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Comment by lilactown | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the spirit of your words. I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.

The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.

For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.

The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.

Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.

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Agreed. Parent seems to think that engaging in rhetoric is universially fun and useful endeavor that will expand our mind and better us as a person. This is not true on a number of issues.

Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.

A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects. In fact they also have the rights to react angrily if the subject is a direct threat to their lives and livelihood. People arguing things often don’t realize that there is a person on the other end of the debate, a person with feelings, like love and compassion, but also anger and disgust. If a subject threatens or belittles, them being insulted or angry is the natural response.

> "A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported."

This is nonsense. I'm an immigrant who argues for limits. Certain subjects being (subjectively) sensitive to talk about doesn't mean they're unproductive because of it. In fact we'll never get anywhere if we don't talk about them.

Limiting speech arbitrarily, especially over very assumptive beliefs of offense, is a terrible thing. You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.

This. I'm also an immigrant myself that argues for limits.

> You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.

Exactly, and if you're not capable of engaging in that discussion productively, don't be surprised if your viewpoints and positions don't get the consideration you think they deserve.

Civil dialogue is the foundation upon which we find understanding in the face of disparate experiences. If you're feelings about the dialogue gets in the way of contributing to understanding, then it is you that is hurting your own cause.

> who argues for limits.

+1 , want to add, almost everyone argues for limits on immigration because without limits that would be an argument for _unlimited_ immigration.

Sometimes we construe ourselves as vastly separated "islands" of ideologies, when in reality we're more like tight clusters. That is we have similar ideals, and differentiate on how to accomplish them.

For example "Help the poor" is often agreed upon, but then argued about "How to help the poor" . (Do we give them tough love and bootstraps yada yada? or Do we give them support, resources and encouragement and yada yada?).

> Limiting speech arbitrarily [...] is a terrible thing.

This is not true. We do limit speech, both through moderation (like here on HN), terms of service (e.g. on Twitter, Facebook etc.), codes of conduct (in our workplace), in our legal society (slander, hate-speech, etc.), etc. But also through our moral behavior. As humans we know that some topics are insensitive to talk about around some people (e.g. we don’t tell yo'mama jokes around a recently orphaned person).

Debating against abortion around a person that is at risk of being forced into pregnancy, or against gay rights against a person not allowed to openly express their love for their same-sex partner is a truly offensive thing to do. When a platform limits such a speech it is acting in a very human way.

Sussing an offensive party to protect the rights of the disenfranchised one is what normal humans do in a normal conversation.

First, protecting the rights of the disenfranchised means, by definition, they are not disenfranchised. I'm not sure why you keep using that word.

Second, if we rewind to the original comment, it's clearly talking about people "who are offended by everything", on a platform where everything offends someone. This is not about rules or regulations, or personal behavior; all of which have very specific context in which they apply.

Rather it's about the lack of engagement with different perspectives by labelling everything taboo at such a scale and breadth as to prevent any possible discussion, and the worrisome self-censorship as a result. You're only reinforcing this point with your sweeping generalizations on behalf of people and situations you don't represent.

If you find something offensive then you are free to not participate, but you do not have the right to limit their speech. You're not protecting anyone's right by doing so, and I find it the very opposite of human to regress towards silence instead of moving forward through reason.

Sorry you are right, this I went on a little tangent there (as explained in a sibling comment).

However “people who are offended by everything” is often used as a synonym for left leaning folks (or rather folks in favor of societal diversity; SJWs if you will). Also “shutting down the debate” is often used to complain about when a left leaning person reacts offensively (or even angrily) during a debate. This is regardless of if the preceding comment was actually very insulting or threatening to some people that may be present.

In a sibling comment I explain that—in my opinion—it is actually a good thing if people that hold oppressing and insulting views self-censor after having received angry replies to their offensive views. I‘d like to add now that normally us “left leaning folks” don’t simply label speech as offensive and leave it at that. We—as grandparent points out—we actively engage in the conversation and point out (sometimes in anger) the flaws in the opposing opinion, explain why a thing is offensive and bad, and why we are angry about it. Then we hope that either they will change their view or at least reconsider before they say something like this again.

Again I should reiterate that I am specifically talking about debates that I consider threatening or offensive to some groups of people.

> "“left leaning folks” don’t simply label speech as offensive and leave it at that"

But that's what you just did, and are still doing. Offensive is subjective. Who are you to consider what is offensive to others? Are you in those groups? Are you personally taking offense?

Why did you say immigration can't be discussed? I'm an immigration who discusses it just fine, and I find it annoying and offensive that you act offended on my behalf and shutdown any discussion. I don't want or need that and am fully capable of engaging in the discussion or leaving myself out of it. Engage with the argument or leave it, but stop acting on behalf of others as if they don't have agency. It's just a soft bigotry to think that they can't speak for themselves.

And self-censorship is never good. People holding views that you find offensive don't need to stop doing anything, and this has both exposed bad people and led to revolutionary new ideas. At one point ending slavery and women's suffrage was also offensive to discuss, but good thing we discussed it and actually made progress. Let's not stop now.

Lets get this straight: When did I actually say “immigration can’t be discussed”? I said it might be annoying to an immigrant when people play the devils advocate to argue for limits on immigration. And I said it might be threatening to an immigrant that is at risk of deportation.

I know I didn’t word it perfectly and I understand you might have misunderstood me. English is not my first language and I’m sometimes not as clear as I could be. Particularly in this case I left out the word ‘might’, hoping that it was implied from this being a hypothetical scenario. Sorry for that.

I’m sorry if I left you thinking that all immigrants think this, or are of a certain opinion, I don’t believe this my self and it certainly was not my intention to claim any such thing.

I also don’t hold the opinion that some topics can’t be discussed. Only that it is natural to be insulted if certain opinions in said topics are expressed. Since you mentioned slavery, imagine a public forum about in Pennsylvania in 1849. Some people might think the debate about abolition is only theoretical and might play the devils advocate, imagining and stating arguments that make sense in a theoretical scenario. Who is this helping? Is Fredrick Douglass gonna walk by this forum and think: “I’m glad people are having this debate, I hope this person that argues for slavery keeps posting.” Say John Brown replies stating this for-slavery person “is an idiot” and “should keep silent, for their own good,” do you think that Harriet Tubman would be thinking: “Oh my, I hope John Brown—though well intentioned—will not silence this anti-abolitionist. In fact why is John Brown speaking on my behalf? he was never a slave. We got to keep this debate going if we want to end slavery.” Finally Harriet Ann Jacobs walks by and simply says to her self: “Well, I’m free now, I don’t need to participate in this forum. I’ll just leave it.”

No, this is ridiculous. We don’t stop these humanitarian disaster by allowing bigoted views to persist. If someone comes with an insulting argument based on a bigoted view, the normal thing to do is to insult back and hope they never speak of this again.

> "Only that it is natural to be insulted if certain opinions in said topics are expressed."

Again, so what? It happens and is entirely subjective, and whether it's shared by millions of people or specific to an individual is an irrelevant detail.

> "Who is this helping?"

Who cares? Discussion happens. There is no imperative that it must be helpful, whatever that means. That's yet another subjective judgement.

> "We don’t stop these humanitarian disaster by allowing bigoted views to persist."

Discussion is what determined they were wrong views in the first place. Speech from the opposing side that, at the time, was considered rebellious and wrong eventually won and created change.

> "the normal thing to do is to insult back"

Yes. Counter speech and ideas with better speech and ideas. That is the opposite of (self-) censorship and limiting expression because of potential offense.

You're comparing immigration limits to being against abolition? What a strawman.

No I’m not. Here I was expanding on the point the parent made where abolition was an example:

> [S]elf-censorship is never good. People holding views that you find offensive don't need to stop doing anything, and this has both exposed bad people and led to revolutionary new ideas

This is a silly argument given the above example.

Remember the topic is about self-censorship and whether getting offended about certain rhetoric is natural, not about any specific topic which might offend people.

You can't just label some topics as "Disenfranchising issues" and then cease to have debate on the topic. There's always going to be a debate on to what extent should society go out of its way to enfranchise people and to what extent is the onus on the individual." You can't just shutdown these topics because you want more than others are willing to give. You can't label people hateful just because they don't want to be generous and you certainly can't shutdown the debate on the extent to which people are entitled to generosity or frugality.

I don't think GP was labeling anyone as hateful. Escalation isn't very helpful in my opinion.

It’s not being hateful it’s just being honest. Sorry if the Truth offends you. This thread is like a bunch of steroid users becoming up with reasons why they need them

Some topics are sensitive, but that's not a reason to stop discussing these issues. We need dialogue or the political divide will just keep growing.

> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people,

Immigration is a zero sum game. No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there. Neither leftist nor more conservative immigration policy gives every immigrant who wants to the opportunity to enter the United States. The claim that left-leaning individual's immigration policy is not 'disenfranchising' is laughable. For every person entering from South America, some number of people cannot enter from another country. You can say this is not the case all you want, but given that immigration does put pressure on a country's resources, this is always true. Similarly, if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.

You can't just say something is disenfranchising and thus non-negotiable. For example, you say the pro-life position is disenfranchising because -- I assume -- you believe it takes away the right of a woman to not have a child. However, a pro-life person would make the obvious argument that actually the pro-choice position is disenfranchising because there is a person -- the child -- who is being killed without having a say in it. Should the pro-choice position now become unmentionable?

> No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there.

"developed": The US and Europe are rich.

"wanting": Other people want to be rich. That's why they come.

If US/Europe worshipped money less, they would be less rich. There would be less incentive for others to come, or for incumbents to keep them out. If you want to reduce flow, reduce pressure.

Here's the thing though: You, and your children, would have to work for a living.

> immigration does put pressure on a country's resources

Does it? Or are immigrants the resource being consumed? Seems to me they do the work. And once their children are Americanized, how many grandchildren will they have? Fewer. The US needs immigrants like a car needs gasoline. It eats them.

> if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.

