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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

The irony is that the conservatives are the ones that are supposed to be close-minded here.

EDIT: To stave off the flood of downvotes: Like pg, I grew up in a midwestern conservative town, and I now live in SV. Conservatives are people, too, and it's not the "end of the world" to live among people with other political and religious views. The media does a bad job here by portraying only a caricature of them here (much like the unfairly over-represented "radicals" in other followings), and I think that the bias here in SV against conservatives can even be considered a form of classism.

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No downvote here, but the appeal with "the media" is unnecessary. The caricature bares some semblance to reality and as someone who's spent a large amount of my life in balanced enclaves of conservative states, not wholly unwarranted.

All that said, avoiding an entire state because of the perception or political demo breakdown of said state is a mistake. No matter what state in the U.S. you pick, you will find like-minded people, opportunity and physical beauty. And if you find otherwise, you should feel empowered to change it.

I suspect the tech diaspora will continue, because concentrating people and other resources in one or two areas drives local inflation.

> All that said, avoiding an entire state because of the perception or political demo breakdown of said state is a mistake.

It's avoiding states because of their laws, which is a result of the political demographics. It's not the demographics themselves. Those laws have very real consequences for the people living in those states, and I would not want to be one of those people.

I used to be open-minded. But, that changed drastically, recently.

Out of curiousity, over the last couple of years I infiltrated some conservative groups near me. I truly wanted to understand the core views and fundamental philosophy. I came at it with an anthropological perspective and with eyes wide open.

But, I saw so much nasty stuff in those groups - hatred, rage, violence, paranoia - that I'm just no longer open-minded. Instead, I'm now convinced that the lead-poisoning in the US is much more widespread than just Flint, MI.

Edit: I don't mean that last sentence to be in jest. I'm really serious about this. It's something that should be investigated.

Eh, there's a lot of close-minded ignorance, intolerance and hate on the "liberal" side as well. Nobody and no shading of the political spectrum has a monopoly on being shitty people.

Same. Spent a lot of time immersing myself in far right culture to learn. What I found was less ideology and way way way more hate, paranoia, conspiracies, and lack of critical thought.

Pretty much.

Hard to ignore what "conservatism" really means now.

> the bias here in SV against conservatives can even be considered a form of classism

Conservatives want to abolish estate taxes, which would entrench the class system of workers versus heirs.

An interesting case where estate taxes are a problem was recently mentioned by a high school classmate who's a farmer in southern Arkansas: Many small farmers are land rich but cash poor. The property their family has been working for generations is now quite valuable and if they're not making a huge amount of profit - and most small farmers aren't - they won't have enough cash for the taxes to pass down along with the land to their children who will be forced to sell thus ending generations of farming in that family.

That is a corner case ("land rich, money poor" enough to hit the estate tax thresholds) that accounts for almost no family farms. I don't remember the number of people that would be affected by it, but it's very small.

The movement to end the estate tax has invoked that because it's a good narrative, it resonates emotionally, but the numbers don't back it up.

Estate taxes are, in my humble opinion, unmediated evil. Retaxing generational wealth and savings that have already been taxed once as income is unconscionable, and unfairly penalizes those who are fiscally responsible and actually do save.

I downvoted because you responded to a person who said something, but your response doesn't seem to be based on what they said.

(Note that I made this comment because I've seen many requests in the past to explain downvotes.)

Try reading both posts out loud. That might help you understand. Down voting someone because you don't understand someone sees rude.

Sad to see my post get flagged despite the thought provoking discussion that it rooted. People on this site and people in general struggle with taking others' points of view. Even though I'm not actually a conservative, it's important not to judge others -- that is the mark of an educated mind.

I read both posts carefully, and thought about them, before I downvoted. Re-reading them again, I don't think I downvoted because I didn't understand either comment.

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