Centrism is often relative.
Someone who is a ‘centrist’ between the far-right GOP and the centre-right Dems is probably just a shy Republican.
Someone who is a ‘centrist’ by the perceptions of Lemmy could be anyone who isn’t a devotee of Mao, depending on which part of Lemmy you’re talking to.
Totally, when you’re in a left wing echo chamber it’s easy to get labelled as a centrist or worse solely because you can sometimes see where the right wing is coming from, even if you don’t agree with them.
I don’t know why there’s currently a coordinated attack on anyone who isn’t so far left that reality has left them and they’re abstaining from voting. It’s bizarre.
Basically everyone on this website is to the left of the dems, and is just settling because America’s democracy is kinda fucked
i think this is vastly misrepresented. A conservative “centrist” would be your traditional conservative, what we would refer to as moderate right, or center moderate right. Where as on the lefty side, it’s a little bit more like “i just don’t like the conservatives” and that’s kind of the extent of it.
moderate lefties would be like, socially progressive people, for example. Anything past that and you start getting into harder left wing camps. The left just isn’t as fractured and extremist as the right is in certain aspects, there are definitely extremists, but the vast majority of people fall into the more “centrist” definition of political alignment.
Ah, the good old claiming that “everybody not with us is a commie” so beloved by Fascists coming from the guy who posts memes where the toon who doesn’t agree to vote for Zionist-Genocide-loving Biden is wearing a red shirt with a white sickle and hammer.
It’s really interesting to see neolibs using the same kind of argument Nazis (I KID YOU NOT!) used which was basically calling everybody not with them “Communists”.
Well, it does make some sense given that the pro-Oligarchy politics of Neoliberlism aren’t that much away from Fascist politics, the main difference being that Fascism thinks the State should be above the ultra-wealthy and then after that comes the powerless riff-raff whilst Neoliberalism thinks the ultra-wealthy should be above the State and after that comes the powerless riff-raff.
Lemmy was literally started by ML. Who misidentify as Communists. Giving communists a bad name. There are literally people here who regularly defend lenin, stalin, Mao, Soviet russia, china, North korea, Etc. He’s not wrong. And if you feel attacked I think that says more perhaps about you than anyone else.
I Trend left libertarian/ anarcho communist. Yet I regularly get called a neoliberal by many of the Marxist leninists around here for not playing Simon Says group think. Far more often than I get called a tanky by right Wingers who visit. Which is saying something because being anti authoritarian I critique both pretty regularly.
Quick Edit I don’t stand behind everything PJ posts. Some I think is in bad taste as is much of Ozma’s. But they’re definitely not wrong in this case.
It is pretty funny that the “part of lemmy” in question immediately pops up and calls them a fascist though, proving the point
Semi-serious question, what made you want to engage with this guy in like, some kind of debate? It’s pretty obvious he’s just like, a basic bitch bad faith neolib poster that’s going around and inciting pre-election division, probably get suppress voting or some shit, idk. But like, why engage with him? What’s the point, really?
I detest hypocrisy and bad faith mindless tribalist propaganda slogans.
(In fact in the country I live in, there are actual Communists who were even Stalinists until not that long ago, and that’s exactly what I dislike about them: hyprocrisy and bad faith mindless tribalist propaganda slogans. Curiously I detest the neo-Fascists for the very same reason: it’s a judgement and opinion I hold quite which applies independently of the supposed political side of those doing it)
So I pointed out the hypocrisy and the tribalist, parroty, propagandist and even unimaginative nature of the slogans that poster uses, not for them (in my experience people who operate like that either do so in bad faith or don’t actually seriously analyse the tribalists slogans they hear before they parrot them, so logic won’t affect them in the least) but for anybody else who ponders about politics (rather than be a mindless follower of a tribe) who happens to go by and who might not have noticed this yet.
PS: Funnilly enough, the post below this one on my profile is also on a chain were I engaged with another parroty, slogan throwing hypocrite, of the other tribe of American politics (not that those tribes are politically that far apart, IMHO) for a very similar reason: that one was throwing around the “Free Speech” slogan demanding that Netanyahu gets to address Congress, but apparently wasn’t so keen on my suggestion that if Congress is indeed a place where speech should be free then anybody should be allowed to speak there whenever they want and hence Netanyahu can join queue rather than get ahead by invitations (which interfere in the Free Speech of everybody else). Tribalist slogan throwers are invariably hypocrites.
Binarism is a sop for people who desperately want to cling to a self-affirming label, but can’t come up with any justification better than “the opposition is worse.”
I tend to avoid anyone that feels compelled to define themselves by a political ideology. It just becomes an identity and the identity becomes more important than anything the ideology was supposed to represent.
You really aren’t required to wear your team colors or even have a team. If you have a point- make the point. If any part of your point depends on declaring your political identity- it’s not a solid point.
Counterpoint: If my existence as a marginalized individual has already been politicized by conservatives, then I lack the privileged position to simply “Make the point and shut up”, which is what you are effectively suggesting. When my identity as a human being (by blood, not beliefs) has been made a political argument, then no I’m sorry, my identity is also political… and that has been forced on me. Nothing about that invalidates the points I have to make to argue for my continued existence.
All I’m saying is, you act like identity is an abstract thing from politics, but for some people it can never be. Just being quiet means they are still people arguing for your death.
