“Top of the world, Ma!” LOL!!
[quote]Makavali wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
no surprise that everyone in PWI seems to be near the edge.[/quote]
[i]Your PERSONAL issues Score is 80%.
Your ECONOMIC issues Score is 50%.
According to your answers, the political group that agrees with you most is…
Centrist
CENTRISTS espouse a “middle ground” regarding government control of the economy and personal behavior. Depending on the issue, they sometimes favor government intervention and sometimes support individual freedom of choice.
Centrists pride themselves on keeping an open mind, tend to oppose “political extremes,” and emphasize what they describe as “practical” solutions to problems.[/i]
Wonder if the #@!&ing picture will load.[/quote]
It just sounds to me like you are inconsistent.
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
[quote]Makavali wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
no surprise that everyone in PWI seems to be near the edge.[/quote]
[i]Your PERSONAL issues Score is 80%.
Your ECONOMIC issues Score is 50%.
According to your answers, the political group that agrees with you most is…
Centrist
CENTRISTS espouse a “middle ground” regarding government control of the economy and personal behavior. Depending on the issue, they sometimes favor government intervention and sometimes support individual freedom of choice.
Centrists pride themselves on keeping an open mind, tend to oppose “political extremes,” and emphasize what they describe as “practical” solutions to problems.[/i]
Wonder if the #@!&ing picture will load.[/quote]
It just sounds to me like you are inconsistent.[/quote]
You’d think so, but I’ve never liked liberals or conservatives in the extreme sense. Seems about right to me. That said, Bill is right about the test being flawed.
Your PERSONAL issues Score is 100%.
Your ECONOMIC issues Score is 70%.
According to your answers, the political group that agrees with you most is…
LIBERTARIANS
I’d say that the quiz misses loads of issues relavent to your political stance though.
I think we could reduce it to ONE question as to whether a person is libertarian or tends toward statist:
Q) Would you favor a Constitutional amendment stating, not necessarily with these words, but having this meaning:
No act shall be a crime in the United States unless it wrongfully: harms another entity physically, deprives a person of his or her liberty, or deprives an entity of its property by force or by fraud; or constitutes threatening or conspiring to do any of these.
??
The opposite question I suppose would be to ask if you favor any laws making crimes of acts – or in the case of more than one person, consensual acts – which harm no other person or entity and do not threaten or conspire to do so.
win.
[quote]Rockscar wrote:
I know we have had this thread before with Political Compass, but it is very biased in the way questions are posed, long and outdated IMO … with issues in 2004 specifically found here if you’d like to see it or take the test.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
Post up your resluts if you like.
[/quote]
The question on this quiz were very misleading at times.
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
No act shall be a crime in the United States unless it wrongfully: harms another entity physically, deprives a person of his or her liberty, or deprives an entity of its property by force or by fraud; or constitutes threatening or conspiring to do any of these.
??[/quote]
You have basically just summed up all the law and the prophets.
The flaw with that statement is: By whose standard would you judge right and wrong?
Vindication. The scales of justice dictate it and are governed by that.
There has to be a judgment, presumably by a jury, on whether an act not only does one of these things but also did it wrongfully.
The forum has a way of accepting edits, showing them as having been done, then going back and replacing the post with the old version.
Actually I had modified the above to include cases where acts involved more than one person and were consensual.
Trying again on that:
“No act shall be a crime in the United States unless it wrongfully: harms another entity physically and non-consensually, deprives a person of his or her liberty, or deprives an entity of its property by force or by fraud; or constitutes threatening or conspiring to do any of these.”
The reason for the word “wrongfully” is that for example it might not be deemed wrongful to hold a person who had just committed a crime for the authorities, or for a convicted criminal to be held in prison, yet it could be stated that such acts deprive him of his liberty.
Or it ought not be deemed wrongful to injure or even kill, if necessary, in self-defense.
Of course the word might be considered not really necessary as this is a prohibition against laws covering acts OTHER than these, rather than stating that all acts of these sorts must be defined as crimes.
But on the other hand, if we still honored the principles of English Common Law then the principle of jury nullification would be in good standing today, instead of treated in the United States as a bastard stepchild not to be spoken of. Namely, a jury should be able to decide that while in fact the defendant did commit the act in question specified by law as being a crime, his act was not wrongful and therefore he is found not guilty.
Having this word in this Amendment would give that a firm basis.
Various statist reasons for objecting to such a Constitutional Amendment would be “But I want it to be a crime for a person to own a gun!” “But I want it to be a crime for a restaurant to sell liquor on Sunday!” “But I want it to be a crime for a person to not have the government-required level of health insurance!” And so forth.
If anyone has knowledge of the political compass, would you mind helping me with a little interpretation.
The above are my results. However, there are no examples given on the page that are actually close to where I score. It may make a dash of sense, in that I often seem to surprise people once they get to know me. I assume they think of me as very right wing conservative. Actually, I think of myself as a conservative with an open mind. Can someone give me a better interpretation and possible a comparison so that I may better orient with the results.
