Quick background on this. A fellow I met while I hung out with the AZLP Mises Caucus is actually working on a degree in Political Science. He has a fun survey out there that he is trying to manage the weighting on the responses. If you don’t mind helping a guy out.
Yes, its a Likert-type survey that puts you into a quadrant, but what makes this one different is it maps it into three dimensions with the third being tradition vs. openness. It then plots it in a way for you to visualize exactly the type of totalitarian shitlord you are. Its kind of cool.
Interesting. My browser may be keeping me from actually taking the survey. Regardless I am person A. No/no enforcement, liberty, traditional morals.
Blocked here at work as well.
ZaRDOZ IS PLEASED WITH HIS CHOSEN, THE GREEN RJ. ZARDOZ DECREES THAT THE GREEN ONE WILL BE IN CHARGE OF DISTRIBUTING THE GIFT OF THE GUN, SO THAT THE EARTH MAY BE CLEANSED OF THE FILTHY BLUE-HAIRED BRUTALS. ZARDOZ HAS SPOKEN.
“Are you now, or have you ever been…”
No … but we are willing to learn …
Not working for me.
The first half we’d probably all agree on, the second half gets interesting. My results:
Economic +87.5
Your responses lean toward private ownership, voluntary exchange, and decentralized economic decision-making
Social/Cultural +12.5
Your responses place greater value on inherited traditions, social continuity, and established cultural institutions.
Enforcement -75
Your responses place greater emphasis on allowing peaceful individual choices even when those choices conflict with prevailing social or economic preferences.
Mine was pretty close to that: +87.5, +12.5, -91.7
Econ – 100
Social/Cultural – 37.5
Encforcment – -41.7
We’re almost twins. +79.2, +12.5, -75.0.
79.2, 29.2, -50.
I was all the way at the extreme for market and liberty, and dead in the middle for social.
I think the wording of the questions is too ambiguous to suss out true orientation.
I believe a lot of cultural traditions are important… many are important to having the ability to live a free life in a free society.
And in most cases, the government should butt out.
But this survey did not explore the nuance of “should the government stop a guy from wearing a dress and calling himself Shirley” and “should the government allow Shirley (neé Cletus) to change in the locker room with my 12 year old daughter?”
So a lot of my answers landed in the middle because “it depends”.
I am pretty extreme on individual liberty and right to challenge authority-government or otherwise.
But I am also pretty extreme on the importance of culture in maintaining a functioning society. Example? Compare the US with … anywhere outside the west.
It really doesnt do a good job of capturing that.
The problem isn’t so much that the questions are ambiguous (although they are, necessarily so).
The problem with this, and with every other similar survey, is that your answers are going to change when you actually confront the questions in real life, versus on your computer while arseing off at work over a plate of takeout Pad See Ew.
Ooh. Now I want Thai food….
I like Thai. You like shirt?
Yep.
It’s a good start.
+95.8; +4.2; -91.7
+100, +20.8, – 95.8
Thanks for sharing, mexi.
+100 economic; +16.7 social; -95.7 enforcement
clones
Thanks for participating!
I got it to work in FireFox, Windows version.
Market orientation: Very strong +100
Your responses lean toward private ownership, voluntary exchange, and decentralized economic decision-making.
Traditional orientation: Moderate +37.5
Your responses place greater value on inherited traditions, social continuity, and established cultural institutions.
Liberty orientation: Very strong -100
Your responses place greater emphasis on allowing peaceful individual choices even when those choices conflict with prevailing social or economic preferences.
See, the divergence between your Liberty orientation score and mine highlights the nuance that’s missing. I think the question that prevented me from getting to -100, I interpreted in my mind as “No, you can’t just dig a pit and take a dump on a public beach. We don’t do that here.”
How it’s enforced is a different question.
Yeah, there was lots of room for “mostly” in those seemingly absolute questions.
He needs to take another look at his questions and tighten the ambiguity. They are way too broad to get a real picture.
I kept seeing “generally” in the questions, so they didn’t seem absolute to me.
