Your political views!

[ScottMcTony]

I'm the closest! I'm horrible and stupid?

As the only person to be further to that side, yes, of course! Or at least to the best of my judgment you're of a demonstrably horrible and stupid opinion on one matter.
And we all know a persons worth can be estimated from a single event!

I could probably find something to argue with what Kudistos is saying that I would actually be interested in, like, going into in depth, or possibly I think he's brilliant, right now I'm too tired to even read his small wall of text and am going to bed.

I will say to OutFoxxed, who I admittedly only read one sentence of one post from, that I can criticize the ideal behind communism very reasonably and very concisely: I hate slavery, and I especially hate it when every single citizen is a slave to a small number of people, something that is absolutely necessary for communism. If human nature were such that it weren't necessary, communism would be redundant anyway because people would already be behaving the way communism hopes to get them to behave in an anarchistic society.

[Covarr]

I ended up in about the same place as The Seer of Shadows. I was bothered by the ambiguity of some of the questions though. A number of them were worded such that it was difficult to tell if the word "only" was implied, which would completely change my answer.

One that particularly caught my attention was: "A same sex couple in a stable, loving relationship, should not be excluded from the possibility of child adoption."

I chose strongly disagree, but not out of anything against homosexual couples, rather, mostly because I feel children should have a mother AND a father, role models of both genders, something which is entirely lacking if both genders are the same sex. The thing is, I don't think that my reason is what the maker of this quiz had in mind behind this question, so my answer may not accurately affect my overall score.

[ScottMcTony]

No you're obviously a blatant homophobe and just don't know it sorry.

[Furzball]

I chose strongly disagree, but not out of anything against homosexual couples, rather, mostly because I feel children should have a mother AND a father, role models of both genders, something which is entirely lacking if both genders are the same sex. The thing is, I don't think that my reason is what the maker of this quiz had in mind behind this question, so my answer may not accurately affect my overall score.

That is an understandable opinion. I don't have a turnaround for it but I do have a reason I believe they should be adopted. Does anyone know how much an orphanage gets from govy funds. I would guess $25 per child per week for food. Enough for wear and tear on clothes and building. Medical. Basically bottom of the bucket in pocket money. If they had anything more it's due to our donations. So which would you rather have. A child stay in an orphanage, where they are poor and most likely out on the streets if never adopted. Or raised by two loving guys or gals with more money then what the orphanage spends on the child.

[ScottMcTony]

Every answer causing my red dot to not be having glorious freedom sex with the bottom line were ones that really had nothing to do with my feelings on policy and more on my suspicions about how the behavior of certain groups will trend, IE the one about first generation immigrants. Which I think I just hit disagree to instead of strongly disagree. Same for a lot of those types. Still, whatever.
AND NOW TO ACTUALLY SLEEP OR AT LEAST ATTEMPT V2.

[Kudistos Megistos]

One that particularly caught my attention was: "A same sex couple in a stable, loving relationship, should not be excluded from the possibility of child adoption."

I chose strongly disagree, but not out of anything against homosexual couples, rather, mostly because I feel children should have a mother AND a father, role models of both genders, something which is entirely lacking if both genders are the same sex. The thing is, I don't think that my reason is what the maker of this quiz had in mind behind this question, so my answer may not accurately affect my overall score.

I think that might be one of the things the author had in mind, but the main idea was probably to gauge one's homophobia level. Thing is, a lot of people say they aren't homophobic but reveal their homophobia when they find themselves uneasy with the idea of gay people being around children, in much the same way that many people claim not to be racist but won't allow their daughter to marry outside of their race.

And I think the response to your specific criticism of gay adoption is that it implies the alternative will always be the child going to a straight couple in a loving stable relationship. That isn't the case, and the alternative to a child getting adopted by a gay couple may be the child spending the rest of its life in care and suffering from far more problems than just not having parent figures from both sexes. Also, whilst this may be a generalisation, a lot of gay couples have a lot of money; a higher proportion than straight couples. I'm sure that I'll get shouted at for this, but I'm almost certain that its true. Financial stability can be very important, and is especially important to a child's education.

