> Matt Cramer:
> > ...
> > You're trying to force everything I say through some kind of cosmic
> > battle of left vs. right. My politics do not fit into that dichotomy.
> > ...
>
> That depends on your definitions. The Left is or used to
> be defined as the party of freedom and equality, the Right as
> the party of authority, established order, and inequality
> (of both political power and private wealth). There are
> other definitions, of course, but I don't think they make
> much sense or have much use, where as the definitions I
> give have been pertinent since the invention of slavery.
For this to be useful for me, I'd need to have definitions for freedom and equality.
> If politics is the theory and practice of whose will shall be
> done in a community, then it is hard to see how any politics
> does not come down somewhere on the Left-Right spectrum: either
> one thinks some should rule others, or one thinks not, or one
> perhaps thinks some should sometimes sort of rule others if
> they're not too unpleasant about it, or if they follow a nifty
> set of rules, or if they're the vanguard of the working
> class. One could evade the spectrum by evading politics
> altogether, of course, but you did say "my politics" and you're
> writing on a political discussion list.
The problem is that this one-dimensional analysis is not complete. The Advocates for Self-Gov recognize this with their political quiz, which has two dimensions (one for personal issues, and one for economic issues), but even that is only one degree better and still much two simplified.
How do you label someone - politically left or right - who supports the following issues:
Ending the US War on Drugs Ending US/NATO Imperialism (Middle East, Balkans, South America) Supporting Individual Gun Rights Decentralising political power (having a constitutional US Fed gov)
There are two left causes and two right causes, yet they coexist? Is this person on the left or on the right?
Matt
-- Matt Cramer <cramer at voicenet.com> http://www.voicenet.com/~cramer/ The technology that extends our senses is increasingly difficult to distinguish from the technology that creates our senses.
-Richard Thieme