2004-09-29 - 4:59 p.m.

political compass

I managed to stumble accross the political compass and took the test. This site correctly points out that the traditional definitions of left and right are less and less meaningful these days and plots your position on the political compass from the responses given to the questions. The X-axis show the traditional economic view of left-right and the Y-axis which tries to represent the social scope, although I found many of the questions relating to this area to be ambiguous.

So I end up in the NW quarter at Economic -1.88 and Social +2.56 (both on a scale of -10.0 to +10.0) sitting pretty. They provide a graph of current and former world leaders on which I find myself right on top of Pope John Paul II. Not bad for a bigot and racist like me. There was no one else in my area of the graph and the next nearest person was Gerhard Schroder *shivers*.

Nothing surprising to me then, but it raises a few interesting points, that

• "conservative Democrats tend to have more in common with Republicans than with the liberals within their own ranks", a statement in whose context seems to expect to shock the reader, a sad sign that the millions that vote Democrat in the States and Labor here are happily unaware of
• the British parties New Labour and the Conservatives which correspond very closely to Labor and Liberal here sit virtually on top of each other, and yet we are to be passionately in favour of one over the other?
• despite claiming objectivism the site still uses emotive terms to refer to the BNP
• the BNP is placed directly to the north of me by about 5 points which when taking into account media portrayal is reassuring
• they make no attempt to understand Michael Peroutka

None of which means much with the election approaching as the more you think, the more you despair of the situation. There is no prerequisite for being able to choose your government. Explains why all of the western world leaders are in the same 20% of the map.

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