Si vis pacem para bellum, and there will be war. I honestly am unable to think of a scenario that will prevent a collapse of at least the US democracy, if not the rest of the world with it (because let's face it, the US picked up the tab to ensure the freedom of democracies while us Europeans stood aside). The only thing capable of stopping the spiral towards death is if the Democrats win a solid majority in November... but that is completely unrealistic.
I used to be a pro-American when I was a child blinded by US propaganda and television. Americans are heroes are what I always thought.!
Then the Iraq, Afghanistan wars, the coups in Libya and the Syrian War - encouraged via Obama's so-called 'moderate rapist rebels' completely changed my mind. What CNN said was completely different from what my Libyan and Syrian colleagues said. So Much Lying. It was around that time I did extensive reading of American history and realised I was a moron.
> US picked up the tab to ensure the freedom of democracies while us Europeans stood aside
Cite! The US does anything it wants to keep corporate power corporate. We topple lots of democracies. US is squarely imperialist.
See my comment about Smedley Butler from earlier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31469671
Sure, the US was somewhat imperialist a century ago, but that's long gone.
I have less than zero sympathy.
I mean, specifically there has been no national law mandating Covid vaccine use. There were some restrictions applied differently to vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
2. https://law.stanford.edu/2022/01/20/a-look-at-the-supreme-co....
A human right for bodily autonomy would include the right to decide what and what not to wear on their own bodies.
it's a slippery slope and out of scope of what government should be regulating if one views bodily autonomy as important.
There are a number of technical reasons why the mRNA vaccines should be safer than existing vaccines. In any case, there were non mRNA alternatives. I believe that most life-scientists are just curious and trying to do good work. I don't really trust corporate big (whatever), but pharma in this case. I do trust the individual scientists I know to be caring and empathetic people and to do their best to save lives.
This is the exact argument the conservatives have against abortion.
Non-Contagious Things that that kill people = bodily autonomy.
Sounds arbitrary.
My body my choice right?
It only seems arbitrary to me if I look at it from a narcissistic perspective.
Killing a baby is an effect on someone around(technically inside) a person.
So while it's not contagious, the effect of killing someone is the same.
And therefore no bodily autonomy should be allowed in this case.
It's the exact same logic used for covid restrictions.
You don't have bodily autonomy in cases where you can hurt others.
That said, the fundamental disagreement w.r.t abortion is whether or when a fetus is a person with the same legal protections as a born child, and to what extent to weigh this question, or these potential rights against the rights of the mother.
Abortion necessarily involves the killing of an organism. Anyone arguing otherwise is not basing their argument in reality. However, many commonly accepted and legal actions almost inevitably involve the killing of organisms: walking, driving, excavation, building. Our legal systems typically even allows for the killing of complex, almost-surely sentient creatures for food, and other purposes. This extends as far as the killing of humans under certain very limited circumstances. The essential disagreement on abortion is whether and when the killing that is an inescapable part of abortion is permissible, justified, lawful, and generally not murder.
The bill has however an explicit exception for abortions, saying that regardless if a fetuses are a person, it doesn't mean abortions should be illegal.
fetuses aren't citizens but they are considered people... in some states.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to ask you about this multiple times already. We ban accounts that keep doing it, so please don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31873367
Well know if I'm right in November.
I live in europe and US dems are pretty much in line with our right leaning parties. Except for a handful of extremes.
The US republicans are very unique to US in that their opinions are very close knitted to US specific laws. So I cant really think of a similar party anywhere else.
But yea. A swedish left and US dems are very very far from achother politically.
Democrats are a right party with authoritarian tendencies. Not left at all.
Maybe your views have been distorted by right wing news calling Biden “far left” which is an objective falsehood.
I’ve seen over half the nations on earth and I stand behind the OP assessment of the US Dem party as center right. Do investigate a bit before knee jerk responding from a position of falsehood
The primary constituency of both parties is corporate America, whom they rely on for donations.
As far as I understand it, the fundamental and (seemingly) globally agreed upon divide is that Far Left = The State is in [presumably benevolent] control, and Far Right = The State is in [presumably malicious] control, while regular Left = The State knows what's best for The People (because it is derived from pure democracy) while regular Right = The People know what's best for themselves (and choose representatives for situations where multiple individuals are involved).
How far off am I, from a global perspective?
All of those are things that even the far right in Europe wouldn't dare suggest, yet the leftmost party in the US stands behind them, or is at least willing to accept them.
Voter ID is a non controversial issue in many countries. In the US I've seen arguments against it from both sides. Disparate impact concerns from the left, privacy and freedom from the feds on the right.
