people are really out here completely unironically explaining the polical compass as a way to understand politics AT A COLLEGE LEVEL aaaaasaaaa :agony-shivering: :agony-deep:

  • SerLava [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    It's bad enough of a model, but it's made so much worse by the fact that it was popularized in the form of a specific quiz by a libertarian who was intentionally distorting the results

    Biggest of all it needs to be 3 dimensions at least. Economic distribution, state authority, social freedom. This chart mashes the last two together.

    Like did you know that on this chart, the main difference between an anarchist and a communist is that the communist hates gays and art?

    Literally that's it

    It's actually that stupid

    • SoyViking [he/him]
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      2 years ago

      The authoritarian vs. libertarian scale is unadultered bullshit as it is an illustration of the liberal fallacy of thinking that only the government can be the source of coercion and despotism. An "an"cap utopia where the world was one big company town with open air child slave markets would be classified as more "free" than your milquetoast succdem welfare state or your socialist workers' state since people would be oppressed by the market and not by the state..

      Also, the political compass is Nazi apologia. It claims that the Nazis were economically centrist, making them look more reasonable than communism way up in the corner.

      And now we are talking about Nazis, if we were to believe the political compass, Nazis are sort of neighbours to communists, whereas libertarians are at the other end of the chart, despite far right economic and social politics has always gone hand in hand.

      • SerLava [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Absolutely, a state authority spectrum, especially under capitalism, necessarily has private authority as its opposite. If you get rid of Government you just get Government™ Sponsored by Amazon™

    • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]
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      2 years ago

      I also think it's easier for a crank chud to become a crank leftist than to ever touch the toxic goop that is liberalism. If you can be convinced to have righteous anger instead of punching down, suddenly a union sounds like a good idea. So, in that sense, a quantum leap over center left to far left makes much more sense than the linear progression that the square/cube implies. I think it's a shortcoming of charting out politics in general