Only if there's a cap. Which is uncreative. Do the opposite. Aggressively add people to the ranks of the United States.

Imagine: Tomorrow, Trump comes on the TV and, in terrible Spanish, invites the people of Baha California (both states), Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas to hold referenda under Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution, about joining the United States. They'd be enticed by what's left of the "American dream", sun-belt voters would get a shot at cheaper and sunnier real estate, and factory workers could go to where the jobs are. The problem with NAFTA is that capital can flow but workers can't. So let the people move freely too! And if the Russians can run a foreign influence campaign to make Brexit happen, why can't the US do a Mexic-enter?

We can make the sum be much, much more than zero.

None of this is true. Immigrants come for better opportunity and living conditions, not to be "rich" although the ability to actually do so is welcomed.

If the countries they were coming from had better conditions then there would be less need to immigrate, and it would also help far more people. That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want. Why would you rather have countries be worse to stop immigration rather than lifting the others up?

And the vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that? Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.

> Immigrants come for better opportunity and living conditions, not to be "rich" although the ability to actually do so is welcomed.

The US, and similar countries, are rich by global standards. A "normal", "not rich" middle class lifestyle there is enviable to "normal" people in most of the world. The argument about "better opportunity and living conditions" vs "rich" is about word choice and connotation. When I say "rich" I mean to call into question what Americans think of as "normal", and to consider how their "normal" is supported.

> to stop immigration

When a patient is sick, you don't want to stop the blood transfusions keeping them alive.

> Why would you rather have countries be worse [...] rather than lifting the others up?

The United States isn't actually better in a sustainable way. It operates a Ponzi scheme: Immigrants are lured in, they do the work, and hopefully they even get a little material comfort, but mostly they are working for the benefit of their children. The trap is that their children end up Americanized, which reduces their fertility to below replacement. Within a few generations they are all dead. Hence the need for a constant replacement flow. Without that, the US would be Japan.

It goes without saying that not every culture can operate in this way. An ecosystem made entirely of leeches will crash; there also need to be hosts.

> [t]he vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that?

The incumbents at the top of these Ponzi schemes have easy jobs. They certainly don't pick strawberries.

Those easy lives serve one purpose: They are the beacon that draws more workers in.

The top of the pyramid can be supported because it is constantly dying off.

> Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.

Their culture, which gave them life, is destroyed, and replaced with The American Way of Life, so they have no great-grandchildren. In this way, America is a population sink.

> That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want.

So long as the draw of the American Dream is as strong as it is, any disincentives sufficiently powerful to counteract it will need to be inhumane -- think "children in cages". Laws that cannot be enforced humanely are not legitimate.

Thank you! I’ve been biting my lips not to correct these comments about how “immigration is (sometimes) bad” because I’m trying to focus on grandparent’s point. But you said it much better then I could have.

Having mexic-enter is vastly different than immigration. It's dishonest to compare the two.

Namely.. I am someone who is against illegal immigration but I would support mexico joining the usa

The point of the parent is to demonstrate how silly zero-sum arguments against immigration are, not to compare. A similar anecdote is to point at the open border policy inside the EU. Allowing free migration of people within the EU states (i.e. open borders) has had tremendous economic benefits for every member state, except perhaps the countries that are loosing workers.

Consider also that free migration is allowed within the US borders. Everyone in South Carolina is currently leagally allowed to migrate to California. Is California loosing money to South Carolina because of this?

> Consider also that free migration is allowed within the US borders. Everyone in South Carolina is currently leagally allowed to migrate to California. Is California loosing money to South Carolina because of this?

Again... completely apples-to-oranges comparison. Migrants between South Carolina and California share enough in common that it hardly classifies as migration other than due to the internal political divisions of the United States.

Legal immigration to the US is a zero-sum game, by law, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Tell me, what precisely is the economic mechanism that makes California loose money from Sonorense migrants, but not from South Carolinian migrants. What is it that migrants from Baja California, Liberia, or Ireland lack in commonalty with native Californians but migrants from Louisiana have?

I’m also a little confused as to what you mean by zero-sum by law. Is there a law that states that the federal government has to pay with each immigrant? If a Jamaican immigrant produces growth for the US (say by doing labor and contributing to the economy), then the US has to, by law, pay that growth back to Jamaica? Are we not talking about economic zero-sum?

Every legal immigrant entering the United States is one less immigrant that can enter due to immigration quotas established by congress

Those disenfranchising issues have affected people on the other side. Those parents probably know a few.

Getting angry is natural, but anger is easy. Advancement of the cause doesn't entail getting likes, hearts or clap-backs. The real work is in persuasion.

You’re talking about _illegal immigration_.

Legal immigrants, which is the majority and the ones generally designed by the word “immigrants” (without qualitatif), aren’t being deported. Legal and illegal immigrations are two different topics (social, political, economical), it doesn’t really make sense to mix them.

Also I’m an immigrant myself and argue for some level of immigration control, and that’s the case for every single expat I know.

Being angry about an opinion is fine. That doesn't mean you should try to stop people from talking about it.

Save from the feedback of concrete actions being taken (which you want to avoid), discussion by a diverse crowd is the only way to properly surface the harmfulness of a viewpoint.

Making an opinion politically incorrect won't stop people from holding it, they may on the contrary feel validated by it.

As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.

The ultimate expression of Tyranny of the Majority, completely automated.

> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being.

To achieve long lasting social changes you have to have a dialogue and convince the other party, if you think the entirety of your opinion is so morally justified that even having further debate is morally wrong then you can never achieve permanent social change it will just be temporary.

> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.

There is a limit at which this is true, but most discussion of these issues doesn’t encroach into that territory. As an immigrant from a Muslim country I don’t feel “threats to my safety” when Trump talks about Islamic fundamentalism or extra scrutiny over immigration from certain countries. (It would be pretty odd to declare those topics off-limits, seeing as how the Muslim country I’m from has taken aggressive measures to fight the same exact fundamentalist forces.) I might feel differently if we were talking about putting Muslims in internment camps. But nobody is doing that, even though the left is acting like they are.

Does the US have “too many immigrants?” Until 2007, a plurality of Hispanic Americans (many of whom are immigrants) said “yes.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Even today, 1 in 4 do. Only 14% say we have “too few immigrants” (which is the view de facto embraced by our current policies, which will lead to increased numbers of immigrants.) Given those views, it’s bizarre to treat discussion of immigration issues as off-limits.

You see this on issue after issue: leftists declare huge swaths of issues as off limits for discussion even to the point of excluding discussion of positions held by large swaths of the groups at issue. For example, 37% of women want to restrict Roe further or overrule it completely, compared to 38% who want to loosen its restrictions either somewhat or significantly. Another 16% want to maintain the status quo. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NPR_.... Supermajorities of women, moreover, support measures like waiting periods.

Or, consider “police brutality.” An editor at the NYT was fired for running a op-ed by Tom Cotton advocating a law-and-order response to violence following the death of George Floyd. Recent polling shows that a majority of Hispanic people, who are disproportionately the target of aggressive policing, think “the breakdown of law and order” is a “bigger problem” than “systemic racism.” Large majorities of Black and Hispanic people want to either maintain existing levels of policing, or further increase them.

In practice, it’s your approach that’s “disenfranchising.” That rule makes the majority uncomfortable with expressing anything but the most left-leaning views with respect to a minority group. For example, Ilhan Omar and Linda Saraour say expectations of assimilation are “racist.” This is not even a mainstream opinion among American Muslims, who are one of the most assimilated groups in the country. (To the point that a majority voted for George W. Bush in 2000.) But a big fraction of well-meaning non-Muslims don’t want to be called racist. So they feel comfortable amplifying anti-assimilationist views, but not pro-assimilationist ones. Since non-Muslims are a huge majority of people, that dramatically distorts and biases the debate around Muslim assimilation in a manner that doesn’t reflect the views of Muslims themselves.

That phenomenon has had a real impact on the debate over abortion. A quarter of Democratic women want to further restrict Roe or overrule it. That viewpoint is completely unrepresented among Democratic men.

You wrote a good comment a couple years about about the dynamics here. "Leftists" oppose discussions about incremental regulation of abortion for the same reader "right-wingers" oppose those discussions about firearms: both sides assume the discussion is a slippery slope towards all-out prohibition, and both sides have valid reasons to believe that.

In this comment, you depict left-of-center resistance to these discussions as irrational. But of course, it's not at all irrational; in fact, it's probably vital.

In that context I was talking about political strategy. I think its rational for Democrats as a party to oppose abortion restrictions. But here I’m talking about whether certain issues should be off-limits for discussion. Folks on the far left accuse men of being misogynist if they express opposition to using federal funds for abortion, even though 50-60% of women themselves, depending on the poll, express such opposition. That distorts the debate.

There are also special considerations when you’re talking about issues that affect minorities, outside a political context. There, the approach of selectively amplifying extreme positions can overwhelm ideological diversity (or even majority views) within minority groups. The other day, my dad—a blue dog Democrat—expressed his frustration at how “the media has made Ilhan Omar the face of Muslims.” I’ve observed the palpable discomfort people in liberal circles have expressing views on immigration to the right of Omar. They feel like the way to be “allies”—and insulate themselves from being called racist—is to “amplify” views like her’s. But the net result of that is that debate around issues like assimilation—within the left—is totally dominated by these extreme views. And that seriously disenfranchises people. Especially in contexts, such as academic institutions and media, controlled by the left, where there is no need to deal with the potential opposite extreme positions on the right.

Consider this: Person A calls for a total ban on abortion. person B calls this person a misogynist.

[Now I don’t know if this has ever happened (usually I don’t call people misogynists unless they talk about women as objects) but let’s go with this]

We can rephrase this as: Person A says pregnant people should be forced to undergo their pregnancy. Person B says this person in misinformed in an insulting manner.

