Post your political compass result.

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Well, we've only got 3 out of 20 on the right side period, pretty surprised to see Viper over there with me.

For comparison, here is an older compilation back from 2015.



Source: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=253483&start=90

Please note that some questions have changed subsequently. Regardless, the new responses tend to fit the same pattern:

Ranked, most to least prevalent:

1. Left Libertarian
2. Right Libertarian
3. Left Authoritarian
4. Right Authoritarian

Worth keeping in mind that this test is known to try and push everyone down and to the left on the graph.

To the left, granted, but I'm not so sure it pushes you down. Too many questions involve government meddling in personal affairs, with no way to tell it to let people do whatever the hell they want.

The questions are typically framed in a way that makes it less likely for a person to choose the "authoritarian" option.

Many questions have no clearly libertarian option.

Left and Right have become arbitrary distinctions. The authoritarian/libertarian dichotomy is of far greater interest to me.

I don't think it would be incorrect to assume that libertarian philosophies are a majority position in the Anglosphere.

In the west it's mostly Americans that have some fetish with authoritarianism... and celebrities.

They're really not, though. They are still meaningful, even if politicians and the news misuse them.



Are we taking the same test? Nearly all of them do.

Slightly more left-wing and less libertarian than last time.

Not sure how to copy the image but here it is:

Your Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -4.5
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.44

Right click on the image and click "copy image address". Then in the reply box, click the little square on the toolbar with the mountains and sun. Paste the link into the box that comes up.

Viper missed one user


https://www.politicalcompass.org/crowdc ... &soc=-7.44

Viper's chart has five people on the right side, although one is only 0.2 points over. I think you might have forgotten to count nurseangela.

We don't have many discussions about economics here (there were more in 2012, probably because of Obamacare and the proximity to the 2008 recession) so it's hard to judge whether people are on the left or right economically. Political Compass leaves out the progressive-conservative axis (perhaps there is a better term?). People who consider themselves very socially liberal but who think the job is done might end up on -3 to -4 on the liberal-authoritarian axis, and any score at all on the economic axis, but then a 6 or 7 on the progressive-conservative axis.

Mikah, for example, considers himself quite proudly right-wing, but he's economically opposed to free trade and globalism so he ends up on the left. I think you'd get the same if Jacoby took the test. They're not necessary wrong about being right-wing, they're just on the economic left.

In the same way, most people would probably call some of my political opinions pretty hard-left (although actually I think my extreme "abolish borders" position is right wing), but I'm relaxed about people getting wealthy and that includes Africa, so PC makes me economically right wing. Won't stop someone calling me left-wing when I say that I think privilege exists.

How is "abolish borders" right wing?

I agree the test seems to have a funny concept of "left" and "right". I'd never considered myself a right-winger.

I don't actually want to abolish borders, it's more like abolishing visa restrictions. Let the free market sort it all out.

Actually that's a terrible idea because bottom-up systems only work if there are high rates of failure, and national failure is much worse than business failure, so for the forseeable future we need authoritarian immigration policies to stop a race to the bottom. Once all countries are wealthy, stable and well-governed, and up for the idea, abolishing restrictions on movement would be ideal.

Perhaps my strongly anti-prison stances are better examples of traditionally leftist policies, but even that's liberal rather than leftist...

The way the questions are weighted, it's very difficult to score more than just barely above the line unless you're religious. Many of the authoritarian/libertarian questions are on spirituality and faith-based issues. So, considering most young people in the Anglosphere aren't devout, it definitely seems like it has a downward bias to me.

Left/right, less so, many of the economic questions are direct quotes from various figures seen as typical of each end. Mostly Milton Friedman and Karl Marx. But unless you understand what Friedman et. al. mean by the quoted statements, yeah, they can come across as baby-eating; and even with that understanding, I'd say they still seem vastly out-of-touch. So there's a bit of a push there too.

I also, contra one above statement, would definitely not describe economic questions (which is how the test defines "left-right") as meaningless. That they've been devalued in recent decades is an example of late Cold War politics shifting policy pretty dramatically right on economic issues, with the post-WWII social-democratic consensus replaced with a Reaganomics consensus absorbed even on the (center-)left by Clinton and Blair. The Great Recession has brought them back into public attention though, as seen in Occupy, the Sanders movement, and the return to Old Labour under Corbyn. Hell, even half of BLM's demands are economic in nature.

Rehabilitative justice is. But the "prison-industrial complex"/for-profit prisons, which is one of the biggest things today exacerbating the problem of punishment being an end in itself, is specifically something talked about by the progressive/soc-dem/socialist left, much more than bog-standard liberals. Some libertarians have also jumped on the issue because it's a textbook example of a crony-capitalist "too big to fail" industry though.

Last edited by Pravda on 16 Oct 2016, 4:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.