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The elephant in the room is that this sort of enlightened centrism, while it sounds noble, rests on several ill-formed assumptions. The first is that, by readi

The elephant in the room is that this sort of enlightened centrism, while it sounds noble, rests on several ill-formed assumptions. The first is that, by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. This assumes the Overton Window is balanced, stationary, and not tilted to one side or the other. You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further left or right. Another is that the opposing content can actually be merged. In many cases the content will cover different pieces of the same broad issue. Or the interviewees will present their opinions in a completely different fashion. Up to you to carry all this context in your head, or make simplistic summaries of viewpoints that don’t add much value beyond what is already commonly known. The third assumption is that being at the center or having this detachment from either side is a political position in and of itself. I think it’s too simplistic to say you’ll be the net sum of whatever each side puts out, but you’re taking a position all the same. You’re not obligated to give equal credence to the opposing side on a number of issues. At best it will make you more detached from politics over time, splitting hairs over policy stances at the voting booth instead of more impactful grassroots political action.

mseidl 5y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/ For some funny times.
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  Why post this left wing talking point narrative here? What does it add to conversation?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  Replace "funny times" with "endless straw men" and you are spot on.
anm89 5y ago
Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than that. That enlightened centrism subreddit listed below is up there with the most toxic sub reddits I've seen on reddit where people "dunk" on the idea that anyone would be so brave to have the gall not to conform precisely with progressive rhetoric on anything. It somehow seems like some of these people are more offended with the center than the other side. Anyway yeah, I'm a centrist and it's not because I'm trying to be neutral, it's because both sides are terrifying cesspools the further you get to their extremes and the best outcome for partisan politics is to give either of those groups as little power as possible. It's not some abstract goal of evenly seeing both sides on the issues.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Agreed. The center is the glue the holds the populace in check. We need these people. Once the center is eroded things will not go well.
  - anm89 5y ago
    Here's an interesting article from a great blog that tries to use a game theory perspective to quantify your belief and makes a really interesting argument in agreement with you: https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/
  - kthulutude 5y ago
    Once the center is eroded things will not go well... for centrists. The idea that both 'extremes' are equivalently bad neglects the real differences in worldview that create a sense of political urgency. It's important to remember that this political urgency is a reflection of real social problems--for some people, the consequences are literally life and death.
Ajedi32 5y ago
I don't think this article is necessarily arguing for centrism. Being able to understand the perspective of all sides of an issue doesn't mean your own views will necessarily fall directly in the "middle" of those perspectives. It probably does mean, however, that you're less likely to demonize those who disagree with you.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  There are no sides, and certainly not just 2 positions to have on issues. The rest of the world is a lot less binary than US politics as well. I live in China and I smirk painfully at people in a biparty telling us our monoparty is oppressive and reduce variation of solution (having only 2 mutually exclusive choices is not twice as good as only one, it's like 10% better if you consider there are 10 choices of solutions). I vote for French elections and the choices are much more nuanced. Hell our president could only be described to an American as centrist when he's a lot more than the synthesis of socialism and conservatism.
  - Ajedi32 5y ago
    You'll notice I said all sides, not "both". That was intentional. As you say, there are often more than two sides to any one issue, and a near-infinite number of different perspectives once you start considering more than one issue at a time. For what it's worth, the US actually does have more than two political parties. It's just that our first-past-the-post election system ensures only two of them are able to effectively compete on the national stage at a given time.
BryantD 5y ago
First and foremost: I agree with you on all counts regarding enlightened centrism. Second: I think there's some value to increasing awareness of counter-arguments. I do not believe that good discourse inevitably drives out bad, but I do think there are practical advantages when people I agree with understand opposing arguments, and I think some percentage of people I disagree with will think twice if they know more. (Yeah, you can figure out which are which from my comment history, but I like a good Rawlsian veil of ignorance.) There is definitely a line between "all sides are of equal value" and "this is what the different sides are saying." It's a difficult one to draw. The stated intent of Ground News seems quite good, for example.