[nfitc1]

Heh. I'm pretty close to furzball's, but a little more authoritarian.

Yep. I'm more socialist than capitalist, but I wasn't aware that I was so politically neutral.

[yoshi314]

that is surprising.

[Opine]

One that particularly caught my attention was: "A same sex couple in a stable, loving relationship, should not be excluded from the possibility of child adoption."

I chose strongly disagree, but not out of anything against homosexual couples, rather, mostly because I feel children should have a mother AND a father, role models of both genders, something which is entirely lacking if both genders are the same sex. The thing is, I don't think that my reason is what the maker of this quiz had in mind behind this question, so my answer may not accurately affect my overall score.

I think that might be one of the things the author had in mind, but the main idea was probably to gauge one's homophobia level. Thing is, a lot of people say they aren't homophobic but reveal their homophobia when they find themselves uneasy with the idea of gay people being around children, in much the same way that many people claim not to be racist but won't allow their daughter to marry outside of their race.

And I think the response to your specific criticism of gay adoption is that it implies the alternative will always be the child going to a straight couple in a loving stable relationship. That isn't the case, and the alternative to a child getting adopted by a gay couple may be the child spending the rest of its life in care and suffering from far more problems than just not having parent figures from both sexes. Also, whilst this may be a generalisation, a lot of gay couples have a lot of money; a higher proportion than straight couples. I'm sure that I'll get shouted at for this, but I'm almost certain that its true. Financial stability can be very important, and is especially important to a child's education.

Just sharing.

[Bosola]

As you might be able to infer from the OP, we differ greatly on the respective merits of Marxism and the current "hegemony".

The rub is the difference between 'Marxism' and 'marxism'. I don't really think the ideology he offers as replacement is either well fleshed out, or likely to avoid the same difficulties as any other. In that sense, I am a 'marxist' as opposed to a 'Marxist' - mine belongs to the same family of theoretical thought, but I don't have any affinity to the Manifesto.

In fact, I would even go as far as to say that all ages of (Western, at least) culture have been marked by the same problems as those (I) identify in the earlier post. Medieval typology? Look at the Catholics and proto-Protestant Lollards hijacking typology for completely different purposes. Renaissance obsessions with the body? Where do you think all those worries about self-contradictory bodily 'signs' and 'marks' come from?

I suppose the gist is that:

* every age has its own particular ideology - a system of categorizing, labelling and thinking about humans in a social context
* these Ideologies inevitably have some dissonance with practical reality, or can be re-read in two or more radically different ways
* therefore, most of that culture's 'political clashes' - not only in the formal sense, but the points of tension that precipitate works of culture - are just the zeitgeist's self-division made manifest.

Of course, coming from 'cultural studies' (English), I would think that - naturally, I view every element of a particular culture through the lens of its literature.

At the moment, I'm going through a phase in my philosophical thought where I am obsessed with practicality and things actually working in practice, so my defences of our current system, a certain level of liberal democracy mixed with a certain level of economic freedom, is that it has generally been far more successful than anything else, and certainly more successful than any of the attempts at Marxism that have been made.

The matter is one of 'pragmatism' vs 'Ethics' in the broadest sense (Ethics as branch of philosophy dealing with prescriptive descriptions of social life). In terms of practicality, free market economics offers great efficiency and vigor, because it makes the grassroots of a society its engine. This gives it a natural ability to coordinate a massive amount of labour without centralization, which is possibly the reason it has spread so effectively.

As for the other part of the Tripos question - the Romans - that's far easier. Those guys were just drunk.

[jeffdamann]

Maybe Im so evil because Im scientific.

I answered strongly agree to being able to abort. Why?
Lets see. If your a 16 y/o slut that sleeps with everyone and gets preggo, thats your fault, you shouldnt be able to abort.
If your a Well to do lady that has not been into a seedy or wrong situation in her life, and then are raped by someone and get pregnant. You should be able to abort.Or are you saying you shouldnt and have to stare at a product of your torture and rape everyday?

