Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>The article is spot on that the right way to think about it is as a religion. There are articles of faith: the world works in terms of identity-based groups; certain groups hold and actively maintain power over others; it's time to depose those groups and let others have a turn at authority, particularly over what constitutes truth. There is testimony: the "lived experiences" - anecdotes - of members of oppresssd groups are gospel. Obedience is paramount - the first and last step of being an Ally is to accept, believe unquestioningly, and evangelize what you are told.

Your description sounds more like the far-right than anything else:

This is what leads someone like Richard Spencer to voice approval for incidents like one at the University of Ottawa, when a free yoga class for students with disabilities was shut down for “cultural issues of implication.” A Student Federation statement on the matter went as far as to link it to the threat of “cultural genocide.” At the blog for Radix Journal, an alt-right publication he founded, Spencer could barely contain his excitement. He cited the incident as an example of “racial consciousness formation,” and applauded student activists for “engaging in the kind of ideological project that traditionalists should be hard at work on.”

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/safety-pin-box-richard-sp...

> Your description sounds more like the far-right than anything else

Generally both extremes of the political spectrum are immune to reason, and these two extremes seem to now have taken over in the US. What remains is a shouting match.

What a friend of mine described from his recent visit to the country really concerns me. Hotels either showing "conservative" or "liberal" media only. People and cars with stickers and pins everywhere. Exactly like two football fan clubs - unconditional support of the own and hatred of the other.

Americans, you need to fix this as quickly as possible. Truly liberal minded should stand guard when conservatives are speaking and vice versa. Go into the details of each argument and find common ground, points of content as well as a synthesis. And stop listening to organisations like the "Southern poverty law center" who go as far as labeling Maajid Nawaz and Ajaan Hirsi Ali "Anti-Muslim extremists". In fact, stop with the labels altogether - if full blown KKK members and even grand dragons can be befriended and turned by a black musician [1], I think it's time for those shouters to stop and think about what they have done personally to mend society.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis

Worth pointing out: the extreme polarization appears to be the straightforward consequence of our election process in the States.

Our government divides the country into a bunch of districts and forces each one of them to run a first-past-the-post election. Every position is first-past-the-post. The problem is that first-past-the-post seems to have a fixed point, where if parties get too popular they fragment over minor internal differences, or if not popular enough they polarize and demonize to try to suppress third-party turnout and collect those votes for themselves. The fixed point is therefore that 50% of the legislators belong to one party, 50% belong to the other, and everyone is filled with credulity for their own side and hatred for the other. And mathematical fixed-point theorems seem to be general enough to converge on this fixed-point.

It's worth pointing out that you can just look at the presidential election history and see a sequence of these convergences culminating in the US Civil War, and we seem to be falling back into it in the past several election cycles -- not just this last one.

What's even more interesting is that we use proportional methods in the States. The proportional system that you might know as the Sainte-Laguë system, we know as the Webster system and use to allocate House seats among the states. If we used something similar to elect parties to the House, we could probably keep the Senate and the Presidency the same and it would still give a sort of destabilizing effect to the two-party hatred-hegemony.

Just this week I was at a McDonald's for morning coffee amd walked in on a guy going balistic at the employees... because CNN was on the monitors. He was yelling at them to turn off the "fake news." It was at that point that I realized just how bad this is about to get.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com