Ask HN: Why are there no discussions related to the Trump Administration? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are there no discussions related to the Trump Administration?

11 pointsForrestN25 comments

As I write this, none of the top 30 links pertain to the massive emergency engulfing Y Combinator's home country, which will have rippling negative effects around the world. Why isn't this news more important here?

HN is full of extremely intelligent, passionate and capable people. Collectively the readers here could form the bedrock of a powerful resistance to what will very clearly be an abominable and destructive regime. I came today expecting a community making plans to protect the vulnerable, to save the planet from climate catastrophe, to ensure the economic environment that has allowed Silicon Valley to flourish. Instead: "I’m a huge fan of Zelda, The Wind Waker’s graphics."

What does it mean that we as a community are silent about perhaps the most important turning point in society so far in most of our lifetimes?

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I can only speak for myself but I've been clicking flag on anything election related including this. I think both the candidates were bad in their own ways. Hillary an ethically challenged war hawk who as secretary of state brought US Russian relations to the lowest point since the cold war. Trump is crude, unapologetic and his greatest skill is self promotion.

It was pretty clear to any one that bothered to pay attention that the election was very close, either way neither outcome was going to be positive. People predicting the end of civilization because Trump was elected are totally divorced from reality and not thinking rationally. That kind of fear mongering is dangerous and unwarranted. If you want to participate in that there are many many websites you can go to to get your fill personally I'm tired of seeing it and don't think it has any place on this site not to mention political stuff is off topic per HN guidelines.

I appreciate you doing this. I haven't been as zealous lately because I'm shellshocked by the week, and as a result I've been at least once sucked into a political thread that wasted a bunch of my time.

With all due respect, I think you are simply overwhelmed. Specifically, this:

>which will have rippling negative effects around the world.

We don't know that.

>to what will very clearly be an abominable and destructive regime.

Nothing clear about that.

>I came today expecting a community making plans to protect the vulnerable, to save the planet from climate catastrophe, to ensure the economic environment that has allowed Silicon Valley to flourish. Instead: "I’m a huge fan of Zelda, The Wind Waker’s graphics.".

Silicon Valley was not born to protect the vulnerable or save the planet, but to create technology. Often in the form of games and graphics.

To calm your spirits, let me try to put it succinctly:

People are trying to infer what kind of president he will be based on what kind of candidate he was. This doesn't work. When someone is a candidate, their job is to win at the game of being a candidate. This involves a certain tool-set: Scandals, digging up skeletons, making dead people vote, disinformation campaigns, promising a utopia, coming out as crazy, whatever gets the votes. Some are morally higher than this. It might work, but I don't think they ever become presidents, especially when others are playing by certain rules.

When a candidate is elected, though, they are the president and their job isn't to be a candidate anymore, it's to be a president. It's different.

Candidate Trump was something, but President-elect Trump is another thing, POTUS Trump will be something else because he needs to be.

Exactly. People forgot that election smear is just that: smear. Both opponents will try their hardest to make the their opponent look bad.

People need to realize that their image of Trump is not the real Trump, it is only the smeared version of Trump.

Laudable sentiments. Are you willing to extend the same to Hillary?

Of course.

Unfortunately, her e-mails are revealing a lot of stuff that are not just smears. Smears are smears when you have no way to prove it. But with Hillary, her emails are right there for everyone to see, to read, and judge for themselves.

So I try to extend it to her too, but she made it impossible, especially since you don't need to rely on someone else telling you that she is corrupt. Instead, you can read the e-mail evidence for yourself and decide.

Personally, I'm mostly tired of it already. Is this the "most important turning point in society...of our lifetimes?"

I think that may be overly dramatic. There have been many things which have had a dramatic effect on society in our lifetime, both positive and negative. I don't want to give Donald Trump the satisfaction of being a member of that club.

Living well is the best thing you can do, no matter who is president. That doesn't mean living high on the hog, that means doing well, being good, helping others. Nobody can stop us from doing that.

HN is for news and discussion about "hacker news": programming, the startup scene, etc. It's not for organizing political movements, even if you assume everyone is of the same political slant.

Even so, nothing has happened. He was elected, and will be inaugurated in a couple of months. Perhaps we wait until some bills actually get proposed or an actual executive order before we get all crisis mode?

^ this

Furthermore, there have been articles referencing the analytical failings behind the miscalculation by those who claimed Trump had no chance along with numerous links to self-reflection pieces characterizing the attitudes of the media, especially a perceived "smugness" as it pertains to the liberal media.

Confession, I'm socially liberal yet conservative on a few other major issues; I have a history of exhibiting said "smugness" and rather than seeing this election as an "emergency", I find it to be a thought-provoking indictment of our (liberals) ineptitude at true empathy, collaboration, and compromise.

There are plenty of places to hear alarmist talk. HN is not the place for that.

Bookmark your sense of alarm. Your sense of impending doom. Remember your feelings today, then get on with life. Come back in a year or two. How will your perception today compare with reality two years from now? (I have a prediction . . . .)

This is said by someone who has watched the sky fall and people throw hissy fits since the 1968 Nixon victory.

