 20% and 25% – instead of the current seven. This new tax code eliminates the marriage penalty and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) while providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II."
"No business of any size, from a Fortune 500 to a mom and pop shop to a freelancer living job to job, will pay more than 15% of their business income in taxes."
I think I'll just leave it there. If you read that and still think "this is the man for the job", then I'm not sure what more can be said.
I've found that usually when people say things like this, as if the conclusion is extremely obvious, it's because they actually can't articulate why they have the position that they have.
Could you better articulate your point? Here's what I know of what Trump has said:
1) Yes, considerably less tax revenue
2) Which is justifiable because of a massive reduction of our military, and because of vague "waste fraud and abuse".
I guess what I'm getting at is: every single politician talks about cutting taxes. I think there is quite a bit more to be said on this topic.
I don't agree with all of Thiel's politics (I do identify as a libertarian thou), but I do respect the amount of courage it took to speak at this years RNC. The amount of disdain he'll receive from the Valley will be something else.
I disagree with Thiel a lot too, but I always recommend everyone to read his thoughts. He thinks independently and is smart. Thus, from him you can pick up interesting ideas that you won't get elsewhere.
I suspect B. I'm sure there are a lot of Trump supporters in SV, but they largely remain quiet because, I suspect, they don't want their careers/connections negatively harmed by people who think that a Trump presidency will be the end of civilization.
He got a standing ovation at the RNC. No longer do the social conservatives/evangelicals own the Republican party. It's about time.
It's a little disappointing that it takes so much bravery to disagree in Silicon Valley. Supposed, it's a place of brave ideas and independent thinking. But in reality, there's a giant groupthink going on there.
Disclaimer: I don't live in Silicon Valley but I mostly admire it. Also I disagree with Thiel myself though I don't hold it against him.
The majority of interesting projects to me have been fairly radical with political, social or economic propositions behind them even if that wasn't how they were advertised.
All the interesting things seem to happen on the peripheral. Whether the opinion is right or wrong for all time doesn't matter so much as it being divergent from regular thinking.
It is not that conventional thinking is bad. It works 99% of the time or it wouldn't exist. The problem with it is the same as with any habit. The population gets into a rut and begins to think there exists One True Way.
That's a big part of why I enjoy Less Wrong's Sequences and Slate Star Codex. It's so easy to fall into lazy thinking habits and sometimes the right turn of phrase or analogy can snap you out of it.
Examples (perhaps poor, you be the judge):
House prices go up. Why? Shouldn't they depreciate like cars? What's the difference between the English and Japanese housing market? It is culture or central bank policy?
Democracy will exist in the future. Why? They never lasted more than 2 centuries before, has that really changed?
This is not to say democracy shouldn't exist or house prices should rise, only that we ought to question our priors.
If you had to cannibalize key elements of existing vehicles to make most new cars, cars might not depreciate either. Real property and tangible personal property are different.
> What's the difference between the English and Japanese housing market? It is culture or central bank policy?
Perhaps neither. I mean, 0.6% annual population growth vs. -0.2% annual population growth is going to produce a pretty big difference in the housing market, all other things being equal (other things between the UK and Japan obviously are not equal, of course, but that difference alone is going to have an effect on trajectories in the market.)
> Democracy will exist in the future. Why? They never lasted more than 2 centuries before
Iceland (lonest span 930-1430), the Iroquois (since perhaps ~A.D. 1142), and Switzerland (since A.D. 1648) suggest that your "never lasted more than 2 centuries before" is mistaken. And, obviously, these previous long-running examples spent all or much of their existence in their adherence to democratic norms was a notable exception to the surrounding context, one would expect democracies to last longer when it was a more-universal norm.
Very good! We could have a discussion on the subject(s), ranging wide or in-depth. We might even come up with useful corollaries and ways to test the validity of claims.
That would be impossible were we to approach those propositions with mainstream thinking and take our assumptions as givens. Probably this is connected to the Royal Society's motto "Take nobody's word for it".
Sorry, which group still hates gay people so much that they would kill them given the chance and supporting mob? The tech scene might have problems but those groups are not even close to each other.
I would gather that your "myriad other characteristics" are really just policy disagreements, not "hate". I think you can disagree on policy with someone without hating them. Of course, that would require you to actually debate ideas, which I don't think you want to do - especially when it's so easy to throw a label around and end discussion.
B for sure. I still won't do it except when I've had a few beers around friends. The professional backlash has the potential to be pretty brutal. Not to mention how free people feel to call anyone supporting Trump a racist knuckledragger.
I'm not really on either side (I strongly dislike like Trump but also I don't identify with the left at the moment), but I'm curious about the argument here. Why do you call Trump racist? That's a very strong accusation and I'm wondering what drives your thinking on that.
Are you seriously asking this? Is his long history of racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and (for want of a better term) religiously-bigoted comments not enough for you? Are you asking us to go to Google and turn up one of the hundreds of compilations of these comments that you could very easily find for yourself?
Have you forgotten that he was a birther, and still is?
Is there anything short of a video of Trump at a KKK rally that would persuade you? It seems you're determined to pretend that he's not a racist despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
"Are you seriously asking this?"
Yes, I seriously believe in asking questions.
Birthers are ridiculous, but you don't actually have to be racist to be a birther. It's driven primarily by partisan politics. Racism just gets mixed in sometimes.
Here's what I see, over and over again: Trump does something that is not exactly racist but ambiguous enough to be interpreted as such. The media goes wild and declares him Hitler. But when you read the details, it's not nearly as bad as the media claim. So Trump gets free publicity and makes his critics look unreasonable. A clear example of this is the "star of David" incident.
It's a sleazy tactic, but very effective. He uses this tactic not just with racism, but with all kinds of manufactured fake scandals.
If you mix in enough of these incidents with your own confirmation bias, you can be very confident that Trump is racist and yet not be able to provide any solid evidence. I suspect this is what is happening here.
>Here's what I see, over and over again: Trump does something that is not exactly racist but ambiguous enough to be interpreted as such.
By far the most plausible explanation for that behavior is that he is in fact a racist. However, you've made it clear that you won't believe Trump is a racist unless he goes on TV and says "I am a racist". By your standards of proof, hardly any racists exist in the entire USA. It's also inaccurate, by the way, to say that birthirism is driven by partisan politics. The mainstream of the Republican party never touched it, and it was not a component of McCain's campaign. It's driven by people who don't like the fact that the current President isn't an old white dude. After all, McCain himself really wasn't born in the USA, but no-one ever made much of that.
My own preference for POTUS would be someone who, say, doesn't retweet bogus crime statistics by white supremacists, or promulgate factually inaccurate and highly incendiary stereotypes of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. You may be ok with a POTUS who does those things. If you are, then there is probably not much point in us having a discussion.
