They might be called a terrible person on social media, but it's not a statement I would be worried about making in polite company in person, like at a party or something, as long as I said it in such a phrasing and tone of voice as to make it clear that what makes me happy about having less competition is the having less competition part, not hurting others.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Ah, you're critiquing the details of the policy, not the idea of the policy.
Well yes, as with so many things Trump, the implementation concept is strange, the members of administration seem to not be on the same page about what it entails, and it's likely to be walked back.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Right after Lutnick said yesterday that it would be an annual fee. LOL.
This administration acts weird. Announcing tariffs and then cancelling them, leaving manufacturing companies with no idea how to plan in the long term. Waving H1-B red meat in front of the voters and then snatching it away. Strange messaging.
Goodguy
2mo ago
"I don't want H-1B workers because I would prefer, as much as possible, not to compete with other people for jobs" can be said in most kinds of polite society, I think. It might make you seem selfish, but it wouldn't make you seem like a terrible person.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I think probably part of why they maintain the large headcounts is because they're run by people who have absorbed the lesson of some of the early wave of tech companies, which is "never stagnate, never become too focused on a steady source of income, since it's temporary". So they use headcount to experiment with novel approaches to money-making in order to avoid becoming the next Intel or Yahoo.
For better or worse, the enormous data processing facilities and technologies that FAANGs built in order to run their marketing, e-commerce, and data analysis also formed an important part of the technological groundwork and infrastructure necessary to deploy AI at scale. The FAANGs did not plan this, though, they just knew that they needed to be able to crunch and store data on scales previously never created (outside of maybe something like the NSA).
I think that probably most self-identified progressives do oppose the move for various reasons (brown people harmed, desire to oppose Trump in everything, etc.). However, I think that saying "progressives decry this move" is too simplistic. "progressive" is not well defined, and you only link one person writing on one website. From my online impressions of the last 24 hours, it seems to me that "dirtbag leftists" like the move. I think it would probably be fair to say that "leftists who care more about cultural issues than economic issues oppose the move".
If I seem overly pedantic, it is because I have observed how much political discourse on social media has been damaged by people's tendency to say things of the form " believe in / are doing <thing I don't like>". Which is often necessary, because it is impossible to discuss politics without generalizing, but I think that generalizing too much causes discussions to lack important nuance.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Hopefully, figure out how to not be reduced to rubber-stamping a yearly budgetary bill larded up to the gills. But they probably don't have much incentive to do that.
I wouldn't vote for a resolution honoring anyone. I think Congress should focus on legislating, not on assessing the worth of individuals and voting on whether to honor them or not.
I have even more reason to dislike these resolutions given that they allow either side of the left/right political divide to attempt gotcha political moves to put their opponents into traps. For example: "Here's this person who died, you would have to be a ghoul not to vote to honor them! You're not a ghoul, are you???".
I think that is quite an exaggeration. The riots ended up killing a few dozen people and destroying a few city blocks total across the entire country. That's really bad, but that's not what happens when "the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it."
Outside of a few isolated incidents, the police did not let them do it.
To the extent that police did let them do it, not all of that can even be blamed on politics. Police often tend to be quite risk-averse when dealing with large crowds, both to protect themselves and to protect the crowds. They often follow careful procedures rather than just rushing in and meleeing with rioters as soon as they notice that violence or property damage is happening.
Goodguy
3mo ago
A few thousand people have resorted to executing people or burning cities, out of a US population of 350 million.
Goodguy
3mo ago
The viewership has decreased, but many people still find these shows to be a comfy way to unwind at the end of the day. It's not so much about the insights, it's about the warm fuzzy feeling of listening to the same person over and over again, and with many of the hosts, also the warm fuzzy feeling of having one's political beliefs reaffirmed. The target audience are not the kind of people who are highly online and so watch Hasan or Nick Fuentes or whoever instead to get their comfy unwinding and their political affirmation. It's kind of like asking why a bunch of people watch CNN or FOX news even though there are a bunch of people online who provide equally entertaining political content. Just a different demographic.
