I have probably just lost a friend because of my political alignment. It's no secret, I vote Liberal. I campaigned for Malcolm Turnbull, and I'd campaign again.
 
She made comments like "I thought you were progressive" and "more logical than that". She made them in public forums to me. She also votes left (and although I don't know for certain which party she votes for, I can assume it's the Greens). What I don't understand is that this is the second time I have lost a friend to the politics of the Greens. Note, I lost a friend to a party, and a set of ideologies, not because she doesn't like me.
Both times, my former friends have valued the Greens policies over a friend. In the first case, that friend ditched the Greens for the Socialist Alliance. How is it that one can value some beliefs of how to run a country and not separate that from a friend who has differing beliefs?
I started to question this. Are the people who go left of centre so firey that they lose sight of what used to be important to them?
 
I have several friends who are politically left, and from what I know, they are quite sane. But then again, I thought both of my previous friends were reasonable too.
 
England was built on radical changes until about 400 years ago. The system stabilised, and has been managed through a series of small changes over the course of 400 years. I consider it to be a stable political landscape. Does Australia need radical change given we have adopted 300 of those 400 years, and built our own additional 100 years on top? A conservative would say no, it's reasonably good. We only need make small changes. A conservative would also likely not get fired up over the notion of someone coming along and making extreme claims about that person's party's policies. That is why I think the conservatives are more tolerant than the extremists. What I don't understand is why the extreme left are all about "being tolerant" and yet they do not practice tolerance for other's political views. That is why I think I have lost two friends to political extremism. My friend Jonathan Wallace said something quite interesting on my Facebook Wall:

And I find that the left are far more intolerent of the criticism than the right.
 
Nic Newling adds some satire to it:

We believe in equal rights and being accepting of all people... Unless you have a different political view.