More good news - and the kind of initiative that will be good not just for his own base, but for those evil fascists / devilish centrists (this is sarcasm....) too, if they happen to have a job adjacent to manufacturing - it's the kind of initiative I wish our government would go for, instead of expecting investment banks to magically save the day all the time. Benefits long term (environment, government spending), benefits the economy short term (not buying German / Chinese, helping develop new manufacturing & supply chains), benefits people immediately (jobs, quality of life, etc.)



https://www.energylivenews.com/2021/01/26/biden-signs-executive-order-to-replace-entire-government-fleet-with-evs/

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-president-joe-biden-government-vehicles-electric/

But those "evil fascists" will probably whine that evlectric vehicles are "communist" or some other made up bullshit.

In other news, I've seen many posts blaming Biden for the COVID deaths since he was sworn in. I wish I was joking, these people act like literal children (actually, scratch that, it's insulting to children): since those deaths would have been blamed on Trump if he was still in office, they feel it's fair to blame those deaths on Biden. Like he could go back in time and cure people who got the COVID weeks ago and are now dying from it.

They're still anecdotal, and I totally expected to see one or two, but I've seen upvoted comments on Reddit and liked posts on Facebook, and at least one post from Charlie Kirk, one of the literal pieces of shit who runs Turning Point USA and has thus a good reach.

It's also crazy how the Trumpublicans have been on the clock and started to worry about debt and deficit and spending ***the very moment*** Biden was sworn in. It's another of those things that if you'd see on a TV show or movie, you'd think the author is taking his audience for suckers, but here reality is dumber than fiction.

I'd almost forgotten what hearing good news about the government was like.

Hol'up, 'Devilish centrists'? What the flying fuck? Centrists are now evil too?

American centrists are just closet right wingers who know that conservative is a bad word so yes?

I don't care if people want to label themselves centrists but I've never really heard any reasons why that resonated with me. A lot of the reasons come down to "well we read some reports of 'far-left' people doing stuff to private property we didn't like.' I just personally never hear any rebukes to actual policies that make me think 'yeah centrism sounds good.'

This is all gesture, no substance. It would have zero meaningful impact on emissions in the US, and amounts to little more than a transfer of taxpayer dollars to Big Capital, not to mention the jingoistic nonsense that is "Buy American."

I'd say it looks decent, especially after the less-than-ideal 2020 map and the absolutely brutal 2018 one. Dems have great pickup opportunities in Pennsylvania and North Carolina (where GOP incumbents are retiring), and in Wisconsin (where Ron Johnson might be retiring and will be one of the more vulnerable incumbents if he doesn't). Florida, Iowa, and Ohio are certainly not very friendly territory for Dems at this point, but they could get competitive, especially if Dems field a strong candidate and improve their outreach to Latino voters in Florida, if Grassley retires in Iowa, and if Ohio Republicans nominate a candidate perceived as weak or extreme like Jim Jordan.

Meanwhile, Democrats aren't defending any seats in states that Trump won; Arizona and Georgia will be states to watch, but at worst they'll be competitive, and now that Governor Ducey has confirmed he won't run, I'd give Kelly the early advantage in Arizona, no other Republican out there really has a strong statewide profile. The best bet in Georgia is if Doug Collins runs again-- there are rumors that Marjorie Taylor-Green has her eye on a statewide run, and while I doubt she'd win a Senate primary, her nomination would pretty much seal another six years for Warnock. Other than those two, New Hampshire could maybe become competitive if Chris Sununu decides to run, but he's the only Republican with so much as a dream of beating Sen. Hassan. Even he'd have an uphill fight, I think.

What it comes down to is basically, is the difference between the general elections and the GA runoffs a sign that without Trump on the ballot, Republicans struggle to turn out their base? If that's the case, then you combine that with the expected economic upturn, the easing of COVID restrictions and the gradual abatement of the pandemic as vaccines roll out, and the national mood will be more favorable to Democrats than you'd expect in a midterm election. Trump also remains a wildcard; if he gets involved in these races and stays visible, it could drive Democratic turnout and turn away moderates, without the accompanying boost of having him on the ballot to bring out his base.

