Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (10061)	1/27/2006 4:40:02 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 544055

That's why I don't engage in those discussions about various politicians. I can't say I'm much interested in any of them, not enough to know their positions. I'm interested in the ideas and I think I can place them on a continuum. Throwing in a personality complicates it because the personality is the middleman between the idea and the continuum. So I want to leave the personalities out of it, too. We agree on that. Not really but I don't expect it helps to pursue it much. My view is not that personalities complicate the problem of labeling specific legislators. Rather that their positions on issues vary (on some they are in the middle, some on the left, some on the right, etc.) and they also vary over time. Thus, I prefer, if I'm going to do the right/left stuff at all, to do it as an analytical exercise about issues. In that case, to be historically honest, which is not necessarily the best thing to do, it would mean going back to the principles used to establish seating in the assembly during the French revolution and try then to generalize them to the present. Which neither of us has the least interest in doing. On your discussion of trying to use positions on abortion to establish right/left, I gather I misunderstood a comment of yours earlier, not to me but to someone else, that pro-choice would be a far left position. If I misunderstood, my apologies. So, if personal liberties is not a dimension along which you wish to make the right/left policy choices, what is?