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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

One thing that has slowly eroded American ideals (IMO) is the politicization of literally everything. Not only can you not have or share a "bad" thought on politics itself...but something completely unrelated to politics (that is now politicized) is also something you could be burned at the stake for. Then there are just people that share their politics openly and often to spite others.

We've essentially split into two Americas, one red and one blue. The people in the middle (which I generally identify with) are left in the cold...and not only are left in the cold but are attacked by both sides for not abiding by the doctrine. Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink. I am much more likely to share a controversial opinion with someone on the Right than on the Left. But it's both sides, a local race here has a Republican attacking another Republican...for endorsing Romney in 2012. It's like I'm living in a bizarro world.

Horseshoe theory is real.

View on HN

On the flip side, a lot of the more abhorrent things to come out of the current President's mouth are things that were clearly not politically-correct, that a lot of America has been holding back, that are now back in the open.

I'm not sure what the solution is. On one hand, it was there all along, and political-correctness did not help it. On the other hand, racists everywhere have been empowered once again, and all manner of groups have to face stereotypes they've fought so hard over the years. I don't think the U.S. will really get its house in order until it becomes an issue of survival, and of geopolitical importance.

> On the flip side, a lot of the more abhorrent things to come out of the current President's mouth are things that were clearly not politically-correct, that a lot of America has been holding back, that are now back in the open.

It's not hard to see his initial popularity as linked to this. That is, the vilification of having views that are not the same as the majority leading people to feel repressed, and them supporting someone that's unwilling to bend to that, even if they don't support every decision he makes or view he takes.

I don't want racists and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, but I also don't want our society so constrained by mob mentality that having merely unpopular opinions have dire consequences. If we take it as a given that mob mentality (to this degree) is an emergent phenomenon because of our hyper connected world, and that too much mob mentality is causing the problem, how do you mitigate emerging phenomena when you can't really alter what it emerges from?

I'd also be happy if someone could convincingly refute that it's an emergent phenomena, or that mob mentality is the problem, since those seem intractable to me.

> I don't want racists and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, but I also don't want our society so constrained by mob mentality that having merely unpopular opinions have dire consequences.

Either you're in favor of free speech or you're not. Republicans, Democrats, and, yes, Hacker News all participate in cancel culture in one way or another.

Sure there are bots, provocateurs, and anonymous trolls who have no intent on changing their beliefs. But, please, let the American people have enough credit to make decisions for themselves and see racists for who they truly are.

I normally don't reply to my own posts, but I think this is worthy for consideration.

There was someone with a throwaway account that replied with the argument that "Free speech need not be absolute", and then started getting voted down.

What's truly ironic I feel is that in my world view, his speech would just sit there as an alternative viewpoint, read and disagreed with.

But in his world his viewpoint could made illegal (or in the HN world downvoted), based upon what might be perceived as the popular rhetoric of the day.

Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over because the only thing anyone is allowed to do to stop them is to politely and civilly debate them, which doesn't work because hate, fear and lies can circle the world twice before the truth even has its boots on and sources organized.

I'm actually fine with such views not being made illegal though - but I'm not fine with the premise that there should never be any social consequences at all for any ideology or viewpoint regardless of its nature or intent to do harm. Nor do I believe that the right to free speech means everyone must be forced to hear, seriously consider, host or publish that speech.

> the racists and white supremacists take over because the only thing anyone is allowed to do to stop them is to politely and civilly debate them.

There are 300,000,000 million Americans each with his or her own free will and ability to determine right from wrong. So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?

The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.

>So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?

No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.

That people are influenced by more than purely logical, didactic arguments should be self evident, nor does that fact make people sheep, it's simply human nature. We're not compilers, after all, we're primates with countless irrational biases hard wired into our brains. Anti-vaxxers, COVID-denialists, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the resurgence of discredited white supremacist and anti-semitic ideology under the politically correct guise of "racial realism" and the phenomenon of fake news spread by social media should be enough to demonstrate that falsehood can be more compelling than fact, and that facts alone are not sufficient to dissuade such people from their false beliefs, or stop their influence.

>The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.

No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest. America has only ever granted its inalienable rights to white Christian men by default - everyone else has had to fight tooth and nail for their seat at the table and for every scrap of human dignity they could take from the cornucopia of American liberty.

Women's suffrage was earned with speech and blood. African American rights were earned with speech and blood. LGBT rights were earned with speech and blood. Even recently, few outside of the black community really cared about systemic racist violence among the police, despite the black community speaking at length about it for years until they also started taking to the streets and burning shit down... then suddenly everyone else noticed and started listening.

Speech without the force of consequence is as useless as a toothless guard dog.

>No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.

It's quite straightforward to draw this conclusion from the following portion of your previous comment:

>Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over

How does a community 'take over' without expanding to at least a dominant minority? And how does the point being argued, allowing them to speak freely, enable that unless we're to assume that simply being exposed to that worldview will grow their ranks?

> ... your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.

You argued:

  A: Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white
     supremacists take over

That presupposes this:

  B: In a democracy a majority of the people have to agree
     that white supremacy should be the dominant principle for
     governmental rule.

I was pointing out that in order for A to happen, B must happen as well -- but in a rhetorical way to deeply undermine your argument. I assure you, it was completely in good faith. You probably just didn't like the result of it.

> No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest.

Rosa Parks didn't throw a brick through a window. She refused to sit in the back of the bus. That started a boycott of the bus system, and it worked without bloodshed.

Sure blood was spilled in the civil rights marches but not because the people marching wanted it to be.

Rosa Parks sitting in was not act of activism. Pretty much everything before and after in her life was.

I Rosa Parks was radical whole her life. She was not proponent of super peaceful activism, she at the moment thought fighting would he strategically bad idea.

Had she been meek lady, there would be no protests.

She did lived at violent place at the time, did dealt with lynchings, beatings and legal protests up to that point. She did not had philosophy of peaceful activism above all.

While she was not violent, she was not proponent of peaceful above all protesting. That was Kings philosophy and even he was up to breaking law.

Free speech is in now way absolute. We have laws against speech that incites violence, laws against speech in the pursuit of fraud, laws against speech laws against speech that violates IP law, laws against speech integral to criminal activities.

And the world would be a worse place without those laws. Any real discussion about free speech starts with the premise that not all speech can be free and the real questions is in the details of what speech should be free.

I wasn't calling for curtailing speech in any way, but instead mitigating out of control feedback loops that result from the public's way of disincentivizing undesirable speech, which is calling it out.

I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, so I want societal pressure to continue to work as it does against those people. At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.

Reducing this to simply a matter of free speech or not is missing the point. This is a matter of figuring out how to deal with the negative effects of free speech when we care enough about free speech that limiting it in some way is not on the table.

> I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric

That ship has sailed.

> At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.

Free speech isn't just about who gets to speak what, it's about who decides who gets to read/listen/watch what they want. That's basically the crux of censorship, right? I don't want mob induced censorship any more than I want government censorship.

In the end, cancel culture is people who choose not to use free speech to push their agenda, but instead threatens other's livelihood or shame critics of an unpopular position into silence.

> mob induced censorship

That's called "living in a community". It's impossible to interact with other people without providing some level of acceptance or rejection of what they are doing, whether on purpose or accident, whether they interpret you correctly or not.

Even just walking away communicates something.this isn't always bad, it's how we enforce norms that are not laws. Lie or act in a way I do not approve of and I can choose to stop or limit my interactions with you, and I can express my opinion to others. I this way I am censoring you in a small way. It's how humans interact, and it's useful and good when used in moderation for good causes.

When not used in moderation, and when a million people jump on a single person and express enough displeasure to cause severe ramifications for relatively small offenses, then it's not good.

I don't want to see racist rhetoric in the same way I don't want to see poor behavior at others expenses. That is, I want it allowed, but for people to face somewhat appropriate ramifications for the offense, to discourage them from spouting it everywhere people do t want to see it. To be clear, I mean it in the literal, bit colloquial sense, in that it's a preference, not a call to censor others be preventing it entirely, as overreactions are what I'm arguing against.

> That's called "living in a community".

Except cancel culture is anything but community driven. It's social media driven -- which in itself is a platform to get more views to sell you more ads. The more the platform can draw your ire, the more ads it sells, the more ire the platform spreads, etc.

The problem is that words aren't which we argue our politics by anymore. It's now who has the biggest weapon to personally destroy those that speak out.

It is still a community driving it even if the configuration is different.

Luckily here in the United States we have a clever mechanism to deal with the negative effects of free speech. It is called the Bill of Rights, and it works really well. In fact it is the best such system in history.

That is, the vilification of having views that are not the same as the majority leading people to feel repressed, and them supporting someone that's unwilling to bend to that, even if they don't support every decision he makes or view he takes.

We gotta break this stuff into more detail.

If you look at say, the start of #metoo, you see Harvey Weinstein, a man so powerful that the ordinary justice system could not touch him until essentially a Twitter mob took him down.

Now, public accusation is a crappy way to settle bad behavior, it's easy to channel this stuff in any direction a manipulator might choose. But people choose that rout of desperation, when the ordinary justice and more broadly ordinary government processes fail.

If we look at the Minneapolis Police Department in particular, we see a department with such a long history of corruption and even murder that the entire group should be fired. And moreover, all of Minneapolis civic government out side the police would like to do that - but are in fact powerless to do that through a web of laws the police have protecting their interests.

And this is the thing. You have powerful, unaccountable men and women whose acts provoke anger in many parts of the population. Then you have an angry mob which actually can't impose any significant change and once they get going can inflict collateral damage themselves - and maybe get met by a counter-mob. But after the upsurge, any reform is thin and the stage is set for the next event.