Basically, there's a lot of ifs at this point, and a lot depends on just who the Democrats and the GOP run in these elections, but the map itself looks decent for Dems. No incumbents running in states Trump won, no incumbents retiring, and Republicans are mainly playing defense.

That's cool, I guess. I still fail to see how that makes centrists bad/evil, unless that just comes down to opinion.

To me (a centrist), it all comes down to being disgusted with that actions of both sides. They're just as bad as the other, people just don't want to admit it (or flat-out ignore the negative points of their chosen side).

I have yet to hear a legit argument, from either side, telling me why one is better than the other (and I gaurn-fucking-tee some dipshit around here is going to read far too much into that statement). Note: I'm referring to the US here, not Canada.

In other words, both sides are just as equally right as they are equally wrong.

To me, if the US doesn't find a way to work 'down the middle', it will tear itself apart.

*shrug* The US needs to be "torn apart" so it can be put back together in a way that is just, rational, and sustainable. In its current form, it is none of the above, and there's no way to get there without tearing it up and starting over again.

I didn't say they were evil.

I'm focused on policy... I want to see free healthcare, good immigration, racial equality, minimum wage improvements, etc. I don't see how compromising with people who are in favor of the for-profit insurance monster or for deporting everyone, or for keeping things at $7.25 as everything becomes more expensive, is gonna help. I'm not playing sides or talking about the sensationalist stuff like protests going on. This both sides stuff just seems simplistic and elementary to me. I guess whatever progress we can get from Biden is gonna be better than nothing, but in general the centrist idea of compromise only goes so far.

And the system you're preaching about putting in won't give you that either. Then what? Blame the left? Blame the right?

Yeah, what you're trying to sell is total garbage, dressed up in 'desirable' language. It's still garbage, and has been proven, time and time again, that it can't sustain itself in the long run.

Oh my, you're right to stop me, couple of people here clearly don't do sarcasm

Just pointing out that a government works program that drives industrial growth ? Good for everyone, good for Biden's base, good for Republican voters, good for people that sit on the fence. Ultimately, as a result, bad for party political bellyaching.

Biden has to reckon with Obama's record of promising the same thing and getting nothing done, but does come into it with a very changed landscape following Tesla kicking the electric vehicle market into life in a big way.

Here's hoping !

More detail here -

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/biden-vows-to-electrify-the-federal-governments-600000-vehicle-fleet/

I could see a couple common-sensical lines of thought that attract a person to centrism (though in the end I don't think they're all that relevant right now).

One is that it's worthwhile to try to see the best in all sides of a conflict, and try to avoid caricaturing or demonizing the sides that have less to recommend them. (Unfortunately, when one of the sides is the "Donald Trump" party, that side is just so far gone that it's more-or-less impossible to caricature them (Poe's law).) The other is just a sort of pragmatism: One of the sides might be better than the others (or far better, or less awful, etc.), but it can't get everyone to go along with it, so it opts for a "pick your battles" approach, because "something is better than nothing." And sure, I feel like that makes decent enough sense.

But so far all this is pretty vague and uninformative, and the conversation needs to be fleshed out by reference to more specific policies and issues, as Empyreal does in his post. So, try to compare and contrast the tendencies of the left and right on things like the following (and in the end it's no contest, IMO):

-Climate change: "We shouldn't deny the unanimous verdict of scientists, and we should try to reform or curtail the activities of our species that are rapidly making the planet less inhabitable" (L); versus, "No, that's not true" (R).

-Gun violence: "We'd do well to follow the examples of countries where stricter gun regulations help to reduce gun violence" (L); versus, "No, that's not true" (R).

-Health care: "The US has the resources to sharply reduce, if not eliminate, preventable death and destitution brought about by treatable illness; it should be open to doing so, even if it entails some difficult but bearable economic consequences" (L); versus, "No, that's not true" (R).

-Poverty: "The US has the resources to sharply reduce, if not eliminate, poverty among its citizens; it should be open to doing so, even if it entails some difficult but bearable economic consequences" (L); versus, "No, that's not true" (R).

And so on, for immigration, LGBT rights, women's rights, etc. The pattern I see is that it's hard to understand where a "third alternative" or "degrees of truth" etc. might enter the picture on any of these; they seem "either-or" for the most part. The left is pretty much sound (of course with lots of room to disagree about the details), whereas the right is characterized by this massive streak of reactionary denialism.

The entire federal government fleet consists of less than 700k vehicles in a country with 275 million automobiles. 0.2% of the vehicles in the country are in the federal fleet; if you think that's enough to drive "industrial growth" or lead to statistically significant reductions in carbon emissions, I don't know what to say.

I think there's a difference between centrism and the trite 'both sides' crap that gets trotted out in conversations about the two parties in America. At the very least I can respect ending up near the center of the political spectrum because your personal political beliefs led you there, even if my own politics are very dissimilar.

I don't respect the 'both sides' thing, though. The two parties are not equally terrible. Not even close. One party would love to see us go back to the days of women bleeding to death in dingy motel rooms because they couldn't get safe, legal abortions. Miss me with that 'both sides' garbage. It's lazy and disingenuous at best.

Plenty of right winged people even today say that blacks should still be slaves and women shouldn't even vote. As hypocrite and lazy the political left is, the right wing is just plain inhuman.

US's mainstream "political left" would be considered centre-right/liberal-right in much of the rest of the world. When your other main party is significantly to the right of that, it's not exactly surprising it mostly becomes a collection of the alt-right, other forms of far right, and the conservative-right, none of which are the least bit known for valuing people outside their very narrow definitions of "the right kind of people", to put it lightly.

There's a major difference between centrism in a multi-party democracy with parties all over the political spectrum, and "centrism" in a two-party democracy where the choices are essentially moderate-right and far-right.

Can confirm that our centrist parties here in multi party Denmark (10 political parties in parliament) are scum too. Not right wing scum, but scum.

This is complete gibberish and there's not an ounce of truth to it.

It's not like a centrist would be in the middle on every policy. A centrist is someone who leans right on some policies and left on others. There are plenty of people who are pro-gun, pro-life, and fiscally conservative, but also believe climate change is a problem, are pro LGBT rights, and for free healthcare. That's just one hypothetical example, but you could switch the stances around and represent a huge number of Americans. Calling them "devilish" is immature hyperbole.

I still remember the first time I heard the term "radical centrist" and it took hours of reading articles to realize it wasn't sarcasm.

The problem is that in the modern day US, your political imagination is defined by your stance on the culture war. If you support transgender children getting hormone blockers, you're on the left. If you want to make abortion illegal, you're on the right. If you dislike both of those, you're a centrist.

But it gets all fucked up because the centrist politicians fuse these centrist cultural signifiers with extreme-right economic policy. So you end up with people fed up with pronoun policing on the left and shoving Christianity down our throats on the right, calling themselves centrists... and immediately getting lumped in with the Mitt Romney or Joe Manchin types, despite sharing none of their economic beliefs.

tl;dr, politicians who are centrists really are just closet right-wingers, but most citizens who call themselves centrists are only signalling where they stand on gay wedding cakes.

I don't usually stand anywhere on gay wedding cakes, I eat them.

All the finger wagging going on around here about centrists is so over the top, ridiculous.

The whole American politics terminology is fucked up. "Liberal" is used for someone on the left, "socialist", "marxist" and "communist" are used interchangeably and to describe anyone left of Hitler, there are "centrists" that would fall squarely on the right elsewhere, "libertarians" that support a police state or even a monarchy (Liberty Hangout anyone?) or are otherwise "Republicans+Weed" (or more rarely, "Republicans+child porn"), Joe Biden is decried as a radical leftists by his opponents on the right, "republic" doesn't mean a democracy (useful when you want to defend your politicians' fascistic rules that disenfranchise voters...), when it suits them "Nazis" are far-left, mask mandates are "communist", Republicans try their hardest to make MLK and other Black icons into "modern Republicans" (i.e. they want to have their black friend to show they're not racist). In such a mess, how do you really define a "centrist"?

