Summary of political beliefs

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Social Issues:

Abortion: Legal until after the fetus is viable, at which point it is only legal to save the woman's life.

Affirmative Action: Support, but base it on income rather than race.

Death Penalty: Abolish--revenge is unhumanlike, and the true punishment is living with your misdeed.

Drugs and Alcohol: Legalize and regulate alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana. Hard drugs are decriminalized, similar to what's done in portugal.

Euthanasia: Only with the informed consent of both the patient and the doctor. If the patient is in a coma, leave it up to the family until the patient indicated earlier on that they want something to be done or not done.

Homosexuality: Legal and treated the same way as heterosexuality.

Gun Rights: Minus nukes or rocket launchers, any weapon should be legal as long as the customer is an adult, a U.S. resident or citizen, and has no record of serious violent crime.

Immigration: Allow amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the country and only deport those in the middle of crossing the border. Relax quotas for legal immigration.

Marriage: Between 2 people of any gender--not sure about polygamy.

Prostitution: Legal for a woman to sell her own body, but brothels must be very strictly regulated.

Separation of Church and State: Is good.

Stem Cell Research: Some government sponsorship is allowed.



Economic Issues:

Education: No voucher systems, and ideally few to no charter schools. Standardized testing is failing; serious changes are needed to No Child Left Behind.

Environment: End oil subsidies and increase subsidies on alternative energy sources, including nuclear power. Keep environmental policies the same or increase regulations in some cases (where land can be developed)

Fiscal Policy: Balanced budgets are nice, but creating jobs is priority #1.

Health Care: A single-payer health care system, with some extra parts run by the private sector.

Social Security: Keep the same.

Subsidies: End most subsidies, with the exception of farm subsidies for smaller farms and aid to some small businesses.

Taxation: End Bush tax cuts on the rich and raise them to Reagan-era levels.

Unions: Support labor's rights, and oppose firing employees during a strike; strikes are unlimited with the exception of some public workers. Right to work is worse than it sounds.

Foreign Issues:
United Nations: Stay in, and require both U.N. and congressional approval to enter military conflict.

War: Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan minus limited strike forces, focus on toppling the regime in Libya and capturing or killing Qaddafi before leaving.

Weapons of Mass Destruction: Reduce nuclear weapon stockpiles as mandated in New START.

Foreign Aid: End or severely limit aid for weapons, otherwise keep the same.


Overall: A progressive, left-wing populist and supporter of the New Deal/Great Society. Though my social views are probably further to the left, I mostly focus on economic issues.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Social issues:

Abortion: Though I dislike abortion, the consequences of banning it would be far worse than the current legal status. Banning things doesn't reduce the rate of usage; it only drives it underground. Abortion must be safe and legal. Those who are truly pro-life like myself realize that slowing the abortion rate comes not from taking away a woman's right to her body, but from funding anti-poverty programs and through comprehensive sex education in schools as opposed to abstinence-only programs.

Same-sex marriage: Allow it.

Death Penalty/Euthanasia: Due to the costs of the appeals process and the underlying possibility that any innocent person may have been executed, I oppose the death penalty under all circumstances. Life in prison without parole should be the highest punishment.

Euthanasia: Having seen two family members deteriorate in hospices for months until they finally died in agony, I find that forcing these people to stay alive is far more barbaric than letting them choose their own fate. Allow patients to end their own lives, be it passively (cutting off life support) or actively (injection)

Drugs: The War on Drugs has been a costly and authoritarian failure. Legalize soft drugs, decriminalize hard drugs. Focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment--drug users have no place with murderers and rapists. Once again, support anti-poverty and job training programs so that people don't have to resort to dealing drugs (fun fact: most dealers don't actually make much money)

Prostitution: Like drugs, banning it doesn't work. Legalize and regulate using the same system as Nevada; require the use of protection, weekly STD tests.

Gun Control: I believe in the right to keep and bear arms. Other than some limitations (no firearms for those with certain mental illnesses, 1-day waiting period, no guns in public institutions, allow private institutions to decide whether they want to allow guns or not), I oppose gun control. I support allowing concealed weapons with a permit and oppose the assault weapons ban.

Education: Standardized testing teaches conformity and forces curriculums to focus on teaching the test. Merit-based pay and voucher schools are terrible ideas. Require schools to provide healthy options at lunch but allow some junk food (with a calorie cap). Allow student-run prayer in school, but it can't be led by a teacher (i.e. the current policy).

Immigration: Maintain border security, but don't build a fence. At most, create an "electronic fence". Support a guest-worker program towards citizenship while simplifying the process of legal immigration.

