My partner’s family from Philippines grew up in a home without appliances like refrigerators, like many, many people in developing countries.

So while now they have every modern convenience, old habits die hard and stomachs seem to adapt to even the most adverse conditions of foodstuffs.

Not mine. I love their cooking but can only eat food that I’ve seen opened or cooked in front of me. They will legitimately leave meat dishes out on the table for two days or more and then simply “reheat” and consider it good to serve. The cabinets are full of things like mayo, cheese dips, opened gravies and open bottles of fruit juice.

I have had some of the very worst food poisoning in my life from inadvertently eating something there like chicken salad that I thought was fresh, but made with hard-boiled eggs that had been sitting on a counter in summer heat for several days that a “friend” brought over so they “wouldn’t waste.”

Of course I’m the only one that gets sick, so I’m the “special one” that everyone now thinks has some terminal illness and treats me like a hospice patient.

tl:dr

I stopped listening to this bullshit when we had one party openly wanting to roll us back to the dark ages, allowing raped children to die and rolling back the civil rights… and another who just wanted like, healthcare mid populism. If you think it’s extremist to think we need to push back on fascism at all costs then we have nothing to talk about, there is no compromise with hate. That’s literally what they want. You are playing right into their tricks.

See, I agree with you on everything here, and I even used to hold this same position:

But I don’t think intellectual cowardice / laziness explains all centrists.

I really, really wanted to be charitable, as a former conservative, as someone who grew up in the deep rural south surrounded by hardline conservatives, and then flipped a hard 180-degree later in life, I figured my own unique perspective allowed me to see both sides.

Then the fire nation attacked.

And by that I mean covid happened, and with it came off a lot of masks. Now I believe that not only is centrism intellectual laziness, so is ALL political dysfunction. It’s as close as I will get to a twinge of centerism myself, that I have seen into the hearts of people and have seen that they share a common factor that unites us all: laziness.

It’s too broad of a term, and would take an essay to define properly in this context, but at heart it’s what drives everyone, a desire to avoid challenge.

Learning and becoming politically astute to even a grade-school level takes some amount of effort and self-improvement and betterment and study and acceptance of new ideas, and we have left the age of self-challenge. Just look at the state of video games with quest markers to do anything, and 30-second popular video clips for the shortest of attention spans, or make a comment more than three paragraphs in a popular forum if you need evidence that people are not out to challenge themselves broadly. They set into a position that feels comfortable based on who they’re around and who validates them, and they generally stay there. We don’t celebrate people changing their minds, if anything people treat it with shame, and not without good reason. I have been shouted out of leftist spaces for saying I used to be right-wing in some of my views. (Purity testing appears to be another common trait.)

Who and what exactly are you talking about? It’s nearly impossible to have an intelligent conversation when it’s all hand waving and vibes. Have some balls, what’s on your mind.

ITT people conflating liberalism with centerism.

Exterminate… feed and provide healthcare, you know, same thing.

edit: i realized that I had blocked the user below in another thread because they are obtuse, unkind and stupid. I won’t get any answers from them unless I unblock them. Oh well. What’s for lunch.

we’re talking centrists here, not liberals, not moderates, there’s a DISTINCT difference.

The vast majority of so-called centrists are people who just don’t like stress of having a hard stance. That’s why they piss off people on both sides. Impassioned people who understand that progress is a fight need fighters to join them don’t like someone saying that they need to compromise when there are lives and futures on the line. People who see the larger picture are going to be a lot more committed and able to weather criticism.

But most centrists think that they can somehow ride the line between the two and avoid being condemned by either side. This is a thing people do in many circumstances not just politics, and it always makes both sides mad. It’s just a very basic human social faux-paux to think that you can appeal to principled people with a butchered version of their ideals.

It seems so obviously counterproductive that the only thing I can think is that they’re enjoying it, like it’s a kink to get into other people’s sex lives and tell them what they should and should not do.

No, seriously. If you spend time in the conservative, christian communities like where I grew up, you hear these people just spend night and fucking day thinking about “sin” and the ways that nasty, dirty, eeeeevil sinners like to sin and all the details about what manner of sin they partake in… and so on.

