mzw_mzw

It's not that people didn't know the admins have the power; it's that people didn't believe they'd use the power.

Your local police or military could just barge into your house and kill you at any time. They have the power to do that. Society functions to the extent that you don't believe they will do that. If you found out one day that your local police chief had, under cover of law, busted into someone's house and waved a gun at them over a petty personal dispute, though, your faith would be a little shaken.

Yep. It's not so much that Reddit management did something hugely awful in this, or are likely to repeat it. It's that it's opened the door to the suspicion of repeat behavior. Let a million conspiracy theories bloom!

Really, the one this actually hurts is Reddit itself. To hurl in this stinkbomb when a good chunk of the site already considers itself at war with the management... Just profoundly stupid.

Did you even read my comment? Like, the bit where I stated repeatedly that there is no right to speak somewhere online?

What I am pointing out is that the let's strategy in this election was suppression and abuse, and it resulted in President Trump. Maybe try a different approach next time!

Rather than desperately thrashing around to find some excuse why your loss didn't happen, why not instead work on improving your message to Rust Belt voters? Trust me, it'll bring you a lot more success next time.

> The users in question abusing spez have zero right to their speech on the platform.

Oh God, this tired distraction again? We know they have no "right to free speech" on a private platform. We know. Everybody knows. Reddit is not the government and can do what it wants. It could replace every instance of "/u/spez sucks" with "/u/spez is great!" and be absolutely within its rights. What we're saying is that such behavior would not be in the spirit of free speech and would raise questions about Reddit's claimed commitment to that principle, not that it's actually illegal.

> Nuke /r/the_donald, nuke the users and hellban their IPS of those who sent abusive messages, and let's move on. Bask in the irony when I say, "Drain the swamp"

Try to prevent the people whose views you don't like from speaking, eh? That certainly worked out well in the last election.

More or less than effectively zero, you mean? I'll go with equal.

> The whole point is that we have a very realistic possibility that Trump's unexpected win was due to manipulation of electronic polling machines. Possibly by Russia.

No, we really don't.

For this rather wild speculation to have happened:

* The Russians would have had to know exactly which counties would be swing counties, in at least three different states, two of which nobody imagined Trump even had a chance in, in an election year when the best pollsters and analysts in the United States were caught completely flatfooted by the results all over the country.

* They'd have to be lucky enough to pick swing counties that use electronic voting. For example, in Wisconsin there's a mix of electronic and paper ballots across the state.

* And they'd have to know exactly what the vote counts would be weeks in advance so they could slip in ju-u-u-u-ust enough extra votes to give Trump a razor-thin margin of victory.

Look, I realize the election results were traumatic to lots of people, but if you cling to conspiracy theories to avoid dealing with that you're going to spend a long time in the wilderness. I'd advise you instead to work on persuading more people that your political program is the right one. It'll work better in the long run.

Good point, and I'm not being sarcastic: we shouldn't have mail-in voting either, for exactly those same reasons.

> First, no, you are not that old, because there's no point in the history of our republic where that's been the case.

Please don't gaslight. The Democrats were saying it literally weeks ago, when Trump was being vague about accepting the results.

> Injecting volatile political arguments into unrelated threads is a form of trolling

We are discussing a claim that the election was rigged, but we're not allowed to argue about claims that the election was rigged?

Who needs facts when we've got vague insinuations?

I'm so old, I remember when suggesting that the election could be rigged was considered treason. I wonder what happened between now and three weeks ago to make that change.

Well, no, I guess it isn't really that puzzling. Someone lost an election and is upset about it.

Boycotting, ostracizing and shaming them didn't work the last fifty times, but it's bound to work this time!

You are imagining Russian hackers who have a better idea of county-by-county voting patterns in rural Wisconsin than expert American pollsters and statisticians who have been doing this for decades. This theory is not even remotely credible.

Not really. In a counterfactual world where the winner of the national popular vote became President, the candidates would have campaigned differently. So it's impossible to say what the alternate result would have been.

So one sentence blandly asserting that voter suppression is happening in the middle of an essay on an unrelated topic? Okay.

Of course, the winner of the popular vote is meaningless anyway, because that's not how the election works.

> Given the amount of hacking that has gone on during the election, to influence the election, it is worth investigating at some level for a sanity check

Vaguely gesturing at "the amount of hacking" is kinda suspiciously nonspecific given that it was campaign email accounts that were hacked, and in very primitive fashion -- wasn't it a phishing email that the DNC fell for?

The fact that someone can successfully carry out a phishing attempt against a not-particularly-technically-savvy target is hardly evidence that they can just l33tly h4xx0r into any other target you could name, any more than a car break-in is evidence that a bank was robbed in another city.

[citation needed]

Yeah, it's weird how it's a national scandal that people have to present ID to vote, but not to drive a car, rent an apartment, open a bank account, buy cold medicine, get federal assistance, enter a courthouse...

Weird. I distinctly recall that a few weeks ago refusing to accept the results of an election was treason. Lots of people saying that, including here on HN. What changed, I wonder?

I don't think your understanding of American politics is very accurate. For example:

> Iirc they've fought Medicare tooth and nail, even though it's modeled on a republican program.

First, you're thinking of Obamacare, not Medicare (actually, the Affordable Care Act); the narrative you're reaching for is that the ACA is modeled on Republican ideas, therefore the GOP isn't allowed to object to it. Medicare is something completely different, a health insurance entitlement aimed at seniors that's existed for decades.

And even then, neither half of the story is really true, because the GOP is not a monolith. Yes, the Heritage Foundation proposed something vaguely similar in the '90s, and Mitt Romney -- a liberal Republican governing one of our most liberal states -- pushed a vaguely similar plan as well many years ago, but the majority of Republicans disagreed with both on the idea. And even if it was based entirely on an old GOP idea, there's no logical way to therefore decide the GOP can't have problems with this implementation of it, or not believe the Obama administration would be competent to execute it.

Think of it this way. Bill Clinton supported military action against Iraq during his term, and even carried it out. Does that mean no Democrats were allowed to object to George W. Bush's Iraq war, because it was "based on a Democratic idea"? Of course not; the very idea is absurd. Same deal here.

When you can buy and sell a legal action like that it strikes me as a super bad idea. Wouldn't there be some legal equivalent of the patent trolls who today purchase outdated patents and then go around filing nuisance suits based on them?

I think the point was that the real thing is just as much (or as little) of a fraud as the fake is.

Please don't make racist remarks on HN.

If you're saying that people shouldn't be discriminated against for their gender and they also shouldn't be discriminated against for their political views, then hey! We're in 100% agreement.

Maybe it's a super dumb idea to drag outside political issues into the workplace at all. Not everywhere has to be a battlefield.

If you were a Trump voter who worked for GrubHub, would you feel comfortable strolling up to that CEO and casually mentioning who you voted for? Or would you consider yourself just a little bit chilled?

Even if the idea is completely unrelated to the company? And even then, we weren't talking about CEOs. We were talking about people like the low-level employees at GrubHub told that they should keep real quiet about their unapproved opinions if they wanted to keep their jobs.

>You can and should be judged on the basis of the ideas and opinions that you promote.

Not in the context of your employment, you shouldn't. Really, where does this attitude come from that one's employer should get a veto over everything one does when off the clock? It's usually from people who are always complaining about evil corporations stepping on people's rights, too. I don't get it.

Please don't use HN to carry on personal vendettas.