Your political views!

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Kudistos Megistos

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http://www.politicalcompass.org/test

I wonder how the qhimmsters will come out on this test, should any of them take it. ;D

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Pic related; it's where I came. I'm a classical liberal, so no major politicians support my views :'(

No, srsly. Believing that the government should stop telling people what to do and should keep out of everyone's pockets seems, or rather, believing in "the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets" seems to be a more marginal position in global politics nowadays than hardcore communism. Apparently, everyone in the world is either a socialist or a conservative and I'm some kind of freak. The only people who seem to share my views are those paranoid Americans with thousands of guns who think that there's going to be a revolution some time soon, and I'm sure that they're just conservatives who got turned off by the religious right.

Anyway, enough ranting. I'll wait and see if anyone else takes the test.

BTW, I kind of get the idea that there's a little bit of a left-wing bias from some of the questions; asking people whether they think it's sad that water is a consumer product or whether businesses should be penalised for misleading the public seems to be trying to force the test taker to go with the more economically left-wing option.
 
My results.
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It appears Im somewhere in between ghandi and stalin.....(closer to ghandi though :) ... :( I like to be mean sometimes)
 
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>social authoritarian

>economic left

You commie-nazi! :D

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I was gonna take this, but I just found myself answering "I really have no idea, doesn't matter to me"... (Clearly not the case for the racial supremacy questions xD)
...What does that make me? D:
 
I was gonna take this, but I just found myself answering "I really have no idea, doesn't matter to me"... (Clearly not the case for the racial supremacy questions xD)
...What does that make me? D:
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It makes you like everyone else in this country, especially at our age :'(

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Of course, British apathy is likely to be the result of the fact that our parties are all the same. I wish we had some nice, polarised American-style politics; then there'd be a difference between the parties and a reason to choose one over the other.
 
None.

It's late and I'm about to go to bed, but here's the issue in a nutshell.

I believe that at the current historical - material moment, there is a particular hegemony built around a mode of individualism we've inherited from the early 19th century. This system of meaning models human beings as their interior 'selves' - inviolable kernels of attributes such as will to work and idleness - and 'hopes' that socio-economic reality will reflect that. In actuality, it's not as simple as that. People's fortunes are shaped by far more, and by chains of causality far larger than the individual.

There are three responses to this. Let's take the test case of inheritance tax. Is it fair for someone to put others' children at a relative disadvantage by bequeathing an estate? The three answers are:

1. Yes. This helps the individual be rewarded for his lack of 'idleness', a part of his inherent characteristics which should be rewarded (the 'right')

2. No. It prevents the individual from being rewarded for his lack of 'idleness', a part of his inherent characteristics which should be rewarded (the 'Left' - note the capital).

3. 2 almost sees the bigger picture, but fails at the last hurdle. He sees an issue with the hegemony, but doesn't see that he's still applying its flawed, corrupt, self-contradictory and historically contingent 'language'. 1 and 2 are simply making manifest the two contradictory implications of the same system of meaning. This suggests it is invalid, as does the fact it seems tied only to our own, specific period of history.

1 is a Conservative. 2 is a Leftist. 3 is a Marxist.

1 hopes the difficulties of the hegemony will go away by themselves.

2 sees difficulties, but hopes to use social engineering (the taxation of unearned incomes, for example) to create a world that matches the Ideology (the 'system of meaning' contained in the prevailing Hegemony).

3 thinks 1 and 2 are simply echoing each other. Their arguments are irresolvable not because the issue is, for whatever reason, too 'hard', but because they are simply bashing out the inherent flaws in a system of meaning that doesn't work in a world where, as I said before, chains of causality extend beyond the individual.

I am probably closest to the third camp.

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Incidentally, this is the only reason we have a 'problem' of free will in our philosophy departments. The 'problem' is 'how can we have Will when we are the products of causal threads far older and larger than ourselves'. We can't attach to people attributes 'beyond the kernel of the self', so we can't get our heads around it. The solution, of course, is to accept that even when our qualities, experiences and personal attributes are the products of 'things bigger' than our own lives, they are nevertheless inalienably ours.

I suspect be at least a century before this 'solution' gets integrated into common sentiment. Of course, that age will have its own self-contradictory paradigm, falling apart at the seams, and the hideous, lurching polka will no doubt start all over again.

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Right. That's it. I'm going to bed. I'm exhausted.

