Comment by zucker42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zucker42 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

First, the comment you replied to didn't argue both sides are problematic, just that not everyone who voted for Trump is a bad person. Both sides being problematic also doesn't imply that one side isn't more problematic than the other.

I think it's crazy that so many people voted for Trump and honestly believe he's the best person to run the country. I'd have a hard time respecting someone who didn't see how bad Trump was in a lot of ways. But I think most people on the left seem to have no idea why anybody would vote for Trump, and don't realize that is more of an indictment of the extent they are out of touch with 49% of the country, rather than an indication of the idiocy of their political opponents.

An effective rejection of Trumpism must first involve understanding and relating to the people who supported him, and I think a lot of people are lamenting the general lack of interest in such discourse.

Edit: fixed two words which drastically changed the meaning of sentence.

Sure, but when you engage on why they voted for Trump, you receive a litany of mistruths and nonsense and it goes nowhere. Biden is going to raise taxes! Biden is going to take away guns! Hunter Biden's corruption! It's pretty hard to have a conversation when a third party is honking and playing a tuba five feet away, and that's essentially what Fox News, Facebook, Breitbart, et al are doing.

You would, but we were banned long ago if we made anything approaching valid points on places like this. Your ignorance is the result of the bubble, which follows from censorship. You cannot see it because the censorship makes the edges of your bubble invisible to you.

And to make it even more ironic, this comment was dead, and invisible to most HN readers.

The problem is the points you perceive as valid are the products of your own bubble, which operates as an automated factory of lies and deception. As with holocaust deniers, arguing with you is not a valid approach: only shutting you out.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...

>Biden is going to raise taxes

Biden campaigned on raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% back to 28%. If you have a stock market portfolio (including an IRA or 401(k)) and this proposal is enacted, it will adversely affect the value of your investments. It's also been tied to student loan forgiveness, so people without college degrees who are investing for retirement (and those who've paid off their degrees) will in effect be subsidizing those with student loan debt, which is a demographic that skews affluent:

>https://www.educationnext.org/mass-debt-forgiveness-not-prog...

>Households in the upper half of the income distribution hold more student debt than those in the lower half. The highest-income quartile of households owes about one-third of that debt; the lowest-income quartile owes about 12 percent. People who don’t go to college don’t have student debt. They have lower incomes and more constrained job opportunities than others.

> I think it's crazy that so many people voted for Trump and honestly believe he's the best person to run the country.

...out of the two options on the ballot. Which is also the only reason why so many people voted for Biden. The most mind-boggling thing from my German point of view is how little movement there is to leave the two-party system behind.

Exactly! While our (Czech Republic) voting system is far from perfect (the current president is rather controversial and the prime minister is a populist with some rather shady financial deals) political parties regularly go out of business if they fuck up strong enough. And this system will likely also fix the current problems over time, resulting in possibly less bad state.

Having just two parties is insane, that simply means they can get away with anything & just take turns once in a while as voters have no other choice.

I was under the impression from recent reading that the situation in Czechia is really bad with mass protests and serious problems. You're happy with the system though?

There were some protests against anti covid measure a few weeks ago that got quite a bit of publicity due to taking place on the iconic Old Town Square in Prague - but nothing relly major or really ongoing.

The situation is not perfect and the protest not without merit, as the government preatty much squandered any success we had handling the first wave of covid by doing preatty much no preparations, releasing almost all restrictions and then failed to respond in time when things turned for the worse in september.

I guess it can make people angry, if their livelyhood is in danger due to the restrictive measures needed after you fuck up the initial response to the second wave like we did here. Still violent protest is not really an answer and it was indeed an one-off so far. Hopefully people will remeber at least a bit of they not to vote the populist currently in power during the next elections next year.

Also there are regular protests in Belarus and now even in Poland these days that are bigger by many orders of magnitude that what we managed to pull off here since the Velvet Revolution when indeed preatty much everyone was in the streats, which resulted in the fall of the soviet aligned comunist regime back then.

I assume that you guys have some version of proportional representation. The US doesn't. It would take a complete rewrite of the US constitution to get rid of the two party system.

Re-empowering electors could help with respect to presidential elections. Popular election of senators really ties our hands at the senate level, though. Point being, it is difficult to turn a plurality into a compromise majority without either a runoff or a delegated negotiation of some sort. Parliamentary systems have that baked in, of course.

I almost always for an Nth party, where N>2. Literally every single election, I’ve been told that I was wasting my vote, that this was the most important election of my life, etc. There is a tremendous amount of social pressure to vote mainstream. I don’t have high hopes of breaking the cartel anytime soon.

I think the pressure mostly comes from the value that if you're in favor of an outcome, you should be in favor of the prerequisite actions to that outcome. If your favored actions are counterproductive to your favored outcome, then it strikes others as irrational.

This.

There are in fact many parties in the USA. But unfortunately the USA is still using an early alpha release voting system that was invented in the 1700s before voting theory had been even understood.

The result of a majority win voting system is that it only legitimizes 2 parties in practice. This worked 'ok' so long as the 2 parties acted in good faith.

However the last 20-30 years the Republican party got twisted into a movement to undermine government, enrich themselves, and narrowly focus on a couple of right-wing Christian interests to distract a populist base. They've maintained their relevance by turning Fox news and other right-wing owned outlets into effectually state-run propaganda machines. Leaving only the Democrats trying to govern with the Republicans trying to undermine and obstruct that very government.

The only way out of the USA's problems is to have a modern preference voting method, or in the long term the country may be doom to fail.

Not sure they are bad people per se... but where do you draw the line?

Sure Hitler improved the German economy, does that make it defensible to support him?

This is the fundamental question in nationalist movements that are driven by ideologies, tribalism, and cult of personalities... instead of real facts backed up by science and data.

Given that provably almost nothing Trump ever says is even true, how can these people know he is the best person to govern? If there are no facts, it is just beliefs... and that is incredibly dangerous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com