Saw some posts earlier today about the "right", the "left", the "Nazis", the "commies", etc., and I thought I'd illustrate the whole thing more clearly:
The odd thing is that we're arguing even as we agree on the same general principles of what is "good" and what is "bad". The vast majority of us agree that freedom is good and oppression is bad. The political spectrum is not linear, but rather circular: the "extremes" end up merging into the same totalitarian crap... The danger is not whether people go "left" or "right", but rather when they descend to the bottom and cherish a "strong government"...
That isn’t any more clear, it’s just different. There are different ways to illustrate the political spectrum emphasizing different qualities - none of them are definitively correct.
The issue is, in the US we really know so little about world affairs that labels aren't any use to use as categorizations or methods of understanding philosophies. We use them as weapons, pummeling and cutting anyone we don't like with misused, non-understood, meaningless labels in an attempt at what I guess is schoolyard jockeying. In the end, everyone ends up looking like fools.
Had a professor once who asked the question, "Would you rather live in total anarchy, where there is no government, no rule of law and no police force, or under totalitarian rule where the government controls everything?"
My answer was the latter, but only if [b]I AM[/b] the government.
He didn't like that, but it was a simple way of saying, "It depends."
The funny thing is you make a pretty reasonable statement that most people feel compelled to agree with but tie it to what amounts to a meme that just reinforces old, simplistic and factually wrong memes and is just the horse theory nonsense repackaged.
