1. It's not what "half of you wanted". It's what a portion of the portion of those that voted in a 55% turnout election wanted. A tiny and vindictive portion, that lost the popular vote.
2. Even if it were what "half of you wanted", it's also what half of you did not want. This is not a kid's game where you count up the points and call the clear winner. If half of your population's will is being disregarded and worked against, there is a problem.
3. This is plain and simply abhorrent. Even if these were popular policies, they are reprehensible. The majority can be misguided.
PS: Your twitter feed is worse than an angry child's. Seriously, get a hold of yourself. Applauding Trump's targeting of the free press and minorities? "Civilizational cancer"? Are you seriously surprised that people dislike you and your ideologies?
Then it seems to me there has been a problem in the US for many years now.
(Good news everyone! There's now a problem in the UK, too!)
First, it's 46% of the people who voted (i.e. less than half). Second, it's quite disingenuous to suggest that all of those people would support this hamfisted immigration restriction, as-is; in case you were oblivious to your surroundings for the last year, vast numbers of voters -- if not the majority -- were merely voting for the person they despised less. It's more than a tad delusional that there's a mandate here to go and fuck over people's lives because of the happenstance of where they happen to come from.
And it is pretty capricious.
But yeah, he did repeatedly say he would do it.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
It is a trap to think this is about just Trump.
And you think 26.7% of eligible voters, after you've suppressed and disenfranchised so many people, entitles you to violate our laws, our Constitution, and the boundaries of morality?
No. "President" Trump and his neo-Nazi advisor Stephen Bannon can shove this fascist crap where the sun don't shine.
Regardless of how strongly you feel, how heated the discussion, or how others are behaving, you're doing yourself and your argument no favors with the name-calling. Even if you feel that you're just calling a spade a spade, you're just providing others with ammunition to dismiss you and anything you say as just an angry, unreasonable rant. And if you're not actually addressing the people who you don't agree with (which means you're addressing the people who already agree with you, or at best, people who are on the fence), is it really worth saying?
You make a lot of good points at the beginning of your comment. These figures need to be kept in mind, on all sides of these discussions.
I think the problem here is that I genuinely feel I'm calling a spade a spade. Trump himself is probably not ideological enough to be a devoted neo-Nazi. Stephen Bannon, on the other hand, makes Republicans allude to fascism[1].
>“The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office,” said John Weaver, a Republican strategist who ran the presidential campaign of Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and previously advised Senator John McCain of Arizona. “Be very vigilant, America.”[2]
[1] -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/14/steve-bannon-who-...
[2] -- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/donald-trump-...
How many people strongly supported the candidate they ended up casting their ballot for? Both Trump and Clinton had historically low favorability ratings. If people think they're being attacked by one side or the other, it makes it all the harder for them to listen to reasoned debate, and much more likely that they'll be actively voting against a candidate.
Even this "other side" language is problematic, in my opinion. How are you going to find allies among those you don't already agree with when you think of them as "other"? How do you expect them to listen to you? People dig in, get defensive, when they feel they're being attacked. They're no longer listening. There are some people who will never listen to you, or even if they do listen to you, aren't going to end up agreeing with you. But that's not necessarily everyone you don't currently agree with. If you've already written off everyone who voted for a different candidate than you, then you're stuck with very few options. People are more complex than the effectively binary option that was the 2016 US Presidential Election admits.
It's not a "better than them" thing. It's a "what's actually going to make a difference" thing. Language alone isn't going to solve this, of course. But language used poorly can drive needless wedges between people.
All your statements about trying to make people understand, to make them feel equal and not defensive, I was 100% on board with such an approach. And then you realise it's futile.
India did not become independent because Gandhi won; India became independent because it became unfashionable to have colonies, and the British were pressured into letting their empire dissolve.
This is naked white supremacism. For as much bullshit as we've heard about political correctness, why not just come out and say this is straight up religious and racial discrimination?
The president's Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor is a white nationalist, who used to run Breitbart.com, where there is a distinction made between white supremacists and white nationalists (I cannot explain the distinction, for I don't see one). A site all about how awful multiculturalism is, separation of races is necessary for the survival of a country, etc.
