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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Collaborating with the administration legitimizes and normalizes their policies of hate.

This does far more damage than any marginal benefit from "speaking into the president's ear".

I'm sure it's good for Uber to be on Trump's team, but don't pretend you're "standing up for what's right".

This sort of thinking is so tragically misguided. If the only sane people who might potentially have Trump's ear turn away from this role, then the only people advising Trump are the extremely dangerous group he currently has! This is the far bigger danger then appearing to "legitimize" him (as if someone who was elected president needs any more legitimacy). The good he could do as an adviser is orders of magnitude greater than what he could do by turning down the role in fear of adding legitimacy.

Normally I would agree, because that's true in most cases.

But we're past that here. The Germans went with it, and I'm sure some thought at the start that going along would let them do some good. Look how that turned out.

No, it's not okay to just do business as usual here and try to nudge things a bit with policy suggestions. It's time for much more active responses.

Maybe that's true, but not being on an economic advisory board isn't the kind of "active response" you're talking about.

Ah, Godwin's Law. I hope when you reflect back on these times in a year or so you realize how childish it was to compare stopping some Muslims from some unstable countries (not even the big Muslim countries) with literally exterminating Jewish people and blaming them for all of the country's problems.

> from some unstable countries

Like Mo Farrah, an olympic gold medal winning athlete and British citizen?

If you did pay attention at school then you'd know that extermination was final step of pretty long process of de-humanizing Jewish people.

Its not like they put them into prison camps overnight. First they couldn't attend university, then they couldn't own a shop later they couldn't get a passport. Propaganda people had much work to do to allow it happen.

We do not know if it is first step of many but direction is clear.

But who is 'they' in this analogy? The immigrants on hold aren't even from the biggest Muslim countries.

Temporary immigration restrictions on 6 countries is hardly the same thing as du-humanizing Muslims.

>We do not know if it is first step of many but direction is clear.

No it's not. Many other countries have very strict immigration controls dependent on the migrant's origin country and they aren't exactly stuffing people into ovens.

A very big stretch. Restricting immigration from a narrowly defined list of unstable countries (a list that was created by Obama with regards to the visa-waiver program) is very different than imposing restrictions on Muslims. Muslims from every other country aren't affected and Muslim citizens in the US are also not affected.

This isn't a Muslim ban. This is a 90 day ban on people from specific countries with the goal of improving the vetting process. It's neither permanent or specific to Muslims. Obama did a 180 day ban on Iraqis for the exact same reasons.

The effectiveness of this policy can be debated, but comparing this to Hitler -- that's just nonsense.

Yeah, thus far he's only blamed them (and Mexicans) for all of the country's problems. Totally different.

What 'Godwin' himself had to say: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/...

  First, let me get this Donald Trump issue out of the way: If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.

The Holocaust wasn't a sudden event. It was preceded by a steady breakdown of protections and social norms -- see Night and Fog laws, Kristallnacht, etc. There's a lot of history before it came down to concentration camps, and it started with things like attacking the press and clamping down on visas.

It seems highly unlikely to me that Kalanick has any ability to influence Trump/Bannon's policy in this area. But I'd like to address to aside you made about "legitimacy".

GP talked about legitimizing policies. That is quite different than questioning the legitimacy of the electoral vote.

Trump signed an order that was illegal, apparently, to lawyers and laymen alike, because it authorized revoking legal permanent residents of their right to entry into the US without due process. Federal judges have ruled this to be the case, and yet for unknown reasons certain Border Patrol/Homeland departments are defying that order (which is not in keeping with their legitimate authority).

It's substantially likely to be illegal even without that exclusion because it includes discrimination based on the Christian faith of residency applicants.

The Constitution is the source of the legitimacy of presidential orders, and this policy is in multiple ways incompatible with that.

I understand your reasoning, and in the case of a fiscally conservative moderate (republican) that's not bought by corporate interest I would fully agree with that sentiment.

But for sake of argument, let's Godwin this:

I don't want an 80% Hitler because someone good is working with him, tilting him 20% towards the better. The only solution is opposition, and that's hard. He needs to be gone.

Ahh yes, the advisory board with other fringe right-wingers such as Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Sheryl Sandberg. How could he possibly be so two-faced as to throw his hat in with these marginal characters?

You're misinformed.

Nobody from Microsoft, Google, Apple or Facebook are in this group.

https://greatagain.gov/president-elect-trump-announces-addit...

So you think by agreeing to be on Trump's advisory board, Uber agrees with the immigration ban? I guess GM, Tesla, Disney, etc are probably pretending to "stand up for what's right" too , right?

We know exactly one thing: Uber (and none of the companies you list) disagree with the ban enough to threaten to drop out of the advisory board.

I guess there's two ways you can look at it if you're given the chance to advise a President you disagree with:

- Disagree out of principle. Someone else will step up to fill your stop.

- Agree and provide your POV of policy. A 'worse person' won't replace you (immediately).

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