Comment by random314 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by random314 | Hacker News Reader

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That's a Republican narrative, not really backed up by any sound historical analysis. Whereas creation, nurture and development of wedge issues is a standard right wing tactic across the world. Be it love-jihad in India, miscegenation in USA, jewish hatred in nazi Germany or recognition of Ahmediyas as muslims in Pakistan. It incentivizes voters to vote on ideological lines while ignoring/ letting politicians/wealthy industries get away with looting public monies and resources, legally or illegally.

Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India. Because these were never nurtured and developed as wedge issues by BJP. Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians. Absolutely no one gives a shit about abortions or who does what, (except for the government preventing female infanticide). Whether right/left wing they consider abortions as personal business of the woman/man involved. This topic has not been nurtured as a wedge issue because it doesn't align with the BJPs wedge issue- presence of muslims/Christians in society.

I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections .

Are there any legitimate wedge issues in your opinion, or is just everything artificially made up?

Your take feels very cynical, along the lines of "religion is opium for the masses". In this view, people are dupes stringed along by Machiavellist figures, who cannot possibly have strong feelings about various topics themselves.

Gun laws may not be very relevant in India, but neither are caste-related topics in the USA. This is normally called a different culture.

There are legit issues, and wedge issues aren’t necessarily bullshit.

But the right-wing playbook is the same everywhere, frame these issues in a way to maximize fear and link that fear to nostalgia of a better past. In the US guns are big. In Russia there’s an appeal to the bygone Soviet era where all Russian speakers were under one flag.

In the US, the gun argument is the most transparent. Gun marketers evoke (mostly bullshit) memories of how great great grandpa fed the family shooting turkeys with his flintlock, then fought some redcoats for freedom. Then they hard pivot to why you need a concealed carry pistol to stop wild Mexicans from raping your daughter. It’s a really effective argument because it links the gun, crime, immigration, abortion, etc. Then after you spend this money, the liberals are gonna take your guns, so buy more.

The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues. Progressive voters care about everything, but the get out the vote machines are more moderate.

To add a counterpoint - it seems to me the main reason the democrats are antigun is that is where most of their funding comes from. When you take money from Bloomberg or Soros you agree to be antigun. This is not something that is controversial to say, Bloomberg and Soros are very proud of it. They directly inject vast sums of money into local elections to force in anti-gun candidates, and they have been very successful at it.

Despite your own personal viewpoints guns are very popular in the United States among both parties.

Agreed. Urban democrats drive the anti-gun stuff. I’ve belonged to the same gun club since I turned 13.

I had a weird upbringing. One side of my family was big in county republican politics, the other were unionists and involved in democratic politics. Nobody talked about any of this crap growing up.

What did change is crazy people become prominent starting around Obama times. People I’ve known for years are now difficult to talk to as they have been pulled into a world of paranoia and crazy.

> the main reason the democrats are antigun is that is where most of their funding comes from

From a perspective of a country where gun controls are far stronger, this idea that democrats are "antigun" seems hilariously partisan. Democrats only seem to be proposing modest gun controls compared to Republicans.

What do you define as "most of their funding"? What percentage of Democrat funding comes from Soros or Bloomberg?

> The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues.

That’s not true. About half of Black people oppose same sex marriage, about the same as republicans. But they go along with white liberals on social issues in exchange for getting their support on civil rights issues. But, for example, they voted in favor of California’s 2008 ban on same sex marriage. (Back then, they overwhelmingly opposed same sex marriage.) There’s a fair argument that what pushed the referendum over the top was very high Black turnout because Obama was on the ballot.

Similarly, Muslims mostly vote Democrat and support same sex marriage… for other people: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres...

Non-whites vote democrat for different reasons than whites. For them, issues like civil rights, immigration rights, religious freedom for minorities, etc., are often dispositive of other issues. And insofar as many are immigrants, they don't feel ownership over the broader culture. My parents vote Democrat and view these social and cultural issues as being between white Americans. That works both ways--if Democrats supported outlawing abortion they might have some "population control"-type objections, but really wouldn't care because they'd never accept abortion in their own circle anyway.

Remember that all voters are people but not all people are voters.

When you look at the older voting population, numbers skew different.

If these “wedge issues” are manufactured and inconsequential, I’m sure democrats would be happy to go along with the republican positions on abortion, etc., these issues so we can focus on the important economic issues, right?

> Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India.

I said social and cultural issues are important to people—the specific social and cultural issues that cause disagreement obviously different between countries. Guns are a flashpoint in America because there are lots of people like my wife whose family history involves guns. Her ancestors fought in the American revolution and used guns to secure independence. They used guns when crossing the continent to settle the frontier. They used guns to protect themselves and hunt long before there was police officers and grocery stores anywhere nearby. All of this stuff is part of their cultural identity.

