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You can believe this but it would be incorrect. The realistic answer is that political beliefs are multivariate high dimensional vector spaces. And in attempting to project those vector spaces into condensed 2D or 1D projections you condense lots of information. I am a "centrist" in the left vs right 1D projection as the left/right axis has little impact on my political beliefs and values. I am a radical centrist libertarian on a political 2D compass, as can be observed by my very pronounced disagreement with social or governmental authority. On a higher dimensional map, I'm sure there's an even more precise label.
Call it them centrists, call them independents, the terminology is imprecise. Regardless there is a large continent of people, likely even a majority, that don't map cleanly to a right vs left 1D simple axis. They don't have malleable beliefs as you assert, they just aren't binary. You can "hate" them but the only thing you are hating is that the world isn't a simple black vs white one where critical thinking isn't a core element.
Then why don’t you use a word to describe yourself that actually describes yourself. Words have meaning. Centrists has meaning within the American 2-Party system.
It sounds like you are some sort of anarchists libertarian. Like you could use that name and it wouldn’t describe anything within the American 2-party system or be confused with other people who call themselves centrists who tend to have weak political beliefs an sort of just vote based on vibes and whether it feels like America is getting better.
Also initially described yourself as a “centrists” and I said I hate “centrists”. I don’t see how what I said was wrong since you said you were a centrists and I said I hate centrists. But now your a radical libertarian centrists which I guess is something different which maybe I don’t hate but I also don’t know what that entirely means.
The point of describing yourself as a “X” person is so the other person can quickly identify standard point of views you would make. I feel like I accurately described what a “centrists” is.
It is almost always a synonym to independent. Because the American 2-Party system exists on a single left vs right axis. They "exist" on the "center" of that axis. Because it's a projection from the high dimensional vector space to that single axis. Furthermore the discussion originally focused on the left-ness vs right-ness of the Motte as opposed to other online internet forums. Not the libertarian-ness vs authoritarian-ness, or other axial-label-nesses.
Except I'm not an anarchist.
The generic problem with niche political labels is that they are hard to understand. The boundaries of them are blurry. In this 2-Party projection I act like an independent, or a centrist. I vote left, I vote right, I vote based on static principles that you would not consider "generic centrist" but from an actual political action-based labeling category I "act" like a centrist. While my actual principles are probably more niche, I do not think my observed behavior is. I think that a lot of "centrist" are just people with different beliefs that don't map cleanly to a 2-party projection.
In the common usage of the word center or centrists it’s not used in the sense of “get weirder”. When politicians talk about going left or right in primaries but move to the center for the election it doesn’t mean become more “libertarian” or “weirder”. It means soften support for leftist ideas like socialism, trans-right, closed borders or for the right things like don’t talk about mass deportations and only say Criminal Illegals or leave abortion to the states.
In general people like to describe themselves as not “GOP” and not “Dem” because then you get labeled with all the low IQ parts of a party. It’s a big reason for the rise of EA. It gave leftist a high IQ party to call themselves which voted 99% of the time with Dems.
Words have to have meaning. And I do think you are using “centrists” in a way that is outside of the general understanding of the word. Centrist isn’t having weird beliefs. It’s mostly being apolitical and a label people take when they don’t want to have to associate with weird people on either side.
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Multivariate and vector is a bit redundant here fyi.
2 dimensions captures >80% of variance based on available data. It doesn't lose a lot after describing you as a libertarian centrist.
Thanks for the pedantry Mr. English Teacher... Next time I'll use ChatGPT so I can be less redundant.
You got stats to back up that assertion?
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