At http://www.politicalcompass.org you can answer (quite a lot of) questions and in return get a coordinate of your political beliefs. How accurately they pin point you through those questions is unknown, still it could be interesting to compare coordinates.

My results:
Economic Left/Right: -5.00 (Y-axis)
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.62 (X-Axis)

I've done this before..

Stupid Firefox did that thing where it suddenly decides to reload a page for apparently no reason, with the effect that I've just lost almost my entire post. So imagine a <blah blah blah> here concerning the questions and the shown results of famous politicians and religious leaders, and behold my results:

Economic Left/Right: -4.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.05

Making me closes to the Dalai Lama of the people evaluated.

I've done one like it, possibly an earlier version of the same one, but this had questions that definitely weren't on the last one I did, e.g. about the curbing of civil liberties since the dawn of the "war on terror".

On the left side of the graph and extremely close to the middle. Somewhat accurate, but only in as much as the few questions can ascertain.

http://www.allegro.cc/forums/search/efe605d3f2a6e84151c814c397252847

Me:
Economic Left/Right: -3.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.03

Fun little quiz.

Well then apparently I have drifted 0.12 left and 0.72 more libertarian in the past three years. Anybody else going to take the opportunity to assess their drift?

What does it means should be?
(Yes, I know I said the same thing last time).

Anyway,

EDIT: Ye gods! I'm slowly becoming a right-wing authoritarian...

Hmm, looks like I have shifted (0.5, 0.56) since May 2003.

2.75
-3.85

Some stuff really made me think...
It's a sad reflection on our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a bottled, branded consumer product.

and I contradicted myself all over the place. Whitman? "I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am many, I contain multitudes"

Over the years I feel myself drifting ever so slightly closer to 'the middle', which is fine with me. I'd hate to be all the way toward any one end. Extremism sucks.

Sorry for being the third person to post this. I counted the number of answers with coordinates in the two previous threads, 6. So I guess this is an opportunity to participate for those who didn't and an opportunity to check if their values have changed for others.

We all seem to have pretty much the same opinions if this test is accurate.

Towards the centre or away from the centre? Is there anything as useful as a scattergraph or some sort of coloured representation showing how "the general population" spread out on the graph?

Wait until SonShadowCat does it. I'm predicting (+20, +50)

-.13, 3.85

Towards the centre. I went from (-4.25, -3.59) in 2003 to (-3.75, -3.03).

Economic Left/Right: -2.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.33

[EDIT] - Now let's take everybodies (allegro members) scores and plot them on one graph and see if there's anything of significance!

Economic Left/Right: -6.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.85

Welcome to the club, but I'm sure you don't want to be included with me.

Guess I have pretty balanced beliefs...

Economic Left/Right: -1.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.85

Cough.. hello Gandhi.

My god, I'm a fundamentalist and a labour voter!

Well I'm not close to anyone on that chart at, other than I am somewhere between the Dalai Lama and Robert Mugabe

left/right: -4.64
social: 0.26

Which I guess makes me perfect as I am leaning towards socialism yet have a balanced view on authority

Actually I think this makes me officially a hippy.

My old results:

I don't think they asked very balanced questions on authority. I found a lot of questions quite strange. E.g.

I agreed, because the alternative is to allow acceptance of at least some arbitrary authority. That doesn't mean there aren't authorities I respect.

I had to agree with this, as it is the main advantage of a one-party state. I did not get the opportunity to explain that nevertheless the disadvantages outweigh the advantages by a substantial degree in my opinion.

The second part appears to be a question about the degree of surveillance, not the ease with which it can be done.

This personalises the question ("one must"), so doesn't make sense. There cannot always be people above to be obeyed unless there are infinitely many people.

Plus the sudden rush of religious questions towards the end. If you've been raised religiously then you see religious institutions as an authority. If you have been raised securarly then it quite possibly hasn't even been suggested to you that any religious body is an authority.

Then there were questions which seemed to invoke bigger questions than the authors intended - although I may have been unnecessarily second guessing. For example, on the questions about non-marital sex, homosexual relationships, etc:

Taken literally this pulls in questions about euthanasia, GBH and even whether things like conspiracy should be individual crimes and as a result whether you should be able to arrest people for planning a crime before they have a chance to carry it out.

Hmm, I thought I'd be closer to the center than that.

More fun . What is your extremist factor? Are you fit to be called a tree-hugging hippie, a god-damn ultra-right-wing control freak? Perhaps you have more extreme beliefs than Adolf Hitler himself?

Just calculate your distance from the safe center.

Mine is 2.465, so I guess my ideal would be NationStates' inoffensive centrist democracy .

I missed the selection box entry of indifference on every question.
-7.00, -4.15

I agreed here but only under the premise that there can be abstract art that represents something. wtf, it's an "abstraction" of something after all, that is why it is called "abstract", how could it not represent anything? Even if it is verbally inexpressable by the artist, what the creation is an abstraction of... it will still be an abstraction of the state of mind the creator was in, when creating it.
[drifting away again]
Thinking about it there is nothing "non-abstract" in this world.
Everybody perceives the world differently. The state of mind is an abstraction of the thing we like to abstractly refer to as "reality"... i better stop... this is always leading me towards really weird states of mind...