Obviously that specific issue isn’t relevant in India because it’s been fully settled for thousands of years. But the conflict between Hindus and Muslims similarly involves cultural identity.

> Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians.

So your example of how cultural and social issues aren’t important to people is to point out the conflict between Hindus and Muslims? Don’t you see how that parallels the conflicts in America between Christians and secularists?

And if you think religion is an inconsequential “wedge issue”—I’m sure those Muslims and Christians will be willing to conform to what the Hindus want, right?

> I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections.

Yeah but why did they do that? It was because East Pakistan was a different cultural and ethnic group (Bengali) than west Pakistan. Bangladeshi nationalism was sparked by the language movement, where Bengalis began to think of themselves as a distinct people with a different culture and language.

Careful now, you’ve read too many real books to be commenting on HN.

What did you study?

What are these books?

My mom edited an anthology of books on the Bangladeshi independence war. It takes up an entire row on a shelf at home. I lament I can’t read Bangla script but I’ve picked up a bit by osmosis.

Issues trivial enough for your opponent to disarm by ceding them without society harming consequences make poor wedges. A maximally appropriate wedge is one in which you take a harmful extremist view and present it as righteous without dealing with the results of actually fully getting your way.

Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position. We already have long since arrived at the compromise position of making it vastly more expensive and challenging by forcing people to travel substantial distances to few clinics with substantial expensive resources to get services their insurance wont cover to mostly take a few pills. This helpfully leaves them open to public shaming and rebuke.

We also make darn sure that this doesn't occur beyond what we deem viability even though a beings ability to survive outside the womb is an artifact of present tech and doesn't measure any reasonable objective benchmark under pain of prison.

They by any measure got what one would consider substantially their way along with a sharp per capita abortion rate decrease.

It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate. In fact it would even be harmful to conservatives because it would drastically increase turnout if indeed it could be achieved over the will of the people.

> Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells

I used to believe this too because of America’s awful science education. It wasn’t until I went to the ultrasound appointments for my first kid that I realized how incorrect that was.

A 13 week fetus, which under Roe can be killed for another couple of months still, has a face, hands and feet, finger prints, etc. They can suck their thumb and have other human baby reflexes.

> which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position.

Sure, if you wave your hands and say that your side is obviously right about the issues at the heart of a political dispute, you can make any issue seem manufactured. You should go to India and tell the Hindus and the Muslims that they’re both wrong about their “imaginary friends” and that their dispute is a manufactured triviality.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but the whole fixation with personal conscience, individual self determination, and the equal dignity of every individual—ideas that animate American social liberalism— also come from Protestant Christianity. Nobody is making amoral utilitarian arguments for or against same-sex marriage.

> It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate.

Incorrect. Over 65% of Americans would support making abortions illegal in all or most cases after the first trimester: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort.... The public opinion is basically closest to the Mississippi law that’s up before the Supreme Court: 15 weeks with exceptions for health of mother and baby. Incidentally, highly secular countries like France, Denmark, and Finland have settled on 13-14 weeks as well.

But more to the point: if abortion is a manufactured wedge issue, why do people in California care so much about what laws people in Mississippi choose to govern themselves?

>Sure, if you wave your hands and say that your side is obviously right about the issues at the heart of a political dispute, you can make any issue seem manufactured. You should go to India and tell the Hindus and the Muslims that they’re both wrong about their “imaginary friends” and that their dispute is a manufactured triviality.

Take it from the child of an Ahmedi who left Pakistan in 1986. When _you’re_ the wedge issue, you don’t have many other choices.

Exactly right. The wedge issue in India right now is not "imaginary friends". Its literally "Muslims should not be allowed to attend university and run businesses " vs "they should be allowed ".

Muslim shops are being vandalized and burnt all over India https://twitter.com/meerfaisal01/status/1513541836756848644

Neither fingers nor sucking them make you human. What's in your womb at 13 weeks is much stupider than the mouse in a trap in your basement or what's on your sandwich.

Almost all the neocortical prenatal brain development takes place in the third trimester. Electrical activity exists at 13 weeks but it's incapable of consciousness.

It's simply ridiculous to tell a women who unequivocally is an actual human to subordinate her body to the preservation of a less than mouse if she doesn't want to.

The simplest solution is to declare a person a person if it survives birth or is liable and intended to.

It's only complicated if we make it so

These same people are only too happy see kids separated from parents and kept in cages. The non stop propaganda has lined them up to be deeply Christian, hate immigrants, blacks and the poor, distrust vaccines, trust ivermectin, love guns, hate abortions, hate green energy.

The OP is not deceiving anyone when he says that watching an ultrasound made him change his mind on abortions. This is just a narrative trick that presents the " human life begins at conception" belief in a very dramatic fashion. OP probably made up his opinion much earlier when he decided which tribe/ingroup he is going to sign up for, and will support all of the Republican platform right think one way or another.

