accidental double, can't find the delete : p

From your statements in this thread. That's all I have to access you.

How do you judge people then? Of course everyone has their own views but we as humans are very good at seeing and recognizing patterns. And that's a not a bad thing. We can be more specific but classifying beliefs is not a bad exercise, especially since it helps us identify potential allies and also identify potential extremist or troublesome behaviour. If someone is supporting fascism, you wouldn't say "stop trying to force someone into a box and projecting what their ideologies are." It would be stupid to say that because that gives an out to every dangerous belief in the world. And I am not "projecting" what their ideology is, I'm literally inferring it from their statements on this thread. Him saying a "neutral" person with no bias can come in and take ideas that are good from the left and the right meanwhile the left and right just play sides leads me to believe they don't particularly believe in the left or the right. It's a reasonable inference from where I stand. 

These "boxes" you mention are a means of characterization that were put in place to distinguish people from each other. We don't put people into the"boxes" for the fun of it, we do it based on their beliefs. And I wasn't even trying to talk about them. I was just talking about the enlightened centrist they mentioned that would come in and magically be able to take all the good things from everywhere and solve the system. That's the caricature they created, not me and I am arguing against that caricature.

But I never said I thought I was super intelligent, or thought my belief system was super intelligent, or anything else for that matter. I also never claimed to belong to any group-think, political party or official affiliation either (because I don't; what I think is a vast hodgepodge too convoluted to fit into any one defined space). You said all those things. Not me. And while I don't really mind--because I don't argue with people on the internet--there are probably better ways of approaching people that you don't know online than labeling them as you see fit. For one thing, you don't know them, so it's at best a crap shoot and at worst a complete falsehood. And for another, it's just not polite.

What you are describing is not a moderate and it isn't a centrist. 

I believe that is the issue people have with your statements. It is hard to have a discussion about moderates when you define them so completely outside of what they are in reality, however, again, I do believe it is an interesting demonstration of "Moderate Bias".

Someone touched on it already, sort of. But I think the problem with a person not having an official party or group or whatever you want to call it, is that it creates the illusion of a potential blindspot in their peripheral vision. Because let's face it, if someone runs for office with no label attached, it doesn't matter how amazing his or her ideas are. People are going to be leery, because it's a giant question mark. It's also a lot more work to actually listen to someone instead of simply looking at the little R or D or I under their name. People are conditioned to do that now, and it's not good because the people who are in charge of the R's, D's and I's know it, and a lot of them use it to their advantage to manipulate the masses for their own gain. 

Your caricature of a "moderate" or centrist sure seems to describe someone who is super intelligent and above the fray. And if you give such shining endorsement to those people, I thought it would be fair to think you believe that is the right way to go hence you are a proponent of that ideology hence a part of it. I mean no one in here would say I'm an ardent socialist dude but neoliberals have the best ideas. That would be a stupid take to have. And as such, an assumption that you see yourself as a centrist or moderate is a good one to make. Plus you have a problem understanding the fact that there are many people who don't believe what they believe just because their group believes it. What you call group-think. But rather people believe what they believe and they found other people thinking similarly and hence they banded together and to better classify such people, a name came up either from the group or from other people. 

I do admit that just having opinions because other people in your group have them is a real problem but you are conflating that and superimposing that on the majority of people that believe a certain way. It's a kind of elitist outlook on life and a form of looking down on others. 

Your examples of what a "moderate" is are also not well informed. In the end, it really doesn't matter what you call yourself, it's how you behave and what you do in the world and how you interact with others. There is nothing wrong with looking at people and making a judgement based on their beliefs. It helps us identify people we can work with and people we have to work against. In this thread, you have behaved strangely similar to an enlightened centrist. 

I mean, you did say this earlier in the thread:

For some reason that does sound kinda centrist to me : p

Ah, but if you have a third of the pie instead of the whole, is middle still the middle? And what pie was I even talking about, anyway? Oh, and I also quoted Yoda one line down. So according to that logic, I'm as much a Jedi as I am a centrist lol.

Hm. Well I just went back through the quiz and answered a couple questions differently that I'd been on the fence about before and got a different result that makes even more sense still. I'm now classified as a "stressed sideliner", which basically means that you're a low-income person with nothing more than a high school diploma who nobody cares about, or at least not enough to bother engaging; an alienated, fairly non-partisan, probably female person with left-leaning economic views (e.g. more than 70% of this group supports a $15/hour minimum wage, tuition-free college, universal health care, higher taxes on the wealthy, etc.) and mixed but slightly conservative-leaning social and/or foreign policy views overall, which feels like more of a match for where I am right now than my former result's suggestion that I'm a "strong Democrat". You can see my answers to each query here.

As explained in the OP, I felt that my previous result overall made sense in that it correctly identified most of the specific areas where I disagree with the prevailing views of my party and with liberals and progressives. However, I had to qualify my previous result by pointing out that I'm not so doggedly partisan as it suggested. No such qualification is needed in this case. Same thing with religiosity: my previous result required me to qualify that I'm not religiously motivated toward any of my views. No such qualification is needed in this case because the "stressed sideliner" group isn't particularly more religious than the population at large.

This new result is mainly the result of cutting my previous scores for both parties in half. This time I gave the Democrats a 30% instead of a 60% and the Republicans a 10% instead of a 20%. I was kinda generous the first time, but on reflecting more and coming to the realization that there's no longer anyone I can picture myself voting for in 2024 and own a "Let's Go Brandon!" T-shirt and plan to change my party registration from Democrat to independent in the near future...the fact that I'm losing interest in politics and see myself becoming less engaged in the future...I decided to be harsher, feeling that that was a more honest reading of my current feelings. I agree more often with the Democrats than the Republicans, but the truth is that I feel politically homeless right now and that I expected more from my party than this now that they have the House, the Senate, and the presidency. I can't think of anything (...or at least not anything good...) Joe Biden has done for me so far that Trump didn't. I mean there was the Covid relief bill and the stimulus check with that and all, but Trump also signed two of those into law that together supplied me a similar sum of money, for instance. I think I agree with that recent New York Times opinion video arguing that liberals are hypocrites who simply don't live a lot of their purported values. The main differences between the parties seem to be cultural issues and I don't feel like my opinions are even close to where either party currently stands on those overall.

I also read through the typology group comparisons gauging the stances of each on an expanded range of issues in charts, as well as their demography, and my views definitely line-up most closely with the "stressed sideliners" people. Overwhelmingly I found myself in agreement with either the majority or plurality opinion of this group on like everything there practically, and also, appropriately, demographically aligned. I think that's me. At this point anyway.

Anyway, I also changed my answer to the immigration question to "America’s openness to people from all over the world is essential to who we are as a nation" because the question asks whether that's closest to your opinion or not and I think it is, really. My actual stance on immigration policy is that I support what's traditionally been known as "comprehensive immigration reform", as in generally tougher border policies combined with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are already here, and I also just really don't care whether everyone speaks English or not. It turns out that aligns me with the "stressed sideliners" crowd too.

Yeah, centrism is sort of like the jedi helping the rise of darth vader or something, I guess : p