Also I STRONGLY, STRONGLY,STRONGLY believe that anyone with a high chance of passing off genetic abnormalities or diseases SHOULD NOT! be able to mate(without scientific repair of the broken genes)
I feel bad that my child will get bad eyesight and acne, no way would I have a child that may be likely to have down syndrome, or be a dwarf, etc.
To me thats being humanist, I want the entire race to one day become what it can be...and with all the people breeding genetic abnormalities it seems like in 200 years it will be rare to see a healthy person with no major genetic problems.

I mean suppose polio was passed on by birth instead of being a disease. If they didnt get rid of it, wed all have it now. they would have HAD to stop the populace from contiuing to breed that into our species.

[Lion]

that's interesting jeff. makes me wonder, especially since science has evolved to the point where natural selection hardly does anything.

[jeffdamann]

I know, don't get me wrong, I may make some people hate me with my views, but you put it way better than I did. Natural selection is there so only the healthy and able survive. I mean no one wants to hurt anyone unhealthy and unable though. It makes you want to protect them more.Its sort of a catch 22. I just really think that the emergence of some of these horribly crazy mutations in people is a disturbing trend.

Have you ever seen those medical documentaries on the medical channel, I remember one where a boys teeth turned into tumors the size of watermelons. They had to carve him a new face out of tumors....

Just look for wierd but CREDIBLE(I.E. a published documentary) mutation videos. The things you see are forever disturbing....I just dont see a reason to chance passing something that horrible on to someone....

[ScottMcTony]

Ok jeff, consider this. Suppose I am the most rabidly opposed person to absolutely any drug use (I'm not), and that I had no principle problem with restrictions of freedom whatsoever (I do). But, even though this would make me an unlikely candidate, let's assume rabid drug hater me understands prohibition economics as well as real life me does. In this case, as far as my thoughts on what policy can exist would go, I would still have to be in favour of the legalization of everything sans cocaine, meth, and heroin, because this would bring us to a policy that would severely reduce the use of hard drugs (likely without increasing total drug use either, based on historical figures), and would be the single change in policy we could make that would most greatly reduce violent crime rates (based on historical statistical analysis this should theoretically reduce murder rates to less than half what they are now).
I'm not trying to straw man your viewpoints into a prohibitionists argument (though if you aren't in favour of drug policy reform, ah, as I believe the children say, pwned), that was just the way I found it easiest to essentially say that behavior doesn't always reflect policy, even in theory, and that any government action is bound to have consequences outside of what the action directly applies to.

PS: I was about legalization of all drugs for a long time, then noticed that countries following the model hypothetical rabid drug hater me proposed really did have next to no illegal drug use, and more importantly too little to sustain significant organized crime, and would now personally go in favour of that model. So ok, 99% social freedom, gEEZE.

PPS: I have a very strong desire to do DMT.

[DLPB_]

I did this before and ended up dead centre of Authoritarian Left.

I am mostly to the far right of politics

[The Seer of Shadows]

Maybe Im so evil because Im scientific.

I'm exactly the same as you.  I have poor vision and am likely to go bald in the future, and I'm not happy about it

But that's hardly anything.  Some people are genetically predisposed to CHD and cancers, and some people are born with HIV, disabilities, or even perfectly avoidable things like fetal alcohol syndrome.

Because humans have basically transcended the food web, we have no real predators, and can rely on pretty much anything for a food source.  If we worked like other animals, we'd have a mortality rate high enough not only to control our population, but also to prevent the disadvantaged from surviving, so that only the fittest reproduce (sounds lovely, doesn't it?).  Very few people with any disabilities, diseases, or impairments of the senses would survive in nature.

