I haven't done this in a while

[andrewducker]

I used to be a bit further to the left (I think about a -2), but I'm fairly sure I've been about that libertarian for a while now.

Looking on my friends list on FB, most of them are further left than me, and about 70% are more authoritarian (although the vast majority are in the bottom left corner).

Take the test here.

Comments

[andrewducker]

That would put them in the bottom right corner. And I know almost nobody there. So not _terribly_ likely.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Oh, hey, now that I've clicked on it, it's "politicalcompass.org", so YES that's exactly what it is.

And no, while "embrace your inner sociopath" and cheerlead for him mightily may be a bottom-right position, the true purpose of these test is to skew all non-patently-insane views into bottom-middle.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

(Which is to say that, among other things, it plants me bottom and center-left, which is frankly insane.)

[andrewducker]

I'm curious as to why that's insane?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Because citing my position as "centre-left" only makes sense in the American context, wherein economically I'm Loony Left, whereas outside the USA I'm middle-to-conservative. On social issues I'm "Loony left" again in the USA, which puts me bog-standard "let everyone do whatever the fuck they want" majority dead-middle centrist in every civilised country on the planet.

In the mean time, calling me "libertarian" is a joke specifically because "Libertarian" means, in the US-centric context of PoliticalCompass, "holds a gun on people while I rape them and blames them for not having a gun to defend themselves from me".

[andrewducker]

Aaah. From a Canadian viewpoint I guess that makes sense. I live in a theoreticlly civilised country, in which only 30% of the population believes that homosexuals are inherently inferior, and we actually equalised the age of consent a whole 13 years ago.

You seem totally mainstream for civilised society - but I don't kid myself that that civilised society is anything more than a fringe of the planet.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I refuse to allow the number of people holding stupid positions to skew the centre - the number of idiots making a mistake does NOT skew the truth towards the mistake, so why should the number of people holding the same political position skew the "center" closer to their position?

This is a statistical argument - median vs mode vs average, I suspect.

[andrewducker]

But whether you're working from an average of world positions, or from the range of theoretical positions (from homosexuality being illegal->legal from book-burning->free speech, etc.) it sounds like you're going to come out on the extreme liberal end of things.

I'm not sure how much more liberal than you you think people get.