So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.

> So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.

I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the current mob mentality only came about because of unaccountable powers, or even if it did, that it will necessarily dissipate if those powers become and are held accountable. Some things are self-sustaining.

I don't think we can just look the other way because the negative behavior is caused by a feeling of rage and impotency. Should we try to fix the injustices that cause the feeling of rage and impotency? Yes. That doesn't mean we should also ignore the negative effects that rage and impotency results in, otherwise we'll be following a chain back forever.

I don't think we can just look the other way because the negative behavior is caused by a feeling of rage and impotency.

I don't know who's "we" or who's looking the other way.

Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.

It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.

You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior. The problem in many ways is that the mob is also a lot of people, including other mobs, favorite enemy.

> I don't know who's "we" or who's looking the other way.

"We", as a societal group, whether that be "Americans" or "Westerners" or "Human beings". By looking the other way, I meant "assuming the problem will get better if the unaccountable powers are held accountable." People don't change their behavior overnight, even if it's unconsciously acting as a face in a mob they don't realize they're part of, and revolutions rarely result in a change that is positive in all aspects.

What if we trade unaccountable individuals (which sometimes were held accountable) for unaccountable mobs? I don't see one as necessarily better than the other, it's the prevalence and consequences of each that matter to me.

> Everyone on every part of the political spectrum has one or more mob-tendencies they'd like to stamp out (or at least look like they're stamping out). And yet this situation continues. Indeed, it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.

Yes, it's almost as if we've started identifying more with our subgroups than the larger group, and it's like multiple nations forced to coexist within the same borders of people we view as others. Like a digital Gaza Strip.

> It seems like one can't just take negative phenomena in isolation, say "that bad" and go get it. Or you can and everyone's doing it and things are still in a mess and you're part of the mess now.

Sure. That's the other end of the spectrum. I advocated for doing both. Address the root cause, also address the problem. If we accept that poverty increases crime, we shouldn't use that as an excuse to ignore crimes committed by the poor, and we shouldn't ignore that causal relationship and focus purely on policing and punishment.

> You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior.

The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.

Me: You actually need positive, concrete alternatives to mob behavior.

kbenson:The whole point of my original comment is that I don't know what those are, but we need to find and/or advertise and explore any we can find because they are important.

Me: Well, all of the mechanism of modern democracy - a fair justice system, a congress representing the popular will, an executive branch primarily carrying out laws, a press that exposes flaws, etc are the ways modern democratic society has discovered for balancing interests.

In situations of imbalance, when things are not working, reforms within such a democratic capitalist society tend to come from elites because they hold power (with or without a popular mandate). We can see this in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Right Movement. Protests may get things going but those with power have to enact legislation.

Today, it may sound harsh but America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire because the situation didn't bother them. I mentioned the Minneapolis city council, theoretically the representatives of the city, would like to fire the police but cannot. (Nearly) "everyone" have some solutions but they aren't able to exercise them.

At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.

> Today, it may sound harsh but America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire because the situation didn't bother them.

Well, I would say it didn't bother them initially, and it changed so fast that by the time it did bother them (if it does), it was too late. We're talking about a decade or less of time here, since that's about the period of time that social media has had major usage by a majority of people, and while there were less efficient precursor networks (such as radio and television), nothing really compares to the current immediate feedback look of of the current systems, where time for info to permeate a platform and then regurgitates and eaten again can be measured in minutes in some cases, but often in just a few hours.

I doubt even the people that "saw it coming" really understood where it would get to, and there's no concrete indication that we're at the peak (there's pushback, but that can be steamrolled for while).

Elites have more power, and can get stuff done because there's a purity of intent and will expressed by one person with power that's hard to match with many people pooling power... but then again, we're dealing with runaway feedback loops, so who knows what the public can do if a good meme is found.

> At this point, I'd look at Ralph Nader's Only The Super Rich Can Save Us. Because everything points to the very rich having decisive power and this quite willing to let things fall to hell. We can hope these people realize that triumph over a flaming ruin might not actually help as much as they're imagine.

I'd much rather have the stability of the 1990s or 2000s that what we seem to have now when considering my own situation, but I'm white middle class, and I imagine people that have felt disenfranchised their whole lives may see the balance of good and bad happening now a bit differently, and I'm not willing to say they are better off as they were in the 1990s or 2000s. I dunno.

No, when I say "America's elites allowed American institutions become something like a dumpster fire I mean traditional American institutions - the courts, the congress, the presidency, our schools, our health care system etc.

It seems like you imagine that out-of-control social media is happening in a vacuum or can be fixed in a vacuum. It's not and it cannot.

I'm sure almost everyone would prefer not be (hopefully) living through a era in which things fall apart on a multitude of levels. But hey, we should try to do something and if we can't do something immediately, at least analyze it.

> it seems like the whole this different mobs gunning for each other.

What are the various mobs you refer to?

>So, I'd say mobs and counter-mobs are problematic but the root is permanent unaccountable powers that can ignore whatever material grievances different groups have.

I don't know that mobs are rational. Sometimes, I'm sure they will be pointing to a genuine injustice, but just as often as not, they're going to be a rampaging mob. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this next claim, but I wonder that it's simply an accident when they get it "right."

Nonetheless, even the worst among us deserve representation and due process protections: which a mob cannot (and will not) give.

the problem with censorship is that it only capable of censoring unpopular ideas and unpopular ideas are generally not a problem. the problem ideas are the popular memeplexes that propagate the meme that all opposing ideas should be censored.

>The problem ideas are the popular memeplexes that propagate the meme that all opposing ideas should be censored.

No one is arguing this. This is a strawman position no one actually holds.

The celebration in banning Stormfront, Alex Jones, or The_Donald would indicate otherwise to me.

The issue with all of those instances is that the people behind the services - could not stay associated with these elements.

Enforced tolerance is the only thing that is keeping really bad people comfortable at expressing their badness. (Suprisingly - the anti-discrimination applied to private businesses is the reason why people like Alex Jones can safely say whatever he wants and then get a free upgrade at Ramada)

But that's the thing things have changed, the majority of people now disagree with racial segregation, blaming women for being raped etc. and that is a good thing. The thing is people voted for Trump because they want the old times back where "a n* knew their place". There is a reason why the majority of his supporters are significantly over 50. However, it is an illusion that people were not feeling consequences for expressing certain views (or even being suspected of it), just think of Mccarthy or the outrage on Fox if somebody criticises "our troops". The only thing that changed is that now it's also so called "conservatives" (I would call many of the right wing activists) who face this, together with the amplification allowed by social media and peoples (on all sides of the spectrum) desire to somehow feel like a victim.

I'm not going to try to convince you of this but I have to let you know that everything you said is untrue.

What racists have been empowered, and by whom? What has the president said that was racist? When has he ever endorsed racism? How is it that he has a 40% approval rating among black voters? Are they stupid?

"Gallup averages show Trump with a 10% approval rating among blacks in 2017, 11% in 2018 and 10% so far in 2019."

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/268517/analy...

Note however that one way to make a society appear to be less politically polarized is to silence the voice of groups who are not being served well by the current political status quo. When voices fighting for representation and fairness and equality are amplified, and supporters of the status quo resist (which they nearly always do), that will necessarily increase the apparent polarization, but I don't think that's a bad thing, and I certainly don't think it's worse than those voices remaining silenced.

The problem is America isn’t making an effort to not silence other people and give them a platform to talk about their concerns. It’s becoming a crowd of endless screaming with almost zero listening, and people actively trying to silence those who don’t yell alongside them.

yes, and in my opinion, this is one of the factors behind the abysmal pandemic response from the country as a whole. Bad ideas become good ideas if they come one's team and good ideas become bad if they are not. As a result both halves of the country do stupid things, different kinds of stupid of course, while at the same time both sides refuse to do reasonable things.

Do you think that both "halves" of the country are responding to the pandemic with equal stupidity?

It strikes me as nonproductive to call it "stupidity" or debate whether there's a precise equality. Both halves of the country have made it clear, in word and in action, that they think some causes are worth spreading the pandemic.

I have an opinion of course, but I am not interested in debating which side has done dumber things. It is impossible to discuss that issue productively.

Kind of pointless to bring it up then, huh?

Bring what up? That we are being pushed into suicidal stupidity by our allegiance to our political team? I rather think it is worth to bring it up, so that perhaps we all can do it a little less. Debating who exactly is the most to blame is counter productive to that goal.

I don't think it's particular productive to suggest that the problem is some kind of tribalism or reflexive rejections without providing any kind of rationale, argument, or support.

The context matters. The actual actions matter.

I recall folks on the left mocking those who wanted the economy to partially reopen as “valuing a haircut more than human lives”. They mocked with derision the very real depression that I, and many other people here on HN, had as a function of being stuck inside 24/7 while watching businesses and jobs implode while COVID cases explode.

I heard this phrased another way: a wealth adviser stated (roughly) that

"The question each individual faces is 'Would you give up all the money in your IRA so that some old person you don't know will not die?"'

I think that question captures the essence of the situation better than the "haircut...lives" phrase.

The answer is no.

Interacting with other humans inherently carries risk that you could harm others. I could get distracted by my children in the car and kill someone when I cross the center line.

That doesn’t make me evil or selfish for wanting to own a car and drive it.

It also doesn’t make someone selfish for wanting to support their family in normal commerce, in the rare chance that their very legal and very normal economic activity may inadvertently harm someone.

Nope because we're not saving any net lives. We're only exchanging lives during this whole thing. Exchanging mostly older folks for others. The whole quarantine can be described: If you have covid your life matters more than someone who has cancer or another illness.

