Left or Right?

A selective quotation? The full verse:

When lovely lady stoops to folly
And finds too late that men betray!!!
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

Pep (Complex )

Yes, I am Canadian, and yes that is the system here... in theory. In practice, any MP acting against the Prime Minister gets stuck in the back benches or in extreme cases suspended from the party.

And actually, PMs are chosen by the party at large not by the MPs. Have you watched any convention coverage? They can be tedious but can be very interesting and informative.

I am also well aware of the confidence vote issue, but that is not neccessarily a 'feature.' It is our version of impeachment, but has its own problems. Recently, it has been used as a weapon to allow minority governments to act like majorities by playing on the fear that voters would punish any party that triggers an election. This means (again) that MPs are obligated to vote along with the PM rather than on behalf of their ridings.

The theory is that the branches of government represent checks and balances against each other, but the reality is that those in Canada are less effective than they could be.

And that is not even getting into issues with the Senate....

This is getting rather off topic though

Yep. What you say, except to note that when I said that Prime Ministers were made by MPs, I was implicitly making a distinction between "party leader" and actual government leader, as determined by the ability to muster more votes than anyone else in the House.

Crazy system, really. John Pym and Sir Robert Walpole have a lot to answer for . . .

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .

The evening can be very jolly.

Yes, but would you be *Catholic* lite?

Would you tell a Southern baptist they're lukewarm? Better have a couple of good friends backing you up if you try that in some parts of Texas.

No, you would call him a Presbyterian.

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Politics is not religion. Nor is it limited to a dated mid-to-late 20th century artificial left/right dichotomy.



That statement neatly encapsulates the essence of all sorts of religious and political fundamentalist thinking.

Fine, Jig, I'm New Ferret Left.

Isn't claiming everyone should have no bias on any issue or behavior essentially a bias as well? You are stepping on someone else's values and opinions if you enforce the all free, all OK rule.

Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Who said that?

I prefer not to identify with groups that tell me what I believe. I make up my own mind, tyvm.

Many people actually use the groups as a heuristic to quickly identify things they have in common with a group and after identifying those points a person has in common with the group as being more than the other group, a person take sides - or goes along with the general social division of political alignment.

Some people actually say they are right, and then vote left on some social issues. Or say they are left and the vote right on fiscal and policy issues. Not many vote under the umbrella of party absolutism.

You are doing people a disservice though to imply that identifying with a group is subjecting yourself to being told what to believe and that one does not make up their own mind on their own but instead abdicates such decisions to a group.

You get told what to believe regardless of what 'group' you align yourself with.

If you think everything you are doing is without the external influence and contributing factors of other peoples ideas and or wishes you would probably be mistaken.

But how does one choose a group if both of the two options contain a small number of elements with which one agrees and a large number of elements with which one disagrees? I know fewer people who identify themselves as left or right than I know people who identify as neither.

You have to employ a bit of retrospective examination into the voting history of the people you think you want to vote for - regardless of party - and then make your final determination accordingly. With a bit of retrospective examination you can often gain insight as to how that particular legislator will vote in the future on similar/related issues.

Unfortunately, the majority of voters are not 'retrospective voters'.

I agree that one should check the voting history of anyone before voting for them, but I'm not clear how doing so would allow one to then identify as left or right. One might applaud, say, a politician's voting record on gay marriage and yet disagree with his position on school funding, and then vote against him because of expectations that school funding is going to be changed soon where one lives, but that laws regarding gay marriage are not.

Well, history shows that the majority of people are "issue voters". I have voted for a democrat in my town because she wants to expand the gifted children school program that both my kids attend, while the republican, who i have worked with before when i did lobbying, said in a radio interview that he thought the school did not need to expand and would be voting against it.

Parties are nice way to see who you might, best agree with. But not a guarantee.

Unfortunately, you have to balance this all with the bigger picture, that being ultimately where you want to see government in your life and country.

Given that the US main political parties are "far right" and "moderate right"...

Compared to the rest of the world...sure. *shrug*

The lesser of two evils is still evil. Anyway, the act of voting when any result but a unanimous result is acknowledged is an act of violence. If I am not using force or fraud against someone else, why should 51% of the other people in my area get to tell me how to live? If you voted for Bush, you are responsible for all his actions. Just like if you voted for Obama you are responsible for the deaths of the innocents he has caused in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yea tha 51% thing has always been a bummer.

I can't find who first said it, but this describes it better.

"There are two parties in American politics. There is a stupid party and there is an evil party."

Now they have merged into the "Stupid evil party". Of course this would apply to almost every political party.

Is this thread really about voting? Does identifying as left, right, or neither only relate to voting choices?

Doesn't even have to be 51% If I want to paint my house blue and 99% think it should be pink, why should they have a say?

This is why i live outside the of city/town.

Land to do what i want, how i want, no covenants and creeps to tell me how to pain my house or what kind of fence to put up.

I hope not! They haven't extended the vote to mustelid-americans yet!