Ten years on PoFo…and what have I learned? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Any other minor ideologies.
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#14893911
:tl/dr: warning!!

Judging by the number of usernames I don’t recognise here, many of you might rightly ask, “Who the Hell are you?”

Well, believe it or not, I’m one of your forum Administrators but I’ve been helping out over at PoFoUK for a few years now and doing a PhD, so I rarely have time to do much here beyond activate the odd user account or deal with a report.

Nevertheless, this is where my journey of political self-discovery kicked off ten years ago and so I thought I might ruminate on where those ten years has taken me.

In some respects, it’s taken me around in a big circle to back where I started! :lol:

When I first came to political awareness, in the early 1980s, the ‘choice’ we in the UK were offered was between Michael Foot’s Looney Left and Margaret Thatcher’s Rabid Right. That didn’t seem to me to be much of a choice, so I joined the Young Liberals, mostly on the grounds that they were neither Labour nor Conservative and they were strong advocates for electoral reform, which might put an end to the UK’s political two-horse race – a race in which you wouldn’t bet on either horse.

Twenty years on, when I joined PoFo, my views hadn’t shifted much. I had a visceral dislike of capitalism and a similarly systemic aversion to communism, hence one of my early signature images was this:
Image

Naturally, I therefore caught flak from both sides of the traditional political divide, but there must have been something about my contributions because, within a couple of years, I had been invited to become a moderator and then an administrator. The scales on my sig image were, after all, intended to indicate balance.

Early on, though, I was introduced to the Political Compass. It’s not the best political test out there, but it is the least worst.

Instead of being somewhere around the middle, as my ‘militant centrist’ instincts told me I should be, I found myself firmly in the green, bottom left, ‘left libertarian’ quadrant. Repeated re-tests over the last decade have seen me drift further left and more libertarian. Initially, this caused me some disquiet and internal turmoil, but as time went by I came to realise quite how out of kilter and misleading our contemporary notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ really are.

Take a look at this, from the Political Compass:
Image

If indeed I am truly ‘left libertarian’, then it’s unsurprising that I recoil from authoritarian leftism, authoritarian rightism and the libertarian right. I really am a contrarian!!

Then take a look at this – It charts the movement of UK parties over the last 45 years, based on their manifestoes:
Image

With the exception of Labour – at certain points in their history, including now – and the Greens, everyone else is way away from my position. I’m not ‘green’ enough to be a Green (I’m a bit of a petrolhead!), which leaves Labour.

I joined Labour in 2013, not long after I had retired from the Armed Forces (political activism is banned for UK military personnel). That was a move based on pragmatism more than anything else. I didn’t ‘like’ Labour, but if our dismal 2-party state was going to persist and I had to make a choice between the (Red) Devil and the Deep Blue ‘C’, my loathing of capitalism and conservatism forced me to pin my colours to the Labour mast.

I resigned from the party a couple of weeks ago.

Now, therefore, I’m back in the political wilderness and almost back to square one.

So, what have I learned in ten years on PoFo? Well here's my top ten…

1. I'm not so much Libertarian as anti-Authoritarian.

2. I oppose ideological dogmatism.

3. I firmly believe that no single ideology offers a 'magic bullet' to cure all the ills of mankind.

4. I oppose division for division's sake.

5. Hence I'm anti-racist. Whatthefuck is that all about? I know many highly intelligent, successful black people and also many thick as mince, feckless examples of the 'Master Race'. Give it a rest.

6. I'm also perpetually bewildered by anti-Semitism; they go to the synagogue on a Saturday and I go to church on a Sunday. What's to hate?

7. I would describe myself as a 'pragmatic nationalist'. One day, Centuries into the future in all likelihood, humankind will come to realise that what divides us is a tiny fraction of what unites us and that we're all just bipedal carbon-based lifeforms on the same ball of rock in space. For now, for most people, that's science fiction so for my lifetime at least I think that my country, for all its faults, is one of the better ones and worth protecting.

8. I object to polarity and adversarialism. Just because I don't loudly and enthusiastically support position 'A', that does not mean I'm a vociferous supporter of position 'Z'. It's a common mechanism exploited by trolls and antagonists in places like this. For example, I firmly believe that people should be at liberty to define and express their sexuality as they experience it, rather than as social authoritarians would tell them they should. However, I don't see homosexuality as 'normal' – whatever normal is. To me (bear in mind I'm a nurse) the purpose of sexual activity is procreation. Any recreation is a welcome added bonus! That is enough in some people's eyes to label me 'homophobic' but, (again, bear in mind I'm a nurse – and mental-health qualified too) I have no phobia against the LGBT community. I would and do fiercely defend their right to be who they are – not who someone else says they should be, but in an atmosphere of adversarialism, my interlocutors will leap upon the chance to make wilfully erroneous assumptions to advance their argument. :roll:

9. And to further the linguistic nonsense of supposed 'phobias', I have what I believe to be legitimate concerns about Islam, but as per point 8 above, I reject the notion that I'm 'Islamophobic'. My wife and I spent the first five years of our married life in a majority Islamic neighbourhood of an otherwise nondescript East Lancashire mill town. Our Muslim neighbours were, on the whole, far more welcoming, friendly and neighbourly than any of our 'indigenous' Anglo-Saxon neighbours. Working in healthcare, I have dozens of friends and former colleagues for whom I have great respect who are Muslim. Working in healthcare in the military, many of those friends have taken the Queen's Shilling and served in defence of the UK for all of their working lives. They, like me, have grave concerns about the rise of extremism in domestic Islam, not to mention significant anxieties about 'imported' extremism from our immigrant population. To reprise point 8, the issues raised by this relatively recent development are unlikely to be resolved by sitting on either side of a barricade, throwing rocks at each other. Polarity and adversarialism are profoundly unhelpful in political discourse.

10. Finally many of my views, as you can see, are inherently contradictory. That links in very much with points 2, 3 and 4 in particular. Discussions on PoFo, as well as political activity in the real world, is poorly served by imposition of an inflexible ideology. Inevitably, dogmatic adherence to an inherently imperfect theory (see point 3 again) will lead to reductio ad absurdum outcomes somewhere along the line. It's the law of unintended consequences.

All of which, after ten years of PoFo, leaves me back at the start alongside (according to the Political Compass) Ghandi and the Dalai Lama, firmly in the green quadrant and pretty much opposed to all established ideologies.

Maybe I should start a UK version of Five Star?? :lol:
#14893917
Judging by the number of usernames I don’t recognise here, many of you might rightly ask, “Who the Hell are you?”


Indeed! Just who the hell are you? But is it for me to say?


I can offer a little insight as an observer. The two dimensional political compass is limited. Much of what you say about consensus reflects, in my opinion, a communal identity rather than an individual identity. Not unsurprising for someone with a military background. The left side of the compass tends to be more communal minded.

But shouldn’t the communal and consensus seeking tend toward conformity and thus authority? Yet your outlook is politically liberal (in the old pre-revolutionary sense). You are certainly a humanist.

Anyway, enough observations. I’ve taken your political compass test and came out slightly to the left and liberal side of Gandhi and Chomsky (he rates in that quadrant too). I don’t think I am really close in political thought to either of them apart from valuing political freedom and recognising the value of redistribution of wealth. The compass is a rough guide at best.
#14893918
Cartertonian wrote::tl/dr: warning!!

Judging by the number of usernames I don’t recognise here, many of you might rightly ask, “Who the Hell are you?”

Well, believe it or not, I’m one of your forum Administrators but I’ve been helping out over at PoFoUK for a few years now and doing a PhD, so I rarely have time to do much here beyond activate the odd user account or deal with a report.

Nevertheless, this is where my journey of political self-discovery kicked off ten years ago and so I thought I might ruminate on where those ten years has taken me.

In some respects, it’s taken me around in a big circle to back where I started! :lol:

When I first came to political awareness, in the early 1980s, the ‘choice’ we in the UK were offered was between Michael Foot’s Looney Left and Margaret Thatcher’s Rabid Right. That didn’t seem to me to be much of a choice, so I joined the Young Liberals, mostly on the grounds that they were neither Labour nor Conservative and they were strong advocates for electoral reform, which might put an end to the UK’s political two-horse race – a race in which you wouldn’t bet on either horse.

Twenty years on, when I joined PoFo, my views hadn’t shifted much. I had a visceral dislike of capitalism and a similarly systemic aversion to communism, hence one of my early signature images was this:
Image

Naturally, I therefore caught flak from both sides of the traditional political divide, but there must have been something about my contributions because, within a couple of years, I had been invited to become a moderator and then an administrator. The scales on my sig image were, after all, intended to indicate balance.

