then your genuine intolerance is out there on display

Did you really just "so much for the tolerant left" me? Hilarious. Thanks for the laugh, considering where this conversation started. I'll put it to you this way seeing as the concept seems so difficult for you to understand. If you go around condemning gay people to burning for eternity and telling women things like "your body, my choice" then I am not going to respect you because you clearly have no respect for anyone else.

And just to clear things up in case this is the reason that you're taking it so personally, when I say "you", I am not pointing a finger at you, I am using it in a general sense, talking about the people that do these things.

You arrived here telling me that my first comment was actually about right wingers while calling yourself a centrist, but you've already started clutching your pearls just because I don't want to ever meet in the middle with hateful bigots and tried to shame me into changing my position by pulling "iNTolERant LEft" schtick. So I dunno.

That's not a Centrist viewpoint at all. That's a solidly right viewpoint.

Well then all I can say is that there's a fair number of right wing people that consider themselves 'centrists' either dishonestly or genuinely believing it. It's actually what I was going for by putting centrist in quotations.

But something that I will never go near the centre on is human rights (whatever that looks like). For example, women should have full rights over their own bodies and not have to die in hospitals when something goes wrong because doctors don't want to risk harming a foetus (that ends up dying along with her anyway), trans people should be allowed to exist without fear and persecution from other people that can't mind their own damn business and everyone should be able to choose their religion or lack thereof. For me personally, these are the kinds of things that are more important than the price of eggs. And anyone that ignores those issues because of the price of eggs, does in fact look pretty similar to a MAGA to me.

As far as the slippery slope goes, I believe in no tolerance for the intolerant. Once you've shown that you just will not give other people the respect that you personally want, you don't deserve it.

Personally, I don't buy this echo chamber shit. Before social media, you choose your spaces and your company and did not have to put up with random jackasses butting into your conversations to tell you how much they hate gay people or whatever.

The abnormal thing is this expectation that we're all supposed to meet in the middle with any asshole at all times. I'm happy with a townhall meeting once in a while but I don't want to or need to put up with bigots and people who are otherwise socio-politically the opposite of me on a daily basis.

I want to be in the company of people that don't make me feel like shit and who I can see eye to eye with. That's not being closed minded or wanting an echo chamber, that's normal.

'Centrists' don't help much either because they too hold the left to a higher standard than the right and always seem to be looking for any excuse to whip out the ol' "so much for the tolerant left" so that they can feel better about themselves when they vote for who they really wanted to vote for anyway.

People on the right can say in plain English "I want to dismantle women's rights and put all gay people into camps" and the 'centrist' will be like "hmmm yes that seems like a valid political opinion". But the moment someone on the left drops the high road shit for once and bites back, the 'centrist', clutching pearls is like "See? This is why I'm supporting the bigots that hate everyone, because you SWORE and that's unacceptable!"