By the way, it might surprise you to know that you also have confirmation bias. (As confirmation bias is something that we all have, it tends to be a bit of a double-edged sword, rhetorically speaking.) I can see that you are not going to accept that Trump is a racist simply because you interpret all the evidence on the assumption that he is not. However, the alternative hypothesis you're outlining is that he's someone who cynically exploits racial tensions for political gain. That is hardly any better.
"However, the alternative hypothesis you're outlining is that he's someone who cynically exploits racial tensions for political gain."
This is exactly what I'm saying. And I agree that it's not good.
I don't support Trump. I won't vote for him. I'm not okay with people playing off racial politics on either side. I also am not convinced that he's not a racist, I just don't see solid evidence either way. That's why I asked for evidence, and instead of providing it, you just attacked the "standard of proof" you imagine me to have. Your assumption that birthers are all racist (and not just partisan fools) is not proof of anything. You're making up all kinds of assumptions and accusations (before and after all your edits). And then you call me a troll (before editing that out).
I do think that it's trolling to ask why people think Trump is a racist. Your own previous comment makes it perfectly clear why people would think that Trump is a racist. I'm suspect that in reality you know perfectly well which facts lead people to draw that conclusion.
I did not say that all birthers are racist on a personal level, but the movement is undeniably a racist movement. As you know, there are no credible grounds for believing that Obama is not a natural born US citizen. People only think that he is not because he is black.
It's perfectly appropriate to attack your standard of proof when your standard of proof is too high. By your own admission, Trump keeps saying things that appear to be rooted in racism. The comments in question are widely known and abundantly easy to find. I can't really interpret a request for "evidence" as sincere in this context.
If that socialist candidate that you mentioned was big on, say, defense spending, and what you cared about most was defense spending, and the other candidate held the opposite view on defense spending, then it's not unreasonable that you might vote for the socialist candidate despite all the other character or political flaws that candidate might have.
Someone big on defense spending might not believe in any part of socialism, but vote for the socialist anyway to get the result they want on the issue they care about. I imagine they'd get annoyed if people started assuming they were socialist based on WHO they voted for, rather than WHY they voted for that person.
Alright, I'll bite, even though I can't vote here, so I suppose my opinion doesn't really matter and I would not say I am a strong supporter of either candidate.
There are many issues with your question ("Why would you support a racist candidate if you weren't also racist").
First, most of what I've heard about Trump being a "racist" is his comments about illegal Mexican immigrants (which is not a race... it's a group of by-definition criminals, since last time I checked illegally entering the US is, well, not legal). Similarly for the more rigorous checks of people coming from countries having known radical islamist ties -- not a race (and FWIW, many leaders across the world are proposing essentially the same thing -- but Trump gets singled out for some reason). People also seem to paint Trump as being very anti-immigration, though I fail to see how Hillary is any better. Neither appears to have any plan to do anything about highly skilled immigrants -- Hillary does have some stop gap measures for non-skill-related immigration (why does this take priority over immigrants who contribute more to the economy..?), but that's about it.
So then, I'm not that convinced he's a racist in the first place, at least not much worse than everyone else. It's not like you're either an angel or a racist -- probably everyone has some unconscious prejudices, and I'm not going to base my rating of people based on how carefully they choose their words. Content not delivery.
But more importantly, it is entirely possible to support a racist candidate even if you are not racist. Simple example: one candidate is racist but has mostly reasonable policies. The other candidate is "not racist" but proposes to nuke all of the world the day they're elected. It's always a tradeoff.
Trump's racist credentials go quite a way beyond his comments on illegal Mexican immigrants. For example, there are his comments about judge who allegedly can't do his job because he is "Mexican" (though born in Indiana):
Yes, that his ties to his Mexican heritage would suggest that he would be biased specifically against Donald Trump due to Trump's position on Mexican immigration. This is not a particularly strong argument but it's hardly racist. Racist would be some unconnected national lawsuit controversy where the judge made a questionable decision and Trump said 'what do you expect? he's Mexican.'
The judge in question was a member of an ethnic/activist Hispanic lawyer's group. Imagine if the judge presiding over a case with a prominent African American plaintiff turned out to be a member of 'The Dallas Lawyers Association for White Culture' or something. I doubt that everyone who pointed this out would be considered racist.
As Paul Ryan put it, suggesting that someone can't do their job properly because of their ethnic background is pretty much the textbook definition of racism.
The goals of the California La Raza Lawyers Association are (i) fighting prejudice against Latinos in the legal system and (ii) encouraging Latinos to go into law careers. Swap out 'Latinos' for 'white people' and neither of those goals really makes sense any more, because whites and Latinos in California have different histories and face different problems. For that reason it's unclear what sort of organization the 'Dallas Lawyers Association for White Culture' would be, or what sort of goals it would have. The analogy doesn't make any sense.
Trump has, not surprisingly, been shamelessly lying about the association and trying to paint it as some sort of Mexican supremacist organization. As you might expect, given that it counts a very respectable judge amongst it's members, it is no such thing:
All of this is happening because Trump is a bigot. I think it's quite possible that he believes in the conspiracy theory that he's concocted. However, there have so far been no signs of Curiel doing anything inappropriate:
Paul Ryan's comment completely ignores the context. The job of a judge is to make unbiased decisions. A judge engaged in ethnoactivism may conceivably be biased against a defendant whose political platform runs against those interests. This is simply not a racist claim. The mistake you and Ryan make is to misinterpret it as a much more general claim than it actually is.
You said there was an extensive list of racist comments by Trump, but then the only examples you can bring up are incredibly flimsy. It's therefore hard to take your accusations seriously.
It is an absolutely straightforward example of a racist comment. Trump knows full well that his complaints about Curiel are baseless, so he's lashing out by trying to make something out of the fact that the judge has Mexican parents. In other words, he's using racial insults because he's lost the argument. In legal and logical terms, he might just as well have said that Curiel is a poopy pants.
Quite often there are efforts to weave conspiracy theories around Trump's incoherent ranting. So in this instance, there is some kind of story about how the California La Raza Lawyers Association is a shady "ethnoactivist" group, whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. All of this is just a way of providing cover for another one of Trump's uncontrolled bigoted outbursts. The judge is a member of a completely unremarkable kind of law association. It is no different from a gay judge being a member of an LGBT bar association, or a black judge being a member of a black bar association. Everyone knows that these sorts of organizations have the purpose of tackling specific problems faced by (respectively) LGBT and black people in the legal profession. To say that membership of such an organization can disqualify a judge from a particular case is effectively to say that gay judges can't make judgments on gay issues and black judges can't make judgments on black issues. That would be racism/homophobia par exellence.