Without letting down your guard or concern, my advice is to moderate it with another possibility. The U.S. has much better insulation geographically than European countries, and a history that involves worse rhetoric and divisiveness and we've survived. There might be a pro where the whole world sees what even a little bit of white nationalism does to a country, and all those European countries flirting with their own far right nationalists, and have elections coming up soon, might just have an "OH FUCK NO" moment.
And that's probably better than if Europe were electing far right governments before the U.S. Europe has a history of conflagration. Maybe Europe gets cold feet and starts taking far right nationalist politics more seriously, and rejects it more concisely and clearly, at election time. It's much easier, safer, more stable, to squash this at an election.
You should be ashamed. Imagine being unable to go to work after a short vacation - because someone didn't like where you were born, and in the meantime, on a whim, decided not to let you go.
For absolute shame.
Every group on HN notices things that appear to be against them. It's normal human bias. I've seen plenty of flagging/down-voting going on all sides of various issues.
If you legitimately are interested to dig into this more, there are at least two different HN APIs available for you to mine the comments on the site. I'd be interested in the results if you chose to do so.
I don't think looking at a single submission is adequate in dealing with the perception issue, but for the sake of argument, I looked at all of the references for "nazi" (as it was the first on your list) in the comments for the submission you referenced. Only one of them in my opinion can be construed as name-calling, and that is nuanced in that it explicitly says "not all". Still not great, admittedly, but not the blanket name-calling you imply.
This is all the effort I'm willing to do for you on this front. I think this shows good faith. I encourage you to take a step back and look at everything as a whole as objectively as you can. I know this is hard (it's hard for me), but it's increasingly important lest we increase the polarization we already have. We can't control how other people behave directly. All we can do is do our best to control our own behavior to encourage others to do likewise and move forward constructively.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508902
popular support for Nazism has been purged from German culture.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13509130
Trump voters are not 100% made up of nazis, in essence.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13510141
Germany wasn't 100% made up of Nazi supporters either. That didn't stop disaster.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508404
I've sen a lot of angst over the last week about people on the left expressing approval for 'punching nazis' following Richard Spencer suffering a whack on the ear during a TV interview. It's true, someone, probably form the left, carried out an act of physical violence while he was just standing there talking.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508941
I am even wiling to defend the concept of free speech for people like neo-nazis and the kkk - but only up to the point where they endorse violence against others as opposed to merely asserting their own superiority.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508852
Punching nazis is OK. The left gets to decide who is a nazi.
Punching commies is OK. The right gets to decide who is a commie.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13509038
We restricted Nazi immigration, we restricted communist immigration, and we should certainly restrict Muslim extremist immigration.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508999
If you mean Nazi Germany, my opinion is that there aren't actually that many parallels.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508593
For some reason I'm thinking of a parable that goes like: "First they came for the Nazis"...
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508879
And Obama was the biggest nazi of all times
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508763
I'm not saying it has not errupted (it has) I'm saying violence and the glorification if it (as in people sharing the punch a Nazi video) is a dead end and will definitely strengthen trump support.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508587
It is not possible to really invoke Godwin's law regarding Trump, he already opened this door when he accused the CIA of being like NAZIs for reporting he facts.
Good faith means doing that work upfront to ensure that what you're saying has some basis, and in the case of contentious issues, strong basis. Good faith also means backing down when you're called out on something and found to be lacking that strong basis, not continuing to push it forward.
Most people's good faith doesn't extend infinitely. They're fools if they do continue to extend it when repeatedly shown that the people they're engaging with aren't doing so as well.
And you still don't seem to have gotten my original point: I agree that name-calling is uncalled for and actively unconstructive and uncivil. The perception that "your side", whatever that may be, is being treated unfairly pops up on all sides of contentious issues here on HN. Go out and do some real stats work if you think there's something pernicious about some particular behavior. The data is out there. Just anecdotes don't cut it. Your bias (and mine, and anyone's) isn't going to let you see the picture clearly on its own. And when you're done, share the data, methodology, and results with the rest of us. I know there are a lot of people besides me who would be interested in seeing it, regardless of the actual results.
Even for those strongly against Muslims, or immigration in general, it seems difficult to believe that this kind of lame-ass shit is what they had in mind when voting Trump.
And for those few with enough animus to want to screw over some innocent PhD student because of where she was born? Fuck those guys.