tathougies

I'm the child of indian immigrants. My parents adored trump in 2016, I was meh because all my friends told me he was a white supremacist. I thought my parents had gone mad. But then I saw that nothing my friends claimed actually came true and in fact trump governed like any other republican but way better because he didn't exclude people due to culture war issues and he didn't warmonger and brought peace.

But what really redpilled me was the impeachment farce where he literally was impeached for investigating his predecessor for crimes we now know occurred. That sends a very chilling message.

Wow okay.. Some people have too much time on their hands. Since I'm not giving them my money, I honestly don't really care what they do.

Uh... I always thought it was! You're right though. It shares the philosophy though.

I've been on parler for months. Stop exaggerating

Speech should have limits, but calling anything that took place on parler automatically 'hate speech' so contemptible that it ought to result in banning along with everything else on that site is ridiculous. There have been few instances of truly censorship-worthy speech over the past year, from either left or right.

It's not surprising, and it's disingenuous to accuse people of apathy. In several flu seasons, hospitals have been overwhelmed, tent beds set up, etc, and most people don't care because the flu is 'normal'. COVID is becoming 'normal', which is good, because it's not going away, so we all need to learn to deal with it.

This is like accusing those in the 50s for being apathetic about polio, because they didn't upend their entire life to protect their children from this incredibly deadly and disfiguring disease. When humans are confronted with a problem they simply cannot meaningfully prevent, they tend to ignore it and get on with their lives.

I'm unsure if you think that I'm supposed to disagree with you. I really don't. YC is incredibly toxic. I let the scales fall off my eyes on that one. When I first graduated university and started reading hacker news, I had a dream to build a business with YC. I no longer have any interest in doing business with them (would rather bootstrap myself), and only remain on here because of the interesting tech articles.

VC as it is today is absolutely toxic.

The 1st amendment does not apply to private entities. The first amendment is a law restricting only Congress.

'Freedom of speech', however, is not the 1st amendment. It is an ethical precept, not a law. It's like how 'don't cheat on your wife' doesn't mean you get thrown in jail, but you'll generally be seen as a 'bad guy'.

I am glad Poland is doing something, but I'm not sure I like this bill either. This is just censorship by another name.

I think we need to make a distinction -- as the US Supreme Court did -- between large, publicly held corporations and small closely held corporations. In Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court said that only closely held corporations (those held by a small, definable number of people) had freedom of religion and association. That is their justification for why Hobby Lobby did not need to provide BC coverage. Because it was owned only by one small family, forcing them to take the revenue (which they own) to pay would directly violate the religious beliefs of that small number of people.

On the other hand, Amazon does not have freedom of religion, because Amazon has thousands of shareholders with no universal religious inclination. A fundamentalist christian owner of Amazon stock cannot reasonably ask Amazon to stop paying for birth control.

But, I've only thought about this for a few hours. I'm interested in what other policies can be implemented to serve both the rights of hosts and the rights of content creators.

We actually see Trump/Sanders directly overlap in Tulsi Gabbard, a democrat who supported Sanders, but who often disagrees with Trump (and indeed, was the sole democrat to not vote for impeachment). Many Trumpers like her too. I like that she is honest personally. She has both criticized the antifa/blm riots and the riots on the sixth. Brought up concerns of both police brutality (concerns I share, BTW), and election integrity (which I also am concerned with).

I actually have supported with many actions of Antifa / BLM (probably wouldn't guess that from my post history), including the protests at Pelosi's and McConnell's houses, and the disruption of the globalist meetings you mention. I don't agree with them in their destruction of property, especially that of small mom-and-pop businesses, or even big business if it affects small businesses (by raising insurance rates for example). And obviously, I disagree with anything actually threatening lives.

> Based on your logic, if both parties rejected Stalin then you'd be in favor of him.

Yes, I'd rather have a social democrat that rejects Stalin than a fiscal conservative that embraced him.

Unlike the various 'what-ifs' of policy issues, anyone can examine the actual record of Stalin and his policies. And, in my opinion, anyone who finds him a source of inspiration, regardless of their stated policy preferences, has a severe lack of judgement.

Yes, you're right. The casting out of Ron Paul made me really mad. Thanks for reminding me.