By the way, you may recall that Trump has expanded his comments on judges since. He also believes that he could not be judged fairly by a Muslim judge. I wonder what complicated theories people have come up with to try to justify that comment.
It says something quite extraordinary about the present state of the country that there are people willing to defend a Presidential candidate who attacks a federal judge using ugly racist language. Even mainstream Republicans like Paul Ryan don't want to touch this.
It's a simple implication of bias for this particular case. The example of the Muslim judge is also straight forward. No complicated theories or conspiracies are necessary. People whose common sense is not clouded by liberal hysteria can see this.
Donald Trump has offended every ethnic, national and religious group other than white Christian Americans, and thinks that this gives him the right to be tried by a white Christian judge with American parents. Apart from having no legal merit whatsoever, this kind of speculation about possible biases degenerates into incoherence, since there are many different facets to any judge's background and many of them will point in different directions. For example, Curiel was appointed to the state superior court by a Republican governor. Does that mean he shouldn't try the case because, as someone with probable Republican sympathies, he might be biased in favor of Trump? You could fish through Curiel's background and come up with all kinds of speculations about possible biases. Trump chose to take the low road here and throw a bone to his racist supporters by making a totally irrelevant reference to the nationality of the judge's parents. Let's not dignify that disgusting behavior by pretending that Trump was making some kind of legitimate complaint about possible bias. If he had a legitimate complaint, his legal team would be arguing it.
>People whose common sense is not clouded by liberal hysteria can see this.
So Newt Gingrich is clouded by liberal hysteria? He called Trump's comments regarding the judge "inexcusable". And I guess Paul Ryan must be another closet liberal hysteric. It's quite incorrect to paint this as the fringe liberal left vs. common sense. The split of opinion is simply the split between racists and non-racists.
"A defendant, who is running for office on a promise to get tough on Mexican immigration, questioned the neutrality of a judge from a Mexican immigrant family who is presiding over a private lawsuit against the individual."
"A politician, who is running for office on a promise to overturn carbon emissions legislation, called into question the credibility of climate scientist on the grounds that he was of Mexican descent."
Paul Ryan's comment applies to one of those statements, not the other. We don't need to discuss the overall merit of Trump's argument, I'm just saying it's not good evidence of Trump being racist.
(The liberal left is anything but fringe... as far as I can tell, American political discourse is dominated by liberal hysteria, with a few other oddities mixed in like hero worship of the police and military, and unswerving support for Israel. But I digress.)
I'd say that locating Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan on the liberal left is quite a heroic attempt to save that particular argument! If it is really your view that they are left wing liberals, I wonder if your definitions of other terms (e.g. racism) may be so idiosyncratic that a productive discussion is impossible.
As to your comparison between the two statements, it's important to understand first of all that neither of them makes any sense. So in fact it is important to discuss the merits of Trump's argument. As I said before, there are multiple aspects to Curiel's background which point in different directions as to his possible biases. Why is it that Trump chose to focus on unfounded speculations regarding the influence of his ethnicity? Because dogwhistle racism is part of his platform. What he's essentially saying is that the judge is not a "real" American and hence can't be trusted.
The entire edifice of modern liberal politics seems to be built upon the very idea of conscious and unconscious bias on the part of people wielding some fraction of institutional power. Usually it's referred to with terms like 'white privilege' or 'patriarchy.' Calling this out as racist or sexist doesn't get much traction. On HN I even recall repeated discussions on whether white programmers can be trusted construct non-racist algorithms.
People wielding institutional power do have conscious and unconscious biases. It's not racist to point that out. But you do seem to have an unusual definition of the term, so I'm not quite sure what you have in mind there. Are you trying to suggest a comparison with what Trump is doing? If Trump has evidence that institutions controlled predominantly by people with Mexican ancestry are systematically discriminating against white Americans, then he should make it public.
You seem to have contradicted yourself. You admit that people wielding institutional power (who would surely include judges) can make decisions affected by conscious or unconscious biases, and it's not racist to point this out. Case closed.
It is not racist to point out institutional racial biases when there is evidence for their existence. It is racist to make baseless speculations about an individual person's biases simply because of their ethnicity. It's the difference between pointing out that black Americans are more likely to be involved in violent crime than white Americans (not racist) vs. assuming that a particular individual is going to commit a violent crime simply because they are black (racist).
The algorithm discussion is too vague to really engage with, but it's presumably possible that a person's biases could influence their choice of algorithm in certain instances. If we're talking about, say, an algorithm for matching profiles on okcupid, then certain biases of the programmer might "leak" into the design of the algorithm. You could argue semantics over whether the algorithm itself is really "biased", but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the discussion you linked to.
> illegal Mexican immigrants [...] a group of by-definition criminals, since last time I checked illegally entering the US is, well, not legal
Improper entry is a crime, but lots of illegal immigrants aren't guilty of it, but only unlawful presence, which is a civil wrong, not a crime (it is illegal but not criminal -- these things aren't the same.)
But when one of the candidates main strategies is to be so beyond-the-pale ludicrous that any honest question or statement about him is by definition 'loaded' -- nevermind the fact that he himself is the one doing the loading -- it can't be avoided.
Quoting Trump in context is perceived as an attack on him. Showing video of him talking is perceived as an attack on him (that's what the most recent HRC anti-trump attack ads are. Just video of him talking with a little context and emotional window dressing). Literally describing his policy positions or advisers honestly is perceived as an attack on him.
I'm not elgabogringo, and he should answer IMO, but I've voted for racists before so I will give you my own answer:
Voting, particularly in the American 2-party system, is mainly about choosing the lesser of evils.
Would it better to support a moderately racist candidate (keeping in mind most Americans are racist and you yourself probably are to a degree), or somebody utterly free of racist candidate convictions but who has an unshakable faith in military intervention abroad and whose ideas, if implemented, would lead to hundreds of thousands of noncombatants killed?
What if a candidate was racist in her personal worldview, but at the same time supported the cessation of, and was running for an office with a significant impact on, the catastrophic, Nazi-genocide-equivalent "War on Drugs"?
In other words, there are some things worse than racism, and other things equally bad. It's one variable in an extremely complex equation, and one that is also impossible to quantify.
Where do you draw the line between bravery and stupidity? Somehow I don't think a billionare has much to fear from either crowd.
But it does take a special kind of person to be the ordinary guy at the Republican convention who thinks gay marriage is a-okay. Or to be the ordinary bro at the SV soylent hackathon who thinks that we should vote in the biggest anti-immigration candidate in 50 years or more.
Scenario (a) is kind of dependent on who the someone is, isn't it? I think Thiel being an economically liberal, somewhat socially reactionary billionaire helps quite a bit, as does his being a white male (arguably).
Actually I am surprised in todays climate we do not see more of this. Scott McNealy should have been there as well. I share his sentiment that the worst CEO will make a better president than the best politician. Wish I remember where he said that to source it - think it was an interview on Triangulation on the TWIT network.
