New Study Indicates Silicon Valley’s Elite Are Not as Liberal as They Think
nymag.com
nymag.com
It reminds me of the old Norm MacDonald joke where because of abortions and the death penalty, there’s no way for him to vote for a party where nobody is killed.
Another example, the Liberals want to ban hate speech. When pressed the definition of hate speech is any speech that contradicts their own. They don't hold to the Enlightenment ideal of discussing radical views. Instead, if anyone appeals to science, hard science, that disagrees with one of their many incoherent points, that person is banned from the Academy.
Finally, take SF. This city likes to describe itself as one of the most Liberal in the country. Those same Liberals have effectively priced out the majority of middle-class Americans. You know? The one they supposedly love. They did this through zoning regulations. Buildings can only be so tall. You can have only so many families per unit. They can only exist in certain locations. All of the regulation adds up to the problems SF faces today.
In a general sense, there is also the moral regulations the modern Liberals put on us. They continue to enforce the plantation on the black population, and will for decades to come. Liberals hold blacks as perpetual children. They need welfare because they are poorly educated and oppressed by the white man. Now step back and you'll see that they are oppressed by whites: white liberals. For 60 years or more Liberal cities like Chicago, LA, New York all have done nothing to improve the lots of blacks. They are kept as subsistence levels. Those Liberal bastions could have improved housing. They could have improved education. They could have withheld resources to force a change in the individual to learn and improve. They have done nothing. Like children, they shouldn't marry. The Liberals have rigged the welfare laws at all levels to destroy the home by excluding the father. Again, the list goes on. I leave it to reader to research this on their own.
In the end the Liberal of today is the authoritarian of yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WEh51z1H_o
and yes, we need to ease nuclear regulations, protect all speech, and fix regulations around housing (including the regulation of interest rates through freddie/fannie).
a key fix to everything you said about the suppression of black folks (and most of the rest of us) is a return to a progressive tax system. a few decades ago, the US taxed the 1% at up to 90%, didn't have a separate capital gains tax, had an inheritance tax that encouraged industry, and didn't have corporate tax shields (along with encouraging immigration). and thus we prospered.
a few decades ago, the US taxed the 1% at up to 90%
The original driver of reducing rates in the US? John F. Kennedy. There's a great speech he gave before The Commonwealth Club on this very subject; audio is available online.
Classical liberalism in contrast focuses on the liberty of the individual through limiting government.
I think because we only have two major parties here, outlying groups tend to mix together more, even when they have substantial disagreements in their philosophy. As a whole, we are also less well-educated about alternative political systems, which makes the discussion more confusing for everyone involved.
A lot of that is I believe because they tend to come from upper-middle class families or relatively more stable upbringings. It can make discussing some of the various social issues difficult because they've been in a well-insulated bubble most of their life and they're not as familiar with the depths of extreme poverty or working class families as I am.
To me, this sounds like a shared opinion based on personal experience.
I’m from a working class background and arrived at a different conclusion in my own experience. But I get lumped in with people raised upper middle class just because I couldn’t possibly have such opinions. Granted, this is why I try not to be defensive about it: who I am doesn’t really matter (nor should it for anyone else) when we’re discussing ideas.
Can you confirm whether you grew up in an environment of extreme poverty?
He didn't say they must come from there.
I’d love to see some data.
Of course if you work at the kind of companies that only hire people with a top CS degree then you might be led to believe that.
In my experience though it’s not the case. The majority of people in my office grew up lower middle class.
My parents were cleaners and although we were often tight on money we were miles away from extreme poverty.
As I bring up often, my parents were fishermen. They could hardly afford a home and hardly afford to put food on the table or the immense medical bills we were saddled with.
Bringing up my past and my opinions was enough to get them riled up because they simply could not understand where I came from or the things I had to deal with due to poverty. I don't know how else you think I should explain this other than the fact that we had two very different circumstances growing up.
If you can convince people that their long-term self-interest must include the broader community, you may be more likely to get somewhere than pointing out the challenges experienced by other people. In any case, you're unlikely to make any headway against people who are buying private islands and have "escape plans" to get them out of the country. (These people already understand the risk and believe they have factored that into their decisions.)
That doesn't match what the study claimed. At the very least, they found SV "elites" and students to be for liberal taxation policies.
That's what liberal actually means. To be liberal in both areas it to be a progressive.
> Liberal economics means fewer regulations, less federal planning, etc.
Not in America, here we call that conservative. In America, liberal economics mean more central planning and government control and more regulations.
So you're actually agreeing vigorously with the guy to whom you're responding.
They are under the American meaning of the word liberal, you just don't understand what liberal means in America. You are agreeing with me whether you understand it or not. What you mean by liberal, we call conservative or "classical liberal".
Liberal here doesn't mean what it means in the rest of the world.
> In India and Pakistan, for example, "conservative" just means holding on to traditional religious values.
That's not what it means here.
No it isn't, and in the era of social justice warriors, it's relevance is on the rise.
Do it for all CS majors and I’ll be more interested.
You really couldn't find a worse time to defend the government caring about morality or greater good under current administration.
So have many governments.
Even well intentioned regulations have unintended side effects.
Too bad the party is so weird and dysfunctional (and subject to a first-past-the-post voting system in the US), it could have a lot of support.
The right wing donors like Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson far outspend the left and have organizations like ALEC to which there is no left wing equivalent. Data is here so you don’t have to make shit up: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/richest-billionaire...
>According to Open Secrets, Republicans had a larger share of the billionaires -- and their contributions to outside spending groups -- in the 2012 election cycle. Among the top 100 donors in the Open Secrets list, 33 were billionaires, and of those, 14 gave primarily to liberal groups while 19 gave to conservative groups.
>In addition, the top 100 donors of 2012 gave 41 percent of all the money collected by outside spending groups, and of their donations, 71 percent went to conservative groups.
From: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jun/23...
Another relevant source: https://billmoyers.com/2014/04/10/nothing-really-compares-to...
You can read Dark Money by Jane Meyer if you are actually interested in this.
Is that actually a law somewhere?
The so-called socially liberal, fiscally conservative is just Liberalism as conceived of by Locke and gang.
It shouldn’t be a secret that the most fundamental political division of modern times is between labor and caapital, and that Silicon Valley culture is squarely on the side of capital.
I think what's happening is somewhere between the two extremes: the pie is still getting larger, but labor's slice of the pie is diminishing at such a rate that it's barely growing at all.
The social-democracy has wandered worldwide from its economical foundation to another set of causes: ecologism, feminism and identity politics. In the USA the democrats are holding, but in Europe most socialist parties are having a bad time.
Now Hillary (news that have been downvoted here to death) says that maybe inmigration should be curbed to avoid the raising of populism.
And under the risk of downvotes, I do think neoliberalism makes SV the SV it is today, the industry exists because of it. Whether it will keep working or not it is a different matter on its own, but that people tend to cling on and won't let go what has been working isn't really that of a surprise.
If they align with the Democrats on social issues, but Republicans on regulatory issues, they would seem to lean Libertarian. (Right?)
Nobody cares because you want the money, the infrastructure, the university, the network, the lead investor
Wow a wealthy person with no input from the rest of society nor any consequences, STOP THE PRESSES, except dont, it comes with the territory