No, no party is better really. The GOP is the same. It's run by the same kinds of old farts. My main source of good feelings towards the GOP is that I tend to agree with their unelected members. But more and more I'm seeing those members also hate the GOP establishment. I wouldn't be surprised to see the party fracture heavily soon. I hope the democrat party also has the same split. There are good, decent democrats that share common principles and who I'm sure cannot stand their party leadership. I mean, the DNC is so bad, that I actually feel sorry for my left-leaning friends who also seem unable to get any representation.

they are increasingly beyond the reach of normal citizens. If your views do not align 100% with either party, you are increasingly marginalized. See the treatment of Donald Trump (a republican outsider, and not a traditional conservative by any means, but not a democrat in principle either) by the Republican party. For the past four years, republicans have refused to pass bills due to not matching ideological purity tests from Trump. The best example of this is DACA (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/01/09/trum...), for which Trump has repeatedly asked for a legislative solution that gives these children legal status. Because that is not the exact party line of the GOP, they didn't like his solution. And then along with that, he wanted the wall of course, which doesn't fall into line exactly with the democrats, so now, despite DACA and secure borders being an issue many care about, no political party would take them up due to ideological purity.

On the democrat side, see the treatment of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard (Both non-traditional democrats in different ways) by their party.

Honestly, after seeing both how the GOP and Democrats treated Trump, Sanders, and Gabbard, I find myself supportive of all three of them despite them having a very different views. I simply like that they're not either party.

It increasingly seems that both parties are becoming incredibly dogmatic, and anyone who doesn't fall in line is simply barred from public discourse or elected office. It is increasingly true that in order to even get to elected office you need the support of a party.

In my state of Oregon, the democrats and republicans actually mandated that you be part of a party before being elected to office. You can no longer run as an independent. It's so bad, some people made an 'independent party' just to be able to have non-democrat or republican candidates on the ballot, but this suffers from the same issues as parties, in that those individuals still need to be 'nominated' by a select group of people annointed by the party organizers, which means even the independent party has a bias, even if they try to minimize it.

We need major electoral reform, nationwide, but it doesn't benefit any party to do that. What I would like to see are protesters from both BLM, Antifa, or whatever and the capitol protesters (not the rioters of any group please...) band together for a change and demand a better means of governance from their legislators. The people need to band together on common principles, instead of being divided by stupid policy points.

Honestly, I stopped believing the media reporting of Trump once I listened to the full audio of his speech about the awful events in Charlottesville. Literally immediately after the 'both sides' soundbite he goes on to explicitly denounce nazis, and yet the media censored that, to make it appear as if he were defending them. It's so blatant, it's insane.

Like I've said before around here, in 2016, I couldn't stand the man, but the way the media treats him, I find myself rooting for him. Every problem about Trump is their own creation.

And then pick and choose sound bites to report to form a narrative.

But Republicans more and more are shifting. More Republicans today than ever are willing to regulate corporations especially in this area.

Beliefs change. We see it in the senate taking up the cases into twitter and facebook. The party is shifting. Trump was not a traditional pro corporate republican. His doj is trying to punish monopolies. Many in the gop base, including myself, cannot stand congressional Republicans embrace of corporations (although many of us are seeing the democrats embrace big money too -- biden had more bank donations than trump -- and are equally disgusted). And honestly democrats who agree should reach out now to the shifting base. They might gain voters. That's the point I'm making.

No I don't support throwing out votes. This is why I support thomas and alitos reaction to texas v pa.

They said they would have taken the case but, even if they found pa to be wrong, they would not give the resolution asked for. That's eminently reasonable to me. This ensures that if they ruledagainst pa, then what happened there won't happen again while ensuring that thousands who voted in good faith are not disenfranchised

Then why did the supposedly far right donald trump dept of justice file the first major anti trust case in decades?

This conservative administration has been the first in a long while to charge antitrust violations against americans monopolies

How do you square away that fact with your simplistic characterization of conservatives as okay with anything big business does?

Edit: haha downvoteas for an honest question

> The lack of standing is pretty obvious for the supreme Court isn't it? Texas has no say in how Pennsylvania votes. There's other things that are ridiculous about that case, like wanting throw out unrelated Texan votes.

No it's not though. Texas is asking the Supreme Court to answer the question of whether the constitution allows the governor to make up election rules or whether it's just the state legislature. The Supreme Court has ruled that how other states conduct their elections affects other states. By precedent, they should have answered it.

