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Time to Take a Stand

blog.samaltman.com

81–90 of 1001 posts

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#81
post #7

Why is that all of these posts saying to "take a stand" fail to explain the political process? I'll just quote myself here. If you want to help stop trump the most effective ways are to: 1. Call - Local congresspeople (http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/) - Senators (https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/) - Local officials (https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials) 2. Participate - Get involved in local electi…

If you are going to contact your House and Senate representatives, you should do this at the local level.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#83
post #11

This is meaningless grandstanding until: 1) YC voted Thiel off the island 2) YC establishes a policy of "take money from Thiel and you are toxic to us" Anyone in a position of power who took a look at Trump and didn't recoil with disgust needs to be exiled from civil society.

> YC voted Thiel off the island

The hypocrisy of being anti-Trump but accepting Thiel is all over the valley.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#84
This is absolutely nuts.

Green card holders (legal permanent residents of the United States) are being turned back from the US as soon as they get to the airport. They are being forced to file waivers which can be denied.

How can legal permanent residents be denied entry? I mean this has to be breaking So many laws, how can this be ok?

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#85
post #11

This is meaningless grandstanding until: 1) YC voted Thiel off the island 2) YC establishes a policy of "take money from Thiel and you are toxic to us" Anyone in a position of power who took a look at Trump and didn't recoil with disgust needs to be exiled from civil society.

How many degrees of separation from Trump do you think people should go?

"It goes without saying that if the people of Group X are staring at you demandingly, waiting for you to hate the right enemies with the right intensity, and ready to castigate you if you fail to castigate loudly enough, you may be hanging around the wrong group." - http://lesswrong.com/lw/42/tolerate_tolerance/

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#86
I think it's shameful to have an open Trump supporter as part of the upper echelons of YCombinator (Thiel).

Everyone is entitled to their opinions. But when you openly support a candidate who likes to "grab [women] by the pussy", and now is making headway into some sort of Muslim ban which was a campaign headline, how will female and muslim applicants feel if they know part of their process might be controlled by someone who finds this acceptable? Might it discourage them?

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#87

The time to take stand was 3 months ago. Things will get a lot worse now before they can get better and no amount of blogging is going to change that. Trump is hell bent on destroying America from within and his followers (who we are not supposed to criticize) are A-Ok with that. Soon to be seen in a theater near you in Europe as well.

Criticize them all you want, but keep in mind your goal. Do you care about changing their minds, political/social polarization in the US, etc? If so, criticizing them would be a very stupid thing to do. Especially considering the GOP is the strongest its been from a local to national level since the 1920s.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#88

It makes me sad that politics has made its way to the top of HN. I'm relatively new here. One of the things I love about the community is that it has been something of an oasis over the past few months. This is in no way intended to denigrate the esteemed author or his thesis. I'm just disappointed that we're at this point.

You can only afford to ignore politics for as long as it ignores you. This no longer ignores us, because it's affecting our friends, our companies, the pool of tech workers that make up the intelligence that builds Silicon Valley.

This is entirely comparable to when Jewish scientists were first getting barred from getting positions in German universities. We are now seeing the much-publicised case of an Oscar-nominated director being unable to attend to receive his prize. There are many other, less publicised cases of colleagues getting barred from working alongside us.

We can no longer ignore these politics.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the Christian Broadcasting Network no less. This is morally repugnant.

Yet we never heard from you during the years the Obama administration did the opposite... Syria is over 10% Christian, yet only 56 of the ~10K Syrians let into the country were Christian.

It took 2 seconds of googling to fact check you http://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/facts-about-the-syrian-refu...

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#90
post #11

This is meaningless grandstanding until: 1) YC voted Thiel off the island 2) YC establishes a policy of "take money from Thiel and you are toxic to us" Anyone in a position of power who took a look at Trump and didn't recoil with disgust needs to be exiled from civil society.

>Anyone in a position of power who took a look at Trump and didn't recoil with disgust needs to be exiled from civil society. I don't like Trump, but fighting him isn't worth going against the very principles we fight for. People have a right to their beliefs, even if their beliefs are stupid. If not, than what kind of country are we?

I'm not sure of any nominal principle that says we have to do business with, work for or to invite to things people who behave abhorrently.

That Thiel can get a table at a restaurant in SV proves all the talk about changing the world tech leaders do is so much nonsense.

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