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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered that maybe the North American right is just that bad. Reality doesn't magically shift so that it always exists in the exact center of the North American political spectrum

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Watching America from a distance, the left is JUST as bad as the right.

I wouldn't say they are just as bad. They are also bad but they're bad in a very different way. The far right effectively has decided that objective reality doesn't exist at all. The truth is whatever they say it is and they will manufacture data as necessary. The far left on the other hand believes in data but is constrained by their inherent need to reduce every single problem to a combination of race, sex, or class, no matter how multi-faceted / complex the problems actually are. They start from the conclusion and work back to make the data fit. Where the far left and far right overlap is that they are both virulently populist, they both demonize their opponents, and they both believe in the absolute moral purity of their cause.

As an American, I'd say one side is always swept up in a religious fervor and the other is strung out on drugs. They switch roles every twenty years or so. The one doing drugs allows humor and the religious one doesn't.

They're going to switch again within the next two years, by my estimate. It'll be big, traditionalist sects (Catholic, Mormon, etc) on the right and cannabis on the left.

This the result of the two party systems. Bi-paetisan compromise is rare, and even then is often backdoored with legislation not actually discussed.

This leads to the two parties only ever being in an adversarial relationship.

In other systems, sometime you get to make a majority government with other parties. This differi means that in mutti-party systems the "party line" is "these guys are ok, and reasonable" every once in a while.

Not so in the two party system, where the winner-takes-all perpetual adversarial relationship generates a constant steam of "the others suck, are dumb, evil and want to destroy the country"

Also watching from a distance, what’re you talking about? The American right media moguls have fucked up Australian politicsalong with it, and no leftist moguls can claim the same.

I left Australia 9 years ago, politics was pretty messed up then. That was Australia's own doing.

One of these sides has literal, actual Nazis trying their level best to destroy democracy, supporting and protecting people who are murdering people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and others who don't fit into their fascist ideology, and remove most of the legal rights women have gained over the past century+.

The other side has...politicians who are too beholden to corporations to fight as hard as they should for progressive policies.

If you genuinely think that the American left is just as bad as the American right, then either you really haven't been paying attention, or...I guess you think the Nazis had a point or something?

This is why I’m glad I don’t live in America. The brain washing from the media left is as bad as the crazy stuff the right believes.

Do you have any information to actually refute what I said, or just handwaving about "brainwashing"?

I do. But it’s 2021. If I listed out a ton of problems on the left I’ll get a bunch of people on the left screaming “racist” and “nazi”, etc. Can’t have debates and arguments anymore.

There’s also something to be said about not only being “just as bad”, but being righteously self-unaware about it.

Have you considerered your own bias when making this statement ?

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