I'm not sure what the solution is. On one hand, it was there all along, and political-correctness did not help it. On the other hand, racists everywhere have been empowered once again, and all manner of groups have to face stereotypes they've fought so hard over the years. I don't think the U.S. will really get its house in order until it becomes an issue of survival, and of geopolitical importance.

It's not hard to see his initial popularity as linked to this. That is, the vilification of having views that are not the same as the majority leading people to feel repressed, and them supporting someone that's unwilling to bend to that, even if they don't support every decision he makes or view he takes.

I don't want racists and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, but I also don't want our society so constrained by mob mentality that having merely unpopular opinions have dire consequences. If we take it as a given that mob mentality (to this degree) is an emergent phenomenon because of our hyper connected world, and that too much mob mentality is causing the problem, how do you mitigate emerging phenomena when you can't really alter what it emerges from?

I'd also be happy if someone could convincingly refute that it's an emergent phenomena, or that mob mentality is the problem, since those seem intractable to me.

We gotta break this stuff into more detail.

If you look at say, the start of #metoo, you see Harvey Weinstein, a man so powerful that the ordinary justice system could not touch him until essentially a Twitter mob took him down.

Now, public accusation is a crappy way to settle bad behavior, it's easy to channel this stuff in any direction a manipulator might choose. But people choose that rout of desperation, when the ordinary justice and more broadly ordinary government processes fail.

If we look at the Minneapolis Police Department in particular, we see a department with such a long history of corruption and even murder that the entire group should be fired. And moreover, all of Minneapolis civic government out side the police would like to do that - but are in fact powerless to do that through a web of laws the police have protecting their interests.

And this is the thing. You have powerful, unaccountable men and women whose acts provoke anger in many parts of the population. Then you have an angry mob which actually can't impose any significant change and once they get going can inflict collateral damage themselves - and maybe get met by a counter-mob. But after the upsurge, any reform is thin and the stage is set for the next event.

So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.

I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the current mob mentality only came about because of unaccountable powers, or even if it did, that it will necessarily dissipate if those powers become and are held accountable. Some things are self-sustaining.

I don't think we can just look the other way because the negative behavior is caused by a feeling of rage and impotency. Should we try to fix the injustices that cause the feeling of rage and impotency? Yes. That doesn't mean we should also ignore the negative effects that rage and impotency results in, otherwise we'll be following a chain back forever.

I don't know who's "we" or who's looking the other way.

Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.

It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.

You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior. The problem in many ways is that the mob is also a lot of people, including other mobs, favorite enemy.

"We", as a societal group, whether that be "Americans" or "Westerners" or "Human beings". By looking the other way, I meant "assuming the problem will get better if the unaccountable powers are held accountable." People don't change their behavior overnight, even if it's unconsciously acting as a face in a mob they don't realize they're part of, and revolutions rarely result in a change that is positive in all aspects.

What if we trade unaccountable individuals (which sometimes were held accountable) for unaccountable mobs? I don't see one as necessarily better than the other, it's the prevalence and consequences of each that matter to me.

> Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.

Yes, it's almost as if we've started identifying more with our subgroups than the larger group, and it's like multiple nations forced to coexist within the same borders of people we view as others. Like a digital Gaza Strip.

> It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.

Sure. That's the other end of the spectrum. I advocated for doing both. Address the root cause, also address the problem. If we accept that poverty increases crime, we shouldn't use that as an excuse to ignore crimes committed by the poor, and we shouldn't ignore that causal relationship and focus purely on policing and punishment.

> You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior.

The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.

kbenson:The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.

Me: Well, all of the mechanism of modern democracy - a fair justice system, a congress representing the popular will, an executive branch primarily carrying out laws, a press that exposes flaws, etc are the ways modern democratic society has discovered for balancing interests.

In situations of imbalance, when things are not working, reforms within such a democratic capitalist society tend to come from elites because they hold power (with or without a popular mandate). We can see this in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Right Movement. Protests may get things going but those with power have to enact legislation.

Today, it may sound harsh but America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire because the situation didn't bother them. I mentioned the Minneapolis city council, theoretically the representatives of the city, would like to fire the police but cannot. (Nearly) "everyone" have some solutions but they aren't able to exercise them.

At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.

Well, I would say it didn't bother them initially, and it changed so fast that by the time it did bother them (if it does), it was too late. We're talking about a decade or less of time here, since that's about the period of time that social media has had major usage by a majority of people, and while there were less efficient precursor networks (such as radio and television), nothing really compares to the current immediate feedback look of of the current systems, where time for info to permeate a platform and then regurgitates and eaten again can be measured in minutes in some cases, but often in just a few hours.

I doubt even the people that "saw it coming" really understood where it would get to, and there's no concrete indication that we're at the peak (there's pushback, but that can be steamrolled for while).

Elites have more power, and can get stuff done because there's a purity of intent and will expressed by one person with power that's hard to match with many people pooling power... but then again, we're dealing with runaway feedback loops, so who knows what the public can do if a good meme is found.

> At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.

I'd much rather have the stability of the 1990s or 2000s that what we seem to have now when considering my own situation, but I'm white middle class, and I imagine people that have felt disenfranchised their whole lives may see the balance of good and bad happening now a bit differently, and I'm not willing to say they are better off as they were in the 1990s or 2000s. I dunno.

It seems like you imagine that out-of-control social media is happening in a vacuum or can be fixed in a vacuum. It's not and it cannot.

I'm sure almost everyone would prefer not be (hopefully) living through a era in which things fall apart on a multitude of levels. But hey, we should try to do something and if we can't do something immediately, at least analyze it.

What are the various mobs you refer to?

I don't know that mobs are rational. Sometimes, I'm sure they will be pointing to a genuine injustice, but just as often as not, they're going to be a rampaging mob. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this next claim, but I wonder that it's simply an accident when they get it "right."

Nonetheless, even the worst among us deserve representation and due process protections: which a mob cannot (and will not) give.

Either you're in favor of free speech or you're not. Republicans, Democrats, and, yes, Hacker News all participate in cancel culture in one way or another.

Sure there are bots, provocateurs, and anonymous trolls who have no intent on changing their beliefs. But, please, let the American people have enough credit to make decisions for themselves and see racists for who they truly are.

I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, so I want societal pressure to continue to work as it does against those people. At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.

Reducing this to simply a matter of free speech or not is missing the point. This is a matter of figuring out how to deal with the negative effects of free speech when we care enough about free speech that limiting it in some way is not on the table.

That ship has sailed.

> At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.

Free speech isn't just about who gets to speak what, it's about who decides who gets to read/listen/watch what they want. That's basically the crux of censorship, right? I don't want mob induced censorship any more than I want government censorship.

In the end, cancel culture is people who choose not to use free speech to push their agenda, but instead threatens other's livelihood or shame critics of an unpopular position into silence.

That's called "living in a community". It's impossible to interact with other people without providing some level of acceptance or rejection of what they are doing, whether on purpose or accident, whether they interpret you correctly or not.

Even just walking away communicates something.this isn't always bad, it's how we enforce norms that are not laws. Lie or act in a way I do not approve of and I can choose to stop or limit my interactions with you, and I can express my opinion to others. I this way I am censoring you in a small way. It's how humans interact, and it's useful and good when used in moderation for good causes.