As for why they get paid so much. Well, my hunch is that it's just because mainstream media is notoriously conservative in their economic decisions. Just like they pump out endless remakes and sequels, they also would rather stick with a known host and pay him a lot of money than risk trying to elevate some relative unknown to the same position. This might not work for too much longer, but it worked for a long time.
I sometimes call myself a centrist, even though I don't like the term because it's too redolent of 2-dimensional thinking and has too much baggage. When I do call myself a centrist, it's only because it's a convenient shorthand that other people quickly understand, not because I ever care about being in the center.
One thing's for sure. I am not some kind of hybrid of a leftist and a conservative. Lakoff is wrong about that. Indeed, leftism and conservatism both repel me.
I'm just someone who happens to have a bunch of political opinions and preferences, and some of them overlap with leftist ones, and some of them overlap with conservative ones, and some of them overlap with neither. My worldview is not any less consistent than the leftist one or the conservative one.
The whole idea that centrists are biconceptual is just wrong. Some self-identified centrists might be like that, but it is not true of centrists in general.
Unsurprisingly, I think that my views are better and more correct than the views of either leftists or conservatives. So to use an arrogant analogy: a man who thinks that 2 + 2 = 4 is not a mix between a man who thinks that 2 + 2 = 3 and a man who thinks that 2 + 2 = 5.
Keep in mind that people who are willing to go in person to a political debate are not representative of the general population. The vast majority of people could easily think of many dozens of things they would rather spend their time doing than going to a political debate. I'm pretty interested in politics, as is obvious from the fact that I post here, and even I find the idea of going to see a political debate to be extremely boring unless maybe there are some hot women there I could flirt with.
Now granted, this was on a college campus so my point is to some extent reduced by the fact that it might have been relatively easy even for people who aren't very interested in politics to just wander over to the event. I don't know if people had to get tickets to get in. Still, I think that overall, my point stands.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Maybe so are assassinations. They're really really rare, but sometimes they have a huge emotional impact on society.
The remedy is to take a break from going to social media sites where people who sit online 18 hours a day fling shit at each other, and to take a break from hanging out with ideologues in real life, and to go interact with people in general.
Out in the world, life continues. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming. The majority of people are not paying attention to this stuff.
You are reacting the way that many people reacted when they heard that JFK was assassinated, or that MLK was assassinated. An emotional shock. But the rational response, I think, is to remember that assassinations are really really rare. There is no actual civil war going on. Well, there's a cold civil war going on, but not a hot one.
Why is that the case?
It's because of law and order. Which, for all of the current system's faults, and I sure would love it to do a better job of taking care of ordinary people like me instead of exposing me to random street violence and so on, is doing a good job of dissuading that subset of the left who would love to kill right-wingers and that subset of the right who would love to kill left-wingers from actually doing it.
Liberalism, for now, is holding. I mean classical liberalism, not the weird American "liberals = the left" definition.
Yes, there are plenty of angry people in this country who would love to assassinate the leaders of their political opponents, or maybe even put their political opponents in mass into extermination camps.
But liberalism, for now, is holding. As a centrist moderate, I sure hope that it continues to hold. There are some good reasons to believe that it will continue to hold. For one, I think that probably the majority of rich people have no use for a civil war full of populists who are ready to murder anyone who is more successful than them and can be painted as being on the other side.
Given how many guns are in private hands in the US and how many politically angry people there are, assassinations are actually surprisingly rare.
People almost never get killed for their political opinions in the US. It happens very rarely. Now, people do get frequently killed because of political policies in general... and that's one area where I sympathize with the right, despite disagreeing with them on most things. What I mean specifically is, pathological empathy-driven progressive policies that end up unleashing street criminals on the public. That's something I disagree with progressives on.