What might have even happened in this discussion (we are just being theoretical here, right, so we can entertain, right? Or at least we don’t want this topic to be off limits right?) is the following: Person A actually said: “If it were up to women, humanity would be extinct in a generation. Women are evil, and we should not grant them any rights, particularly not the right to determine the birth of their children”. Person B responds: “I’m glad you’ve shown your bigoted misogynistic face. Now we all know what kind of a person you are, and whether we should keep listening to you. Do your self a favor and keep these opinions to your self unless you want to keep embarrassing your self”.

Who here is guilty of shutting down the debate? Who here decided that talking about abortion rights is “off topic”?

Now person B most certainly suggested that person A shouldn’t continue this debate. They also definitely insulted person A. But is anything here in their response surprising? Did they do anything wrong? How about we look at person A in this context? Do we want people like that expressing their opinion? Person B might have insulted person A, and hoped they would leave and never come back, but person A was insulting all women and calling for a whole group of people to have their decisions dictated by other people.

So why am I taking this example? It is obviously an exaggeration and not specifically what we are taking about here. But for all I know this is the kind of conduct that many people say us “lefties” are doing when we “mark a topic off limits”.

Ancestor’s point was this exactly, many people claim that us lefties want to shut down the topic because we get offended by everything. But do we? Are we maybe just behaving in a completely rational way, insulting back people that have insulted us? Asking people to stop that are threatening us, our friends, or people that we know exist?

---

PS: Off course in your example there is another qualifier there: “using federal funds for abortion”. People might have many reason disagree with that including being for forced pregnancies. But now the goalpost has been moved a little hasn’t it? So I took the liberty of moving it in the other direction my self. You provided an example that has probably never happened in reality, so I provide a counter example that also probably never happened, sounds fair?

A premise of your strawman seems to be that women have a different opinion on abortion than men, which isn’t true. Unlike many other political opinions, there is very little difference between men and women on abortion questions: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p.... Republican women are significantly more likely than Republican men to identify as pro-life: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730183531/poll-majority-want-.... Your strawman also invokes gratuitous insults, which aren’t necessary to actually debate the issue.

Apart from that, my hypothetical is one that happens all the time. Article after article denounces policies like waiting periods, which the majority of women support and which exist in other developed countries, as misogynistic: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkg753/what-its-like-to-endu....

Stepping back, a problem with your examples is the individualistic framing. Abortion undoubtedly involves a woman’s bodily autonomy. But it also undoubtedly involves another living thing. (Regardless of what political rights you believe that thing should have, it’s alive as a scientific matter.) Even Roe recognizes that a societal interest in the unborn child kicks in during the second trimester. (Roe, by the way, is unusual even in developed countries. Where many countries have abortion by law, almost none guarantee it under their constitution. Around the same time as Roe, the Canadian Supreme Court declared abortion to be purely a legislative matter. And the German constitutional court declared allowing abortion to be an unconstitutional violation of a fetus’s right to life. That’s still the law in both countries.) It also involves society generally. The fact that the developed world spends tremendous amounts of aid money assisting developing countries to reduce their birth rates belies the idea that reproduction has purely individual effect. Framing it in purely individualistic terms makes it seem more like it shouldn’t be up for debate, but only because the framing cuts out all the interests actually involved. Likewise, a discussion about immigration isn’t just about the immigrant, but about the society that has to expend resources integrating and supporting the immigrant. When you reframe these issues in individualistic terms to exclude effects on other people, they seem more like things that shouldn’t be subject to debate. But that’s just a product of the artificial framing.

> A premise of your strawman seems to be that women have a different opinion on abortion than men.

No it’s not. My premise is that there exist some topics that are disenfranchising to some people, and debating those can be insulting or threatening to some people.

I’m not gonna debate you on the merits of abortion laws or immigration laws, we can leave that for another time. Here we are talking about whether it is OK (or even rational) for us ‘lefties’ to get offended by some topics, and argue to an extend where some people might not want to say certain things in a future debate.

I say it is OK, precisely because there is another person with stakes in the topic who might be at risk if terms of the debate are not in their favor. I moved this to individualistic terms on purpose, precisely because some topics involve individuals. These individuals have feelings and you may expect them to react accordingly.

I think we get into trouble with this analysis, of taking topics off the table for civic discussion.

There are obviously some topics where that's true; for instance, no sane person will entertain a debate about re-segregating schools.

But then you have the idea that immigration is off the table because it dehumanizes undocumented people --- despite the fact that even American Latinos generally believe immigration is a colorable argument, or that abortion is off the table because it threatens the bodily autonomy of women --- despite the fact that a very large fraction of women support addition abortion restrictions. The principle just doesn't hold together.

It's possible that we're all just talking past each other, and that all of us acknowledge that there are going to be public policy discussions about these kinds of topics, and we're just talking about why some citizens will refuse to engage.

(Disclaimer: I think we have a moral imperative to issue a blanket amnesty and simplified path to citizenship for the vast majority of all undocumented immigrants, and oppose European-style restrictions on abortion).

On all of those issues there are at least two takes-and they’ve flip-flopped over time. People on the right have a different take on how to alleviate homelessness (self empowerment vs state dependence). On immigration (remember the time Bernie _didn't_ want immigrants to take jobs from locals?) minorities (also about the extent of state help vs other empowerment vehicles).

There are varied ways to address the issues from different points of view. Parties have switched from one view to the opposing view over time, so by proxy of this we know there isn’t a “right” way and a “wrong” way but rather opposing philosophies that stress one thing over another. Why does one work better now and why will a different one work better tomorrow?

First of all, note that I did not talk at all about parties. I talked about left and right. Historically, the parties that represent right and left (or how much to the right and left they skew) has changed; which ideas fall in the category of left and right thinking have not as much.

It seems that your stance is based on the idea that a large group of people simply adopts one viewpoint or another arbitrarily, that those solutions have not changed over time, and that because of this we should treat them with equal merit. I believe this is wrong, for a number of different reasons.

First, it ignores the outcomes of the actual policies as well as the framework of thinking that it supports. Someone who has a "different take" whose outcome changes whether I or my friends can afford health care or not is not an "equal but opposite" philosophy.

To build on that, because it ignores the actual outcomes and treats all ideas as equal, it supports a framework of hyper-partisan thinking, the idea that ideology is about who you are loyal to. In this framework, your belief makes sense: just because we're loyal to different parties doesn't mean we can't be friends! But again, it ignores the very real implications of those beliefs.

Finally, it also concludes that solutions to these problems, and the people who are in charge of supporting them, cannot evolve and improve, only be renewed as a way to for members of a party to pledge loyalty. Bernie is not a perfect leftist, and has certainly had some shitty takes and policies; sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't). As our understanding of the plight of the common people grows and adjusts to the new realities we are faced with, different solutions will evolve on the left, and that is good.

> Bernie is not a perfect leftist, and has certainly had some shitty takes and policies; sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't).

The wording here demonstrates deep disrespect for people whose ideas, experiences, conclusions and understanding of the world differs from your own.

I meant no disrespect. If I read into your reply here, I think you feel that I am saying that anyone who is "not a perfect leftist" is "shitty"? On reflection I can see how that would be interpreted.

What I meant to wrote was 3 separate points:

- Bernie is not a perfect leftist

To be clear: I don't hold Bernie to the standard of being a "perfect leftist," rather stating the obvious that he is not one. And while I would love a candidate that agreed more with my viewpoints than him, I don't think he's a bad person because he doesn't.

- Bernie has had some shitty takes and policies

I do believe that Bernie Sanders, the politician, has not always wielded his power in my best interest; for instance, voting for the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists" joint resolution that has been used as justification for our military presence in the middle east. I would, in a glib way, rate that vote and the opinions he gave during that time as a "shitty take." I don't think that disrespects him as a person.

- Sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't)

Sometimes people evolve their politics and beliefs as they learn more and the material conditions which they exist in change, which is good. Sometimes they do not, and that's bad. I do not think that adopting strictly leftist beliefs - of which there are a cacophony of differing, conflicting ones - is inherently good. Rather the lack of evolution is bad.

> First, it ignores the outcomes of the actual policies as well as the framework of thinking that it supports. Someone who has a "different take" whose outcome changes whether I or my friends can afford health care or not is not an "equal but opposite" philosophy.

What opinions about health care policy are people allowed to have, in your view?

Please reread the post, as it didn't mention that certain opinions are barred, merely that the opinions are not "equal but opposite".

> the opinions are not "equal but opposite"

What does this even mean?

It means that this is not an equivalent, right-leaning opinion.

And who gets to judge that it isn't equivalent? Equivalency implies measurability and this seems like an immeasurable assertion based solely on personal opinion.

No one; I was under the impression that this was an opinion stated by the poster. The response just seemed to not understand what the poster was saying.

Oh, got it. You highlighted that part from the OP so I assumed that there was some shared understanding of objectivity here that wasn't apparent to me. If it is just the OP's opinion/perception of equivalency (or lack thereof) and nothing else then I guess there's nothing worth discussing here since the person the OP would be in dialogue with could disagree about the OP's judgement of equivalency and it's just two people agreeing to disagree and nothing more.

> remember the time Bernie _didn't_ want immigrants to take jobs from locals?

I'm plucking this bit out because I don't think that's a good summary of his position. He still doesn't "want immigrants to take jobs from locals." He's concerned about corporations abusing immigrant labor to depress American wages. He's long voted for bills to protect immigrants, even while being wary of increasing low-skill immigration. He's trying to find a middle ground between labor and immigration, and that isn't easy.

For an in-depth look:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/25/21143931/b...

I think a huge part of the difference is people's perspective on which is worse: false positives or false negatives.