There have long been gays in the Republican Party and active at the conventions, and they generally agree with the mainstream party position on issues other than gay rights. So, if you got with (a) it is not actually all that brave.
Trump, on the other hand, disagrees with most experts, both partisans and neutral, on climate, energy, foreign policy, environment, and military tactics and strategy (that was not an exhaustive list).
Going with (b) is very brave, because it is a tacit admission that it doesn't matter to you that Trump is wrong in so many vital areas according to most experts.
There aren't many ways to look at that that do not cast you in a bad light. Does it mean you don't think it is possible to actually be an expert in those fields, and so Trump's disagreement with "expert" do not matter?
Or does it mean that you believe it is possible to really be an expert, but almost all of diverse set of current experts got it totally wrong despite decades in their fields, and Trump had figured it all out?
Or does it mean you consider other issues, like whether we should increase torture of prisoners, or we should be targeting families of suspected terrorists, more important than climate, energy, etc., and you match Trump on those other issues?
It's like P.J. O'Rourke said, "I am endorsing Hillary. The second worst thing that could happen to this country. But she’s way behind in second place, you know? She’s wrong about absolutely everything — but she’s wrong within normal parameters!".
No. I'm not going to be baited by ignorant people. If you think our government can experience that kind of contraction in tax receipts without there being catastrophic macroeconomic consequences, I have nothing to say to you. The Tax Policy Center (apparently nonpartisan) drafted a review of the plan - go read that if you're curious.
I'd like to see tax reform. I'd like to see it executed by someone who isn't a raving "billionaire" lunatic with a fairly transparent agenda to lower his own tax bill.
I understood this to be an attack on basically everything the Republican party stands for. Which seemed far braver than saying he was proud to be gay (which to be clear, was also brave in this context).
But everyone seems to assume that the "fake culture wars" are something the Democrats made up, and the Republicans are just fighting for the natural state of affairs, when it seems pretty clear to me that stirring people up about this stuff (e.g. the southern strategy of driving black people to the democratic party so that racists white people will vote republican, or recasting gay marriage as an attack on traditional marriage) is basically what lead to the modern malaise of the Republican party and Trump. There must be a lot of people who want "republican" style economic ideas that will vote Libertarian or even Democrat this year, just to avoid being associated with hate.
So his comment makes much more sense to me if you replace "but" with "because":
I don't pretend to agree with every plank in our party's platform. _Because_ fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.
That fits in neatly with the bit about stopping fighting expensive wars and focus on the economy. It also fits in with him being a proudly gay Republican (and not directly related to Thiel but the most famous transgender woman in America is also a republican). Yet everyone else is reading this the opposite way to me, so maybe I'm wrong?
>Similarly for the more rigorous checks of people coming from countries having known radical islamist ties
I'm not going to touch the rest of your nonsense, but this is an utterly shameless attempt to rewrite history. You know perfectly well that Trump called on several occasions for a ban on all Muslims entering the US, regardless of origin. That is indefensible bigotry. I think you must know that it is indefensible because you tried to gloss over it.
If he'd really wanted a temporary ban (which would still, obviously, be indefensible), he'd have set out clear criteria for when it would end.
Someone who casually throws out insane and bigoted policy proposals, without showing any evidence whatsoever of having seriously thought them through, is not fit to be President. I don't have much time for people who act as apologists for this kind of behavior and help to maintain the illusion that what Trump says is anywhere in the ballpark of actual political discourse. This is a crisis. Every time someone makes bogus arguments for taking Trump seriously as a political figure, we're edging closer to a disaster that could take decades to recover from. It's not fun and games at this point. History will judge us. And your pro-Trump comments will be on record forever.
> How does adding context to a comment taken out of context makes me "pro-Trump"?
Because you're apologising for his bigotry. The fact that the ban is (allegedly) temporary makes it no less bigoted and no more defensible. This is probably going to be quite a close election. Everyone should be speaking out against Trump, not trying to help him weasel out of taking responsibility for the awful things he's said.
>How is properly vetting immigrants, in particular from high-risk countries, bigotry?
What a disingenuous comment. I made it perfectly clear that I was talking about his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the US. You and the OP would love to pretend that he never made that proposal, but he did.
I’m surprised that you’re making such a brazen attempt to rewrite history. He was recorded calling for a complete ban on all Muslims entering the US. Were you really not aware of this? You quoted his "what the hell is going on" words from this video clip, so I think you must have seen it, and I think you must have been aware of what he actually said.
You can't really complain about political discussions occurring in this context. We're commenting on a link to an article about Peter Thiel speaking at the Republican convention. If you don't want political discussions on the site (which is fine), you should just remove this topic altogether.
When someone says something that's flatly untrue on HN, I think it's appropriate to correct that. There is no reason why Trump or his supporters should get a free pass to rewrite history without being challenged on it. If, however, it is your view that there are certain political ideologies or candidates which have a special "protected status" on HN, then I will moderate my comments in future accordingly. I did not think that there was any such policy, though.
When you find yourself impelled to enter a thread like this:
> I'm not going to touch the rest of your nonsense, but this is an utterly shameless
... please don't. Nothing good can come of a discussion that begins by breaking the site guidelines outright. This is true regardless of how important the issue is or how right you are, indeed gets truer as those things are more the case, because you discredit your position by behaving this way. If it's correct, you ought to be able to show that without fulminating.
dang: If it is your policy to selectively tone police people who disagree with Donald Trump, then you have the right to do that as a moderator of this web site. But you should not pretend that you are doing something else.
That's precisely what I'm not doing. You don't get to break the rules here just because you're anti-X, even when X is Trump. Following the site guidelines means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.
If that's how you feel about it, I really think you should just enforce a blanket ban on political discussion on HN. My understanding was that political topics typically aren't permitted, and I suppose it's only because of Thiel that this one got to the front page.
The reason I say this is that political discussion has a moral urgency that technical and philosophical discussion typically lack. Civility in a political context implicitly says "I disagree with your view but it's one that should be taken seriously". I won't stir the pot by mentioning any extreme examples, but there are some political ideologies that do not deserve that level of respect. Of course, one may agree or disagree that this principle applies in the case of Trump -- I don't expect HN to take a position. But asking for maximal civility in this context is making a demand that's far less reasonable than it is outside a political context. Someone who sincerely believes that Trump is a dangerous bigot can't be expected to talk about him as if he's a serious candidate. And yet to refrain from commenting would leave his bigotry unchallenged.
So I'd say relax the interpretation of the rule slightly (it's not as if I was going completely off the rails), or make a firm decision about whether or not politics is off topic on HN. As it is, you're tending to give too much space to polite racist nonsense.
