The online Collins dictionary labels "lefty" with [British, informal, disapproval] i.e. built right into the meaning is a negative spin, akin to "cult" or "propaganda". The meaning: "If you refer to someone as a lefty, you mean that they support the ideals of the political left." But that's already secondary to "left handed" meaning someone who defaults to their left hand for precision activities such as handwriting or drawing.
Per my own counterintelligence against standard English connotations, I've worked to rehabilitate "cult" (for example) such that it gains a more neutral sheen, as a nickname or short version of "subculture", which has an almost mathematical dryness in being some subset of a larger culture, which pretty much any culture already is, and with more factions internally, a recursive data structure right down to "a cult of one" (but what about all those split personalities?).
I'd like to get back to "split personalities" following Maurice Nicoll again, as I often do, with a nod to Kierkegaard and his "to will one thing" discussion. A more typical personality is not so single-minded, or is overzealous with tyrannical tendencies, often a self-overthrowing situation, no need to lift a finger.
However I want instead to take up the left-right axis, insofar as their is one, and talk about my owning a leftist placement, even without claiming to be a fan of Marxist analysis. My economics is more a "free money from the sun" thermodynamic analysis, not that intelligence makes no difference. General Systems Theory (GST) seemed free for the taking when I got around to recycling and/or perpetuating some key terms.
I use other language somewhat oddly as well: "fan" is a status one earns through a lot of homework. I might be appreciative of what I've gotten from a talented vocalist, or rhetorician, or movie director, and that's a step towards becoming a fan, but it takes work to really be a true fan of someone or something. I suppose my meaning of "fan of" is closer to that of "acolyte of" and/or "disciple of", closer to "devotee".
I get to be a leftist through a Mark Twain style anti-imperialism. The Anti-imperialist League included Andrew Carnegie. Quakernomics, the book, is about industrialists with utopian visions of company lifestyles, from janitorial staff, to HR, to officers on the bridge. This commitment to egalitarian structures, sometimes associated with "communism" is likewise associated with horizontally structured private enterprises, where management intermingles with specialists, such as we have in Macrodata Refinement (joke: an allusion to the back rooms in our corporate mazeways).
I'm sympathetic to Hemingway and to the Spaniards who stood up to the fascists, already back then (pre WW2) cutting their teeth as right-wing bad guys. We (e.g. Wikipedia) still think of Franco as a rightie, anti-Franco Republicans as lefties. Those were impressions I developed through the Laughing Horse Books video collection. I've also chronicled in the Coda, March 2025 meeting minutes, regarding my radio-listening habits of some fifteen years ago (waiting in the car for pickup at Winterhaven), then tracing the crackup of Air America and the trajectory of Thom Hartmann and others into the RT America sphere, a bevy of leftists before banned; an iron curtain came down in TV world, with the attempted neocon-NATO coup-takeover of American media.
My other connections to leftism would be through both WILPF and AFSC. I probably don't want to complicate the story further with too many ideological affiliations beyond those two. For example, I'm not planning to tally up clients I've had, as to where they might weigh in on any left-right spectrum. I'm more apolitical than that, less partisan, in my business dealings. Like I'm not a front for any political party other than my own, my Pirate Party, to keep it simple. I believe I'm officially registered as in independent.