The artificial creation of the wedge issues is so absurdly obvious that it sometimes defies belief that people don't recognize it. A reply to an apparently benign business question "is usps actually losing money" will immediately reveal the person's voting choices with 99% accuracy. People are asked to sign up for a tribe in their formative years and then they simply take down notes from the propaganda and assume rigid positions. Propaganda was invented to convince the American people that joining world war 1 was necessary. It has never left us, since.

https://www.history.com/news/world-war-1-propaganda-woodrow-...

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/si...

The real issues facing the country are absurd health care costs, dropping life expectancy, unavailable urban housing and ridiculous student loans. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in solving the problem. Who really has the time to worry about other people's abortions and guns in the middle of all of this.

While Republicans are absolutely nuts, Democrats can be forced by massive public pressure to make at least some minor moves to address these problems - thanks to Bernie. But they will do it in a way that their corporate brethren are not hurt in the least bit.

Consider the price cap of 35$ on insulin. It doesn't mean that the insulin manufacturers profit will drop. Merely that everyone else's premiums will increase so that corporate profits aren't hurt. Bush shafted Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices too.

People in California believe that all Americans including those who are unfortunate enough to live in Mississippi ought to have rights as well. In addition your poll doesn't quite say exactly what you think it does.

It actually doesn't say that most people believe abortion ought to be illegal after the first trimester. What it actually said is that 38% believe that it ought to be illegal in most cases. This is overwhelmingly the people who believe that we are violating the magical ghost that their god hath breathed into even a lump of cells. Also notably this is virtually the same demographic that literally believes the earth is 6000-10,000 years old.

Of the 61% who believe abortion should be legal 44% believe the first trimester ought to be the line. Another 12% think the second trimester ought to be the line and another 44% think birth ought to be the line.

There are two questions. Ought abortions happen outside extraordinary circumstances and where do we draw the line. If we have discerned that a woman has a right to an abortion it makes no sense to average or combine the people who think the line is at zero and the people who think the variable has a value and use that to set policy. Firstly because the average of undefined and an integer is undefined and secondly because that is a fucking terrible why to deal with something that actually has a scientific answer that being basing it on birth rendering it an independent person or brain development such that the fetus goes from having never been conscious in the first place to something more akin to sleep.

> But more to the point: if abortion is a manufactured wedge issue, why do people in California care so much about what laws people in Mississippi choose to govern themselves?

Rephrasing - if X is a manufactured wedge issue then why is it a wedge issue? I think you manufactured an unintended tautology!

"We also make darn sure that this doesn't occur beyond what we deem viability even though a beings ability to survive outside the womb is an artifact of present tech and doesn't measure any reasonable objective benchmark under pain of prison."

This is an interesting topic. The two questions I have, seem to be difficult for people to answer and have them be consistent in other areas of our law and culture.

1) What defines a human life from a logical perspective?

This one seems difficult. For example, you seem to think that if one cannot survive without medical treatment that they don't count as a life or are not worth protecting, yet this is inconsistent with our laws on things like duty of care to special needs individuals, children, or incapacitated people.

2) When is it acceptable to take, or not save, a life?

This is definitely and interesting topic.

I would say that it’s human life at or shortly after conception. It’s alive, it’s a distinct organism, and it’s genetically human. If we found a blastocyst on Mars we’d say “human life found in Mars!” It’s in a stage of the human lifecycle where it’s completely dependent on the mother, but that doesn’t negate either the human part or the life part.

So I think the real debate is over when it’s acceptable to kill a human at an early stage of development. That is fundamentally a moral compromise, in the same way that e.g. the law of self defense is a moral compromise. Nothing in science says a fetus has a “right to life” just as nothing in science says anyone has a “right to bodily autonomy.”

I think partisans and ideologues try to take this issue to extremes based on principle, but I think most people (especially mothers) have a mushy view. They know miscarriages happen naturally in the early weeks and so support some abortion right. They support exceptions for life of mother or fetal abnormalities even in later stages. But for they’ve also seen ultrasounds showing something that looks a lot like a baby at 15 weeks and aren’t ideological enough to think you should be able to kill that without a really good reason.

Here's the funny thing about abortion laws. The Democrats have had a majority multiple times since Roe v Wade or even Casey and they have consistently failed to codify Roe into law. Why? Because they really like the money they get for threatening a woman's right to choose, too.

As even RBG realized, Roe is not built on the best doctrinal foundations. Read Reva Siegel on her preferred path.

Democrats have indeed codified Roe into law in states where they can. Federal law doesn't really work that way though, which is probably why Roe was recognized through penumbras of the constitution or however they would say it. It all gets a bit silly and pompous when we take it to the priests of the law in funny robes, but the practical results of Roe were an almost perfect compromise and undoing it does not seem like a good idea to me.

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