u/Rough-Leg-4148

While there's plenty of criticism both for the administration's stated goals and their execution, as a subreddit devoted to centrists / centrist discussion, there is probably a campaign trail idea that you at least agreed with in theory that nonetheless the current administration mucked up. If that exists, what is that for you?

For me, there were a handful of ideas that could have been good, but I am actually more offended that they completely made it worse to the point that I don't even know if I want the theoretical idea if this is the best we're going to get.

1. DOGE. It was a doomed enterprise to start when Elon and a bunch of teenagers were sent to root around in our critical infrastructure, has cost us more than anything we could have cut... I don't need to belabor how incompetently DOGE was executed. "5 Things You Did Today" emails seemed like something a first year middling performer bachelor in Business student would come up with.

However, I enjoyed the premise of an independent investigating body whose sole mission was to consider administrative bloat and critically evaluate the need to maintain certain staffing requirements. The ideal "DOGE" would have taken a hard look at DOD and defense contracting writ-large. That is one of the single biggest sources of untracked expenditure and tbh, my time in the Fleet made me buy into the rationale that DOD is basically a big money dump for anyone looking to make a buck. No accountability for parts that don't work, no accountability for projects that don't deliver, basically a big "throw money at it system" that seriously needs some kind of audit.

2. Secure borders. I'm less concerned about immigrant families already in the US (the pathway needs to be easier) and more about a border that isn't totally locked down so that actual criminal/terrorist enterprise are able to use these innocents as cover to get into the country unabated. It poses a massive national security risk and law enforcement risk. Of course then you watch ICE conducting a slew of mishandled immigration enforcement operations (mainly in Democratic-majority cities, what do you know) and the civil liberties of actual citizens being actively dismissed and trodden over... so any good faith discussion about professional immigration enforcement goes out the window when you can just watch the news to see how this administration has utterly lost the plot.

Not me, but one of my agencies in the past ran 911 in a pretty rough area. No idea what the call was for, but it sounded like standard BLS "load and go". I guess the patient had some enemies, because as they were preparing the patient to be transported, a third party jumped in the ambulance, shot the patient to death, and left.

Obviously nothing can really be done in that situation - they have a gun and I would not, so protect yourself and your partner. But it got me thinking about some of the DV calls I've been on.

Let's say I am rendering aid to someone involved in an altercation. Generally, I'd expected PD to secure the scene before I get there to avoid anything like this (in fact, that's usually what happens). What I was not sure about was a "pop up" incident where I wouldn't have PD right away.

I'll pose a scenario:

We are dispatched to a routine "trouble breathing" call. The patient wants to be transported. I load them in the stretcher, but as we are about to get them in the ambulance, a third party rolls up and either attempts to (or successfully) assaults the patient.

We would call PD of course and try to separate the fighting, but I am confused as to what ethical obligation -- or protections, more like -- that I would have in such a situation before those resources arrive. My gut feeling is that since this patient is strapped in my gurney, it's sort of an expectation that I would defend them from harm up to the point that I probably couldn't do anything to protect either of us (e.g. gun drawn), even if I may come to harm myself. But we're also trained to ensure scene safety, prioritizing our ambulance team -- no sense in creating more patients by inserting ourselves into a dangerous scene, and request backup where available.

The ethical issue I see is that if we step away to "ensure scene safety" and call for additional resources, we are also allowing this patient that is in our care to get the shit beaten out of them in the meantime. I do not know what protections or obligations EMS has, particularly as force escalates (say, if the assailant brings blunt instruments or sharp objects, etc).

Maybe it's just the environments I grew up in, but I am prior military service and ran with some other "rough and tumble" fields. Growing up, I was a sensitive sort that would read too much into what people said. "They talk like that to you because they like you" was always a weird thing for me to wrap my head around and me being the defensive and emotional type back then was always flummoxed by it.

Well, give it about a decade, and I'm now a civilian in a professional environment. I had a realization that I generally respect and like someone better if they can throw some jabs at me. I give it back in equal measure and the people I love the most get it the most. Even beyond that, when dealing with professional colleagues, clients, and associated partners, I find that I like those that are direct in their intentions ("this is what I want from you/your organization") and can give me an honest read are the ones I remember and respect the most.

