Bro I bet if you did allll that work and took all that risk just to make your life maybbeee better that at the end of the day the people living in the place you made it to would be blown away by your incredible bravery and resolve and would welcome you with open arms into their society and economy!

………

Or maybe they would just pay their coast guard to troll around drowning migrant boats with heavily armed speed boats with expensive lights on and an automated voice message that says “go home” and shrug and say “well we tried!!” as families drown right in front of their eyes.

Centrists by and large are ideological cowards Why? They just have beliefs that put them in the center of the left/right dichotomy. Is one a coward for not being polarized? This point is almost moot, though — centrism is rather nebulous and ephemeral.

Because it is the mechanism centrists use to arrive at their political beliefs that is cowardly. They don’t tend to start from a perspective that arises from their empathy and curiosity for the world and build their politics based on that, they look at the spread of opinions people have around them and just go right down the middle where they can disappear into the crowd without having to do the hard work of creating an actually ideologically rigorous belief system that adheres to reality and evolves with it.

A rightwing fascist emphatically cheers on the genocide of Palestinians (and Jews for that matter confusingly), a leftist emphatically declares genocide is a wrong and a human rights violation. One of those is a dangerous world view that needs to be resisted with force and the other is a world view of harm reduction and solidarity with all humans. What makes most centrists so cowardly is that they take both of those viewpoints as reasonable starting positions and average them to emphatically supporting “some genocide!” and it is incredibly pathetic.

Liberalism is not dependent on the left-right dichotomy, and it is not nebulous like centralism. It is quite well defined in poli-sci. You can read about the beliefs that it encompasses here.

I mean, academia can define “liberalism” however it wants, that isn’t how I define it and most people in conversation about US politics don’t use liberal that way. The word has evolved from the meaning you prescribe to it.

The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs

This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.

I don’t understand the confusion here. My point is that centrism in the US is largely a political position constructed in reverse. If someone (consciously or unconsciously) decides they will peg their beliefs on the center of the Overton Window that is fundamentally a different thing than taking a set of ethics, morals, and policy knowledge and building a political perspective from the ground up.

Call it whatever you want, people that try to disappear in a crowd by just mimicking the behavior and beliefs of people around them are not doing the same thing as people in the crowd who are behaving according to their morals, ethics and understanding of the world and either are blending into the crowd or not because of it.

Centrists by and large are ideological cowards, they are unwilling to imagine right and wrong outside of the comfortable and established narratives that determine right and wrong in their head (and are described within the Overton Window). Centrists will for example happily join progressives in attacking Trump for doing awful things like draconian and cruel immigration control measures, and as soon as Biden takes office and keeps doing the same shit they will flip to yelling at progressives for attacking Biden for doing the same thing.

Centrists are the kind of political position that has substance, it is purely an average of the Overton Window, no matter distorted and fucked up the Overton Window has been made by conservatives and the rich.

Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.

I think what you can say however is that one of the hallmark indicators of centrists (speaking from the context of US politics here just because that is what I know) is that they have no true ideological beliefs. The way a centrist determines right and wrong isn’t by thinking about the problem and applying ethics and critical analysis to it like leftist generally does (and conservatives loudly pretend to do), rather a centrist defines wrong as unpopular.

Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe. This isn’t news to leftists in the US dealing with US centrists, but the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has written it across the sky in big blazing letters that centrism is a catastrophically dangerous way to reach a consensus in a society undergoing crisis and in need of deep reform.

The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs, we just have to shame them into realizing the hateful positions they have (that they don’t perceive as hateful or not hateful, just average!) make them an outcast and they will fold as they always do to whoever controls the narrative.

At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism, there is nothing ideological to locate among the political center of the US, calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.

I’m not a Rogan meathead, but women are absolutely super choosey these days. Dating apps have given women an inflated sense of their own (dating) worth, and they largely want tall, handsome, well-off, slightly older men.

If this is happening even a little bit it is because of the distorting forces of capitalism and addictive phone apps are warping peoples interactions on dating apps.

I promise you, if you are genuinely a pretty nice human being who tries to be a good person there are plenty of women out there who want to fuck you. Really, the world is full of horny women who get hot and bothered by realizing that cute man they just met is also really sweet and kind. You don’t need fit any particular idea of a man, I understand it feels like you do and that is an awful feeling but it is a feeling not the reality.

Also women are probably more choosey because they are by large exhausted from work places that grind them down, trying to make rent, healthcare bullshit and any number of other struggles of modern life, just like you. They want to make sure that use their vanishing amount of free time, energy and money pursuing somebody that isn’t going to be a dead end.

If you want the quickest route to more men finding women who are interested in them, then support unionization, the social safety net, workers rights, and progressive legislation on housing. We need to take better care of people so that they have more free time, energy and money to pursue love and sex.

