In thinking about the political poles and some of the crazy things I've been hearing and reading lately, I've had an original thought (though not necessarily a unique one--I'm sure I'm not the first one to have said this, but I've never heard anyone else say it): We often think of politics as existing on a line or a continuum. We speak in terms of being on the "left" or on the "right." But I've been having a different idea: think the political spectrum is actually much more like a circle than it is a continuum.

Within the regular two-party system, views can be seen as generally left, right, or center. But when you travel outside the normal political boundaries that we're used to, the further you get to the radical "left" or "right," the more the two viewpoints seem to begin to converge again. Thus the circlular idea: two things moving from a given point on a circle heading in opposite directions will be travelling away from each other for a while, but at some point they again getting closer again until they meet.

This observation is brought to mind by how much the radical right and the radical left have sounded like each other in opposing the Iraq war. (Incidentally, this doesn't make either of them wrong neccessarily, it's just an observation on their similarities in some areas.) And much further out on the fringe than either of these two groups, can you really easily tell the difference between a left-wing dictator and a right-wing dictator? Can you see much of a difference between the conspiracy theories of Noam Chomsky and the John Birch Society?

The further right or the further left you get, the more you end up with either anarchy or dictatorship.