Political Compass

[Achilles]

Hello, first time I post here. Not sure how many of you have encountered this before, or if I am the first one to post about it here.

Edit: I can't seem to post links so just google "Political Compass Test" on Google. My results were deep in the green quadrant.

The test isn't necessarily a scientific one, although its far better than your average "left/right" nonsense. Here are my results:


Falls roughly in line with what I would assume. Anyway, I showed this to people in another forum (for a video game, irrelevant to this site) and many people took it, and a surprising number landed in the green quadrant. I found that quite interesting for 2 reasons:

1) Most mainstream political parties are right-wing authoritarian. The site actually notes that; the Republicans and Democrats are different, but they fall in roughly the same place (the blue quadrant).
2) I gave the test to my dad, who voted Republican for most of his life and he also landed in the green quadrant. Not near my, more towards the center, but far closer to me than to say Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.

It would be meaningless to ask you guys to take the test other than for fun since most people here will land either in the red or green quadrant by definition of the site. So what I am asking is: Why if our (Anarchist for me) are much more commonplace than one would assume, do people have such a low opinion of us in Western Countries (particularly the U.S). When I tell people I am an anarchist the first thing they blurt out is "Thats stupid, you have to have laws or else people will rape each other" or some other diatribe.

Comment here and if possible: Give the test to people you know profess anti-left views to see if the actually fall in line with what they claim are their political views.

[Palmares]

That test has been around for a long time. I used to do it many times. do it enough times, you then understand how it rates your answers to the most minute detail. Which of course further skews your results. My results were always towards the overall more anarchic ends of things, but from learning the test per se, though maybe some changes in myself too, I reached -10/-10. :blackA:

There's also been quite a few threads on this in the past, for example:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/political-compass-test-t181196/index.html?t=181196&highlight=political+compass

http://www.revleft.com/vb/politicalcompass-orgi-t182627/index.html?t=182627&highlight=political+compass

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=163266&highlight=political+compass

And perhaps, just like these threads, this thread should go in Learning?

But as you said Achilles, it's just a bit of fun. No more accurate or trustworthy as your average IQ test. It obviously has flaws, so take the results with a grain of salt.

[Chomskyan]

My last results were -8.75 Left, -6.82 Down. That was a month ago.

http://politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=-8.75&soc=-6.82

Reasons? Because they have a societal norm. Societal norms of all kinds are hard to break unless they actually break.

Nelson Mandela said: "It's impossible until it's done" sort of like that. People don't think Left-wing politics are possible until it actually succeeds, then it becomes the new norm. Most people on the Left (Liberals, Progressives, Social Democrats) still believe in capitalism, and don't even dare to try out a Socialist alternative. I was a Liberal and Progressive when I started questioning my Libertarian/Conservative views, but even then I couldn't really envision an alternative to capitalism.

I was an anti-capitalist before I was a Socialist or an Anarchist.