Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktThe Pew Research Center came out with what they classify as political typology. It’s a bit more refined than the political test in the other thread. It’s a more nuanced take than many I’ve seen. The full report and test are here:
http://www.people-press.org/2011/05/04/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/
http://www.people-press.org/typology/quiz/
Mostly Republican
Staunch Conservatives (Highly Engaged Tea Party Supporters)
Main Street Republicans (Conservative on most issues)
Mostly Independent
Libertarians (Free market, small govt. seculars)
Disaffecteds (Downscale and cynical)
Post-Moderns (Moderates, but liberal socially)
Mostly Democratic
New Coalition Democrats (Upbeat, majority minority)
Hard Pressed Democrats (Relgious, financially struggling)
Solid Liberals (Across the board liberal positoins)
Bystanders
Young, politically disengaged
I scored as a post-modern, which feels about right. I’m clearly a Democrat, but have voted for the occasional Republican. [Note to NoVa – Sorry I missed your note the other date about Moran and his opponent.]
BB
Filed under: Uncategorized |
All Things in Moderation 
I’m a post-Modern, whatever that means. I self-identify as a radical moderate, so that kinda fits.
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Well heck, I’m a post-modern also. Aren’t I too old for that?
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Heh, I’m true to form, coming in as a “Solid Liberal.”
My problem with this and the earlier tests is that the questions seem to be asking about my ideal, e.g., choose the answer that most fits, “should” the government do X, etc. Sure I think some of those things ought to happen and I answered the questions accordingly; but I also have a pragmatic side that knows those things are not practical or likely in the real world.. (And that side often relies on more center influences as a balance.)
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Solid liberal on this one, although it may be because this particular one seems to me to be skewed to the social side rather than the economic side.
Solid Liberal. . . me and about 5,000,000 of my closest friends (14% of Americans).
Do you feel my Moonbatty eyes following you still, yello? 😀
Bwahahahahahahaha!!!!!!
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lmsinca – That just means you’re aging backwards. In a few years, you can be pre-modern.
BB
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FB, well I hope you guys will let me know when I start with the baby talk and ease me out of here gently.
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lms, I think it’s hilarious that okie and I are scoring more liberal than you. I came out very slightly more libertarian than you on the earlier one, too–must be the Mom thing that you’ve got going! 😀
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I know michi, I’m losing all my creds. I guess I’m just a bundle of inconsistencies.
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I really all being a post modern on this test.
Here in MN the talk is of a ballot initiative to change the state constitution & ban gay marriage. Some think it will backfire as a GOTV measure & bring more new young voters who care about this issue but don’t normally vote. While the older conservative demographics are more reliable voters. Interesting.g argument…
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PolCompass results:
Economic Left/Right: 1.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.31
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Hmm. My post was eaten. Apologies if this shows up as double. Anyway…
Speaking of ending with the start, here’s David Wilcox singing Start with the Ending
BB
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bb, I had forgotten this quiz. Thanx.
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Great song, FB–I’m going to have to try to keep that one in mind!
lms: you’re not a bundle of inconsistencies, you’re just. . . complicated! Yeah, that’s the ticket–you’re complicated!!
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68 and “Post-modern”.
Architecture meets politics.
I thought I was mid-century moderne. Eames, Eichler, Van der Rohe, Aalto.
My twins'[3.0 yo granddaughters]favorite book is one I bought them at the National Gallery – “Goldilocks and the Three Bears – a tale moderne”. The familiar tale, but Mama Bear makes them chili, not porridge, and the bears home is mid-century moderne, with furnishings ranging from Macintosh to Eames to Aalto to ItalDesign.
Steve Jobs credited his own design preferences to having grown up in an Eichler home.
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Based on your responses, YOU are a…
Libertarian
Along with 9% of the public
I’m always an outlier. Of course, the questions force you into the pigeonhole. Many of these are not true either/or questions–there are other choices.
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Staunch Conservative (Shocker!)
Most of these questions are quite ridiculous, but on the other hand I don’t believe I’ve ever taken one of these tests in which I did not come out on the far right.
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Solid Lib. What a surprise…I needed a quiz to tell me that?
Off to spar with members of this country’s fine medical establishment. Catch y’all later.
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QB:
I agree. I find a lot of the questions odd and have never taken test like this that didn’t result in a far left score.
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“I’m always an outlier. Of course, the questions force you into the pigeonhole. Many of these are not true either/or questions–there are other choices.”
That is why I don’t take these tests as they really prove nothing. Or in some cases I think that both could be true. If you took out the word ‘most’ from these two, my choice would be “YES”…Even with ‘most’ in there, I would answer “YES” since there are no ‘guarantee’s in life.
“Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard vs Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people.”
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Totally agree with the comments about the choices/questions.
Some are both true, some neither really true, true under different assumptions or interpretations, grossly incomplete, prejudicially phrased, etc.
I always fight choices like these, as well as on personality tests. At a certain point, I think the psychology almost takes over that you answer the way you know you are supposed to as an X, not that you don’t answer honestly but that when confronted with two wrong statements you think, well, at least I know which one is a misstatement of my actual position.
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Btw, I can see from my results page that different questions appear on different versions, because I did not have some questions for which I see percentages.
Very dismayed with what I see as the general public’s responses to several. Scary to me that only 31% think that military strength is the best way to ensure peace.
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Dave!
Exactly. Both answers are true. So each deserves a yes. I found that true of most of the questions, to greater or lesser degrees.
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I tend to answer with the response that’s closer to my views. When I took the test originally, I figured on post-modern or possibly new coalition Dem.
Thanks for playing folks.
BB
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Scary to me that only 31% think that military strength is the best way to ensure peace.
Yes, but it’s the important percentage, clearly. 🙂
All that means is that not as many hawks go for political personality tests.
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” Scary to me that only 31% think that military strength is the best way to ensure peace.”
What’s wrong with economic strength for peace? Smaller countries can be bullied as easily with the threat of economic sanctions as with bombing them into submission.
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The question was if it was the best way, not if it was the only way. 😉
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qb:
Scary to me that only 31% think that military strength is the best way to ensure peace
And I’ll bet you’ll be surprised when I tell you that that was my answer to that particular question, so we agreed on at least one. See–the Liberal/Conservative divide can be bridged!
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I’d be surprised if any of us who lived through the entire Cold War think that it was anything but our military strength and the capacity to deliver total destruction anywhere in the world that kept us out of global warfare.
Some might say times have changed, but they can change again.
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Some might say times have changed, but they can change again.
As someone who was too young to care for much of the Cold War, this was an insightful post, Mark. I also just like that expression.
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Mark moonlights as a folk rock songwriter.
Good words of wisdom, Mark.
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Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient
Libertarians 82%
General Public 55%
Who are the 18% of libertarians who disagreed with this? Turn in your top hat and monocle.
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Turn in your top hat and monocle.
Looking around for a like button.
I thought Obama took all your top hats and monocles and gave them to some poor people.
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Turn in your top hat and monocle.
Nominated for comment of the week.
It would be interesting to hear what people thought about a question like that one. My thought process went like this:
“Clearly there are many things government needs to do, so how can I say I agree that it is almost always wasteful and inefficient?”
“Well, qb, that’s a different question. Government has necessary functions, and they are necessary even though they are almost always done wastefully and inefficiently.”
“Yes, you are right, qb. What was I thinking there. Of course government is almost always wasteful and inefficient.”
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He did! He’ll soon be after our (so help me this was the first hit on “walking stick”) bull penis silver handle walking canes. http://www.fashionablecanes.com/550.html?gdftrk=gdfV2384_a_7c453_a_7c8175_a_7c550&gclid=CLTi_YGllK4CFUVeTAodJTpPfA
“As someone who was too young to care for much of the Cold War”
my sister-in-law gave me a blank stare once when i said “East Germany.”
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Could we get participation in the test[s] from the slackers? Please overcome your disdain for this crudity. Obviously, the compass seems to come close to what we think of our PsOV, and the Pew test gives us new words for independent, although not for liberal and conservative. You can take the test without feeling pressured to share, despite ‘Goose’s imprecations.
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Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient
Who are the 18% of libertarians who disagreed with this? Turn in your top hat and monocle.
Well, it said I’m a libertarian (I don’t use that appellation myself) and I disagree that government is almost always wasteful and inefficient. For multiple reasons.
A) Inefficiency is, in part, a product of centralized power and huge bureaucracy. It may seem to be a quibble to say that government in and of itself is not naturally wasteful and inefficient, only every version of government that actually exists. But, not to me when I’m answering that question.
B) I work in the public sector. Worked in the private sector for 20 years. In both cases, the source of waste and inefficiency seemed to be people, rather than the placement of a given organization on the public sector/private sector chart.
I work at the county level, but I don’t see a great deal of waste and inefficiency, and certainly have personally seen worse in the private sector. So, I just have to disagree with “almost always”. If it had said “often”, I might have gone the other way.
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And I’ll bet you’ll be surprised when I tell you that that was my answer to that particular question, so we agreed on at least one. See–the Liberal/Conservative divide can be bridged!