When not used in moderation, and when a million people jump on a single person and express enough displeasure to cause severe ramifications for relatively small offenses, then it's not good.

I don't want to see racist rhetoric in the same way I don't want to see poor behavior at others expenses. That is, I want it allowed, but for people to face somewhat appropriate ramifications for the offense, to discourage them from spouting it everywhere people do t want to see it. To be clear, I mean it in the literal, bit colloquial sense, in that it's a preference, not a call to censor others be preventing it entirely, as overreactions are what I'm arguing against.

Except cancel culture is anything but community driven. It's social media driven -- which in itself is a platform to get more views to sell you more ads. The more the platform can draw your ire, the more ads it sells, the more ire the platform spreads, etc.

The problem is that words aren't which we argue our politics by anymore. It's now who has the biggest weapon to personally destroy those that speak out.

> The First Amendment does not guarantee consequence-free speech.

Civics 101. My right to through my fist stops at your face. Simple. Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, etc. etc.

Political speech, ie, expressing ones viewpoint, is and has always been protected by the First Amendment -- even if it's false or racist speech.

> I would add that after a decade of watching the First Amendment cited almost exclusively to protect hate speech from psychopaths...

What would you replace it with? Seriously. Are you going to punish people for lying? Lock them up for something just slightly racist? Who do we trust to make these judgements? Republican appointed judges? What?

> Are you going to punish people for lying?

We punish people for lies that cause harm all the time. Though a bad example to use (because it is dicta unsupported by the law at the time in a particularly repugnant case suppressing core political speech that was later overturned, so that the quote at issue was never part of the substantive case law itself, wasn't particularly supported by the substantive case law, and was issued in a case now widely recognized as having been wrongly decided), the quote you wave your hand in the vague direction of about falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater is also an odd one to raise if you are going to turn around and sneer at that idea.

It's certainly true the left can have illiberal tendencies, and there's some indication that's on the rise, and that's worrisome. But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter, it's always worth asking how many people have been "cancelled" and to what degree. Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss have never been denied an audience and will almost certainly continue to have huge ones. J.K. Rowling, for all of the articles about her "cancellation" over the past couple of months, turns out to still be a multibillionaire author who still has a book contract. Yes, every day brings us complaints from prominent conservatives about how Twitter is stifling their voice -- complaints generally tweeted to their millions of Twitter followers who like and retweet them in support.

In any case, while I'd be loathe to carve out explicit exceptions to the First Amendment, I'd also be loathe to invoke it too cavalierly. Would I lock someone up for "something just slightly racist"? No, but in practice that's very rarely what we're arguing about when we argue about cancel culture: you mentioned it was a social media phenomenon in another comment here. Would you demand that social media networks not be allowed to make decisions about what content they're willing to carry? How about employers? Firing someone for that "something just slightly racist" is harsh, but do we want to say that HR departments are no longer allowed to make those calls? If so, who is?

I mean, if you don't have protected free speech, you have regulated speech. If you can't say "I believe in X because .... " where X might be racism, then it's no longer freedom, and therefore subject to potential criminal legislation. See John Adams and the sedition act.

> But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter...

Bari Weiss made it clear it was the anger from the Tom Cotton essay where she felt her career at the times became untenable.

When did we decide that an essay by Tom Cotton was too dangerous to be published? That his speech was so dangerous that the core ideas could not just have been countered with... wait for it... more speech.

And no one said that freedom of speech never meant freedom of jobs. Nor did freedom of speech ever mean that people would buy your product after your ugly ideas came to light.

So what is cancel culture? It's this. Specifically this article:

https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2019/9/25/20883697/cancel-cu...

And he advocated using force against protesters ... which is speech.

There was someone with a throwaway account that replied with the argument that "Free speech need not be absolute", and then started getting voted down.

What's truly ironic I feel is that in my world view, his speech would just sit there as an alternative viewpoint, read and disagreed with.

But in his world his viewpoint could made illegal (or in the HN world downvoted), based upon what might be perceived as the popular rhetoric of the day.

I'm actually fine with such views not being made illegal though - but I'm not fine with the premise that there should never be any social consequences at all for any ideology or viewpoint regardless of its nature or intent to do harm. Nor do I believe that the right to free speech means everyone must be forced to hear, seriously consider, host or publish that speech.

There are 300,000,000 million Americans each with his or her own free will and ability to determine right from wrong. So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?

The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.

No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.

That people are influenced by more than purely logical, didactic arguments should be self evident, nor does that fact make people sheep, it's simply human nature. We're not compilers, after all, we're primates with countless irrational biases hard wired into our brains. Anti-vaxxers, COVID-denialists, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the resurgence of discredited white supremacist and anti-semitic ideology under the politically correct guise of "racial realism" and the phenomenon of fake news spread by social media should be enough to demonstrate that falsehood can be more compelling than fact, and that facts alone are not sufficient to dissuade such people from their false beliefs, or stop their influence.

>The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.

No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest. America has only ever granted its inalienable rights to white Christian men by default - everyone else has had to fight tooth and nail for their seat at the table and for every scrap of human dignity they could take from the cornucopia of American liberty.

Women's suffrage was earned with speech and blood. African American rights were earned with speech and blood. LGBT rights were earned with speech and blood. Even recently, few outside of the black community really cared about systemic racist violence among the police, despite the black community speaking at length about it for years until they also started taking to the streets and burning shit down... then suddenly everyone else noticed and started listening.

Speech without the force of consequence is as useless as a toothless guard dog.

You argued:

  A: Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white
     supremacists take over

  B: In a democracy a majority of the people have to agree
     that white supremacy should be the dominant principle for
     governmental rule.

> No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest.

Rosa Parks didn't throw a brick through a window. She refused to sit in the back of the bus. That started a boycott of the bus system, and it worked without bloodshed.

Sure blood was spilled in the civil rights marches but not because the people marching wanted it to be.

I Rosa Parks was radical whole her life. She was not proponent of super peaceful activism, she at the moment thought fighting would he strategically bad idea.

Had she been meek lady, there would be no protests.

She did lived at violent place at the time, did dealt with lynchings, beatings and legal protests up to that point. She did not had philosophy of peaceful activism above all.

While she was not violent, she was not proponent of peaceful above all protesting. That was Kings philosophy and even he was up to breaking law.

It's quite straightforward to draw this conclusion from the following portion of your previous comment:

>Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over

How does a community 'take over' without expanding to at least a dominant minority? And how does the point being argued, allowing them to speak freely, enable that unless we're to assume that simply being exposed to that worldview will grow their ranks?

And the world would be a worse place without those laws. Any real discussion about free speech starts with the premise that not all speech can be free and the real questions is in the details of what speech should be free.

The innocent explanation is more often right than the guilty one.

No one is arguing this. This is a strawman position no one actually holds.

Enforced tolerance is the only thing that is keeping really bad people comfortable at expressing their badness. (Suprisingly - the anti-discrimination applied to private businesses is the reason why people like Alex Jones can safely say whatever he wants and then get a free upgrade at Ramada)

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/268517/analy...

"The question each individual faces is 'Would you give up all the money in your IRA so that some old person you don't know will not die?"'

I think that question captures the essence of the situation better than the "haircut...lives" phrase.

Interacting with other humans inherently carries risk that you could harm others. I could get distracted by my children in the car and kill someone when I cross the center line.

