Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

TC said:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
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Thanks.

Your Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -6.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.82

2EAxhdT.png



I never expected to be the most extreme around here :blink:
 
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TC said:
In regards to big government, it has little to do with physical size, but rather the amount of authority they have over our lives. Now of course the more authority they grant themselves, the more people they're going to need to enforce that authority, and that will cost a lot of money, which increases taxes, etc. But it's still the amount of authority that is the problem. And it's why people get mad when they see the government interfering in our lives in pointless ways over pointless things. They have too much authority. Just like they had too much authority over what you do in your bedroom, for example, and they needed to be taken down a peg.

The reason the government tried to dictate what you could do in your bedroom is because they got too big, too much authority over too many things, it wasn't because they had legitimate authority over your bedroom but they made a few bad decisions over it.

There are some things government should not have any authority over, but when you have people who believe the government should have authority over everything, for our own protection, that is how you end up with a bloated overreaching government. That is how you end up with lemonade stands getting shut down by cops. That is how you get sodomy laws.

At least that is my stupid libertarian view of things.
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Of course we're discussing amount of authority. I'm...not even sure how to reliably measure the physical size of a government? Perhaps number of employees, but even that feels like a poor approximation.

More to the point, the government has the authority that we grant it. We still have a massive drone war and electronic surveillance and marijuana laws because we as a collective society are ok with it. Or at least apathetic. Sure, subsets have been railing against them for a long time, but collectively it's been insufficient to get action. But if society decides enough, then it changes the government. Slowly, to be sure, but that's the way the founding fathers preferred it. We're seeing that societal change on a state-by-state basis with marijuana, we saw it with the US entrance into the World Wars, end of the Vietnam War, etc etc. If society tolerates it, it continues. Jim Crow laws weren't imposed on a tolerant South by overreaching state governments, they were passed by a racist society.

All of this is open to abuse, but what human system isn't? It's only allowed to become and remain abusive because of collectively being ok or apathetic about it. Did the societies of those cities/states that shut down lemonade stands change the laws that granted the authority to do so, or did they move on after it dropped off the news and leave the laws and authority in place?
 
PelicanHazard said:
Of course we're discussing amount of authority. I'm...not even sure how to reliably measure the physical size of a government? Perhaps number of employees, but even that feels like a poor approximation.

More to the point, the government has the authority that we grant it. We still have a massive drone war and electronic surveillance and marijuana laws because we as a collective society are ok with it. Or at least apathetic. Sure, subsets have been railing against them for a long time, but collectively it's been insufficient to get action. But if society decides enough, then it changes the government. Slowly, to be sure, but that's the way the founding fathers preferred it. We're seeing that societal change on a state-by-state basis with marijuana, we saw it with the US entrance into the World Wars, end of the Vietnam War, etc etc. If society tolerates it, it continues. Jim Crow laws weren't imposed on a tolerant South by overreaching state governments, they were passed by a racist society.

All of this is open to abuse, but what human system isn't? It's only allowed to become and remain abusive because of collectively being ok or apathetic about it. Did the societies of those cities/states that shut down lemonade stands change the laws that granted the authority to do so, or did they move on after it dropped off the news and leave the laws and authority in place?
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Even the war for independence was only supported by like 3% of the population, vocal minority can get a lot of things done.
 
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This went literally in the opposite direction I imagined. Curious
 
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Boy I'm left-leaning for UK standards...

And more anarchist than communist.
 
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PelicanHazard said:
Of course we're discussing amount of authority. I'm...not even sure how to reliably measure the physical size of a government? Perhaps number of employees, but even that feels like a poor approximation.

More to the point, the government has the authority that we grant it. We still have a massive drone war and electronic surveillance and marijuana laws because we as a collective society are ok with it. Or at least apathetic. Sure, subsets have been railing against them for a long time, but collectively it's been insufficient to get action. But if society decides enough, then it changes the government. Slowly, to be sure, but that's the way the founding fathers preferred it. We're seeing that societal change on a state-by-state basis with marijuana, we saw it with the US entrance into the World Wars, end of the Vietnam War, etc etc. If society tolerates it, it continues. Jim Crow laws weren't imposed on a tolerant South by overreaching state governments, they were passed by a racist society.

All of this is open to abuse, but what human system isn't? It's only allowed to become and remain abusive because of collectively being ok or apathetic about it. Did the societies of those cities/states that shut down lemonade stands change the laws that granted the authority to do so, or did they move on after it dropped off the news and leave the laws and authority in place?
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This was a discussion about Big Gov vs. Bad Gov, not about the inability of the people to get government to respond to our outrage. I don't dispute that our ability to hold government responsible and force through changes is pathetically ineffectual. I consider that a problem too. Because we definitely didn't vote on a lot of this stuff. Neither did our elected officials run their campaigns on these things either. A lot of this stuff is simply our government taking it upon themselves to take authority over without the approval or consent, or even knowledge in some cases, of the American people.

It also doesn't help when people like me point out that these outrages are the result of big government, only to be smeared as a crazy anarchist that wants no government, who should be ignored.
 
Oh, come on... according to that test, in the last three presidential elections, the US voted the most left-leaning candidate among the two main ones... (yes, including The Donald).
 
Me, a lawyer from Soviet Norwaystan, working for the immigration authorities got this result:

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RdKetchup said:
Thanks.

Your Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -6.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.82

2EAxhdT.png



I never expected to be the most extreme around here :blink:
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Don't worry, you are not. Here's mine:

Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.82
 
I suspect the poll is a bit skewed.

I mean, most of us who answered came out in the libertarian left area. Is it a bias of this group or a bias of the test?

Well, we are probably a strange sample ourselves, but we are here for cars, not for politics, and unless most car people interested in politics are lefties (which would tell many things about the other currents), it means the test is a bit... not so unbiased.

If we put the "0" when our small sample sets its median, for example, we see that we do have different ideas, and while me and LeV are the extremes, we see that most of us sits in a more definable middle, and it is far more easier to put things into perspective.

This is of course true for the "left-right" dimension. The sample is really too small, and the differences too low for the Autoritarian/Libertarian dimension.
 
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