> "Senate Democrats alleged the removals were the result of improper political influence and lawmakers are pushing the federal judge overseeing HPE’s acquisition to hold a lengthy review of the antitrust settlement."
> "Roger Alford, the top deputy to the Justice Department’s antitrust chief Gail Slater, and William Rinner, who led the department’s merger enforcement, were dismissed Monday, according to people familiar with the situation."
chasil · 21h ago
Here is the archived Bloomberg article. If you want to edit this into your comment, no problem.
It sounds more like the US IC treats HP like one of its own departments, and it would very much like to do the same with Juniper.
The idea that even allies will be using US networking equipment in a couple decades seems implausible. Everyone is well-aware that any boxes coming out of the US are as likely to be tapped as ones coming out of china.
graemep · 22h ago
That has always been true, and yet almost every country buys both US or Chinese equipment, and a good many by both.
saubeidl · 22h ago
Maybe it's time we stop.
DaSHacka · 20h ago
Sounds like a great idea; good luck with that.
pyrale · 21h ago
The Snowden leaks showed 20 years ago that cisco routers were being sent to NSA for "aftermarket" modifications before being sent to clients. It's not news.
aerostable_slug · 20h ago
The Snowden leaks demonstrated Cisco wasn't a knowing participant — the equipment was covertly diverted and then modified. That's quite different than knowing collaboration.
tempodox · 20h ago
Is there any computer or internet company that the US IC doesn't treat as their own department? Maybe some very small and insignificant ones.
tptacek · 22h ago
Just a reminder that Juniper was the firm that managed to (1) ship VPN appliances that used the Dual EC RNG, (2) get hacked, and (3) had the hackers substitute in their own Dual EC backdoor curve point, which shipped in their product for years.
I believe that (1) happened prior to the acquisition of netscreen by Juniper. (so, if your comment is meant to suggest something about the integrity of the management, etc. it may not be as significant as you're suggesting).
tptacek · 12h ago
Juniper acquired Netscreen in 2004. The rest of the timeline is in the paper. So, no, I think.
chasil · 22h ago
There are so many dead companies and technologies inside of HPE.
I fail to see how this impeded Huawei.
lenerdenator · 21h ago
Rule #1 of digital security: There is always some spy, somewhere, trying to work an angle to get into your traffic. Absolutely no exceptions.
tjwebbnorfolk · 20h ago
Rule #1.a.: Some part of your network is already compromised. You just don't know which part. Design everything with this in mind.
BobbyTables2 · 7h ago
Kinda rich for a company that was in bed with the Chinese govt (H3C) and has a track record of killing the things it acquires.
Maybe they really wanted to ensure that Juniper dies a slow death ?
jodacola · 23h ago
It’s easy for me to get worked about about the things being done and allowed by this administration, but I have to wonder: will allowing these mega companies create more opportunities for scrappy upstarts to disrupt these giant, slow moving, clunky monoliths?
bc569a80a344f9c · 22h ago
Probably not.
Look at Juniper specifically. In 2021, their revenue roughly broke down as 40% service provider, 35% enterprise campuses, 25% cloud. In 2025, that had shifted to 45% enterprise campuses, 30% service provider, and 25% cloud. That shift is mostly reflected by how much money they pumped into Mist, and how successful that was.
Scrappy little upstarts have a _really_ hard time selling networking equipment to service providers and enterprises, who require tons of arcane features that take a long time to build and validate. They also operate very much on reputation, and rely on training pipelines outside of their own organizations (i.e., certifications). On the SP side (and the more modern enterprise side) there's also the significant issue of integration with other IT systems. At that scale, people aren't just command line jockeys that log into a router to provision something - Comcast can't operate like that, they need well defined API integrations with their provisioning system.
It is interesting and noteworthy that HPE's interest in Juniper is mostly due to the success of Mist, which _was_ a scrappy little upstart that got purchased by Juniper in 2019 (???). Mist (as a product line) only got successful once it was backed by Juniper, a known player. They had a much, much harder time selling to big accounts before that.
