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Comment by greggsy | Hacker News Reader

I have a lot of respect for Professor Tim Flannery - he’s a great science communicator and hosted a heap of shows in the early 2000’s.

He fronted a parliamentary hearing on climate change some time around 2010, where a heroic Liberal minister stated something along the lines of ‘you’re a palaeontologist, not a climate scientist, so you’re argument is invalid’. It was pretty sad to see.

Even being a climate scientist back then was cause for your credentials to be brought into question, let alone one from a cognate field.

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That's especially funny since almost all we know about the climate's long term behaviour has been dug up from the ground.

> Liberal minister

Not being familiar with Australian politics, is it liberal in the US meaning or the european meaning ?

Liberal party in Australia is the centre-right party. I am guessing they'd still be left of the US right-wing but that's beside the point.

I personally won't label the Liberal party as a centre-right party or left of the US right wing when it is currently led by Peter Dutton who is a typical far right element in modern politics.

I also struggle to categorize its recent former leader Tony Abbott and his close mate Joe Hockey who was the Treasurer as "centre-right". We are talking about a priest who was famously & accurately labelled by the only female Australian Prime Minister as a misogyny - that speech was voted for the No.1 moment in Australian TV history! These two are the people who want everyone to believe that it is a life style choice when people don't buy & drive ferrari.

Oh, let's also don't forget what happened to Liberal's actual centre-right leader Malcolm Turnbull. He was replaced by a bulldozer PM who is responsible for the use of automated machines to force the most vulnerable people to fork out billions of $ to cover their non-exist debts so his federal budget can look better to his supporters. Is this centre-right?

The Liberal party, for all its recent decade plus of derangement, is still clearly a center right party on an international scope. It would, for example, be anathema to degrade the level of services we experience in this country (and the Libs did pump a lot of money into services over the last few years, even whilst favouring private schools and clawing back robotically cash from those unable to fight back)

But even in US meaning, liberals are central right. Dems are central right. There is no labor or left party in US. The closest u can find is Bernie who is a social dem.

Why do American users keep repeating this rubbish? Have you all read the same book / blockpost making this ridiculous claim?

I don't understand ur logic. Won't American say Dems are left? and non-Americans would say there is no left in America acedemically? Isn't that the opposite of what u saying?

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat."

Gore Vidal

> and non-Americans would say there is no left in America acedemically

“left” isn’t a thing academically because there isn’t some line that actually captures the wide variety of political positions.

This meme of “there is no left in America” is just a childish way of saying, “I don’t like the current majority opinion of the Democratic Party”.

>“left” isn’t a thing academically because there isn’t some line that actually captures the wide variety of political positions.

Well, for Europeans (and I'd guess Canadians, Latin Americans, etc.) there is a line, and the Dems never cut it. A fuzzy line (a spectrum if you will on the left) doesn't mean there isn't one, and one can be of either side. Dems are not, and have never been, even close to the fuzzy "border" part of that line, always to the right of it.

Centrist is the more accurate term for Dems (and even that's charitable).

It's basically center-right (Dems), and right-to-far-right (GOP).

Sure, for some Americans, Democrats might be called "left", but then again other Americans also considered Swedish style social democracy as "communism".

>This meme of “there is no left in America” is just a childish way of saying, “I don’t like the current majority opinion of the Democratic Party”.

No, it's more like saying "America never has had a left party, just a party more to the left than the other".

Not in any historical sense of the term as developed and still currently used in Europe, at any rate.

Giving how hard it is to find affordable housing in Stockholm, I have to wonder if Swedish style social democracy is so great after all, if it can't even solve the fundamental human need of housing by building enough for everyone.

That feels to me like a straw man.

Poverty rate in Sweden is, like in most of Western Europe, low. [1] whilst the cost of living is lower than in the USA as an example. [2] At the same time schools, university, healthcare, social services, is accessible to everyone. There is a shortage of housing, only 0.8% of rental properties are availbe for rent[3] but it isn’t necessarily only a failure of government as the housing market is largely commercial, only 19% of housing is owned by the government [4].

[1] https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm

[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...

[3] https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...

[4] https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11...

No I mention housing supply because it is an issue that cuts orthogonally across the popular left-right dimension.

Japan is very capitalist but builds lots of housing because landowners can build up with little zoning restrictions.

The USSR was very communist and they also built a lot of housing because the government just went in and did it.

But the USA and Europe seem to easily get stuck in NIMBY traps where nothing gets built, and then when prices go up due to lack of supply people will reach for solutions like rent control, which almost 100% of economists will tell you is bad for longterm housing supply because it discourages new construction.

I've heard Stockholm's rent control is especially stupid because while the landlord is forced to rent to the primary tenant at a low, below market rate, that primary tenant can turn around and sublet their entire unit at a much higher, market rate to a secondary tenant. So the primary lease is basically a capital asset with perpetual returns. The unit ends up renting for market rate anyway to the secondary tenant, while the primary tenant collects free money.

