The Ultimate Political Compass Thread

Great Debates
1

The Ultimate Political Compass Thread

And so, journey’s end:

Does The Political Compass give an accurate reading?
Political Compass #1: Globalisation, Humanity and OmniCorp.
#2: My country, right or wrong
#3: Pride in one’s country is foolish.
#4: Superior racial qualities.
#5: My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
#6: Justifying illegal military action.
#7: “Info-tainment” is a worrying trend.
#8: Class division vs. international division. (+ SentientMeat’s economic worldview)
#9: Inflation vs. unemployment.
#10: Corporate respect of the environment.
#11: From each according to his ability, to each according to need.
#12: Sad reflections in branded drinking water.
#13: Land should not be bought and sold.
#14: Many personal fortunes contribute nothing to society.
#15: Protectionism is sometimes necessary in trade.
#16: Shareholder profit is a company’s only responsibility.
#17: The rich are too highly taxed.
#18: Better healthcare for those who can pay for it.
#19: Penalising businesses which mislead the public.
#20: The freer the market, the freer the people.
#21: Abortion should be illegal.
#22: All authority must be questioned.
#23: An eye for an eye.
#24: Taxpayers should not prop up theatres or museums.
#25: Schools shouldn’t make attendance compulsory.
#26: Different kinds of people should keep to their own.
#27: Good parents sometimes have to spank their children.
#28: It’s natural for children to keep secrets.
#29: Marijuana should be legalised.
#30: School’s prime function is equipping kids to find jobs.
#31: Seriously disabled people should not reproduce.
#32: Learning discipline is the most important thing.
#33: ‘Savage peoples’ vs. ‘different culture’
#34: Society should not support those who refuse to work.
#35: Keep cheerfully busy when troubled.
#36: First generation immigrants can never be fully integrated.
#37: What’s good for corporations is always good for everyone.
#38: No broadcasting institution should receive public funding.
#39: Our civil rights are being excessively curbed re. terrorism.
#40: One party states avoid delays to progress.
#41: Only wrongdoers need worry about official surveillance.
#42: The death penalty should be an option for serious crimes.
#43: Society must have people above to be obeyed.
#44: Abstract art that doesn’t represent anything isn’t art at all.
#45: Punishment is more important than rehabilitation.
#46: It is a waste of time to try to rehabilitate some criminals.
#47: Businessmen are more important than writers and artists.
#48: A mother’s first duty is to be a homemaker.
#49: Companies exploit the Third World’s plant genetic resources.
#50: Mature people make peace with the establishment.
#51: Astrology accurately explains many things.
#52: You cannot be moral without being religious.
#53: Charity is better than social secuity.
#54: Some people are naturally unlucky
#55: Schools and religious values.
#56: Sex outside marriage is usually immoral.
#57: Gay couples should not be excluded from adoption.
#58: Pornography should be legal.
#59: Adult bedroom activity is no business of the state.
#60: No one can feel naturally homosexual.
#61: Society’s openness about sex is going to far.

