why not? what is this "moderatism"? explain. all i know about it so far is that it is not a hybrid of both sides, even though there are good ideas on both sides. i wish badnarik would go over to your house and beat some sense into you about anti-trust policy. then send him over to me to for a lesson on war policy.
huh? i dont think i have ever even seen the word "moderatism" before. you say there are misconceptions about it, i hoped you would tell me what it really is. i honestly thought most moderates actually believed in a hybrid of views from both sides. but you explicitly said that isnt what "moderatism" is. i dunno what that means. could you at least link me to where i was told what it was?
I'm of the opinion that you are capable of deducing what the term (which I made up) means. Conservatism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism.... Like I said, the Right is right about some things, the left is right about others. People shouldn't accept the things that one side is wrong about just so they can support that particular party.
sure, that makes sense. then we can take good ideas from both sides and make a wonderful hybrid and call it moderatism. dang it, i thought i had it figured out!
Moderates do not have to be centrists, although many are. On the spectrum of ideas from the radical right to the radical left, moderate opinion overlaps well into the conservative and liberal spheres. It just refuses to embrace radical and extreme viewpoints on either end.
that graph was drawn up by idiots. a libertarian is not a conservative leaning moderate. total drug legalization. freeing the thousands and thousands of drug criminals. complete dismantling of huge parts of government, totally free immigration, the repeal of basically every government control of the economy. total aboltion of the EPA. complete restriction of government money in health care, including disease research. pro-choice. complete isolationism. thats moderate? good ideas, but not moderate. you need to realize that both parties are similar, they want to restrict freedom. one mostly wants your money, and the other wants your morals. thats the difference. a moderate is a person who is too silly to oppose both these things. let me explain what i mean. before we had social security, a program of its kind would have been considered extreme. red, being a moderate who is terrified of extremes, would oppose social security. but over time, the political climate has changed, and has shifted the midpoint between the extremes. now the government is far far bigger than people would have imagined 80 years ago. so a moderates like red now favor the current size of the govenment, ore or less. so the moderate is not taking a philosophical stance, but is adopting an arbitrary stance based on the fallacy that any idea that substantially differs from the current stance of the middle is wrong. a moderate is a person who, given a choice between murderous naziism and slightly less murderous nazis, finds the midpoint and takes that stance. a moderate has their stance dictated to them by the exremes, but does not notice. being a moderate has no real philosophical basis. if i ask a moderate to pick a number between 1 and 10, they choose 5. lets say they guess correctly. now without changing the correct answer, lets say i rephrase the question and ask them to choose a number between 1 and 100. they choose 50, the middle. even though the correct answer is still 5. their answer was dictated to them by the extreme choices, not by a philosophical position. their solutions change based on the current political climate. having no basis to their postions, they really only want to be seen as thoughtful.
What nonsense. You keep making this absurd claim that moderates have no ideas and that they are required somehow to take the exact middle of every issue. You have never once substantiated this with anything like examples or documentation. You have always failed to perceive that moderates seek the balance point, not the exact midpoint. Sometimes the fulcrum is off to the left or right. There is a difference between a moderate and a centrist but you cannot seem to comprehend it, though I have explained it many times. Look at the chart closely, there is a broad band of opinion that is moderate. It only excludes the extremes. Not even you advocate the extreme positions. You are an idealist who will almost never be satisfied. . . I am a pragmatist who almost always is.
thats basically true. if they thought anything unique they would be a third party, not shuffling in the middle. let me tell you another example. there is not always middle ground or "balanced" position between the two current extremes. lets take gay marriage for example. conservatives cant stand it, liberals love it. but the correct answer is not betwixt those two positions, it is not a balance, the correct stance is that government should stop mandating marriage altogether and let it be a private issue. but moderates dont think that way. of course! because your chart is woefully flawed. there are two totally separate real issues that people generally are consistent with. fiscal and social issues. that is why a one axis graph is inadequate! where is the position for the big government super religious populist? what about the tiny government/social freedoms guy? there has to be a grid, not a line. the libertarian stances i listed earlier do not belong on a continuum between today's liberal and conservative. the two axis grid is necessary, because there is not much correlation between favoring prayer in schools and smaller government. they are based on total different topics. we can mostly assume that a guy who favors prayer in schools also is far more likely to oppose abortion. but we cant make any such judgement about a fiscal issue, because that is totally irrelevant. so one axis is silly and misleading. the fact that your line shows libertarians as moderate conservatives is loco. libertarians favor far more extreme positions on fiscal policy than any ordinary conservative as well as more extreme social freedom than most liberals. so why are they listed on your chart as basically the opposite of what they are? your chart only exists because people hardly give the complexities of politics any thought. at best it is a gross oversimplification. modern political scientists would never teach their students that your line is accurate. here, this is what i mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Compass "The underlying principle of the Political Compass is that political views may be measured along two separate and independent axes." this should be obvious to you. there is not a simple fascism to communism continuum. that is absurd. i would guess if you lived in both for a while, you would hardly be able to tell the difference. polar opposites? please. it is easy to be satisfied when you favor the status quo.
