Taking Destiny's Centrist Quiz

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The Quiz

Destiny, a political content creator, had a conversation with Youtuber PF Jung in the form of a Centrist Quiz. The goal is to see if Destiny can guess PF Jung’s entire worldview and perfectly predict Jung’s opinion on a variety of loosely-related issues.

It stands to reason that if you can predict someone’s entire worldview but do not share it, then you must understand their perspective to some degree. Usually when parties disagree, they assume that the other party does not understand them. Such is not the case with Destiny and Jung’s conversation: it’s abundantly clear that Destiny understands Jung’s view - Jung scores basically an 8/8 and qualifies as a bona fide centrist.

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So what is a centrist per Destiny’s definition? In short, a centrist is someone who is for all intents and purposes a full supporter of Donald Trump, and uses the fake label of ‘centrist’ to create some distance from conservatives, probably for marketing purposes. There is some truth to this - I’m reminded of Tim Pool as an example. Pool consistently refers to himself as non-partisan and something of a centrist, but is one of the most consistent defenders of Trump there is. Dave Rubin is another example. So clearly there are self-labeled centrists that are secret conservatives out there.

In any case, I thought it would be fun to take the Centrist Quiz myself to see if I am a fake-centrist also! Think of this as a very-online version of the already online political compass test. Anyway:

Question 1: Broadly speaking, my guess is you would say that Andrew Tate is probably on the net a negative influence for men, and he's probably done some bad things. You're not 100% sure if all the charges in Romania are fair, and it seems like they might drum these up a little bit, but all in all, he's probably not a great guy. Is this about your opinion of Andrew Tate?

I don’t have a strong opinion on Tate or his crimes. I don’t know much about him, but from what I’ve seen he comes across as a manosphere influencer with negative views about women. My answer is that I agree that the wording in the question is basically my take, but I don’t know anything about the trial, so this will be half a point.

Question 2: On the COVID lab leak stuff, would you say this was one of the larger examples of the mainstream media suppressing conversation about a topic that should have deserved to have been spoken about more because people that believed in lab leak were totally and wholly vindicated by evidence that came out later?

There are 2 parts to this question, one is did the media suppress the lab leak theory, and two is was it in fact a lab leak?

On the first part, I don’t follow meta-media conversations around these issues, since I don’t watch regular news and that’s not where I get my information from anyway. My guess is that lab leak was out of the Overton window and it wasn’t something talked about much on outlets, but perhaps it was featured on Fox News.

To the question of if it was actually a leak, I place a low-probability on Lab Leak. Originally I was around 50/50 when agencies looked into it and the department of energy weakly supported it, but the official lab leak debate lowered my confidence down, so I’m around a 10% chance of leak, which I think is basically fair. But I’m not a virologist so I can’t know definitively based on personal experimentation if it was the product of a leak or not. My guess is the state departments have a vested interest in finding out the truth on this matter, and if they report with confidence that it was not a leak - I have no strong reason to disbelieve them.

More interesting than the question of this specific lab leak debate is the concept of gain of function research in general. It’s odd to me that we give grants to people to produce deadly transmissible diseases to study “just in case one got loose.” On that issue I can see how a virologist would be incentivized to extol the benefits of GoF research and downplay the negatives - so I’m inclined to disbelieve the arguments in favor of GoF research - but I keep an open mind.

Question 3: For mRNA vaccines, would you say that a lot of the conspiracies around it are probably not true, but there is reason to be concerned for some things, and mandating these was definitely the wrong decision?

This is a very general question, but I of course think we should be concerned about things. Ideally this is tested and verified to be effective and safe through various human trials, which is in fact what happened. Possibly myocarditis is a factor in our decision making? I don’t know. The best argument in favor of the effectiveness of vaccines is the mortality rate differences in people who were vaccinated and people who were not. Since the sample size of those groups encompasses the entire US (You exist in a superposition where you were either vaxxed or not) we can definitely use this as a comprehensive natural experiment. What we see are significant differences in mortality between vaxxed and non-vaxxed. These differences are so large that they probably swamp any demographic difference between the two groups and basically prove causation.

