Having read Jerith‘s answers to the Political Compass test, I tried it by myself.
If you are curious, my coordinates are:
- Economic Left/Right: -4,62;
- Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5,79.
From my point of view, the most interesting thing is not my result: oddly, it seems there are not many people placed in the lower-right square.
Are there really so few of them? Is my friend Elias the last right libertarian left? Sorry, I couldn’t resist such a good pun. :)
Mmh, in my opinion the political compass is very biased. You should give the world’s smallest political quiz a try:
http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html
Maybe.
This second quiz still places me on the left corner.
Left liberal:
personal issues score: 90%;
economic issues score: 30%.
Then it means you are a socialist :-)
@Thomas: no way! :)
I agree with TJ. Questions on the political compass are generally statements posed by a “liberal” on which you should state your level of agreement. It’s too easy to fool the test to get your desired result.
Questions like “The rich are too highly taxed.” or “Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers.” are simply nonsense questions based on the classic black/white way of thinking (something that recently Torvalds criticized on one of his blog: most of the time the right answer is “it depends”). Answering with a simple “i agree”/”i disagree” on such statement it’s just nonsense. What am I agreeing on the first statement? About high taxation? What is an high taxation? Who is a rich? Is a man who cannot be fired by his employer rich or poor?
What means disagreeing on the second statement? That a woman cannot have a career? Or that a woman that wants to have a pregnancy should balance both a career and her duties as a mother? A woman can proudly show herself at work with her pregnancy, if all goes well, even until 15 days before the birth. I saw such a woman and I still admire her. It’s just a question of personal choices, no law, no regulation can encompass all the differents shades of grey that exist. It all goes down to “common sense”, something that too many people don’t want to use because it requires personal choices and responsibilities. It’s much more easier to stick to a law or a regulation or written by someone else; you can behave as an idiot, but as long as it’s the law that allows (or compels) you to behave in such a way, you feel fine.
Anyway, Elias is not the last one right libertarian left (i’m more a centrist, even in the quiz that TJ proposes, half centrist half libertarian):
Economic Left/Right: 1.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.77
And the Jerith you link is also on our side (and I’m not surprised as he has personally commented each one of his answers) ;)
@Luciano: I agree. Answering those questions with a list of “agree/disagree” might be silly… a quiz is not a game but it’s not so far away from it, though. Anyhow, I know that right libertarians are not completely gone :) but neither quiz showed many of them and that’s an interesting subject.
May I suggest another test?
http://selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY/
I’m curious to see how much the results of that test
are related to the results of the political compass.
My results are 100% John Stuart Mill and 99% Jean Paul Sartre.
@dela:
My results are:
Jean-Paul Sartre (100%) and Aquinas (88%).
It’s odd to see Aquinas having answered from a thermoeconomics point of view, which is essentially antichristian. :)