When all of our children become serial killers and cancer death rates rise we'll look back on this time as the worst decision the world has ever made. Being a human means excepting risk. You wake up everyday and take on risk. Yes some people are willing to take more risks than others. I'm an avid skydiver. To those people who don't like risk: Stay at home and get someone to deliver groceries and live your miserable life by yourself at home. Thanks.

Don't you think that the people in Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Germany, New Zealand, Portugal,etc, are better of for having accomplished an effective and relatively short-lived quarantine? In the US the choice did not have to be between indefinite home detention and 1/4 million excess deaths. We fucked this up.

What's worse is the Left's then about-face to let's pack tens of thousands of people together to protest exposing untold numbers more to the very virus they professed to oppose. The political "side" I once found myself cheering on has turned into a outrage-fueled hypocrisy-machine where the greatest victim wins.

I really don't think that's a totally fair take on the situation. The theme of the BLM protests was people taking on huge personal risk to seize an opportunity for change that might not present itself again. I don't think anyone was trying to argue that joining a crowd in a pandemic and standing opposed to police in riot gear itching to use it was a safe thing to do.

And no one principled would object to that if the risk was indeed personal. It is not, obviously, and the people protesting surely know it, so if you have a shred of intellectual honesty that noble narrative cannot possibly hold. The real truth is that these people weighted the risk of infecting themselves and others and decided on behalf of us all, that it was worth it.

See that sounds good but that applies to everything anyone does right now. If you leave your home at all at this point you're making the choice that whatever you doing carries a risk of harming yourself and others. There's really no way to isolate the risk to just yourself.

And so yeah, that was a real choice that made. Like my friends and I had to decide if worth it to join the protests and we were pretty firmly on the side of this was too important to not do. And so you're absolutely right but I feel like it's hard to be measured when the argument is "look the left is going out to march in a civil rights protest but doesn't want hair salons or schools to open -- the hipocrits!"

There need to be some nuance here. I think most people agree that grocery stores and hospitals needs to be open and that chuck-e-cheese probably doesn't. I don't think it's at all hypocritical to take a stance in the middle. Of course there's going to be lots of disagreement about what falls on what side but that's the argument to have.

> See that sounds good but that applies to everything anyone does right now. If you leave your home at all at this point you're making the choice that whatever you doing carries a risk of harming yourself and others.

It's a poor comparison: the risk of transmission when gathering huge numbers of humans together is exponentially higher than leaving your home to buy groceries.

Have you seen the fly-by drone footage of Hollywood Blvd on July 7th of the BLM protests [1]? It was outrageously reckless and not just to the lives of the people who took part.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/iSlH3SG.gifv

Of course the risk isn't equal, it's just that the argument "look at these people risking the live of others by going out" can't hold absolutely because even going groceries is risking the lives of others so the argument needs to take into the risks and reward to decide if it's reckless or not.

So yes BLM protests are high risk, but to the protesters they're also high reward if they manage to affect change which, largely, they are!

Reckless would be going to a music festival right now, and in my opinion, opening schools. The reward just isn't there. Kids will be happy to have an extra long summer break.

First of all let me say I appreciate your civility and candor and that I believe you, and your friends, truly believe that your choice is honorable and just. However, consider that many, many people do not have the same privileges of the typical young, affluent and still comfortably employed HN audience. Many people, who worked incredibly hard to buy their chuck-e-cheese franchise or their hair salon are middle aged, have a family to support and no way to do it. Many of them will never recover from this. They are too old, too broke, and do not have the sort of mind that can give them access to the highly paid jobs that we take for granted. Their protests strike me as at least equally noble and justified. Its a big country and tragedy abounds. You can weave true, heartbreaking narratives about almost any group. The question of which of those are worthy enough to justify spreading this germ seems to me, at present, ridiculous. None are. Protests in the streets now just increase our division, make it impossible to take appeals for a lock down seriously and will ultimately just plunge us, all of us, deeper into the hell we are already in.

I don't think the parent's point is that on any given issue both sides respond stupidly, I would guess they think two sides respond stupidly in different areas.

As a representative of a minority within a minority - libertarian gay atheist immigrant - both sides have been completely crap about it. For different reasons...

Such as - banning testing for COVID by nursing homes upon (re)admittance in NYC.

If anything should unite Americans now is utter and universal contempt for the institutions that failed us in navigating this crisis. The government, the media, the opposition, even parts of the medical community. The health of both the people and the economy was treated not as the prime concern but as an opportunity to pursue other agendas. A terrible reckoning is due, but we are too blinded by hatred towards each other to demand it. What a sad, sad epilogue to the American story.

The counter to this though, is that the time when things weren't politicized was essentially when minority groups didn't have political, eoconomic, cultural power.

There is no new split into two Americas, there was always a split- between those who had political, cultural and economic power, and those that don't. The only difference now is that the people who are in the group with power aren't exclusively rich, white, conservative men.

We can go back, we can stop black people from getting loans and decent jobs, we can make all our women secretaries again, and I'm sure that will solve all our political ills.

It is dangerous that political differences are now being moralized. You vote for Biden? You're evil and should be fired. You vote for Trump? You're a Nazi and should be fired. Then what? What's the next step? I used to read about the French Revolution in horror. Parisans cheered when a Guillotine dropped, for they thought it was the righteous thing to do. And the history repeated itself in China 55 years ago and then 35 years ago, all in the name of upholding superior morality.

Are we going to repeat the history in the US?

Who the next enemy is predictably being determined by the ruling party and Wall Street, and there's nothing anybody can do about that now that it's gone too far. If you wish to compare history, it's close to Weimar Republic, the social unrest, threats of violence, propaganda lies, full-on corruption and domination at cost of human health and lives.

It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.

> Who the next enemy is predictably being determined by the ruling party and Wall Street,

1. If this was generally true the Wall street and Republicans started #metoo and I can't believe that.

> and there's nothing anybody can do about that now that it's gone too far.

2. This is not only pessimistic but too pessimistic and also counterproductive (unless one wish to drive society faster to the edge.)

> It's all sleight of hand, everybody gets fooled into a suckers rally that makes most current matters irrelevant. Ofc I hope I'm wrong, but just watch what they do.

Kind of agree. I guess if you made a real poll between Americans on if they wanted

1. Trump

2. Biden

3. A randomly selected choice between 5 men and 5 women that were decent, smart, had succeeded in life despite being nice

then I guess people would vote for 3 in the poll.

The American system seems to favour bad compromises lately.

For leadership with integrity #metoo and #blacklivesmatter is about justice and fairness. Not about creating new enemies for personal gain.

I might have misunderstood you.

In that case: have my apology and also know that I misunderstood you (and in that case: still don't understand you despite trying), so a little clarification might be helpful if you care :-)

There will be doubling down on creating new enemies, until everybody burns, unless people wise up fast.

American electoral system, same as in UK, is about 500 years old.

It makes it unsafe to vote for your actual favourite candidate, because you don't get a second round... I always remind people that Maine's scandalous governor LePage never won 50% of the voter support and his first win was with merely 37% of the vote.

I sincerely don't know what you think politics would be except for morals put into law.

We are humans first, Americans second, and Democrats/Republicans/whatever third.

The issue is that many folks want to view others as $POLITICAL_PARTY first and human second.

Are fetuses human? That's a political issue. Who is allowed to be American? That's a political issue.

Hell, half of conservative political rhetoric is distinguishing between real and fake Americans.

That’s fine, and the mark of a well-functioning society is the ability to have those discussions calmly and rationally.

You can only really have those kinds of discussions calmly if you're not at all affected by the decision. It doesn't have anything to do with a functioning society. If you're black it's hard to have a dispassionate discussion about stop-and-frisk or no-knock raids.

If I point a gun to your head do you think we can stand there and have a calm and rational discussion about whether I should pull the trigger? Of course not! You're going to fight to protect yourself.

I always find it curious how easy it is for beliefs seem to line up so smoothly along party lines... even unrelated ones like economic policy and religion all seem to line up in a very clean way in the US.

Is there another universe where all the religious people are very pro-economic redistribution? That seems to be within reasonable interpretation of the teachings of Jesus.

Try having "morals put into law" and what you end up with is Sharia law. In democracy you should avoid doing that, because people typically do not agree on what's moral.

Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one. The reason why, for example, murder is illegal isn't because it's immoral, but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal. Same for theft, or even such minor annoyances like fining someone for playing music too loud.

> Laws should made from purely utilitarian point of view, not the moral one.

You are trying to draw a distinction between the "utilitarian" and the "moral". But, to quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), "Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories" [1]. Claims about what is "utilitarian" are inescapably moral claims.

> but because most people do not want to fall victim to such crime so they voted to make it illegal.

In historical terms, that is quite false. In every democratic country, murder was already illegal for centuries (even millennia) before democracy was introduced. In fact, the earliest surviving legal text (the Sumerian code of Ur-Nammu, c. 2100–2050 BCE) criminalised murder, and predates the invention of democracy in ancient Athens (594 BCE) by approximately 1500 years.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200630100724/https://www.iep.u...

I know it sucks. It reminds me of a quote often attributed to John F. Kennedy:

> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

And in a world where the choice is between Biden and Trump. It is increasingly tempting to vote for the Guillotine.

> It is increasingly tempting to vote for the Guillotine.

It didn't work so well the last few times it was used - the English revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, all ended up in a bloodbath, next one more gruesome than the last. I urge you to reconsider.

Also I recommend "the revolutions" podcast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Duncan_(podcaster)

France never returned back to monarchy, and Russia never reinstated the empire after the revolutions. Yes some awful people used the political turmoil to seize power in both cases—and similar thing would probably happen if Americans started chopping the heads of the rich—but in both cases the revolutions left a lasting mark, and both France and Russia are more democratic then they were during monarchy (although Russia is in serious regression at the moment).