There is a lot to blame on everyone for this mess, but the past decade has been terrible. Words have lost their meaning. People only speak in hyperboles. Someone disagreed with you? You're victim of "cancel culture". Your source of news is "fake news". Your disobedience towards COVID rules is equivalent to Black people fighting segregation, your refusal to wear a mask is equivalent to Rosa Parks, your
redneck uprising led by Bison Boy is your 1776. Everything is 1984.

It's like 1984 (eh - see above) and Idiocracy had a baby.

Everyone gets so insanely heated over these labels. My issue with centrists sometimes is this "both sides have their bad points" thing... like anyone who doesn't have a few right-wing viewpoints is some loony who can't ever be reasoned with. I think pretty much everything I believe is firmly left-wing or socialist, and anything not is evolving every day. I don't think it's necessarily a noble or better thing to sit in the middle, which is the sense I get from a lot who call themselves centrists. It matters what your ideas are.

I do think a lot of these issues like climate change, police brutality, et. al aren't necessarily even partisan things, they're just made so by twisted rhetoric and political grandstanding. Things get polluted with propaganda. The only reason I'd even categorize myself as on the left (I hate labeling myself anything) is because I want human rights advanced and oppressive, unfair systems toppled. Somehow these things are affiliated often with one side of the spectrum.

And yes there's no real left wing in the U.S. political power sphere. Recently a few politicians like AOC and some of her cohorts have come up, but they're far from radical and are only now just getting started. But the political theater demands that the Republicans throw around words like 'socialist' whenever anything remotely moves the dial towards helping anyone. It's all nonsense.

Frankly the left isn't exactly squeaky clean on that front either. Plenty of folks like to decry anybody perceived as to the right of AOC or Bernie Sanders as 'Republican-lite', 'corporate Dems', 'DINOs', etc. Heck, you get far enough out into the weeds, you'll get leftists calling Bernie Sanders center-right.

I know I just came fresh off a tirade against 'both sides', but, well, when it comes to hyperbolic labeling (which is annoying but not very consequential, certainly not nearly as important as the right's horrific policies) both the right and the left need to calm down.

If the people you're talking about vote or make laws in shitty ways, well, if the suit fits then so be it.

That's why I don't label myself though. Obviously nothing involving people will ever be squeaky clean. People will fuck up. I don't take pride in being part of a club politically.

Are you absolutely sure you have the correct idea of how things actually work?

Assuming a technical lifetime of roughly 15 years for an automobile, and a domestic production of roughly 8 to 10 million cars annually, that 700k cars would be almost 8% of the entire output of the US automobile industry during a normal year. And if the federal fleet of cars is replaced this way, you can bet you butt that several states (of the semi-sensible kind, not the generally illiterate ones) will soon follow suit. Now, the federal fleet is large enough to have an impact on the designs. If the government actually specifies the requirements in a sensible way, that spec will have a HUGE impact on the technology of the car makers. If you can't understand how and why, you've obviously never had a job at corporate sales. Federal and state-level sales combined could well amount to 10% of the manufacturing for several years, and if you really think the manufacturers will simply shrug and think they don't need to pay attention to that, you're seriously delusional. This kind of opportunities are the carrot offered to the companies, and since government is quite probably not going to demand vehicles that run on endangered giant redwood, mashed baby seals and gutted spotted owls like the previous administration would likely have done, had they realized they can decide to do so, it will have an immense effect on the future designs.

No car manufacturer can afford to give up the opportunity to offer their models to the government, and that's the beauty of it. Or do you think a CEO of one of them would be prepared to go before the board of investors, and say "we didn't think we should be arsed to even try to get 20% more sales", now do you? And that's how a government can influence things without enacting laws or tightening the regulations. Capitalist systems can produce good results if guided in an intelligent way, and this actually is a good example. Absolute numbers are rarely the full story, and I completely disagree with you here. This is a big deal, no matter how people might try to spin it.

And once the tech is there, maybe the US companies might have a shot at selling something in Europe again, too? Because, hell, I haven't even considered a US car in the last 20 years, they actually don't make sense in any way.

