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The Two Kinds of Moderate

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#121

Post by Apocryphon »

jpitz wrote: post #115
Apocryphon wrote: post #111

I know that the dictum to keep politics off of HN has been a dead letter for some time- especially since tech has become overtly non-apolitical in the last few years- but it's still funny to see pg himself breaking that rule.

How is he breaking it?

This is an essay on politics.

It goes to show that people in tech are acknowledging more that the industry is not apolitical and has a very real social and political effect on the world at large, and are so dropping the pretense of lacking political interest. That and like the rest of the world, the tech industry has become increasingly politically polarized over the last half decade.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#122

Post by CriticalCathed »

> Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.

I don't think I can take seriously an essay that so flatly and flippantly claims this as fact. This is a masturbatory essay.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#123

Post by Ididntdothis »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #103
spamizbad wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, in the US the "coservative" movement is misnamed. It seeks not to conserve, but make radical change to both government (shrink it significantly) and culture (change mainstream values, cultural output). They're trying to push for extraordinary change and are willing to take extraordinary measures to get there. Ironically, the closest thing we have to "true" conservatives here are self-fashioned centrists, who gen…

Well, the conservatives want to conserve, not the current status quo, but the status quo of, say, 1950. To get there from here, we'd need to make some drastic changes to the current status quo. And that's not inherently an insane approach. If we've been going in the wrong direction for the last 70 years, the most useful move is to go back to where we were. Now, in practice, it's not that simple. You can't just go bac…

”Well, the conservatives want to conserve, not the current status quo, but the status quo of, say, 1950. To get there from here, we'd need to make some drastic changes to the current status quo.”

They don’t want that. Otherwise they would support tax increases and lower salaries for CEOs. They want to go back to a mythical past that never existed the same way they are Reaganites that would call the real Reagan a RINO.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#124

Post by youdontknowtho »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #92
morelisp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus Clinton was elected on explicit Third Way positions nearly 30 years ago. If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda. What you're noticing is the democrats finding a new base a decade after losing their working class supporters, through a combination of Third Way politics, the Republican Sout…

> If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda. You think that Democrats have not moved in the past 10-15 years? You think that the idea that they have is merely Republican propaganda? I think you haven't been paying attention. Or maybe you were paying too much attention. 15 years ago, AOC wasn't even old enough to vote. Were there Democrats in the House who held the same positi…

I'm trying to understand how you see Republican positions changing over time as well. From the perspective of policy or cultural issues. If I grant your point about how the last 15 years has seen a resurgent left, something that I'm stoked about, could you explain a little about how you've seen the republicans change over 10 to 20 years?

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#125

Post by redisman »

namirez wrote: post #114

> For some reason the far right tend to ignore moderates rather than despise them as backsliders. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it means that the far right is less ideological than the far left. Or perhaps that they are more confident, or more resigned, or simply more disorganized. I just don't know. This is a typical complaint by the so called moderates who feel unappreciated by the left (whatever that is). But I yet to…

It really is a bizarre setup, I think it's mostly generated by the reality-distorting effect of the ubiquitous "far-right opinion" programming on radio and Fox News and now online. The far left is supposedly in control of everything despite only controlling a handful of seats of power in the past century.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#126

Post by rabidrat »

msla wrote: post #14
hnhg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps 'accidental moderate'='independent' and 'intentional moderate'='centrist'?

"Intentional moderate" = High Broderism, or at least the popular understanding of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Broder http://pressthink.org/2010/06/clowns-to-the-left-of-me-joker... The above has this quote, which sums it up nicely: > Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the w…

On average, humans have one breast and one testicle.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#127

Post by youdontknowtho »

pjc50 wrote: post #38
whyoh wrote: post #35

>the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. I don't think you can reduce political arguments to who is "right" and who is "wrong". Politics and moral questions are not mathematical problems. We fundamentally don't all agree on what the final outcome (of a society, of life) should be. Maybe 99% of us can agree with something like "happiness" or "peace", but those are way too vague and the devil's in the det…

Eventually this ends up with a million people dead and everyone saying "well that was probably bad, maybe we should have tried to prevent that". Just because we cannot guarantee certainty or outcomes doesn't absolve us from the moral responsibility to try.

That's a pretty big simplification of politics over the last century and a half.

For example, let me grant you that Nazi Germany and the Soviets were equally bad for the sake of this question, would that mean that we and our allies were moderate? Do the proxy wars that we fought/are fighting all over the world factor into an ideological spectrum?

The reason that I'm asking a question instead of just going all "what about-ism" is I really would like top understand why people think the way they do. Not trying to start an argument.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#128

Post by ksdale »

taneq wrote: post #107

It never occurred to me that people would tailor their political views to try and be "moderate". The whole idea feels kind of dirty to me, your political views should be your honest opinion.

I don’t know that I’d call myself a moderate, but my honest opinion is that many strongly held views disturb me precisely because they tend to be so strongly held by those who seem to hold them, rather than being wrong in themselves, or because they require their adherents to brook no opposition. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I believe that people who say they have all the answers can safely be assumed to be wrong about a great many things, and strong political ideologies are, in essence, claims to have all the answers.

I’m open to a lot of ideas, and I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with policies that are way outside the Overton window, but I think what feels dirty to me is holding political opinions so strongly that it makes our fellow humans the bad guys.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#129

Post by youdontknowtho »

youdontknowtho wrote: post #108

"and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong" I disagree with this in the strongest terms. I realize that the people on this site lean right, and arguing politics isn't really cricket, so I won't go into to why. The "center" is a political ideology that pretends that it's something else. Also, being good at one thing doesn't make someone's opinion about everything else important.

tough crowd.

Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate

#130

Post by joejerryronnie »

CalChris wrote: post #110
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only so much time, attention, and energy. If your focus is on, say, trans rights, you're not spending that time focusing on working-class economics. And even if you can do it all, there's only so much attention the voters have. If all they hear about you is on trans rights, they don't perceive you doing anything about their economic problems. The Democrats' central message used to be "we care about the workin…

The population of the United States is dominated by the coasts. The GDP of the United States is dominated by the coasts. The tax base of the United States is dominated by the coasts.

You’ve perfectly summarized the OP’s final point.
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