That doesn’t make me evil or selfish for wanting to own a car and drive it.

It also doesn’t make someone selfish for wanting to support their family in normal commerce, in the rare chance that their very legal and very normal economic activity may inadvertently harm someone.

When all of our children become serial killers and cancer death rates rise we'll look back on this time as the worst decision the world has ever made. Being a human means excepting risk. You wake up everyday and take on risk. Yes some people are willing to take more risks than others. I'm an avid skydiver. To those people who don't like risk: Stay at home and get someone to deliver groceries and live your miserable life by yourself at home. Thanks.

And so yeah, that was a real choice that made. Like my friends and I had to decide if worth it to join the protests and we were pretty firmly on the side of this was too important to not do. And so you're absolutely right but I feel like it's hard to be measured when the argument is "look the left is going out to march in a civil rights protest but doesn't want hair salons or schools to open -- the hipocrits!"

There need to be some nuance here. I think most people agree that grocery stores and hospitals needs to be open and that chuck-e-cheese probably doesn't. I don't think it's at all hypocritical to take a stance in the middle. Of course there's going to be lots of disagreement about what falls on what side but that's the argument to have.

It's a poor comparison: the risk of transmission when gathering huge numbers of humans together is exponentially higher than leaving your home to buy groceries.

Have you seen the fly-by drone footage of Hollywood Blvd on July 7th of the BLM protests [1]? It was outrageously reckless and not just to the lives of the people who took part.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/iSlH3SG.gifv

So yes BLM protests are high risk, but to the protesters they're also high reward if they manage to affect change which, largely, they are!

Reckless would be going to a music festival right now, and in my opinion, opening schools. The reward just isn't there. Kids will be happy to have an extra long summer break.

The context matters. The actual actions matter.

Such as - banning testing for COVID by nursing homes upon (re)admittance in NYC.

There is no new split into two Americas, there was always a split- between those who had political, cultural and economic power, and those that don't. The only difference now is that the people who are in the group with power aren't exclusively rich, white, conservative men.

We can go back, we can stop black people from getting loans and decent jobs, we can make all our women secretaries again, and I'm sure that will solve all our political ills.

Are we going to repeat the history in the US?

If people in another country may be wrong and have to be taught what's right, well, how can people in another state avoid such error? How can people next door be always right, such as I am?

'Godless' non-religious people on the left are extremely 'moral' and burn people at the stake via deplatforming and cancelling.

Science and scientific culture of the last 50/100 years has helped, but even it's been hijacked by our monolithic emotional reality of tribalism and fear. Zooming out, scientific culture is a momentary lifting of a mountain one inch off the ground.

The development of human nature is frozen in time compared to the development of science. Science has caught up to it, and has hit a wall which scientific papers alone cannot move. In fact, the analogy of throwing wads of paper at a wall and expecting it to move. That's the impact it's having.

I fear there is not much we can do about human nature until we can physically change ourselves at the DNA level, to rid or regulate emotions like rage and disgust via CRISPR etc. There's pros and cons of being in the 'World State' or in the 'Savage Reservation'. (Brave New World reference.)

It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.

1. If this was generally true the Wall street and Republicans started #metoo and I can't believe that.

> and there's nothing anybody can do about that now that it's gone too far.

2. This is not only pessimistic but too pessimistic and also counterproductive (unless one wish to drive society faster to the edge.)

> It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.

Kind of agree. I guess if you made a real poll between Americans on if they wanted

1. Trump

2. Biden

3. A randomly selected choice between 5 men and 5 women that were decent, smart, had succeeded in life despite being nice

then I guess people would vote for 3 in the poll.

The American system seems to favour bad compromises lately.

It makes it unsafe to vote for your actual favourite candidate, because you don't get a second round... I always remind people that Maine's scandalous governor LePage never won 50% of the voter support and his first win was with merely 37% of the vote.

In that case: have my apology and also know that I misunderstood you (and in that case: still don't understand you despite trying), so a little clarification might be helpful if you care :-)

Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one. The reason why, for example, murder is illegal isn't because it's immoral, but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal. Same for theft, or even such minor annoyances like fining someone for playing music too loud.

You are trying to draw a distinction between the "utilitarian" and the "moral". But, to quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), "Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories" [1]. Claims about what is "utilitarian" are inescapably moral claims.

> but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal.

In historical terms, that is quite false. In every democratic country, murder was already illegal for centuries (even millennia) before democracy was introduced. In fact, the earliest surviving legal text (the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu, c. 2100–2050 BCE) criminalised murder, and predates the invention of democracy in ancient Athens (594 BCE) by approximately 1500 years.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200630100724/https://www.iep.u...

The issue is that many folks want to view others as $POLITICAL_PARTY first and human second.

Hell, half of conservative political rhetoric is distinguishing between real and fake Americans.

If I point a gun to your head do you think we can stand there and have a calm and rational discussion about whether I should pull the trigger? Of course not! You're going to fight to protect yourself.

Is there another universe where all the religious people are very pro-economic redistribution? That seems to be within reasonable interpretation of the teachings of Jesus.

> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

And in a world where the choice is between Biden and Trump. It is increasingly tempting to vote for the Guillotine.

It didn't work so well the last few times it was used - the English revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, all ended up in a bloodbath, next one more gruesome than the last. I urge you to reconsider.

Also I recommend "the revolutions" podcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Duncan_(podcaster)

This is not necessary the case though, as seen after the Cuban or the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, Mexico.

At some point revolution becomes necessary, and if democratic means remain unavailable, this revolution will be violent. Horrible people using the political turmoil will become a risk people are willing to take in this growing frustration.

Napoleon III would like a word with you.

They still wanted a lot of changes to allow more freedom, restrictions and more transparency... just not necessarily a formal republic.

Think about this - in CATO's own Human Freedom Index half of the top 16 countries are monarchies.

1 New Zealand - monarchy 2 Switzerland - republic 3 Hong Kong (definitely not going to be in #4 now) 4 Canada - monarchy 5 Australia - monarchy 6 Denmark - monarchy 6 Luxembourg - monarchy 8 Finland - republic 8 Germany - republic 10 Ireland - repulbic 11 Sweden - monarchy 11 Netherlands - monarchy 13 Austria - republic 14 United Kingdom - monarchy 15 Estonia - republic 15 United States - republic

Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1804–1814)

Louis XVIII, King of France (1814–1824)

Charles X, King of France (1824–1830)

Louis Philippe I, King of France (1830–1848)

Napoleon III, Emperor of the French (1852–1870)

I'm not arguing either were good, just curious about your point of view here.

That said, the revolutionary spirit under Czar Nicolas II were completely rational, and understandable. The use of violence was needed because the ruling class was—unlike at the end of the Soviet Union—unwilling to make the revolution happen peacefully.

Nobody can tell the future. The fact that awful people might use the turmoil to seize power is not something that people are thinking about when they are trying to overthrow their current oppressors.

Or are you saying that you dislike Trump or Biden so much that you'd rather use violence to achieve what you desire?

Let's say you'd use Guillotine so Trump can step down, then should those who dislike democrats also use the same means to have Biden step down? And if someone tends to oppose what you do, you'd rather use Guillotine to resolve the difference?

I think it's pretty clear what kind of person you are.