That's very well put and a good example of the substantive kind of comment we're hoping for.
I don't know that we have the ability to do what you're suggesting. First, it gets awfully tricky to define "politics". Second, people wouldn't listen. Third, there's a legitimate intersection between the core mandate of HN and some political stories, even if they nearly always bleed over. That's why the site guidelines have always declared most stories about politics to be off-topic, instead of all. In the end there are judgment calls to be made and no easy way to avoid them.
Thiel has substantial leverage over YC, and Thiel clearly is a very strong Trump supporter. So I'm not sure why you're surprised that anything which can be construed as anti-trump is being censored: YC supports Trump and will silence anyone who disagrees.
That is so remarkably far from the truth that it feels like the work of an optimization algorithm.
I don't know if Thiel has any leverage over YC, but if he does it must decay awfully quickly with distance, since I've never noticed any with respect to HN and I'm pretty sensitive about that. In fact the very notion strikes me as absurd, which I mention just as a data point.
As for YC supporting Trump (or rather YC people; I don't imagine YC as an org would support anybody), the data is both prolific and exactly the opposite.
I'd suggest pushing it up internally that Thiel should be removed as a partner. There's going to be a massive boycott/retaliation against Thiel and all of his investments. YC would do well to lead the way and disassociate themselves.
Even if I agreed with you and had any influence over it, it would not be in HN's interests to do that.
The reason is that such forms of influence are reciprocal à la Newton's third law. To attempt to exercise such influence would be to invite it in return. I think everyone at/on HN and at YC would agree that it's best for HN to remain free of that.
>Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don't need to see Hillary Clinton's deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. She pushed for a war in Libya, and today it's a training ground for ISIS. On this most important issue, Donald Trump is right. It's time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country.
What? Isn't Trump for _escalation_ in the middle east? This makes no sense.
In general, the whole "social issues are just distractions from economic problems, which are the only issues that matter" attitude taken by Thiel as a huge red flag.
Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry about being forced to use the wrong bathroom. Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry about being impregnated by a rapist and forced to carry the baby to term. Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry about shot by the police while his hands are up because the cops are afraid of his skin color. And evidently Peter Thiel is so disconnected from ordinary life that he's forgotten that he has to worry about being denied service because of his partner's gender.
These issues are real issues to matter to real people, and for some of us (including me, a lesbian trans woman), they are our top priority. The only reason he's saying this is because either he's lucky enough to be unaffected or he thinks he's unaffected. If Thiel thinks these issues are "fake", then he doesn't belong in a position of power, and I am automatically skeptical of any candidate he endorses.
It's just like last year, when Obergefell vs. Hodges happened, and immediately the anti-TPP crowd started claiming that Obergefell vs. Hodges was just a smokescreen meant to distract people from TPP being put on the fast track. I'm sorry, but my and more importantly my friends' ability to marry whoever we want is deeply important and very much real. All that little outburst by the anti-TPP crowd did is prove to me that the anti-TPP agenda is opposed to the LGBT rights movement. They've basically guaranteed that I'll never speak out against the TPP.
96 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadBut, we have a new republican party now - one that is centered on Trump at the moment and is entirely concerned with the economics of the middle/working class. I'm glad to see that's here. I've always been conservative leaning, but couldn't countenance being a republican because of their old social views which I thought to be completely backwards.
Now that they've dropped that, and (I think) embraced identity differences, I am more than willing to throw my hat in with them.
have you looked at the positions of the current candidate for VP? the various "bathroom" laws, as currently exhibited in Carolina?
the republicans, especially the evangelicals amongst them are pro LGBT. what. the. hell.
trump's speech got praise by david duke. the grand-wizard of the KKK, in case that isn't clear.
and this is the republican party platform. thiel right in the middle of it. pro big government, how else will you deport 11mio people, enforce law and order and build that wall?
libertarian MY ASS.
Meanwhile, how about Democrat Robert Byrd who was an ex-KKK segregationist that was in the senate for FORTY YEARS!
Democrats are the part of slavery and segregation. They fought for slavery, they fought for segregation, they voted against the civil rights acts. TIL.
if you truly believe that today's democrat party, the one with the black president, is pro-slavery and pro-racism, well, good riddance then.
B) I don't think Trump is racist. It may also shock you that, despite being the party of the slavery and segregation, I don't think Democrats are racist either. In fact, I am fine having a long political discussion about ideas without ever labeling the other side with a scary name.
but like most things he says, i'm not sure if he means it.
Its nominee may be an unconventional Republican, but the GOP is still the Grand Old Party.
[1] https://prod-static-ngop-pbl.s3.amazonaws.com/media/document... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/us/politics/republican-con...
"If you are single and earn less than $25,000, or married and jointly earn less than $50,000, you will not owe any income tax. That removes nearly 75 million households – over 50% – from the income tax rolls. They get a new one page form to send the IRS saying, 'I win,'"
"All other Americans will get a simpler tax code with four brackets – 0%, 10%, 20% and 25% – instead of the current seven. This new tax code eliminates the marriage penalty and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) while providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II."
"No business of any size, from a Fortune 500 to a mom and pop shop to a freelancer living job to job, will pay more than 15% of their business income in taxes."
I think I'll just leave it there. If you read that and still think "this is the man for the job", then I'm not sure what more can be said.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/tax-reform
I've found that usually when people say things like this, as if the conclusion is extremely obvious, it's because they actually can't articulate why they have the position that they have.
Could you better articulate your point? Here's what I know of what Trump has said:
1) Yes, considerably less tax revenue 2) Which is justifiable because of a massive reduction of our military, and because of vague "waste fraud and abuse".
I guess what I'm getting at is: every single politician talks about cutting taxes. I think there is quite a bit more to be said on this topic.
Here is a back of the envelope accounting of his plan: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/03/07/...
All politicians are somewhat hand wavy about getting costs and revenues to line up. Most don't just completely make shit up.
(a) for someone to say that they're proud to be gay at a republican convention
(b) for someone in Silicon Valley to openly support Trump
I'm actually not sure.
He got a standing ovation at the RNC. No longer do the social conservatives/evangelicals own the Republican party. It's about time.
Disclaimer: I don't live in Silicon Valley but I mostly admire it. Also I disagree with Thiel myself though I don't hold it against him.
The majority of interesting projects to me have been fairly radical with political, social or economic propositions behind them even if that wasn't how they were advertised.
All the interesting things seem to happen on the peripheral. Whether the opinion is right or wrong for all time doesn't matter so much as it being divergent from regular thinking.
It is not that conventional thinking is bad. It works 99% of the time or it wouldn't exist. The problem with it is the same as with any habit. The population gets into a rut and begins to think there exists One True Way.
