Thanks for the clarification. I knew I was being naive, but had to make a stab at it. Nevertheless, it is the state of the system here and you won’t be changing things by standing back and complaining.
Even in a parliamentary system one is left trying to develop a coalition of more than 50% once your are in the seat, so to speak.
So what is the alternative to FPTP then? In California we have some things like tax increases that require 66% of the vote. Isn’t that just the minority winning in most cases? I don’t get it. It seems like a trick, sophistry.
At some point a coalition will need to be assembled that can deliver 50%+1 to pass legislation.
I think our problem has a lot more to do with too much money being at risk thus power holders lie steal and cheat to maintain their grip. Maybe devolution is the way to go.
The first thing the robots will do is take over the economy. They’ll crow, “You’re doing it all wrong! WTF is wrong with you morons?” We will then enter a brief period of paradise until they realize we really are useless.
But then again, I was rather appalled to discover just how little I actually know, and how uninformed any opinion I could presently hold must be, on the topics of trade policy, welfare, the draft, etc. And some of the “best” choices for me seemingly excluded other choices I would like to include.
But mostly I found myself feeling troublingly ignorant. I wouldn’t have thought myself in favor of legalizing all hard drugs, but when faced with the alternatives in the quiz, it seems to my abstinent mind that most of the worst evils resultant from illegal drugs stem from their prohibition.
In any case, I landed about where I expected I would on the graph. Liberaler than most, and slightly on the libertarian side. (My support for the welfare state keeps that dot from rising too high.)
It was the proximity of that line to the quote you had from me that got me going. Thank you for the apology. I reacted before I got too steamed. Maybe I learned how to deal with these things a little bit better. Communication is tricky.
I’m from Buffalo too and was also genuinely quite surprised. It definitely makes you question what they considered to be Buffalo for the purposes of the study, and how conservatism was measured.
That said, it also makes you think about how conservative Buffalo might actually be… it certainly feels conservative, especially socially conservative, including in local media. The working-class suburbs like the Tonawandas, Cheektowaga etc. are absurdly conservative and I think that has a big effect on public perception because it seems like that’s where most of the population is. Though Amherst is now considered by the USPS to be Buffalo for some reason, it’s a far more liberal area (the university undoubtedly having a big influence - I grew up practically adjacent to the campus), and those still living in Buffalo itself are generally more liberal - including the old-money people (which includes some of my family which is how I know), and the hip young people in Elmwood Village, and all the working poor (which describes most of the city) who are more likely to vote liberal than those in the adjacent suburbs. There’s also got to be a big Canadian influence, although the lower part of Ontario just over the border is quite conservative for Canada.
Ultimately it makes me wonder… if Buffalo had the money that the other cities in that part of the list had - and I would guess it has a small, sad fraction of it - could it be a great, and liberal, city again?
This quiz is clearly biased to provide results on the “libertarian” and/or “conservative” quadrants. I scored similarly to @Donald_Petersen, but only because the choices proffered rather suck.
Hey don’t knock uninformed. If you can maintain empathy you will probably find yourself on the correct side of an opinion on policy.
I read up on those subjects regularly, it isn’t enlightening it is distressing & needlessly so. I find it often the way it is written, the sources/spin than the actual information itself. So to get a well informed opinion these days to me means treading through & around big piles of shit no matter the ideological predisposition of the source.
edit - for instance (empathy), on hard drugs your stance would seem to be “harm reduction” which often includes legalization or decriminalization among other tools. “Harm reduction” says it all.
I got almost the same result, my dot is one diagonal directly up. I wish it broke down the questions and answers to show you what contributed to what. I chose the most welfare-state/socialist answers for the economic questions (or so I thought) so I’m not sure what skewed me more libertarian. Interesting quiz but clearly not perfect.
