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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

I think the main difference between the extreme left and the extreme right in the US at the moment is that the extreme left is marginalized and holds no power beyond occasionally NIMBYing new cell towers and such, whereas the extreme right holds the Presidency, much of the legislature, and many other powerful positions.

There's nothing inherent about the two which means it has to be this way. It could easily be flipped if circumstances were different. But here and now, the extreme right is much more worrisome.

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The extreme left, marginalized ? Come on, they were able to push near resignation on of their own (ie. a hardcode Sanders support) at Evergreen College and in Canada, they were able to pass what essentially boils down to "compelled speech" law.

They are nowhere near "marginalized", quite the contrary...

"Marginalized"? Nonsense, they have absolute control even over an institution as important and famous as Evergreen College... everyone knows that's the stepping stone to world domination

As a Canadian who refuses to comply with Bill C-16, the fringe left made me a thought criminal.

This Bill C-16? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Act_to_amend_the_Canadian_H...

What's so bad about it?

> the amendment also makes it a criminal offence to incite or promote hatred because of gender identity or gender expression

Seems vague, what counts as promoting hatred? If someone makes fun of the 1000+ genders and counting, do they go to jail?

And from the bill:

(2) Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of

(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or

(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction. [0]

[0] http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-319.htm...

So, what does actually count as promoting hatred, legally speaking?

> In Warman v. Winnicki, 2006 CHRT 20, Karen A. Jensen found the respondent had posted messages to the Internet which were "vicious and dehumanizing". The adjudicator ordered the respondent to cease and desist his discriminatory practices and to pay a penalty of $6,000

>In Warman v. Northern Alliance, 2009 CHRT 10, Edward Peter Lustig held that the respondent's website was in violation of s. 13(1) because the website carried controversial remarks about Roma, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, blacks, Arabs, and others. The adjudicator made an order pursuant to s. 54(1)(a) to ensure that the impugned website, which is defunct, remained inactive

I am cherry picking a bit, more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada#Cas...

That's rather vague. "Vicious and dehumanizing" could be anything from "I dislike you" to "we will murder your entire ethnic group." The remarks in Warman v. Winnicki, which I won't reproduce here, look to be much closer to the second. For example: https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/chrt/doc/2006/2006chrt20/2006ch...

I'm having trouble finding the original material for Warman v. Northern Alliance, but according to http://www.richardwarman.ca/?page_id=6 it involved calls for murder and genocide.

If that's the standard the law requires, it sounds like a good law. Free speech does not include death threats. Even the US does not go that far.

As per C-16, calling someone "Sir" instead of "Xir" if the person addressed wants to be called "Xir".

The incident between Ben Shapiro and Zoey Tur could have qualified if it had happened in Canada under the rule of the Human Rights Tribunal.

Also, recently, a landlord got convicted by that so called "human right tribunal" for not having removed his shoes in a muslim tenant's apartment.

Yes, this is insane. I just object to the idea that this insanity validates other kinds of insanity like neo-Nazi ideology. It's all bullshit.

I have no idea where I mentioned to validates the Nazi/neo-Nazi ideology. Nazism is a national socialism which, much like fascism, has nothing to do with conservativism, quite the opposite. That being said, this completely ignore the fact that Nazi's mass murder were preceded and followed by Communist mass murder, not just in the USSR (including the Gulag and purges dating back to the October Revolution), but also China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc. Mao's regime alone is responsible for twice the death toll of WWII.

The leading ideological cause of death in the 20th century is not fascism, it's communism.

That being said, I challenge you to find any pro-Nazi argument in the discourse of either Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern, Ben Shapiro or even (on the Canadian side) Jordan Peterson.

I find it rather odd that you deny validating Naziism and then spend most of your comment defending it by saying communism was worse.

Do you have more information on those? Wikipedia briefly mentions the pronoun thing, but it seems to be made up by someone opposed to the law.

I have no idea what Evergreen College is, and I doubt anything that happens there would even slightly influence anything about my life. Is that the worst thing the extreme left are capable of at the moment? That proves my point if so.

Sanders is not anywhere close to the extreme left, anywhere else than the US and he would be considered relatively centrist

> the extreme right holds the Presidency

I strongly disagree with this statement.

The extreme right elected the President, clearly. Despite his rhetoric, Trump's actual positions are a very mixed bag.

I don't think he has any actual positions, aside from possibly being very positive on Russia. He just sort of says whatever comes to mind at any given moment, apparently based on whoever he last talked to. But he mostly talks to people on the extreme right. It's a weak hold, but it's a hold just the same.

Trump's actual policy actions are generally consistent with the “extreme right” label, though not all positions of the same extremist faction.

>the extreme right holds the Presidency, much of the legislature, and many other powerful positions

Most of Trump's cabinet and the legislature are neocons.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/to-understand-polarizat...

That's a different branch of the extreme right.

That's absurd, neocons may be trying to harness the grassroots power of certain far right groups but their ideology is nearly identical to the ideology of say, the Clintons or Obama.

We should look at what they've done to really know who they are. Which is a bit tough, because they've done very little so far, but things like the Muslim/travel ban, attempting to repeal the ACA, cracking down on illegal immigration, and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement indicate a much more extreme right ideology than Clinton or Obama.

None of those policies are "extreme" for the right, let's break those down.

>"Muslim" Travel ban

Its a blanket policy on ALL travelers from a specific list drafted by Obama for a similar policy he too actually enacted. Muslims were not banned from say, the UK or Pakistan. It is also temporary. Even center leaning right-wingers have concerns about foreigners from unstable nations.

>Attempting to repeal the ACA

TrumpCare is almost Obamacare-lite, doesn't completely overhaul it, barely right-of-center, and to the more libertarian right-wingers, actually still a very liberal policy.

>Cracking down on illegal immigration

A solidly right-wing position, not an "extreme" one.

>Pulling out of the Paris climate agreement

Climate scientists think the Paris agreement is a joke, if we're basing your judgement of this on effectiveness towards combating climate change, even liberal politicians are guilty of being "extreme right" on this one.

The travel ban was the administration's attempt to do a "Muslim ban" legally. Yes, it sucks as a Muslim ban, but that's still what it's trying to do.

As for "temporary," that's an obvious lie by the administration. They claimed that it was a temporary thing to keep the country safe while they reviewed how people from those countries are vetted. The original ban would have expired by now, so they've had enough time to review their vetting process according to their own metrics, but the administration is still fighting for it in court. Why would they do that unless it was intended to be perpetually renewed?

As far as the ACA goes, the "skinny repeal" that failed in the Senate yesterday by a single vote was definitely not Obamacare-lite. It would have basically torched the entire medical insurance system by retaining the protections for pre-existing conditions while removing the individual mandate and not replacing it with any other incentive to maintain coverage while healthy. That's rather extreme.

On Paris, if climate scientists think the agreement is a joke (and that is, as far as I can tell, not at all true), then the fact that the administration withdrew from it surely demonstrates that they are quite extreme.

Yes all of these things are extreme from a leftist perspective, but until there are talks of establishing an ethnostate or abolishing the Federal Reserve, they are not extreme right, it would do the left good to find subtler methods of communicating their concerns to the right wing with methods other than calling any policy solidly right of center "extreme".

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/climate/2015...

Moving the goalposts? If what I said didn't qualify, why did you first argue that the policies weren't what I said they were?

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