I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream

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I feel like you’re just nitpicking. I admit I nitpicked about Breitbart, so fair enough, but I really feel that liberals race-baiting and falsely labeling people all the time will pretty much guarantee another term of Trump. Similarly with the one-sided reporting, where it’s not just the negative tone and slanted facts, but the complete lack of coverage of certain issues, and obsessive focus on issues that, to Trump voters, are just trivial relative to real problems like jobs and education and crime. Like transgender bathrooms. If the media want to reelect Trump, they’re going about it the right way.

Your points:

Fair enough, you found a writer at Breitbart who, in her personal Twitter feed, expresses the view that not all groups of people are exactly equal in every way, including genetically. Fair enough.

You seem to be implying that Bannon is rabidly anti-Semitic. You’d probably have to explain why so many Jews work at Breitbart. Also why it’s so pro-Israel. While you’re there, please explain why Trump, who read the statement, is so pro-Israel? Or why most of his children are either converted Jews or have married Jews. Seems kind of weird that Trump would be an anti-Semite, or keep an anti-Semite around, no? Have you seen how happy Netanyahu is to have Trump in the White House after Obama, who actively worked to weaken Israel? So he didn’t mention the Jews. I find it very hard to believe that was malicious. All the statements are surprisingly short. I read three, Obama 2015, and Bush, 2007. Bush, like Trump, didn’t even mention a number. I would have thought they’d read off all the ethnic groups with the number of dead. I think you guys just hate Trump so much and are so emotional that you’ll seize on anything, anything at all, real or imagined, to hurt him. Consider that exaggerating will prevent Trumpsters and middle America from taking you seriously and ensure that the Republicans keep winning.

Jeff, you do have open borders. If anywhere from 12 to 30 million illegal aliens are in America, you have open borders. Yes, it is very hard to get a green card. But getting a green card is legal migration. Sneaking across the border is illegal immigration. Surely you see the difference? Illegal immigrants don’t apply for green cards. You do know this, right?

Really? That’s a bit disingenuous. The vast majority of American settlers were from cultural groups that were so similar that they had no trouble congealing into a common American identity. Same thing happened in Australia and New Zealand, and to a lesser extent South Africa (Dutch and English) and Canada (French and English).

I’ll just say one more thing. You said that “Muslim immigrants are more American than I will ever be, and I am incredibly proud to have them here, as fellow Americans.” Have you ever been to a Muslim country? Did you know that there are 10 countries that will kill you for being a homosexual, as your good friend Joel is? Would you like to guess what religion those countries follow? Why do you ignore this? You do realise that these people whom you consider to be more American than yourself, absolutely do not share your values? They don’t suddenly become like you when they get off the plane. Look at this, from CNN: “More than half of British Muslims (52%) think homosexuality should not be legal, and nearly half (47%) think it is not appropriate for gay people to teach in schools, according to a new survey of British Muslims.” Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/11/europe/britain-muslims-survey/
Jeff, if you think Republicans are bad, you need to get some perspective. What happens when these people run for office and actually start implementing this stuff in American law? Do you want people in your country who want the death penalty for homosexuality? If you’re a liberal, stand up for liberal values. You are not going to be holding hands and singing Kumbaya with these guys. I know you want to, and I do too, and in a perfect world we would, but that’s just not realistic. It’s never going to happen.

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Actually I’m quite prepared to believe that there are thousands of reasonable - or simply nominal - Muslims in the US. But wouldn’t they be equally in favour of keeping the ‘wackos’ out…?

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Sure, there’s a continuum when it comes to how seriously you take your religion. Then there’s how your religion is tied up with your overall culture, how you choose to organise your society. On an individual level it affects your morals and values and so on. Ideally, all groups would be against fundamentalism, violence, and more or less embrace liberal values. But that doesn’t happen in practice. Read the CNN article I quoted. It depends what you call whacko. Most British Muslims in that study didn’t openly support Isis, as you’d expect. But a liberal reading that report should be absolutely horrified. More than half of British Muslims wanting to outlaw homosexuality and nearly half wanting to ban gays from teaching? In Britain? Yikes. That’s not good. People like Jeff should be having a heart attack over that. As would most people in Western societies.

