dumpsterlid

With that said, I think it’s a bad faith argument to lump all concern together as concern trolling. If enthusiasm had been weak, the shoe could have just as easily been on the other foot, with countless armchair politicians lamenting those ‘fascist agitators’ who convinced Biden to drop out, thereby handing Donnie Dipshit the presidency.

Hindsight is 20/20, I’m just glad we’re still in this.

I don't think you are listening, people were saying this over and over again BEFORE Biden stepped down, we didn't need hindsight, YOU did because you refused to listen.

I love that y'all admit you were wrong superficially but then insult people who have been making strong arguments for quite a long time that Biden should step down and not run again with statements like "well, who could have known!" with a happy shrug.

We did and people like you almost cost us the election. Do you understand how dangerous a role people like you played in shutting down criticism of Biden and attacking concerned Democrats like they were all Russia trollbots or something?

You speak of the danger of divisiveness, of having democrats split up and fractured... hopefully you do realize that is PRECISELY what democrats shouting down concerns about Biden were doing? Can you at least see that in 20/20 hindsight?

What have you learned that will lead you into NOT making the same potentially catastrophic miscalculation next time around?

...because you realize y'all look like clowns in the wake of Harris raising 200 million and 170,000 volunteers in a week right?

Honestly, you need to stop commenting on politics until you dismantle your world view and understanding of how US politics works please, you don't understand very basic shit here. I don't know what more proof you need than the last month or so of politics.

Don't give me this "Wow, happy surprise! Who woulda thought things could go so well!" nonsense, it is insulting and minimizing to those of us who have actually been paying attention and understood the political forces at play.

The cognizant google employees I worked with were actually VERY in support of unionizing, even more so than google employees themselves, it was a really interesting mix of people and they didn't have their heads up their asses like normal techbro google employees who are used to everything working out and handwaving away systematic concerns.

Multiple attempts over the years had been made to unionize, but Google always crushed them with an iron fist.

Notice how Google Maps data hasn't been improving, and if anything getting worse?

I worked for Cognizant, a contractor for Google maps at the Bothell office. I worked for a contractor that Google would fire every 5 years, contract it to another company and change the sign on the office building they owned...then rehire everyone. One of the benefits of this for them (one of the key benefits) was it made it much harder for workers to organize especially because Cognizant and Google can just play "go talk to the other parent I cant do anything" when workers ask for help because they were suffering/needed higher pay to survive/needed basic accomodations.

I worked for Google but Google didn't want to pay me or my coworkers a living wage, so Google paid some lawyers to make it so they could pretend we didn't work for Google.

Google is a trash company with absolutely zero idea how to move forward into the future, the company was absolutely chock full of intelligent interesting smart people but Google was so shortsighted that they forced my whole department back to the office for no good reason (literally everything was remote work too).

My experience after working for Google was that Google was most definitely going to collapse within the decade in terms of market power, at the very least in the realm of maps/spatial data.

What a shameful, pathetic company and the management should be ashamed of how stupid and out of touch they were.

Also, completely and utterly anti-worker.

(Cognizant is trash too but if you have ever heard of the company Cognizant you already know that).

A particular point of shame I want to level at the management above me at Cognizant and Google, most of our work was involved with prototyping google maps data editing and QC workflows... that could then be exported to India or somewhere else with cheap labor.... except upper management was racist as fuck against Indian workers and would complain about their shoddy work indirectly all the time...

...and never bring up that they specifically wanted to hire Indians so they could pay them shit and treat them like shit. If you were a tech worker in India would you work as hard as I did for far far far far less pay and WAY worse treatment?

I actually led a training class on a workflow that was absolutely not suited for new workers to Google Maps gis data editing to... totally new entry level hires in India, and the Indians were frequently cheating or totally checking out.. again because why the hell would they take this shit seriously? To be clear most people were like most people, they just did the best job they could, but there were lots of people I was training that could see right through the bullshit of the entire system and I can ZERO percent blame them for not disrespecting themselves by treating Google like it was genuine in its offers of employment, stability and a career.

Management encouraged a culture where lowkey shitting on Indians for being lazy and dumb was basically accepted because it rationalized the cruelty, inefficiency and stupidity of the entire system.

I hate Google.

I think it is rather that conservatism has nothing to do with being conservative really at the end of the day, that is just the team colors these people wear to identify what team they are on.

Conservatives are conservative so they can hate without guilt and so they can control and possess with violence and be rewarded for it. From this angle the synergy heinous shitheads see in being a Republican and being a pedophile (but also defining your public persona completely around hating pedophiles too) is pretty straightforward in my opinion. Also probably the most pathetic thing on the face of the earth.

I don't really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?

Yes

Centrists by and large are ideological cowards Why? They just have beliefs that put them in the center of the left/right dichotomy. Is one a coward for not being polarized? This point is almost moot, though — centrism is rather nebulous and ephemeral.

Because it is the mechanism centrists use to arrive at their political beliefs that is cowardly. They don’t tend to start from a perspective that arises from their empathy and curiosity for the world and build their politics based on that, they look at the spread of opinions people have around them and just go right down the middle where they can disappear into the crowd without having to do the hard work of creating an actually ideologically rigorous belief system that adheres to reality and evolves with it.

