“Individual rights” is so general as to be completely meaningless. Is access to abortion an “individual right”? Is freedom to not be dictated to by churches an individual right? That’s not a term monopolized by any wing.
“pro free markets”… what wing is that? The one where tariffs are great or the one with easier international movement of labor and capital?
Left and right wing are useful for broadly grouping political mindsets, but that doesn’t mean all human behavior or activity can be dumped in one of two bins. Eating peanut butter is pretty popular no matter what your other ideologies.
I wonder if this is the admins trying to hedge against the “tech companies are censoring the right” nonsense, though honestly, it’s going to get called that regardless.
Oh, I’m sure you’re right. That’s why they were being so gentle with them for so long, fear of the political fallout. Which, frankly, just angers me. It’s only with the rabid right that we have to soft peddle things to not step on their delicate sensibilities. They have no trouble shitting all over progressives and smiling about it.
He hasn’t tweeted yet that I’ve heard about. I’m sure he will though, probably during his usual 3:00 AM log roll.
What do you call people who have views that are considered both left and right wing?
Human beings.
“Centrists” are either people who take no personal responsibility for their actions, or whose political views are entirely self-serving (usually both).
That’s the beauty of these online forums, people making threats or engaging in otherwise unacceptable or illegal behavior can be tracked down and arrested or incarcerated at the authorities leisure. And I hope every single one of the people who threatened the police or anyone else is hauled off to jail.
I’m a centrist and also living proof that you’re mistaken because I am VERY engaged and I’ve always taken responsibility for my own actions. The reason I’m a centrist is to keep my eyes on both sides, since at times both have proven to be untrustworthy or bad at governing.
Without attributing any amount of savvy or decency whatsoever to the Reddit powers that be, it MAY be the case that quarantining is better than banning from a practical standpoint in this case.
Who goes to r/the_donald? People who enjoy very much swimming in that particular sewer. They’re all already there, and nobody else really engages with them intentionally anymore as it is. If Reddit nuked them, you could argue, they’d all just flood into less hateful or violence-prone subs and ruin it for other people. This way they can just huff one another’s farts forever.
I don’t mean this is objectively a great solution. They’re still basically self-radicalizing in a way that would make ISIS’s propaganda people blush. But from the standpoint of the rest of Reddit, eh, maybe it’ll help.
Now, like I said, who knows if this was the thinking behind Reddit’s decision. Who knows if there was any thinking.
If Reddit nuked r/the_donald, it would probably be like hitting a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat. I’d bet there are plenty of people on it who meet the requirements to create a new subreddit who would start many effective clones of it, causing a ton of work for the admins.
That counterfactual would have to assume that Jack Dorsey isn’t a Libertarian who’s ready and willing to give right-wing populists the run of his site, supposedly in the name of free speech.
It’s often people who pretend to be rational, open-minded, moderate and above politics, but who are really just deviating from a core set of beliefs only on one or maybe two issues where they feel they’ll be personally affected. Often the basis is quite pathetic, revealing some deep-seated personal insecurities. In any case, they can’t admit they’re doing this, so they lose themselves in a fantasy that they’re centrists and maintain it vociferously when presented with facts and definitions and evidence of their own behaviour that would suggest otherwise.
Libertarians also pose as centrists, but that’s a more simple-minded deception than the one I just described where they abandon the political compass they so often promote with their rigged quizzes, returning the the simple left/right spectrum.
I read some of the antifascist subreddits and this is what happens whenever a far right subreddit is nuked. They have all been far smaller than T_D, but there are usually five to ten new subreddits that appear afterwards. They usually get banned too, but I can imagine the chaos that banning T_D would cause.
Sitting on a fence that’s a dangerous course
Oh, you could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force
Even the hero gets a bullet in the chest
Oh yeah, once upon a time in the west
The fact one can’t agree what is left or right and the fact that the political parties aren’t consistent on those views I think bolsters the idea there is a “center”.
EDIT:
We don’t need allies, we need accomplices. Unless you’re willing to absolutely oppose the racist, fascist dorks cosplaying as modern Nazis, you are complicit with the systemic injustice the dorks enable.
Just because some things like wearing clothes or breathing air, aren’t code-able as left and right, doesn’t mean publicly enthusiastic Trump supporters are an unrecognized grouping of moderate centrists.
There are drivers who feel like safe and sensible drivers, but aren’t, and drivers who feel reckless, who aren’t. Most people quietly think of themselves as “centrists”. That’s because left-wing and right-wing are relative distinctions, not absolute, and people rarely think of themselves on the edge.
But since it is relative, it’s incredibly safe to say that {the group of people more right-wing than The_Donald contributors} is much smaller than {the group of people more left-wing than The_Donald contributors}, even if a few of those people like puppies and public sidewalks along with their expressed disapproval of brown-skinned migrants.