Early on, though, I was introduced to the Political Compass. It’s not the best political test out there, but it is the least worst.

Instead of being somewhere around the middle, as my ‘militant centrist’ instincts told me I should be, I found myself firmly in the green, bottom left, ‘left libertarian’ quadrant. Repeated re-tests over the last decade have seen me drift further left and more libertarian. Initially, this caused me some disquiet and internal turmoil, but as time went by I came to realise quite how out of kilter and misleading our contemporary notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ really are.

Take a look at this, from the Political Compass:
Image

If indeed I am truly ‘left libertarian’, then it’s unsurprising that I recoil from authoritarian leftism, authoritarian rightism and the libertarian right. I really am a contrarian!!

Then take a look at this – It charts the movement of UK parties over the last 45 years, based on their manifestoes:
Image

With the exception of Labour – at certain points in their history, including now – and the Greens, everyone else is way away from my position. I’m not ‘green’ enough to be a Green (I’m a bit of a petrolhead!), which leaves Labour.

I joined Labour in 2013, not long after I had retired from the Armed Forces (political activism is banned for UK military personnel). That was a move based on pragmatism more than anything else. I didn’t ‘like’ Labour, but if our dismal 2-party state was going to persist and I had to make a choice between the (Red) Devil and the Deep Blue ‘C’, my loathing of capitalism and conservatism forced me to pin my colours to the Labour mast.

I resigned from the party a couple of weeks ago.

Now, therefore, I’m back in the political wilderness and almost back to square one.

So, what have I learned in ten years on PoFo? Well here's my top ten…

1. I'm not so much Libertarian as anti-Authoritarian.

2. I oppose ideological dogmatism.

3. I firmly believe that no single ideology offers a 'magic bullet' to cure all the ills of mankind.

4. I oppose division for division's sake.

5. Hence I'm anti-racist. Whatthefuck is that all about? I know many highly intelligent, successful black people and also many thick as mince, feckless examples of the 'Master Race'. Give it a rest.

6. I'm also perpetually bewildered by anti-Semitism; they go to the synagogue on a Saturday and I go to church on a Sunday. What's to hate?

7. I would describe myself as a 'pragmatic nationalist'. One day, Centuries into the future in all likelihood, humankind will come to realise that what divides us is a tiny fraction of what unites us and that we're all just bipedal carbon-based lifeforms on the same ball of rock in space. For now, for most people, that's science fiction so for my lifetime at least I think that my country, for all its faults, is one of the better ones and worth protecting.

8. I object to polarity and adversarialism. Just because I don't loudly and enthusiastically support position 'A', that does not mean I'm a vociferous supporter of position 'Z'. It's a common mechanism exploited by trolls and antagonists in places like this. For example, I firmly believe that people should be at liberty to define and express their sexuality as they experience it, rather than as social authoritarians would tell them they should. However, I don't see homosexuality as 'normal' – whatever normal is. To me (bear in mind I'm a nurse) the purpose of sexual activity is procreation. Any recreation is a welcome added bonus! That is enough in some people's eyes to label me 'homophobic' but, (again, bear in mind I'm a nurse – and mental-health qualified too) I have no phobia against the LGBT community. I would and do fiercely defend their right to be who they are – not who someone else says they should be, but in an atmosphere of adversarialism, my interlocutors will leap upon the chance to make wilfully erroneous assumptions to advance their argument. :roll:

9. And to further the linguistic nonsense of supposed 'phobias', I have what I believe to be legitimate concerns about Islam, but as per point 8 above, I reject the notion that I'm 'Islamophobic'. My wife and I spent the first five years of our married life in a majority Islamic neighbourhood of an otherwise nondescript East Lancashire mill town. Our Muslim neighbours were, on the whole, far more welcoming, friendly and neighbourly than any of our 'indigenous' Anglo-Saxon neighbours. Working in healthcare, I have dozens of friends and former colleagues for whom I have great respect who are Muslim. Working in healthcare in the military, many of those friends have taken the Queen's Shilling and served in defence of the UK for all of their working lives. They, like me, have grave concerns about the rise of extremism in domestic Islam, not to mention significant anxieties about 'imported' extremism from our immigrant population. To reprise point 8, the issues raised by this relatively recent development are unlikely to be resolved by sitting on either side of a barricade, throwing rocks at each other. Polarity and adversarialism are profoundly unhelpful in political discourse.

