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This is a well-crafted piece, let's break it down:
I'll leave it to the gallery to decide if OP simply has natural talent at this, or is a trained and well-polished master baiter, but, from me, kudos.
Trust me, I'm not a leftoid baiting. You'll notice the conspicuous absence of any mentions of Rosalind Franklin in my post, which would be the number 1 point anybody of a left wing persuasion would attempt to make here.
Instead I fully and freely acknowledge that Rosalind Franklin has been massively overrated, the narrative about how Watson and Crick somehow "stole" her work (never mind the fact that it's very unlikely she would even understand the implications of the images she produced, it's very non trivial to go from this to realizing it implies DNA has a double helix structure) is completely discredited and her contributions were nowhere near those of the people who actually got the Nobel prize.
No, I don't think you're a leftoid baiting - mate, I wouldn't have chosen to make that post if I didn't know your posting well.
Plus, mentioning Franklin would be poor baitcraft. You'd get written off as a leftoid and not get nearly as much attention as doing the former rightoid schtick.
Some people here, including yourself, seem to have developed the view that I'm some sort of evil genius who has nothing better to do than spend my free time honing the art of the bait and trying those skills out on the people here like some sort of lab experiment. The truth is a lot more mundane (as life often is): everything I say is certified 100% organic and genuine with no artificial preservatives or colouring.
You may not be an evil genius but inadvertently (or not... OooOoOOOooOo) you're quite good at poking the hornets nest here
I like it, please continue
So, previously, in response to justawoman, I wrote that there's a distinct stage in the decline of forums where their dynamic becomes increasingly dominated by people coming in to argue with "the forum", which they see as an amorphous outgroup blob. The paradigmatic example to me is all the incels (not in the lib sense, actual incels) going to 4chan's /fit/ to argue with /fit/izens about how self-improvement is impossible and nobody will ever get laid except Chad. It may be true that, in certain respects - perhaps on particular issues, perhaps in response to particular arguments, or perhaps, perhaps often, in response to obviously bad posts which cloak themselves in those issues and arguments - themotte can summon a hornet's nest. This is bad. It is bad to poke the hornet's nest, bad to summon the hornets, bad to be a hornet. If you do this, you are degrading the space and the community. Even though many people come here and see what they want to see, themotte is not a monolithic rightoid hiveblob, but to troll it as if it is a monolithic rightoid hiveblob is to summon that hiveblob out of the future as an entirely natural defense mechanism. If you like this dynamic in a community, I invite you to move on, and instead visit the beautiful imageboard of /pol/, where anyone can play 128D dramatard chess with whatever outgroupblob they choose to envision.
While what you say is 100% true, the unfortunate truth is that The Motte has been slowly but steadily shifting in a "monolithic rightoid hiveblob" direction.
It is not one, and one of the reasons I like to state my opinions and then get dogpiled by the hiveblob is to prevent it from becoming one (as long as I am here, it can't be one by definition).
But as someone who considers themselves a pragmatic centrist with (classical, not contemporary) liberal characteristics, I do find this place increasingly frustrating. So like it or not, it's cathartic to see some seethe and cope from the gang.
What would you say are the 3 main Left and 3 Right beliefs that position you on the centrist chair?
I started typing a different comment but got distracted and never finished. I'll try again.
3+ right:
I believe that privatizing government services, where there is a competitive market for the service, is almost always a great thing. I.e. privatizing trash collection? probably excellent idea, privatizing municipal water? Probably a terrible idea
I'm an extremely strong believer in gun rights and aside from no-brainer restrictions on violent fucked up people, I'm generally opposed to any gun limitations
I think voter ID laws are kind of a no-brainer, however I do believe the government has an obligation to make it quite easy to get said ID. I have very low faith that politicians who support the former will enable the latter, but in a vacuum it's a solid plan.
While I am pro-organized labour in theory, I find that almost every large prolific western union is more of a rent-seeking organization than something that actually makes workers better off. I think most teachers, police, government workers, and dock workers (I've seen effort posts on this last one that they're not as bad as I think they are, but can't remember the details) should be razed to the ground and then maybe allowed to be rebuilt provided they don't immediately go back to rent seeking. Paradoxically, I think declining union enrollment overall in the West probably hasn't been great for society overall, but I'm not strongly attached to this one.
