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Also, many of the questions are false dilemmas, in the sense that I often found myself wanting to answer “both” or “neither” or “something in between” but that wasn’t allowed.

Anyway, trying to answer these from a European perspective (okay, a Dutch perspective – I can’t speak for all of Europe) was an interesting experience. Let’s see what I got.

1 and 11: Neo-Nazis waving swastikas around? Hoo boy. This is one of those examples of America being a tad more absolute about the whole “free speech” thing than most European countries. In Germany, Austria, and a lot of the countries that were occupied, public display of Nazi symbols is banned and for good reason.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact America wasn’t invaded or occupied in WWII. For Americans who weren’t soldiers, the war was a far-off spectacle, with the Nazis as cartoonish villains. For Europeans, not so much. Even when most people who actually lived through the war are dead or senile, there is such a thing as collective consciousness (transferred through history lessons, books, anecdotes from grandparents and such) – and in most European countries, that collective consciousness remembers the last time people were waving swastikas in the streets, and what that was like. (For the same reason, Soviet symbols are banned in many Eastern European countries).

Oh, and a dozen people have probably made this reference already, but in your example, neo-Nazis are an inconvenience to traffic; in Soviet Illinois, traffic is an inconvenience to neo-Nazis.

As for the Exxon Mobil protesters, this is one of those questions where I wanted to answer “something in between”. I’d allow the protesters to stay near the headquarters, but I’d step in if they tried to block people from entering the office. Even if you’re the evil CEO of an evil corporation, as long as you haven’t been convicted of a crime, you should be able to walk around freely without being harrassed or hindered. That’s a pretty important part of rule of law, and the police should protect that right when it’s threatened. That being said, as long as the protesters remain peaceful they should be able to protest where they like, which is an equally important right; I definitely wouldn’t send them away to a “designated free speech zone” (and I suspect you’re deliberately trying to steer people in a certain direction here by using scary-sounding phrases like that).

2 and 12: A on both counts. I know this is a pet peeve of yours, but I think the whole issue of employer tolerance for dissenting opinions is a lot less black-and-white than you often make it out to be. I think a lot of it depends on how much of a political agenda your employer has, what your job is, and how vocal you are about your dissenting opinion. Suppose there’s a priest who, in his spare time, goes around telling everyone he meets that religion is bullshit – would you blame the Catholic Church for firing him?

Sure, people’s political views are often unfairly held against them by their employers, but if you are a public spokesman (such as a priest, or a school principal, or a news anchor) for an organisation with a clear agenda, some adherence to “party line” can be reasonably asked of you.

3 and 13: By this point I figured out what you were doing. I answered A to both. I think the Second Amendment is an abomination, and if America had any sense the thing would have been repealed a century ago. However, my distaste for letting people have guns was overridden here by another distaste – for federations.

I’m a strong believer in the unitary state, and I think the US is a lot more federalised than a nation has any right to be. Regional and local authorities should not have the power to decide who can have an abortion or who gets to buy guns; no matter how crazy the rules get, they should be the same for everyone.

I get that a giant country with 300 million people can’t be as tightly centralised as, say, France, but the US takes things too far. ‘Death penalty? Gay marriage? Pfff, minor details. Let each state figure that out for themselves. It’s not like making sure all our citizens have the same rights and are subject to the same laws is an important part of being a country anyway.’

4 and 14: A and B, respectively. Point is, I wouldn’t allow any kind of monument to the CSA even if everyone in town thought it would be neat. For me, the CSA are roughly on the same level as Franco’s fascists in Spain, and people who express sympathy for the Confederates today (and/or wave the Confederate Navy Jack around because they think it looks “badass”) creep me out as deeply as those people in Italy who still think Mussolini was a great guy.

5 and 15: Definitely B for the former; for the latter I wanted to answer “both”.

Maybe when it comes to practical politics, I do have a bit of a meta-level thinker in me: I recognise that democracy only works if everyone plays by the rules even when they don’t like the outcome. Your Republican legislator is contradicting the obvious will of the chamber and being an asshole, but he’s doing so within procedure, so no one has a right to stop him. If people can be assholes while following procedure, it means that the procedures need to be changed – not that they should be temporarily suspended when people use them to be assholes.

6 and 16: These were the most blatant false dilemmas. In both cases, the only answers available were either “I agree with {the feminist group|SOPAFAMPA} and think they should be praised” or “what they’re doing is wrong and harmful to society”. I disagree with SOPAFAMPA and only halfheartedly agree with the feminist group, but I think both groups are acting within their democratic rights (even if SOPAFAMPA is fighting pretty dirty).

You love the “free marketplace of ideas” and have written at length about how amazing it is that libertarians and Communists can live together without trying to get each other burned at the stake; coming from you, then, these kinds of false dilemmas between “I agree with these guys” and “these guys aren’t playing fair” were unexpected to say the least.

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A very thought-provoking quiz all the same, and the distinction between object-level and meta-level thinking is a valuable one.

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1/11) B
2/12) B
3/13) B
4/14) A
5/15) A

For 6 and 16, I don’t much like feminism or communism, so I went in opposite directions.

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Apparently I’m thinking meta. Not exactly a surprise – I didn’t twig what the test was about, but my standard ‘avoidance of accusations of being invested’ mechanism is to mentally scrub out the context for a problem and consider it just as a question of principle, so I defaulted to that in a quiz situation.

Four rules, in order of importance (and also of scale):
1: An isolated individual or group may do anything they like, regardless.
2: People may believe and say in public anything, however much other people don’t like it. Offence is a fact about the listener, not the speaker, and it is very not OK to deny someone you disagree with (or even think needs executing) a platform from which to speak.
3: Small government is better than (and outranks) large.
4: Whoever has the most votes ‘wins’.

1 is obvious and as far as I’m concerned covers all the ‘hot button’ stuff – sexuality, abortion, gun control, etc. 2 has exceptions involving known lies and direct threats, and 3 is more generally a policy of denying the leverage of scale to people who think they get to dictate to others.

4 conflicts badly with the other three, quite obviously, which is why it’s last; it’s more of a ‘ceteris paribus': if the problem does not involve the government, nobody is being told they can’t say something, and is not directed at a specific individual, then it’s a straight vote. This does result in a potential situation where an individual always ‘wins’, but as soon as they acquire a few dozen friends and become a ‘minority’ they stop ‘winning'; I’ve never actually had that come up in a problem, though.

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