-4, -2.87

A lot of the questions were leading, as well as multi-sided. I could answer the questions differently given a different context, but I tried to generalize.

Economic Left/Right: 1.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.15

I've drifted to the right side

Economic Left/Right: -8.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.31

Last time I was at (-6.75, -6.87).

Holy crap, I'm further left than I thought...
Economic Left/Right: -7.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.90..

Okay, so I'm a Mid-leftwing Authoritarian, Unaffiliated with any party. Nice to know, I guess...

For what it's worth, your score is extremely close to mine.

I have no idea what the terms really mean... Like Liberal, Concervative, etc..

but here we go:

Economic Left/Right: -5.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.54

Because 'Abstract Art' has become more an umbrella term than an exact one. These days, anything that isn't semi-realistic gets called abstact art.

As for my results... -8.0, -5.64.

The abstract art question really does depend on what you consider "abstract". To me, "abstract art" brings to mind stuff like hanging a store-bought shovel on the wall and calling it art, or a roll of chicken wire just sitting there on the floor, or the top of a paint-splattered table (all of which I actually saw in a museum ).

Economic Left/Right: 5.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 2.46

I suspect I'm the most economically right wing person on the forum. But that's not odd since I'm also the most economically right wing person I've ever known...

However, I think the test has a major problem. I may say that abstract art isn't art, and that probably pegs me as being a social authoritarian, but am I really a social authoritarian unless I'm actually advocating the execution of abstract artists?

http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html- And for a slightly different take, the worlds shortest political quiz.

Reminds me of the simpsons episode where Homer builds a Barbeque completely wrong. It turns into a big mess of cement and metal which is later considered 'art'.

I consider abstract art to be any art that isn't meant to be recognized for what it actually is, but is interesting to look at... if that makes sense. I don't really like abstract art
If you look at it and ask "What is that?", it's probably abstract art.
Abstract
Not so abstract

That's the kind of "abstract art that does NOT represent anything"(aside from the object that it actually is), does not require any skill to create and therefore should not be considered art at all.(and the "artists" should be tar'd 'n feathered!;D)
The only one who would be allowed to call a store-bought shovel art, is the manufacturer of the shovel, because he actually needed some skill to create it but then it is not abstract art but more like usable-art or more specifically a tool, is every tool a piece of art?... now this is a little strange... shouldn't then every product of every craft be considered art?
What is art? (let the 'religious' flamewar begin...:D)

I remember one advertisement from a magazine: "Maglite - A work of art that works." I have two (A 3D and a Solitaire), and i have to agree. Amazingly durable stuff.

So far we have "Amazingly durable stuff".
I'll add 'beautiful'.

Art is beautiful amazingly durable stuff.

Noooooooooo.......

You see, this question is pointless. Everybody has their own opinion on this subject, and since the whole discussion revolves around the definition of the word "art", we will ultimately fail to agree.
One could argue that art is everything that was created without a primary purpose, just for the sake of itself. But that would exclude most of the works of Bach, Rembrandt and the likes; Bach composed mainly for church services, and Rembrandt's paintings were intended to illustrate and decorate (as was all fine art until the late 1800s).
Then there's the definition of "depicting reality", which clearly doesn't fit most modern art, which is at least partly abstract, or intentionally distorts reality (surrealism comes to mind).
"Beauty" doesn't work either; especially in modern art, there are lots of works that are generally acknowledged to be "art", while being all but beautiful or pleasant to perceive. Plus, "beauty" is a very subjective thing. While I dislike most metal music, I can still understand that others may like it and even think of it as the most beautiful music they've ever heard.
Yet another definition might take "artistic value" into account, but this is so ridiculous I will only touch the basics. "Artistic value" is a very dangerous work because it implies that art is very complicated and hard to understand, something you need to learn thoroughly before you can appreciate it, and that only very very few people are enlightened enough to judge what is "valuable" and what is not. Hitler made laws about art using a similar definition. Nuff said.
Then there are people who say that something is art as soon as someone says so. Which isn't correct either, because that would truly make the maglite a stroke of artistic genius.

I'm a hippie!

I'm amazed at how many times I wished there were a "Couldn't (dis)agree more strongly" button.
Take this one: "Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races."
There are only 3 advantages of "our race" I can think of:
1) We are less visible when placed in front of a light background
2) When tattooed, the colors come out nicely
3) The common prejudices against my race tend to open more doors for me than those that exist agains other races.
And 3 basically comes from people who "strongly agree" with the given statement in the first place.

I was referring to the Maglite as more of a piece of usable art like DB suggested. It's so well thought and designed that it is, IMO, a piece of art.

I know. I forgot to use an emoticon.

"Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers."

Where's the question "Fathers may have careers..."?
I think either both questions, or one question with the the word Parents should be in there.
I strongly agree to the question, because I think anyone who gets a child should put the child before their own needs.

I came pretty close to Gandhi...

What is not art?