I'm generally very opposed to the most recent wave of Western government immigration policy. I live in Canada, I'm sure you can fill in the blanks here.
Patriotism is good, actually.
3+ left:
I think things like school lunch programs, and basically anything that improves children's lives is massively positive EV and should have money poured into it.
I think public transit, bike lanes, etc are actually the only solution to grid lock and increasing traffic. If we accept that 1) cities have finite downtown space, 2) populations of major cities will continue to grow 3) those people will want to move around and 4) traffic is already bad, then the only solution is to get people moving in ways that are significantly more space efficient per person. There is no other way to solve this math equation.
I'm generally quite pro skilled immigration pipelines, provided they are implemented sensibly. To get super leftist, they actually feel kind of like neo-colonialism as were basically sucking smart motivated people out of countries that need them more than we do, but as a beneficiary of it, I'm still down.
Green/renewable energy is clearly good. It obviously has issues around intermittency and cannot be the entire grid, but it also has clear utility and cost structure benefits.
The Civilian Conservation Corps was absurdly based and needs to come back ASAP. To get spicy, I'm a fan of expanding low skill patriotic government employment opportunities and then getting rid of minimum wage. You don't have to offer min wage, but you do have to offer a better working option than the CCC+.
Things that I imagine piss off people on both sides:
I'm quite pro UBI, specifically a negative income tax. I think it makes sense (the right does not like this). I also think that to make the math work, you'll at the very minimum need to delete basically every other government support program, and then fire all the people who administer them (the left does not like this).
Pensions in general in the West are absolutely fucked. In the USA, you need to uncap social security tax contributions, and I'm sure some other brain-dead obvious tweaks that are deeply unpopular politically, if deeply rational. In Canada , that looks like dramatically reducing OAS clawback thresholds, and probably having an asset test as well, for a start.
Build baby build. I'm very YIMBY. I think that we should basically wholesale take basically Tokyo's zoning and apply that across the Western world. Constraints on building shit is a huge reason why China is about to become very very scary. I also think that suburban built environments are retarded and profoundly unsustainable (see: property tax rates in the outer GTA cities, especially ones running out of Greenfield development space vs Toronto, really makes you "hmmm") and should have to pay for themselves and then get fucked and densify.
I have a hard time caring about trans issues, both for and against. I'd prefer to leave them alone and let them live. I don't give a shit about bathrooms as long as their design isn't obviously bad (just give everyone full length stall doors that lock, so basically a small room with a toilet, boom problem solved and it's way easier to do coke in club bathrooms, win/win). I'd also like women's sports to be just bio women. I am definitely against trans flavor medical interventions on anyone under 18. I am very against my (hypothetical) child going to a drag queen story hour, but I'm not sure if preventing other parents from being dumb is something I should have a say over.
I think the war on drugs and general drug Puritanism has been a profound fail. I think that leftist drug "treatment" (read: do nothing) is also a profound fail. Just fucking bring back institutions already.
In general I cannot bring myself to care about Chinese subsidies on things like EVs and solar panels. Every time you buy a highly subsidized Chinese good, Xi Jinping essentially gifts you a small amount of Chinese taxpayer money, I'm more than happy to take their money.
I'm pretty open to massively weakening IP protections, both patent and copyright. I'm open to the idea of that being a disaster, but I'm also extremely confident the current setup is far from the Pareto frontier.
Western tax systems are dumb and bad. I'm quite open to things like Fair Tax. I've also spent a while trying to come up with my own optimal taxation scheme. In short: remove corporate taxes almost entirely, but also massively reduce the ability to defer recognizing income by keeping cash at the corporate level (unless re-invested into the company, which I want to incentivize) and force income recognition as it happens. Also increase the top marginal tax brackets a lot. This causes Mark Zucc and other billionaires to recognize 100s of millions to billions in income each year, which makes them unhappy. However I think capital flight is offset by extremely low corporate tax rates. I'm also more than happy to make the LCGE/QSBS exemption like $100 million. Capitalism abhors a vacuum, and after some upheaval I think this creates a much more dynamic economy.
Conclusion
I'm sure I can think of more, I also have takes along these lines for basically every political issue.
In general, I am extremely pragmatic, if the policy increases wealth, wellbeing, GDP, or in general holistically improves society, I'm all in. I do not give a shit what the underlying ideology of the idea is, as long as it works.
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