Beyond Left and Right?

1. Are you tough and macho or tender and effeminate?

2. Do you believe that human nature is essentially good or evil?

3. Should we be communicative or secretive?

4. How do we treat those who think differently from ourselves?

5. Do we regard moral values as fixed or negotiable?

6. Is art just cultural masturbation?

7. Is sex always dirty, or only when you do it right?

In these terms, a right wing position would be:

I'm tough and macho.

Human nature is evil.

We should be secretive.

We should persecute those who think differently from ourselves.

Moral values are fixed.

Art is wank.

Sex is dirty.

Next time I give you a lift, be prepared to point, in good time.

"Left" and "Right" come from the Assembly after the French Rev.: the republicans sat on the left and the monarchists on the right. This doesn't seem too different from today's major political divide (all bow to His Appointed Majesty King George Dubya), so I'd say they can still be effectively used.

Politically I'm somewhere in the Green's near orbit, but w/o their annoying new puritanism. I like the Bentham-Mill-Dewey liberal tradition and I agree w/ Judith Shklar that the definition of a liberal is someone who thinks cruelty is the worst thing we do. Of course it can't always be avoided so I believe in the freedom of the arts so they can be a sort of laboratory in which to work out a lot of our more evil tendencies.

But I'm also pragmatic enough to know you often have to compromise and prioritize. I think the labor-enviro coalitions that have sprung up in response to the WTO and IMF are very good things. I'm rambling a bit so I'll sign off and let you receive your abuse now.

story in today's Guardian

about how people in Britain (including the government) witch-hunt 'the liberal elite', which turns out to be a lot smaller and less elite than you might think.

I'm aware that 'liberal' is a weak word, though, because in the US and in economics it can mean right wing. So I prefer good old fashioned 'left and right'. And yes, the quiz was me saying 'It still means something to me'.

I'm waiting for Ally here. Can you like the rich and real estate brokers more than artists and the poor and be anything but 'right wing'? It's a genuine question, not a slur.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,538025,00.html

Obviously it's not a hundred per cent great (it's a bit like The Spark but with a straight face) but anyway, I got -5.31 on the left/right scale and -6.67 on the liberal/authoritarian scale, which puts me slightly to the right of Tony Benn, but I'm slightly more liberal than him.

Does this help? Or does it screw the question, is the point to simply define ourselves on a left->right axis?

Both Thatcher and Bush seemed motivated mainly by revenge for the former successes of liberalism. Thatcher battled against the 'permissive socoety' of the 1960s and, especially, Socialism and Communism. Bush battles Clinton's successes and Gore's policies, which actually beat his in the popular vote and hang around as ghosts worthy of jousting with: 'We *will* drill in the Arctic Reserves...'

For the record, my scores:

Economic Left/Right: -2.45

Authoritarian/Libertarian: -8.36

Unsurprisingly I'm on the libertarian left. Quite extreme on the libertarian scale, but not as far left economically as I expected. Oi vey! Like Ned, I must be a bit more laissez faire than I realised. Blame the music industry. I just signed a new publishing contract with Sony, but haven't paid my Musician's Union membership fees in about ten years.

Auth/Lib: -7.38

Blimey I'm right next to Momus. I can see where I dropped a few points - there's that qn about "It is normal for people to have rebellious ideas and then settle down" which I thought was factually correct but not neccessarily desirable, but I clicked 'agree' anyway, heh.

Economic left/right: -7.55.

Authoritarian/Libertarian: -9.03

Very left, very left-wing...and very left-handed. Coincidence?

Now just give me a bunch of money, someone, and we'll see if my seeming radicalism holds any water whatsoever.

My problem with the diagram is that it feels to me [boring sloppy word alert] reductive and trivialising. I'm more suspicous of how CLOSE Ken and T.Benn are then how much more "right" Clare Short is than Hitler. Partly I spose I'm just being my usual perverse argumentative self: "Oh this is the map you all use, well you know it's totally wrong" plus a good splash of "you'll never diagrammatise or define ME I am a FREE SPIRIT I am punk roXoR see me MORPH etc etc"... But partly I am just BORED with a shorthand derived from the revolutionary assembly from BEFORE the two centuries when the actual real concrete problems and failures of [the STATE = the PEOPLE] as a mechanism of social organisation was introduced. It's just fatuous to say pro-state, anti-state. I think the MONOCULTURE and the GUNS thread blew diff.big holes in the plan that diagram gives. None of the foax — well *maybe* Ken, but he's *such* a dogde- and-weave pragmatist-playa — in the left- libt zone strike me as particularly libertarian (Gandhi?! How'd HE get there?!) I'm not judging Momus as I'm quite unable from thread to thread to work out WHERE his position is: too much of it is merely provocatively topically positional and thus not necessarily internally coherent (a good comeback here is IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE)

(ps to be honest putting second/third rung politicians anywhere on such maps is a waste of space: obviously Blair's ministers will be near Blair, their current job is articulate HIS project.)

I judged myself by Momus's original questions *ages* ago and was on the left in all of them. However I would define myself in terms of a set of values rather than party political allegiance, so I suppose I *have* transcended traditional set ideas of "left" and "right".

i've never considered myself to be political at all. i did notice while takingt he test that there were a few questions where i believed the actual statement to be accurate in the US, though it did not reflect my personal views... i'm going to retake the test and see if said questions had a significant impact on my score. nice thread, by the way.

http://www.stats.org/newsletters/0107/quiz.htm

left/right: -0.50, authoritarian/libertarian: -2.67

me and charles kennedy seem to very close. if only i knew who he was.