My reasons for embarking on this exploration of each proposition were:
[ul][li]To understand, without mischaracterisation, opposing viewpoints. So frequently and easily are strawmen built in political debate (especially in America, or so it seems) that they often leave room for nothing else on the battlefield. [/li][li]To explore the issues, the philosophical positions, the policies themselves, rather than the party or personality which merely symbolises or advocates such positions (often misleadingly - see point 1), especially in this year of a US election in which partisan hysteria and misinformation played more part than any I can remember.[/li][li]To provide a quick bookmarkable resource for future political discussions on almost any issue: if the basics have been covered here, they might provide a useful platform from which to explore recent developments or news items. If it seems that the basics are the problem, again, the Political Compass thread on that subject might provide a less shrilly partisan summary of the opposing sides of that coin (and could be found simply by entering “Ultimate Political Compass” in the search box.)[/ul][/li]How successful has this been, In My Opinion? In the same order as above:
[ul][li]Fairly successful: Strawmen were, by and large, kept to a minimum. At least, whenever one reared its head I or someone else would quickly call it as such, and that poster would either back up with “What I meant was…” or simply leave the threads altogether, perhaps realising that they were not the place for inflammatory drive-bys. If any of those people stopped for one moment and thought “Hey, you know, maybe the people I’m characterising as X or Y don’t actually exist, at least not in anything like the numbers I’m proposing?”, this is no small success.[/li][li]Very successful: Look through the threads. How often do you see the words “Bush”, “Blair”, “Labour” or “Republican”? Almost never. You’re far more likely to see the names of philosophers, economists and political figures of the past. This is as it should be in political debate, IMO - I don’t even really want to know these currently “newsworthy” people’s names. (Perhaps this also explains why some of the Straight Dope usernames you see in GD so often pop up only rarely in these particular threads: Did they find them intimidating, academic to ‘real’ politics, or just boring?)[/li][li]Very successful: There were very few threads in which we didn’t get to the real “meat” almost instantly, and the discussions thereafter tended to be pretty concentrated - I think each thread stands quite well as an introduction to each issue. Going through them now, I can’t really see any in which an important point has not been made, even if they might be shorter on detailed citations than other GD threads.[/ul][/li]
So what of us Dopers? I can tell you that the average Doper lies at (-1.26, -3.63): ie. having a strong dedication to social liberty, while at the same time recognising the role of both capitalism and taxation on the economic axis. I’ve picked out a few members as a representative sample, rounding to an easily presented number. First, the vertical Social score.

Authoritarian (10)

8: Brutus
|
|
|
V

1.5 Bricker
0.5: Airman Doors, Debaser, Shodan
0 Arbitrary zero

-1.5: Rune, furt, cckerberos
-2.5 JRDelirious, JackMannii, John Mace
-3.5 Mangetout, Siege, pervert
-4.5 erislover, RickJay
-5 Ramanujan
-6 jshore, Aldebaran, Jonathan Chance
-7 Reeder, Left Hand of Darkness
-8 Olentzero, Gest, SentientMeat
Libertarian (-10)

What does this mean? Well, clearly, we are a pretty anti-authoritarian bunch: in fact, I consider that there is something about democracy and the open exchange of ideas which eventually necessitates a rejection of socially authoritarian government. And yet, where do the actual politicians who govern our respective democracies lie on this axis? Astonishingly, of all of us, nearest Brutus! The leaders of the free world do an extremely good job of pretending to advocate social liberty, while actually limiting it enormously. The only way to expose their true authoritarian nature, I would suggest, is to have these exact same arguments in public.

As for the horizontal economic axis, we were spread far more evenly (read this left to right):

Left(-10) Olentzero (-8.5), LHOD, Gest, jshore (-7.5), SMeat, Reeder, Mangetout (-5), erislover, Alde (-4), JRD, Jackmanni (-3), Siege (-1)

—>Arbitrary Zero—>

JChance, RickJay, AirDoors (0.5), Rama, furt (2), Debaser, MG (3.5), Shodan (5), JohnM, Bricker, perv (6.5), Rune, cckerberos, Brutus (8) Right (10)
What of this, then? Firstly, I think it shows that dividing social and economic issues is extremely useful, since two people can be quite similar on one axis but massively different on the other. Those two people would even interpret their economic positions in terms of authoritarianism/libertarianism differently. US-type Libertarians see authoritarianism in government taxation, while European-type Libertarians see authoritarianism in law-of-the-jungle capitalism.

And yet the two extremes on the spectrum are not really so different, I believe. So long as we all advocate democracy (and we didn’t find anyone who rejected it outright), then economics in a democracy really just comes down to some kind of balance between efficiency and welfare in pursuit of something called progress. The Right may argue that efficiency (“progress”) has a byproduct of increasing the welfare of the electorate in the long run. The Left holds that attending to the electorate’s wellbeing (“progress”) has a byproduct of increasing efficiency in the long run. The Right may find the inefficiency in the Left’s approach unacceptable, the Left may consider that the Right allows an unacceptable level of suffering. Each might label the other “unfair”. Clearly, neither approach has its heart in entirely the wrong place: I’d suggest that whether the same goal is achieved by money called “tax” or money called “private property” is ultimately as arbitrarily distinct as “we did it” is to “you and I did it”.

Now, that’s not to say that slight differences in opinion about the exact approach to take in pursuit of similar goals might not, like the butterfly’s wings and the weather, have enormously different consequences: For example, our great grandchildren might read these very threads in order to understand what economic justification could possibly have led us not to, say, restrict our carbon emissions when we had the chance. But none of us are Stalins or Pinochets: None of us want suffering or oppression, or are utterly indifferent to it. We merely attach different priorities to different statistics, advocating different paths to what is perhaps ultimately a similar destination. Again, I believe that to characterise the opponents we find here otherwise is simple strawmanship, and would hope that you can join me in respecting those who lie far from you on either axis.

Many thanks to all who contributed, especially those who contributed in almost every thread: John Mace, Rune, Debaser, MGibson, Shodan, xtisme and BobLibDem, to name a few who come to mind. Curiously (Bob excepted), these guys all inhabited the far Right of the Compass. I suppose that might be expected since I, a far leftist, opened all of the debates (which perhaps attracts opposition more than agreement), but it was curious how often I found myself up against several of them at a time - did other leftists consider I was doing a decent enough job on my own, or is there something in the rightist position which somehow has an affinity for these, more “fundamental” and “meaty”, political discussions? (Having said that, Brutus, the most right-wing and authoritarian of us all, rarely showed up either - a shame really, since I would have liked to have heard his responses to many of my OP’s).

So, the debate of the debates (and I would appreciate it if, for completeness, this thread were allowed to stay in GD despite some apparent IMHO characteristics): what do you think this lot shows, if anything? Has your score changed at all (try it again now and see) in the course of it? Did it, and does it, serve any purpose? Did you get anything from it? I’ll try and get someone involved with the Compass itself to register here as a Guest - if they are gracious enough to make an appearance, please extend to them the courtesy you showed me in the threads themselves.

I hope I may have convinced some of you here that your opponent (in any political debate) might actually hold a tenable position upon which two reasonable people can agree to differ, rather than being the shrill and hysterical knee-jerker you thought they were; indeed, that people are generally more like you than you first realise. If there is one Ultimate Point of this Ultimate Thread, it is that there is no Them and Us. There is only, Ultimately, Us.

2

I’d like to first thank you, SentientMeat for this series of threads. They have been a notable exception to the business as usual partisan bickering that GD can become sometimes. Your series stands as an example for the high ideals we should all hope to achieve in our debates on the SDMB.

3

Agreed. However, I don’t think there is anything wrong with discussing current events or debating current events in GD. It’s just nice to look at the high level view as well, which is what these threads did.

A general debate on “Levels of Taxation” often makes for a better and more meaningful debate than a more specific focus on “Are George Bush’s tax cuts good?”.

Sadly, I don’t think we can learn much from the results of posters taking the compass test. As has been pointed out by conservative posters before, the compass has many tainted statements that don’t even have a conservative answer. Further, many of the statements are so poorly worded as to be entirely useless. I’d much rather gauge the leanings of the SDMB through voting patterns or registrations than by the results of this test.

Oddly, I would say that IMO your statements came the closest to a rejection of democracy, SM. Your views that the constitution is a outdated document, and your seeming willingness to ignore it is something that I find most chilling. To me, a rejection of the constitution (for an American at least, which I know you are not) is a rejection of democracy. This document is our democracy, or at least the basis for it. If it’s ignored and disregarded than that would quite possibly be a lethal blow to our democracy, IMHO.

You nailed it with this paragraph.

