Well. Sunday’s post about Time Magazine’s political quiz turned out to be even more amusing and informative than I could ever have predicted:

• We learned that longtime Loyal Reader™ Mr. Born is fully twenty-seven percent conservative—and now I strongly suspect he may be the vector for my 8%. But don’t worry. For everyone’s safety I have banished him until he has the surgery to eliminate this problem.
• Meanwhile, Loyal Reader™ Badland has the opposite situation: Badland scored 2%, and thus probably should not be hanging around a blogger who, at 8%, is FOUR TIMES more conservative.
• I received a very tempting marriage proposal from another 8%-er, NomadUK. Unfortunately it is just not meant to be, as his/our would-be poly partner scored 13%. (Naturally I suspect the pernicious influence of Mr. Born, but cannot as yet prove it.)

I fear that until I get this pestilence eradicated from the Palace, I may have to lock up everyone in quarantine—including, apparently, myself. But the whole exercise got me thinking about another quiz that’s been around for a while: the Political Compass. This one adds another axis to the left-right dimension, and outputs a four-quadrant grid with your position on it. When I took it a few years ago and wrote about it here, my results looked like this:

Iris the Lefty Libertarian. Quelle surprise.

At the time I mused:

I took the quiz years ago, and I do not remember my chart position.  It would be interesting to compare it to today, and see whether over time my views have drifted in one direction or another.  As you can see, in certain respects there is not much further I can possibly drift.

So I took it again yesterday BECAUSE SCIENCE, but it returned only a blank grid.

I thought there was a problem with the site itself. But no: the problem is that my results are now off the charts:

Economic Left/Right: -18.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -9.03

Technically my social score is on the grid—only barely—but its intersection with my economic score is…way off.

I am left wondering if this shift is because a few years more reading, writing, learning and thinking on my part has led to my feeling more strongly about positions that I previously held more tentatively. In other words, I may have drifted from “yes, I think so” (agree) to “I am quite certain” (strongly agree). In any case, here is what my results would look like if the Political Compass could handle the likes of Your Humble Monarch™:

Whatever you do, don’t tell the NYPD or the FBI. Or CIA. Or anyone at the Federal Reserve, the Bank of New York, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer or CitiGroup. I don’t need their ilk coming ’round the Palace. I already have enough problems with Mr. Born.