Yeah, that kind of sums it up for me. But as passionately as I feel about some issues, the solutions aren’t always obvious to me. Take international trade. The choices offered in the quiz obviously don’t represent every possible valid solution, but for the purposes of the quiz we are to assume that the six choices represent most of the spectrum of thought on the subject. But what do the six choices actually mean, in terms of how they affect people? Here are the choices:
A. Continue as currently, more or less.
B. Get rid of all tariffs, quotas, and export subsidies.
C. Aggressively enforce existing trade laws, retaliating against foreign subsidies which hurt domestic industries.
D. Increase tariffs and/or pull out of some/all of our trade agreements.
E. Implement an all out industrial policy.
F. Get rid of the existing reams of tariff schedules and trade agreements, but tax imports implicitly by having a national sales tax. This sales tax could replace Social Security taxes, the federal income tax, or both.
My goals are your usual soft-hearted moonbat stuff: a reasonable standard of living and as much prosperity as we can muster for as many people as possible, discouraging exploitation of labor forces worldwide. Tariffs, as I understand them in my fourth-grade way, protect local industries against “unfair” foreign competition that use dirt-cheap manufacturing labor costs etc. to undercut our prices. But how am I supposed to know if “pull out of some/all of our trade agreements” would be helpful? Surely some agreements are beneficial, and some are terrible. I don’t think it’s all a zero-sum game, as if people are simply gonna buy their TVs from somewhere so it’d be better if they bought ours. No, if prices are too high and wages are too low, nobody’s gonna buy a TV from anybody.
So I have no idea how to choose any of the choices from that first question. Maybe getting rid of all tariffs, quotas, and subsidies would be helpful, or maybe such balls-out laissez-faire free trade would drive all manufacturing to nations that engage in near-slavery-level industrial employment.
The burden is on me to learn more about this stuff, since I do feel an obligation to ensure my opinion is an informed one if I’m going to hold one. But man, there ain’t enough hours in the day.
Yeah, I’d like to know how the answers contribute to where you fall on that axis. I mean, for much of it it’s obvious, but less so for things like trade policy and terror.
Personally, I’ve always felt like a civil libertarian in that I think we should look out for each other, and keep each other company, but otherwise leave each other alone. In areas like public education, I’m all for funding it out the wazoo, since we all benefit from smarter kids, even those of us who choose to have no kids. In terms of gun control, my first instinct would have been to support the 2nd amendment to a certain degree (with heavy restrictions/prohibitions on obviously purpose-built murder weapons and WMDs), but lately I’ve become more suspicious of the idea that every schmuck on the street (myself included in that schmuck-herd) should have unfettered rights to walk into the local gun store and buy themselves a Saturday Night Special just in case the opportunity to take a life happens to cross their path someday. Still, I’ve grown increasingly suspicious of what’s looking more and more like the beginnings of a repressive police state in America. I don’t mean our rights are being oppressed all over the place yet, but certainly the infrastructure has rapidly been built to permit the government to surveil and crack down wherever and whenever it feels the urge. And we’ve seen plenty of examples where authorities have taken advantage of the tools and weapons and extended permissions they’ve recently acquired and gone way, way beyond the levels of force, intrusiveness, brutality, and civil-rights-infringing we used to consider prudent and just.
Well, anyway. I could go on, but I’m just gonna let it go for now.
I thought it was pretty telling that the only thing they provided a link to information for was the “industrial policy”… I checked it out and while the Wikipedia page that is linked isn’t a very specific explanation, it sounds to me like it involves heavy government intervention in industry and the economy in order to shape the country to be as competitive as possible internationally. Rather than the relatively laissez-faire free-market approach of tariffs and trade agreements and whatnot. Part of it would also be heavy investment in the things you need for industry to thrive, like infrastructure.
I chose that option in the quiz - admitting fully that the quiz influenced me to do so, and also admitting that I too don’t know enough about the other options to have a truly informed decision.
yeah, from what I am seeing, Buffalo seems to be getting younger people to be part of the community. Especially with the work on the waterfront. Be careful with labeling Amherst. There is the University section, but there is a lot of money in other parts of Amherst, which often translates to more conservative values (although I don’t know that for sure anymore about the Amherst money, but my observations “back in the day” led me to believe this).
That being said, I still have friends and family back home that say, “What do you mean, you don’t get Good Friday off?!?”