This is not necessary the case though, as seen after the Cuban or the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, Mexico.

At some point revolution becomes necessary, and if democratic means remain unavailable, this revolution will be violent. Horrible people using the political turmoil will become a risk people are willing to take in this growing frustration.

> France never returned back to monarchy

Napoleon III would like a word with you.

French Revolution (1789–1799)

Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (1804–1814)

Louis XVIII, King of France (1814–1824)

Charles X, King of France (1824–1830)

Louis Philippe I, King of France (1830–1848)

Napoleon III, Emperor of the French (1852–1870)

Well, Napoleon Bonaparte as well, plus all the kings between him and Napoleon III.

If you read up on the history of French revolution, they didn't particularly want a republic. They got a republic as the last resort... and they changed the country forever, even Emperor Napoleon didn't roll everything back.

They still wanted a lot of changes to allow more freedom, restrictions and more transparency... just not necessarily a formal republic.

Think about this - in CATO's own Human Freedom Index half of the top 16 countries are monarchies.

1 New Zealand - monarchy 2 Switzerland - republic 3 Hong Kong (definitely not going to be in #4 now) 4 Canada - monarchy 5 Australia - monarchy 6 Denmark - monarchy 6 Luxembourg - monarchy 8 Finland - republic 8 Germany - republic 10 Ireland - repulbic 11 Sweden - monarchy 11 Netherlands - monarchy 13 Austria - republic 14 United Kingdom - monarchy 15 Estonia - republic 15 United States - republic

Honest question, do you believe Lenin and Stalin were better than the Czars?

I'm not arguing either were good, just curious about your point of view here.

idk. Russia had a lot of czars, some of them (like Ivan the Terrible) were probably worse then even Stalin, and some of them might even have been better then Gorbachev.

That said, the revolutionary spirit under Czar Nicolas II were completely rational, and understandable. The use of violence was needed because the ruling class was—unlike at the end of the Soviet Union—unwilling to make the revolution happen peacefully.

Nobody can tell the future. The fact that awful people might use the turmoil to seize power is not something that people are thinking about when they are trying to overthrow their current oppressors.

France returned back to monarchy a couple of times. They kept switching back and forth between various kind of monarchies and republics. Fortunately not with the kind of bloodbaths that accompanied the initial revolution.

Why? Trump will have just one more term at most. So are you essentially saying that you're not happy with the current election system and you tend to use violence to overthrow it?

Or are you saying that you dislike Trump or Biden so much that you'd rather use violence to achieve what you desire?

Let's say you'd use Guillotine so Trump can step down, then should those who dislike democrats also use the same means to have Biden step down? And if someone tends to oppose what you do, you'd rather use Guillotine to resolve the difference?

I think it's pretty clear what kind of person you are.

I’m saying there are policies that an overwhelming majority in USA supports, such as universal healthcare, taxing the rich, stop foreign wars, stop police violence, reduce carbon emission, etc. which will never be enacted in the current political climate. Our choices—well the voters choice; I’m not allowed to vote—is basically: Not getting what we want or not getting what we want plus inhumane bigotry.

If this were a real democracy, popular policies would be enacted, or at least be on the ballot. But this is not the case. As evident from the Black Lives Matter protest, riot seems to be the only avenue for change. And as popular policies keep getting put on the back burner while corporate interests keep getting the front seat regardless of who we vote, the illusion of democracy will frustrate more and more people. The more frustrated we get the more likely we will resort to violence.

I’m not saying that violence will lead to good outcome (it probably won’t; as history shows), but an ever angrier and more frustrated population will eventually use it if democratic means remain unavailable. That is more and more people will vote for the Guillotine if the only options on the ballots are: a) business as usual, or b) business as usual + hating minorities.

> are policies that an overwhelming majority in USA supports, such as universal healthcare, taxing the rich, stop foreign wars, stop police violence, reduce carbon emission

None of those things are supported by an overwhelming majority unless 3/5ths now constitutes “overwhelming”. Additionally, your view of what the issues are show how biased your approach is to begin with.

- Almost nobody has an issue with reducing police violence, but a bunch of people have issues with getting rid of the police.

- Almost nobody “wants foreign wars” but a bunch of people think military intervention is needed.

- Nobody is against taxing the rich, it’s already right in the tax code and the top 1 percent pays something like a third of all tax revenues already. What a bunch of people are against is arbitrarily raising their taxes further because of tall poppy syndrome.

- Reduce carbon emissions. Yes, but sadly not overwhelming majority still and even then, the “how” is critical and there is even less common ground there.

So there are nuances when making legislation to enact popular policies. I know that, what is your point?

A functioning legislator discusses these nuances, and comes up with a legislation that enacts the policy such that most people can benefit from it. This is one of the benefits of having a diverse ruling class. No one person needs to know how a popular policy gets enacted, that is the purpose of representative democracy.

He explicitly stated his point before the enumeration; your phrasing of the original comment is both technically inaccurate and reeks of your biases to such an extent as to sour further engagement with you.

You're technically inaccurate because 58-60% is not an "overwhelming majority".

I'm not a US citizen (or resident), and I find it almost unbelievable and absolutely unacceptable that you don't have some form of universal healthcare, for example. I probably agree with you politically way more than I disagree with you, but the other posters points against you still stand.

EDIT: I realise my first paragraph here might sound a bit harsh, that was not my intention - my intention was to make it explicitly known to you such that you might take it to heart and it might possibly be helpful to you to realise.

No, you’re not getting it. “Reduce police violence” is something people can support. However, the position taken by a major party has been “defund the police” instead. They have started with the “how” and have done so with an untenable position for more than half of the country.

The same applies to solving global warming. Carbon taxation was actually a feasible solution with conservative support. Now instead, a huge chunk of the liberal position has shifted to the green new deal, which is a jobs program and wealth redistribution scheme only orthogonally related to slowing global warming. Nuclear is another viable solution to global warming that nobody wants to touch because science is scary.

This is precisely the kind of scarecrowing we are seeing with the ruling class today in America. I purposely worded the demands as vague and agreeable as possible, because that is what the majority of the population can agree on.

I personally want carbon tax and police abolition, but there is no consensus on either of these, and what I personally want doesn’t matter. I am not a dictator and the USA is not a dictatorship. It is the legislator’s job to gather what the people want, and find a way to deliver it in a way that will benefit the most. However the American ruling class is not even pretending to be interested in what policies the general population supports.

Should it matter if the majority supports something if it violates the human rights of others?

Yes, it should! But none of the policies I mentioned previously does that.

> I’m saying there are policies that an overwhelming majority in USA supports, such as universal healthcare, taxing the rich, stop foreign wars, stop police violence, reduce carbon emission, etc.

The average person might support all of those end results if the cost to get there were zero, i.e. if we could wave a magic wand.

However each one of those has a cost or tradeoff that a significant number - possibly majority - of people would be unwilling to accept.

>I think it's pretty clear what kind of person you are.

This sentiment is a pretty on-the-nose example of the societal problem we're discussing.

I think the moralization is due to the religious root of the American culture. Religion is all about morality, and the American people, especially those on the right side, invoke God too easily. Those on the left side, still think it's God that grant the America the privilege to herd all the people of the whole world, to teach the world what's right and wrong.

If people in another country may be wrong and have to be taught what's right, well, how can people in another state avoid such error? How can people next door be always right, such as I am?

No, 'moralisation' comes from the emotions of our biology. Disgust, tribalism, groupthink, mob mentality - all the horrors are in our biology, right here, right now, inside everyone, in 2020.

'Godless' non-religious people on the left are extremely 'moral' and burn people at the stake via deplatforming and cancelling.

Science and scientific culture of the last 50/100 years has helped, but even it's been hijacked by our monolithic emotional reality of tribalism and fear. Zooming out, scientific culture is a momentary lifting of a mountain one inch off the ground.

The development of human nature is frozen in time compared to the development of science. Science has caught up to it, and has hit a wall which scientific papers alone cannot move. In fact, the analogy of throwing wads of paper at a wall and expecting it to move. That's the impact it's having.

I fear there is not much we can do about human nature until we can physically change ourselves at the DNA level, to rid or regulate emotions like rage and disgust via CRISPR etc. There's pros and cons of being in the 'World State' or in the 'Savage Reservation'. (Brave New World reference.)

The idea that "everything is getting politicized" is more often an expression of the loss of normative dominance: ideas that you used to enjoy free of criticism and pushback are now subject to challenge. They haven't become politicized, they were always political. You just didn't have to justify them versus criticism.

The only sense in which horseshoe theory is real is that the rejection of the status quo tends to split someone in one direction or the other, and occasionally those new to alternative political ideologies will waffle or get shunted down different pipelines. Example: younger people going down the IDW pipeline who end up socialist once they realize the error. They don't return to dominant liberal narratives because they already figured out the ways in which they are toxic and false, and they also reject their previous pathway.

I can't imagine thinking that "bizarro world" is one in which people hold a larger diversity of opinion and criticize within a party.

It's been brewing since around 1970, plus or minus a few years.

What changed then? A lot of things. We can talk about the financial decoupling and tech, of course. But that was also when imported oil became a concern. It was when international shipping settled on a standard intermodal container. It was when the drug wars started. And it was after major victories in the civil rights movement, and failures in Vietnam. There were winners and losers in these changes. The big winners were neoliberal-progressives who could shape all these influences into a new political alignment that pleased globalizing businesses and placated the masses. The losers were the remnants of the supremacist structure post-Reconstruction, who had fell into a decline with the Depression and war years, and saw collapse in the 60's. They were ushered towards religion, nostalgia narratives about the good old days, and apocalyptic fiction about the decline of the world and those few who would stand up to it.

