3rd October 2017, 5:18 AM
I've only recently heard of horseshoe theory, and I already hate it. I mean, the central premise is so easy to dismantle, since we already know that for any country what the "extremes" of their political spectrum look like are going to vary greatly. Heck even within the same country, or within the same issue across the history of that country. The civil rights movement had a lot of "extreme centrists" wringing their hands whining about how they just wish everyone would stop fighting, as though the thing that was being fought about was just some trifling matter and not whether or not black people were allowed to use the same public resources as white people. Centrists, by and large, take great pride in how "above it all" they are, in how they just look at two sides fighting and wouldn't lower themselves to taking a side in the matter and just "becoming another extremist". Without fail, all the centrists I've met or seen tend to be well-off and the issues they are sitting on the fence about tend to be ones that wouldn't affect them personally one way or another. In other words, they have no skin in the fight, no dog in the game, so they literally don't see what the problem is, making it so much easier to just not take a side. Oh, but wait 10 years for the political landscape to shift, and bam, their new "center" will just shift to whatever detail is being hashed out now.
Centrists only care that people are fighting or unhappy, which makes no sense to them, because it would be so easy to just "be happy", wouldn't it? They don't care WHAT is being fought about, even though there is a universe of difference between punching someone for stepping on your shoes vs punching the neo nazi that just pepper sprayed you. I've said before we shouldn't get too comfortable with using violence as a solution, and I still think that, but context is everything.
Centrists only care that people are fighting or unhappy, which makes no sense to them, because it would be so easy to just "be happy", wouldn't it? They don't care WHAT is being fought about, even though there is a universe of difference between punching someone for stepping on your shoes vs punching the neo nazi that just pepper sprayed you. I've said before we shouldn't get too comfortable with using violence as a solution, and I still think that, but context is everything.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)