>Collectively the readers here could form the bedrock of a powerful resistance to what will very clearly be an abominable and destructive regime.

No. Your hypnosis will soon wear off, give it a couple of months. This is exactly why nobody talks about this on HN.

I'm uvpoting this post pour encourager les autres, so we can talk about it and mock you^W^Wdiscuss it and posts like it in one place.

>As I write this, none of the top 30 links pertain to the massive emergency engulfing Y Combinator's home country, which will have rippling negative effects around the world.

What "massive emergency"? What "negative effects"? Every four years the losing voters will say that it's the end of the world, and yet here we are, going through the same tired shit yet again.

> Collectively the readers here could form the bedrock of a powerful resistance to what will very clearly be an abominable and destructive regime.

First, the people here are entrepreneurs and many of them would be the first to sell software to run trains to the camps if it meant turning a buck. The people here are the sort whose businesses collect the data that would used by a fascist state. The people here are the type to laugh at the enslavement of the poor by the service industry. I would count on them not one goddamned bit.

Second, looking past the silly rhetoric and bluster, how can we claim the "very cleary...an abominable and destructive regime" bit? What, like the excessive assassinations via drones Obama carried out? Or the bombings of countries the US conducted under Clinton? Or the comically large fuckup of military adventurism under Bush II? You gotta do better if you want to sound credible.

> What does it mean that we as a community are silent about perhaps the most important turning point in society so far in most of our lifetimes?

More important than 9/11 and the Patriot Act? More important than the fall of the Berlin Wall? More important than the release of Netscape and IE? More important than Facebook and Twitter and Paypal?

Do you even read what you're saying? Your alarm is only matched by your ignorance.

Politics is off topic per the Guidelines. Even then, there have been several discussions about Trump in the past few days.

There was a very good link submitted to an NPR article that simply took Trump's published list of things he says he is going to do in the first 100 days, and annotated the items with a short look at what it would take to accomplish them.

It did not advocate for or against the various items. It just looked objectively at whether they could be accomplished. There was nothing partisan or inflammatory in the article.

It was [flagged] and [dead] within minutes.

If a simple, nonpartisan, neutral analysis like that cannot make it here, no way is anything even remotely near political activism going to fly.

A lot of people on the site are tired of the political discussion on the site, especially given what such discussions have looked like recently, and that political discussions are not generally in line with the site guidelines. I suspect a lot of submissions are getting flagged as a result, sometimes regardless of the tone of the article.

A discussion of that article would have been quite likely mostly a duplicate of the discussion on the 100 day plan itself, because it only supplies additional arguments for the existing discussion. So it might be better to just quote it in comments.

Careful. It's not the stories themselves that are or aren't suitable for HN. It's the topic and (to a lesser extent) the mode of inquiry†.

Political stories are flagged from HN not because they don't admit to intellectual inquiry (such as it is around here), but because this community won't react to them in that spirit. Good political stories, bad political stories: all of them generate unbelievably noxious threads.

You're right of course. But, since this is a nerd message board, I feel entitled to point out at tedious length that you're right for the wrong reason. :)

† In very rare cases, you can see academic studies of politics get some traction here.

Is this your first election? What you are experiencing is called OMG!-The-candidate-I-voted-for-did-not-win-so-the-world must-be-ending Syndrome. Happens every election. Remember Bush? "OMG! That idiot will be the end of America as we know it!" Well, we're still here, America is still here.

So calm down. The President is not a dictator. The President does not have that kind of power.

Discussions about Trump have been all over the front page ever since the election.

> massive emergency

Maybe that's just not the consensus view you thought it was.

Something that really helped me stop getting panicky / excited / enraged by politics is ready and listening to P.J. O'Rourke. He's entertaining and funny and level headed.

Definitely helped me gain a calmer understand of politics.

Try his books or start here[1] with his 'Dangerous state of the nation' address at the Sydney Opera House.

1. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/pj-o'-...

There are multiple threads, some of them with >1000 comments. why they are not in the top 30 (anymore) has been answered in the other comments.

From what I've read of them (as an outsider), there is still a lot of "Why did that just happen", pro-contra-Trump debates and of course a lot of hypotheticals -> we don't know all that much yet. It seems people will need time to cool down and figure out where to go next, and watch what actually is likely to happen.

I think I got part of my answer: it seems that many people on HN do not interact much with those of us who are now in immanent danger. Reading the delusional apathy, ignorance and disdain in the replies here I'm even more concerned.

What is the specific policy that has been proposed that puts you in imminent danger?

In a separate vein, I think this comment does surface an important idea: it's easy to think HN=SV/SF, and that the perceived monoculture of SV/SF defines HN. HN is filled with people who are interested in the core topics of technology, and that includes readers in red and blue states, Baptists and LGBTs, Prius-drivers and pickup-drivers.

If you're going to blame people for not interacting with you, pay close attention to how you treat them when they do.

> delusional apathy, ignorance and disdain

I engaged with some folks I know on Twitter with calls for moderation and suggestions that things might not be as dire as they seem. I was asked to "stop", "go away", "shut up", and "respect the pain".

Twitter now seems to be functioning as the national amygdala.

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