The problem that the neoliberal structure faced was the one politicians always face: how to accommodate a divided electorate and keep one's career? The formula that emerged was to force the talking points into a narrower spectrum, a tactic refined over the course of decades. In this space, policy change is blocked where it hurts private property interests(as neoliberalism indicates), and the remainder is a set-aside for partisanship where professionals craft pro and contra arguments.

But the consequence of doing that is a build-up of pressure on both left and right, as everything gradually becomes a property issue and gets blocked or deferred. With no enfranchisement, both have radicalized - first the right, and then the left in reaction.

And that's the state of things. How does it end? With a new coalition that courts all the defining forces of this era effectively, guided by some overarching ideology. However, if we take this to be a cycle as in Strauss-Howe's theory, this is simply the beginning of the neoliberal decline, a period of crisis management and compromise, not the defining of that coalition.

You're forgetting a group (that probably existed all along): many people simply don't care.

Also the fact that people actually feel the need to have bans on talking about politics eg at the workplace doesn't seem like a good sign to me, and that's hardly new at all.

It's pretty bad. I have friends that I can't really talk to about politics because they're super on board with trump, and other friends that I need to avoid the topic with because they're so committed to socialism. It's mostly when we speak online where people just feel free to be the shittiest just because you're talking to them over chat instead of to their faces.

> Honestly, the Left is the worst at this. They will actively try to ruin your life over wrongthink.

This experience must vary a lot with your locale. I live in a medium sized town in Canada and feel very uncomfortable talking to my conservative, suburban neighbours about issues I strongly believe should be a priority for everyone. Like climate change.

They know that them and me don’t see eye to eye on these issues but I can’t bring it up in a way that I would with my left leaning friends and it pains me. Because it’s something that both sides of the political spectrum should be able to rally behind. Many conservatives here fancy themselves as sort of “salt of the earth people” so I don’t get the hostility towards some kind of conservation.

Will your conservative neighbors be annoyed and maybe ignore you if you bring up climate change, or will they actively try to get you fired from your job?

I think the Left is getting flak for doing the latter.

They will at best ostracize me from their social circles. And at worst damage my property.

Yes, I had a direct experience of the latter when my car was keyed for having a “give peace a chance” bumper sticker during the times of the war on Iraq. And that’s in Canada, bear in mind.

Tell that to a gay teacher in a conservative area.

Seinfeld's skit, "who doesn't want to wear the ribbon?" couldn't have been more true and poignant.

It's generally easier to play the role of the Very Reasonable Person Who's Just Asking Questions when you're defending the status quo; any change you stymie by undercutting people's emotional energy or by slowing things down works to your advantage.

Not always. I've used the "Very Reasonable Person Who's Just Asking Questions" to ask some very, very uncomfortable questions.

Here's one you can try in the current political climate: "Why don't you have ANY [insert minority] employees working in your organization?"

To give an example of someone a large subset of HN would like to sh*t on with that question, a company I have worked for:

In our case (we have some minorities but not as many as HN would like).

Why: because they aren't available.

We have KPIs for HR and managers that strongly encourage it, but there just aren't more qualified women/black/etc coders.

Which, in our case, translates to less than 5 (but awesome, and highly regarded) black persons[0], about 30% women.

[0]: Note however that the demographic is quite different here in Norway. I know people here who never saw black people except on holiday until they were far beyond 20 years old. In their defense though: 1.) Part of why there are so few black peopøe here seems to be that keeping slaves hasn't been popular here for hundreds of years. 2.) Norwegians have accepted a lot of people from other countries over the years: Pakistani, Chilean etc, so I don't think it is about xenophobia.

Why do you believe [insert minority] coders aren't qualified?

Long term poverty in certain areas; Leading to poorer education systems; Resulting in less than stellar academic attainment; Resulting is lack of experience.

If I put out a simple coding test and some people cannot crack it - I'm not going to check if my 2+2 test is unfairly biased towards people with red hair.

Did you know, for example, that even fairly wealthy black American families are less able to educate their kids to the same level as white American families? Because access to proper education and parental education levels matter a lot. Because kids growing up in poor areas will get lower levels of attainment. Because long term poverty matters.

Breaking that education barrier takes more than one generation.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...

This question doesn't follow.

We are actively looking for them, employing them whenever possible[0].

[0]: I lost two female candidates I tried to hire, one because she wasn't fluent in a language that a majority of our customers use and one because HR didn't react in time and when she interviewed with us she was also on the way to her second interview at another company.

Both landed well-paying jobs shortly afterwards. I guess we are not the only company trying to look diverse.

There are so few black people around here that I guess the reason I don't see more black coders is just statistics.

Its enlightened centrism and a place of profound privilege to be comfortable in the world as it exists thinking all of those "extremists" advocating for change are just being too emotional and partisan.

Centrism is de-facto the status quo. Which, in current times, means support for the police as it exists, supports for business regulation as it exists, supports greenhouse gases and military conduct as it exists, supports the behavior and election processes of politicians as they exist, etc.

Its simply the privilege of the majority to be the "moderate" ones. To be radical is not to be good or bad, it just to be outside the norm. And it makes sense that those in the norm find those outside it dangerous and threatening, because... they want to be. Thats the whole point. Their time is wasted if the goal is not to become the new moderate, the new normal, the new center.

In addition, this "centrism" isn't actually "center", ideologies don't actually fall neatly along a single dimension. These are just handy ways to reference and group ideologies.

The "center" people are referring to here is a United States-centric form of liberalism. It's not any less "extreme" than communism, it's just the dominant political force and, as you say, has the privilege of positioning itself as the comfortable default. In reality, it's a fairly extreme commitment to a different set of principles.

How is the US style of center-liberalism extreme, as compared to an ideology that demands total control over the economy and its citizens? Or do you think concepts such as "rule of law" are extremist?

At the very least the commodification of absolutely everything is pretty extreme.

It isn't absolutely everything for one. If it was then you could legally buy slaves, nuclear weapons or foreign nations could buy New York in its entirety based upon a market cap would be far closer to commodification of everything.

Commoditization is just a fundamental result of math basically. Fundamentally there is still a cost to a commodities no matter what party pays for it to provide it or bar access through certain methods as illegitimate like it being illegal to buy organs from a donor for transplant.

You call them priveledged but are they necessarily always wrong? There would be a bias towards more extreme passions to try to go towards extreme changes and would feel a temptation towards partisanship feeling so outnumbered.

Given that norms say nothing about it doesn't mean they are always but the possibility exists that the extremists really are too emotional and partisan, and getting what they wanted would be the proverbial dog catching the car and not knowing what to do with it or crashing it immediately.

> Horseshoe theory is real.

This was literally Hitler's primary argument for establishing the Nazi Party in Mein Kampf in the way that he did. So at least a 100 years old.

Based on the results, there's a pretty strong argument that it's true.

Then it is time to create a formal, enforceable separation between person and profession. That is, what one does personally is taken separately from professional conduct and vice versa.

Everything is political; being apolitical just means you support the status quo.

This is just a fancier way of saying “If you’re not with me you’re against me”

It's literally not; how do you know I don't support the status quo? I'm just pointing out that being "apolitical" is a political stance, whether or not you agree with that stance.

By this reasoning my dog supports the status quo.

If your dog had the mental capacity to understand the basics of the two main sides in US politics and chose to support neither, then sure.

There aren’t “two main sides” in US politics. There are two parties and choosing either comes with a metric fuck-ton of positions. Generally supporting Democrats just because they support one position you agree with is dumber than not supporting either side.

I think not voting at all is the dumbest possible position.

Your ability to draw reason out of text is flawed, then. Your dog has no ability to influence human politics whatsoever; you do.

You could also be apolitical because you find all available options to be unacceptable, or because you just don't know what's going on.

Separately, not opposing the status quo is more like accepting it than supporting it, and these are all different.

Your lack of nuance rather proves the point of the great grandparent post.

Well ironically, the great grandparent also lacks nuance. I think your comment is the one the brings it forward, and is more valuable than the great grandparent for that reason.

> You could also be apolitical because you find all available options to be unacceptable

Is this apolitical, or is it having a politics that is not well represented? It seems more like the latter to me.

People who feel unrepresented often lapse into apathy; you can only struggle against an uncaring world for so long before you tire or go insane.

Apathy towards issues of policy is a political position. You know the political positions, but you became apathetic about the political system.

Being apolitical is implying that you think that it's good enough as it is to not care.

> having a politics that is not well represented

I think being apolitical is more about having an objective view and judging opinions based on merit rather than the political spectrum they originated from. Could also mean you're either are against all political views, or have none, but this last one seems less likely to happen in practice. People tend to have an opinion, more or less informed or objective as it may be.

> or because you just don't know what's going on.

Exactly. Anybody who earnestly tries to be informed will realize that there are limits to what they know and subjects for which they are not [yet] informed. There needs to be room for people to say "I'm not informed on that issue, so I don't have an opinion."

I told a person who was collecting signatures to get a proposition on Nov's ballot, almost word for word your italics.

Their response was "I get paid per signature, will you sign it so I can make more money?"

My response, "That's an even worse reason, are you telling me someone buying this prop its way into the ballot?" He left at this point.

As I like to say; why would we have a word 'apolitical' if we can't imagine a thing that is accepted as apolitical? It would be a rather useless adjective.

It is completely reasonable for someone to say they don't like the status quo but also are uncertain about whether a policy improves on the status quo due to their limited knowledge. If that isn't being apolitical we may as well strike the word from the dictionary. It is technically a political stance, but it is not forceful enough to be called support of anything.

