| Thursday, September 29, 2005 |
14:01 - I used to hate these things. Oh wait, I still do
http://www.okcupid.com/politics
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People at Dean's World have been taking this Politics Test and sharing their results. For some reason the "OK Cupid" site is getting lots of play lately with its polls, hoary as the exercise is by now, and I guess we can never resist a politics test that tries to convince us that it's accurate and fun and (most importantly) unbiased like no other politics test has been before.
My results came out almost exactly where Dean's were (65% permissive Social Liberal, 65% permissive Economic Conservative), making me a Libertarian... and more alarmingly, I noticed that on the Famous People graph, I'm right smack dab in the middle of John Kerry's face. Well, actually in his hair, but that covers a lot of territory.
I think there may be some fishiness to the test. I noticed the author's snark showing through here and there ("logging restrictions preventing loggers from logging logs"); and of course I couldn't help but notice that of the people taking the test, the answers on the post-test questions all seemed to be coming out overwhelmingly against the war, overwhelmingly pro-Kerry, strongly in favor of gun control, etc. And the blue (Kerry) speckles on the presidential election results overlapped the "Libertarian" sector almost entirely, whereas the "Fascist" and "Totalitarian" sectors were almost all red (e.g. Bush), even though that's where Stalin is. Do those sound accurate to you? Only if you're one of the blue speckles, I would tend to think.
I guess it's that "famous people" graphic that gets to me the most, though. Why does Kerry get to be a Centrist on the Libertarian border, whereas Bush and Reagan are crammed up into the upper-left corner? How come "good guys" like Gandhi get to be the poster children for Socialists, whereas Hitler doesn't even show up on the graphic (though he'd certainly be placed up in the Fascist slice, "National Socialism" notwithstanding)? Why is my role model apparently Adam Sandler?
And let's not even get into why the more "permissive" you score on the Economics axis, the more "conservative" and the less "liberal" you are.
I noticed that there were few questions about the necessity of defense spending or about Constitutional strict-interpretation or about which of the first ten Amendments we consider most important, which is one of the most concise litmus tests I know. Yet there's a lot about how we feel about big corporations and the homeless. Not a lot of room for "compassionate conservatism" in the result set.
Intentional? My imagination? I'unno. I just think this stuff is never as unbiased as it ever claims to be, just as I have yet to see someone who claims to be a "centrist" who isn't really a partisan trying really really hard to keep it under his hat.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid. And I'm not sure where the "Paranoid" sector of the graphic goes.
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Brian Tiemann
