GoFundMe should be political neutral, but it openly turns left. I recommend a long post explaining this phenomenon: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-libe...
I should have stuck to my rule about stopping reading at 'woke' but I wanted to give it a chance.
Why? Are you advocating for ISIS to be able to do a gofundme?
It's up to individuals whether they want to donate to any particular cause.
if ISIS isn't under US financial sanctions, then yes. GFM is not, and should not, be in the business of gatekeeping people's desire to fund causes they believe in, as long as those causes are legal.
You're talking past each other. OP said should, you're talking about "needs".
It also happens to be how reality works. Private organizations have literally always chosen sides. It’s how the world works, and I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your likes. Nothing you can do about it mate.
Your "point" doesn't stand for much if it's just your opinion and you refuse to justify the reason for it.
>It also happens to be how reality works. Private organizations have literally always chosen sides. It’s how the world works, and I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your likes. Nothing you can do about it mate.
The state can always send Men With Guns to quell dissenting speech. Should we also proclaim that the government "absolutely does not need" to guarantee freedom of speech? Corporations can ultimately coerce you into accepting terms that overwhelmingly favor them, by offering services under "take it or leave it" terms. Should we say that consumers "absolutely does not need" to be afforded consumer protection rights?
Apart from that, we also regulate a lot of private companies to be neutral. Your power utility may be private but can’t deplatform you. Telecom carriers are similar. Social media companies are just common carriers and public utilities that have avoided regulation so far with careful political donations. Payment companies (Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, PayPal, and yes, GoFundMe) are all just basic payment utilities and should also be treated as public utilities in many ways even if they remain private otherwise.
>We just need to make political viewpoint a protected class as well.
I have not gasped at the outlandishness of an HN post in some time.
GoFundMe is not a grocer, or a transit provider. It isn't a power company. It is a luxury service in a free market with low capital requirements.
Under no circumstance should arbitrary businesses be required to cater to people of all political persuasions.
Protected classes exist based on attributes of ourselves which are immutable. You can't change being a woman, being old, or being a particular ethnic group. You certainly "choose" your political opinions.
> I have not gasped at the outlandishness of an HN post in some time.
How else can a democratic republic preserve the diversity of viewpoints required for such a society to function? This really shouldn't be a controversial idea.
Differences of opinion are not only okay, they are essential!
Should a conservative landlord be able to evict anyone who voted for a progressive? Or deny renting in the first place?
> Protected classes exist based on attributes of ourselves which are immutable. You can't change being a woman,
I can't phrase this any less provocatively... Are you saying that all rights against discrimination end if one has a gender transition because it's no longer immutable? I really don't think immutability is the right line to use to decide who gets rights.
Religious belief is protected, and also mutable. Ask me how I know. Political affiliation needs the same protection.
That's not to say immutability is a great method to determine rights. Mind you, I don't think political affiliation needs such protections. Freedom of expression and association already handle interactions with political affiliation. The government guarantees your ability to have a political opinion, but not for other people respect it or to help you promote it. What people do with their business is still part of their view points - the real solution is to decentralize power more, so that even if you get thrown out for your political opinion, you can always work somewhere else that likes your politics
No, but housing is already protected. How can you possibly think GoFundMe and housing/food are the same thing?
I simply struggle to understand why a decent person should have to serve someone who wants to kill minorities, or who wants to end democratic government in this country.
Furthermore, you act like if you don't enact this protection you're defending, no one will serve people of different political opinions. The truth is you're making a mountain out of an anthill. Most places serve people of differing political views. I go to a bar with a "Fuck Greg Abbott" sign at the front of the bar, and they'll happily serve a Conservative as long as they aren't being hateful. I happen to go to a bar owned by a Trumpian, anti-worker, anti-vax conservative (I happen to respect some of the bartenders, and the food is good). I am allowed to eat there despite the lack of your proposed legislation.
P.S.
>How else can a democratic republic preserve the diversity of viewpoints required for such a society to function?
It's functioned for close to 250 years, and the more I read American history, the more I realize that the current tumult and animosity is actually the norm, and the "peace" of the postwar period was the outlier.
It does not matter whether the reason for initial distrust is religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or political beliefs. You should not start such "economic war" unless your goal is complete elimination of the other group, which, i think, is a rather stupid goal to have.
The only reason abortion is a political issue, for example, is because of the outsized influence that tax exempt organizations have.
I don't see anything positive in tax breaks and tax code complexity in general as it is a method to obfuscate spendings and evade taxes, which creates all kinds of unintended consequences.
I can see positives in having the flexibility to tax things to discourage them, or to encourage behaviors. That's one of the best tools the government has to influence the public's behavior! (EG cigarette taxes). No assessment of the net-net benefit, merely pointing out the complexity of taxes does enable some good things as well.
Selling to both sides can be a profitable venture, which encourages neutrality, but so is locking in customers by something other than the quality or price of your product
Then state that they're not neutral on the TOS and don't accept funds.
They accepted funds and then tried to straight up steal them.
When all speech, commerce, and art became transmitted by the permission of a small number of private firms whose combined powers exceed that of any nation-state.
> They're basically indifferent on social issues, and so from the right they appear "left" because they echo the broadest appeal as a marketing technique.
