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Comment by throw25231 | Hacker News Reader

TPP withdrawal isn't on here yet even though it has already been announced.

As bad as Trump is, we should celebrate the good policies and fight the bad ones. I'm optimistic about the TPP withdrawal, the policy removing two pieces of old regulation (a policy that's been implemented successfully in Canada[0]), FDA reform, cutting down on corruption, and cutting back lobbying. I'm pessimistic about the climate related policy, immigration policy, and especially scared about foreign policy.

[0]: http://www.npr.org/2015/05/26/409671996/canada-cuts-down-on-...

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>cutting down on corruption, and cutting back lobbying

Oh yea, like how Trump drained the swamp and staffed his administration with all these outsiders with fresh new ideas...oh wait, it's literally the RNC. And his Sec of State choice is the CEO of ExxonMobil and one of the campaign promises is literally to invest more in shale oil / natural gas / etc.

Give me a break. There is nothing worth celebrating in this kleptocracy and this wishy-washy "Oh let's focus on the good stuff!" only distracts from the facts.

What do you hope to achieve with such a reply, other than signalling that you hate Trump (which is a rather common sentiment here, so go you)?

At no point did they argue that this makes Trump good or even acceptable, and in fact they specifically mentioned things about Trump that scare them. I found the comment to be thoughtful and nice in light of this rather gloomy situation. Sometimes it's important to celebrate good things without yelling at each other.

I'm sorry for coming across as singling you out on this, but please don't consider the next paragraph aimed at you specifically.

The single thing that has bothered me most during this entire election is how both Trump voters and Hillary voters spent so much time basically yelling at each other in tribal fashion. My Facebook feed was dominated by mostly pro-Hillary people who decried anyone even remotely agreeing with Trump as racist, misogynist, rural uneducated shits, and a a pro-Trump person or two who kept posting about emails and pizza-related tinfoil hat theories (and that coming from someone who generally speaking is considered a bit of a conspiracy theorist). I know for a fact that a large portion of these posts served absolutely no good purpose I could imagine other than 'virtue signalling'.

I mean, don't get me wrong, if I had to pick a side I'd be in the Hillary camp. I have opinions too.

And sometimes I've expressed them in ways and places where it mostly just benefited me as a person somehow. I'm not perfect. But it frustrates me to no end to see people just yelling at each other. It seems less of an issue in my real-world interactions, but then my real world consists of people who mostly agree with me.

Without targeting you specifically, I really hope everyone here, myself included, can avoid being part of the screaming mobs. One of my favorite things about this place is that it still often challenges my thinking (I'm less of a functional programming zealot, and one of my new year's resolutions is to give emacs a real shot, for example), and I really hope we can at the very least bring some of this quality even to political discussions, because we do have a lot more influence than we think.

My hope was to show that any chance of "fighting corruption" is a sham and clearly a smoke-and-mirrors act used to distract from the high-level looting that is taking place. You'll notice that the OP edited their post to reflect this so obviously it had some impact beyond virtue signaling.

Personally, I found the comment to be incredibly unthoughtful, as they just posted the "nice" things that they teach you in politics 101 to put on your platform so that people will look at those and think "hey it's not so bad." I work in politics, I've lived in DC for twenty years, I've seen this exact scenario play out in the Bush years ("He has some good ideas! We can support those at least, right?") and we all know how that turned out for this country. Undue optimism and shallow political thinking doesn't exactly make for a "challenging" post.

Between being part of a "screaming mob" and standing by saying nothing as horror unfolds before us, I'll add my voice to the choir.

Who knows if you'll be right or everyone else will be right. We'll have to wait 4 years and see if Trump comes through with his promises.

Right now, you're acting like you're the only that is right and everyone is too stupid. You're acting very smug, the same smug that lost Hillary the election.

"In the entirely of the technological age, across the breadth of the world, you could probably count the number of people whose mind has been changed completely on a political or religious topic by a Facebook discussion on the fingers of both hands."

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