Context This is my response to a discussion about Firefox collaborating with Ecosia, and the discussion that followed quickly went awry. Not only we need it seems to vote for Democrats^[1] no matter what their policies or our opinions are, but we also must support Firefox whatever its moves or shifts in values are, because of its nominal support for privacy in the W3C. But the political take this commenter took brings as back to the election debate we keep having on Lemmy. Like only recently I debated someone claiming that literally we should throw trans people under the bus because of utilitarianism (if Trump wins they say, global warming will kill way more people, and we are sacrificing those people for the “ideological purism” of protecting trans people).

So we see centrists are willing to sacrifice human life and demolish pillars of democracy to defend their centrist dogma, even reaching for far-fetched causality chains to make reality fit their trolley-problem meme obsession.

In defense of extremism

I don’t want this post to just reiterate my response to the Firefox centrist. In fact, I was planning to write “in defense of extremism” with this main argument:

If Auschwitz II - Birkenau is peak capitalism, then anarchist extremist is virtuous. In terms of militarism, political intolerance, racial hatred, and labor exploitation, let alone the murder and stealing efficiency for which it most notorious.

An anarchist is by definition opposed to militarism, political intolerance, racial hatred, and labor exploitation. So anarchism is the logical opposition to all of these together, and there is no room for compromise with any of those:

• No middle ground for militarism
• No middle ground for racial hatred
• No middle ground for political intolerance including religion, sex and gender.
• No room for labor exploitation, in most historical cases supported by the above systems of oppression.

For these reasons I was planning to debunk centrism, since there is no middle ground between freedom and Birkenau, as there is no middle ground between sense and nonsense (eg like antivaxxers and medicine, there is simply no middle ground). Therefore, centrism is also morally wrong.

Responding to centrists

But the arguments I was playing around with in my head for the defense of extremism kept popping up in random discussions I had around Lemmy. Some of them were too good to waste on some rando centrist drawing parallels between Democrats and Firefox 😂. I kept the part that most easily generalizes to the defense of extremism, and best underscores the hypocrisy, intolerance, and immoral compromise of centrists, who are themselves biased ideologues with their own set of material interests.

Here goes:

I am a pragmatist, you are an idealist.

1. This is not what these words mean.
2. You don’t get to define what other people determine themselves as.
3. I am ideologue with certain material interests, and you are an ideologue with a different set of interest, who is willing to solve equations with human lives.
4. A centrist although presenting as non-ideologue, is willing to protect his moderation bias even with the lives of other people he thinks as ideological purists.
5. By continuously compromising with the worst amongst the humanity for precious election points he makes society worse for all of us.
6. The real meaning of centrism is that you are flexible with your red lines against fascism and corporatism, and weigh human lives according to their ideological distance from oneself.

history shows that “radical solutions” are almost always a mirage

We have LibreWolf, Mullvad, TorBrowser, which are all Firefox forks of course. If we are talking about possible extinction of the gecko engine perhaps we could have this discussion anew, but because these other projects exist, not because we have to support any ill advised move Firefox makes that time and again alienates this community.

To further this argument, there is, well, open source in general, which many people frame by the same “moderate-biased” arguments you propose. Nonetheless it exists and thrives, and it is well shown that the GPL licenses are better for developers. All this happens because of what you dismiss as “idealists”, since the era of Creative Commons, Independent Media Center, and the Internet Archive, up to the Tor Project, Tails, SciHub and all other good things the internet has to offer comes from ideologues. Even Lemmy that you are currently using.

The centrist as intolerant, purist and conservative

So whatever is outside the centrist’s tunnel vision is just non-existent. That makes the centrist an extremist naive empiricist, lacking non only object constancy but also the intellectual sophistication to stipulate configurations of the world outside his immediate and temporary surroundings.

The blithe centrist happily leeches off to preach ad nauseam that middle ground with spooks, fascists and advertisers is a universal truth we must blindly succumb to. Then it is shown that the centrist is not just naive or misguided but actively hostile and dishonest (see first section of this comment for evidence of logical inconsistency and dishonesty^[2]) with people of different opinions, so they prove themselves not to be centrist at all, but diet fascists.

To sum up, in this post I have shown that:

• Centrists can be tactically motivated and intellectually dishonest.
• Centrist are in fact intolerant of views different than theirs.
• Centrists are immoral and undemocratic, in their pursuit of middle ground with perpetrators of exploitation and discrimination.
• Centrists are in fact extremist in their naive empiricism, tunnel vision, and glorification of the status quo that was given to them, which is by definition conservative.

Combining common terms from the above propositions: Centrists are tactically motivated, intellectually dishonest, intolerant to difference of opinion, indifferent to the rights of others, immoral and undemocratic apologists of exploitation and discrimination, extremist in their empiricism and conservatism.

Centrist? Better call them sentries of the status quo. Disclaimer: I hate centrists with a burning passion.

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1. I have made my point very clear in this post, including the contributions of others underneath. ↩︎

2. The rest of the comment overlaps with the second part of this post. ↩︎