#i'm an enlightened centrist

[earththeplanet]

I swear to fuck if it turns out that Trump wins because some of y'all are so obsessed with moral purity that y'all let a racist, queerphobic, sex offender aspiring dictator who literally incited a riot at the capital and openly said that if he is given power, he will make life hell for anyone who is not a rich white cishet man become president rather than vote for Harris, then we're about to throw some hands, because we do NOT have any wiggle room to play around that. And y'all BETTER not act surprised if the fascist gets elected into office and starts doing fascist shit, especially with how vocal he has been about wanting to do fascist stuff.

[tropylium]

I Will Refrain From Posting Discourse (note to self) but it is still a consistently annoying feature of the tumblr userbase ecology to keep running all the time into the dumb unreflective "everything I don't like is capitalism" "leftism just means like, being a good person" "the System intends all the bad things" folk memeplex, or gogforbid, attempts to turn this into an elaborated ideology without changing any of the conclusions

for comparison I keep hearing about the boogieman of Unhinged Twitter Leftists but if anything, my experience is that they're extremely easy to avoid and the place is instead pretty good for 1. existing mainly in circles of vaguely-realist non-shit-starting liberal centrists and 2. ideological immune system variety from exposure at will to dumb unreflective folk-rightists for a change too. Could be recent from UTLs emigrating elsewhere because rocket man bad, or a problem that only ever existed for people aiming to be leftists, but either way I'll take it

[chelledoggo]

sometimes i get this intrusive negative self-talk that says: "do you think just because you're Christian and 'woke' now makes up for what a shitty person you used to be? how you used to be an "enlightened centrist" anti-sjw? all those shitty things you've said and done?"

and my only answer is: "no. but i can be better going forward."

i can't change all the things i've done, said, and believed in the past. and nobody is required to excuse or forgive me for those things.

but that's not the point of why i'm trying to be better now. i'm doing it because i know it's the right thing to do. because i want to be a force for good, even if i can only do so on a small scale.

i want to do right by the people i've harmed in the past, even if they'll never forgive me or even know i've changed. i don't need them to forgive me. i just need to do right BECAUSE it's right.

[profesionalquestionaskerer]

You are so brave for not voting.

I mean imagine not being willing to do such moral compromise of voting an asshole over voting someone who wants to deport, kill and imprison anyone that isn't like him.

It takes a lot to be willing to let someone like that win just to uphold your morals, because yeah, candidate asshole is an idiot who will do some things that you won't like. So not voting and letting the other guy that will do that just 10 times worse is the right call.

So brave not doing nothing to stand for your morals, not voting for a third party even, just not voting.

Because you are right man! Both sides are bad. Wait i'm sorry i was reading the enlightened centrist manifesto.

Congrats, you keep your morals, even if it means everything crumbles around you and the ones you love. You are so great, so moral for not doing anything.

Beign on tumblr and retweeting posts about it really helped the world!

So keep seeing the world in black and white, keep waiting for a pitch ivory leader. You will eventualy find it, let's hope democracy it's still a thing by then. But i believe in you, keep trying!

You did nothing and won nothing. 🥳🥳🥳

[gl1tchr]

Be real now, what is Edward 2022 hygiene like? I’ve seen people say he def doesn’t wash shit but then others say he’s obsessive over how he smells

I'm going to take the enlightened centrist route and say Both are true /j

Seriously tho based on his morning routine in TRYO I think he does the absolute bare minimum because that's all he can really manage day-to-day. I think there are days he definitely skips it, but I do think he tries his best not to smell bad because that just draws unnecessary attention. I think he prolly keeps a cheap little travel deodorant on him to help with sweating, maybe a lil squirt hand sanitizer for his own cleanliness bc germs. I think he smells aggressively like Nothing and is just about as clean as someone who bathes Pretty Much Every Day is

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm going to rewrite these Tweets without the super hidden, impossible-to-detect subtext.

Katherine: Hello, echo chamber! Please validate my opinion. Let's all say Hitler was left wing so people will stop comparing my views to the Nazis. It makes me feel bad when they do it and I've decided revising history is much easier than becoming a better person.

Elon: Gotta maintain this ruse that I am an enlightened centrist. I know, I will say he was both even though that doesn't make sense.

But how?

Umm... okay, this is just dumb enough to work...

Hitler was right wing about flags and shit but left wing about all of the evil mass murder stuff.

Nice job, me. I am so smart. Now, I just have to turn off Community Notes for all my Tweets and I'm golden.

[thedissonantverses]

Dragon Age as an Introduction to Post-Modernism(Part 1)

“The center cannot hold.” This is one of my favorite quotes in the English language. You’d think I’d have first heard it one of my many literature classes but no, I first saw it in Stephen King’s The Stand, which if you haven’t read it is a buck-wild coked out good vs evil narrative where the Antichrist uses the U.S. Military to destroy the world.

