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Comment by mr_blobs | Hacker News Reader

I think an entire generation has just learned a lesson in civics.

Our system worked as designed: The candidate that won the electoral college won the presidency.

I lost faith in democracy after the election because of the amount of companies and people that feel like the only way to beat Trump in the next election is to suppress the freedoms of the people that support him.

It shows me that they never really believed in democracy in the first place and only played along because their candidate was the projected winner.

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"I lost faith in democracy after the election because of the amount of companies and people that feel like the only way to beat Trump in the next election is to suppress the freedoms of the people that support him."

Evidence of systematic suppression please? Who? What? When? Where?

It's subliminal and covert. You can't really measure it. It comes in the form of an attitude and a culture change.

Sound familiar?

> Sound familiar?

Nope. Sounds like BS. You can't measure it? Doesn't exist, then.

> You can't measure it? Doesn't exist, then.

By that notion, do you also conclude that human don't have consciousness?

Maybe? Consciousness is pretty ill defined. If you define it such that it can be measured, then the measurement answers the question. If you define it such that it cannot be measured, then I think it's kind of meaningless.

Covert racism and sexism, which happens much much less than what many portray, yes.

However, we aren't talking about that. We are talking about what can't be measured.

The pay-wage gap for women is a good example. The left seems to think this is due to covert sexism. When you compare for education, job title, and many other factors to equal out the comparisons, there is no wage gap.

In what way is the wage gap argument even relevant here? This is a measurable thing, and people can discuss and debate actual facts. As you pointed out, some analyses of the data don't indicate a systematic bias. Regardless of what you believe, there are data and factual statements that can be made. But it's also utterly irrelevant.

On the other hand, you've made the claim that a very large number of people who oppose Trump want to suppress the freedoms of his supporters. This is a falsifiable claim, but you say that it cannot be measured and you can't provide any other proof or evidence. This is commonly known as "making shit up".

If this argument is valid, then I can argue that most Trump supporters secretly want to bomb England. I can't measure it or provide any evidence, but it's clearly true, because I said so.

HN is having technical difficulties, so I had to create another account.

Trump supporters attacked:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=trump+supporter... (Just some of the Trump supporters attacked)

There were some stories popping up that minorities were also being attacked after the election. However, so many of them turned out to be made-up/fake, It's really difficult to believe that it's happening at any elevated level (especially with almost no video proof besides what someone said).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3603345/Conservative... (Facebook bans vocal Trump supporter)

http://ilovemyfreedom.org/facebook-bans-trump-supporters/ (Facebook bans trump supporter page)

http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/11/30/reddit-vows-combat-onl... (Reddit CEO edits Trump supporter comments)

http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/18/trumps-digital-director-tw... (Twitter actively censored Trump campaign)

http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-bans-fake-news-sites-fr... (fake news sites banned from Facebook)

Fake news sites are banned from FB advertising, yet they only seem to be right-leaning. Sites like the Huffingtonpost, which has some of the most click-baity and outright fake news stories I've ever seen still gets to post their sludge on FB and get paid for it.

I don't see any of the censoring happening with violent and vocal BLM supporters that call for the death of white people and police officers. In fact, Jack Dorsey is good friends with one of the leaders of the movement.

Examples: http://hypeline.org/minutes-after-dallas-shooting-blm-radica...

These are just a small sampling of the censoring and violence that has been happening before and after the election.

It's relevant because people get fired and companies get boycotted over a highly politicized interpretation of the results, which actually is usually do to many other factors.

This thought policing stops, however, when it involves something like the abuse and silencing of a political opponent or someone you don't support.

I didn't even mention all of the Wikileaks that showed that almost everyone in the mainstream media was conspiring against Trump, Sanders, and all political opponents of HRC.

Your main account has been posting primarily political comments, which is an abuse of this site and its community. To create another account so you can post more political comments faster is going much too far, so we've banned this account and we'll ban the main one if you continue.

> Trump supporters attacked [...] There were some stories popping up that minorities were also being attacked after the election. However, so many of them turned out to be made-up/fake, It's really difficult to believe that it's happening at any elevated level (especially with almost no video proof besides what someone said).

First, anyone attacking Trump supporters physically is clearly a pretty terrible person and no one in any position of power is supporting this.

Second, a few nutso people don't represent a systematic effort to suppress Trump voters or their freedoms as you've claimed.

Third, you must see the hypocrisy of dismissing all claims of violence against minorities while believing every story about violence against Trump supporters. Even Trump doesn't believe this. On national television he told his own supporters to stop.

