California Is Making Liberals Squirm | Hacker News Reader

California Is Making Liberals Squirm

nytimes.com

12 pointsbryan013 comments

As a liberal from a very loudly conservative state who moved to California, I believe that California's classist policies are racist when it comes down to brass tacks - especially its feudal age prop 13. I'm glad Ezra all but said so as well.

Just to muse, when I was younger I assumed people who were very into yoga and its aesthetics were chill people. As I've aged into my late 20s, most of the people I know who practice yoga and its aesthetics have excruciatingly stressful day jobs and horrible anxiety. They are some of the least relaxed people I know.

I now ponder if they're so loud about relaxing because they want it so badly. Anecdata for sure, but maybe there's more to it.

I wonder if progressive America's increasing focus on purity and aesthetics are similar?

After taking a look at 538's rankings of racial disparities in police encounters in Portland/Seatte/San Francisco/Washington DC[1], the contradictory support of BLM in those areas among it's constituents, progressive America's constant refusal to allow housing and absolute insistence on lockdowns in a pandemic that mostly punish non-white families, I worry I'm onto something.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-biden-administratio...

edit: spellings

Somewhere along the line, neo-liberalism got marketed as a left wing ideology (it's not) and has since caused all manner of confusion as to why its expressed values don't materialize out of neo-liberal policies.

The answer is that leftist messaging is just a thin veneer over staunchly capitalistic and globalist politics. As long as people look to "liberal" messaging from corporate America, it seems unlikely to change.

This is confusing to me... I believe that neo-liberalism is fundamentally making decisions according to evidence to benefit our society regardless of tradition / religion / who said it. To me, that openness to solutions puts it opposite of many present-day conservatives who value tradition, existing power structures, historical norms, and therefore makes it a "left" ideology.

In my understanding a neo-liberal government is a fan of unblocking housing development, evidence based decision making w.r.t. pandemic responses, and police encounters. I would personally call governments in many parts of the Bay traditionally conservative as they are trying to protect what it was 50 years ago.

What does Neo-liberalism mean to you?

edits: lots of things, sorry if that confuses any responders...

To me it's a pro-capitalist, pro-globalist, quasi-neo-colonialist ideology. It's meant to spread modernization through corporate capitalism [1].

I think the quintessential neo-liberal group is the Trilateral Commission [2], which many high audience mainstream media talking heads are members.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission

> What does Neo-liberalism mean to you?

"Free" markets will solve everything. Muh private sector. Change is inevitable, so get with the program grandpa.

That's my takeaway.

You're mixing up liberalism with neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#:~:text=Neoliber....

There needs to be a word like postjudice , meaning rational judgement after the fact of long-lived experience. To be sure, induction based on finite data is never proof, but it does reach some Bayesian threshold of likelihood, always accepting the possibility of a Hume-Taleb Black Swan .

For me, yoga is like golf. As activity, it seems to be interesting, challenging, disciplined and worthwhile. There's no easy path to success, and progress takes a lot of dedicated practice. I could imagine enjoying it, and I would be slightly afraid of doing it obsessively, to the detriment of people or activities that deserve my attention.

However, my postjudice is that yogis and golfers are always somewhere on the spectrum between smugness and narcissism. In the case of golf, there also seems to be a subtext of extreme competitiveness, that belies its bucolic environment. My view is reinforced with the ubiquitous attachment of both golf and yoga to Five Star Resorts in places like Oman, Sri Lanka or Bali.

The people who do the activity completely put me off attempting the thing itself.

> Writing this piece, I found myself thinking about Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist.” Kendi’s central argument is that it is policy outcomes, not personal intent, that matter. “Racist policies are defined as any policy that leads to racial inequity,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2019. “And so, for me, racial language in the policy doesn’t matter, intent of the policymaker doesn’t matter, even the consciousness of the policymaker, that it’s going lead to inequity, doesn’t matter. It’s all about the fundamental outcome.”

I’m pulling this out next time my neighbors cite “traffic” when opposing any development.

> California is dominated by Democrats, but many of the people Democrats claim to care about most can’t afford to live there.

> There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. In California, the same split political personality exists, but in reverse: We’re often symbolically liberal, but operationally conservative. Renaming closed schools is an almost novelistically on-point example, but it is not the most consequential.

He seems very close to realizing that neo-liberalism is not a left wing ideology and that it's producing the results it's intended to produce. Recently neo-liberalism has "borrowed" some left wing language around race, but only superficially so. Neo-liberal politics as practiced, are still the foundation of the establishment.

No mention of prop 13.

best point: it's all about the outcome, not the intentions

Note for those unfamiliar: Klein is a well-known liberal writer, though he is among the least partisan liberals I've ever heard of. He regular debates and interviews people on the opposite side of the spectrum from him and treats them as sincere, respectable people who have interesting ideas.

Yup. I felt this piece was really well-written and captured the current "state" of CA better than anything else I've read.

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