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The 2016 Election

blog.samaltman.com

71–80 of 646 posts

Re: The 2016 Election

#71

YC: Happy to cut people off over SOPA support. YC: Can't bring itself to even censure a billionaire who only works with them "part-time" for supporting actual hatred and sexual abuse. I await this thread filling up with "but how you can be tolerant if you don't tolerate intolerance?!" and other Phil-101 Do You Sees

Now Trump = actual hatred.

I don't support trump, but the hyperbole is getting exhausting.

Re: The 2016 Election

#72

YC: Happy to cut people off over SOPA support. YC: Can't bring itself to even censure a billionaire who only works with them "part-time" for supporting actual hatred and sexual abuse. I await this thread filling up with "but how you can be tolerant if you don't tolerate intolerance?!" and other Phil-101 Do You Sees

There's a degree of separation you're missing. SOPA is a specific belief, Trump is a person who has many beliefs.

Person -> SOPA

Person -> Trump -> Sexism/Racism/etc

Thiel doesn't support Trump because he's racist/etc, he does it in spite of that. That doesn't make Thiel right, however it is an important distinction. If Thiel said or did anything racist/sexist/etc, he'd be out of YC. It's a slippery slope to start firing people because someone they support supports something you don't like.

After all, Clinton supports SOPA, and Sam just endorsed her.

Re: The 2016 Election

#73

> (of course, if Peter said some of the things Trump says himself, he would no longer be part of Y Combinator). So when he wrote that giving women the right to vote has been eroding capitalist democracy ... ?

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

You can disagree with the statement, but why do you think it is punishable?

Re: The 2016 Election

#74
post #17

Bravo to Sam for the endorsement and for calling Trump out for what he is. On the issue of Peter Thiel, for those of you that believe it's wrong to fire someone based on their political actions, is there any limit? If David Duke ran for office, or the Ku Klux Klan fielded a candidate for president, and someone gave a high profile speech endorsing them and supported their campaign with a million dollars, would it stil…

We are talking here about 40-50% of the American electorate not some fringe maniac. If you think those people's opinion should be shunned than your world view seems very restricted to me.

We needn't equate shunning people (plural) with choosing not to have a super-high-profile booster in a leadership role.

Not the same thing at all.

Re: The 2016 Election

#75
>unprecedented threat to America

Hillary is an unprecedented threat to the world. But I guess Americans are so cut of from the rest of the world, it's hard for them to see things from others perspective. As a citizen of third world please don't unleash Hillary on us.

Re: The 2016 Election

#76
post #6

> We should all feel a duty to try to understand the roughly > half of the country that thinks we are severely misguided. > I don’t understand how 43% of the country supports Trump. > But I’d like to find out, because we have to include > everyone in our path forward. If our best ideas are to > stop talking to or fire anyone who disagrees with us, > we’ll be facing this whole situation again in 2020. > > That kind of…

Sam tweeted that this was his favorite article about the election: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on... It really does a great job of helping explain Trump supporters.

> It really does a great job of helping explain Trump supporters.

I think what we're seeing are the results of taking 6 trillion dollars that should have been spent building infrastructure for working class Americans and instead wasting it in Iraq.

Re: The 2016 Election

#77
Sam, just so you know, many of your sentences could exchange Trump for Hillary and be exactly what Trump supporters I know say. Especially this one:

> [Hillary] shows little respect for the Constitution, the Republic, or for human decency, and I fear for national security if [she] becomes our president.

Other sentences would just exchange antonyms and not make it sound any better. You call Trump isolationist, they call Hillary interventionist.

I fear that your reasoning for why you endorse Hillary and not Trump doesn't really speak to someone who likes Trump in the first place. Calling Trump racist, for instance, isn't going to flip anyone's voting bit.

The only very cogent Hillary endorsement (or rather Not-Trump endorsement) I've read that would actually speak to conservatives is this one: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-jo...

Which is fairly long and not the kind of thing I'd suggest sharing with your Grandma or Thiel, but I think you could distill more convincing talking points from it that would appeal to people much more conservative than yourself.

Note: My own opinion is too wordy for the small margins here, I'm just relaying sentiments of people I've talked to. I'm from New Hampshire, and people here, especially up north, have had Trump signs from very early on in this campaign, way before anyone in the media seemed to take him seriously.

Re: The 2016 Election

#78
post #6

> We should all feel a duty to try to understand the roughly > half of the country that thinks we are severely misguided. > I don’t understand how 43% of the country supports Trump. > But I’d like to find out, because we have to include > everyone in our path forward. If our best ideas are to > stop talking to or fire anyone who disagrees with us, > we’ll be facing this whole situation again in 2020. > > That kind of…

It's definitely not a popular position. Just take a look at Twitter and you'll see people from both sides nearly calling for the death of the other. While not super surprising I've seen little discussion around the fact that your chances of being fired for supporting one of the candidates (you can guess who) publicly are pretty good. Especially when you work in the tech field. Which to me is really interesting becaus…

> you'll see people from both sides nearly calling for the death of the other

Not to sound too tinfoilhatter, but this is exactly what you would want the masses to behave like as a politician. Neither candidate gives two shits about you me or anyone who isn't part of the ruling elite, they're just in it for the power.

Re: The 2016 Election

#79
post #6

> We should all feel a duty to try to understand the roughly > half of the country that thinks we are severely misguided. > I don’t understand how 43% of the country supports Trump. > But I’d like to find out, because we have to include > everyone in our path forward. If our best ideas are to > stop talking to or fire anyone who disagrees with us, > we’ll be facing this whole situation again in 2020. > > That kind of…

Sam tweeted that this was his favorite article about the election: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on... It really does a great job of helping explain Trump supporters.

If you found the Cracked article insightful, an even deeper discussion of this "dark matter" phenomenon ("I don't know anyone who supports candidate X, but I can measure their gravity, so they must be out there somewhere") is in this essay from Slate Star Codex.

"I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

Re: The 2016 Election

#80
I'm sure I'll be labelled a cynic, but I'm pretty sure if Thiel didn't make a shit ton of money and is likely to make more money in the future, YC would have dumped him over politics a long time ago.
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