Leads you here...

...despite your destination.

How dare the Catholic Church attack Amnesty International on its record of defending human rights?

And another from the BBC which almost made tears come to my eyes.

My question today is about left and right. I have been reading a few blog posts on the topic here
and there. The one at Lonely Planet, if you can get past the wankery, isn’t bad. It’s actually an old post, but interesting.

My thoughts? Well, as I said at Blogocracy, I don’t have enough big words to post at Lonely Planet, so I’ll wank on here instead.

I do have a problem calling myself left.

I think there are a few reasons for this. The first reason is an inbuilt dislike of calling myself anything – sort of a standard Australian dislike of drawing attention to yourself, just in case someone calls you on it – “Left? You? Hah!”

Another is the increasing inability of traditional Left politics, mainly based on economics and concerned with people (or so I thought), to explain the positions of people we may describe as Right on things such as gay marriage, immigration or the environment, and vice versa. We often forget how straight out racist the union movement was in the beginning – I suppose based on the belief that foreigners take jobs. And the compromises that people like Peter Garrett have to make in their stance on things like logging in Tasmania don’t fit, either. There are many people who economically Right, as selfish as all get out, but are all for gay marriage and saving the whales. Making yourself hardline Left on industrial relations, for example, means these people will bugger off and vote the arseholes in again.

These are the people who are doing okay economically, they have their big tellies and McMansions, but they have the shits with the Conservatives because of the Neanderthal attitude to social and environmental issues. I reckon there’s a few of ‘em that vote, too.

This narrow view of what the Left is brings me to another issue. Calling yourself Left restricts your ability to argue with morons. Granted, this is not normally that much of a problem, but a lot of people have instant associations with the term.

You can never really get away from dealing with generalisations, but unless you want to spend all day ranting loudly against people that rant equally loudly back, sometimes you need to operate in the system.

It’s all well and good to fight the good fight, to never compromise your morals. When I was a teller for a major bank, I could have told the CEO that the company’s overriding focus on profits was a crime against humanity, and that treating staff like crap was really pretty shitty. Then gone and got a new job and felt better about my day.

Pretty bloody selfish, really. Now, obviously I’d be lying if I told you I really stayed to help out the workers, show solidarity, etc – there was a fair amount of self interest involved.

But when I got to management, and my job became protecting the staff from getting shafted by the company, I did so, and I did it well. They all passed their “performance reviews” even if, according to the company rules, they didn’t deserve to. I did make a small bit of difference. That’s pretty small scale, but I’m sure there are many that toe the line for long enough to get to a place they can actually make a difference, even if that means working for a government they don’t like for a while.

It’s always going to be a balancing act, and there will come a point past which you cannot go – a point where you actually compromise a personal belief and not just a superficial position – and at that point you have to have a go.

My point is that labels are useful, but sometimes deceptive, and sometimes unhelpful. Wearing your heart on your sleeve is admirable, but pragmatic passion gets you further.