I could dive into all the scientific advantages and limitations of that little theory over reality, but I wouldn't like to bore anyone to death

[Lion]

I will say to OutFoxxed, who I admittedly only read one sentence of one post from, that I can criticize the ideal behind communism very reasonably and very concisely: I hate slavery, and I especially hate it when every single citizen is a slave to a small number of people, something that is absolutely necessary for communism. If human nature were such that it weren't necessary, communism would be redundant anyway because people would already be behaving the way communism hopes to get them to behave in an anarchistic society.

idea behind communism. in actual practice communism is disgusting. but the idea behind communism where everyone is equal and shares is not a bad one. just that communism is responsible for mass murder and many other things. per

[titeguy3]

I will say to OutFoxxed, who I admittedly only read one sentence of one post from, that I can criticize the ideal behind communism very reasonably and very concisely: I hate slavery, and I especially hate it when every single citizen is a slave to a small number of people, something that is absolutely necessary for communism. If human nature were such that it weren't necessary, communism would be redundant anyway because people would already be behaving the way communism hopes to get them to behave in an anarchistic society.

idea behind communism. in actual practice communism is disgusting. but the idea behind communism where everyone is equal and shares is not a bad one. just that communism is responsible for mass murder and many other things. per

thumbs up for being rational about the c-word.

[ScottMcTony]

I will say to OutFoxxed, who I admittedly only read one sentence of one post from, that I can criticize the ideal behind communism very reasonably and very concisely: I hate slavery, and I especially hate it when every single citizen is a slave to a small number of people, something that is absolutely necessary for communism. If human nature were such that it weren't necessary, communism would be redundant anyway because people would already be behaving the way communism hopes to get them to behave in an anarchistic society.

idea behind communism. in actual practice communism is disgusting. but the idea behind communism where everyone is equal and shares is not a bad one. just that communism is responsible for mass murder and many other things. per

Nono even a communistic (I do not think that is a word but ok Opera if your spell checker does not object) society that worked perfectly would still pretty much require an absolute slave state unless we're talking about a society that didn't actually have imposed communism but instead just had everyone choosing to share perfectly and that is not a political ideology or a social ideology that is just speculation about a hypothetical species that is obviously not human and also if it were human would probably be less efficient than real life capitalism anyway because of the lack of competition.
I guess you could say if nobody minded that would not be ideologically horrible anyway? But again, that just means we're not talking about humans or anything that could ever exist without going extinct before it reached a certain stage of civilization. Or if you're just saying the motivating force behind being pro-communism isn't disgusting then sure, the motivation for everything ever looks like a positive thing to the person doing it.
I am not sure if anyone living is capable of reading the last sentence I wrote but hopefully it is not quite that incomprehensible.

[Kudistos Megistos]

Actually, the idea behind communism is a bad one.

It's naive about human nature in a very childish way (which is one of the reasons why people become more right wing as they get older), and it's also incredibly arrogant. Why arrogant? Because Marx seems to have assumed that, not only had he understood the course of history to the extent where he could predict the future, but also that a working political system can be derived a priori. Oh for fuck's sake! I can't even begin to explain how ridiculous that is. Humans and society are far too complex for anyone to be able to look at a few factory workers and then figure out a way to fix society whilst sitting in one's armchair. It's not at all surprising that when the ideals of communism are put into practice they always go horribly wrong and create states so far from the actual ideal that commies can get away with saying that they weren't following the ideals at all. It should really be obvious that any grand, over-ambitious theory of everything that is derived a priori is going to fail badly.

Conservatism is often called an anti-ideology, but I think that some forms of liberalism are as well. Both are very "empiricist" kinds of philosophy and justify their beliefs by claiming that their systems, whilst not perfect, have shown themselves to be generally less shitty than other systems when put into practice. That's why I brought up Churchill's quote about democracy; democracy is crap, but the alternatives that have been tried have all been worse. Things like communism and socialism have a very "rationalist" feel about them, which may explain why they have been more popular on the continent than in the Anglo-Saxon world

Interestingly, the way that people nowadays talk about socialism vs the free market reminds me of the way ancient Greeks talked about democracy and the other forms of government (namely, dictatorship and oligarchy). A lot of the more intellectual Greeks were easily able to point out the flaws in democracy and thought it was an awful idea that must obviously lead to poor government. It stands to reason, doesn't it? And yet time has shown that democracy has worked better than oligarchy and dictatorship. I have a feeling that people in 1,000 years time will be looking at today's communists the same way that we look at Greeks like Socrates who thought (if Plato is to be believed) that democracy was obviously doomed to failure.

