Leftist politics sounds good to me. Maybe I'll think of something more substantive to say later.

what i think should be one of the top priorities of the left is to wake up and react to the republican war on science. namely, putting a permanent ban on bullshit spin terminology like "sound science" and "junk science", and reastablishing the White House Office of Science and Technology. no more of this privatization of science studies by the right to create results that fit their oil buddy agenda.

I think the American left, a term I use very loosly, is so close to the positions of the American right that they have as much interest in defeating science as the right does.

privatization seems to have become like a drug to republicans. it was appalling the way the bush administration tried to paint social security as a ticking time bomb, but the statistics they used to prove their point were nothing more than unrealistic age/income input figures fed through a conservative think-tank (the heritage foundation) to produce a worst case scenario. 

and i agree that the left is being nowhere near aggressive enough. perfect example, the iraq spending bill. i don't want soldiers in the field to suffer, but i think compromise from the democrats is hitting the table too early. bush has mastered the art of the bully, but he's not invulnerable. 

i see it as being relative to the whole small vs big government debate. inadvertantly libertarianism could play into the hands of privatization advocates. look at it this way; at the moment FEMA is a disaster, the perfect argument for the scaling down of government. but just suppose that FEMA actually did what it was originally intended to do, did it well, and was properly run without partisan interference.

i absolutely agree that the state can be given to much power, and cases such as terry schiavo definitely highlight the blatant interference of government in the lives of private citizens, but i still feel that you can scale back big government TOO much. 

Socially it corresponds with my views. Economically a polar opposite. Capitalism is flawed.

I agree, and did not mean to imply that stem cell research is unimportant. I would simply like to see universal health coverage at the foundation of it. And, although reconfiguring the healthcare system would take a lot of work at this point, I think you are right that it would, in the end, simply take saying "yes" and doing it.  Sometimes, we must simply say "yes" to something, and work out the difficulties later.  

I think they have a shot, but mostly because there does not seem to be a viable Republican candidate right now. I think putting Hillary in would be a big mistake, because, like you said, she does not really have any broad appeal (and I personally think that she should just switch to the Republican party, since she seems more in line with them). Obama is inexperienced, but maybe we need a little inexperience right now.  I do fear that Obama is losing the edge he seemed to have in 2004.  I would not rule Edwards out, though I hate that his populism gets bogged down in his personal spending habits (though he has come out and basically called the War on Terror an ideology, which I like and, to my knowledge, none of the major contenders have gone this far).  I personally would like to see Kucinich make a run, but he does not have a chance in hell.  All this is a long way of saying that they have a chance, as long as they don't blow it.  

There is a similar situation in this country, perhaps not so much anti-science but the blurring of left and right in mainstream parties. The Labour Party and the Conservative Party are very very similar these days. They aim for the middle because that is where the votes are won. In the meantime the grassroots of both parties, the right wing conservatives and the left wing socialists are getting more and more frustrated at their party.

Personally I am not a member of the Labour Party, nor do I vote for them unless there's a chance the Tories could win the constituency/ council I live in. In Manchester, the Tories cannot win so I don't vote Labour. In Lancaster it's marginal red/blue (think of them as the other way round from the US) so I voted Labour the other week in the council elections.

I want to move totally off topic if I may and talk about Marxism. I do accept Marx' criticisms of capitalism, its effect on the workers, alienated labour/ exploitation etc. It fits perfectly with what actually exists, how many people I know actually feel about work, even if (as most do) they accept it as normal. There is a strong belief that communism doesn't work, and who can blame people for that? Soviet communism was abysmal and any reader of Marx can tell you that virtually none of it can be found in Marx. I see capitalism as destructive and also see how it forms mechanisms that will lead to its destruction, dissatisfied workers, reliance on profit, unsustainability of resources (in response to the problem of unsustainability of markets that Marx recognises). However, I also see that a totally state-based economy is not the answer either, it still alienates people from their product, it still has all the negative aspects of capitalism and more.

The only answer I find is co-operatives, working within an organised market framework. It rids the problem of alienated labour, the worker owns his product, he also shares labour communally, reestablishing a connection to other men. There is no need for surplus values (=less working hours) - No profits from the worker's labour goes anywhere but to the worker i.e. no boss. A democratic way to organise production i.e. no boss to rule the workers, the workers rule their own labour, again defeating alienation. If co-operatives have responsibilities to the environment, increased recycling etc, they are more likely to respond as co-operatives (cost becomes less of an issue) than a capitalist profiteer. Goods may also become cheaper to buy, not only because of less need for surplus value but also because competition remains because of the market. There may also be government subsidies/advisors to help smaller co-operatives keep their feet.

