techxit

I'm in my 30s, which means that I'm 97 in tech years. So I remember the 1990s. People were horrible to that woman. Her complaint about a "vast right-wing conspiracy" is spot-on. The Establishment beat the hell out of her.

So she realized that she had to work with the Establishment to get things done. Like I said, I'd rather take a chance of planting a bomb in it than throw a brick at it. And if I'm wrong and Clinton proved a sellout, we could fire her in 2020.

Yes, she accepted her market rate for speeches at Goldman Sachs... after leaving public service. Wouldn't you? I despise Goldman Sachs and I applied to work for them at one point, because if I'd gotten the Core Strats gig, it would have been good for my career. Almost all of us are whores, or were at one time. That's how capitalism works.

The Democratic establishment sold out their base.

I dislike the Democratic establishment (although it is less onerous than the Republican one). I dislike the fact that left-leaning and rational people face a complacent one-party system. Not enough to vote for Trump.

Just saying that people are "dirty" because they have friends in the Establishment is bigoted and Trumpist. We have to accept that people have different strategies for dealing with corruption, corporatism, and national failure and that one only knows the right one in hindsight.

Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Peter Thiel are categorically not what this country needs. I wish we had given Hillary a chance. If she had turned out to be an Establishment hack, we could fire her in 2020.

I personally think that Hillary is far more liberal than she was given credit for. She's been turned into a cynical pragmatist by 20+ years of bitter experience in politics... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think her heart was in the right place all along. She'd probably twist arms and threaten careers of people on both sides of the aisle to get a public option passed, and that's the kind of ballbuster the country needs. However, she's the sort of person who does very well in 1-on-1 interactions but fails with rooms and groups. She has grace but no charisma. She let her self be painted as a duplicitous Establishment hack.

The irony is that Clinton and Trump voters both voted on the premise of their candidate being radically different from what they'd seen. Clinton voters believed that she was a liberal working within the establishment who'd bring us single-payer healthcare. Trump voters (except for the small percentage who actually are "deplorables", meaning racists and sexists and xenophobes) believed that Trump's dog-whistle rhetoric was just cynical game-playing. It bothers me that people accused Clinton of being "two-faced", while supporting a candidate in whom the best-case scenario is that he doesn't believe half the shit he says.

We also have a country where people hate the perceived cultural elite that is occasionally condescending ("flyover country") more than they hate the socioeconomic elite that is actually ruining their lives and that needs, for the good of red and blue staters, to be overthrown. Numbers may explain that. There are more of us in the 4.99% for them to hate than in the 0.01% that something actually needs to be done about (although I doubt that Trump is the solution).

Can we have a black bar for America, please?

I hate the racism and sexism that his movement represents. I hate that people are treating his election as a vindication of the worst elements of our nation's history, rather than an expression of sheer desperation from the burping turtle at the bottom of the stack.

I've worked in tech for 10 years. It's full of people who did not vocally support Trump (and may well have voted for Clinton) but who perpetuate sexism and racism and think that they're doing so for valid business reasons ("culture fit"). I know who the enemy is and I know who to hate. It's not the guy in Milwaukee who lost his job and his dignity and can't afford to insure his family and gets socked with an "individual mandate" penalty for it.

This is the good kind of nationalism, the kind where people band together to defeat the global elite and the upper class/0.1% instead of letting them divide-and-conquer us (Red States vs. Blue, white vs. black, immigrant vs. native, Boomers vs. Millennials).

I wish that our recent display of nationalism in the US had not been one of the disgusting kind.

Fuck Thiel, fuck Y Combinator, fuck racism and sexism and fuck calling Clinton "the lesser of two evils" because people can't differentiate between a security violation [1] and a 40-year career of housing discrimination, fraud, misogyny, tax evasion, and brazen narcissism. And especially fuck the anti-intellectualism that has taken over not just corporate life and the software industry, but now political life wholesale.

[1] And as someone who's worked for the Feds, I am pissed as hell at Clinton for her email server. If the Republicans had put forward someone decent, I might have gone that way. Trump, on the other hand... just no.

Bullshit. First of all, high house prices are there because most of the country is dying (another causative factor of this shocking election). Second, as much as "Obamacare" failed, it was better than doing nothing-- we had a 9/11 every 24 days under the old health insurance system-- and repealing it will kill people in blue states and red ones. Finally, the threatened trade wars will put our economy in a deep recession.

It's too early to tell. Trump could turn out to be a "normal" Republican and then we're probably fine. Or, this could be a complete disaster.