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>I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness IMO this is what distinguishes a traditional liberal from a a progressive. For me, a liberal is bas

>I noticed that liberals had this similar authoritarianness IMO this is what distinguishes a traditional liberal from a a progressive. For me, a liberal is basically libertarian with a belief the state can be used to ensure the rights of citizens are administered evenly. IMO, if someone's actions aren't depriving another of life or liberty, the state doesn't have much standing in regulating that activity. Progressives believe state power can/should be used to protects their rights and their feelings. But, depending on the issue, you'll find conservatives taking the same stance. Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything. Conservatives that want they're feeling protected are no different than the "SJW" so many of them rail against. Like all things there are some grey areas. For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that. Abortion is another I see both sides on and believe compromise is the best way forward. You'll find "authoritarians" on both sides of the political spectrum. In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places. So do progressive/liberals (environmental issues, for example). In other cases, both sides can begin to see the state as a tool to unnecessarily curtail the liberty of their countrymen.

masondixon 10y ago
The problem is definitions. > if someone's actions aren't depriving another of life or liberty This requires definitions of what "life" and "liberty" mean. Once you choose these definitions you must ensure they are consistently applied to all your arguments. > Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything. What does "deprive" mean? If we continued this discussion debating the definitions, the key would be ensuring they are applied consistently to all other claims by both parties. This is practically endless. Maybe we need a new dictionary that is more specific and uses examples. Just like Stack Overflow Documentation - they realised that the key to good documentation is examples.
serge2k 10y ago
> For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that Really? I don't. It's a weird thing to care so much about. > In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places Do they? I guess you could argue that cruel laws like the one Pence signed in Illinois are the only recourse they have for what they consider a moral battle. I'm not sure how you can explain away fighting abortion while simultaneously fighting sexual education, contraceptive use, and welfare for those people who choose to keep the baby when they have no real hope of raising it well without help.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  >It's a weird thing to care so much about. I agree with you. It wasn't something any thought about before. But once it made its way into the public discussion, I understand how some people would be uncomfortable with it: especially people who don't know any trans people. >'m not sure how you can explain away... I can't and I don't. I think people like Mike Pence are assholes. My personal stance is we should use the age of viability (as arrived at by scientific consensus) as a legal cut off.
- larrywright 10y ago
  Minor correction: Pence was the governor of Indiana, not Illinois.
quonn 10y ago
> Abortion is another I see both sides on and believe compromise is the best way forward. How would such a compromise look like? > In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places. Right, but this is already your personal judgement. For example I personally feel that the conservative stance on abortion is cruel and creates more suffering.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  >How would such a compromise look like? Stop legal abortions at the age of viability as arrived at through scientific consensus. >I personally feel that the conservative stance on abortion is cruel... In some cases, it is. I'm not agreeing with all the anti-abortion arguments. I have also talked with "progressive" family members that have a cold/cruel absolutist view of it. In their mind, 8 months was fair game, because choice. When it comes to abortion, the assholery cuts both ways.
  - quonn 10y ago
    > Stop legal abortions at the age of viability as arrived at through scientific consensus. The age of viability could be arbitrarily early as technology progresses so I don't see how that is a good criterion. Instead I would argue for several different criteria. One is consciousness. This probably only occurs half a year after the child is born. Another one would be the ability to feel pain. Regardless of all other concerns, as a practical matter, I would argue that once a baby has some sort of independent existence from it's parents (once it came out as a matter of fact, no matter when) then it ought to be protected. > In their mind, 8 months was fair game, because choice. Is this really a practical problem? Abortions after 3 months (sometimes after 6 months) are somewhat controversial, but also very rare. For example, the numbers in Germany seem to be that 97% of abortions occur early. The late abortions are almost always related to very serious disabilities and this is a completely different topic. For those rare cases I would again argue that sometimes good arguments can be made for the abortion. It is not a clear cut case. Related: "I wager that the fetus experiences nothing in utero; that it feels the way we do when we are in a deep, dreamless sleep." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-consciousness-arise/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-conscio...
throwanem 10y ago
> Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything. There's an opportunity cost. I expanded on that a few days ago, and rather than rehearse it again, I'll link the answer I gave to "What do anti-gay-marriage people gain?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12933668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12933668
- trhway 10y ago
  from that your comment: >Homosexual partnerships, which are incapable of producing children, thus are of no benefit to the state, and can only be an unproductive diversion of funds which otherwise would be allocated to the benefit of heterosexual marriages which can and often do produce children. i think you're completely wrong here. Homosexual couples do adopt children and given the number of children in the foster care one can see how a homosexual couple adopting an existing child may be of even bigger benefit to the state/society/planet than a heterosexual couple producing a brand new child. Like with most of the "liberal/progressive" agenda - ecology/climate, marijuana legalization, education, healthcare, social safety net, death penalty abolishment, equal gay and others rights, etc... - i wish to think that this is we, humans, becoming morally better, yet it is also very easy to notice that when the wide society accepts those ideas it is almost always correlates ("correlation is no causation"?) with the fact that at the time of accepting of the given idea that acceptance is economically more beneficial than the not-acceptance. Well, better carrot than the stick...
