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Comment by prirun | Hacker News Reader

People are becoming more extreme, both left and right, to the point that I think an extreme and middle would have a hard time being a couple, let alone opposite extremes.

I know a couple where the guy is extreme right and the wife is middle. The wife had to prohibit all discussion of politics, in private or with company, because they usually got out of control.

This is also a problem between generations. I know a lady, leaning right but not what I'd call extreme, who no longer is speaking to her daughter who is extreme left. It's crazy to me that politics is being given this much power in some people's lives.

Here's a clue to everyone: politicians don't care about us, at all! They only want to keep us divided and fighting amongst ourselves so we don't unite and fight against them.

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The US has no real left. Your "left" is basically:

- Biology of sex is complicated (true), Sociology of gender is complicated (also true), therefore we should give people some slack here and protect them of bigots want to punish them for something they have been born into.

- Sexuality is complex and consenting adults should be allowed to do what they want

- Sexuality is complex and people should be able to marry other people regaedless of sex and gender

Given the fact that these are all well researched topics I am not sure how a liberal position like that could be considered extreme.

Extreme would be something like demanding that gay people are ahot on the streets or that kids genitalia are checked at school.

The US has no left in the same sense that it has no right. It’s just different tribes of liberals arguing over which is more fascist.

Do me a favour and list the policy promises of each side (be it implicit or explicit ones) and then we check what political ideology they stem from.

Example: Banning books or drag shows, for others because you don't like them is not what I would call "liberal". But hey, in certain political circles words have lost all connection to their meaning, so knock yourself out.

As a European I don't like the Democrats either, but pretending both sides are the same is a spwcial kind of mental gymnastics.

Banning things isn’t illiberal; liberalism doesn’t mean unlimited tolerance for everything, and all liberals have and enforce their own taboos. It’s baffling that people seem to think that liberalism means “the only rule is that there are no rules”.

Edit: that said, the “right” in America has been very meek in its “bans” compared with the left. You’re talking about politicians running on promises to remove books from local schools, winning on that platform, and following through. And then usually it gets overturned by some judge and quietly goes away. Meanwhile, we’ve seen for years school boards making decisions to remove books based on “left”ish principles and receiving little national backlash, even in ruby-red districts. No massive furor, no “this-is-a-threat-to-our-democracy” handwringing, maybe a write up in some rag like Breitbart or an episode of Tucker Carlson. It doesn’t get overturned, and people just accept it because they have no other choice. Which of these is less liberal?

I should add that this is only focusing on hard power. Where the “left” really shines is in using its networks to exert a lot of soft power. The state plays its part, as do corporations, NGOs, media outlets, academic institutions, doxxing and harassment rings. All part of the same structure working to manufacture consent. I remember when transgenderism became a hot-button issue so quickly that most “liberals” in the colloquial sense were caught completely off guard. There was maybe a year where every voice of authority was proclaiming the new truth, but people weren’t yet ready. It was too much, too quickly, and a lot of these people resisted. But once it became clear that if you dissented on this, you weren’t allowed in the club anymore, many gave in. It did give rise to TERFs and other splinter movements, which is why such a hard push is so dangerous. But back to these networks, that’s how “left” power works. And “right” power consists of reactionary half-measures like “don’t push this on kids until they’re eight.”

Again, I agree that there’s no left in America. But that’s increasingly true globally, especially among very-online political wonks. If Marx rose from the dead today, the entire left would condemn him as a crypto-fascist. And the right is much the same. It can’t conceive of itself as anything more than the half-hearted preserver of yesterday’s lies. It doesn’t have the vision or the will to be truly “right” in any historically normal sense of the word.

Drug legalization, gender reassignment and defunding the police are not mainstream views from other countries.

Let me go through your points:

1. Drug legalization: This is mainstream where I live. A majority of people are for a legalization (or at least a decriminalization) of Marijuana in some fashion or another. This is pretty much the same in the US as far as I can judge. There are some outliers that would extend that to other drugs as well (as e.g. Portugal did with quite some success), but that is a minority opinion among US Democrats, especially among those in any position of power.

2. Gender affirmative care (this includes btw. stuff that affirms the gender people had at theie birth) are relatively non-issues where I live. People who really need this get it. People who don't, don't. There are very few people who would lighty perform operations on their bodies. There are even fewer parents who would allow their children to undergo such a thing. This is basically a made up propaganda-talking-point that literally has no influence on my or your life at all. There have been studies that show links between the feeling of disgust and right wing ideology. Such a topic where you can other a powerless minority that right wingers feel disgusted about is a textbook manipulation example. My advice: Focus on voting for policy issues that actually impact your life instead of letting them manipulate you into voting against your own interest.

