You see, Brendan, I'm going at this from both ends. Like most people, I have fairly conventional opinions on the fairly conventional issues, and - as I used to like to discuss, I acknowledge that these opinions are transient and illegitimate.

Like most people, I also have a set of of abstract universal convictions which should serve to inform my opinions on all the individual concrete issues. As I am a silly little teenager, these are probably still evolving. Now, my abstract universal convictions ("values", I suppose) probably differ from others' more, oddly enough, than my opinions on individual issues do. The point is that to work from your values to your stance on individual issues takes a lot of understanding I do not yet have and thought I have not yet put into it. So, until I have my own, I work with the dominant paradiggim. Can you para-diggit?

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Example:
I have never been able to accept the common conviction that wrongdoers deserve to suffer for their misdeeds. This is a part of what most think of as 'justice'.

Think of someone who has caused hurt - against you, those you love, fictional even. Imagine them getting what's coming to them. As graphically as you want - nobody's watching.
What are you feeling? Now that's a feeling. That's justice. You could bottle that feeling and sell it. Bite the tourniquet harder - that's a feeling you could inject into your swollen straining blue veins. Just don't ever shake my hand.

That's your justice.

I'm essentially just anti-hurt. It's starting to look like the moral high ground is nothing but a better place to throw rocks from. I'm anti-hurt, and I don't care what caused the hurt except so far as it can be prevented.

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Now how does that affect my opinion on, say, mandatory minimum sentencing? I'd have to know what our current policy is, I'd need to crunch some numbers on recidivism, on the deterrent power of minimums, on the efficacy of alternative sentences. I haven't done all that - others have, and they tell me that mandatory minimums don't prevent further crime, and only work as the sort of eye-for-eye justice I dislike and to appease antsy citizens. So I disagree with mandatory minimums.

How does that affect my opinion on carbon credit trading? The war in Afghanistan? Trade liberalisation?
I could make some guesses, but the point is that I have no real clue.

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I suppose one reason I'm sort of eager to buy into the Ignatieff cult is that - even though some of our fundamental convictions seem wildly different - I imagine he might actually understand enough to build his opinions from those core convictons. Most politicians seem to make vague speeches about their core convictions and have their pollsters feed them positions on the individual issues.

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Oh, obvious joke, by the way, Brendan:
You are amazed at how little people's opinions differ.
I found nothing amazing at all about how the opinions of little people differ.

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Apologies about readability. That's 4AM speaking.