However, it's not a random scrappy little upstart, it got started by very senior people from Cisco that couldn't get their vision executed at Cisco. Specifically, Bob Friday (who co-founded Airespace in 2001, which was purchased by Cisco and directly led to Cisco wireless controllers), and Sujay Hajela, who was an SVP responsible for enterprise and wireless at Cisco, having led the Meraki purchase. More than a decade later, Meraki - another upstart, I guess - still isn't aimed at much other than SMB.
That Mist made it as an newcomer is the exception to the rule and entirely due to those very specific people and their very specific contacts. I wouldn't be surprised if at all if Mist had initially been fully intended to be a spin-out from Cisco with the express purpose of folding them back in a decade later if they were successful enough, and it just so happened that they got snagged up by Juniper first.
tptacek · 22h ago
A nit here: leaving Cisco to do a product Cisco should do itself is literally part of the cultural DNA of Cisco; it's practically what you're supposed to do. In years of working with/around Cisco, I saw people literally do startups for things that were just planned features for existing Cisco products.
bc569a80a344f9c · 21h ago
Completely agree, I expressed that poorly - that Mist didn't just get rolled back into Cisco seems like an aberration given Cisco's spin-out culture, and I'd be curious to find out some day what happened for them to get scooped up by Juniper instead.
"Normal" startups in this space that aren't just spin-outs designed to come back to the mothership if they're successful are incredibly rare.
jodacola · 21h ago
Appreciate the insights; this segment of the industry is my forte so this was educational.
I realize it’s impossible to predict what comes next, but I’m curious about analogs to this merger and what one could reasonably expect to happen over the next many years.
My philosophy is showing in that I don’t see these deals as good for competition or the market in general, so I’m (perhaps hopelessly) looking for the silver lining here.
Den_VR · 22h ago
Spot on about Mist (Mist AI). Great insight.
inerte · 21h ago
“We need bigger companies so smaller ones have a chance” is a weird take.
jodacola · 21h ago
That wasn’t the take I was going for, but can see how it came off that way.
I’m opposed to these mega corps and looking (hoping) for some silver lining here that gives me some hope. Sibling comments have educated on that front.
gryfft · 23h ago
Sure, and then the clunky monoliths buy the scrappy little disruptors and take them apart.
(Source: worked for a scrappy little disruptor that was bought out and cannibalized)
xyst · 20h ago
One way to avoid “corporate raiders" and hostile takeovers is for companies to be owned by employees.
xyst · 20h ago
Maybe, but what’s to stop “scrappy upstart” from becoming the next HPE?
We need companies owned by the people that built the company. Not by the C-level executives that are appointed by a board of billionaire lackeys, bankers, trust fund kiddies who are hellbent on flipping a profit at all costs.
Also of course more regulation, and higher corporate tax. Get rid of the stock manipulation tactic known as stock buybacks that only encourage short term growth/pump in price of stock.
Den_VR · 22h ago
Hopefully after the merger Juniper will still be able to do things like lend equipment to events CCC.
Aruba has been pretty lackluster under HPE, so we’ll see where Juniper takes them. Or is taken.
stogot · 23h ago
Isn’t Ericsson (HQ in Texas) the best positioned to counter Hauwei in the telecom space? don’t see why HPE/Juniper tech merger would be a priority or advantage
otoburb · 22h ago
Ericsson is a Swedish company with headquarters in Stockholm. They (and everybody else) have lost and continue to lose market share to Huawei short of these types of overt government interventions/market interventions.
sneak · 22h ago
Because it’s really about putting one’s thumb on the scale of market participation, not actually about China at all.
This is why Boeing can make as many bad planes as they want. They’re part of the US government and they will always “win” the game we pretend they play against other vendors.
Same goes for Lockheed, Raytheon, AT&T, Microsoft, HP, and Dell. Delta. Probably also Ford and GM.
AWS is trying to get on this list (see the whole JEDI thing that was gift-wrapped for them until Oracle got mad and noisy about the corruption) and almost certainly will eventually if they haven’t already.
Circumstances suggest that Apple (because iPhone use aiding in global surveillance due to iMessage), Google (because Gmail and search), and Meta (because WhatsApp) are similarly favored (although not totally integrated like Microsoft and Boeing and AT&T) over any competitors, due to their massive and often-overlooked strategic geopolitical importance, both domestic and abroad. There are unimaginably big perks to playing ball with the state, just ask Palantir.
