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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all, they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal about how they're the good guys doing all the helping more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure everyone notices.

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> Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are

Being awesome because you help those in need? How horrible!

> more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping

This is a common and tired talking point: "virtue signalling". It often comes from people who are less helpful than others, and resent how more helpful people receive accolades. Their own personal judgement about whether something actually helps isn't authoritative, and is usually motivated reasoning anyways.

"Government shouldn't help people" is such a bizarrely popular take in the USA.

As I understand it the key Republican discovery was that their voters prioritize making people they don't like suffer over their own comfort.

That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.

> their voters prioritize making people they don't like suffer over their own comfort.

> That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.

Those are the (sizeable) subset who are obsessed with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament rather than the turn-the-other-cheek teachings of Christ, who is little more than a totem for these fundamentalists.

Arguably there is less harm in believing that Christ's ministry was historical than believing that Sodom and Gomorrah were historical.

"Two thousand years ago there was this dude saying 'Be excellent to one another'" is certainly less dangerous, but to be fair the same dude described in the Bible does likewise say:

"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword."

Which like, you don't need to twist that very hard to get to a place where you're going around "bringing the sword" to people who you think need it...

The Old Testament is big on genocide though, "We should definitely murder these children" has a lot more justification at the start of the book, or if you're batshit and think that stuff about Revelation, right at the end is a concrete prediction of future events then maybe that too.

I think the actual sentiment is closer to "first, do no harm" (a.k.a. the precautionary principle) which is not nearly as bizarre!

That might be the noble aspiration that lives only inside their head, while outwardly the sentiment seems to look more like "make the government harmful so we can justify making it smaller."

Which would be laudable if that was what is actually happening. In practice it looks more like DOGE: setting every part of the government you don't understand or emotionally dislike on fire. Meanwhile, large corporate sponsors are allowed to do immeasurable harm without any oversight whatsoever.

Last I checked, corporations can't even exist without government blessing them into existence. If you have a problem with corporations, maybe you should dig into the root of that matter.

How does your second sentence follow from the first?

The root of the matter is the malicious harms committed against society by a given person or company or corporation.

The fact that people and companies and corporations are, in a general sense, "allowed" to exist by the government, seems vaguely tangential to the matter.

The other side actively goes out of their way to be cruel and is proud about it. All the while trying to stigmatize decency and help.

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