This is a great tool for crusades and other holy wars. You can paint inconvenient bystanders who don't come over to your side as enemy combatants and justify attacking them. Also fantastic for reinforcing in-group identity, forcing group members to stay loyal or lose their entire friend group.
This doesn't actually address the parent post in that quite literally half-truths aren't truths. Of course the rhetorical implication is that only one side had those truths but that is most certainly not the argument being made here.
What does that have to do with what I said? Nothing.
Political center are not passive bystanders. They are people who are active in politics and either actively stop or actively push for real policies. That then affect how country operates.
It is set of ideologies as much as any other political group is. They make aliances or refuse to make them too.
A random example policy position: "We should vote for the immediate shutdown of coal plants and demand their replacement with large scale nuclear reactors."
There are lots of good objections available here, from pointing out that blackouts kill people and coal is an important part of energy capacity, to jobs arguments, to arguments about micro-reactors and the lifespan of nuclear plants.
If you're going to sit on one side of the debate and say anyone who isn't fully aligned is wrong/a liar/etc, then you are both doomed for failure and have started at a maximally partisan position.
Political positions have little to do with objective truths and instead tend to fall on value arguments.
A "centrist" who looks at each issue and takes the average of the mainstream parties' positions is a fool, and will be wrong more often than someone who picks a party and follows along with their beliefs.
Someone who looks at each issue and comes to their own conclusion is likely to end up with views that will not line up cleanly with any political coalition, and must choose which issues to compromise on when deciding which coalition to back in a given political contest.
A political party is a compromise - a bunch of people who've decided they can accept one-another's redlines and non-negotiables.
A sane person doesn't just choose a party and adopt their party-line; a sane person works out what their opinions are, and maybe then chooses to support a party with policies that are sufficiently congruent with their views. Or not.
People who don't think for themselves are not really participating in politics. They're kidding themselves. They should voluntarily refrain from voting.
If you are determined to pick middle of all issues, you are not superior neutral thinker. Instead, you are enabler for whoever is bigger lier or whoever is set up to cause more harm.
People dont have to have same opinions as me. But the contemporary idea that if you position yourself in the middle you are doing good by definition is wrong.
I don't think a lot of centrists claim to be "doing good" just for being in the middle.
You can't read from this position the intent. It could be indifference about a topic, caring about it yet rejecting both extreme views, or somebody that did deeply study the topic and found the center to be just right.
Both rejecting centrism or glorifying it, makes no sense in any case.
Who gets to decide what is truth and what is a lie?
Case in point. The Pulse Nightclub shooting 5 years ago. Proven the shooter chose it because of lax security compared to other places he considered. He didn't know it was LGBTQ+. It was about Syria, Afganistan, and other middle eastern wars to him.
Now it is hailed as persecution of the LGBTQ+ community - a target. Who is doing this? Politicians, activist, etc.
Who decides what the truth is? Why do they spin the lies as truths? This is societies problem today. Manipulation of fact and fiction by those who want to control you, and those who control the message.
Inaguration Day at the US Capitol. Police officer killed after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. No proof, not even a strand. Now thought to have had a stroke. Pols, pundits, and Trump haters still swear he was MURDERED. Female protester killed by capital police - still no identification which officer did it, or what she was doing when shot. Sound like open&shut case of self-defense? Wouldn't they sing that from the heavens?
How about Jeffery Epstein? How did he hang himself in a maximum security facility where two video cameras failed, and guards checked him frequently? Guilty - probably. I'm surprised if they aren't taking bets on when girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell committed suicide. Who else was involved in their island escapades? Who benefits from their silence?
>Proven the shooter chose it because of lax security compared to other places he considered. He didn't know it was LGBTQ+. It was about Syria, Afganistan, and other middle eastern wars to him.
How? By whom? Why should we trust you or your sources?
Your thesis is that no one can be trusted to decide what is truth and what is a lie... then you follow up with several "facts" which clearly share a common ideological bias. Like most people who pretend only to be concerned with the integrity of the truth and ask "who controls the truth? Who watches the watchers?", you're just attempting to move the Overton window by pretending an anti-leftist narrative is a neutral one.
