Left or Right?

tldr

Here you go Jig, much better than right and left. Anyone who wants power over another belongs in the bottom diamond.

The first mistake is trying to define, catagorize or otherwise 'box' political views. Left or Right ..... that's all we get?

I don't have an answer for that one. Neither works.....nor does that diagram thingy a few posts back really help. I feel a certain way about certain things and other people want to place those feelings and attitudes into boxes so THEY feel better about understanding the way I think.....good for them.

I'm pretty much a free thinking all the way around.

As for SL.....I find it ironic that a California based company is so panty twisted about adult content and gay/lesbian issues. Then again.....Cali has been twisted up about a lot of stuff over the past few years SL will continue to be SL and people will continue to bemoan the things they don't agree with.....but politics aren't likely to end SL or alter it.....it's individuals that do that.

In SL I was surprised to discover that a good number of the people I like have political views that are opposite to mine.

.

(X) Diving in and eating all the pie despite the best efforts of leftists to make me share it.

The SL "political coordinate system" should be 3D, so we can build a model and fly around in it, shouldn't it?

Other factors in assessing a person's political position might include such things as the degree to which one personally uses force to impose political system on others, whether they personally create the policies, are involved in transmitting the orders, directives, etc. involved in using force to impose political systems, actually point guns, apply handcuffs, hit people with billy clubs, put people into cells, perform lethal injections, hang people, dispose of bodies, and the other processes involved in using force to impose political systems.

And the Republicans trying to keep it for the oil companies.

.

Bravo! and that is our biggest problem in politics today both sides want to polarize as much as possible then accuse the other-side of being the ones doing it while in truth both sides are just horrible and have no business being in office.

Who won the last election in the USA? ... nobody we all lost, just like the election before that and the election before that.

South Park had it right, our choices are always either a XXXX sandwich or a douche bag.

I'm dead interested in this string,not so much to see who thinks what as to what countries see what as right & left wing...

Australians, English Americans and Euros all seem to have really different definitions of conservative and left...

There isn't a real left in the US, in comparison with Europe, for example. Anti-communism made us skittish about anything that even glances left.

.

hahahah .... right and the moon is made of cheese in rl not in sl ere there are several heesy moons i'm sure

where there are several cheesy moons, got it.

glad I made you laugh.

.

Yeh, well I wouldn't know from experience of the places, but here from Australia, the USA & UK looks like they have both left & right and Europe looks pretty much just leftish.

That's a real generalisation on my part here, I'm with the others who say it is way more complex than just basic left and right. I think in the past decade or so it has blurred into more about either your an extreme or a moderate what ever side. But it is kinda interesting.

My right wing friends insist I am leftist and my left wing friends insist I am right wing.

To quote the Pretenders, "In the middle of the road, you see the darndest things..."

And things are not as bad politicly in the US as they could be.. In Canada it is nigh high treason to vote outside party lines. In the US it seems to happen all the time without anyone losing their head (or carreer).

Left<->Right political stances are sooooo last millennium.

I like this little diagram and think I'll save it. In most issues, I have a tendency to fall in the lower portion of the Libertarian diamond, but seem to have a hard time getting people to understand how that fits in with their normal Liberal vs Conservative crap.

DANGER!!!

Yep - and it has been that way for quite a while now.

People who say they are left wing often get annoyed with me for being -too- left wing.

But that's really only because the American left is the same as the international center-right. So if you're moderate or center-left by global standards, you're far left by US standards. And if you're an actual leftist by global standards, you're an extremist by US standards...

And yet, I'm not a radical type. I'm not like the fringes of left and right that run out and antagonize through protest or commit crimes to back their stance.

Alexander, for all I know you are Canadian yourself, but I think that your characterization of the system here is a bit simplistic, largely because it is comparing apples and oranges. Canadian Members of Parliament are more likely to vote with their party (it is actually fairly rare for a party leader to mandate conformity) because, unlike the US, our legislative and executive branches are combined in one, in the House of Commons. That means that our Prime Minister derives all of her or his power and, indeed, the very right to BE Prime Minister, from the support of MPs. On many issues, most notably financial ones, a lost vote by the government means that that government falls. So party discipline is rather more important here than in the States.

That's not to DEFEND the Canadian system, btw, which after all derives from the centuries-old British one.

The concept of "no confidence" was such a surprise to me. It doesn't happen at all in the US. Our officials get elected for a set term.

.

Just covering the MAJOR issues you need five dimensions:

economy[1] (socialist though "classical liberal"
state (authoritarian through anarchist)
religion (establishmentarian through activist atheist)
ecology (conservationist through "classical progressive"
economy[2] (central control vs free market)

Democracy as we see in real life and Communism as we see in real life are no more different from each other than the left side differs from the right side of a pile of dog sh!t. One side catches sparkels a bit more because it happens to face the sun, but both sides smell identically.

What's called corruption on one side is called free market economics on the other.
What's called a party member ship on one side, translates into money on the other side.

See? Same sh!t, no matter the angle you take for viewing it.

Yeah, it's a weird system ... and I say that as someone who knows a fair amount about its evolution, and has lived under it her entire life.

It DOES work, but it's not as truly democratic, frankly, as what you have in the States. That said, what you have in the States can seem pretty ... weird ... and unworkable too sometimes.