I think part of it is comfortability, since I'm still basically a socially anxious crittur at heart and it really is a sign of some level of "trust", but directness itself seems to give me comfort. If I say "did I just speak in word vomit and look like an idiot", it gives me far more peace to have that validated than any level of reassurance. It somehow gives me less anxiety for people to be honest and share that honesty than the falsity of making myself "feel better", which is what I felt like I was looking for in my younger days.

I don't know -- I know it seems like an obvious social convention, but it's just odd, isn't it? Is that part of maturation or is my brain just swiss cheese? I feel like other people feel the same way though, because the strongest friendships that I see are those that engage in this level of brutal honesty.

So between adaptation/progress, a lot of the pros/cons come down to workforce requirements and whether you feel equipped to handle squalor versus disease. Those are fair tradeoffs, although I prefer adaptation buildings in that regard. Some buildings are more effective in the progress tree but generator more squalor or affect temperature level -- again, cost and benefits.

However, there are some buildings that I don't see why I would go for the "normal" version. I have never see a reason to use the regular pharma labs over testing labs; I have never seen a reason to use any other logistics bays over vanguard (I think there is some tradeoff for workforce, but at that point it becomes somewhat negligible). I don't see the purpose in regular scout headquarters over survivalist, and to me it seems like not having scouts die makes Pathfinder scouts preferential. I don't use harvester hangars generally, but the adaptation one is simply a net benefit with no downside with nearly double the intake versus the regular one.

There simply seems to be no upside to use alternative/moderate versions of some of these buildings or laws. Am I missing something?

To be clear, there are policies that could help (or hurt), but the real problem is a lack of standards and lack of enforcement. Now you might say that this could be solved through policy, but there were periods of time in our history where we did maintain rigorous standards and enforce discipline in schools and there were funding/accessibility issues. What changed?

Parents.

Let's take a couple situations:

Situation #1: A student is failing. The teacher holds a standard. The student continues to fail.

• The parent has a conference or directly contacts the school/teacher. "What are you doing to help my kid?" There are bad teachers for sure, but the onus is always on the teacher to make the kid pass.
• The administration intervenes and strongarms the teacher into changing grades to allow kids to pass to the next level even though they lack the foundation of success, which only exacerbates the problem down the line.
• You end up with functionally illiterate high school graduates who should have been help back or actually failed their classes.
• Corrollary to this: The same proverbial "well he's an athlete" or whatever other intervention in which it's clear that such an activity supercedes the need for learning. That's an institutional problem but really should be handled by the parents, who should be willing to say "no football for you unless you get your shit together in class."

Situation #2: A student is a constant discipline problem. Distracting other students, being disruptful, or otherwise degrading the quality of the classroom to the point that the teacher would need to focus most of their attention just getting through that kid to the expense of other kids intending to learn.

• Parent answer: "You're picking on my kid!" Nothing is addressed at home and the student's behavior is validated.
• Admin answer: Take them on a walk/remove from the classroom temporarily, but not really addressing the problem in the first. Admin suggests that the teacher should "lay off" because they don't want to get angry phonecalls.

Ultimately, the school administration enables this behavior by little fault of their own, really -- even if the parent files a frivilous lawsuit, that is still costly for the school and they don't want that kind of press. Phones aren't being taken away, students aren't being failed, and no one is being held accountable. Teachers are given the responsibility of parenting with none of the disciplinary teeth that come with it, and we wonder why they fail. To say nothing of truancy, which is rarely, if ever enforced.

What percentage of parents/kids are we willing to excuse the behavior of based on "home life" or "economics"? There are significantly poorer families that still take care of business at home and teach respect for the institutions of education.

The failures of the education system are the failures of a pervasively individualistic, antagonistic, "fuck them, I'm right" culture. It transcends political ideology and socioeconomic status at this point. You can't legislate your way out of a society that puts more onus on the whims of juveniles than what should be some of the most respected professions in the country.

