The implication here is that people vote for trump because they are stupid. Which is a political non-starter. If you can’t explain what they think in words they would agree with, you just don’t understand them.
But sure I’ll try to take the other side. Is every person in an organization associated with the word “nuclear” essential? Will nations start blowing up if a single one is fired?
So we need to know who got let go and what their responsibility is. Otherwise we are just word associating (“nuclear safety people = good”, “reducing safety = bad”), which is probably what the authors of this piece hoped for.
But come on, this is just a nerd fantasy that appeals to HNers (the smart people doing important science are untouchable and will automatically do what’s right).
That takes a level of willful ignorance I can't comprehend.
Many (most?) Americans don't seem to have ever learned how to think critically or question what authority figures tell them to believe.
On top of that, COVID was rough for lots and lots of people. Even though it started under Trump, he somehow managed to avoid blame for the government's missteps early on. Biden did what he could, but even an absolute perfect response would have caused a lot of strife for a lot of people, and his administration's response was definitely not perfect. In a way I think it's impressive how well Harris did; even had Biden decided not to run at all for a second term, it would have been an uphill battle for the incumbent party to stay in power after COVID.
At a certain point this line of thinking is just saying you don’t think elections work, or that there should be some non-democratic supervisor to undo bad ones.
There is also an older idea that getting people out to vote is part of the game. An election is when citizens back leaders from their community. It’s not taking a survey of every 18+ human life form with a pulse.
A "president" who declared himself and any breaking the law "to save the country" as above the law.
That's the crucial difference here.
> If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
-- John Stuart Mill
How un-democratic, huh?
Even if Trump had 99% of the votes, that would not justify his brown shirts. Call that un-democratic. If fascism is the same as a healthy society, as long as most people who were eligible at one point in time thought that's what they want (just take how Trump voters have no clue how tariffs work, and how saying "I want tariffs" means nothing as long as they don't), because "democracy", then that's just mob rule by the worst.
Why are you using a quote about censorship and free speech to talk about the outcome of an election? Those aren’t related things.
Nobody thinks majority vote makes truth, but majority of electoral voters does determine the president of the US.
> Even if Trump had 99% of the votes
It sounds like your previous comment expressing concern about the number of voters was in bad faith.
> Trump voters have no clue how tariffs work
I noticed this actually isn’t an argument against tariffs.
I don’t think it’s going to look pretty if we starting quizzing low class democratic voters on economic questions either. This has no bearing on whether the policy is a good idea or not.
Heh. Nope. A minority of Americans voted for a fascist, not half of them. That's a fact. 23%, 28%, doesn't matter in light of "half of Americans".
And in addition even if 99% voted for fascism it wouldn't give them the right to impose fascism on 1%. If you don't see how the quote relates to that, how it's an analogy, well.
> I don’t think it’s going to look pretty if we starting quizzing low class democratic voters on economic questions either. This has no bearing on whether the policy is a good idea or not.
It has a bearing on the legitimacy of saying "people want this". If I send you an email saying "click here to get a million bucks", it means you wanted a million bucks, not catch malware. Now you can say "but cybersecurity has nothing to do with elections" and tell me I'm arguing in bad faith because you're not even trying to follow ^^
But if you really want to be pedantic: there are around 75M non-citizens living in the US, so that means there are only 265M Americans in the US. A quick search suggests that the number of American citizens living outside the US is under 5M. 77M out of 270M is 28%, so Trump did get more than a quarter of Americans to vote for him.
(For the record, I said "of the country", and didn't restrict my comment to only US citizens as you did.)
At any rate, I don't find these sorts of takes all that useful when it comes to electoral math. 77M people voted for Trump. Around 100M people in the US are ineligible to vote (under 18 years old, non-citizens, felons denied voting rights, etc.). That leaves around 90M people left who could have voted, but didn't: to me, that's either "I'm fine with what the people who vote decide" (so a tacit vote for Trump) or "I don't care at all, screw this".
So that's 167M votes either explicitly for Trump, or implicitly for watching things burn. That's about half the country.
But sure, if you must be pedantic, amend my comment to "nearly half the people who voted in the election". It doesn't change the meaning or outcome or implications of the rest of what I said.
So let's stop playing dumb number games. Half of the country either actively wanted this, or was fine with it.
So if Harris and her goons did this shit, the correct response would be the same.
> if you really want to be pedantic
Why would I want to be? Saying "the people are fine with this so it's fine" would be BS even if 99% of Americans voted for it. That's the "dumb numbers game", I didn't start with that and I attribute zero value to it.
I believe this as well, but it still baffles me. Don't people have a sense that things can always get worse?
I’ve been thinking for some time that both our countries need some kind of wake up call. I’m very sad that we seem to be getting one simultaneously, yet it might not be a reversible event. At least not on any short order.
But yeah, the lack of truly bad experiences seems to have made us all very soft. I know some of us experience poverty or immigrated from horrible governments so we know firsthand how much worse things can be, but on average I get the sense that people typically have no idea.
Through the repetition of statements like: "illegals commit more crime," "illegals are eating your dogs," "Trump - Low prices, Kamala - High prices | 2024."
Those things are not true, but having no proof does not matter any more. You just need to "flood the zone."
They don't even attempt to hide this technique at all. This philosophy was openly confirmed by multiple people in the current administration, including the Vice President.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-sentence/