Exactly. The other survey allows for a spectrum between just one thing or another, so I felt more comfortable with my answers there.
It’s okay to not have a middle choice, since you are supposed to just pick the one you agree with more than the other.
The problem is that the choices they offer just to not capture real differences between the right and left. It’s like saying, “Do you like dogs? Or do you like cars?” I can like both, or neither, and they have little to do with each other.
The example I listed was being forced to choose whether people who are on social assistance have it ‘easy’ and are exploiting the aystem, or whether they have it really hard because they aren’t getting enough benefits. That’s a false dischotomy.
I believe that poor people on social assistance have it really hard, but the answer is not more social assistance. In fact, the social assistance they’ve gotten in the form of housing projects and other government ‘help’ have trapped them and made them dependent, just as we trapped First Nations people in Canada by giving them social assistance so long as they stayed on reservations filled with poverty, terrible schools, and little economic opportunity. We incentvized bad choices, and got lots of them.
Another one was a choice between peqce through agrength, or peqce through diplomacy. Again, false dichotomy, as most people on the right would aay that military strength is a prerequisite for diplomacy, and if you want to be successful you need both.
But that kind of nuance is just not allowed nor captured in this silly quiz.
If you really want to be entertaining, Sam, you might show us a few examples of fair, balanced questions that will illustrate a true conservative position juxtaposed with a true liberal position. I promise to find your examples amusing.
Wow, you sure know how to phrase a request. Pass. Next time, try it with less snark.
Yeah, didn’t think you could.
That one was particularly bad. There was no option for ‘mostly past racial discrimination created a vicious circle of poverty, broken families, crime, and poor educational achievement, compounded by a lack of opportunities for the less educated in the modern economy’. But a lot of those questions could have both or neither as a valid answer.
Jesus Christ, you’re trying to boil down 400+ years of a complex racial situation into two sentences–sure you’re going to have the thought that you could do a better job given a few hundred pages of qualifications. As I so politely asked Sam, why don’t you try writing your version of the two-sentence choice so we can make fun of your omissions and absurd oversimplifications?
For my part, they could oversimplify even more–“Black lives matter?” or “All lives matter?”–and I’d be able to pick one, and so could you, if you’d give up your need to nitpick for a second.
So why do you need a flawed, arguably leading question, survey to tell you what you already know?
And why are you so invested in this survey that you feel the need to defend its shortcomings, pointed out by those whom you’ve invited to take it?
I never said I could do a better job. They chose to have only two options, and make it an either/or choice rather than giving a scale.
I told you my answer, and it doesn’t match either option. If it’s so simple, which one should I have picked?
That would be a terrible question, since it’s not about what you actually believe, but which tribe you belong to. Taken literally virtually everyone would say both.
I think I am correct to say that more college students are now women than men. At least in some areas, female voters outnumber male voters. (I cannot easily find national figures.) Women of course live longer than men too.
Since elderly women outlive their husbands, they also inherit more wealth than men do.
This is a terribly worded, poorly thought -out question, so therefore I decline to answer it.
See how that works now?
When did I do that?
I already knew how false equivalence works, thanks.
That word does not mean what you think it means.
I don’t have any theories or evidence to back this up, but these are some differences I’ve noticed between leftists and liberals.
Liberals are more opposed to guns, leftists fully embrace guns.
Liberals reject authoritarianism, leftists embrace left wing authoritarianism. As an example I saw some leftists be deeply disappointed that AOC spoke out in support of the protesters in Cuba.
Liberals believe in heavily regulated capitalism (capitalism with tons of environmental regulations, labor laws, sustainability laws, redistributions, progressive taxes, welfare programs), leftists reject capitalism as a whole.
Leftists tend to assume any failure of left wing governments is due to US intervention. Liberals are more open to the concept that mismanagement plays a role in their failures.
Also leftists hate liberals more than they hate fascists.
I’m a liberal and I endorse this message.
Gotta be some sort of spectrum here, because I’m on it.
That’s kinda the OP question here, in fact: can someone on the lefty-lib spectrum consider himself either one?
Examples: I have no problem with the violent overthrowal of the state, but I’m pretty sure it ain’t happening over my lifetime (twenty years to go, tops, at this point) and there are some “liberal” positions that I want to see enacted in that time: better health care, voting rights, DACA etc.
One of my hardest-core lefty friends is actually friendly to Trump and Trumpism because he sees fascism as essential to a revolution, though when I put that to him bluntly, he denies enabling Trumpism --he says he just doesn’t see a difference between Trump and any other US president in the long run, which I find disingenuous. I see a difference, and if we need to live through a few decades of a right-wing dictatorship to get what we want, I’m agin it.
I honestly can’t tell which label is better for me, lib or lefty. Sounds like Wesley Clark is putting me squarely in the lib camp. Maybe so. But I often find them wishy-washy, too eager to compromise, too satisfied with the status quo. Maybe that’s just their public posture, to get re-elected in a climate that that finds left-wing positions unacceptable?
I wrote this flippantly but, in the cool, morning light, I notice that the list of distinctions between leftists and liberals says very little about economics.
I am a lefty as well as a liberal. I even find it weird that you present these two ideas in distinction.
There are 100 years of left-wing governments that would describe themselves as both socialist and liberal.
It’s only through a weird artefact of late twentieth-century American politics that “liberal” came to mean “left, but not very much”.
Marx made a distinction between revolutionary socialists and democratic socialists. Perhaps the latter is what you mean by “liberal”?
Well, obviously, I don’t spend a lot of effort on labels, which is why I’m curious which one applies to me. I don’t know, and care little. Maybe you’re right that it’s entirely possible to be both, with no distinction necessary, simultaneously. I don’t enjoy being a “member” of anything, and my political philosophy is the simple one I outlined at first: far too much wealth is concentrated in the wealthy and far too little in the poor, so how do you fix that? The older I get (and I’ve just about hit “maximum old”) the more radical I become because the one lesson I’ve learned is that if you try to do it too gradually, too “reasonably”, it never gets done, so I’m more focused on what giant steps can we take now to improve wealth distribution for the people living today. Fuck the long-range future. That’s bullshit.