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It's pretty much impossible to get authleft on the political compass test unless you're a racist religious zealot who's obsessed with controlling people's sex lives. So some leftists who would otherwise be MLs and be open to supporting past and current socialist states take the test and get libleft, and decide they must actually be anarchists.
It's also impossible to actually get an anarchist result on the site, since the "libleft" quadrant assumes state control of the economy.
Yes, polcomp is about neatly separating people into definable categories. In-groups and out-groups. This is anti-solidarity, counter-revolutionary, and the footwork of the fascists.
maybe it's paranoid but i think it's an op
if you quantify qualities (put political values into numbers) you can play numerical tricks with them, like having a spatialy located centre - people associate the centre of anything with stuff, and same with edges or corners, and also signs like - and +.
so yeah its about putting people in groups, but also i think about disolving or warping the terms they use and reducing political debate.
reducing it all to keywords and numbers means not having to investigate the arguments behind the words/numbers, you can just use them as totems or arguments in themselves or reference points without having to argue.
There's a mysticism you can create with numbers, they're seen as invoilable or axiomatic so if you can map political arguments to them you can pretend the thing they reference is also axiomatic.
I think you make a good point, but it's less an op and more just the standard MO for what liberalism does to everything; Vulgarize it, disarm it, and then absorb it.
Through the use of those sliding scales and number magic we can transform 4 distinct ideologies into the qualities or data points you mentioned, sucking out the revolutionary spirit like a hoover vacuum. This is the vulgarization. You like cops? AuthRight trait, +1 to your Dictator stat. You gay? Anarchist trait, +1 Antifa stat. These are no longer ideologies/belief structures, but rather buckets of flair that you can reach into to pull out the various opinion pins to put on your shit.
We now have people hitting the 4 vulgarized "quadrants," but at the end of the day they are all simply ideologically incoherent terminally online people with a bag full of flair. These people are too busy winnowing out the "bad guys" from their in-group to organize or reach some kind of solidarity. After all, we can't go about starting socialism with all these goddamn tankies in my twitter mentions talking about gulags! This is the disarmament.
Which leads us to absorption, where Capital takes advantage of the discord to use these in-groups as marketing demographics for their Che t-shirts and rainbow-packaged BLT sandwiches.
No one who uses the political compass unironically is even adjacent to real politics.
surely politics is simple enough to be plotted in two dimensional space. how could being so reductive have any negative consequences
So when you say communism that's a bit problematic because you see communism is authoritarian left social right economic centre and also worse the closer you get to the corners.
I'm on the left and even I don't think we should abolish money or homes thats why I'm right on authoritarian issues and left on libertarian ones, I'm basically in the centre really, but on the left - I'm not a racist is what I'm saying, I just believe in a hierarchy of cultural values that happens to correspond to skin tone. So a centrist, yeah, as in not an extremist. Anyway, here's that in coordinates: -3,4,22,0.8; -23; +0.9.
Framing politics as a spectrum of "freedom vs authority" is extreme libertarian shit.
Nah, I think the anti-communist propaganda is worse. At least, it's way WAY more pervasive. It's something 99% of Americans have been infected with. The political compass is still not something most Americans are aware of.
Neither the far left nor far right like mega-corps, right? It might be easier to get a far right guy to become a lefty than it is to get a lib to become a lefty because the lib might benefit from big business. If you can convince the righty that they have some weird hang up about the working class or POC, they might already be receptive to how fucked the market is. That way, there's a quantum leap on that chart which would have implied the lib would be easier to convince.
Yeah, it's certainly proven to be a strong propaganda tool. I'm working on a new one in the hopes it helps counteract some of the ignorance it's spread.
edit: Removed a bunch of details. Can't just leave the details of my nefarious plan in public.
New political compass:
spoiler
-> Willing to come together in solidarity to build a better future under communism.
-> Unwilling to join the project of global species-awareness and a brighter future under communism, gets the wall.
That's certainly more emotionally satisfying, but if we want to actually win we need to drag more people over onto our side before we start making ultimatums.
