this diary makes me feel, not the first time, how names have slithered free of accepted meanings, and how important it is to continually define and redefine them, as the room for misunderstanding is growing, even as communication efforts are growing too.

or should we throw out all the old labels and start again?

the two most abused words in politics, it seems to me, are 'liberal' and 'conservative'. sometimes i wonder if it even suits some agendas that confusion persist. it sure gets old trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the truthiness all the time, with people talking right past each other, because the nomenclature and terminology has become irremediably scrambled.

thanks martin, for trying to explain yourself and your attitudes. it made me think. probably many of us here have mixtures of beliefs that resist easy categorisations, such as left or right.

if i'm conservative about the environment and government borrowing & taxing, yet pro regulation of business and finance (un economic-liberal) and pro free health care and guaranteed minimum wages, anti big military and pro spending on infrastructure pensions and health care, (socially liberal) for whom do i vote? always the lesser evil?

perhaps you are less confused than i am, but this diary helped me realise my own confusion, so thanks.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty