I find the labeling of all non-authoritarian folks, whether they support capitalism run amok or are appalled by it, as ‘libertarian’ to be disingenuous.
It’s similar to the way that you can mix red and green light to make yellow, and you can mix red and blue light to make violet. Yellow and violet are exact opposites, so the red light that’s a component of both can be seen as a parallel of this “libertarian” label.
I hope that’s clear.
Whenever I take these quizzes they tell me I’m literally Peter Kropotkin.
…I mean, they’re not wrong, how could you not like this guy?
I dunno - I wish the questions had more degrees. I was more luke warm to some of the answer that an “agree” or “disagree” didn’t really fit.
But at any rate, here is where I scored. Pretty sure its about where I tested before.
Looking at the grid you link, I’m probably best described as a collectivist, not an egalitarian, which may explain my objection to the label “libertarian.”
Libertarian may mean different things to different people, but I don’t see how it can possibly mean any philosophy or political belief that doesn’t value liberty. I don’t value liberty. I don’t see how a liberty-based analysis adds anything to public policy.
But the quiz doesn’t really ask the questions it would need to to find this out at all. It asks whether abortion should be legal.
If it asked, “If we lived in an alternate reality where somehow having a law against abortion resulted in great outcomes - happier people, healthier women, healthier babies, less poverty, etc., would you support that law?” And one of that answers was, “Well, yes, but that’s kind of a ridiculous hypothetical” then I’d pick that one in a heartbeat. That would show I don’t put much value on liberty at all, but rather on social outcomes, which this quiz would describe as “authoritarian” but which isn’t anything of the kind since it isn’t about obeying authority.
I’m not a libertarian in any possible sense of the word. I just have some understanding of what makes good public policy and how making laws shapes public behaviour.
Bubble. Me and @frauenfelder are the most conservative guys here!
Edit: OK I looked at @Mister44’s score and he’s the most conservative, me and Mark are just duking it out for second place.
Fuck punitive justice!
Like most such, that test is flawed in that it makes assumptions about capital punishment that are not objectively true.
I do not think endless, meaningless, dehumanizing torment is vastly preferable to a clean and dignified death, therefore I am always categorized as being in favor of punishment. This reveals more about the anti-death penalty crowd than it does about me, I think.
The problem is that people on the left all over the world were calling themselves libertarians since the 1850s, but people on the right in the USA decided to call themselves the same thing 100 years later. The most well known group to call themselves libertarian in Britain in the early 2000s (where and when this quiz was made) were a far left group.
Telling a group of left wing anti authoritarians to not call themselves something because of a group on the right calling themselves the same thing (Illegitimately, in the eyes of the left) probably isn’t going to get the desired effect.
It’s one of the things I’ve hated about modern politics is how easily people steal terms to slip past solid policy/agenda questions with buzz words like transparency or liberty. People just take it to mean anything and never really get caught until its too late and they’ve done what they wanted.
I’m not in the B.B. bubble it seems. Bang in the middle economically and half way down into libertarianism. In these parts I guess that counts as rabidly right-wing.
Again, see it in the context of Britain 20 years ago. Specifically…
The people sentenced to life imprisonment in both of these cases were told by the judge that if the death sentence was an option he would have given it. All of them were innocent of the crimes they went to prison for.
It’s a question about whether you support the death sentence knowing that some innocent people will die too.
Did you see where Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair were on their charts? They put you back towards the centre.
I see it as a question of whether you support torture and needless suffering knowing that some of the people might deserve it.
But remember I live in the USA. In America, not supporting the death penalty is synonymous with supporting torture and suffering, approving of the deprivation of basic human rights, and empowering sadists. Because that’s what we have in the USA as the other option instead of the death penalty; we don’t send you to a rehabilitation center staffed with caring professionals, we send you to a punishment cell, where you will be brutalized by other felons and by psychologically damaged prison guards who will then go home and brutalize their families. That’s our system.
And everybody dies, there’s nothing to fear in death. You and I will both get there no matter how many grandstands, bandwagons and soapboxes are in the way.
If we were to reframe ‘liberty’ as reproductive choice, freedom of religion, speech, and association. Would that make the political value of ‘liberty’ more sensible?
Any political graph that reduces down to two axis is pretty useless, no? Do you know anybody, besides oblivious white dudes, who lives in a two-axis world?
Yes you do, be a pal and take the test.
Dang that’s a fine-looking flag!
Sadly, in the U.S. there are a lot of people who live in a one-axis world: political flatlanders, relatively speaking.