If this were a real democracy, popular policies would be enacted, or at least be on the ballot. But this is not the case. As evident from the Black Lives Matter protest, riot seems to be the only avenue for change. And as popular policies keep getting put on the back burner while corporate interests keep getting the front seat regardless of who we vote, the illusion of democracy will frustrate more and more people. The more frustrated we get the more likely we will resort to violence.

I’m not saying that violence will lead to good outcome (it probably won’t; as history shows), but an ever angrier and more frustrated population will eventually use it if democratic means remain unavailable. That is more and more people will vote for the Guillotine if the only options on the ballots are: a) business as usual, or b) business as usual + hating minorities.

None of those things are supported by an overwhelming majority unless 3/5ths now constitutes “overwhelming”. Additionally, your view of what the issues are show how biased your approach is to begin with.

- Almost nobody has an issue with reducing police violence, but a bunch of people have issues with getting rid of the police.

- Almost nobody “wants foreign wars” but a bunch of people think military intervention is needed.

- Nobody is against taxing the rich, it’s already right in the tax code and the top 1 percent pays something like a third of all tax revenues already. What a bunch of people are against is arbitrarily raising their taxes further because of tall poppy syndrome.

- Reduce carbon emissions. Yes, but sadly not overwhelming majority still and even then, the “how” is critical and there is even less common ground there.

A functioning legislator discusses these nuances, and comes up with a legislation that enacts the policy such that most people can benefit from it. This is one of the benefits of having a diverse ruling class. No one person needs to know how a popular policy gets enacted, that is the purpose of representative democracy.

You're technically inaccurate because 58-60% is not an "overwhelming majority".

I'm not a US citizen (or resident), and I find it almost unbelievable and absolutely unacceptable that you don't have some form of universal healthcare, for example. I probably agree with you politically way more than I disagree with you, but the other posters points against you still stand.

EDIT: I realise my first paragraph here might sound a bit harsh, that was not my intention - my intention was to make it explicitly known to you such that you might take it to heart and it might possibly be helpful to you to realise.

The same applies to solving global warming. Carbon taxation was actually a feasible solution with conservative support. Now instead, a huge chunk of the liberal position has shifted to the green new deal, which is a jobs program and wealth redistribution scheme only orthogonally related to slowing global warming. Nuclear is another viable solution to global warming that nobody wants to touch because science is scary.

I personally want carbon tax and police abolition, but there is no consensus on either of these, and what I personally want doesn’t matter. I am not a dictator and the USA is not a dictatorship. It is the legislator’s job to gather what the people want, and find a way to deliver it in a way that will benefit the most. However the American ruling class is not even pretending to be interested in what policies the general population supports.

The average person might support all of those end results if the cost to get there were zero, i.e. if we could wave a magic wand.

However each one of those has a cost or tradeoff that a significant number - possibly majority - of people would be unwilling to accept.

This sentiment is a pretty on-the-nose example of the societal problem we're discussing.

The only sense in which horseshoe theory is real is that the rejection of the status quo tends to split someone in one direction or the other, and occasionally those new to alternative political ideologies will waffle or get shunted down different pipelines. Example: younger people going down the IDW pipeline who end up socialist once they realize the error. They don't return to dominant liberal narratives because they already figured out the ways in which they are toxic and false, and they also reject their previous pathway.

I can't imagine thinking that "bizarro world" is one in which people hold a larger diversity of opinion and criticize within a party.

What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of course. But that was also when imported oil became a concern. It was when international shipping settled on a standard intermodal container. It was when the drug wars started. And it was after major victories in the civil rights movement, and failures in Vietnam. There were winners and losers in these changes. The big winners were neoliberal-progressives who could shape all these influences into a new political alignment that pleased globalizing businesses and placated the masses. The losers were the remnants of the supremacist structure post-Reconstruction, who had fell into a decline with the Depression and war years, and saw collapse in the 60's. They were ushered towards religion, nostalgia narratives about the good old days, and apocalyptic fiction about the decline of the world and those few who would stand up to it.

The problem that the neoliberal structure faced was the one politicians always face: how to accommodate a divided electorate and keep one's career? The formula that emerged was to force the talking points into a narrower spectrum, a tactic refined over the course of decades. In this space, policy change is blocked where it hurts private property interests(as neoliberalism indicates), and the remainder is a set-aside for partisanship where professionals craft pro and contra arguments.

But the consequence of doing that is a build-up of pressure on both left and right, as everything gradually becomes a property issue and gets blocked or deferred. With no enfranchisement, both have radicalized - first the right, and then the left in reaction.

And that's the state of things. How does it end? With a new coalition that courts all the defining forces of this era effectively, guided by some overarching ideology. However, if we take this to be a cycle as in Strauss-Howe's theory, this is simply the beginning of the neoliberal decline, a period of crisis management and compromise, not the defining of that coalition.

Also the fact that people actually feel the need to have bans on talking about politics eg at the workplace doesn't seem like a good sign to me, and that's hardly new at all.

This experience must vary a lot with your locale. I live in a medium sized town in Canada and feel very uncomfortable talking to my conservative, suburban neighbours about issues I strongly believe should be a priority for everyone. Like climate change.

They know that them and me don’t see eye to eye on these issues but I can’t bring it up in a way that I would with my left leaning friends and it pains me. Because it’s something that both sides of the political spectrum should be able to rally behind. Many conservatives here fancy themselves as sort of “salt of the earth people” so I don’t get the hostility towards some kind of conservation.

I think the Left is getting flak for doing the latter.

Yes, I had a direct experience of the latter when my car was keyed for having a “give peace a chance” bumper sticker during the times of the war on Iraq. And that’s in Canada, bear in mind.

Here's one you can try in the current political climate: "Why don't you have ANY [insert minority] employees working in your organization?"

In our case (we have some minorities but not as many as HN would like).

Why: because they aren't available.

We have KPIs for HR and managers that strongly encourage it, but there just aren't more qualified women/black/etc coders.

Which, in our case, translates to less than 5 (but awesome, and highly regarded) black persons[0], about 30% women.

[0]: Note however that the demographic is quite different here in Norway. I know people here who never saw black people except on holiday until they were far beyond 20 years old. In their defense though: 1.) Part of why there are so few black peopøe here seems to be that keeping slaves hasn't been popular here for hundreds of years. 2.) Norwegians have accepted a lot of people from other countries over the years: Pakistani, Chilean etc, so I don't think it is about xenophobia.

If I put out a simple coding test and some people cannot crack it - I'm not going to check if my 2+2 test is unfairly biased towards people with red hair.

Did you know, for example, that even fairly wealthy black American families are less able to educate their kids to the same level as white American families? Because access to proper education and parental education levels matter a lot. Because kids growing up in poor areas will get lower levels of attainment. Because long term poverty matters.

Breaking that education barrier takes more than one generation.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...

We are actively looking for them, employing them whenever possible[0].

[0]: I lost two female candidates I tried to hire, one because she wasn't fluent in a language that a majority of our customers use and one because HR didn't react in time and when she interviewed with us she was also on the way to her second interview at another company.

Both landed well-paying jobs shortly afterwards. I guess we are not the only company trying to look diverse.

There are so few black people around here that I guess the reason I don't see more black coders is just statistics.

"It's generally easier to play the role of the Very Reasonable Person Who's Just Asking Questions when you're defending the status quo; any change you stymie by undercutting people's emotional energy or by slowing things down works to your advantage."

