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Curious: are there any republicans left on HN? I have no concept of how you can defend this

by koe123 2mo ago

toomuchtodo 2mo ago
https://www.daynaemcraig.com/narcissistsprayer/ https://www.daynaemcraig.com/narcissistsprayer/ “That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal. And if it is, that’s not my fault. And if it was, I didn’t mean it. And if I did You deserved it.”
- DaSHacka 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jazzypants 2mo ago
    No one is talking about Fauci here. This kind of whataboutism is frankly disgusting.
    - DaSHacka 2mo ago
      You ask how Republicans can possibly defend this behavior, I argue both mainstream political parties excuse blatant corruption and borderline evil on a regular basis. If you would self-identify as a Democrat, ask yourself this: How do you feel about the recent Fauci findings, and the fact he needed a pardon to protect him against ever being prosecuted against potential crimes that are now being discussed in a Senate hearing. Then `s/Fauci/Trump` and you'll arrive at your answer for Republicans. I guarantee Trump will copy the template Biden established at the end of his term, and pardon all his cronies and family members on his way out the door in January 2029.
ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
i suspect that, much like the rest of the world, HN has had a sharp increase in people who "don't do politics"
- spiderfarmer 2mo ago
  In my experience only people from the US are afraid to exercise their freedom of speech when conversing with friends, family and colleagues.
program_whiz 2mo ago
(not a repub) I don't defend it, its outright fraud, but I also accept the reality that it is a more visible, and perhaps exaggerated, form of what has been ongoing forever. Those who seek power seek it to: 1. Enrich themselves and their family 2. Wield it to achieve their means The "pay to play" is rife everywhere. The contractors who get a sweet deal from local / fed government, the competition is stifled. The senators who make 10's of millions on insider information. The imminent domain cases where property is seized so corporation / donor can make millions. The "futures market" where insiders use their knowledge of product release date to swindle money for ordinary folks. The crypto scams, lotteries, casinos, street vendors, telemarketers, info-mercials, self-help gurus, snake oil sales, lemon peddlers, and more. The truth is that the human system has not deviated far from the imposed hierarchy of feudalism / monarchy, we have only become better at concealing it, making it more potent in some ways. Power, corruption, opportunism, and greed are part of our nature. In an extremely large population with a democratic veneer, the levers of power become diffuse an ineffable, until they are blatantly shoved into our face. In some ways I'm glad because its only through a constant vigilance and resetting the public vigilance that these kind of things can be controlled to any degree. Its an entropic force, seeping into the system at all times, only kept at bay by the disdain of the populace and fear in the hearts of the ruling elites. Its definitely not a Republicans only phenomenon, the list on both sides of the aisle is embarrassingly long. But due to how our political system is setup, and human psychology, little will change by voting. People are tribal, and only have two choices in the matter, both of which are usually power-seeking corrupted. The prisoner's dilemma is giving the US a life-sentence.
- 317070 2mo ago
  > but I also accept the reality that it is a more visible, and perhaps exaggerated, form of what has been ongoing forever Thanks for sharing this. It's a deep insight for me. I did not understand how the same people that were deeply skeptical about the state, ended up being so quiet when the state's corruption became flagrant and blatant. But this line of thinking makes a lot of sense.
  - lotsofpulp 2mo ago
antiloper 2mo ago
Why shouldn't there be? Depending on the poll you look at, republicans are polling around 40%: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/generic-congressional-vote https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/ge...
- muwtyhg 2mo ago
  Because communities can end up selecting for political party, so any given community doesn't need to reflect national demographics. That said, there are definitely Republicans here. They come out of the woodwork when the topic of government waste is brought up.
muglug 2mo ago
Not a Republican by any stretch of any imagination, but here’s my attempt at a steelman argument: I imagine these companies were already spending some amount on crawlers that would poll every N milliseconds to get an edge on some market-moving post. In turn I imagine Truth Social were also spending more serving this bot traffic. Truth Social making $1M a month from it — a rounding error in Trump’s fortunes — doesn’t seem like a world-ending catastrophe. Trump has done many bad things to erode trust in our institutions and government. When compared to him trying to overturn the results of an election, this too seems like a rounding error.
- mikestew 2mo ago
  Sometimes there isn’t a steelman argument for outright corruption, especially when the argument is, “meh, could be worse.”
OsrsNeedsf2P 2mo ago
Not a Republican, but I support this behavior because I can't wait for more talent to leave the US
- DaSHacka 2mo ago
  This but unironically. I don't really care about this country being a ""global leader"" in an industry, but not having to compete with the whole world for my job is sweet. Thanks to Trumps policies reducing the amount of international students and workers visas, I was actually able to both get accepted into a grad school I never expected and land and a job straight out of college. Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, whodathunk.
- Hikikomori 2mo ago
  Pretty much. America got the president it deserves after installing and supporting do many dictators.
jazzypants 2mo ago
You're not going to get a real response. They're here. They literally just ignore it. It's too inconvenient of a truth. It's much easier to just point fingers at poor immigrants than to actually give a shit about the corruption of rich people.
- Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
  > You're not going to get a real response. They're here. They literally just ignore it. But that is the real response. All politicians do some things that you disagree with, so even if you hate some of their behavior, you can still end up supporting them if on balance their policy decisions are more aligned with your interests.
  - jazzypants 2mo ago
    I see what you're saying, but ignoring something is withholding a response by definition. Generally, I accept slight dissonance with politicians on matters of policy. I don't think it's okay to accept politicians blatantly breaking the law and sneering in the face of culpability.
    - Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