chmod600 5y ago
You don't need to give equal credence, but you do need a source of facts that is not cherry-picked. Polarization leads to cherry-picking, so the only way to get facts that might falsify (or complicate) narratives is to seek out adversarial sources with their own (but different) biases.
lumost 5y ago
In practice there are three possible outcomes for resolving differences between large groups of people. 1) Some negotiated middle between viewpoints 2) Some converged position based on a winning argument. 3) War If viewpoints remain diverged for a sufficiently long period, 3 is almost inevitable. Understanding the different sides helps lead to either 1 or 2. My ask with family members who are on the other side of recent issues has always been to broaden their news/media consumption. Reading the other sides media has given me insight into why they feel the way they feel, even if I don't believe the feeling is valid.
wallacoloo 5y ago
> Another is that the opposing content can actually be merged. In many cases the content will cover different pieces of the same broad issue. Or the interviewees will present their opinions in a completely different fashion. Up to you to carry all this context in your head, or make simplistic summaries of viewpoints that don’t add much value beyond what is already commonly known. If differently aligned parties cover different sections of a broad issue, then aren’t you gaining more knowledge by listening to more varied sources? V.s. listening to just one political angle that would give you only a narrow slice of reality. Also, what is “commonly known”? I personally have found when taking in 3-4 different sources that the amount of common knowledge is vanishingly small! How many of the pro covid lockdown group know anything about the death rate for your age group? Or knew accurate ratios of outdoor v.s. indoor spread? How many of the anti-lockdown group knew these things? There’s a lot of things which should be common knowledge that really aren’t. You can combat some of this by reading “both sides”. But if you’re doing that, doesn’t it sort of mean that you trust neither of your sources? Aren’t you doing extra overhead to sort out where each side is wrong/lying? Seems better to just find a source that you trust instead.
rayiner 5y ago
No, those aren’t the assumptions at all. The assumption is not that “the truth is likely to lie between the two poles” but rather that, in a democracy, you have to pay attention to what the other half of the country thinks. Democracy isn’t about “finding the truth.” It’s not really even about “truth” anyway. Most disputes are about differing moral judgments not disagreements about facts. For example, liberals I’ve talked to are often a bit surprised to learn that a fetus stops being “just a bundle of cells” very soon, and by 12-13 weeks has all its parts, a face, etc. That doesn’t cause them to go “oh, now my view of abortion is totally the opposite!” Views on what stage of development entitled a human to a right to life isn’t about truth finding, it’s about differing moral judgments. In a democracy, the most important thing is accommodating those disparate world views so we can live together productively.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  > it’s about differing moral judgments I submit that it's less about moral judgements--no one comes out in favor of, say, chattel slavery--than it is about controlling people via cognitive dissonance[1]. After a life-altering act, e.g. aborting a pregnancy, or having a gender reassignment surgery, it is cheaper for the mind to fall in with a re-enforcement group than to realize the decision was wrong. Not to judge these wrong calls as worse than my own wrong calls. Merely being descriptive. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
jjj1232 5y ago
I mostly agree with you but I think it’s interesting that you make an additional assumption that I think is incorrect: You say "You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further left or right.” Which misses another possibility: that the overton window can shift when one side moves further to the center. The democrats’ economic stances are a good example of this: they've moved towards neoliberal economic policy since the 80s, to the point where the democrats and republicans have a materially indistinguishable stance on unions, workers rights, public benefits, Wall Street, etc. This may seem like nit-picking but I think it’s important to clarify that some policies that lie outside the overton window are “extreme” because those in power want them to seem extreme, not because they are actually unpopular or unrealistic. This may be wrong, but when I think of centrists I think of people who decide where they stand on each policy on a spectrum that extends from what the Dems deem acceptable to what the Republicans deem acceptable. If you’re someone who decides where they stand on an issue regardless of these arbitrary endpoints I think “independent” or “non-partisan” fits better.
amoorthy 5y ago