And no, not a teacher. Just a lot of reading on how education policy and the proposals put forth by both parties, both of which sometimes have merit but ultimately fail to address the primary complaints that I see from educators. It is a problem that no one at the political level wants to address because it's telling your voters "parent your damn kids" and no electable politician is going to have the balls to tell their voting base that.

I am using 7Sage.

Last week after work, I decided to say "whatever, I'll take a practice" and got a 155 -- first time I'd ever a full practice, albeit last year I did play around with it for a few months before deciding to defer. I didn't review all of the questions afterward, but between that and some explanations I got on some LR drills, I keep discovering that 50% of wrong answers were me not reading the question properly.

"Which argmuent is LEAST similar to this argument" and somehow I miss the big capitalized word, sweating over two very similar answers that clearly are MOST. "Goodness, which one is better?" and there was the least similar argument that I'd written off from the beginning just by... not paying attention.

If it's not missing a key piece of the question, it's overlooking a single word in a passage or answer that basically gives away where I should be looking. Instead I'm trying to perform LSAT calculus as I mull over what should be a simple answer, had I really paid attention.

Now granted, there's definitely some real sticky questions where I have to think about sufficient and necessary conditions, but the time crunch for each questions stresses my overthinking little mind. All 4 of my brain cells are sprinters, for better or ill, but I'm trying to be optimistic that over time I'll start picking up on this. I guess I only just started.

... from dumpster fire campaigns and parties at that level?

I don't know if I'd define solely "winning" every election in that state as the only datapoint -- driving turnout, creating competitive races with competitive candidates, etc. But as someone who has never worked with a campaign, I sometimes see comments like "the X party of this state is really good/total garbage". I don't really know what that means as a layman.

This is kind of the "nitty gritty" of politics rather than policy.

Not at all an economist and really polling the room on people who are better read on varying levels of economics.

Self-inflicted wounds aside (Iran War, tarriffs, e.g.), it seems like the popularity of most presidencies are very much at the whim of the economy, while they themselves have few tools to both manage it responsibly and deliver on affordability for voters.

For low-info voters or those that vote solely with their wallets, your litmus test for the effectiveness of a presidency is written on the tags of your grocery store. If you have investments and track stocks, sure, that's important to you and you can track that to.

But it seems like packaging an economic message is probably the hardest thing a presidency will ever have to do, and if your circumstances are not great, you're going to struggle to establish that narrative.

Carter has many perceived, and real, failings. But truthfully, it seems like the overwhelming success of Reagan largely road some economic coattails into the 80s. We remember everything now and can take a more nuanced big picture look, but the guy was popular and has largely laid the foundation for modern conservative economic policy (for good or for ill). Clinton had the dot-com boom and a roaring economy with a national post-Soviet, American hegemony zeitgest.

Biden seems like an interesting case -- COVID happened, the world economy tanked, and if you're a proponent of Biden's economy policy and the Inflation Reduction Act, you'd say that he prevented an even more catastrophic economic climate. But it's admittedly a difficult position to be in when you can say "things are getting better, even though they still kind of suck BUT would have been worse without X", versus "things are better." I'd say it may have been largely out of his control, same as many previous presidents.

Again, I am no economists and not well-versed on the subject. I make no endorsements or criticisms.

The claim that I'd like to see refuted (or supported): It is merely my observation that so much of our economic climate is 1) more directly controlled by the actions of Congress with their appropriations power and 2) is largely out of the control of the presidency entirely. Do you agree, disagree, or caveat that? Further, what steps would be appropriate for a president to take -- speaking in hypotheticals because each administration's actions are going to be circumstantial to existing conditions?

I draw some distinctions between the MAGA movement writ large and MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), because while true MAGA may be a cultish floor for Trump, I think the allegiance of the more strictly MAHA crowd is more open to persuasion.

Ideologically, they are not necessarily the same movement, and the MAHA coalition includes former Bernie bros, heterodox Roganites, "wellness moms", and big pharma skeptics. Some of these are not likely to shift to Democrats and will remain in the conspiratorial camp, but others may be swayed by more reasonable policy.