Others I would assume get special treatment: Comcast, Level 3, Verizon. Probably also Visa.
Good luck trying to compete with any of them in the market on merit when the people who own and control
the market don’t want their buddies or surveillance partners to lose.
It’s mostly about the transfer of MANY billions of dollars of public tax money to the friends and associates of those who direct that money. China is just a convenient excuse. We all know the US as a unit is totally incapable of catching up to Chinese technology output or development pace (save for isolated pockets like Apple and SpaceX who thrive despite being in the US, not because of it).
Most of the functions of the state are around allocation of ostensibly-public money, and little else, I find.
kube-system · 22h ago
> Probably also Ford and GM.
Probably? GM was literally nationalized for a period not that long ago.
tristor · 20h ago
> Because it’s really about putting one’s thumb on the scale of market participation, not actually about China at all.
I wish this were true. It is not. Huawei has very famously (and publicly admitted) to stealing intellectual property from US tech companies, in many cases through conducting corporate espionage. Huawei has also had many of their products independently audited by various governments and found to contain intentional security flaws or backdoors.
You could easily make the argument that clearly US companies are just as bad, after all most US tech companies got funding to start from the CIA and clearly the intelligence community is really involved w/ Juniper and HPE (Dual EC anyone?). Both sides doing something doesn't absolve anyone who has to make a decision from understanding the implications of it, though.
This is more than just putting the thumb on the scale, it's a battle between a world of Pax Americana and a world where China runs things.
> We all know the US as a unit is totally incapable of catching up to Chinese technology output or development pace (save for isolated pockets like Apple and SpaceX who thrive despite being in the US, not because of it).
You mean the same US tech industry that has invented basically every modern computer technology, including the most cutting edge technologies available now? Are you kidding me? Nobody can possibly take this statement seriously. China has leg irons on because of US sanctions, but nonetheless the historical record is pretty clear that China excels at copying and scaling, but not so much invention. Creativity requires freedom of thought, something in horribly short supply within China.
xyst · 20h ago
I wonder if the "US intelligence community" is really Kash Patel.
He has been known to work/consult/lobby on behalf of Chinese (and other foreign country) companies to push or backchannel in DC for favorable outcomes in US. [1]
I'll tell you what's crazy, is the fact that anybody is surprised by this. These stories can come out all day every day (and often do), but the corruption is so deep that there will be no consequence. Just business as usual.
potato3732842 · 21h ago
This. They are the problem. Because whatever side they're on they lend political capitol to the stupidity when it's their team doing it. You'll never have enough people to care enough to change things so long as half the people who could care at any one time are actively making excuses or running cover when it's their guy.
People need to have some goddamn principals. Corruption and backroom dealing is bad no matter who's doing it. Even if you like who's doing it you should still not like it because at the very least it de-legitimizes your cause.
No comments yet
giantg2 · 22h ago
It's not crazy, it's typical (sadly).
Anytime either side is pushing something the other side disagrees with, they claim the opposition is being partisan. Then there are the flip flops, like claiming the debt ceiling is a big deal, then ignoring the issue once you're the one in power. Complain about heavy handed tactics when dealing with protests or "legal" pot, but not about guns. Have the IRS audit groups you don't like. Etcetera
supplied_demand · 22h ago
[flagged]
dang · 17h ago
Please don't start or perpetuate political flamewars on HN, regardless of what politics you favor or disfavor.
Political topics can obviously be far more important than anything else on HN's frontpage, but that doesn't make the flamewar style of discussion ok on this site. It's repetitive and indignant, and those are the two qualities which most destroy what we're trying for, i.e. gratifying curiosity and facilitating curious exchange.
Edit: your account has unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines, such as by arguing aggressively with other users. We eventually have to ban accounts that do this. From a quick look I don't think you're quite over that line yet, but it could easily get there, so it would be good if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate.
No comments yet
thesuitonym · 22h ago
It's what happens when a morally bankrupt party has nothing to offer except flimsy or made up grievances.
mgkimsal · 22h ago
Thank you. I feel this frustration about the 'both sides'ing of every political argument. There is a huge difference in the quality and quantity of the basic political/social norms (and laws) being broken under this administration compared with previous administrations. Bush, Clinton, Obama and Biden had faults, but none were so blatant about power, control, retribution and self-enrichment, and none had surrounding supporters so eager to push a self-serving agenda. It's not even a close comparison.
