this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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I made no assumption about where you discuss anything. It was one provable example given.
I excuse none of the most vile parts of conservatism. I am not your enemy. I am not happy with status quo.
However, I hate the political "adjustment" of language, no matter which side carries it out. I hate making words more vague to try and mask reality. I hate how easily and liberally Nazi is thrown around.
I do not like polarization. I do not like driving away people who disagree with me. I do not like "cancelling" people no matter which party carries it out. I believe in innocent until proven guilty.
And I really, really fucking hate forcing people to believe what I do because their goddamn group membership word matches mine.
It’s easy not to like polarization when one specific side chooses hate as it’s platform. People bemoan the lack of polite discourse, empathy, and fact. I’m not going to normalize or treat as equal the viewpoints of hatred as a policy.
Conservatives haven’t had a real single idea aside from Outgroup of the Week since Reaganomics. And reagonmics is exactly what helped millionaires snowball into billionaires and create the very economic issues we are suffering now. There is no “fiscal conservative” anymore. It’s simply tax cuts for the rich.
So anyone that could even entertain the notion of voting for the political party that presented Trump as a president is not a centrist.
I’d believe someone from the US is centrist if they agreed with 87% of Biden’s extremely centrist policy.
You are speaking a lot about what a Centrist is to you. There is an irony to that and I implore you to recognize that. They are not a homogeneous group. You don't like the image you have of them that is largely manufactured of old pictures of your enemies spun into straw.
I'm Canadian and voted Liberal in the federal election, but I do understand US politics to a degree. I thought Trump was an absolute fool, and fools do so love their own. I understand to some degree why he won, though I feel voter apathy played as large a part as well.
Regardless, if I took a stance that would be typically right-wing, would that be me defending them? No. You can arrive at the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons. You can also follow your heart and feel that you've been nothing but good, and royally fuck things up.
For example, I gave the example elsewhere in this thread, but I believe in much tighter immigration controls, if not outright eliminating most of it for now. You may look at that and call me a racist. You would be wrong. The race is irrelevant, and it's an environmental and economic stance that led me there. Our current immigration policies allow pushing down the minimum wage, makes UBI more difficult (if not impossible) to implement, and allow countries that are outstripping their resources to simply place those people elsewhere instead of dealing with their population issues in a realistic way. This is one of many things that has also irreparably damaged the environment.
Something done for good reasons is having bad knock-on effects and we should adjust things before it gets worse. In my experience, a Centrist gets to say "right idea, horrible implementation, let's fix it" instead of just clinging to an ideal.
You're misunderstanding the economics of immigration. The economic risks are far worse without it than with it. Capitalisms core mechanisms demand growth to thrive, North Americans are not having birth fast enough to replace their own population. Immigration is absolutely mandatory if you want to retire someday. Immigrants often also create far more jobs than they "take", if they open a restaurant that provides jobs, for example, there is a net positive to the economy there. There is a higher rate of entrepreneurship in immigrant populations (immigrants are about 80 percent more likely to found a firm, compared to U.S.-born citizens). The only thing that "allows" pushing down the minimum wage is voting for conservatives who believe you should starve for being born poor.