Warning: opinions follow

To reduce scope to something like welfare for illustrative purposes, there's actually pretty broad agreement from both sides that some people just need help through no fault of their own and that at some level, there should be some kind of program to provide that help. And there's similar agreement that people who don't have such a need should be prevented from intentionally gaming/milking a system (getting benefits without a legitimate need). The interesting parts come in two other scenarios: 1) someone who legitimately needs help and doesn't get it, and 2) someone who doesn't need help but does get it. Those are both wasteful and unjust and we'd all like to reduce those cases to as close to zero as possible. But the left and the right disagree about which case is more unjust. The right would like to focus on efficiency and self-sufficiency, so the greater injustice is fostering an environment where you can get assistance without deserving it (which perpetuates and/or deepens the dependence), and you're willing to concede that this means some people who need help won't get it. The left, on the other hand, would like to focus on covering everyone who needs help, and anyone slipping through the cracks is an injustice, but this means that you have to accept the inefficiency of allowing some people who don't need/deserve assistance to get it, and you just shrug and say that's the cost of providing a good safety net.

I think this is basically true. although there are some issues that are so polarizing that they take precedence over the false positive vs false negative preference. the examples that immediately come to mind involve enforcement and punishment. the right generally seems to accept policies like stop-and-frisk or demanding ID from brown people near the border, regardless of how many of those targeted turn out to be doing nothing wrong. the left pretty much takes the same position on campus sexual assault cases, although it at least asserts that false positives are very rare.

False positive and false negative rates also have a relation to the injustice of a false positive. Having to provide ID and get frisked sucks but being falsely accused of a crime and having your entirely life destroyed even if rare is a massive injustice. This is the entire premise of Blackstone's Ratio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

For what it's worth I'm libertarian and lean towards having false positives for any of those three scenarios.

Yeah, I think false-positive and false-negative aren't exactly the right construct to consider for some scenarios. It's more like "whose suffering bothers you more?" People in need or those whose contribution is wasted? The racially-profiled or those who may be harmed by criminals if we aren't diligent? Wrongly-accused rapists or rape victims?

How do you empower someone without helping them?

I don't think conservatives/Republicans are strictly against helping anyone, they just disagree on the method. The historically conservative view has been to try and give them a job through which they can support themselves as opposed to a "handout" through a social program. On paper I think they would describe it as the equivalent of "teaching a man to fish" vs "giving a man a fish".

Obviously there is a lot of room for skepticism as to whether you think the approach works in practice, or if the approach is simply a front to enact changes that will nominally benefit the unempowered but in reality benefit the empowered. But I don't know of many who aren't in favor of something as vague as "helping people", and most genuinely believe they are doing so.

It’s more than that. Conservatives think that liberal social and economic ideas actively destroy the infrastructure people rely on to help themselves. An example of this is marriage. Liberals have sought to normalize divorce and the raising children outside of marriage. Both of those things are empirically proven to make people poorer—for obvious reasons. Indeed, welfare benefits are often structured to disincentivize marriage, which in turn keeps people poor. Liberals often don’t appreciate that conservative social and economic views are synergistic like that.

> Both of those things are empirically proven to make people poorer

Nothing of this sort has by any means been proven.

I’m from a country that probably has one of the highest—if not the highest—proportion of children born outside of marriage. I my self is raised by a single mother, my sister has a son born outside of marriage, and so do many of my friends. This country is also one of the wealthiest in the world and has way less poverty then many countries where child rearing outside of marriage is less common.

In fact you could probably argue just as easily that actively supporting single parents has greater economic benefits then to disenfranchise them.

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/04/25/the-changing-prof...

> While it’s well-established that married parents are typically better off financially than unmarried parents, there are also differences in financial well-being among unmarried parents. For example, a much larger share of solo parents are living in poverty compared with cohabiting parents (27% vs. 16%).3

Correlation is not causation. Could it be that a third variable (say stress) is causing both high divorce rates and mass poverty?

Also the article you link to and quote is about unmarried couples vs. married couples, the source for these number is confusing to say the least, and focuses on the US where single parents don’t get that much welfare, which neither adds nor removes anything from my point that: single parenting is not by it self a good predictor of poverty.

I'd be interested in hearing more about what liberals have done to "normalize" divorce.

A conservative movement genuinely interested in making sure children are raised in wedlock could endorse routine family planning and reproductive health services, rather than building an entire totalizing culture war out of opposition to them. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine a policy more antithetical to our founding principles than one that compels the reluctant unwed parents of unwanted children to marry.

These issues didn't seem to bother Ben Franklin too much. But: fair enough! A liberal.

>Indeed, welfare benefits are often structured to disincentivize marriage, which in turn keeps people poor. Liberals often don’t appreciate that conservative social and economic views are synergistic like that.

I'd posit that it's not the benefits themselves that disincentivize such things, it's the rules surrounding how one accesses such benefits does so.

If our social programs didn't penalize such activities (through a variety of a restrictions on applying for and keeping such benefits) and we didn't make people jump through arbitrary and often degrading hoops to get them, all the while denigrating such folks as "lazy" or "greedy" or "worthless to society" I think that there wouldn't be such an issue to discuss.

What's more, at least in the US, there is a long tradition of blaming the poor for their poverty and assuming that it's their fault. Which makes it much more palatable to discriminate against those without means for many people.

But that's objectively false. There are many factors that impact poverty, some of which include specific legal and cultural incentives (both conscious and unconscious) which disadvantage certain people and advantage others.

Can you post an example of how welfare benefits are structured to disincentivize marriage?

I also think this is an example of how conservatives and progressives talk past each other. There's a difference between being in favor of divorce, and being in favor of recognizing that there are situations where divorce is a better option than staying married. Also, there's a difference between being in favor of raising children outside of marriage, and being in favor of an unmarried person or family raising an existing child that would otherwise not be raised by anyone.

Good Q. I think it’s a nuanced distinction. Helping too much can too often lead to a lack of empowerment, IMO. The idea that you can’t help yourself, so you must be led along by another as if you were a child. I think empowerment requires helping, but helping through “nudges,” if that makes sense

In the context of a system where it's almost impossible to lose money above a certain point and almost impossible to make money below a certain point (edit: without doing something reckless, which often happens).. No this does not make sense to me.

You may be being slightly hyperbolic, but in either case I would doubt that is a majority-held opinion.

> In the context of a system where it's almost impossible to lose money above a certain point and almost impossible to make money below a certain point

Whether you believe we live in such a system seems like a matter of opinion and outlook.

I wonder if there's a correlation there, where for some people they think that offering any help is by definition paternalistic? "As if they were a child", as in believing that only children need help.

You create a system in which they can help themselves while the others have a vested interest in helping them raise. It’s called capitalism.

By providing them with opportunity?

The issue isn't that they don't have a different rationale, it's the particulars of what that rationale is built on. "State dependence" alleviates suffering when implemented in earnest, "self-empowerment" perpetuates inequality and privileges luck and momentum over innovation and (paradoxically) moment-to-moment hard work.

In America, there has always been one side on the right side of history and one on the wrong, as far as health and happiness go. People and institutions switch sides, but the sides exist all the same. It comes down to how considerate you are of your neighbors, here and abroad. It's baffling that such a rich society continues to engage interpersonally with a scarcity mindset. Bootstraps are a myth; give until you can't and then ask for what you need. If we still then have racial issues, class issues, gender issues, religious issues, then the problem goes deeper than economics, and we'll need to face that with the same level of compassion.

The thing about state dependence that I don’t like is that that means the state has power over you. Follow our rules or you lose benefits. What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits.

We don’t want to have what they had in the old “second world” where the state could bend the will of the people because it held all the cards.

That’s not to deny that we can serve people better. Create access to capital, lessen predatory practices on innumerate consumers, incentivize women to enter more productive areas of the economy, etc.

Re: state power... ”Follow our rules or you lose benefits. What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits.”

How is this different than private power? Honestly, I've had to put up with far more arbitrary bs from my HMO than state or federal programs. With my state and the feds at least there is a clear statement of benefits, a clear procedure to appeal, and a solid attempt to deliver on promises.

How well does that compare to, say, your cable company? Or how well have big companies done respecting your privacy? In other words, lots of people get directly screwed by private companies, too.

I'm not trying to say that government programs are the ideal answer to everything. In the USA there is a serious need for reasonable debate, responsible budgets, and a commitment to good government.

There is plenty of potential for abuse with government over reach. But there is also plenty of abuse from government under-reach, too. Isn't it in everybody's interests to have a functioning government? One that that operates under good-faith intentions to follow it's mandate?

My guess is that right-leaning people are more comfortable with private corporations having that sort of power because they presume that the people in charge of the corporations must be competent and wise to get to their position. Possibly also that the dynamics of the free market will somehow protect people's rights.

No, IMO it's because generally speaking the govt has much more power over you than any private entity. You don't have to follow the rules of any particular private entity unless you choose to. You can't choose not to pay your taxes (legally) or escape the surveillance state.

There are exceptions to this of course, such as government-sponsored monopolies (healthcare, ISPs, utilities). But a lot of that is regulatory capture IMO - we've ceded a lot of power to MegaCorp Inc. which I'm not comfortable with either.

As terrible as a lot of big private companies are, at least they can't waltz into any/every platform (e.g. G, FB, Twitter, etc) and demand everything they have on you like the feds can. No one holds a candle to the potential of govt tyranny, everyone is at the mercy of "the man".

At the end of the day, massive consolidation of power at the top levels of society is never healthy, whatever form it may take.

As terrible as a lot of big private companies are, at least they can't waltz into any/every platform (e.g. G, FB, Twitter, etc)

This in an amusing statement considering that many people consider Google and Facebook to be terrible big private companies.

And note, their power doesn't come from government-sponsored monopolies.

Also, calling utilities and ISPs government-sponsored utilities is grossly misleading; both are natural monopolies due to the capital costs that are involved.

Even more people consider Google and FB useful and valuable and gladly (and voluntarily) use their services. Otherwise those "terrible companies" wouldn't be so big anymore.

Capital costs do not create monopolies, just an obstacle solved by raising capital. Government regulations create monopolies - there is no way to fix those.

I recommend you actually read up on natural monopolies. It's a well understood and universally accepted phenomenon (at least academically; obviously there are vested interests who prefer to deny their existence despite clear facts).

Every time people show me a "natural" monopoly I find regulations around it that corrupt the market.

People believing in the so-called natural monopolies lack fate in the entrepreneurial drive, creativity and innovation of the free individuals working hard in their own interest, for their own betterment.

