801–810 of 964 posts
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So in the issues of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, anti-lynching laws, Voting Rights what position would a centrist have taken that wouldn't have explicitly maintained white supremacy?
This is the typical bait to attack centrism: moral coercion by framing an issue so that "NO" can never be an answer. Centrism doesn't mean indifference regarding any topic, nor does it mean "meet in the middle" on any topic.
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I've read and even said a lot of uncomfortable things on the internet, but seeing someone lament the loss of not pitting a holocaust survivor with a denier probably takes the cake.
A lot of holocaust survivors have made very cogent cases against deniers, you may be underestimating their strength. Maybe some people couldn't do that, but other people could. It is a lot of people we are talking about.
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Very few people decide the value of a fetus on a binary. Some leftists say it’s always just a clump of cells, some rightists say it’s always a human life. Most people just don’t know. Immediately after conception it’s clearly just a clump of cells, immediately before birth it’s clearly a baby. Hence why most Americans are between lots of exceptions and few exceptions. In general, if lots of people feel a certain way,…
> In general, if lots of people feel a certain way, and your conclusion is completely contradictory, you should assume you’re wrong until strong evidence says otherwise. This is a useful heuristic for becoming popular but not for making moral decisions. It is the worst possible approach to forming one's conscience. > You’re essentially assuming you know better than everyone. You're assuming everyone else formed a rea…
This is less true with morals, unless you’re a relativist.
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I'm not even sure if its true since most media will barely engage with the issue. But Fauci appeared concerned that Covid-19 could potentially be the result of a gain-of-function research that artificially evolved another COVID strain to increase its effectiveness at spreading. If true, COVID-19 is the biggest scientific fuck up of all time. Fauci had allegedly pushed to resume funding that sort of research. Instead,…
This should be trivially easy for proponents of that theory to prove it if that is in his emails. Just link to an un-edited, full context email thread relevant to that topic. So does this exist? If so, just share that link. If not, stop pretending that "media bias" is an excuse to continue sharing the claim surrounded by unfounded conspiracy thinking.
>We have a good team lined up to look very critically at this, so we should know much more at the end of the weekend. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change
Page 3187: https://www.scribd.com/document/510220252/Fauci-Emails#from_...
HN formatting is primitive, but the relevant sentence is "Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."
The contrast is stark compared to the US because in our political system, a coalition has to be formed after each election to form a majority.
This means building consensus and thinking multi-partisan is the default. This pretty much rules out the "total war" approach on political opponents as it means shooting yourself in the foot. You may need that other party to form a majority.
Therefore, centrism in the broadest sense, which I see as the spectrum center-left, center, center-right...is the heart of the matter here, instead of some barren wasteland. Over 90% of the population votes within that relatively narrow bandwidth, therefore this is the negotiation space.
And negotiate we will. Whilst we too have pockets of extreme left and right getting disproportionate media attention, reality on the ground (voting and policy) is basically centrists all around, with minor tweaks to the left and right.
The above system isn't perfect, above all it does lead to slow progress at best, as policy is watered down due to the nature of coalitions, but let's not stray too far off topic.
The US political system indeed seems designed to destroy or at least "win" from the other party, and basically...anything goes.
Without any choice, centrism is not represented, at least not in media. But that doesn't mean centrism does not exist. I would expect in any developed nation the majority of the population to be in the center or fairly close to it, the so-called silent majority.
The thing I find most baffling is how besides polarization between the left and right reaching new heights, many of you seem so indoctrinated into this us versus them dogma that many if not most comments below heavily criticize or even attack centrism.
You should take some time to think about that position. The point of the article was to break out of your bubble, yet you double down. When you reject both the opposing party as well as centrism, you basically reject some 50-70% of the typical population. This besides the ridiculous notion of reducing something as complex as a human being to "friend" or "enemy".
Way to miss the point.
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I started writing out all the tit-for-tat responses, then I remembered that this topic is about media narrative bubbles. I already know all of your claims because I watch broadcast news programs here and there. I see the news reports on Good Morning America when we have it on. I know what the left-wing narratives are. That's my point. It's the default. You have to work harder to get something that isn't in that bubbl…
You're seeing the point. This isn't a bubble. This is objective reality .
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Christmas and church settings don't indicate Christianity. Most secular Americans celebrate Christmas or attend weddings and funerals in Christian churches or officiated by Christian clergy. Indeed, for a very long time it was the norm to have one's own funeral or wedding at a church, officiated by Christian clergy, even if one was atheist or agnostic and even today it's quite common.
This is true, but also underlines the very point the article was making. In the United States, Christianity is the default. Characters are typically only identified if the stray from the default. Furthermore, given the sheer imbalance of identities in the country, it’s a disingenuous to claim that say Batman is equally likely to be Zoroastrian, because he’s not explicitly stated not to be.
But Christianity isn’t the default, secular is the default. When there are identifiably Christian characters, they are often some cringey stereotype (the religious clique in “Easy A”, for example). See also the link about “Hollywood’s religion problem” for many more examples. Hollywood clearly, starkly distinguishes between “normal” characters and “Christian” characters.
> Furthermore, given the sheer imbalance of identities in the country, it’s a disingenuous to claim that say Batman is equally likely to be Zoroastrian, because he’s not explicitly stated not to be.
Right, because that would be unjust. Justice demands proportional representation, and you can’t have proportional representation and equal representation. If I create a cult tomorrow I shouldn’t have the same representation as Atheists or Hindus, who constitute a much larger share of the country.
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> In general, if lots of people feel a certain way, and your conclusion is completely contradictory, you should assume you’re wrong until strong evidence says otherwise. This is a useful heuristic for becoming popular but not for making moral decisions. It is the worst possible approach to forming one's conscience. > You’re essentially assuming you know better than everyone. You're assuming everyone else formed a rea…
In general, people are about as intelligent as you, and at least the same order of magnitude. People are prone to trends as much as the market is, but the market of ideas tends to be somewhat efficient (not least because all profits from financial to business to psychic stem from people and their expectations). So the conclusion that everyone is wrong requires serious burden of proof. Doesn’t mean you can’t be contra…
> This is less true with morals, unless you’re a relativist.
Even assuming moral absolutism is valid, that very much depends on what measure you choose to apply to values that, even if they are naturally quantifiable (which I doubt for morality, even one assumes it is absolute), clearly have no obvious natural ratio-level measure, making orders of magnitude and other ratio-dependent comparisons entirely arbitrary.
The elephant in the room is that this sort of enlightened centrism, while it sounds noble, rests on several ill-formed assumptions. The first is that, by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. This assumes the Overton Window is balanced, stationary, and not tilted to one side or the other. You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further l…
Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than tha…