I gave a counterexample.

That said, in most cases, good equity policies have nothing to do with racist quotas, and everything to do with cultures which are accepting of diverse patterns of communication, cultures, and behavioral styles, and with identifying talent wherever it may be found, rather than using surface indicators like school someone went to, clothing, or similar.

Centrism is de-facto the status quo. Which, in current times, means support for the police as it exists, supports for business regulation as it exists, supports greenhouse gases and military conduct as it exists, supports the behavior and election processes of politicians as they exist, etc.

Its simply the privilege of the majority to be the "moderate" ones. To be radical is not to be good or bad, it just to be outside the norm. And it makes sense that those in the norm find those outside it dangerous and threatening, because... they want to be. Thats the whole point. Their time is wasted if the goal is not to become the new moderate, the new normal, the new center.

Given that norms say nothing about it doesn't mean they are always but the possibility exists that the extremists really are too emotional and partisan, and getting what they wanted would be the proverbial dog catching the car and not knowing what to do with it or crashing it immediately.

The "center" people are referring to here is a United States-centric form of liberalism. It's not any less "extreme" than communism, it's just the dominant political force and, as you say, has the privilege of positioning itself as the comfortable default. In reality, it's a fairly extreme commitment to a different set of principles.

Commoditization is just a fundamental result of math basically. Fundamentally there is still a cost to a commodities no matter what party pays for it to provide it or bar access through certain methods as illegitimate like it being illegal to buy organs from a donor for transplant.

This was literally Hitler's primary argument for establishing the Nazi Party in Mein Kampf in the way that he did. So at least a 100 years old.

Based on the results, there's a pretty strong argument that it's true.

If a person feels strongly about some special political cause, fantastic, they ought to make their case convincingly. But the idea of castigating others for not putting in the time or enthusiasm to share their superior moral clarity is exhausting.

In other words, "you don’t have time or inclination to obsess about the political origins and implications of every atomic micro-decision in your day because doing so is a tremendously tedious and unproductive burden that frequently yields no meaningful insight or behavior change" is a lot of words to say that you support the status quo.

I think everybody does, on issues that aren't important to them.

There are loads of issues folks are just not engaged with enough to have a qualified opinion (their perspective not mine), which is fine. I view that as living in the status quo but not necessarily evidence of endorsing the status quo.

For instance, do we really expect your average citizen (American in this case) to have a thought out POV on qualified immunity? Policing tactics? Effective tactics to address diversity in the workplace? Herd immunity? Actuarial risk assessment of economic activity during the pandemic? If not are they supporting the status quo?

I think most people just shrug and I don’t blame them. Processing information in the era of the death of expertise has made even having an opinion right now an absolute hellscape.

Also - being apolitical is a political stance, in itself.

Separately, not opposing the status quo is more like accepting it than supporting it, and these are all different.

Your lack of nuance rather proves the point of the great grandparent post.

Exactly. Anybody who earnestly tries to be informed will realize that there are limits to what they know and subjects for which they are not [yet] informed. There needs to be room for people to say "I'm not informed on that issue, so I don't have an opinion."

Their response was "I get paid per signature, will you sign it so I can make more money?"

My response, "That's an even worse reason, are you telling me someone buying this prop its way into the ballot?" He left at this point.

> You could also be apolitical because you find all available options to be unacceptable

Is this apolitical, or is it having a politics that is not well represented? It seems more like the latter to me.

Being apolitical is implying that you think that it's good enough as it is to not care.

I think being apolitical is more about having an objective view and judging opinions based on merit rather than the political spectrum they originated from. Could also mean you're either are against all political views, or have none, but this last one seems less likely to happen in practice. People tend to have an opinion, more or less informed or objective as it may be.

It is completely reasonable for someone to say they don't like the status quo but also are uncertain about whether a policy improves on the status quo due to their limited knowledge. If that isn't being apolitical we may as well strike the word from the dictionary. It is technically a political stance, but it is not forceful enough to be called support of anything.

I should add, this goes in both directions and I see it from both sides of the political spectrum. I consider myself an independent. I try to judge all issues individually and fall into different camps depending on what we're talking about, but political dialogue has become so toxic that I've gotten to the point where I just cast my vote and move on.

Take for example how we got to religious freedom. In the past, if you were the wrong religion, you would be tortured and executed.

In a lot of places, this led to horrendous religious wars where literally millions of people died. In the end, we ended up with freedom of religion as a compromise. The state would no longer compel you to choose a religion.

Of course each religion thought they were right and the others were wrong. But they stopped using the power of the state to compel conversions. They would still proselytize and try to persuade other people to join their faith, but they stopped trying to use the power of the state to compel people. After that, religion became a lot more apolitical.

Sometimes begin apoliticial means you don't think it is worth using the power of the state to change the status quo. You may be against the status quo, and think debate or persuasion is more effective.

In addition, reference to the status quo in the quote is simplistic. A lot of times the status quo is like an armistice line between two warring sides. Many times the status quo includes things you are for and things you are against. Maybe the way the status quo is right now, the benefit of the things you are for, is greater than the burden of the things you are against. If you try to change the status quo, you may end up destabilizing the status quo so much, that when the new equilibrium is reached, you end up losing some of things you were for.

If you think you hold no political opinion this is usually a sign that you can afford to do so. Just like my grandfather who fought in the Wehrmacht and said afterwards that he wasn't convinced, he just went the easy way and didn't question his orders. Was that apolitical? I don't think so — it was more an excuse he told himself to avoid responsibility for what he helped create.

Sorry, but sometimes inaction is political, because it means you are willing to give the controls to the next person who grabs it as long as you don't think you will end up worse off. "I don't care what happens to anyone but me", may sound apolitical, but it really isn't.

Interestingly, both meanings are in the dictionary[1] and the argument that there is just one is either coming from ignorance or bad faith. The GP's "being apolitical just means you support the status quo" definitely looks like a troll. It uses "support" as "endure" (an unusual meaning in such a context) but implies "support" as "promote".

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/support

Back when I studied ethics we were talking about the famous trolly problem. The professor proposed multiple scenarios and after each asked the auditorium who would act and who wouldn't. I can vividly remember three points:

1. Even seemingly clear cut ethical questions weren't clear cut at all. Rarely as much as 80:20 more often 60:40

2. Doing nothing always gets a perk over doing smomething. If you do something you might have done the wrong thing and feel silly for it - if you do nothing it is easier to brush off.

3. When the professor rephrased a scenario in such a way that you had to take basically the same decision, but your role was more direct (instead of pulling a lever to sacrifice one person, you'd have to push them in front of the trolly) nearly nobody would do so.

These differences in perception of indirect and direct effect is what we use to excuse ourselves in cases where our inaction would have saved lives ("I could have easily pulled the lever and saved four lives" VS "I couldn't have pushed that person in front of the trolly, even if it would have saved lives").

Similarily my grandfather's generation would have said: "There was nothing I could have done to stop it anyways" - with the unspoken part beeing "without taking a personal burden". Note that we live in one of the few areas where people were hiding in the mountains to resist the Nazis and these were partely people he personally knew. So he knew one could do something, he just either didn't dare, chose to (conveniently for him) not think about it, or only felt sorry in hindsight.