People got riled up when Biden was 'violating the Constitution' with multiple attempts at loan forgiveness. Some of the same people who hated Biden for this 'unconstitutional' behaviour voted for Trump because he promised to get rid of the Department of Education, in the misguided hope that their own student loans would be eliminated with the department. I don't quite know how we got to this level of stupid in the US - it may have always been there, just easier to see via social media?
mschuster91 · 19h ago
> There is a huge difference in the quality and quantity of the basic political/social norms (and laws) being broken under this administration compared with previous administrations.
Indeed, but it's not just the administration that has issues whenever Republicans control it.
I distinctly 'member McConnell filibustering his own bill, the Republicans sabotaging ACA (aided, of course, by Democrats trying to achieve bipartisan ownership even though they had a majority at the time [1]), or worst of all the Republicans refusing the appointment of Merrick Garland (citing that Obama was a lame-duck outgoing President) [3], only to do just the same thing with Barrett at the end of 2020, right before the elections [4].
Republicans, when in power, demand that Democrats cooperate with them (and Democrats are spineless enough to always play ball) - and when Democrats are in power, even if they have majorities, they obstruct in all ways possible. It's madness.
Yep the reason why Democrats got their shit kicked in is because they kept to their principles.
tehwebguy · 20h ago
I mean yeah one party is way, way worse but Democrats have funded all of the above, confirmed the appointments that are doing this, and pushed the conflation of policy protest with antisemitism. It’s really bleak at the national level!
dang · 17h ago
Please don't perpetuate political flamewars on HN, regardless of what politics you favor or disfavor.
Political topics can obviously be far more important than anything else on HN's frontpage, but that doesn't make the flamewar style of discussion ok on this site. It's repetitive and indignant, and those are the two qualities which most destroy what we're trying for, i.e. gratifying curiosity and facilitating curious exchange.
The Big Beautiful Bill passed without any Democrats voting for it. Democrats are not great (or good) by any measure, but they did not confirm all the appointments that are doing this.
==Six nominees received no supporting votes from any Democratic senators or independent senators who caucus with Democrats: Hegseth, Russell Vought for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Gabbard, Kennedy, Howard Lutnick for secretary of commerce, and Linda McMahon for secretary of education. ==
An annoying part is that this is a bit causative. They were so indoctrinated in the fear of how much this was happening before, that they convinced themselves it was normal and required.
That is, allowing it to become a normative conversation with no pushback that "government is bad" is a large part of how we got here.
vpribish · 19h ago
Bad people think others are also bad.
taeric · 19h ago
And otherwise good people can be convinced that bad things are necessary.
Yes, every now and then an ridiculously shameless person will emerge. No, that isn't everyone.
hearsathought · 20h ago
Accuse others of what you are doing or planning to do. It's standard politics. Both sides do it. It even applies internationally/geopolitically.
quickthrowman · 21h ago
This is precisely what I expected from this administration, it kicked off with not one, but two crypto pump-n-dump/bribe vehicles from the President and First Lady.
Anyone expecting less than nakedly open corruption and self-dealing is not paying attention.
Yeul · 20h ago
A US president visiting his own golf course on a state visit!
I think it's just too painful for people to admit how fast their country is going down the drain.
I like to imagine how decent Germans must have felt in 1938. How did they keep themselves sane?
mschuster91 · 20h ago
> A US president visiting his own golf course on a state visit!
Meh, I don't have too much of a problem with this one. A number of US Presidents, both modern and long-since dead, have been known to indulge in golfing [1].
There's so many truly bad things Trump has done, him visiting a golf course is hardly extraordinary in comparison.
They didn't pay themselves to golf or charge the government millions to house the secret service. It's among the most blatant bits of corruption.
cobrabyte · 22h ago
That's modern politics.
throw0101c · 21h ago
> It's crazy seeing the people who cried "Political partisanship" and "Weaponization of government" are doing it all now, in a higher magnitude than anything they complained about.
The concept of “projection” is really crazy once you get a good feel for it. I see it happening in so many places now.
