Joel Spolsky: Time to take a stand | Hacker News Reader

Joel Spolsky: Time to take a stand

meta.stackoverflow.com

115 pointsnmjohn39 comments

So...how are we taking a stand? What's recommended, internet postings? I think we've got those covered.

https://www.indivisibleguide.com/web

This is a really fantastic, actionable, and readable guide. It's an effort by Congressional staffers to reverse-engineer what was so effective about the Tea Party.

Another good next step is to make a sizable contribution to the ACLU.

Also, support newspapers. Pay the cost of a few drinks to subscribe to the digital edition instead of working around their paywall.

by upvoting that post in stackoverflow, of course.

It's much more on the personal impact scale, but I built http://offsettrump.com for trying to get people to make things the tiniest bit better.

So maybe Trump really will make America great again. It's just that he'll do it by being the counterexample which spurs people to action.

Something something entropy

Where were you when Obama, who got elected primarily by people who opposed to the recklessness of Wall St, continued with the Bush bailouts, ordered the murder of thousands via drones, and supported policies that increased the transfer of wealth to the top 1%?

Trump is horrible, but so was Obama...How come all these HN "progressives" did little Obama was screwing the country over?

P.S. I like your site, awesome job!

The time to take a stand was, of course, election day.

Future historians would be stunned that Trump received 42% of women vote and more Hispanic vote than Romney did. People voted fully knowing what would happen considering Trump had spelled out his actions as president almost on daily basis. Sometime I just don't now if I'm living in a bubble here where everyone around me in tech industry is in protest mode. Could it be the case that people in South/mid-west are rejoicing with all these executive orders? Could it be the case that people protesting are only in slight (3% ?) majority with people who are supporting Trump's actions? It would be great to know what is going on with outside the bubble.

I think it's pretty funny how the question got locked "due to the high amount of off-topic comments generated", given how off-topic the question itself was (in the context of Stack Overflow, of course).

Also, wow that question got closed as off-topic a lot! There's almost three pages of closures and subsequent re-opens in the edit history: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/342440/revisions

I found Kasra Rahjerdi’s “answer” to be more affecting. While I thought Joel’s “question” well-written, I found myself agreeing with those saying that it would perhaps have been more appropriate as a blog post. However, the post works well to open the discussion and to provide a platform for Kasra, an Iranian developer working for Stack Overflow to express his thoughts and feelings on how recent developments have effected him personally.

Great idea open world, communities, et cetera, but how to deal with terrorism? Look at the Europe, how uncontrolled immigration ends.

Does literally every non-political website needs to talk about Trump? I go to SO for answers, not stands.

Don't forget to thank the nice, kind people from the banned countries who helped you do your work, make money, and contribute to the overall economy so you can take care of your family.

Yes, we want to talk about it, but does it need to be in StackOverflow? Is there a StackExchange for politics?

Edit: there is http://politics.stackexchange.com/

Can you really stay out of politics? Ten years from now, what if Spolski is in jail and SO closed down. Then what?

Spolsky's post was specifically about the SO community. It was the best place and the best time to post it.

If you disagree, feel free to moderate the post for irrelevance, I know they have a mechanism to do that over there.

Are you any less likely or more likely to support policies based on what you see in digital media? Do the owners of these websites owe it to you to not talk about their opinions? I understand that you may not wish to deal with this. But I suspect many of the people affected by this ban also do not wish to deal with it, and that creating lots of public pressure is the best way to effect change.

My thought on this is that if CEOs of traditionally non-political platforms are compelled to post political content, there might be something significant/concerning happening.

More directly: did you find this browsing SO?

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

If only more american "liberals" had spoken out against their president waging war in Iraq, Syria and Libya; as fiercely as many of them are speaking out against their new president simply banning those countries' citizens from entering the US...

Who knows... I guess we can only now imagine what could've been.

The action we take now is so we don't have to say "if only"

Except now it may be too late, which is why when you have a President that is of your own party, you protest their terrible policies so they will (hopefully) listen. Presidents do not tend to listen to the opposition protestors (and that's all the more true when said President's party has the House, Senate, and Supreme Court).

