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Comment by joecot | Hacker News Reader

Hi there! I'm in the "Left" bubble. What are some of these points the "Right" bubble has that I should be taking a good look at?

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The most egregious as someone who is in the left bubble but acknowledges nuance on many issues I would say are:

identity politics: economic problems are economic and fixating on identity is never going to solve them but further alienate people. What this sounds like is disrupting meritocracy "we <insert combo of minority identities> president or engineer... etc" but in reality is nothing but an extension of confessionalism, which never works. Look at where such politics ends (Lebanon's current crisis <-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Pact, Iraq's current crisis <-- https://www.mei.edu/publications/nation-or-religion-iraqs-hy...). Increase representation by fixing the pipeline problem not instating qoutas without sunset deadlines or criteria

scientism: the usage of phrases such as "believe science" when talking about social issues like abortion where worth is assigned to lives and even ignoring it completely when talking about puberty blockers. Never mind how anti-scientific "believe science" is.

American exceptionalism: A lot more subtle than the right's "shithole country" comments but no less dangerous, look no further than how Poland is talked about, or Hungary... etc. Can't fathom how different societies look at issues from other perspectives. This is a form of cultural imperialism.

All of the above are subject to your definition of left and are points of debate within the left too.

That depends on your interests. Being from the Netherlands, where racism and slavery are less of a hot topic compared to the US, I was interested, and I can offer you some things that I personally found interesting. For example this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFqVNPwsLNo (esp @24:00). And Thomas Sowell's book on the history of slavery, here's an interesting part of the audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAf8XL2xQI

I'll watch both eventually, but the first note from that interview at 24 minutes is that the breakdown of the black family is a huge issue in the US. That kids are much more likely to grow up and commit crimes if there's no father figure in the house. And he's right, it is. But he skips the reasons behind them, and comes to the incorrect conclusion that that's not a "white cop's fault".

1. Those families often don't have dads because they were arrested on minor drug offenses, or killed by said cops.

2. America's social safety net is packed full of means testing. That includes means testing on welfare, which leads to broken families because there will be significantly less public assistance if there's a father in the picture than if there isn't.

I would urge you to sit on your hands so to speak, and fact-check your own intuitive responses. For example (1) might be true, but how often? And Larry Elder seems to mean that 75% of black women is not married, how did that happen? 2) You're probably not wrong, but he frames it as: the government may be (inadvertently?) discouraging marriage, which backfires on black kids (boys mostly).

Anyway, listening to the right has certainly enriched my thinking in various aspects.

Decentralization / smaller government. Left often has an inexplicable urge to assume that Government Knows Best. Imagine the Fed government gets somebody like Trump at the top again, but smarter, with more effective political tactics and stays in power for a longer time.

Limiting what government can do puts the brakes on what such a person can accomplish. Leave things up to the states, of course you can still occasionally get problems at the state level, but that's only 1/50 as much of a problem.

Assuming anti-vax is a single movement. I have a normally reasonable friend who refused an STD vaccine for his newborn. Having a <1 year old baby vaccinated against STD's simply doesn't make sense. His experience opened my eyes: Some vaccines undoubtedly are genuine medical miracles that save lots of lives, but the necessity of others can be rather questionable. (The number of recommended vaccines for children has also exploded since my friend and I ourselves were kids, unless you have children yourself you might assume your childhood experience is still the norm, which it isn't.)

When you say "Why should I vaccinate my 0-year-old against an STD?" and the doctor can't give answer beyond "You won't be able to send them to school if you don't," it really does seem rather reasonable to conclude that it's medically unnecessary but Big Pharma's successfully lobbied the government to require this particular shot.

To be fair, my friend may be wrong. There may be sound medical reasons their doctor didn't know or didn't feel like explaining for the 1000th time.

My point is, there are shades and shades of anti-vax. We use the same term to describe (a) the irrational nutjob who rejects all vaccines and denies all historical reports of how bad things like smallpox were as some kind of elaborate hoax, and (b) reasonable people who are trying to reasonably evaluate whether a given medical product is a reasonable step for their health situation, and sometimes reasonably comes to the conclusion that it's not (as in the case of a parent who decides it doesn't make sense to vaccinate a newborn against STD's.)

Liberals want things like less military spending, more peaceful approaches to international politics, no more proxy wars, and no more hawkish behavior (like us shooting down Iran's drones). There's so much war weariness from the Middle East that liberals have it in their mind that the US is the bad guys, that we are the militaristic aggressors, that we cause all the problems.

I don't really like hawkish behavior either. Of course I want free healthcare and to not have to worry about war. Obviously reducing our presence in the ME would be great. But the reality is that China is essentially re-inventing colonialism, rapidly making military advances towards Taiwan, gobbling up islands, viciously oppressing their citizens, inventing new and terrifying surveillance technology, slipping their malware in front of our children as apps and games, and just generally bullying other members of the world stage. The Russian government is killing political opponents, working on their own Great Firewall/retreating into their own Internet, systematically trying to weaken Western democracy with what is basically psyops, hacking the shit out of everyone they can, and building ASAT/hypersonic weapons specifically designed to attack American resources.

Basically, the enemies of the US seem like they're spending massive amounts of time and resources trying to destroy us on every front. Meanwhile America, still can't get electronic voting right four years later, and was close to defunding its critical defense infrastructure: https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/07/01/next-gen-icb...

America has a lot of problems but compared to this kind of behavior, we are definitely not the bad guys. Nearly all of the anti-patriotic sentiment I've seen ("America is third-world", "America is stupid and racist", "I'm moving to Canada because I hate the government", "Everyone else does it better", "I would never work for the government", etc) is coming from the Left. They should be more honest with themselves about both the good and bad things about America, because we need to fix race relations, healthcare, education, etc. but we definitely also need military spending. Cause fuck China.

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