Shitty people seem to believe that everyone is like themselves; they assume that others would do the same shitty things they would do in a similar situation. They assign the emotional reactions and responses that they would have in a given set of circumstances to others, even if there is no evidence to support it.
I suspect this is also where nuclear brinksmanship comes from. “We would conduct a sneak attack first strike on them, if we could, so they must be planning on doing it to us.”
I think this is also why most cops don’t see anything wrong with breaking the law to carry out what they believe their duty to be. They see the world through the lens of criminal behavior.
Corrupt politicians know that they would be availing themselves of every possible option to personally enrich themselves and push their agenda; they assume that every politician in power must also be doing this and are just getting away with it.
krapp · 22h ago
What's crazy is that this is a well known and established strategy of the right, to the point that "every accusation is a confession" has become memetic, and yet it always works.
perihelions · 22h ago
"The government is secretly controlled by an unaccountable, undemocratic Deep State", says the government secretly puppeteering civil finance regulators with CIA agents.
theyinwhy · 21h ago
every accusation is a confession
troyvit · 20h ago
Man if that's true then what really freaks me out is all the accusations about vote rigging that happened in the last two elections.
74B5 · 20h ago
And the only logical conclusion is, no problem is solvable. Kind of the best thing the parasites could wish for, right? And only because people cant distinguish sincere politics anymore.
azinman2 · 21h ago
This could not be more literally true
t0mas88 · 18h ago
And now think about Elon Musk's pedo guy......
hypeatei · 21h ago
It's like the bullshit "hunter Biden laptop" story which, after years of investigations, found that he filled out a gun form incorrectly. That's called a political witch hunt. Not only that, but cries of censorship by Twitter were also bullshit seeing as Republicans (Trump specifically) submitted the same requests to take things down all the time.
treebeard901 · 20h ago
The DOJ and the Courts have all been owned by the business class for a long time. It is basically whoever has the most money or political connections. Nothing else really matters.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-29/top-doj-a... ("Top DOJ Antitrust Officials Removed Over HPE-Juniper Settlement" (July 29))
> "Senate Democrats alleged the removals were the result of improper political influence and lawmakers are pushing the federal judge overseeing HPE’s acquisition to hold a lengthy review of the antitrust settlement."
> "Roger Alford, the top deputy to the Justice Department’s antitrust chief Gail Slater, and William Rinner, who led the department’s merger enforcement, were dismissed Monday, according to people familiar with the situation."
https://archive.ph/LlUJM
The idea that even allies will be using US networking equipment in a couple decades seems implausible. Everyone is well-aware that any boxes coming out of the US are as likely to be tapped as ones coming out of china.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/376.pdf
I fail to see how this impeded Huawei.
Maybe they really wanted to ensure that Juniper dies a slow death ?
Look at Juniper specifically. In 2021, their revenue roughly broke down as 40% service provider, 35% enterprise campuses, 25% cloud. In 2025, that had shifted to 45% enterprise campuses, 30% service provider, and 25% cloud. That shift is mostly reflected by how much money they pumped into Mist, and how successful that was.
Scrappy little upstarts have a _really_ hard time selling networking equipment to service providers and enterprises, who require tons of arcane features that take a long time to build and validate. They also operate very much on reputation, and rely on training pipelines outside of their own organizations (i.e., certifications). On the SP side (and the more modern enterprise side) there's also the significant issue of integration with other IT systems. At that scale, people aren't just command line jockeys that log into a router to provision something - Comcast can't operate like that, they need well defined API integrations with their provisioning system.
It is interesting and noteworthy that HPE's interest in Juniper is mostly due to the success of Mist, which _was_ a scrappy little upstart that got purchased by Juniper in 2019 (???). Mist (as a product line) only got successful once it was backed by Juniper, a known player. They had a much, much harder time selling to big accounts before that.
However, it's not a random scrappy little upstart, it got started by very senior people from Cisco that couldn't get their vision executed at Cisco. Specifically, Bob Friday (who co-founded Airespace in 2001, which was purchased by Cisco and directly led to Cisco wireless controllers), and Sujay Hajela, who was an SVP responsible for enterprise and wireless at Cisco, having led the Meraki purchase. More than a decade later, Meraki - another upstart, I guess - still isn't aimed at much other than SMB.
