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Comment by claudeganon | Hacker News Reader

After living in LA for a few years, it certainly does feel exactly the way you describe within the city.

But those juxtapositions are literal blocks apart from each other. The Google campus is next door to a shanty town in Venice, and their security sic the police on them for any minor infractions (or just made up ones). Very similar situation with the redevelopment downtown.

It really does give you a bleak portrait of the tolerance for inhumanity within the context liberal Capitalism. California is ostensibly as “wacky leftist” as the US gets and it’s a bleak, cruel place in many regards.

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Can you describe the basis for your "Google sic the police on the homeless" comment? There was a shitty local magazine article about this but my personal experience does not match this perception at all.

I’m friends with housing activists in LA who work on these issues. There was a similar thing with Google Maps cars conveniently showing up right after violent camp dispersals in my old neighborhood.

Here’s an article about it from back in 2015:

https://pando.com/2015/06/22/we-got-geeks/

It’s the same in Brazil. We are basically converging to become Rio de Janeiro minus the natural beauty. Well and the shantytowns in rio have better views.

I would take away the opposite conclusion. Left-wing government isn’t the solution in California any more than it is in developing countries and failed states; it is the problem.

Public utility districts have been very successful in places they have been permitted to operate, including in the state capital, Sacramento.

Of course PGE spends millions every year lobbying against them.

American liberals are always yelling for more “humanity”, but they keep quiet about the requirement that humanity must come at someone else’s expense. Yes, we need cheaper housing - but not here. Yes, guvment must build better jails - but not here. Yes, please run more buses - but not down my street. Yes, we must accept more refugees - but put them somewhere far away, certainly not anywhere near my child’s route to school.

Liberalism and NIMBYism are joined at the hip. Liberalism is loud and ostentatious, while NIMBYism is prosecuted quietly via the court system, lobbying, and political donations. There’s a certain poetic beauty to how both seem to coexist in the same group of people.

I’m not sure where you get those ideas? Where I live in NYC, they recently shut down a major street to cars so buses could run more easily — and the furthest left want to expand that. The left leaning people I know want to close jails, not build better ones elsewhere. We opposed an Amazon campus in our backyard specifically because it would drive up rents — and the furthest left want rent control.

Liberals are obviously not a monolith of only ethically consistent people, but I definitely don’t see the pervasive NIMBYism.

The Left in New York City are largely socialists by now, who had enough of a long-standing working-class tradition to avoid allying with liberal NIMBYs.

He's honestly pretty spot on about liberals, as the spot on the spectrum in between conservatives and social democrats.

Maybe so, but I don’t read the original comment as a critique of centrist Democrats in particular. (I also don’t think centrist Democrats are alone in the gap between their professed values and their actual ones.)

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Here the same people who yell for affordable housing also go to court to block construction of new towers. The same people who complain about buses stuck in traffic on W 86th St also prevent the introduction of universal metered parking and congestion pricing.

But my original comment was mainly addressing the NIMBYism in California. Look at SF: it's a low-rise city of sky-high demand and prices. Who's preventing new construction? The same local NIMBYs who enjoy rising property values due to severely restricted supply of land that can be built on.

I until very recently lived downtown, where congestion pricing would actually take effect, and the people most in support were again the furthest left.

SF does seem to be more NIMBYish, but I’m not sure why you think it’s a microcosm of liberalism.

"Liberalism" is the "hipsters" of modern leftist politics...

I think you are conflating entirely two different concepts. NIMBYism is a unique California value and closely related to California history rather than a true left ideology. In fact, leftist policies are for more denser urban development, public transit etc as you can see in European countries

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