It is most certainly a coded message for “you have to believe in what I believe.” Being apolitical is not a political stance.

I keep to myself because I don't trust people to take my slight differences of opinion with appropriate calm. I've been burned one too many times by "you don't agree with my concept/idea/candidate you're a literal fucking monster." No thanks, I could have been your ally but I'll just stay home.

I should add, this goes in both directions and I see it from both sides of the political spectrum. I consider myself an independent. I try to judge all issues individually and fall into different camps depending on what we're talking about, but political dialogue has become so toxic that I've gotten to the point where I just cast my vote and move on.

Fair enough. I read it as condemning apolitical folks for lack of engagement but I see your larger point.

This is a very broad definition of political.

No, it's really not. This is just cult like Puritanism that shows your lack of balance and proportionality.

It is. Sorry it is. I am not American and the whole two party thing annoys the heck out of me, but politics is the question of how we (or others) organize how we live with each other. This spans from mundane things like whether you can paint your fence in the color you like to fundamental existential questions that regard your safety and wellbeing.

If you think you hold no political opinion this is usually a sign that you can afford to do so. Just like my grandfather who fought in the Wehrmacht and said afterwards that he wasn't convinced, he just went the easy way and didn't question his orders. Was that apolitical? I don't think so — it was more an excuse he told himself to avoid responsibility for what he helped create.

Sorry, but sometimes inaction is political, because it means you are willing to give the controls to the next person who grabs it as long as you don't think you will end up worse off. "I don't care what happens to anyone but me", may sound apolitical, but it really isn't.

People just put different meaning into "support". There are some who honestly believe you can support something through apathy and there are some who, just as honestly, believe that support is an action and hence cannot happen through inaction.

Interestingly, both meanings are in the dictionary[1] and the argument that there is just one is either coming from ignorance or bad faith. The GP's "being apolitical just means you support the status quo" definitely looks like a troll. It uses "support" as "endure" (an unusual meaning in such a context) but implies "support" as "promote".

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/support

This is indeed a quite tricky question. Trickier than one would intuitivly think.

Back when I studied ethics we were talking about the famous trolly problem. The professor proposed multiple scenarios and after each asked the auditorium who would act and who wouldn't. I can vividly remember three points:

1. Even seemingly clear cut ethical questions weren't clear cut at all. Rarely as much as 80:20 more often 60:40

2. Doing nothing always gets a perk over doing smomething. If you do something you might have done the wrong thing and feel silly for it - if you do nothing it is easier to brush off.

3. When the professor rephrased a scenario in such a way that you had to take basically the same decision, but your role was more direct (instead of pulling a lever to sacrifice one person, you'd have to push them in front of the trolly) nearly nobody would do so.

These differences in perception of indirect and direct effect is what we use to excuse ourselves in cases where our inaction would have saved lives ("I could have easily pulled the lever and saved four lives" VS "I couldn't have pushed that person in front of the trolly, even if it would have saved lives").

Similarily my grandfather's generation would have said: "There was nothing I could have done to stop it anyways" - with the unspoken part beeing "without taking a personal burden". Note that we live in one of the few areas where people were hiding in the mountains to resist the Nazis and these were partely people he personally knew. So he knew one could do something, he just either didn't dare, chose to (conveniently for him) not think about it, or only felt sorry in hindsight.

As another data point: At least where I grew up not helping someone in need (e.g. of first aid) is a felony, as long as the circumstances allowed you to help. Not sure how this is in the US tho

This is not a trolley problem and is just a language trick: "to support" means "to quietly endure" and "to promote". If you wanted to a variant of a trolley problem for this it would be: there is a lever, if you pull it then something happens (you don't know what) and if you don't pull it then something else or the same thing continues to happen (you don't know what will or won't happen).

And this is sidetracking. Even in the original trolley problem you don't know what is or isn't going to happen. For the sake of the thought experiment you certainly could just assume mathematical precision, but nowhere does it say you must.

Back to the trolley problem and the thesis of everything being a subject of politics as in politics as "the principles relating to or inherent in a sphere or activity, especially when concerned with power and status." and "a particular set of political beliefs or principles".

Is a rich aristocrat on the court of the french king who puts sticks down his throat so he can vomit and eat on while the poor starve at the gates apolitical? This aristocrat is completely minding his own business, might even be a very nice soul who never hurt a fly.

In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical. Even if you exile yourself in the desert that would be a choice that e.g. influences your family. This influence on your surrounding world is what makes things political, because we constantly decide how to interact with the society around us. And it doesn't matter if you hold strong political opinions or are oblivious to everything, what you do is still a part of politics (e.g. by signaling others what is commonly accepted behavior and which your (polical) values are. Do you pull the lever and kill the man or do you let the five other people die? What if they are kids? What if they are old people? What if they are black?

Decisions like these are not arbitrary, they show us fundamental truths of how we think and work in relation to our surroundings, and this is – in my book – political.

>And this is sidetracking. Even in the original trolley problem you don't know what is or isn't going to happen.

Indeed. The premise of the problem is that you believe that a certain action will cause a certain effect and the actual effects of your actions do not matter as it's an ethical and not mechanical, medical or engineering problem.

>In my eyes there is rarely any way to act apolitical.

It is understood. I just wanted to make you aware that in some other people eyes it's bonkers.

The problem is most people are spectators in their own country, not citizens. And they do have the luxury of apathy. It may very well be true they consider having an opinion on civil matters too strenuous, meaning it would take them away from the daily entertainment, the need to get attention, rather than paying attention. There's nothing to be done about it really. It's a kind of corruption and a cultural rot. George Carlin called these people dumbass motherfuckers. And I think that's diplomatic. Bullshit jobs, bullshit life, they are there to earn money only to spend it all to enrich someone else. It's so terrible they can't even be bothered to have an opinion about how civil society is organized, because really what they're living is something of a nightmare. They are so ignorant, they have anti-imagination. You give them an idea by historical reference, and it's instant annihilation, and time for more bonbons. The capacity to have a conversation just doesn't exist.

And there were all kinds of ignorant kids, grew up in podunk poor towns, but still had an opinion about the civil and the uncivil. They were certainly political. And they volunteered to fight fascism and quite a lot of them died for it. Now, fascism is just name calling. It's not a real thing that exists, or could exist. It's just politics, which is also unimportant and mostly make believe. It's something that his site considers anti-intellectual.

So when people intentionally refuse to think and wilfully run from fundamental truth, the situation is pretty dire. Apolitical is indistinguishable from apathy. Perhaps some part of it's cognitive dissonance, that at least suggests there's an awareness of a conflict that matters enough to ignore because it's more comfortable.

In "The Coddling of the American Mind" Jonathan Haidt speaks of catastrophizing. I believe the new cult of Puritanism is from a place of catastrophizing.

You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone. ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

> These things are not asking to be judged by you.

Somebody needs to tell me what voting is supposed to be about, then.

Nobody is obliged to vote on a matter. At least not in America, I've heard it might be different in Australia. When I feel as though I cannot make an informed decision, I choose not to vote. Why should my uninformed vote be so valued that I'm obliged to give it? What utility is there in an uninformed vote?

You can vote your opinion and not be a troubled soul. Voting doesn’t require your politics to be a consuming passion.

My politics are outside the Overton window to the point I'm just depending on the rest of my fellow citizens not to make their mess my mess with their choices.

Were you saying this in a comedic way, as a parody of the thinking the parent complained about? Because it's exactly that, intentional or not.

Politics is about applying collective power from an entity funded by taxpayers. There is nothing political about the decision of whether or not to assist an elderly woman who is lost, or volunteer to coach a youth basketball team, or you know, just do decent things to make the world a better place that doesn't require the application of the collective power of our government institutions.

Being apolitical means you don't care about policy.

Politics is war by other means (Clausewitz), then that would mean everything in life is warfare too.

It doesn't have to be, if people are willing to compromise.

If people were willing to compromise then it wouldn't have become a political issue to begin with.

I guess these silly generalizations can go on ad infinitum and we end up with every concept A describes any situation B.

It reminds me of what happens to the numbers if we allow for 2 + 2 = 5 to be true. Effectively 1 will end up being equal to 0, and since every number multiplied by 1 is it self, and every number multiplied by 0 is 0, we end up with all numbers being equal to 0. Effectively rendering them useless.

I think the one of the big things that makes things political is coercion. If you are using the power of the state to advance a controversial goal then it is political.

Take for example how we got to religious freedom. In the past, if you were the wrong religion, you would be tortured and executed.

In a lot of places, this led to horrendous religious wars where literally millions of people died. In the end, we ended up with freedom of religion as a compromise. The state would no longer compel you to choose a religion.

Of course each religion thought they were right and the others were wrong. But they stopped using the power of the state to compel conversions. They would still proselytize and try to persuade other people to join their faith, but they stopped trying to use the power of the state to compel people. After that, religion became a lot more apolitical.

Sometimes begin apoliticial means you don't think it is worth using the power of the state to change the status quo. You may be against the status quo, and think debate or persuasion is more effective.

In addition, reference to the status quo in the quote is simplistic. A lot of times the status quo is like an armistice line between two warring sides. Many times the status quo includes things you are for and things you are against. Maybe the way the status quo is right now, the benefit of the things you are for, is greater than the burden of the things you are against. If you try to change the status quo, you may end up destabilizing the status quo so much, that when the new equilibrium is reached, you end up losing some of things you were for.