That Mist made it as an newcomer is the exception to the rule and entirely due to those very specific people and their very specific contacts. I wouldn't be surprised if at all if Mist had initially been fully intended to be a spin-out from Cisco with the express purpose of folding them back in a decade later if they were successful enough, and it just so happened that they got snagged up by Juniper first.
"Normal" startups in this space that aren't just spin-outs designed to come back to the mothership if they're successful are incredibly rare.
I realize it’s impossible to predict what comes next, but I’m curious about analogs to this merger and what one could reasonably expect to happen over the next many years.
My philosophy is showing in that I don’t see these deals as good for competition or the market in general, so I’m (perhaps hopelessly) looking for the silver lining here.
I’m opposed to these mega corps and looking (hoping) for some silver lining here that gives me some hope. Sibling comments have educated on that front.
(Source: worked for a scrappy little disruptor that was bought out and cannibalized)
We need companies owned by the people that built the company. Not by the C-level executives that are appointed by a board of billionaire lackeys, bankers, trust fund kiddies who are hellbent on flipping a profit at all costs.
Also of course more regulation, and higher corporate tax. Get rid of the stock manipulation tactic known as stock buybacks that only encourage short term growth/pump in price of stock.
Aruba has been pretty lackluster under HPE, so we’ll see where Juniper takes them. Or is taken.
This is why Boeing can make as many bad planes as they want. They’re part of the US government and they will always “win” the game we pretend they play against other vendors.
Same goes for Lockheed, Raytheon, AT&T, Microsoft, HP, and Dell. Delta. Probably also Ford and GM.
AWS is trying to get on this list (see the whole JEDI thing that was gift-wrapped for them until Oracle got mad and noisy about the corruption) and almost certainly will eventually if they haven’t already.
Circumstances suggest that Apple (because iPhone use aiding in global surveillance due to iMessage), Google (because Gmail and search), and Meta (because WhatsApp) are similarly favored (although not totally integrated like Microsoft and Boeing and AT&T) over any competitors, due to their massive and often-overlooked strategic geopolitical importance, both domestic and abroad. There are unimaginably big perks to playing ball with the state, just ask Palantir.
Others I would assume get special treatment: Comcast, Level 3, Verizon. Probably also Visa.
Good luck trying to compete with any of them in the market on merit when the people who own and control the market don’t want their buddies or surveillance partners to lose.
It’s mostly about the transfer of MANY billions of dollars of public tax money to the friends and associates of those who direct that money. China is just a convenient excuse. We all know the US as a unit is totally incapable of catching up to Chinese technology output or development pace (save for isolated pockets like Apple and SpaceX who thrive despite being in the US, not because of it).
Most of the functions of the state are around allocation of ostensibly-public money, and little else, I find.
Probably? GM was literally nationalized for a period not that long ago.
I wish this were true. It is not. Huawei has very famously (and publicly admitted) to stealing intellectual property from US tech companies, in many cases through conducting corporate espionage. Huawei has also had many of their products independently audited by various governments and found to contain intentional security flaws or backdoors.
You could easily make the argument that clearly US companies are just as bad, after all most US tech companies got funding to start from the CIA and clearly the intelligence community is really involved w/ Juniper and HPE (Dual EC anyone?). Both sides doing something doesn't absolve anyone who has to make a decision from understanding the implications of it, though.
This is more than just putting the thumb on the scale, it's a battle between a world of Pax Americana and a world where China runs things.
> We all know the US as a unit is totally incapable of catching up to Chinese technology output or development pace (save for isolated pockets like Apple and SpaceX who thrive despite being in the US, not because of it).
You mean the same US tech industry that has invented basically every modern computer technology, including the most cutting edge technologies available now? Are you kidding me? Nobody can possibly take this statement seriously. China has leg irons on because of US sanctions, but nonetheless the historical record is pretty clear that China excels at copying and scaling, but not so much invention. Creativity requires freedom of thought, something in horribly short supply within China.
He has been known to work/consult/lobby on behalf of Chinese (and other foreign country) companies to push or backchannel in DC for favorable outcomes in US. [1]
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/patels-roster-of-forei...
https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...
