Ideological and Spatial Thinking
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices
someone has acquired by the age of 18." -- Albert Einstein
Measure your own political ideology
by completing a questionnaire, go to
Political Compass.
What
ideologies do Geography
111 students hold?
The graphed result is very useful to put your ideology in perspective with
others.
A triangle shows the three ideologies as poles, in opposition to each other.
Circles result in overlapping. Not each perspective would agree that they overlap with the other perspectives or even by how much they overlap. Radicals agree liberals to help people in need; but they disagree whether this is the end or only the means to something even better, such as guaranteed work or income.
The three perspectives diverge from each other and have no possibility of understanding each other.
Conversion could take place for each of the perspectives. Here conservatives and liberals converge on the radical viewpoint.
1) Look at the left-hand graph, based on
polling from September 20-22, 2004, before the 2004 presidential election.
Notice 1) how distinctive Democrats and Republicans are from each other, yet
2) each contains ideologies of the other; 3) no radical ideology is
included; and 4) what could Moderate mean? The missing parts of the the
three bar graph are probably "no response."
2) Examine
where (zip code, county) personal political
donations go to Democrats or Republicans.
3) Use your skills to understand the
explicitly stated reasons that are commonly
given to explain poverty and wealth in the table below. Refer to the
table of three ideologies used in this course,
if necessary.
Poverty | Wealth | ||
Ideology | Reason | Ideology | Reason |
Radical |
capitalism | Radical | capitalism |
Conservative | laziness | Liberal, Radical | connections |
Liberal, Radical |
unequal possibilities | Liberal, Radical | dishonesty |
Liberal, Radical |
discrimination | Liberal, Radical | good possibilities |
Conservative | lack of effort | Conservative | hard work |
Conservative | no talents | Conservative | talents |
Conservative | bad luck | Conservative | luck |
Who are the young men and women going to war in Iraq, again (2003
and beyond)?
Two states, Texas and Florida, account for nearly a quarter of the
total: Texans alone make up 18% of the army. California (which provides 12% of
the navy and 11% of the marines), New Jersey and Pennsylvania round out the top
five states. In general, the navy gets a surprising number of recruits from the
mid-west; the air force hails, on the whole, from the west, and from Alaska;
marines come from all over. Soldiers — the people who do the hard work on the
ground — tend to come from harder-jawed regions. The generally Republican,
pro-gun South contributes a lot more soldiers than the Democratic Northeast,
both in absolute numbers and percentages of the regional population.
A Texan
is eight times more likely to be in uniform than a New Yorker. Magazines have
particular ideologies. Read
a good example from The Economist. Ideology plays an
important part in how the U.S. government, Republican and Democratic, manipulate
public information. Examine
the deception of the federal budget. For more insights on how ideology
informs content, see the results of a national
opinion poll of Republicans and
Democrats. The
New Internationalist
magazine has identified seven different political systems worldwide. When you get to this site, scroll to the bottom of the page!
What ideology does the New York
Times have in its book reviews? Look
at an example of how mixed
up labels of ideology often are. Political cartoons
captures ideological issues well. Here are two examples:1) Over time, radical ideas often become common sense. 2) What is racism?
The Chinese
government does not like that the revolutionaries in Nepal calling themselves Maoists. Why?
