zlacker

>>dang+(OP)
This is a terrible decision. The tech industry has built powerful tools of social control, and runs vast databases of private data on pretty much everyone in the country. We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry.

We need to be talking about the political implications of what we've built, and figuring out how to fix our mess. This is like the period before the hurricane: everyone should be busy boarding up windows, and you can't do that if you decide you're just not going to talk about the coming storm because it makes you feel bad.

>>idlewo+ck
>We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry.

This is why I support a moratorium on politics here. This kind of assumption and hyperbole is really off-putting. I'm happy to debate these topics, but not here.

Now, that said, it's going to be a little murky. For example, I want to examine Ed Ou's detention at the US border. What if something breaks about Snowden or Assange? How about net neutrality?

>>ibejoe+Vt
How is it "assumption and hyperbole" to take statements at face value? The incoming administration is on the record with their intents.

>>ajames+gw
>When the statements themselves are hyperbole. Look at how many details about the wall have changed.

>I don't understand why people on the left assume he was lying all of the times he delivered toned down statements and was only telling the truth when at the most extreme.

As someone on the left, it bothers me too. The guy has said many, sometimes mutually contradictory or impossible things, and has never given any indication of having reached some final disposition on anything. People somehow ignore everything he says that they could agree with as random lies, but analyze every year old tossed off tweet where he references some irrational policy or false fact as established policy of the next administration.

He creates a precarious environment for businesses that rely on established relationships with the traditional Republican and Democratic leadership group, and a precarious environment for minority groups due to his white identity politics pandering during the campaign. It's created such a distorted public discourse around the man that somehow Ted Cruz got painted as a more reasonable alternative. The institutional media attacks him in order to defend their business interests, and the majority (who are each a minority in some way), defend any media critique uncritically. The guy is not the devil, it's just in your interests to paint him as the devil if he isn't friends with the congresspeople that you own, and he's said enough contradictory stuff that your job is easy. Really, on social issues he ran as a mainstream Republican but with faux straight talk rhetoric that felt like it went further when it really didn't - if you're terrified of him, you should have been terrified of any of them. There are Muslim registries, they're just locked within accountable and unexaminable intelligence organizations, large and small. There is a wall. These were institutions born from bipartisanship.

Nevertheless, he's dangerous as any president could be, and more unpredictable than any president we have ever had. It's more important that we talk about the stuff he has said, not less. Whether or not you take it at face value is irrelevant when it's all you have to plan around. What's the alternative; to wait and see, and after it happens, start thinking about it? You shouldn't need to assume the earthquake will result in a tsunami to start preparing for it.

Your comment shows something that does disturb me on HN, though - comments that are being flagged for disagreement, rather than downvoted.