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Jeff, there is no dream without law, order and reason.

I respect you immensely because you have been so influential on my success as a software developer. Not just because of technical insights but because of how you shaped my thinking process to solve problems.

Having said that, I could not understand how you could be so flawed in your arguments.

Muslim Ban
You cite CNN proving Trump initiated a “Muslim Ban”. Even in the article, it does not state there is specific religious test to ban Muslims. To infer Trump has ordered a “Muslim Ban” is disingenuous. The temporary ban is not much different than what President Obama has ordered and many Democrats supported in the past. Fact from Hysteria

The Wall
Literal or figurative, it does not matter. The point is the border is not secure. We can all have empathy in our hearts for people that want to risk everything to just for a chance at a better life. Allowing people the opportunity to come here and having a secure border are not mutually exclusive. Frankly, half the country who understand this are getting pretty sick and tired of being called racist.

Flawed Democracy
We are a Republic. The founders knew that Democracies end up with the majority oppressing the minority. The electoral college is designed to prevent this. It also prevents us from voting ourselves into a socialist disaster like Venezuela. Why not a popular vote?

So you would have rather have had McCain or Romney? Hmmm, would you have preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump? Even though she used a private server to run a most high office and she decided which emails to turn over? Even though she had major conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation? Did the Obama DOJ do anything about this even though small time Navy sailors went to prison for far less violations? Did you support this most corrupt government?

I figured it out. You are just a Democrat through and through.

You now are going to support every hard left wing organization:

Planned Parenthood
Fine you can have abortions, but do I have to pay for it?
Seriously go look up what a third term abortion entails, it’s disgusting. Does that viable baby not deserve protection?

You are going to support:
NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post
ACLU
ect.

No Washington Times, NY Post, ACLJ, Judicial Watch, CATO Institute?

You probably can’t imagine how people could ever possibly vote for Trump. It’s because you do not listen to the other side. You dismiss as racist, homophobic, sexist bigots without listening to arguments.

I still think that you are a great thinker but somehow you got stuck in a left wing echo chamber. Please read and listen to the other side.

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Yeah it must be truly upsetting to always worry about losing your job for something that’s out of your control.

I’d point out the prejudice in considering “people” and LGBTs as distinct sets, but that would make be an SJW and that would be terrible.

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I’m sorry but I just don’t think there is any sort of untapped middle out there for any coherent third party. The Overton window has been shifted so far to the right that there effectively is no left, what used to be the left is now what used to be a moderate Republican, and the right is, as you pointed out, flirting with white nationalism.

Obamacare was a move toward creating a modern healthcare system as it exists in most of the Western world, but to hear the Right, it was the rebirth of the USSR.

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To be precise, his party has won two last elections. And his political opponents call this as “destroying democracy”.[quote=“Piotr_Pawlowski, post:88, topic:4882”]
our Constitutional Court is not independent any more
[/quote]

The Constitutional Court judges are elected by the Parlament. After previous ruling party lost presidential and parlament elections they wanted to veto all new bills using their judges in the Constitutional Court. Using law tricks the court was blocked. That dispute only showed that judges are elected by politicians and are simply serving them. They were not independent at all.

It is funny to see exactly same arguments are used now in in the US. So in next 12 months we’ll hear every other day that the US Constitution is violated etc. And finally people will get bored with that leftists fanatics.

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You’ve just described Evangelical Protestants. American Muslims are more likely to support LGBTs and gay marriage that white evangelicals.

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Yes, cults are a bad idea. I think fervent religion in any form is a bad idea. I say there’s no need to import more of that sort of thing. Ever read The Crucible?

Maybe cult is too strong a word. But I’ve seen Christian Evangelical faith healers, and it did strike me as a little freaky and cultish. The question is: would you want to live in an exclusively Muslim or Christian Evangelical society? If not, why ship members of either group to your country in large numbers, where eventually they’ll start influencing the legal system and so on?

