Political Quiz

The estimation quiz was fun. Despite managing to guess Tony Benn’s age, I couldn’t best Rob: 36%. I’m really, really bad at estimating weights and distances (and when did they add seats to the House of Commons–it was 651 fairly recently, I thought….).

I took the political quiz, too, and I actually made it through to the end. Here are my results:

1 left/right -5.9355 (-0.3573)
2 pragmatism +0.7792 (+0.0469)

In other words, pretty far to the left, and mildly pragmatic. No surprise. And actually, I now see I answered wrong on one question that would put me farther to the left, but I’m not doing it over again.

Normally, I can’t finish those political quizzes because I get irritated with the questions. When I’m asked to agree or disagree with questions like this:

The only way for some workers to achieve fair pay is through collective bargaining.

I don’t know what to do. This is demonstrably and uncontroversially false as a factual statement. If it means to refer to workers as “any worker or subset of the workers in our society” than some of them can achieve fair pay through any number of other strategies. Developing specialized knowledge and limiting its dissemination is collective action, but it’s not collective bargaining. It’s not a viable strategy for all workers, and it many not work as well to achieve fair pay, but it certainly might work in some cases, which would be enough to make me have to disagree with the statement.

If the statement means workers in the sense of a national workforce, there are other ways they could achieve fair pay as well. Supporting a political party that will push through “fair pay legislation” might just work. I happen to think that in almost all cases, collective bargaining is a much better idea, but that’s not relavent to how much I agree or disagree with the question.

So as a matter of logic, I should say I disagree. Really, everyone should, once they think about the question. Of course, as a practical matter, the question is meant to gauge my support of unions, which is quite high. But I really have a hard time responding to the spirit of these questions rather than the actual meaning of the statement. (And I’m a “practical” lefty??)

Another example:

Aggressive foreign policies will not put a stop to international terrorism.

What the hell? It’s rather obviously possible that foreign policy that is potentially classifiable as agressive could stop a particular instance of international terrorism. It’s also insane to think that agressiveness is the only trait (or even a necessary trait) of effective foreign policy on this front. Of course, technically, I’d should have disagreed, because nothing short of a world government (this rendering all terrorism domestic) could actually “put a stop to international terrorism” in the broad sense. So I’d have to disagree with the statement even if we replaced the word “agressive” with “The best possible.”

In the end, the ambiguities here forced me to answer “no opinion.”

Still, I found this one better than most political quizzes. A lower portion of the questions gave me this kind of frustration, and I in the end it wasn’t libertarian political propaganda, designed to show us how they’re the only ones who really support freedom, which is a refreshing change.