Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by deaux | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

deaux

[flagged]

View on HN

I’m not familiar with the situation you’re referring to, but my experience was different.

From my side, the collaboration was positive and genuinely respectful.

Just wanted to share another perspective.

That isn’t necessarily “different”. Someone with truly horrifying opinions can be genuinely respectful and pleasant to work with, unless you fall into the wrong social group. (I know nothing about this guy’s opinions and don’t have much reason to care, either, I just feel the need to point out how people tend to overestimate the alignment between “nice people” and “people I agree with”. Much as they do the one between “nice people” and “people it’s worthwhile to listen to”, but that’s a story for another day.)

@mananaysiempre I completely agree with your point.

> Someone with truly horrifying opinions can be genuinely respectful and pleasant to work with, unless you fall into the wrong social group.

This is how psychopathic tyranny and bullying works "I'm nice and friendly so long as I get my way." I worked with a manager just like this. Super friendly guy until something doesn't go his way and he'll rip you apart in front of everyone. Also the kind of person who manipulates everyone into doing all his work for him while he spent most of his time looking at sports cars and tattooed women on line. Being overly nice and friendly in a position of power is a HUGE red flag for me because it inevitably is a front for manipulation.

That’s a thing, but not the thing I was talking about.

I was talking about the existence of people who are just nice and pleasant in the normal healthy manner in their ordinary lives, except they hold some opinions that you (or I, and possibly even not both of us) would find horrifying.

(That description actually applies to most people who have ever lived, but that they exist among our contemporaries is both more stark and more important. It makes me much more averse to being $NOTNICE to people who are $WRONG, because I don’t think I would want to live when people habitually were, and perhaps even thought it was virtuous to be, not nice to those they know are in some way morally wrong.)

Thousands of serial rapists, murderers, and abusers also have the ability to be very positive, funny, and genuinely respectful to others when they choose to.

Would you like to share another perspective for them too?

Louis CK and Genghis Khan were both very effective in their respective lines of work and I'll die on that hill. And while I'm at it, Bill Clinton was an alright president (though the surrounding administration would likely be looked at as a bunch of snakes if not for the even worse Bush2 cabinet that followed).

Heck, Lincoln wanted to ship 'em back to Africa and Henry Ford was a moralizing anti-semite. Nobody is clean under a microscope.

By the sounds of it you're sharing the only perspective with any validity so far.

Who you work with certainly matters, but it does show that it's incredibly easy to get a foot in the door with a lot of political things.

People complain so much about politics as being this completely foreign and detached thing. But it's not if you put a bit of effort into it.

Well yeah of course it's not hard to get involved in politics, if the involvement is supporting people who are rich and powerful even if it is via the use of a more modest looking young mouthpiece. OP was supporting a conservative party, so basically going with the flow of a bunch of what a bunch of influential and rich people wanted as their pawn. If you have something that is of little consequence to the rich, like mothers against drunk driving or something, sure you can probably get it done as it's a token gesture and the powerful just pull strings to get out of those prosecution anyways.

If you look at actually trying to move the meter away from the status quo of the rich and powerful, rather than just repainting the pieces on the chess board, you see politicians like Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul found the whole thing rigged against them. Bernie was railroaded by the upper echelons of his own party and Ron Paul found his name magically erased from practically all the talks on the high level debates in the press to the point they would just skip over his name in the primary poll rankings.

It's incredibly easy to get involved with people like Mamdani or Seattle's Katie Wilson or so many others, if that's your political angle. The same is true on the other side.

We should be encouraging people to be more involved. That helps shape outcomes.

Katie Wilson's claim to fame is doing the bidding of rich and powerful King County Metro union gang / alias "ATU" for the purposes of using exploitive taxes to take from the population of Seattle (who have infamously been fleeced on massive gouged public transit construction costs) and reshuffle the money to cushy transit union lobby and their benefactors so their precious fiefdom would not be downsized. She then created a payroll tax to enrich rich contractors to create a tiny amount of "affordable housing" (buzz word used to enrich construction contractors at public cost) for a select few. She is basically a shining beacon of a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful as they are all too happy to be the benefactors of her tax policies that largely socialize costs and privatize the earnings albeit under a false flag of helping the poor.

Mamdani has been legally barred from the Presidency, the position we are discussing. He simply cannot. In fact, I suspect that is part of the reason why Trump has been so weirdly chum with him, he's simply not a threat for the presidency and never will be.

I wasn't discussing 'the presidency'. I'm saying it's easy to get involved - especially so for the local races that matter more to most people's lives in any case, where things like zoning and school curriculums are decided, or where money either gets invested to further fossil fuel infrastructure or for cleaner things like bikes, walking and transit.

>Well yeah of course it's not hard to get involved in politics, if the involvement is supporting people who are rich and powerful even if it is via the use of a more modest looking young mouthpiece.

I fail to see how it’d be any more difficult to get involved in politics for candidates that don’t meet this criteria.

You've quoted a single sentence then ignored the second paragraph where I explained things even Jon Stewart famously pointed out:

https://youtu.be/SqRt8Lbk5eY?t=387

It's easy to "fail to see" when you do not look.

We appear to be talking about different topics entirely. Your points seem to be about the effectiveness of political involvement, but the comment you’re replying to and the quote I posted relates to political involvement.

It’s encouraging to hear stories about how people get involved. We can learn about the process, network, and have an impact, even if that impact is incremental.

Edit: Clarified, added second paragraph

> Bernie was railroaded by the upper echelons of his own party

Bernie Sanders is an Independent, he doesn't have a party.

I see you've disregarded I used past tense in regard to his 'railroading' and then changed the tense, which I find underhanded. To bring it to a more plain level, he , at a prior time, under his more notable POTUS bids, ran on the Democratic ticket.

What's also worth pointing out is that the person Democratic upper echelon nominated, without even a primary, the last election was someone who did so abysmally in the popular primaries that she was at single digit percents yet magically got installed as the POTUS contendor without even a a vote. When you consider our voting system is set up that writing a candidate in is essentially throwing your vote away, a popular primary does not even happen (imperfect as it may be), in practice the two parties are operating as bureaucrats of in-party members who are giving you a choice of two people that represent the in-party elite albeit with some different kinds and volumes of scraps tossed to the general populace.

And for the most part, our founding fathers warned us of exactly this.

Do you have links to back up your claims?

The only context I have is that the OP helped a right-of-center political candidate in his country of origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jun-seok

Where does it talk about his use of English or his lawyers?

The bigger the loon, the more impressive the successes of campaign professionals.

Loons are also useful stepping stones. Use them for career progression and then cast them aside, you could even claim they abused you or took advantage of you and that you're excited to help <X> next who actually cares about the people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com