There's a great part in the book 1984 where they talk about how the elite 1% control everything and 85% are just living off the scraps. The remaining 14% see themselves as prospective elites, though they live only marginally better than the 85%. The elites promise that if only they defend the 1% hard enough, and do everything they're told they should do, then one day they might be let into the elite crowd.
I think George Orwell was describing centrists as that 14%. The defenders of the status quo.
Ah yes, the "You must always stand 100% behind ALL the political positions and decisions of my party, even the most extreme ones, or you are just the same as the worst examples of the other party." argument.
Even if one party is clearly worse than the other overall, it's still a messed up way to think. No one is above criticism.
This is completrly dishonest.
No political parties were mentioned whatsoever, and I'm curious which party you think reresents the "left", because no Western country has a legitimate left wing party present in their effective two-party systems.
No mention of loyalty either, to any people or groups of people, and certainly not blind loyalty. No mention of supporting positions at all.
What do you hope to gain from such a blatantly disingenuous comment? I'm honestly baffled.
Using the word "political party" might have been a misnomer of my part. By "political party" I meant the positions generally associated with the left and the right. And the whole point I'm trying to make is that the idea portrayed in the comic makes a case for blind loyalty to the ideologies of the political "side" that you identify with. This is the kind of attitude I am firmly against. This forces people into boxes that very few people truly fit in.
It's always fun to listen to some Americans labelling Dems as commies.
This is obviously not the same view as OP, but based upon the comments I thought I could throw a light on where "the world" places Dems and Republicans on the wold political scene. Ish...
So where would the people identifying themselves as left or right be?
The illustration is not analogous. The first picture is based on the perception that centrists have of themselves, the second is the reality of that perception. It’s a metaphor. Humor does not always follow logic, crazy right?
This incongruity model can explain why older adults do not comprehend jokes as frequently as younger adults. Due to declines tied to the aging process, older adults may not have the cognitive resources needed to create multiple representations, to simultaneously hold multiple ones in order to detect the incongruity, or to inhibit the first one that was activated. Getting the joke relies on working memory capacity and control functions. However, when older adults succeed in their efforts to do these things, they typically show greater appreciation of the joke than younger adults do and report greater life satisfaction than those who don’t see the humor.
Interesting read on why sometimes we don’t get the joke.
The right sees themselves on top. That's the whole basis of their worldview, whether they expressly know it or not -- they're the privileged class in the "natural order." Actually, some of them are on the bottom too, but are being deceived by those at the top with false promises that they can be there too (these are the people I'm mostly interested in reaching - the only cure for the people on top is ... uh ... being redacted, let's say).
People identifying as left is tricky. Most of us end up at the bottom for not playing their sick games (anarchists, socialists, etc.), though I'd add layers to the bottom rung. There's a vast difference between the marginalization a communist feels for being discriminated against for a political philosophy vs. what a LGBTQ+ person or BIPOC feels for their whole identity.
But it gets complicated because neoliberals often think of themselves as "left" but they are in reality centrists. Every time a liberal compromises with the right, they are positioning themselves exactly where you see the centrist in the picture. It's why they act baffled when they get called out for signing off on things like the fascist border policy or sending arms to a genocidal state because in their minds of course we need to cOmPrOmIsE, and people who are harmed by that compromise be damned! Won't somebody think about the campaign!!! If we criticize them, then it's because we just "don't know how the world works" or we are "young, and we'll grow out of it" (I'm nearly half a century old, and I only get more convinced I'm right lol).
Mostly speaking from a US perspective, since that's where I live.
I'll go ahead and presume you know that some billionaires see themselves as marginalized, stepped on by society to take their hard-earned wealth away and spread it to leeches that haven't worked a day in their life.
Were they to see this picture, they'd see themselves at the bottom.How they see themselves is irrelevant to how they are. A lack of perspective doesn't make them right.
equating political centrists to elite supporters
I find it funny that the same group of people who believe trickle down economics doesn't work also insist that trickle down policy will work because of "lesser evil" and "best option".
Some of us enjoy not bootlicking a party 24/7 expecting it to solve problems simply because it isn't the one that is pure evil.
Like I can bet my entire life savings Biden's national train plan will go absolutely nowhere because Obama's national train plan went absolutely nowhere. Yet every doofus and their mom are on here telling me I should appreciate baby steps for wasting my tax money (for the nth time) and not criticize Biden because he needs to beat Trump in the elections.
Yeah no thanks. If the best he can bring to the table is more hot air, he's not doing enough for his constituency at all.
Yeah no thanks. If the best he can bring to the table is more hot air, he's not doing enough for his constituency at all.
And yet you would compare that to the opposition...hmm.
i’m a true neutral in the way that i let the entropy of society take over and say fuck it, nothing matters
politics is a horse race, and america is in dead fucking last, so how does my iota of participation impact any significant amount to the ongoing—here’s that word—enshittification of the public political climate?
edit: alright cool, bad take, i might reconsider this one
