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Comment by Helmet | Hacker News Reader

>The left has not taken over anything.

I specifically said that the dominant culture is left - and it most certainly is, not the economic order.

Virtually every major newspaper in every major city is left-leaning, almost every single cable news network, and all the major tech giants, who are a gateway to content, are undeniably liberal. And academia...well that goes without saying - half are card carrying communists, while the other half are in the ballpark.

In fact, it's heresy to even be conservative at most major tech companies.

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> In fact, it's heresy to even be conservative at most major tech companies.

I've found more self-professed libertarians in this field than I've found of their left-leaning counterparts.

Instead of being conservative or liberal why don't we just try being nice to people?

All these hot button issues that divide conservatives/liberals would evaporate if each side just tried, in each interaction to treat the other with dignity and according to their needs.

You know, the golden rule: Treat others like you would like to be treated? That's a good start, but we really need the platinum rule: to treat people how they would like to be treated.

Attempting to walk this path is a much harder task than relying on a dusty old book or on an enumeration of freedoms. It requires one to try to develop humility and wisdom.

I believe there are no moral absolutes, and that only by paying attention the entire situation in the moment can you tell what you should do.

When you adopt this point of view, you see that labels like liberal/conservative are just a set of received ideas that people use to avoid the difficult work described above.

They are just an interrelated set of heuristics allowing you to take shortcuts in our day to day interactions with others.

Then how do you explain the successive insanely excessive right wing governments in the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia over the last 30-40 years?

Have you even read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky?

What do you even mean by conservative? Liberal?

You do realise that liberal and liberalism means keeping the government out of people's lives. The USA is a liberal nation by definition, for example 'The separation of church and state' and your 'right to bare arms, in a well regulated malitia'

>Then how do you explain the successive insanely excessive right wing governments

I'm not familiar with Australian politics, but as for the others, what do you mean? We have had both liberal and conservative governments the last 30-40 years. This, again, has little to do with the mainstream culture, which was my original point.

As for explaining to you why neoliberalism has triumphed, well I recommend that you start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

>Have you even read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky?

Yes, and it had quite an effect on me when I was in college, and utterly ignorant of history. A lot has changed now, and while much of the book is still good, Chomsky has lost his credibility as a cultural critic following the embarrassment of his analyses about a few corners of the world...:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO1JkjbzvPw

Not to mention the Cambodia/Khmer Rouge situation, which should have tipped me off earlier. But I was naive then.

>You do realise that liberal and liberalism means keeping the government out of people's lives....

I understand well what the words mean, friend-o.

>I'm not familiar with Australian politics

I don't think you can really compare Australian Politics with US Politics the situation here is probably more similar to the UK than the US. Our parlimentry system is influenced by the UK 'Westminster system' we do not have a directly elected head of state. If you want to be technical the Govenor General appointed by the Queen is our Head of state. Sitting Prime ministers can be replaced by another member of their own party has happened several times in last 10 years.

To put my biases up front I am a left leaning voter who dislikes both major parties - voted for Greens most recently. Anyway here is my attempt to summarize it:

Our two major parties are the Labor party and the Liberal party.

"Liberal" in Australia has a different meaning to how the word is used in US. Calling someone a liberal or accusing them of holding liberal views has a very different meaning then in US. Here it refers to ecconomic Liberalism (support for private ownership and free trade). The Liberal party typically has a conservative stance on social issues.

Labor party has traditionally drawn it's support from Union movement it's policies mostly align with social democracy. In recent years labor has drifted more right-ward similar to Tony Blair led "New Labour" in UK. Labor party's stance on social issues has boggled my mind in recent years they tend to ping-pong all over the place. In general they take a more populist approach rather than standing on principles (i.e Kevin Rudd walking away from climate change action after declaring it the moral challenge of a generation during his election campaign) which in my opinion plays a big roll in growth of Greens (winning seats in state/federal parliament etc) as the 'inner city left' has somewhat abandoned Labor.

To call either party "insanely excessive" is inaccurate and I say that as someone who disagrees with both parties.

> insanely excessive right wing governments in Canada

Calling anyone who disagrees with your political philosophy "insane" is....I don't even know what word to use.

EDIT: Perhaps instead of a downvote, you could give a few examples of the insanely excessive things right wing governments in Canada have done recently (extraordinary claims and all that....).

The biggest thing that comes to mind (as a non-Canadian) was the Harper government banning scientists from making public statements. It's as if they knew all evidence contradicted the policy they were trying to enact, so rather than enact better policy they just decided to silence anyone who could provide evidence of their malfeasance.

No disagreement from me that that policy was absolutely shameful. But it falls a ways short of "successive insanely excessive right wing governments", at least for me.

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