Re: The Energumen Political Spectrum!

Energumen wrote:
EKurt...@xxxxxxx wrote:
Quadrant 2: Jean Marie Le Pen, David Duke
QUADRANT 2 (bottom right):
1. Pro national autonomy and anti transnational bodies
2. Crime is the fault of the criminal, not social conditions - "hang em and flog em"
3. Anti-immigration - ethnic make-up of countries should be left as they are
4. Tendancies towards sympathy for Islamist terrorism - "America had it coming"
5. Anti free markets and pro central planning
6. Anti-American
7. Anti-Israel
8. Antisemitic tendancies - "Zionists control the White House"

I doubt that 5. is true of David Duke, and publicly stating sentiments
4 or 6 would be instant political death in the US.

Call 6 "anti american hegemony" then. See,
http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/051122/2005112209.html
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3175767,00.html

Note that we are talking and tendancies relative to others here.


Where are the BNP in this scheme? They do not "believe reform of
Islamic countries is difficult if not impossible", they don't care one
way or the other; they think it is not Britain's business; and they
certainly don't have any sympathy for Islamist terrorism, though they
may believe "America had it coming". They also are AFAICT both pro free
markets and pro central planning, depending on the situation. Their
only stipulation is that ownership of British firms should stay in
British hands.

It's a spectrum. You do understand that?

Well, I used the equivalent "continua", so clearly I do. But you are
not, as you claim in the top post, using Principal Component Analysis,
except in a whimsical way, since you have not analyzed a body of
empirical data and then agonized over the meaning of the resulting
factors, which you would have to do in an agnostic analysis. (or
perhaps you have, but you did not say so).

The flaw in your reasoning is that, because two individuals agree that,
for example, "multicultural societies can and must work", that they do
so for the same underlying reason; but one might be motivated by
economic and demographic considerations, and the by egalitarianism and
the desire to mortify nationalist sentiment. It is this underlying (and
very often unexamined) motivation that should form the basis of any
taxonomy of political opinion.

So a better classification scheme would get at the fundamentals of
belief, not simply classify the specific opinions that are a
consequence of them. We can see that most clearly in the case I cited,
that of the BNP. There is no a priori reason that the complex map of
human political opinion can be captured by a simple questionnaire, or
reduce to a simple 2-factor model.

Most individuals or groups may
not tick all of the boxes, just like any other such spectrum that
anyone has ever produced. It's only a web of correlations.

The BNP, if you forced me to place a pin, would probably be to the
right on the axis of tranzism and a little bit down on the axis of
idiotarianism.


ISTM that the BNP is hard to classify along the usual continua because
their overriding policy aim is to recover and preserve British national
identity, not to promote an economic theory or to assist "progress"
according to some notion of moral historical development.

(BTW, tendancies -> tendencies, whither -> wither (at least on my side
of the Atlantic); and I agree with the previous poster that the font in
the jpg needs to change)

Who pushed out of bed this morning. ;-)

Did I ruffle your hair a bit?

You try to help people and this is how they treat you. "No good deed
goes unpunished". In the top post you said "Any suggestions are
welcome." I suggest you use a spell-checker.

.