I’m not surprised. You were out defending our country while I was at home playing Nintendo and eating Cheetos! God bless you for your part in making the world safe for slackers such as myself to sit on my ass and play Super Mario!
I tend to agree with QB: I’m surprised that only 34% agree that as strong military is the best way to ensure peace, but it may be a response to what they felt the question implied. In this case, I did not read it to imply that it was the only way, or that it was ideal, or that there was no risk of a large standing army being used for wars of choice or for international meddling in areas that have ambiguous relevance to US national security. But diplomacy is mostly worthless in the world as it is without Michigoose and Troll McWingnut standing behind our diplomats, smiling benevolently and gesturing to our huge arsenal of powerful weapons. And that’s just how it is. 🙂
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“diplomacy is mostly worthless in the world as it is without Michigoose and Troll McWingnut standing behind our diplomats, smiling benevolently and gesturing to our huge arsenal of powerful weapons. And that’s just how it is.”
When I had my Jeep, I needed to swap out the windshield hinges. They’re attached with ‘torx’ bolts, which require a special tool to remove. Most of them came out with the torx driver, but one was a bit stubborn & became stripped. I drilled a hole down the length of the bolt, to use a tool called an ‘EZ out’ to turn out the bolt. The EZ out broke. So the last option was to weld a nut to the head of the bolt & use a normal wrench / socket to remove the bolt.
Which tool was the best one for the job?
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Thinking about the best tools for peace a bit further, a case study in the Americas might be worthwhile. Of the 30-odd countries here (including the Caribbean), we have an adversarial relationship where the military has kept the peace with basically one country: Cuba. For the rest, our economy is our most effective tool at keeping the peace – particularly with our immediate neighbors. Maybe I’m missing some events, but what I recall of our use of military force in this area over the last several decades is limited to the debacle in Grenada and the removal of Noriega.
Looking at the Korean conflict, which is no longer a proxy war between us & China / the Soviets, while the military keeps the ‘peace’ there, there will not be a lasting peace until NK devotes its economic output towards raising the standard of living for its people rather than maintaining an enormous standing army. Viewed in that context it seems that armies can be as destabilizing as they are stabilizing.
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my sister-in-law gave me a blank stare once when i said “East Germany.”
Well, I’m not that naive/ill-informed. I was a political science major in college, so it’s not an entirely foreign concept. But there is a big difference between reading about MADD and doing drills in your middle school class for the commy nuclear attack. I suspect that sort of thing has a pretty profound impact on your foreign policy views.
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ashot–there’s also a big difference between reading about MADD and being the person advising the unit commander about the fallout distribution of the nuke that just got dropped (by either side). If you ever meet anybody who served in Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, ask them about the significance of the Fulda Gap.
The world is a very, very different place than it was just 20 years ago.
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Michi:
Fulda Gap! I haven’t thought about that since college — I took a poli-sci course in Cold War military strategy/theory. The term paper was an analysis of a potential Soviet military incursion through the Caucasus to grab control of the Shatt al-Arab and what the US/NATO could do about it (nothing).
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Wasn’t an attack through the Fulda Gap the basis for Red Storm Rising?
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Mike and yello–yep, and yep. One of the most strategically important terrain features in the entire world for the better part of 50 years.
Now it’s the Straits of Hormuz.
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The world is a very, very different place than it was just 20 years ago.
Without a doubt, but I bet people who lived through the Cold War feel about Iran, and in some cases Muslims in general, they way they felt about Russia and communists. So it makes sense to me that people would be shaped heavily by their experience during the Cold War and that those beliefs would still be held today. You contrast that with experience with military intervention: the two Iraq Wars and Afghanistan. The first Iraq War was a success in that we got Iraq out of Kuwait, but obviously we had to go back. And the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have left many, if not most, of my peers skeptical that the military is the best way to ensure peace.
There are other examples of military involvement such as in Somalia or Serbia/Yugoslavia, but I think many younger Americans have had their view of the miliary more prominently shaped by our actions in the Middle East as opposed to conflicts elsewhere.
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Ashot – we old cold warriors worry about stuff like China building a deepwater fleet that can get out of the China Sea and project into the Pacific and the Persian Gulf. So I see how different your world view is. Take one or both of the political tests and see where you line up, for your own amusement, if not for ours.
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Mark- I’ve been busy at work and haven’t had a chance to take the political tests. If I don’t get to it today I should have time on Wednesday because I have an admin hearing tomorrow and my schedule frees up a lot after that.
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Cool, ashot.
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By the way, has anyone else noticed the cool dashboard feature that lets you know when someone has replied to your post? It sort of provides a compromise between those who like threading and those who did not.
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