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  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Actually, here's my first draft of the test's intro, talking about how tests like this are inherently reductive.

    Real world policy is composed of endless independent decisions, yet political frameworks try to fit all of political thought into just a single left/right spectrum. If you're lucky you'll get a second axis, or maybe even eight of them. Doing this requires lumping some of the endless decisions together and adding them up into a single position. One person might care about black rights but not gay rights, another might care about gay rights but not black rights, and any political test (even this one) will declare those two individuals equivalent, even though the difference between those two test-takers may matter an awful lot to you if you are gay or black.

    Some of this kludging together is inevitable - if we all had time to rattle off every one of our views to everyone we meet, we would not need political tests. But who decides what views get to be grouped together? Is the difference between left and right one of big versus small government? Social versus capital control of the economy? Minority rights versus nah? Inevitably, the groupings are determined by the biases of whoever wrote the test.

    To attempt to address this, I have constructed this test using the three most common frameworks I've found people operating under, by actually talking to people with different political views and seeing what ideas they think are virtuous, which they think are viceful, and which they fail to understand entirely. It is, of course, still biased. But it attempts to at least show you three different biased views of the world.

    • ElectricMonk [she/her,undecided]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      But government isn’t a class in and of itself, a ML gov (in theory) controls the MOP on behalf of the worker, which is worth distinguishing from a nationalist, theocratic, monarchist etc government controlling the MOP.

      • Owl [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        The difference between ML and anarchist theories is the government controlling the MOP on behalf of the worker and the worker directly controlling the MOP.

        Acknowledging different kinds of left theories lets me make the leftist framework a triangle so it's more interesting and exciting than the other two.