10. Finally many of my views, as you can see, are inherently contradictory. That links in very much with points 2, 3 and 4 in particular. Discussions on PoFo, as well as political activity in the real world, is poorly served by imposition of an inflexible ideology. Inevitably, dogmatic adherence to an inherently imperfect theory (see point 3 again) will lead to reductio ad absurdum outcomes somewhere along the line. It's the law of unintended consequences.

All of which, after ten years of PoFo, leaves me back at the start alongside (according to the Political Compass) Ghandi and the Dalai Lama, firmly in the green quadrant and pretty much opposed to all established ideologies.

Maybe I should start a UK version of Five Star?? :lol:


I am firmly in the green quadrant as well. With Libertarian, I have sometimes seen it written as Liberal and given that the opposite is authoritarian I would take it more as meaning liberal in the sense of non authoritarian.

I am surprised what you say about antisemitism having been on a board for ten year though I thought the same as you when I first joined one eleven years ago. Israel believes Jews are people who have I think it is at least one grandmother who was Jewish. Many of them are not religious at all. It is now basically a hereditary thing - that is based on who you are descended from though they call it an ethnic thing. Now how long things will stay like that I do not know and of course as Jews intermarry they let go of that much to Israel's consternation. That being said antisemitsm seems to come from where it always did the far right - ever had a look at Stormfront? Give it a try and you will see where they come from ;)

You are definitely right that where we are now is way to the right of what would have been considered the right a few decades ago - indeed we likely would have called it more the far right with the freedom given to corporations and some of the open racism, though that is less in England than the US and not socially acceptable yet in Scotland.

I also agree with what I think you are saying about not putting people into boxes - people can have different views on different things but on forums you regularly see - the right or the left, Seems to be particularly in US forums.

I have never belonged to a political party but in some ways it would make sense if we all belonged to one and that was the only place they got donations from. Then possibly we could move closer to getting our Politicians serving us rather than big business. ;)
Last edited by alethea on 06 Mar 2018 11:58, edited 2 times in total.
#14893920
Reichstraten wrote:I like your standpoints.
I adherred to various different political ideologies, but I've come to the conclusion that ideology mostly clouded my judgments.

Yes, I think formulated and prescriptive ideologies do exactly that. Just look throughout history at the evils perpetrated in the name of ideological purity.

foxdemon wrote:But shouldn’t the communal and consensus seeking tend toward conformity and thus authority? Yet your outlook is politically liberal (in the old pre-revolutionary sense). You are certainly a humanist.

Yes indeed, but as I summed up, "...many of my views, as you can see, are inherently contradictory." And as I intimated, it's largely a matter of degree. I'm not an anarchist. If society is to continue, it cannot do so on the basis of enabling complete individualism. Mindful of my comment about reductio ad absurdum arguments, I would still have to observe that one person's assertion of their individualism is highly likely to impact adversely on someone else's, NAP notwithstanding. Ergo, if we're all going to have to live together - or at least in close proximity with each other - there have to be certain compromises that should be agreed upon with the widest consensus possible.

Anyway, enough observations. I’ve taken your political compass test and came out slightly to the left and liberal side of Gandhi and Chomsky (he rates in that quadrant too). I don’t think I am really close in political thought to either of them apart from valuing political freedom and recognising the value of redistribution of wealth. The compass is a rough guide at best.

I did caveat it as the 'least worst'. If Winston Churchill had had knowledge of it, he would probably describe it as the worst form of political test...apart from all the others that have been tried!

There have been many political tests offered through the pages of PoFo over my ten years. Most of them have been rather US-centric, and US politics is markedly different to politics elsewhere. The US appear to have a centre-right party (Democrats) and a hard-right party (Republicans), such is the pervasive influence of the Ghost of Joe McCarthy in the US.

What interests me, actually, is quite how many pofo members plot into the green quadrant, yet appear in the course of discussion to have often widely opposing views on many issues.

