Me and the Mahatma.
Posted by Big John on March 27, 2008
My friend .. ‘Longrider’ .. recently published his result after taking the ‘Political Compass’ .. test .. so I thought that I would have a go.
Now I don’t usually take these sort of things too seriously as very often the questions are posed in such a way that a simple ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ cannot express one’s true opinion on some subjects.
Anyway here is the result of my test after answering six pages of questions …
… Well how about that ?
So, would you have guessed from some of my rants and comments that this grumpy old git would find himself in such company as Gandhi, Mandela and The Dalai Lama ? …
… Now that’s what I call ‘a result’ ! 
March 27, 2008 at 7:05 pm
An interesting point, of course, is that whatever their politics, Gandhi believed and the Dalai Lama believes things that are very peculiar indeed. If your neighbour were to evince the same sort of spiritual opinions as these two, most people would dismiss him as a nutter.
Gandhi, of course, did a lot of good, especially in fields of conflict resolution, though his career as a professional politician was somewhat more chequered. As for the Dalai Lama, well, I don’t really know how to evaluate him. Would the world really be that much poorer if he didn’t exist? Ungenerous as it might sound, I cannot find much reason to think it would. Come to think of it, I could say the same of the Archdruid of Canterbury.
As you rightly say, these opinion tests are of dubious value because they offer too coarse a filter but they can be fun as long as we don’t take them too seriously.
March 27, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Well, for what it’s worth my dot showed up directly under the “g” of Big John (on your graph)…so I can see why we seem to see eye to eye, John.
March 27, 2008 at 8:31 pm
As you can probably guess, I turned up just to the left of Gandhi. I seem to belie the theory that the older one gets, the more conservative one becomes. lol
March 28, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Hmm. I started the test, but bailed out halfway through when it dawned on me that it’s all a clever ploy by HM spooks to find out, via the medium of a ‘just for fun’ online test (admit it, you’d never have filled it out if they’d called it a survey, would you?), who has extreme views that could be a threat to national security etc etc. Your IP is, of course, logged as soon as you arrive at the site. Basically, if ‘they’ didn’t know who you were before, they do now. Here’s a tip: go back, redo the test, and give contradictory answers all the way through and they’ll be tearing their hair out trying to make sense of it all when they collate the answers.
Of course, I could just be slightly paranoid
April 13, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Very interesting, but I wasn’t surprised at all to find myself just about where you were on the graph. Very liberal here and proud of it….no changing me now….lol
April 14, 2008 at 9:05 am
Ah the political compass I remember it in the old days of the BC blog, I did it twice 2 years apart and the only thing that changed was that I became -0.4 more libertarian. I think you can probably imagine where I came -9.x and -8.x, I was quite proud of myself! Suffice to say there are no famous people cited in my zone, presumably because there would have to be a witchhunt for them!
April 19, 2008 at 10:30 pm
[...] I was becoming a little more authoritarian if not any less economically left. Both Longrider and Big John have done the compass this month so it prompted me to do it again. And I’ve barely moved, [...]