Levi has mentioned more than once in the past few weeks that he thinks I’m becoming more and more conservative of late. I didn’t think I have been but it is hard to be objective when judging yourself. A year or two ago I took the Political Compass test and I got a 6.5 on the Economic axis and -4.0 on the Social axis. Today I decided to retake the test to see what has changed. This time I was 5.0 on the Economic axis and -3.9 on the Social axis.

Comparing these tests I’ve become less right on the Economic axis and essentially remained the same on the Social Axis. Since the Political Compass is a two axis measurement, to convert it to the simplified Left/Right scale it seems best to rotate the axis 45 degrees clockwise and project the data point onto the new horizontal axis. This leaves just right of center (random side thought: While centre is most likely the proper Canadian spelling, it doesn’t feel right using it for a location. Centre feel right when I use it for a facility, but I feel the need differentiate them through spelling. Maybe it has to do with the fact that programming languages use American spellings), but very much a centrist.

It appears that I’ve actually moved a little left since the previous test which if I equal the left/right to liberal/conservative respectively, as is often done, I’ve become more liberal making Levi wrong (I just had to point that out). I don’t feel like pulling out a textbook to remember how to find the perpendicular distance of a point from a line so I’m really just eyeballing the vector projection. Either way, I’m moving more to the left again, which I’ll attribute to the substantial reading in economics and political economy I’ve done over this last year. I’ve become a little more pragmatic about government intervention.

Political Compass has a great little app that you can take the test on and plot you against your friends scores. Here is mine:

As you can see, I tend to have friends on the socially libertarian side (Chris and Kevin being the only authoritarians). On a Left/Right scale there would be 34 on the Left and 6 on the Right with Andrew Falcao being most Left and Kevin Royal being most Right (of course we all know from The Next Great Prime Minister that Kevin is an extremist who the poor, minorities, and women won’t vote for). It is pretty evenly distributed on the Left and my friends on the Right hug the center.

As a ending note I will be heading up to TBay after exams. I’ll be taking off the term so I’ll likely just play which city I’m in by ear, but I’ll likely be in TBay for at least a month, part of which will be me house siting for my parents when they go to California and their “puppy” (he looks full grown to me) Baxter (a black lab) needs taking care of. Now that I got Atlas Shrugged off my desk (I DO NOT recommend it) I can do some varied reading now so I expect to do that alot over the next 6 months.

Random Wikipedia Article: LaVeyan Satanism

Currently Listening to: Heat Of The Moment – Asia