The Left does not criticize voter ID per se, the Left criticizes that many people are effectively locked out from voting because obtaining ID cards can be an utter pain in the ass.
I think this view of right/left as an axis of government optimizing for freedom/control is only very prevalent in particularly right-wing commonwealth discourse.
The law and construction of social systems in the common-law English tradition stem from a position that one can do anything unless barred by law, including in situations where it hurts others. The law of equity, largely derived from religious canon law, existed as a separate system layered upon the common law court system of 'hard rules' to fix situations wherein the application of common-law would lead to morally suspect outcomes. The situation in civilian countries, by contrast, generally define a sphere of acceptable behavior which explicitly excludes abusive and intentionally harmful behavior - the restrictions on behavior are baked in. Civilian-derived systems are far more common than those from the commonwealth, and accordingly the types of discussions had in each are very different on this point.
The result is it's very rare to conceive of left and right in terms of freedom, because most other nations derive from systems in which freedom is already viewed as one element to be balanced against other considerations rather than the unmitigated chief virtue upon which all analysis is founded.
Even in the commonwealth, progressive discourse is not driven in terms of de-jure freedoms, it's driven by de-facto freedoms, largely economic and social freedoms. The government only needs to be restrained when it restricts social rights or maintain economic systems that strip dignity from individuals. Generally, however, these aren't discussed in terms of the degree of freedoms afforded, but rather in terms of rights and equality before the law.
What?
I lived in America for over a decade before I could say that I begun to understand it. I have seen people like you who visit my home country and claim to understand it. All they do is project their faulty models onto our values and culture.
I literally spent most of my rhetorical time abroad trying to convince folks that there was any difference at all between our two main parties.
You can scoff at me, but you will encounter this conclusion over and over again. The world sees our two parties as beholden to corporate interests, as are centrist parties all over the globe. Money apparently makes the world go around
You sound like you didn't even go outside Europe.
There are two scales, nationalism-globalism, and capitalism-intervention.
Most countries have very little difference between their capitalism-intervention side, because there's only one country where someone who supports free markets and capitalism could move to, this results in the right wing of all the countries becoming purely nationalist supporting govt intervention facing globalist left wing supporting their kind of govt intervention.
For example my dad in my home country has very little opinion on capitalism/intervention scale. But on the nationalism/globalism scale he has a strong opinion. If I were to describe the economic policies of the Democratic party, he wouldn't truly form an opinion, but the moment I will start describing the social policies he would immediately understand it and call it 'the leftist party'.
From the perspective of a country that is to the left of the Democrats, yes, they appear centre-right.
I'm not sure you've can offer a truly global perspective from which to accurately determine whether the US Gov is left or right leaning, but if I had to predict such an answer I'd say it would tip right.
Edit: okay, did some hunting and found this: https://archive.ph/PjNEF
Check the bubble chart. The Dems are in fact globally left-leaning, according to the Manifesto Project described in the article. But check the relative positions from e.g. a British perspective (since that happens to be shown in the chart). The Dems are to the right of the UK's left-wing Labour Party, while the Republicans are right of the right-wing Conservatives. The overall British perspective of the US would be of a right-leaning country.
I've not looked at other perspectives since I'm in mobile and I've not going to deep-dive the Manifesto Project just now. But I wonder which are the nations which have an "overall" perspective of the US as left-leaning?
Meanwhile, the US reaches as far right as the EU does, but in the other direction, it barely reaches the middle of the EU (i.e. total) spectrum.
So it's not that Democrats are adjacent to the far right. It's just that they're more right wing than left wing. They're obviously still much closer to the centre-left than they are to the far-right, but they are also further from the left extreme than they are from the right extreme
The most sensible minimal extension (to 2d) that I know of is to distinguish between how much you value personal freedom on one axis and economic freedom on the other. That still leaves out a lot, but is the best indicator of which side you'll likely to end up on regarding most political contentions, given the simplicity of the model.
There are actually two popular models of that kind, the Nolan Chart (example quiz [1], your spectrum is the vertical axis) and the Political Compass (example quiz [2], your spectrum is the secondary diagonal).
Also, btw, the fascist movement recruited much of it's ideological and political concepts and initial core activist base from syndicalist/corporatist socialist circles and was strongly anti-capitalist/pro-socialist and anti-conservative. Benito Mussolini was for a time chief editor of the Italian Socialist Party's newspaper "Avanti!" and member of the party's National Directorate.
In Europe there is a plethora of parties all throughout the political spectrum.