Political discourse

Daniel Sloss has a funny bit about exactly this.

https://youtu.be/O-qcXpapsoY
Sadly it’s so true

The enlightened centrism is strong in this one. No, the US don’t have a conflict of left vs. right. The conflict is between the right and everyone else. And most of the right are just rubes who think they being part of some kind of movement but in reality are just being fleeced by a bunch of grifters

Centrist views such as? grabs popcorn

No seriously, what do you happen to be sitting on the fence about?

This can be attributed to a method of gaining and maintaining political power called divide and conquer. Poisoning the discourse with targeted manipulation in (social) media, while treating politics as kind of bizarre and grievous reality TV show, where everyone is trying to throw the biggest pile of verbal shit on the other.

Bellend means penis tip cos it looks kind of like a bell

I don’t care from which side to peel banana

!enlightenedcentrism@lemmy.world

This will be fun to watch.

Uh… fucking cope hard. The Nazis won’t care about your enlightened centrism when they arrest you for being brown and/or the wrong kind of white.

Trying to pretend that there’s a concerted far-left effort to create civil war in 'Murica is patently absurd

Idk man, I spent altogether too much time over in .ml, and now my view on what is “far left” has changed quite drastically. And that group certainly seems hell bent on starting a civil war.

There are absolutely far more MAGAs, but the tankies are, unfortunately, still far left.

Double entendre.

If you think lemmy is immune to outside agitators, then you’re kidding yourself

I’m certain that there are interested groups trying to whip up a few lunatics so that “the left” can be pitted against the right, and blamed for violence, but there’s no doubt that there’s a far larger audience of people in the US who are eager to lean into fascism and spill blood when they are encouraged

That’s still an oversimplification. In reality political opinion varies across a spectrum; it’s not just hard left, hard right, or no opinion. My own views for example are a little left of centre with a leaning towards liberty (i.e. away from authoritarian). So of course I get called a nazi by the hard left, and a tankie by the hard right, both of which are utter nonsense.

I would have never guessed

I’d say the curve it’s much flatter on the left side. As in right side is shouting tankie, meanwhile there are like 2 tankies and the right wants to set the whole barn on fire to get them both.

Maybe if you mean this as the left vs the left… sure.

No its what german dogs do.

Centrism doesn’t mean sitting on a fence. It means most of the time understanding that both sides are right and wrong at the same time, I often see the problem identified correctly but the solution that is prescribed is absolutely incorrect.

Here are some centrist positions.

We need to stop unfettered immigration, so closing the borders is great, locking up and kicking out immigrants who have committed legal offenses is good, and we should expedite that process but we shouldn’t be kidnapping or profiling people. We shouldn’t be giving economic assistance to illegal immigrants. I know it doesn’t happen at the federal level but it does happen at the state level.

Banning guns won’t solve the violence problem, guns don’t kill people people kill people. American violence is caused by inequality and lack of mental healthcare. Solve that instead of taking guns away.

We should have higher taxes, universal healthcare and stronger safety nets but also much less regulation because most of it is actually designed to protect the incumbent corporations. Free the markets as much as possible, but never bail out a single corporation that fails, bail out the employees.

Increasing the minimum wage does nothing.

Instead of relying on underpaid immigrant labor the US should stop giving cash and tax subsidies to farmers and instead directly subsidize their wages by paying the employees directly. This is my middle of the road solution, we should actually consider nationalization of farms. One of the few things where that could work right now because I think nationalization in general leads to terrible mismanagement. But farms are already inefficient, corrupt and mismanaged and also living on the government tits so we might as well.

Justifying things as “scientific” when the science is social science and the results are not reproducible is intellectually dishonest, and is rampant in discourse about various topics nowadays. The academia brought upon themselves the mistrust they have garnered. This is good because universities have become job training centers and they were never meant to be that, so maybe we’re due for a little creative destruction.

I could continue, but I got shit to do.

https://imgur.com/gallery/cmon-do-civil-war-dzKQtkt

But also

If you think the next US civil war will be fought between Nazis and Marxist-Leninists, you don’t understand American politics very well. The US in 2025 isn’t Stalingrad in 1942.