Blog, June 2007

(Requires Javascript.)

The Axes

A two-dimensional graph requires two axes — that is, two sets of scales on which the data points must be assessed. In politics there are many candidate axes, some listed below, of which we can only choose two:

• Traditional Left–Right division. Left– and Right-wing ideologies encompass a whole variety of different policy areas and are the standard method of classifying a political party.
• Libertarian–Authoritarian. This is a method of classifying parties according to how “free” they aim for citizens to be.
• Environmentalism. You could assess a party by how friendly its policies are to the environment.
• Euroskepticism. You could assess a party on whether it is pro– or anti-EU.
• Atlanticism. You could assess a party on whether it is pro– or anti-US.

I’ve chosen the first two from that list, as I felt they were likely to provide the most interesting picture of politics in the UK…

dict is a command that is supplied with most Linux and BSD distributions. If you enter dict foo at the command-line, you get back the dictionary definition of “foo”. Normally several different dictionaries are supplied, including some dictionaries of translation, and it’s possible to look up the word on various online dictionaries too.

As counterparts to dict I’ve created thes for looking stuff up in Moby’s Thesaurus and ency for online encyclopaedia Wikipedia…

So I only managed to take two…