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Next thing you’re going to tell us is that we SHOULDN’T become absolutely obsessed with the personal habits and sex lives of other people whom I will never meet nor be involved with in any way! Preposterous!

The best story I ever heard about this was a single dad who had to take his teenage daughter to the doctor because she got an infection from inserting a toothbrush handle or something else that wasn’t sanitary, and instead of giving her ANY kind of scolding or negative judgement, he was very loving and helped her laugh it off, and then he just left on her pillow a $100 gift card to Adam & Eve or some other large, commercial, adult site that lets you buy gift cards.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to even suggest an age here, but I think as a parent you will know when it’s time to have the talk/leave the card.

People aren’t going to like the reality that we need BOTH people to change their habits AND we need companies to follow suite.

I mean, needed. We’re in it now, it’s too late to stop, maybe we can still prevent the worst case if people all get over themselves really fast and are willing to change the way they do things.

lol.

What’s weird is how anyone really cares?

I genuinely cannot believe that people still care about this in the year 2024.

Like, does anyone care if people draw animal people looking cute or sexy or just with human proportions or anything in between? Does it really bother anyone or is it just fun to try to bandwagon something that freaked some housewives out in the 90’s because some inside edition episode? It’s just drawings of animal characters like have been done for literal millenia. Imagine if some of the more “notorious” disney films came out today, people would lose their minds.

Yep! Or even how you usually breath without thinking about it but can take over manual control. Your brain does a LOT of things with your senses all the time that you don’t notice, it has layers and layers of intelligence that makes decisions on what it will “report” upwards, so you depend on basically a vast system of managers or sub-officers that are conscious but have no language, to fully captain and control your meat-ship.

The idea is that if you can make your surroundings as dark as possible, then shine a very small point of light into your eye and wiggle it so there’s a shadow changing angles rapidly across your retina, this will make the blood vessels you can’t normally see shift slightly in your field of vision so your brain forgets how to edit them out and they pop into view.

This site gives instructions how to use black construction paper with a pinhole in a dark room, but I’ve learned how to do it with a nearly closed fist and any bright light source.

You know what’s worse than being a basement dweller? It’s being unaware that you’re vulnerable to propaganda, being unaware that you’re an emotional creature and your brain doesn’t try to make sense, it tries to connect stories and ideas to explain why you’re feeling what you feel.

In other words, you can be a smart person and easily influenced into positions that either are not your own, or not even connected to reality just because you had a feeling once validated by someone saying the right thing at the right time and you don’t question the story that you start piecing together in your head.

So the question you would need to always ask yourself, is what is it that you feel that you need to cling to such cynical and hateful stereotypes to the extent of even invalidating or denying the testimony of others who are directly contradicting your obviously exaggerated tales of “listening to hippies talk about jews.”

You are describing a personal experience and because it validates some feeling you already had, it feels like a real evaluation of the broader world. Other people who do this include: scientologists, flat-earthers, modern nazis, cult members and generally people who just go through life angry and miserable and blaming that misery on others. Don’t be a pawn to others or your own brain, have some control over your narratives.

Well SHIT son, you lived on the COAST??

Well that shit changes everything, I had no idea you overheard things out on the coast, I mean I was here ready to talk about crime stats and systemic inequality and the USA’s history with civil rights, but here is a person who heard some stuff out on the coast! I guess I should reconsider everything and stop supporting efforts to squash nazis in an industrial nazi-squashing machine.

This concept can be scaled up to a lot of things, like why most of our systems break down. Nature only maintains what is needed to continue the species, everything that happens to you afterwards, with the exception of child-rearing, will be abandoned by nature unless someone gains some trait from living longer that helps the species propagate.

But nature is kind of silly, it doesn’t make “choices” so some of the adaptations can be weird. Like how our retina’s blood supply formed on the front of the retina so your brain has to always edit out your blood vessels from your vision and you can only see it using special tricks of light and then BAM all the spaghetti appears that’s been there all along.

Imagine what else our brain tells us and shows or doesn’t show us to make sense of what evolution has turned us into.