Progressive Politics

I love how people love to divide things into "left" and "right", even though when you cross international borders not only do they not hold, but different issues become jumbled into their notions of "left" and "right" which they suddenly try to explain away with their own subjective prioritization of which issue is the most important. It's specially ironic when it's computer scientists doing it, computer scientists who have to deal with exponential growth of complexity in computer systems, yet still think wetware systems that are going to be much less defined and are going to be a lot less predictive somehow can have their ideologies put in a line. AI hallucinates, but the bipolar linear political system people delude themselves is proof that humans have no problems hallucinating themselves.

The day you can place dots for all parties everywhere without labeling on a graph (I'll be nice, you can have an additional axis) with an objective definition for what is left/right/up/down such that everyone can recognize which dots correspond to each party is the day I will be proven wrong. There's actually several models that attempt to do this and have been applied to AI political bias, and even they can't agree on it. (tangential source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaroJxFTVFQ )

Left and right is the modern day equivalent of the Roman pantheon. There's actually a far more objective criteria, and it is between those who are willing to work within the premises of a system of governance and those who are trying to game it, but unfortunately it does not correspond to what people consider left and right across the borders and is quite distinct and relative to each system of governance, never mind being pedantic versus considering the intent.

It all comes down to representative democracies being better than winner takes all personality driven democracies, which warps people's views into extremes that can't tolerate critical discussions e.g. US republicans who believe it's all a conspiracy and want to radically change the US, US democrats who won't discuss criticism about Israel, or consider ranked voting systems and popular vote over electoral college. With representative democracies, voting "nOt LeFt Or RiGhT" doesn't result in a lost vote, but means you can have additional opportunities to refine your vote. It's a big reason why in the last elections Spain didn't fall to the fascists.