From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Aug 29 2001 - 23:11:56 MDT
Charlie Stross writes
> Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> > Yes, what is scary is that objectivity has eluded us once more.
>
> Agreed.
"The World's Smallest Political Quiz" at http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html
seems pretty unbiased to me. Of the ten questions, only two are even a
little bit begging for certain answers or make assertions. Can you tell
me what questions you have a problem with? What questions make you
uncomfortable. I spoke at length about JUST THE FIRST SIX questions
of that awful English instrument you (or someone) submitted.
Proof that objectivity is possible is easy: just use questions
that are unbiased to the degree that one *cannot* tell the beliefs
of the question's framer. I thought in your own stab at it, Charlie,
that you did quite a good job.
> > But what is infinitely more scary is a second possiblity: that
> > indeed the World's Shortest Political Quiz is mainly objective,
> > that this one on the contrary is to a great degree *more* loaded,
> > and that many people who agree with the objectives of this later
> > quiz don't mind it being so.
>
> Naah. This quiz doesn't actually imply that the people who set it
> support these positions; it's designed to establish whether you,
> the person who's sitting the quiz, supports those positions.
I thought it obvious the mind-set of whoever wrote that test. He
or she is clearly left-liberal.
Now it *IS* true that in *some* ideologies, vanilla discourse
is itself to be criticized. Marxist rhetoric is unmistakeable,
and it's instantly obvious that someone *is not* a Marxist if
most sentences fail to have certain loaded words and phrases.
But I have known many, many people who lie at obvious ends of the
political spectrum who are capable of using the same English language,
and fairly describing situations. In fact, it's only when they slip
and give themselves away (often deliberately, of course) by the choice
of "pinko" for "left", or "homophobic" for "anti-gay", or "nigger" for
"black", or "exploitation" for "employment" that they give away their
position. Newscasters and quiz makers should hold themselves to a
higher standard.
> You seem to be confusing the political compass
> quiz (which is aimed at people who come from a culture that is not
> your own, where political discourse is framed in different terms --
> for example the "nigger" word is merely considered rude, and what
> you call a "liberal" would probably be at home in the conservative
> party) with an expression of the ideologies it's polling.
Conceivably, you could be right. That would be most amazing. But
I'd be willing to bet that if I walked down the street in London
and took the first hundred people that I came to, they would be
able to guess the political ideology of that test's makers.
> > In other words, what is really scary is when even slight injustices
> > aren't confessed as such when they are in the service of ideology.
> > It's another case of the good ends justifying the not-so-good means.
>
> Eh? I don't follow you.
I have reason to believe that the following does not fit *you* (especially
since looking at your own quiz). Quite a number of people in the 20th
century, while they wouldn't come directly out and say so in so many words,
truly believe that lying or stealing for progressive causes is justified.
This is more true of the left than of the right because of the serious
setback that the extreme right suffered in the outcome of World War II.
If the Nazis and Japanese militarists won, and the democracies and
socialist country had lost, then it would be the right that was backed
up by powerful, extreme, ideologically uniform totalitarian countries.
But what happened was that it was the left who inherited slogans like
"political power comes out of the barrel of a gun" from Lenin and Mao,
and a lot of other clearly sinister behavior/slogans from the
Chinese and Russian Communists.
Another factor that breaks the left/right symmetry (at least in American
politics) is that conservatives are viewed as evil by the left, whereas
liberals are viewed as wrong or stupid by the right. I've lost track of
the number of times that I *myself* have been accused on this very list
of "having no compassion", or suffering from some other similar character
flaw. Conservatives are viewed by American liberals (in many cases) as
*morally* deficient; corporation executives are honestly thought to be
monsters; what tactics aren't justified when you're fighting evil?
Lee Corbin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:10:15 MST