Comment by heavyset_go 5 days ago
> Is stuff really as bad as it looks or are media somehow exaggerating things?
If you think what you've seen is bad, consider how bad the stuff you don't see is, and then consider how bad it is for those who aren't the type to post on HN.
> When's the last time you saw a Trump supporter on this site?
Today, several. They made themselves known in several threads related to recent events.
It's against the guidelines to call out posts/posters, but you can use the HN Algolia to list the most popular threads from this week/month and you'll see plenty of them.
Which guideline? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think it should be fine for you to link a few "I support Trump" comments from the past week? Note that believing the Trump administration is correct on a particular issue, or that they are being unfairly criticized, is not the same as advocating that people vote for Trump. I wasn't able to find anything I would consider actual Trump support from a quick skim of recent threads. I don't believe I've ever seen it on HN.
dang has mentioned several times that witchhunting is against the rules, and I'm not going to compile a list of witches for you, mostly because it is both toxic to communities and not conducive of interesting conversation, especially when you can just use the HN Algolia yourself.
Trump supporters aren't stupid, they understand they lose credibility if they just say they have blind faith in Trump.
They demonstrate it through their actions and misinformation tactics. You'll find many outright wrong comments on the recent ICE shootings, and many emotionally charged comments suggesting it's good that people got what they deserved.
They'll also misinformation about the types of undocumented people, and how many there are. These are obvious falsehoods, including things such as claiming random citizens are actually terrorists when they're just not. Or claiming we somehow have 100 million undocumented people.
If someone is parroting official speech from the DHS, which these days is almost always outright lies, then we can safely assume they are a trump supporter. We're well past the point of healthy conversation or skepticism. If you believe just about anything this administration or DHS says, you are closer to a cult member than a rational, reasoning human.
Yeah, but what he's doing to the country is so much worse than illegal immigration that it would be silly to bring it up.
Theres a scale involved.
You can support deportation without being a trump supporter.
But if you willfully ignore the scale, the lack of due process, and try and make it binary deportation/open borders, the Trumpometer starts reading stratospheric.
Most techies are libertarians and/or moderates. They definitely live in liberal hot spots, but they aren’t going out of their way to address social wrongs and protest. Heck, most Californians are moderate, mostly concerned about making money and living the good life, the only reason they are called liberal at all is because Pete Wilson alienated most of the states Hispanics from the Republican Party in an ill planned illegal immigration witch hunt. It didn’t just go from Reagan to Newsom overnight, the change was mostly for anti-racism reasons.
California is also hardly a far left state, it still has more trump voters than Texas.
I don't think HN is representative of techies, especially not when discussing politics.
Techies even more moderate if they aren’t on HN, si I don’t get your point.
>When's the last time you saw a Trump supporter on this site?
Many in this very thread, actually.
>The userbase here is considerably further left than a very left-wing state such as California.
Considering any fixture in American politics "very left-wing" is already an indicator of how skewed right the perspective is. The signature policy goal of the stereotypical "far-left" American politician (Bernie Sanders) is a government healthcare system already present in many countries around the world, including many less developed than the US.
California isn't "very left-wing". It's liberal, centre-left if you're being kind. The democrats are a centre-right party with some mildly-leftist pockets of members.
I am pointing out that HN is not very representative of the US political spectrum, and opinions about what's going on in the US will be filtered based on that. You're largely just hearing from one set of partisans here.
By US standards, California is very left-wing. International standards are not super relevant. (I'm also a bit skeptical of the cliche that the Democrats are a right-wing party internationally. For example, Obama endorsed Trudeau in Canada. But again, not super relevant.)
Democrats are (or were) considered "right wing" on some stuff and really "left wing" on other stuff. It's really futile trying to compare the political parties with different incentives internationally and putting a single left/right wing label on them.
Democrats were also just a big tent party for a long time, with more 'real right wing' members than 'real left wing' members, maybe that's the reason for the platitude.
