re: #587 Obdicut

Yes, in that ‘right-wing’ there just means “GOP”. Which is what I said earlier.

1) It doesn’t “just mean that”. 2) It was just one US example. Pick another from another country.

You apparently think I said “The words don’t have any meaning and can never have any meaning whenever used”, instead of, as I actually said, that the words basically are just shorthand for GOP or Democrat, or in a different context, social conservative or not a social conservative.

What you said was “‘left’ and ‘right’ are fictitious terms that don’t have any inherent meaning. “ I guess you contradicted yourself.

But yes, it’s incorrect to say that Hitler was either left or right wing. Saying so is meaningless. If your ad-hod definition of right-wing includes strong state power, then he was right wing. If your ad-hoc definition of the left is for strong state power, then he’s left-wing. Really, he is neither, nor are any other totalitarians, in the context of politics as they apply to democracy.

So Hitler wasn’t right wing because all definitions according to you are “ad hoc”. Everything gets molded together in the totalitarianism mold. Got it. So would you be saying that there was no meaningful difference between Pinochet’s Chile and East Germany, either?

I’m sorry, but do you see that here your own ad hoc definitions are breaking down? You’re apparently implying that one or the other ‘side’ has a specific view of social stratification, but earlier you touched on the fact, which I raised, that both ‘sides’ often share the same goal but differ in how to get there.

My “ad hoc” definition is not breaking down: You are simply wrong about them sharing the same goals. They are not, and what you are stating is simply untrue. Same applies to the methods question.

Left and right are simply arbitrary designations for any two political groups that are struggling with each other. What’s weird is that even in countries that don’t have a two-party system, people still prefer to pretend the left/right distinction exists, even if they have to go through bizarre loops in their head to have it make sense.

Right, no principal difference in regards to left and right between the Bolsheviks and the Czarists. Talk about bizarre loops to get where you want to get indeed.

Heh. No, I don’t assume they could ever have such meaning. That’s my entire point, actually. They have no meaning except in how people use them, and people use them in arbitrary and incoherent ways. And they always have.

They being used arbitrarily and incoherently sometimes does not mean they are inherently meaningless. There are clear, definable and identifiable centers of meaning that of course have shifted throughout history due to social and political contexts shifting. How else could it be for political terms?