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"As a centralist, all points must be considered. From giving women rights, to exterminating the culturally inferior."
(slrpnk.net)
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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God I hate the current political discourse. You have extremists vs extremists, and now both sides are vilifying everyone that doesn't blindly adhere to all their positions.
I’ve had people try to tell me that basic healthcare and corrections to income equality are “extremely progressive” viewpoints. I’m done with letting others’ definition of extremism into the conversation.
Being called an extremist is not really the thing I'm taking issue with. The right wing has been doing that for decades, screeching "communist!" at the most ridiculous things. And depending on which particular ideals you subscribe to, being such an "extremist" is probably a good thing.
The issue I have is that instead of calling out that shitty behavior, the left has started emulating and expanding on it. In addition to calling everyone "fascist", they've started attacking the entire concept of being a centrist (and I mean actual centrist here, not just right wingers arguing in bad faith). People aren't born believing in one socioeconomic system or another, it's learned. Generally, everyone is going to start off somewhere in the center, as they become politically aware. If the only voices they ever hear is two sides screeching names at eachother, you wind up with a disengaged and disinterested voting population, which will only help the fascists.
I agree with this actually. I think your other comments were worded too vaguely, allowing differences of interpretation to cause severe disagreement.
Centrists lack a moral center. They test to see the way the wind is blowing and do that.
Why wouldn't we adopt a tactic that has proven effective?
The left tried "calling it out" for decades. Unfortunately, as the right realized, the liberals were so committed to compromise and being the "reasonable" ones that they could be as unreasonable as they want and they'd still reach across the aisle and try to compromise. When you're up against an enemy like that with no backbone, whose whole identity rests on being the "reasonable compromise," all you have to do is take the maximalist, most extreme position on every issue, and then you can let yourself be "talked down" to what you actually want. Meanwhile, you can actually promote specific ideas and a general ideology in order to influence where the electorate stands, while the other side can never full-throatedly embrace a coherent ideology and just triangulates carefully focus group tested positions.
The right has won by being beligerant, extreme, and unapologetic, and the reason they've won is because it's taken so fucking long for any sort of actual left to even begin to emerge and react to that by actually standing up to them and giving it back to them. Even so, the closest we have to a "left" in the mainstream, the Democratic party, is still overwhelmingly committed to moderation and compromise! Rather than criticizing the left for being too beligerant, the left should be criticized for not being beligerant enough! Instead "centrists" will go out and find some fringe group of online communists with no power and compare that against the extremism of the mainstream right, which currently holds majorities in every branch of the US government.
You misunderstand my position. Maybe that's on me for being too vague.
My position can be summed up as "talk softly, carry a big stick." At no point does that necessitate compromising. When dealing with online discussions, it's not just you and the person you are directly speaking to. There's other people reading. Some of those people are the frothing at the mouth right wingers, who you are never going to reach anyway, and so they are irrelevant. On the other hand, some of those people will be the young, some will be the adults who are just become politically aware. These are all people who can be persuaded with logic, and you want on your side. None of that necessitates you compromising your ideals (and not should you).
The same thing applies to when you go out protesting. The point is to get more people on your side, without simply becoming what you are fighting against. So you should be peaceful, you should be respectful, but in the interest of not compromising, you should also be armed.
I see, I understand that a bit better. Imo you need a carrot-and-stick approach, meeting belligerence with reason can come across as weakness, and if bad faith tactics are allowed to be deployed, they can win against someone committed to staying in good faith. The goal should be to have a reasonable discussion, but to do that, you gotta make sure the costs of straying from that are too high to be worth the benefit, and that can mean being rude and confrontational and throwing their tactics back in their face - but it's situational. That's what "speaking softly but carrying a big stick" means to me.
Found the enabler. ⬆️
Found the source of the problem.
No two humans are going to agree on every point. If you vilify everyone that differs from you in the slightest, you are a detriment to your own cause.
But of course, no one actually wants to fix everything. They want to just make snarky comments online to feel superior.
"In the slightest" being centrist code for "who counts as a human being" and "does bombing hospitals and starving children count as genocide"
Nobody is vilifying someone because they have different opinions on the importance of reading Shakespeare in high-school, or if they think, big centralised public libraries are a better option to lots of smaller public libraries.
This is just the quintessential enlightened centrist argument, reducing down serious issues about basic fundamental morals into just "disagreement"
No, but they are dumping people into that category in their mind, and then making all kinds of assumptions and conclusions about that person based off the one false assumption. And then because it's the internet, the name calling starts and all constructive conversation ends.