I speculate that those members, myself included, are primarily motivated by a dislike of all current forms of government, which given the plot for the movement of UK parties that shows them congregating mostly around the upper right, blue quadrant, results in said detractors from 'the norm' tending to congregate in the green quadrant.
#14893923
On a personal level, I found agreeable almost all you said; accept one thing. I find the self-designation of 'nationalist' generally disconcerting. To me, nationalism is basically an inherently racist thought modality, sorry to be blunt.

Is it at all related to your military background? Or perhaps it's just good old British Pride?

I see nothing wrong (or indeed inherently 'nationalistic') in British/English/etc. (including other culturally defined localities) pride. However, I am a vehement anti-nationalist.
#14893926
Crantag wrote:On a personal level, I found agreeable almost all you said; accept one thing. I find the self-designation of 'nationalist' generally disconcerting. To me, nationalism is basically an inherently racist thought modality, sorry to be blunt.

Is it at all related to your military background? Or perhaps it's just good old British Pride?

I see nothing wrong (or indeed inherently 'nationalistic') in British/English/etc. (including other culturally defined localities) pride. However, I am a vehement anti-nationalist.


That's why I prefixed it with 'pragmatic'.

The world is clearly not how I would want it to be and, despite our current disconcerting shift to the right in the UK, I think we Brits have a pretty good recipe going and it's worth preserving.

We have, sadly, a fair number of white nationalists and 'ethno'-nationalists on PoFoUK, who seem to hold to some J K Rowling inspired sense of there being 'pureblood' Britons, who are being diluted to eradication by demographic displacement. I hold with none of that, indeed one of the things I do take from the US is the notion that if you choose to live somewhere (or choose to remain in the place of your birth, even if your ancestry is elsewhere) and invest in being British, then you are British. I have a close friend who is Muslim, military (he's a major in the Army) and whose grandfather came to the UK just after the second world war. Ergo both he and his father are UK-born and in my eyes he's as British as I am, but to our WNs, he should be on the next plane back to Morocco.

Thus I want to preserve the social norms and values of the British, but I have no wish to make it an exclusive club, membership of which being contingent on matters outwith the individual's control, like to whom they were born.
#14893937
Cartertonian wrote::tl/dr: warning!!

Judging by the number of usernames I don’t recognise here, many of you might rightly ask, “Who the Hell are you?”

Well, believe it or not, I’m one of your forum Administrators but I’ve been helping out over at PoFoUK for a few years now and doing a PhD, so I rarely have time to do much here beyond activate the odd user account or deal with a report.

Nevertheless, this is where my journey of political self-discovery kicked off ten years ago and so I thought I might ruminate on where those ten years has taken me.

In some respects, it’s taken me around in a big circle to back where I started! :lol:

When I first came to political awareness, in the early 1980s, the ‘choice’ we in the UK were offered was between Michael Foot’s Looney Left and Margaret Thatcher’s Rabid Right. That didn’t seem to me to be much of a choice, so I joined the Young Liberals, mostly on the grounds that they were neither Labour nor Conservative and they were strong advocates for electoral reform, which might put an end to the UK’s political two-horse race – a race in which you wouldn’t bet on either horse.

Twenty years on, when I joined PoFo, my views hadn’t shifted much. I had a visceral dislike of capitalism and a similarly systemic aversion to communism, hence one of my early signature images was this:
Image

Naturally, I therefore caught flak from both sides of the traditional political divide, but there must have been something about my contributions because, within a couple of years, I had been invited to become a moderator and then an administrator. The scales on my sig image were, after all, intended to indicate balance.

Early on, though, I was introduced to the Political Compass. It’s not the best political test out there, but it is the least worst.

Instead of being somewhere around the middle, as my ‘militant centrist’ instincts told me I should be, I found myself firmly in the green, bottom left, ‘left libertarian’ quadrant. Repeated re-tests over the last decade have seen me drift further left and more libertarian. Initially, this caused me some disquiet and internal turmoil, but as time went by I came to realise quite how out of kilter and misleading our contemporary notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ really are.

Take a look at this, from the Political Compass:
Image

If indeed I am truly ‘left libertarian’, then it’s unsurprising that I recoil from authoritarian leftism, authoritarian rightism and the libertarian right. I really am a contrarian!!

Then take a look at this – It charts the movement of UK parties over the last 45 years, based on their manifestoes:
Image

With the exception of Labour – at certain points in their history, including now – and the Greens, everyone else is way away from my position. I’m not ‘green’ enough to be a Green (I’m a bit of a petrolhead!), which leaves Labour.