      That's true and what makes poltical topics frustrating and mostly pointless to discuss online. There's very little incentive to engage with the topic in an intellectually honest way. Most would prefer to only contribute in a way that paints their team in a better light. I guess that's why any political topics should be avoided on HN. Even with perfect moderation, one can't avoid the biases of individuals selecting when to or not to contribute to a discussion.
      - jazzypants 2mo ago
        It's literally impossible to avoid politics on any forum. Everything is politics. Politicians create the laws that govern society. If you want to associate with other people in that society, you need to be able discuss those laws. There's no escaping it no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel, and attempting to moderate it out of existence is an exercise in futility. How on Earth do you imagine that a forum like this would discuss things like AI regulation without discussing politics? Beyond just regulation, there's inflation, tariffs, copyright, immigration... All of these things affect tech workers every day. A forum without politics is an absurd fantasy.
urams 2mo ago
Were you similarly upset when Trump was only on Twitter and Twitter had an API?
- ok123456 2mo ago
  The API was free then
  - leobg 2mo ago
    I don’t think the “Firehose” level was. I think it was 50k/mo or something. That was before AI training was a thing.
    - ok123456 2mo ago
      You didn't need "Firehose" level to write a simple bot that polled realDonaldTrump every minute or so.
- jazzypants 2mo ago
  How are you even pretending this a real argument? What is the implied slam dunk here?
Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
If most were being honest, they would probably admit that the corrupt behavior like this is bad, but that the overall balance of good vs bad policy decisions still favor having Republicans in power vs Democrats.
- Freedumbs 2mo ago
  I can agree, it's likely all politicians are corrupt. Democrats are awful, but GOP are genuinely bad people. Like this story for instance. Historically presidents pretended to divest from their holdings and focus on being president, not making money. The current presidential administration took a plane from Qatar spent our tax dollars to fix it up and will keep it as a personal gift, hired his bud to do the reflecting pool then persecuted citizens who touched it, has social media service that sells early access to promote insider trading, ... Could really keep going forever. There's no point in listing all the crime or norms that have been destroyed. Maybe it's good that someone is exploiting all the edge cases and treating our country as a game to be won. I don't see it that way. I love my neighbors.
  - Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
    Trump is certainly the most overtly corrupt and immoral US president in history. But I try to focus on policies rather than their personalities. I'd rather see $1 billion lost to graft than $100 billion lost to bad policy. But I'll admit, Trump's flagrancy makes it hard to ignore. I'm generally libertarian or classic liberal, so I agree with maybe 70% of Republican policy and 30% of Democratic policy (assuming those are the only two choices), but lately that's been shifting closer to 50/50.
    - Freedumbs 2mo ago
      Maybe I'm really uninformed but classic liberal and libertarian are polar opposites. Republican policy is insanely archaic and constrains human freedoms much more that Democrats, so I'm struggling to see how a libertarian could support the guys putting militarized unaccountable secret police into our cities to terrorize and kill Americans. They're also much more into thought crimes than Dems, so I'm really wondering what you consider important? What's objectionable about Democrat policy from the "libertarian or classic liberal" perspective?
0xcde4c3db 2mo ago
I doubt there are many dyed-in-the-wool Republicans as such, but I'll bet there are many who still identify strongly enough with the old-school Republican messaging around rugged individualism and supply-side economics that they view the median Democrat as actively destructive by comparison to the merely flawed median Republican. I'm far from being one of those myself, but I imagine the argument would be that any regulation one could propose to address this is bound to be worse than the problem itself, in terms of chilling effects on legitimate speech and commercial activity.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
ekjhgkejhgk 2mo ago
I find all these people disgusting, but if you're curious I can repeat for you one of their dishonest responses. They said it's not really insider trading, because the people that benefit from this are already hitting the HTTP GETs over and over to get the news fast, instead what they're paying for is for getting the push notifications which is a good business practice from truth social, because serving push notifications when news exist is cheaper than responding to HTTP gets over and over.
thisisit 2mo ago
There are republicans left and most will devolve to equivocating talking about corruption under Biden (Hunter Laptop), Clinton etc and maybe say "everyone is corrupt and this is just slightly more corrupt maybe more in the open" why are you making a scene about it? Not realizing that steps like these mean that society as a whole will become overtly corrupt instead of covertly corrupt. If a President is so corrupt that he is selling access for what is loose change for him - I mean what is $100k when he is getting $400million jet - their local offices will also feel comfortable nickel and diming them for small access. A trip to DMV will turn into "You want your driving license? That'll be $50 extra for me on top of the administrative fees". This is the reality of life in some low trust third world countries. Now coming to America! But in the meantime lets celebrate equivocating and whataboutism.
- swordsith 2mo ago
  ragebait used to be hard to identify
AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
Well, I mostly lean Republican. I'm still registered as one, so I can vote in their primaries. I have never voted for Trump, either in a primary or general election. I disagree with him strongly on much of what he does. I would describe myself as conservative, but definitely not MAGA. I'm what was Republican 10 or 30 or 50 years ago, not what they've turned into. How can I defend this (pay for early access)? I don't. I oppose it.
etruong42 2mo ago
Define "republican". I am sympathetic to many sides. I would equate this comment to a comment that asks "how can you liberals/wokists/etc defend this" if the post were about California's "Stop Nick Shirley Act" or something. For those without the power to change reprehensible institutions, invoking this level of tribalism only further entrenches those with power because we remain powerlessly bickering with each other rather than uniting.
thrance 2mo ago
I saw some yesterday, casually promoting the conspiracy theory of "Cultural Marxism", living blissfully in their shared fantasy.
negura 2mo ago
im not american. i'm not even from a western country. but as a bystand observer, it's a bit late to start a conversation with republicans on social media. after cancelling them for years. you reap what you saw. you never cared about understanding their point of view and now that conversation can never be had again

Curious: are there any republicans left on HN? I have no concept of how you can defend this

by koe123 2mo ago

Curious: are there any republicans left on HN? I have no concept of how you can defend this

https://www.daynaemcraig.com/narcissistsprayer/ https://www.daynaemcraig.com/narcissistsprayer/ “That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal. And if it is, that’s not my fault. And if it was, I didn’t mean it. And if I did You deserved it.”

DaSHacka 2mo ago
[flagged]
- jazzypants 2mo ago
  No one is talking about Fauci here. This kind of whataboutism is frankly disgusting.
  - DaSHacka 2mo ago
    You ask how Republicans can possibly defend this behavior, I argue both mainstream political parties excuse blatant corruption and borderline evil on a regular basis. If you would self-identify as a Democrat, ask yourself this: How do you feel about the recent Fauci findings, and the fact he needed a pardon to protect him against ever being prosecuted against potential crimes that are now being discussed in a Senate hearing. Then `s/Fauci/Trump` and you'll arrive at your answer for Republicans. I guarantee Trump will copy the template Biden established at the end of his term, and pardon all his cronies and family members on his way out the door in January 2029.

ratelimitsteve 2mo ago

i suspect that, much like the rest of the world, HN has had a sharp increase in people who "don't do politics"

spiderfarmer 2mo ago
In my experience only people from the US are afraid to exercise their freedom of speech when conversing with friends, family and colleagues.

program_whiz 2mo ago

(not a repub) I don't defend it, its outright fraud, but I also accept the reality that it is a more visible, and perhaps exaggerated, form of what has been ongoing forever. Those who seek power seek it to: 1. Enrich themselves and their family 2. Wield it to achieve their means The "pay to play" is rife everywhere. The contractors who get a sweet deal from local / fed government, the competition is stifled. The senators who make 10's of millions on insider information. The imminent domain cases where property is seized so corporation / donor can make millions. The "futures market" where insiders use their knowledge of product release date to swindle money for ordinary folks. The crypto scams, lotteries, casinos, street vendors, telemarketers, info-mercials, self-help gurus, snake oil sales, lemon peddlers, and more. The truth is that the human system has not deviated far from the imposed hierarchy of feudalism / monarchy, we have only become better at concealing it, making it more potent in some ways. Power, corruption, opportunism, and greed are part of our nature. In an extremely large population with a democratic veneer, the levers of power become diffuse an ineffable, until they are blatantly shoved into our face. In some ways I'm glad because its only through a constant vigilance and resetting the public vigilance that these kind of things can be controlled to any degree. Its an entropic force, seeping into the system at all times, only kept at bay by the disdain of the populace and fear in the hearts of the ruling elites. Its definitely not a Republicans only phenomenon, the list on both sides of the aisle is embarrassingly long. But due to how our political system is setup, and human psychology, little will change by voting. People are tribal, and only have two choices in the matter, both of which are usually power-seeking corrupted. The prisoner's dilemma is giving the US a life-sentence.

317070 2mo ago
> but I also accept the reality that it is a more visible, and perhaps exaggerated, form of what has been ongoing forever Thanks for sharing this. It's a deep insight for me. I did not understand how the same people that were deeply skeptical about the state, ended up being so quiet when the state's corruption became flagrant and blatant. But this line of thinking makes a lot of sense.
- lotsofpulp 2mo ago

antiloper 2mo ago

Why shouldn't there be? Depending on the poll you look at, republicans are polling around 40%: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/generic-congressional-vote https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/ge...

muwtyhg 2mo ago
Because communities can end up selecting for political party, so any given community doesn't need to reflect national demographics. That said, there are definitely Republicans here. They come out of the woodwork when the topic of government waste is brought up.

muglug 2mo ago

Not a Republican by any stretch of any imagination, but here’s my attempt at a steelman argument: I imagine these companies were already spending some amount on crawlers that would poll every N milliseconds to get an edge on some market-moving post. In turn I imagine Truth Social were also spending more serving this bot traffic. Truth Social making $1M a month from it — a rounding error in Trump’s fortunes — doesn’t seem like a world-ending catastrophe. Trump has done many bad things to erode trust in our institutions and government. When compared to him trying to overturn the results of an election, this too seems like a rounding error.

mikestew 2mo ago
Sometimes there isn’t a steelman argument for outright corruption, especially when the argument is, “meh, could be worse.”

OsrsNeedsf2P 2mo ago

Not a Republican, but I support this behavior because I can't wait for more talent to leave the US

DaSHacka 2mo ago
This but unironically. I don't really care about this country being a ""global leader"" in an industry, but not having to compete with the whole world for my job is sweet. Thanks to Trumps policies reducing the amount of international students and workers visas, I was actually able to both get accepted into a grad school I never expected and land and a job straight out of college. Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, whodathunk.
Hikikomori 2mo ago
Pretty much. America got the president it deserves after installing and supporting do many dictators.

jazzypants 2mo ago

You're not going to get a real response. They're here. They literally just ignore it. It's too inconvenient of a truth. It's much easier to just point fingers at poor immigrants than to actually give a shit about the corruption of rich people.

Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
> You're not going to get a real response. They're here. They literally just ignore it. But that is the real response. All politicians do some things that you disagree with, so even if you hate some of their behavior, you can still end up supporting them if on balance their policy decisions are more aligned with your interests.
- jazzypants 2mo ago
  I see what you're saying, but ignoring something is withholding a response by definition. Generally, I accept slight dissonance with politicians on matters of policy. I don't think it's okay to accept politicians blatantly breaking the law and sneering in the face of culpability.
  - Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
    That's true and what makes poltical topics frustrating and mostly pointless to discuss online. There's very little incentive to engage with the topic in an intellectually honest way. Most would prefer to only contribute in a way that paints their team in a better light. I guess that's why any political topics should be avoided on HN. Even with perfect moderation, one can't avoid the biases of individuals selecting when to or not to contribute to a discussion.
    - jazzypants 2mo ago
      It's literally impossible to avoid politics on any forum. Everything is politics. Politicians create the laws that govern society. If you want to associate with other people in that society, you need to be able discuss those laws. There's no escaping it no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel, and attempting to moderate it out of existence is an exercise in futility. How on Earth do you imagine that a forum like this would discuss things like AI regulation without discussing politics? Beyond just regulation, there's inflation, tariffs, copyright, immigration... All of these things affect tech workers every day. A forum without politics is an absurd fantasy.

urams 2mo ago

Were you similarly upset when Trump was only on Twitter and Twitter had an API?

ok123456 2mo ago
The API was free then
- leobg 2mo ago
  I don’t think the “Firehose” level was. I think it was 50k/mo or something. That was before AI training was a thing.
  - ok123456 2mo ago
    You didn't need "Firehose" level to write a simple bot that polled realDonaldTrump every minute or so.
jazzypants 2mo ago
How are you even pretending this a real argument? What is the implied slam dunk here?

Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago

If most were being honest, they would probably admit that the corrupt behavior like this is bad, but that the overall balance of good vs bad policy decisions still favor having Republicans in power vs Democrats.

Freedumbs 2mo ago
I can agree, it's likely all politicians are corrupt. Democrats are awful, but GOP are genuinely bad people. Like this story for instance. Historically presidents pretended to divest from their holdings and focus on being president, not making money. The current presidential administration took a plane from Qatar spent our tax dollars to fix it up and will keep it as a personal gift, hired his bud to do the reflecting pool then persecuted citizens who touched it, has social media service that sells early access to promote insider trading, ... Could really keep going forever. There's no point in listing all the crime or norms that have been destroyed. Maybe it's good that someone is exploiting all the edge cases and treating our country as a game to be won. I don't see it that way. I love my neighbors.
- Eueudhsbsj32 2mo ago
  Trump is certainly the most overtly corrupt and immoral US president in history. But I try to focus on policies rather than their personalities. I'd rather see $1 billion lost to graft than $100 billion lost to bad policy. But I'll admit, Trump's flagrancy makes it hard to ignore. I'm generally libertarian or classic liberal, so I agree with maybe 70% of Republican policy and 30% of Democratic policy (assuming those are the only two choices), but lately that's been shifting closer to 50/50.
  - Freedumbs 2mo ago
    Maybe I'm really uninformed but classic liberal and libertarian are polar opposites. Republican policy is insanely archaic and constrains human freedoms much more that Democrats, so I'm struggling to see how a libertarian could support the guys putting militarized unaccountable secret police into our cities to terrorize and kill Americans. They're also much more into thought crimes than Dems, so I'm really wondering what you consider important? What's objectionable about Democrat policy from the "libertarian or classic liberal" perspective?

0xcde4c3db 2mo ago

I doubt there are many dyed-in-the-wool Republicans as such, but I'll bet there are many who still identify strongly enough with the old-school Republican messaging around rugged individualism and supply-side economics that they view the median Democrat as actively destructive by comparison to the merely flawed median Republican. I'm far from being one of those myself, but I imagine the argument would be that any regulation one could propose to address this is bound to be worse than the problem itself, in terms of chilling effects on legitimate speech and commercial activity.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

ekjhgkejhgk 2mo ago

I find all these people disgusting, but if you're curious I can repeat for you one of their dishonest responses. They said it's not really insider trading, because the people that benefit from this are already hitting the HTTP GETs over and over to get the news fast, instead what they're paying for is for getting the push notifications which is a good business practice from truth social, because serving push notifications when news exist is cheaper than responding to HTTP gets over and over.

thisisit 2mo ago

There are republicans left and most will devolve to equivocating talking about corruption under Biden (Hunter Laptop), Clinton etc and maybe say "everyone is corrupt and this is just slightly more corrupt maybe more in the open" why are you making a scene about it? Not realizing that steps like these mean that society as a whole will become overtly corrupt instead of covertly corrupt. If a President is so corrupt that he is selling access for what is loose change for him - I mean what is $100k when he is getting $400million jet - their local offices will also feel comfortable nickel and diming them for small access. A trip to DMV will turn into "You want your driving license? That'll be $50 extra for me on top of the administrative fees". This is the reality of life in some low trust third world countries. Now coming to America! But in the meantime lets celebrate equivocating and whataboutism.

swordsith 2mo ago
ragebait used to be hard to identify

AnimalMuppet 2mo ago

Well, I mostly lean Republican. I'm still registered as one, so I can vote in their primaries. I have never voted for Trump, either in a primary or general election. I disagree with him strongly on much of what he does. I would describe myself as conservative, but definitely not MAGA. I'm what was Republican 10 or 30 or 50 years ago, not what they've turned into. How can I defend this (pay for early access)? I don't. I oppose it.

etruong42 2mo ago

Define "republican". I am sympathetic to many sides. I would equate this comment to a comment that asks "how can you liberals/wokists/etc defend this" if the post were about California's "Stop Nick Shirley Act" or something. For those without the power to change reprehensible institutions, invoking this level of tribalism only further entrenches those with power because we remain powerlessly bickering with each other rather than uniting.

thrance 2mo ago

I saw some yesterday, casually promoting the conspiracy theory of "Cultural Marxism", living blissfully in their shared fantasy.

negura 2mo ago

im not american. i'm not even from a western country. but as a bystand observer, it's a bit late to start a conversation with republicans on social media. after cancelling them for years. you reap what you saw. you never cared about understanding their point of view and now that conversation can never be had again