What do you think?

Marx said that Liberal Democracy is neither liberal nor democratic. I find that to be fairly true.

As for anrachism, it really cannot work. I really do think it doesn't protect people from the rise of tyranny. Most humans could be trusted to live and get along peacefully and productively but there are always those who don't.

Setting co-operatives in a market is an ideal solution. I did not mean absolute competition as with free-marketism. That is dangerous. All economic systems have markets, not just capitalism. If there is a controlled market where no co-op is let to go out of business (subsidies, advice and benefits), and where co-ops are not let to drive others out of business (rules to adhere to) and yet some kind of price battle is aloud to remain (within reason) then the market can then perpetuate rough equality. At the same time nationalised institutions (healthcare, schools etc) can operate along more Rawlsian lines, i.e. we can justify some inequality if over all standards of living improve, so we can justify paying doctors a high wage as incentive to perform actions to the benefit of society.

What I suggest is a controlled market. The market is necessary, not only to avoid state/individual monopolies, but also to cater to the welfare and needs of society at large. The market is a strong force, let it loose and it can cripple everything in sight, control it, set co-ops within a guided framework and it can be a positive force.   

Personally I subscribe to the belief that one-dimensional measures are not enough to describe politics.

I like the two-dimensional Nolan map (http://freedomkeys.com/nolancharts.htm), though three dimensions is OK too (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/6/14/45425/6208)

Yeah, they all peg me as way out in the liberal quarter. There's a great one that I have lost the URL to, that shows famous people and political parties on the graph. It put me in the same spot as ghandi, the green party and martin luther king: diametrically opposite the two main parties of the UK, which were prettymuch on top of eachother.

This was interesting: I do not appear to have been voting for my beliefs, since I have been voting LibDem (The UK's only Libertarian party) rather than Green (The UKs only Liberal party).

Part of that's tactics, though. LibDems are way more likely to win.

Personally I think the thing is biased, like online IQ tests.

Online IQ test: Your IQ is 180! You can order this framed...
Me: I'm being sold something. I suspect the test was biased. I shall retake it, answering all questions as wrongly as possible. Lessee, capital of Holland: timbucktoo. Anagram of "topeat": carrot...
Online IQ test: Your IQ is 105! You can order this framed...
Me: Riiight.

If: I see a test that places me ontop of Gandhi and other people commonly considered "definitely good", and the green party; and I see that all the other political parties in my country hold views diametrically opposed to my own; then what am I to assume?

Am I to assume that the green party holds my best interests and I should vote for them?

Or should I suspect "This feels too pat, and I am being sold something", and hypothesise that perhaps the questions were such that everyone would show up as a liberal or a libertarian, and the ads on the results page for liberal and libertarian sites are not just concidence?

Depends which "Libertarian Left". The radical libertarian left, I'm a part of (anything on this site that says "Agorism" describes my beliefs, Mutualism is close too). The moderate libertarian-left is a confused inconsistent set of ideas.

Radical libertarian leftists are primarily libertarian to the extent that they don't advocate the initiation of force at all, leftists in a somewhat secondary sense in their advocacy of worker control over the means of production and the end of upper and lower classes.

I think the left and libertarians are actually ultimately the same group. They're both motivated by a belief that everybody is equal and a strong belief in a principle of justice, the problem is that they've taken off in two wrong directions with the same ideas. One was the people who believe in a natural born economic elite class and came to defend the products of favoritism in the name of equal rights and the "free market" which when pressed they'll admit isn't present and not see a contradiction, and that's where most libertarians are today. The other is the people who believed in an elected political elite class and came to defend political inequality of power because it hid under the thin veil of democracy, under which even a cursory glance would reveal a priviledged class of underworked well-paid inherently-parasitic bureaucrats exactly antithetical to any values of equality. And because of Rand on the right-libertarian end declaring egalitarianism as basically evil and the Austrian School's conflation of authoritarianism and socialism, and also because of the left's tendency to conflate the products of capitalism with the free-market rhetoric it's apologists love to use, they hate each other.

The differences are more than reconcilable.