Hacker News Reader

Comment by drekk | Hacker News Reader

California's government is center-right. There is no far left party in US politics. That's why you don't have affordable higher education or healthcare, why your infrastructure is decaying, why you don't have nice public transit, etc.

It's also why your taxes are so high with nothing to show for them. Turns out austerity is expensive for most people. Canada and Mexico have cheap insulin because their governments are only willing to put up with so much profiteering in medicine. One has to ask why the US government is. Is that because of the far left, too?

View on HN

Left and right aren't objective measurements, they are relative ones. Relative to US politics generally California's government is left. If you're in some even more left European country that doesn't mean anything - Europe is not the objective standard by which everyone measures politics.

While it's true that the terms are relative, there are countries in Europe and South America that have literal communist, socialist or anarchist parties.

Hearing people describe Democrats as far left makes them sound like clowns spouting canned propaganda. It's not conducive to conversation as you know you aren't talking to a rational person who can argue in good faith.

People who call US Democrats far left likely don't have experience with culture outside of their own and their local/national mainstream news.

Either that or they hang out on 4chan

>don't have experience with culture outside of their own and their local/national mainstream news.

Isn't this true of most Americans democrat or otherwise.

Basically yes. I think the internet has changed things quite a bit but many are still isolated

Rural communities need broadband internet access and we need to work to reduce the amount and impact of echo chambers on the internet

For most Americans, exposure to outside cultures will happen much more through reading about them or interacting with, say, foreign exchange students and foreign cultural social groups, than visiting the places. Americans who grow up with the money to travel abroad a lot often come from general wealth, which also lets them afford to spend more time doing things like grad school. This affects the liberal causes well-traveled American liberals might support; they may care less about economic fairness than gender/racial equality for instance.

We had a subject called "Social Studies" in school which introduced us to other cultures of the world. I thought every country had something similar.

This is just the opinion of some fool on the internet, but I personally think that interacting with people from other cultures is far more important than just reading about them. Not saying I disagree with you, I definitely had social studies in school in the US but that didn't impact me nearly as much as interacting with other fellow fools on the internet. We can learn a lot more about each others perspectives and cultures by interacting.

I completely agree. I live in Canada, and run a weekly Zoom call on startups etc. We have quite a few members from India, Latin America and elsewhere and I find it useful to get their perspectives. I even have callers from China (you need to change the Zoom data center config to permit this). These are people that I met on WeChat groups (unfortunately not a realistic option outside China for most right now), and some former students. We try to stay away from politics, but interestingly there is a wide range of points of view from Chinese callers.

Agreed. Though the things I learnt in social studies like history, geography, and civics helped me in finding a common ground with people of other cultures. Given my introverted nature I imagine I would have had a much harder time if I did not have this foundation.

Some countries are further left and some are further right. To add even more complexity some countries, all of them really, are just different in ways that a one dimensional scale doesn't really capture that well. This is both true and a trivial observation. It is a banality that doesn't really mean anything but is often offered as if it did.

Is this an intentional troll?

Is this an intentional troll?

On this note, most of California's problems come from a populace that apes left wing ideology while acting right wing when the rubber hits the road.

"Black Lives Matter but not if they have to build housing next to me" is a California meme.

See also Prop 13, a tax revolt, being the crux of a lot of California issues.

While government services can certainly be more efficient and cost disease is rampant, we first have to agree that the government should be providing the service in the first place (which we don't, countrywide)

I’d argue there is a difference between what side of the political spectrum California is on and whether or not they are good at governing. You mention that we don’t have good public transit but California is famous for massively expensive infrastructure projects. It seems it’s less of a ideological issue and more of a competency one.

SF spends more on homelessness than any other municipality, but still has rampant homelessness.

SF’s muni is one of the worst in the country in terms of reliability and speed but we have a muni budget that is equal to London per capita.

Most complaints in California isn’t on its ideology, but rather its incompetence at executing its ideology

Compared to the most populous countries, China and India, would you put the US and California to the left or the right? How about compared to other major world powers like Japan?

It seems to me that California does both more economic redistribution via higher taxes and is more open in terms of accepting a wide variety of foreign immigrants, cultures and religions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com