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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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we're talking centrists here, not liberals, not moderates, there's a DISTINCT difference.
The vast majority of so-called centrists are people who just don't like stress of having a hard stance. That's why they piss off people on both sides. Impassioned people who understand that progress is a fight need fighters to join them don't like someone saying that they need to compromise when there are lives and futures on the line. People who see the larger picture are going to be a lot more committed and able to weather criticism.
But most centrists think that they can somehow ride the line between the two and avoid being condemned by either side. This is a thing people do in many circumstances not just politics, and it always makes both sides mad. It's just a very basic human social faux-paux to think that you can appeal to principled people with a butchered version of their ideals.
A more generous interpretation would be that an "appeal to principled people with a butchered version of their ideals" is basically the definition of compromise. From their perspective, they're just trying to keep the band together. Maybe the band needed to break up a long time ago, and they're just holding everyone back. But I don't think intellectual cowardice / laziness explains all centrists.
See, I agree with you on everything here, and I even used to hold this same position:
I really, really wanted to be charitable, as a former conservative, as someone who grew up in the deep rural south surrounded by hardline conservatives, and then flipped a hard 180-degree later in life, I figured my own unique perspective allowed me to see both sides.
Then the fire nation attacked.
And by that I mean covid happened, and with it came off a lot of masks. Now I believe that not only is centrism intellectual laziness, so is ALL political dysfunction. It's as close as I will get to a twinge of centerism myself, that I have seen into the hearts of people and have seen that they share a common factor that unites us all: laziness.
It's too broad of a term, and would take an essay to define properly in this context, but at heart it's what drives everyone, a desire to avoid challenge.
Learning and becoming politically astute to even a grade-school level takes some amount of effort and self-improvement and betterment and study and acceptance of new ideas, and we have left the age of self-challenge. Just look at the state of video games with quest markers to do anything, and 30-second popular video clips for the shortest of attention spans, or make a comment more than three paragraphs in a popular forum if you need evidence that people are not out to challenge themselves broadly. They set into a position that feels comfortable based on who they're around and who validates them, and they generally stay there. We don't celebrate people changing their minds, if anything people treat it with shame, and not without good reason. I have been shouted out of leftist spaces for saying I used to be right-wing in some of my views. (Purity testing appears to be another common trait.)
Well said! I've come to terms with being Fire Nation, myself. I try to be Iroh but too often end up Mai.
Covid did a number on me. I have a thing about germs anyway, but the vitriol around masks and the anti-vax stuff really reset my barometer for what I can expect from other people. I'm basically just now getting some faith back in humanity whilst trying to pull my head out of my ego. But still, there's a reason I spend more time with A.I. these days. Without dredging up the loss of third spaces and the effects of social media, I just gotta say - it seems like we've forgotten how to help each other. Like as a species.
No, that's a bullshit definition imposed by nuance-allergic 'either you're with us or you're against us' ideologues. Someone who consistently avoids taking an explicit stance on issues is not a centrist. Fence-sitting is not centrism--they're only "so-called centrists" because ignorant people like you label them that.
A centrist is someone whose collective of views/stances is such that it would not really be accurate to label them with "left" or "right". Furthermore, people like you also, in my experience, don't seem to realize that, for example, "left-leaning" and "right-leaning" are in fact subcategories of "centrist"--the "lean" describes the direction that the majority (but not all) of their positions go.
The irony is that a lot more people can be accurately described as "centrist" than actually self-identify (or are accurately identified by others) as such (partially thanks to people like you constantly using the term incorrectly), while the hardline ideologues of both wings arguably hate 'people who agree with them more than they disagree, but won't go as far as they do', more than they do the ones at the opposite end of the political spectrum, and call them "centrists", instead of the ones for whom the definition actually applies!
Centrists piss me off because inevitably they will treat civil rights as negotiable
No.
Civil rights are literally the things we happen to by and large agree upon because we have negotiated. We must always refine and improve our idea of civil rights and what they mean - and much of that refinement comes through negotiation.