Optimistically, MAHA might include:

• wellness culture
• anti-corporate distrust (Big Pharma / processed food companies)
• libertarian anti-mandate sentiment
• environmental toxin concerns
• “institutions lied to us” distrust
• crunchy/organic lifestyle politics

Of course, for all of that, we also get a healthy portion of:

• antivaxxers
• "5G towers are giving us cancer"
• "It's only healthy if it's totally organic and no GMO"
• raw milk and red meat
• insert any other kind of pseudoscientific fringe belief

I don't think the venn diagram is a perfect circle. While obviously time has proven the opposite, part of me (mostly trying to see potential upsides to the new administration circa Jan 2025) hoped that RFK would lean more into processed foods, innovative therapies beyond "pump and dumb" pharmaceuticals for mental health care, environmental pollutants, etc -- it wouldn't have been perfect, but maybe some good could have come of it. History disappoints us, but it does potentially leave the door open to explore continuing concerns on public health.

Most redditors are not public health professionals, so I get that there are some limitations to this question - but at least it is worth considering. Processed food reform, environmental toxins, and holistic wellness are all things that I think the larger Democratic coalition could adopt and reaffirm. What do you think?

Part of the story I am writing is a nation being invaded by a very vindictive and destructive force which is laying waste to the country, including it's civilian population. Our protagonist is a very young infantrymen who was separated from his unit and is traveling with another displaced civilian. It's a fantasy story but I won't belabor the details, they aren't really important. The pertinent background is that he is basically pressed into service prior to the war after being a little rapscallion and his family basically being fed up with his antics, so they let him choose jail or military. Their last conversation is "You're a disappointment, but we hope this makes you a better man one day".

The plot note that I was considering: part of their journey is meant to take them to one city, but our soldier protagonist wants to make a detour into his hometown - dangerous, but he's emotional and distraught. His father, mother, and childhood friends would have all lived there. When he arrives, the city is totally deserted (seemingly), before he happens across a evidence of mass killings in the city. He tries to find the bodies or some indication that his family is alive, but it's never confirmed.

The story goes well beyond this point and it's a key moment of characterization for our character to never really have confirmation that his family is alive. Even after the main events of this plotline close, it's still brought up occasionally that he's looking for them and hoping they are alive. The way the plot is planned, however, we never get confirmation if his family was among the victims or simply disappeared off somewhere else.

From a writing standpoint, I feel like a lot of writing operates on the Schrodinger's Corpse principle: if we don't visually confirm death, they may be assumed to not be dead.

On one hand, I felt that never receiving confirmation would play a lot into this protagonist's character growth. War is terrible, chaotic, and we don't always get closure. More than that, the protagonist's character arc is very much of "becoming a truly good man", and part of that is overcoming the need for his father to validate that verbally -- he has to reflect and believe that he became the kind of person his father would be proud of.

On the other hand, I can see it being frustrating from a reader's perspective. "So is the family alive or do we have signs or...?" They are sort of like a Chekhov's Gun which, ironically as I understand it, Checkhov himself despised the notion that the proverbial gun must be fired but nonetheless the trope is interpreted as "if you're gonna keep bringing this up, we're going to need some kind of closure on it".

From a general writing standpoint, I know conventional wisdom says "anything can be good if you write it well", but I wanted to consider the do's and don'ts of this kind of literary device.

I'm choosing popular media as examples of this trope but don't know really what to call it.

Basically, a lot of fantasy stories have really evil or eldritch antagonists, and this trope is basically used to beef up their ranks to give the good guys some action without having to think too much about the moral scruples of our protagonists mowing down hordes of actual humans with complicated motivations and grey political alliances. All of these tropes basically employ the "mindless hordes" trope, but they're written in different ways, usually hinging on evil so corrupting that it removes agency from normal people -- scary and helpful to up the stakes. There's some level of tragedy there, too.

I am working on something which may involve this, but like any trope it really comes down to the writing, so I am here to ask where writers can do this trope well -- and where it generally fails.

