2046 wrote:I fully support JMS's challenge to Serafina. There's a thread around here somewhere where I expressed the view that most of the hardcore Warsies are further left than the average dirty Trekkie. While Serafina's challenge will probably have little to do with that (given that the community-at-large will have input), it's nonetheless something I'll look for in the results.
Might that have been
this thread?
I still disagree with you on the whole. My contention is, and has been for quite some time, that there's
no intrinsic relationship between the traditional left-right political spectrum and the positions people take in the VS debate. Any
apparent relationship is going to be due to the relative political uniformity of SDN, specifically, as a community, and I think that's going to show a difference in variance rather than a difference in typical position, when compared with boards of similar size and age.
The traditional SDN chatter that Trek debaters are conservative, I put no more stock in than the traditional SDN chatter that Trek debaters are uneducated. The latter claim has been thoroughly disproven; the former claim is likely to be even less tenable.
A couple notes specifically about the Political Compass:
WILGA wrote:What is the difference between strongly disagree and disagree or agree and strongly agree?
The difference is taken to be certainty and emotion. We could actually separate opinions more finely - sometimes people have no opinion. (I think you might be supposed to leave the question blank if you have no opinion.)
For example:
Political Compass wrote:Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races.
You might click "Strongly disagree" if you take race to be a social illusion.
You might click "Disagree" if you experience periodic doubts of your views, or think that perhaps your race has a few superior qualities, though not many more than other races, or if you aren't racist but don't know about the topic, or don't care about the topic.
You might click "Agree" if you were a racist, but one who thinks that all races have
some superior qualities making it a harder call, or if you are racist but don't know about the topic, or don't care about the topic.
You might click "Strongly Agree" if it was very important to you that your race be considered superior, or if you took it as an article of faith that your race was superior.
Many questions are the sort which much could be said about it. If you find yourself responding "Well, of course!" or "Well, of course not!" that is a strong agreement or disagreement; if you find yourself wanting to hedge your answer with caveats and addenda, you agree or disagree less strongly.
A small point for Serafina, who PMed me saying that the Political Compass website is conservatively biased because it's based on US politics: See
here. The Political Compass website considers US politicians to generally be right-authoritarian, and also charts
EU governments. The questions may be often related to active US policy questions, but it's not actually globally biased left-to-right.
2046: Did you notice that your score puts you left-libertarian from Obama's listed score?
Another point for everyone: You can build charts
here. You might find it easier to just type in "&NAME=X,Y at the end of the URL if you're making a large list. Below is a link to a chart showing all the scores that have been given thus far in this thread:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/crowdch ... 7.62,-6.56
As we can see, we're not all in exactly the same place on the political spectrum, although we are so far heavily clumped in left-libertarian land - and with the older scores included, you can see that either there's a lot of random error, or we aren't drifting in the same directions at all. My expectation is that you would get a similar sort of spread on most internet forums. My expectation also is that SDN will have less variation in scores than comparable boards of similar size (e.g., SB.com) - and anybody with an active account on SDN is welcome to test that hypothesis for me.