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Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

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Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#321

Post by zaroth »

swang wrote: post #205
jerf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you went Godwin. Trump isn't Hitler. That's election propaganda, not truth. Election's over. Time to put the election propaganda away. Now, you might still not like him. Heck, let me take a bold step and say you won't like him. He will do things you won't like. Welcome to the real world. My government's been doing things I don't like my entire life. (Along with all the things I do like.) But I rate the odds that…

do you think no one in germany opposed hitler? hitler was seen to be pretty crazy to most "moderate" germans too and he wasn't voted in as the führer with absolute power. he slowly worked his way up in popularity until he became chancellor. then he worked to slowly build up members of the NSDAP into positions of power until no one could oppose him. then he began suppressing the opposition. the lesson about hitler in…

Understand that with Trump, he is willing to say somewhat crazy shit in order to negotiate from a position of strength, versus conceding the fact ahead of time and hoping another country will give us the same slack.

I think this will become more clear once the man has a chance to lead for a few months. That no, he's not going to try to dispatch paddywagons to round up all the illegals, no he's not going to try to require all Muslim citizens to enter some sort of registry... but he is going to tell all the people who spent the 10 years becoming legal citizens that there time was well-spent, and send a message to the people like Syed Farook that they will have a much harder time walking through CBP.

Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#322

Post by tptacek »

edblarney wrote: post #290
ForrestN wrote: post #94

Is there a kind of "political correctness" that refuses the acknowledgment of facts and likelihoods that sound similar to irrational dismissal? Does that kind prevent people from hearing the following things which I think most people would agree to be true? -Donald Trump says he wants to completely deregulate the banking industry, which will most likely, in the long term, lead to a crisis on par with or greater than…

"Donald Trump and Paul Ryan plan to strip approximately 20 million people of health insurance, " No - they said they are going to repeal and replace Obamacare with something else. That does not mean they are going to strip people of their health insurance. "Donald Trump is part of a movement to dismantle pluralism in the United States, including the marginalization of immigrants and their descendants" This is a lie.…

There are generations of families --- literally millions of people --- that are linked together through people who are in the US "illegally". People were brought here as children and have known no other life. People who were born in this country and are unassailably citizens, deserving of all the protections previous generations of Americans died on beaches to defend for them, whose parents were brought here illegally as children.

Do not casually dismiss these people by appealing to "legal immigration". The Obama Administration had to fight hard to secure continued residency for some of these children, and Trump's 100 Day Plan includes a pledge to revoke that security.

This is a real concern deserving your careful consideration. It's not a sound bite. You can disagree, but if you're disagreeing that we should be concerned about a pledge to rend families apart, you owe a more careful and honest articulation of your disagreement than you gave here.

Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#323

Post by [deleted] »

ForrestN wrote: post #289
lucio wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that if you oppose an elected government, as in "muster all of its leverage, economic and otherwise, in the fight to curtail the power of Thiel's organization (The Trump Administration)", you're opposing democracy.

No. More people voted for Hillary Clinton. And the Electoral College is constitutionally enshrined to stop candidates like Trump. From wikipedia: James Madison argued against "an interested and overbearing majority" and the "mischiefs of faction" in an electoral system. He defined a faction as "a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common im…

[deleted]

Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#325

Post by user837387 »

leesalminen wrote: post #222
user837387 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is your opinion and you are entitled to it but I disagree. Put Hillary in a balance with Trump and by far she is the better candidate. When people are willing to believe in the Father of Lies, even after you show them recorded evidence, they are a lost cause. It is really hard to cure willful ignorance. Hillary has also lied, I admit it, but it is not even on the same league of Trump. The Democrats' fault (and m…

> Up to this point I used to honestly believe that justice always prevailed, some how. How one could arrive at this opinion after reviewing the entirely of recorded human history is beyond me.

I do know our history. And I could explain my reasoning, but the short story is that I was being an idealist and an idiot. That is how.

Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#326

Post by tptacek »

RealGeek wrote: post #70
meritt wrote: post #21

This was obvious from the RNC speech and further reinforced when Thiel donated $1M to Trump. A contrarian bet, sure, but $1M is a pretty small price to pay to have a 50/50 shot at CTO of the USA. I'm sure he'll see a very significant ROI on his $1M once the government starts awarding contracts very conveniently to companies of which he owns a portion. I had very negative feelings about Thiel, and those were magnified…

> I'm sure he'll see a very significant ROI on his $1M once the government starts awarding contracts very conveniently to companies of which he owns a portion. Wasn't Trump rallying against such crony corruption aka 'pay for play'?

Every successful politician in the last hundred years has "rallied against crony corruption".

Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#327

Post by Jtsummers »

gnarbarian wrote: post #282
kafkaesq wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to what others have said: His head-over-heels support for a decidedly anti-libertarian candidate like Trump is in itself quite extremist. This has always been one of the standard tools for (crypto-)fascists and closet authoritarians of all ilks to get into positions of influence -- by using people of nominally "opposing" viewpoints as, in effect, wedge instruments to disrupt the system as violently as pos…

You can't call trump an extremist when half the country voted for him.

1) Seems a bit strong to tell someone what they can and can't say.

2) He didn't get half the country to vote for him. It looks like around 55-60% of voters turned out this year (the whole tally isn't calculated yet). Of those, he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him). So at best he seems to have gotten around 30% of the voters to vote for him. Not everyone is a voter (age, other disqualifying factors). So even if he had somehow gotten 50% of voters (which, again, he didn't), he'd still have less than half the country voting for him.

Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#328

Post by tptacek »

raldi wrote: post #324

Now go back and read all the HN comments from 26 days ago about how Thiel was flushing money down the toilet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716514

I don't think many of Thiel's detractors denied that he was buying himself this seat at the table. In fact, many of us were animated by exactly that concern.

Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#329

Post by zaroth »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #227
the_decider wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Its a legitimate idea currently making the headway in our community. And if you think its ridiculous, let me ask you...Is the notion of a seperatist, intelligently run Californian sovereign state any less ridiculous than the notion of a Trump Presidency two years ago? We've always been a community of disruptors...well, now's our opportunity to really distrupt. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/calexit-is-silicon-…

Where are you planning to get your water?

NAFTA, obviously.

Re: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

#330

Post by tptacek »

gnarbarian wrote: post #282
kafkaesq wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to what others have said: His head-over-heels support for a decidedly anti-libertarian candidate like Trump is in itself quite extremist. This has always been one of the standard tools for (crypto-)fascists and closet authoritarians of all ilks to get into positions of influence -- by using people of nominally "opposing" viewpoints as, in effect, wedge instruments to disrupt the system as violently as pos…

You can't call trump an extremist when half the country voted for him.

Yes, you can. Your rebuttal doesn't even hold together logically. Extremism isn't defined by lack of popular support. Our entire system of government was designed in part out of a fear of the extremism of the massed public.
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