Or being apolitical just means you don’t have time or inclination to obsess about the political origins and implications of every atomic micro-decision in your day because doing so is a tremendously tedious and unproductive burden that frequently yields no meaningful insight or behavior change. Not every one needs to be an activist about every thing.

If a person feels strongly about some special political cause, fantastic, they ought to make their case convincingly. But the idea of castigating others for not putting in the time or enthusiasm to share their superior moral clarity is exhausting.

I generally agree. It's impossible to have a knowledgable position on every single issue, and a full-time job to have a position on whatever is popular in a given week. The end result is that on most issues, most of us default to the status quo, because, well, that's how the status quo works. It's literally the default until enough people care to change it.

In other words, "you don’t have time or inclination to obsess about the political origins and implications of every atomic micro-decision in your day because doing so is a tremendously tedious and unproductive burden that frequently yields no meaningful insight or behavior change" is a lot of words to say that you support the status quo.

I think everybody does, on issues that aren't important to them.

Semantics, but I view “support” as an active measure.

There are loads of issues folks are just not engaged with enough to have a qualified opinion (their perspective not mine), which is fine. I view that as living in the status quo but not necessarily evidence of endorsing the status quo.

For instance, do we really expect your average citizen (American in this case) to have a thought out POV on qualified immunity? Policing tactics? Effective tactics to address diversity in the workplace? Herd immunity? Actuarial risk assessment of economic activity during the pandemic? If not are they supporting the status quo?

I think most people just shrug and I don’t blame them. Processing information in the era of the death of expertise has made even having an opinion right now an absolute hellscape.

Being apolitical is not a synonym to avoiding activism.

Also - being apolitical is a political stance, in itself.

You're equivocating on the word "support". Actively supporting whoever is currently in power is not the same as not caring enough to bother or being on the fence as to which side to support.

Disagree. Often there is simply no option for practical policy choices, in the USA at least.

I tire of centrists, among chaos, claiming everything is being politicized.

I'm sorry - once in a while bad things happen and a choice must be made.

A centrist isn't always someone who's avoiding working on problems or avoiding decisions. A centrist can be someone who believes that different people see different parts of various problems and that solutions can come from people who aren't subscribed to a set political party.

That's not a centrist view, that's an independent view.

See! Even the definition of a centrist is political!

Centrists see themselves as imminently reasonable, sure. But virtually everyone believes "that different people see different parts of various problems and that solutions can come from people who aren't subscribed to a set political party." It's not a defining characteristic of centrists, it's a a defining characteristic of people who think of themselves as reasonable. IMO, the defining characteristic of centrists is that they think that they're the only reasonable ones and that everyone else is an ideologue.

At their worst, sure. At their best, it's someone who aspires to remain "centered" in their analysis, without letting it lead to arrogance over others.

Honestly, I think some people just want a break. And I can both respect that AND firmly believe that if a musician, for example, wants to make a comment on current events as part of their performance, they absolutely should.

I've been told that "taking a neutral position, when privileged, is unethical."

(I understand the postmodern thrust here, and I actually to some degree agree with it, but at the limit this completely obliterates any pretense of objectivity - even within science.)

Isn't centrism more a matter of compromise than neutrality?

Centrism is - I want it all position. Donald Trump is practically a centrist.

I don't think you understand the point of centrists.

Centrists agree that choices need to be made. Centrists think that some of those choices should go in one direction, some in the other, and most in a direction not presented by either side. Centrists believe in logic, discourse, and evidence to get to choices, over ideology. Centrists believe in looking for solutions which work for everyone when possible. Etc.

Everyone hates centrists, since if you disagree on charters OR abortion OR charters OR race OR police OR .... with someone on the left or on the right, they think you're a horrible person. You'll always disagree on at least one axis.

IMHO that’s usually just a platitude - got an example?

Sure.

Charter schools: They work great with proper checks-and-balances. They should be not-for-profits, follow extensive transparency laws, have salary caps, and strong civil rights protections. They should compete with public schools without restrictions beyond that. If public schools go under because of better competitors, more power to them!

Medicine: Works great pure free market. Works great purely nationalized. What we don't want is a complex network of regulations from lobbyists combined with mandatory insurance (whether by government regulation or by practicality). Both the far-right and the far-left solutions would work great! We've landed in a no-man's land in between.

Gun control: It's a reasonable policy, but rule-of-law should prevail. We've got a Constitution for a reason, and we should follow it, even if it feels unreasonable. If we disagree, we should amend it.

Race: The left is correct about most of the problems, and bonkers about most of the solutions. We need to have an open national discourse about changes, and to do that, we need free speech and to get rid of cancel culture. The left's oppression of free speech contributes to the systemic oppression they're trying to eliminate.

... and so on.

You don't need to agree with the above, but they're strong, principled stances, agreeing with neither side.

I’m not sure those are centrist positions. On the first one, I disagree with you on the science. On the second, you explicitly pointed put why centrism is bad (and with important qualifications, I sort of agree with the point you were making there). With respect to guns... meh that might be centrist, but it’s not really specific enough to base actual policy and constitutional law on - the history is also much more complex than you imply. With respect to race, I’d suggest you’re painting with an absurdly broad brush that doesn’t reflect the actual ideological spectrum.

In my opinion, trying to be “centrist” is more of an aesthetic choice than actually related to ideology.

What I will give you is that any community where honest discussion of actual, specific issues is impossible is toxic... but in practice I see that critique most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs.

1) You don't need to agree.

2) Each of those is an essay or two to justify. Of course they're not specific. This isn't a political essay. I'm giving examples -- enough to understand the gist, not the nuance.

3) In modern America, all of these views piss everyone off -- left AND right. If you articulate most of them, you'll get fired WHOEVER your boss is AND uninvited to the family dinner.

That this "critique [is] most often wielded by dishonest provocateurs" is precisely because everyone else is afraid to speak. In a functioning civic society, we'd have many opinions like the ones above, and we'd all discuss them and work towards the best solutions. I've found that the best solution to "dishonest provocateurs" is still to assume the best intentions until shown otherwise.

1. I know, I also don’t think its meaningfully “centrist”.

2. Not sure what your point is here - you originally pointed out why either right or left solutions would be good, but the compromise is bad.

3. I don’t think that’s true - believe it or not it is still possible to discuss actual issues. I certainly do, with people who disagree with me.

So... there are a few positions on which you might be a “moderate”, but I don’t see any argument actually presented for why centrist solutions are preferable to those backed up by an actual ideological goal.

I think you define "centrist" differently than I do.

Your definition seems to be "split the left-and-right down the middle." That's not the one I've heard or used.

That's okay; words are used differently in different places, but I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing as much as initial posts suggested. Most people I know who consider themselves "centrists" hold a mixture of left-wing and right-wing views. They don't just find the median opinions.

I think what you call "centrist," where I live would be called a "moderate."

None of this is strong or principled. What's the principle?

* Charter schools: Politicians create charter school setups that don't have proper checks and balances and tend to completely shirk their responsibility to public schools in the process. Your statement isn't some fringe idea. It's just not why charter schools are pushed. If you take a look at what happens with charter schools you'd see why people get divided on them. We aren't presented with a rational system. We're presented with a system that gets hijacked to push religious schools and/or defund public schools without.

* Medicine: "Works great pure free market." - Citation Needed. No one will give us your far left solution.

* Gun control: In case you haven't noticed, we aren't allowed to question it. We aren't even allowed to study it. This game is rigged.

* Race: How does cancel culture play into this? I'm not allowed to find a different Applebees if the manager is a racist? "The left's oppression of free speech" - do tell.

Many poor countries have free market medicine: the number of medical providers is not constrained by a guild system; new drugs and medical procedures are regulated lightly if at all; pricing is completely transparent; patients can choose their standard of care, and there is extensive unbundling (e.g. a surgeon gives you a recommended list of supplies, and you have the option to obtain them yourself in any way you wish); non-emergency procedures must be paid for in cash in advance (which tends to result in prices being reasonable); the very poor rely on charities or an extremely basic state-funded backstop.

Such systems are surprisingly efficient and often seem to work better than the lawyer- and lobbyist-designed mess of American healthcare.

This reads a lot like "My very-conservative positions are centrist."

I don't think you'd find very many people willing to agree those positions are centrist.

Which is fine. Your positions are your positions, and obviously you hold them because you think them to be reasonable. But "centrist?" I don't think so.

You're both applying a wildly subjective label whose meaning nobody can agree on. I happen to think (as a relatively centrist American living on the West Coast) that those opinions are indeed "centrist". They might count as "very conservative" in the part of the country I live in, but in many other parts they would be distinctly "liberal" (another word whose meaning has been utterly scrambled).

In general I think there's a tendency for politically engaged people to put "views I disagree with" in the "other" bin, and everyone defines "extreme" and "center" to reflect their particular idea of what the sane, morally correct opinion is. There were plenty of people on the left who seemed to think Warren (for example) was a centrist neoliberal sellout.

This is exactly it. Every conservative I speak with thinks I'm Joseph Stalin, and every liberal thinks I'm Adolf Hitler. I've stopped talking to people about these things.

What's amazing about it is you can voice disagreement in just one place, and you're either a liberal snowflake or a Trump-supporting racist. It doesn't seem to matter which place you disagree, or whether your disagreement falls on the other side of the political spectrum.

What terrifies me even more is when the same tribalism leads people on either side to start reflexively defending their entire "side" - thus the right-wing fondness for Pinochet or Franco, or the left-wing fondness for Castro or Maduro (just to cherry-pick some examples). Sooner or later you just end up delegitimizing liberal democracy altogether (which I'm sure is the entire point, for some).

