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Comment by boroboro4 | Hacker News Reader

This is what great reporting looks like: well-written, transparent, and rigorous. It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.

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> It’s sad to see how hatred toward progressives can distort people’s judgment.

The status quo is easy, change is hard, and anyone benefiting from the status quo will do whatever they have to in order to prevent change. Progressive by definition want change, progress. Change is scary. Humans are most easily motivated by fear.

I think it's a little more than just fear of change. Garry Tan knows where his (material) interests lie, and will do and say anything to fight off those who would build a more equal society, even if it means supporting actual fascists like Trump. The ultra-wealthy are very class conscious.

It would be nice if billionaires could f off to billionaire island and leave everyone else alone

you won capitalism. go away.

With respect, you just reiterated what I said. We agree 100%. He's invested in the status quo and will throw us all under the bus to keep it.

This isn't great reporting. It's politics.

Completely content-free junk statement. The post is purportedly about correcting bad information about a person who held public office, and (if it is in fact misinformation) was spread for political reasons. How are you supposed to do such a correction without it being political?

Everything is politics.

Which food you eat (are you vegan? carnivore diet? Both have implications in regards to animal welfare, climate change, soil use, identity etc etc), which media you consume (obvious), which job you have (which power structures do you strengthen with it? who benefits from your labor? who do you try to disrupt?).

To say one is "apolitical" is just voicing a preference for the status quo.

To decry something as political is just voicing one's political opposition to the view expressed.

Maybe I just want to eat what tastes good, and not have to worry about how what I chose on the menu is going to support a politician, political party, businessperson, etc.

The "everything is politics" meme is old and annoying.

Sure, you can. But don't pretend that's not a political choice.

Just because you choose to ignore the externalities of your choices doesn't mean they no longer exist. It just means that you value your personal well being and comfort more than being informed about the results of your actions.

And have the luxury of being able to ignore them. That is a luxury.

I never said anything about ignoring the externalities. I also never said that I was ignorant to the results of my actions.

It's just not political for me.

I guess I'm not surprised that this cognitive trap about politics has spread - after all, people care more about deploying any tools they can to "win", rather than being correct.

It's pretty clear your definition of politics is a lot more narrow than what almost everyone else is talking about in this thread.

And I know that you never said anything about ignoring the externalities, that's what I'm saying about you.

It's a poltical act to eat food that tastes good, in defiance of the activists who think that the food yiu find tasty is immoral and want to make it illegal for you to do so. Something is a poltical act if other people want you not to do it and want to enforce this through law, which you have no control over.

That's a pretty depressing worldview. Children playing in the park aren't being political. It's possible to just exist sometimes.

But that park was probably created as a result of a vote or other political process.

>Children playing in the park aren't being political

I can assure you they absolutely are. Of course there isn't a well defined elected government here, but 'social politics' between children are absolutely occurring. Things like looks, material goods, clothes, ability to take care of themselves, etc all affect how they interact with each other and who is popular and gets to take the lead/be bullies/etc.

HN posters can be really clueless to the world around them at times.

We don't even have to zoom in, to be honest.

What children? What park? The presence of a park pre-supposes a political society that has prioritized parks, the budget to enact those priorities, and the space to do so. Any one of those can spiral into its own political microcosm.

How is that park maintained? Is there a special kids area of the park? Is it "for kids" or is it "The kids area", implying that kids aren't allowed in the rest of the park? Are the children not allowed in the park after a certain time - and who decides that time, and why? Sometimes the park is used for town events, but can get rented out. Who decides that?

Complexity is inherent, from the atoms to the galaxies. Any rejection of that is just plugging your ears, willfully or not.

The children playing in a park aren't being political, and are largely insulated from the politics of playing in a park... but those circumstances are surrounded by all kinds of political process. As another commenter said, the park's existence is probably due to politics; as are the rules the children need to follow, what activities are permitted, the safety and maintenance of park equipment and facilities, curfews, etc. It is also a choice on the part of the parents to let their kids play in a park, and which parks their kids play in, and those choices aren't made in a vacuum. Perhaps the perspective of the adult should not be to view children in the park as apolitical, but to be cognizant of the processes that influence their children and try to ensure that they work for the children's benefit.

It's not that long ago that black children were barred from being in the same space as white children so at one point yes, it was political.

Kind of a category error to suggest there's a stark difference. Over the last 100 years, enormous amounts of excellent journalism has been informed by political objectives on the part of reporters.

Yikes. Vastly outweighed by the ruination of journalism by politics.

There's abusive intersections of politics and journalism just like there are abusive intersections of all sorts of other things and journalism. The idea of a truly neutral reporter though is a fiction.

Journalism is politics. Choosing to daylight information about government is a political choice, regardless of which information you're daylighting. Often, there is a political party (or multiple political parties) trying to avoid daylighting that information. That's also a political choice.

The existence of the fourth estate is the existence of a political actor in tension with the others.

It’s weirder than that. Even the idea of an apolitical journalism is ahistorical.

Apolitical journalism started with the telegram wire services as a _marketing_ approach, not a moral one. It allowed them to sell to more local papers which were all politically aligned. You can see that in some of the surviving names. But local reporting stayed political in those individual papers the whole time. We have like a whole chapter in basic us history classes on the political implications of the Spanish American war journalism empires.

Apolitical tv was similarly a market condition. The airwaves were limited, so the content was controlled. That was apolitical in that it tried to appease both parties, but you wouldn’t see any topical coverage on political issues they both opposed.

So when people talk about politics entering journalism they are telling on themselves. They prefer a very narrow set of journalism that wasn’t ever some universal norm, and was itself political.

This article isn't that -- nothing excellent is achieved. It's pure intra-party squabbling between leftist and centrist factions of California Dems. Balko is just trying to score points for his faction.

Re. hatred towards progressives and the Boudin recall:

>Boudin ... alleged... that the campaign was largely a Republican effort to remove him from power. Despite Boudin's claims, the recall campaign was publicly led by Democrats. 83% of donors to the campaign were from Democratic-registered voters or no-party-preference voters, with over 80% of donations coming from local San Franciscans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin)

There's quite a lot on the reasons why in the article.

From an article linked in the original article:

> In the pro-recall camp, big money makes up a much bigger slice of the pie. Over three-quarters of the total money raised ($4.76 million) has come from $50,000-plus donations, and only 4 percent has come from donations smaller than $1,000.

This doesn't give me a very charitable view of the recall donors. Democrats or not.

Given how many articles he's published in Reason Magazine over the years, Radley Balko might qualify as "libertarian" or perhaps "civil libertarian" rather than "progressive." Not that the labels ought to matter too much.

(I posted this article with its actual title a few days ago and it didn't pop at all, which is funny I guess)

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