Politics

[Fall_Child42]

I have a question about this political compass.

How does this bottom left corner even make any sense?

How can somebody be against government involvement but pro social programs?

A strong government influence is needed in order to have social programs at all. Somebody with libertarian ideals should not be willing to accept anything like healthcare, having roads built for them, or free education. So in order to be left economically you would have to lean at least somewhat authoritarian.

[Otohiko]

How can somebody be against government involvement but pro social programs?

What does the bottom left corner have to do with social programs?

To simplify and extremize, bottom left corner is hippie utopia where no government or authority exists at all, but everybody lives in agreement with each other while respecting everybody else's uniqueness.

(Of course, consider the other 3 corners too, top left being a permanent "dictatorship of the proletariat", top right being cyberpunk-esque corporate hell, bottom right being some sort of post-apocalyptic dog-eat-dog world. They're supposed to be unrealistic and extreme, and noone is actually supposed to end up in absolute corners on the compass.)

[Fall_Child42]

How can somebody be against government involvement but pro social programs?

What does the bottom left corner have to do with social programs?

To simplify and extremize, bottom left corner is hippie utopia where no government or authority exists at all, but everybody lives in agreement with each other while respecting everybody else's uniqueness.

(Of course, consider the other 4 corners too, top left being a permanent "dictatorship of the proletariat", top right being cyberpunk-esque corporate hell, bottom right being Mad Max. They're supposed to be unrealistic and extreme, and noone is actually supposed to end up in absolute corners on the compass.)

If you are left economically you are pro taxation, protectionism, and government spending (likely on social programs)

[Fall_Child42]

Also, how come in your extreme simplifications, the bottom left one was the only one you portrayed positively?
two of the others you described incredibly negatively, and the third just neutrally. I see your tricky language games.

[Otohiko]

No, not really. Those things are not simply a matter of left-right, and are determined by up/down as well. Communism, for example, is not about government spending, taxation or protectionism at all (despite what Fox News says), but very clearly about the eventual elimination of all those things including government. You're forgetting that leftist economics and politics, by and large, are fundamentally about the eventual dissolution of the state, market economy, etc., and only see taxes and state mechanisms as means to get there (someday...) What you're describing are not "left economically" but very much "upper left", because that involves a definition of the state and its function, an inherently authoritarian construct.

[Otohiko]

Also, how come in your extreme simplifications, the bottom left one was the only one you portrayed positively?
two of the others you described incredibly negatively, and the third just neutrally. I see your tricky language games.

Lol, I dunno, hippie la-la land isn't necessarily positive. And if it may be positive, it's also the least realistic.

[EvaFan]

Decided to give it a try and not really surprised by the results. I would have appreciated a "Neutral" reaction to some of the questions that would not effect the results though.

[Fall_Child42]

the definition of left right economics specific to this political compass is as follows.

The Economic (Left-Right) axis measures one's opinion of how the economy should be run: "left" is defined as the view that the economy should be run by a cooperative collective agency (which can mean the state, but can also mean a network of communes), while "right" is defined as the view that the economy should be left to the devices of competing individuals and organisations.

Any co-operative collective agency, even communes, requires some form of authoritarian control, so again I say that that entire lower left quadrant does not make any logical sense within the definitions set out by the political compass itself.

[Otohiko]

Oh you're playing language games too now. Cooperative collective agency != government involvement or social programs (in the sense of state-funded bureaucracy). The lower left is simply concerned with collective agency as something that works on the level of individuals (i.e. the right of everyone to have an individual say in the collective and to have their interest protected by the collective as far as possible). It doesn't make sense in the extreme, of course, but neither do the other corners.

[inthesto]

I have a question about this political compass.

How does this bottom left corner even make any sense?

How can somebody be against government involvement but pro social programs?

A strong government influence is needed in order to have social programs at all. Somebody with libertarian ideals should not be willing to accept anything like healthcare, having roads built for them, or free education. So in order to be left economically you would have to lean at least somewhat authoritarian.

The Y-axis isn't very well labeled, since "libertarian" already has another definition that is described by the second quadrant of the graph. What the Y-axis describes is the government's role in social policy, as opposed to economic policy. The positive end of the axis would be for government restricting personal freedoms whereas the negative is about the government allowing them. I don't know what the Canadian issues in question would be, but in the USA it's typically abortion, drug laws, and gay rights.