So the proposition is which "check/balance" is better: Market competition or Elections.

Modern economics research shows that the efficient markets hypothesis is not true and definitely requires government regulation to operate in the way that Chicago School econ describes it. So that leaves Elections as the better balance mechanism by default.

> So that leaves Elections as the better balance mechanism by default.

This is a non-sequitor. The efficient market theorem can be untrue without elections necessarily being better at determining efficiency. I personally don’t believe in the efficient market (it’s why I’m an active trader). But elections, where ill-informed people vote on topics they barely have any knowledge about, risking nothing in the process, seem significantly worse at guaranteeing acceptable outcomes.

> The efficient market theorem can be untrue without elections necessarily being better at determining efficiency.

Can you go into more detail on how that could be for me? If the EMH is untrue, then there must be some other mechanism besides competition that checks the private sector, no? What would that be?

I'm implicitly lumping "regulation" as part of the Elections mechanism, btw, so I'm assuming you didn't mean regulation as the mechanism.

Yeah, we've seen the remarkable result of elections with Putin, Venezuela, China and now Trump.

Meanwhile unregulated fields like software, computers and communication have enjoyed the fastest and most remarkable progress in modern history. Progress which benefits us all every day.

Quite a straw man you put forward here.

First of all, You seem to be confused because you are mistaking what happens in Russia, Venezuela and China for actual elections. Whatever happens in those places is certainly not what I meant by the term "elections."

Second, You point to "three" (or are those 3 things really the same thing?) successes in competition, each of which were aided by investment authorized by elected legislators. Then you point to one failure of elections and proceed to conclude that competition is the better of the two. It doesn't follow, I'm afraid.

As for Trump, yes, that was the elections mechanism failing. I never said it was perfect. But the Market competition mechanism fails more often, in my estimation. Neither is perfect, but competition seems to create much higher probability for imperfection, abuse, flaws, and suffering.

Russia, Venezuela and USA all had actual democratic elections at some point. But they elected dictators which took power and never let go. The results were horrifying: imprisoned people, children in concentration camps and death, countless deaths. Destroying a country's economy leads to famine and, yes, death.

The effects of free market "failures" are comparatively laughable and always corrected by the free market itself sooner or later.

There is no contest which one is graver. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the reality and evidence all around us.

I'd say it's because corporate power is much more fragily held than goverment power. A startup can ruin a corporation - it takes a revolution to ruin a government.

Competition is what keeps private corporations well behaved. Governments are monopolies and thus unchecked.

Governments are checked by the wavering legitimacy of any given representative within the government. In our system, we have a direct check on that legitimacy through elections.

Meanwhile, corporations frequently do not have to compete, having either become a monopoly or having agreed upon "standards" without which they insist solvency in their given area would be impossible (as they rake in untold riches in profit). The only check on that power is indirectly through refusing to transact with them en masse. However, as long as their credit is good, they can continue to exist and operate with impunity.

In the end, the question is of the accumulation of which currency determines who is "good" enough to run your life: political clout or money.

Franklu, people who have to be nice to me tend to do better by me than people who just happen to have a lot of money.

Governments are checked by the democratic process. And competition is not working as well as it should. There are plenty of corporate monopolies, Varsity being one of the most obvious at the present time.

Neither is perfect but we can easily see that private competition works better by far by comparing the results: all the modern life products and services vs the mess that governments and governmental services are in various parts of the world.

The question is not which is more efficient, but which is more responsible with power.

Governments have incomparably more power and thus their abuses are incomparably worse: famines, pogroms, wars, asset confiscation, incarceration, murder.

Companies are controlled by the market, it's governments we need to worry about and find ways to control and regulate.

Still, the question is not which currently have more power, but which is more responsible with that power in a democratic society.

Companies are remarkably good at finding ways to control the market. That's why antitrust legislation is needed to protect consumers.

The only unbeatable way companies control the market is through government-granted monopoly. Any other way is eventually defeated by the market itself.

Every government intervention in the market will benefit established players and will hinder startups and thus the markets's self-regulating mechanisms.

This is an extreme counterexample, but doesn't the fact that the government will prosecute large companies that order hit squads to assassinate startup employees count as an "intervention"?

There are many other cases where I'd be very uncomfortable trusting these so-called "self-regulatinf mechanisms", e.g. the abolition of slavery, child labour, and racial/sexual employment discrimination.

All that is illegal behavior. Markets require the rule of law too and nobody is disputing the role of governments to implement and uphold the law.

Moreover, none of those things were always illegal. There was a time where it was not obvious that they should be illegal. Yet, despite the relatively laisez faire economics of the 19th century (in the UK at least), these behaviours were not simply self-regulated away. That required government intervention in the form of passing laws and ensuring that the law was followed.

Price fixing is also illegal behaviour, but my impression is that you're more relaxed about that?

> is that that means the state has power over you

This is a recurring theme that I despise. People need to start to talk about the government in a democracy as "we". You are the government, the state is a collective you are part off and have power over. You are in fact dependent on others, that is the point of a society.

So when someone says, hey, when I joined this society, I was told its people upheld the right for all its members to equal opportunity? But my parents did not have the money that yours did? And that affected my opportunity? So what gives?

When you have the attitude of the government as a seperate entity, it becomes reality. The more you see the government as such, the more it is allowed to become a ruler over others, since that's how you depict it. When it should be the CEO that you, a member of the board, elected, and can booth out when you don't like what they're doing no more, and you also can join the government if you want to contribute more, etc.

Sorry to hijike your discussion about handling the homelessness crisis , but that's a sore point for me. I find it really weak of people to look for someone else to govern them, and I wish people took responsability for their government (in democracies), because they are its owner and fundamentally have power over it. But too many prefer to delegate and pretend they're powerless against the faceless man.

> This is a recurring theme that I despise. People need to start to talk about the government in a democracy as "we". You are the government, the state is a collective you are part off and have power over. You are in fact dependent on others, that is the point of a society.

I take your point, but for an individual this is only true in a very abstract sense. The People may govern Themselves, but I do not govern myself in any meaningful way.

BTW, this idea came up recently on a different article and got some good discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24528467

Sorry but no, the state is fundamentally different and opposed to the individual. Individuals make up society but individuals are not society.

The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group. In most cases it's pretty mundane stuff you give up as an individual, basically 0 cost stuff for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society. Or via listening to the state in regards to the rules and policies they put in place.

But it is foolish to say that they are one and the same.

> But it is foolish to say that they are one and the same

I don't see where in what I said you got the impression I was saying that they are one and the same?

I'm saying that, in a working democracy, you are a part of the government, which is very different from seeing the government as a seperate entity you are subservient too.

> The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group

The point of a democratic society is to create a friendly association with others. For it to be friendly, it kind of requires all participants to benefit and feel fairly treated. In turn, this often means that a democratic society will put a stronger emphasis on the individual than non-democratic alternatives. That is to say, the goal of a democratic society is to maximize everyone's rights at the individual level.

Now yes, that does mean that a democratic society is a group of people that assemble together in order to overpower individuals or other groups that would try to dominate over them through force. Maybe that's what you meant here, but it seems a bit of a sideway conversation. Since they do so in order to protect their own individual rights from being taken by force by others.

>The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group.

The entire purpose of a society is to harness the potential of the group in order to enrich each individual life within it.

Stow that scarcity mindset.

You are being small minded to what I'm saying. You say harness the potential of the group. How do you do that? It necessarily requires stifling the motivations of individuals so that they can work together. I'm making 0 moral judgements on whether the motivations of an individual are or are not valid.

Notice I specifically said > for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society.

So, you might want to re-evaluate your bias towards what I said.

>It necessarily requires stifling the motivations of individuals so that they can work together.

This assumes that people are naturally and totally individualistic, which is untrue even at a biological level. People work together instinctually, and they also decide, rationally, to work together. Individual and collective motivations are often the same; and while collective motivations sometimes stifle individual motivations, the former often (if not more often) replaces a LACK of motivation. In fact, the appeal to engaging in collective action in order to fill in a hole of individual meaning (motivation) underpins some of humanity's strongest and most common institutions: military service, volunteer service, protest, religion, work. That is society: individuals working in concert, by each's determination.

>I'm making 0 moral judgements on whether the motivations of an individual are or are not valid.

You're making a moral judgment privileging individual motivation, separating it from collective motivation.

Your argument is simply wrong on its face. It tries to generalize a solipsistic perspective to the rest of humanity, to which it very clearly does not apply. Perhaps only in this thought are you truly as much an individual as you seem to think people must necessarily be.

You're putting words in my mouth at this point so I don't know what else I can contribute to this discussion to move it forward.

I share the same argument David Graeber was making in Utopia of Rules, you should give it a read.

No, I simply addressed your statements re: individual vs collective motivation. This reply of yours is simply a way for you to avoid interrogating your viewpoint in light of my response, which I think is a shame.

But people ARE naturally and totally individualistic. Even when they cooperate, they do it for their own individual interest. It's due to the nature of our evolution.

Read "The Selfish Gene".

That's a misunderstanding of the thesis. Because humans tend to have trouble surviving completely alone, our nature is to privilege others and the group in many circumstances, over our individual wellbeing. Sacrifice - of comfort, health, even life - in order to secure the survival of our children and tribe is common because it is often so much more effective at allowing for the perpetuation of a given line than purely individualistic behavior. That's what's so profound about the concept presented in "The Selfish Gene": the meta-impulse to preserve one's genes often overrides the meta-impulse to preserve one's own life.

I think this would be a stronger argument if a congress that has a below 30% approval rating didn't have a 90% reelection rate.

Unless we're talking election fraud though, it is the people that have chosen to reelect or to delegate the choice to others to do so for them.

And anyone motivated enough can engage even further in the process, become a candidate, influence others, etc.

I find so many people are just complainers, but they barely take anytime to even understand how the system works, I wouldn't be surprised if half the people don't even know what a congressman can do, can't do, and does. And even less surprised if most people didn't even bother reading about each candidate for more than 10 minutes.

