Silicon Valley's Ambivalence Towards Trump Turns to Anger
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Rhetorically, the answer implied is that, had they made their voices and opinions known earlier, it might not have seemed as heroic as it does now. Letting circumstances become dire, when they could have been prevented altogether suggests performances are crafted and dishonest for the purpose of branding, marketing or personal fame.
Sort of like if John McAfee reared his head right about now, but with greater subtlety.
Tech was already shoveling tons of money into her campaign. Bezos-owned Washington Post was about as Anti-Trump as a news organization can be.
(Personally, I think the article is overstating the case.)
But now its week one, the policies are eggregious and the implementation is incompetent, and a groundswell is building. I suppose now industry leaders dont feel like they are sticking their necks out, or at least they have a lot of company.
There was really no good choice and it became a choice of the least bad and the guy who won at least isn't afraid to say he's looking out for Americans whereas Hillary was more timid about looking out for the average Joe and Sue.
That said, at least Mussolini made the trains run on time and the Nazis were pretty efficient, which is more than can be said for the Trump administration's first week...
What I've discovered (thanks to helpful nudging from /u/dang) is that this is a community with a variety of ideologies and geographies. We see in the community the things that we're primed to see.
For example if you have strong feelings in either direction about the links between Trump and fascism, you're more likely to perceive that it is the dominant view even if it's only held by and discussed by a small group of people.
Link to /u/dang's comment where they explained this to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13083111
Little known fact: the original word for the kinds of publicity companies use to grow demand for their product was "propaganda" (propagate the goods, get it?) coined by Edward L Bernays, Freud's nephew and the first formalizer of advertising.[1] After Germany appointed a minister of advertising ("Propaganda"), the industry decided it needed a new name.
Now we have a journalist/propagandist on the National Security Council. Should be interesting. Did you know Alan Kay was on Reagan's? He (Alan) has some hysterical stories of his time on the NSC.
If some of Google's shareholders want to pursue political goals instead of providing search services, they can take their money out of Google shares and start a PAC. This is precisely the reason why Sergey Brin said that he does not represent Google when he was at the protest at SFO yesterday.
But these are the same companies and people who tacitly approved of Trump and did nothing to stop his election, or even try to educate people.
I'm looking at Google, who are now trying to woo Republicans !
I have a serious question. While I am personally against a ban on immigration of the kind Trump is doing, 6 out of the 7 countries targeted - all except Somalia - have a permanent ban on Israelis. Not a 4 month ban "until they figure out" some aggressive vetting processes, and make themselves look like they kept a promise to their constituents. A permanent ban.
By the logic of "this is a ban on Muslims", that is a "ban on Jews".
My question is - where was the outrage all those years? Seriously think about it.
Chomsky (who I have met and later email-debated with extensively) says criticizing other countries is like criticizing the 19th century, and your duty is criticizing the crimes of your own, because you can do the most there. While I agree with that duty, I think it misses one crucial piece.
People from progressive and developed countries tend to "let things go" when other countries violate human rights because they are so far outside their local political reality. They end up navel gazing at their own sins, with dangerous consequences.
For example, feminists today in the USA spend much more energy on making sure default social network avatars are gender-neutral than they do on stopping human trafficking, honor killings and rape culture in patriarchal tribal / caste societies in other countries. That's what I mean by navel gazing.
Angel Merkel and EU bureaucrats let millions of Syrian refugees into Europe while not requiring Saudi Arabia and the other gulf states to even sign the UN convention on the rights of the refugee. These people speak Arabic but go to a country where their language and customs are out of place and retard their contributions to society. And why? Navel gazing.
Similarly Jews often help exacerbate criticism of Israel by failng to require people to apply the same standards to other countries. Care about the rights of refugees? Great. Let's have a solution that all the countries of the region implement: giving citizenship to those who were born in the country. Then after couple generations Palestinian refugees etc. would have long stopped being refugees. By having Israel alone give citizenship and a right of return, you practically force eg all Lebanese of Palestinian descent to try and flood Israel.
Instead, their pride in their country's achievements makes them acquiesce with those who use the words "Social Justice" to advocate a kind of double standard Marxist view that everything is a zero-sum game and there must be losers. Zionists must lose. White people must apologize and pay reparations. But these double standard Social Justice never lead to anything except perpetuation of misery for those that have to live without rights.
My point here is that pride in exceptionalism leads to complacency. We should have cared when these countries (and other Islamic countries) banned Israelis from entering. But we were focused too much on our Western world.
The Valley isn't going to be hosting migrants and they aren't going to be competing against unskilled migrant labour.
Why is it walls are just fine around LAs mansion estates and in closed gated communities, but as soon as the general populace wants them they become bad?
Maybe, just maybe, these sons and daughters of immigrants and refugees are just as disgusted by the actions of Trump (and Bannon) as the millions of others.
Whenever I mention how the corporate Dems have been selling us out for years and we need to light a fire under their ass to work for our interests, I'm immediately ostracized from my fellow "progressives."
Avoiding a hot war in Eastern Europe is worth the people affected by the new immigration bans.
I am in favor of peace as it is the best state for humanity to strive. But to maintain peace, we must have a good strategy, not a call to people like Putin such as "Please do anything you like".
I think Obama and his advisers sorely missed someone like a Condoleezza or a Cohen, etc. people who would give him some good insight into Putin's thinking and why he acts the way he does.
I mean, at the end of the Obama presidency US-Russia relations were hotting up beyond my comfort.
Mansions have walls/hedges for lots of reasons: privacy, sound isolation, blocking unsightly views and sure perhaps some security. None of that has anything to do with whether we should build the world's longest modern wall to help enforce immigration policy. Sure they are both walls but that's where the similarity ends.
Example 1: Mansion walls are unlikely to create diplomatic tensions with one of the US's major trading partners whereas a wall with Mexico would likely do that.
Example 2: The Mexican wall will likely require lots of eminent domain seizures of private land. Mansions walls require none.
Example 3: The mexican wall will impact net flows of illegal migrants between the US and Mexico. Private walls do not.
Sane arguments for or against this wall are inapplicable to private walls. This equivalency is pointless. Your argument is spurious.
Basically gated communities shield you from some kinds of crime. If you think Mexican immigrants are causing lots of crime then you should also think people in Maine or Michigan shouldn't have much say because of the lower concentrations of immigrants there.