Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

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> Maybe education will help.

You mean, Red education to get the Blues to see the error of their ways, or Blue education to get the Reds to see the error of their ways? People really don't want their enemies' values taught to their kids. We are seeing massive pushback against Blue education now, which was the key to Virginia's governor flipping red. It may be the most important issue of the 2022 elections. Did I mention how much people hate their kids being indoctrinated in values they think are evil?

> Maybe small nations work way better. As far I can see this is the case. So maybe splitting up the nation into even smaller states would help.

Yes, if Saudi Arabia doesn't let women drive, we don't need to invade and conquer Saudi Arabia. We can can grant asylum to Saudi women who are unhappy with this arrangement, and just leave Saudi Arabia alone. Even if they behead people.

>Think on a gay child in a radical state that demands forced conversion therapy.

Agree. Ultimately it means giving up on the idea that the US is going to fix the whole world. We stayed in Afghanistan, it seems, to make sure the girls can go to school and that gay men are not killed for being gay. I don't think this was the right decision. At some point you have to say "I hate how those people live, but I'm not going to try to change them."

Honestly I don't know a single friend of mine on the left who is willing to say this. I have friends on the right, on the other hand, who want nothing more than to be left alone. They don't care how many abortions people have in New York or what kind of stuff is taught in New York schools about how evil Europeans are. But the reverse is not true, every single leftist friend I have is absolutely committed to making sure girls in Alabama can also have abortions and that they are taught the evils of Europeans in the Alabama schools. For there to be any peace, the left is going to have to give this asymmetry up, and learn to live and let live.

I agree, but you're being a little biased I think, presumably due to your experience and the news you read:

>"I hate how those people live, but I'm not going to try to change them."

This is phrased to sound reasonable without context, but based on your example, it's more like "They are fairly objectively killing/beating/oppressing people for their gender/sexuality, but I'm not going to try to change them." I agree it's probably futile, especially in this case, but we should be realistic about what we are asking people to accept.

As for the domestic example of abortion, everybody I know on the right, friends and otherwise, want it illegal for everybody, and have a pretty deep hatred for people who get abortions (sometimes barring health reasons), in their own state and in all others. On this and other topics, they are all firmly in "dominion" territory, even going so far as to "joke" to varying degrees about killing people on the left for their crimes.

I am not refuting your point though, and I'm not taking a "both sides" stance, just offering a different view on the same conclusion. In general people want to exclude others, and in general the right favors splitting first, and, if that's unrealistic, dominion second, while the left tend to favors dominion first. Both are enormous disasters.

> which was the key to Virginia's governor flipping red

I think you'll find that turnout in an off year was the major driver of this change. Turnout 2020: 75%, Turnout 2021: 55%.

In general, only motivated people turn up in off years, which usually favours the opposition.

I wonder how coherent the base of either party is values-wise or ideologically. There's certainly some intellectuals that have a clear ideological side, but for the people I talk to offline there often seems to be a kind of sports-team dynamic, even if they don't fit neatly into ideological boxes. For example, I know Republicans that don't generally support their party's economic policies, and Democrats that don't support many of their party's social policies, but neither of those facts seem to interfere with them being solid partisans. Often they end up in a media bubble for their "team" which probably contributes.

Truth helps.

Every, single popular issue has nuance.

Whenever I see something on Cable News, usually my 'BS sense' tingles at least a bit, and I check alternative resources for more information.

Usually, most things don't fit very clearly into a narrative once you have a lot of facts.

> They don't care how many abortions people have in New York...

> every single leftist friend I have is absolutely committed to making sure girls in Alabama can also have abortions

I find it so curious how much you claim that people on the right just want to be left alone, and then bring up the issue of abortion as an example. If what you really wanted was for people to live and let live, then why would you care about women in Alabama having abortions? Don't they have just as much of a right to be "left alone"?

There are deep historical roots for this. In 1861, the US South just wanted to be left alone. It was the US North that forced their moral values on the South.

Some of us think that's a good thing.

The Union’s war against the Confederacy was fueled by the religious zeal of an evangelical Christian movement. I’m not sure that should be the go-to template for how we structure a diverse country of 330 million people.

That is a unique take on the abolition of slavery. I am sure you have accessed much more literature and data on this take that seems novel to me.

I don't think there's anything unique about it. Some Enlightenment thinkers opposed slavery, but abolition in the U.S. was an evangelical Christian movement. The Republican Party was a fusion of religious fundamentalists and northeastern capitalists. The Civil Rights movement was also quite closely affiliated with Christianity until the late 20th century. It's not a coincidence that Martin Luther King was a preacher.

Remember that, prior to modern genetic science, "all men are created equal" was an unfalsifiable assertion. IT was an article of faith. The Confederacy thus sought to portray their position as resting on scientific observation. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto.... And, of course, there's little apart from faith that could convince a society to sacrifice 360,000 of their own to fight for the freedom of a distinct group of people. I'm not aware of any other such "war of morality" in history prior to that.

All that being said, not every perceived social ill is slavery, and the Civil War isn't a good template for how we should relate to societies that have different moral frameworks. Do we want to go to war with Bangladesh because homosexuality is illegal there? My view is that Bangladeshis get to decide how to structure their society, and that this self determination is a principle that overrides almost all others. But maybe I'm biased being a foreigner.

> My view is that Bangladeshis get to decide how to structure their society, and that this self determination is a principle that overrides almost all others.

Unless you're a Bangladeshi gay I suppose. Then other people get to determine your social structure for you.

Self-determination is a collective right, not an individual right. Distinct groups of people get to structure their society as they see fit. Individuals within that a society must abide by those rules.

International law, of course, recognizes individual rights as well. My point is that when a society doesn’t abide by those rights, it’s not the business of other societies to do anything about it. Self-determination should trump in almost every case.

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