This is incorrect. Our readership at The Factual is polled every day on trending questions and results show that they do not fall along party lines consistently. The same person often agrees with different sides on different issues. (Our polls often match up to national polls like Pew and Gallup so they may be representative of the US though we do not ask demographic information to prove this). Moreover, research shows that reading different sides, when they are both presented in an informative fashion, helps people appreciate different viewpoints if not change it at times. It's only when viewpoints are presented with highly inflammatory language that we tend to dig into our pre-existing beliefs. This isn't about finding some mythical center. People are often curious why people have different viewpoints. Indeed, I think this is a big reason why comment sections like HN work so well. The net effect likely is one of moderation in one's beliefs, which seems like a good thing overall.
xwolfi 5y ago
Credence isn't required to be neutral in the center. I vote center in my country (France) which I also disagree with should call center because it gives this impression to be at a border of two "sides" of the population but whatever. I can understand what's credible or not on both sides but what matters to be is WHY they believe these positions. I don't want to synthetise them as much as I want these people to either stop suffering or stop believing they suffer. So I vote not for more socialism or more traditionalism, but to remove the need for tradition while lowering the grouping effect of socialism. It is obviously a position in itself to reject the left or right visions of a path forward. Your mistake maybe is that there are two sides to a political spectrum while there are many dimensions to the political hypercube.
zeruch 5y ago
I don think that is what it purports to do, or likely will end up doing. It might result in people seeing how much common aspects a story has, and that helps to divorce the factual aspects from the editorialization. Maybe. It might result in a broader intake of facts (if both/either side is being selective). It might result in a litany of things better than the binary dung-hosing we have now. If the worst that happens is people attempt to be less binary, I'd still consider that a small victory. Being centrist is not inherently bad either, it just is. The only concern there I would have would be if one intentionally tries to triangulate towards a middle, as opposed to arriving there naturally. It's what Paul Graham referred to as an "accidental moderate" versus and intentional one. http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
eli_gottlieb 5y ago
>The first is that, by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. This assumes the Overton Window is balanced, stationary, and not tilted to one side or the other. You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further left or right. Or, alternatively, and I think this will be a rather more accurate description of most centrists, it means that the partisan axis doesn't really describe any "principal component" of variation in people's actual opinions. Indeed, this is broadly what political scientists find, IIRC: very few people hold the opinion "we should do as little as possible", but many people hold an opinion on one issue that gets them classed as "left-wing" and an opinion on another issue that gets them classed as "right-wing" -- and see no real contradiction between the two.
soheil 5y ago
1. Your view that there are only two sides is too simplistic. To be in the center doesn't mean you're in a 1-dimensional line you could be on a 2D circle or worse n-dimensional space where there are several competing and opposing views on many different orthogonal axes. To be in the center means not to become beholden to one political view and on one side of a very specific axis. 2. Whether or not opposing content can be merged is irrelevant if there are many different ways of thinking about a topic than a simple binary right or wrong. Often reasoning from first principles yields vastly different results if slight changes are made up and along the chain of reasoning. And different people can have vastly diverging points of view even though they did their own thinking. Therefore to be in the center simply means not to drink the Kool-Aid the latest politician is selling. 3. I think you could reasonably argue being in the center is itself a valid political position if you agree that, again, there are more than two sides. If there are many more viewpoints some not even discussed by current politicians why must everyone pick a side that is currently most fashionable? To be in the center doesn't mean you'll be the net sum of each side, it means you have your own opinion and do not necessarily buy into the narrative that is being sold by either political parties.
paulddraper 5y ago
> ill-formed assumption...by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. Not at all. 1. The assumption is that reading from multiple sides, you'll arrive at the enlightened position, center or otherwise. This is the same assumption as in a courtroom. The idea isn't that the prosecution and the defense are both equally valid positions. (They don't.) The idea is that vigorous argument will yield the truth. 2. There's a lot of news that isn't necessarily "a side" but that you'd miss from a monotonous diet. For example, in Jan 2020 I watched some Tucker Carlson episodes on Fox News. At the time the news media was overwhelmingly focused on Trump's first impeachment, but Carlson chose to cover this new "Chinese coronavirus." I want to know what's going on in the world and it's absurd to think one particular source covers it all, even it wanted to.