Where I thought it got interesting was testing how committed you were to traditional values. Should the government enforce them? Not always, but also not never. When, how, and which ones are where the nuance is. Which you’re not going to capture with a survey like this.
I am just a caveman libertarian. OG SMASH COMMIES! My scores reflect that.
One more thing, I have been around long enough to see why “maybe” does. One the government gets a little piece, it never stops. Don’t feed the government bear!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VM6E4UAJ30
How it’s enforced is a different question.
Right… we joke about helicopters.
…As long as they are privately owned helicopters…
Something I think is always missing from these types of surveys is what types of social values are being preserved, and against what?
If we’re talking about preserving generally Western Judeo-Christian social values against Eastern Islamist blood feud values, I’d say yes. If it’s about preserving conservative Christian values against having a more open and liberal society, I’d say no.
My husband and I thought the same – the survey emphasizes government’s role but not that of society in-general.
The difficulty, Chipping, is that its not at all clear that you can have a dechristianized open liberal society that has sufficient antibodies to, say Islamic tribalist values. That’s kind of the experiment Europe is running right now, and the early returns are . . . not encouraging.
Yeah, they have weaponized “freedom of religion” to mean “dont teach shared values.”
Civics used to have a function of a general indoctrination into our society. The CWP replaced this with a different indoctrination.
It doesnt have to be explicitly Christian (but an outside authority definitely helps), but it does have to have a shared value set centered around the things that allow a society to function, including personal honor and integrity, family, respecting and helping your neighbor, etc.
Without that, it just cant work.
And they know this. Which is why it is under such sustained attack.
Likewise.
OT – I’m enjoying all the political theater in Japan over the US Marine who allegedly robbed and killed a woman in Okinawa.
If he’s guilty I hope the Corps throws the book at him, but I’ll happily pull all our troops from Japan to solve the problem.
As I said yesterday, they recognized the guy from his tats, which is one more reason not to get tatted up.
The Japan politics about hosting and where to host US troops is an amazing exercise in NIMBY.
Having grown up in a heavy summer tourism area I get it. OTH, Okinawa really needs the money they spend. Also Okinawa has always been considered 2nd class by Tokyo.
Sensei,
Okinawa has always been a floating prison for US armed forces in the region. As you said, mainland Japanese are happy to house them down in Okinawa so they aren’t pestering the “nice” Japanese girls.
Sadly, it seems that there is always some rape scandal du jour going on. Ship young, dumb, and full of cum dudes overseas in the thousands and you shouldn’t be surprised when some of them cause issues. When I was stationed there it was common for the Marines to turn over criminals to the Okinawans for punishment in most cases. “You’ll spend the next 20 years eating fish heads and rice” is how they put it. I think they also punished them after their terms were up too. (Bad Conduct Discharge, etc.).
The good news is that, outside of these incidents, there is a lot of good will between the Okinawan young ladies and US service members. All a guy has to do is try to learn a little “pillow” Japanese and he will find lots of gals willing to work on international relations with him.
Pope, from yesterday:
My wife laughed so hard when I showed her this.
She was glad you think she is innocent.
I wonder when we will be able to say “that has served its purpose”
The original intent was to secure an enemy and stop their military from reforming.
But now the function is to project power.
And China provides an excellent reason for this.
So… we “dont need” it…. never?
Or if Japan wasn’t busy building its own versions of bridges to nowhere they could defend themselves.
If they don’t want to do that they can become another province of China. Turnabout is fair play, I think.
I think that exactly sums up our current dilemma.
Do we subsidized Japan’s bridges to nowhere?
Or do we allow China to eventually absorb them?
China isnt exactly know for its territorial expansionism beyond contiguous Asia. But they definitely have their eye on global domination.
If we leave Japan and Korea, I doubt it would be too terribly long before they were at least protectorates of China.
Look how quickly the promises of autonomy for Hong Kong evaporated.
If he’s guilty, keel haul him.
(+91.7, -20.8, -95.8)
Being the only person with a negative middle score, it’s clear I’m the only True Libertarian.
My ranking system is Individual > Hey Buddy, Stop Doing that > It’s not theft/kidnapping/murder when the police do it.
So not inviting the Reformed Gofruitian to the neighborhood BBQ ’cause who wants to associate with Reformed Gofruitians amirite is fine.
Encouraging the Reformed Gofruitian to move by telling them they’re unwelcome is also fine.
Encouraging the Reformed Gofruitian to move by punching them/keying their car/molotoving their house is not fine.
Passing a law evicting the Reformed Gofruitian is the absolute worst.
I think we all agree on all of that.
I saw the ambiguity there in things like
“Is it OK for the government to require separate restrooms for women”?
“Is it OK to exclude Trans women from those restrooms?”
There have been times when “the market” failed on these questions.
So when dealing with it philosophically, you have to factor in “what if the market locks out women, blacks or the Irish?”
My pure libertarian ideals say “someone else will hire them and wipe the floor with everyone else because of cheap labor.”
But history leans the other way – although not purely. Jim Crow was needed to fight back against market forces, for example.
“The market failed” is necessarily a matter of opinion, not fact.
When you start with the basic assumption that “collective action is going to happen therefore it should work the way I want it to” it leads you to a lot of bad places. Yes Jim Crow was “necessary” for those people who were unhappy that individuals chose to act/associate with undesirables.
History is pretty clear that “The Market” is never as monolithic/consistent as government is.
Economic – Market +100
Social Cultural – Traditional +41.7
Enforcement – Liberty -29.2
(+95.8, 0.0, -91.7)
I think we are seeing a libertarian consensus form, where “it depends on how you interpret it” being the controlling factor for the soxial/cultural axis. Lots of SoCons running around. Some would have the government enforce it. Others would just have everyone agree on certain basic principles.
I think a society depends on a shared set of values.
For us it would be an old school “your word is your bond”, “honor is everything”, “respect your neighbor” kind of society.
Without that, it would be really hard to have liberty.
Which is probably why the left attacks those values so vociferously.
Which MA Glib hasn’t been around?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/massachusetts-man-pleads-guilty-selling-radioactive-material-rcna601780
They couldn’t find anything more to charge him with?
My Beyond the Dichotomy political coordinates: (+91.7, -4.2, -75.0)
Political identity is more than left vs. right. Where do you land?
https://beyondthedichotomy.org/result?e=91.7&s=-4.2&a=-75.0
Economic +79.2 Market. Pretty accurate. I don’t think that unfettered market capitalism will produce the shining city on the hill, but I also don’t much care that it won’t. Nothing will.
Social and Cultural +8.3 Traditional. Also not bad. Despite my atheism and genial libertine perversity, I’m actually quite fond of traditional cultural values, even religious ones. Just keep them out of my basement.
Enforcement -100.0 Liberty. Dead nuts on.
Not bad, I guess.
This seems to be close to the consensus.
“Traditional values” are not uniformly good. But you cannot have a society with bad or broken shared values.
my issue with many liberty questions is it needs a “no one has to pay if you fuck up” clause.
Setting this group lose on that survey is going to skew his results in very strange ways.
I suspect that he will learn that his survey is not very discerning at the extreme on liberty or market.
I suspect that he wont learn anything with that set of questions on society.
I warned him about that, and he said he needed a wide spectrum of opinion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Nolan Chart questions were too ambiguous too. I once demonstrated to Nolan himself how two hypothetical people could answer every question different from each other and both land dead center on his chart. His response was that while possible, such persons could not exist.
@Aloysius
Nice!
When I need ambient, your stuff works wonderfully.
+100 +25 -75
About average around here it looks like.
Collective punishment time on Okinawa!
https://x.com/iiimef/status/2107465093801775266
Welcome to grade school.
小学校へよこうぞう！
Teach marines not to kill!
It’s interesting how the victims are locals on Okinawa, but other service members or service members’ families in Germany.
Impossible to read because TwiX stopped you from opening pictures in new tabs or downloading them.