Just look at this thread. I started it with "the current American political discourse sucks" and no-one commenting was able to take that statement at face value. Everyone replied with assumptions on what my stance was on issues I didn't mention. It's that exact reflex that I have a problem with. Essentially, I agree with the message, but I disagree with the delivery method.
People can smell the tepid liberalism and pretty reliably guess what else you believe because they've seen it before. The modlog indicates they were right. You are exactly the person they're talking about when they mock someone bothsidesing genocide.
Hamas doesn't equal the entirety of the Palestinian population in the same way that the Israeli government/military doesn't equal the entire Israeli population. Why is that so hard for you .ml tankies to separate? There's a reason why I specifically make sure to phrase the discussion as "Hamas's actions" not "the Palestinians' actions"
Israel is fighting to eradicate the entire Palestinian people, Hamas is fighting to protect the entire Palestinian people, and even groups whose members Hamas murdered to obtain power are supporting them at this point in time. When you adopt the zionist framing that Israel is justified in fighting Hamas because they're just so evil, you are carrying water for Israel.
If you're old enough to remember Iraq, they did the same shit; the right wanted to murder as many Muslims as possible, the tepid liberals tried to say they only opposed Saddam and the Baathists and terrorists as if the two positions weren't equivalent in practice.
I'm old enough to remember the first Iraq. I'm also aware enough of history to understand that when you hold a group up as the innocent victims, when they were anything but, you create an environment where other groups emulate them down the road.
The Israeli government holds the lions share of the blame for the Gaza genocide, after all, they are the one's doing it. But if we want to learn from this, and learn from what led up to it to hopefully short circuit things before they get this far in the future, we must acknowledge Hamas role.
Hamas may be fighting for the Palestinian people, but how you fight can have a major effect on how your enemies react, and also can have a major effect on soft support from third parties. Things like fighting out of civilian areas, and fighting without uniforms, etc, were made war crimes in the past specifically because of situations like this; it ends up getting civilians caught in the crossfire at best, and targeted at worst.
This isn't a left/right position, this is just observations on what has happened globally every time an assymetrical war has been fought over the last 30 years.
Realistically, everyone holds some blame here. If the UN had some balls (and if the US and USSR could have pulled their heads out of their collective asses back in the seventies) there would have been peacekeepers and a two state solution after the first war. Probably should have made Jerusalem a city state like the Vatican, just to stop everyone fighting for control of that too.
Hamas role? They tried to be peaceful during the march of return, they got gassed and shot with snipers.
The only role any Palestinian group can play that won't have Israel making those same criticisms is to stand in a field and commit seppuku.
You criticize Hamas for not using uniforms, while Israel arms civilians and helps them build homes on stolen land between Gaza and their own military bases, you criticize Hamas for fighting near civilians, while the IDF's HQ is literally next to a shopping mall.
The two aren't even comparable, because Palestine doesn't have the benefit of billions of dollars of military equipment and the ability to have a standing army without getting bombed necessary to fight a non-guerilla war, meanwhile Israel chooses to do these things.
There is one single party responsible for starting this conflict, who can end it at any time, that's Israel.
Sometimes there are no good choices, but that doesn't absolve you of the consequences of that choice you had to make.
The world isn't made up of good guys and bad guys. Hamas doesn't get a pass on their actions just because Israel committed worse. And my purpose in pointing this out is not to absolve Israel of their actions, it's to ensure people remain aware of what actions are likely to result in what consequences.
My hope is that in the future, when some other fight for freedom starts up somewhere else, the people there can learn from what happened in Gaza. Learn which actions worked, which ones were futile, and which ones actively made things worse. That learning gets real muddy if we keep glossing the whole thing over with "Everything is only Israel's fault".
Someone beaks into your house, starts eating all your food, stealing your things, hurting your children, and kills your dog.
You fight back.
Do we now say that we need to acknowledge the role you had in the home invasion?
Do I kidnap the home invader's kid in response? The world is not as simplistic as you'd apparently like it to be.
If taking hostages is the only way to save your family and you've already tried everything else, what do you do?
Like you said, the world is not simple.
And this is the learning that I'm saying has to happen. Did that kidnapping work? Are their families safe? Did it effect nothing? Or, did it make things worse? What were the consequences of that action? That's what I'm saying we have to not gloss over by making Hamas out to be innocent angels, and Israel the cartoon villains. In 20 years, if some freedom fighter on another continent looks to this conflict for inspiration, should they take away that everything Hamas ever did was a good idea, by the simple virtue that Israel was worse? Or should they actually learn?
