You've read right past everything the parent comment said and wrote a generic comment demonizing the "MAGA crowd". This is not what a dialogue looks like and until people start controlling their fanaticism - especially the American left - the USA will make no progress on healing the divisions that have been building up for decades.

Lets flip back to the parent message : > People on the left think that anyone on the right is a lunatic, and everyone on the right thinks the same thing about the left.

You thinking you’re right is ingrained in your belief system, and maybe reinforced by certain signals you pick up.

I think an exercise is to start walking or thinking a mile in the shoes of the opposite camp, can make a lot of difference.

A step further is to actually start a dialogue with someone from the opposite camp where you both actively try to see it from the others perspective.

I can't help but think that the recent militant/aggressive behavior of left-wing activists and the left-wing establishment and mainstream media almost completely ignoring the concerns of their citizens around immigration and globalization pushes a lot of them to the right, even if they don't necessarily agree with the other policies of those parties. This is interestingly enough happening both in the US and Western Europe.

That's why I think that the left digging in is a losing strategy. The more radical they appear the more people they'll push in the other direction. Currently that's 50-50 in the US and the Democrats didn't seem to learn much from the past 4 years. Neither have a lot of the people paining Trump as a monster and making him as the scapegoat for everything that's going wrong in the US (and the world).

> That's why I think that the left digging in is a losing strategy.

I think the meta is that lacking a scientific approach, we have to have some things we are not willing to compromise on. Yes, having almost seventy million people vote for 45 is alarming but we don't have any option but to dig in because it is clear that the right is not digging in. They are stuck in a perpetual tracter control beam right as to speak.

I know what the counter argument will likely be: you have to be in power to be able to do anything at all but this appeal to moderation is what I'd argue has allowed the right to go to the extreme right: the overton window.

The whole premise of "both sides" is flawed here. Of course, it is silly to think 45 is a monster and things will be good once he is no longer in the picture. However, it is just as silly to think that just because seventy million people voted a certain way that their grievances are legitimate. They are not. And as long as we coddle them with "both sides", we can't begin the work we need to do to to undo all the lunacy of the last four years.

The will of the majority is incredibly overrated. Just because a large group of people believes something does not make it true. Often, you need to teach people and help them understand. We have to understand that we can't default to a middle ground approach because there is no end to this spectrum: the right continues on its march right and if we continue reaching for the middle we will be where they were n - 1 time ago.

I can get behind one thing though: we have to be grateful to the 45 administration because he has exposed some serious systemic flaws that we must address if we are to avoid a repeat of the last four years.

Edit: spelling

This is how democracy works. If you want these 70 million votes, you better address the problem they complain about. In 2016, many, many of these votes (Those in MI for example), did not have a problem with the progressive advances. But they would have liked to see that their problems are also on Hillary's mind. They didn't, and she lost.

First of all, the mainstream media in the US is center-right, not left-wing in any shape, except for a few cultural issues. If you want to see left-leaning media, look at The Jacobin or Democracy Now.

The US is also not 50-50 - the democrats have won the popular vote by a slight or decent margin in the last 4 elections, and 8 out of the 9 most recent ones (the only exception was Bush 2004). That the US electoral system is so bad that this didn't matter twice in the last 20 years is another discussion.

I was with your comment until this:

> Neither have a lot of the people paining Trump as a monster and making him as the scapegoat for everything that's going wrong in the US (and the world).

These responsibility and reality denying assertions fuel division. Obviously Trump isn't responsible for everything wrong in the world. But he is certainly responsible for some. Trump hamstrung the federal public health response, gave speeches encouraging everyone to be irresponsible, pushed snake oil cures, stole PPE from states, sucked all the air out of the room for intelligent discourse, and seemed to generally do anything he could to make Covid worse (likely due to denial and disrespect of experts). If the office of the President had been vacant for the past year, we would be in better shape pandemic wise.

