Being careful with my language should not be indicative of believing that it is a left-right issue. Being careful of my language should be indicative that I believe people will interpret it as a left-right position and I'm not here to discuss politics.

You're talking about how society should be run and how the state should respond to issues within its purview. That's inherently political.

I would say that being careful with one's language to avoid offense is reasonable, if the hypothetical other party's propensity for taking offense is reasonable. Incense at the specter of a political discussion is not reasonable.

Discussions on HN are more interesting when the partisan temperature is turned down.

A political discussion need not be divisive. Again, it's not good that so many have been convinced that it must be.

Yeah this is more on the other axis. Authoritarianism doesn’t care about left or right.

This is something I've noticed. Often authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian views are mapped to left-right views. This makes conversation particularly confusing at times. I tend to notice when fairly central left-right anti-authoritarians speak they get accused of being left or right (whichever is opposite of the position the person they are responding to). I'm unsure how to have these types of discussions without them becoming left-right issues.

You should check out the political compass [0]. It's an organization but I'm more interested in the compass itself [1], which has left and right on the X axis and authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism on the Y axis. It seems to succinctly describe one's political ideology, although not to a granular detail. There is also the issue of multi-faceted extremism, where one takes views on different issues where when taken as a whole, the overall political philosophy does not fit into any one category. An example is being pro-gun-rights but left-leaning. PG wrote about this [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Po...

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

I recently stumbled upon Altemeyer and found his recent thoughts fascinating. He tries to approach the subject separately from left/right. The PDF is free.

https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/

That’s likely to a large extent a product of the US’s two party system. In multiparty democracies, you’ll usually get a selection of right-wing parties, from libertarian/ hyper capitalist types to moderate conservative parties (think Merkel’s CDU) to hard right to fascists. In the US, to some extent they’re packed uncomfortably into one party (though some of the CDUish tendency ends up in the other party), and the authoritarian end of the spectrum is assertive and noisy and tends to grab the narrative.

That and left or right doesn’t care about Authoritarianism when they think the Authorities are on their side.

Who is making it a left-right issue in this thread?

I think if you check now you'll see it. I was trying to keep the temperature low to reduce the instances of this.