I love it when I see someone on the other side of the political spectrum that at least understands this fundamental difference. It’s been my experience that many people on the left side of the political spectrum simply don’t get this. Conservative philosophy seems to be quite a mystery to some, and the result is simply an assumtion of meanness or evil. I don’t think any meaningful converstation is possible if one side thinks the other side is evil and cruel. It is possible if one side thinks the other side is wrong. That’s a point that is at least solid enough to begin a foundation of understanding, if not acceptance of the opposing point of view.

I’d tend to agree with this. If I read an OP of which I entirely agree, I’m most likely to simply nod in agreement and move along to reading other threads. I, like most other dopers I suspect, read a lot more threads than I participate in. It’s when I read a well thought out and logical thread in which I disagree that I’m likely to jump in a post with a thought or two of my own.

For example, there are many threads bashing Bush on subjects where I agree with the bashers. Stem cell research is a recent example. I find I have no interest in jumping on the bashing. Everything I think has already been said and there’s nobody taking the other side. (Or a very outnumbered few. Social conservatives are rare on the SDMB.) I’d much rather jump into a thread where Bush is being bashed on a subject where I feel it’s not warranted.

I’ll check back in and let you know.

The compass itself: No. The debates in these threads: Yes.

4

I just wanted to say how much I have appreciated these threads. Thank you, SentientMeat.

I came to these boards when the Political Compass was in full swing, and only saw a handful of them as they were actually posted and debated, but I’ve gone back and read thru quite a few, and found that they were indeed helpful in gaining some understanding of positions that I myself don’t take.

Frankly, I’m hoping that the Mods will see fit to eventually sticky this post or something so that the links are easily found and accessed. What drew me to the SDMB was the level of intelligence and the quality of the reasoning I saw in the GD forums, and the Political Compass threads may be the best, most consistent example of that.

Good job, everyone.

5

SentientMeat,

While I didn’t participate in most of the threads due to limited time constraints on my part, I followed most of them as much as possible. This lurker would like to say thanks for bringing a level of discourse across multiple threads that rivals some of the best independent debates we’ve had around here.

6

Though I’m not so much a lurker; what DMC said. Thank you SM.

7

What he said.

Regards,
Shodan

8

Good job on putting this whole thing together, SM.

As flawed as the comapss is (in terms of questions and limitations on answers) it did put me exactly where I would’ve put myself, so in my case at least it was an accurate guage.

I enjoyed the debates, although the regulars pretty much took predictable positions on the propositions most of the time. All in all though, a worthwhile experience as it gave some good insights into the thinking behind the various positions.

9

Thanks a million Sentient Meat. This has been my favorite GD series. I’ve changed my position on a few items based on the dialogue here, but no more than one position on any issue. The discussions all were, as I recall, quite civilized. I learned a few things along the way. Good show!

10

First, thanks and congrats to the OP for a series of excellent threads as well as a very well-written and insightful summary. I share Debaser’s approbation for:

this paragraph, and I think it is an excellent precis of the left/right tension that we see here daily.

As one of the very few here with a positive score on the Authoritarian/Libertarian axis, I’d like to comment a bit further on this:

I would argue that this is an area in which Dopers are going to be far from a representative sample of the United States, to pick a particularly influential representative democracy. Are the leaders of the free world mirroring their constituencies, and the disconnect simply with the fact that this message boards attracts those more disposed to a libertarian than an authoritarian bent? Or is there truly a chasm between the elected leadership and the Teeming Voting Millions?

11

I was surprised when I looked at the graph (linked to in a ATMB thread) of Doper Scores on the Political Compass just how heavily toward the Libertarian side responses were tilted. (I’m not sure why I’m surprised, especially given that my own score followed that trend.)

I’ve read bits and pieces of many of the threads, participated in a few, and I’ve found some of them instructive as to how people think about issues, and others instructive about how people think about words. It has surprised me how many people have reacted to one or more thread with the objection that they felt that the statement was slanted to make an honest answer for them impossible. On the other hand, it hasn’t surprised me, but has irritated me, to se how many people think that the way that they would answer the question is the only possible way to answer the question.