On June 12, 2016, Mateen spent just over three hours in PULSE from the time he began slaughtering innocent people at roughly 2:00 a.m. until he was killed by a SWAT team at roughly 5:00 a.m. During that time, he repeatedly spoke to his captives about his motive, did the same with the police with whom he was negotiating, and discussed his cause with local media which he had called from inside the club. Mateen was remarkably consistent in what he said about his motivation. Over and over, he emphasized that his attack at PULSE was in retaliation for U.S. bombing campaigns in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. In his first call with 911 while inside PULSE, this is what he said about why he was killing people:
Because you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. … You need to stop the U.S. airstrikes. They need to stop the U.S. airstrikes, OK? . … This went down, a lot of innocent women and children are getting killed in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, OK? … The airstrikes need to stop and stop collaborating with Russia. OK?
In the hours he spent surrounded by the gay people he was murdering, he never once uttered a homophobic syllable, instead always emphasizing his geo-political motive. Not a single survivor reported him saying anything derogatory about LGBTs or even anything that suggested he knew he was in a gay club. All said he spoke extensively about his vengeance on behalf of ISIS against U.S. bombing of innocent Muslims.
Mateen's postings on Facebook leading up to his attack all reflected the same motive. They were filled with rage about and vows of retaliation against U.S. bombing. Not a single post contained any references to LGBTs let alone anger or violence toward them. “You kill innocent women and children by doing U.S. airstrikes,” Mateen wrote on Facebook in one of his last posts before attacking PULSE, adding: “Now taste the Islamic state vengeance.”
: People still surround the Pulse nightclub which is still an active crime scene on June 18, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
It was of course nonetheless possible that he secretly harbored hatred for LGBTs and hid his real motive, but that never made sense: the whole point of terrorism is to publicize, not conceal, the grievances driving the violence. And again, good journalism requires evidence before ratifying claims. There never was any to support the story that Mateen's attack was driven by anti-LGBT hatred, and all the available evidence early on negated that suspicion and pointed to a radically different motive. But the media frenzy ended up, by design or otherwise, obscuring Mateen's anger over Obama's bombing campaigns as his motive in favor of promoting this as an anti-LGBT hate crime.
As the FBI investigation into Mateen proceeded, all the early media gossip — that Mateen was a closeted gay man who had searched for male sexual partners and had even previously visited PULSE — were debunked. The month after the attack, The Washington Post reported that “The FBI has found no evidence so far that Omar Mateen chose the popular establishment because of its gay clientele,” and quoted a federal investigator as saying: “While there can be no denying the significant impact on the gay community, the investigation hasn’t revealed that he targeted PULSE because it was a gay club.” The New York Times quickly noted that no evidence could be found to support the speculation that Mateen was gay:
F.B.I. investigators, who have conducted more than 500 interviews in the case, are continuing to contact men who claim to have had sexual relations with Mr. Mateen or think they saw him at gay bars. But so far, they have not found any independent corroboration — through his web searches, emails or other electronic data — to establish that he was, in fact, gay, officials said.
The following year, the local paper that most extensively covered the PULSE massacre, The Orlando Sentinel, acknowledge that “there’s still no evidence that the Pulse killer intended to target gay people.”
As the investigation proceeded, this anti-LGBT hate crime narrative became more and more unlikely. But the question of Mateen's motives was settled once and for all — or at least it should have been — during the unsuccessful attempt by the Justice Department to prosecute Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, on numerous felony charges alleging her complicity in her husband's attack. That trial — quite justifiably — ended in a full acquittal for Salman, but evidence emerged during it that conclusively disproved the widely held view that Mateen chose PULSE because he wanted to kill gay people.
Ok. I'm not even claiming you're wrong, but again, if we can't trust anyone to determine what truth is, why should we believe you?
How can you prove you're right without invoking exactly the same sources of truth that are being discredited as untrustworthy due to their biases?
Once you play the "Who controls the truth?" card, it applies as much to you as anyone else. That argument becomes infinite and recursive when the implication is that no one can be trusted. Otherwise, the implication is that only certain sources of truth can't be trusted - which itself is simply a statement of bias. Just tell us which side you're on, in that case.
But his point is that's not what's being asked. The original poster in this sub-discussion said "trust on one" then posted something he regards as "truth" to counteract "the narrative".
He was rightly called out for being someone we can't trust by his own definitions.
"Trust no one" is a bad philosophy because it's infinite regress. And anyone who claims to follow that philosophy at some point reaches a point where they have to be hypocritical and trust someone because unless they've acquired all of this information firsthand by being everywhere at all times they can't say they didn't acquire the information from someone else. And since someone isn't no one, we can't trust them.
I could continue, but that is the point.