Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

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You can't choose your skin color or where you were born, but you can choose your political beliefs.

...a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them.

it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.

Is this what we really want? A society of distrusting, hating separatist camps that vilify and exclude each other? Using organizational authority to actively punish "thoughtcrime" should be anathema to fellow liberals and those who espouse humanist values. However, there is (and always has been) a collectivist/identity/responsibility camp who thinks such authoritarian stances are ok.

A tolerant society needs to tolerate the free expression of dissenting and even reprehensible speech. A tolerant democratic society should tolerate legal political expression. As much as an enlightened company should have room for projects to experiment and "fail fast," a society should afford its citizens the opportunity to choose "the wrong" side. Really, the whole point of a democratic society, is that there's no one entity above imposing their idea of right and wrong over the populace.

Collectivism isn't evil and it is a deep part of what it means to be human, but it can't be allowed to trump the rights of the individual. People are best protected and served when collectivism and individualism are in balance.

Liberalism isn't very liberal anymore.

Obviously I'm equivocating, since that would make no sense any other way. The smooth progression over the past 70-80 years where "liberalism" has turned a 180 that at times it seems like nobody has noticed is... I dunno... fascinating, if nothing else. Tolerance, diversity, free speech, many other words, all have rotated 180 degrees in that time frame.

In addition to the left-right spectrum, there's also an authoritarianism scale. The one dimensional left-right spectrum seems to be bent into a horseshoe, with the open end facing up. The up-down axis measures authoritarianism. So the further towards the ends of the spectrum you are, the more authoritarian your stance is.

Others map this on 2-axes, like the D&D alignment diagram.

The one dimensional left-right spectrum seems to be bent into a horseshoe [...] the further towards the ends of the spectrum you are, the more authoritarian your stance is.

Cool observation - I really like this. Though in effect it goes from being one dimensional to two dimensional: x being extent of services, production, distribution, and exchange controlled by state or private bodies, y being level of participation of the population in the decision making process.

You could add z to measure spending policy - now you can represent fiscal conservatism, level of democracy and social policy as a tetrahedron.

One of the thing that intrigues me is the number of ways in which "liberalism" (call it "doctrinaire liberalism", as practiced on universities) are convinced they believe in one thing by name even as they believe the opposite. Liberalism right now is actually highly authoritarian. It claims not to be, but uses every ounce of authority it can come across and seeks vastly more.

If you say "I'm a liberal but I'm not an authoritarian", then I'd suggest at this point you may not actually be a "liberal" anymore, or certainly not a doctrinaire one. There's a lot of people who are, IMHO, coasting on definitions now a decade or two out of date and voting for people who are labeled "liberal" without noticing the two "liberals" in question aren't the same thing anymore. It's a significant driver in the realignment process that we've begun seeing in the spectrum. (Trump is only the beginning of the realignment, not the end, and he is an effect, not a cause.)

It is also strange, for example, to see "liberals" who are, presumably, still considering them superior to those stuffy, stuck-up Victorians with their hangups about sex, even as they push consent laws that are far more constraining than a Victorian would ever have dreamed of.

There's a huge gulf between what doctrinaire liberals believe, and what they believe they believe (no typo). It boggles my mind.

Nowadays, I think of such liberals as "Collectivist." Some of them are even straight-up Marxist, though often they aren't open about that.

According to this, I'm center-left and anti-authoritarian:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

I said it's less objectionable, not that it's not objectionable.

Examples of collectivism:

Racism. Sexism. Class warfarism.

Collectivism isn't evil? It's an objectively false idea and actively destructive to human life. How is that not evil?

> Is this what we really want? A society of distrusting, hating separatist camps that vilify and exclude each other?

That's not what I want, but it's certainly the the message I hear from conservatives and the republican party in this country.

I also hear this message implicitly from the left.

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