hansolo
Look, I can’t help that you have limited real life experience, but the middle is crowded with people of a wide variety of political beliefs. For some, like me, I’m more center-left, supporting things like obvious human rights issues, but I won’t go all in on some of the more outlandish financial policies. And I simply will not give machine politics a moment of my life. I’ve seen it fail miserably too many times to think it can work just because one side does it.
But so when your retort to someone not exactly like you is “you don’t deserve respect until you’re someone exactly like me and think only how I think,” then your genuine intolerance is out there on display, and yet you aren’t self aware enough to realize you’ve just said it.
It’s disappointing that you jumped into that within A single comment. Seriously?
That’s not a Centrist viewpoint at all. That’s a solidly right viewpoint.
The Centrist would, however, say “look, if you’re going to make your whole vibe about tolerance, that’s cool. I love it. But my homie, that’s a slippery slope you haven’t fully negotiated yet. So when your less disciplined people start to be big picture tolerant through on-paper intolerance, don’t expect me to do the same mental gymnastics to defend it that you do with your mom at Thanksgiving. How about you solve the problem before you create it by not being sloppy and bumbling your way into an obvious trap every bully has pulled since the dawn of time?”
But hey, as a Centrist, the Left can’t discern me from someone like Bush 43 or a raging MAGA freak because anything right of far left is a legit fascist. Which is why I cant hang with you all, your labels are weird. But the Right usually wants to hang me for being a traitor, so one of y’all is far more worth dealing with occasional cringe.
I’m certainly not going to argue with you on this.
However, I will say that, fromy perspective, if you remember the world prior to 9/11, government incompetence was the standard. Sometimes shitbag people can bumble into a golden opportunity and have no hesitation milking it for all they can.
But I can’t prove my idealized version any more than you can. Maybe we’re both right. Maybe we’re both wrong. We’ll never know.
Regardless of the reality of what happened, the increased scrutiny and surveillance pushed a lot of people to distrust of institutions, just like you.
That sentiment was actually ramping up quite a bit in the 90s, and the way the factors that led to the mistrust never went away, but we were given a Faustian deal to ignore them or be labeled a traitor made it all worse.
Same.
There’s a song by the Armenian band Ladaniva that’s just a few lines about a mountain home with a table that sits under a fig tree for the season. It’s relatively vague imagery with beautiful haunting vocals. Makes me ugly weep every time. No idea why. It’s the only song that has ever affected me like that. But there’s something about the idea of just a homey, simple life and how gar away that is that makes it seem all the more important.
The Oracle at Delphi relied on mild asphyxiation and from natural gas coming up from a fissure in a cave, and then priests “interpreting” the babbling as a prophecy.