I hate to be all humorless and all about this posting (especially since I’m not in one of the identity categories that is supposed to lack a sense of humor) but each panel of this illustrates a way in which moderates are not engaging in politics — in other word this cartoon is making fun of something we (centrists) don’t do, rather than lampooning something we do do. (He said doodoo.)
First panel assumes moderates support free speech rights indiscriminately, and implies that offensive speech is violence. Neither is true. Moderates follow the original Free Speech Movement ideal that the response to bad speech is not suppression but good speech. It’s an imperfect response, but it’s better than suppression. And violence is violence, not speech.
Second panel assumes a type of false equivalence regarding rights and the assertion of rights that moderates do not make. It’s a false equivalence that both extremes make — reactionaries and SJWs. I find it a little offensive, actually, that this panel makes hate groups and civil rights fighters appear comparable, when they aren’t. Note especially that civil rights activists are not pursuing changes that matter only for a special interest group — they matter for everyone, as Dr. King so eloquently explained.
Third panel is missing any awareness or recognition that we the people have put organized violence in the hands of the state precisely because we want some larger control (both to assert and curb) of violence in order to decide collectively when it is and isn’t necessary — we decide that it is necessary in some cases, like resisting the Third Reich or (some of the) fundamentalist terrorism, and that it is not in our interest in others. That’s part of being adults in society.
Fourth panel is pretty good, thanks. But it isn’t about centrism, it’s about apathy. Do those on the far left and the far right really perceive centrists as apathetic? That’s something we should work on fixing as well.
