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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

Telling Sanders and Trump voters that their support is based on conspiracy theories is not a good way to win their support away from their current candidates. Not sure when it happened but at some point it became part of the collective wisdom of political wonks that the best way to win someone to your point of view is to call them stupid. Pretty sure the works/fails ratio on that is at least 1:10 and probably more like 1:100.

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> Telling Sanders and Trump voters that their support is based on conspiracy theories is not a good way to win their support away from their current candidates

Nor is telling flat earthers that their beliefs are based in conspiracy theory a good way to win their support. I am not trying to win their support by that comment, as this is not the proper forum for that conversation. I am simply stating a fact.

Are you saying that people who have a problem with this conflict of interest are the equivalent of flat earthers? That's not a viable position to take.

What conflict of interest are you talking about? I'm saying that I am not trying to convert Flat Earthers or fervent Sanders/Trump supporters but merely explaining what makes them exist.

The conflict of interest is what you're calling a "conspiracy theory". It's a known fact that there is conflict of interest between the Buttigieg campaign and Acronym/Shadow. That's not a "theory", it is indeed a fact.

> It's a known fact that there is conflict of interest between the Buttigieg campaign and Acronym/Shadow. That's not a "theory", it is indeed a fact.

Citation needed. It is a known fact that Shadow is one of the few software contractors that works for cheap for Democratic candidates. The fact that Buttigieg also used them for cheap projects does not mean there is a conflict of interest, and immediately jumping to that conclusion indicates conspiracy-minded thinking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22241404

That's the definition of conflict of interest! You can't sell tech to the candidates and the election at the same time.

You definitely can. AWS does it. NGP VAN does it. Every contractor that the DNC uses does it. To believe that they don't is the kind of ignorance that leads to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and your own conspiracy theory.

There's a difference between AWS and a tiny startup, the CEO of which is married to one of the top advisors of a the Buttigeig campaign. At this point, this conversation doesn't really matter as it's been widely accepted as a conflict of interested and condemned.

> it's been widely accepted as a conflict of interested and condemned.

Citation needed. The only people this has been widely accepted among are conspiracy theorists.

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