As another data point: At least where I grew up not helping someone in need (e.g. of first aid) is a felony, as long as the circumstances allowed you to help. Not sure how this is in the US tho

Back to the trolley problem and the thesis of everything being a subject of politics as in politics as "the principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status." and "a particular set of political beliefs or principles".

Is a rich aristocrat on the court of the french king who puts sticks down his throat so he can vomit and eat on while the poor starve at the gates apolitical? This aristocrat is completely minding his own business, might even be a very nice soul who never hurt a fly.

In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical. Even if you exile yourself in the desert that would be a choice that e.g. influences your family. This influence on your surrounding world is what makes things political, because we constantly decide how to interact with the society around us. And it doesn't matter if you hold strong political opinions or are oblivious to everything, what you do is still a part of politics (e.g. by signaling others what is commonly accepted behavior and which your (polical) values are. Do you pull the lever and kill the man or do you let the five other people die? What if they are kids? What if they are old people? What if they are black?

Decisions like these are not arbitrary, they show us fundamental truths of how we think and work in relation to our surroundings, and this is – in my book – political.

And there were all kinds of ignorant kids, grew up in podunk poor towns, but still had an opinion about the civil and the uncivil. They were certainly political. And they volunteered to fight fascism and quite a lot of them died for it. Now, fascism is just name calling. It's not a real thing that exists, or could exist. It's just politics, which is also unimportant and mostly make believe. It's something that his site considers anti-intellectual.

So when people intentionally refuse to think and wilfully run from fundamental truth, the situation is pretty dire. Apolitical is indistinguishable from apathy. Perhaps some part of it's cognitive dissonance, that at least suggests there's an awareness of a conflict that matters enough to ignore because it's more comfortable.

Indeed. The premise of the problem is that you believe that a certain action will cause a certain effect and the actual effects of your actions do not matter as it's an ethical and not mechanical, medical or engineering problem.

>In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical.

It is understood. I just wanted to make you aware that in some other people eyes it's bonkers.

Somebody needs to tell me what voting is supposed to be about, then.

It reminds me of what happens to the numbers if we allow for 2 + 2 = 5 to be true. Effectively 1 will end up being equal to 0, and since every number multiplied by 1 is it self, and every number multiplied by 0 is 0, we end up with all numbers being equal to 0. Effectively rendering them useless.

Politics is about applying collective power from an entity funded by taxpayers. There is nothing political about the decision of whether or not to assist an elderly woman who is lost, or volunteer to coach a youth basketball team, or you know, just do decent things to make the world a better place that doesn't require the application of the collective power of our government institutions.

This is a political statement. I'm not sure how the world "political" drifted away from the meaning of law, rulers, and representation to whatever it means now. Any statement about what the law should be is political. Any statement about how best to change or preserve laws, specifically or generally, is political.

edit: Whether global warming is anthropogenic or not is not political. What we should do about it (or not do about it if we don't think it's real or we don't think it's important) is political.

My wife happens to be vehemently opposed to abortion, and also a woman of color. Yet you associated her with a bigot and climate change denial.

Which exposes similar thinking to what the OP was talking about: Not everything is political, but because my wife thinks differently from you on terminating fetuses due to her having worked in a neonatal ICU with premature babies, she's a bigot? Sounds like you are in a tribe and are lumping my wife into the opposing tribe based on one opinion she holds.

By the way, I find it ironic that your last sentence that condemns view points that differ from your own to be silenced and then mentions flat-earthers. The original flat-earthers gave Galileo the platform they thought he deserved: a life sentence in prison. They were confident and lacked the intellectual humility to believe opposing views should be countered, not suppressed. Ring a bell?

That said, wrong opinions—which I am willing to state exist—do not deserve to be elevated, they do deserve scrutiny if stated.

Banning abortions is a wrong opinion. Perhaps some people have some reason to hold this opinion, and perhaps not all of these people are bigots (although many are). However they are still wrong. And when these wrong options are stated, they do deserve to be scrutinized, and they don’t deserve to be elevated in the general discourse.

However, your statement "banning abortions is a wrong opinion" is itself an opinion. Yet you stated it as if it's a scientific certainty, when in fact it's an opinion you don't share. My wife and I debate it all the time, and it comes down to a prioritization difference in my mind vs her mind. I prioritize the privacy and rights of the pregnant woman over the future existence of the fetus. She views the fetus identically to one that has exited the birth canal and is now a baby. She doesn't think there is a break in the continuum. I disagree with her entirely, but that doesn't make me right and her wrong. It just means that I put a higher priority on the woman's freedom than I do on the right of the fetus to develop into a human. It's amusing to me that when my wife and I argue about this topic, she is focused on the rights of the fetus, and I'm focused on the rights of the woman. We aren't having one argument over a woman's rights, we are having two arguments simultaneously. This is a nuanced view that the current political debate doesn't allow for. Her view was obviously influenced by walking into a hospital and watching parents pray by the side of incubators containing 26 week preemies, and then seeing activists debating whether third-trimester abortions should be banned. I certainly don't blame her for having that opinion when she has to reconcile those two ideas simultaneously. It's a lot easier to hold the opinion that you and I share when we view fetuses clinically rather than in incubators.

However I don’t see the statement “Women have rights to their bodies” as an unresolved political question. I see it as a pretty clear truth, as true as “slavery is wrong and should be illegal”. I have my reasons to believe this is so (which I won’t go into because we are debating whether “everything is political”, not abortion rights). So under my philosophical framework anti-abortion is a wrong opinion to have. And I am certainly not the only person to believe this.

Gallileo isn't relevant in this context at all.

I disagree. Those are both political statements for precisely the same reason. You're just very unlikely to find people with political power or influence disagreeing with the first statement (although that wasn't true in the past!).

So it is a political statement, but not controversial to say in most situations.

If you want to deplatform anti-abortion people, you need to show to them that their understanding of when a cell becomes a human is wrong. The only way to do that is to have widely used technology of growing a baby from any cell artificially, and for that we need to remove the 14 day limit on embryo exexperimentation.

I will wait for an trans/intersex person who is well versed in LGBTQ+ policy to answer.

Hacker News guidelines say you shouldn't do that https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

It is now.[1] "Donald Trump Says The Earth Is Flat" - Flat Earth Society.

[1] https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=69...

Here's one of mine: Fetuses have human DNA, and different DNA from their mothers. Saying "The right of the mother over her own body" doesn't extend to a different individual that is temporarily present within her body.

Here's another: If you take the Bible seriously, you also have to take seriously what the Old Testament prophets said about God's concern for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien.

I personally would feel comfortable sharing either of those with people on the right, but I would be rather more nervous sharing one of them with people on the left.

I don't like diversity initiatives. I've literally worked at companies where the CEO announced we were NOT to hire any more white men. I am not ok with anyone putting a restriction on you because of your gender identity or skin color. Increasingly, woke people are ok with this as long as the restriction is placed on white men. I believe this is because many woke groups mistakenly see things as zero sum games where bringing people down will literally lift others up. I would not be willing to speak out about this since it would label me a bigot and a racist, even though my wife and kids aren't white.

- Not all problems require more/bigger Government, and sometimes makes the problems worse.

- I am pro 2nd amendment and don't think most gun laws are actually legal.

- Actual Socialism is bad, even immoral imo but I do support socialized healthcare and a few other things (see below)

- Capitalism is pretty great most of the time, except when it comes to externalities, transactions under duress (like healthcare often is) and tragedy of the commons scenarios.

