I agree with his stance on this, and I think Trump and his latest executive orders are awful, but I also think that at this point, "hatred," "bigotry," and "racism" should be excised from public discourse.
How else do you want to describe the contents (and spirit) of this executive order?
I think getting into mealy mouthed wiesel words and euphemisms for something that's clearly hateful and bigoted and racist helps no one.
Today, if I read an article describing someone as racist, that gets me no closer to understanding them as a person, because I have no idea what the article means by that, or if the author can be trusted to wield that word.
I realize one feels uneasy making long-winded arguments about something that seems so obvious, but that it is necessary is just a consequence of diversity of thought. There are actually people who disagree with your characterization of this order as racist or bigoted who are also sincere and thoughtful.
Would you call it a hateful act as well?
Now you will have to find out cases when Obama ordered government officers to ignore court order.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/29/customs-bord...
> Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents defied the orders of federal judges regarding Donald Trump’s travel bans on Sunday, according to members of Congress and attorneys who rallied protests around the country in support of detained refugees and travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Instead of providing supporting argument for your above statement, you conveniently change the subject to another, only loosely related matter.
Whataboutism at its best :-)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/...
But you feel like "Obama did it" is an apt corollary to the scale, scope and circumstances of this week's events? Because of an actual event, and the resulting review and re-examination of existing Iraqi refugees which caused a slowdown in the acceptance of new Iraqi refugees for several months, you know because of finite resources... and no explicit orders or stop immigration that equates close enough to Trump's EO? I mean there's just no way to discuss that rationally with someone who wants to make that comparison. It's intellectual laziness and textbook false equivalence. If Obama did nothing he would have been crucified for that by Republicans. And because Obama did the most benign thing possible he was likely crucified for that by Republicans. And because the thing he did had tangible consequences, but wasn't unreasonable, that's now justification for Trump's EO? Forget double dipping, some people are triple dipping.
But let's compare anyway. A review of existing refugees which caused the slower acceptance of new refugees in response to the discovered failure in the system.
VS
Trump picked some countries seemingly at random from a large pool of Muslim countries in order to fulfill a "campaign promise" regardless of actual need or circumstances. The countries he picked haven't been a hotbed of terrorism against the U.S. He selected no countries that he has business interests in, even if they have had citizens who've carried out attacks against the U.S. His executive order effected people with green cards and visa's people we've already researched and vetted, not just new immigration.
Yeah, they're the same event all right /s. So is your BS ignorance or dishonesty?
Obama: implemented quietly, no official ban, limited to one country
Trump: implemented through executive order, covers 7 dangerous countries.
Apart from style and scope, the effect was/is the same: stop certain groups of people from coming here for a period of time, until better checks are implemented.
Except for Iran, the countries he has picked ARE on the list of the most terrorist-ridden places in the world [1][2].
[1] http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-global-terrorism-inde...
The comparison barely pasts muster when you consider the circumstances. First of all, Obama's 'ban' was based on an intelligence report that stated that terrorist had already gotten into the US through the immigration program, and wanted to know why that was the case. They limited, not banned, Iraqis to make sure that the new processes were working. Here, there was a clear and present cause and effect to show why these steps were taken.
Trump's ban is a straight outright ban, based on a list, granted, that was made by the previous administration, but unless I've missed the report/statement/briefing, that honestly doesn't have anything to do with a specific policy or situation, other than keep them out. Otherwise, why would long-standing US green card holders also have to warned not to leave the country for fear of not getting back into the US??
> Would you call it a hateful act as well?
I would call what Obama did sad, both for what he did and the reactions he received, but nobody ever thought he did it because he wanted an entire nation kept out of the country, let alone just a particular reason. (This is all hearsay, but considering what the man has previously stated publicly, lends some truth to this rumour, but apparently this is as legal as they could get to keep Muslims from the Middle East out of the country.)
I don't see it as anti-Muslim decision, 87% of the world's Muslim population are not affected. I see it as anti-terrorism decision, targeted at the top 7 most terrorist-ridden countries in the world [1].
