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Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

This idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with your economic policy is obviously a paid plant is painful. I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies. Spend a few minutes honestly imagining the opposition has good intentions. Seek out what they think they mean.

The data on higher minimum wages is not clear and it is not obvious it would benefit all Americans (or even the poorest Americans). Even if I agree with you, your rhetoric costs you an ally.

> This is not rocket science

No, its economic policy and its arguably much much more complex than rocket science. We’ve been thinking about rockets for about 100 years, political economy for about 2500.

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> I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies.

Only one side of this is, in fact, being misconstrued, as is evident by the recent deaths of women in states with abortion bans:

https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...

False balance is its own form of fallacious thinking.

Q.E.D.

Abortion is the ultimate debate; with no clear answer from any biological, moral, legal, ethical, philosophical, or even religious clause, and science leaning the "wrong" direction depending on social "norms".

Social norms are friction against the ability to be honest with peers - that are nearly all going to be incentived to lie about their actual opinion, and project the opposite (but vote the way they are told anyway)

The consequences are not necessarily the motivations.

I don't want to get too far afield here, but just in the interest of the parent point about assuming good faith, please take a look at this article if you have time: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/05/dr-warr...

"Up until around 32 weeks," and not all with medical diagnoses. And this is under current law. Can you say that everyone should be completely comfortable with this?

From the OP:

> and the other wanted to control women’s bodies

and you:

> Can you say that everyone should be completely comfortable with this?

So... control of women's bodies, as claimed in the OP? Why is it necessary for you to be comfortable?

If a given abortion is in fact murder, and I have some power to stop it (through politics or otherwise,) I feel uncomfortable inasmuch as I am allowing murder, and I feel it ethically necessary to resolve the discomfort. This moral consideration does of course balance against many others, including the preventable deaths of mothers that the OP highlighted.

Looking from outside of US its quite confusing how society of the free the country of libertarians… even makes this debatable. Its quite literally commanding someone what they can or cannot do about their body.

Looking at this from outside the US, it is quite bizarre to see how 2 extreme positions dominate the abortion debate there. Ultimately, the question is at which point the embryo should be considered a human being, who's life deserves some form of legal protection. One extreme position is that there should be no legal protection at all until birth. The other extreme would be granting full legal protection from conception. Both positions are fringe positions in Western Europe. The way the debate is radicalized in the US as a mater of fundamental human rights, feels like it leaves little space for the kind of compromise that most Europeans would accept as the only sensible position.

People who are not comfortable with it should simply not seek this particular care for themselves.

> The data on higher minimum wages is not clear and it is not obvious it would benefit all Americans (or even the poorest Americans).

You've been duped [1].

There is an extensive scare campaign around raising the minimum wage that is motivated by one thing only: allowing the wealthy to retain more of the profits generated by their workers. That's all that's happening here.

There is a well understood principle hhere too called the alienation of labor [2]. To summarize, without pushback workers will become increasingly estranged from and unable to produce the products they produce.

This is ultimately bad for the corporations that are exploiting them and the society as a whole because if nobody has any money, then there are no customers for your business. Over recent decades we've extended this by invoking debt. Housing debt, student debt, medical debt, credit card debt. These are temporary patches to a system that is fundamentally exploitative.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

[2]: https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/press-release/new-stu...

You didn't actually argue against the point though. How is it obvious that raising the minimum wage benefits all Americans? The people making wage already don't "have any money" yet the economy is fine anyways since they don't make up the majority of spending. Debt has been high forever.

Marx is right, the only thing that matters is labor + capex to create products / services. If rich people want to move money around buying expensive crap that's marginally better and isn't too much harder to produce, we should encourage that. As of now, most of the S&P 500 focuses on producing products for the common man or other businesses. This is exactly what you'd want to see and I don't see why we should rock the boat and reduce the total labor spent on the needs of the average person (minimum wage labor).

> an extensive scare campaign around raising the minimum wage that is motivated by one thing only: allowing the wealthy to retain more of the profits generated by their workers. That's all that's happening here.

This is not an honest summary of the literature.

