say what?

[quarrel]

Some weeks ago, I encountered one of the innumerable academic quizzes on the Internets. This particular one was a Philosophical Health Check. Most tests of this sort are meant to identify your political ideology. This one aims to point out mutual contradictions in your beliefs, such as believing Michelangelo to be a great artist but also feeling art is subjective. The test has thirty questions that break down into fifteen linked pairs, with each pair testing a core concept from different angles.

According to this test, I scored three contradictions, so of course I'm going to criticize the questions. I first want to clarify that I don't have a problem with the general idea behind the test. Quite the opposite. It somewhat justifies my personal reluctance to take an active role in politics, which I partially base on my belief that I simply don't understand complex ethical situations well enough to justify influencing how other people act in them. A person should get his own house in order before telling others how to live, and he'd certainly better be logical and consistent before he helps decide who stays free and who goes to jail.

One question concerned whether atheism is a faith or a rational belief. I didn't try very hard to answer this question since I have no idea what the tester meant by "atheism". I've seen too many arguments on that subject hinge on whether the arguers thought it meant "the belief there is no God" or "the absence of belief in God", and I can't find a consistent, authoritative answer myself.

Another pair that tripped me up was weather I think the government should protect citizens from unsafe drugs. Again, I don't care what the test says here since I gave a dummy answer. You had to answer either "Agree" or "Disagree", and I'm honestly not sure where I stand on this issue, so I answered randomly and moved on.

The last involved whether I think people should be rewarded purely on their merits or whether it's acceptable sometimes to give a person more than she deserves because she got less than she deserved at some previous event. I agreed to both, which is, of course, a contradiction. Okay. That one's fair. Mea culpa.

The site says "Each statement is carefully worded, so do pay attention to what each one actually says." Well, I did that.

I also paid attention to words, or so I thought, when I tweeted about something being a paradox. One of my followers replied that it wasn't a paradox because it wasn't a contradiction.

I paid attention to words, and tried to learn about them, when someone said that adding some kind of competency exam as a prerequisite to voting was fascist, and who implied that returning the voting age to 21 was also fascist. I was going to follow up by asking whether it was fascist to restrict voting in any way for any reason, or to oppose lowering the age further to 16, or to have made it 21 in the first place. I didn't get a chance because he ignored me. (Let's be fair, though. When a complete stranger sends you a private message asking about fascism, it doesn't matter how well it's written. You ignore it because the sender is a kook.)

"Farther" doesn't mean "further". "That" and "which" aren't interchangeable. "Spontaneously" doesn't mean "promptly". But that's the easy stuff. I don't know how to communicate with people to whom "immediately" also doesn't mean "promptly", or who cringe if you call a proud person arrogant or you speak of false pretenses or you mention raising children. I can't understand an economist who says "counterfeiting" but doesn't mean "printing fake money". Someone who requires I know the difference between a dictator and a despot before he'll entertain my questions should just pick the next guy with his hand up.

And I still don't know what fascism is.