The notion that this stuff has the "broadest appeal as a marketing technique" doesn't hold water. Why are Hispanics suddenly "Latinx" now, when virtually no Hispanics identify with that term? https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
Last year, they had "Black Trans" posters at our local mall. My county is half Republicans, and a lot of the Democrats are middle class Black people who definitely do not have socially progressive views on gender identity.
> They're basically indifferent on social issues, and so from the right they appear "left" because they echo the broadest appeal as a marketing technique.
The notion that this stuff has the "broadest appeal as a marketing technique" doesn't hold water. Why are Hispanics suddenly "Latinx" now, when virtually no Hispanics identify with that term? https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in.... Last year, they had "Black Trans" posters at our local mall. My county is half Republicans, and a lot of the Democrats are middle class Black people who definitely do not have socially progressive views on gender identity.
I'd say the larger difference is left activism is pro-social, or hyper-social in the extreme. "Black Trans" is promoting one specific identity, but not at the expense of others (apart from dilution). Whereas what is perceived as right activism has to rise to the level of being anti-social - a simple picture a happy heteronormative traditional family does not suffice (since it is taken for granted as the norm). Rather it defines itself by explicitly opposing left activism, and such overt conflict is a commercial non-starter.
Left activism is anti-social: it elevates the sovereign individual to primacy. It rejects the legitimacy of the majority to impose norms and demand conformity—even when it comes to socialization of children. It replaces that with the right of small minorities to impose norms on everyone else. For example, whereas in Asian countries you have norms that demand you address elders by formal titles, in left activism you have norms that require everyone to exchange pronouns for the sake of a small minority. The insistence on social affirmation, moreover, makes modern left activism different than the old liberal pluralism.
In the form of intersectionality, left activism is also appropriative. It uses the political capital of Black people, for example, to advance a number of other ideological positions which most Black people and Muslims don’t support and don’t agree with.
Furthermore, US society is deeply rooted in individualism and so professing individualism is not leftist. In fact I'd say your framing does well to illustrate the disconnect - by attempting the claim that individualism is a leftist thing, despite it being overwhelmingly ingrained in mainstream US society, you're not really arguing for conservatism but rather something well to the right of conservatism. From that perspective, of course most everything appears to be leftist including conservatism itself.
I know—my point is that you’re using a quite liberal sense of what’s “anti-social.”
> You're talking about larger appreciation of social conformity, where I'm talking about creating immediate conflict.
During her confirmation hearing, Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown claimed that she “wasn’t aware” that the Christian school where she was a board member espoused traditional views on gender and abortion. Why did a Black woman feel the need to not only clarify her own views, but actively disassociate herself from an organization that is completely normal for a Black woman to be associated with? Why did she need to imply that she might have acted differently had she known that a Christian school affiliated with a Black baptist church taught traditional Christian doctrine (as if that was a surprise?) You don’t think it was because of the threat of conflict from the activist left?
> Furthermore, US society is deeply rooted in individualism and so professing individualism is not leftist.
The US is more individualist than say China, sure. But most of the US, from the Puritan-descended WASP northeast, to the Midwest, to the South, never struck me as especially individualist. The west coast, sure, and maybe Colorado or Arizona. Recall, the US is the most religious developed country in the world—in terms of how many people pray daily, it ranks up there with Iran. The rhetoric of rugged pioneer individualism yields to communalism pretty readily in most of the country. In the small Iowa town where my wife went to high school, sports practices were all scheduled to allow kids to also attend church youth groups.
Because she was looking for approval from the Democratic Party? Are you asking why the Democratic Party cares about the opinions of the "activist left" ?
> But most of the US, from the Puritan-descended WASP northeast, to the Midwest, to the South, never struck me as especially individualist
Religion in the Northeast seems more like a token thing rather than a way of life (eg "Christmas and Easter Catholic"), and despite communal structures the entire US is still steeped in individualism. One of the current major political issues of the political right, anti-mask / anti-vaccine, rests mainly on appeals to individual freedom! It's front and center in the founding documents - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
Now explain to me what is wrong with political factions publicly criticizing corporations under the guise of wanting political and moral change at the corporation, when in reality, they are attacking the corporation's financial interests, and their goal is to render their own brand of politics the one that commercial interests bend the knee to.
You have made the empiricist's error: conflating what he discovers to be, with what ought to be.
See this article by Dr Peter Attia (and embedded graph under heading "OBSERVATION 4") about how dangerous COVID is for children (and adults < 35).
https://peterattiamd.com/a-follow-up-to-my-article-on-vaccin...
The covid mandate in the US at least was of adults. All of whom are at some risk (especially if you include long covid).
That said I don't think it's productive to debate what "political" means.
Your definition would suggest public water utilities are "political" which sounds silly to me.
Google offers the definition
>relating to the ideas or strategies of a particular party or group in politics.
Tell that to the people of Flint, Michigan.
I hope they don't get chickenpox, personally. I hope they get some life experience that opens their eyes to how ignorant they are.
Covid is also easily survivable for children, and adults in reasonably good health. I survived corona a year ago and now see no medical reason to get those jabs.
I had it and recovered. I have blood test results and Dr. letter to prove it.
The CDC says actual measured outcomes show I am in the category of persons who do better than the jabbed.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm "By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone."
Your attempt to tell me to get yearly jabs is similar to what upsets the Canadian protestors. Please stop with the coercion and mandates.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/smallpox-vaccine-bioatt...
i dont understand why there is such little knowledge on the history of political theory.