My friend and I are under the same impression that the nonsensical labelling of a person's political views is a bad (or at least an unproductive) thing and should either be viewed differently or removed from discussion totally, it serves no real purpose. No more of this left or right nonsense, conservative/liberal. And I find it hard for anyone to actually BE a Republican or Democrat, namely because how does one define them? Parties don't seem to run under one complete and total, one size fits all platform. If this was the case then any partisan vote in Congress would be an exercise in futility, since the dominate party would win. It's also silly because no one has ever really given us a less-than-totally-vague/ambiguous definition as what it means to be a conservative or liberal. Conservative or liberal to what? Where's the standard, and those who deviate one way or another are labelled appropriately? I can come up with the stand point that it's wrong to eat babies, and so a liberal would want to advance it so you can eat babies, while a conservative would always want to keep it so that you can't eat babies, or perhaps make it even harder to eat babies. It doesn't make any sense to come up with these types of labels since they automatically stick a person in a category they may not want to be in (the eating babies category), even though setting up a policy making it ok to eat babies would seem to fit their particular viewscape.
I will thoroughly agree though that a place like the TFP, a place renowned (at least amongst its own members) as being a place of total thought, should always be moderated by its fellow denizens so that both sides can have their bad agruments exposed even if those doing the moderating do agree with the general concept.
I'm not sure if that first paragraph made any sense, but hopefully it starts to bring me back into this community (even though I'm sure no one knows I was around for my first 500 posts anyway
) since it's a place I know that has generally level-headed and intelligent members.