Who would you vote for?

[masked_marsoe]

I stumbled across the Political Compass's rankings.
This is why we American's say "hard left", the rest of the world laughs. Only Gravel and Kucinich even come into the boundaries of "left", and are a fair way off from "hard left" in any sense.

[AlDaja]

I prefer Libertarian. A happy mix of left and right with a health dose of commonsense.

[homo sine domino]

Originally Posted by masked_marsoe

I stumbled across the Political Compass's rankings.
This is why we American's say "hard left", the rest of the world laughs. Only Gravel and Kucinich even come into the boundaries of "left", and are a fair way off from "hard left" in any sense.

Spoiler:

I thought you were from New Zealand!?

Anyway, thanks for digging up that picture. Gives us a neat overview.

On a side note, the poll might use a "I won't vote / I didn't vote" option.

[Trojan_Ripper]

I guess that is left of the right in the right box masked_marsoe.

American Thinker:

In the endless Summer of Love there is no 9/11. And to tens of millions of dreamy folk on the Left, the Summer of Love never stopped. For those people there is no dangerous Ahmadi-Nejad in Tehran, threatening a fiery new holocaust for Tel Aviv and Washington, DC. There is no nuclear proliferation by mad little mass-murdering Kim Jong Il. There is no Osama Bin Laden stirring up terror cells around the world -- just a poor, confused man somewhere in the mysterious, deeply spiritual East, whom we have offended in some terrible way.

For the Dreamy Left there is no history, and no fundamental human conflict. There was no Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor half a century ago -- except as a terrible misunderstanding, because our parents and grandparents were just so ignorant and racist in that benighted time. There was never a Cold War, there is no necessary war ever, there is no human value worth fighting for. We have transcended all that by our saintly morality and good will. History was mostly a big misunderstanding. Reality is only an agreement. Peace and Love are forever and ever, and nobody has to do anything to make it so, except to wish for it hard enough. If everybody wants it, it will be so.

For decades I've seen the bumper stickers: "Visualize World Peace," "If you think it, it will happen." What I never really grasped is that millions of reality-impaired people actually believe that. Last summer, the good people at "World Jump Day" planned to shift the orbit of planet Earth in order to 'stop global warming, extend daytime hours and create a more homogenous climate.' They were going to achieve this by having 600 million people jump up in the air at the same time."

I blush to say this, but I think I know those people. They're my liberal friends. They think wars happen because Americans are evil -- not because we were attacked by the Emperor cult of bushido Japan, or war was declared on us by the Hitler fanatics of Nazi Germany. Or, least of all, by Soviet imperialism, the greatest peace-loving movement on earth. Or by Osama Bin Laden. They are the people who are convinced today that if only the United States left Iraq, there would be peace, and that Saddam Hussein wasn't such a bad guy after all.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin got it exactly right: "The West are wishful thinkers. We will give them what they want to think." It worked like a charm for the Soviets for more than seven decades, in spite of all the known horrors. The Left simply extends an open invitation to con artists and sociopaths everywhere, and guess what? They come buzzing around like fat flies to horse droppings. Where are you, Charlie Trie, and Norman Hsu? Where are you Bill Clinton and the Reverend Jim Jones? Come and get it!

So when the world turns out to be different from dreamland and 9/11 happens in front of our eyes, somebody else has to be blamed. Because God is Love and Love is Love and Reality is Love. If that's not true, it's because of the evil people. (Like Republicans and neocons, and fat white middle-aged men with Southern accents and cruel faces, and mean people in military uniforms like in the Hollywood movies ... and you know what they're really like. Kluxers in sheets, every single one of 'em. You can tell just by looking at them.)

I've never understood why the Left hates Republican presidents so much, though I've heard them say it for decades. The Democrats didn't just oppose Eisenhower politically, they feverishly hated and despised him. The same for Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and so on until George W. Bush. (The next Republican president will also be hated and slandered. It's totally predictable.)

Oddly enough, LBJ was also fervently hated by the Left, even though he was a liberal Democrat who transformed the grief over Kennedy's assassination into the trillion-dollar War on Poverty. Yet he was still hated by the Left, with real, eye-popping, carpet-biting hatred.

I never understood it.

Until 9/11 happened -- and the Left went right along believing what they did before. Life changed right in front of all of our eyes, with the dark, smoking Twin Towers. And on the Left, nothing changed.

Then I think the saner folks in the country started to get it.

I had a dark, heavy-hearted feeling during the Clinton years that we were in for some terrible blow, because the country was pretending that the Summer of Love was back, Bill Clinton was President and nothing bad would ever, ever happen again. To me it looked like we were just asking for it.

When 9/11 happened, half the political world woke up. But not the other half, on the Left. The Left can't be wrong. If the facts on the ground contradict what's in their heads, the facts must be wrong.

That's not just true for the Mooney Left, but even for the Hard Noam Chomsky Left. Because the Chomsky Left is only the Mooney Left grown more verbose. Like Chomsky, the Hard Left believes that ordinary people are easily suckered by the Big War-Mongering Corporations, just like the ad campaigns for Coke and Pepsi. Chomsky calls it "manufactured consent". That just means that normal people can't be trusted to think for themselves. They are constantly suckered by the Big Evil Corps.

Reality is too painful for these folks. It's too scary. They protect themselves by a powerful, invisible shield of psychic Saran Wrap. It's just like the miracle of plastics.

I never really understood that, because, frankly, it would mean that half of my contemporaries were mad. Or -- let's use a nice word -- they are "in denial." But not just the normal, everyday denial, the kind that doctors see when their patients are dying in the hospital. Rather, the Left denies entire categories of shared physical danger that are plainly visible to all us, every single day. They just turn those facts upside-down, or shift the responsibility to the wrong side. In Winston Churchill's perspicacious phrase, they blame the fire brigade, not the fire.

It's like blocking out an oncoming ten-wheeler truck even as it bears down on you, hooting its ear-splitting powerhorn. What truck? I don't see any truck!

Well, get across the street, you fool, I feel like shouting. But of course that doesn't do any good either. They are shielded. They are impenetrable.

So why are plainly un-sane people allowed to vote? I think we need to give a reality test before anybody gets a vote in a democratic society. Just put every aspiring voter in front of a ten-wheeler, and slowly drive it toward them, honking the big horn, and giving them plenty of time to walk away. If they escape alive, they can vote. If not, well, tant pis, as the French would say. (That's not what you might think it means).

OK, that's not exactly right, but why should millions of plainly deluded folks be allowed to sink the civilized world, in the face of clear and present danger?

Well, we get to watch them again today. Just notice how they are in denial. As Ronald Reagan said on a memorable occasion debating Jimmy Carter, "There he goes again." On September 11, there they go again.

Don't get upset. Just watch them being themselves. And don't ever let them to cross a busy street without adult supervision.

[homo sine domino]

I read the article I must state that the person is as biased as the people he claims to criticize for bias.

He, I'll assume it's a man, seems to ignore that the United States have a skeleton in their closet as well.

[Emperor Norton I]

The thing I hate about the right is that it generalizes the left and does it ignorantly. It caricatures them as dreamers, disconnected from reality and willing to toss out fact to support their own views and wants. It caricatures them as America haters as well. It says that the right are realists.

The problem is that Conservatism is so damned pessimistic about human nature and so feral and aggressive. They feel a constant need to ignore any progress, any little concession to the poor, the needy, anyone that needs it. Never mind that liberalism has been the driving force in all things that have helped America progress; the end of slavery, trust busting, a fair deal for the working man (something the modern right would call commie or some other name), the very establishment of Republic itself. Liberalism was once the Republican parties platform, as you can clearly see with TR. And yet now they damn it, all the while still calling themselves the party of Lincoln and Roosevelt. And what happens when someone disagrees with their pessimism? Then they're weak, dreamers, naive. The left is not unrealistic, but it believes in what we can do. They understand that there is evil and that there is corruption in human nature, but the goal of liberalism is to ensure an environment where the corruption of human nature need not arise. The left understands that we have enemies and it does not blame America first, it looks at history from a view outside a tint of red, white and blue. We have enemies, and often those enemies were created by us in some way. Japan attacked because we cut them off of oil and moved to a defensive stance, Fascism and Hitler rose because we entered the first world war and upset the balance, causing Germany to lose and sending the German people into a poverty where fanaticism was their only food. However, this does not rescind their evil or excuse it, but it explains it. The problem with the right is it pays no attention to America's sins.

The left is not without teeth. It struggles, protests, etc.. It believes that we should be prepared for enemies, but should not give away our democracy, and our freedoms to do it, and should not fight war because it is the easiest choice but because it is the last one, and diplomacy should come before the gun. They believe that humans can do better, that society can do better, and we can make it happen. The right revels in its nihilism. Humans are evil at heart, nothing can be done, never mind that we have shown things can be done. And if the left wants to lead another movement to progress society, then they're dreamers, ignorants laying on the grass, staring at the sun and saying "If only..."
The Right's pessimism on human nature also leads them to constantly seek the solution, and pay no attention to the source or cause of the problem.

There are so many things off base with the above argument, that my mind has trouble grasping how to argue with it. It is a complex argument with a wholly different view of reality than I have. Why I am on the left is that I wish to aid the common man, I believe we can do better, go further. The left has always made society evolve, go forward. It has always progressed us into something better, and more refined. And it always wins out, no matter how long the struggle.

Conservatism is fine in strides, but when it is your total and outright mantra, it is just far too stifling. Especially considering how far right conservatism has moved.

[Afterburner]

The left is only taking strides forward IN THEIR OPINION. There is no definite "way forward." Otherwise there wouldn't so many disagreements about where the country should be moving. Personally I think A more Libertarian view of the world is "the way forward" but obviously you would disagree Norton.

I find it funny that you generalize the Right as generalizing the Left. Pot, meet kettle.

[Emperor Norton I]

We both generalize each other, and that is what I did and I know I did. I know its hypocritical, but I did it as a warrior of ideology and only in retribution. I didn't mean to generalize all conservatives, but those that become so far to the right that anyone that disagrees with them is their enemy and whom the world is a black and white reality to.

[Afterburner]

Originally Posted by Emperor Norton I

We both generalize each other, and that is what I did and I know I did. I know its hypocritical, but I did it as a warrior of ideology and only in retribution.

Or we could not generalize, that might work. I don't generalize the left, or even the far left. YEs I disagree with them, but that is not the same as generalizing. I mean sure I make a few jokes here and there about the dirty commies but by and large I know they are just another subset of humanity who has found their own way in the world and has formed t heir own beliefs. That's how humans work, they are individuals and I can't expect everyone to agree with me, especially because I'm not always right. I don't want to live inside an echo chamber, and the opinions and beliefs of those who are different from me constantly keep me guessing about my own beliefs and being critical of them, even if I don't necessarily change them.

[Emperor Norton I]

My only problem is of what has become of Conservatism. It used to be right of moderate which is OK and is a perfectly fine philosophy, but it is no longer that close. I can still get along with those that are right of moderate and moderate conservatives, but those farther right conservatives today just don't let up. Trust me, I have a few folks on ignore right now because I just got so sick of them making every argument about the left being evil or something like that.

That little blurb above was a spur of weeks of built up anger.