Yes, it sucks for law-abiding citizens of these countries who would like to visit the US in the next 120 days. But it is only temporary.
This assumes that the other countries will comply with the administrations requests for information on the individuals, otherwise it will be extended indefinitely. Iran doesn't have a US embassy and they don't officially have relations with the US, you think they're going to suddenly start handing over information to the US? If anything, this gives them more reason to say, "See how the US is treating us like shit?" which further stirs up anti-US sentiment among them.
Also, yes, green card holders ARE affected by this. My wife won't be able to leave the country without fear of being denied entry upon her return despite her being a valid green card holder.
So guilt by association is definitely real and is definitely used by various other groups and countries to enrich their lives.
As far as the green card goes, I know quite a few people over dramatizing the effects of Trumps legislation primarily due to their hatred for them. My wife is Mexican and has a green card. Just this past weekend she left the US for a short trip to MX, and is already back. Her parents, daily, drive to Mexico for their job and drive back to the US where they live. If your wife is finding it difficult to re-enter the country, then from my perspective at least, there may be other reasons.
Trump immediately stopped the entry of all foreign nationals, including green card holders returning from vacations and people who already had vaild visas.
That's very different. You could argue that the Administration didn't intend for the order to apply to GC holders, but the fact that the implementation of an executive order was different from its intention proves that it was poorly thought out.
Stop parroting these bullshit alternative facts. In substance and impact, Trump's EO is far more expansive than anything Obama did.
You could apply the Occam's razor, and describe them by the reasoning given by the administration - as an attempt to limit terrorists entering the US by limiting access to people from countries known to produce terrorists.
You might ofcourse disagree with the usefulness and means of these executive orders, but it doesn't mean they are meant as hateful or racist.
Put into context with the new administration and how they acted since the inauguration my application of Occam's razor would lead to the exact opposite conclusion of yours.
I don't think having ad hominem as your main argument is a good strategy, look at the election results!
The reality is: more than half the people disagree, if you label them, you are dooming all chance of ever getting your way.
This is extremely superficial, arrogant, even offensive to people who voted for Trump. And that is the reason why Trump won IMO. Opposition couldnt understand (not even recognize) the legitimate and valid thoughtful reasons people had to vote for Trump.
Trump may have swayed some undecided voters in his favours as a protest vote but all he had to do was rally the Republican voters and make Clinton look so bad the Democrat voters wouldn't want to get her elected.
The question isn't why Trump won, the question is why Clinton lost. In terms of absolute numbers, Clinton couldn't even match the numbers with which Obama was re-elected. She won the popular vote but the popular vote is not where you win the presidency and she knew that.
The voters who should have been Democrat voters didn't have faith in their candidate and I think they didn't even have faith in their party. Trump's election is not simply a weird victory of a Republican outsider, it's a massive defeat of the Democrat establishment.
A single young man with a sordid past and complicated relationship with the gay community claimed allegiance to Islamists immediately prior to massacring dozens of people at a gay-centric dance club.
The killer was upset about the US presence in Iraq/Syria and had been preparing the attack for some time, possibly helped by his wife (arrested and charged with helping him). Both were Muslims.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Orlando_nightclub_shootin...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/politics/noor-salman-a...
From the wiki:
>Mateen's ex-wife, however, claimed that his father called him gay while in her presence. Speaking on her behalf, her current fiancé said that she, his family, and others believed he was gay, and that "the FBI asked her not to tell this to the American media"
My male friend has been called "gay" a few times because he likes Broadway shows.
You can believe in any hearsay you want, but at the end of the day, this was a US-hating, Muslim guy/couple, killing LGBT people (for whom many Muslims have special hatred, and like to throw them off the roofs).
For what it's worth, the FBI also found no evidence linking him to ISIL.
We can't possibly know what he felt in his heart, but making policy decisions based on the assumption that we can is reckless and only serves to further smooth over any of hint of subtlety left in American public discourse.
