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From your link, I think the author nailed it. The fear is that the current leftist ideas are tomorrow's mainstream ideas and tomorrow's left will be more extrem

by logn 12y ago

From your link, I think the author nailed it. The fear is that the current leftist ideas are tomorrow's mainstream ideas and tomorrow's left will be more extreme. The reality is that tomorrow's left will have opinions like the NYT writer. You can see the inverse of this on the right, too: Rand Paul has surpassed Sarah Palin; Alex Jones surpassed Glenn Beck. Edit to add: So the progression of political trends isn't linear. Liberals push for the next new idea and conservatives want to hang on to (or revive) some other value, but (hopefully) neither is going to endlessly push their agenda today until it's some authoritarian mockery of itself.

morgante 12y ago
Yup! That idea gives me hope that we are not in an inexorable decline of intellectual thought. Fashions, including intellectual ones, are both faster to appear and slower lived than actual ideological shifts. I think it's telling that while political and ideological fashions fall in and out of favor, actual policies tend to progress towards effectiveness.
- lnanek2 12y ago
  What makes you think polices get more effective? The F-35 is a laughing stock. Surely most effective wouldn't be an overbudget, past deadline, aircraft with a host of problems. Surely most effective would mean avoiding things like that with government purchases. Taxes get more complicated every year. I have a whole extra set of documents and fines to deal with because no health insurance is punished now, for example. Surely more effective would be least overhead to do taxes possible and least burden on the poor people without insurance. The goal of many politicians is to increase pork barrel spending in their state, so it isn't like they are even trying to be effective for many policies, just to try to wrest the most money and support from the others. So if you mean most effective at making deals with businesses, maybe you are correct.
  - Gifford 12y ago
    The point of ACA was to make not being insured more hassle than being insured, to motivate you get insurance, not complain about the hassle of being uninsured. Maybe you philosophically oppose insurance, but it isn't ineffective at its stated goal
Alex3917 12y ago
> The fear is that the current leftist ideas are tomorrow's mainstream ideas and tomorrow's left will be more extreme. I see a lot of evidence on the right but not much on the left. E.g. The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality. But I don't really see any evidence that, say, what the folks lobbying for high speed trains really want is to put Christians to death or whatever.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  > The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality. I'm curious what this alleged political process actually looks like -- are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe? -- and the extent to which "people saying they support gays [etc]" here in America actually are participate in that sort of process. When I hear those words, I think of some of the people behind SB 296 in Utah, the antidiscrimination legislation which has received praise from both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the American Civil Liberties Union. Also, way to go easy on the left. "High speed trains" is the worst you could do? Ha! You could at least apply the "help African governments" standard and start digging through their support of various leftist / Marxist regimes for convenient atrocities, I'm sure there's something :P
  - Alex3917 12y ago
    > are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/whos-helping-finance-ugandas-kill-the-gays-bill-you-are_b_2229509.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/whos-helping-finan... > Also, way to go easy on the left. I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorities, rather than the exception. Whereas when people on the left have historically supported genocidal regimes, as far as I can tell it's been because they (perhaps naively) did so unknowingly rather than because supporting genocide was their intended outcome.

by logn 12y ago

morgante 12y ago

Yup! That idea gives me hope that we are not in an inexorable decline of intellectual thought. Fashions, including intellectual ones, are both faster to appear and slower lived than actual ideological shifts. I think it's telling that while political and ideological fashions fall in and out of favor, actual policies tend to progress towards effectiveness.

lnanek2 12y ago
What makes you think polices get more effective? The F-35 is a laughing stock. Surely most effective wouldn't be an overbudget, past deadline, aircraft with a host of problems. Surely most effective would mean avoiding things like that with government purchases. Taxes get more complicated every year. I have a whole extra set of documents and fines to deal with because no health insurance is punished now, for example. Surely more effective would be least overhead to do taxes possible and least burden on the poor people without insurance. The goal of many politicians is to increase pork barrel spending in their state, so it isn't like they are even trying to be effective for many policies, just to try to wrest the most money and support from the others. So if you mean most effective at making deals with businesses, maybe you are correct.
- Gifford 12y ago
  The point of ACA was to make not being insured more hassle than being insured, to motivate you get insurance, not complain about the hassle of being uninsured. Maybe you philosophically oppose insurance, but it isn't ineffective at its stated goal

Alex3917 12y ago

> The fear is that the current leftist ideas are tomorrow's mainstream ideas and tomorrow's left will be more extreme. I see a lot of evidence on the right but not much on the left. E.g. The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality. But I don't really see any evidence that, say, what the folks lobbying for high speed trains really want is to put Christians to death or whatever.

fennecfoxen 12y ago
> The people saying they support gays but are against gay marriage are the same ones helping African governments pass laws enacting the death penalty for homosexuality. I'm curious what this alleged political process actually looks like -- are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe? -- and the extent to which "people saying they support gays [etc]" here in America actually are participate in that sort of process. When I hear those words, I think of some of the people behind SB 296 in Utah, the antidiscrimination legislation which has received praise from both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the American Civil Liberties Union. Also, way to go easy on the left. "High speed trains" is the worst you could do? Ha! You could at least apply the "help African governments" standard and start digging through their support of various leftist / Marxist regimes for convenient atrocities, I'm sure there's something :P
- Alex3917 12y ago
  > are people writing checks to re-elect Robert Mugabe? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/whos-helping-finance-ugandas-kill-the-gays-bill-you-are_b_2229509.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-peron/whos-helping-finan... > Also, way to go easy on the left. I mean if you actually read DailyKos or whatever it's clear that a lot of the people there are batshit crazy. But as far as I can tell it's one level of crazy, I'm sure there are exceptions but for the vast majority of people I don't think it goes 10 levels deep. Whereas on the right it seems to be the rule that when people are fighting against the public option for healthcare what really want is to genocide minorities, rather than the exception. Whereas when people on the left have historically supported genocidal regimes, as far as I can tell it's been because they (perhaps naively) did so unknowingly rather than because supporting genocide was their intended outcome.