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > Homosexual couples do adopt children and given the number of children in the foster care [...] A commonly cited argument, to be sure. Let's look at the magnitude of its impact in practice. Per federal statistics, roughly five hundred thousand US children are in foster care, which is roughly two-thirds of a percent of children in the US, or six per thousand. Figures on the number of children adopted by homosexual couples are somewhat harder to come by, but the highest number I found cited by a pro- group calls it about 22,000, which works out to about 4.4 percent of children in care, or 26 per hundred thousand of all children in the US. Does this benefit seem likely to outweigh the cost to the other 99,974 children and their families? Does it justify a federal transfer of wealth from those families - who, given the fashion by which the tax benefits we discuss are distributed, will tend toward the lower end of the income scale - to those homosexual couples already wealthy enough to consider adoption and be likely to gain approval? There's an argument to be made that these figures aren't representative because homosexual marriage is so new, and will increase over time, and that's fair. Let's look at the best possible case. Roughly 1.5 percent of the US population identifies as homosexual. (We disregard self-identified bisexuals in this analysis; when they make up their minds, they all but unanimously settle on heterosexualism.) Out of call it 240 hundred million Americans, if every two homosexuals equate to one marriage, we have 1.8 million couples. With half a million children in care, to reach full coverage, the overall adoption rate among those couples needs to be a bit more than one in four. Does this seem likely? That's four orders of magnitude, and roughly a factor of three thousand, over the general adoption rate - and if we disregard intercountry adoptions, as we have throughout this discussion and properly should here, it becomes more like a factor of five thousand. I do not dispute that homosexual couples, unable themselves to produce children absent extensive scientific and medical intervention, are more likely than others to adopt. But five thousand times more likely?
rp2008 10y ago
There is no such thing as a libertarian that believes the "state can used to ensure" anything. One of the core tenants of libertarianism is the nonaggression pact, and with this it is impossible to use the state to "ensure" too many things domestically. This next part will seem hostile, but think about it logically. The reality is that people usually want to enforce and others the qualities that they project from their own shadow; for instance, liberals tend to be racist (wanting special privaliges for one race or another, depending on the circumstance), and sexist (wanting to elect a treasonous criminal based on it being a woman alone), and thieving (wanting to levy money from others via taxation, for their own causes), and yet these three qualities are some of the biggest claims that liberals make against libertarians and conservatives, that they are greedy, racist, sexists.
matt4077 10y ago
That's a bit of a caricature. You're fighting some imagined liberals that you can possibly find on tumblr, not out there in the real world. There are really not that many fighting on the internet about who said what about who's sexual identity. Liberals care about someone who has to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage, has no meaningful time with their children, has to go to work even when sick or risk being fired, is possibly just a broken bone away from homelessness, and is preyed on by the financial industry with fraudulent credits etc. Oh – and when they get home, there's Mit Romney on FOX saying poor people are lazy. As a liberal I know that these people may have made poor choices. Where's the father? Shoulda finished school! Why do you need a cell phone? I just don't care. I see the willingness to spend money on anything /but/ the basic needs of people: the military, tax cuts to levels last seen in the 1920, etc. Indeed, conservatives seem to enjoy the suffering of others to such a degree that they're willing to spend more on people when they get to throw them in jail, with a bonus if it's a 20-year wait for the electric chair. There are all sorts of questions about incentivizing people, motivating them and punishing them at the core of all this. The problem is that these questions are discussed only in terms of morality, not practicality. Every single industrialized country can serve as a laboratory, and time and again we see policies that improve lives.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  >Liberals care about someone who has to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage, has no meaningful time with their children, has to go to work even when sick or risk being fired, is possibly just a broken bone away from homelessness, and is preyed on by the financial industry with fraudulent credits etc. Oh – and when they get home, there's Mit Romney on FOX saying poor people are lazy. Ridiculous. I can't tell you how many times I've heard those sentiments expressed when they're tapping away on their iPhones. Liberals care about whatever they currently feel the most strongly about. And they see no issues with using the fruits of Chinese laborers working in slave-like conditions while simultaneously agitating for the increase of minimum wages.
  - king_wentz 10y ago
    Someone using an iPhone doesn't invalidate their views - are they supposed to suddenly stop using a phone as a statement to the world? I see plenty of issues with Chinese laborers working in slave-like conditions. I'm happy to discuss breaking trade treaties and dealing with the consequences to give these people better lives. I'd say their condition is worse than the American poor - so if anything, we should bias towards them. But, we have power to fix these things within the bounds of our nation and refuse to do it. We have more influence over our country than any other.
moon_priestess 10y ago
> For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that. How? Requiring trans people carry papers just so they can use the restroom doesn't strike you as just as little bit terrible? Trans people already use whichever bathroom they feel more safe and comfortable in: All these bathroom laws do is make life harder for members of what is already a very marginalized group. There's literally no positive aspect to them whatsoever.
- aminorex 10y ago
  All bathrooms matter.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > All these bathroom laws do is make life harder for members of what is already a very marginalized group. I've had discussions with psychologists and trans people. This illustrates the disconnect we're seeing between the left and the public. Trans people are a vanishingly small proportion of the population, compared to the people who have lost jobs when their manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Worrying about their desires (a tiny percentage of the population) and de-prioritizing the desires of a far larger group of people is insulting to the people who have lost jobs and can't find new ones. Talk about skewed priorities. Also, if you thought you were Napoleon or black (and happened not to be black), you'd be roundly laughed at and diagnosed with a mental illness, and sent to therapy, resources permitting. Similarly, you can argue that Trans people have a mental illness - they think they're something they're not. It's just that the therapy to disabuse them of the notion is more trouble than it's worth.
  - woofyman 10y ago
    It was conservatives who made a big deal over bathrooms by passing laws.
    - ubertaco 10y ago
      Try to step out of your own perspective and look at it from the other side. I'm not asking you to agree with the other side, just to give it a fair shake before putting it down. Consider the viewpoint of a parent of a young (10-year-old) child. That parent sends their 10-year-old daughter into the women's restroom. If that restroom can be legally entered by any person who is willing to say out loud "I feel like I am a woman", that restroom is open to any number of adult men who prey on children to enter. Yes, this is the ever-present, sometimes-alarmist "who will think of the children" argument. But being a tired argument doesn't make it an inaccurate or illegitimate one. If there is no answer given for it, then it remains valid, if eventually tiring to hear.
che_shirecat 10y ago
Thank you for elucidating what I've been attempting to communicate to people when I tell them I'm a liberal, not a progressive. Your point about conservatives being progressives of sort just in the other direction is spot on.
che_shirecat 10y ago
Thank you for elucidating what I've been attempting to communicate to people when I tell them I'm a liberal, not a progressive. Your point about conservatives being progressives of sort just in the other direction is spot on.

