American centrists in a nutshell
America needs more than 2 parties
We need a system that supports more than two parties without third parties being spoilers
youd need revolution for that at this point
There is growing support for new voting and election systems that would support this
We just need the correct voting system.
Approval or STAR would be best.
There’s momentum behind the false start, RCV. That system is fundamentally broken in many of the exact same ways as First Past the Post.
RCV is also broken in wholly unique ways. Like failing monotonicity. It’s the only system where showing a candidate more support can cause them to lose, and cause your least favorite to win.
The guy who first invented the system (a nerd named Condorcet, living some 200 years ago) took and set it aside as a bad idea.
Then a couple other nerds messed with it to make STV, the single transferable Vote, which is actually a multi-winner system.
Some other nerds just flat out resurrected Condorcet’s failed voting system as IRV, or instant runoff voting. This was a bad idea, but at the time there weren’t many other options. (The Condorcet Method is clunky and still broken, and Condorcet died in prison after criticizing the newly written French constitution as not being very egalitarian)
Anyway, skipping ahead to the 1990s and an organization called FairVote pops up pushing a renamed version of IRV as a fix to every single election problem ever.
But the thing is, by this point we knew that it wasn’t.
See first a dude named Durverger came along and figured out that First Past the Post was shit. But in a math way.
Durverger’s Law shows that over time, any voting population using First Past the Post will fall into a Two Party system. There are no exceptions due to what is called the Spoiler Effect.
Then in the 1970s a dude named Kenneth Arrow got his PhD showing that any ranked voting system is subject to the same faults as First Past the Post, just at different places in the process. (Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem)
Which is where we come back to Approval and STAR. Both are Cardinal voting systems. You do not rank candidates against each other, but rate them independently against an arbitrary scale, like 0-5. Then you simply count the ratings. Since two (or more) candidates can have the same rating, the spoiler effect never comes into play. Making cardinal voting systems the only voting systems that can support viable third parties.
Approval is dead simple and is actually fairly old. It was used for a few centuries to elect Popes until some nastiness and war with multiple people claiming to be the rightful Pope.
STAR was invented a decade ago with the use of computer modeling and population surveys and shit. It’s literally the best voting system designed to date. Provided your goal is giving the most people possible a voice in your election.
support means nothing if the current system is undemocratic in the first place.
also places where better voting systems are already implemented didnt see much improvement. this is a deeper multifaceted problem
“both” implies that there are only two options. Both parties supported slavery and Jim Crow. It was the oppressed themselves and some allies who stood up and fought
White Supremacy All the Way Down
That can be said of “western civilization” in general, too.
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silly nonsense espoused by a fraction of a percent people, plus you.
provide some evidence or context if you’re going to choose anomalous extreme examples for your prejudices rather than the actual cultural temperature.
No. You can just take my word for it that this exists, or stew in ignorance.
Conservatives can choose to stop being evil at any time. That’s what prejudice is for.
“Prove that your life sucks” lol
Fuck em, can’t argue with people who chose to be blind.
most of your posts are factually incorrect or at best misguided extremist views.
I’m not taking your word that most recent incorrect post is actually correct if you don’t look at any sources or critically analyze it.
“That’s what prejudice is for.”
No, prejudice is not a tool for you to attack people with when you don’t have a point.
youre supposed to be fighting against prejudice, not encouraging it.
Trolling a mod, eh?
Bold move, Cotton. 🍿
“Let’s see how it works out for 'em”
call wrong out where wrong is.
I do, and that’s why I’m accusing you of trolling.
then your thinking cap’s on backwards.
do you know what “trolling” means?
you’re using that term wrong.
it doesn’t apply to my comments at all.
it applies to the misrepresentative meme in the post.
There’s a reason you’re the one getting massively downvoted throughout this thread, you delusional dipshit. Now fuck off.
Found the centrist.
“Found the centrist.”
literally the opposite of what that means.
The reactionary right is actively stripping rights away from people in the US and attempting to turn the country into a theocracy by re-entrenching patriarchal hierarchies and forcing us to live under their weird religious rules.
there, that’s correct.
has nothing to do with the post or my comment, but it is accurate.
Then I don’t know what you’re talking about.
It sounded like you were saying that there aren’t a bunch of people claiming to be in the middle who actively vote for reactionaries.
this meme is misrepresenting a centrist misunderstanding modern liberals and conservatives with a literal slave owner and a slave.
those parties are not analagous.
centrists don’t believe that slave owners and slaves are the same, and it is lazy and detrimental to misunderstand and then misrepresent any group so that others misunderstand political concepts as poorly as this poster repeatedly does.
OP is simply trying to stoke contempt, which is unhelpful.
they are memers operating on bad information, not activists.
there are plenty of valid jokes you can make about centrists, this poster repeatedly misunderstands and misrepresents political concepts as something to be reviled and disdained for no other reason than to breed polarization.
centrists don’t believe that slave owners and slaves are the same, and it is lazy and detrimental to misunderstand and then misrepresent any group so that others misunderstand political concepts as poorly as this poster repeatedly does.
