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OK - fair point. But there are a lot of things that don’t follow under “Nazi-type things”.
Many Democrats are right of center on some issues, for example, and not saying Nazi like things. So I guess I don’t understand the idea of it is black or white.
I suppose I understand the idea that “If you’re talking points are fascist, you’re a fascist.”
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There definitely used to be a center. It was never huge, but since 1992, it’s gone, with a widening rift between them. This isn’t too surprising, but what I found interesting was the 50th percentile “moderate” members of each party. As the Republicans drifted harder right overall, so did their moderates. But the Democrat moderates are about where they’ve always been. So it’s not a symmetrical move. The average Republican is now wayyyy more conservative than the average Democrat is liberal.
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And not just that.
A political “center” makes no sense for lots of things. Big tells for me were:
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Human rights: if you concede group A has rights, but claim B is grasping for rights no one else has, then a centrist has inadvertently laid groundwork for compromising everyone’s rights.
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Environment: maybe you can get away with letting companies poison the atmosphere a little or a river in a healthy climate. But we no longer have that, thanks in part to “centrists.” How can you issue compromise with the climate? You cannot. That’s like proposing a compromise with gravity while falling to your death (or subsequent generations’ deaths—it’s not a perfect metaphor).
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Conservation: extinction is forever, and stories like Jurassic Park are as much fantasy as The Lord of the Rings. You can’t have a middle ground, here. No middle ground is possible. If you tag along with “centrists,” you’ll find yourself in a mass extinction-level event which cannot be corrected (or even mitigated).
There are others, but @spetrovits basically misunderstands my point: the political “center” has overall contributed nothing of value, so it may as well not exist.
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Curious what would have happened if Twitter had decided that his birtherism was just racist conspiracy mongering that they didn’t want any part of, and had banned him years ago.
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The “center” itself moves along with political shifts, right? The end of the “liberal consensus” is a good example. We used to have a much higher upper tax bracket, strong goverment regulations on business, social security programs, and strong supports for unions that only the right fringe (people like Goldwater or whoever) would go after. Mainstream GOP support for such things weren’t really in question. It was just the way the world was. That changed post-Nixon. What was “center” started to shift away from that to something else. The center is ALWAYS relative.
I’d like to think that MOST people would see a group like this as “extreme right” which they are… but the overton window has gone so far to the right, that we have people actively advocating for fascism who are considered mainstream.
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The left haven’t really shifted. The reason why there is conflict with the ‘centrists’ is because they moved their policies to the right in an attempt to claim swing voters, alienating left wing voters in the process.
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Oddly enough a lot of the “Center” these days seem to be deeply right wing when you listen to it. It’s really seems to be more embarrassed right wing that doesn’t want to be called that. Oh those guys? I’m not one of those as I’m above partisan politics.
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One problem with that chart is that it assumes a binary where you support either the Republican or Democratic position to some degree. A lot of people on the left think that the Democratic position is shit, but the Republicans are a blocked, overflowing sewer in comparison.
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Think about this, the Nazi’s tried to clamp down on cigarettes for public safety reasons. A good thing, but they were still fucking Nazis. Hitler promoted the Volkswagon, a beloved car, but he was still a fucking Nazi.
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Can you explain what this is showing?
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All the comments & posts that reddit admins had to remove from /r/The_Donald for violating site-wide rules over the past 30 days.
Note two of the items were links to stories about censorship, so they got that going.
If you read the posts supposedly from Trump in the AMA, it’s clear someone else wrote them for him, which is what you would expect. The answers were in complete sentences and used vocabulary he doesn’t use in his tweets. It was weird watching the Trump supporters feel special that he spoke directly to them when it was obviously a PR person on the other end.
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What is that supposed to be on the warning sign? Bile? That’s not a standard DOT-compliant traffic sign anyway. Might I suggest a couple alternatives:
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In 2015 the Conservatives were running for re-election. They were not popular after a long reign and were trying dumb tricks to get votes. One thing they did in their budget before the election was eliminate a child tax credit and replace it with a $60 monthly payout. Because the $60 was offset by the removal of the tax credit (and it was itself taxable) the average Canadian apparently stood to gain $10 a month.
Then what they did was not actually issue those cheques for half the year. So during the election campaign suddenly Canadians with kids under 18 got cheques for $360 per child. The week that happened their popularity in the polls surged.
That’s the center. People talk like there are there are enlightened people who weigh both sides and think rationally about who to vote for. But the “middle” is composed of people with no convictions, no long term memory, and no long term plans who are only in it for the most recent shiny thing that flashed in front of them. They don’t care what they are in the middle of because they don’t lift their eyes high enough to notice. Selfish idiots who don’t even understand how to be selfish well.
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Hence the flood of asshats on r/unpopularopinion. Makes sense. Unlike their comments.
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I don’t know what that has to do with the concept there aren’t “centrists”. I mean they have that political spectrum chart and there is a middle rating.
Like how about people for individual rights, but also pro free markets?
The idea everyone fits into a nice neat category is absurd. Insistence on labeling leads to tribalism. With us or against us attitudes. Sounds like something Bush would say.
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That makes an assumption that these things can’t be mutually exclusive.
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That’s syncretism, not centrism
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