Take Burnham’s Test to See If You’re a Progressive

wmbriggs.com

5 points·jonathancai··4 comments

Example argument: "the reactionary might happily ban pornography while the liberal insists it be shown to grade schoolers".

And that's the quality of this article. Yawn.

Agreed. My eye rolling started when the commenter assumed "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion" once included "and no one should suffer social consequences for expressing them."

The author also seems to think modern reactionaries think the US shouldn't negotiate with Portugal, Poland, Sri Lanka, or the other socialist states listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states .

In the original, non-"modernized" list, it seems like there's a lot of points that people on the right would agree with way more so than people on the left.

Cool, but the list is written in a way that you can’t be a good person without “being progressive, but it’s just the wording.

> 1. All forms of racial segregation and discrimination are wrong.

The first one and it’s some subjective question that everyone will answer “Well of course I do! It’s not discrimination that I think X or Y people suck because reasons”. My favorite comment on this was a Welshman taking to a Londoner about Britain “No one here is racist unless you want to talk about gypsies”.

>2. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion.

Does hate speech exist? Do you feel that you should be tolerant of intolerance? This is not getting better for subjectiveness. How much of what is going on right now is “You aren’t allowed to be wrong!”?

>3. Everyone has a right to free, public education.

Define FREE.

I skimmed the rest. Didn’t get better. Is this just some attempt to get people to call themselves what the author considers themself without really investigating the minutia of these issues?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com