That's one way to downplay the tens of thousands of refugees displaced by the rebels the Obama administration armed, which, by the way, caused both Brexit to win and secured Trump's seat.

Good thing the Internet really went to town talking about how the left needs to be more introspective after Trump's win, it seems we all learned from that.

While we're using weak copy/pasta without real discussion, I have one that some people here believe:

Then they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the globalists, and I did not speak out because I was not a globalist.

Then they came for the SJWs, and I did not speak out Because I was not an SJW.

Then they saw that pretty much all problems had been fixed so they stopped coming for people. America was great again and everyone lived happily ever after.

Fin.

> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

This stand by Joel here is quite puzzling. Has Joel made a stand for the rights of gays and women in these countries?

Will he make a stand for Israel? 6 out of 7 countries chosen by Trump do not recognize Israel as a state:

https://www.quora.com/Isnt-it-pointless-that-some-countries-...

He moved to Israel when he was 15[1], served in Israeli military and was a community organizer there, so this is very unfortunate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky

Pretty sure you could have guessed what it was going to be about, given what's going on today, and just not clicked on it. "Change the channel" is what we used to say.

Or do you click on every SO link?

Surely all the tech CEOs also took a stand in 2011 when Obama banned refugees from Iraq. Anyone wanna check that...

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-kentucky-us-dozens-te...

Or 2015, when the administration put into place the law [1] that the President is using now. If you read the EO [2], you'll note it doesn't actually list the countries. The list was already in place.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/158

[2] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3431228/Extreme-V...

This is about the blanket ban on immigration from 7 countries, not refugees. This ban includes highly skilled workers who already have visas to work in the USA and will have a measurable impact on the economy and future of the USA.

It is different, sure, but also similar. Given that there was 0 outrage then and now it is up to 11 something doesn't sound right. For them to care so much about immigration, I am sure they at least wrote a toned-down memo, or sent a lobbyist to have a chat with some Congress-person about it.

Also, how many CEOs have been lobbying Obama to end the foreign interference which created the suffering and refugee crisis over the years. I am guessing not too many.

It's different in that this directly affects their companies. This is hurting their own employees many of whom now cannot return to work and restricting the pool of workers they can hire from in the future. It may only be a little pain now but the more the USA restricts immigration (especially with no regards to actual skills these immigrants possess) the less competitive silicon valley will be with the rest of the world.

Surely this is a false equivalency.

It is not the same clearly. But the logic behind it is similar.

Moreover there is another idea here and that is looking why are there refugees streaming from those countries. It is not because of a natural disaster, it is not random. It is usually because the West had been meddling there directly and via proxies for many years. Obama has been funding rebel groups in Syria probably with full knowledge there is a revolving door between the "rebels" and ISIS. So I see this sudden "support" from the all the tech CEOs a bit hypocritical. How heavily have they been lobbying the administration the last few decades to end foreign interference? Now that Trump did something stupid (and disallowing people who have H1-B visas, already accepted and so on is stupid and counterproductive), they are all happy to jump on the "take a stand platform".

Very different bans, dont you think?

This ban was made possible by the last administration. Obama set it all up, in multiple ways. Few seemed to care when he did it. This sudden outrage is the worst type of hypocrisy. Had these people protested Obama's terrible policies, it would have helped the current situation; Obama might have at least listened to his own voters.

Liberals will also suddenly re-discover that they don't like the NSA's vast, intrusive spying powers, after the Democrats in the House and Senate barely said a word against Obama's 10x expansion of such over his eight years. Now that all of that power is in Trump's hands, the protests to come are trivial to anticipate.

So you are saying that as Obama's legislation that allowed this to happen wasn't opposed, people shouldn't oppose Trump's use of it for something they are strongly against?

I do not live there or perfectly understand American politics, but that does not seem a very robust logical thinking.

I am not sure what group of people you refer as "Liberals", but I remember a lot of people, especially in this forum, opposing NSA and privacy threats very fiercely. So I don't know who exactly did not say a word against it.

But even if that is true, I still don't get it. The presidential role in itself has a lot of power on presidentialism (is that a word in english?). So if someone I strongly disagree occupy the presidental role do something that is allowed for a president to do that I strongly disagree I can't protest against it because I have not protested against presidentialism before?

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