Saturday, February 24, 2007

Political Compass - You should go here

Political Compass is brilliant, and it's probably the best way to describe someone's politics. This is me right here. I've taken it a few times, and I'm pretty steadily in about the same area.

The way it works is that it just trashes the left/right model used in American politics, because it's actually quite useless. Adding labels means less and less, so it uses words with absolute meaning to describe your political inclinations. What it does is put economic beliefs on the left/right axis and then other issues of state control on the up/down axis, so that way you can understand, for example, the Libertarian party.

Frankly, I think the best model would account for military and foreign relations to be on a separate axis, maybe a willingness to use military force axis. You might be an economic libertarian who's a social libertarian as well, but you feel the military needs power to do what's necessary internationally, or whatever.

But anyway, it's on the sidebar, and if any of the two people that read this blog want to comment, leave your coordinates.

3 comments:

Fiacolet said...

That poll was full of liberal bias. Some of the questions were worded so that conservative were "racist," "homophobic," or "anti-women."

Here's an example of what I mean:
"Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers."

Someone who is a conservative would normally say "strongly disagree," because they don't support treating women like crap. They would, however be tagged a liberal on Political Compass because conservatives are stereotyped by liberals as "sexist." A liberal would also say "strongly disagree."

If the question were worded as "Do you believe homemakers should be banned because women have rights," both sides would say they disagree, and both sides would be tagged as conservatives because liberals are stereotyped as being wacko feminists.

There is no room for excuses by them, I mathematically found that the average score was 0.00 and 0.00, which is a "moderate."

His FAQ Addresses this, and (of course) he ducks the issue.

StolenMonkey86 said...

Fred, in the first place, I find the thing fairly accurate. In the second place, the whole point is to get away from the labels "liberal" and "conservative" because they are relative terms that don't mean a whole lot over time.

Basically, a traditional conservative would be more likely to appear in the top right, a libertarian conservative would appear in the bottom right. Your typical liberal will appear in the bottom left, and commies go in the top left.

StolenMonkey86 said...

to get right on the dot you probably have to contradict yourself