I Am Not a Progressive | Hacker News Reader

I Am Not a Progressive

michaelshellenberger.substack.com

19 pointsstarkd16 comments

Also, the article is horribly a historic.

Yes, progressives did lead the charge for community based mental health services replacing mental hospitals. And guess what. It works all over the rest of the developed world.

What the rest of the developed world didn’t have was Raegan kicking out millions of mentally ill people, and further massive underspending towards mental services.

Countries which do that don’t have mentally ill homeless wandering on their streets.

The author blames safe injection sites for the explosion of drug addiction, never mind that safe injection sites barely exist in the country, and are anyways very new as a public health measure (the first one that was officially endorsed is probably fewer than a few years old). Safe injection sites don’t just exist to allow people to indulge their addiction. They also exist because they provide an opportunity for addicted people to access official medical services and social services which then provides opportunities to help them manage or eliminate their addictions. It’s something that has been successful in reducing addiction throughout the world.

Safe injection sites are a step towards eliminating addiction, not an acceptance that addiction will happen.

The best hope for treating addicts is urging people not to get into it. The sad fact is that even the relatively successful treatment programs require the motivation of the addict to get better, because there really is no other treatment. You can flood as much money at the problem but it doesn't change anything. The best treatment is warning people not to fall into it. Setting up addiction centers only prolongs their pain, without solving it. But that only shows all the more that they don't really want to solve it, because they don't think it can be solved.

I never thought I’d see deadenders for the War on Drugs. Even my apparently enlightened conservative friends have dispensary cards.

Progressivism (in the classical, anti-American Wilsonian sense) was completely refuted by Coolidge =>

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth and their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.

--Presidential speech in Philadelphia commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 5, 1926

https://coolidgefoundation.org/resources/civil-rhetoric-of-c...

"trillions be spent making electricity more expensive so we can harmonize with nature through solar panels made by enslaved Muslims in China, and through industrial wind projects built in the habitat of critically endangered whale species. "

All we need to do is to switch to NUCLEAR energy, and enjoy a glowing future. Shillenberger at his finest.

I struggled to read it.

Sounds like the author found that solving hard problems is hard, and in particular ideology-driven solutions don’t always work.

It’s not a dig at liberal, progressive, leftist or whatever ideologies, it’s true for true whole spectrum. It’s like fixing bugs with language design principles.

Don't forget about the singularity.

The ultimate "we're fucked" idea.

What is Shelter First and Housing Earned? A quick search on google only yielded results for "Housing First". What's the difference in shelter and housing, and how does one earn their way from shelter to housing?

I’m shocked that as other states, even that progressive Austin, have criminalized homelessness that their rates have dropped and those areas that did not have seen increases. Might make someone wonder.

If being homeless is a crime, it gets rectified by the virtue of putting the homeless to a prison, which serves as a home!

I recommend the book “The Wizard and the Prophet” to the author [1]. It clears up a fundamental confusion in the article that treats Progressives as Wizards when they’re really Prophets.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-T...

Not a great bit of writing. But sure, it's certainly true that people above the age of 35 who grew up thinking of themselves as liberal/left wing are going to have some discomfort with young progressives and their obsessions with safety and minority issues over phenomena with more bulk impact such as the core feminist battle, which is far from won.

In my case, my discomfort is because many young progressives today are simply not liberal—at all. They have become frighteningly authoritarian.

It’s damn hard to be supportive of a public governing philosophy that you have been fighting against for decades even if you might agree with where they might be on left-right moral axis on big topics.

I'm waiting to see the more radical young progressives openly praise China for the wise, statewide, uniformly enforced progressive policies.

I think many already have. In fact, there's a long history of looking the other way. New York Times reporters and columnists actively covered up Stalin's atrocities for years.

Not a great screed. The author simultaneously complains about someone spreading hopelessness because they said we are “hopelessly unprepared” (which anyways is not synonymous with spreading hopelessness, if they do not insist that we cannot be prepared...hopelessly is used less as a description and more as an intensifier of the word unprepared here) while immediately after complaining about someone else spreading a positive message because the message was based on PR.

They complain that Sacramento progressives are spreading hopelessness because a Capitol lobbyist (!) claims that nothing can be done.

Really, the article is basically throwing a bunch of random anecdotes that they are not entirely thrilled about and ascribing them to “progressiveness”.

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