if just a handful of idealists

If they are so few why does their vote matter that much? Futile attempt to undermine those who disagree with oneself on the basis of statistical sums.

suck it up

This arguments goes both ways. You say I suck it up, I say you suck it up, I don’t put my friends’ life/well-being on the line, for the sake of some half-baked moderation bias one considers self-evident truth.

the third-party purist who made their heart sing.

This is not what happened. All analyses point to that Harris failed to mobilize progressive voters. But this is not a discussion we are having right now, I have made my point very clear in this post including the contributions of others underneath.

So this is a dishonest ad hominem argument, that contradicts itself. I expect it to be thought of as refuted, and one should not resurrect it as per the anti-sealioning policy.

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 purism.
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”, from the era of Creative Commons, Independent Media Center, and the Internet Archive, 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.

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 your logical inconsistency and dishonesty) 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 conservativism.

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