Your Political Compass

[obsidianavenger]

you mean like rand paul who insists on being paid for the work he does?

thats not really receiving a benefit of the welfare state... medicare renumeration rates for doctors are famously poor... thats why many hospitals/doctors only accept a certain number of medicare patients. they wouldn't be able to afford to stay open otherwise.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/06/21/More-doctors-refusing-Medicare-patients/UPI-20241277133043/

 

[kenandkids]

@obsidianavenger

Since you mentioned suing as a recourse, let me ask you:

What government services (like judges) are legitimate and which are theft? I've asked others this question and invariably anything that could help someone else was considered theft. Or perhaps you imagine corporate judges?

Ijust noticed the exclusion for Rand Paul, yes... plenty of people to excuse for one excuse or another...

 

[obsidianavenger]

@obsidianavenger

Since you mentioned suing as a recourse, let me ask you:

What government services (like judges) are legitimate and which are theft? I've asked others this question and invariably anything that could help someone else was considered theft. Or perhaps you imagine corporate judges?

Ijust noticed the exclusion for Rand Paul, yes... plenty of people to excuse for one excuse or another...

actually i don't think much of rand paul... he's little more than a tea party populist stooge. i was just commenting that its not inconsistent with libertarianism to want to get paid for services rendered.

as for legitimate tasks of government- law courts, police, military. basically protecting people from each other as they go about their business. monopoly on force. etc.

some libertarians think these can be funded through taxes, others maintain that voluntary user fees apply and that only those who pay get coverage. of course, to be truly consistent a libertarian would have to be an anarchist in the end, which is why i gave up on pure libertarianism. but yeah. libertarians believe that the only legitimate use of the government is to prevent people from initiating force against other people. which includes suing those that harm others against their will.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

You mean like Ayn Rand, who preached this antisocial bullshit and then collected Social Security and Medicare when she needed it? Or her acolyte Rand Paul, who votes against benefits but as a doctor insists on getting the highest Medicare payment rates possible? Libertarians are people who want for themselves and want to make sure no one else gets anywhere. You can fill in the blanks on the mental and emotional defects that are required to hold that viewpoint.

I mean exactly like that.

They hate paying taxes and yet they never voluntarily immigrate to nations that exemplify the anti-government stance. Maybe expecting a little political honesty is a bit much when one enjoys the clean water, available leisure parks, unspoiled food, working infrastructure,etc.. Every example of Rand's Pardise is a wartorn wreck, because all of the good libertarians do there what they do here, take from everyone possible and complain loudly at being victimised. Here we have a government that stops them from murdering each other and their victims in the open, not like the libertarians utopia of Somalia...

Well, they want the government to serve them, and to not serve other people. They want the protections of the social contract when it helps them, and they want it all cut when it helps people they feel are unworthy. When other people use a government service they are parasites, but when they use it they are deserving of it. Usually and not coincidentally those "other" people are poor and brown...

 

[ImprobableJoe]

...or Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, who plans on destroying America's social safety net, even though he collected Social Security after his father died. He's been collecting a government paycheck and government benefits for over a decade, as do the rest of the Republican politicians who attack government employee benefits and pensions. Fucking scumbags.

 

[Andiferous]

Eh there, not all of you have even tried this test and braved your results. If not, I've got a mind to torment you silly for commenting on the thread. If I am remiss, please feel free to post your link and feed me crow.

Edit: Or if you like let me know and I could make a new thread or something, but I'd much rather bully you into taking the test.

 

[obsidianavenger]

...or Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, who plans on destroying America's social safety net, even though he collected Social Security after his father died. He's been collecting a government paycheck and government benefits for over a decade, as do the rest of the Republican politicians who attack government employee benefits and pensions. Fucking scumbags.

i'm sorry, i usually ignore your posts, because i know nothing good will come of responding, but you're completely missing the point. libertarians collect social security because they've been forced to pay into it at every paycheck, and SS is the only way to recoup those losses. they want the money to stop being forcibly taken out of people's pay; that doesn't mean they should just abandon the money thats already been taken out of their own.

furthermore, politicians who are trying to change the system are doing a job and get paid for that job. perhaps in their ideal system, their job would be eliminated... but until it is they are doing it and should get paid for it.

 

[TheJilvin]

Mine is a little bit different with the economics. I don't believe that I am far enough downward for anti-authoritarianism.

 

[Independent Vision]

you're still not understanding. cooperation is good, and extremely valuable. society is based on cooperation. but the libertarian just takes this seriously, and doesn't call forced actions cooperation. he calls them coersion.

you can go to a doctor if you pay his fee (or he chooses to donate his services to you). you can obtain any education you want assuming it is provided voluntarily by someone rather than being funded by the government, etc. its really not about "EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF FUCK EVERYONE ELSE". its about people being able to keep what they earn and not being entitled to what others have earned just because those others my have more than them.

let me take an example... if i buy something from company x and it poisons me, assuming a libertarian society, i or my surviving relatives can sue them for fraud, because they lied about what the product actually contained and what it would do to me (unless of course they ADMITTED it was poison, in which case i would have had no incentive to buy from them in the first place). companies who got caught at this would be ruined. what incentive would they have to produce faulty products?

pirates and robber barons are essentially anti-libertarian because they actively and purposely violate the non-aggression principle. capitalists (who aren't committing fraud or other crimes) don't. i don't know why you feel the need to conflate the two.