But the murder of someone like Charlie Kirk is an easily foreseeable consequence of what happens when you have hundreds of millions of guns in private hands in a country that is politically polarized.
Note, when I say that I am not calling for gun ownership rights to be reduced. I'm just saying that statistically, it's an obvious consequence. These things are inevitably going to happen from time to time. It's surprising that they happen so infrequently.
Social media is currently awash with people who are using this incident to get cheap dopamine hits and/or to propagandize for their side of the great chimp shit-flinging fight that is the culture war.
They're deranged. And they should not be taken seriously. Most of them are sad people who are using political engagement to make up for the failures of their individual lives.
Someone who is highly politically engaged and spends 18 hours a day writing angry comments on social media will end up creating more online political content than 100 ordinary people. Social media enormously over-represents the opinions of angry no-life losers on both sides of the culture war.
Some view it all as a war between good and evil. And, if I was in some part of Mexico where people fought against murderous cartels, I'd see it that way too. But I live in the US. I am lucky enough, because of the continuing success (for all their faults) of the US' liberal systems and norms, to be able to see our situation in the US as a war between the stupid and the smart. A delineation that cuts across left/right lines.
As in the famous Revenge of the Sith crawl, "there are heroes on both sides"... well, in our reality it's not quite that epic, it's more like "there are smart and stupid people on both sides". And "there are decent people and sociopaths on both sides". I'm lucky to live in a part of the world where that's actually the case. But it is the case.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Well, in a sense the First Amendment is just words. But the liberal system and norms that we enjoy in the US, which the First Amendment is part of, is why you largely don't have to worry about sitting in jail for your political opinions. Getting fired or canceled for your political opinions is bad, but sitting in jail or getting killed by government agents for them is much worse.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Not sure, but pretty convinced of it, since a large majority of leftists I've met in person have not been like Redditors. Granted, that's just another kind of bias, and some might say "well they were just hiding it around you". Maybe, but by the same token I could say that for some people their Reddit use is just them blowing off steam and it's not really representative of their entire personality. It's hard to say.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Probably, although I'd be curious to see the exact questions asked in the poll and to compare the data against what right-of-center people would say about the justifiability of killing equally divisive left-wing figures. Here's some information: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/04/lets-kill-the-republicans.php.
Goodguy
3mo ago
The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence.
Depends what you define as "the left". Social media and a venue in San Francisco are not necessarily good representatives of, say, Democratic Party voters as a whole.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Reddit is not representative of the left as a whole, just like X and 4chan are not representative of the right as a whole. All these sites heavily over-represent highly online, highly ideological people.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Yeah, like I've said before, America actually has a very very low level of direct political violence (assassinations, bombings, etc.) considering how much political anger there is in America and how heavily armed Americans are.
If the murder of Charlie Kirk does tip the country over the edge, it will be because of the narratives around it, not because of the event itself. America has almost unbelievably few assassinations for a country that is so politically polarized and heavily armed.
Goodguy
3mo ago
I don't see any evidence other than the timing that the cheering was connected with Kirk's death. However, if it was, that wouldn't surprise me one bit. Plenty of people on both sides of the culture war feel happy when members of the other side die.
I know that you would almost certainly not publicize a video of right-wingers cheering the death of some leftist figure, so I take your comment as being tribalism rather than as an attempt to shed light on things.
Goodguy
3mo ago
In the moment it was retarded, but I don't think he himself is retarded, although he might be mentally disturbed. He had no prior experience with committing violence or evading police, he was on the run and by himself for days, and probably really pumped full of adrenaline. I think it takes a rare breed of person to be able to think calmly and rationally in such a situation, especially without having done any relevant training.
Sorry, I misread your comment. See my other reply. But to your question, yeah I'd be fine with it if it seemed like the motivation was just a global desire to avoid competition, not some particular hatred of conservatives.
By the way, I'm not a conservative, so your example might be a bit mis-targeted.
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