What's your political typology? (Quiz)

[Farmageddon]

Eagle367 said:

Farmageddon said:

How did you answer the first question? Also, the last one? : p

I ended up as a stressed sideliner lol

All in all, besides being obviously american-centric, I'm always a little letdown by how little room there usually is to any radical position in these tests.

They went more the pop quiz route rather than the actual nitty and gritty. I am for "big" government as long as the government is serving the people and not causing wars. The "big" government argument is stupid to begin with because it matters what the government does, not how "big" or "small" it is. 

Yeah, besides the fact that a lot of public services are not exactly run by the government  - take universities here in brazil for example (even though bolsonaro has been meddling with them), they have much more worker autonomy than any private university, it's not even close.

So is that "big government", when really it's just "big" (I wish) public funding for work done with relative autonomy? In a sense I'd like more public services with less government.

sundin13 said:

JackHandy said:

Look at it this way.

Suppose you have three people in a room. One is hard right, one is hard left, and the other is an a-political moderate. The hard right is going to stick to their party's talking points, and believe everything they say is utterly infallible. The hard left is going to do the same. But the moderate, on the other hand, he or she will be able to see the validity (and fallacy) of both their positions, equally. So instead of getting nothing done, they can take what works on the right, what works on the left, and disregard what doesn't work and make real, positive, pragmatic decisions based on facts and not dogmatic propaganda.

That is why I believe the in the moderate position.

Thats a cool hypothetical, but that isn't how reality works. Moderate decision making simply isn't more evidence based than less moderate positions. Moderates aren't more likely to accept something outside of their typical political platform than less moderate positions. Moderates aren't the "get things done" branch of politics. I find it fairly laughable that you can still assert this given what is currently happening in US politics.

What this is, to me, is a prime example of the "Moderation Bias" that I talked about earlier. People think of being in the middle as virtuous because of all these made up attributes they attach to the idea. Sometimes, the extremes are right. Sometimes, the extremes compromise. That shouldn't be surprising. 

In Brazil there's the term "centrão" (a colloquial version of "the big center"), which refers to parties and politicians who don't really have much of an agenda. Besides cling to power by negotiating their support to whomever is in charge, their biggest concern seems to be corruption - but they are rarely singled out.

Last edited by Farmageddon - on 26 November 2021