Why did I have to learn this in meatspace, and not on the internet from random kids? Things ain’t right, I tell you, when my extended family knows and/or cares more about an environmental topic than left-leaning Lemmy.

Because everything is on fire and while using less soap and laundry detergent bottles is certainly a good goal to aim for, it is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic and worse it is rearranging deck chairs according to the directions of a captain who is trying to distract everyone from dealing with the fact that the ship is sinking.

Recycling by and large doesn’t work but corporations really don’t care because recycling is a great way to sell consumers the experience of being environmental when consuming and it provides way to shift blame and get people focused on recycling rather than the actions of big corporations.

As recycling implodes as a cultural ritual of “doing your part” to save the environment there has been a rise in advertisements from companies selling smaller detergent and soap bottles and I think they are trying to fulfill the same emotional need and story .

Which isn’t to say these soap bottles aren’t a good thing, but if the left leaning people you interact with aren’t focused on this… I don’t think that is indicative of anything but the high number of existential environmental problems we face and the general refusal of neoliberal and rightwing governments to tackle them.

Two things.

A really great goal for meditation or just mental health in general is trying to be conscious of the pleasantness of having an idea and desiring to do it or even just having the desire to do something before you have attached any higher level executive functioning type of thoughts and rationalized that desire within a framework of events and logic. Just try to enjoy the feeling without rushing to attach things to it. WAYYY harder said than done of course :)

Second thing, prioritize getting high quality time burying yourself in video games or whatever else you go to hyperfocus on and shut out the outside world. Set an alarm, play the video game and make yourself forget about all those anxieties hanging in your head about what you should actually be doing right now. Lean into your ability to get lost in a thing and trust the alarm. I am realizing if I don’t do this I just feel always exhausted from a thirst for stimulation, and often people are unfortunately disgusted or repulsed when they perceive how much stimulation my ADHD actually needs for me to feel balanced enough to become functional and adult.

I find that everyone in my life will frequently start to be disgusted by how much I am focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all others but those outside perspectives don’t understand no matter how much they say exactly how much I need those long stretches of meditative pursuit of a single thing in order to be functional or even remotely happy. As someone with ADHD unless you are really lucky, you have to hide how much time you spend doing this or there are very real social consequences (again it really doesn’t matter what people say they accept, people won’t accept you for it unless they have a mind like you). One of the best ways to do that is to just ensure the stimulation you are getting is high quality, distilled stimulation that fits best into your life.

From another perspective setting an alarm and leaning into a favorite hyperfocus is a great way to slow down the feeling of a day sliding by, it helps counteract one the worst consequences of time blindness which is just a general feeling that you are never actually arriving anywhere but just chasing after things you are behind on.

Hi Keith it’s your Mom’s friend Charen (pronounced with a hard Ch) she met at a weird multi-level marketing candle scheme she didn’t realize she was getting trapped into a miserable full length evening advertisement for (I should remember, I hosted it!).

I barely know you but I just wanted to raise awareness for my community Facebook group Leopards4FacesInNeed that connects vulnerable third world children with Christian Leopards.

Also stop smoking pot Keith, it is a SIN and I think talking about it publicly here as a thinly veiled attempt to shame you in a totally out of context fashion is totally appropriate and it’s not like I am going to face any consequences so maybe just log out of facebook and stop checking it for years at a time so you don’t have to deal with people like me. Also have you talked to my son Kevin? I lost him to the terrible woke plague and he won’t talk to me unless I take off my maga hat and I’m afraid to since I think I can hear the sound of the good old days of America playing from within side the hat, it must be a sign from up above (you should hear the tiny angles sing my name) and even my love for my son can’t get in the way of those types of messages!

the portal straight to the depths of Facebook rendered into the raw flesh of reality screeches as it destabilizes and collapses shut 🚪 💥

The peaceful silence of the night resumes. 🐿️ 🌙 🦨 🦗 🦗 🦉 🌟 💤

I know that, did you have to say that in a condescending way?

Gotta love this framing that is trying to get me to see China as the big bad rival.

Like, we are in a climate emergency, great if China makes a bunch of solar panels and drives down the cost, it’s the US’s fault for not recognizing that this is an emergency too and responding by subsidizing solar production in the US to the point that China’s actions weren’t a problem.

If we were talking about graphics cards, or luxury cars, or something else that wasn’t trying to combat catastrophic climate change I might feel differently, but in this context things are so desperate that it is as simple as More Solar Panels = Good

I am not a teenager, but I think younger people are generally pretty fucking cool.

Yeah, yall are immature, so what, compared to old people when they were your age, y’all are so MUCH COOLER.

Seriously, on every metric, I don’t understand how you can shit on young people these days. They are just an improvement on us.