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I think the key is the second part, not necessarily that they were so similar to start. The US is largely a melting pot, not multicultural - immigrants adopted the local culture and mixed it their own, rather than totally retaining their individual cultural identity.

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Nowhere in that article did it state what her job is. Here the job description:

The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the Office of the Attorney General which evolved over the years into the head of the Department of Justice and chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government. The Attorney General represents the United States in legal matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive departments of the Government when so requested. In matters of exceptional gravity or importance the Attorney General appears in person before the Supreme Court. Since the 1870 Act that established the Department of Justice as an executive department of the government of the United States, the Attorney General has guided the world’s largest law office and the central agency for enforcement of federal laws.

The AG is the chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government. She advises the President. In other words, the AG is the President’s legal advisor and head of the DOJ, serving at the pleasure of the President. Refusing to follow an executive order would surely displease any president and the result would have been the same. Again, this is a job she would have held for another week, so largely the firing was political theater (for both sides.)

I don’t really care what Yates’ record was prior to this, she didn’t do her job this week. If I get fired this week for willfully deleting a production database or taking down a production system, nobody cares about what I did 6 months or 6 years ago.

Great, so why haven’t you been up in arms over that issue? Surely we would have created significantly more revenue that way to offset stupid pet projects like the wall.

Let me ask you, do you think Trump is capable of doing anything right? Are any of his positions reasonable?

Here are some of what he wants to get done in the first 100 days that I consider to be good things:

  • Renegotiate or withdraw from NAFTA. - NAFTA has been terrible for the middle class American worker.

Manufacturing was once a path to the middle class for these folks. In the 1960s, 28% of American workers were employed in manufacturing. That’s down to 8.7% today, said Edward Leamer, economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

  • Lift the restrictions on $50 trillion dollars’ worth of American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas, and clean coal.

Anything that reduces our dependence on foreign oil, lowers oil prices, which in turn puts pressure on SA is a good thing IMO.

  • Propose a constitutional amendment that imposes term limits on all members of Congress.
  • A five-year ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service.

He could screw up everything else in his presidency except maybe a nuclear war and he would get my vote for most influential President in my lifetime.

  • Allow American corporations to repatriate money at a 10% rate.

They’d want to put those repatriated dollars to good use, which hopefully means more jobs.

  • End common core.

As a father of a 5th grader, I can tell you common core (Math) is terrible. It over-complicates EVERYTHING.

  • A 35% tax cut for middle-class families with two children.

  • Reduce the number of tax brackets from 7 to 3.

  • Establish tariffs to discourage offshoring.

  • Reform visa rules to increase penalties for overstaying and to ensure jobs are offered to American workers first.

The H-1B program has been abused for as long as I can remember.

We need to stop reacting like cavemen
Not everything Obama did was terrible (I’m looking at you republicans.)
Not everything Trump will do will be terrible for the United States.

Obama has screwed up plenty:

  • Snowden
  • Obamacare - completely ignored regulating costs
  • TPP
  • “Droning” collateral damage (innocent people), Americans without due process, etc.

Where has your outrage been on any of these? All I’m trying to do is highlight that taking sides is the wrong strategy: left vs. right, democrat vs republican.

Everyone is guilty of this. “Obama couldn’t do anything right”, “Bush was a moron”, “Trump is unhinged.”

I’m cautiously optimistic that Trump will be different, and sometimes different is better than the same career-politicians we’ve been dealt with. Some of it will be “bad”, some of it will be “good” from my point of view.

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Obamacare was nothing like any existing healthcare system in the modern world. It simply subsidizes private insurance for lower income Americans. Obama ‘compromised’ and dropped single-payer. Obamacare became a health insurance reform law rather than an overhaul of the structure of healthcare. See the difference?

Americans were and still are brainwashed into thinking universal healthcare is a terrible thing. I know firsthand how stupid this is. Our 5 year old has been a type-1 diabetic since he was 19 months old. We have to have the best insurance we can afford in order to pay for his medical supplies (he has an insulin pump + CGM,) which run more than $6,000 per quarter. If you look at the relatively rudimentary supplies you would think there’s probably $100 worth of supplies max. I have a cousin in France who is also a type-1 diabetic, he pays exactly $0 for his supplies. I don’t expect to pay $0 to be clear. But I don’t expect to be held hostage to the tune of $23,000 in premiums and co-pays per year either. Regulate big pharma or universal healthcare. Pick one.