Let me dissect the joke for you:
The overwhelmingly vast majority of people proclaiming to be (enlightened)centrists are in fact hugely regressive rightwing conservatives.
And they will happily vote the political party full of people who publicly judge black people for having slaveholders among their ancestors, without a clue as to how that may have happened.
“The overwhelmingly vast majority of people proclaiming to be (enlightened)centrists are in fact hugely regressive rightwing conservatives.”
incorrect.
The point of the meme is that centrists claiming to see both sides of an issue would see something as extreme as slavery similarly, which is inaccurate trolling.
If your “joke” is simply to make things up to sow discord, you’re no better than MAGA.
making people angry at entire groups for zero reason based on inaccurate information is not a “joke”.
also, bear in mind that the post history of this OP troll is fraught with misinformation.
The point of the meme is that centrists claiming to see both sides of an issue would see something as extreme as slavery similarly, which is inaccurate trolling.
I mean, are the modern republican party’s positions actually that much better? Voter disenfranchisement; removing human rights for women, lgbt people, and other minorities; economic policies that will harm nearly everyone but themselves; colluding with enemy countries; working with Nazis; I mean look at this collection of quotes from the republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. What the fuck is this?
Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few
- Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial candidate
You’re telling me this guy wouldn’t bring back slavery the nanosecond he thought he could? If not, you’re deluding yourself; he literally says as much verbatim. The republican party is JUST AS BAD, IF NOT WORSE than the people who fought to keep slavery. Anyone who claims to see “both sidez” is quite literally saying that those quotes and the democrats’ policies are equivalently acceptable. That’s basically the OP’s meme.
Oof this dude doesn’t get hyperbole or jokes lol
“If your “joke” is simply to make things up to so discord, you’re no better than MAGA.”
GUYS HE DID THE THING
Seriously earlier you asked for evidence, can’t do better than that
The meme is using a metaphor to expose the reality that you seemingly agreed with.
It’s using slavery as the analogue for the modern reactionary fascism that the right has been deploying to strip people’s rights away.
Furthermore there were “centrists” in both cases who dismissed the liberation efforts as extremist.
Edit: I saw the title again, and realized that may be what you’re referring to so my reply didn’t really address what you were talking about.
I suggest you look at the child-separation camps and research the phrases “white genocide” and “replacement theory” if you want to know what modern white supremacy looks like. Also, look to the black lives matter protests if you want to see what happens when people protest the white supremacy that touches their lives most frequently.
“The meme is using a metaphor to”
poorly, and to no good end.
it’s an extremist’s imagining of politics, because they don’t understand what politics is enough to make a relevant meme.
“I suggest you look at the child-separation camps and research the phrases “white genocide” and “replacement theory” if…”
it’s great that some of you guys are finally looking these things up, but don’t assume that everybody is as ignorant of history and how it relates to modern life as the cloud who howl in support of bigotry and trolling.
they want to fight others as long as their group is bigger, there’s no more to this meme than that.
it’s great that some of you guys are finally looking these things up, but don’t assume that everybody is as ignorant of history and how it relates to modern life as the cloud who howl in support of bigotry and trolling.
Who was the one who needed examples of white supremacy again?
centrists don’t believe that slave owners and slaves are the same
Centrists don’t believe that now… because leftists and progressives won that battle…
You seem to not understand the Middle ground fallacy. Which is what this meme is making fun of.
If you’ve built your personal political philosophy on the middle ground fallacy (it seems like you may have given how upset you are) then you got a lot of rethinking to do.
“Centrists don’t believe that now… because leftists and progressives won that battle…”
your contention is that further back in the day, people were confusing slaves and slave owners?
you sure about that one?
“You seem to not understand the Middle ground fallacy”
in what way is somebody knowing the difference between centrist and conservative policies a fallacy?
“Which is what this meme is making fun of.”
it really isn’t, you should check the other comments around this post and see how many other people, like you, are incorrectly identifying the point of this meme differently.
everybody has a different idea of what this flawed meme shows because it’s a Rorschach test for how little you understand centrism, horseshoe theory, or your middle ground fallacy.
“If you’ve built your personal political philosophy on the middle ground fallacy…”
I understand your confusion given you don’t understand the difference between political ideologies to the point where they are identical to you.
If you’ve built your political ideology on proximal repetition rather than critical analysis, you have a lot more than rethinking to do.
in what way is somebody knowing the difference between centrist and conservative policies a fallacy?
The meme is not about knowing the difference, it’s a criticism of the position itself. Truth is truth. The truth doesn’t care what the center of any political debate is.
To be a centrist is to say well this side is saying one thing that side is saying this other thing we should try to average them out to get to the best conclusion. That is a logical fallacy.
The truth may or may not be in the center of the political debate, but that is not because it’s the center of the political debate.
To quote the Wikipedia article you’ve already been linked:
An example of an argument to moderation would be considering two statements about the colour of the Sky on Earth during the day – one claiming, correctly, that the sky is Blue, and another claiming that it is Yellow – and incorrectly concluding that the sky is the intermediate colour, Green.
If you’ve built your political ideology on proximal repetition rather than critical analysis
If you mean proximally repeating a point on the political compass then you’re agreeing with the point of the meme.
