Hacker News Reader

Comment by profeaturo | Hacker News Reader

As long as what you learn complies with the regime idealogy. Europe is a nicer place to live for now, but that’s more in spite of Europeans’ politics than because of it. There’s no significant difference in thought between the typical American liberal progressive and his European counterpart. Now that Europeans have sufficiently Americanized they’ll soon discover that the problems america faces now are in fact universal to all diverse liberal democracies.

View on HN

Note: (neo)liberal != left. Just because the Democrats are called "the left" (or even "the far left" on Fox News), doesn't mean they are. Look at the policies they support; are they pro-worker, pro-single payer, anti-war, anti-imperialist? No. So not "the left".

Regardless of what they themselves or anybody else calls them, what matters is what policies they concretely support.

The modern atomized “far left” are the new Bible thumpers, except far more useful to the elite as their religious texts are fluid and ever-changing.

They serve as arbiters of morality to keep the “normal” liberals in line and make certain the window of discussion never again approaches heretical talk of “nationalization” or “the 1%”.

There’s still old school leftists around that strongly support the policies you described, but they’ve been essentially banished from the political sphere at even the metro level. Even the DSA has been nearly entirely co-opted by this quasi-religious garbage.

As Christopher Hitchens would say, "Religion poisons everything." That is why the separation of church and state is vitally important.

Want to have your mind blown? The systems Americans call single payer are not all the same. And it's not a silver bullet either. The rest of your talking points is a little out of date -- the country most openly diplaying its imperialist mindset and also the one currently engaged in an offensive war is Russia.

I'm talking about https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1976. I didn't say it would be a silver bullet, but it would be a large improvement over what we have now, and save money in the long run to boot.

Your words indicate your knowledge of the Ukraine conflict is lacking. But believe what you want. https://www.thepostil.com/conflict-in-ukraine-genesis/

> Look at the policies they support; are they pro-worker, pro-single payer, anti-war, anti-imperialist? No.

Neither was Stalin.

> As long as what you learn complies with the regime idealogy

This seems completely unconnected to the discussion, but ok.

> Now that Europeans have sufficiently Americanized they’ll soon discover that the problems america faces now are in fact universal to all liberal democracies.

I concede, this may be true.

My point is that you’re correct, there are in fact things to be learned, but many of those lessons violate the basic principles of modern progressive liberal society, and the moment one might even begin to consider those possibilities out loud, he’ll be immediately shut down as racist, misogynist, Christian, right wing extremist, etc.

Contrary to what some Americans think, Europe is not culturally homogeneous. The countries themselves tend to be, with some exceptions, but they do differ from each other, sometimes in significant ways.

This is mostly true of the small European countries. The bigger ones like Germany, Spain or the UK have considerable internal tensions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com