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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.
by pwinnski 6y ago
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.
- natechols 6y agoYou'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.
- woofie11 6y agoThis 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.
- natechols 6y agoWhat 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).
- GoodJokes 6y agoHm, i Doth say the fragile man might be insecure
- orangecat 6y agoI don't think you'd find very many people willing to agree those positions are centrist. They are. You seem to be in a bubble where the range of acceptable opinion goes from Stalin on the far left to Hillary Clinton on the far right.
- pwinnski 6y agoI live in Texas. The list of more-conservative areas in this country is very small. I am surrounded by conservatives, and these views are very common among right-wingers. Pro-charter schools, free market medicine, 2nd amendment over all, free speech and "cancel culture" as prime issues of race -- these are generally in line with conservative positions, and very, very far from liberal positions. And again, as I said, that's fine! I'm not disagreeing with the positions, I'm just saying that claiming to be "centrist' doesn't actually make you centrist. Most people aren't far-right nor far-left. Most people, knowingly or unknowingly, adopt positions from each side. Holding both right-wing and left-wing views doesn't make one centrist, it makes one independent, and I think most people are in this category.
- pwinnski 6y agoThis dismissal is both factually very far from correct, and, I think, an example of the toxic partisanship that is too common on the internet.