The struggle hasn't ended yet and the resistance remains defiant. Israel has been unmasked as a genocidal settler colonial entity and is more isolated than ever before.
You know why people are framing Israel as villains? It's because they've lost the propaganda war. Hamas did that.
And without Western support, Israel is done.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20151019-palestine-through-the-lens-of-frantz-fanon/
Both the Occupier and the Occupied can and do use acts of terrorism to further their aims, but the aims are diametrically opposed. The aim of the occupier is to continue the occupation, that requires violence to maintain, and ethnic cleansing. The aim of the occupied is to end the occupation, by any means possible, and gain emancipation. We see that one is a reaction to the other, Israel's perpetual violence towards native peoples is the underlying cause of these conflicts. Solutions to ending the violence of anti-colonialism can only come from ending the underlying violence of the colonialism.
We see that permanent occupation develops into an Apartheid, as the settlers / occupiers have rights upheld by the State and Military, while the natives / occupied have no rights and subjected to violence from both the Settlers and Military. The State, who holds the monopoly on power, uses terrorism to suppress resistance to the occupation in order to maintain it. The occupied, having no power, uses terrorism as a means to resist the occupation.
Israel has no interest in peace, it has interest in land grabbing, which is in complete opposition to peace. This is fundamental to Zionism. Which is why an end to Zionism and a regime change, where a Secular Bi-National One-State that gives equal rights to Palestinians and Israelis is the only way for the conflict to really end. Not only with Palestinian resistance, but with all resistance groups that were created by Israeli occupation.
The existence of Hamas, and any armed resistance movement, is directly due to the decades of violence experienced daily under the permanent occupation, the Apartheid State, of Israel. It's impossible to understand their existence if you don't understand the lived experience and material conditions they are forced to live under. There is no such thing as a perfect victim when it comes to anti-Colonialist resistance, not for the Vietcong, the IRA, or the ANC either. Can you condemn the violence of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the same way as the violence of the Warsaw Ghetto?
In the Shadow of the Holocaust by Masha Gessen, the situation in Gaza is compared to the Warsaw Ghettos. The comparison was also made by a Palestinian poet who was later killed by an Israeli airstrike. Adi Callai has also written on the parallels in his article The Gaza Ghetto Uprising and expanded upon in his corresponding video
Adi Callai has also done a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized by Zionism during its history, as well as an analysis of Franz Fanon and Identity Politics in the context of Colonialism and Anti-colonialism.
Honestly, when it comes to these types of conflict, I'm less concerned about the overall morality of the movement, and more concerned with the the individual actions, and even then, I'm generally more concerned with effectiveness, rather than whether or not it was "right". That question tends to get very blurry as time goes on. Look at historical revolutions against monarchies like the French or Russian revolutions. Does the initial "righteousness" of the movement cover for actions that came later?
I'm a believer in being aware of and accepting the consequences of the choices you make, both good and bad. If there are bad consequences to your actions, you have to own the fact that you've either deemed those consequences as acceptable, or else you were unaware that it would happen. Everything is a choice, and all choices have consequences. Judging the right and wrong of it is a quagmire I try not to delve into. I think it's much more useful to keep sight of what choices led to what consequences, and learn from that.
You'd benefit from watching those videos by Adi Callai or reading Franz Fanon.
When peaceful resistance is met with live ammo and the everyday violence of apartheid and settler colonialism are normalized by the occupier, the only option left is armed resistance. When the occupier wants you dead for existing, you can either die fighting for your freedom or die lying down.
I think you need to think through the full implications of what it means when I say that all actions have consequences. I don't just mean that in the context of Hamas's actions. It applies to everyone. Hamas's existence is a consequence of actions taken by a whole host of people (there's plenty of blame to go around when it comes to any geopolitical issue in the middle east).
The point I'm trying to get across is that everyone is responsible for their own actions. No one get to use the "look what you made me do" excuse. It's your fault for choosing to do a thing, and it may be someone else's fault for forcing you into that choice. If you want to try to follow the butterfly effect backwards to some original fault to find someone to point at and go "it's all their fault!", good luck to you. There's too many what-ifs. Does any of this happen if the Arab world doesn't go to war with Israel off and on since the 40s? Does the US even think twice about Israel if there wasn't the sunni schiite schism and the Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy wars driving instability in the region? Do we blame it all on the British for drawing arbitrary lines across the map?