Moreover, similar challenges to PA law by PA voters, PA candidates, and Trump himself were dismissed also for standing. Perhaps you can argue Texas has no standing to tell PA what to do. But shouldn't a PA voter have standing to question whether his governor can make up rules? How come absolutely no one has standing?

> I'm not sure you can argue they're bad actors when the clear and obvious reasoning for those measures across the country are to limit the spread of a deadly pandemic.

But they violated a court order. Sure, it's to stop a pandemic. But a judge ordered that order to be violated. Court orders supersede gubernatorial edicts.

> The governor's in charge of enforcement

I'm sorry... that's not good enough for an election. Can a governor allow votes to be made up even though it's against the law, because the governor is 'in charge of enforcement'. Can Trump use the national guard to stop the Biden electors from meeting because he's 'in charge of enforcement'.

At some point, the government needs to be held responsible for lack of enforcement of basic civil rights -- election integrity is a governmental duty. You can't just choose not to enforce it.

I'm a trump supporter in that I voted for him in 2020. I didn't vote for him in 2016 because I didn't think he'd do a good job. The last your years have shown me that while I don't agree with everything, he's done more that I agree with than I think a Clinton would have (or that a Biden would). For example, I like that he's signed peace accords between Israel and Muslim nations, and not started major new foreign wars, protected religious freedoms, forced medical transparency, passed criminal justice reform, etc. I don't believe Clinton would have done those things, or that Biden will, given that his administration started new wars, used the military against american citizens, tried to force nuns to violate their conscience, etc. So yes, in that I mostly support the past four years of American federal policy, I support Trumpism?

Some people don't want Biden as president. That's their opinion and they have every right to protest. Regardless of what their opinion is though, everyone should agree that this particular behavior is unacceptable. Unfortunately, we could not come to an agreement on that just this summer, and this is the natural end result of a country where large swaths of the population are unwilling to call out political violence when 'their side' are the ones committing it.

At this point, even Trump telling people to stop (which, to his credit, he has) will not help, in the same way that democrats telling Antifa to stop will not help (I mean Biden has asked them to stop for months now, and they're still launching fireworks at the courthouse in Portland to the point the mayor is now begging for federal help).

Political violence has been normalized by the media (both social and not) to the point where, even popular politicians who disagree with the mob will become its victims.

The scary part is that some people perpetuated all this polarization and rage for money.

I mean... I agree with you. I like Norway's model... Please don't be so confrontational.

Yes, the increased standard deduction was one of the best things from the TCJA.

I refinanced last year for a 0.125% better interest rate, and the bank paid me $1000 to do it. It was the easiest decision I ever made. Basically, there was $5000 in closing costs and the bank paid me $6000 in points. If I paid money I would have gotten a lower rate, but I already had a great rate.

Now, I'm refinancing again, but I'm paying some money. All in all, my net refinancing costs will be around $2000, but I have halved my interest rate almost, and will now be able to pay my home off about 10-15 years earlier (we just bought two years ago).

In the USA, first-time homebuyers can put 3.5% down with an FHA loan, but they have to pay insurance until they reach 20% equity.

Yikes. As an American, I would have thought Norway would have a much more lenient form of debt relief based on everything I hear about Scandinavia from our local press. But what you're describing seems incredibly harsh. I wonder if this is why Norwegians tend to be more financially responsible. Only being able to declare bankruptcy once certainly would make people learn their lesson? Is that true? Does it work in practice?

I mean Iran threatens every month or so to literally bomb Israel off the map. Some countries are okay with that kind of rhetoric. In general, the US is not.

I can't tell if you're joking or not. Easter Island is yet another example of my general premise. The people who colonized it originally -- the rapa nui -- are still around, even if their current culture is very different from the civilization that erected the moai?

Rome didn't collapse, it just diversified into several other smaller states. The Aztec empire wasn't overthrown by the Spanish, but just fractured. The empire of Genghis Khan didn't collapse, it just got successfully split until what remained resembled nothing of what it once was.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but rather pointing out that -- in the grand scheme of history -- every collapse can be recast as a 'diversifying' of the original society, even if the end state of the society has little in resemblance to the original.

For example, the Roman empire lasted -- in the form of the byzantines -- until 1453, only a few decades before Columbus discovered America, but the Byzantines were not really Roman in the way we think of ancient Rome, despite having every claim to being one and the same with the Roman empire.