Political Litmus Test
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which would never happen.
to use a totally fictitious example
To get at underlying beliefs, it is sometimes useful to envision entirely impossible hypotheticals
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My tolerance of hypothetical only goes so far.
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Why don't they just ask if you're a Greenpeace member. Those are the only morons who think corporations are inherently evil.
Yeah, but then there are questions like:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Your only options for answering are: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
For me to answer that one honestly I would need an option for
"Maybe? Sometimes. It depends on the enemy and the enemies enemy, but there is not enough information to form an opinion because my enemies' enemy may be trying to kill me also."
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Haha that's awful.
Taliban 1980s-- our friend. Taliban 2000s-- our enemy.
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Maybe
That was my reaction to like 75% of the questions. Hence me not being sure where I'd land on the graph, though if you asked me to pick a point on it I'd go for the same quadrant that I got from the test.
I usually don't like this kind of tests, even less so the ones that don't include a neutral option.
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-6, -6. Dead center Greenville.
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@blakeyrat said:
Why don't they just ask if you're a Greenpeace member. Those are the only morons who think corporations are inherently evil.
Yeah, but then there are questions like:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Your only options for answering are: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
For me to answer that one honestly I would need an option for
"Maybe? Sometimes. It depends on the enemy and the enemies enemy, but there is not enough information to form an opinion because my enemies' enemy may be trying to kill me also."
Then you should answer either "Disagree" or "Strongly Disagree". If simply being an enemy of your enemy isn't reason enough to consider them a friend, then you disagree - even if there happens to be some cases where there is some other factors that causes them to be considered a friend.
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Then you should answer either "Disagree" or "Strongly Disagree". If simply being an enemy of your enemy isn't reason enough to consider them a friend, then you disagree - even if there happens to be some cases where there is some other factors that causes them to be considered a friend.
I would "Strongly Disagree" with your opinion on this issue.
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More clearly worded, the question is "Does being an enemy of your enemy make someone your friend", not "Are there enemies of your enemies that are your friends". The first shows your position, the second is just circumstances and would be irrelevant information for this test.
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So we agree that the wording is pretty shit on some questions?
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Yup, but not that difficult to figure out.
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Try #2
"Supporting my country is more important than questioning if it is right or wrong"
or
"I am a very patriotic person"
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Well, the
Try #2
was in reference to a 500 error combined with a "Body too similar".
But, part of what does not make me a strict conservative is that I think that blind patriotism is bullshit. So...no?
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I'm too lazy to do this particular test (or maybe the same one?), but in the past on this kind of test and grid I scored around (2,-2).
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was in reference to a 500 error combined with a "Body too similar".
Oh. that makes more sense, I didn't think it was a particularly confusing one.
I think that blind patriotism is bullshit.
Agreed. America seems very big on it in general, and I've never quite understood it
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Sure you are.
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America seems very big on it in general, and I've never quite understood it
Me either. I liked George Carlin's take on it: "Symbols are for the simple-minded" when referring to the fetishism of the American flag.
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@Jaloopa said:
America seems very big on it in general, and I've never quite understood it
Me either. I liked George Carlin's take on it: "Symbols are for the simple-minded" when referring to the fetishism of the American flag.
I like this one: "Slavish obedience to an idea means that you're unable to otherwise occupy your mind."
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Here I go.
I expected to be just a bit farther to the right. But hen again, I fell pray to quite a few questions, where I weren't sure if "I don't agree" meant "I think it's the exact opposite" or "I think this isn't right, it's more of a kinda maybe."
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I usually--this will shock many here--tend to be just to the right of center on various versions of that quiz, and anywhere from just below the horizontal line to crowding the bottom of it.
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I'm blander than you!
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Questioning whether your country is right or wrong IS supporting it.
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Some of the questions were... strange in how they are open to interpretation. For example, "The only social responsibility of a company should be to deliver a profit to its shareholders." If you look at the question from a "neutral" point of view, then you'd see that there are plenty of companies that have other goals in their charters. There's no "should" about profit. A company should do what its charter says. So I have to disagree with the statement, and it makes me look like a lefty despite the fact that I fully support companies created to earn profits earning profits.
I guess the point of the quiz is to reflect back to you how you interpret these questions. But there isn't a choice that accurately reflects my real answer.
It only goes to show how categorical both the left and right are in their thinking.
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The test isn't a morality test, though. It's measuring your opinion on what government should be. It's measuring whether you think the government should protect people from bad choices or whether it should give people as much freedom as is humanly possible (authoritarian vs libertarian).
But there can be a trade off between left/right and up/down too. Like, if you have very strong convictions, you might be tempted to enforce them on everyone, so questions like that are there to find out which axis is more important to you.
But the unspoken assumption is whether you think the Government should be aligned to your personal interests. What if you don't agree with that assumption
There were questions there specifically asking whether you agreed with that assumption.
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Surprising approximately nobody:
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Yeah, and I agreed with “people who can work and choose not to shouldn't expect to be supported by society”, because I do agree with that, even though I'd probably fight anyone bringing up such an obvious conservative talking point because they're about to imply that everyone who's poor is only poor because they're lazy.
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I don't want to do drugs, and my experiences with painkillers leads me to believe that it numbs you and dumbs you to the experiences of life.