> Well, for Europeans (and I'd guess Canadians, Latin Americans, etc.) there is a line, and the Dems never cut it.

This is overly simplistic. For instance, the US (left?) has been ahead of Europe on issues like accessibility for the disabled or same-sex marriage.

Those are plain old shared with bourgeois / social democracy concerns, not specifically left concerns (left is about class issues, and focuses on the economic substrate and equality, which is sees as more fundamental and where all others are mere derivatory or pale in importnace. Marx even considered these kind of things "bourgeois rights" and somewhat dismissed them.

In any case, it's not like the right is against "accessibility for the disabled".

Similarly, same-sex marriage is not about left vs right but about progressive/liberal (in the in favor of invididual rights sense) vs concervative.

An anarcho-capitalist can be all about same-sex marriage without being left (the opposite), where even communists were known to be socially conservative in several cases, or pioneering such rights in others.

There is no line, stop burying your head in the sand by pretending there is.

It’s so incredibly stupid to think that there is just one dimension driving all political views and it’s stemming from the lens of the US two-party system sucking the oxygen out of the room.

Pick all of the policies you think defines a “left” party and we can go through one-by-one and find parties in some country that are considered right-wing that will share some of the same views.

Political science is an actual subject. I would suggest everyone to take look just to learn bit. Why do u think I don't like Dems? The only thing I said is that they r not left. Which is true. I stated it like I say cold or hot. Did I ever mention I prefer which?

Political science doesn’t place everything onto a left-right single dimensional line. If you think it does you need to spend some more time actually reading.

Additionally, political science has many subfields and the ones that are closely related to political beliefs are subject to the same replication crisis as the other fields of social psychology (i.e. lots of junk science). So any of that stuff that generalizes 1 dimensional outcomes to entire lifestyles and views is likely complete trash.

I'll emphasize what kortilla said, please read about actual political science, not stuff you encounter online about this. Open a book. This online mudslinging nonsense is meaningless.

In quantitative political science, candidates and parties tend to be placed in "n-dimensional political spaces" where each issue occupies a different dimension. For example, if an election contains candidates who have publicly stated their positions on LGBT rights, free trade, and public healthcare, then you can call this a 3-dimensional political space where candidates place their attitudes on these issues on these axes.

In qualitative political science, there's many distinctions. There's "liberal rights vs substantive rights" political systems (e.g. whether the government guarantees individuals rights against their government or whether the government guarantees individuals substantive (standard of living e.g. basic healthcare) claims. There's "authoritarian vs democratic systems" (e.g. both fascist systems and Democratic Centralist ("politburo-style") socialist systems are authoritarin systems; liberal democratic, social democratic, and participatory economic systems are all democratic systems).

Even then, Europe has social democratic and communist parties that are anti-immigration. Japan has pro-labor pro-immigration parties. Politics cannot be boiled down to a "left" and a "right". When discussing "the Left" in the context of political philosophy, I've largely seen it as a reference to Hegelian Marxist thought at its strongest and a general orientation around the disenfranchisement of labor at its weakest.

No, it means when compared on the international stage the American left is no more like the global center-right.

Also, the majority of American citizens don't like the opinions of the democratic party. They works for the corps, not the people.

Ugh, stop digging in on this lame 1 dimensional spectrum. It doesn’t adequately capture anything meaningful in the real world.

There is no “global center-right”.

What is considered a “right wing extremist” in France could still be extremely nationalistic, anti-immigration, pro state entitlements, anti free speech, and anti gun rights. That has zero overlap with any of the political parties in the US no matter where you plop the dumb pin on the 1d line.

In any other western country and most of Europe, American Democrats would be considered insane right wing extremists. They don't even support having a healthcare system or banning guns.

In America, the anti-Romani and anti-immigration stances of many "left" European parties would be considered right wing.

It's almost like not all issues fit neatly on a single left/right dimension.

Also the Democrats created Obamacare which is similar to the Swiss system of mandated insurance, so they obviously do care about healthcare.

And in many states, Democrats have passed gun control at the state level.

> They don't even support having a healthcare system

That doesn't sound right.

> or banning guns.

In which other western country or part of Europe are guns banned?

It isn't right, but also... in the US, parties are institutionally weak. People do not (cannot) vote for parties, but for individual representatives. Ergo, different Democrats (or Republicans) run on issues perceived to have saliency locally. From such a collection of elected individuals, it is much more difficult to craft a "party" position -- because in some districts, supporting healthcare/gun control/whatever is not a winner.

Increasing partisanship and gerrymandering are making this less true, but it is still a significant force, particularly for Senate seats.

Strong parties, that run on a policy platform and where they have much more control over their members, just isn't a thing in the US, and couldn't be, without a lot of constitutional changes.

Not sure about that. Lots of voting systems don't vote for parties directly either. And I would say the two parties in the US are extremely strong, FPTP seems to reenforce that. It might also lead to the parties accepting some level of dissidence from some members -- better for a blue party to have a slightly red-ish congressman in a red state than to cede it to the other party. But I don't think that really weakens the parties because it goes both ways.

