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Cake day: July 5th, 2025

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  • At first read I see a flaw in the first part of your argument, which is that centralization vs collectivization of economic ownership is not directly indicative of policy, rather it is the percentage of economic output which is used for collective services that dictates the Left/Right spectrum, which indeed is how a Far Left position can be coextant with a market economy and private ownership but with a tax or public stake in economic actors that returns a majority of the “profit” to collective service, it is rather the degree of enforcement of property rights as one of a set of rights and regulations by a central Authority which lies on the Auth/Lib spectrum that dictates the structure of the economic order. This is how for example you could be a Lib/Left Marxist who prefers central planning of the economy, so long as you don’t believe the central planning should be enforced by monopoly of violence and instead implemented by collective consensus, there is no fundamental conflict in the position. Leninism on the other hand implies use of force by a centralized state military/police to restructure the economy along central planned lines, which is an Authoritarian position.

    I agree the “quiz” is very flawed, it would need an order of magnitude more questions to be accurate, and authorship bias is certainly an issue.

    That said, the compass itself I find to be quite accurate to the mental political models of most individuals. What you are pointing to, Centralization vs Distribution, is a relatively new way to concieve of the older Federal vs Local or State vs Community political framework. I would indeed view this as a “third axis” or omission by the two axis compass, as both Authority and Economy can have organization and flow biased towards fewer or more numerous nodes of participation/enforcement. To go back to your Lib Left Marxism, you could say that the Marxism part of that formula calls for a State economic planning model with high collectivization of economic output and low State enforcement of policy. On thing often missing from the Auth/Lib axis description is that reduced State enforcement does not mean reduced enforcement overall, but rather that the enforcement does not rely on the state monopoly on violence, instead directing enforcement through social exchange relying on the individuals applying their independent power onto each other to discourage deviancy from the consensus.

    An easy example of this is in many tribal groups and including pacifist Western religious sects the worst corrective action an individual faces is shunning, which relies on all of the individuals of the community independently choosing to no longer participate socially or economically with the individual being corrected. The decision to do so may be more or less centralized or decentralized (for example a Priarch/Priest might declare shunning in a nonviolent Christian community, while a specific tribal group may only do so through a process of full group consensus, or even the most lib/local of all a spontaneous reaction of each individual against the deviant based on norms.



  • Political Compass Vector

    Because politics is not limited to Left and Right, compressed down to it’s minimum reasonable simplicity it is at least two dimensional. In mass media you see “Left” vs “Right” division, on Lemmy you see Lib Left vs Auth Right vs Center divisions, which are just as strong but largely suppressed by entrenched political interests especially in the US but also across the industrialized world where Lib Left has been suppressed by the capitalist political apparatus.

    Note that most of the time when someone on the Fediverse decries “Liberals” they mean capitalist centrist in the “Neo-Liberal” mode. In some specific circumstances though you might see Auth Left criticizing Lib Left with the term, essentially insulting them by lumping them in with the Centrists. In other cases more in line with mass media you might see any Right position using the term against anyone center or left of center.

    Essentially, Liberal has become a term only meaningful in context, and for that reason largely useless in common discourse. This is why the Political Compass is so useful a tool, situating political positions in their context, though of course it is flawed by being only two dimensional when actual political groups are very much multidimensional.








  • Yes, it very much depends on the definition of Homo sapiens.

    There is a strict genetic definition in which a set of defining genes constrain the species, in which case there was likely a first human, but there is every possibility that their first descendents didn’t meet that definition and it took a few generations of back and forthing and natural selection for a consistent line of humans to exist.

    On the other hand you could define the species based on social behavior, in which case the “first human” only arose in context of at least one other member of the species, and “Adam and Eve” or “Annie and Eve” or “Adam and Steve” scenario.

    Then you go to what most agricultrually minded people think of as a “species”, which is fetile interbreeding. In that case it seems like there never really was a separation between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus and Neanderthals, as there is now broadly accepted evidence of interbreeding long past the “differentiation” of the species, though social and territorial differences seem to have kept them from re-merging into a unified population.