PolitiCube

You've wandered onto a rant about "The Political Compass" if you'd rather not read about that, it's not too late to turn back now.

The Political Compas claims to be educational, yet makes almost no effort to provide any educational information about the details of their compass, instead laughably hoping you'll pay them to teach you about their political compass in a seminar. But back to what little information it does provide, it divides politics between the two dimensions of a social scale depicted as "Authoritarian: state-imposed collectivism vs Libertarian: voluntary regional collectivism" and an economic scale depicted as "Left vs Right" though as far as I can tell almost never actually defines any of it beyond just that. As such while we can reasonably conclude that they must mean economic socialism vs economic capitalism, it takes a lot of digging to find anything even marginally more specific, such as "regulated economy vs deregulated economy." As to the definition/application of their social scale, I don't even think they know what they mean, for instance the use of the phrase, "regional collectivism," does its geography matter? Is it more libertarian if its region of authority is a subset of a larger geographic area? Is a monarchical dictatorship considered libertarian if its authority is limited to a regional subset of a greater area? Also for authoritarian "state-imposed collectivism", they only care about collectivism imposed by the state, so as long as a state gives everyone the right to vote, it doesn't matter if a bunch of people are free to choose to stand outside the polls with guns and threaten anyone of a certain skin color if they try to vote, that has zero relavance to authoritarianism because the state still allowed them to vote, stop trying to imply that matters for a social scale. Ah yes, "voluntary collectivism," let's just ignore the paradox of a world where collectivism, the concept of pushing people into in-groups and out-groups to engage in in-group/out-group biases, is voluntary, because "if we never define anything, then our words can never be wrong." By now you probably understand how much I dislike that site and why it motivated someone who doesn't care about politics to make this site. Let's get to more examples of their absurdity.

Propositions which are totally relevant to these two dimensions:

"Astrology accurately explains many things." Agree or disagree? Wow this very clearly applies to the... socio-... economic... uh... mentality which can motivate literally anything. This question tells us nothing about anything, except maybe that they voluntarily joined a cult so, libertarian, got it by a thread! Let's see what he has to say: From their FAQ, "There is a psychological linkage between determinism and authoritarianism. The astrology believer may hold very liberal social views in other areas, but this does not alter this more authoritarian aspect within his or her cluster of attitudes." Oh... so the person who voluntarily joins the astrology collective is thus the opposite of voluntary collectivism (which is a meaningful metric for libertarianism), not because of any reason therein, but because, and this definitely matters, determinism can be associated with authoritarianism. See that is the mark of a real political survey, which is, to paraphrase its creator, "not like one of those personality classification tests, this is a real political analysis tool." Let me try, now as you know (and this definitely isn't a gross over-generalization), poor people are more likely to vote for authoritarian policies, therefore let's ask people if they are poor and use that to conclude that they are more authoritarian than people who are not poor. Perfection.

"Some people are naturally unlucky." Agree or disagree? Checking the test, agreeing is more authoritarian. I'll go out on a very short limb here and guess that the only relevance this could possibly have is the immediately preceeding above explanation given by the creator, "There is a psychological linkage between determinism and authoritarianism." Now to do that once is laughable enough, but twice, really? Putting even more weight onto this exact same topic, the relevance of which make no sense and has barely any importance to begin with, wow, we're really getting to the bottom of whether social collectivism is "state-imposed" or "voluntary" and "regional".

"It’s natural for children to keep some secrets from their parents." Agree or disagree? Now I could be wrong, but I think the child is analogous to citizens and the parent is analogous to the government, and whether I believe that it is or isn't natural for citizens to keep secrets from their government, informs us about me being more or less authoritarian, because... my belief of humans being prone to keeping secrets... which doesn't actually imply anything should be done about that... says... something-something more authoritarian, I'm guessing. Because if I believe it's natural then I'm turning a blind eye to it, or equally, if it's natural then I believe we need to do something about it. (Making a test with responses that can be interpreted either way is a very good method to never being wrong). Checking the test, agreeing is actually more libertarian, so he went with the turning a blind eye interpretation.

"Abstract art that doesn’t represent anything shouldn’t be considered art at all." Agree or disagree? This is arguably both an economic and social concept, but I'm guessing it only applies to social, let me quickly take the whole test twice and just change that one answer to find out... agreeing is more authoritarian. So if someone doesn't consider something art, a somewhat inconsequential and subjective label/distinction, then they are clearly supporting state-imposed collectivism. Sure, I guess, though that's really stretching it and better spent on a more direct/relevant topic.

"The businessperson and the manufacturer are more important than the writer and the artist." Agree or disagree? From the test, agreeing is more authoritarian. This makes sense because the relative importance of one profession to another profession is a very authoritarian concept, trust me. Also, how dare you think this would have any relevance to economics. Also, no this is not a wildly ambiguous prompt for you to respond to, in which disagreeing could either mean neither is more important than the other or the opposite one is more important.

"Multinational companies are unethically exploiting the plant genetic resources of developing countries." Agree or disagree? This is a hilarous prompt, because it's so far from rationality that I'd have to guess that his motivation is just, "if people agree they are idiots and therefore more likely to support this poitical ideology." It's like if he prompted with: "Multinational wind turbines are unethically exploiting the Earth's natural wind resources blowing out of developing countries." Absolutely hilarious. From the test, agreeing is more libertarian. So, if a country doesn't want other countries to have some plant it has, then they would have to possess them through some state-imposed methods I guess. And yet, somehow, a nation asserting control over the unique plant genetic resources that exist in its country to block them from the free-market is clearly libertarian, trust me. Keep in mind, that this is definitely not relevant to capitalism at all.

More issues:

USA presidential elections, in which for some reason Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 are just off-center, leaning auhoritarian and right, then in 2012, suddenly Barack Obama is over halfway to fully authoritarian and right, similarly in 2016 Hillary Clinton has moved far to the economic right and further authoritarian, while in 2020 Joe Biden has moved to the far economic right and over halfway to authoritarian, laughably placng him a negligible distance from Donald Trump. It is beyond me how anyone could think that Joe Biden doesn't support many many socialist economic programs, and thus sincerely place him almost fully capitalistic. That is just plain propaganda in addition to being arbitrary and inconsistent. Though I suppose I shouldn't expect any different from a guy who sincerely thinks that FDR's New Deal: full of subsidies, public works programs, labor unionizations, the literal start of social security in the USA, etc. was somehow not socialistic.

His countries plotted on the main example political compass, there are only six of them all clustered along the extreme top or right edges of the compass. Why? How is anyone supposed to utilize that for a frame of reference, especially when the entire rest of the compass has no reference since the only countries included are all either fully authoritarian or fully capitalist? Further, a buried orphan page under /euchart depicts the creator's hilarious political bias in which he graphs all of the 22 EU countries as all authoriatarian-right, leaving the entire rest of the compass as empty, while depicting the UK and Spain as tied for most capitalist of all 22 countries. This in combination with the severe lack of defined axes makes the compass deliberately lacking in educational usefulness and blatantly propagandist.

Constant advertisements and self-promotions, financial solicitations, donation requests, paranoid greed-driven delusions of self-importance with a constant need to remind you how great he is while making every effort to assert intellectual rights to the idea of a simple political test, no he will not let you see his magical scoring process for doing simple calculations of x and y, how dare you try to assess the test's validity. Etcetera.

And that is the story of how this site came to be.