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Comment by nickserv | Hacker News Reader

> Almost all Americans think this sort of thing is nonsense. But the average American has little standing to hold the American bureaucracy accountable for its nonsense.

Sorry but they don't get off that easy when almost half of them voted Trump into office.

> Americans, especially outside overcrowded urban areas, are courteous, helpful, hospitable people that are very tolerant of other people and ideas.

I've found quite the opposite, out in the boonies you're more likely to get harassed when you're not the "right" color or religion. I've had some really nice, helpful people turn nasty as soon as I mentioned my atheism, for example.

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You can't blame this on Trump alone.

8 years of Obama gave increased spying, kept the insane TSA, blocked people born in Iran from entering the country (independent of what nationality they currently have). Gave the ESTA Visa Waiver program, where you have to pay for getting exactly no rights what-so-ever. And as final insult, you are allowed to list the social media you use.

I'll agree with all that. I think the average American knows all that stuff is dumb as well, and that is part of what I'm saying.

The American voter, individually and in aggregate, has lost much say in American bureaucracy. I don't blame Trump alone in this. Bush thought Homeland Security was a good idea. But Trump thinks the problem with American government is that he hasn't been running it. We'll see that that is a foolish take on things soon. Obama made the same mistake and had the same revelation eventually, hence all the executive orders and phone calls in his later presidency instead of laws and reforms and such.

Half didn't vote for Trump. Look again at the turnout rates. Also keep in mind that most "Trump voters" voted against Clinton more than they voted for Trump. I think that is kind of silly but that's the thought process of the Trump voters I talk to.

I can't comment about your personal experiences in small town America other than to say that my experience is very different and that referring to areas epithetically (1) undermines your point. America is a very broad and diverse place, though, so there are idiots and bigots in places. But I would just like to point out that kind and welcoming people are easy to find. They don't make headlines. And good impressions don't last as long as bad ones, I guess.

(1) Boonies or boondocks implies a judgemental attitude that people are backwards or unsophisticated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boondocks

Americans as individuals are generally quite friendly, regardless of city.

Let me ask you a loaded question though: Are you white?

I am, and have had only good experiences both in NYC, LA, SF as well as a bunch of small towns.

If you are not white, or dress differently, or are transgender, I can guarantee you which of a small town or a big city would be more embracing. (On aggregate, there are of course outliers on both sides)

> [...] most "Trump voters" voted against Clinton more than they voted for Trump.

That is not a valid argument by any possible mean. Everybody has the right to vote whatever they want of course, but saying what you said is like saying "people eat meat to piss off vegans more than because they like it". And regardless, the driving motive of something doesn't change the end result of such something.

People need to take responsibility for their actions. They voted for Trump and their is the fault of the current state of things. Period. The reasons behind why they did it don't matter and, frankly, it's also nobody's business.

> That is not a valid argument by any possible mean.

Now try convincing someone. That is what I tried to do throughout the entire election, but the propaganda machine is treated as fact by many here.

These people get hung up on the idea that we can never leave the two party system, meaning no third party candidate will ever get elected.

Here in Utah, we did manage to give McMullin 20% of the vote, but that was still marginally less than Hillary (after salt lake county) or Trump.

> saying what you said is like saying "people eat meat to piss off vegans more than because they like it"

Or... it's nothing like that?

I mean, I get the impression that some portion of people did vote for Trump to piss people off, but that's not what the parent was talking about. Saying that they "voted against Clinton more than they voted for Trump" means they cast a vote to avoid what they saw as the worse outcome.

> Half didn't vote for Trump. Look again at the turnout rates.

You cannot claim that people who didn't vote don't support Trump (or vice versa, don't support Hillary). There simply isn't any data to support this.

> Also keep in mind that most "Trump voters" voted against Clinton more than they voted for Trump.

Citation needed.

I voted for a third party candidate. I know many who voted down ticket and left the presidential ballot blank. And it doesn't make sense, but I can understand why someone would feel like not voting at all out of disgust.

I suspect I'm not alone in wishing you had cast your vote in a way that mattered. Hopefully in hindsight it's clear no one "listened" to your deep moral convictions (or whatever) that led you to vote for that third party or to led your friends to vote blank top of ballot entries.

You simply fell prey to a focused disinformation campaign that actively tried to prevent intelligent voters from voting and that worked, probably well enough to influence the outcome of the election. That's a hard pill to swallow and you'll probably tell me and yourself that of course that's not what happened, but it wasn't an accident you felt that way. The Russians are very, very good at disinformation and always have been.

You're smart enough to accumulate huge karma here on HN so I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how voting works. Hopefully you'll manage to fight the confirmation bias you'll likely look for to justify your past actions and be able to make your future actions matter. A great many people wish they had your vote. Please make it count.

This logic doesn't really work out...it seems to also hold that everyone who voted for HRC also voted in a way that didn't matter, so they might as well have just stayed home (the outcome would be no different).

Also, it really reads as just a not-very-thinly-veiled accusation that people who do not vote for the candidate that you want to win are stupid and/or naive. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that, necessarily, but you might as well just say it. I disagree with both the rhetoric and the conclusion entirely, but your opinion is what it is.

Personally, I think this kind of thinking leads to the negative outcomes that pervade our political system. Even if third parties have no chance of winning, the idea that they might not be able to bank on the votes of people scared of the "wrong lizard" might force them to moderate their political stands.

The election had two candidates that together received just shy of 100% of the vote and that split that vote very nearly 50/50. The rest of the names on the ballot were spoilers, not candidates. That outcome was not a surprise and no one seriously expected anyone other than those two candidates to win or have any other impact than spoiling the vote of one or both of the winners. Which of thse two candidates would win was not known until the election, because polling is difficult and presidential races in the US tend to be close, so the voting was necessary and no votes for either serious candidate were wasted. All of that is true for every US presidential election in recent memory.