I joined Labour in 2013, not long after I had retired from the Armed Forces (political activism is banned for UK military personnel). That was a move based on pragmatism more than anything else. I didn’t ‘like’ Labour, but if our dismal 2-party state was going to persist and I had to make a choice between the (Red) Devil and the Deep Blue ‘C’, my loathing of capitalism and conservatism forced me to pin my colours to the Labour mast.

I resigned from the party a couple of weeks ago.

Now, therefore, I’m back in the political wilderness and almost back to square one.

So, what have I learned in ten years on PoFo? Well here's my top ten…

1. I'm not so much Libertarian as anti-Authoritarian.

2. I oppose ideological dogmatism.

3. I firmly believe that no single ideology offers a 'magic bullet' to cure all the ills of mankind.

4. I oppose division for division's sake.

5. Hence I'm anti-racist. Whatthefuck is that all about? I know many highly intelligent, successful black people and also many thick as mince, feckless examples of the 'Master Race'. Give it a rest.

6. I'm also perpetually bewildered by anti-Semitism; they go to the synagogue on a Saturday and I go to church on a Sunday. What's to hate?

7. I would describe myself as a 'pragmatic nationalist'. One day, Centuries into the future in all likelihood, humankind will come to realise that what divides us is a tiny fraction of what unites us and that we're all just bipedal carbon-based lifeforms on the same ball of rock in space. For now, for most people, that's science fiction so for my lifetime at least I think that my country, for all its faults, is one of the better ones and worth protecting.

8. I object to polarity and adversarialism. Just because I don't loudly and enthusiastically support position 'A', that does not mean I'm a vociferous supporter of position 'Z'. It's a common mechanism exploited by trolls and antagonists in places like this. For example, I firmly believe that people should be at liberty to define and express their sexuality as they experience it, rather than as social authoritarians would tell them they should. However, I don't see homosexuality as 'normal' – whatever normal is. To me (bear in mind I'm a nurse) the purpose of sexual activity is procreation. Any recreation is a welcome added bonus! That is enough in some people's eyes to label me 'homophobic' but, (again, bear in mind I'm a nurse – and mental-health qualified too) I have no phobia against the LGBT community. I would and do fiercely defend their right to be who they are – not who someone else says they should be, but in an atmosphere of adversarialism, my interlocutors will leap upon the chance to make wilfully erroneous assumptions to advance their argument. :roll:

9. And to further the linguistic nonsense of supposed 'phobias', I have what I believe to be legitimate concerns about Islam, but as per point 8 above, I reject the notion that I'm 'Islamophobic'. My wife and I spent the first five years of our married life in a majority Islamic neighbourhood of an otherwise nondescript East Lancashire mill town. Our Muslim neighbours were, on the whole, far more welcoming, friendly and neighbourly than any of our 'indigenous' Anglo-Saxon neighbours. Working in healthcare, I have dozens of friends and former colleagues for whom I have great respect who are Muslim. Working in healthcare in the military, many of those friends have taken the Queen's Shilling and served in defence of the UK for all of their working lives. They, like me, have grave concerns about the rise of extremism in domestic Islam, not to mention significant anxieties about 'imported' extremism from our immigrant population. To reprise point 8, the issues raised by this relatively recent development are unlikely to be resolved by sitting on either side of a barricade, throwing rocks at each other. Polarity and adversarialism are profoundly unhelpful in political discourse.

10. Finally many of my views, as you can see, are inherently contradictory. That links in very much with points 2, 3 and 4 in particular. Discussions on PoFo, as well as political activity in the real world, is poorly served by imposition of an inflexible ideology. Inevitably, dogmatic adherence to an inherently imperfect theory (see point 3 again) will lead to reductio ad absurdum outcomes somewhere along the line. It's the law of unintended consequences.

All of which, after ten years of PoFo, leaves me back at the start alongside (according to the Political Compass) Ghandi and the Dalai Lama, firmly in the green quadrant and pretty much opposed to all established ideologies.

Maybe I should start a UK version of Five Star?? :lol:


Sadly we are the only 2 surviving centrists on this forum :(
It is a boring position but the best one in my opinion.