I'm not American, but now live in America, and I've literally had to explain how laws are made in the US to many Americans. That's depressing. And it's not like I'm an expert on it, I just took a few hours reading through the wikipedia page and the usa.gov website. (p.s.: It's not better in my country Canada, people are similarly lacking in ownership and awareness, so I'm not trying to point fingers at Americans exclusively)

Yes, we can discuss the system and issues with representation, like being first past the post, and all, but even before that, I think there's just a lack of ownership by a lot of people who don't consider themselves a part of the government, when they are. The word itself means: "the people rule" and is defined as: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state". As a citizen of a democratic state, YOU ARE the government.

The skills that make a politician successful at getting elected are orthogonal to the skills of a good administrator.

Meritocracy works (barely) in private corporation but is completely useless in politics.

Do you apply this same reasoning to people whose housing, food, and healthcare are all put at risk if their employer decides they don't like them?

Seems like you're concerned about what's mostly a hypothetical when done by the state today- but probably hundreds of millions of people in the US alone are being coerced to do things they don't want to under threat of losing the exact things you're worried about. And in a lot of cases, what's one big thing mitigating that coercion? The very social safety nets you're worried about!

You can change your employer much easier than you can change your government.

But there are no substantial distinctions between employers in terms of how the utilize the coercive leverage that they have. So this is an illusory "safety-net".

The relative ease of ending the relationship means the effect of that leverage is greatly reduced.

Especially since Citizens United gave your employer outsized power to change the government.

There are more employers than govs. Imagine if the govt could cancel your benefits because it didn’t like your tweet. A few companies, ok, it sucks, but you have a chance to move on.

Consider how hard it would be to get a law like that past the judiciary system. If you or I can see how ridiculous the notion is then it must be obvious to a jury of our peers. Even with majority fiat the judiciary branch can still quell all kinds of popular but unjust laws. The travel ban is a great example of something the judiciary crushed. Same thing with the requirement in the ACA that employer-provided insurance include coverage for birth control, which is arguably far more popular.

There isn't just one Government in the US. What we have is a system of branches, each of which must agree that a law is acceptable. If just one branch disagrees then it can effect change.

Similarly we are not just one state. We're a federation and individual states can fight against federal laws that their constituents find unjust. Washington and Colorado did just that when they legalized marijuana. It's still illegal at the federal level, but the ATF has no jurisdiction within state lines so they can't do anything about manufacture and sale within state borders.

Consolidating that all under the same umbrella erases a lot of the very complexity that serves to protect you. And you can't accord that complexity to a corporation because shareholders and the board have a level of tyranny not found in our government.

The anti-drug war.

A tweet may be able to cancel careers, but cannot extinguish legal entitlements.

If the government could do that it would mean that legislators were elected that passed such a law. It's not a credible hypothetical, IMO. And even if it were, there would be recourse in the form of electing different legislators at the next opportunity.

Guantanamo Bay

And to you does human trafficking indict the private sector in the same manner or not?

We can elect legislators who are opposed to abuses like Guantanamo Bay and campaign on fixing it.

What can we or the private sector do about abuses in the private sector?

Any illegalities perpetrated by the private sector should be (and are) prosecuted to the full extend of the law. In addition, market misbehaving is punished by the market through the consumer.

The private sector is not above the law. The problem is that the government is. This is why, while both can misbehave, I see governments as a much, much larger danger to the average citizen than corporations. And the history agrees with me.

Just noting that in your scenario here, you are admitting that the private sector is not able to correct it's own abuses, but rather needs the elected government to do so.

>market misbehaving is punished by the market through the consumer.

Can you explain how the consumer punishes private sector entities engaged in human trafficking, for example? It seems there's plenty of evidence that deception and cutting corners is the most market competitive behavior that corporations can employ which allows them to offer the most appealing prices. Therefore market misbehavior is rewarded, not punished by consumers because the price signal is too reductionist to capture all of that.

>And the history agrees with me.

That is debate-able

I wrote this in another comment but it bears repeating: Illegal behavior is punished. Markets require the rule of law. The role of governments to implement and uphold the law. Nobody is disputing that.

>We don’t want to have what they had in the old “second world” where the state could bend the will of the people because it held all the cards.

Isn't it apparent, though, that this type of leverage is inevitable in any societal structure? Some party will have a level of power where it can coerce many others to basically do their bidding at threat of witholding some essential sustenance. In the private sector, witholding employment means poverty and the resulting wretched consequences to health and status.

The proposition that government should be the only one with that leverage is the lesser of many evils, because at least there is electoral recourse against a government that abuses it.

This is opposed to leaving that leverage with the private sector, where there is no recourse, other that not participating, which is exactly their leverage in the first place, as you will be left with no income and in poverty.

> The thing about state dependence that I don’t like is that that means the state has power over you.

This is genuinely sad-funny considering the state of the US federal government overreach (independent of sitting president), policing, justice and implementation of secret courts and police forces.

In any case, welfare states handle this quite well with a justice system largely independent from the social executive flanked by mandatory legal aid. Which, if anything, has resulted in a power imbalance towards those receiving state benefits.

>The thing about state dependence that I don’t like is that that means the state has power over you. Follow our rules or you lose benefits. What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits.

I don't understand how this would be a valid reason to not give a benefit. Even if that benefit comes with strings or can be taken away, isn't receiving that benefit for a period of time more helpful than never receiving it at all?

It doesn't have to be a valid reason. From the POV of a state that wants to micromanage the beliefs of its population, social benefits become a tool of coercion. This has happened before, the history of USSR has plenty of examples.

That's not an argument against state help & social services per se. It's an argument for being vigilant and ensuring the government serves the people more than it serves itself.

In USSR these opportunities didn't exist outside of the state. In the US, opportunities exist, some people are just too far down below the ladder that they can't even begin to climb. If you fear this type of situation in which people in the US are dependent on the state, isn't it an acknowledgment that the self reliance and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" ideas that are used to argue against state help are myths? Otherwise why would people allow themselves to be coerced by the state if there were other viable alternatives?

> If you fear this type of situation in which people in the US are dependent on the state, isn't it an acknowledgment that the self reliance and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" ideas that are used to argue against state help are myths?

Perhaps. I personally don't buy the "self-made man" arguments. They feel too much like survivorship bias.

I don't think it's that simple. The presence of a benefit can create a moat around other opportunities, e.g. social housing easing the burden of finding housing but also reinforcing geographic segregation by social class.

You’re not thinking long enough. Give the state enough time and it will use it as a cudgel to get people to do things the way they want.

I'd like to see what real-world examples you're thinking of when you write this, because the line of reasoning you're pursuing in this part of the thread looks to me more like a terminally cynical description of having a society and legal system.

Or they will be returned to the exact same state they would be in otherwise? How is that a threat? Would a hungry person turn down a free meal because they will just be hungry later and they don’t want to be reliant on whoever gave them the meal?

The state always has power over you, it wouldn't be much of a state otherwise. If it doesn't respect your rights, you're screwed anyway. Capital doesn't help you when the state refuses to enforce your property rights, skills don't help you when you've been disappeared out of a helicopter.

Exactly. See Russia for an example of all these awful consequences of state power, without the social safety net.

Sure, a tyrannical government could take away your benefits for having the wrong views. They could also just take away your property in the absence of benefits.

This is in part a reply to you and in part a comment on all the sibling comments.

There are many cultural assumptions that are built into the comments here. Worth examining.

* "What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits." Some countries use government to ensure every mom and baby-to-be has prenatal care and food. There is not a belief test there, just a pregnancy test. Could you give an example of the types of belief tests you are against?

I find the US emphasis on church charity rather than government services repugnant in particular because it often is used exactly for ideological coercion. Not all churches, but many, see the provision of services as a way to enforce/reward/punish certain beliefs and behaviors. I've always found that un-christ-like myself but hey I'm just a heretic. A government service that says, "hey, you're 16 and homeless so we will feed you dinner" seems much better and less coercive than a church that says, "you're 16 and homeless so we'll feed you dinner if you pray beforehand and we get to choose your pronouns".

* Many sibling commenters mention employers a lot. That's another cultural assumption that I find interesting. In the culture I was raised in, it was assumed that government help is rightfully directed primarily at the very young, the very old, and the very sick -- in general, people without employers and with fewer opportunities to 'just help themselves' or pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That is, after all, why we formed a bunch of these government agencies -- we as a people, as a community, felt bad seeing 87-year-old men starve to death in their apartments because they had limited mobility and no income, or watching 4-month-old babies refuse to get that corporate job they obviously should've that would've allowed mama who had a debilitating injury from birthing to afford formula for the kid. Ah, self-empowerment: works so well when it results in 4-year-olds becoming trash pickers to help their families, and 92-year-olds to sit by the road (if they even live that long) begging because it brings in a little cash! No. Some of these government programs were formed because there are times in a person's life where all the psychological empowerment and even job skills training classes you want aren't gonna help, but food and a place to live will.

To go back to discussions above this, I still engage a lot on Facebook for political argument purposes. It's boring just talking with people who agree with me (the people I live with, generally) so I do seek out other points of view on Facebook. It is interesting how some folks always slide an argument back to the point they want -- tried talking about Amy Coney Barrett's opinion in a Title IX case with a friend doing a PhD, and strangely enough she kept bringing it back to how universities shouldn't be policing "stuff that happens in bars". I just mention this example because campus adjudication of sexual assault cases and the relationship with Title IX and due process rights is, ugh, a totally different, complicated, legally interesting conversation than 'what happens in bars'. But we can't even have the conversation -- a conversation I feel I can contribute to in an interesting way because I've been faculty at a university and have dealt informally with harassment between students -- because it continually slides back to these fake talking points that dismiss all the important stuff! Is that social cooling or not?

> Many sibling commenters mention employers a lot.

Probably because the vast majority of Americans can only afford healthcare for those debilitating injuries by finding an employer who will sign them up for the employee health plan.

