91–95 of 95 posts
"Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship."
Politics needs to be added. What a fucking joke. Someone regex the submissions.
In Spain the word populism has turned into an insult that traditional political parties use freely against new political parties even if the statements are perfectly legit (e.g. universal basic income). Is this happening in other countries too?
Yes. Everywhere "populism" is used as an insult for political parties that actually listen to people and intent to do as the population wants, as opposed to established parties that mainly keep their power because of intertia and are getting more and more disconnected from their voters. Populism is how democracy is supposed to work.
That is called propaganda though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the author completely misses the core issue: when the populace at large gets tired of getting hammered with elitist & special-interest issues, to the point of being told to actively facilitate what is broadly considered distasteful, they start looking for someone who will restore the mundane norms they are comfortable with. The following is a list of US populist complaints, which Trump successfully addressed. (D…
>"most people aren't [facilitating/celbrating LGBQT], and find differing sexualities repulsive" I believe most people in the US are accepting of homosexuality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_attitudes_toward_homo...
> 46 percent of respondents said transgender people should be required to “use the public restrooms of the gender they were born into.”
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/half-of...
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So that makes it OK when we, as a group, decide that brown people don't deserve to live happy healthy lives because they are taking our jobs.
It's not a judgment on what people deserve , but on what you are willing to give up to help them. School children in Africa don't deserve to go hungry, but tons of people on HN are still going to buy a shiny new MacBook Pro this year instead of using that money to feed dozens of kids in the developing world for a year.[1] The fact that restricting immigration is a group choice while not donating money is an individua…
But both issues are similarly nuanced.
In the same way I can't just trust that a donation to any random opaque 'help the children' fund is actually effectively helping starving children, we can't just blindly open all borders and take in every tired, poor, huddled mass.
But there is a very, very clear middle ground.
I can research aid organizations to find one that I believe will use my donation effectively.
We can build systems to establish qualified immigrants with the same basic starting point we agree everyone should have (food stamps/healthcare/temporary unemployment assistance/affordable housing) so they can start a life here.
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Because populism leads very quicky to dark places. Most all systems of government, of vested authority and state monopoly of violence, are to address our instinct towards populism. Egging on the mob never ends well.
You're only labeling it "populism" (which is normally defined as 'support for the concerns of ordinary people') because you don't like the outcome. If you liked the outcome you would call it "democratic." Somehow the idea of being concerned about the outcome for ordinary people has become vilified by American liberals because red state, blue collar, ordinary people are worthless. What is going on?! Trump wants to be…
In this case, Trump rode the anger of voters who want to close the borders to both immigrants and imported manufactured goods, because they perceived that some of their jobs going to illegal imigrants, and other manufacturing jobs had been taken overseas.
How many of those people, do you think, buy everything at Walmart (whether it's all they can afford or not)? How many of those people realize that a 35% border tax and getting rid of our internal slave labor force will lead to commensurately higher prices of goods and services, without necessarily bringing back the jobs that were actually automated away? If they have thought it through, where's the better outcome?
This is why we don't have a direct democracy. These issues are more complicated than one can wrap their head around without making it a full-time job for an industry, and the decisions aren't helped by folks making decisions out of anger and desperation.