I gave my father-in-law a good laugh recently when I told him I was a radical centrist. I thought I’d check that assertion by taking OKCupid’s political test. I remember taking it two years (and four jobs!) ago and remember being tagged as a social liberal and economic moderate.
Here are the results I got yesterday:
I rated as:
The summary said:
You are best described as a centrist. You exhibit a very well-developed sense of right and wrong and believe in economic fairness.
Switching the result chart to the “political ideologies” view, my result point puts me on the outer edge of the centrist circle, just tangential to both the libertarian and democrat zones:
The more amusing chart is the “famous people” chart, in which I’m located smack-dab between Donald Trump and Adam Sandler. I have no idea how they derived Sandler’s social and political views:
There’s one face on the “famous people” chart that I can’t place: who’s that in the lower right quadrant behind Hillary Clinton? The one with the nearly completely obscured face?
I think Barack Obama’s placement all the way down in the lower-right corner in deep socialist-land is wrong and based on too much listening to Rush Limbaugh (although I think any listening to him is a bad idea). I think he should be in the same zone as Hillary Clinton.
I know a couple of people behind WordPress: Matt Mullenweg, whom I’ve met through Rannie and tests positive for “Democrat”:
and Mark Jaquith, with whom I worked at b5media. The test says that Mark is a libertarian bordering on anarchist. He did answer “strongly agree” to the statement that two consenting adults should be allowed to duel to the death. I wonder if he carries a “slappin’ glove” for those moments when someone has insulted his honour:
Gentle Readers! I’m curious to see where you end up on the chart – go take the political test and feel free to post your results in the comments!
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As I sort of suspected:
- Social Liberal (66% permissive) (more that you, you reactionary stick in the mud)
- Economic Conservative (83% permissive)
They call this Libertarian, though perhaps I'd feel better if that was a small "l" lol. I'd probably be closer to the unibomber over there except I rarely ranked anything highest or lowest.
No death duels for me - I'm purely conservative on that one, e.g. experience has shown us this is no way to run a society.
Random notes:
- funny how wanting more economic freedom is labeled "conservative"
- how does this question "23 I would feel better if there were video cameras on most street corners, to prevent crime" affect your rating. Certainly the modern experience would suggest that universal video surveillance (cf. the UK, photo radar) is a left wing aka "Democrat" phenomena
- as would this one "30 Most people are too stupid to know what's best for them"
David Janes: Hey, David...you hippie.
I was thinking of using the test as the basis for a programming tutorial, so I might just spend some time noodling with it, say by establishing a baseline set of results by answering "strongly agree" for every question on one run of the test and then changing only one answer on subsequent runs.
The obscured face looks like Bono.
I tihnk that's Bono hiding behind Hilary. You can tell by the unfortunate sunglasses.
By the way, I am:
Social Liberal (73% permissive)
Economic Liberal (23% permissive)
Wow. Bottom quartile of economic permissiveness. I guess maybe that MBA didn't take after all...
This is an interesting referencepoint for your readership!
This test describes me as a strong democrat:
Social Liberal
(88% permissive)
Economic Moderate
(55% permissive)
But IRL I would consider myself more economically conservative and generally self-identify closer to a libertarian.
Yep, that's Bono back there.
I'm not that far off from you Joey, 60% and 56%. But I am more Libertarian and in the land of the Donald.
Yeah, everyone knew I was going to be a socialist. No one is surprised. Especially bnk.
:-)
OMG I'm just like Hillary Clinton! Apparently.
Would you be surpised at 60% permissive on social and 55% permissive on Economics? Ye gad! a Centrist.
bnk: I think I just heard Wendy burst into laughter just now, and she's eight kilometres due east of me at this moment.