That is absolutely not what a centrist is. Although centrists have a non-voting, disinterested crowd, it likely it isn't any larger, by percent, than, say, leftists, who have a difficult time getting people of their own party to vote. More likely it falls between the Democrats' less aggressive voter turnout and the Republicans' more aggressive voter turnout.
A centrist, in general, may agree with some aspects of either party, and, depending on the political climate and the overall weight and balance of needs, will vote one way or the other after actually thinking about the issues involved. This is because they are willing to take on the personal responsibility of making a fucking assessment.
..as opposed to extremists, who take the simplest, least nuanced, most insulting take they can of anyone with a different opinion, and assume that that is what those with a different opinion are doing.
This is, however, pretty understandable, because extremists are emotionally, mentally, and overall psychologically incapable of hosting two genuinely differing ideologies in their heads without going on tilt and asserting insulting shit about people whom they, in actuality, know nothing about except a label they have chosen to vent their hate on.
I stopped listening to this bullshit when we had one party openly wanting to roll us back to the dark ages, allowing raped children to die and rolling back the civil rights... and another who just wanted like, healthcare mid populism. If you think it's extremist to think we need to push back on fascism at all costs then we have nothing to talk about, there is no compromise with hate. That's literally what they want. You are playing right into their tricks.
And then you went and did exactly what he said, you threw nuance out of the window, made broad assumptions of all parties motives, and then levied a "with us or against us" thinking to it.
We could all chill the fuck out and focus on real issues. Issues like how the ruling class inflames these wedge issues like abortion, and woke ideology for this exact purpose, so we are too busy fighting each other to care enough about being robbed so we don't band together and end capitalism.. Most people think the way they are told to by their peer groups, that is to say their values are a byproduct of environment, and as long as our government continues to let billionaires exist, they will continue exploiting large groups of people to fight each other over issues, those issues, that if we were all left alone to our own devices, i feel pretty certain we wouldn't be fighting over.
Let me be clear by saying i agree these wedge issues actually matter, but that's why they are effective tools. But fighting over them creates more division which makes the wedge issues more serious, but if we could just collectively agree we are sick of capitalist money in politics and collectively force the government to end it, within 5-10 years you would see that we can have common sense policies again. But we cant do that while divided.
For me I see 2 things happening. 1) I see capitalism destroying the world rapidly, for real, while we are fighting each other over social issues global warming is rapidly closing in on ending our species. 2) I see a population trained to hate each other that cannot stand together against the ruling class that is going to destroy us all just so that they can live like gods on private islands.
This is what gets me, even when you make well reasoned arguments like this people just collectively what-about-ism you into the floor, and we drifter closer to the end. It feels like screaming into a vacuum...
Absolutely solid take. Well said.
"Divide and conquer" has worked from time immemorial. I may not agree with everything in socialism or capitalism, or other world views - there are lots of things everyone can disagree about in our variegated ideologies.
But the far greater threat is falling prey to the divisions used to control the populace, and thus being unable to effectively defend yourself and those you love against things like the ruling class centralizing wealth excessively while blithely ignoring matters that are critical to species survival.
And from what I can tell there is no way to convey this point to people effectively. Shit half the time someone reluctantly agrees with me I still know that nothing changed for them. Kind of like "yeah what you're saying is true, but what-about...".
If we cant stop demonizing each other we are fucked, especially when in the end the people who everyone is fighting against, are actually just like 5-10% of the population on other side of the aisle. I truly believe the large majority of people don't really care that much and just vote the way they always have because that's how they were raised, but social media and the news has tricked everyone into thinking that 1 side of the aisle are a bunch of transexual communist's who get pregnant just so they can abort it, and the other side of the aisle are polishing there SS uniforms and dreaming about when they can finally go on a liberal killing spree. The truth is the people worthy of that level of critique are not most people, we are just being propagandized at levels the world has not seen before.
tl:dr