How Would We Fair With The Echr....

[ToraToraTora]

If we did what all the ABLW's wanted and gave Gib to the Spanish against the wishes of 99.99999% of the population? Ditto the Falklands to the Argies? Is it ok to ignore human rights if it's for the right on Liberal cause? We get a lot of whining about both places but no one seems to give us any idea how it would work in practice.

[Hypognosis]

@ToraToraTora
//No one says it in as many words jake but they always take the side of Spain/Argentina. //

Some of us would appreciate it if you adopted some fresh terminology to describe whoever this is you've been speaking to. It looks like most of the self-styled left-of-centre folk here all want the Falklands and Gibraltar kept. Blood has been spilt; not to be given up lightly.

Or, as one of my favourite lines from British TV drama put it...

"C r a * hats! Don't lose it again."

[Hypognosis]

I was going to suggest (mostly for humour value) terminology such as hippy-dippy, peace-and-love, no-more-wars, hopeless idealists.

The whole concept of "giving land back" is internally inconsistent in that it harks back to feudalism anyway and, if they thought it through, should be proclaimed as belonging to no-one. (Except maybe whoever's currently sitting on it - squatter's rights and all that). :-)

Anyway, left wingers are one group, hopeless idealists are another. Try not to get us mixed up, please.

[andy-hughes]

Tora - you appear to refer to being an ABLW as though it's a bad thing ... ?

[Quizmonster]

Pretty-well every single hand-wringing, tree-hugging, yoghurt-knitting, loony-leftie, right-on-liberal that I'm aware of here on AnswerBank - including me - has made it perfectly plain that we do NOT want to give Spain and Argentina Gibraltar or the Falklands.
Does any one of us suppose that this will elicit an abject apology or an end to such oft-repeated absurdity from TTT?

[FredPuli43]

Tora, do you know anybody to the right, politically, of you? Who is it? When they die, I'd like to have them preserved in a museum, you see, for the interest of later generations. I am a right-winger in general terms, so this interests me: that you think that anybody to the left of you must wish us to give up Gibraltar or the Falklands

[andy-hughes]

To the right of Tora - that will be Atilla The Hun!

[Quizmonster]

I've long believed that the concept of Left and Right politically is a misnomer...and yes, I do know where the idea came from. It suggests that there is a long, horizontal line, as it were, of such views, so that the respective ends are poles apart. However, I - somewhere to the Left of Karl Marx - have often found myself quite close in opinion to people who would claim to be, as Andy suggests, somewhere to the Right of Attila the Hun.

I believe the political spectrum is, at the very least, an arc of a circle. Having said that, I have very rarely indeed felt in agreement with TTT or one or two others of the ilk here on AnswerBank!

[andy-hughes]

I would like to be associated with the remarks of the last speaker.

[LazyGun]

@QM, Anfy Hughes - Its been recognised for some time now that the traditional left/right polarisation of politics is both unhelpful and often incorrect.

You might be interested in this site;
http://www.politicalcompass.org/index

[Quizmonster]

Cheers, Andy. I was taken by your use of the word, 'remarks' in the AnswerBank context. That reveals that you must feel much the same as I do about AB threads. I know we are all pecking away at individual keyboards, more or less widely separated in time and space, but I have always felt that contributors are in a real-time 'conversation'.
In such a situation, we tend to 'listen' to what everyone else is saying and - if we just repeat something - everyone else around looks at us as if we are deaf, stupid or boorish. It's usually easy to spot AB responders who haven't bothered to read earlier replies, for example, and I must say that I simply apply one of these three adjectives to them.
It's good to know that there are others like yourself around who see AB threads as conversations.
Cheers

LG. I did the analysis in your link and ended up pretty close to the Dalai Lama, believe it or not! Not bad for a devout atheist, eh?

[jim360]

Yeah, I had a go at that link too. I landed almost in the middle on the economics scale (hardly surprising, I didn't understand what half the questions were talking about) but am apparently very much a social libertarian (scored -4.21, and am about half way down the diagram from the centre point). Who knew?

[LazyGun]

@ Jim, QM - I am in the bottom left quartile, not too surprisingly. Do you not think the result you got mirrors your own beliefs, either of you?

There are other systems out there which attempt to add a different dimension to the traditional left-right polarity, but this seems one of the easier to understand :)

[jim360]

Well it probably does, at least on the social side, although maybe I'm a bit closer to the centre than it gave as I'm not sure that all the answers I gave were the correct ones. In particular there were several questions on which I would have preferred to choose "neutral" or "don't know", but with that choice not available I tended to choose "agree".

[Quizmonster]

LG, I'm perfectly happy to be placed alongside the Dalai Lama in the world's political/social spectrum. He seems like a reasonable bloke! Having said that, and as Jim says above, the strictures of the answer-choices in certain cases inevitably create less-than-perfect responses