I feared at one point that the commies might convert you but it seems you managed to survive the brainwashing.
#14893939
B0ycey wrote:Are you??

I can think of a few more!!!


I meant from the really old posters. Usually people gradually become insane here and drift to either Hard left or Hard Right or something extremist in general.
#14893940
Wait, what's old? WTF, I've been posting here for 10 years(as of Mar 1)? :eek:

I'd hardly see myself as hard left. I am center with left-leaning. Many don't see that I am an economic conservative. <shrug>
#14893945
Hello there Cartertonian. Good to see you back! :)

Cartertonian wrote:8. I object to polarity and adversarialism. Just because I don't loudly and enthusiastically support position 'A', that does not mean I'm a vociferous supporter of position 'Z'. It's a common mechanism exploited by trolls and antagonists in places like this. For example, I firmly believe that people should be at liberty to define and express their sexuality as they experience it, rather than as social authoritarians would tell them they should. However, I don't see homosexuality as 'normal' – whatever normal is. To me (bear in mind I'm a nurse) the purpose of sexual activity is procreation. Any recreation is a welcome added bonus! That is enough in some people's eyes to label me 'homophobic' but, (again, bear in mind I'm a nurse – and mental-health qualified too) I have no phobia against the LGBT community. I would and do fiercely defend their right to be who they are – not who someone else says they should be, but in an atmosphere of adversarialism, my interlocutors will leap upon the chance to make wilfully erroneous assumptions to advance their argument.

9. And to further the linguistic nonsense of supposed 'phobias', I have what I believe to be legitimate concerns about Islam, but as per point 8 above, I reject the notion that I'm 'Islamophobic'. My wife and I spent the first five years of our married life in a majority Islamic neighbourhood of an otherwise nondescript East Lancashire mill town. Our Muslim neighbours were, on the whole, far more welcoming, friendly and neighbourly than any of our 'indigenous' Anglo-Saxon neighbours. Working in healthcare, I have dozens of friends and former colleagues for whom I have great respect who are Muslim. Working in healthcare in the military, many of those friends have taken the Queen's Shilling and served in defence of the UK for all of their working lives. They, like me, have grave concerns about the rise of extremism in domestic Islam, not to mention significant anxieties about 'imported' extremism from our immigrant population. To reprise point 8, the issues raised by this relatively recent development are unlikely to be resolved by sitting on either side of a barricade, throwing rocks at each other. Polarity and adversarialism are profoundly unhelpful in political discourse.


So, basically, you're a virulently racist homophobe? :excited:

Cartertonian wrote:Maybe I should start a UK version of Five Star??

It's long overdue. But then, if Decky's right, when Corbyn gets in he's going to nationalise and subsidise all the pubs and give everyone an allotment. So that's something to think about. :D
#14893953
Heisenberg wrote:So, basically, you're a virulently racist homophobe?

I don't understand... I never said I was Muslim??

;) :p

if Decky's right, when Corbyn gets in he's going to nationalise and subsidise all the pubs and give everyone an allotment. So that's something to think about.

Interestingly, I voted for Corbyn in the leadership ballot. At the time it seemed the choices were three classic, anodyne Blairites or Jezza. Being heartily sick of the New Labour 'Tory-lite' agenda and having decided that Jezza was my kind of maverick, I was pleased to see him elected. Unfortunately, he brought with him a lot of far left hangers-on we could have well done without seeing elevated to the shadow front bench.

So in my view I'm back where I started in the early eighties; a dangerously right-wing Tory government led by a woman and a looney left-wing opposition led by a maverick eccentric! :eek:
#14893967
Godstud wrote:Wait, what's old? WTF, I've been posting here for 10 years(as of Mar 1)? :eek:

I'd hardly see myself as hard left. I am center with left-leaning. Many don't see that I am an economic conservative. <shrug>


You are conservative on ecnomic issues but you are hard left on most social issues. I would not say that you have reached Qatz-Dave-Ixabert-Rei level but you can also be described as a radical, just not on all subjects.
#14893974
I feared at one point that the commies might convert you but it seems you managed to survive the brainwashing.

Early days yet, JohnRawls, early days.... :)
#14894021
Welcome back, Carter.

Also brainwashing? pffft, does helping someone to see the light of Truth is brainwashing? Just because sometimes that help may require a really big stick and also possibly a pointy one? :p
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