Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time to Take a Stand

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#671

Post by LeChuck »

jacquesm wrote: post #246
kawera wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me naive but Trump's repugnant behaviour and actions may well steer voters away from similar european candidates. The rise of Martin Schulz, plus Merkel, is probably enough to stop Germany's far right from gaining power. Austrians have shown restraint in the last election and at least for now Spain and Portugal are pretty safe. Will Hamon/Macron be enough to block the FN in France? Lest not forget that the FN in…

NL is about (March) to make a huge shift to ultra-right. The coming elections are predicted to be a landslide victory for the PVV, the extremist/nationalist party which is pushing those exact same buttons that Trump is pushing. We may end up in a very strange situation where the largest political party will not be part of government and where the prime minister will be part of that party (a constitutional crisis, his…

That's not quite correct. It happened in 1977 and in 1982.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_general_election,_1977

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_general_election,_1982

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#672

Post by ihsw »

woofyman wrote: post #309
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very unhelpful. i think any way to signal that trump and his policies are unpopular is helpful. if everyone knows that a vast majority of people are going to vote against him next time, congress people do not have to bend to his will, and world leaders do not feel as pressured to work with him. it seems like maintaining an illusion of popularity is paramount for history's bad political regimes, i think this is why. e…

>it seems like maintaining an illusion of popularity is paramount for history's bad political regimes That's why he is so obsessed with crowd sizes and the lie that he would've won the popular vote if not for 5-10 million fraudulent votes.

Clearly you've missed the intention behind his statements regarding crowd sizes, which is yet another jab to the news media. It was very successful among his constituency ("liberal media lying again! very devious!") but the message seems to have been missed by the left.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#673

Post by gizmo »

artursapek wrote: post #530
gizmo wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this justifies discrimination against Muslims. I'm flagging this because this kind of incendiary racism has no place on HN.

- Islam is not a race, it's an ideology - Go live in one of these European cities that have been turned into a refugee ghetto by their government, and come back and tell me that

- Islamophobia is an ideology, Islam is a religion. Persecution of Muslims is no different than persecution of Jews, which we also -- rightly -- call racist.

- There are no such cities. You're just spouting racist paranoia, nothing more.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#674

Post by buyx »

MichaelGG wrote: post #543
microtonal wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very important people - calling everyone who voted for Trump a racist homophobe Maybe they are not racist homophobes, but they voted a racist homophobe and his cabal into power. They knew that his was one of the expected outcomes. Voting is powerful and you are (co-)responsible for the outcome. If you don't want racist executive orders, don't vote for a racist. Simple as that.

>racist Explain how the EO is racist. Blocking a country is not racist. If the EO was "Persians are not allowed in" that'd be different. And homophobe? A gay man spoke at the RNC to huge applause (even made a comment on how getting upset over transgender bathroom use is pointless). These kind of careless accusations just make everyone ignore real charges of racism.

Blocking a country is not racist. If the EO was "Persians are not allowed in" that'd be different.

Indeed."Muslim" is not a race. Perhaps a better word would be "bigoted" or "discriminatory" not "racist"?

If we are going to be splitting hairs: are Persians a race, or are they an ethnicity?

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#675

Post by guildwriter »

chinathrow wrote: post #663
ihsw wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, UAE, and Malaysia missing from this list? Serious question.

Because the buy a shitload amount of weapons from the US.

It's not that simple.

"In the realm of extremist Islam, the Saudis are “both the arsonists and the firefighters,” said William McCants, a Brookings Institution scholar. “They promote a very toxic form of Islam that draws sharp lines between a small number of true believers and everyone else, Muslim and non-Muslim,” he said, providing ideological fodder for violent jihadists.

Yet at the same time, “they’re our partners in counterterrorism,” said Mr. McCants, one of three dozen academics, government officials and experts on Islam from multiple countries interviewed for this article.