- Democrats have been swayed by extreme leftists lately and they are trying to use any tragedy to push a socialist addenda.

Probably many more. If there was a pro capitalism party that supported moderate government intervention (when needed) and stood up for all of our constitutional rights, I would jump ship in a second.

Also I am sure there is a perception bubble effect but on pretty mainstream sites like reddit I regularly see posts and comments blaming all of societies ills on Capitalism that are highly up-voted.

    Democrats have been swayed by extreme leftists

While I'm kidding about the op, I see this all the time on my feed. Just today, I saw someone in my Facebook feed just today demand that everyone unfriend person X right away because they're a Trump supporter, and he would go through the list of mutual friends and unfriend everyone who didn't. I'm far from a Trump supporter, but I find this behavior childish.

Sharing the "concern for the disadvantaged" with a rightist I would expect to not result in a verbal confrontation, unless they were extreme right.

I'm genuinely curious what the HN crowd is going to regard as "controversial opinions" that will get you in trouble.

it could be you are talking about the one that starts here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867618

dang gets around to taking notice right about here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23868001

dang says: "We've rate limited your account again for perpetuating flamewars on this site."

you said: "I've been explicitly told by the HN moderators that my opinions on policing - which are well within the American mainstream and probably a touch left of center - are so controversial they constitute flamebait and I shouldn't discuss them here."

that does not to me sound at all like a good-faith representation of what dang said.

Democrat officials in multiple states encouraged people to attend large gatherings in Asian neighborhoods to "fight racism" when the pandemic was getting started. So it goes far beyond being "rude to some people". Both sides have made huge mistakes, and it appears that the foreign press is giving one side a pass.

This is going to change rapidly over the coming days, as the virus is rapidly growing the south.

According to JHU, for confirmed cases (not deaths, as in your comment): AZ (#3), FL (#5), MS (#8), AL (#9), SC (#10). (50/50) In approx. another week, GA (currently #11) will probably also become #10.

I've been deriving this data from the JHU data (which is on GitHub) myself for a while now: https://imgur.com/a/RpjEm9Z ; the full chart is remarkably busy, and not that great. I mean to try to clean it up into something more usable, but I've been swamped with my day job all week.

I expect deaths will generally follow in the coming weeks, regrettably. There might be some variance, of course, between states in deaths-per-captia, and that is a graph I've been meaning to make (since that might show something interesting about which states are better dealing with infections), especially after Chris Wallace's interview with Trump, and the remarks the President made there.

Apparently LA (#1) has a Democrat. Huh.

The problem isn't giving both sides the chance to speak, it's pretending that the ideas are equal and giving them equal weight. For example, wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing as ideas for fighting the pandemic are not similar to drinking bleach and bathing in UV light. Yet both ideas get equal coverage and equal weight, as if they are both valid methods of dealing with the pandemic. This is why we cannot discuss politics and why Americans have to hide their views. People who can think will not put up with the stupidity of the idiotic ideas people who can't think put forward. How can you have a conversation with an idiot who thinks it's a good idea to drink bleach? Or one who thinks corona is spread by 5G towers. There is nothing to talk about. And the idiot cannot converse back either. They are likely unable to actually understand the situation so any evidence provided goes above their head.

Eventually, the idiots move to one side, the rest move to another, and it becomes an intractable problem. That's what we're seeing now in America. The institutions that are led by idiots have failed horribly, often on purpose: White House, Senate, CDC, FDA, Florida, Texas, Arizona, etc. But of course, this is all taboo to discuss in the first place. Politics are taboo in America. That's why no one talks about any issues and why we truly are a "shithole country," as the president called it.

It's a very difficult bind, because the media has fully bought in.

I feel identical, but apparently mirrored politically to you. So in the spirit of charity, how do you feel the R side has gotten more conservative? I don't even need sources, just your perspective.

Since Reagan, the Republican Party has moved very far to the right, focused primarily on lowering taxes for the rich, undermining the social programs they used to support, creative gerrymandering, and suppressing votes they don't like (often black votes).

Under Reagan there was still some sanity and reason behind it and especially under George HW Bush, but since Newt Gingrich, the party seems to have abandoned all common sense, embraced lies to justify war under Bush jr, and with Trump, it's just all lies for the sake of lies, with every remaining principle they used to have thrown out of the window, with the lone exception of power for its own sake, and hurting people they disagree with.

McCain and Romney seem(ed) to be the last of the old guard that still care (somewhat?) about basic honesty.

Though I guess the move towards the current insanity has nothing to do with anything resembling conservatism or "right" anymore. But the party has definitely changed beyond recognition. And I do think it started with Nixon's Southern Strategy, which was already about sacrificing principles for power. The first step on a very long slide down.

I'm sorry - once in a while bad things happen and a choice must be made.

Centrists agree that choices need to be made. Centrists think that some of those choices should go in one direction, some in the other, and most in a direction not presented by either side. Centrists believe in logic, discourse, and evidence to get to choices, over ideology. Centrists believe in looking for solutions which work for everyone when possible. Etc.

Everyone hates centrists, since if you disagree on charters OR abortion OR charters OR race OR police OR .... with someone on the left or on the right, they think you're a horrible person. You'll always disagree on at least one axis.

Charter schools: They work great with proper checks-and-balances. They should be not-for-profits, follow extensive transparency laws, have salary caps, and strong civil rights protections. They should compete with public schools without restrictions beyond that. If public schools go under because of better competitors, more power to them!

Medicine: Works great pure free market. Works great purely nationalized. What we don't want is a complex network of regulations from lobbyists combined with mandatory insurance (whether by government regulation or by practicality). Both the far-right and the far-left solutions would work great! We've landed in a no-man's land in between.

Gun control: It's a reasonable policy, but rule-of-law should prevail. We've got a Constitution for a reason, and we should follow it, even if it feels unreasonable. If we disagree, we should amend it.

Race: The left is correct about most of the problems, and bonkers about most of the solutions. We need to have an open national discourse about changes, and to do that, we need free speech and to get rid of cancel culture. The left's oppression of free speech contributes to the systemic oppression they're trying to eliminate.

... and so on.

You don't need to agree with the above, but they're strong, principled stances, agreeing with neither side.

I don't think the far-right solution ever worked great. ACA is far from perfect, but it is saving lives. But the problem with US health insurance goes far deeper than merely how you pay for it and who gets access to it; the entire system is run in a very non-transparent way in order to maximise profits. The goal of the current system is still profit, not healing people, and that's where it goes wrong.

It's good that you mention mandatory insurance by practicality, because that's really the case: only very rich people can pay medical costs out of pocket; to most people, medical costs are a life or death issue, so it can never be a truly free market. A healthy-in-between system would be private insurance in a strongly regulated system; this works in a lot of countries. It's the lawless free-for-all where it's fine to screw or misinform patients for profit, that doesn't work.

My primary "centrist" issue is probably abortion: in the US the discussion seems to be all-or-nothing: either all abortion is legal or all abortion is banned, no matter what. A sensible compromise would be to allow early term abortions (first trimester miscarriages are extremely common, the embryo is still in an early stage of development), while strongly regulating late term abortions (they're already rare, and are only necessary for extreme medical problems). Abortion as an alternative to contraception can be made unnecessary through better sex ed and better access to contraceptives.