masondixon 10y ago

The problem is definitions. > if someone's actions aren't depriving another of life or liberty This requires definitions of what "life" and "liberty" mean. Once you choose these definitions you must ensure they are consistently applied to all your arguments. > Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything. What does "deprive" mean? If we continued this discussion debating the definitions, the key would be ensuring they are applied consistently to all other claims by both parties. This is practically endless. Maybe we need a new dictionary that is more specific and uses examples. Just like Stack Overflow Documentation - they realised that the key to good documentation is examples.

serge2k 10y ago

> For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that Really? I don't. It's a weird thing to care so much about. > In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places Do they? I guess you could argue that cruel laws like the one Pence signed in Illinois are the only recourse they have for what they consider a moral battle. I'm not sure how you can explain away fighting abortion while simultaneously fighting sexual education, contraceptive use, and welfare for those people who choose to keep the baby when they have no real hope of raising it well without help.

alistproducer2 10y ago
>It's a weird thing to care so much about. I agree with you. It wasn't something any thought about before. But once it made its way into the public discussion, I understand how some people would be uncomfortable with it: especially people who don't know any trans people. >'m not sure how you can explain away... I can't and I don't. I think people like Mike Pence are assholes. My personal stance is we should use the age of viability (as arrived at by scientific consensus) as a legal cut off.
larrywright 10y ago
Minor correction: Pence was the governor of Indiana, not Illinois.

quonn 10y ago

> Abortion is another I see both sides on and believe compromise is the best way forward. How would such a compromise look like? > In some cases (like abortion) conservatives have their heart in the right places. Right, but this is already your personal judgement. For example I personally feel that the conservative stance on abortion is cruel and creates more suffering.

