(Very) broadly speaking in politics there’s economic and social positions. i.e. What kind of society to have and how to fund it. It’s complicated because it’s possible to have an identical position but for opposite reasons. For an extreme example imagine two people against slavery in the US civil war. Person one is against slavery because it is a stain on humanity. Person two is against slavery because they don’t want any non-whites living in the US. Identical political policy, diametrically opposed ideology. If I had to commit to one sentence answers about the values of left/right positions I’d probably say: Left - our money spent on our best interests whilst looking forward and being progressive Right - My money spent on my best interest whilst keeping society pretty much as it is or even going back a bit to how it were. This is obviously a gross generalisation and probably quite wrong.

If we are all fucked, whatever, then why bother worrying? - you can’t change anything and it makes you feel worse. Enjoy what you’ve got left.

Specifically with politics the left-right spectrum is nothing to do with the surrounding culture. It’s objective rather than subjective. As a result to be classified “left” you cannot be occupying the “right” nor “central” section of the spectrum. Communist - socialist - centrist - conservative - fascist is an easy to remember five steps through the spectrum. Although obviously it is far more nuanced and complicated than that in reality.

Nice to meet someone in the wild who knows the difference between libertarian and the US definition of libertarian. I’ve often wondered why US politics takes perfectly decent words (conservative, socialist etc) and proceeds to redefine them at odds with the rest of the world. For example: team red’s loony religious right wing being called conservative or calling anybody from team blue left wing.

The key word here might be “nutjob”. Mental illness manifests itself in a myriad of ways… perhaps that’s all it was. A very sick man doing very sick things.

Dishonest, no. The vast majority of British people would have happily classed him as black - the same with Vaughn. Whether through racism or ignorance I’m not sure. In South Africa the term coloured/colored is used with zero negative connotations but in the UK “coloured” (and I assume the US too) is viewed very negatively as that is how the older generation categorised anybody who wasn’t white… whether you were Bangladeshi, Nigerian, Chinese etc it didn’t really matter.

Here’s the thing, Vaughn has a white Welsh father and a black Zambian mother so it’s a bit dishonest to call him black. Rishi has two brown Indian parents. But yes, as a result, they probably do have a similar-ish skin colour.

The big problem about discussing conservatives / Conservatives here is that this board seems quite US-focused. The British Conservative Party (the current party of UK government) pretty much came in to existence back in the day to “conserve” things and put a check on “progressive / liberal” policies. Conservative means something different whether your context is American-politics or whether it’s politics-politics.