But do the extremely rich really get to rest and enjoy their spoils the way you think? Just look at someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk, they just keep working even though they already have far more than they can spend. Gates is especially funny because he’s working full time on figuring out how to spend his fortune. Almost like having all that money just became another problem that now requires solving.

Bro, I LITERALLY just said I don't give a shit about rich people problems. You can fuck all the way off trying to get me to sympathize with them. "Oh but it's hard to spend all that money!" Then don't fuck over the working class to accumulate so much money you have to work to spend it all! Or do the ethical thing and let the working class eat you. I might keep arguing with you but this is the last this particular stupidity is going to be dignified with a response.

Okay, see what you just did there? You went from “being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it” to having an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit, and I’m willing to bet you’re not thinking of living next to skid row either. And then you want to be able to save money on top of that, too.

Ah, I should have clarified. American cities are built wrong and need a redo. Please refer to this educational content. I do sometimes forget that not everyone is on board with the reality that cars and car-centric infrastructure is destroying our mental health, our finances, our cities, and our world, so that's on me. The point is, what I described is a reality in several of the dozens of places that aren't the USA, and the fact that it's not a reality here is the direct result of the actions of people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and just to throw another one in there, Charles Edwin Wilson. Look him up if you don't know him, but he ranks just under Henry Kissinger in terms of worst people in American history. Just to reiterate, if your goal is to get me to feel sympathy for the owner class, give up now.

It's at least a little bit interesting IMO that this is something of a pattern I've noticed. I had plenty of stupid arguments on Reddit, but at least those ones would change over time as new information was introduced and responded to. Here, it seems way more common for people to just ignore your rebuttals to their points and just repeat them without adding anything new. Are people here just more stubborn, or what?

I mean, if he went to high school in a red state, maybe his high school econ homework would explain why he's like this.

I mean, at least you acknowledged that I said it this time. Even if I'm now slightly less convinced that you deliberately aren't getting it, because you still didn't seem to understand what I was actually arguing.

They say it takes exponentially more effort to debunk bullshit than it does to spread it, and when I'm making a real effort to make a point and your rebuttal is basically "nuh uh," that seems to hold true. Fortunately, I don't have to type out the argument myself when I can just post Charlynn Teter's excellent essay, sources included, about it instead. https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2021/01/30/no-more-lies-the-truth-about-raising-the-minimum-wage/ I look forward to how you "nuh uh" this.

I'm sorry, how in the fuck is the minimum wage not related to the fact that rising prices and inflation are causing people to struggle financially? That's like saying the tides have nothing to do with surfing.

And sure, wages are up, the problem is that if you bother to account for inflation and COL, the purchasing power they provide is down. That's what people mean when they say "real wages." I'm sure you know that on some level, even if for purposes of this discussion, you're pretending not to.

mine is similar, they laugh at my jokes and can also continue them

How do you know their partner is a doofus?

I don't think I can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on.

Well, if you had heard the things Elon says, seen the people he signal boosts, or heard of the people and groups he associates with, then you would understand why people are accusing him of spouting far right nonsense. It's because the things he says are frequently far right nonsense, the people he signal boosts are frequently people who spout far right nonsense, and the people and groups he associates with are frequently significant sources of far right nonsense. And I'm not a Democrat in any sense other than thinking they're not as bad for the world as Republicans are, but I can think of at least one good reason to throw rocks at "the other color," that being when they're propagating harmful far-right nonsense. I'd have thought this logic would be bulletproof, but I find myself cowed by the counterargument that "I have no idea what you're talking about but you seem mean."

Paying attention to the world around you is a great way to avoid making yourself look silly, if you're interested in stopping it from happening again.

It's kind of a philosophical question, I guess. A concrete example would be during the 2020 BLM protests, people who self-describe as centrists argued (and still do now) that the protests, because they occasionally led to property damage and theft, were as bad as the police murdering unarmed black people, and all the other aspects of the criminal justice system that disproportionately punish black people for existing. This is a pattern common to most issues that results in centrists most commonly aligning themselves with the status quo, which, in practice, means they spend a lot more time fighting against the left than against the right.

I think a lot of people associate centrism with, like, skepticism, the idea of which is that you apportion your beliefs to the ordinariness of the claim and the evidence available to support it. The problem there is that while a skeptic should not accept a claim without evidence, there should also be an evidence threshold at which they do accept the claim. For a small example, I as a skeptic am happy to take your word for it if you say you got a dog, because I know that's a thing a lot of people do, though I'm always happy to look at photos of your dog; for a larger example, most people who practice skepticism do accept evolution and climate change, because of all of the evidence for them. Likewise, while it is good to not blindly base your values on what one side or the other tells you, after an assessment of the evidence on both sides of an issue, one should be able to come down on one side if that side is clearly right and the other is clearly wrong, and that is the step centrists appear to consistently neglect.

Therefore, in a situation like BLM, or climate change, or following the rest of the world's lead on healthcare, if rigid adherence to centrism leads the centrist to say both sides are bad, then I think that's a pretty convincing case of centrism doing a bad thing. And because in practice, it does that bad thing consistently across a range of issues, I think a pretty strong case could be made for centrism in general being a bad thing.

Here's a longer-form dive into this idea.

Sorry for talking your ear off. I have the day off work.

What's your take on separating an ideology from its proponents? Because while centrism in principle isn't necessarily bad, I most frequently see self-described centrists equating people, usually on the left, protesting against a bad thing with people, usually on the right, doing the bad thing that's being protested against, as a way of arguing that nothing should be done about those bad things. And that is a position that ultimately only runs interference for people doing bad things.

i mean, sure, but that doesn't mean that it would be inaccurate to say i "believe" the scientific consensus on most things, in a colloquial sense, anyway. the fact that the reason i think evolution is true is because of all the evidence for it and not just because forrest valkai said so doesn't make the sentence "i believe in evolution" untrue.