I'd appreciate it if people wouldn't rush to the conclusion that we do these things for partisan reasons. It takes self-discipline to suspend your political reflexes and consider other explanations, but that's a necessary habit to get into if we're to have thoughtful discourse here.
In the above case, there was no ideal place to prune the off-topic subthread. 12945175 started the political digression for sure, but seemed clearly to be an offhand misstep in an otherwise good-faith conversation. That's not really a problem on HN. The problem is when other users (you, in this case) pounce and turn the politics knobs to 11. Then we get a flamewar. Had it been possible to snip the thread at the original off-topic aside, we'd have done that, but obviously we can't edit users' comments that way.
While I have you, I need to ask you to change how you use HN. You've been violating the site's guidelines by using it primarily to conduct political battles. That's an abuse, and we ban accounts that do it. HN exists to gratify intellectual curiosity. Using it to bash political foes damages that.
This isn't because we favor one political position over another. We're gardeners. When gangs show up to rumble and trample the garden, it doesn't matter what colors they're wearing.
>You've been violating the site's guidelines by using it primarily to conduct political battles
What? I read what I find interesting, and respond if I have something to say. Your assessment of my use of the site makes it very clear that you are not succeeding in "suspend(ing) your political reflexes and consider(ing) other explanations".
...Because if you're in USNE, you probably felt genuinely ill after hearing the nomination. Missouri, as well as the rest of the US Midwest, is famously comically red.
So if you're in a discussion about cultural differences between USNE and USMW, that's an entirely valid point.
Also, if you're in a red state, you might feel the need to tell people you didn't vote for Trump, because you want to make sure that you'll get flamed by the right people. If you feel this way, it's okay.
>Because if you're in USNE, you probably felt genuinely ill after hearing the nomination
Which is both a foolish assumption and completely off-topic and irrelevant. Even in the NE, millions of people voted for Trump. And millions more didn't vote for him, but are not so blinded by their little bubble of hate that they "felt genuinely ill" over their preferred candidate losing an election.
>So if you're in a discussion about cultural differences between USNE and USMW, that's an entirely valid point.
Uhm, well, because I'm having a conversation about cultural differences between the midwest and the north-east. I think it's appropriate to segway into another topic that way.
If it's the sarcasm you find inappropriate, I respectfully disagree. If our new president fulfills his promises, friends of mine will be cataloged, deported. My own hopes of US citizenship and the life me and my wife had planned for ourselves is now uncertain. I find it all very stressful, and humor is an outlet for that stress.
If it's the particular apology you find inappropriate, that was not a joke. As a progressive in the midwest, I did not do enough to campaign to the large group of Trump-voters in my immediate family, friend group and neighborhood.
FYI, "segue" is the word you're looking for. A "segway" is one of those Dean Kamen scooters. Apologies if raising that is a jerk thing to do, but if I were on the other end I'd appreciate it. I can't tell you how long I went spelling "carotid" wrong, despite being aware of the printed word (I thought that one was pronounced differently, oddly enough).
The only people Trump has promised to deport are those here illegally, so I'm assuming that the friends you mention are illegal immigrants, whose mere presence in the country is a crime. Is it so much to ask visitors to our country to follow our laws?
I've traveled to a lot of countries. Every country I visit, I read and follow the laws of the country, including visa and immigration rules. Many of these laws I disagree with it find morally repugnant. Forgive me if I don't cry any tears for your deported criminal friends.
The friends I'm mentioning are a married homosexual couple; if the federal gov't stops recognizing their marriage, the non-citizen wife would lose grounds for residency.
I still want to address this though:
> Is it so much to ask visitors to our country to follow our laws?
I think this is a very strange thing to say. Obviously, if someone intentionally violates visas to stay here illegally, deportation is appropriate - the only main stream politicians who disagree with this are straw men invented by the Republican party.
What the immediate discussion is actually about is two scenarios:
One; you illegally enter the country with your young child. Your kid grows up in US preschool, elementary school, high school. She speaks English as her native language, hasn't been to Mexico since you left 25 years ago and legally works at Walmart under DACA.
Trump has said he wants to revoke DACA and deport the kid. I believe, like most on the left, that your kid should not be held responsible for you breaking the law, and should be given legal means to work and a path to attain citizenship.
Two; you illegally enter the country with your spouse. A year or so later you have a child born on US soil, that child gets a US birth certificate and becomes a US citizen.
As the law currently stands, you can now be deported, and your 2-year old would become a ward of the state, with the usual probabilities of success of those programs. There is a proposal to allow you to stay in the country to raise the kid, DAPA. Trump has said he will strike that down.
Eg: This is not about you breaking the law; it's about whether your children can be held accountable for it.
