Re: Operation Politically Homeless
Daniel C. Burton (dburton@ocf.berkeley.edu)
7 Dec 1997 21:17:05 GMT
One interesting thing that I forgot to mention is that I actually have
seen another two axis spectrum with different axes that seemed to make
some mesaure of sense. It was proposed by people on soc.anarchism (I
think) and the two axes were Private Property and Rule of Law. It went
something like this:
Rule of Law
Monarchism
^*Communism *Socialism * Fascism *
|
| *Populism
| Democratic
| Socialism* Conservatism
| Moderates *
|Several odd *
|* Marxist *
|Variants Progressivism
| Natural-Rights
| Libertarianism*
| Anarcho-
|Anarcho- Socialism "Type 3" Anarcho-Capitalism
|*Communism * * Anarchism *
+-----------------------------------------> Private Property
I've been trying to reconcile this one with the Personal/Economic axes,
because the economic one really doesn't acknowledge that lack of
government control does not necessarily mean well established private
control. This is especially relevant on environmental issues where
standard conservatism advocates essentially an anarchy in control of
pollution (i.e. no government control, AND no control by private
land-owners) whereas libertarianism advocates extensive private property
rights.
On the other hand the Private Property/Rule of Law spectrum doesn't
distinguish very well between government control of the economy and
government control of personal lives.
I was starting to toy with possible 3-dimensional spectrums, but then I
realized that no property vs. private property vs. government controls
gives you three distinct choices on every issue and none is a mix of the
other two. This makes it imposible to split the issue meaningfully into
two independent axes. For example, if you choose property vs. anarchy and
government vs. private control you end up with all the points on the
anarchy side being equivalent.
Of course, not all of the possible sets of choices are even things that
most people think are stable or possible, but some people could
conceivably advocate them.
What we really have is a tripartite opposition on economic issues and a
bipartite opposition on personal issues. This is really sort of 2.5
dimensional and can be expanded to 3 dimensions, or collapsed to 2
dimensions, but either way either adds of subtracts detail unnecessarily.
And of course, if we keep looking we can probably split up the issues even
more until we have many little oppositions....
Fortunately your brain doesn't need spatial representations for everything
and has a much easier time figuring out what's close to what than these
political scientists. They should take a crash course in connectivist
networks and semantic spaces or something.
Wow, all this has inspired me. I think I'll try to write a computer
program using artificial neural networks to help people find their
political home with an arbitary number of arbitary-partite choices on
issue! Anyone want to help me?