I don't think you'd find very many people willing to agree those positions are centrist.

Which is fine. Your positions are your positions, and obviously you hold them because you think them to be reasonable. But "centrist?" I don't think so.

In general I think there's a tendency for politically engaged people to put "views I disagree with" in the "other" bin, and everyone defines "extreme" and "center" to reflect their particular idea of what the sane, morally correct opinion is. There were plenty of people on the left who seemed to think Warren (for example) was a centrist neoliberal sellout.

What's amazing about it is you can voice disagreement in just one place, and you're either a liberal snowflake or a Trump-supporting racist. It doesn't seem to matter which place you disagree, or whether your disagreement falls on the other side of the political spectrum.

Pro-charter schools, free market medicine, 2nd amendment over all, free speech and "cancel culture" as prime issues of race -- these are generally in line with conservative positions, and very, very far from liberal positions.

And again, as I said, that's fine! I'm not disagreeing with the positions, I'm just saying that claiming to be "centrist' doesn't actually make you centrist.

Most people aren't far-right nor far-left. Most people, knowingly or unknowingly, adopt positions from each side. Holding both right-wing and left-wing views doesn't make one centrist, it makes one independent, and I think most people are in this category.

* Charter schools: Politicians create charter school setups that don't have proper checks and balances and tend to completely shirk their responsibility to public schools in the process. Your statement isn't some fringe idea. It's just not why charter schools are pushed. If you take a look at what happens with charter schools you'd see why people get divided on them. We aren't presented with a rational system. We're presented with a system that gets hijacked to push religious schools and/or defund public schools without.

* Medicine: "Works great pure free market." - Citation Needed. No one will give us your far left solution.

* Gun control: In case you haven't noticed, we aren't allowed to question it. We aren't even allowed to study it. This game is rigged.

* Race: How does cancel culture play into this? I'm not allowed to find a different Applebees if the manager is a racist? "The left's oppression of free speech" - do tell.

Such systems are surprisingly efficient and often seem to work better than the lawyer- and lobbyist-designed mess of American healthcare.

In my opinion, trying to be “centrist” is more of an aesthetic choice than actually related to ideology.

What I will give you is that any community where honest discussion of actual, specific issues is impossible is toxic... but in practice I see that critique most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs.

2) Each of those is an essay or two to justify. Of course they're not specific. This isn't a political essay. I'm giving examples -- enough to understand the gist, not the nuance.

3) In modern America, all of these views piss everyone off -- left AND right. If you articulate most of them, you'll get fired WHOEVER your boss is AND uninvited to the family dinner.

That this "critique [is] most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs" is precisely because everyone else is afraid to speak. In a functioning civic society, we'd have many opinions like the ones above, and we'd all discuss them and work towards the best solutions. I've found that the best solution to "dishonest provocateurs" is still to assume the best intentions until shown otherwise.

2. Not sure what your point is here - you originally pointed out why either right or left solutions would be good, but the compromise is bad.

3. I don’t think that’s true - believe it or not it is still possible to discuss actual issues. I certainly do, with people who disagree with me.

So... there are a few positions on which you might be a “moderate”, but I don’t see any argument actually presented for why centrist solutions are preferable to those backed up by an actual ideological goal.

Your definition seems to be "split the left-and-right down the middle." That's not the one I've heard or used.

That's okay; words are used differently in different places, but I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing as much as initial posts suggested. Most people I know who consider themselves "centrists" hold a mixture of left-wing and right-wing views. They don't just find the median opinions.

I think what you call "centrist," where I live would be called a "moderate."

People over-estimate the degree to which our political parties represent an inherently consistent set of policy ideas. For example, social liberalism and being pro-immigration are intertwined in the US. But the socially liberal women prime ministers of Denmark and New Zealand are also anti-immigration. About 1 in 6 Democrats believe abortion should nearly always be illegal. African Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, have a similar split to Republicans when it comes to same-sex marriage and whether belief in God is a necessary prerequisite to morality.

The political parties are a compromise amongst groups of people with heterodox views. They’re not something that ideologically must be bundled together.

In terms of larger ideology, a schism is brewing between social conservatives, nationalists, and pro-business conservatives, with Trumpism versus anti-Trumpism cutting across all those groups. (As you recall, while Republicans supported him, most wanted someone else in the primaries initially.) The differences are less extreme than in the Democratic Party—where you have Marxists and 2/3 of Wall Street under the same tent—but they divisions are growing.

How do you think a gay man is able to talk at RNC and them having "gay cure" support in their platform? Because when you put all of the different positions in one document - they tend to contradict the majority's views. (Outright ban on abortion is supported only by a third of republicans! SSM ban is also supported by a third.)

Independents are more liberal on the topic of abortion than democrats...

(I'm not trying to be overly snarky here.)

I saw a remarkable illustration of this at a conservative event where a panel was discussing Bostock before the case was decided. The room was evenly divided, but with very strong opinions on both sides. There is a seed of a real conflict there. Textualism isn’t a robust foundation for the kind of broad structural changes social conservatives want. You need the conservative counterparts to liberal judges, who seek to vindicate broader principles gleaned from the law (except here to conservative ends).

This is inhuman. I cannot always be on - I am not a machine. I cannot be useful to anyone when I am torn into anxious shreds by knowing about everything that is wrong in the world all at once. Our brains were built for knowing what's "bad" on a local level - not on a global, ~7.8 billion people level. It is inhuman for you to insist that I jump at the bit every time "bad things happen."

I can only choose to pick certain hills which are most important to me, and I will die on them. You choose your things - you are welcome to die on them, too. Do not shame people for trying to survive this chaos that is bad enough with the world's population's problems, and amplified through social network's outrage machines that benefit from any (but especially psychologically traumatic) "engagement."

Try it out. Stops a troll cold.

But of course this debate has been going on a long time. And maybe yours are the more recent words echoing a past hero's opinion.

In the words of MLK:

"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection...."

I suppose it depends on whether you see current ills of society as at the level of segregation and outright violence against peoples (and need street-level action and peaceful revolution immediately), or more subtle things that affect everyone, like rich-vs-poor class differences growing (and are things to be solved through our deliberative political process).

But back to the point, the problem with shouting down anyone who doesn't agree with you and/or labeling people who are not 100% on board with you as the hidden "enemy", is that you will later find out you weren't winning as much as you thought based on the silence. And some of that silent segment will find they can only express themselves when standing alone, safe in the voting booth, and you get a result like we have had for the last couple years. Worse, those that could've joined your side are put off by the aggression and withhold their vote for you.

Yeah people don't like facing their complicity with the horror of the world, especially since it's not at all obvious how to fix it. It can feel like (and can actually be) pointless self-flagellation.

But it's not incorrect.

Random example: I should be able to argue for second amendment rights with out buying into isolationist trade policies. The way things are right now the two come bundled together and legislative votes are based on partisanship, not policy.

It's about making changes based on rationality rather than emotion and ideology.

I will say I also don't care for the daily discourse and politicization of everything.

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

https://youtu.be/KrefKCaV8m4

(I understand the postmodern thrust here, and I actually to some degree agree with it, but at the limit this completely obliterates any pretense of objectivity - even within science.)

I've never ruined anyone

Those are the very kind of toxic comments we need to get away from