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For a site that typically is frequented by software developers, why don’t we look at each of these topics as a bug in the system. When I start debugging I look at the symptoms, the environment, and begin to work out how this could be happening to find where to dig into the code and begin looking for the root cause. And when I’m debugging I’m looking for a root cause, not a quick patch I can slap on and hope it works. So let’s apply similar process here:

First, let’s see if we can agree on why these millions of undocumented workers are here? I’d conjecture that the majority are here for the primary purpose of working, Some smaller number may be here for illegal activities, but I’m hard pressed to believe we have over 10 million people employed in the drug trade and other illegal activities. So can we agree that the majority are here for jobs? Now, we have laws that require employers to document their workers to ensure that they are not here illegally. So if we put the two together we can conclude that the majority of undocumented immigrants are here to work, and have jobs, and we have existing laws prohibiting them from having those jobs. So based on this can we also then conclude that there are a number of businesses that must employ these individuals and provide these jobs?

So how is that they can find jobs? I can see two main options here: 1) they have false documentation, i.e. the employer is duped into hiring them and doesn’t know they are undocumented 2) the employer knows they are undocumented, and employs them anyway. We’ve put into place a number of systems such as DHS eVerify to cut back on false documentation, and if our system here isn’t sufficient that sounds like a good place to put some additional effort in fixing this problem. In our world of electronic records there is no reason we couldn’t catch falsified documentation easily, we can tell if a credit card is being used improperly in near real time, you can’t convince me we can’t determine if someone is falsifying their work identity.

So if it’s hard to falsify documentation, we have to conclude that a majority of jobs are being provided willingly by employers. So why would an employer want to hire undocumented workers? Isn’t there a risk they will get caught? Sure, but if the penalty is low enough, and the reward high enough maybe it’s worth the risk. Look at where the majority of undocumented workers end up working, typically low skill jobs that are often pretty dangerous, or in poor working conditions. So having a workforce that isn’t really governed by labor laws, and can’t complain or claim against insurance if they are injured is a pretty appealing thing. Example, one study showed over 25% of painters and one third of the drywall hangers in the construction industry are undocumented (again, maybe those numbers are off a little, every study has some wiggle room), and why would this be a good thing for owners of painting companies? Climbing on roofs and ladders, working in typically poor conditions (ever been in an enclosed space when applying solvent based paint or seen the dust when handing drywall), and you are prone to having a lot of injuries or long term health issues. So maybe this is why an undocumented work force is so appealing, They aren’t going to file claims against your workmans compensation insurance, or make OSHA complaints about working conditions.

So given this set of conditions it seems that the root issue is that employers are providing too many job opportunities to undocumented workers. If there were fewer jobs I’d conjecture that many of the undocumented workers would have never come here. So maybe we don’t need a wall, what we need is proper enforcement and stiffer penalties for employers who hire undocumented workers? We have a system that provides a benefit to undocumented workers, and now have decided we want to put up a wall around it to keep the workers out? Seems to me it’s like putting a pile of money somewhere and putting a fence around it, sure the fence may be effective, but wouldn’t it be just as effective to remove the pile of money? Why not the same here, increase penalties for employing undocumented workers, and increase enforcement of the existing laws we have today. Remove the supply of jobs, problem begins to solve itself. I can’t believe that we couldn’t actually solve this if we wanted to, but the reality is that many industries rely on undocumented workers, and as such we’ve in many ways overlooked the issue when it’s closer to home. Everyone like to complain about it, but do you want to pay more for the cost of constructions, landscaping, hotels, or other industries that are taking advantage of undocumented labor? So bottom line, the wall is not really a solution, it’s at best a band-aide on the problem, at worst nothing but a theatrical move that does nothing. We don’t need a wall, we just need to decide if we really want to enforce our current labor laws or not. The jobs go away, the undocumented workers in those jobs lose incentive to be here. Fix the root problem, the problem is solved, put a patch on it and you’ll end up having to fix it again in the future.