Every recent increase in the minimum wage in America has produced zero to positive local employment effects [1][2][3][4]. Per your source, however, it also causes (non-monetary) inflation [5]. Moreover, we find in other countries that there is a limit to the tactic: in France, minimum-wage increases significantly decrease employment [6].

So no, people expressing scepticism towards minimum-wage increases are being duped no more than those being told it's corporate propaganda. They're asking legitimate questions that have nuanced answers. (It's also reasonable to ask if rural Alabama might have a different minimum wage from New York City.)

[1] https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02...

[2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w4509

[3] https://sp2.upenn.edu/study-increasing-minimum-wage-has-posi...

[4] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.35.1.3

[5] https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/press-release/new-stu...

[6] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

Item 5 seems weird to me…

1/ it pulls data from Uber eats. Many restaurants added “vanity” service charges to bills to provide visibility to the law changes. Instead of increasing menu prices, they add a mandatory service charge. I don’t know if this is accounted for in Uber eats takeout/delivery pricing

2/ most of the restaurants are fast food chains (think McDonalds). Full service business is included, but the sample size is much smaller. Even if it’s full service, the user isn’t “serviced” as these are delivery/takeout prices.

3/ the analysis is only national chain restaurants.

> if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies. Spend a few minutes honestly imagining the opposition has good intentions

Why should I? One side is happy to push absolute known BS about "post birth abortions", about harvesting of fetal body parts for everything from alternative medicine to a quest for immortality.

The time for "assume good faith" is long, long, long gone. These arguments are not in good faith. And I can rule out good intentions when you can't even have a sincere argument about it and lie through your teeth, knowingly and deliberately about it.

For the sake of argument: if a foreign power would want to destabilize the US there are few better ways than promoting ideas like the above as much as possible.

If compromise isn't possible on any issue because the other side is evil incarnate and completely unreasonable - well that doesn't leave many nice places where a democracy can go.

It's not really a choice but a demonstration of intelligence and empathy. Still, if you deliberately decide to remain ignorant, or simply fail to understand the opposition's position even despite your best efforts, it shouldn't surprise you when you also fail to convince people your position is the correct one.

Once you reach this stage, your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining, which makes a poor impression of yourself and actually pushes people away from your position. At best you might get some likes on social media though, which can feel nice.

Most of the web consists of this, so if that's what you prefer, I guess it's just going with the flow.

What position is that?

The one where it is okay to be absolutely, and objectively, dishonest, to get what you want?

When you have people who say "I don't actually care if your position is correct", your position that it is somehow my obligation to cater and pander to them, and that it is a failing of mine to not be willing to do so is farcical.

This is literally idiocracy in the making.

If I make a poor impression on people by repeatedly shutting down their horseshit about doctors performing "abortions" up to a week or a month after birth, or that babies are being harvested in the basement of a pizza parlor for their adrenachrome, and you're more concerned about how I should be "understanding" of that perspective, again, you're also supporting the idiocracy.

As anodyne as this post appears, there is real brilliance is linking the inability to convince others of your point with the inability to imagine other people's point of view. Just wanted to thank you for this one.

> if you ... simply fail to understand the opposition's position ... your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining

So, so good.

> One side is happy to push absolute known BS about "post birth abortions", about harvesting of fetal body parts for everything from alternative medicine to a quest for immortality

Doesn't that increase the chances that one side consists of a significant number of good people who have simpy been duped? How does demonising them help?

Many people think incest, rape, and vitally-risky abortions total something more than 7% of abortions. Not remotely close.

Knowing that the vast abortions are preventable and essentially extremely ethically lazy birth control may also be a factoid worth "evangelizing".

   Embryonic stem cells only come from four to five day old blastocysts or younger embryos. These are eggs that have been fertilized in the laboratory but have not been implanted in a womb.

https://www.cirm.ca.gov/myths-and-misconceptions-about-stem-...

Ironically, 'science' and 'religion' actually oppose each other as to when "life" begins. Which ironically neither side can even cognitively process, because they are so blinded ideologically.

"And why should I change? If I change, I loose everything! I loose my self! Who in their right mind would accept such a fate? That's why..." - Amalthus, circa 4058 Alrest.

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