A rightwing fascist emphatically cheers on the genocide of Palestinians (and Jews for that matter confusingly), a leftist emphatically declares genocide is a wrong and a human rights violation. One of those is a dangerous world view that needs to be resisted with force and the other is a world view of harm reduction and solidarity with all humans. What makes most centrists so cowardly is that they take both of those viewpoints as reasonable starting positions and average them to emphatically supporting "some genocide!" and it is incredibly pathetic.

Liberalism is not dependent on the left-right dichotomy, and it is not nebulous like centralism. It is quite well defined in poli-sci. You can read about the beliefs that it encompasses here.

I mean, academia can define “liberalism” however it wants, that isn’t how I define it and most people in conversation about US politics don’t use liberal that way. The word has evolved from the meaning you prescribe to it.

The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs

This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.

I don’t understand the confusion here. My point is that centrism in the US is largely a political position constructed in reverse. If someone (consciously or unconsciously) decides they will peg their beliefs on the center of the Overton Window that is fundamentally a different thing than taking a set of ethics, morals, and policy knowledge and building a political perspective from the ground up.

Call it whatever you want, people that try to disappear in a crowd by just mimicking the behavior and beliefs of people around them are not doing the same thing as people in the crowd who are behaving according to their morals, ethics and understanding of the world and either are blending into the crowd or not because of it.

Centrists by and large are ideological cowards, they are unwilling to imagine right and wrong outside of the comfortable and established narratives that determine right and wrong in their head (and are described within the Overton Window). Centrists will for example happily join progressives in attacking Trump for doing awful things like draconian and cruel immigration control measures, and as soon as Biden takes office and keeps doing the same shit they will flip to yelling at progressives for attacking Biden for doing the same thing.

Centrists are the kind of political position that has substance, it is purely an average of the Overton Window, no matter distorted and fucked up the Overton Window has been made by conservatives and the rich.

Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.

I think what you can say however is that one of the hallmark indicators of centrists (speaking from the context of US politics here just because that is what I know) is that they have no true ideological beliefs. The way a centrist determines right and wrong isn’t by thinking about the problem and applying ethics and critical analysis to it like leftist generally does (and conservatives loudly pretend to do), rather a centrist defines wrong as unpopular.

Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe. This isn’t news to leftists in the US dealing with US centrists, but the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has written it across the sky in big blazing letters that centrism is a catastrophically dangerous way to reach a consensus in a society undergoing crisis and in need of deep reform.

The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs, we just have to shame them into realizing the hateful positions they have (that they don’t perceive as hateful or not hateful, just average!) make them an outcast and they will fold as they always do to whoever controls the narrative.

At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism, there is nothing ideological to locate among the political center of the US, calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.

Please come back after you’ve worked in any customer service position interacting with the general populace. Plenty of smart folks out there, but just as many people that absolutely are not.

I have, people are enraging sometimes but also people are fucking stressed as hell these days, I think overall people try to get along as best they can, even when working customer service where you meet insane people and need to rant about them after work because it breaks your brain how stupid they are from your perspective…. but that is life, a lot of people are hurting at least in my country (US). I don’t blame people for falling apart or making stupid choices because they don’t have the energy or alacrity left in their bodies after work to function.

Yeah there are assholes, I am not some naive fool who trusts everybody, but I am sorry I just aggressively don’t agree with this endlessly repetitive narrative that the average person is a lazy, dumb piece of shit. I know people like that, but the real ones, who could have lived a much easier life but chose to be an asshole just because, are actually pretty rare.

Plenty of people are landscapes of trauma (like me) even just from the trauma of always being stressed about money, and I just don’t feel like when that pushes people to do stupid irrational things that that really is an indicator those people were stupid, morally deficient or lacking in industriousness.

Ok, the intelligence of the most average person I know is still plenty intelligent. I don’t only know geniuses or something, it’s just I don’t feel like the normal human beings I encounter on a daily basis are deficient in intelligence. What makes people awful is usually their beliefs not their intelligence.

The human brain is FARRRRR too powerful of a biological adaption to get manipulated so transparently in this way by imagery in one context with imagery in another. It is an absurd ask to say that people would be “dumb” enough for their brains to do this and no except in neurodiverse cases (which is cool!) the human brain doesn’t work like this.

Yeah probably but literally that is so fucking insulting to me that companies/copyright behave this way, the human brain is extraordinarily complex, the idea that seeing a character recreated in a sandbox by a 3rd party modder could “warp” my thinking about Nintendo characters or games is basically a slap in the face by Nintendo.

Like… if you see a dumb meme with Mario in it, do you think “huh, maybe I shouldn’t buy Nintendo games, Mario is tarnished forever for me” …?. No, and what makes me think that is *this bullshit. I will never give Nintendo money because of the way they behave like this.

I mean I have a steam deck so I have no reason to get a switch or anything so whatever no big loss.

It’s hilariously pathetic that a bunch of lawyers convinced the people at Nintendo to waste their time doing this shit.

There is zero percent overlap between janky Garry’s mod custom assets with Nintendo sales of their polished AAA games except to probably drive sales of Nintendo games to a degree.