Dead Men Left

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Et Alia has a go at an eye-wateringly stupid internet political quiz, noting however that:

...This quiz isn't as stupid as the Political Compass—whose designer should be run through a wood chipper—because at least it doesn't equate the set of all possible political positions with a bounded set. “But the Political Compass is two dimensional, not one dimensional!” its defenders scream. Right, I say—that means it commits the same mistake twice and is therefore twice as stupid...


Do-it-yourself focus groups - cack-handedly reproducing the myopic categories of conventional politics, singing along with the bad karaoke version of a marketing guru's teeth-grindingly foul original, grinning and drooling as you do so whilst the crowd stares, aghast - I can't see the point of endlessly generating these things, either. It must be the same urge that drives people to watch the West Wing.