Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day! Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day!

>> ^notarobot:

Diapers! Diapers!! Playing Golf!!! DOW JONES!!!!
The horror!

^Evidently political orientation, in the most general sense, is inherent. Conservatives have a much smaller "circle of empathy" than left-wing and liberal people, who are more attuned than conservatives to a wide range of social connectedness. (Contrast this with Margaret Thatcher who famously proclaimed that societies do not, in fact, exist.) And then there are those Americans with their hula-hoops who call themselves libertarians... *sigh*

Tags for this video have been changed from 'margaret thatcher, british, europe, dana gould, argetina, battleship' to 'margaret thatcher, british, europe, dana gould, argentina, battleship' - edited by videosiftbannedme

>> ^SaNdMaN:
"Outstanding. This guy needs to be on Jon Stewart and/or Colbert if he hasn't already."
He was on The Daily Show and it wasn't anything special.


By 'not anything special' generally means that he defended the Iraq war rather than attacking religion. Thus disappointing a large portion of the crowd. For those interested, his Daily Show appearances include him talking about nearly getting spanked by Margaret Thatcher, playing devils advocate for Mother Theresa and having the grand son of Ayatollah Kohmanei over for supper at his house. Oh, and the time he spent in Iraq and North Korea too. Nothing special? One of the far and away most interesting guests the Daily Show has had, which is saying a lot.

While you do a good job pointing out some perceived flaws, am curious to find out what you would do to reverse this trend? I think alot of what you mention is actually sociological and natural in our society. What you are pushing for is as DjSunKid said an extremist stance of feminism.

While there are women who strive to be the leaders in their profession and achieve something for themselves, there is a large segment of the female population that is quite alright with fitting in the stereotype of being female, of dressing up, of being sexy, of being chased, screeching when they see a mouse and looking for a big strong man. There is a entire industry centered around this. This is a standard that has been psychologically upheld by society as a whole, and women themselves. Something I see alot in the society where I live, the Arab world, very few girls try hard here because why should they? They are going to marry a Arabian Istallion and have kids and shop in Gucci and Versace. They are perfectly happy in that role.

I think some of that is social, some of it is psychological from media exposure, the barbie dolls, the princess stories and so on that build up a psychological outlook that some connect with and accept as their own and some reject.

For example look at someone like Ayn Rand.

I talked to a lot of medical students, some of them were female, most of them were heading to OBYGN and pediatrics, both deal with kids and children. They choose to do so. You will hardly find many women in the role of surgeon for example. Is this discrimination?

Back in University I had a chance to befriend a woman in her 50s who was doing adult education, she looked and acted alot like a man. Probing her previous profession she told me she was a construction foreman. She explained that for co workers and clients to take her seriously she had to adopt a hard exterior, or else no one would have obeyed her as a boss or took her seriously managerially. But she had no quams about this, she said certain businesses require male standpoint, not to mean the sex but the qualities, hard, aggressive and stubborn.

Look at how Hillary Clinton tried to meld her campaign, did it pay for her to play on her female side? did it pay for her to become more manly? Then look at someone like Margaret Thatcher. She was asexual as far as am concerned in her politics.

The equality of sexes has been reached, and there has been large progress since the 1800s and the suffrage movement. Women have the right to vote, work, enter politics, and professional occupations. There is still inequality when it comes to pay scale but I believe this is balancing out now in the world economy because administration and business is gender neutral most of the time. Results are far more important.

But does it mean the higher echelons of power are male dominated? Not at all. Germany, Bangladesh, US and many other nations have females who reached high levels of power. There is an abundance of strong female role models.

With regards to the comments on this website, this is the internet the demographic of this website is in the 18-25 range most are students, many are lonely introverted types. Most are male, some are here before or after being to a porn site. This goes a long way to describe the "Omfg shes hot" type of comments.

With regards to cinema and the like, its business. Its marketing and demographics, one shouldn't read too much into it.

The problem Hollywood has with creating female heroes is that they work on base levels so they push a hard women, which is psychologically constructed in such a way as being Bitchy. This is frankly because people in Hollywood think on those levels, they never deal in complicated characters. They need standardized themes, of conflict, and love and very often a strange sex scene where you didn't expect one.

Take the example of Lara Croft that was made into two films. The video game portrayed her as a smart intelligent royal who did tomb raids. Instead of vividly exploring this, by way of Batman orgins where she say fell into a cave and explored and developed into a tom boy and found a ancient dagger or something, they instead went simply with telling the audience that she is that way because her daddy was like that. Because Hollywood producers are idiots and they are desperately trying to connect and hit that 15-20 year demographic that needs to see a tit.

I suggest you read the studies you cite before you propose that conservatism is a form of 'mental illness', the study itself was carried out to link a hypotheses to the idea that conservatism shares common treads as a whole or independently with regards to rigidity, inequality and unwillingness to be open to new ideas.

"Our first assumption, too, is that conservative ideologies – like virtually all other belief systems – are adopted in part because they satisfy some psychological needs. This does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."