alistproducer2 10y ago
>How would such a compromise look like? Stop legal abortions at the age of viability as arrived at through scientific consensus. >I personally feel that the conservative stance on abortion is cruel... In some cases, it is. I'm not agreeing with all the anti-abortion arguments. I have also talked with "progressive" family members that have a cold/cruel absolutist view of it. In their mind, 8 months was fair game, because choice. When it comes to abortion, the assholery cuts both ways.
- quonn 10y ago
  > Stop legal abortions at the age of viability as arrived at through scientific consensus. The age of viability could be arbitrarily early as technology progresses so I don't see how that is a good criterion. Instead I would argue for several different criteria. One is consciousness. This probably only occurs half a year after the child is born. Another one would be the ability to feel pain. Regardless of all other concerns, as a practical matter, I would argue that once a baby has some sort of independent existence from it's parents (once it came out as a matter of fact, no matter when) then it ought to be protected. > In their mind, 8 months was fair game, because choice. Is this really a practical problem? Abortions after 3 months (sometimes after 6 months) are somewhat controversial, but also very rare. For example, the numbers in Germany seem to be that 97% of abortions occur early. The late abortions are almost always related to very serious disabilities and this is a completely different topic. For those rare cases I would again argue that sometimes good arguments can be made for the abortion. It is not a clear cut case. Related: "I wager that the fetus experiences nothing in utero; that it feels the way we do when we are in a deep, dreamless sleep." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-consciousness-arise/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-conscio...

throwanem 10y ago

> Gay people getting married deprives no one of anything. There's an opportunity cost. I expanded on that a few days ago, and rather than rehearse it again, I'll link the answer I gave to "What do anti-gay-marriage people gain?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12933668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12933668

trhway 10y ago
from that your comment: >Homosexual partnerships, which are incapable of producing children, thus are of no benefit to the state, and can only be an unproductive diversion of funds which otherwise would be allocated to the benefit of heterosexual marriages which can and often do produce children. i think you're completely wrong here. Homosexual couples do adopt children and given the number of children in the foster care one can see how a homosexual couple adopting an existing child may be of even bigger benefit to the state/society/planet than a heterosexual couple producing a brand new child. Like with most of the "liberal/progressive" agenda - ecology/climate, marijuana legalization, education, healthcare, social safety net, death penalty abolishment, equal gay and others rights, etc... - i wish to think that this is we, humans, becoming morally better, yet it is also very easy to notice that when the wide society accepts those ideas it is almost always correlates ("correlation is no causation"?) with the fact that at the time of accepting of the given idea that acceptance is economically more beneficial than the not-acceptance. Well, better carrot than the stick...
- throwanem 10y ago
  > Homosexual couples do adopt children and given the number of children in the foster care [...] A commonly cited argument, to be sure. Let's look at the magnitude of its impact in practice. Per federal statistics, roughly five hundred thousand US children are in foster care, which is roughly two-thirds of a percent of children in the US, or six per thousand. Figures on the number of children adopted by homosexual couples are somewhat harder to come by, but the highest number I found cited by a pro- group calls it about 22,000, which works out to about 4.4 percent of children in care, or 26 per hundred thousand of all children in the US. Does this benefit seem likely to outweigh the cost to the other 99,974 children and their families? Does it justify a federal transfer of wealth from those families - who, given the fashion by which the tax benefits we discuss are distributed, will tend toward the lower end of the income scale - to those homosexual couples already wealthy enough to consider adoption and be likely to gain approval? There's an argument to be made that these figures aren't representative because homosexual marriage is so new, and will increase over time, and that's fair. Let's look at the best possible case. Roughly 1.5 percent of the US population identifies as homosexual. (We disregard self-identified bisexuals in this analysis; when they make up their minds, they all but unanimously settle on heterosexualism.) Out of call it 240 hundred million Americans, if every two homosexuals equate to one marriage, we have 1.8 million couples. With half a million children in care, to reach full coverage, the overall adoption rate among those couples needs to be a bit more than one in four. Does this seem likely? That's four orders of magnitude, and roughly a factor of three thousand, over the general adoption rate - and if we disregard intercountry adoptions, as we have throughout this discussion and properly should here, it becomes more like a factor of five thousand. I do not dispute that homosexual couples, unable themselves to produce children absent extensive scientific and medical intervention, are more likely than others to adopt. But five thousand times more likely?

rp2008 10y ago

There is no such thing as a libertarian that believes the "state can used to ensure" anything. One of the core tenants of libertarianism is the nonaggression pact, and with this it is impossible to use the state to "ensure" too many things domestically. This next part will seem hostile, but think about it logically. The reality is that people usually want to enforce and others the qualities that they project from their own shadow; for instance, liberals tend to be racist (wanting special privaliges for one race or another, depending on the circumstance), and sexist (wanting to elect a treasonous criminal based on it being a woman alone), and thieving (wanting to levy money from others via taxation, for their own causes), and yet these three qualities are some of the biggest claims that liberals make against libertarians and conservatives, that they are greedy, racist, sexists.