Anyhow, the full poem is by William Butler Yeats and goes like this:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Now dear reader, I don't know about you, but when I read that I am strongly reminded of:

"And so the Golden City is Blackened

With each step you take into my Hall.

Marvel at perfection for it is fleeting.

For you have brought sin into Heaven.

And Doom upon all the World. "

Before we go any further, we need to define Post-Modernism as a school of thought. But first, we start with Modernism because it is easier to define the former against its predecessor. In a lot of ways, Modernism was driven by schools of thought like the Enlightenment. There's the idea that there is some kind of utopia humanity is striving for. If you were a say, white, upper-class man in the 1880's who sees more democracies forming, more advances in science and technology, less restrictive rule of the church, it was easy to think that humanity was going to achieve some great final universal destination. Humanity is ultimately good and eventually everything will be okay.

Then WWI happened. Yeats’ poem above? The historical context surrounding it is the utter, devastating ruin that was WWI. A war often overshadowed by the sheer, unapologetic evil of WWII, but WWI was the first time in history humanity saw what horror technology, biological warfare, and mechanical ingenuity can unleash. Nine million military dead, 23 million wounded, and 8 million civilians dead. Try to wrap your head around those numbers. How do you cope with the knowledge that humanity is even capable of that kind of unmitigated destruction. That we can rip entire countries to shreds and not even blink. At the same time, the Spanish Influenza killed, by the lower estimates, 50 million people. The human brain physically cannot comprehend what those numbers look like. An entire generation was just gone. I cannot emphasize enough what this phase of history did to humanity on a large scale, psychologically and physically. All of the worst things we are capable of a species, we did and then some.

Which is how we get to Post-Modernism. Rather than aiming for some universal ideal, we are aiming to understand. The center cannot hold because there is no center and never was. There is no universal morality. Get comfortable with cognitive dissonance and unreality. Get comfortable with the idea that two things can and must be true at once.

Just to make it perfectly clear, Post-Modernism is not a centrist philosophy. There are very hard lines in the sand when it comes to things like slavery, genocide, colonialism, eugenics, centrism, fascism. We do not tolerate such things on this blog. Okay? Okay. One of the reasons I'm writing this is because I truly think the death of media literacy is contributing to the rise of fascism we're seeing world-wide. Forgetting, ignoring, and white-washing history is not the goal.

Another large takeaway from Post-Modernism is that if you read a war story and came away feeling inspired, it's probably a bad story. I strongly recommend Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five or Tim O'Brian's The Things They Carried if you want good books to explore this particular topic further. War is horror. It is the Void, the emptiness you stare into that stares back. It takes everything from you, including yourself. Trying to make sense of something so senseless is a Sisyphean task I, and many other have spent our whole lives chasing. One of the reasons I'm so fascinated by history was when I learned about the Holocaust and just could not understand.

Until I did.

As for how all of this applies to Dragon Age, what I want to spend the next four parts exploring how these ideas of unreliable narration, existential horror, history being written by the victors, and that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter are the whole point. I want to take a look at each game individually through my favorite literary school of thought. Hope to see you on the next part, where I shall tackle Origins first.

[transparentkittenheart]

Wyll and Astarion were talking about justice and what it means to them. Wyll was being an enlightened centrist about "needing balance in all things." Then Astarion goes off saying how "You really need to make an example of them. All crime must be punished to the fullest extent!!"

I'm just like.... my guy.... YOU'RE THE CRIMINAL??

[tobiasdrake]

Do you think that optimistic stories are gonna be needed more than ever in these incoming dark times?

Probably. Art tends to reflect culture and also, to some degree, shape it.

It will be interesting to see what sort of media this new political landscape produces. I'm expecting a lot of "Fascism bad" that gets derided as preachy. "Do we really need to be told for the eleven billionth time that Nazis are evil?" people will ask aggravatedly while literal Nazis march in the streets behind them.

There are a lot of people who are shocked, scared, and horrified about what the right has become. Who were maybe willing to give it a pass when Americans elected Trump the first time, that maybe they just didn't know better, but saw the writing on the wall when Americans eagerly rushed back to Trump for a second serving of racism, violence, and misogyny.

And I'd expect to see that shock and fear reflected in the art that the evolving culture produces moving forward.

But I'm also expecting a lot of "Jack and Jill have different political beliefs, but it's important that they be able to come together as family and community." Because Americans think politics are as inconsequential as which set of jerseys wins the Super Bowl. A lot of people really are just out there to win it for the Home Team and don't think policy actually shapes our lives in any meaningful way.

