The Two Kinds of Moderate

To use a perhaps extreme example: there's lots of injustice happening right now in China, and not a lot can be done directly to fix it. Are the people seeking justice willing to risk a nuclear war with China just to force changes? Would that help anything?

I worry about this, because I see that quote (along with an abuse of Popper's paradox of tolerance) thrown around a lot these days, by people who I don't at all trust to be of good will. The times we're living in are of great potential, but they're also incredibly fragile. Too much pressure, too much disruption, and the civilization may break down - which means not just rolling back a good thousand years of progress, but also leaving the next hundred or thousand generations stuck in these conditions on a thoroughly broken planet. You can't just reboot a technological civilization. Which makes me think that there is a solid argument to be made for minding the order, and not jumping to extreme action in pursuit of justice.

EDIT: I suppose this may be the "accidental moderate's" answer to the complaint about "intentional moderates". It's not about unwillingness to commit, or being extremely conflict-averse, or trying to appeal to all sides of the issue. It's about refusing to engage in actions - or call to actions - that lead to too much of collateral damage.

I find the over-reliance on second hand ("factual") data, charts and figures, disturbing.

People have to learn to observe, think, and understand themselves.

Not just passively consume pre-made charts and statistics (which are the easiest thing to manipulate). And learning how to spot BS statistical claims wont help when the raw data can be themselves cherry-picked, manipulated, and diced in tons of ways.

Not to mention that live experience is 360 (if one tries), where data will always paint less than the whole picture. One could arrange for great "official" charts and figures for every country -- and most countries do. Unless one gets on the field and talk to the people on the street and the workplace, and try to check the reality in various situations, they can have a totally BS picture painted for them by the statistics and "factual data".

>One person's experience, no matter how broad for an individual, is still just one individual's anecdotal experience.

Well, you're not 10000 people. You're just one, like everyone else is. In the end, whatever you're fed or read or watch, you have to make up your mind for yourself.

>The principles of fact checking and bias analysis should not be relegated solely to academia.

Nor should fact checking and bias analysis start and begin with data people are handed down from official or other sources. Those can range from perfectly accurate to badly compiled to totally and mischievously misleading (for saving face, incompetence, for profit, etc).

If you lived in USSR, would you trust the official data, or you would try to balance things and do direct observation?

You shouldn't blindly trust "facts" and "figures" anywhere else either...

Clinton was elected on explicit Third Way positions nearly 30 years ago. If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda. What you're noticing is the democrats finding a new base a decade after losing their working class supporters, through a combination of Third Way politics, the Republican Southern Strategy. The GOP saw this coming and stoked / capitulated to increasing racist elements of the party during Obama's presidency. This is the only major change in the past decade.

(Well, the democrats aren't really that smart - it's not so much they're finding a new base as they're left with the ones the new GOP ideology intentionally excludes. As a party, they are doing a terrible job mobilizing this!)

Are these actually in conflict? Are they also not part of the working class? What sort of policies do you think should have been enacted against this?