Now for some groups, could the possibility of side-effects such as myocarditis outweigh the consequences of having a more severe covid outbreak? Possibly. But myocarditis is also a possible side effect of covid. I, personally, got vaxxed and got covid a few months afterwards, and experienced the occasional irregular heartbeat for a few days which subsided and I haven’t experienced since. Was it the vaccine? Covid? Some third thing or a combination of both? I have no clue.

Vaccine mandates are interesting. Vaccines are already mandated by law in all 50 states for exactly the reasons you can think of. For that reason I generally support the existing mandates (why should I support repealing the mandates we already have?) This to me seems like a pretty classic case of status-quo bias. If I was born in the future and covid vaccines were one of the many vaccines mandated already, would I do my own research and decide that this one in particular should be removed from the list? Arguing that I should seems to be special pleading designed to comport with our existing reality and not a genuine examination of vaccine mandates as an idea.

However, the downside of mandating a vaccine is the same downside that you have when you mandate any behavior: some people won’t like it. And when people don’t like it, they get mad at you and you risk jeopardizing the entire system. An example of this would be Trump appointing RFK. What happened was that the Biden administration mandated the vaccine for federal employees. This caused a backlash and was essentially the entire impetus for RFK running. Now RFK will be setting health standards for the entire country. If Biden had never mandated vaccines, would we be in the position we are today? Sure, some thousands of federal employees would have died but for the mandated vaccine, but I don’t know if their lives outweigh RFK’s rise.

For this reason I suppose I am against mandates for adults, as I see the point in personal freedom here. If you die because of your own dumb decisions as an adult, that’s fine. Mandates for children are a bit riskier because you’re letting parents decide, but maybe we should repeal mandates for school vaccinations as well as a form of Darwinian natural selection - cutting off the spawn of low IQ parents at the stem? This seems pretty diabolical, but if it’s what you all want then… okay I guess. Sounds extreme for me!

At the end of the day, I was vaccinated and would have gotten boosters, but I moved out to the remote countryside and was too lazy to make the drive to get them. I’m young and not near anyone and I haven’t gotten sick in years. When I move back to a more populated area I might get vaccinated, but I would have to see a doctor to investigate that heartbeat issue I talked about previously, before getting a vaccination with the possibility of that side-effect. If in the meantime I die of a heart attack, feel free to clown on me for getting vaccinated, I won’t care. I think that I don’t get points based on the spirit of the question, so I’ll say no points.

Question 4: Do you think that social media companies were cracking down on conservatives more than liberals, especially exemplified in the Twitter Files?

I didn’t read the Twitter files so I don’t have any strong feelings about this. The meta-level conversations around media don’t interest me as much as more specific political questions, so I never become informed about this type of activity.

My weakly-held prior is that the government probably puts some pressure on media companies to conform in some way, but I have no information on this because I am not informed on this topic. That’s just a gut guess and not substantiated in anything other than speculation. No points for this question.

Question 5: Do you agree that conservatives downplay Donald Trump’s weaponization of the Department of Justice, while the left also weaponizes it?

In this question, he draws upon the specific New York case against Trump. Just like meta-media questions, personal questions of character or impropriety do not intrigue me. If Kamala was a very bad person, I would still have voted for her over Trump. Politicians' opinions on foreign policy, economic policy, tax policy, immigration policy etc etc., are massively more important than character questions because they impact hundreds of millions of people.

Here is the introduction of the case that has its own Wikipedia page:

The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump is a criminal case against Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States and current president-elect. Trump was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal payments made to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels as hush money to buy her silence over a sexual encounter between them; with costs related to the transaction included, the payments totaled $420,000. The Manhattan District Attorney (DA), Alvin Bragg, accused Trump of falsifying these business records with the intent to commit other crimes: violation of federal campaign finance limits, unlawfully influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and tax fraud.

For the most part, I do not care about this. Not only do I not care about sexual impropriety bribes, I don’t even know if it’s wrong to use campaign money for that. For what it’s worth, the Politico summary of the strengths and weakness of the hush money case says the following under its weaknesses section:

Prosecutors’ decision to elevate the business-records charges into felonies by linking them to an underlying violation of election laws was a novel legal theory. Some critics contend that prosecutors overstepped by transforming simple bookkeeping violations into a case about election interference. Trump may revive this argument on appeal.

