re: #584 000G

No, they’ve always been used in contradictory and self-defeating ways, even back during the French revolution.

They are also not interchangeable (which would be a condition for meaninglessness).

They are, in fact, interchangeable.

It is both a left and a right-wing position to provide universal healthcare, for example. The left and the right are both in favor of strong government intervention. Both the left and the right are anti-regulation. Both the left and the right are more for individual liberty than government power, and both the left and the right are more for government power than individual liberty.

I think I get your problem. You think of terms in a nominalistic way. That doesn’t work with political terms, though.

My ‘problem’? And no, I don’t think of terms in a nominalistic way, except in the trivial way that I don’t think that Platonic ideals exist.

You have a bizarre habit of thinking that you understand someone’s thoughts after a very brief exchange. I don’t know why you do it. It serves only to piss other people off.