you're making an absolute judgment on the entire society

Show me where I did that.

makes your arbitrarily determined authority

Again, stop making shit up. There is no authority, but there is such a category as developed countries, which the US belongs to, who all legislate openly such that you can track trends, political movements, ideological shifts, legislation and make comparisons.

And if you can find someone who's job is to track those very things and measure them against each other who will happily assert that the US looks leftist compared to most other developed countries, by all means, please do point him or her out of to me. That would be a rare and welcome treat.

i didn't notice the "arbitrary society {XYZ} is the authoritative definitive determinant of ideology in the world against which all are judged" icon floating above your head

Probably because that never happened, so don't be too hard on yourself.

what international standards? saudi arabia? malaysia?

If you bothered to read a little further, you would have caught the "developed countries" part. HTH.

those are just arbitrary points, not Magical Authoritative Determinators of Ideology, Anointed By God, which you apparently believe for some ignorant reason

Assumes facts not in evidence. Thanks for the bad faith.

the truth is, every society has some who resist change, and some who accelerate it. the center is determined by the center of that society, at that time. and this center is always moving. and it is the only logically valid measure of center, left, and right. for that given society. at that given time

Hence why, currently, and for a a while now at least, the US has been regarded as more conservative than most other developed countries. You're not refuting any points with this.

if you really reached for some magical bullshit measure of ideology globally, rather than society-by-society (the only valid measure), then the usa is actually a moderate middle-of-the-road country

And if you actually bothered to read what's got you frothing so much, you'd find that nothing like that has actually happened. Best of luck.

By international standards, even the Democratic party is to the right on a lot of issues (mostly economic at this point) than the rest of the developed world.

Haven't checked out any polls lately, have we?

The percentage of Americans supporting same sex marriage has been above 50% for a while now.

Your IP traffic has been recorded, comrade.

LOL, like that is somehow remotely new.

How about the European Union?

Not a country. HTH.

What if Greece decided to leave an Germany attacked it?

WTF are you smoking?

It's not exactly the same, but the same premise.

"[It] ain't the same fuckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fuckin' sport!"

Its the whole reasons things are struck down all the time as 'void for vagueness.'

Sigh.

Definition needed for 'things' and citations definitely needed for "all the time" and "void for vagueness".

As an optimistic younger lad, I really thought most bigotry (in industrialized countries anyway) would at least be on death's doorstep by the time I was as well.

Sadly, learning anything about race relations in the US long ago crushed that timeline for me.

Oh well. All you can do is fight, right? Keep up the good work.

,i>nope, i'd say libertarians don't really care what other people do over there, it's their own rights they're concerned about. get your own house in order... and all that.

So, nothing to do with what GP was talking about then?

"Republicans want a huge military but they don't want to send it anywhere. The Democrats wants a small military and they want to send it everywhere."

That was a cute joke in the 90s. Sadly, recent history's kinda fucked that up, no?

moral equivalence libertarians.

FTFY

I love all you Americans crowing about the uselessness of the coming distributed energy age. Y'all might be correct as far as the US goes (and for now), but for billions of us in the rest of the world, shit like this has either been cost-effective for years or one of the few methods to get any kind of electricity when you don't the massive capital for the old-school way.

Patience.

Actually, you could probably easily get 33% of the US public to agree that money equals free speech.