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Comment by tehwebguy | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly enough I don't see anything the ACLU is doing in the article that's particularly left or even progressive, just barely Democrat. My guess is there's 100x as much money available to an org fighting for a particular party's most important items at a given moment vs actually looking for free speech violations.

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The ACLU on Northern California is the #3 donor (over $300k) for the effort to reject the recall of the progressive DA in SF. (sfethics.org list of actual donors, not guesswork).

Regardless of one's position on the recall, it seems an odd thing for the N. Cal ACLU to be putting over 5% of it's operating budget into this campaign.

I guess it depends on what stances the DA has on civil liberties issues (vs their likely replacements).

Or perhaps whether the ACLU ever expects to bring a case against the City and County of SF.

You know - perhaps like protests vs the City, or on public streets near the Federal Court.

The SF DA refuses to prosecute pretty much any crime. Seriously.

Yes, the level-headed take is that an organization has not taken a "hard-left turn" unless they are calling for redistributing the land and cancelling the debt.

They are based in the United States of America which is a relatively conservative country.

Unless your baseline is "Nordic countries" or similar, the US is pretty far to the left.

This is true regardless of whether you look at the size of the government, relative to the economy or where it sits on the spectrum between ethno-nationalist vs self-criticism/openness to outsiders. The US has a much larger than average sized government spending vs the size of its economy and it takes in three times more immigrants per year than any other country.

By comparison, China, Japan, India and other major world powers are considerably further to the right. Even influential small countries such as Israel and Singapore are also a bit more conservative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...

> Unless your baseline is "Nordic countries" or similar, the US is pretty far to the left.

How about most of Europe and Latin America?

It is hard to define what "left" means nowadays but it is telling that you believe the "size of the government", as defined by mostly military spending, can consist as a checkbox for being part of the left.

>it is telling that you believe the "size of the government", as defined by mostly military spending

Be honest here.

None of the budgets of any governments mentioned are "defined by mostly military spending".

I am not arguing about the other governments you mentioned, I am arguing that it is simply incorrect to use "size of government" as a measure of how "left" a country is, particularly when using the US as an example. The US is notorious for having very bad safety nets while disproportionately investing in military, both of which are hardly causes favoured by the left.

Military spending in the US is dwarfed by entitlements spending.

Even then, much of that military spending has been going towards the defense of allies that underinvest in their own defense.

Not sure where the claim about taking immigrants is coming from, according to the OECD: https://stats.oecd.org/viewhtml.aspx?datasetcode=MIG&lang=en

Germany takes more and this is raw numbers not adjusted by the size of the country. Germany is less than a third the size of the US and taking more. Spain takes 60% as many immigrants as the US and is roughly 1/7 the population.

> Not sure where the claim about taking immigrants is coming from

The link was right at the bottom of the comment and if you click it, you'll see data sources mentioned prominently.

As of 2020, the US has 50.6 million foreign born immigrants, while Germany, which was #2, had 15.8 million. Adjusted for current population it's fairly close. The UK, in contrast had 9.4M, and Spain 6.8M. All of these countries have immigrant populations compared to world averages.

You could nitpick at time frames or various other ways to slice the data but there's no defensible claim that the US accepts fewer immigrants than most countries.

One of their most visible (on Twitter) attorneys is a transgender person who openly called for "stopping the circulation" of a book discussing critically the transgender phenomenon [0]. This is the same org that once fought for a neo-Nazi organization's right to hold a march. From "I may not agree with your opinion, but I'll defend your right to say it," to "we must prevent opposing views from being heard" in under a decade.

0: https://www.iwf.org/2020/11/16/some-in-aclu-have-new-cause-b...

"$AUTHOR has actual courage" - Ben Shapiro - the back of that book

Something something paradox of tolerance

Paradox of tolerance is A) not obviously true, B) only applies to extreme acts, otherwise you have zero tolerance.

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