Facebook: Nachman is beyond liberal

Facebook has just added a new applications feature, where outside developers can write little applications that users can put on their profiles. As with all new Facebook features, it's of dubious quality, at least for now. One of these new gadgets is a polticial "compass" from the Washington Post, which gauges and displays your political ideologue based on a ten-question survey. The survey is pretty basic, with questions about abortion, death penalty, taxes, and other typical liberal/conservative dividers. The answers are in the form of "disagree strongly," "disagree," etc.

According to the survey, my political views are to the left of the average liberal position. But the survey doesn't really measure how liberal or how conservative you are. Instead, it finds out if you are liberal and conservative, and to what degree your political views follow party line. For example, I agree with every typical Democratic or liberal position, but that doesn't make me far left. Instead, they should have included question about welfare, universal healthcare, and religion in public schools. That would have seperated the leaning ideologues from the hardcore believers.