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.
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.
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.
>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.
I'm from the US myself, so I'm familiar with this kind of thinking, but it's just frustrating and annoying to me because it's really so juvenile. But it's basically the national religion for a significant (but minority) fraction of the American population.
And yeah, the gun control thing is really annoying too. Whenever a discussion thread here gets into guns, the Americans jump in and then it's always the same BS arguments about "gun control only keeps honest people from having guns". Americans are extremely myopic and have absolutely no idea what life is like outside their country, and can't even imagine what it's like in a developed country where gun ownership is extremely uncommon, among many other things. Despite the internet promising to bring the world closer together, it really hasn't, and as I've gotten older and more worldly, it just annoys me that Americans are so unable to see past their own borders.
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.