To many Americans, being upset about the election is worse than electing the wrong guy. The problem is you for taking it so seriously, for actually caring about the consequences. They see themselves as enlightened for thinking that the government does nothing, all politicians are the same, and who you support says nothing about you personally. Why let something so trivial as voting MAGA break up a friendship? Or a family? Or a marriage?

And I'd expect to see that centrist condescension and "Why So Serious" trivialization reflected in the art that the evolving culture produces as well.

What I don't expect to see is a lot of pro-fascism stuff. The Right's cornered the market on news punditry but have never been very successful at mainstreaming their fiction. Because.

Well.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Alt-Right fiction sucks. They've written books and produced movies and TV shows, and it all sucks. Because it isn't made creatively. It's created in anger. The Alt-Right is just angry. Fascists are just angry. They don't want to participate in culture. They're mad at culture and want to shoot it with verbal guns.

And that gets reflected in their media, which is too often more focused on trying to dunk on somebody than on telling the story that they're ostensibly here to tell.

There is good conservative media out there. Hell, live-action Sonic the Hedgehog is surprisingly conservative. It's a story about a cop learning to appreciate small-town rural living and stop yearning for the glamour of the big city, while being harassed by Big Government Overreach. There's a lot of conservative values in their interpretation of the video game.

But there isn't any good Alt-Right media out there, because they're too angry to write. Lady Ballers is an offensive piece of shit, but it's also a bad movie. Its story is flat and self-defeating, its characters are uninteresting and fail to grow or change in any meaningful way, and its comedy wildly misses the mark.

Because that's what happens when the only thing you're interested in as a creator is, "How many people can I offend with this?" You end up writing a protest sign stretched out to the length of a novel. The audience for Ben Shapiro's "teen girl goes Die Hard against a school shooter and proves the merits of gun ownership" action movie is very niche.

So the Alt-Right will be encouraged to keep producing furious dogshit, and it will continue failing to gain any real ground among the mainstream entertainment market. But we can probably look forward to a lot of antifascism and a lot of condescending centrist finger-wagging in media to come.

That's my prediction, anyway.

[nervoustragedyluminary]

'afabmisogyny' is probably the most mask off terf BS I've read like ecspecially when it comes with shit like "trans women could never understand what cis women and afabs experience" like fuck right off that's some jk Rowling level 'oh I'd march with you if you actually were opressed' BS and calling trans people 'trans activists' that's such an old dogwhistle for not seeing trans liberation as legit and treating radfems terfs and the rights violence against trans people as a 'two sides ' issue... Like calling it a 'war between radfems and trans activists' is just mask off

Just fyi beware of or block detransraichu as she seems to be trying to peddle this 'uwu both sides I'm an enlightened centrist in the war against the radfems and transadvocates' BS while reblogging literal terfs talking about 'the penis is not a neutral organ because it rapes and impregnates women' and excusing that as 'its research for my book'

[whumpster-fire]

Concession Speech

My Fellow Americans,

What the fuck.

To the dumb accelerationist sacks of shit on this website: congratulations. Y'all got what you wanted. A fascist in the white house. I hope you're fucking happy. Have fun with that. I hope that as you watch this country burn to the ground and probably take several others with it, you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that you successfully refrained from sullying your conscience by supporting someone who wasn't Revolutionary enough for you.

To the "enlightened centrists" and "leftists" who did nothing but repost memes from blogs with Pepe profile pictures about Kamala being the antichrist, conspiracy theories about what the World Economic Forum was plotting, or other right wing crap all year: I'm expecting you to go mask off in the next few weeks, but don't worry, you weren't fooling anyone anyway.

To the open Trump supporters: I don't know what any of you are even doing on this blog other than looking for "delicious libtard tears" so: congratulations. I truly wish you the best as you enjoy the success of your sadistic ideology. Good job. I know nothing's going to change your minds at this point. Don't let the cork on your champagne bottle hit you in the eye. Also get off my fucking blog.

To the Non-Americans: this is your one apology, and your one preemptive warning that I'm not going to tolerate victim blaming on here. Most of us didn't fucking want him. Also if you're in a country that's been flirting with right wing lunatics itself e.g. the UK, Hungary, Poland, climb down off your high horse.

To everyone else: Oh my god I am so fucking tired. Can we catch even ONE break?

[spurgie-cousin]

Have you heard about this horrible anti-Mormon bigot here on Tumblr called "lemuel-apologist"? She is so two-faced! She says that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were "clearly pedophiles" while reaping popularity on Tumblr by claiming to be an anti-capitalist asexual nonbinary queer woman of color. But at the same time she does this, she also brags about being the best alto in her ward choir and graduating top of her class at BYU. So either her wokery is performative or her church attendance is. I'm not sure which is worse.

