Renzatic on 21/8/2018 at 02:21

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The actual Libertarian party is a little more right leaning than you are, which means that they occupy an unhappy medium between the big two.

They're too socially liberal for conservatives, too laissez faire capitalists for the liberals, they somehow manage to be even more preachy than Democrats, and the candidates they run for the presidency always end up being kinda doofy.

Judith on 21/8/2018 at 12:25

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Looks like I'm circa -6 on both scales, that would make me close to anarchists. And I thought my high school punk days are long over :D

Edit: correction, according to the GoToQuiz I'm left social moderate (4.79, 0.8), so that's closer to what I think of myself.

Btw. rising aggression in debate isn't something that appeared yesterday or even a few years ago. I saw that during my uni years. I was taught that debate is about presenting your arguments and listening to what the other party has to say. Finding value in that, or changing your mind wasn't something to be ashamed of. But with students from subsequent younger years that appeared on uni, the debate was all about winning and the other side became an opponent, someone to be humiliated and defeated. These people are now managers, heads of deparaments, politicians.

heywood on 21/8/2018 at 16:21

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He's leading by counter-example. It's a new thing :sly:

Seriously though, Trump is a buffoon and icemann has a point. How often do you see political righties trying to aggressively shout down, drown out, silence, or block left-wingers in their exercise of freedom of speech and assembly? The Occupy movement was allowed to take over public parks for a few months. They were given the opportunity to make their point in public, without being over-run by counter-protesters or having militant right-wing "direct action" groups rough them up. Before that, I think we made an effort to accommodate the traveling mob that protested the WTO and G8 meetings. They had room to protest, media coverage, and we tolerated some civil disobedience getting in the way for a while in the name of protest. The cops started getting serious when a militant minority was trashing store fronts, flipping cars, starting fires, and the like. The protestors received plenty of criticism from the right, but I don't remember righties taking direct action to shut them down or calling for left-anarchists to be silenced online.

It wasn't always like that. If you go back to the middle decades of the 20th century, the shoe was on the other foot. But I don't want that to be an excuse for a wave of left-McCarthyism. The suppression of left politics in the mid-20th century led to a boiling over and wave of real violence in the late 1960s and 1970s. I don't want to repeat that history.

heywood on 21/8/2018 at 16:53

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No. Fair point. In 2010, the Tea Partier's could hold a rally or protest. But now they can't.

Starker on 21/8/2018 at 18:21

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Maybe you don't hear so much about the extremists on the far left because they aren't equal. The extreme left want to give people healthcare and, at the worst, break things while protesting globalism. The extreme right want to get rid of everyone who doesn't look like them and, at the worst, advocate killing all non-white people and at times resort to actual murder, as it happened in the case of Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik.