My political views

This is Pew’s political typology quiz. Online talk of politics is often just hinted at, I thought it would be fun to get explicit. I took the quiz, and below are my responses.

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Top response, with low confidence. I really have no deep understanding of how national debt works but I feel the government should do more to help needy Americans. I don’t know where the money should come from. Everything has unintended consequences.

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Can I say both? No? I think about the subway system here in NYC. I read a ton of articles about how much of a mess the MTA is, but at the end of the day it’s a pretty remarkable system. And public schooling is part of the government, and thinking of that definitely makes me think that “both” is the right response. I guess the second, with low confidence.

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Is there really no way to skip questions on this quiz? I don’t know anything about this. I chose the top response just to shake things up.

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Top response, high confidence. Put it like this: slavery is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.

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Top response, medium confidence. I think it really depends on the industry and the kind of regulation, though. I’m glad there’s government regulation of over drugs but I think there must be a better way to do it and might be doing more harm than good at the moment.

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Top response, high confidence.

Brief aside: What does it mean to be ‘accepted by society’? To me that means you should never receive hate or discrimination for being who you are.

My sense is that for other people ‘accepted by society’ means ‘it should become invisible to society, not even abnormal.’ That’s something that I don’t hope for, and mostly this is because I’m a religious Jew who wears a yarmulke in public and I carry my differences with me wherever I go. I don’t think being or feeling different is a bad thing, and I don’t think it should be a bad thing. In fact! In fact the idea that everybody deserves to feel not different is an oppressive majoritarian idea. Moving on.

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Most? Most corporations make a fair and reasonable amount of profit. I think there are some industries that should be taxed more significantly because they do not serve the public interest. I’m mostly thinking of certain parts of the financial industry.

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No clue. It depends on the laws and regulations, I guess. You can’t pass, so I’m going to go with the less-liberal option just to keep things interesting. Certainly it’s sometimes true that stricter environmental laws don’t really help anybody.

By the way, part of my response here is that none of the environmental laws will actually be strong enough to impact climate change. If presented with a government program that could convincingly impact climate change I would absolutely hurt the economy and sacrifice jobs.

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I chose the top one with high confidence, because I’m a good old-fashioned coastal elite and nearly all economists are pro-immigration in the US.

But even if I did think that immigrants were a burden on our country (I guess I’m willing to believe that) I would still be opposed to using cruel methods to expel people from the country. Those two things don’t have to go together.

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I really don’t know what to do with this choice. The first is just mean and wrong. Poor people don’t have it easy even if they get benefits. I also don’t know if the government is the main reason why poor people have hard lives. Also being poor doesn’t mean you have a “hard life.”

I went with the second because I took this to be asking “should poor people get more or less government money on the margins” and I think more.

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I vote the second option, with medium confidence. (Though: what even is fair, man?)

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In a TV interview Malcolm X once said the following:

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.

I think there’s probably no better year to be a black person in the United States than 2019, and also that’s not saying much. I’m pretty optimistic that things will continue to get better for black people in our country but part of that calculation is taking into consideration continued outrage about police beatings and killings.

Second option, high confidence.

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Oh god, I don’t know. The first, I guess.

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The second option, high confidence. Though it really does depend on what “success” means.

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I think this is another “both” situation for me.

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I really have very few opinions about foreign policy. and all of them are weakly held.

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I like voting and I live in NYC, so I’m a registered Democrat. I don’t strongly identify with the party.

Apparently this all makes me an Opportunity Democrat? That’s what Pew tells me, at least.

 

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