Generally well-done:

• Lord of the Rings could be sort of one of these -- the orcs and evil men don't get much characterization, and "it ain't that kind of movie, kid". We don't have the protagonists getting weird about mowing them down, they're just straight up evil.
• The White Walkers are an existential abomination threatening the entire world, but there's also only a handul of them... so they have the power to resurrect the dead, which is terrifying and adds to their otherworldly, unstoppable nature.
• The husks -- basically the same, but I'll chock that up to the fact that Mass Effect is first a video game series and you need basic goons to fight, because only duking it with evil starships wouldn't really fit the game.

Examples I'd think of "probably not well done or half-baked" are any story in which these hordes are written as explicitly tragic and corrupted versions of normal people... but then there is zero remorse or reflection from the protagonists about killing them in droves. Fantasy is replete with such ideas.

Ironically, Star Wars is a tangential example of this: the Jedi and the good guys believe all life is sacred, unless you're mowing down stormtroopers or only vaguely humanoid aliens. There's very little reflection on "the face behind the evil" unless it's the top dogs that are explicitly bad. It gets around this in some ways during the Prequels by using droids as a primary antagonist, but robots, disembodied spirits, and other "not really human, just guilt-free combatants" aren't really my thing.

For the purposes of this discussion, I wanted to discuss what the do's and dont's are of writing these kind of "enemy hordes". It's all in the writing, sure, but that's what I wanted to get into. What I'm working on will probably employ it to some degree, but I am leaning more into "these people aren't evil, just corrupted and it's very sad" and that will reflect in how the characters themselves react to having to fight them.

Ah, the beauty of the spotless mind, the third party observor that has never seen any of Star Wars. I wish I could watch it all again.

Andor is probably the most accessible for someone new to Star Wars but enjoys high-quality televion, and of course it's a #1 favorite show for me. However, I am wondering in retrospect if there's anything in there that might be worth knowing first - like are there enough context clues to figure out the world? He's not going to be able to infer the Prequels; Jedi never come up and he would have passing idea of what they are, so he might be confused. I'm just not sure.

My thoughts: Just give a quick rundown of the Prequels, this is what the Clone Wars were and this is how we ended up with the current state of affairs. Andor is a guy in a later movie. There you go.

But given that Andor is such a great show, I have to wonder if it's better off going in blind.

On the other hand, maybe we just watch the main 6 and Rogue 1, and then go back to Andor so he goes in with somewhat of an appreciation of the world. I am just not sure.

EDIT: So we've got some options. The two standouts, besides just doing Andor and cutting ANH and maybe R1 (but idk):

1. Chronological: Andor>R1>ANH
2. Release Order: ANH>R1>Andor

Chronological has a nice "build-up" to it before they take out the Death Star. You see what happens all the way up to that critical moment, and know what went into it and what it means. You see the Rebellion go from nothing to taking on the Empire. The story gets even more fantastical, can you imagine how all the Force and Vader-hallway stuff would hit if we spent 2 seasons grounded and now suddenly it's terrifying space wizards and evil masterminds at the top? Some of that feels a bit like jumping the shark, though, and a first time viewer may not appreciate Andor at first without the context of what's at stake.

Release imo might be the best for someone to ease into the tonal shift. ANH is campy, R1 feels campy by comparison to Andor, and Andor works our way backwards. But then you know, spoilers, and we've have to ease into the grounded parts of Star Wars that way. But it does make that final scene in Andor to Kafrene and all the rest all the more impactful, knowing what's going to happen and that in fact, Andor is basically responsible for everything that followed over a 2 week (!) period.

He's seen Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. I think that's an example of where either order could work, but potentially changes the impact more than we could know (at least with BCS>BB, you kind of have to stop at the last 4 episodes to make it "work", where Andor doesn't have that problem necessarily).

Probably because my own personal politics is a mixed bag, I’ve always felt it was possible for true ideological differences between parties, or “camps” (progressive, libertarian, liberal, conservative, whatever), to still produce thoughtful debate and mutual respect. The idea being that different worldviews would help develop policy that wasn’t one-sided, but at least attempted to address concerns raised by all sides. Compromise, right?