And that's why, when prodded, I tell people I'm a centrist. I'm a grown ass man who's completely capable of making up my own mind. I choose not to play ID Politics (serves zero purpose other than to divide people further), I don't support BLM/Antifa/Proud Boys/Oath Keepers/etc (they serve zero purpose other than to divide as well), I don't support policies that actively serve to divide the populace further (no trans in the military, bathroom-gate, etc). I don't support giving money to anyone in the Middle East (we should stay the hell away from that shithole all together- if those countries want change, let them do it themselves, you can't force democracy through a bullet).

I've been labelled as every ic, ist, and ism you can possibly think of, just as much as I've been called a 'cuck', pussy, faggot, etc. It's comical.

The last thing I need is some 20-something telling me how the world should be, all the while willingly ignoring any sort of counterpoint brought up. Instead, out comes all the labels, ic, ist and ism's instead. More and more division, that's all that keeps happening.

'Unity Through Diversity' is a pipe dream as long as both sides of the spectrum refuse to come to some sort of compromise.

BLM is just fighting against the racism that goes back centuries. Antifa just means you're against fascism. Anybody telling you different about either one is lying or grifting... I see no reason not to support these broad movements on principle.

Eläköön Suomi ! Good to see that someone got exactly where I was coming from with that. I'm excited about things like automotive electrification, and the way to do it is to get governments to adopt it first / in a big way. Several British municipal bodies are gearing up to electrify public transport; this will absolutely feed back into the manufacturing processes of heavy transport vehicles, and we'll see the end of the smog-generating diesel bus. The US government buying in is enormous, also because of how visible that will be - everything from embassies to Hollywood movies will be using these vehicles - imagine the global impact that will have.

BLM are nothing more than another Al Sharpton type; opportunists. 'Defund the police' is a foolish and stupid solution. Do that, you're going to end up with all sorts of 'Kenosha's' around the US. Of course, you're not 'allowed' to say things like that, because it's 'racist'. God forbid you mention that maybe BLM should be advocating for a change in 'black culture' first, because that's racist too. You can't run around screaming 'racism' and claiming victimhood every single time someone questions anything you say or do.

And that's not even bringing up the shear amount of destruction that has been caused in the name of that movement. I don't give a shit if they have problems with law enforcement, you burn, loot, etc, whatever point you're trying to make gets thrown out the window. You don't want cops shooting you, but you run around destroying shit? Logic? None. Legitimacy? Now gone too.

Antifa are no better than the 'fascists' they claim they're fighting against.

And both of these groups support some form of censorship on some level, which is completely wrong.

It's like saying cops are inherently murderers and "fascists" for fighting criminals and sometimes killing them in the process. It's not hard to understand:

-BLM/Antifa = fighting for respect and uphold of civil/human rights. For BLM is the obvious and actually proven racial bias Police has on black people. Antifa are against nazis and other racist/bigot scum, like the ones who attempted to overthrow the US Goverment some days ago, people who were wearing antisemitic shirts/hoodies, pro italian/german fascist wares, etc.

-Proud Boys/Oathkeepers/Rednecks in general = fight for the abolition/supression of human rights for a portion of the population, while giving their own kin vast privileges to actually get away with crimes, felonies and other despicable shit. What are these people protecting? White privilege and supremacy, in general terms. Some of them are calling for black slavery again.

Do you really think that allowing people doing the Roman Salute on the streets, wearing shirts with Swastikas/Fasces or mockery of the jewish genocide is fine, just because "freedom of speech"? Your freedom ends where the other's begin.

The people who usually says "antifa are as bad as XX" is because they support in a way or another white supremacists, racists, bigots and other scum.

Not in this case. Antifa don't a pass because 'they're saying the right things' while advocating violence for those that they don't agree with.

If you've ever talked to black people you know they're always doing things to help in their own communities; using that as an argument against the oppression of cops against them is actually racist, yes. I am not "cancelling" you or whatever other nonsense by saying so. Just facts. You seem to be implying that black people have something inherently wrong with their culture or are just naturally doing things to get shot more often - which is fucking racist.

