The Guardian seems to be doing well on HN recently. For such a one-sided political publication, with no technical merit, that seems odd.
They certainly are left-aligned: they are famous (and notorious) for it. The "Guardian-reading lentil-munching sandal-wearing lefty" is a popular caricature, I've even seen people criticised during debates for being a "good Guardian-reader" (i.e. a part-time socialist).
But they do publish articles on relevant topics, and are prepared to stick their collective neck out for important stories like the Snowden case. They are probably a few notches above the open sewer which characterises much of the rest of the UK press, and it's clear that many people on HN find them relevant, if not always correct.
I find some of these caricatures interesting. Like how many leftists are vegans or vegetarians, and how many libertarians are meat-lovers. You would perhaps think that diet should have no correlation with political opinions, but it certainly seems to have.
Or take clothing. Among leftists, there seems to be more people wearing stuff like sandals, colorful clothing, dreadlocks, piercings etc. than among right-wingers or libertarians. When I see pictures of libertarians or right-wingers, they often seem to be wearing conformist looking clothes, such as suits. Is there a reason for this?
In order to do well economically, you probably need to be careful not to offend other people, so you cannot express yourself too much. People who express themselves more (wear what they want to, rather than what is inoffensive), are probably more likely to become economic losers. And if you're an economic loser, I guess left-wing politics (tax the rich!) is appealing.
A lot of modernist architects have espoused socialist views, but someone like Mies van der Rohe also built some work for the Nazi regime. The modernist architect Philip Johnson was a notorious Nazi sympathizer.
There's an article here that starts to unpick the architecture/politics relationship in relation to one architect's work: http://archinect.com/features/article/4618/peter-eisenman-li...
Since architecture requires significant wealth and organization, it's rarely, if ever, something that comes out of anarchism. So statism or philanthropy is often behind it.
On the other hand, preserving old traditional buildings tends to be a leftist cause, while wanting to bulldoze them and replace them with new modern buildings tends to be a right-wing cause.
One axis is economic, the other social, with the traditional left-right divide being mapped to the social axis.
Here is the tricky bit, that once you start mapping liberal and conservative on the economic axis things tend to reverse compared to the social one.
So quite often social conservatives end up in the economic "liberal" (or laissez-faire) end.
That is, in itself, an appalling caricature, albeit some left-wingers might be in that category. It's like saying all libertarians/right-wingers are Gordon Gecko "greed is good", devil-take-the-hindmost callous money-grubbers.
Isn't simply a case of advertising that you are part of a particular social grouping (or at least aspire to it) by conforming to the styles used by that group?
NB My own favourite example being spotting genuinely posh people by the colour and state of their cords trousers... (is it an ex-army thing?).
I'd probably describe it as economically Liberal (in the non-American sense), pro-safety net/NHS, and pro-legal enforcement of civility. Basically the non-angry upper-middle class. Anti-petty bourgeoisie. Fabian.
Unfortunately Yes. I've been thinking about a way to take multiple articles on the same subject from different sources and separate facts from opinions and narratives in an automated way. I wonder if such an app already exists. By comparing multiple sources from different political sides / locations , it should be possible to eliminate bias (unless all sources are biased the same way).