That's a big part of why I enjoy Less Wrong's Sequences and Slate Star Codex. It's so easy to fall into lazy thinking habits and sometimes the right turn of phrase or analogy can snap you out of it.
Examples (perhaps poor, you be the judge):
House prices go up. Why? Shouldn't they depreciate like cars? What's the difference between the English and Japanese housing market? It is culture or central bank policy?
Democracy will exist in the future. Why? They never lasted more than 2 centuries before, has that really changed?
This is not to say democracy shouldn't exist or house prices should rise, only that we ought to question our priors.
Supply and demand.
> Shouldn't they depreciate like cars?
If you had to cannibalize key elements of existing vehicles to make most new cars, cars might not depreciate either. Real property and tangible personal property are different.
> What's the difference between the English and Japanese housing market? It is culture or central bank policy?
Perhaps neither. I mean, 0.6% annual population growth vs. -0.2% annual population growth is going to produce a pretty big difference in the housing market, all other things being equal (other things between the UK and Japan obviously are not equal, of course, but that difference alone is going to have an effect on trajectories in the market.)
> Democracy will exist in the future. Why? They never lasted more than 2 centuries before
Iceland (lonest span 930-1430), the Iroquois (since perhaps ~A.D. 1142), and Switzerland (since A.D. 1648) suggest that your "never lasted more than 2 centuries before" is mistaken. And, obviously, these previous long-running examples spent all or much of their existence in their adherence to democratic norms was a notable exception to the surrounding context, one would expect democracies to last longer when it was a more-universal norm.
That would be impossible were we to approach those propositions with mainstream thinking and take our assumptions as givens. Probably this is connected to the Royal Society's motto "Take nobody's word for it".
Listen for yourself: https://youtu.be/bywahovIbPg?t=201
Imagine someone upset at being called a socialist, when all they did was vote for the socialist candidate.
You don't actually want to have a debate, you just want to call me a name and hope that ends the discussion.
Have you forgotten that he was a birther, and still is?
Is there anything short of a video of Trump at a KKK rally that would persuade you? It seems you're determined to pretend that he's not a racist despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I didn't think many people matching those criteria would be reading my comment, but ok:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=trump+racist+comments
Scroll down a bit and you'll see that even Paul Ryan has noticed that there's a problem here.
Birthers are ridiculous, but you don't actually have to be racist to be a birther. It's driven primarily by partisan politics. Racism just gets mixed in sometimes.
Here's what I see, over and over again: Trump does something that is not exactly racist but ambiguous enough to be interpreted as such. The media goes wild and declares him Hitler. But when you read the details, it's not nearly as bad as the media claim. So Trump gets free publicity and makes his critics look unreasonable. A clear example of this is the "star of David" incident.
It's a sleazy tactic, but very effective. He uses this tactic not just with racism, but with all kinds of manufactured fake scandals.
If you mix in enough of these incidents with your own confirmation bias, you can be very confident that Trump is racist and yet not be able to provide any solid evidence. I suspect this is what is happening here.
By far the most plausible explanation for that behavior is that he is in fact a racist. However, you've made it clear that you won't believe Trump is a racist unless he goes on TV and says "I am a racist". By your standards of proof, hardly any racists exist in the entire USA. It's also inaccurate, by the way, to say that birthirism is driven by partisan politics. The mainstream of the Republican party never touched it, and it was not a component of McCain's campaign. It's driven by people who don't like the fact that the current President isn't an old white dude. After all, McCain himself really wasn't born in the USA, but no-one ever made much of that.
My own preference for POTUS would be someone who, say, doesn't retweet bogus crime statistics by white supremacists, or promulgate factually inaccurate and highly incendiary stereotypes of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. You may be ok with a POTUS who does those things. If you are, then there is probably not much point in us having a discussion.
By the way, it might surprise you to know that you also have confirmation bias. (As confirmation bias is something that we all have, it tends to be a bit of a double-edged sword, rhetorically speaking.) I can see that you are not going to accept that Trump is a racist simply because you interpret all the evidence on the assumption that he is not. However, the alternative hypothesis you're outlining is that he's someone who cynically exploits racial tensions for political gain. That is hardly any better.
This is exactly what I'm saying. And I agree that it's not good.
I don't support Trump. I won't vote for him. I'm not okay with people playing off racial politics on either side. I also am not convinced that he's not a racist, I just don't see solid evidence either way. That's why I asked for evidence, and instead of providing it, you just attacked the "standard of proof" you imagine me to have. Your assumption that birthers are all racist (and not just partisan fools) is not proof of anything. You're making up all kinds of assumptions and accusations (before and after all your edits). And then you call me a troll (before editing that out).
I did not say that all birthers are racist on a personal level, but the movement is undeniably a racist movement. As you know, there are no credible grounds for believing that Obama is not a natural born US citizen. People only think that he is not because he is black.
It's perfectly appropriate to attack your standard of proof when your standard of proof is too high. By your own admission, Trump keeps saying things that appear to be rooted in racism. The comments in question are widely known and abundantly easy to find. I can't really interpret a request for "evidence" as sincere in this context.
Someone big on defense spending might not believe in any part of socialism, but vote for the socialist anyway to get the result they want on the issue they care about. I imagine they'd get annoyed if people started assuming they were socialist based on WHO they voted for, rather than WHY they voted for that person.
There are many issues with your question ("Why would you support a racist candidate if you weren't also racist").
First, most of what I've heard about Trump being a "racist" is his comments about illegal Mexican immigrants (which is not a race... it's a group of by-definition criminals, since last time I checked illegally entering the US is, well, not legal). Similarly for the more rigorous checks of people coming from countries having known radical islamist ties -- not a race (and FWIW, many leaders across the world are proposing essentially the same thing -- but Trump gets singled out for some reason). People also seem to paint Trump as being very anti-immigration, though I fail to see how Hillary is any better. Neither appears to have any plan to do anything about highly skilled immigrants -- Hillary does have some stop gap measures for non-skill-related immigration (why does this take priority over immigrants who contribute more to the economy..?), but that's about it.
So then, I'm not that convinced he's a racist in the first place, at least not much worse than everyone else. It's not like you're either an angel or a racist -- probably everyone has some unconscious prejudices, and I'm not going to base my rating of people based on how carefully they choose their words. Content not delivery.
But more importantly, it is entirely possible to support a racist candidate even if you are not racist. Simple example: one candidate is racist but has mostly reasonable policies. The other candidate is "not racist" but proposes to nuke all of the world the day they're elected. It's always a tradeoff.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/31/opinions/trump-attack-on-j...
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/07/politics/paul-ryan-donald-...
And there were the times he retweeted bogus crime figures from a white supremacist twitter account:
http://fortune.com/donald-trump-white-supremacist-genocide/
And of course the time he called for all Muslims to be banned from entering the USA.