Never does it claim conservatism is a form of mental illness, the study states itself that it is not judgmental with regards to political spectrums. Was Theodore Roosevelt mentally ill? Margaret Thatcher? Dwight D. Eisenhower?

Furthermore different political stands are psychologically more comfortable depending on the situation, post 9-11 it was psychologically more comfortable to become politically conservative due to the psychological motivators of fear and threat kicking in becoming more rigid and reactionary against threats that appeared and an effort to return to the 'good old days'. Claiming Bush is a conservative is laughable, since he is not a conservative, he is a religious right wing authoritarian.

I think saying one political sphere is better then another is rather silly, each persons political stance is highly nuanced beyond simply labels such as democrat, republican, liberal or conservative. Andrew Sullivan can be called a religious conservative, but he is pro-gay rights, and is supportive of Barack Obama. Where is his mental illness then?

^ Made me think of Margaret Thatcher, and a quote i thought i half remembered about her once not recognizing her daughter at a party. Instead I ran across this old article which I'll read fully tomorrow, but skimming it, i picked up on descriptions of her as Macho and Tough which might be interesting to reflect on in the context of the vid.

About The Political Compass

In the introduction, we explained the inadequacies of the traditional left-right line.

If we recognise that this is essentially an economic line it's fine, as far as it goes. We can show, for example, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, with their commitment to a totally controlled economy, on the hard left. Socialists like Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe would occupy a less extreme leftist position. Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet.

That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That's the one that the mere left-right scale doesn't adequately address. So we've added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.

Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper political analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. While the former involves state-imposed arbitary collectivism in the extreme top left, on the extreme bottom left is voluntary collectivism at regional level, with no state involved. Hundreds of such anarchist communities exisited in Spain during the civil war period

You can also put Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market, on the far right as well as in a hardcore authoritarian position. On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process.

The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy)

The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal "anarchism" championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America's Libertarian Party, which couples social Darwinian right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.

In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarianism is necessarily "right wing", with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today's Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.
A Word about Neo-cons and Neo-libs

U.S.neo-conservatives, with their commitment to high military spending and the global assertion of national values, tend to be more authoritarian than hard right. By contrast, neo-liberals, opposed to such moral leadership and, more especially, the ensuing demands on the tax payer, belong to a further right but less authoritarian region. Paradoxically, the "free market", in neo-con parlance, also allows for the large-scale subsidy of the military-industrial complex, a considerable degree of corporate welfare, and protectionism when deemed in the national interest. These are viewed by neo-libs as impediments to the unfettered market forces that they champion.


International Chart

A diverse professional team has assessed the words and actions of internationally known contemporary leaders to give you an idea of how they relate to each other on the political compass.

We regret the present exclusion of some major leaders, especially in the developing world. This is due to our inability so far to contact independent experts.


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Thanks from the Political Compass team.
US Primaries 2007
A few words about "The Extreme Right", and a look at the parties in England's local elections
ICONOCHASMS: How well do you know your political icons ?

New material is regularly added to The Political Compass - please keep coming back !

If Margaret Thatcher made a foreign policy statement I happened to agree with I wouldn't upvote her.

There was an interesting Newsnight clip on Friday night (the BBC puts their programmes up on their website, but I'm not sure whether it is still up) where it was suggested that Segolene Royal will probably not win because many French women are jealous of her for her looks (the segment suggested that French women don't 'stand together' but instead pick each other apart - as in every other country then. Baaa-zing! ;-) )

The thing that worries me about the French elections is that both parties have committed to fundamental change, but it looks like both sides will only end up damaging the country further. Nicolas Sarkozy is the right winger that called rioters 'scum' a few years ago and there are apparently fears of heavy rioting breaking out if he wins (which initial polls are suggesting he will). Segolene Royal is the left winger who has said how much she admires what Tony Blair has done in Britain and she would like to do the same thing in France - yikes! Blair destroyed the left wing in Britain to make his party electable and then since has basically copied Margaret Thatcher's policies..and Royal wants to emulate him?

She also said her relationship with Blair will be a help if she wins the election as she will have connections. Well only as long as Blair stays in power, and there is the question of how much people listen to Blair anyway especially after that incident last year where the microphones were left on during the Blair/Bush chat "Yo, Blair!"!

Margaret Thatcher did alot for the UK economy, allowing it to compete directly with the international market. Though this did come at a cost of union busting. Two sides to every story as they say.

"Is it worth it?"
no.
====
frm songfacts.com:
Elvis has said in interviews that this was written from the perspective of workers in British shipbuilding seaports during the buildup to England's war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982, an event that then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher seized (as most politicians would) in order to use the cacophony of nationalistic fervor to drown out the groaning sounds of a crumbling economy.
The song is set in a region that's economically depressed, one where essentials like "a new winter coat for the wife" is hard to come by. But there's a "rumour" that the local shipyard will soon have work, building ships for a war. The townspeople want to be happy that they will soon have jobs, but it is at the expense of their own boys who must go fight the war.
Chet Baker plays the mournful, lonely trumpet solo on this ballad. It is rumored to be Baker's last recorded performance.