this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Surrounding yourself with radicals of any political ideology is generally a bad idea
Except maybe centrist if its even possible to be radical centrist
This is an extremely shallow perspective
Not really. I'd say he sees the modern issues we face better than you. It's an issue of echo chambers. If you concentrate a community only with people who share your ideology, especially radical ideology it just amplifies it within that community and achieves little else.
People begin to believe that their worldview is the dominant one, because they're entirely unopposed in their thinking. They are never challenged on any major belief, so the discourse is almost pointless and just spends its time running around the edges of difference.
It also breeds laziness, because you never have to defend your position. Mostly just ends up as communities that share memes with eachother which I shouldn't need to point out is pretty pointless.
Centrism isn't magically enlightened. Depending on the climate it's arguably incredibly naive. "Radical centrism" just sounds like having no internal philosophy.
And my comment had nothing to do with bob's second point about centrism, only the first about surrounding yourself with radicals of any political ideology.
You would benefit from being specific when making a comment where your exact words are wholesale endorsement of someone's worldview. Turning around and immediately changing the entire thesis of your comment makes it seem like your goal was to be contrarian rather than add to the discussion.
A. "Don't surround yourself with extremists.
I'd surround myself with extreme centrists instead"
B. "That is shallow"
You. "They see modern issues better than you. (...)"
You may want to rethink how you provide endorsement in general, if someone pointing out how shallow of a belief something that is inarguably shallow encourages you to claim that other someone, off of a single comment, literally sees the world better.
Have a good one.
Your reading comprehension isn't my issue to fix. I didn't say a word about centrism. As soon as your ego got hurt you come at me with this nonsense. It's cool, you can still grow from this and have it be worth the time taken.
It's a fun game to call failures of rhetoric someone else's failure of reading comprehension. Flimsy, too.
Implicitly, yes you did, by virtue of defending a comment that did discuss "radical centrism" against criticism for being "extremely shallow".
You do understand that I can agree with one idea a person has without endorsing the entirety of their character, or even their entire argument? For the record, centrism is destroying my country.
The branch of our major party which would once have been called 'hard left' is now well and truly centrist, almost centre-right or hard-right on some issues such as defense and the right to protest.
Might be healthy to stop believing you have people figured out from one tiny slice of text or one issue that they've discussed, or even crazier: read and understand what is being said before you go pointing your political divining rod.
The hilarious(ly depressing) thing is that you could be talking about almost any democracy in the world right now. It's most famously true in America, but it's also true here where I live in Australia, it's true for the UK, we're increasingly seeing it across mainland Europe.
Yeah it's a god damn mess. I wonder if the effect has been as crippling to the democratic process in countries where they don't have systems completely dominated by 2 major parties. Doesn't leave a lot of room for nuance.
That's a fine bit of Enlightened Centrist hypocrisy from start to finish 🤦
The fact is that centrists have the biggest echo chamber in the world and are consequently as sure of their philosophy being standard as everyone except the far right, sometimes even more.
I'd much rather be around like minded people who think independently (which isn't a contradiction when you're not a part of the centrist circlejerk. There's a lot more ideological diversity on the left.) than a bunch of centrists mindlessly repeating what the party propagandists and Politico (but I repeat myself) tell them to think.
Who in your world are the major players, political figures or thinkers in this kabal of centrists?
Before you reply please note that I am not from the USA. I am peripherally aware of U.S politics from a geopolitical perspective because we are lapdogs for that country but there's few minor players that I'd be aware of without research.
This presuposses that your concept for "centrist" is accurate. Which can really only be understood by critically examining the available set of ideologies and making up your own mind
I'd rather learn from Angela Davis, Marsha P Johnson, Judith Butler, and their peers than from whatever "radical centrism" is.