Obviously political partisanship has always been a thing, but the parties themselves have never felt as polarized as they are now. You don’t really have the same outsized internal blocs like the Dixiecrats or Rockefeller Republicans anymore. You can blame a lot of things for that, but for the sake of this discussion, it doesn’t really matter. Politics has become more of a team sport than ever.

That gets me to what I’m actually asking: if you have people who are genuine conservatives and people who are genuine progressives, how do we realistically expect them to ever come to an accord when their ideologies may be diametrically opposed?

We see strange alliances of convenience. Democrats aligning with libertarians like Thomas Massie on certain issues, for example. But strip away shared anti-MAGA sentiment, or shared outrage over something like the Epstein files, and you’re left with Massie and a whole lot of people who otherwise think his ideas are fundamentally wrong. I wouldn’t foresee them agreeing on much of anything in the future.

There’s also a lot of late-term nostalgia now for figures like John McCain and Barack Obama. I remember plenty of doomerism around both, even when I was younger, but at the candidate level there was clearly mutual respect in 2008. They called each other good men. There was at least a baseline belief that either could do the job honorably.

Now, because of temporary alignments on specific issues, you’ll hear people say things like, “I disagree with most of his ideology, but I respect Thomas Massie.” You hear versions of that in reverse, too.

But if the ideological divide is so wide that the other side’s worldview feels fundamentally unfathomable, how is it possible to maintain dignity and respect unless, on some level, you don’t actually believe their ideas are destructive?

Hypothetical: If you’re a conservative and genuinely think progressive ideology is bad for the country, how do you work together anyway? If you’re a progressive and genuinely think conservative ideology is fundamentally wrong, how do you build bipartisan solutions?

Since this is r/centrist, I thought you guys might have a good view on this.

How do you meaningfully govern with people whose worldview you believe is fundamentally wrong?

The moment the Correspondent's Dinner was crashed, it seemed like social media jumped straight to crazy town all over the place. The reality is that it's surprising that more things like this don't happen.

First, the last time someone tried to assassinate a president at the Washington Hilton, it was to impress Jodie Foster, and they got a lot closer to actually killing the President than this guy. It's not that complicated. Someone sufficiently mentally ill can and will do stuff like this. The guy was a chronically online loser who wanted to "make a statement" because, as we've discovered, social media (specifically reddit) had melted his brain.

As a facility, Wash Hilton is not that secure, but is a common gathering place for big events in DC. There's a ton of access points and not many perceptible "layers". I could totally see someone sprinting past security and being taken down, but we don't need to set up 5 military checkpoints every time a cabinet official is in town. SS did their job, mostly. Do I think they were caught off guard? A little bit, but it was resolved rather quickly all things considered for a facility with the floor plan like that.

No one reacted because most people, including the plethora of smoothbrains implying that they "would have reacted differently" aren't crawling under a table at every loud noise. For people who aren't plagued by related PTSD, the expected reaction is "wait, what's happening?" It never feels real until it's happening to you. Arm chair analysts really out here making themselves look like sheltered fools that watch too many movies.

You know what's more surprising? That we haven't had someone who feels like they have nothing to lose that has been truly impacted trying to take out the President - someone who's family was swept up by ICE or shot by police, a disgruntled service member displeased with yet another Middle Eastern war that no one asked for, or any number of other personal grievances. Take your pick. There's plenty.

On the other hand, of course Republicans got to work weaponizing it. Every time there has been a public attempt on Trump, it has been politicized to smear the Democrats and anyone that is displeased with Trump as lunatics -- an easy position from which to dismiss their other concerns. The same thing happens in reverse; a crazy dude sprays some vinegar at Omar and suddenly you have MAGA talking heads playing defense and saying it was an inside job. It's dumb and it's exhausting.

There is no vast conspiracy. There is no inside job. Talking about this guy like he's a crisis actor makes us feel comfortable because events like these make us realize that there are some very stupid, very emotionally charged people out there who might otherwise align with us. No ideology is special in that regard. Social media is poison to the masses and the responsible to do is condemn it every time it happens and call for unity. You don't need to spin tales to rationalize it for "your side".