The US controls the ocean. They don’t need to fight a ground war. Trump’s play is very clear: “Give it to us, because you can’t stop us taking it.” So it’s weird he’d sell weapons to Denmark. Makes it look like he’s bluffing. I wonder if he’ll now very publicly stop the sale. That’d be the right move, even if he is bluffing.

How will you get them there? The US controls the ocean. I suspect they also control low earth orbit and so will be constantly watching.

I mean, the main sustainable feature of indigenous food systems is their small population size relative to the environment’s carrying capacity. Trying to feed a large city on hunted game would be far less sustainable than modern agriculture…

Centrist here.

1. Fuck off with your anti-centrist bigotry and caricatured centrist views.

2. It is a both sides thing, because your fucking pussies of a Democrat party are showing what wealth hoarding, vote chasing cowards they are, by keeping their heads down and mounting zero opposition to your government being seized by a populist dictator. They are clearly not a viable alternative to this atrocity. We need to replace the whole two party, capitalism-corrupted system, not just ensure that your supposed “good guy party” wins the next election.

3. Being a centrist doesn’t make me a milquetoast appeaser. It means I reject the dichotomy that the only alternative to this populism is more capital-first liberal greed.

4. Your view of centrists, casting them all as people who can’t decide between the two obvious alternatives, rather than people who reject both, is the one thing that both the left and the right agree on. It’s propaganda to keep one of the two extractive elites in power and prevent us from ever even discussing actual alternatives.

5. Same thing, for math lovers: if you take a 1D slice through a n-dimensional normal distribution of views, the more perpendicular a dimension is to yours, the less correlated they are, the more those views will tend to map to the center of the dimension you’re insisting on, despite being actually just as distinct. It’s your insistence on this 1D view that creates centrists, and your dismissal of them is propaganda to prevent real change.

I’m not a fan of insurance companies, but the dental/medical insurance split makes sense. Insurance is fundamentally a risk hedging game. It matters what the risks are. Most medical conditions will only happen to a small percentage of people, so we can all put money into a pool and pay out to the unlucky people who, for example, get cancer. Almost everyone needs some dental work eventually, everyone’s teeth wear down. Dental insurance is more like a savings plan than a gamble on rare outcomes. It doesn’t make sense to pool those risks together.

Sorry for the delay in reply, I’ve been off of social media lately. Thanks for the cogent reply, I appreciate the time you put into it.

I think you make a solid case, except for one central fallacy. I am galvanised away from the right by the atrocities you list. However, you smuggle in the assumption that pushing away from the selfish, parochial right must push me towards the contemporary political left—both the formal political parties, and the informal zeitgeist of leftist culture/ideology. I can (and I believe morally should) reject that too.

The space of alternatives is much larger, and varies on many more dimensions, than the current political dichotomy. I believe that insistence on that dichotomy, that you must pick between left and right, does far more long term harm than even right wing bigotry does. I’d even go as far as to let the selfish right wing bullies win, whatever the immediate costs, if I believed it would eventually bring about a system that is fair and just for future generations, to escape this historical trap of perpetually short-sighted left-right swings. My views are more nuanced than this, but that’s beyond the scope here.

This position makes me a centrist, because I support neither contemporary political party and oppose both. However, I find that zealots from both sides insist that it means I must be on the side of their enemies. You’re with us or you’re against us, if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem, blank and white, no alternatives. It’s that kind of thinking that keeps the pendulum swinging, prevents conversations about long-term, global solutions and dooms future generations to more vicious bickering about which bathroom 0.1% of the population should use while the world around them burns.

Pretty sure that’s the move that makes you starve to death or be arrested for vagrancy…

Only winning move I can see is to be born into the exploiter class.

Not an American

No, the bigotry is lumping all centrists, who have a diversity of views, in with the hateful ideology, despite having zero information about what they actually believe.

Counterargument: Centrists are actually a diverse group with many very different positions, that just have in common the fact they don’t agree with either of the currently dominant political factions.

Aggressive reposte: what you just did (political stereotyping, where you label everyone who disagrees with you as basically being the same cartoon villain) is, in my experience, an example the left-wing bigotry that drives centrists away from your political faction. Disagreeing with your doesn’t mean that I agree with the hateful morons on the right, it just means I also see and won’t tolerate your bigotry.

Wait, how is “not equal to” a Nazi symbol?

Been using Arch for daily driver, web server, large data analytics machine, gaming, music making, programming, visual design and a while lot more for 15 years now. The only time I’ve had an issue with something in the official repos was when freecad was compiled with a version of a library that wasn’t compatible with a very specific thing I wanted to do and I had to recompile it. That’s it. 15 years. One issue. Not sure that even this Gaben fellow could improve on that…

Looks like women are too busy with all that sex stuff to get out on their motorbikes.