Saudi leaders seek good relations with the West and see jihadist violence as a menace that could endanger their rule, especially now that the Islamic State is staging attacks in the kingdom — 25 in the last eight months, by the government’s count. But they are also driven by their rivalry with Iran, and they depend for legitimacy on a clerical establishment dedicated to a reactionary set of beliefs. Those conflicting goals can play out in a bafflingly inconsistent manner."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/world/middleeast/saudi-ar...

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#676

Post by Retra »

brightball wrote: post #189

Easiest way to take a stand is to be logically consistent about federal power - which means be against it always and not just when the opposition party is in charge. If 2/3 of the country can't agree that it needs to apply to the whole country then it's a state policy and not a federal one. Embrace the 10th amendment and make nullification a common act and not some rare that people scorn. It's the agree to disagree a…

You want to unite the country by making divide and conquer a stronger and more effective political strategy?

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#677

Post by whyileft »

cderwin wrote: post #297
bratsche wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like it's not very effective, but that may be because there needs more weight of numbers behind it. If you're in a progressive area like the Bay area I can see how it would just add extra load to officials who may not need further persuading. I'm in Texas though. A very red state. I've been calling my representative and senators to voice my opinion on all this stuff, but it's hard to tell how effective it is…

I wonder how much calling actually matters, because I feel like whether they receive 10 calls or 10,000, it's always going to be one-sided. Conservatives aren't going to call their reps and they don't have the propensity to engage in the same activism as progressives, so I would think representatives would take calls with a relative grain of salt. If a very conservative congressperson starts getting a bunch of calls…

It only really works if you are showing them that they are going against what they thought their base wanted. Free trade right now would probably be one where a lot of Republican members of congress would have likely been surprised to learn a year ago that there was a large percentage of their Republican voting constituency that was against free trade.

So yes, if you are a Republican with a Republican representative then calling them to voice your displeasure about Donald Trump's behavior may be beneficial. Otherwise it probably won't do much unless there really is massive numbers.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#678

Post by idlewords »

jacobian wrote: post #658
idlewords wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now the most important thing you can do is donate money. Consider starting here: ACLU (state offices especially) Council on American-Islamic Relations (state offices especially) National Immigration Law Center

Can you expand on why donating to state offices is more effective? And, which states?

The state organizations have separate budgets, and they do the direct work with affected people.

For example, CAIR-MA serves all of New England on less than a quarter million dollars a year.

Any state, but particularly red states. Consider CAIR-Oklahoma.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#679

Post by throwaway_374 »

artursapek wrote: post #191

Trump has an anti-Muslim position because the recent bombings, shootings, stabbings, and semi-truck attacks in Europe have all been committed by Muslims. And it's not a coincidence - their ideology says that they are rewarded in the afterlife for killing "infidels" (us). Christians don't live by this kind of ideology.

Are you actually fucking retarded? This isn't a white nationalist forum, this is a discourse of highly intellectual rational arguments. Please connect the dots between your statements.

Re: Time to Take a Stand

#680

Post by nkurz »

dang wrote: post #575
bassman9000 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy shit, no one has actually read the text. Why do I bother. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/refugee-musli... > (c) To temporarily reduce investigative burdens on relevant agencies during the review period described in subsection (a) of this section, to ensure the proper review and maximum utilization of available resources for the screening of foreign nationals, and to ensure that adequate standards…

> Holy shit, no one has actually read the text. Why do I bother. Please don't be rude in comments here. The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to use the "you didn't even read the article" trope, and you've done that repeatedly in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may not have followed his link, but this isn't a standard case of "you didn't even read the article". By "the text", he means the actual executive order, which strangely isn't linked from Sam's piece. His frustration is that people are reading the blog post, but seem oddly disinterested in the primary source, which he feels contradicts (or at least complexifies) many of the points that Sam makes.

I wonder if the discussion might be more productive if you switched the URL to the primary source: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3431228/Extreme-V....

Post reply on HN