And just like in every previous election, no one "listened" to the voters who voted for the spoiler candidates. No one said "if HRC or DT had just done x they would have gotten more of the Green Party or Libertarian voters." People who vote for spoiler candidates self select themselves into a group where they guarantee the winning and losing major parties don't care at all what they think. Voting for a spoiler candidate means the major candidates don't have to care what you think, and they don't, so you end up with even less influence than if you had voted for one or the other of the potential winners.

Before you get lecturey, maybe make sure parent was voting in a place where casting a different vote had a chance of directly mattering?

My third party vote in CA arguably has a bigger effect than a major party vote in CA, for the presidency in the general election.

Most parts of the US are close enough that a "major victory" or a "guaranteed outcome" is measured at the level of a few percentage points. Even in the hopelessly gerrymandered house elections coming up in 2018 there may be as many as 70 seats in play, precisely because even a "safe" seat is only safe by a comparatively small percentage margin.

Geographically, "most parts of the US" are fairly close. If you live in one of those parts, vote accordingly.

By population, that's substantially less true - nothing I do in the ballot box is going to make a dent in a 60-40 split in CA, and quite a few will have to think just like me before it does. If you're in one of those parts, vote accordingly.

> Citation needed.

I assume, like me, OP was there. We tried to talk sense into voters, but this was the biggest concern for most of them. Here in the US, we have been stuck in a two party system for decades simply because of this (flawed) logic.

Most Americans won't change their behavior to effect a greater change unless they are sure that greater change will be happen because of their relatively insignificant effort. This is why we struggle so much with climate change, the two party system, monopolies, etc.

> You cannot claim that people who didn't vote don't support Trump

Irrelevant. What is relevant is that you can't claim that people that didn't vote at all aactually voted for Trump, which is necessary to support the upthread claim that nearly half of Americans voted for Trump. Less than 1/5 of Americans, and less than 1/3 of registered voters, voted for Trump.

Agreed, I grew up in the midwest and I now live in NYC, and New Yorkers are far, far nicer than midwesterners. The intolerance in the red parts of the US is suffocating.

> Sorry but they don't get off that easy when almost half of them voted Trump into office.

Nowhere near half of Americans voted Trump into office. (Now, if you want to criticize a very large share of eligible voters for abstaining, that's valid, but abstaining isn't the same as voting for Trump.)

In the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, roughly 63 million votes, of a population of 325 million, were cast for #45.

That is 19% of the total population. Reliable sources inform me that this may in fact be significantly less than half of all Americans.

The notion of the nutcase fringe in politics has been around for a while -- there's about 20% of the vote you've got to be very aware of. Where other voters are insufficiently motivated, or actively discouraged by various means (voter suppression efforts, media, uninspiring candidates), the fringe can win.

That said, there's a range of types throughout the country, and a worrying fraction are worrying. Or worse.

The percentage of eligible voters (not total population) who selected Trump is somewhere around 26/27%, but more importantly, in a democracy, not voting is also a decision one needs to take responsibility for.

> in a democracy, not voting is also a decision one needs to take responsibility for.

Yes, but it's a different decision than voting for candidate X. Facts matter in criticism.

Are you actually putting newborn children in the mix to pretend that only 19% of Americans wanted Trump there?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You didn't answer their question.

Since newborn children are Americans, they were in the mix from the time the claim was made that nearly half of Americans voted Trump into office. Setting the correct universe of comparison is the responsibility of the person making the claim.

Of course, even if you mean "Americans eligible to vote" or the slightly smaller number of "Americans registered to vote", the claim still isn't even approximately true.

While it may feel cathartic to blame Trump for this, unfortunately the situation is much worse than that. The article is about an ESTA denial. ESTA was put in place during the Bush administration (July 2007), and random ESTA denials happened all the time during the Obama administration. Not much has changed on this front since Trump took office, as far as I can tell.

I'm not sure exactly how we're getting away with having this ESTA thing at all for countries that are supposedly part of the Visa Waiver program, without them retaliating in kind. I only hope that we'll come to our senses and stop before they do so. But given that ESTA has now existed for 10 years and both parties seem to support it, I have low hopes of it going away.

ESTA replaced the previous I-94W form; in fact most of the questions are the same. You could also be denied entry before ESTA was introduced.

The best rendition of the text on the I-94W form is undoubtedly Frank Zappa and the Ensemble Modern's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPPDrXHjJx8

> Sorry but they don't get off that easy when almost half of them voted Trump into office.

Not to rehash the past, but I thought we had gotten it clear by now: voting for the guy does not indicate support. Americans vote for the candidate they fear and despise the least.

Voting is literally one of the two types of support that actually counts, far more than for-or-against posts on the internet. The other one would be giving money.

If you voted for Trump, you supported Trump. It's OK to change your mind, but people need to own and take responsibility for what they do at the ballot box.

And people wonder why voter participation is so low...

> Americans vote for the [Republican or Democratic] candidate they fear and despise the least.

That's exactly the flawed logic that is keeping us in this two party system. If we just vote for the candidate we support, neither Trump not Hillary would stand a chance.

The trouble with convincing people to actually do that is that most Americans feel the need to be on the winning side. "My vote is worthless unless it's for someone who can actually win."

That's fundamentally not the "logic that is keeping us in this two party system". That logic is the logic of understanding our current electoral system. The US electoral system as it currently stands will inevitably result in a two-party system. Sure you can change which two parties it is, that's happened several times, but without changing First Past The Post you're not going to get any other system.

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