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Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

I find the Nolan Chart (https://www.theadvocates.org/political-type-comparison/) to be a better version of the 2D compass. You're absolutely right that more dimensions would be better, but finding the right orthogonal ones is difficult.

The Nolan Chart is superior to the simplistic left vs right of U.S. political discourse in part because it shows there is more variation than the major parties would like everyone to think.

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"Freedom" is and always has been incoherent. Rights and protections require enforcement by society. Every right creates a countervailing obligation and social function. Property rights require a state apparatus to enforce them (or they aren't really "rights" at all). Free speech, collective bargaining, privacy, free exercise of religion, etc. require state intervention for preservation of those rights.

Libertarians tell a story about their ideology that assumes power and coercion can only be performed by the government (often in a slippery way, conceding a government that has lots of ability to secure property rights) and that power exerted by the wealthy or by organized communities of interest without a manifest government cannot be coercive or unfree in some sense. It just makes no sense.

It says that I am very progressive, and yet I find that wing's usual baggage laughable. Monty Python knew it all along, the Judaea's Peoples Front are the worst, it's every man's right to have babies and anyway, what have the Romans ever done for us?

The site is clearly libertarian, so they have a vested interest in trying to dunk on both the "left" and "right". When in actuality they're just lumpenproletariat who are going to get run over by the only people who have actual freedom in this country.

That doesn't make you not progressive FWIW

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