Minor parties and coalition governments in other countries function in somewhat the same way. It's not uncommon for a party to win but not gain absolute power in the legislative branch of government, and have to compromise with others to pass laws and spending bills.

> They don't even support having a healthcare system

Democrats are the ones pushing for universal healthcare: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/achievin...

> or banning guns.

Yep, they're the ones pushing for gun control too: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/healing-...

I don't see how one could read socialist literature and not come to that conclusion. Read Kropotkin, Marx, Mao, Engels, Proudhon, and you can not come away thinking that both major US parties are to the right. I think one would be hard pressed reading just economics and coming away with that conclusions. They are pro-capital, pro-imperial, pro-free trade parties. That sure sounds like a right-wing party.

Minor nit: free trade isn't right or left wing in the traditional sense, it's isolationist vs globalist. Marx was generally in favor of free trade because he thought at the time protectionism bred more industrialists:

>The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.

>Indirectly, however, it interests us inasmuch as we must desire as the present system of production to develop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible: because along with it will develop also those economic phenomena which are its necessary consequences, and which must destroy the whole system: misery of the great mass of the people, in consequence of overproduction. This overproduction engendering either periodical gluts and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic stagnation of trade; division of society into a small class of large capitalist, and a large one of practically hereditary wage-slaves, proletarians, who, while their numbers increase constantly, are at the same time constantly being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in short, society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodeling of the economic structure which forms it basis.

From this point of view, 40 years ago Marx pronounced, in principle, in favor of Free Trade as the more progressive plan, and therefore the plan which would soonest bring capitalist society to that deadlock. But if Marx declared in favor of Free Trade on that ground, is that not a reason for every supporter of the present order of society to declare against Free Trade? If Free Trade is stated to be revolutionary, must not all good citizens vote for Protection as a conservative plan?

>If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to please the socialists. It will do so because Free trade has become a necessity for the industrial capitalists. But if it should reject Free Trade and stick to Protection, in order to cheat the socialists out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers. You cannot breed the one without breeding the other.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/

First past the post voting has given the two party duopoly a death grip on American politics. People generally have a latent party, and ascribe anything that they disagree with as part of the opposing political camp. To answer your question, someone in the blue tribe (latent Democrat) will see the big-business-supreme legal regime and blame it on overwhelming right-leaning politics. Meanwhile someone in the red tribe (latent Republican) will look at the same freedom-destroying laws and their poor outcomes, but lay the blame at overwhelming leftism. In reality, the grassroots of both parties want similar things, but are herded into violent disagreement by the corporate-sponsored political machine.

(This isn't to say the two parties are the same, especially post ~2018. Just that the main dynamic is very similar)

In the US the democrats are not center-right relative to the US population.

They r central right acedemically even in US. The difference is that the public might perceive them as 'the US left'. Isn't relative definition more confusing? Isn't it easier to put everything on the same scale so that there is no confusion? To say US dem party is liberal is exactly right. Liberals are central right

There is no “scale”. What is considers “left” in Europe just looks like authoritarian nationalism from citizens of countries with a completely different set of priorities.

Mixing up Russia style commies and Europe social Dems never fails to amuse me. Why would ppl keep doing such things?

Where do you get the impression that occurred here? GDPR and other data residency requirements is authoritarian and nationalist by definition.

> But even in US meaning, liberals are central right.

In the US, different people use “liberal” to mean:

(1) Everything to the left of center of institutional power of the Republican Party, or

(2) Everything to the right of their preferred viewpoint (common among the US’s small number of actual leftists.)

(3) People who agree with their particular take on pro-capitalist econonic policy (often prefixed with “classical”.)

Among other uses.

Politicians are subservient to the entities that fund them, and in Australia?

> "Coal is mined in every state of Australia. The largest black coal resources occur in Queensland and New South Wales. About 70% of coal mined in Australia is exported, mostly to eastern Asia, and of the balance most is used in electricity generation. In 2019-20 Australia exported 390 Mt of coal (177 Mt metallurgical coal and 213 Mt thermal coal) and was the world's largest exporter of metallurgical coal and second largest exporter of thermal coal."

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

The fact that Australia has been experiencing severe climate-change-related whipsaws from extreme flooding to extreme drought and fire hasn't changed this dynamic, as the Australian government cheerfully reports:

> "Coal export volumes have grown at an average annual rate of 2.5 per cent from 285 Mt in 2010–11 to 363 Mt in 2020–21... In 2020, Australia held 14 per cent of the world’s coal reserves (black and brown), ranking third behind the United States (23 per cent) and Russia (15 per cent)."

It's the same in the USA, although here we have two fossil-fuel-owned parties, Dems and Reps, but the former lie about their climate agenda while the latter are honest about it. In reality, both are owned by Wall Street interests who invest heavily in fossil fuels.

At least they could be honest about the science, instead of trying to hide the reality.

first mistake - you take the words of a politician, at one stroke, against a lifetime of disciplined study and speaking.

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