> A government service that says, "hey, you're 16 and homeless so we will feed you dinner" seems much better and less coercive than a church that says, "you're 16 and homeless so we'll feed you dinner if you pray beforehand and we get to choose your pronouns".

If the results of the latter were proven to result in generally a much happier and more cohesive society, would you be so confident and assured in your opposition and disdain for the approach?

I'm a religious person for utilitarian reasons and read my Bible weekly and go to church accordingly.

But a whole lot of teen suicide and abortion is due to haters hating (I mean Christians being dogmatic) -- it's pretty well proven that coercive religious dogma is bad for mental health, as well as in the US divorce and abortion rates. The pressure to keep up appearances and lie about who you are and your actual life is not the bit that leads to a happy and cohesive society.

You’re leaping from “coercive religion dogma is bad for mental health” (I’ll accept that for the sake of argument) to “faith based charity is bad”. I don’t see how that follows. Seeing as you go to Church for utilitarian reasons, I don’t understand why you would condemn a faith based charity for trying to offer some sort of spiritual sustenance to the people they serve.

What about all the instances where state dependence increased suffering though? What baffles me is that we continue to fall into the trap that there are only 2 ways to approach every problem.

I think the current trend of not engaging with those who are politically different cuts across the political spectrum. There is an intense trend to stay within ideological bubbles at the moment, and to try to censor voices that do not align with one's own leanings. People both liberal and conservative just get _angry_ at anyone with a different political or social idea, and write them off as "bad people", which is not productive. They also tend to leap to the conclusion that if you disagree about one idea, you must adhere to the opposite ideology on every issue. As a moderate person, this is an extremely tiresome experience I have over and over again with people of both liberal and conservative leanings.

This comment is the most conniving one I have heard in awhile. To paraphrase, your argument is convincing and it’s similar to those who blame it on the “SJW” types so let’s shift the argument on over to those supposed people.

So many assumptions piled onto assumptions about people.

> So many assumptions piled onto assumptions about people.

Spot on.

It's basically a preemptive strike before anyone gets the idea to point at cancel culture and the like.

Reminds me of “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

I don't know. Do left-wing people really put so much effort in empathizing with minorities, or is it rather that they come with a complete theory of how the minorities think, and only interact with those who agree with the theory?

How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant? Would they treat them as an equal, or even defer to their lived experience? Or would they simply find another, less conservative immigrant, who would not oppose their world-view, and choose this one to be the speaker for the minority?

In my experience, there is not much difference between left-wing and right-wing people in willingness to help oppressed people. Seems to me they mostly differ in style: a left-wing person would probably create a non-profit organization and also write about what the government should do, a right-wing person would probably work under the umbrella of some religious group and also write about how individuals should help themselves and each other. On each side, a few people would actually do something, more people would talk about how someone else should do something, and most wouldn't really care. I am not saying the sides are exactly balanced; I am just saying empathising with people (but also twisting their opinions to better fit your ideology) exists on both sides.

(By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person as "anti-scientific", without actually addressing the substance of their argument, just because that person disagreed with some organization that has a mission to help this marginalized community. No more detais, because it happened in a private conversation, it's just a funny coincidence that first I read this, then I switch a browser tab and read about how empathetic left-wing people are. Some of them are, some of them are not.)

I am not necessarily saying that leftists are a panacea of altruist thinking, having washed away their colonial upbringing in their dialogues with a theoretical minority. ;)

Rather, I understand leftist thought to be rooted in questioning hierarchy and power structures, which I believe leads to more readily seeking solidarity with those that are not as well off as they are.

> By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person

This does sound like a funny happenstance. My original reply was about this same sort of funny coincidence in reverse; how I often see the left critiqued as being "intolerant" when I frequently see them lifting and amplifying the voices of those who are disenfranchised by the system that they materially benefit from.

> How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant?

First, debates are not typical discourse. In my experience, debates are meant to be a show of virtue. Whose virtues you're being weighed against will greatly determine your behavior or whether you even decide to participate at all. I think that Hacker News values sound, well written arguments, which is why I am here posting. :)

Therefore, I think that given the propensity toward identity politics (from both sides) and the difficulty in interrogating the root of the beliefs that immigrant without appearing to be questioning the validity of them, I (as a white leftist) would prefer not to debate them. So, yes, I would rather propose someone whose lived experience might be more similar to theirs - perhaps a left-leaning immigrant - specifically because I would be afraid of either appearing weak in the eyes of right-wing spectators by deferring to their lived experience, or seem like an asshole because I am questioning the validity of their experience. It would be a PR nightmare. :)

In a private, personal setting (i.e. not a debate) I think that talking to your hypothetical conservative immigrant would probably be a great opportunity for me to learn about their experience and explore the root of their beliefs. I hope I would get to share mine as well.

> I understand leftist thought to be rooted in questioning hierarchy and power structures, which I believe leads to more readily seeking solidarity with those that are not as well off as they are.

Yes. A political orientation is about - to put it bluntly - which parts of reality you focus on and which parts of reality you ignore. So, suppose we have a group of people who are e.g. simultaneously victims of racism and of high crime in their neighborhood. A left-wing person would be happy to help them fight racism, but would feel uncomfortable hearing about crime perpertated by members of the same minority against their neighbors. A right-wing person would be happy to help them fight crime, but would feel uncomfortable discussing structural racism.

Sometimes the existing structures are oppressive and should be torn down. Sometimes they are necessary for survival. Quite often, they are both at the same time.

The bigger problem is left-leaning people getting harassed and immediately flagged as right/alt-right/-ist (i.e., "not one of us") when merely disagreeing with or challenging dogma. See Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker for some high profile examples.

Don't toe the line and echo approved orthodoxy? You're the enemy! This is extreme tribal behavior.

As a result, there is a chilling effect and a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left[1][2]. Certainly don't feel welcome to speak or think openly. This is incredibly regressive, damaging to liberalism and enlightenment values. Seriously, not being able to challenge your own side and engage in dialectic will send us back to the dark ages.

1. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right

2. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right/comm...

Thinkers should instead crush tribalism, like this: http://blog.cr.yp.to/20160607-dueprocess.html

> a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left

"the left" isn't a discrete thinkspace. There is a political spectrum, which isn't linear. The individuals mentioned are still relatively leftist, regardless of whoever is critical or engaging in other disparaging acts. Implying there is 1 left-wing or 1 right-wing is tribal behavior.

This was addressed above, in the bit talking about people failing to put the same effort into empathising and understanding people who historically receive little to no empathy or understanding whatsoever. Ignore our personal feelings on the matter for a moment: do we honestly believe JK Rowling has made an effort to converse with, understand, and empathize with trans women?

> do we honestly believe JK Rowling has made an effort to converse with, understand, and empathize with trans women?

I don't agree with JK Rowling's take on these issues. But I actually think she likely has made at least some effort to do this. Some of her open letters certainly mention her knowing trans people and sympathising with their experiences.

Although in general I think the gender debate is a prime example of neither side listening to the other. There is a group of people who aren't listening to trans people when they say that they have gender feelings which are important to them. But equally trans people aren't listening to other people when they say that their physical bodies are important to them.

Being told your opinions are problematic and hurtful is part of the process of changing them. This is the "paradox of intolerance", without a certain degree of intolerance of unacceptable beliefs, intolerance itself spreads further.

It is really the same process as having any ingrained belief challenged, it is going to make that person uncomfortable because something they took on faith is being challenged. That doesn't mean it's not something that should happen.

Also a great way to solidify them and get people to dig in their heels.

Shaming is often more about making the shamer feel good than a rational calculation of persuasive power.

This seems like a false equivalence. Trans people aren't trying to tell cis people that their physical bodies aren't allowed to matter to them, nor to invalidate cis people's gender or force them to be treated as another gender.

> Trans people aren't trying to tell cis people that their physical bodies aren't allowed to matter to them

I feel like they are.

Specifically, if you believe that "feeling like" a gender makes you that gender, then it seems to me that logically you have to believe one of the following:

(1) That having the physiology associated with a given gender is not sufficient to count as a gender.

This invalidates the identity of people like me who don't experience the "gender feeling" that trans people (and some cis people) talk about, and therefore base their identity as a man/woman on their physicality.

(2) That gender categories are "open" where for example either feeling like a man OR having "male" physiology makes you a man.

But that seems to make the whole concept of gender pointless because people with penises don't share anything in common with people who feel like men (that they don't also share with people who feel like women and people with vaginas) unless they happen to be people who fall into both categories. It also makes it impossible for someone express that they have one of those things but not the other because there is only one label "man/woman" to describe two distinct phenomena.

---

If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.

> If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.

This is called nonbinary, agender, or genderqueer. This is a fairly established situation. You may come across someone who uses nonstandard pronouns such as "they/them" or "zyr/zem" or something like that. There's even an LGBTQ flag for being nonbinary. (Q stands for queer/questioning as well). If you are assigned male at birth but don't identify as male or any other gender then you may be nonbinary or agender. If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organization to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!

(Additionally on technicality, trans means "anything that isn't identifiying as one's assigned gender at birth". Being nonbinary is a subset of being trans. Society is most familiar with binary trans identity, which is when someone is assigned F/M at birth but identifies as M/F, however this is not the entire set of trans identity. You are free to be assigned M at birth but identify with no gender, and still be trans.)

Right, so this deals with one side of the equation: it allows me to represent the fact that I don't have gender feelings. But it doesn't allow me to represent my biological maleness, in fact if anything it seems to deny it. My physiology is an important part of me (and my identity), and if I describe myself as non-binary or agender then that part of me isn't being communicated or represented. I want to be able to describe my (lack of) gender feelings and my physiology separately, and make the same distinction when talking about other people.

---

> If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organisation to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!

