Tasteless site

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Sat Feb 17 11:43:39 PST 2001


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.
> > > ...

Gordon Fitch:
> > 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.

Matt Cramer:
> For this to be useful for me, I'd need to have definitions for freedom and
> equality.

I just gave them, as a result of which I was consigned to the land of mythical bull elephants -- it's been my impression that actual elephants are highly social, as are most mammals, but the fact is, I don't know many elephants personally.

Gordon Fitch:
> > 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.

Matt Cramer:
> 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.

Of course it's not complete. (However, "economic issues" do not form another dimension orthogonal to the political.) The idea is to give an approximate location of political ideologies and their component ideas.

Matt Cramer:
> 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?


>From my point of view, the first three are leftist positions;
I am astonished that any leftists suggest that taking weapons away from the working class and the poor and leaving them in the hands of the military and the police would be a good idea.

The fourth is liberalism, which is a sort of middle-of-the- spectrum synthesis of anarchistic and feudal ideas -- originally, the bourgeoisie wanted freedom for themselves with no one above (except maybe the Lord and his word as revealed to John Locke) and feudalism or slavery for everyone beneath them, which was conveniently implemented by means of liberal property rights. For a while liberal states fitfully imparted rights and benefits to the lower orders to pacify them -- usually with a great deal of carrying-on -- but things seem to be going the other way at the moment, which is what I would predict. As the situations of the rich and the poor draw further apart, more elaborate State systems are needed to keep order. Hence such grotesque exercises as scanning every face at the Superbowl and running the images through a computerized recognition system.



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