roachboy

i do not see the necessary value of being a moderate.
but then again, i do not see political positions as being defined by abstract notions like "moderate" or "extreme"--these relational terms are themselves the outcomes of political conflict, not terms that can be used to evaluate political conflict.
if moderate means in the present context more or less what amonkie said when characterizing herself above, then it is a fairly narrow spectrum of opinion defined mostly by the overlap/gaps that intertwine fiscal and social conservatism at the moment.
what this type of moderate would necessarily do is find that the existing range of political options constitutes a coherent range of options in general.
this only makes sense to me if you take the american political spectrum as a kind of natural horizon for plotting out political positions.

form time to time, i repeat my favorite short characterization of the american political system: a single party state with two right wings.
to say this, you would have to relativize the spectrum of options that is available in the states, juxtaposing it with that which one might find in other countries, or against a range of options that had obtained previously in the states itself.
but it seems that if you do relativize the existing american political spectrum, you are necessarily understood as an extremist by folk who operate within it as if it was absolute.
from this it follows that the term "extreme" denotes almost nothing.
except that the positions outlined do not slot neatly into the existing--hopelessly narrow--range of "legitimate" political positions that obtain at present here.

so these terms--moderate and extreme--seem to me worthless except as they indicate relations to a spectrum that i take as being itself arbitrary.

when i was more inclined to participate here on a regular basis, i would adopt fairly consistent positions in debates that to some extent reflected my actual politics--however my political positions in 3-d life would be bent into the situation that obtained within particular arguments in the board. so they did not really give an index of who i am or how i think about things in 3-d life: in the world, conservative discourse is simply not a frame of reference that impacts on me at all. it is much more relevant in posts i make here. i find it debilitating intellectually to waste my time taking conservative ideology seriously, except as a kind of socio-political problem, a kind of social laboratory experiment in the engineering of viewpoints.
which i suppose would mark me as "extreme" here.
but the term means nothing.
seriously, folks, it means nothing.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite