The Children’s Table of Politics

As you may have noticed, I love political compass memes. However, the classic political compass has its problems, and political compass tests are even worse. The political compass is inherently divisive, by which I mean that it separates people who are like-minded but have slightly different opinions about certain things, while simultaneously lumping in together people with vastly different worldviews (lefties think that Nazis are authright, they were actually authleft, meanwhile the political compass test puts in them in authcentre). Now then, there are more political compass tests out there than I can shake a stick at, so hopefully by the time I get round to publishing this article, I’ll have conducted my experiment on seeing the variance of their results, but based on what I already know, I predict that the test will place me closer to June Lapine than to Carl Benjamin. This is where things get weird, because anarchists don’t really fit on the compass at all, despite what this meme might suggest:

Enter the phrase “children’s table of politics,” which my fellow Hiver @edicted coined. In truth, the more that you support the ideas of both personal liberty and private property rights (think a gay threesome maintaining a homestead where they grow marijuana and defend their property with machine guns), the more it necessarily drives a person to the bottom centre, rather than either of the corners. June Lapine, better known as Shoe0nhead, is only left of centre because she still stubbornly clings to the idea that some sort of government administrated social safety net can be maintained in a society where the state is largely stripped of its power. June, however, is not me; she and I come from very different backgrounds, and while I sympathise with her position, having once been a socialist myself (a very different kind of socialist, mind you), at the end of the day, the State is an inherent evil, and cannot be trusted to be good unless the citizenry perpetually watches it like a hawk. Better not to have a state at all, or any permanent institution, really. Then again, most people who call themselves “left-libertarian” or “libertarian socialist” haven’t really thought things through regarding wider society, hence stupid takes like this:

At the very least, most liblefties (including June herself) are honest enough with themselves to admit this, hence:

Granted, every quadrant has its stupid takes that the other three are in agreement against. Nevertheless, why is this table so flawed? Well, before we can figure that out, we need to define some terms. “Left” means “socialist” and “right” means “capitalist,” obviously, but the terms “capitalism” and “socialism” are poorly defined, with both groups of self-identifiers misrepresenting the perceived other. To set the record straight: capitalism is the voluntary exchange of labour and private property, socialism is the collectivisation of labour and private property. That’s it. Capitalism is not inherently based on profit (that would be the central banking industry), and socialism does not inherently have a welfare system (that would be a centralised form of charity). In fact, the nations with the strongest welfare systems in the world (the Nordic countries) actually have a less-regulated economy than countries with dysfunctional welfare systems; in other words, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, despite their high taxes, are actually more capitalist and less socialist than the United States, Canada, Britain, Russia, or China. The hallmark of a socialist society is not a welfare state, but nationalisation of industry, which may take the form of either subsidies (as the US government does with agriculture) or direct management (Russian mining companies and Chinese infrastructure projects). The proper shape of the political compass is actually a diamond, because people with strong beliefs end up having to compromise between authority and equality. Centrists, meanwhile, seem to be the most susceptible to brainwashing, hence all four corners being united against room-temperature centrist takes, for example:

I agree with three of the four quadrants, incidentally. The only one I don’t is authright, simply because I’m not at all religious. Porn is a vice, certainly, most people who make it end up regretting it, and it provides sexually inexperienced individuals with an extremely skewed view of normal sexual activity (there is a reason that sexually repressed people tend to be the kinkiest fuckers going). Considering (((who))) runs the porn industry, that makes for an interesting segue into how people feel about Jews:

Spicy, I know, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: anti-Semitism has been around for as long as Judaism itself. Left or right, black or white, everyone hates the Jews. I, of course, am of the opinion that all religions are dangerous, whether they profess the existence of gods and souls or not. Believe in the spiritual or don’t, I care not, but religious institutions are objectively dangerous.

I have mentioned in the past that I get called “far-right” a lot more than I get called “far-left,” because I spend much more time arguing with leftists than rightists, but in the event that I actually managed to get a self-described leftist to actually engage with what I’m saying, what I find is a surprising amount of agreement, for example my opinions on law enforcement. To elucidate, here’s a conversation I had on Hive regarding the FBI:

The Pholosopher: Defund the FBI

Vladan Lausevic: I see, and was that your position when Trump was the president and in power?

This conversation took place shortly after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, hence the assumption that “defund the FBI” is nothing more than reactionary outrage.

Me: This has nothing to do with Trump. The FBI is utterly redundant as a law enforcement agency (name one thing they do that can’t be done by the NSA, DEA, or US Marshals), was originally created to deal with organised crime that arose as a direct result of Prohibition, and has continually invented more boogeymen since 1933 to justify its continued existence. You can be TDS-sufferer, a leftist, or both, and still be able to acknowledge that the FBI has always been a partisan political actor constantly mired in corruption and incompetence, and doesn’t need to exist.

For those who live in a cave, TDS stands for “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term coined by Senator Rand Paul for people who hate Donald Trump so much that they feel compelled to oppose everything he says. I argue with TDS-sufferers a lot, because I don’t care if people hate Trump, but FFS, at least hate him for the right reasons! Alas, pointing out that he’s not actually a fascist (or a racist) apparently makes me some kind of personality cultist or “hipster doofus Trump pumper,” easily the most creative of insults I’ve had lobbed at me.

Vlad: Very good reasoning. Thank for this perspective. If I remember right, the USA has more than 10 federal security agencies from the CIA and FBI to DEA and Homeland Security. Do you also see that as a big government bureaucracy?

Me: Of course. I used to be a leftist, and even then, I saw the security state as a huge waste of money. The DEA, for example, doesn’t need to exist either, because the drug war is completely pointless. The DEA probably spends more time investigating the Cocaine Import Agency than private citizens anyway, so the CIA should be dissolved as well. There are better things that the federal government could spend all that money on, but it never does, and probably never will. As long as the government keeps expanding at the expense of the citizenry, I will demand less government.

Vlad: Legalize it! Nice to hear that 🙂 Important to unite the libertarian right, left, middle, greens and others

The entire conversation can be viewed here for your entertainmment. FTR, despite having been an unironic Soviet, I had to laugh at the redundant ineptitude of the Soviet security state, since no-one knew what anyone else was up to (a natural consequence of everything being on a strictly need-to-know basis), hence the NKVD (predecessor of the MVD) and KGB alike allocating more resources to spying on their own people than anyone else.

Here’s the deal: if you truly believe in freedom, then you must, by necessity, believe that people have the freedom to do things that you don’t like. I’ll never partake of marijuana, for example, but I think people should be allowed to if they wish. In fact, I take more of an issue with tobacco, because I can’t stand the smell of cigarette smoke, and secondhand smoke is demonstrably dangerous. Nonetheless, I’m not going on a crusade to ban tobacco any time soon. We all have our vices, mine are alcohol and hentai. Self-improvement is the solution, government regulation is nothing more than a cardboard box to conceal the underlying issue. But NOOO, “we live in a society,” so the onus is on someone else to solve your personal problems. Sod off.

And now, we come to the way that the political compass should truly look:

The three in the middle, incidentally (socialists, centrists, and corporatists) are where the “banality of evil” usually shows up; the dead souls whose existence is devoted to utterly indifferent condemnation of people who want no part of the system. Think, for example: “I want to know how you’re keeping Insuracare in the black when you’re writing checks to every Harry Hardship and Sally Sob-Story who gives you a phone call!” For a similar reason, I refer to “stakeholder capitalism” as “a kinder, gentler fascism.” FFS, sometimes I wish Klaus Schwab could read minds; he’d know how much everyone hates his guts… and maybe he already does, but he’d rather exterminate humanity than admit he’s wrong. Speaking of which, I chose a gradient colour scheme for a good reason: it includes purple and orange. If you didn’t already know, “orange libleft” is the group that includes wokists, and old-fashioned left-libertarians are some of the most vociferous opponents of wokery. “Purple libright,” meanwhile, is the “but what if the child consents” crowd, and while they pretend to be libertarians, they aren’t, really. Purple is authcentre, that’s where nonces belong, that’s where they usually show up anyway, and Epstein didn’t kill himself. Fight me.

Here’s the deal: you can’t have total economic equality and total personal freedom, because every activity that results in economic inequality must be curtailed if equality is to be maintained. You cannot have total economic freedom and total personal freedom, because protectionism is sometimes necessary in trade, some ways of making money violate the NAP, and some things should not be commodified in the first place. You cannot have total economic freedom or total economic equality in any authoritarian system, totalitarianism very much included, because of the entrenched class structure. The hierarchy of the state, much like the state itself, exists because of an upward redistribution of wealth called taxation. Taxation is theft. No, you can’t own the rain. If you don’t know what that’s a reference to:

Maybe I spend too much time farming memes.

Anyway, I think I’ll wrap this up now. I’ll conclude by saying that I’ll still use the old-fashioned political compass terms to describe someone’s ideology, because that’s simply how the discourse has been shaped. Nonetheless, I think it is time we re-think the way in which we categorise belief systems. Na shledanou!