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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Monday, September 30, 2002
01:21 - Why We All Link to Lileks
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/1002/100201.html#100102

(top) link
It's because this is the kind of thing he writes on his so-called "off days", framed in apology for it not making sense or being Deep and/or Insightful:

This is a bipartisan delusion. Let’s play partisan ping-pong:

Liberals are socialists.
Conservatives want to ruin the earth and poison the water.
Liberals are baby-killers.
Conservatives only care about rich CEO fatcats.
Liberals hate America.
Conservatives think the free market smiles on slavery.
Liberals believe all criminals should go free.
Conservatives want to put all black people in jail.
Liberals are godless atheists.
Conservatives want to make everyone handle snakes for Jeebus.

I’m not trotting out the Shades of Gray line of which the morally irresolute are fond; there are issues that require moral rigor, a willingness to say yes and no and right and wrong. But while those issues often cohere along party lines, the people who hold these various positions are often on different sides of political spectrum. And if you think that’s codswaddle, then you’ve never talked to an anti-death penality Republican or a pro-life Democrat. Push comes to shove, people retreat to the comforting bunkers of their party, but outside of an election or a great sweeping national issue, push just usually comes to push. Cliches are fun for screeds, but man does not live or govern or coexist by screed alone.

I hope this is as obvious to you as it seems to me.

This is by way of endorsement of the two-party system, particularly the kind that involves lots of filler-material extra parties like the Greens and the Communists and the Natural Law people who have particular individual mandates to thrust with, but none of whom have (thank goodness) enough of a consistent and comprehensive plan for the world to amass any kind of meaningful constituency. The real political spectrum that makes any sense is linear, and the outlier groups inform points along the line, rather than representing axes all their own in multidimensional space.

Which isn't to say, of course, that a given person fits at one point along the spectrum line. It just means that when you shake everybody out, there are poles that develop. It's not really a line, it's more like a cross-section of a galaxy. There's a big round wide blur in the middle, but the two long spiky endpoints are distinct. Every nation has these two poles, in one form or another, under one name or another. Certain predilections tend to hang together at those endpoints.

But in that big blur in the middle, anything goes. We get attracted one way or another, moving differently in reaction to different issues, but almost nobody actually plants themselves out there in one or the other of the thin pointy parts.

Whether the political spectrum is a 2-D plane like Eric S. Raymond illustrates it, or a big undefinable blob where nobody can be pinned down at a particular spot with a thumbtack on all the issues at once, it's still important to remember how few people there actually are out at the edges.

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© Brian Tiemann