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I do listen to "both" sides! That's exactly why I'm a leftist!
I don't get why centrists think that you have to be "centrist" to listen to both sides, or why doing so makes you a centrist.
The same reason most smart non rich Republicans say they're Libertarians: so no one will give them shit.
Thing is, any reasonably person has by now realised that the Venn diagram of Libertarians and Conservatives is nearly a circle.
Exactly.
For America I'm what used to be a centrist, but now unfortunately I would be considered far left. I hate what we have become. Vote blue!
Green is better but not enough people even know about the Green party that it would be viable
It's not even just that people don't know about the green party, it's that we are stuck with a voting system that is inherently biased against 3rd parties being viable.
If we can switch to a better voting system like STAR or approval, it would be far better for the green party.
And the existing parties would have to compete for once, which would go a long way towards making them not dumpster fires.
The Greens are horrible on their own merits. Any third party in the US needs to start out saying the voting system must be changed. If they don't, that's a good sign they're a combination of a grift and useful idiots. The Greens rarely talk about it unless someone else brings it up first, and they quickly try to change the subject after mumbling a few things about it.
Another sign is that they don't try to build up support over time from local and state races. Greens occasionally run candidates for state congress, but for the most part, they show up for a Presidential run every 4 years and disappear.
Their historical anti-nuclear stance has exasperated climate change. They held back something that would have been very useful to mass deploy 20-30 years ago (although I do think the economics have changed, and it's no longer the right option for new rollouts). The German wing of the party is currently cheering on the dismantling of perfectly good nuclear reactors in exchange for much, much dirtier sources.
Nader's campaign in 2000 absolutely did torpedo Al Gore (and no, you don't have to convert every Nader voter in Florida to Gore for this to be true). He kept power out of the hands of one of the most genuine public servants to run in recent history, and gave power to a trainwreck of an administration that was 180 degrees away from their stated goals.
Greens need to get serious or fuck off.
The Democrats are nominating a genocide denier though. Similarly to pretty much every election for the last 50 years. (Not genocide specifically, but a candidate with major issues in their beliefs). Voting blue simply allows them to continue ignoring us. It also lends legitimacy to the winner. If the 2020 election had seen Biden win 15% to Trump's 10%, that'd be a much better case for Biden being an illegitimate president. When you do average things, you get average results. There is zero reason to think voting blue is ever going to fix any of our problems, because it hasn't so far.
I think it's a difference in how we define words. If we focus on our common ground, first, then we are more likely to listen to each other. To a person who identifies as centrist, a person who calls themselves liberal might appear to be on the fringe of society IF the so-called centrist (who may even actually be liberal) is within a community where they are surrounded by more conservative voices.
Being with my husband has taught me that how we individually define words matters a lot more than we think. He and I grew up in very different circumstances and will often argue different points and then get extremely frustrated at each other for not understanding what we mean. Sometimes I'm thinking "what is he saying, that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about" only to realize that the way he defines a word, phrase, or idea is completely different to my definition.
If you want someone to truly listen to you, you first have to be open to discovering what's important to them and how they are expressing it
I think their point is that you can get more done with compromise than with strict adherence to your principles. Being right doesn't mean much of shit if nothing gets done about it.
Meet me in the middle, says the dishonest man. They take a step back. Meet me in the middle he says again.
"The boat is sinking", says the captain. The crew try to fix the boat the best they can. The captain stops them. "Let's wait until we can fix it completely."
The boat is sinking! Says the captain. The captain starts to fix it, but the crew stop him and say well what about the sail. E- removed an autocorrect error.
This counts as wisdom to you?
It's very clearly an analogy.
It's also a myopic view of political centrism/compatibilism.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Recognizing that both sides of the political spectrum represent real concerns from real people who are demographically, geographically, and culturally different, and seeking to find practical, possible compromises between them to benefit the greatest number of people is hardly the same thing as selfish negotiation for personal gain. Both the left and the right would benefit from ignoring distracting wedge issues and cultural politics so they could solve some more important upstream structural and economic issues. The right needs to become more socialist and spend money on great public works and bureaucratic administration, and the left needs to recognize that industry and commerce have enough intrinsic social benefit so as to justify less bureaucratic quagmire. The right needs to pay teachers and IRS auditors, the left needs to pay cops and soldiers. The right needs to reform it's draconian view of the corrections system, and the left needs to recognize the failures of deinstitutionalization. The right could use less tyranny of the majority,, the left could use less tyranny of the minority. Etc etc etc. It's just the nature of a dialectic to constantly be in negotiation.
Most centrist arguments are about assigning priority and engaging in triage. It isn't a moral failure to focus on campaign finance reform rather than the age of puberty blockers, it's recognizing greater harm and limited political opportunity. The modern sentiment that there's no reasonable center comes predominantly from young people who have never lived in a culture where differing political parties could get along. That's a consequence of the radicalization of media, not a truism or innate property of politics.
One side, I just want to kill all LGBTQ, the other side Let's get kids food at school! BoTh SiDeS
Yeah this kind of response makes me think you're in a troll farm, it's so extremely silly. there's no legitimate right wing political faction that is advocating for the death of all queer people. there might be some angry, misspelled rants on a poster at a neo-Nazi rally. Tweets don't count, That's not legitimate discussion or discourse. that's just graffiti on a bathroom wall.