Trump was elected for very valid concerns, as I've been trying to tell my blue friends since 2016. Where he went after that was very destructive (and no, not in the "creative destruction" sense). This election should have been a landslide, but for a massive propaganda push discrediting outgroup media as "fake news". Propaganda driven groupthink is the real dynamic of our division, and until people start becoming immune to falsely authoritative sources, it's only going to get worse.

>This is not what a dialogue looks like

Yes it is. You just don't like it.

The post you're replying to lays out, from their perspective, a list of actions that they believe are self-evidently unjustifiable.

Do you agree with that assessment? Do you believe there's justification to be had? I think most of the real arguments in favor of them have been left unsaid, because they fundamentally contradict a number of modern western paradigms regarding inherent rights and human dignity. But that's not really fatal to the philosophic position; maybe those paradigms are false.

What I like does not define what a dialogue is.

Dialogue means engaging with the opposite party. No engagement, no dialogue. Enumerating a bunch of random things in reply to anything is not dialogue.

The comment is talking about how the gp has their priorities wrong. Separation policy, etc are actual problems, and more important than “my neighbors don’t love this country like I do: they don’t admit to being inspired by its founding myths, they don’t like to sing the anthem or say the pledge of allegiance”. Come on, in a country with a reputation for rough, independent individuals, that’s your top grievance? So the comment has a clear point, and it relates to what the gp stated. That’s a dialogue. You’re the one refusing to further engage with the counterpoint, which is how the dialogue was disrupted.

> This is not what a dialogue looks like and until people start controlling their fanaticism - especially the American left - the USA will make no progress on healing the divisions that have been building up for decades.

Ah the ol’ open dialog two step—the right wins? Time for the left to open up dialog with the right. The left wins? Time for the left to open up dialog with the right. The left is a broad coalition, the right is not. Maybe it’s the right’s turn to finally try opening up some dialog.

> forced sterilization

Every time this is brought up, and the usual analogies to Nazi Germany are made, people get uncomfortable when it's pointed out that the doctor at the center of this is named Mahendra Amin, that he's an immigrant himself, that he has a history of medicaid fraud (which is likely what this was; more fraud), and is (from his name and photos) obviously non-white:

> https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-10-22/women-alle...

But "Nazi doc sterilizes immigrant women of color" clearly has better optics.

In some catholic countries, abortion was a long "taboo" topic, and to have aborted - was similar in status to a sex-worker. So there were "angel" makers, woman who aborted without a doctors license. It was dangerous- it was shunned, and it was absolutely necessary, because the normal sex-drive, with no money available for contraceptives - this was the only way out of "constant" reproduction, work-overload and deeper poverty.

If caught in the act of aborting, the very same woman, often with several children already, in fear of getting shunned and ostracized, would throw the "witch" doctor to the wulfes. And this is what this sounds like.

Requesting a black-market Vasectomy and then denying it when the light of public opinion falls on it. Such things happen in totalitarian states, like china, but not in democracy with independent courts like the us.

Does it matter what the ethnicity the doctor was, rather than the agency and government that allowed it?

What a weird aspect of the horrific violation of human rights to focus on.

I can see why people might jump right to the Nazis there, but it’s important to know that the Nazis took their cue on forced sterilization from the eugenics movement in the USA. At one point, some 30 states had laws allowing for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_State...

Because of course all non whites are basically the same. He's a Gujarati doctor; his politics are going to be well to the right, like any self-respecting prosperous Indian professional.

> are absolutely fine with things like separating kids from their parents

This is a lie propagated by people that don't understand what happens on the southern border: kids are temporarily separated from the adults smuggling them into the country because we don't know if those adults are their parents.

This is what Trump was referring to with the "coyote" comment during the last presidential debate. The number of people on Twitter thinking he meant the animal was a massive facepalm that just revealed how ignorant they are. "Coyote" in this context means "human trafficker".

Please don't do political flamewar on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023556.

>forced sterilization

I don't think it's accurate to say Trump supporters were OK with this. We had headlines about that happening in Georgia earlier this year. There are many issues at play here, but this seems to be a result of a horrible deranged doctor rather than some kind of forced sterilization program. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-hysterectomy-doctor-wasnt-...