When I was there on deployment a few Sergeants in our battalion got in trouble for different things (DUI, a purse snatching, and a rape).
All Sergeants were put on restriction, we were not allowed to go any where except work, we would all be marched to get haircuts.
We did this for a month and then we had to give a safety presentation to the Battalion Commander.
Remind me again, why did I like being a Marine?
It’s how you met the Mrs.?
This was after we had been married for 6 years and she was back in 29 Palms.
On weekends I would go hang out with her family or my old carpenter buddies.
It was embarrassing to say I couldn’t come out because I was grounded for what other people did.
Regarding social conformity, I think my scores sort of represent my actual values.
I am absolutely opposed to government enforcing social norms {note, I don’t think we are talking about punishing violent crime as an aspect of enforcing social norms . . . but I get how someone might include that in their thoughts}.
I am totally ok with voluntary associations enforcing their own social norms within their own associates {ostracization is a powerful tool}.
I am not certain how you prevent one voluntary association imposing its will on another without a neutral referee in the mix {might makes right generates involuntary associations}.
However, when the referee imposes its will on an unwilling association — well, that’s just another type of oppression.
I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?
I guess I don’t actually have a rational conclusion to this.
Shame is a force for good.
My Beyond the Dichotomy political coordinates: (+100.0, +54.2, -75.0)
Political identity is more than left vs. right. Where do you land?
https://beyondthedichotomy.org/result?e=100.0&s=54.2&a=-75.0
I’m a big fan of shaming and Christianity.
(+91.7, +58.3, -37.5)
https://notthebee.com/article/the-replies-to-this-dumb-headline-are-absolutely-amazing
Some of the replies to a NY Magazine headline on Cornell are spectacular.
From a young age I lectured my son to avoid sloppy seconds.
I love how the men are posting sarcastic remarks, and the women are recording videos of themselves lecturing their kids so they can post on social media. That’s an accurate description of where our society is.
I had to have a lecture with my son after Kavenaugh. It was a teachable moment, because it was obviously nonsense…. and mom believed he was a serial rapist who went to rape parties on a ship. Passionately.
Seeing this helped him internalize “this could happen to you” instead of blowing it off like teens do.
I used this one for my daughter. She is heading to college soon, and she bought the narrative on this.
So I used it to teach her about how “not putting yourself in that position” isnt the patriarchy attacking women, it is solid advice.
Whether you buy the narrative or not, it is clear that she did things she regrets, and that drugs and alcohol are involved. So we got to talk about how you make mistakes when your inhibitions are lowered. Maybe you make the mistake of snorting ketamine off of some frat boy’s thingie, and then your night becomes a blur that you have to “come to understand after processing for weeks” – if you believe the narrative.
“Think about the children!!!”
Oh shut the hell up morons.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/battle-over-daylight-saving-time-erupts-push-stop-changing-clocks-hits-senate-wall
We Floridians voted to stop the nonsense years ago. But for some reason the feds have to approve it. They have not acted.
I am squarely in the corner of economic/liberty.
I don’t know if I should feel like a dirty hippy, or a cigar chomping robber baron.
Yes
Vibrancy in Eden Prairie
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/somali-community-leader-calls-for-solutions-after-eden-prairie-shooting/
D0n’T cAll It a SoMLli GaNg! Th3rE i5 n0 tUrF! ThEy DoN’t HaVe A sTrUcTuReD h1eRaRcHy!
Eden Prairie, Minnesoda is pretty high on the Cake Eater scale.
They just need a special Summer jobs program for Somali’s – that will do the trick.
I would suggest that he add a self-identification section. Political affiliation, philosophical affiliation. Maybe religeosity.
Seeing how you self-identify versus how you stack up against others is interesting.
Some of the most hard-core SoCons I know are black democrats. Some are far right republicans in their philosophy, but would vote for AOC over any republican all day, every day.
Hah! BBC runs a story on the two NFL officials suspended this week. They included a pic of one but not the other. I wonder why?