Posted by youcould 10/26/2024
It's an interesting idea, but in both the book and this article, the connections are spurious. For example, it's a good soundbite that one can draw a through line from the Scots-Irish individualism to the libertarianism of California, but little real evidence of this actually provided.
I get the sense that this analysis is just based on the author’s knowledge of English cultures of the period? I think Spanish/French culture had influence too, it’s just that the author didn’t do enough research on them to be able to include them in their model.
Liberalism itself is not a coherent worldview, and the observed duality in this article seems unsurprising given the tensions that pull Liberalism in different direction. On the one hand, there is the Liberal notion of "freedom" or liberty as absence of external constraint (what the author would likely identify with the Scots-Irish) that pulls Liberalism toward ever greater "pushing of boundaries" and the transgression of limits, hyper-individualism, secularism, and skepticism. On the other, the tacit theology grounding Liberalism is a Protestant theism and a tradition that is, surprise surprise, communitarian (i.e., what the author identifies with Yankee or Puritans). So liberty vs. order.
Of course, Liberalism, like any worldview, doesn't just stand still. Its consequences are fleshed out over time. And here is where we see conflict. On the one hand, Liberalism celebrates neutrality. Its understanding of religious tolerance is rooted in this idea of neutrality. But on the other hand, Liberalism is justified by Protestant theological notions. Even its neutrality is itself extended only to doctrines that share its liberal egalitarian presuppositions.
Of course, just as Liberalism (Locke) is incomprehensible without Descartes and Protestantism (Luther), Protestantism (Luther) and Descartes cannot be appreciated without Ockham [0][1]. It's been a religious and philosophical war all along.
I don't really buy the notion that California's modern web of seemingly endless hypocrisy can be traced back to centuries-old ideologies.
Then again... what does account for it? In the USA, California's "liberalism" does appear to be unique in its scope and pervasiveness. After two and a half decades in California, I can call it out for its FAKE liberalism. There's a lot of grandstanding, pontificating, and self-congratulation... but in the end it's a bunch of corrupt politicians and anti-citizen handouts to special interests, just like anywhere else.
Even worse, these handouts are couched in an annual parade of "ballot initiatives" that CA voters are dumb enough to fall for over and over. BILLIONS of dollars to "combat homelessness," with essentially zero results. And that's just one egregious example. Everyday life is hampered by other idiotic, do-nothing laws.
One example: One of the cleanest-burning fuels you can buy anywhere is denatured alcohol. Welp, that's illegal in CA. So you have to burn dirtier isopropanol.
Online shopping for Californians is a pain in the ass, because after researching and comparing and then finally selecting an item, you see: "Can't be shipped to your area." I saw this recently with plastic gardening tubs. WTF.
Meanwhile, CA mandates the inclusion of cancer-causing MTBA in all of its gasoline. Which the oil companies use as an excuse to jack CA's gas prices yet higher than CA's obscene taxes already do.
The hypocrisy is crushing.
All in all the hypocrisy both 1) amounts to a language game of hymnal prompt-response, akin to LLMs, or perhaps a Roman Catholic church service; 2) is a deliberate tactic to exploit the principle of explosion [1]: "from a contradiction, anything follows."
Firstly: even outside of California, yet in cities or locales within its sphere of influence, the hypocrisy can be demonstrated and observed for yourself by testing peoples' actual abilities to overcome innate prejudice and bias, their propensity for inclusivity and diversity, their desire to actually materially improve the positions of the less fortunate, etc. but without telling them that you expect them to respond in the usual progressive manner. If you ask a so-called progressive what they are doing to be more "diverse" and "inclusive" of "marginalized groups," or how they are creating a "safe space" for "allies," like an LLM they will be prompted to respond in the expected manner with all the shibboleths and hallmarks of progressive speech and vocabulary; yet if you observe their action without first prompting them as such you will find that the outcomes of their actions are anything but, and they are subject to the exact same prejudices and biases as even the staunchest bible bashing conservative. The only difference is that they know how to conceal these biases by spewing out the appropriate words when prompted, cloaking themselves in the language of virtue much as a Catholic might when asked to "lift up their hearts":
We lift them up to the LORD.
Hence beyond sloganeering and support for piecemeal reform
(supporting candidates who combine radical slogans with piecemeal reform policy will be especially tempt-
ing) they are unlikely to engage in any sustained push for large scale change.
Secondly, while remaining on the topic of language: it's through this Orwellian redefinition of common vocabulary such that words mean their exact opposites that contradictions can be manufactured, and language can be twisted any which way to mean anything at all at any time. When your language, and thus the formulation of your ideology, lacks internal consistency, it becomes possible to use it to justify and prove any statement whatsoever [1]; truth, after all, is relative, and merely the product of an oppressive regime exercising its power over the oppressed, and so there is never any stable ground upon which all propositions may be measured and judged on equal merits. The ground is always shifting, and so the rules of engagement can always be redrawn from one discussion to the next, one person to another, with no unifying principle underlying the entire ideology.
Thus, hypocrisy is not a failing of progressivism, it is a feature, and hence the progressives branding themselves as "liberals" despite violating basically every basic precept of liberalism: egalitarianism of all people, irrespective of the accidentals of race, gender, appearance, etc., and freedom of expression [4]:
We believe in judging people based on their personal character, not based on their group identity, and Liberals used to believe in
that too. It used to be the basic precept of a liberal ideology, to look past people's race, their sexuality and their gender and
just judge them as individual human beings. That is what “liberalism” was; that was the meaning of the word. Now, it means exactly
the opposite; it means that there is nothing more important than a person's group or other identity.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
[2] https://philpapers.org/archive/BRIWP.pdf
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20221218155108/https://itcommuni...
