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This World Ain't Big Enough For Two 5 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I for one am tired of having racism identified with the right. I'm tired of hearing people tell me I should change parties because my party is right wing and so was Hitler, as if there were any similarities between the two.

    I don't think "left" and "right" is adequate to describe the spectrum anymore.

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
    • Where I used to work one of my coworkers would say that a graph of political thoughts is more like a circle. Moderates on both sides are very similar and as you go to the extremes the extreme righ and the extreme left thinking individuals have more in common with each other than anyone else.

      I thought it was a very interesting way to illustrate political thinking. :-)

      • :) The original second paragraph to my post (which I deleted before posting) mentioned how a high school teacher drew that circle for our class and I never bought it. While there are people shooting each other on both ends (and actually all up and down) the spectrum, I can never see someone becoming so anti-gun-control that they become pro-gun-control, for example.

        --
        J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
        • That is not the point though.
          I believe there are two.

          1. That they have in fact become very much like each other for having entrenched themselves in extreme views and not being open to considering others.

          2. People at such extremes find themselves at odds with those in the "middle", and may form "unholy" alliances to fight that fight.
          --
          Were that I say, pancakes?

          • Yeah, I do see what everyone's saying here, and it's shedding some light on that circle (which has bothered me for seven or eight years). Always before I've felt like people were using it to say, "Viewpoints don't matter, as long as you don't take them strongly. When you take them strongly, you become just like the other side. See? That proves viewpoints don't matter. So since your viewpoints don't matter, you should just drop your point and accept mine."

            Seriously, until today, that's how I've heard that circle used.

            I think the problem is strength of a viewpoint needs to be measured in more than just one dimension:

            • Personal view on the specific issue.
            • Strength of certainty of personal viewpoint.
            • Willingness to consider other viewpoints.
            • Willingness to die for viewpoint.
            • Willingness to kill for viewpoint.

            With a more finegrained scale, it's easier to say exactly how the "far-left" and "far-right" are like one another.

            And yes, it makes more sense once you point out that they do sometimes form alliances to fight the middle. Like some of the people that have teamed up with the ACLU but don't like them because they are (more-or-less) leftist (okay, I guess that's not really an alliance of extremes, but it's sort of an example).

            --
            J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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