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I agree with the overall schema of how forum cultures work but I think you have a blindspot. The motte is the equivalent to the left-wing dominated forum but for right wingers. Lefties here are absolutely dogpilled, mass-replied, gish-galloped, mass reported, or downvoted. Far more than the reverse happens here. So yes the lefties that stick around here do have a selection pressure, but lets not pretend that righties don't stoop to the same left-forum behavior when they are suddenly the majority.
EDIT: This is straight up just human tribal behavior. Attaching a political label to it is just further evidence.
As a lefty (in multiple senses of the word) here, I disagree heavily. The rate at which this happens is orders of magnitude lower than the mirror image in a typical subreddit that has discussion about similar topics as here. By my observations, leftist posters who get treated this way are almost always treated this way in response to particularly careless or bad-faith posts*.
* Aside: these extremely low quality posts often have characteristics which appear to me as posts that would be popular on a typical subreddit; my conjecture is that these commenters are used to calibrating their arguments for the type of scrutiny in those environments and didn't properly re-calibrated for the standards of this forum before commenting.
Then we disagree. As a centrist, I witness and have experienced it with my own eyes.
If this is your major point then you are making a point I am not arguing, its not about quantity it's that it happens at all. This place has orders lower magnitudes of people than the mirror image typical subreddit. This is like saying it's safer to be be next to a bear in the woods because bears kill less people then men do. It's bad stats because you interact with an astronomically large amount of men everyday, everywhere. I doubt the Motte has more than 50k-100k active users. Just went and looked at the comparative PurplePillDebate on reddit. It has 121k weekly visitors, and it is very degraded from its heyday.
I'm not really going to weigh into a discussion of "quality". That is highly subjective, to the point, that one could easily just say every post that gets dog-pilled and mass-reported was "low quality". It's a just-so-story.
I hate the centrists label because fundamentally it means you have no beliefs. If the left pushes the left Overton farther left then a centrists moves left, if the right is winning the pushing of the Overton window then you move right.
I feel confident say Trump political core is a ‘90s finance bro in NYC which would be mostly left then. Of course he has some eccentricities but he’s mostly that. A centrists political position over a life time would be like a pinball bouncing around as a npc.
It also strongly encourages Overton window pushing, if 30-40% of voters are just centrists then the best thing you can do as a political operative is push hard on boundaries. If you move the boundaries then a bunch of centrists slide in as your voters.
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.
It means to move closer to the center in the left/right dichotomy.
Centrists have political beliefs. You are trying to cast apolitical people, aka people who just call themselves "apolitical" as "centrists" but I have never heard a centrist describe themselves as apolitical. They always express beliefs that are in the middle of the left vs right spectrum.
EA is dumb, they might portray themselves as "high IQ" but they are "low EQ" naive, idiots. They've just psy-opped themselves into these weird, niche, radical beliefs.
There is an interesting problem in your argument. You "hate" centrists because they lack beliefs or are dumb, but now you are calling them "normal" (opposite of weird), "apolitical", "even-kneeled". You've essentially gone from shitting on them to now glazing them. Word's do have meaning, so stop using the word "hate" to describe that anger you feel that they aren't weird like you. The desperate desire for them to adopt your weirdness.
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