> "Medicine: Works great pure free market. Works great purely nationalized. What we don't want is a complex network of regulations from lobbyists combined with mandatory insurance (whether by government regulation or by practicality). Both the far-right and the far-left solutions would work great! We've landed in a no-man's land in between."

I don't think the far-right solution ever worked great. ACA is far from perfect, but it is saving lives. But the problem with US health insurance goes far deeper than merely how you pay for it and who gets access to it; the entire system is run in a very non-transparent way in order to maximise profits. The goal of the current system is still profit, not healing people, and that's where it goes wrong.

It's good that you mention mandatory insurance by practicality, because that's really the case: only very rich people can pay medical costs out of pocket; to most people, medical costs are a life or death issue, so it can never be a truly free market. A healthy-in-between system would be private insurance in a strongly regulated system; this works in a lot of countries. It's the lawless free-for-all where it's fine to screw or misinform patients for profit, that doesn't work.

My primary "centrist" issue is probably abortion: in the US the discussion seems to be all-or-nothing: either all abortion is legal or all abortion is banned, no matter what. A sensible compromise would be to allow early term abortions (first trimester miscarriages are extremely common, the embryo is still in an early stage of development), while strongly regulating late term abortions (they're already rare, and are only necessary for extreme medical problems). Abortion as an alternative to contraception can be made unnecessary through better sex ed and better access to contraceptives.

Independents are all over the map ideologically: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-moderate-middle-is-...

People over-estimate the degree to which our political parties represent an inherently consistent set of policy ideas. For example, social liberalism and being pro-immigration are intertwined in the US. But the socially liberal women prime ministers of Denmark and New Zealand are also anti-immigration. About 1 in 6 Democrats believe abortion should nearly always be illegal. African Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, have a similar split to Republicans when it comes to same-sex marriage and whether belief in God is a necessary prerequisite to morality.

The political parties are a compromise amongst groups of people with heterodox views. They’re not something that ideologically must be bundled together.

That's probably more true of the Democratic party, which is in fact a coalition of several large and somewhat disparate blocks (in particular, the black vote, which strategically prefers the concentrated vote over the most ideologically representative one --- Ismail White's book on this is pretty interesting). I don't think there are comparable forces in the Republican party --- though there were before the "ideological sort".

There are at least two significant and distinct forces in the Republican Party: pro-business and free enterprise people, and (mostly religious) social conservatives. You can find more if you look carefully — by no means Republican Party is a monolith.

Yes, there are two different kinds of white people that constitute the majority of the Republican party.

(I'm not trying to be overly snarky here.)

Sorry, what do you mean? In the comment above, you said “I don't think there are comparable forces in the Republican party”, and now you admit that there are. I am very confused by what you are trying to convey.

The two factions you're referring to are not meaningfully opposed. That's not true of the Democratic labor, black, urban liberal and latino coalition.

They’re not at odds in the same way as Democratic subgroups, but they are meaningfully in conflict and the divisions are growing bigger. Social conservatives, in general, would be willing to give a lot more on economic/regulatory issues, in order to make meaningful progress on social issues. Indeed, many chafe are the restrictions of a small-government platform that limits government power to shape society. Pro-business conservatives, by contrast, are wedded to limited government. And they see social conservative positions as a liability in a modern corporate climate. (Issues like immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage are why many Wall Street types have switched to the Democratic Party in recent years.)

I saw a remarkable illustration of this at a conservative event where a panel was discussing Bostock before the case was decided. The room was evenly divided, but with very strong opinions on both sides. There is a seed of a real conflict there. Textualism isn’t a robust foundation for the kind of broad structural changes social conservatives want. You need the conservative counterparts to liberal judges, who seek to vindicate broader principles gleaned from the law (except here to conservative ends).

Thanks for the book recommendation! Within the Republican Party, there is less in the way of groups with diametrically opposed views. But Republicans also have fairly heterodox positions on individual issues. The party contains nearly everyone that has a broad view of the second amendment, but a third want stricter gun laws. The party contains nearly everyone that wants to overturn Roe but the majority do not. Republicans contain nearly all the super anti-tax people, but half want to raise taxes on those making above $10 million. About half of republicans support same sex marriage (while 1:6 Democrats oppose it).

In terms of larger ideology, a schism is brewing between social conservatives, nationalists, and pro-business conservatives, with Trumpism versus anti-Trumpism cutting across all those groups. (As you recall, while Republicans supported him, most wanted someone else in the primaries initially.) The differences are less extreme than in the Democratic Party—where you have Marxists and 2/3 of Wall Street under the same tent—but they divisions are growing.

Both parties are mostly groups of "single issue voters".

How do you think a gay man is able to talk at RNC and them having "gay cure" support in their platform? Because when you put all of the different positions in one document - they tend to contradict the majority's views. (Outright ban on abortion is supported only by a third of republicans! SSM ban is also supported by a third.)

Independents are more liberal on the topic of abortion than democrats...

That's part of why I think "centrist" just isn't a very useful label.

A centrist appreciates balance and pragmatism, also realizes no-compromise extremists are part of the problem.

You've just summed up why being a moderate is such a miserable experience for most of us. These days, being a moderate isn't being in the middle on everything. Instead, being a moderate means that someone can't infer my position on gun control based on my position on universal health care. Because I'm not enough of an ideologue to have a consistently predictable menu of choices based on the tribe I find more affinity with, I'm always the bad guy for different reasons depending on the tribe I'm around.

Exactly, and you're not allowed to have a nuanced view on controversial issues.

Nowadays I define my moderation as "somewhere between the libertarians and the democratic socialists", which of course would make me completely unacceptable to either of those groups.

I don’t understand why is it so unusual to simply judge each issue according to your individual reason, morals and the best data you can find, but I also lack a lot of group joining instinct. Apparently both sides prefer loyalty to being right. I’ve been wearing masks since February and have at various times run afoul of both sides as they politicized the issue differently as time went by.

The point is that choices should be made about singular policy items.

Random example: I should be able to argue for second amendment rights with out buying into isolationist trade policies. The way things are right now the two come bundled together and legislative votes are based on partisanship, not policy.

Nowaday political views are a lifestyle.

What choice are you referring to?

Centrists tend to be more pragmatic and prefer approaches that work, while those on the left and right are more ideological, and wish to conform the world to their ideas, regardless of the cost or feasibility. And anyone who disagrees is treated as a heretic, as if one side has the truth concerning the messy complexity of social reality.

IMHE, centrists generally have a self-image of pragmatism, but are as ideologically driven as any other group.

So, "silence is complicity"? That's pretty accusatory and offputting.

But of course this debate has been going on a long time. And maybe yours are the more recent words echoing a past hero's opinion.

In the words of MLK:

"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection...."

I suppose it depends on whether you see current ills of society as at the level of segregation and outright violence against peoples (and need street-level action and peaceful revolution immediately), or more subtle things that affect everyone, like rich-vs-poor class differences growing (and are things to be solved through our deliberative political process).

But back to the point, the problem with shouting down anyone who doesn't agree with you and/or labeling people who are not 100% on board with you as the hidden "enemy", is that you will later find out you weren't winning as much as you thought based on the silence. And some of that silent segment will find they can only express themselves when standing alone, safe in the voting booth, and you get a result like we have had for the last couple years. Worse, those that could've joined your side are put off by the aggression and withhold their vote for you.

I don’t think King was arguing silence is violence. His argument was against those actively telling black people to wait, to tone things down, etc.

> So, "silence is complicity"? That's pretty accusatory and offputting.

Yeah people don't like facing their complicity with the horror of the world, especially since it's not at all obvious how to fix it. It can feel like (and can actually be) pointless self-flagellation.

But it's not incorrect.

Being a centrist isn't about avoiding change or believing in the status quo.

It's about making changes based on rationality rather than emotion and ideology.

Or perhaps, I just hate both sides? I can't stand the crazy right wingers who think climate change is a hoax, that masks oppress people, etc. I can't stand left wingers who virtue signal constantly and call me x-phobic or x-ist for not agreeing with something. So yes, I'm apolitical because I truly hate both sides anymore. I think of it as polarization to the point of pushing people like me aside.

And I tire of Twitter - the agent of that chaos - insisting I must always be "on," having a political position on everything all the time, and always ready to rally around wrong-doing.

This is inhuman. I cannot always be on - I am not a machine. I cannot be useful to anyone when I am torn into anxious shreds by knowing about everything that is wrong in the world all at once. Our brains were built for knowing what's "bad" on a local level - not on a global, ~7.8 billion people level. It is inhuman for you to insist that I jump at the bit every time "bad things happen."

I can only choose to pick certain hills which are most important to me, and I will die on them. You choose your things - you are welcome to die on them, too. Do not shame people for trying to survive this chaos that is bad enough with the world's population's problems, and amplified through social network's outrage machines that benefit from any (but especially psychologically traumatic) "engagement."

It's 100% okay to not be completely informed on an issue! If anyone is accosting you for that, then that's not okay or constructive. I'm not asking any more than that you be understanding that when our freedoms are under attack, ie currently, you are willing to make a choice and not complain because a lot is at stake.

What I do for joy on Twitter, when a mind-reader has (yet again) ascribed strange opinions or motives to me, is sincerely forgive them for their behavior.

Try it out. Stops a troll cold.

One could argue the point of inflection was here:

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

https://youtu.be/KrefKCaV8m4

As a centrist I'm not completely apathetic to all politics and I have some strongly held viewpoints, even if they are moderate. So I'm not sure why you're tired of centrists. Centrists understand there's nuance in everything, and leaning too heavily in either direction can be unhealthy.

I will say I also don't care for the daily discourse and politicization of everything.

"The left will ruin you.."

I've never ruined anyone

Those are the very kind of toxic comments we need to get away from

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