Most of the stuff that people seem to argue about here - drugs and guns in a bundle and such - aren't really political at all, in a left/right sense.

For one reason or another a whole bunch of special issues have got tied up and labelled "left" or (in that peculiar American usage) "liberal", and others as "right" or "conservative".

And yet for so many there is no particular reason why supporters they are seen as going together. And you get glaring inconsistencies, like people saying they are pro-life and pro-death penalty - and the other way round. Or people being libertarian on some issues and anti-libertarian on others, and yet talking as if libertarianism was a fundamental principle.

I think a lot of it is about us having things which we care a lot about, but needing allies, so we group ourselves with the people who agree with us on the things we care about, and take on board the other things that our allies include in the package deal. (And I'm not talking about the Mudcat discussions here, but about the background to them.)

And one reason these kind of things go round and round here is that in some ways much of the music we love has been included in these package deals, at least for Americans. So "folk music" gets seen s a "liberal" linked music, and "country" gets seen as a "conservative" music -and yet much of the time its the very same music. And that means we can't avoid each other's company. And if we look into it at the end of the day the old truth applies, there is more that unites us than divides us.