mseidl 5y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/ For some funny times.

Dma54rhs 5y ago
Why post this left wing talking point narrative here? What does it add to conversation?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bart_spoon 5y ago
Replace "funny times" with "endless straw men" and you are spot on.

anm89 5y ago

Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than that. That enlightened centrism subreddit listed below is up there with the most toxic sub reddits I've seen on reddit where people "dunk" on the idea that anyone would be so brave to have the gall not to conform precisely with progressive rhetoric on anything. It somehow seems like some of these people are more offended with the center than the other side. Anyway yeah, I'm a centrist and it's not because I'm trying to be neutral, it's because both sides are terrifying cesspools the further you get to their extremes and the best outcome for partisan politics is to give either of those groups as little power as possible. It's not some abstract goal of evenly seeing both sides on the issues.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Agreed. The center is the glue the holds the populace in check. We need these people. Once the center is eroded things will not go well.
- anm89 5y ago
  Here's an interesting article from a great blog that tries to use a game theory perspective to quantify your belief and makes a really interesting argument in agreement with you: https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/
- kthulutude 5y ago
  Once the center is eroded things will not go well... for centrists. The idea that both 'extremes' are equivalently bad neglects the real differences in worldview that create a sense of political urgency. It's important to remember that this political urgency is a reflection of real social problems--for some people, the consequences are literally life and death.

Ajedi32 5y ago

I don't think this article is necessarily arguing for centrism. Being able to understand the perspective of all sides of an issue doesn't mean your own views will necessarily fall directly in the "middle" of those perspectives. It probably does mean, however, that you're less likely to demonize those who disagree with you.

xwolfi 5y ago
There are no sides, and certainly not just 2 positions to have on issues. The rest of the world is a lot less binary than US politics as well. I live in China and I smirk painfully at people in a biparty telling us our monoparty is oppressive and reduce variation of solution (having only 2 mutually exclusive choices is not twice as good as only one, it's like 10% better if you consider there are 10 choices of solutions). I vote for French elections and the choices are much more nuanced. Hell our president could only be described to an American as centrist when he's a lot more than the synthesis of socialism and conservatism.
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  You'll notice I said all sides, not "both". That was intentional. As you say, there are often more than two sides to any one issue, and a near-infinite number of different perspectives once you start considering more than one issue at a time. For what it's worth, the US actually does have more than two political parties. It's just that our first-past-the-post election system ensures only two of them are able to effectively compete on the national stage at a given time.

BryantD 5y ago

First and foremost: I agree with you on all counts regarding enlightened centrism. Second: I think there's some value to increasing awareness of counter-arguments. I do not believe that good discourse inevitably drives out bad, but I do think there are practical advantages when people I agree with understand opposing arguments, and I think some percentage of people I disagree with will think twice if they know more. (Yeah, you can figure out which are which from my comment history, but I like a good Rawlsian veil of ignorance.) There is definitely a line between "all sides are of equal value" and "this is what the different sides are saying." It's a difficult one to draw. The stated intent of Ground News seems quite good, for example.

chmod600 5y ago

You don't need to give equal credence, but you do need a source of facts that is not cherry-picked. Polarization leads to cherry-picking, so the only way to get facts that might falsify (or complicate) narratives is to seek out adversarial sources with their own (but different) biases.