- The FBI has investigated and found no links that he was a patron of the club.
- He has, for a fact, murdered people in the name of Islam.
We can't know what he felt in his heart, but also we don't have any reason to believe his stated motives aren't his actual ones. It an uncomfortable fact, but a large percentage of Muslims say they believe in Sharia which holds some pretty awful beliefs about gay people (and women, and others).
Incidentally, his actual 'stated motives' were "[his] people... getting killed" in air strikes in general, and the death of Abu Waheeb in particular.
Nobody is claiming that Trump's win is illegitimate due to the electoral vs. popular mismatch, but it's clear that something is seriously wrong when a candidate can win an election by several million votes and still lose the presidency. If I were a Democrat, I'd be even more annoyed that my party had won the popular vote four times in the 21st Century and only won the presidency twice.
I think the obvious answer is to increase the number of representatives in the House. Wyoming residents currently have 3x the influence in presidential elections as people from Texas, which is seriously askew given the relative power of the two.
I'm not an American so the electoral college is completely alien to me but what you're saying is basically that you disagree with the entire point of having the electoral college.
Clinton lost in almost every state. The reason she won the popular vote (which, again, doesn't matter in the presidential election) is that she won in some of the states with the highest population, like California. Yes, this means she won more people over, but they still only represent a fraction of the demographics.
The electoral college has obvious flaws like swing states being the primary concern of candidates during much of their campaigns. But it's important to understand that without the electoral college there would be other problems, specifically the most populous states practically deciding the election.
So either way it's unfair: either it's unfair to a large portion of the overall population by putting states above people, or it's unfair to a large number of states by putting population above state rights.
It's really a question of what the US wants to be. Do you want to be an alliance of sovereign states united under a federal government, or do you want to be a singular nation with a central government that delegates to the individual states for bureaucratic reasons?
It seems a lot of Americans say they want the former but secretly think they have the latter. A weighted state-based system will always result in "undemocratic" results like the 2016 election, a direct vote will always be unfair to smaller states. You can't have it both ways.
In my opinion the electoral college should be abolished and the US elections (all of them) should be reformed in a way that no longer necessitates a two-party system but in practice state rights are an important issue to Americans.
The US motto may be "e pluribus unum" but that doesn't mean the political landscape can be treated as a homogeneous playing field.
[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analytic...
I know they have real concerns, like economic pain, threats to their way of life, and concerns about mass immigration—concerns which, by the way, I argued in the grandparent that the left counters with labels. "Your concerns aren't real; you're just xenophobic." But I think the cultural stuff was a big part of it.
I realize they don't represent all Trump supporters, and never said they did.
If you're going to stage a cultural revolution you should at least get that there will be some form of counter-revolution at some point. And if your revolution is concerned with things that don't concern the the rest of the populace (and in fact sounds like complete gibberish to them), best of luck with that fight...
I actually think this may be quite a problem for President Trump down the line. These are friendly, community minded people who - generally speaking - overlooked (rather than covertly support, as everyone seems to project) Trump's more outlandish/discriminatory rhetoric. If he comes up short on the community reinvestment and gets mired in a bunch of unseemly scandals, the support of these people will drop off.
That said, what people think is true is - of course - whatever they can be convinced is true. Immigration really isn't/hasn't been a problem, so if the president can build an unnecessary wall and convince people that immigration isn't a problem anymore because of it then maybe we're boned.
Its was very symmetric.
an election is a choice between 2 alternates though
didn't like X (maybe 'thought X would do bad things' is a better way to translate that), is a valid reason to vote for Y, and doesn't translate very well to "just to fuck with everyone"
---------
if you dislike Trump, the Democratic Party's failure to give the American people a better alternative to Trump than Clinton, deserves some portion of the blame
(and while we're on it, the medias failure to hold the democratic party accountable to produce better options than Trump deserve a good deal of the blame as well)
-----------
These things work in balance, Trump gets away with a lot of the stuff he gets away with, because people don't trust the alternatives,
people don't trust the alternatives, because those alternatives have proven themselves unworthy of trust
It's also what Trump supporters on this very site and elsewhere have stated to be their rationale. Trump was meant to be a "brick through the window of the establishment" thrown by angry, conservative, lower-middle class white voters driven to desperation by globalism and liberal cultural oppression, who wanted the existing system destroyed so that something more representative of their values could replace it. Various articles have been written about the phenomenon, so clearly it was a factor.