The judge in question was a member of an ethnic/activist Hispanic lawyer's group. Imagine if the judge presiding over a case with a prominent African American plaintiff turned out to be a member of 'The Dallas Lawyers Association for White Culture' or something. I doubt that everyone who pointed this out would be considered racist.
The goals of the California La Raza Lawyers Association are (i) fighting prejudice against Latinos in the legal system and (ii) encouraging Latinos to go into law careers. Swap out 'Latinos' for 'white people' and neither of those goals really makes sense any more, because whites and Latinos in California have different histories and face different problems. For that reason it's unclear what sort of organization the 'Dallas Lawyers Association for White Culture' would be, or what sort of goals it would have. The analogy doesn't make any sense.
Trump has, not surprisingly, been shamelessly lying about the association and trying to paint it as some sort of Mexican supremacist organization. As you might expect, given that it counts a very respectable judge amongst it's members, it is no such thing:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/...
All of this is happening because Trump is a bigot. I think it's quite possible that he believes in the conspiracy theory that he's concocted. However, there have so far been no signs of Curiel doing anything inappropriate:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/06/...
You said there was an extensive list of racist comments by Trump, but then the only examples you can bring up are incredibly flimsy. It's therefore hard to take your accusations seriously.
Quite often there are efforts to weave conspiracy theories around Trump's incoherent ranting. So in this instance, there is some kind of story about how the California La Raza Lawyers Association is a shady "ethnoactivist" group, whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. All of this is just a way of providing cover for another one of Trump's uncontrolled bigoted outbursts. The judge is a member of a completely unremarkable kind of law association. It is no different from a gay judge being a member of an LGBT bar association, or a black judge being a member of a black bar association. Everyone knows that these sorts of organizations have the purpose of tackling specific problems faced by (respectively) LGBT and black people in the legal profession. To say that membership of such an organization can disqualify a judge from a particular case is effectively to say that gay judges can't make judgments on gay issues and black judges can't make judgments on black issues. That would be racism/homophobia par exellence.
By the way, you may recall that Trump has expanded his comments on judges since. He also believes that he could not be judged fairly by a Muslim judge. I wonder what complicated theories people have come up with to try to justify that comment.
It says something quite extraordinary about the present state of the country that there are people willing to defend a Presidential candidate who attacks a federal judge using ugly racist language. Even mainstream Republicans like Paul Ryan don't want to touch this.
>People whose common sense is not clouded by liberal hysteria can see this.
So Newt Gingrich is clouded by liberal hysteria? He called Trump's comments regarding the judge "inexcusable". And I guess Paul Ryan must be another closet liberal hysteric. It's quite incorrect to paint this as the fringe liberal left vs. common sense. The split of opinion is simply the split between racists and non-racists.
"A defendant, who is running for office on a promise to get tough on Mexican immigration, questioned the neutrality of a judge from a Mexican immigrant family who is presiding over a private lawsuit against the individual."
"A politician, who is running for office on a promise to overturn carbon emissions legislation, called into question the credibility of climate scientist on the grounds that he was of Mexican descent."
Paul Ryan's comment applies to one of those statements, not the other. We don't need to discuss the overall merit of Trump's argument, I'm just saying it's not good evidence of Trump being racist.
(The liberal left is anything but fringe... as far as I can tell, American political discourse is dominated by liberal hysteria, with a few other oddities mixed in like hero worship of the police and military, and unswerving support for Israel. But I digress.)
As to your comparison between the two statements, it's important to understand first of all that neither of them makes any sense. So in fact it is important to discuss the merits of Trump's argument. As I said before, there are multiple aspects to Curiel's background which point in different directions as to his possible biases. Why is it that Trump chose to focus on unfounded speculations regarding the influence of his ethnicity? Because dogwhistle racism is part of his platform. What he's essentially saying is that the judge is not a "real" American and hence can't be trusted.
The "racist algorithms" thing sounds made up.
Here's one discussion of biased algorithms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9211436
The algorithm discussion is too vague to really engage with, but it's presumably possible that a person's biases could influence their choice of algorithm in certain instances. If we're talking about, say, an algorithm for matching profiles on okcupid, then certain biases of the programmer might "leak" into the design of the algorithm. You could argue semantics over whether the algorithm itself is really "biased", but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the discussion you linked to.
Improper entry is a crime, but lots of illegal immigrants aren't guilty of it, but only unlawful presence, which is a civil wrong, not a crime (it is illegal but not criminal -- these things aren't the same.)
http://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2014/07/is-illegal-immigrat...
Quoting Trump in context is perceived as an attack on him. Showing video of him talking is perceived as an attack on him (that's what the most recent HRC anti-trump attack ads are. Just video of him talking with a little context and emotional window dressing). Literally describing his policy positions or advisers honestly is perceived as an attack on him.
Voting, particularly in the American 2-party system, is mainly about choosing the lesser of evils.
Would it better to support a moderately racist candidate (keeping in mind most Americans are racist and you yourself probably are to a degree), or somebody utterly free of racist candidate convictions but who has an unshakable faith in military intervention abroad and whose ideas, if implemented, would lead to hundreds of thousands of noncombatants killed?
What if a candidate was racist in her personal worldview, but at the same time supported the cessation of, and was running for an office with a significant impact on, the catastrophic, Nazi-genocide-equivalent "War on Drugs"?
In other words, there are some things worse than racism, and other things equally bad. It's one variable in an extremely complex equation, and one that is also impossible to quantify.
But it does take a special kind of person to be the ordinary guy at the Republican convention who thinks gay marriage is a-okay. Or to be the ordinary bro at the SV soylent hackathon who thinks that we should vote in the biggest anti-immigration candidate in 50 years or more.
Trump, on the other hand, disagrees with most experts, both partisans and neutral, on climate, energy, foreign policy, environment, and military tactics and strategy (that was not an exhaustive list).
Going with (b) is very brave, because it is a tacit admission that it doesn't matter to you that Trump is wrong in so many vital areas according to most experts.
There aren't many ways to look at that that do not cast you in a bad light. Does it mean you don't think it is possible to actually be an expert in those fields, and so Trump's disagreement with "expert" do not matter?
Or does it mean that you believe it is possible to really be an expert, but almost all of diverse set of current experts got it totally wrong despite decades in their fields, and Trump had figured it all out?
Or does it mean you consider other issues, like whether we should increase torture of prisoners, or we should be targeting families of suspected terrorists, more important than climate, energy, etc., and you match Trump on those other issues?
It's like P.J. O'Rourke said, "I am endorsing Hillary. The second worst thing that could happen to this country. But she’s way behind in second place, you know? She’s wrong about absolutely everything — but she’s wrong within normal parameters!".