[quote]JEATON wrote:
If anyone has knowledge of the political compass, would you mind helping me with a little interpretation.
The above are my results. However, there are no examples given on the page that are actually close to where I score. It may make a dash of sense, in that I often seem to surprise people once they get to know me. I assume they think of me as very right wing conservative. Actually, I think of myself as a conservative with an open mind. Can someone give me a better interpretation and possible a comparison so that I may better orient with the results.
[/quote]
I’m not familiar with the particular test you took, but basically all it says is that your AVERAGE values were roughly split between those favoring governmental authority over personal life and economics and those in favor of individual freedom, at least with regard to the libertarian/statist split. As to how they determined “left/right,” I don’t know.
Your pick of yes and no answers could be 100% opposite of another individual who also averaged about 50%. So it does not mean that your views are necessarily the same as his on anything “despite” plotting to the same point or a similar point.
EDIT: Okay, I remembered the original post mentioned something about this, and found the link there. (The above is simply truth regarding approximate 50/50 splits for any test.)
Frankly, I thought it was crap. Not based on underpinning political philosophies, but on things that tended to be Republican/Democrat partisan divides and some (IMO) pseudopsychology.
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
But on the other hand, if we still honored the principles of English Common Law then the principle of jury nullification would be in good standing today, instead of treated in the United States as a bastard stepchild not to be spoken of.[/quote]
This is beautiful. However we, as a society don’t honor anything any more. Being honorable and living one’s life out of principles is fundamental for liberty. How many people do you know of who are truly confident and can say: I don’t follow rules I live my life by principles? Honor is an essential quality for true confidence. Why is that relevant to this conversation? Because these individuals are in a position to become authoritative, which is the antithesis of authoritarian. A society made up of individuals who are honorable and authoritative can produce natural leaders who have a solid and commanding presence - I don’t even see people who have a presence anymore. Honor is but a concept. In reality, I perceive people who are not present to this quality, unable to discern the principles of the law, let alone live by them. Having no authority within themselves ( parenting is an example ) we no longer know how to lead and need to follow - and so we follow rules instead of living our lives lead by principles. That is liberty, to my own experience. I personally experience greater freedom from being and living like this. But that requires knowing honor and embodying it.
To borrow from your powerful illustration of the stepchild, honor has been banned at the womb’s door from having a dignified birth and it is now the bastard child of society. Unwanted because of being unrecognised.
Politics is not my forte but my synthesis of libertarians and statists is essentially the difference between:
Authoritative x Authoritarian
Most people in our society do not possess enough solidity to be lead by the principles of liberty and therefore are required to follow the rules of obedience.
And that is just my observation.[quote]
Having this word in this Amendment would give that a firm basis.[/quote]
In principle yes. In practice, we need integrity in order to carry out justice.
Having “this word” is an abstract concept. The firm basis can only be given by the population experiencing a system that honors its integrity above its image and therefore has a commanding presence by being authoritative and not authoritarian.
The system, as I perceive it today, is lip service: The image of power replaced by the substance of solidity, when power is truly present.
I mean a firm basis in that there would at least be one written thing in the Constitition that a defendant could point to to show that if his act was not wrongful then it is not a crime.
It does happen quite often in the US that a jury comes to the conclusion that a person’s act was the right thing to do (as they discuss among themselves or to the press afterwards) but believe they HAVE to convict him of a crime because he did in fact commit actions that the law specifies to be a crime.
Simply having a word doesn’t necessarily fix this but it would be better than the current situation, where most juries do not know that they do not have to convict even if the act was performed – their job need not simply be to determine whether it occurred – and most US judges consider it “contempt of court” for defense attorneys to present to juries that they do have that option.
Although it is also true that many US judges consider it contempt of court to argue any existing amendment of the US Constitution as part of one’s defense (seriously.) Such is considered a matter for Federal judges to decide, not juries.
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
I mean a firm basis in that there would at least be one written thing in the Constitition that a defendant could point to to show that if his act was not wrongful then it is not a crime.
It does happen quite often in the US that a jury comes to the conclusion that a person’s act was the right thing to do (as they discuss among themselves or to the press afterwards) but believe they HAVE to convict him of a crime because he did in fact commit actions that the law specifies to be a crime.
Simply having a word doesn’t necessarily fix this but it would be better than the current situation, where most juries do not know that they do not have to convict…[/quote]
But this is common sense! Or rather a failure of having it.
This is what I was talking about in having people in the judicial system who are essentially without any sense of inner authoritativeness.
The way you put it gives me the mental image of a theater of puppets.
‘Contempt of court’ can be a card used by the authoritarian streak in us when an authoritative voice raises and challenges our claims to absolute knowledge, judgement and subsequently power.
Not the best test, but it’s fairly accurate. I took a similar test once that said I was a hard left liberal.
I am at 100 on personal issues and 50 economic issues right between Liberal and Libertairian