Anyway, the questionaire was odd. For example, it asked me about abortion
This is the fundamental problem with the test: pointless questions or badly-formulated questions that indicate a lack of understanding of the underlying issues.
Abortion is a "hot button issue", not a political indicator. People who believe in it think it's a medical decision and people who think it's wrong consider it infanticide. It's not really an ideological issue but an issue of where one believes human life begins. Even the most libertarian Libertarian would be against infanticide, and rare would be the authoritarian who would object to elective surgery for the removal of a benign tumor. Does it have anything to do with political ideology? I don't think so.
And spanking children is "authoritarian"? Bullshit. Not letting your kids play violent video games or eat junk food or play Dungeons and Dragons or watch R-rated movies is way more authoritarian than the specific nature of punishment being corporal when a rule is actually broken.
The death penalty is "authoritarian"? Compared to what? Life in prison? Why? (Giving serial killers parole would be very libertarian, but not even Libertarians want that.) Where one comes down on "Three Strikes" laws is way more indicative of one's authoritarianism than the death penalty.
More revealing still is one's stand on "victimless crimes" and "sin taxes" in such areas as prostitution, drugs, gambling, trans fats, cigarettes, off-label prescription drugs, financial services, manicure / pedicure licensing, etc.
What happens to serial killers is going to be very bad for the killer and very good for the rest of society, whatever specific mode of segregation of the former from the latter is employed, and it really has almost nothing to do with political ideology compared to a lot of other much more important ideas.
Lastly there's foreign policy, which is too complicated to put on the graph with everything else. Walter Russel Meade has his own 4-axis graph for dealing with this issue and it's still an oversimplification.
But even if you do think foreign policy opinions belong on this graph as an indicator of ideology (and for Transnational Progressives you'd have a point), the quiz author's questions are pure nonsense:
Military action that defies international law is sometimes justified.
This scores support for "international law" as "libertarian".
Question: Does the fact that the action is military make it authoritarian, or the fact that it defies international law?
If the former, is it never authoritarian to support international military operations? If the nature of the military action is what makes it authoritarian doesn't that make the mention of "international law" in this context a red herring?
If the latter, how is it libertarian to endorse centralized rule by distant authority over home rule by local authority?
What about America's defiance of "international law" against U.N. censorship of religious speech? Does the stately imprimatur of "international law" magically transform censorship from authoritarian to libertarian?
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Topic: Where Are You On The Political Compass? (Read 41042 times)