>
As the law currently stands, you can now be deported, and your 2-year old would become a ward of the state, with the usual probabilities of success of those programs. There is a proposal to allow you to stay in the country to raise the kid, DAPA. Trump has said he will strike that down.
>Eg: This is not about you breaking the law; it's about whether your children can be held accountable for it.
Out of interest, would you feel differently if the parents involved were convicted of a non-immigration crime and were sent to prison instead of being deported?
To be clear: I'm not saying I support DAPA, I'm saying that and DACA are the two immediate scenarios that were on the table for the election.
As I noted in my comment, I do support DACA.
For exactly the reason you state above, I'm not sure how I feel about DAPA: The same moral problem (of removing a parent from a childs life) exists in any scenario where a parent commits a jail or deportation-eligible non-violent crime.
Should there be a punishment for overstaying a visa? What should it be?
I think the answer may depend on the type of visa, the length of overstay, and perhaps some other factors, but in the majority of cases, I would expect the answer to be deportation, which would necessitate an arrest and holding. Whether that's called a criminal offense or civil offense is a distinction without a difference.
>Uhm, well, because I'm having a conversation about cultural differences between the midwest and the north-east
The subject is entirely irrelevant. You just bring it up to virtue signal, despite the fact that even in your best case scenario, 30% of the people you are assuming would want an apology are people who voted for Trump.
>If our new president fulfills his promises, friends of mine will be cataloged, deported. My own hopes of US citizenship and the life me and my wife had planned for ourselves is now uncertain.
Are you sure about that? He's already backtracking on ObamaCare, saying he wants to keep parts of it, and the latest news about deportations is that he wants to deport people who have criminal records. Personally, I'm wondering why people who aren't legal immigrants or residents, and who have committed crimes (beyond speeding tickets...) are still here and haven't been deported yet. Who's going to moan about that? He's also making noises about figuring out who the "terrific people" are and keeping them here. Obviously, a lot of stuff he's said was said to appeal to angry voters, and isn't necessarily what he's going to do in office; I expect he's going to go back on a lot of his promises, but in a way that he can claim he didn't (by simply not going as far as implied; then he'll claim he didn't "mean that literally" or "didn't fully articulate the policy" or something like that). Call me crazy or overly-optimistic, but I'm thinking now that he's going to water a lot of stuff down, in an attempt to keep his popularity numbers very high, while still getting some things done that he thought needed to be done.
>As a progressive in the midwest, I did not do enough to campaign to the large group of Trump-voters in my immediate family, friend group and neighborhood.
There was absolutely nothing you could have done to change the course of the election, unless you campaigned a lot to get more people to the polls in the Dem primary to vote for Bernie. Once Hillary was anointed, it was all over: too many voters simply were not going to vote for her, no matter what. Just look at the turnout numbers: about 4-5 million fewer people voted this year than in 2008 when Obama was elected, even though there's more eligible voters 8 years later (greater population). A lot of people simply hated Hillary and voted for Trump out of spite, many voted 3rd party (though many of those votes were angry Republicans), but tons of people simply didn't vote. The DNC has only itself to blame for this, so if you're mad about that, I suggest you dedicate your campaigning efforts to reforming the DNC.
I'm not, rationally anyway, worried about mass deportation of illegal aliens - there are constitutional measures in place to prevent those, like illegal search and seizure, that a conservative court will uphold. My specific concern with deportations is that congress will pass a bill where the federal government no longer recognizes states rights to marry homosexual couples, and that a more conservative supreme court will uphold it.
That would remove grounds for residency for the wife of a very good friend of mine, since the USCIS uses the federal gov'ts recognition of marriage for visa proceedings, forcing them apart. I expect there are many thousands like them.
On the overall gist of what you're saying though - I hope you are right.
i think the 60 minutes interview tonight is going to calm a lot of nerves.
personally i think the trump presidency will be shocking in how normal it is. people are just completely worked up over his campaign persona which is understandable.
what people forget sometimes is that we have a political system in place designed to prevent dictatorships, exactly the kind of thing people on the left are concerned about with trump (and people on the right were equally concerned about with obama).
You may be right, but "Don't be worried that the president has promised to do horrible, horrible things--he was probably just lying to make racists happy, and anyway he changes his mind at the drop of a hat!" is not exactly encouraging.
>He's already backtracking on ObamaCare, saying he wants to keep parts of it
He said that over 6 months ago, that's not backtracking.
>unless you campaigned a lot to get more people to the polls in the Dem primary to vote for Bernie.
That would not have changed anything. There was no primary election, it was rigged. Perhaps try reading those leaked emails the media was telling you not to read.