
How liberalism is enslaving Ireland as a colony of Silicon Valley - raleighm
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/how-liberalism-is-enslaving-ireland-as-a-colony-of-silicon-valley-1.3597453
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freeone3000
Your houses are expensive and multinational corporations aren't paying tax.
What in the world does that have to do with marriage equality or abortion
access? Do theocracies have higher tax rates?

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gurumeditations
Gay rights = lack of affordable housing? This is a big heap of nothing. He
seems to be complaining that while Ireland has thrown off the old oppressive
Catholic way, the new liberal way of personal freedom has failed to bring
economic freedom with it. No point or suggestions, just complaining.

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polotics
You miss the point of the article I think:ensuring fairness and equal
trwatment for people of all sexual orientations is an old subject matter that
should have been done and dusted a long time ago. Loudly celebrating an
overdue Irish catch-up whilst stealing billions in sorely missed public
services that would materially and not just symbolically help those same
people of all sexual orientations can be understood as a very evil, albeit
rainbow-colored, ploy.

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polotics
Also there is a clear point: make the FANGs pay fair taxes.

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EngineerBetter
Thought-provoking. It seems a convenient decoy of massive tech companies to
encourage as much personal freedom as possible, whilst being complicit in
limiting the economic freedom of those outside of our Hacker News, coders'
salary bubble.

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yters
It is very ironic that modern tech is becoming the very dogmatic and
repressive regime it claims to replace.

Right now there is a big push to move all the US gov IT to the "cloud" which
either means Google Cloud or AWS. What happens when a corporation possesses
all our personal data? Perhaps Google's end game is a bit more political than
we realize.

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lallysingh
Oppressed turns into oppressor, you always turn into your parents, etc.
Essentially when power shifts most models of proper behavior don't. Just the
few that the newly-in-power disagreed with.

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mg794613
Although being a 'leftie' myself, the writer of this article has no problems
applying tactics that would make fascists turn green of jealousy. Any attempt
to argue with facts are served off with 'misogynistic'. That's not how you
debate.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Nagle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Nagle)
[http://zero-books.net/blogs/zero/angela-nagles-state-regardi...](http://zero-
books.net/blogs/zero/angela-nagles-state-regarding-the-daily-beast/)
[http://zero-books.net/blogs/zero/our-response-to-charles-dav...](http://zero-
books.net/blogs/zero/our-response-to-charles-davis-attack-on-angela-nagle/)

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phnk
I failed to see much fascism in the links above, unless one equates fascism
with a plagiarism dispute.

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scythe
The article tries to make a connection between Ireland's status as an
international tax haven and the high price of rent in Dublin. I can't
elucidate a chain of deduction that would imply this, but the overall
structure seems to be roughly low taxes therefore inequality therefore housing
crisis, but the second implication is false -- as a key example, China has
inequality as high or higher than Ireland and no housing crisis. The reason
Ireland has a housing crisis is most likely that, just as in the rest of the
English-speaking world, they've made it illegal to build enough housing to
meet demand.

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sgt101
Markets fail : without intervention economic activity aggregates and
centralises. There are three responses that are possible. 1) You can "let the
market sort it out" \- but in the limit you end up with Mexico City and a very
hard issue of transport and quality of life in the suburbs. In addition "the
market" will optimise to local optima... Flats are built with 1 or 2 bedrooms
because that's what young professionals want, or can afford. In London if all
new builds were mandated to be built as multiple (min 4) 3 large bedrooms (3
_25m^2) units, the demographics and loci of the current market would be very
altered, family life would become more practical for many and there would be
much less of a flight to commuting and more community in places like The City
and Westminster. 2) You can say no to more housing and the untrammelled market
and do nothing (or little) to deal with the over demand; this means that you
have a "nice for the elite" city (Manhattan, London, Dublin) that lots of
people would love to live in but few can afford. 3) You _could* intervene with
state planning and move some of the locus of economic activity to other
centres. For example in Ireland a high speed rail line could connect Dublin
and Belfast and could alter the economic balance between the two (of course
they are in different countries and soon different economic systems!) In the
UK investment in the transport infrastructure in the Northwest (for example
high capacity urban rail links between Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Bolton and
Preston) could create an alternative focus to London and enable substantial
relief for the current housing crisis because the urban infrastructure
required to house people at a high quality of life (schools, colleges, parks,
leisure centres, restaurants, theatres, culture and community) exist.

My point is that letting the market build housing is an effective intervention
up to a point; but it's not the only option by a long jaunt.

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sgt101
Also market led building will result in a further transfer of wealth to land
owners...

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alphabettsy
It seems like a tremendous overstatement to invoke themes like colonialism and
slavery when talking about socio-economic change that doesn’t even begin to
reflect the horrors coming from the history of those things.

