FNORD: The steamy third-axis of the political compass
Forget left/right, authoritarian/libertarian, this is far more relevant
So there I was, watching David Duke babble on about white purity or some other such nonsense, and I was thinking: ew. This guy and his opinions are completely gross. I glowered in my liberal self-righteousness of assessing that David Duke is a bad person. Then I flipped the figurative channel, and suddenly I was watching Richard Spencer insightfully wax on about birth rates or some other such totally more legitimate talking points. Wow, I thought, this guy sure looks and sounds intelligent enough to trust with regards to these sorts of things.
Some folks—idiots, let’s call them—might distinguish that the difference is that David Duke is a white supremacist, whereas Richard Spencer is simply a white nationalist. No, that definitely isn’t it. It was only after weeks of intensive soul-searching that I arrived at the true answer: Richard Spencer is a hottie, whereas David Duke is a nottie. Richard Spencer is a man with reprehensible politics but twunky good looks and doesn’t look a day over 25, whereas David Duke looks like the fucking Swamp Thing, thus opening up to what is perhaps the most underrepresented yet easily the most important aspect of political taxonomy: “but how hot are they?”
Consider that if we were to break down the entire political compass with examples of individuals who are all perfect-10’s, what we arrive at is a wholly reductive spectacle. Although these men and women litter the compass, they are clearly aligned politically in regards to how hot they are. To not call attention reveals our rational bankruptcy. While I absolutely do not see eye-to-eye with Richard Spencer’s heinously offensive political opinions, I would consider myself a 9—an 8 at the very least—giving the two of us at least one axis of political overlap, which is why I find myself nodding along so feverishly to everything he says. For a historical lens on the subject: Stalin vs. Hitler could be seen as not a conflict between communism and fascism, but between hot and not.
Things changed once we had Eisenhower (mid) and Khruschev (ugly) and this is also ultimately how JFK nearly ended the Cold War (by being Hot). The unfolding gerontocracy in the autumn years of the Soviet Union was itself more importantly aîskhrocracy, that is to say uggo-ocracy, and was damned from the start. Yes, I’m sure we’ve all heard it before: “real uggo-ocracy has never been tried,” because we’ve yet to find a hypothetical leader who all can universally agree to be objectively ugly. Keep dreaming. I, meanwhile, will remain hot.
Let’s look at some graphs.
The commonalities here should be obvious. The deficiencies of the traditional compass start to make themselves apparent. Let’s see another graph, this one made up entirely of 10’s:
Forget about debating the relative inaccuracy of certain placements, it doesn’t fucking matter—again, the political commonalities here are obvious, and that is the point.
There are countless charlatans who pretend to be hot. Ben Garrison trying to make Donald Trump fuckable, op-ed writers trying to assure us all that Joe Biden fucks. A crock of shit. They’re trying to manipulate hot people like me into voting for patently un-hot people. I have to educate my fellow hot people in sexy dialectics. History is a cycle of hot and not. To put in Hegelian terms: hottie, nottie, mid.
Forget the political compass test website, which was clearly made to skew people into being libertarians, hotornot.com was probably the most important political device since the invention of democracy and was much better at assessing political values.
There really is something to this, I think. Richard Spencer, for instance, is now a passionate Kamala Stan. When I look into his dreamy eyes I just think: brat. Just like me. Kamala is a bona fide MILF, so of course he and I see eye to eye on this issue. I say we all put aside our petty differences on “values” and come together with one beautiful cause: DEATH TO UGGOS.
Doug Fnord is a senior political op-ed writer for Discordia Review. He has a Masters in political science from DeVry University. His opinions are not endorsed by Discordia Review.