You can decide for yourself if you care about this, if I cared I would look to see how many of the felonies were various business record falsifications tacked onto the case to elevate the felony count - but I don’t care enough to do even that. If he was better than kamala on the issues, I would have voted for him. If Kamala was in his position, I would have voted for her. This makes essentially no difference to me, but I could imagine it being a decent tie-breaker if nothing else.

The election interference case however, is basically correct in that what Trump did on the 6th and the fake electors ploy was bad. In a just world, he would be sentenced for this.

Half a point.

Question 6: Epstein was absolutely killed in prison by somebody who didn’t want his list of things getting out, right?

High profile assassinations are not unheard of. I recall the reporting around this being a bit odd in the sense that there weren’t guards on duty at the time of death or something? Maybe it was a routine shift-change that Epstein was aware of and used that opportunity to kill himself. Maybe it was a deliberate move to give the assassin his chance. It’s my understanding that Epstein had a black-book and probably had incriminating information on a wide range of public figures.

This quiz is supposed to be about centrism, which I consider to be a political label, and many of the questions do not directly concern policy. I see the merit in including cultural questions as they still give useful information about a person, but these things are just not what I spend my time researching, so I don’t have a strong opinion. Usually in these instances I default to trusting the official story, but if new information came out that suggested he was in fact murdered, I wouldn’t be shocked.

My answer is that I guess he wasn’t assassinated.

Question 7: The Russia-Ukraine war is terrible, but should the U.S. find an off-ramp for peace, even if it means Ukraine cedes some territory?

This seems entirely reasonable to me. The alternatives are for the U.S. to not seek peace, or to think that the war is not terrible. Out of the choices presented in the question, I’ll agree that the war is bad and the U.S. should seek peace, and that may include territorial questions. I’m not entirely sure what an alternative would be.

On the one hand, it is a good idea for the U.S. to push back on our enemies abroad, but on the other hand Ukraine has a draft. I am against the draft because I would not want to go to war, and I feel for Ukrainian men who are not allowed to leave and were conscripted into the army. Weighing the options between giving Putin what he wants, and fighting and dying, I would choose to give him what he wants because I have a sense of self-preservation. But depending on what I thought he might do to our society even if we surrendered, I may count that as being worse and worth armed resistance. I think the concept of surrender is underexplored, and Americans are very war hungry for conflicts they will never participate in.

For that reason, I mostly downplay hawk attitudes relative to dove attitudes, since the incentive structure for these things is entirely backwards, where the people calling for war are never the people actually fighting. This means that discourse around war is always more hawkish than it would otherwise be, especially if there is active conscription occurring.

But for the U.S. it seems like a good move. We’ve given Ukraine $56 billion, which is approximately 0.00933% of the entire federal budget (or around $186 per citizen). Our aid has been critical in throwing water on Putin’s plans, making the return on our money pretty tremendous considering on how cheap it is relative to the size of our budget. For that reason I support giving them aid, but I do wonder if the US has caused more deaths than there would otherwise be by funding this operation.

I get one point for this question.

Question 8: Do you think Democrats are too lax on the border, and that we need to crack down on immigration significantly?

This is a complicated question, but we have to recognize the Democratic party as having priorities that are set by groups. This is a topic for another day, but the gist is that there is no illegal immigration group in the Democratic party, so it’s not an issue that is prioritized in any meaningful way. In that sense, they are too lax on the border.

But in an ideological sense, they are much too strict! As is the Republican party! But open borders is outside of the Overton window, so we have to keep this conversation grounded in reality. So my answer would be: Yes Democrats are too lax and yes we need to crack down on illegal immigration, as Biden already has. In this sense, I agree with president Biden and support his actions on the matter. One point.

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Conclusion

That’s all! In total I will say that I got a 3/8. So I suppose I failed and I’m probably not a centrist according to Destiny’s definition.

I implore you to take the quiz yourself and tell me what your score is.