I'm pretty familiar with the LGBTQ community in general, and I have spent a great deal of time over the last year or so reading up about and thinking about gender identity. My view is that the mainstream view in the LGBTQ community where one's gender identity (which label they use - man/woman/non-binary/etc) is assumed to correspond to "a feeling of gender" is quite naive. This is certainly true for some people, but there are also other reasons why people choose to use those labels including having certain physiologies or simply the fact that you were assigned the label and never bothered to change it. It seems to me that these other kinds of gender identity are equally valid and one way or another ought to find representation in whatever system of gender we settle one, but that a "gender feelings" focussed conception of gender doesn't provide this representation.

(one such system would be a system eschews having a single gender label at all and requires that we are more specific about which aspects of sex/gender we are talking about in situations where we need to make gendered distinctions)

> it allows me to represent the fact that I don't have gender feelings. But it doesn't allow me to represent my biological maleness, in fact if anything it seems to deny it.

You can identify as a masc nonbinary or AMAB nonbinary. These are distinctions that are pretty common to use in the LGBTQ community which is why I suggest not just reading up and thinking but actually going to a community and participating within it. Your local group may even be able to introduce you to other AMAB NB people that you can compare and contrast experiences with.

Except when they are: As in the case of Caster Semenya. Never has it been more clear that trans rights are human rights.

is there not room outside of the right for people who are not that empathetic or would rather not spend the energy to understand these people? I want action on climate change, I want single payer health care, subsidized college, reproductive rights, separation of church and state.

what i don't care about is how many genders an English department can create. I don't discriminate, but I also don't want to expend any energy understanding or empathizing .

Liberals aren't out here forcing each other at gunpoint to protest every cause that exists. If you don't want to engage on an issue, don't engage. The person being discussed above (Rowling) is being called out for making repeated, harmful public statements. Don't do that. Smile and nod and you'll be fine.

Maybe avoid characterizing your would-be allies in terms of dumb right-wing tropes like "how many genders an English department can create" while you're at it.

Interesting since 1 day later a major HN story is about a company (coinbase) blocking political discussions at the workplace. It created a big backlash by people who refused to follow that rule and insisted that anything and everything is politics, arguing that (lack of speech) is still speech, that speech is action, that being neutral is implicit or even active support of one side or the other, and many other completely extreme and unreasonable stances.

Maybe people aren't forcing each other at gunpoint, but it's pretty close.

I don't really see the parallel. The poster I responded to seemed to be asking the question in a personal capacity, not from a position of power over others. When you front an organization representing, and being represented by, hundreds of people, then yes, politics are unavoidable by definition.

Furthermore, unless there's more context I've skimmed over (I assume you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899), it's not clear that Coinbase will suffer any negative consequences from this whatsoever aside from being shunned by activists, which I presume is a consequence they're okay with since they published a blog post explicitly alienating that group. The only folks being forced I see are the employees being told to pipe down or ship out.

(also, while it may not be substantive to this discussion, the belief that neutrality, especially explicit neutrality, is tacit endorsement of the status quo is neither extreme nor unreasonable)

The people who were working there were forced discuss or be "activists" by other coworkers. That isn't a position of power, it's others directly encroaching on their space and working conditions.

This is a direct example of what you are denying, that people are somehow not being forced to participate in these politics. They are, and increasingly so, with very few companies taking such an active stance to combat it.

And yes, neutrality is specifically the absence of any single position. It cannot be an endorsement of anything, be definition. Redefining terms to be whatever is politically convenient to create strawman positions and drama is another tactic used by those who want to force politics into every situation.

> The people who were working there were forced discuss or be "activists" by other coworkers.

Source? I have no idea what this is referring to.

Effective neutrality due to lack of will or resources is one thing. But a declaration of neutrality is a message to other actors that you will not intervene in their affairs. It is a rejection of the cultural norm that extremism (outside the company) should be tempered. Sounds pretty political to me, but maybe you and I are working with different definitions of politics.

This is really eloquently put. A concrete example: I grew up in Minnesota in an area with a lot of Somali refugees. When the Trump travel ban went into effect, many of them were cut off from their families. I have friends that had to choose between packing up their lives to immigrate to Germany or never seeing their family again.

In that context, I'm not particularly interested in engaging with the idea that the travel ban is A Good Thing Actually. And I don't think I'd maintain a friendship with someone who thinks that it is. I do not consider this a character flaw.

> The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled

I think there are a lot more people who think they do this than actually do this. Left-leaning spaces are some of the most homogenous around. I can’t tell you how many left-leaning people I know who were genuinely shocked and surprised that, when it came time to vote, “people of color” didn’t like Elizabeth Warren. Their perception of getting to know “immigrants from other countries” and “people who are racially minoritized” rested entirely on interacting with immigrants and minorities who travel in the same rarified elite circles as themselves and hold the same views. “Center people of color” during the primary became “f--k moderates” after the convention, without a hint of irony.

Of course I’m painting with a very broad brush! Obviously not all left-leaning people are like that. But I do think there is a lack of appreciation for the relationships right-leaning folks have with people who are different from themselves. One of the most racially integrated places I’ve ever been is rural Texas. It’s a function of economics and geography. Left-leaning cities are highly segregated—educated left leaning people generally don’t live and work alongside immigrants and racial minorities.

I do actually agree with you. It is very easy to be radical in your beliefs (in either direction) when you don't need to interact with the people that they effect. There are plenty of "ivory tower" leftists. The difference is that I do believe that those leftists are seeking to find solidarity with the oppressed, though not always successfully. Sometimes they miss the mark, and there are plenty examples of shitty behavior, but I think that they're heading in the right direction.

I also think that it's unfortunate it's so easy to mistake a critique like that as an attack of the left as a whole. Leftist policy should always have the goal of materially making peoples lives better. We should ruthlessly measure and criticize whether we are in fact succeeding in that, both by the numbers and by the lived experience of the people they effect.

The current form of discourse in America is so hyper-partisan as to make that sort of critique almost impossible to do in public, as it comes off as a show of weakness rather than an opportunity for evolution. It's painful.

I think folks on the left are well-meaning, but I’m not sure if they’re “headed in the right direction.” I’ve been rattled after this happened at my law school alma mater recently: https://www.thecollegefix.com/northwestern-law-faculty-refus...

The ivory tower leftists are now pushing a narrative of pervasive “white supremacy,” pitting whites versus non-whites. And again, the ivory tower folks are being tone deaf. The NYT recently ran an article where self-described “liberal pollsters” asked about the views of Latino people. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...

> Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.

> In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

What the article describes as the views of the overwhelming majority of Hispanics reflects my own views as an immigrant. By contrast, the approach taken by these ivory tower folks is in my opinion unworkable and threatens to blow up something that works about America: our ability to assimilate and lift up immigrant groups. If you look at the data, all immigrant groups are on a path to reaching economic parity with white people. Asians are already there, and Latinos achieve parity within a few generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/3/1567/5741707

Ivory tower leftists are leading these chants, amplifying people like Linda Sarsour who call assimilation “racist,” etc. And I think that ends in disaster. Nowadays, I have to keep an eye out to make sure my half-white daughter isn’t being exposed to this stuff. And frankly, I’m a pretty liberal person so this is distressing. I don’t like the direction Trump has gone by alienating immigrants. But there is a good chance that Nikki Hailey is the future of the GOP. Meanwhile, who comes after Biden? Elizabeth Warren, who talks about all of us non-white people as a progressive bloc, constantly assailed by white people? AOC? Ilhan Omar?

You get that Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren don't represent the majority of people left of the American center, right? "Squad" politics get trounced outside of hyper-left noncompetitive districts. There's a pretty significant media bias feeding into this analysis you're providing. If you're going to cite Elizabeth Warren, for instance, you might want to factor in the fact that she quite literally embarrassed herself in the 2020 Democratic primary.

I recognize they’re not representative. I said that “I’m not sure” that the left is “heading in the right direction.” What’s the direction? After Biden won the nomination I thought I had overreacted and things were going back to normal. Then I opened up Twitter to see the most completely normal Midwestern people at my alma mater declare they are “gatekeepers of white supremacy” on a Zoom conference with hundreds of students. The feminist academic Dean I watched get installed just a couple of years ago was cancelled for not acquiescing to similar declarations. My dad says it’s just academia, and not to worry about “so long as it’s confined to the campus.” But he’s also 70! He’s not going to be around forever to keep things in line.

I think it mostly is campus stuff. Even the New Yorker ran a whole long piece practically taking Ibrahim Kendi apart. See also the elite discourse backlash against Robin Diangelo.

A missionary may also engage with people with different experiences than their own, but they're only doing so to cement their own world view. When they come across someone they disagree with, they'll just label them as evil without thinking about it.

To be clear, I don't think that it's a right vs left thing. I think that social media incentivizes people to behave poorly. Ben Shapiro had an enlightening discussion with a founder of Vox about the nature of polarization [1], but that's not why he's famous or how he makes money. His audience wants to see him bash unprepared liberals, so that's what he's going to do. Even if he doesn't, some other pundit will simply take his place.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMOUiWCjkn4

You just painted all missionaries with a pretty broad brush.

> A missionary may also engage with people with different experiences than their own, but they're only doing so to cement their own world view. When they come across someone they disagree with, they'll just label them as evil without thinking about it.

As a former Mormon missionary, I couldn't disagree more. I didn't meet many people who were interested in the Mormon church, but I didn't consider them evil. If anything, it was my views on my religion and personal spirituality that evolved enormously over the course of the two years, far more than the 19 years previous or the many since. I learned a lot about myself and my worldview. Certainly a lot more than anyone changed their worldview by talking to me.

That's fair. I shouldn't have generalized this among all the individual missionaries. My point is to provide an example of engaging with different worldviews does not necessarily imply open-mindedness.

Do you mind telling us how many missionaries you've met and engaged with in your adult life?

> I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.

That wasn’t the subtext at all. Interesting that you think the shoe fits so well, though.

I tried to couch my reply as not assuming intent on your part specifically, but rather my attempt at pointing out a pattern I have seen other people engage in and be subject to.

When looking at this and your other reply to me elsewhere in this thread, it does not feel like you're engaging me in good faith.

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