Odd thought on friends and available categories

[redbird]

I mentioned this to wild_irises and she said to go ahead and post it.

If I'm ever tempted to think that my LiveJournal friends list is a valid cross-section of anything (with the possible exception of my social circle as a whole), I need only remember that there are more transgendered people on my friends list than there are Republicans (or Tories [1]). There may, in fact, be more space probes and fictional characters on my friends list than there are Republicans/Tories (and that is not an accurate reflection of my social circle as a whole).

If anyone who thinks I'm wrong about the numbers or proportions wants to come out as a Republican, please do.

[1] My first thought was just "Republicans," but considering the geographic distribution of my friendslist, it seemed only fair to throw Tories into the mix.

Comments

[snippy]

Just to clarify: I am not a Republican; I have been a registered member of the Democratic party since I began voting (sometime in the early 1980s). I will likely vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but I am not changing my party affiliation.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

We don't do formal party affiliations in the UK: you're either a member of a political party (which is not usual) or you generally define your affiliation by the party you intend to vote for. (There is also an informal process of assessment "She's a typical Tory," or "very Old Labour", or "a natural LibDem", but this has no formal basis.)

I would consider myself to be in general a Labour voter, though the lies and hypocrisy of Tony Blair over the Iraq war have turned my stomach: at the last Scottish elections, I voted for my local MSP, who is Labour, because I liked him: my list vote went to the Green party, because I find more and more that the Scottish Green party matches my political views: and my vote for a local councillor went to the Scottish Socialist Party candidate. (I had been so focussed on the Scottish Parliament elections that I'd forgotten to think about the local council elections, and ended up picking the SSP candidate for a bunch of small reasons. She didn't get in.)

Generally speaking, I find that it makes more sense to define politics by the things I'm for rather than by party affiliation. So I'm basically a socialist and strongly for equal rights for all. At one time this would have meant I had to vote Labour, but Labour has been drifting rightward, and in Scotland there are other alternatives, thanks to our fairer voting system.

I know that in the US Democrats are right-of-centre (mostly rather like moderate Tories) and Republicans are further right than would ever be electable over here, and you basically don't have a national left wing party: your two-party system is much, much more entrenched than ours.