Furthermore, in spite of what capital L libertarian philosophy argues, I'd argue that it is possible for a government to legislate in favor of of freedoms. The easy examples would be Roe vs Wade, where the US federal government enforced a woman's right to choose to have an abortion regardless of where she lived, and the Civil Rights Act, where the government enforced an individual's right to not be denied service based on race, ethnicity, gender, etc. It's really not difficult to imagine personal rights that would otherwise be squashed if there were no governmental body to protect them.

[Otohiko]

Yep, and that's basically where non-extreme lower-left politics can usually be seen - protecting minority rights and interests from undue influence of either a) the market; b) the social interests of the majority.

[Fall_Child42]

The Y-axis isn't very well labeled, since "libertarian" already has another definition that is described by the second quadrant of the graph. What the Y-axis describes is the government's role in social policy, as opposed to economic policy. The positive end of the axis would be for government restricting personal freedoms whereas the negative is about the government allowing them. I don't know what the Canadian issues in question would be, but in the USA it's typically abortion, drug laws, and gay rights.

Furthermore, in spite of what capital L libertarian philosophy argues, I'd argue that it is possible for a government to legislate in favor of of freedoms. The easy examples would be Roe vs Wade, where the US federal government enforced a woman's right to choose to have an abortion regardless of where she lived, and the Civil Rights Act, where the government enforced an individual's right to not be denied service based on race, ethnicity, gender, etc. It's really not difficult to imagine personal rights that would otherwise be squashed if there were no governmental body to protect them.

that's actually a very interesting argument. Saying that a government is needed to enforce freedoms. That does make sense, and is in line with even extreme libertarian ideals. The problem arises when you start moving left or right within these two extremes.

My issue, is with the lower left section. For any form of wealth distribution, you would need some form of taxing system - which is completely against libertarian ideals. At least as far as I understand. Should an individual not be able to choose if he would like to share his wealth or keep it?


Also this

Note to any Muslims present. Abuse a female in my presence, and you are being sent to a hospital emergency ward with life threatening injuries. And no human law will make me change my mind.

[Fall_Child42]

basically all i'm saying is that the graph is bad.

[Qyot27]

The problem is that 'libertarian' is very often a horridly-defined term. One can be libertarian on social issues and not on economic ones. There's no requirement of being absolutely libertarian on everything - if you were, you'd probably be a staunch anarchist (and I know a couple that post on other forums I frequent).

The bottom line is that ideologies are, at their root, just that - ideas. And most people don't pull from just one pool of ideas, thus it is incredibly unlikely to have someone follow exactly one set of ideas from one single source in every conceivable scenario. It's incredibly easy to want government to get out of one's moral decision-making concerning non-violent acts while still holding that it (or similar collective) has a duty to act in the market to stabilize it and prevent it from becoming abusive of the public, since again, not everyone believes the laissez-faire 'self-governing market' slogan.

[quote=zibbazabba905]I also find it intriguing that other countries have things such as a "communist" "socialist" "fascist" and "nazi" party. But that's probably something completely different.[/quote]
Uh, the U.S. has those too, although some may not explicitly align themselves with Nazis and Fascists (I did find one that was advocating the return of the U.S. to British rule and basically implementing apartheid, but otherwise I think those are pretty hard to come by). But the CPUSA and Socialist Party USA both exist, as well as smaller parties within the same ideological family.

[trythil]

I read your post, and my opinion came after. Why would I change it after reading it again? Also, I don't care to argue, I was just stating it.

Because stating

I think green energy has alot of possibilities but its way too early to do anything other than fund research for it right now IMO.

sounds like you're ignoring production-level deployments of renewable energy generation sources. Yes, they are early stage production deployments, but they work. The next thing to do is to scale up production, to drive costs down, and you don't achieve that with small-scale research prototypes. You achieve it by optimizing production processes in tandem with further basic research.

For example, there are solar cells (in research stage) that show 40% efficiency, a four-fold increase over typical production cells. That's pretty awesome. Meanwhile, we have installers like SolarCity that have developed business models (sustainable business, it seems) around this sort of thing, even with the comparatively inefficient cells we currently have access to. In time I'm sure they'll upgrade their product offerings to use better cells as they become available. It's just like any other industry.

I would like to know why Romney's plan seems to just ignore cases like SolarCity; I would like to know why he seems to have skipped over the possibility of federal assistance (note: not even necessarily money, because I don't think they need more money; it could just be streamlining regulation) for corporations like them. They're not the only one in the US.

If you aren't ignoring those cases and you still think that, I would like you to point out why you think they're not ready for prime time. Otherwise, your opinion is without factual basis, which is one of the biggest problems we have in politics.