Where do you stand politically?

[ed_jaxon]

Normally I am loathe to put any test out there that divides people but this one made me really think about where I stand on a number of issues.

While I hate the Briggs-Meyers and other personality tests, I actually got something out of this exercise.

Be interesting to see where others lie.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

[Prospero]

No one who reads the stuff I post will be surprised to see I am even further "left" by this little test's criteria than the OP.

[trish]

Here's mine ->

[Faldur]

Ya, doubt there will be many surprises here, holy crap i lean to the right. Who'd a thunk.. Thanks for posting Ed, fun stuff.

[Stavros]

I am in the same square as Prospero and Trish, but further to the right of the former and the right of the latter, but lower down. It becomes problematic when you look at the other charts, for example the one with the composers. I do not think Beethoven can be put on the left, I have always thought him a boring German nationalist as far as his politics are concerned -and he wasn't that interested in it anyway, and the same is true of Shostakovich -who joined the Communist Party in 1960, and Prokofiev -a man I thought well-known for his conservative attitude. Putting Wagner on the authoritarian right ignores his hostility to modern industry and his latent/partial homosexuality, I suspect he is there for his half-baked political ideas rather than the manner in which he lived his life, most of it on borrowed money. If he was anything, he was an anarchist.

Even more controversial is the idea that Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot are on the left, their fixation with state power has nothing to do with equality of opportunity, or equality of any kind, if that is a cardinal value on the left. Whatever. I did the Ichonochasms test and got 30 right out of the 49 questions. And apparently, if I was an American citizen, there would be noone for me to vote for!

Anyway, thanks for the link Ed! But where are you on the chart...or is it a secret?

[Prospero]

One of the difficulties with anything of this sort - in the modern world - is that simple definitions of right and left break down all the time.

The Right in the US, for instance, accuse liberals of sharing common ideological ground with islamists. (Whether this is a genuine belieby the Right or simply a smear it is hard to tell).

If they really examined that claim it would be obvious to them that it is palpable nonsense. The real authoritarian viewpoint of the radical Jihadist with his reactionary view of the role of women, his faith in God and his divine laws actually has far more to do with some on the religious right than anyone on the liberal left spectrum. That is just one example.

Equally those on the Liberal left who are accused, by Tea party supporters of being communists, have virtually no shared ground with the classic Marxist-Leninist ideas which define state communism.

And then on the Left many believe that radical free market defenders are also automatically racist or of the religious right. Of course there is an overlap and you do find far more racism on the right than on the left.

But again it is a distortion and a simplification.
All too simplistic.

[Prospero]

Surely that first chart was Eds?

[onmyknees]

No one who reads the stuff I post will be surprised to see I am even further "left" by this little test's criteria than the OP.

No....really ? Understatement of the decade.

I got well into the test , and while I understand the attempt....I found many of the questions to be too absolute. Life's decesions and answers do not lend themselves one sentence questions, rarely are things that black and white, but it was interesting.

[iagodelgado]

Fun.

I ended up more or less beside Trish.

[SammiValentine]

lots of questions have double points or examples that you want to agree with one bit and disagree the other. its tricky to complete. :P