Voter ID laws: They're a terrible idea and are inevitably intended to suppress voting rights. Support automatic registration on the condition that you have taken the same citizenship test that residents have to take (it would be a required high-school test, the only exception to my opposition to standardized testing).

Economic stuff next.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

     I've bounced basically everywhere over the past month and a half or so (basically every political view imaginable except Nazism, Maoism, and the various breeds of "classical liberalism", including modern "conservatism"), so I might as well peg down my central views here and now. If you read this, will you disagree with me? Probably. I'm sure my own views are flawed and skewed by my own life experiences (or lack thereof), and they'll most likely change as I grow and change as a person. But for now, what is below me is right to me.

     Essentially, I take the view that man, while clearly holding the potential to do great things, is fundamentally flawed, with most of these flaws coming from our animal instincts and impulses (selfishness, aggression, excess pursuit of self-indulgence). Many of these problems have been mended or dulled over the past 200,000 years of our species's existence, but in the West I see signs of a decline, much as the other great civilizations have declined and collapsed. Why?

     Well, there seems to be a reversal of much of the social progress made; privatization of industry (often for no good reason besides the idea of privatization), rolling back of the welfare state, and most worryingly, a media, society, and government that now encourages us to embrace our animal traits through disregarding the need to contribute to one's community. Promoted are concepts like the sexual objectification of women, and in general the glorification of greed and decadence. We're constantly outdoing ourselves in scientific and medical progress, reducing infant mortality, reducing absolute poverty in developing states, yet we're less happy than ever, because what we see as "happiness" is the hollow pursuit of animal pleasure, not the fulfilling happiness of helping others and spending time with family and community.

     I've probably angered both "conservatives" and "liberals" with that last paragraph, and if so I'm proud of myself. Both the major parties in America essentially advocate two flavors of individualism. The Republican Party, the more outwardly dangerous beast, is quasi-Objectivist in its open desire to subjugate most of the population, with those unwilling or unable to slave away for the plutocrats left to die. At the same time, most of the party is socially "conservative", though certainly not in the way I am; the GOP's positions are simply part of their goal of subjugating those they see as lesser (women and homosexuals) and avoiding the social change the plutocrats fear, not on any desire to improve society's moral compass.

     The Democratic Party, the lesser of two evils, has views on the role of government which are lukewarm at best and, despite some dissenting voices on the left, being pulled into a more benign form of neoliberalism (as opposed to the Randite GOP). The Democratic Party's variety of individualism is a perversion of the concept of "rights" into the idea of "I can do whatever I want and no one can stop me", or "Don't like X? Don't do it.". This dangerous idea is that it is inherently wrong to make judgement on how others live their lives, and that we're all just individual people living individual lives and pursuing our own happiness. Taken to its logical conclusion, we should let an alcoholic drink themselves to death, because it's their business, right? Certainly I don't want to eliminate fun or turn everyone into soulless drones. But I believe that we are all interconnected as members of the human race, and we have a duty to intervene when one of us is harming another or if one of us is harming themselves. I suspect a silent majority or at least a significant minority of Americans would agree with me here, but neither major party reflects this view, instead shilling their two rancid flavors of hyper-individualism.

     Like most Western leftists, I take the view that our society's peak was the period from about 1933 to 1969, the point where we achieved the most progress in the pursuit of social and economic equality. But starting in the late 1970's and late 1980's, I'd say, the decline has begun and continues to this day. We've become a civilization of individuals, who seek to ignore what, as Kennedy said, they can do for their country. Instead, the plutocratic stranglehold on civilization has been accepted and the chasm between rich and poor continues to widen, while both heads of the individualist beast preach to us to live for ourselves, be it through the accumulation of wealth at the expense of others or the pursuit of mindless self-indulgence at the expense of others (and ourselves).

     Hence, my ideal society, which for all I know could exist in 50 years or never, would be a stateless, classless society where individuals all accept the need to work for the collective good, while still embracing their individuality and using their own skills to innovate for themselves and others. What would I call it? It seems fairly similar to Marxism or syndicalism, albeit with a moralistic tinge. At the same time, the emphasis on community and family reminds me a bit of Asian society. For all the issues I take with the governments of China, Singapore, Japan, etc., perhaps that's where the world will turn in the future. Is it unrealistic? Probably. In practice, I generally accept gradual reform through a social democratic or democratic socialist state, since in the end, ensuring that people live better lives is more immediately important than anything else.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Snowstalker

Is this the most radical member of these boards? I'd hope so.

Depends on what you mean by "radical".