But this is HN after all, it's a relatively self selecting and privileged bubble. One man's bravery is another man's minor act of inconvenience.
Very illuminating.
I also take issue with the idea that "expressing opposition to racism" really counts as "opposition". Talk is cheap, particularly if you're rich and privileged, and even more so if you're rich, privileged, and your talk is uncontroversial. Opposing racism requires every day actions, some of them difficult or uncomfortable, not self congratulatory tweets and blog posts. And especially not self congratulatory tweets and blog posts from CEOs or venture capitalists.
-----
Person A: I'm facing discrimination in my industry.
Person B: I don't see color. Racists are bad.
Person A: Too bad I don't work for you. How can I deal with what is happening?
Person B: There's going to be more of this with Trump. I hate Trump.
-----
I related to this dynamic a lot.
edit: it was an interview of Asad Haider (editor of viewpointmag.com) on the last Behind The News (Doug Henwood's show) episode.
Superficially true, but the virtues people are basically forced to signal in order not to be economically ruined are, as they say, socially constructed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling
The short version is, it's when someone acts in a "moral" fashion not because they truly believe it, but because they want others to see them as virtuous. Imagine someone attending a protest purely so that their friends can see them protesting, or donating to charity just so they can tell everyone that they donated.
Attending a protest or donating to charity is relatively risky and expensive in comparison to just feigning outrage, retweeting slogans or changing your avatar.
I'd define it "When in Rome ...."
Personally I would never attach the word "virtue" to opinion/thought only actions.
It turns out that Jesus was one of those morbid people, criticizing the Pharisees and hypocrisy (preaching water and drinking wine).
Hypocrisy permeates business and politics, so while "virtue signaling" is perhaps overused, it is nonetheless a useful catch phrase. You can also use it against the right, if you wish.
Trump holding a rifle on stage is also virtue signaling.
What I object to is the specific phrase itself. Not because it's inherently bad, but because of how it's used. People use it as a way to dismiss and insult people without appearing dismissive and insulting. It's like if I say "you're suffering from a rectal-cranial inversion" rather than "you have your head up your ass."
If people want to call me insincere and disingenuous, I'd like them to have the courage to say it straight, not hide it behind scientific terms.
I've been working for a while now on having concrete, one to one conversations about race with strangers. Some key principles in this work are to call people in, not out, focus on personal experiences, and build out from shared values. It's hard. But I grew up in St Louis, which is a deeply, deeply racist town, where I was told from a young age that we lived in a colorblind society, and that I should stay away from the black parts of town of I valued my life.
Ignoring racism doesn't make it go away. Ignoring white nationalists, and giving them more acceptable labels doesn't make them go away, and doesn't make their hated any softer. These labels are still useful and relevant, and removing words useful for discussing the worst offenses, and providing a rock bottom which most people are happy to distance themselves from.
White silence enables white violence.
However Trump's supporters either believe that other races/religions are inferior or believe their concerns are more important and ignore it.
So what can someone do if they want to combat inequality/injustice/etc?
It's not like their opponents are arguing with an open mind.
The first is that Donald Trump explicitly ran a primary campaign that at one time called for banning all Muslim travel to the United States. It is difficult for me to see how that promise is not rooted in some combination of bigotry and ignorance. For those who remember such promises Trump made, Trump will not automatically signal "compassion" and "tolerance", and I'm sure it's easy to morph an awfully crude executive order targeting countries already on a watch list into a policy that advocates "racism" and "bigotry".
