I don’t really understand your point here. Are you claiming that a centrist supports some amount of genocide?

Yes

What I like to imagine that brings a smile to my face is the afterlife for Ronald Reagan involves him being stuck in a small room perfectly healthy and fine, but utterly alone, for the rest of eternity. Nothing is in the room and there are no windows. The room is a single color and silent.

Kissinger I think I would like to not to actually go to hell but be reincarnated as a public trash can in the dirtiest and most desperate part of a Republican/austerity ravaged rust belt city. In this case I would hope Kissinger felt excruciating pain the entire time.

Then again maybe heaven would be wonderful for the rest of us if you took Kissinger and Reagan and cloned them into human bowling pins that you would try to squish into blood splatters with boulders over and over again in a relaxing bowling style game. In this case every single death would be felt by Reagan and Kissinger, their screams and squishing bodies would echo around the bowling alley adding a nice staccato excitement to the background music playing on the speakers!

Do I sound unhinged? Good! Maybe I am describing a bowling alley in hell and not heaven but idk sign me up wherever it is both these men are mass murderers who more than got away with their heinous crimes.

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.

You poor people need to get over yourselves and admit that the lines on the graph of economic factors that exclude poor people look good. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves, the fact that you aren’t happy about us making money is going to LOSE US THE ELECTION so get serious ok?

The other guy is worse, so we really don’t have to listen to a damn thing you say at all and you have to vote for our guy, get that through your poverty addled brains.

Sure, team vs team games create the immediate game design consequence that if your teammates are terrible they can ruin your experience even if you are playing extremely well.

As a result good game design should limit the capacity of a single player to ruin the rest of their team’s experience. Obviously, this is a balance to find, limit this too much and the player no longer feels like they can impact the game for better or for worse. It goes beyond a balance though into the basic incentives and framing of the gameplay.

Take for example match length time, one of the ways a game can handle a player getting dealt a shitty hand with teammates is to have the match length be short enough that a player can just shrug their shoulders and discard the next 10 minutes or so from their competitive goals and just play the match out until it ends and they get matched with better teammates. Rocket League is a perfect example of this. Imagine if Rocket League had League Of Legends length matches. Imagine how much more toxic rocket league players would be to each other if getting matched with a shitty teammate meant having to play 40 minutes of frustrating, unfun gameplay with no coordination between teammates.

Another way team based competitive games can mitigate teammates being frustrating and not coordinating is by building the gameplay around it being easy and natural to coordinate with teammates. Take for example Apex Legends with it’s brilliant pinging system along with automated call outs, it makes coordination natural for players who might otherwise just fuck off and not coordinate (not that this doesn’t still happen). The equivalent system in a LOL type game would a simple way to non-verbally telegraph the rhythm of your next attacks to your teammates so that they could easily chain their moves with yours. Make it so the game is always displaying to your teammates what you are planning to do next so that it is maximally easy for your teammates to coordinate even if they don’t give a shit.

I have other examples but I think RTS games also struggle often with these things, in team games that go on for 20+ mins the losing team almost always starts to get angry and frustrated at each other even though… losing is literally 50% of the experience in playing a competitive RTS. That is bad game design in my opinion, losing isn’t going to be as fun as winning but there are ways to make players less likely to get genuinely upset with each other when they are losing. Take for example Titanfall 2’s end of the match blitz where the losing team has to try to get to escape drop ships, it gives individual players on the losing team something to fixate on pro-actively doing that can benefit them meaningfully instead of just letting the losing team check out from the gameplay and start blaming each other.

What I really don’t respect about the design of League Of Legends is it is one of those types of games that really puts teammates at odds with each other and it creates a lot of toxic conflict because of it. It is just bad design, people joke about the toxicity of games like LOL but it isn’t a joke.

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.

One of the reasons it is so hard is that right now is an extremely difficult time for people, so I think meeting people is even more difficult. If you are stressed out about making rent every month, guess what socialization and finding a partner becomes a distant priority vs just surviving.

I promise you though there are plenty of women out there who find social awkward people into niche hobbies sexy, especially if you are a genuinely nice person (which, beyond a superficial impression, is pretty much always the truly sexy thing about a person).

The problem is that those women are sitting at home exhausted and sad from modern life the same way you are, and it is hard to meet people outside the context of a bar.

If you are a nice person you are sexy and enough the way you are, what needs to change is the brutal grind of modern life, not you.

I mean just from a basic freetime calculation… women didn’t use to be able to work, which is fucked up, but it is also fucked up how much everybody’s lives are swallowed up by work at least in the US, and if you compare the difficulty of finding a women to hit it off with vs when women weren’t working as much…. I mean you have to cut yourself slack. The women of your dreams probably isn’t at the bar or wherever public meeting space you are, or actively on the dating app because they are stressed out and working all the time just like you :(

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.

If you were in a Tom Clancy novel we would know it.

All the people around you would act like wooden placeholders for character archetypes.

Lights can represent hope, and Israel is very focused on destroying that in Palestinian’s hearts right now.

I was being bitterly sarcastic but honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if Israel was being that cruel.

Tradwife influencers seem like people who don’t understand how having a kink works and mistakenly craft their identity around an aspect of a kink that is toxic when applied outside the bubble of consent and play with a trusted partner.

true, but there isn’t even real human feces in these shitposts, it is just AI shit that don’t smell

Is this the future of memes? Just lazily typing prompts into an AI that feeds out Cards Against Humanity style “zany!” combinations of dumb shit?

It all feels like the same fucking photo, the same lighting, the same boring reductive lowest common denominator responses to people asking “wouldn’t it be funny if?” that don’t carry any deeper meaning. I feel like I am looking at advertisements, except nobody is selling me anything other than a less vibrant future where human artists are even less valued than they are now.

Memes aren’t supposed to be “high art” or whatever, that is the fun of them they are handmade, stupid and janky. These AI images don’t feel like that though, instead of feeling silly and handmade they just feel…. disposable and it makes me sad that people are so excited to relate to art in a way where the future is exciting because of the limitless disposability of art that AI unlocks….

Shopkeeper, increasingly exasperated: I’m trying to tell you that I’m evil and offering these wares with no regard for the harm they will do!

Me: You realize we are in the middle of a literal apocalypse and I am one of the only people who can stop it and save countless lives and you are still trying to nickel and dime me for a soda and some run of the mill agility potions? Like you have to understand that if I die and fail than you are also dead as well and if you have the magic ability to zoom ahead of me to deeper floors of this dungeons to repeatedly set up your shop without experiencing any harm from the creatures I am having to slaughter one by one by one… what the hell are you doing trying to make a quick buck selling crap to me?

Obviously your worldview is so warped that you don’t see the most evil thing you are doing is attempting to make a quick buck off of selling the hero tools that are essential to them saving the world, but honestly as exasperated as I am about this I work in the pharmaceutical industry and WOW by comparison selling me a pair of boots that is going to curse my strength is just amateur evil shit. Try getting a massive chunk of society addicted to opioids you wannabe evil schmuck and then get back to me about being evil.

Shopkeeper, taken aback and kind of concerned: ….are you ok? Damn what reality do you come from? This place is a literal hell dungeon full of creatures that want to dissect you slowly before feeding on your corpse but wow sounds like you have seen some shit