Quote:
Originally Posted by Tribesman
So a dwarf would be a "giant" if he was quarter of an inch taller than his dwarf neighbours, but cetrtainly he wouldn't be a giant by any credible measures.
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Dumb analogy. There is a fairly universal range of size for dwarfism and gigantism. This is not true in politics. In general, the "left vs right" paradigm is a poor one anyway, certainly for discussing politics globally. At the very least a 2-axis system like that politicalcompass.com website makes more sense. That said, in the 2-party US system, left and right make slightly more sense than comparisons with other political systems with their myriad parties.
So for US politics, the critical measurement is really distance from the US center. Nothing else matters, and other countries and where we land relative to them doesn't matter—not even a little.
If you're looking at analogies, you might want to compare, say, US NASCAR vehicles to European F1. The two never compete with each other, and are optimized for entirely different track types as well as arbitrary rules limitations. Saying one is faster is meaningless, since they'd never be allowed to race one another.