I'm not saying that there isn't more of a political problem on the right in America than there is on the left. Conservatives are often on the wrong side of history. But the left has some insane notions as well that they hold with as much religious fervor as the right.
Problem being the compromise usually means accepting the worst bits of the deal. So instead of a race to the bottom its just a light jog.
Sometimes you need to draw out the 'inevitable end' for a better solution to be made apparent. Grab a bucket and start throwing water overboard, we might yet make it to port.
The problem is that the other guys are the ones busy kicking holes in the boat, while the centrists share their sincere concerns that buckets are woke, and that stopping people kicking holes and repairing them can't be done because it's never been done.
There's no satisfaction knowing you're right as you start inhaling lungfulls of water - the morally correct thing to do is save everyone by throwing that motherfucker overboard if they won't stop kicking holes abnd let you sell their hole-kicking boots to pay for a repair kit.
But the problem is it isn't one or two people kicking holes, it's half the damn ship. Morally correct is, again, useless when you can do nothing with it. It's more complicated than just patching up a hole or two, it's trying to convince a force as strong as yourself that you've come to the correct conclusion while they were incapable of doing the same.
The core problem is a small group of people with disproportionate wealth and political power, which they're using to exploit the gullible masses. Both are a problem, but if you solve for one, the other solves itself. You also create the opportunity to solve... most of society's problems.
Compromise only works if both sides are acting in good faith and acutally are trying to get shit done. If one side is actively trying to tear the whole democratic system down then it will just result in a slow decline if the other side compromises.
I think their point is that you can get more done with compromise than with strict adherence to your principles.
Yes, Neville Chamberlain was famously correct in compromising with Germany.
(Do I need an /s? I'll keep that one just in case.)
Oh no, compromises can be bad so we should just retire the concept entirely. (Do I need an /s?)
Without compromise, we wouldn't have an American Constitution.
If you're going to use historical examples as a weapon, you'd do well to be better versed in it.
That's funny, I don't have the American Constitution.
I also never said not to compromise, as others here have pointed out, compromise isn't always possible.
Unless you have some sort of alternate history where compromising with the Nazis worked?
I said we, which can exclude you, while including me.
Clearly we don't have a supermajority in order to circumvent the democratic systems in place to avoid the need to compromise, so if compromise isn't possible, what is?
The Nazis only lost after several countries unified to defeat them. What would you have Poland do? France? When your only options are to lose or lose faster, compromise is the only possibility.
The Nazis only lost after several countries unified to defeat them. What would you have Poland do? France? When your only options are to lose or lose faster, compromise is the only possibility.
I said Neville Chamberlain, not the leaders of Poland. Poland had no recourse after being invaded by both Germany and Russia; and it didn't exactly help them, did it? Had the nations of the world stood up to Germany, it's likely they would have had to back down entirely. You're starting at the end. Germany didn't start off invading Poland; they invaded Austria*, then Czechoslovakia. Check out the Munich Agreement for an insight into how well appeasement works with the far right.
"At a Cabinet meeting on 8 September 1937, Chamberlain indicated that he saw "the lessening of the tension between this country and Italy as a very valuable contribution toward the pacification and appeasement of Europe" which would "weaken the Rome–Berlin axis.""
That turned out well too, didn't it?
I'm not left or right, so if that makes me centrist so be it. Yes, the real political debate of reasonable solutions is happening mostly on the left, and much of the right is reactionary, racist, regressive and retarded. But the left thinks telling me what I'm allowed to think and say is a moral imperative, they're mostly obsessed with distracting cultural shit, they're real cunty when I say retard, and theyre all a bunch of fat non binary autistic blue haired weirdos.
The right is a bunch of mean ignorant evil fucks, but the left is a bunch of whiny annoying pussies. The whole human species is asshole.
I'm not left or right
I have news for you bestie
Small point of order here, county level data shows right wing counties are more obese. So it's mean, ignorant, evil, AND fat fucks. I'll take non-binary, autistic, and blue haired though. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4692249/
I won't. The cat people need bullying.
You sound lovely to be around
I don't want to be around you either. Begone, thot.
Get off twitter and leave the house.
It is funny how your description of "the left" exactly matches all the right wing strawmen that they use to describe "the left".
Because it's funny.
And genuinely they're the left's Maga morons
Yeah, as it turns out, when you actually hear out both sides, it becomes very clear that one side is, for the most part, completely full of shit. And that the other side barely pays lip service to their supposed beliefs, even though they're somewhat correct.
If you start out right in the middle, and then every time you find out that you're wrong about something, change your mind on that topic, overtime you'll shift further and further left. Not to say being the most left is correct, but the vast majority of correct answers to topics lie to the left of Democrats, while most of the obviously false ones lie within the beliefs of establishment Dems and Republicans.
I don't like being categorized as a leftist because being a leftist now is just being radical and crazy and I certainly don't want to belong to this category. So leftists as we see them certainly don't listen to both sides, that's for sure (or those people aren't numerous enough to have a party we can look for, whatever the country you're talking about). So I would like to call myself a centrist, as it should mean that you listen to both sides, but centrist are apparently right wings who don't assume being right wings. That's why I generally don't answer anymore because all categories are fucked up and I don't seem to belong to any of them: none of them are able to have rational and nuanced opinions and solutions, whatever the subject.