So it's the fault of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for choosing violence? You're just both-sides-ing Colonialism and Anti-colonialism without any critical understanding of the material reality of why the colonialism exists or how it's affecting the local population.
So we're doing Zionist propaganda now?
Additionally:
Are you just not capable of viewing a conflict as anything other than absolute good vs absolute evil? Are you a person that believes the ends always justify the means? Who then gets to decide which ends are the most just?
I'm Anti-colonialist anti-imperialist and anti-fascist. I believe every human deserves human rights. I support those who fight against their oppressors in order to gain emancipation and independence. Violence doesn't come out of nowhere, to understand where it comes from you need material analysis. To end anti-colonialist violence, you need to first end the violence of colonialism. That is the root cause of anti-colonial violence. It's not that difficult to understand, especially if you try to read and understand the works of those who fought against colonialism and imperialism.
I don't disagree with any of that, but the way you phrase it seems to imply that any and all actions taken by the oppressed group are inherently justified. Is that the case, or would you say that there are still limits?
I'm not interested in justification, that sidelines the root causes of the issue. If the violent actions of the oppressed are concerning, which is a completely understandable position, the focus still needs to center on the violent actions of the oppressor (the root cause) which are also magnitudes worse both in brutality and scale.
I don't personally agree with every action every resistance has ever done, but that doesn't matter. If I want an end to the violence, which I do, I know the focus of my attention needs to be on ending the root cause of the violence.
This has been the case with every anti-colonialist movement. Ireland, Vietnam, Algeria, ect. Something Franz Fanon has studied, understood, and explained incredibly well.
Whatever you say Herr Niemöller. Keep your false equivalences, ignore the US now has literal concentration camps, and calmly wait until they come for you.
I never made any equivalences, stated any of my political opinions, or said anything other the fact that the current US political discourse sucks.
And things are only going to get worse because people like you would rather make up shit to get offended by, instead of doing anything that might get the majority on your side.
Making things up? Have you read the news? People have been arrested by plainclothes thugs and deported with no due process. There was a picture earlier of the holding bunks of the victims of these extrajudiciary ICE raids next to literal concentration camps. They are being sent, irreversably, to work camps in other countries that are known to torture and kill their prisoners, especially foreigners. You are ignorant to the point of danger.
If thinking I am a human being with full and equal rights to every other human being and that anyone who disagrees can go fuck themselves makes me an extremist then that’s a reflection of the society I live in, not me.
And yeah, the people who ‘don’t agree with me on every point’ are the people trying to criminalize my existence. How many states is it illegal for you to piss in a public restroom? How many states are trying to criminalize your healthcare? Have you had the government confiscate or alter your passport? Did you even know this shit is happening?
Exactly. 99% of the time attacks against centrists are just smug nerds who believe their side of extremism is better than the other sides.
There is no extremist left in the american political discourse. Theres hardly even any left at all. And yes you really are the villain if you dont want women and minority groups to be equal with cishet white men or for israel to stop genociding.
What positions of the two provided (being against facism, and protecting women) don't you "blindly" adhere to?
And there's the idiotic extrapolation I'm referring to. I'm talking about the discourse in general, not the specifics.
That's a way to say you don't want to say which specifics you are against because people will see your shitty morals
Wrong again. I'm trying to point out that it's exactly this type of conversation that has been driving people away and making the left wing half of the US political spectrum completely impotent.
Seems like a great way to say “I bought into the right wing populist bullshit, and don’t want to be held accountable for the results we’re now seeing. So I’ll blame the left that the right wing populist bullshiit told me to blame for everything.”
As dumb as it is to claim the left and right are only having minor disagreements, or are equally valid, your comment is not helping because this behavior is exactly what Anteater is referring to.
And what would you have the left do?
Meet the right in the middle. Again?
So that in 4 years, asking that political prisoners be treated with the slightest amount of human decency is just too damn extreme for the right to take seriously?
No, I would have them work against the right even more than they are now on a macro level, and on a personal level to be firm that certain things are wrong but to not drive away people who are willing to convert.
we live in an age of information. if someone chooses to wallow in disinformation, that is their choice to remain ignorant. if someone is 'willing go convert', they will do it themselves by reading the news and searching for facts.
You should know most people don't read the news, let alone search for facts
Which minor policies are you being vilified for supporting?