Yes, strongly held opinions based on wild extrapolation of limited personal experience into territory you know nothing about are pretty much par for the course with you.
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Only the efficiencies of a large corporation can support a container ship and the port facilities to use it.
Balanced against that is the fact that the typical top-down command structure of a large commercial outfit is a breeding ground for power games and corner-cutting that preferentially benefit those closer to the C suite and can cause plenty of damage to everybody else.
Which of these effects dominates in any given corporation needs to be assessed case by case, but it is short-sighted to pretend that either isn't there.
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Yeah, but then there are questions like:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Your only options for answering are: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
For me to answer that one honestly I would need an option for
"Maybe? Sometimes. It depends on the enemy and the enemies enemy, but there is not enough information to form an opinion because my enemies' enemy may be trying to kill me also."
Seems to me that even a cursory reading of history would be enough to demonstrate clearly that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a terrible principle on which to base foreign policy and an even worse one on which to base personal friendship - precisely because it lacks so much nuance. Therefore, strongly disagree it is.
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Right; but like everything, you take the good with the bad.
The nuclear reactors producing massive quantities of clean, safe energy-- the medical imaging devices that save thousands of lives-- make the presence of atomic weapons tolerable. Would it be nice to have the reactors without the bombs? Yeah. But sorry, they come as a package. That's just the way it is.
Containerized shipping has done more to improve quality of life than probably any invention in history, except possibly the steam engine. Unlike building a steam engine, it takes massive organization to build/maintain/manage a containerized shipping system. Does the guy at the top make himself rich in the process? Well, possibly. But it's still worth it.
Now, that all said, there are some corporations that were purposely designed as useless parasites. Enron being the most obvious recent example. And by no means do I propose society tolerate Enrons.
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The nuclear reactors producing massive quantities of clean, safe energy-- the medical imaging devices that save thousands of lives-- make the presence of atomic weapons tolerable.
Meh. The nukes themselves probably saved or created billions of lives. I think they're tolerable on their own.
Seems to me that even a cursory reading of history would be enough to demonstrate clearly that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a terrible principle on which to base foreign policy and an even worse one on which to base personal friendship - precisely because it lacks so much nuance.
Yes, but it definitely depends on the enemy and the stakes. With the Cold War over, stakes are much lower and this sort of reasoning doesn't make nearly as much sense, at least from a US perspective.
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Would it be nice to have the reactors without the bombs? Yeah. But sorry, they come as a package. That's just the way it is.
And that is a fact that I wish more boosters of "clean, safe" nuclear energy would spend more time pondering. So are the decommissioning costs associated with obsolete reactors.
Containerized shipping has done more to improve quality of life than probably any invention in history
Agreed.
there are some corporations that were purposely designed as useless parasites. Enron being the most obvious recent example. And by no means do I propose society tolerate Enrons.
Then it would pay us to keep seeking ways to organize ourselves that don't lend themselves to being gamed by people like that.
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With the Cold War over, stakes are much lower and this sort of reasoning doesn't make nearly as much sense, at least from a US perspective.
Protip: it didn't make sense with the Cold War going either.
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Protip: it didn't make sense with the Cold War going either.
You need to find a new Pro.
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Just because I disagree with someone doesn't mean I want to toss them in prison...
This is the real libertarian/classical liberal position. What most people think of as libertarian is a straw man constructed by people who can't distinguish between tolerance and approval.
But the unspoken assumption is whether you think the Government should be aligned to your personal interests. What if you don't agree with that assumption?
Half the test is unspoken assumptions, but I'm taking it anyway because
(why isn't this a thing yet?).My results will not be a surprise to anyone who has been here longer than a day:
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My results will not be a surprise to anyone who has been here longer than a day:
Looks like you're more conservative than libertarian... I knew it!
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I agreed with “people who can work and choose not to shouldn't expect to be supported by society”, because I do agree with that
Depends entirely on how you construe the meaning of "work". I disagreed with that one because I took it to be referring to paid work, and there are vast numbers of people who have a completely legitimate claim to societal support who choose not to engage in paid work that they would undoubtedly be completely capable of, for completely sound reasons.
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All trolling aside, the author of the test has a flawed concept of libertarianism.
the individual is more important than the state
What libertarianism really is, is what I quoted from @mott555 above:
Just because I disagree with someone doesn't mean I want to toss them in prison...
But the test questions don't really allow for that, so...
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I don't approve of this test, way too much "which side of the line are you on" involving many curving squiggly lines.
Anyways, this is what it said I got based on my inability to choose "Neither Agree/Disagree":
(No idea if the one-box will work, it's not allowed inside work proxy)
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Another one joining the ranks of left-libertarians. I wouldn't have actually said that though if you'd just asked me.
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How the hell does "do you think abstract art is art" reflect on one's political compass?
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I disagreed with that one because I took it to be referring to paid work, and there are vast numbers of people who have a completely legitimate claim to societal support who choose not to engage in paid work that they would undoubtedly be completely capable of, for completely sound reasons.
Would you please elaborate on that with some examples?
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How the hell does "do you think abstract art is art" reflect on one's political compass?
You mean you don't know? What a fillastein.
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Oh, right, if I say I do think so I'm a dirty pinko librul. Sneaky!
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