3. Defunding the police is a non issue in my country. Why? Because our police for the most part doesn't execute people without trial and they serve and protect instead. Of couese europe has bigot cops as well, but better training and a more service orientwd culture make all the difference here. If they would have the same bad culture as US cops I can assure you that defunding them would be quite popular.

P.S. where exactly I live is not relevant, this would hold true for my country and all surrounding neighbour-countries.

1. Marijuana isn't legal in most of Europe. It's been decriminalized in a number of countries. On the other hand, it is legal in around half of the US, and decriminalized in much more. So let's focus on real, hard drugs. How much of Europe has legalized heroin?

2. Nobody needs it. What they need is proper treatment for gender dysphoria or autogynephilia. Unfortunately, the entire discourse around this subject isn't a conversation but a struggle session where mountains of legitimate scientific criticism are silenced.

> This is basically a made up propaganda-talking-point that literally has no influence on my or your life at all

I thought you were a leftist; why the radlib talking-points? Of course nobody's actions occur in a vacuum. Everyone's life choices affect everyone around them. Antisocial behaviors should be discouraged, and prosocial behaviors should be encouraged. And it is quite a large social phenomenon in the United States.

> There have been studies that show links between the feeling of disgust and right wing ideology.

This is just silly. There have also been studies linking "leftist" ideology to dark triad personality traits, but does that have any bearing on whether or not your argument is correct? Besides, disgust is a normal, natural reaction. It's evolutionarily beneficial. I don't know why you think smearing your opponents with a healthy trait is a winning strategy.

> Because our police for the most part doesn't execute people without trial and they serve and protect instead.

This shows your ignorance of the actual situation in America. Unjustified police killings of civilians are vanishingly rare. To put it into perspective there are around 150 shootings of unarmed people by police each year. This is certainly going to be higher than in your country, but our violent crime rate is also certainly much higher, necessitating more police action. This number doesn't take into account people who were struggling to take an officer's gun and other mitigating scenarios. You reference "bigot cops", so I presume you're referring to the BLM narratives. There is a racial disparity in absolute numbers, but when controlling for all such mitigating factors, it actually reverses. Police are less willing to shoot black suspects because they know they'll be under the microscope much more than for shooting white ones.

But anyway, like I said, we can put a number at around 150. On the other hand, we had 1,200 children age 6-17 on puberty blockers 4,200 on hormone treatments, 282 receiving mastectomies, and 42,000 total diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021. That last number had doubled since 2017. Based on projections at the time, all are surely much higher now. So which of these is "basically a made up propaganda-talking-point?"

In the end, your rebuttal boils down to "my country doesn't have the same problems yours has, so we haven't tried fixing them." But it seems confirmed that your country hasn’t legalized drugs, doesn’t have a massive social push for transgenderism, and hasn’t defunded the police.

The US left also supports children gender reassignment surgery. How many others do?

You're believing in lies. Get off the kool aid.

Ah the good old "think of the children"-trope. A centuries old, but highly effective populist tactic — might you have fallen for it?

They say: $political_enemy wants to force children to do $x, therefore we must ban $x. Of course their goal is not to ban $x for children, but for adults as well. And the gullible public goes "Oh lord, not the children!" and supports them.

So be aware that in reality it is the right who wants to forbid gender reaffirming care for adults — if they gave a single fuck about children they would do something about the leading cause of death for children. Don't you think kids getting slaughtered is "a bit" worse than a tiny fraction of them undergoing gender reaffirming surgery? And if you don't exactly know what gender reaffirming surgery means, read up on it please?

The kids are just an excuse.

Just like with the book bans, where they first say they want to protect kids and then they ban books from public libraries that can also be used by adults. Or drag shows, first it was about kids now they want to ban adults from them as well (see: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/commentisfree/2023/mar/1...)

> They only want to keep us divided and fighting amongst ourselves so we don't unite and fight against them.

This is obviously true, but the reason they're able to do it is that there is a legitimate disagreement about the most core beliefs that roughly splits our society in half. Yes the politicians are self serving, but that doesn't make them wrong when for example they say "democrats want to murder babies" because their supporters do genuinely believe abortion is murder. That's not manipulation really, conservatives would believe that either way. We divide ourselves very well without any grand conspiracy.

Not an American. Watching from afar. We have a problem of too many teenage pregnancies in South Africa. Some of it is due to economics some of it due to social issues. What I don't understand about the US is how loud the extreme voices are. IMHO there is merit in messaging that prevents young girls getting pregnant. Whether it is promoting birth control or abstinence. There is also merit in giving options once girl is pregnant. No one solution is absolutely right and and no one solution is absolutely wrong. This being a technology site we know this off course because you can use Ruby, Python or PHP to create you SAAS and it depends on you the person.

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