I tend to avoid anyone that feels compelled to define themselves by a political ideology. It just becomes an identity and the identity becomes more important than anything the ideology was supposed to represent.
Please reevaluate my comment with focus on the phrase ‘political identity’. If you’re talking about sexuality or gender- that’s not a ‘political identity’, That’s who you are as a human being as much as being black or white or tall or short. I recognize and sympathize that those facets of humanity have been brutally politicized but I’m speaking of ‘political identities’ that people necessarily choose or willingly accept, not the ‘identity’ that comes from just being born as you.
My dude, their comment is arguing that their sexuality/gender is already politicised, so they don’t have the privilege of choosing a political identity as it’s thrust upon them by the republicans.
They read your comments fine, I don’t necessarily agree with them, but they read it
Unfortunately, to all those that feel compelled to proudly display their teams colors, that makes you the ‘other’.
I’m not really comfortable as ‘one of’ anything so I’ve become pretty accustomed to being ‘the other’.
A person belonging to one or more Order is just as likely to carry a flag of the counter-establishment as the flag of the establishment-- just as long as it is a flag. - Principia Discordia
my long standing, and proven litmus test of politics is “if you have an opinion, it’s wrong”
Because without fail, people will just say shit, that’s just wrong. The second that politics comes into play.
Please for the love of god, stop engaging with politics, it’s worse than reality TV, because we live here.
Please for the love of god, stop engaging with politics,
If you live in anything resembling a democracy that’s basically surrendering to whatever opponents of your rights want to do to you. If you’re that submissive I guess that’s your only option but I’m saying if you have any strength of will at all ‘engage with politics as an individual, just don’t imagine yourself as representing or represented by a team.’
‘engage with politics as an individual, just don’t imagine yourself as representing or represented by a team.’
this pretty much. Everytime i say this shit people seem to take the most idiotic interpretation of it for some reason. I’m talking about the kind of politics where nothing happens other than people yelling at each other for being stupid, and then ironically, people yell at me for being a stupid idiot.
Comedy literally couldn’t write itself.
Imo, the issue is that political opinions are more complicated than reducing them to a location on a 1-dimensional line.
Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.
I think what you can say however is that one of the hallmark indicators of centrists (speaking from the context of US politics here just because that is what I know) is that they have no true ideological beliefs. The way a centrist determines right and wrong isn’t by thinking about the problem and applying ethics and critical analysis to it like leftist generally does (and conservatives loudly pretend to do), rather a centrist defines wrong as unpopular.
Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe. This isn’t news to leftists in the US dealing with US centrists, but the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has written it across the sky in big blazing letters that centrism is a catastrophically dangerous way to reach a consensus in a society undergoing crisis and in need of deep reform.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs, we just have to shame them into realizing the hateful positions they have (that they don’t perceive as hateful or not hateful, just average!) make them an outcast and they will fold as they always do to whoever controls the narrative.
At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism, there is nothing ideological to locate among the political center of the US, calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.
Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.
Great strides can be made by simply trying to avoid reductionism. Ofc, FPTP isn’t helping this cause.
Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe.
Is that not what a centrist is, by definition? I don’t mean that a centrist is literally doing what you are describing, but a centrist is someone who sits in the middle of the left/right dichotomy. By this fact, they would have to be right in the average of the Overton Window.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs
This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.
At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism
Liberalism is not dependent on the left-right dichotomy, and it is not nebulous like centralism. It is quite well defined in poli-sci. You can read about the beliefs that it encompasses here.
calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.
One important thing to clarify is that when the term “liberal” is used as a pejorative, it is, generally, and weirdly, not used in reference to liberalism (at least that’s how it seems to me), but, instead, as some vague reference to the also nebulous term “leftist”.
Liberalism is not dependent on the left-right dichotomy, and it is not nebulous like centralism. It is quite well defined in poli-sci. You can read about the beliefs that it encompasses here.
I mean, academia can define “liberalism” however it wants, that isn’t how I define it and most people in conversation about US politics don’t use liberal that way. The word has evolved from the meaning you prescribe to it.
The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs
This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.
I don’t understand the confusion here. My point is that centrism in the US is largely a political position constructed in reverse. If someone (consciously or unconsciously) decides they will peg their beliefs on the center of the Overton Window that is fundamentally a different thing than taking a set of ethics, morals, and policy knowledge and building a political perspective from the ground up.
Call it whatever you want, people that try to disappear in a crowd by just mimicking the behavior and beliefs of people around them are not doing the same thing as people in the crowd who are behaving according to their morals, ethics and understanding of the world and either are blending into the crowd or not because of it.
Centrists by and large are ideological cowards, they are unwilling to imagine right and wrong outside of the comfortable and established narratives that determine right and wrong in their head (and are described within the Overton Window). Centrists will for example happily join progressives in attacking Trump for doing awful things like draconian and cruel immigration control measures, and as soon as Biden takes office and keeps doing the same shit they will flip to yelling at progressives for attacking Biden for doing the same thing.
Centrists are the kind of political position that has substance, it is purely an average of the Overton Window, no matter distorted and fucked up the Overton Window has been made by conservatives and the rich.
“everyone has to be a raving lunatic completely committed to following one herd or the other, regardless of what they actually think. Any individual thought must comply with hard party lines”
Is that what this means?
It’s Ozma were talking about. It 100% is. They will always sabotage the achievable in favor of unobtainable perfection.
