Thursday, June 26, 2008

The political compass and where I am on it.

Ever heard of the political compass? It's a very cool graph that shows you where you stand on economics (Left or Right) and on social issues (authoritarian and libertarian). In doing so it dispels with the archaic idea of 'Left vs. Right = Commies vs. Fascists' because the idea that social authoritarianism and economic neo-liberalism inherently go together is, frankly, a load of bull (ever seen the LDP?). Because of the way the political compass is designed, we can see that communism and fascism aren't opposites, as communism is an economic model and fascism is a social model. Hence, the classic 'Left vs. Right' graph is fundamentally flawed.

The compass changes this so that the opposite of communism is neo-liberalism, and the opposite of authoritarianism is libertarianism.This is where I stand. Unsurprising, really. The classic 'leftist' of politics (the one that would be the moderate left on the older political scale) and where most other member of the GrodsMilitary would stand. Funnily enough, when I first took the test in yr11, I was either 1 square or 2 squares, on both scales, from being as far-left and far-libertarian as possible. How I've mellowed in my slightly less old age.

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