South-Southwest

Randomly musing on politics recently, I decided to check this political quiz out and see if my score had changed at all. (I don't remember now where I saw the quiz originally; I think it was probably linked on one of the political blogs I read.) It's an interesting quiz, as it charts the standard left-right economic axis but also adds an up-down authoritarian-libertarian axis — so that Stalin and Hitler, for example, are both authoritarian, but Stalin is far to the left on the economic axis.

The quiz consists of statements that you're asked to agree or disagree with; there's no "no opinion" or middle option, so that if you can't give a clear-cut answer, you have to pick the closest choice. Since I hate being phone-polled because I'm always required to answer yes or no, there being no box on the pollster's form for "it depends," it's not surprising that I have a lot of trouble with some of the questions. My guess, however, is that the quiz is set up that way on purpose, to make you think and split differences (whereas I think phone polls are set up to be easy to tabulate and turn into Powerpoint presentations).

In any event, reversing the ususal pattern, I seem to be drifting leftward with age: a year or two ago I was around -5, -6, I think, and today I came in at -6, -7. If I had to explain this, I'd probably blame it partly on Bush, partly on Enron, the latter case being an excellent argument against unregulated capitalism if you ask me, although hardly anyone ever does. I don't know if that's the right explanation, though; it could also be that I'm simply getting crabbier.

On an entirely different note, since it is Friday (I'm cutting this one close), here are some of those little blue things I was talking about the other day. All previous blue-flower pix have been from years past, but I took this one today; this isn't squill, but that too is coming right along.