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The "political compass" quiz

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Invictus

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That quiz is presented from a entrenched Marxist perspective that is full of false dichotomies, and as such is thoroughly invalid. I’ve blogged at length about it here:

What I found tonight ...was a grotesque rip off of the original idea twisted beyond recognition by marxists brainwashed by "critical theory". An objective test should accurately determine one's actual level of knowledge or views, given an honest examinee -- but this quiz is so laden with contradictory, loaded, and irrelevant questions, that no objective evaluation is possible. (In fact, it only claims to be valid for citizens of "western democracies.") ..

About half the questions on the quiz reflect the false dichotomy between blind state-worship and the rejection of all political authority shared by libertarians and Statists. In other words, you must either blindly accept everything the government does without question, or reject it as the selfish actions of power-hungry bureaucrats. Sample questions: "Making peace with the establishment is an important aspect of maturity." and "No one chooses their country of birth, so it's foolish to be proud of it.

....

The quiz includes a number of seemingly irrelevant questions that actually reject the distinction between the government's proper roles of preventing the use of force and assume that it must force a particular morality down everyone else's throat...  Examples:

"Sex outside of marriage is usually immoral. Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers. Abstract art that doesn't represent anything shouldn't be considered art at all. Astrology accurately explains many things."

To the extend that the notion of a "political compass" is valid at all, the best online quiz is Politopia.

(If you want to see where I scored, my email is [email protected])

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I don't think these quizzes are to be taken overly seriously. They trap you into answering questions that are poorly worded and people often answer them dishonestly, just to be as left or right as possible.

Additionaly, many of the questions were obviously paraphrased from the pseudoscientific "Authoritarian Personality" studies by Adorno and Horkheimer, which you can view here:

http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm

You'll notice that some of the Political Compass questions have been directly plagiarised from the F-scale.

Just a bit of fun.

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From that page,

[4]The business man and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and the professor.

An "estimate of fascist receptivity", eh? This was obviously written by a Marxist.

A person who has bad manners, habits, and breeding can hardly expect to get along with decent people.

How the hell is it legitimate to mix good manners with racism?

(Edit: My score was 2.3)

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An "estimate of fascist receptivity", eh? This was obviously written by a Marxist.
I no longer attempt to distinguish between fascism and Marxism. They are an equal threat to my liberty and share the ultimate goals of subordinating individual rights to the will of state, transforming the world into a giant collective, and turning man into a sacrificial animal with no purpose but the service of others.

How the hell is it legitimate to mix good manners with racism?

Note the passage at the bottom of the page

Well, there you have it. For more information, consult T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). It should be noted here that that the authors concluded that it had "still to be demonstrated" if the F-scale actually did, in fact, measure fascist receptivity at a personality level. They were sure it measured something --- but not exactly sure what. T. W. Adorno returned to the University of Frankfurt, where he amused himself as a principal figure in the Frankfurt school of "critical theory", producing a Freudian-Marxist melange of pseudo-scientific speculative foolishness that is now, thank God, thoroughly discredited.
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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
To the extend that the notion of a "political compass" is valid at all, the best online quiz is Politopia.

(If you want to see where I scored, my email is [email protected])

Good old Politopia.

NW-You  would feel most at home in the Northwest region. You advocate a              large degree of economic and personal freedom. Your neighbors include folks like Ayn Rand, Jesse Ventura, Milton Friedman, and Drew Carey, and may refer to themselves as "classical liberals," "libertarians," "market liberals," "old whigs," "objectivists,"              "propertarians," "agorists," or "anarcho-capitalist."

Anarcho-capitalist is a stupid term, though. :P

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NW-You  would feel most at home in the Northwest region. You advocate a large degree of economic and personal freedom. Your neighbors include folks like Ayn Rand, Jesse Ventura, Milton Friedman, and Drew Carey, and may refer to themselves as "classical liberals," "libertarians," "market liberals," "old whigs," "objectivists," "propertarians," "agorists," or "anarcho-capitalist."

I had no idea Drew Carey was NW.

For the curious,

1) "propetarian" is chomskyspeak for advocate of property rights

2) "agorist" is defined here

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  • 6 years later...

The political compass quiz is supposed to be short and simplistic. It is for mass-application. Read up on the origin of the Nolan Chart. Pretty much any of the ones I have seen will place an Objectivist just a bit low and to the left of 100% libertarianism (i.e. full market anarchy), at the top of the diamond in the nolan chart as an example, which is the libertarian minarchist position.

Edited by CapitalistSwine
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[I thought it was better to use an old thread rather than start a new one...]

Economic (Left): -0.88

Social (Libertarian): -2.31

That's easily the most right-wing I've ever been and pretty close to the most authoritarian I've ever been too. When I was maybe 20, I was about -7,-7 deep in the Libertarian Left/Green Square. I was never able to pull off being in the Authoritarian Left/Red Square even during my most rabid Marxist days. political compass may under-estimate left-wing authoritarianism because it treats secular-rationalist views as automatically libertarianism. I've still have moderated a lot over time even if this is still the most left-wing result in this thread. I'll have to wait and see if it stays that way. :D

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