Also, whilst I'm here, just to p*** KM off - the answer was just that the Greeks were terribly obsessed with moments where the boundaries between individuals are broken. See: screaming, mass crying, birthing and ritual eating (food sharing, spectre of cannibalism as per Agamemnon. You didn't think the similarities between an Ox-like King's demise and a crowned cow being led to sacrificial bath were coincidence, did you?).

So, yeah, that was the answer to Tripos. Hope you got it ; )
 
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I'm for the class system, and to save the enviroment  ;D I sorta have mixed opinions on various things. Like the abortion question. Problem I have with abortion is where is the father's choice? As to primary school, I do believe it should train us in job basics. Heck have the kids start out working in some way. I don't care if it's creating picture frames, entertainment, or accounting. I also do feel that we should control reproduction of people. There are just some who should not breed. We need to control how companies treat the enviroment. I also think what you pay for is what you should get. People that are able to work but don't through their own choice shouldn't receive our support. Heck I went back to work with a busted shoulder blade over getting paid $900-1200 per month for the rest of my life.


And I'll probably go on with my rant so shutting up now.
 
It is all based on what I am looking at. My views of society differ from the views of this forum. This is Qhimm's forums. He is the absolute ruler. As this is not a democracy here my views are skewed from what i would expect from a democratic society like the one where i live.
 
I already know I'm like, 100% on social freedoms, and I only know that I think anarchy is inferior and communism entirely non-functional on the economic freedoms. Can't be bothered to take the test, so yeah, social ultra-hippie who openly admits he has almost no idea economically. If forced to describe myself in one word, at gunpoint, however, I'm more likely to say libertarian than socialist.
By the way I think everyone who's closer to authoritarian is some kind of horrible stupid person.
 
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I'm a bit old school with social structure. not really a proponent of gay marriage/adoption. though i do support free choice (abortion!!!) and some limitations upon the corporate world (otherwise there'd be oil spills all over the place).

last time i took this i got almost dead centre.

EDIT: there's a rightwing side and a leftwing side to it O________O. Asking about bottled water is countered for example, do you feel nationality blah blah blah 1st generation immigration blah blah blah. imo it's pretty balanced.
 
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What? Everyone's a commie-nazi! Srsly, am I the most socially liberal person here? That's just scary! :mrgreen:

EDIT: there's a rightwing side and a leftwing side to it O________O. Asking about bottled water is countered for example, do you feel nationality blah blah blah 1st generation immigration blah blah blah. imo it's pretty balanced.
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The problem with the bottled water example is that it is something quite emotive and it's likely that even an economically right wing person will agree that it's sad; the two examples you give aren't counter examples because people on either side of the spectrum will vote in different ways.

I'm the closest! I'm horrible and stupid?
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You've answered your own question! :D

I also look forward to arguing with Bosola when he wakes up :P. The rest of you might want to skip posts of ours that are responses to each other; it will be frighteningly dull if you're not an Oxbridge philosopher.

As you might be able to infer from the OP, we differ greatly on the respective merits of Marxism and the current "hegemony". My position on the latter is summed up by Churchill's comment on democracy:

No one pretends that democracy the evil hegemony ;D is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy the evil hegemony is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
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At the moment, I'm going through a phase in my philosophical thought where I am obsessed with practicality and things actually working in practice, so my defences of our current system, a certain level of liberal democracy mixed with a certain level of economic freedom, is that it has generally been far more successful than anything else, and certainly more successful than any of the attempts at Marxism that have been made.

And yes, I'm aware that none of the states that have commonly been called communist over the past century have been what Marx had in mind. That's the point; the transition from ivory towers to real life has not been smooth, whereas attempts to implement the ideals of liberalism and the free market, whilst not creating the perfectly fair meritocratic utopia they have promised, have nevertheless been closer to the ideal than the attempts to implement the ideals of Marxism.
 
btw, seeing as i believe in regulation, i would be a socialist freak  :-D i believe in regulation because 1) monopolies 2) great depression 3) quality control 4) social/enviromental concerns. 1) and 2) speak for themselves. Quality Control --> Look at China, it's more deregulated than the US, every other month you hear about lead in paint or hormones in milk and other things. 4) Social + enviromental, look at BP's oil spill. or for example wages --> until labour laws were established classical liberal America had children working in factories, and an entire family worked 14 hour days 7 days a week just to barely put food on the table. Nowadays, I believe the government must regulate the economy to some degree. Else it leads to some sort of problem. The most infamous case of classical liberalism gone awry is known as the great depression.
 
