ytoi

Someone suddenly stopping shouldn't be unexpected, nor is it necessarily against the rules of the road. Hacker News is fun and all but consistently gets beaten by 15 seconds of googling e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/nyregion/double-parking-i...

I don't know the person in question. He might have been a great person overall, to the people around him or maybe he wasn't very pleasant, but that was it. I don't know. Certainly people tend to have widely different impressions other people.

What I do know, and what the world should have thought us in the last couple of years, is that when this isn't the case it is often hiding in plain sight under layers of denial. And that the only way to uncover those things is to be able to speak about people and their actions. So while I do believe in being respectful I am not sure that we have earned the luxury to be uncomfortable when someone has a negative opinion about someone else.

What do you mean? As far as I know the major tax reform by the right-wing parties was the "work tax deduction" which makes taxes less flat. (The deduction is capped at roughly median income). Top marginal rates have been largely the same since the mid '90s.

I just think it is inaccurate to call that leftism. There are certainly leftist in the US and there are also similarities between socialism and social liberalism, but the game being played in the US isn't a leftist one. It isn't about state intervention, union power or even legislation. That private individuals, institutions or companies should be able to do and say whatever they want is even a right wing positions in the first place. Just that it originally was about teaching about god, excluding gay people and firing union organizers. So if anything, people that want precedence for their opinions are right of liberal and not left. The left position is that important institution shouldn't be private (or at least not privately funded) in the first place and/or primarily be accountable to the state rather than individuals.

I disagree. As a European "leftist", which I guess counts as the "far left" people like to blame things on, I think almost all these issues being discussed are right wing issues. To the point were you have to explain to people in Europe, that have been reading US articles, that the things they are opposing doesn't exist here. Overall European leftist doesn't want company policies, affirmative action or even large immigration. They want powerful unions, fair admissions to university, daycare, protection of employment and other concrete things that the US consider socialism. This entire "social justice" situation is because liberals in the US doesn't want to give up their privileges of private social insurance, good schools districts, rising housing markets, lobbying etc. So the result is the predictably a shallow shouting match, which people are uncomfortable with after the fact.

More freedom requires more self-discipline. When you are doing things like everyone else the systems are built for you. When you aren't you have to build those systems yourself, which can be harder than people think.