We'll see down the road.
Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org http://www.nathannewman.org ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lawrence" <lawrence at krubner.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 7:32 PM Subject: Re: What Kind of Socialist Are You? Take the Test
>I actually would love to create a more sophisticated set of selection
>question based note just on the violence-democracy issues that this quiz
>focused on and more on the real debates on how to structure socialism.
Well, I've got a website, a database, and a webserver running PHP, so I could help out. My knowledge of Left history isn't nearly deep enough to shape the questions, but if you could figure out better questions, I could do the programming.
> Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> >However, I also didn't like the first question on equality, since it's
> >unnuanced, since it assumes absolute equality of results, while there are
> >other degrees of equality- equality based on effort (from and to each
> >according to their means), equality of economic power in setting whatever
> >inequality of incentives is deemed useful, etc. No room for market
> >socialism or really the whole internal debate of democratic socialisms.
> >That I come up anarchist as my second choice shows the poverty of the
list-
> >it kind of equates anarchist with democratic and anti-Soviet.
> >
> >I actually would love to create a more sophisticated set of selection
> >question based note just on the violence-democracy issues that this quiz
> >focused on and more on the real debates on how to structure socialism.
> >Maybe it could be a group LBO project to create the key set of questions
> >that differentiate different forms of socialism.
>
> Yeah, it was kind of a dumb test. Changing just one answer would
> change the entire results - it's pretty nuty to choose among 14
> categories based on just 10 questions. The equality question was
> almost impossible to answer, as was the USSR vs. USA one, and the
> violence one, and the parliamentary one... All those damned forced
> choices. Doing that right would probably take 100 questions, assuming
> there was a right way to do it, and it was worth doing at all.
>
> Doug