this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
686 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59593 readers
3385 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Confirmation means she can, until it becomes clear that she isn't going to.
Then the excuses will start. And centrists will say that anyone who remembers this article "doesn't know how government works."
I'm saying this now because I intend to link back to this comment when it happens.
The only time we ever had net neutrality it was under a “centrist.” And yes, we will have it again, until another republican wins because actual centrists - people who equate both parties at every opportunity - didn’t vote, and encouraged people not to because it’s all “pointless.”
(Btw you are the enlightened centrist)
Also, people who reliably vote tend to get the policies they want. People who don’t vote tend to complain the most about not getting what they want.
You're angry.
Considering centrism a bad thing makes any opinion you have worthless.
Centrists believe this about anyone to their left and only their left.
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'm not sure what you're asking here. Do you want to know whether I think that a proponent of an ideology having a view I don't like means that their ideology is evil? I do not.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=fZ4nvCVAGw0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Centrism isn't about saying both sides are bad (though that would be true in the US, at least), it's about saying both sides are right on some issues and wrong on others.
Tell that to centrists, or at least the American ones.
Let me steal someone else's thunder then, "you don't know how the government works!". I don't know either so me saying this is meaningless, but at least we skipped the "excuses" part lol