I've a very diverse set of friends, ex-colleagues, associates, peers, and other people I know and like. My jobs have given me opportunities to meet and work with 100s, perhaps even 1,000s of people and I find that for the most part I enjoy being with each and every one of them. I hesitate to tell any stories of any of them, and generally make up names, change genders and place names in order to protect the guilty. I'll do the same here but I suspect it will be a tad more difficult to hide from some people.

Jerry is a passionate, "right wing" republican, if not a tea partier himself, certainly somebody who sympathises with many of the ideals of the Tea Party. Hell, I espouse to many of those ideals myself, fiscal responsibility and freedom being key. But we very much differ on so many ways beyond these core ideas that I find it easier to not associate with them. To Jerry, I am a "leftist" and I'm pretty sure he spits after he says it. To him being a leftist is just about as stupid as one could be.

Me, I hate labels, they divide so well. I don't really understand "leftist" however, I do know the origin of the term but I don't understand why what I see as wanting to help my fellow man is looked upon with such vile. I look at the so-called left and right politicians and I can't see any fucking difference, there are sometimes some slight public policy differences but at the party level, they are all the same. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is nothing truly honest in politics and thus truly honest people find the whole thing distasteful.

And yet, because I happen to read DemocracyNow.org, I am a leftist (or at least, now that I'm told it is a "very leftist" website, should I continue to go and read their articles, I too am a leftist.  But of course I make stupidly huge amounts of money, much of it has come from Big Oil, an industry I support even if I am quite angry at BP and others .... we can't do without them for the foreseeable future. Besides, there is nothing inherently wrong with Big Oil, it is individual companies and people that make the mistakes. Not all energy companies are bad, most are trying hard to do things cleaner, cheaper, and with less impact on the environment. But people are people and some of the work I do helps to make sure people are accountable for their decisions, and such visible accountability often forces better behaviour.

I would make all drugs legal, controlled access and without any advertising, but legal. Okay, the advertising bit would be tough, I'd have to think that through further, but I absolutely would remove all criminal sanctions connected with the use of any drug from pot to heroine and anywhere in between. I would ensure there were legal and safe ways to access the drugs and that there was a great deal of real information letting people understand about drugs. If that happened, I predict most people would not change their behaviour from what they do today but some would and my sincere belief is that use of the most dangerous drugs would significantly decrease and likely the use of so-called soft-drugs would increase.

I would let people partake in any activity they wanted to as long as they assumed all the risk and cost involved. That makes me a libertarian.

I definitely want to ensure that anybody who wants to eat, eats, and that anybody who wants shelter, and as is willing to do whatever their body and mind allows them to do, should have that. I don't, however, give money or any support of any kind to young, able-bodied men who don't have children to feed unless there truly is nothing for them to do. You have a right to live but you must work for that right. If you are going to drink your life away, it might as well be on the streets, but if all you need is a hand up then I absolutely think there should be government agencies there to provide it. I used them myself in my life and I doubt I'd be alive today if they weren't available. That makes me a leftist.

To the extent that it is possible to prove to 100% the guilt of a person in heinous crimes, I'd support the death penalty, however I do not yet believe it is possible to do so and "close enough" is not. No innocent man should go to jail let alone be killed, it just isn't fair to take away the only thing each of us has that is truly ours. Unfortunately, it isn't a deterrent of any sort and with our legal system in place, it isn't even a cost savings unless the offender is quite young. I like facts and figures, leave the emotions out. We can't kill 'em because we get it wrong all the time and you wouldn't want to be the innocent one put to death.

I don't believe people should be given a free ride in life but then I don't think they should necessarily be forced into depravity if they can't work for whatever reason. I'm willing to accept that a certain percentage of humans will try to take advantage of that good will and get a free ride for themselves, mostly I'm willing to let that happen so the deserving can get the help they need. Its not like anybody is making great gobs of money, trust me this is just barely enough to survive.

Left, right, up, down, in and out, round and round. If "Left" means that in general I don't think any of us were asked to be born and thus have exactly the same amount of "rights" as any one other of us, then yes I am a lefty. But Left of what I'm not sure. It certainly doesn't mean that I support every stupid Politically Correct cause, phrase, or person ... far from it ... but it does mean I have an open mind. I don't desire great wealth nor do I idolize those who have it. While I'm sure there are some small exceptions, you don't get rich by being nice and fair to other people; you get rich by screwing the other guy wherever and whenever you can. Damn few so-called self-made millionaires got there without breaking (of course they'd say "twisting" or "bending") the rules and laws in place to ensure people don't get screwed.

Take Bill Gates; Microsoft has stolen technology (as proven in court) many times, sometimes being forced to pay restitution after the fact but not always (rarely is the fight a fair one). As it is only fairly recently that Bill Gates was not the CEO and so he is definitely responsible for the culture of that firm that said it was okay to steal other's Intellectual Property; it seems only reasonable to me, therefore, that Mr. Gates himself at some point engaged in the same type of behaviour, not that I am aware that he did, it just seems the most reasonable interpretation of the data. It does, in fact, go back decades to the very beginnings of DOS when Microsoft was so small Bill actually (supposedly) wrote code himself...I have always wondered why it was that DR DOS was allowed to survive when all other so-called MS competitors were beaten down; a secret that may never be revealed.

I think you have to be a little morally corrupt just to want to have the sort of wealth Gates has, somehow he has to justify it in his head that he is so much more deserving of a piece of the world then anybody else (for that is what money is, an abstraction of the earth's and human's value). A Capitalist will say he deserves every penny, a communist will say he deserves no more than anybody else, a socialist will say that he may well deserve more than others (he works harder and Microsoft may not be my cup of tea, their software does provide value to billions) but that he should share with others.

There are no true capitalists, not even Mr. Gates himself. If you believe in percentage-based income taxes to fund anything, whether for the social good or security of the nation, then you are not a pure capitalist, you are a socialist; all that is left to determine is the degree with which you put societal values above capitalistic ones. I'm not sure there are any real communists either, at least not any hard working ones, though perhaps if we truly shared the earth's bounty equally then I suspect many of us would find communism quite palatable (though nobody likes a lazy person so this is definitely a tough sell).

So, if the left side of socialism is communism and the right side of socialism is capitalism, then I don't think I'm a lefty or a righty...I think I'm a middley/ Who's to say where the middle is? Might as well be me.