Economic Left/Right: -3.25
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -2.87

Does that make him a liberal?

I'll expropriate all your asses!

oh no! not direct center! oh no!!!

This test always maddens me when I see it. How do you answer questions like this: "If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations."

The question should be whether trans-national corporations would be serving "humanity" better than the alternatives presented in the question, not whether one prefers the concept of a business institution more than flesh and blood people. You're just supposed to assume that by answering trans-national you're taking the pro-market, anti-leftist stance. The whole test is filled with straw-men like that.

Why "should" the question be worded in your way?

It would be less of a loaded question.

Because the question should be more about trans-nationals v.s. other modes of serving humanity rather than humanity v.s. trans-nationals. It'd be a bit like framing global warming/gigantic state control over the economy as "Should be let the earth get warmer and watch the world implode or leave people to make decisions about energy consumption to themselves?"

http://politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=-5.50&soc=1.90

Bah! occidentocentric BS

It's a question about corporate stewardship and influence. Do corporations have a primary moral duty to humanity as a whole or to stockholders and the profit margin. (And how should the state respond.)

When a libertarian whines about 'loaded questions,' it always seems to boil down to 'not loaded the right way.'

these categories don't mean anything. tocqueville was right when he said that the only real political differences were between those who wished to "restrict" or "extend" popular rule. c.f.:

socrates, lenin, woodrow wilson = "leftists" (or liberal heroes) who thought the masses should just shut up and let the elite run things for the common good.

hamilton, hayek, reagan = "conservatives" who thought people had no right to use their own government for the common good.

anyone who fits the commonsense definition of an actual believer in democracy - jefferson, la follette, lincoln, nader - is uncategorizable as either "left" or "right."

It's a question about corporate stewardship and influence. Do corporations have a primary moral duty to humanity as a whole or to stockholders and the profit margin. (And how should the state respond.)

I think you're referring to another (albeit similar) question that's asked on their.

When a libertarian whines about 'loaded questions,' it always seems to boil down to 'not loaded the right way.'

Because the question isn't misleading and tricky at all. Had I written it it would've asked something like "State regulation or freedom, eh, Lefty?" blah blah everybody slants everything.

these categories don't mean anything. tocqueville was right when he said that the only real political differences were between those who wished to "restrict" or "extend" popular rule. c.f.:

Thomas Sowell broke it down into an "unconstrained" and "constrained" visions (or ideologies) about how the world worked. (The most memorable part for me lately was where he breaks down why youth worship is common on the left and abhorred by the right.) William Goldwin epitomizes the uncategorized figure as the train of thought of countless leftist ideas came directly from his "station" (social justice being the biggest) and yet he would've never have advocated anything but laissez faire economies to fix many of the problems he saw.

The book is absolute essential for understanding modern political thought and the roots behind countless ideas we all seem to just assume are either random or just built on tradition, and not essential to the ideologues' mindset..

Economic Left/Right: -2.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.97

This is roughly what I expected. I don't this test has any real value.

J.D., I would categorize neither Socrates nor Lenin as "liberal heroes".

I do agree that true democrats are difficult to categorize as left or right, but I think that that difficulty extends to just about everybody.

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -5.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.97

I'm pretty close to Gandhi. Hooray!
(of course if there was a laziness/self-discipline vector I don't think I'd come so close)

Economic Left/Right: -4.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.92

.5 / -3.38. Nobody at all who is famous is in the bottom right quadrant except Friedman? Weird.

x-pst - Gandhi was too lazy even to eat or dress, what are you talking about?

i couldn't give yes or no answers to so many of them i gave up. does this make me a liberal now?

i mean seriously, is there too much entertainment mixed with fact? what the fuck does that even mean?

I remember doing this once and then doing it about a month later and getting completely different results because I took the questions at face value at first.

Poorly worded questions, but my interpretation of that was: Does entertainment slip information into it that can be harmful (re: rap songs), and do information outlets utilize information too much? (re: news broadcasts reporting on car chases)

Despite my reservations in the past:

Economic Left/Right: -6.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.69

I'm still not sure that a question like this is a useful barometer of political views (but maybe I'm wrong):

"When you are troubled, it's better not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheerful things."

(I like how every major US presidential candidate is in the top right quadrant.)

Political Compass seems to interpret 'politics' as an entire world of cultural and moral beliefs along with policy.

The reservations you expressed before were about a different test, Sundar. The American libertarian "SMALLEST TEST IN THE WORLD THAT WILL UNDOUBTEDLY TELL YOU TO VOTE LIBERTARIAN" is completely unrelated to the PC people.

My score:
Economic Left/Right: -8.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -9.38

Funny, I just took this one with a friend the other day and we groused about all the same shit. I forget the numbers, but I was right by the Dalai Lama.

Hey
Economic Left/Right: -5.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.90 makes a communist, right?

Economic Left/Right: -8.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.77

I'm a little curious about where they place some people. I don't know that much about the Dalai Lama's poltics so I could be off (and I'll back him over the Chinese occupation all day long) but if he were in power, he'd be a divine-right monarch, wouldn't he? Why would the Swedish govt be so much further right than the Canadian NDP or Dennis Kucinich?

Hm, maybe not quite: "He expanded on the Five-Point Peace Plan and proposed the creation of a self-governing democratic Tibet, "in association with the People's Republic of China".

(Still, would his views on social issues necessarily be *that* much more libertarian than Hilary Clinton's, say?)