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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't always like this. Silicon Valley was a lot more diverse/tolerant in the first dotcom boom and until ~2006 or so than since. It really went off the deep end circa the Brendan Eich incident (2014), and then the most recent Presidential election cycle. The "Ex-communicate Peter Thiel" movement was the point of no return, and when I decided to flee permanently.

It doesn't seem to be as bad even in other equally-liberal tech areas outside SV.

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Both the Eich and Thiel situations were downright appalling in how they mirrored the exact kind of Witch hunt and ostracizing that liberalism historically and morally should be against.

The fact that people didn't seem to grasp the hypocrisy and danger of their actions made it even more chilling.

That people openly suggested firing anyone who voted for Trump was pretty shocking to me (despite the fact that I didn't vote for him)

This is one of the first things I've noticed when looking at political discussions. People (correctly) note the abuse of powers in others, but the moment they get power themselves they see no problem with (ab)using it to attack those who did it before. And then the power relations change again and it starts anew.

Definitely. The tactics used to shame Trump supporters, evangelicals, and the like are the exact same as the ones used to shame and invalidate people of color, women's rights, etc. In the past.

It's disheartening, really.

It's natural.

Maybe people haven't seen it in America before, but this happens all the time.

Radicalism begets radical responses over enough of a time line.

People in this thread keep feeling disheartened or calling out liberals enclaves - but they completely forget that this is only 3 weeks into Trumps presidency.

As a candidate he was frightening to liberals, in a way no American presidential candidate has been in a long time.

And now he is president. He scares and disturbs people around the world. I can't imagine how liberal groups feel.

On top of that he won and is supported by people who argue that hate speech is free speech.

I don't care how liberal groups feel. I care how they act. And how they are acting is contrary to both liberalism and liberty.

(Conservatives are not acting conservatively, either...)

If you don't quite care about how people feel, you lose the position to judge how they act.

Human actions ultimately find their motivation in emotions, not in rationality.

Besides- that's a belief unmoored from reality.

There's a fight going on, and one side has been using techniques to dismantle every institution and source of strength of the other. Youll have reached the point that even facts itself are under question.

The period of following ideals died a while back. Either liberals learn from the political play book of the conservatives, or they disappear.

The frightening part about your post is that you might not even be trolling.

Why is this frightening?

Presumably because it's trying to equate San Francisco liberals venting about Trump supporters, with the legal oppression of women and minorities with the full backing of the state. A level of false equivalency that is terrifying for people who are slowly realising that a large number of Trump supporters have lost all touch with reality.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" -- Voltaire

59% of Trump supporters believe the last president of the United states was not a citizen of the US, and therefore ineligible to be president.

66% believe that Obama is lying about his religion and is secretly a muslim.

Put together, that is some real "Protocals of the Elders of Zion" stuff. No wonder they want to ban muslims, they actually believe the country has already been secretly taken over by them. There's multiple bestseller books that claim exactly that. People pushing this conspiracy are all over the Republican establishment and Trump and other public figures drop blatant dog-whistles that just sound like stupidity to normal people, but confirm these paranoid fantasies for believers.

Trump actually said on television that Obama actively helped the Orlando shooting. And people in this thread are like "well, I like his tax policies" and "people are so rude to supporters of Fascism, that's the real fascism!".

> Trump actually said on television that Obama actively helped the Orlando shooting. And people in this thread are like "well, I like his tax policies" and "people are so rude to supporters of Fascism, that's the real fascism!".

The question I ask myself is where does being "rude" end and oppression of your opposition start. I'm thinking about this in the broader context of multiple elections happening here in Europe this year and what is the appropriate response.

On one hand I'm strictly in the camp that if you say shit people should be fully allowed to critize you for it. On the other hand I'm not sure this is a helpful strategy to further the wanted end.

That aside, this sub-thread is about the fine line where the power relations change and those who weren't in power before now start to abuse that power themselves. I've seen multiple calls to legally oppress people that voted for Trump. That's as wrong to me as legal oppression of women and minorities. I don't know if there's such a thing as "good oppression", but I have a feeling the answer is no.

The Republican party literally stood in court and argued that it was okay for them to prevent Democrats voting! That it would only be illegal if they targetted black voters with voter suppresion efforts because of their race, but targetting them because they know they would vote Democrats was entirely legal. They do this all over the country and have done so consistently for decades and continue to do so today (actually more so as federal restrictions were removed by the supreme court).

Maybe one day we'll need to worry about women and minorities suppressing white men, but we're not there yet.

> Maybe one day we'll need to worry about women and minorities suppressing white men, but we're not there yet.

Do you think we should wait until we are there, so we can again react to problems instead of preventing them? People stated that they want to do this.

Does this make the things the other side did any less horrible? No, multiple things can be horrible at the same time.

>The question I ask myself is where does being "rude" end and oppression of your opposition start.

With state power and ownership of material resources, duh. Being a dick to someone isn't oppression. Making them homeless is oppression. Rounding them up and putting them into a camp is oppression. Shooting them is oppression.

Do people not realize that these things happen today?

I'm more inclined to suggest that liberals are getting tired of being the diplomatic party and reaching across the isle [1] [2], and are starting to play the same game. I'm not saying tit for tat is constructive, but going by this election cycle, dirty seems to be what's working.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...

[2] https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/06/n...

I'm inclined to agree. The Republican party the last few cycles has just become the party of NO, no to this policy, no to that law, undo, remove, etc. etc. They don't seem to have any ideas to show except to destroy everything the Democrats do, good and bad.

Trump was the last straw for me. I voted McCain and Romney but Trump was just too far into the deep end (that and Mitch McConnell has been one of the most obstructionist politicians in American history).

Tit for tat isn't particularly constructive, but it's sure as hell the rational strategy in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

There is no hypocrisy or intolerance in fighting intolerance. You're trying to make the argument that one is not tolerant unless they tolerate intolerance, which doesn't make any sense.

Eich used his capital to deny rights to our friends. They did nothing to his rights.

It's the PC/SJW lunacy and its ideas becoming mainstream.

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