Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Campaign 2016

Your statement immediately before saying that this is not a generalization IS a generalization. When one ascribes a strict set of traits or values to a diverse group in which there is no way to assess how close in opinion every person in that group is to the other, one is generalizing.
Much like our RR group here: there are some things we might all agree on, but even our reasons for those items of agreement may be quite different.
Open mind to me may not be the same as open mind to you, etc. You get the picture.
In summary, attributing a set of beliefs or opinions or dogmas to any group constitutes a generalization. It assumes facts not in evidence, i.e., the actual reasons and details that underlie those beliefs.
Political parties should house diversity of opinion. There should be an open and frank discussion of ideas. That is not the case (for the most part).
Left of center is a fuzzy definition - by that I mean it is a range of values and not a crisp value.
Same goes for right of center.
But as anyone with our (yours and mine) experience knows: getting any group to agree on anything is always tricky. There will be lines in the sand that will divide any group, no matter how cohesive they may seem to be.
Labels divide.
Ideas (and more importantly, actions) are the currency by which we can make sound decisions. If a politician's actions move in a direction that I want to go, I will support her/him. Otherwise I will not. I don't need a label for that.

Labels can be useful, and labels can be divisive, depending on how they are used.

For example, a census categorizes people according to, among other things, race, ethnicity, gender, age, income, working status. Polls do the same. In both cases they are categorized in order to achieve greater understanding. Political parties use their label to group thoughts or philosophical approaches together to distinguish themselves. People do too (e.g., "I'm a white, working-class, male"; or "I'm a person of color AND means".) "Black lives matter".

But, labels can also be used to divide, demean, and discriminate. "White's only"; "libtard"; and every kind of racial, national or ethnic slur.

Attitudinal labels "Liberal", "Conservative", "Progressive" can be used or misused the same way. If they are used to bring understanding, they are useful (in organizing thoughts, for example). If they are used pejoratively, they are not. My wife and I used to teasingly call each other "empty-headed liberal" and "dyed-in-the-wool conservative" because it was funny, since we agree on 95% of everything, but it pointed out the ridiculousness of trying to categorize our positions as black or white.

Let's keep our discussion on the philosophical and useful side, and not on the pejorative.

By the way, "horseshoe theory" is not horse shyte, but a well-established model for grouping and discussing political thought. When individuals or groups get extreme in support of their views, they become indistinguishable. A crowd killed by a bomb doesn't care if the bomb- wielder was a fascist or an anarchist, they're just as dead. There are authoritarians that call themselves communist and those that call themselves fascist. Their behavior is indistinguishable - who was worse, Stalin or Hitler?

Sounds likes horseshyte to me. Of course it matters, unless you don't mind if it happens again.
One needs to find the root cause of things and not the superficial labels attributed in order to facilitate the digestion as desired by those who distribute the news.
I've read about it. It is prime grade BS. It is based entirely on a coarse grained stratification. In statistics we call that nonsense.

Pejorative? Truly...

BTW - I can't think of any instance where labels are inclusive. They are usually used to exclude some group from some other group. Can you?

The social justice warrior faction is NOT diverse at all, Zeke.
That's their problem. Diversity is NOT tolerated in the far out regressive left in any way whatsoever. Example after example abounds where one can observe all nails that stick up, getting pounded down or shouted out of the area in order to protect their "safe spaces".

This is what that slimy bitchy queen Matt Drudge headlines at his site tonight:

Extremes occur in almost any human grouping. Whenever they target the quashing of dissent they are wrong. My point is: they result from very different causes and the causes are important if one wishes to stop and correct them.
When one lumps all such extremes into the same bin, one runs the risk of creating yet another extreme which does nothing to help correct the original problem, it only exacerbates them making a solution that much more difficult.
The difference again, is in kind. Thus, the solutions will necessarily be different.
So don't read this as a justification of any extreme that aims to silence dissent. Read it as a clarification of how to deal with and understand and attempt to correct it.
Such is the world we live in and such are the people that inhabit it. Filled with nuance and not at all "black and white", as Trump would have it.

So, any validity to the Hillary heath claims?

I didn't say labels, of themselves, are inclusive, only that they can be useful - especially when seeking inclusion. Just to use an example from history... last week ... the Circuit Court struck down the voter ID laws in NC because they were drafted with discriminatory intent. How would we know that unless the voters has not been categorized or labeled. In this case the labels were used to ensure inclusion.