lumost 5y ago

In practice there are three possible outcomes for resolving differences between large groups of people. 1) Some negotiated middle between viewpoints 2) Some converged position based on a winning argument. 3) War If viewpoints remain diverged for a sufficiently long period, 3 is almost inevitable. Understanding the different sides helps lead to either 1 or 2. My ask with family members who are on the other side of recent issues has always been to broaden their news/media consumption. Reading the other sides media has given me insight into why they feel the way they feel, even if I don't believe the feeling is valid.

wallacoloo 5y ago

> Another is that the opposing content can actually be merged. In many cases the content will cover different pieces of the same broad issue. Or the interviewees will present their opinions in a completely different fashion. Up to you to carry all this context in your head, or make simplistic summaries of viewpoints that don’t add much value beyond what is already commonly known. If differently aligned parties cover different sections of a broad issue, then aren’t you gaining more knowledge by listening to more varied sources? V.s. listening to just one political angle that would give you only a narrow slice of reality. Also, what is “commonly known”? I personally have found when taking in 3-4 different sources that the amount of common knowledge is vanishingly small! How many of the pro covid lockdown group know anything about the death rate for your age group? Or knew accurate ratios of outdoor v.s. indoor spread? How many of the anti-lockdown group knew these things? There’s a lot of things which should be common knowledge that really aren’t. You can combat some of this by reading “both sides”. But if you’re doing that, doesn’t it sort of mean that you trust neither of your sources? Aren’t you doing extra overhead to sort out where each side is wrong/lying? Seems better to just find a source that you trust instead.

rayiner 5y ago

No, those aren’t the assumptions at all. The assumption is not that “the truth is likely to lie between the two poles” but rather that, in a democracy, you have to pay attention to what the other half of the country thinks. Democracy isn’t about “finding the truth.” It’s not really even about “truth” anyway. Most disputes are about differing moral judgments not disagreements about facts. For example, liberals I’ve talked to are often a bit surprised to learn that a fetus stops being “just a bundle of cells” very soon, and by 12-13 weeks has all its parts, a face, etc. That doesn’t cause them to go “oh, now my view of abortion is totally the opposite!” Views on what stage of development entitled a human to a right to life isn’t about truth finding, it’s about differing moral judgments. In a democracy, the most important thing is accommodating those disparate world views so we can live together productively.

smitty1e 5y ago
> it’s about differing moral judgments I submit that it's less about moral judgements--no one comes out in favor of, say, chattel slavery--than it is about controlling people via cognitive dissonance[1]. After a life-altering act, e.g. aborting a pregnancy, or having a gender reassignment surgery, it is cheaper for the mind to fall in with a re-enforcement group than to realize the decision was wrong. Not to judge these wrong calls as worse than my own wrong calls. Merely being descriptive. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

jjj1232 5y ago

I mostly agree with you but I think it’s interesting that you make an additional assumption that I think is incorrect: You say "You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further left or right.” Which misses another possibility: that the overton window can shift when one side moves further to the center. The democrats’ economic stances are a good example of this: they've moved towards neoliberal economic policy since the 80s, to the point where the democrats and republicans have a materially indistinguishable stance on unions, workers rights, public benefits, Wall Street, etc. This may seem like nit-picking but I think it’s important to clarify that some policies that lie outside the overton window are “extreme” because those in power want them to seem extreme, not because they are actually unpopular or unrealistic. This may be wrong, but when I think of centrists I think of people who decide where they stand on each policy on a spectrum that extends from what the Dems deem acceptable to what the Republicans deem acceptable. If you’re someone who decides where they stand on an issue regardless of these arbitrary endpoints I think “independent” or “non-partisan” fits better.

amoorthy 5y ago

This is incorrect. Our readership at The Factual is polled every day on trending questions and results show that they do not fall along party lines consistently. The same person often agrees with different sides on different issues. (Our polls often match up to national polls like Pew and Gallup so they may be representative of the US though we do not ask demographic information to prove this). Moreover, research shows that reading different sides, when they are both presented in an informative fashion, helps people appreciate different viewpoints if not change it at times. It's only when viewpoints are presented with highly inflammatory language that we tend to dig into our pre-existing beliefs. This isn't about finding some mythical center. People are often curious why people have different viewpoints. Indeed, I think this is a big reason why comment sections like HN work so well. The net effect likely is one of moderation in one's beliefs, which seems like a good thing overall.

xwolfi 5y ago

Credence isn't required to be neutral in the center. I vote center in my country (France) which I also disagree with should call center because it gives this impression to be at a border of two "sides" of the population but whatever. I can understand what's credible or not on both sides but what matters to be is WHY they believe these positions. I don't want to synthetise them as much as I want these people to either stop suffering or stop believing they suffer. So I vote not for more socialism or more traditionalism, but to remove the need for tradition while lowering the grouping effect of socialism. It is obviously a position in itself to reject the left or right visions of a path forward. Your mistake maybe is that there are two sides to a political spectrum while there are many dimensions to the political hypercube.

zeruch 5y ago

I don think that is what it purports to do, or likely will end up doing. It might result in people seeing how much common aspects a story has, and that helps to divorce the factual aspects from the editorialization. Maybe. It might result in a broader intake of facts (if both/either side is being selective). It might result in a litany of things better than the binary dung-hosing we have now. If the worst that happens is people attempt to be less binary, I'd still consider that a small victory. Being centrist is not inherently bad either, it just is. The only concern there I would have would be if one intentionally tries to triangulate towards a middle, as opposed to arriving there naturally. It's what Paul Graham referred to as an "accidental moderate" versus and intentional one. http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

eli_gottlieb 5y ago

>The first is that, by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. This assumes the Overton Window is balanced, stationary, and not tilted to one side or the other. You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further left or right. Or, alternatively, and I think this will be a rather more accurate description of most centrists, it means that the partisan axis doesn't really describe any "principal component" of variation in people's actual opinions. Indeed, this is broadly what political scientists find, IIRC: very few people hold the opinion "we should do as little as possible", but many people hold an opinion on one issue that gets them classed as "left-wing" and an opinion on another issue that gets them classed as "right-wing" -- and see no real contradiction between the two.

soheil 5y ago

1. Your view that there are only two sides is too simplistic. To be in the center doesn't mean you're in a 1-dimensional line you could be on a 2D circle or worse n-dimensional space where there are several competing and opposing views on many different orthogonal axes. To be in the center means not to become beholden to one political view and on one side of a very specific axis. 2. Whether or not opposing content can be merged is irrelevant if there are many different ways of thinking about a topic than a simple binary right or wrong. Often reasoning from first principles yields vastly different results if slight changes are made up and along the chain of reasoning. And different people can have vastly diverging points of view even though they did their own thinking. Therefore to be in the center simply means not to drink the Kool-Aid the latest politician is selling. 3. I think you could reasonably argue being in the center is itself a valid political position if you agree that, again, there are more than two sides. If there are many more viewpoints some not even discussed by current politicians why must everyone pick a side that is currently most fashionable? To be in the center doesn't mean you'll be the net sum of each side, it means you have your own opinion and do not necessarily buy into the narrative that is being sold by either political parties.

paulddraper 5y ago

> ill-formed assumption...by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. Not at all. 1. The assumption is that reading from multiple sides, you'll arrive at the enlightened position, center or otherwise. This is the same assumption as in a courtroom. The idea isn't that the prosecution and the defense are both equally valid positions. (They don't.) The idea is that vigorous argument will yield the truth. 2. There's a lot of news that isn't necessarily "a side" but that you'd miss from a monotonous diet. For example, in Jan 2020 I watched some Tucker Carlson episodes on Fox News. At the time the news media was overwhelmingly focused on Trump's first impeachment, but Carlson chose to cover this new "Chinese coronavirus." I want to know what's going on in the world and it's absurd to think one particular source covers it all, even it wanted to.