Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
A true centrist is someone who considers both left and right positions carefully, then sides with the right.
Centrism is rarely a coherent ideology and to most people it's seen as the "default" or "starting" position of politics. In reality, issue by issue, there is rarely a coherent 'in between' position. Centrists tend to be politically naive, and navigate the world by intuition (they call it common sense). The Right dominates people who think this way.
Sorry, no. Politics is about tradeoffs. The defining tradeoff of politics is how you balance individual freedom from interference, with public services like public transport, sanitation healthcare. Most people would prefer to be left alone by the government and to be able to get on with their lives, but most people would also like there to be a social safety net and convenient things like buses and trains which can only really be tackled with government involvement.
But in order to have sanitation, say, you need people to drive bin lorries, and so you need to convince people to drive bin lorries (maybe by paying them, or maybe by punishing people who are allocated to driving bin lorries by the government and don't do it) which involves a curtailment of freedom - either because the government is taking money off its citizens, or punishing people who don't do what it says, or whatever. There will always be jobs that people want to be done but don't really want to do if given a completely free choice.
And so, there is a tradeoff: how much does the government interfere to make those jobs get done? Whether it's charging taxes or job allocations, the better you want public services, the more the government interferes.
And because it's a tradeoff, there is a continuum of reasonable positions. It's not that you can only consistently think we should have Marxist-Leninist communism, the state tells you what job to do and if you refuse you are sent to the gulag, or an anarcho-capitalist hell-state where nobody ever collects the garbage because nobody wants to pay for it.
And that's only the most important tradeoff - there are infinitely many other tradeoffs where fulfilling one shared goal impinges on another and how you resolve it can be expressed on a continuum. People tend to have a broad direction on all of these - left wingers prioritise public goods over individual freedoms (but still think both are good), while right wingers prioritise individual freedoms (but still think both are good). Even the MAGA "healthcare is communism" morons still think that there should be healthcare and transport and so on (they just disagree about how it should be provided and paid for and what form it takes). Even the communists think freedom is good as long as it doesn't interfere with some greater goal.
I mean, there's way more dimensions to this than just freedom vs. safety net. The dominant form or right wing politics, right now, is very much not libertarian.
But yes, "everything is actually the right" is not how directions work.
It doesn't have to be an ideology.
People don't fit neatly into boxes or necessarily have to subscribe to an ideology fully.
Centrilsts might be politically naive yes, but that doesn't just make them Right wing automatically?
you're trying to be rational and thoughtful here.
that makes you an evil centrist, clearly.
the people on lemmy here don't want to discuss things, they just want to label you as awful for not being as politically hardcore or pure or whatever as they believe themselves to be.
Centrism is the ideology of not having an ideology. If you're not working from root axioms, if you're just winging every moral decision... that's being a loser, not politically intelligent.
oh, praytell us wise sir, what are these 'root axioms' from which you are so intelligent?
lol condescending asshole... They're supposed to be YOUR axioms, not mine. They could be anything you supposedly care about.
The point in identifying and using axioms is to not accidentally be a hypocrite, like every Republican that voted for Trump that thinks small government is the way to go.
and what happens when my axioms are in conflict with yours?
or my axiom is self interest above all else, such that hypocrisy is useful tool to manipulate others?
call me names all you want if it makes you feel better, is that one of your axioms? mock anyone who asks you a question that challenges your assumption?
lol Your ploys to ignorance are nothing but pathetic. If your axioms are truly to seek self-satisfaction above all else, you are simply an enemy of mine.
So weird that you took a moral position as an insult. Almost like you are trash not worth considering.
Right, anyone who isn't you is trash. Sounds like a convenient axiom.
Centrism describes the views you have, not the methods you have used to obtain those views, so this is incorrect on a base level. Someone who thinks through their views from first principles and lands on having views between the current left and right (somehow, seems hard to do but it's possible) is a centrist. Someone who wings their views and pays no attention to politics at all but happens to align more with a right or left ideology is not a centrist.
Centrism. Not finding yourself in the center.
Yes I know what you said. I'm doing this thing called disagreeing where I think something different than what you do.
lol
It's comments and people like you that divide us
Why I hate being left sometimes
No it isn't.... I'm not feeling very divided by that guy.
Speak for yourself, the left alienates allies.
Ok
- Person currently causing division
lol no.
It's people like you who insist labels are more important than beliefs that divide us. Genuinely, your ignorance is beyond vile in this context.
I don't think OP is the one here I'd say is obsessed with labels. The entire question is basically just asking what's behind them.
It's pretty much naive realism applied to politics.
You just described the entirety of .ml and that pseudo-progressive movement on lemmy pretty succinctly.
The only thing I’d add is how it’s all a made up front to look like they are active and committed to a belief, but when it comes time to do anything meaningful at all, they cannot be bothered.
Their entire ideology can be summarized as: just a bunch of words on the internet.