I'd like to see tax reform. I'd like to see it executed by someone who isn't a raving "billionaire" lunatic with a fairly transparent agenda to lower his own tax bill.
Milton Friedman had a simple flat tax system too. I think Estonia and maybe Latvia have been using it.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being uncivil. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that, regardless of how right you are.
If you're not going to be baited, you needn't comment about it, and definitely please don't insult the people you're not going to be baited by.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12141934 and marked it off-topic.
But everyone seems to assume that the "fake culture wars" are something the Democrats made up, and the Republicans are just fighting for the natural state of affairs, when it seems pretty clear to me that stirring people up about this stuff (e.g. the southern strategy of driving black people to the democratic party so that racists white people will vote republican, or recasting gay marriage as an attack on traditional marriage) is basically what lead to the modern malaise of the Republican party and Trump. There must be a lot of people who want "republican" style economic ideas that will vote Libertarian or even Democrat this year, just to avoid being associated with hate.
So his comment makes much more sense to me if you replace "but" with "because":
I don't pretend to agree with every plank in our party's platform. _Because_ fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.
That fits in neatly with the bit about stopping fighting expensive wars and focus on the economy. It also fits in with him being a proudly gay Republican (and not directly related to Thiel but the most famous transgender woman in America is also a republican). Yet everyone else is reading this the opposite way to me, so maybe I'm wrong?
I'm not going to touch the rest of your nonsense, but this is an utterly shameless attempt to rewrite history. You know perfectly well that Trump called on several occasions for a ban on all Muslims entering the US, regardless of origin. That is indefensible bigotry. I think you must know that it is indefensible because you tried to gloss over it.
This was said in context of the refugee crisis in Europe.
If he'd really wanted a temporary ban (which would still, obviously, be indefensible), he'd have set out clear criteria for when it would end.
Someone who casually throws out insane and bigoted policy proposals, without showing any evidence whatsoever of having seriously thought them through, is not fit to be President. I don't have much time for people who act as apologists for this kind of behavior and help to maintain the illusion that what Trump says is anywhere in the ballpark of actual political discourse. This is a crisis. Every time someone makes bogus arguments for taking Trump seriously as a political figure, we're edging closer to a disaster that could take decades to recover from. It's not fun and games at this point. History will judge us. And your pro-Trump comments will be on record forever.
Wow. Take a deep breath and tone down your hysteria a bit:
1. How does adding context to a comment taken out of context makes me "pro-Trump"?
2. How is properly vetting immigrants, in particular from high-risk countries, bigotry?
Because you're apologising for his bigotry. The fact that the ban is (allegedly) temporary makes it no less bigoted and no more defensible. This is probably going to be quite a close election. Everyone should be speaking out against Trump, not trying to help him weasel out of taking responsibility for the awful things he's said.
>How is properly vetting immigrants, in particular from high-risk countries, bigotry?
What a disingenuous comment. I made it perfectly clear that I was talking about his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the US. You and the OP would love to pretend that he never made that proposal, but he did.
He asked that immigration from certain countries be temporarily halted, to introduce a proper vetting process.
Your highly emotional reasoning (I am "apologising for his bigotry"?) makes me rest my case.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2015/dec/08/donald...
When someone says something that's flatly untrue on HN, I think it's appropriate to correct that. There is no reason why Trump or his supporters should get a free pass to rewrite history without being challenged on it. If, however, it is your view that there are certain political ideologies or candidates which have a special "protected status" on HN, then I will moderate my comments in future accordingly. I did not think that there was any such policy, though.
> I'm not going to touch the rest of your nonsense, but this is an utterly shameless
... please don't. Nothing good can come of a discussion that begins by breaking the site guidelines outright. This is true regardless of how important the issue is or how right you are, indeed gets truer as those things are more the case, because you discredit your position by behaving this way. If it's correct, you ought to be able to show that without fulminating.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142296 and marked it off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
The reason I say this is that political discussion has a moral urgency that technical and philosophical discussion typically lack. Civility in a political context implicitly says "I disagree with your view but it's one that should be taken seriously". I won't stir the pot by mentioning any extreme examples, but there are some political ideologies that do not deserve that level of respect. Of course, one may agree or disagree that this principle applies in the case of Trump -- I don't expect HN to take a position. But asking for maximal civility in this context is making a demand that's far less reasonable than it is outside a political context. Someone who sincerely believes that Trump is a dangerous bigot can't be expected to talk about him as if he's a serious candidate. And yet to refrain from commenting would leave his bigotry unchallenged.
So I'd say relax the interpretation of the rule slightly (it's not as if I was going completely off the rails), or make a firm decision about whether or not politics is off topic on HN. As it is, you're tending to give too much space to polite racist nonsense.
I don't know that we have the ability to do what you're suggesting. First, it gets awfully tricky to define "politics". Second, people wouldn't listen. Third, there's a legitimate intersection between the core mandate of HN and some political stories, even if they nearly always bleed over. That's why the site guidelines have always declared most stories about politics to be off-topic, instead of all. In the end there are judgment calls to be made and no easy way to avoid them.
I don't know if Thiel has any leverage over YC, but if he does it must decay awfully quickly with distance, since I've never noticed any with respect to HN and I'm pretty sensitive about that. In fact the very notion strikes me as absurd, which I mention just as a data point.
As for YC supporting Trump (or rather YC people; I don't imagine YC as an org would support anybody), the data is both prolific and exactly the opposite.
The reason is that such forms of influence are reciprocal à la Newton's third law. To attempt to exercise such influence would be to invite it in return. I think everyone at/on HN and at YC would agree that it's best for HN to remain free of that.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/727902623597105153
What? Isn't Trump for _escalation_ in the middle east? This makes no sense.
Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry about being forced to use the wrong bathroom. Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry about being impregnated by a rapist and forced to carry the baby to term. Peter Thiel doesn't have to worry about shot by the police while his hands are up because the cops are afraid of his skin color. And evidently Peter Thiel is so disconnected from ordinary life that he's forgotten that he has to worry about being denied service because of his partner's gender.
These issues are real issues to matter to real people, and for some of us (including me, a lesbian trans woman), they are our top priority. The only reason he's saying this is because either he's lucky enough to be unaffected or he thinks he's unaffected. If Thiel thinks these issues are "fake", then he doesn't belong in a position of power, and I am automatically skeptical of any candidate he endorses.
It's just like last year, when Obergefell vs. Hodges happened, and immediately the anti-TPP crowd started claiming that Obergefell vs. Hodges was just a smokescreen meant to distract people from TPP being put on the fast track. I'm sorry, but my and more importantly my friends' ability to marry whoever we want is deeply important and very much real. All that little outburst by the anti-TPP crowd did is prove to me that the anti-TPP agenda is opposed to the LGBT rights movement. They've basically guaranteed that I'll never speak out against the TPP.