btw, seeing as i believe in regulation, i would be a socialist freak  :-D i believe in regulation because 1) monopolies 2) great depression 3) quality control 4) social/enviromental concerns. 1) and 2) speak for themselves. Quality Control --> Look at China, it's more deregulated than the US, every other month you hear about lead in paint or hormones in milk and other things. 4) Social + enviromental, look at BP's oil spill. or for example wages --> until labour laws were established classical liberal America had children working in factories, and an entire family worked 14 hour days 7 days a week just to barely put food on the table. Nowadays, I believe the government must regulate the economy to some degree. Else it leads to some sort of problem. The most infamous case of classical liberalism gone awry is known as the great depression.
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And the most infamous case of governments who tell people what to do and thinking they knew better than the people going awry is that thing that happened ten years after the great depression ;D

Oh, and a sizeable number of economists would greatly disagree with the idea that the great depression was caused by underregulation by the government, but I have a theory that most people's opinions of the causes of things like this will actually be cases of them trying to use it as a way to support their own philosophy.
 
Well... yay for unoriginality. I thought I'd be more of a libertarian than that. I'm pretty open-minded... but I guess I do agree that there *needs* to be discipline and authority in order to have a functioning community. Often I find that with no authority figure, even in tiny groups, there is little to no organization and order. Ok now I'm wondering why I'm not more authoritarian. :P

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btw, seeing as i believe in regulation, i would be a socialist freak  :-D i believe in regulation because 1) monopolies 2) great depression 3) quality control 4) social/enviromental concerns. 1) and 2) speak for themselves. Quality Control --> Look at China, it's more deregulated than the US, every other month you hear about lead in paint or hormones in milk and other things. 4) Social + enviromental, look at BP's oil spill. or for example wages --> until labour laws were established classical liberal America had children working in factories, and an entire family worked 14 hour days 7 days a week just to barely put food on the table. Nowadays, I believe the government must regulate the economy to some degree. Else it leads to some sort of problem. The most infamous case of classical liberalism gone awry is known as the great depression.
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And the most infamous case of governments who tell people what to do and thinking they knew better than the people going awry is that thing that happened ten years after the great depression ;D

Oh, and a sizeable number of economists would greatly disagree with the idea that the great depression was caused by underregulation by the government, but I have a theory that most people's opinions of the causes of things like this will actually be cases of them trying to use it as a way to support their own philosophy.
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actually, i don't think you can criticize the idea behind communism. let's not jump the gun and automatically think communism = evil. (i'm not pro-communism, i believe the soviets had a very disgusting form of communism; gulags anyone?), it's just that the idea behind communism was horribly executed and infringed on basic freedoms. I personally do not believe that the economy should have that many regulations and control measures upon it. just enough to ensure prosperity and safety. Not regulation to the point of communism. my belief is that the government should guide the economy, not control it. look at the various labour laws passed in the United States since the industrial revolution. Child Labour, Minimum wage, maternity leave, paid vacation, etc etc. All government influence in business. Or perhaps product screening. The FDA screens many drugs, and requires a fair amount of testing before a drug is released to the public. I'm a bodybuilder, and protein supplements are a fantastic example. when you buy them they say "statements not evaluated by the FDA." some companies are actually quite shady and the products sometimes can be .... subpar to say the least. half of the products they come out with hardly do a thing over the old version. Creatine Monohydrate does more than CEE or liquid creatine (both proven to be LESS effective) yet companies still come out with these newfangled creatine products that are supposedly an upgrade over good ole creatine monohydrate. The lack of FDA guidance means XXX company can just put "proven to add 100 pound in 1 month" and will not suffer any legal consequences. Hell, some of the stuff supplement companies release can be downright toxic and they still wouldn't have to worry too much. FDA helps us alot. Rarely there will be drugs that pass FDA inspection and it is later found that it is harmful to health. I remember the vioxx incident from a few years back. Oh man, they got sued for tons because it killed a bunch of people. Now just imagine if there was no FDA to regulate drugs, imagine the amount of lethal and dangerous drugs out there. Vioxx would be a daily occurrence. Expect to see 11 finger infants, sterile adults, genetic mutation and everything in between.
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It's generally accepted that Hoover inaction led to the Depression b/c he strongly believed in laissez-faire and did not feel like interfering in what he believed was not the governments responsibility. He saw the imminent economic peril, yet chose to stand and watch rather than act. Roosevelts claim to fame, was a stronger government presence in the US. FDIC (federally insured banks) and government programs led to a huge drop in unemployment.
 
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