People need to have some goddamn principals. Corruption and backroom dealing is bad no matter who's doing it. Even if you like who's doing it you should still not like it because at the very least it de-legitimizes your cause.
No comments yet
Anytime either side is pushing something the other side disagrees with, they claim the opposition is being partisan. Then there are the flip flops, like claiming the debt ceiling is a big deal, then ignoring the issue once you're the one in power. Complain about heavy handed tactics when dealing with protests or "legal" pot, but not about guns. Have the IRS audit groups you don't like. Etcetera
Political topics can obviously be far more important than anything else on HN's frontpage, but that doesn't make the flamewar style of discussion ok on this site. It's repetitive and indignant, and those are the two qualities which most destroy what we're trying for, i.e. gratifying curiosity and facilitating curious exchange.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: your account has unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines, such as by arguing aggressively with other users. We eventually have to ban accounts that do this. From a quick look I don't think you're quite over that line yet, but it could easily get there, so it would be good if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate.
No comments yet
People got riled up when Biden was 'violating the Constitution' with multiple attempts at loan forgiveness. Some of the same people who hated Biden for this 'unconstitutional' behaviour voted for Trump because he promised to get rid of the Department of Education, in the misguided hope that their own student loans would be eliminated with the department. I don't quite know how we got to this level of stupid in the US - it may have always been there, just easier to see via social media?
Indeed, but it's not just the administration that has issues whenever Republicans control it.
I distinctly 'member McConnell filibustering his own bill, the Republicans sabotaging ACA (aided, of course, by Democrats trying to achieve bipartisan ownership even though they had a majority at the time [1]), or worst of all the Republicans refusing the appointment of Merrick Garland (citing that Obama was a lame-duck outgoing President) [3], only to do just the same thing with Barrett at the end of 2020, right before the elections [4].
Republicans, when in power, demand that Democrats cooperate with them (and Democrats are spineless enough to always play ball) - and when Democrats are in power, even if they have majorities, they obstruct in all ways possible. It's madness.
[1] https://theweek.com/articles/469675/mitch-mcconnells-amazing...
[2] https://archive.ph/ZhYSP
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Coney_Barrett
Political topics can obviously be far more important than anything else on HN's frontpage, but that doesn't make the flamewar style of discussion ok on this site. It's repetitive and indignant, and those are the two qualities which most destroy what we're trying for, i.e. gratifying curiosity and facilitating curious exchange.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
==Six nominees received no supporting votes from any Democratic senators or independent senators who caucus with Democrats: Hegseth, Russell Vought for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Gabbard, Kennedy, Howard Lutnick for secretary of commerce, and Linda McMahon for secretary of education. ==
https://ballotpedia.org/How_senators_voted_on_Trump_Cabinet_...
That is, allowing it to become a normative conversation with no pushback that "government is bad" is a large part of how we got here.
Yes, every now and then an ridiculously shameless person will emerge. No, that isn't everyone.
Anyone expecting less than nakedly open corruption and self-dealing is not paying attention.
I think it's just too painful for people to admit how fast their country is going down the drain. I like to imagine how decent Germans must have felt in 1938. How did they keep themselves sane?
Meh, I don't have too much of a problem with this one. A number of US Presidents, both modern and long-since dead, have been known to indulge in golfing [1].
There's so many truly bad things Trump has done, him visiting a golf course is hardly extraordinary in comparison.
[1] https://www.scga.org/blog/13174/every-presidential-golfer-ra...
Every accusation is an admission.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/every_accusation_is_a_confess...
* https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/karl-marx-enemy-quote/
Shitty people seem to believe that everyone is like themselves; they assume that others would do the same shitty things they would do in a similar situation. They assign the emotional reactions and responses that they would have in a given set of circumstances to others, even if there is no evidence to support it.
I suspect this is also where nuclear brinksmanship comes from. “We would conduct a sneak attack first strike on them, if we could, so they must be planning on doing it to us.”
I think this is also why most cops don’t see anything wrong with breaking the law to carry out what they believe their duty to be. They see the world through the lens of criminal behavior.
Corrupt politicians know that they would be availing themselves of every possible option to personally enrich themselves and push their agenda; they assume that every politician in power must also be doing this and are just getting away with it.