Cleaning off my desktop

A few weeks back I ran into "The Political Compass", a website/questionnaire which has been making some rounds online. The idea is that to classify people's politics on a spectrum between "left" and "right" is a gross oversimplification - making it impossible to distinguish between (say) such leftists as Stalin and Gandhi. To deepen the picture a little, they posit two dimensions of political belief - social and political - and plot you on a cartesian grid according to how you answer a battery of questions.

Which brings us to the bit about cleaning off my desktop. I've always figured myself well to the left economically, but socially libertarian. According to the questionnaire, I rated thusly:



Like I'd thought. Anyway, now I can delete this image from my desktop.

FYI, this is how the current presidential candidates rate:


I'm not sure how they're deciding to answer their questionnaire on behalf of the candidates, but I'm dinging up comfortably to the left of (and more socially libertarian than) Kucinich.

But that's not the story, of course. The story is that by and large, the Democratic and Republican candidates represent a choice only in what bit of the right-wing-authoritarian quadrant you'd like to inhabit.

You can take the questionnaire yourself here.