[4] https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/house/sitti...
The shocking liberalism of California's approach to street-visible crime, homelessness, immigration, and drug use is a backlash against prior failed policies. The 80s and 90s saw brutally high crime rates. Gang activity terrified people. It felt like every single nightly news included some 8 year-old girl caught in the crossfire waiting to buy ice cream from an ice cream truck. Combine that with Satanism scares, the Polly Klaas case, and we got some tough laws. As kids in LA County, we were not allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys to school. A classmate of mine was expelled for having a switchblade comb because of zero-tolerance rules against lookalike weapons. Three-strikes laws and enhanced sentencing for gang-related crime led to extreme prison overcrowding and the general hardening of the prisons themselves led to runaway recidivism.
It was pretty obvious those approaches were not working. So what happens? A backlash in the opposite direction. Addiction rates only got higher when we arrested people for drug use, so try something else. If you're not going to build housing and you're not going to have public toilets, exactly where are people who live on the street supposed to shit? Let them shit in the street.
This is neither progressive nor conservative. It's the same back and forth oscillating between two extremes and hoping you eventually discover moderation that all of American politics experiences because of the two-party, first past the post voting system. California isn't even really that progressive. It's public-facing culture is dominated by the hippies of the Bay Area and libertines of Hollywood, but those are hardly the only people. Mexican Catholics, all of the refugees and immigrants from Asia post the wars in Vietnam and Korea, and the huge flood of Orthodox fleeing former Soviet republics after 1989 make up far more of the population than any descendants of the English. These are hardly super progressive populations. It's only been dominated by Democrats since the mid-90s due to backlash from Prop 187 poisoning Latino voters against the Republican party, plus whatever residual strength remains in public-sector and trade unions. Throw in the relatively high proportion of success in performing arts rather than business ownership in making people wealthy and you get a pretty good atmosphere against the American GOP. It doesn't mean the average person there is radically different from the average person anywhere else.
Exactly! And it's annoying.
In fact, looking at the activity this thread, I think most posters aren't even American, since the hours do not align with American timezones.
Heck, Unherd isn't prominent in the US as it's a uniquely British blog that's part of the UK Culture War.
Ok. In that case there are 29 other threads on HN's front page to look at, and perhaps have curious conversation about.
"Dumb", "laughably wrong", "couldn't make it past the first few", "whatever the point was supposed to be", "going to have a tough time reaching any", "drunk the koolaid", "I certainly wouldn't trust", and "completely indifferent to correctness" are all markers of the kind of conversation we're trying to avoid here.
When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
In the case of the current article I was being proactive because it seemed to me interesting enough to deserve a frontpage discussion but also at obvious risk for turning into the usual nasty mush. That's why I did the pin-the-admonition-to-the-top thing.
The author is apparently living in a weird Newsmax/Infowars (?) media bubble combined with occasional off-topic nonfiction books and doesn't seem capable of critically evaluating information before mashing it together and hyperbolically passing it to readers.
In place since 2009,
> The San Francisco Mandatory Recycling and Composting Ordinance (No. 100-09) is a local municipal ordinance requiring all persons located in San Francisco to separate their recyclables, compostables and landfilled trash and to participate in recycling and composting programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Mandatory_Recycl...
There is no enforcement of people using the bins fastidiously, and people constantly dump their food scraps and recycling into their ordinary trash bins. (Not to mention plenty of dumping of incorrect stuff into the other bins, which is also not ordinarily enforced against.) If a resident throws all of their food scraps into the trash bin, nobody is going to do anything about it. In theory if someone starts dumping car batteries in the compost or something the city can come fine them.
Characterizing this policy as making it "illegal not to compost your food scraps" is at best a significant exaggeration which is grossly misleading to readers.
(As an aside: I would personally recommend people compost their food scraps, either on their own property or using a collected bin: dumping organic material in a landfill creates a lot of methane, landfill space is not unlimited, the resulting compost is a useful by-product, and separating most food scraps from general garbage is easy.)
The whole thing is a hyperbolic rhetorical flourish intended to provoke a knee-jerk fear/anger response among an audience previously primed by right-wing media but entirely personally unfamiliar with San Franciso, not a careful discussion of the benefits and harms or even the ideological underpinnings of various local ordinances.
Leading with "culture war" nonsense likely to provoke pointless arguments like this one is why this article is a poor fit for HN which people would be better served by skipping.
"Required by municipal ordinance to participate in composting programs" would be a positive way to state it.
Only false in that it omits that fentanyl is also condoned, or that it's not just playgrounds, but all public places.
> dang, if it weren't for your top-level comment I would have just moved on without comment here. It wouldn't be hard to go point by point through the parts of the first few paragraphs of this article that are laughable, but it's really not worth the trouble. Instead people should just skip the whole thing and move along to the next topic, optionally flagging the topic
Perhaps it's not worth your trouble to discuss the article substantively, and that's fine—but please don't post shallow dismissals, name-calling, or snark as an alternative. The site guidelines ask commenters to avoid all of those.
The gold rush, farming, ww2 industry, tech, CA is a catch basin for people who want to get rich quick.