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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

When you're writing things like "you're part of the problem", you've departed from the norms of this place. There's a place for that kind of advocacy, but it's not HN; we're here for curious conversation. Even some people ordinarily inclined to agree with you will recoil from this kind of rhetoric here.

Agreed on avoiding finger pointing. But the bit about "American Far Left" is spot on.

I mean, we do have a far-left but it's not particularly doing stuff right now. The last time it was active they were blowing up buildings across the US or trying to bomb the US capitol [1] [2]. We're 30-40 years removed from that, and the far-right is more active right now. They definitely do exist and I'd say groups that are analogous to them certainly exist right now.

1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1980s-far-left-female... 2: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/remembering-left-w...

housing the homeless

SF and the Bay Area have been preventing housing creation for decades: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/, to the point that average SF rent is $3700/month: https://bungalow.com/articles/what-is-the-real-cost-of-livin.... The Bay Area is more politically left than anywhere else in the U.S.

The Bay Area, from what I can tell, has a lot of faux-left people actually running the show. People who are actually left and not centrist have been pushing for some sort of rent/landlord reform for decades, and the landlords have enough money to continue resisting and probably will do so for quite some time.

I'm glad I don't live there, tbh, SF sounds like a boring version of the nightmare futures written about in dystopian fiction.

Have you tried putting weed in your carry-on on any foreign airline? The drug laws in many America cities and states are "far left" relative to the rest of the world. Coincidentally, lax drug laws have caused many issues in SF that led to Chesa Boudin's recall

Stupid drug laws cause the problem. Criminalizing drugs creates crime.

We do have a drug epidemic happening but the answer certainly isn't locking people up.

Consciously choosing to not prosecute serial felons doesn't accomplish any of those goals. He broke the social contract humans have with each other that makes society function. It's recall worthy (the voters agree).

Political spectrums are always relative, and the spectrum of one country does not align well with the spectrum of another.

So while the policies you mention (social justice etc) might be main stream in one country, they can be far left in another.

Left-wing politics in the US would be centrist in much of Europe and positively right wing in say Cuba or Venezuela.

But you are not alone in your false equivalence - take for example the way many Cuban exiles in florida equate the democratic party with the communist Cuban regime (both described as left wing in their native countries.)

So comparing policies and parties from two different countries, and trying to use the same "scale" (left and right) is prone to error.

An error well understood, and exploited, by politicians everywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw&t=6s

you're right. There is no far left.

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