But what is probably worse is the way she has teamed up with a "Tumblr famous" (his words) influencer named r4cs0. This guy is some kind of enlightened centrist who thinks it's okay to bash Trump and conservatives as long as he also says he hates "Kamaleon" and "Tampon Tim" as well. r4cs0 and lemuel-apologist have apparently agreed that it would be funny to mock Mormons, so they have been telling people that they are going to organize a queer jump humping orgy to protest capitalism by breaking into a furniture store in Salt Lake and doing SICK things in there!

And I'm just over here like, how are you gonna participate in an orgy when you claim to be asexual??? Like I said, this nonsense these people are spreading is clearly performative. If them mocking our faith wasn't bad enough, it just adds insult to injury to know they are only doing it because they enjoy being edgy on the internet!

[0w0tsuki]

The TME Transmisoginy Discourse Playbook:

"Your emotions are valid. It sucks that you had to go through that. But the thing is there's just ONE or TWO points I think I can disprove to show that you actually have no fucking clue what your talking about and shouldn't be speaking to begin with. Anyways here's my 10+ paragraph take down analysis response"

"Hey could you not talk about your own oppression like ever? Your LITERALLY just infighting and are the sole responsibility for the divide in the queer community. So now I'm going to exclude you for being an exclusionist "

"DUDE what's the transfem crusade about THIS WEEK?! Y'all are just overreactive hysterical cunts just LOOKING for anthills to blow out of proportions into mountains. Calm down. It's not that deep. Log off. Touch grass"

*Constructs a Beaddel strawman to argue against that's actually just a transmisoginistic caricature and shove words into the mouth of anyone who points out that your strawmanning*

*Look through OP's blog to find anything that you can screenshot to use to write them off out of hand without genuinely having to engage with them*

(Enlightened Centrist Voice) "Worry not fellow discoursers. For I am a neutral third party who's uninvolved in this discourse so I am the perfect one to provide a LEVEL HEADED opinion on this discourse that I have absolutely zero stake in" *Proceeds to spout the most biased and transmisoginistic garbage you've ever heard*

"Don't you know that cis butches sometimes get mistaken for trans women and harassed by TERFs? Don't you know that cis dudes are sometimes punished by their peers for being a little effeminate? SEE?! Transmisoginy affects EVERYONE! So that TME/TMA distinction your using has no rhetorical value and is actually and indication of how divisive your being "

"Hey I am a part of the identity group that you're claiming to have experienced transmisoginy from a subset of and instead of taking this as a call to work to make my community better by discouraging that subset as a member of their community, I'm going to interpret this post as a wide sweeping attack on my community and me personally."

"Hey you're literally taking this out of context and trying to construct your own narrative. This discourse is CLEARLY referencing (separate post that all the transfems in the discourse already knew about that doesn't debunk the transmisoginy being discussed/change the narrative and sometimes even make the transmisoginy even worse)

[chelledoggo]

i'm no longer an "enlightened centrist," but i still do hold some views that could be considered "centrist" depending on who you're asking.

for example:

i believe that access to guns and poor mental health both play a part in the gun violence epidemic. we need common sense gun control AND better access to mental health resources.

i believe that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. i would like to see contraceptives and plan B pills more accessible to reduce the necessity of abortions, but i don't want abortions to be illegal or overly controlled by the government.

we need to be more mindful of mens' mental health. however, men should NOT be receiving role models in the form of your Andrew Tates and your Jordan Petersons. we need to allow men to be vulnerable and give them encouragement, without nurturing an unwarranted sense of male entitlement in them. the patriarchy is what hurt men, we need to be healing them.

we should not be taxing churches that operate as genuine places of worship and charity. but we should ABSOLUTELY be taxing megachurches and corporate chain churches that openly promote regressive political agendas and engage in "prosperity gospel" activity such as asking their congregants to "plant a seed."

if you disagree with me on any of these, i only ask that you please be civil. if you're going to just hurl insults at me, i'll block you on the spot.

[horizon-verizon]

Remember all those finger-wagging lectures about how the French left/minorities needed to “be realistic, hold its nose, and vote Macron to bloc the fascist Le Pen” ?

Now, Macron’s party is in third place and the far right is on the brink of power, but let’s watch Macron and the “Enlightened and Humanists Centrists” utterly refuse to return the favour.

Liberals and centrists are the ones who went out of their way to completely normalize, mainstream, and de-demonize far right ideas.

...anon, i'm not French. how did you get the idea that I was one of those who anyone said anything like this to?

Still, yes, I agree. Liberals and centrists, esp politicians, have the power they have or interests in maintaining the status quo already built on racial, class, gender, etc. inequalities.

[sirenium]

I just want everyone to be careful. There seems to be an increase of right-wingers on Tumblr lately (at least I'm getting them put on my radar more often), including the ""enlightened centrist"" types. it may be tempting to call them out, but you're better off just blocking those people. no meaningful conversation will result from interaction with them.