The second is that the executive order was so poorly constructed, so hastily issued, and so overly sweeping, that it snagged people that shouldn't have been snagged (your green card holders and already-accepted refugees and whatnot) and threw immigration into chaos. Again, this only adds to the overall impression of "racism" for those who already have it.
From my perspective, my impression of this Trump executive order is more one of shoot-from-the-hip incompetence (that could've been avoided merely with more consultation with policy experts) and a fairly deaf political ear.
Do we suddenly think Saudi society has changed enough that no Saudis are prone to terrorism?
Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-didn%E2%80%99t-Donald-Trump-includ...
This seems strange to me.
Hence your "nations without Trump hotels" comment seemed strange to me.
http://www.npr.org/2017/01/28/512199324/countries-listed-on-...
Meanwhile, I think the move is motivated by 1) actual interests of people in his cabinet and advisory group (notably Bannon), and 2) populist pandering for re-election. I think that's sufficient motivation. I think the ham-fisted implementation of the policy is either arrogance meeting incompetence or an attempt to anchor expectations so low that Republican elected officials can later happily get on board with him when he's merely being very awful instead of incomprehensibly awful, saying he's "learned". I hope it's the former.
Personally, when I read words like bigot/racist/etc., I instantly associate it with myself and my demographic, as a label that names us, not as a descriptor. I know that I personally meet none of the classical definitions of those words, but I also recognize that, in modern parlance, I "am" those things.
It's pretty messed up.
Surely Fred Wilson is considered a leader within certain communities.
Call it what it is. Everywhere you see it.
Calling Trump racist or a Nazi isn't effective. It's preaching to the choir. You don't convince his supporters, and you alienate the moderates that believe Trump is moderate like them.
This is deliberate. Trump deliberately made himself the motte-and-bailey candidate, so both moderates and extremists feel Trump is on their side. He's done that through double-messages and lying, so that the moderates came to believe that Trump was lying on his extreme proposals, and the extremists believed Trump was lying on his moderate proposals. Even his VP choice served that goal.
By calling Trump names, you're setting yourself up to be seen as unfairly strawmanning him, therefore reducing your credibility among the people you most want to convince. You're also setting yourself up to be seen as slyly using words as emotional hand-grenades ("nazi! bigot!") to shut down discourse, rather than actually believing these labels. Through that, you cede the moral high ground, not because you're manipulative, but because your target audience believes you are.
Hillary Clinton paid consultants millions to help her convince the public, and even that didn't work. Throwing around labels it hopeless. Regardless of whether you honestly believe those labels, they don't work anymore. Go on at your peril. I don't know what the solution is. Wider involvement in the political process, repeal of the Electoral College, and redistricting all seem like better ideas. And then, propose a positive vision, not just criticism of the other side.
Edit:
I'll be clearer: you're right. Do you want to be right, or do you want to win?
These are labels. No one really knows what "hate" means anymore, but because people are emotional, they see the word, recall what they think of Trump, and think, "yeah, that's hateful!"
This is a problem for two reasons. First, while Fred is probably a smart, intellectually rigorous guy, many people aren't. Most people who shout "that's hateful" or "that's racist" don't actually have a repository of comprehensive thought behind it. This is partly why Trump won in the first place. People everywhere would say, "You support Trump! You're racist!" or "Trump has a position involving race! He's racist!" This is not an argument, but once you introduce this vitriolic adjective into the room, everyone worries about their ideas being placed into this odious category, and discussion becomes stifled. People become sick of this, and vote Trump just to fuck with everyone.
The second reason is that using labels convinces no one who isn't already on your side. Fred knows this, and this post is targeted at those people. This is virtue signaling: taking a "brave stance" on a position that people already agree with you on. Some virtue signaling is necessary; leaders should speak out; but generally this type of lazy rhetoric, combined with the incentive of popularity over truth, divides us more than any policy.
I'm glad he's donating money, but he writes that he's "done keeping his mouth shut," and for that to be a courageous act he has to (like everyone else) do more than hurl labels.