matt4077 10y ago

That's a bit of a caricature. You're fighting some imagined liberals that you can possibly find on tumblr, not out there in the real world. There are really not that many fighting on the internet about who said what about who's sexual identity. Liberals care about someone who has to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage, has no meaningful time with their children, has to go to work even when sick or risk being fired, is possibly just a broken bone away from homelessness, and is preyed on by the financial industry with fraudulent credits etc. Oh – and when they get home, there's Mit Romney on FOX saying poor people are lazy. As a liberal I know that these people may have made poor choices. Where's the father? Shoulda finished school! Why do you need a cell phone? I just don't care. I see the willingness to spend money on anything /but/ the basic needs of people: the military, tax cuts to levels last seen in the 1920, etc. Indeed, conservatives seem to enjoy the suffering of others to such a degree that they're willing to spend more on people when they get to throw them in jail, with a bonus if it's a 20-year wait for the electric chair. There are all sorts of questions about incentivizing people, motivating them and punishing them at the core of all this. The problem is that these questions are discussed only in terms of morality, not practicality. Every single industrialized country can serve as a laboratory, and time and again we see policies that improve lives.

jimmywanger 10y ago
>Liberals care about someone who has to work 12 hours a day for minimum wage, has no meaningful time with their children, has to go to work even when sick or risk being fired, is possibly just a broken bone away from homelessness, and is preyed on by the financial industry with fraudulent credits etc. Oh – and when they get home, there's Mit Romney on FOX saying poor people are lazy. Ridiculous. I can't tell you how many times I've heard those sentiments expressed when they're tapping away on their iPhones. Liberals care about whatever they currently feel the most strongly about. And they see no issues with using the fruits of Chinese laborers working in slave-like conditions while simultaneously agitating for the increase of minimum wages.
- king_wentz 10y ago
  Someone using an iPhone doesn't invalidate their views - are they supposed to suddenly stop using a phone as a statement to the world? I see plenty of issues with Chinese laborers working in slave-like conditions. I'm happy to discuss breaking trade treaties and dealing with the consequences to give these people better lives. I'd say their condition is worse than the American poor - so if anything, we should bias towards them. But, we have power to fix these things within the bounds of our nation and refuse to do it. We have more influence over our country than any other.

moon_priestess 10y ago

> For example, the trans bathroom thing. I legitimately see both sides on that. How? Requiring trans people carry papers just so they can use the restroom doesn't strike you as just as little bit terrible? Trans people already use whichever bathroom they feel more safe and comfortable in: All these bathroom laws do is make life harder for members of what is already a very marginalized group. There's literally no positive aspect to them whatsoever.

aminorex 10y ago
All bathrooms matter.
jimmywanger 10y ago
> All these bathroom laws do is make life harder for members of what is already a very marginalized group. I've had discussions with psychologists and trans people. This illustrates the disconnect we're seeing between the left and the public. Trans people are a vanishingly small proportion of the population, compared to the people who have lost jobs when their manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Worrying about their desires (a tiny percentage of the population) and de-prioritizing the desires of a far larger group of people is insulting to the people who have lost jobs and can't find new ones. Talk about skewed priorities. Also, if you thought you were Napoleon or black (and happened not to be black), you'd be roundly laughed at and diagnosed with a mental illness, and sent to therapy, resources permitting. Similarly, you can argue that Trans people have a mental illness - they think they're something they're not. It's just that the therapy to disabuse them of the notion is more trouble than it's worth.
- woofyman 10y ago
  It was conservatives who made a big deal over bathrooms by passing laws.
  - ubertaco 10y ago
    Try to step out of your own perspective and look at it from the other side. I'm not asking you to agree with the other side, just to give it a fair shake before putting it down. Consider the viewpoint of a parent of a young (10-year-old) child. That parent sends their 10-year-old daughter into the women's restroom. If that restroom can be legally entered by any person who is willing to say out loud "I feel like I am a woman", that restroom is open to any number of adult men who prey on children to enter. Yes, this is the ever-present, sometimes-alarmist "who will think of the children" argument. But being a tired argument doesn't make it an inaccurate or illegitimate one. If there is no answer given for it, then it remains valid, if eventually tiring to hear.

che_shirecat 10y ago

Thank you for elucidating what I've been attempting to communicate to people when I tell them I'm a liberal, not a progressive. Your point about conservatives being progressives of sort just in the other direction is spot on.

che_shirecat 10y ago