> Facebook bans vocal Trump supporter

A quick search indicates that she'd been banned repeatedly in the past before her Trump support. I don't have any visibility into what she was posting to get banned repeatedly. It seems like this particular ban was an overreach, but not surprising given the history.

> Facebook bans trump supporter page

I have no visibility into this either so I can't really speak to it. Maybe Facebook was pointlessly and senselessly banning? Maybe the ban came because the group regularly pushes the limits of what Facebook allows? I have no idea.

> Reddit CEO edits Trump supporter comments

This was stupid and wildly inappropriate but hardly constituted any kind of secret censorship. His edits were not subtle. He changed mentions of his own name to mentions of the_donald mods.

> Twitter actively censored Trump campaign

So this whole article is about Twitter not approving some particular custom emoji? I don't see what the issue is on these particular emoji, but I also think this is a mountains-of-molehills situation. They ran the rest of the campaign.

> fake news sites banned from Facebook

It says something that you assume banning fake news sites is an attack against the right.

> Fake news sites are banned from FB advertising, yet they only seem to be right-leaning. Sites like the Huffingtonpost, which has some of the most click-baity and outright fake news stories I've ever seen still gets to post their sludge on FB and get paid for it.

Huffington Post posts a lot of clickbait trash. That's not the same at all as fake news, though. I'm pretty sure Facebook also allows a lot of clickbait trash from sites like Breitbart.

> I don't see any of the censoring happening with violent and vocal BLM supporters that call for the death of white people and police officers. In fact, Jack Dorsey is good friends with one of the leaders of the movement.

I don't see any BLM leaders calling for the deaths of white people or police officers. You can't point to random assholes online and claim they represent an entire movement. Or if you can, I can point to David Duke and other overtly racist Trump supporters to condemn all Trump supporters.

Stories of overtly racist and violent Trump supporters are not hard to find: http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/20/politics/donald-trump-immigrat...

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/21/politics/trump-muslims-surveil...: "At least one man punched the protester and a woman kicked him while he was on the ground."

> I didn't even mention all of the Wikileaks that showed that almost everyone in the mainstream media was conspiring against Trump, Sanders, and all political opponents of HRC.

Everyone in the mainstream media? Seriously?

> Our system worked as designed: The candidate that won the electoral college won the presidency.

Well, yes, the system worked as designed. But that's not the question that's being studied.

The study evaluates if people feel that 'our system' is a good one. And the not just whether the electoral college to select a president is a good example of a representative democracy, but whether a representative democracy, where we hold elections for the people in the society to select representatives to govern us, is a good way to organize humans.

On the one hand, no, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were clearly not the smartest, wisest, most knowledgeable humans the United States could offer, who would be the most successful in communications with other countries, who would offer public policies that maximize the desired benefits and minimize negative consequences in the ideal ratio, who would handle the issues that they are presented with throughout the presidency with the greatest understanding of the issues, and who would select advisors and delegate responsibilities as required.

Someone with these characteristics would not likely be selected by the people, who would lack the information to determine which person they were. Even with a knowledgeable population, people would disagree on the policies they would implement. Also, someone with the best characteristics would be continuously improving their abilities, rather than campaigning.

On the other hand, the electoral college and presidency, flawed as they are, are better than a military coup, anarchy, or a dictatorship (assuming the dictator isn't this ideal leader, or wouldn't select an ideal successor).

There's no question that democracy as a system has some inherent problems. But I doubt that we can come up with a better alternative than a representative democracy, which is I think the main drawback of this survey.

There's also no question that the form of representative democracy we currently have is corrupted and inefficient, and that we could make one more fair and accurate than it is. But I doubt it would stay that way.

I've complained about Trump win and discussed consequences - and possible actions. However, I feel rather offended by a suggestion that I'm not democratic in views.

I also felt Trump won democratically, more or less. Played by existed rules, nobody loudly objected to rules before voting - sounds fair. That was until I looked into things with different perspective.

I think election and voting are two rather different things. While voting took a day and was fair by itself, election was going on for a couple of years - enough to be able to work out democratic approach. It this case it was a sort of propaganda - the populist way Trump chose and rather skillfully followed.

Now I don't think the winning is too legitimate. However in practice I think we're left more with attempts to keep the good parts of existing system, protecting them from possible and likely mistakes or deliberate attacks from the president. This protection will take efforts and won't likely be perfect, but that's I think what we have.

So, lots of work ahead. A good thing is that the election forces us to look into root causes of the problems. But all that has little to do with rejection of democracy by those who oppose Trump.

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