Left, Right, or Middle?

This whole thing about identifying yourself or others as being politically left, right, or middle is becoming increasingly annoying to me.  If you choose to identify yourself in that manner, it is certainly your right to do so, but to me it leads me to believe you don't spend much time doing any critical thinking about things.  I don't find any subject to be simple enough to think there is one simple position to take regarding it.  You name the subject, and I will find some things where I agree with the left, others where I agree with the right, and still others where my position is more closely aligned with those in the middle.  

Does that make me a centrist?  No.  It makes me someone who thinks about topics and is willing to consider all sides, their pros and their cons.  I don't think any political group has any corner on the truth, but what is worse is I think they all spend way too much time actually cornering the market on lies, misrepresentations, mis-characterisations, straw-manning, and ad hominem attacks (attacking the source rather than the issue).  

The other thing I am completely fed up with is judging people's character by one or two words in a Tweet.  First of all, I wouldn't bother to read a Tweet if you went to the trouble to put it in front of me?  Why? because few if any out there can adequately express themselves in 280 characters without inviting vagaries, mis-statements, and poor word choices as they issue things on-the-fly from their phones.  I want to actually understand what people mean to say rather than just what it might appear that they are saying.  I want to have an actual dialog where I can question whether I understand what they are trying to communicate.

I have often said that virtually nothing that is said or written by anyone is completely clear in its meaning except to the speaker or author.  Sometimes it is not even clear to them a few minutes after they have said or written it.  That even happens to me as I find that something I have written could be misunderstood.

Perhaps you may think that what someone has said is "perfectly clear."  That is seldom if ever the truth since the very act of reading something makes it subject to the interpretation of the reader which can itself be flawed or biased.

In the mean time I have decided that whenever anyone makes blanket negative statements about any group of people (race, political, religious, or otherwise), I am going to take that statement personally as if it was said directly to me.  I am going to do my best to walk in their shoes (not possible, but like I said "my best").  I am going to read and listen to those statements as if I was part of that group and deal with my reaction to it.  So if you want to call any group of people crazy, morons, stupid, hicks, genetically challenged, or whatever, you have just said that to my face and I just might not take it kindly.