Almost 40% of California voted for Trump. The political polarity of a group can be measured in multiple ways. If you measure it by the views of its elected representatives or leaders of its institutions, it will look quite extreme because every 55/45 gets converted to a +1. In other words, you can have nearly 30% of a state being against gay marriage, yet "obviously" California is extremely gay-friendly.
I suspect (for no concrete reason in particular besides a feeling) that the readership of HN is fairly similar to California in political demographics. Active commentators are considerably more left-wing due to selection effects.
unrelated tangent, sorry. i agree with your comment, just ranting/venting about a detail.
> a very left-wing state such as California.
seeing any US state being described as "very left-wing" is interesting to me, think it just shows how different these views are depending on who you ask. i'd describe California as Centrist. sure, socially open, no issue with sexuality or heritage. but also, free markets, corpo power, $$$, generally pro-system. the Orange is disliked heavily, but after all it's not the system which is the problem, it's the Orange!
> The userbase here is considerably further left
can't agree, from my own experiences of discussing political topics on here. again, socially open, free minds, sure. but positive towards Silicon Valley, VC-funding, investments and a general lean towards Imperialism(for freedom, of course, not the bad kind). yes, overtly racist comments get downvoted until they're dead.
"further left than very left-wing" could be the description of an anarcho-communist, self-hosted mastodon instance, not a US state.
to end on a funny note, https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQAfP-2...
sorry for being pedantic, and maybe wrong. please show me y'alls POV, i'm not saying that i'm right, it's just kind of my opinion, man.
Thats not left/right, thats lib/auth. But I guess you cant scare people with "ooooh the government likes elements of civil freedom" it just isnt spooky enough, you gotta try and tangle it up with leftism somehow to really push the point home.
>seeing any US state being described as "very left-wing" is interesting to me, think it just shows how different these views are between US and Euro. i'd describe California as Centrist. sure, socially open, no issue with sexuality or heritage. but also, free markets, corpo power, $$$, generally pro-system. the Orange is disliked heavily, but after all it's not the system which is the problem, it's the Orange!
California is considering a wealth tax which is already causing billionaires to flee the state.
>to end on a funny note, https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQAfP-2...
It's the Europeans who want us to ship more weapons to Ukraine.
> It's the Europeans who want us to ship more weapons to Ukraine.
well, you chose the one "good" example, where weapons are actually used for defense against a different Imperialist. what about the money going towards the Palestinian Genocide? what about other wars/invasions/operations, started or backed by Democrats/Bi-Partisan support.
> California is considering a wealth tax
a one-time tax of 5% on the net worth of residents with over $1 billion, bunch of commies! some decades ago, wealth tax was a high, double-digit number.
even so, do you think a one-time 5% wealth tax is enough to be called very left-wing?
I'm a Trump supporter, generally. I see a lot of comments at the bottom of threads by people who I assume also are. The reason you don't often hear this admission when you're in a forum with downvotes like this one is twofold. One, obviously, the person gets immediately downvoted, so those posts are harder to find. Two, if a person admits to it in a post, that often functions as a thought terminating trigger for everyone else involved, and it doesn't matter what point he was trying to make; the interlocutor just calls him a racist or something and moves on.
Actually, I like using HN because I find it has a much higher proportion of right wing or centrist thinkers than Reddit, or at least less downvote propensity towards those groups. And crucially, I won't get banned from HN just for voting for Trump, unlike a terribly large number of subreddits. This userbase is definitely more right-leaning than Reddit, of that I'm sure.
I would like to point out the humor in that the above comment has been downvoted at least 3 times. Lol
You were supposed to say silent and let them pretend to be persecuted on an internet forum
Also consider that there are 340 million people in the US. With that sort of population size, you can construct whatever narrative you want out of daily video clips of 1-in-a-million events.
>the type to post on HN.
When's the last time you saw a Trump supporter on this site? The userbase here is considerably further left than a very left-wing state such as California. That will very much be reflected in what gets posted here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791909