How are you going to sue the company?
I have always wondered about that. HOW are you going to sue a company and be sure that you are getting a fair trial? Who upholds the independence and the standard of said courts? How are you going to be able to afford to pay for a high quality lawyer and the medical care for the poisoning and such?

I am also wondering how people think that paying out of pocket for road safety, police, firefighting, medical care, water, water sanitation, sanitation and garbage handling, dental care, administration, sciences, military, education and all those things would be cheaper than pooling money into a collective fund that we utilize as a community since we are living in a community?

The reason for these things being communal is that what effects your neighbor also effects you.

If your neighbor cannot afford to get certain medical care or vaccinations they can become dangerous for you to have around you, regardless of you being very healthy.
If your neighbors apartment/house catches on fire your in danger too.
If your neighbor can't afford clean water, or water in general his/her apartment/house might become an issue in the health safety department.
If your neighbor cannot afford proper garbage handling... same problem.
If you're living in an area where the majority of people can't afford these things and a riot happens, do you expect the military to show up an protect your property or apartment?

I don't know... I suppose it just doesn't make sense to me.

 

[australopithecus]

Thought I'd see if my position had changed since I last did this.

Looks like I'm 0.37 more left wing and 0.71 more Libertarian.

 

[Independent Vision]

Heh...

Retook it, with a more rigorous stance on certain questions and this is what it looks like now:

I just keep going more and more to the left, apparently. First time I took the test, a couple of years ago, I was more to the center.

 

[kenandkids]

Eh there, not all of you have even tried this test and braved your results. If not, I've got a mind to torment you silly for commenting on the thread. If I am remiss, please feel free to post your link and feed me crow.

Edit: Or if you like let me know and I could make a new thread or something, but I'd much rather bully you into taking the test.

I took it, but since we can't simply upload a picture and I don't see the point in needing to make an account somewhere, upload pictures, then link them here...

-5.62, -6.26

 

[AdmiralPeacock]

Eh there, not all of you have even tried this test and braved your results. If not, I've got a mind to torment you silly for commenting on the thread. If I am remiss, please feel free to post your link and feed me crow.

Edit: Or if you like let me know and I could make a new thread or something, but I'd much rather bully you into taking the test.

I took it, but since we can't simply upload a picture and I don't see the point in needing to make an account somewhere, upload pictures, then link them here...

-5.62, -6.26

Heh, you fail teh internets.



----
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Right Click, Copy Image Location, Paste.

TA-DA!


-- this is not intended to sound as mean as it may come across... the in person performance that would accompany it would be quite endearing --

 

[MisterMudkip]

 

[aMarshall]

Hm, I 'm not really that libertarian, I swear.

xkcd

The test isn't a diamond, but I'm just gonna attribute that to them not knowing how to program it to be rotated 45 degrees.

 

[Dean]

I have consistently fallen economically centrist in the Libertarian Left quadrant, though tending towards Left Anarchism.

Economic Left/Right: -5.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -9.23

No surprises here! This thingie is brilliant. I found the FAQs to be particularly enlightening on most fields in politics, and the political sciences. And I have used them as a source for things in the past, and will continue to do so. Great for getting your bearings on these sorts of most important issues.

I, like Professor Chomsky, favor the label "Libertarian Socialist".

For some background details; example: I clicked "Strongly Agree" to "All authority should be questioned", as well as an enthusiastic Strongly Agree to "There is now a worrying fusion of information and entertainment". I am finding the consequences of this hideous confusion to be ... disquieting; to put it mildly.

As well as a vehement (strongly) "Agree" to the statement "A same-sex couple in a stable loving relationship, should not be excluded from the possibility of child adoption." Obviously given my own Bisexuality, and also the egalitarian ideals that I aspire to. However, I must say, I found some of the questions to be either slanted, or just plain....weird. For example:

• "It is a sad reflection of our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a bottled, branded consumer product."

In Northern England, we all drink tap-water, so how am I supposed to answer this question? :| Strange indeed... so that all pretty much summarizes it. I appear to be in more or less the same area as everyone else. Thanks for this topic.

Note: Granted where it's due, it was Andiferous that led me here.

 

[Andiferous]

Well, glad to be of help. I'm tickled to know you're on our side.

 

[impiku]

Economic Left/Right: 2.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.95

I must say, I lol'd at the first question: If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations. What's up with this superfluous dichotomy? Businesses can serve humanity too.

I kind of think this quiz is biased, but then again what politics quiz isn't...

 

[Dean]

[. . .]

I kind of think this quiz is biased, but then again what politics quiz isn't...

It all is, really. According to the FAQs on this website, (The Political Compass website) there are some right-wingers like yourself who think it has a leftward bias.... there are some left-wingers who think it has a right-wing bias. I can't help but thinking that when we take these tests, the meaning of each individual question is entirely subjective, and hence our reactions to the questions will be too.

 

[Noth]

It was, I suppose, to be expected.

Although as was mentioned, a lot of the questions maybe strike more of a chord with Americans. Also, quite a few questions had me going: "how on earth am I going to answer this without context?!"
There are a few points that I know I answered with a more authoritarian swing, but I can see how the majority of those questions pulled me down towards the Libs