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Absolutely.

Yessir. The democrat’s version of the “wall” is gun control to prevent violence. If we posit that unjustified shootings (mass or otherwise) are already illegal, why do democrats continue to push for additional laws that law-breakers won’t follow, only to penalize law-abiding citizens?

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[quote=Shwance13]Planned Parenthood
Fine you can have abortions, but do I have to pay for it?
Seriously go look up what a third term abortion entails, it’s disgusting. Does that viable baby not deserve protection?[/quote]

First, we haven’t allowed Federal funding for abortions for some time now.

But even if we did, in your Republic you don’t get to necessarily pick and choose what you want your tax money to go to, right? I’m pretty sure that if we asked each person what they thought their tax money should go to fund you’d get a different answer. So the answer here is yes, you do have to in many cases pay for things you don’t agree with. We all do; we aren’t asked when we pay our taxes, “Which government run agencies and programs would you like this money to go to”.

As for abortion in general, I think we need to get to a point of compromise and work out a way to move past this issue. Maybe we can ban late term abortions nationwide except in a few medical cases where it’s life threatening? Maybe we can agree to provide contraception to keep unwanted pregnancies down to a minimum? There needs to be something other than both sides taking an immovable position that they can’t compromise on. That is a deadlock, and in that case you’ll never really get anywhere useful.

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Jeff, in the sea of timid responses to the awful policies of the Trump’s administration your post is fantastic and inspiring. You were involved in the creation of two great products aimed at helping people (SO and Discourse), this change in your political attitude is consistent with it.

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Not sure how you got from wall to guns, but I think you are saying that both “sides” have their sacred cows that they want to promote and are equally ridiculous. I certainly agree on that.

People often don’t look at what a real fix might be to a problem, they want simple solutions, and unfortunately the real solution is often not the simple one.

Example, we wage a “war on drugs” by trying to cut the transport/sale of illegal drugs. But the real problem is drug use. There would be no need for illegal drug trade if there weren’t buyers. Supply and demand. But it’s much easier to pretend that the problem is that drugs are for sale, not that they are in demand. It’s much harder to look at the systemic issues of why do people feel they need illegal drugs to make it through their life.

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If you want to see some of the democrat’s plan to try to take back congress & the White House, you can see it here:

This sounds less like a group of people who want a better America and more like a group that wants power in America. I believe the republican party is no different. These two parties are the cancer, and we keep feeding it.

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Thanks for this Jeff. I am also getting active for the first time but its easy to get overwhelmed. I’ve found moveon.org very helpful. The last two Sunday evenings they organized calls and they hope to continue throughout the first 100 days. They are practical training calls focused on the most important things you can do THIS week whether your lawmakers are red or blue… very strategic. https://act.moveon.org/survey/readytoresist

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Are you aware that B. Obama suspended Iraq Refugee Program for six months over terrorism fears in 2011? how is this any different?

First, it could easily be argued that what Obama did was wrong. There wasn’t as much outrage, however, because his act wasn’t nearly as outrageous as Trump’s and the media didn’t report on it.

Are you aware of the significant differences between what Obama did and what Trump did? Obama’s ban was in direct response to a specific threat – iraqi terrorists were actively using the refugee program to gain entry. Trump’s ban was not based on any actual threat. Obama singled out a single country, but Trump is very clearly singling out a religion. He says country, but it’s clear from what he said and what he did that this is an attempt at an illegal ban based on religion.

You could make the claim that he didn’t ban all muslims, which is true. What’s interesting is that he spared muslims from countries where he does business. Isn’t that interesting? Some of the actual 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, yet that country wasn’t banned. Isn’t that interesting, too?

Obama’s ban didn’t affect legal green card holders, Trump’s did. Though, Trump is now back-peddling on that issue. Still, we had a couple of days where US officials illegally detained people who had a legal right to be in this country.

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