[Bosola]

I have a feeling that people in 1,000 years time will be looking at today's communists the same way that we look at Greeks like Socrates who thought (if Plato is to be believed) that democracy was obviously doomed to failure.

No. They'll look at our obsession with kernels of selfhood as we look at the late medievals' obsessions with typology. Re-read my first post.

Also, you really should treat the Greek matter with a lot more subtlety. Analogies are troublesome enough when synchronious.

I'm also very suspicious of the suggestion that any means of carrying out social life doesn't implicitly contain some prescriptive description of it. Anarcho-capitalism works well with a theory of individual economic units you know full well didn't exist before the eighteenth century.

[Kudistos Megistos]

I have a feeling that people in 1,000 years time will be looking at today's communists the same way that we look at Greeks like Socrates who thought (if Plato is to be believed) that democracy was obviously doomed to failure.

No. They'll look at our obsession with kernels of selfhood as we look at the late medievals' obsessions with typology.

Pfft! If they do, then I owe you a coke

Also, you really should treat the Greek matter with a lot more subtlety. Analogies are troublesome enough when synchronious.

I'll treat it with the amount of subtlety that Marxists use when analysing human society and the complex relationships between the individuals who make up said society.

[Lion]

Actually, the idea behind communism is a bad one.

It's naive about human nature in a very childish way (which is one of the reasons why people become more right wing as they get older), and it's also incredibly arrogant. Why arrogant? Because Marx seems to have assumed that, not only had he understood the course of history to the extent where he could predict the future, but also that a working political system can be derived a priori. Oh for f***'s sake! I can't even begin to explain how ridiculous that is. Humans and society are far too complex for anyone to be able to look at a few factory workers and then figure out a way to fix society whilst sitting in one's armchair. It's not at all surprising that when the ideals of communism are put into practice they always go horribly wrong and create states so far from the actual ideal that commies can get away with saying that they weren't following the ideals at all. It should really be obvious that any grand, over-ambitious theory of everything that is derived a priori is going to fail badly.

first things first, try separating the idea from the execution. i'm merely saying the idea was not a bad one, not that communism is good or turned out alright.

i don't think society is that complicated. everyone in the world wants one thing: happiness/satisfaction. that is what everything, our actions, our lives, our governments, iare structured to accomplish, and every action is in the pursuit of happiness or will bring the most happiness/satisfaction or is a gamble at happiness. Even suicide, where one willing harms themself is based on the belief that by ending the pain you are at the happiest position you can be in. Understanding that, by creating a world of equal opportunity where noone is better than someone else, and everyone was truly truly equal (in theory), then everyone in theory should have access to the same amount of happiness. There isn't the corporate moguls in their ivory towers and the dirty bums found in the subways. Of course Marxism is good on paper. I don't know how you can say Marxism is about slavery, it is actually about the proletariat SEIZING control. Communism is a version of marxism, that I am willing to bet, is not what Karl Marx or anyone would have imagined. The ideas behind it, were pretty much this 1) Everyone has equal opportunity and access to material things 2) Equality between social classes. By being as equal as possible, you are giving everyone the same chance to equality. Though, as long as there are differences between people, there can never, ever, be equality. Marxist philosophies when put to practice have been tainted by corruption, brutality and a general totalitarian regime. The slavery is not really part of the idea behind communism, or socialism. The idea behind communism is equality between the social classes. Slavery is just a by-product of the plan in motion. The gulags, the totalitarianism, and everything. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that socialism could work in the modern day world. too many corrupt people, and i doubt the world is ready for a socialist/totalitarian government.

Also as to Marx not having a clue about the world, and sitting in his arm chair and all that. I say look at democracy. Look at the primarily white aristocratic males who run society. I think they are equally limited in scope, not understanding poverty the way an orphan in the slums of New York or the ghettos of Louisiana. How does a rich white man understand what may be going through the youth populations mind? Or perhaps a poverty stricken girl who lost her parents? I think that is an unfair knock on socialism. Does it matter who, where and how the idea was conceived but whether it is a good one or not?

The idea behind socialism is this: equal social classes. equal wealth. the economy is the property of the people. is that so bad of an idea? when you get down to execution of socialist ideals slavery, death, evil blah blah blah, that's when the problems arise. But the idea itself is quite good. (this is to scott mctony as well. the slave state is how communism is executed not the idea behind it as was the point of my post)

also, i don't think you can judge an entire political ideology by one or two examples especially since communist russia pretty much created modern day communism and are essentially just one example of communism. if you look at vatican city, you may say a theocracy works quite well. if you look at other theocracies, you would see the Aztecs and human sacrifice or maybe variations of theocracies such as the monarchies in which the kings ruled through divine right. Yet Vatican city a peaceful nation is doing just fine.

[ScottMcTony]

OutFoxxed, I am not sure I could precisely say that you're actually making any logical fallacies, but think about it like this. If I think "I'm going to cut my legs off and collect on the insurance money!", then collecting the insurance was the "idea", but cutting my legs off is still an inherently necessary part of the real idea, and something that I have, the entire time, intended to do by design. It's not so much that myself and Kudistos are separating the idea from the execution, so much as it's you separating positive goals from the rest of the idea.

Also, while I shouldn't have to say this (as it is incredibly obvious from the context of my post, but this is the stupid internet), I am not trying to straw man communism with cutting off ones own legs for insurance money, and if you thought I was, get that out of your dumb head.

[Kudistos Megistos]

first things first, try separating the idea from the execution. i'm merely saying the idea was not a bad one, not that communism is good or turned out alright.

This really is hilarious. The main point I tend to make is that communism suffers when the idea gets executed. And that is the problem with with idea. Or one of the problems. Communism and all other "big ideas" fail to take into account that things don't always go to plan and fails to take into account that one can not judge a system as good or bad or know whether it will be successful or unsuccessful until it has been put into practice. The idea is wildly over-ambitious and based on a gross simplification of human society and a childish insistence that everything be perfect. Not accounting for the separation between idea and execution is a flaw in the idea

Also as to Marx not having a clue about the world, and sitting in his arm chair and all that. I say look at democracy. Look at the primarily white aristocratic males who run society. I think they are equally limited in scope, not understanding poverty the way an orphan in the slums of New York or the ghettos of Louisiana. How does a rich white man understand what may be going through the youth populations mind? Or perhaps a poverty stricken girl who lost her parents? I think that is an unfair knock on socialism. Does it matter who, where and how the idea was conceived but whether it is a good one or not?

Yes, look at democracy. It isn't perfect is it? Now look at communism. Democracy suddenly seems a lot better when the two are compared. You see, this is related to the idea of far left philosophies being unrealistic and over-ambitious. They think that we can make a perfect society with no injustice, and whenever there is any injustice created by a system they say that the system must be destroyed. But what if there is no perfect system? What if we have to compromise and go with the one that creates the least injustice?

also, i don't think you can judge an entire political ideology by one or two examples especially since communist russia pretty much created modern day communism and are essentially just one example of communism.

When was I just using one example? Look at China, North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Cuba and god knows how many other countries in which communism has lead to poverty and oppression and has totally failed in its goal, in most cases either being overthrown or silently dismantled. Has there ever been any communist state that has been even moderately successful? Capitalism hasn't always produced thriving, prosperous meritocratic democracies, but it has at least succeeded a few times.

I'm in a storytelling mood right now, so I'll tell you a story.

There was once a burning building full of people, and two firemen arrived to try to rescue everyone. One of the firemen was a capitalist/classical liberal/democrat/whatever philosophy I'm supposed to be defending, and the other was a socialist/communist/I don't care any more. However, it soon became apparent that rescuing everyone would be impossible.

The first fireman said:

"We can't save everyone; some people will have to die. But we can save some! Let's go in there and save as many as we can, even if it means some injustices will result!"

The second firemen said:

"No! Equality is what's most important! It's not fair that some people get to live and some people have to die. Why should some people get life whilst others lose out? Unless everyone can be saved, no-one should be saved! Everyone must die!"

Then a giant tentacle monster came and raped both of them. Then it raped the charred corpses of everyone inside. The end. (if you couldn't tell, it's 3:00 where I live and I'm tired )