My guess (reacting to Bricker’s words which appear on my screen) is that the Teeming Millions are more libertarian than the average American. But, I suspect that there is a tendency towards authoritarianism in most leaders, elected or otherwise. I think there is a tendency towards “I know how things should be” which correlates strongly with authoritarianism in most would be elected leaders. Of course, the potential for the scores reported in the graph to not be representative of the Teeming Millions at large also exists given the self-reporting nature of those scores.

12

I’ve nothing to add except:

  1. Like Debaser, I’m uncertain of the utility of the test and found many of the questions maddeningly vague. That’s why I didn’t post much in the threads. Nonetheless, I lurked a lot and most of the discussions were very useful and educational.
  2. Did the test again and my scores moved slightly, both towards the arbitrary zero; I appear to be turning into AirmanDoors.
  3. One more “thank you” to SM for an outstanding series of threads. We oughta come up with some sort of prize for these sorts of efforts.
13

How about a no prize?

14

As someone who is generally too scared to get involved in anything political, I wanted to echo the sentiment that this series of threads was really cool, and that I enjoyed reading them. Thanks very much SentientMeat.

15

I find this puzzling.

A Constitution is, in some sense, anti-democratic if we take the exact meaning of that word. Even with a looser definition it’s really a constraint on democracy, requiring that certain areas of the law have a super-majority in order to pass. I think a constitution is one of the greatest political inventions, but it certainly isn’t necessary for democracy. The UK, for instance, has no constution.

Additionally, calling the Constitution outdated is not the same as recomending that it be scrapped. Has SM advanced the cause of scrapping the Constitution, or just changing certain aspect of it? I never picked this up from his postings.

16

Funny, I thought my score would be much more conservative than it was.

Economic Left/Right: 0.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.92

puts me dang near the center of the cross hairs.

Great threads Sentient Meat, you are to be given plaudits and Kudos.

17

Economic Left/Right: -1.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.46

I wish I had found this series earlier as I would like to have participated. Now, at this late stage, all I have is the daunting task of having to read all of these threads. There goes my weekend! Yeah, thanks SM :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously: I join the chorus of “good job” and look forward to more debates of this quality started by you or others inspired/informed by this exercise.

18

My hat is also off to ya SM…great series of threads. I actually got much more out of your series of threads than I did the test itself…which I assume was your whole point. It was a very good idea of yours to use the test to expand the dialogue between the various elements here on the board.

Kudos and all that…can’t wait for your next series. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

19

Since you actually asked some questions I figures I’d go ahead and answer them, having given you your just rewards of praise. :slight_smile:

I tried it again about a month ago and got virtually the same score (just for reference since you didn’t use me on your chart I was Libertarian/Right, Economic Left/Right: 4.50, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.18). I suppose that the biggest thing I got out of the series was how others interpereted some of the questions differently from myself…what assumptions they used and what conclusions they drew from those assumptions.

My score? From my perspective its about where I figured I’d fall…somewhere close to the middle of the road. From the perspective of folks attempting to judge my stances by my score, I’m unsure how much use it really is. If you meant the series of threads though, I found them quite useful and they served the purpose of open discussion on the various topics…and as I said it was an interesting insight into the assumptions people make when reading the questions, and how those assumptions, along with their various world views, drove their answers.

A deeper insight into where many of the dopers on the board are coming from and a smaller insight into their thought processes.
What actually surprised me most was not how often we (the participants I mean) all clashed…but how many questions we essentially agreed on. It was funny to see peoples expectations punctured as their assumptions on what a given poster would or would not answer was dashed. This happened on both sides of the isle, but I think most often it happened when assumptions were made about the ‘right wing’ dopers and many of the social questions. I could practically hear the eyes popping on some of them. :slight_smile:

Anyway, just my two cents worth.

-XT

20

I’ve taken the test many times. In my response to the first thread, I gave my score as -5.75, -1.79. Now my reading is -5.00, -3.69. I seem to be drifting dangerously to the right.