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by genericresponse 806 days ago
Can you clarify what you mean by "social politics?"

I ask because rural health is effectively its own subspecialty in family medicine. There doesn't seem to be a locality equivalent for other geographic subgroups. This implies, to me, an extra level of focus on the needs of a population.

1 comments

The claimed support for this (Cicero Institute) is a right-wing libertarian policy group that is rather notorious for is attempts to criminalize homelessness at the state and municipal level. I would take any policy suggestions they make with a giant grain of salt. In almost all cases "loosening of <X> regulations" involves screwing the poor and disenfranchised as much as possible with regards to X.
Too much of this far right libertarian nonesense on HN, has really been grinding my gears.

Surprised not to also see someone bring up lab leak theories and anti-covid nonsense, somehow.

I've been saying for ages that HN is full of far-right extremists. It's long been a problem in the tech industry.
There's no shortage of it and there's a highly visible few ... but I wouldn't go so far as to say that HN is "full of" either far-right extremists or (US) libertarians.

Just in this little sub thread run there's clear push back on "far right libertarian nonesense" which is more the norm, there's always a few trying to run particular flags up some pole or another and there's generally many more pointing out issues in idealogical positions.

Various topics do devolve into attracting a small cluster of actively vocal shared bubble comments but these tend to disappear from ranking quickly as the comment noise outweighs the post vote and it sinks.

Much noise, less substance.

>but I wouldn't go so far as to say that HN is "full of" either far-right extremists or (US) libertarians.

"full of" can be interpreted many ways. I don't mean to say that the vast majority of people here are like that, but there are some very vocal members here, and I don't see them being down-modded to oblivion as I would in more moderate venues. In a forum full of college-educated Europeans, for instance, I would not see any of that nonsense.

It's a predominately US site, that brings a high tolerance for peculiarly US PoVs.

Many political comments on HN carry an implicit belief that only "free market" (for some variation of) capitalism OR extreme authoritarian "communism" exist as systems, many of the older coders grew up with Heinlein as teenagers which carried forward as influencing their thought, etc. Gun control and free speech are other topics that centre on a primarily US PoV, and so on down the line.

I'm neither North American nor European and always find it amusing | fascinating picking out the various implicit positions that comments carry.