I don't agree with anything else you said either - burning/looting is just a strawman used by right wingers to act like there's cities literally burning to the ground or some other hysteria. Yeah there have been people who've burnt or broken shit - I hardly think it's the most pressing issue going on right now. Doesn't make me support the cause less anyway. And that thing about "you don't want the cops shooting you but you destroy shit"... that's just a false equivalence and gross misappropriation of what's happening.

Violence against who? Why the BLM became riots in the first place? because they killed black Americans before, in and after peaceful protests. Their first protests were actually very peaceful but cops brutalized them to death. A bunch of people is protesting saying "don't kill us" and cops go and kill them in sight. What did you expect?

What's the big deal about "censoring" the worship of genocidal tyrants or the spread of inhuman principles and behavior anyway? Who would ever cry about censoring fascism? Fascists. Pretty obvious.

First, "defund the police" is a bad slogan for a great idea. It's a bad slogan because it can be used against the idea by misrepresenting it to simpletons. It's a great idea because the police doesn't need military-grade weapons and the money cut from bloated police budgets can be used to fund initiatives in mental illness, crime prevention, social safety nets, etc. You can certainly say what you said, but you have to realize that a lot of people who say it are either racist (or, if we are generous, ignorant). Now BLM is a movement that started because of systemic racism and police killings; saying "they should take care of X other problem" is like saying an organization for brain cancer should focus on skin cancer instead.



95% of the protests were entirely peaceful without any major incident. And there was a LOT of protests for BLM. Also, your argument makes it seem like you care more about property than about the individuals shot by police. And it's ignoring that there were documented agitators from the police, that some of the more troublesome protests ended up badly because of police decisions (e.g. changing curfew time so they can start dispersing the protesters). And it's ignoring all the absolutely heinous act committed by police, like that poor woman who received a rubber bullet when coming out of a store, that homeless man in a wheelchair who got shot in the face, that old man who was pushed to the ground, those protesters who were followed home, those who were arrested and put in unmarked vans.



That's the old "Hitler loved dogs so dog owners are Nazis". Just because two sides support something (in a very, very different way) doesn't mean they're at all similar. Not all ideas are worth sharing in polite society. Is it "censorship" to forbid disseminating KKK or Nazi messages? Maybe it is, but in this case, the censorship of that particular idea is better than letting the idea spread. Plenty of countries have laws against hate speech, for instance, and it hasn't lead to any slippery slope.

Making bomb threats, death threats, spreading child porn, libel, etc. are all things that are under some form of "censorship". And it's for the better, for reason that should be quite obvious.

Right, don't question shit because it's 'racist'. Got it. And yes, there are issues within 'black culture' that contribute to many of the problems some of them face. They'll tell you the same thing if you ask them, does that make them racist too?

And I must've been dreaming last spring/summer with the burning and looting going on? The 'mostly peaceful' protests that took place while shit burned?

And that is not a 'false equivalence/gross misappropriation', it's called 'cause and effect'. You can't claim you're being 'peaceful' when shit is burning down at the same time, that's not how that works. Or is that racist too?

Holy shit, there's a lot of bad faith or incredible naiveté in your comment.

Yes, the protests were mostly peaceful. But surprise surprise, the media talk about the times where they weren't. Do you think most people die in car accidents because the media talk about the deadly accidents and not the millions of drivers whoa rrived safely home???

Also, you can't exactly blame people for being angry at the police, especially minorities. Police brutality is a huge issue in the US, particularly if you have a certain skin color.

When black people protest peacefully (like kneeling during the anthem) they are told to stand up and shut up. When they protest peacefully, they are barely a blip on the media scene (as evidenced by the fact that you ignored all the peaceful protests). So even if you discount the agitators and the looters who were just using the protest as a front... black people have a fucking right to be angry.

EDIT to add: And look, I wish the protests were all peaceful and there had been no looting or burning, too. I really do. But you know what I wish even more? That people weren't judged by the color of their skins, that there weren't any bias in the police system, that cops would be trained to deal humanly with people, even drug users or otherwise agitated persons. Compared to that, a looted Target isn't a huge concern. If it is to you, maybe you just found out why people might think you're racist...