This is an attempt to capture my current political position, solely for the purpose of seeing how it morphs over time.

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First of all, purism is a luxury afforded to immature thinkers. Discussing the concepts of pure liberalism, socialism, or conservatism–whatever those mean to someone–are largely meaningless when all sides in a debate don’t agree on them. My new rule is to avoid these terms until 1) I understand them fully, and 2) I can be sure whoever I’m talking to agrees on the definitions.

Ideals

We’ve already established that I don’t believe we can pursue ideals (at least right now), but we must at least lay out what I think they are.

Ideally everyone would be highly educated and would respect the two main concepts of doing the following for humanity:

1. Reducing suffering
2. Increasing happiness

I subscribe loosely to the tenets of Secular Humanism, which are to:

• Need to test beliefs – A conviction that dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, must be weighed and tested by each individual and not simply accepted on faith.
• Reason, evidence, scientific method – A commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism, in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions.
• Fulfillment, growth, creativity – A primary concern with fulfillment, growth and creativity for both the individual and humankind in general.
• Search for truth – A constant search for objective truth, with the understanding that new knowledge and experience constantly alter our imperfect perception of it.
• This life – A concern for this life and a commitment to making it meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us.
• Ethics – A search for viable individual, social and political principles of ethical conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility.
• Building a better world – A conviction that with reason, an open exchange of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made in building a better world for ourselves and our children.

Dealing With It

The above doesn’t mention how to attain these things–only that they are what I think we should strive for. That’s where it gets interesting. Many believe that their particular government preference is the way to go to get the list above. Others disagree with the list outright.

My thoughts are that in order to have the list above we must have an educated and free-thinking populace, and that currently we’re heading at a brisk pace away from that. Ignorance is creating people who in turn create more ignorant people, and the rate of this catastrophe’s growth is staggering.

The answer is not to let people fend for themselves, or, as Libertarians like to say, “ask the local Churches and communities for help”. That doesn’t work. People help very small groups of people who look and talk like them, not those who look or behave differently from themselves–especially when they’re far away.

And once you start talking about distances you have variation in ideas. Some people want to be pacifists; others want to kill pacifists in order to get to heaven. The notion of leaving people alone to think what they want to think, and to raise their children how they want to raise them is great on paper, but when they’re plotting how to release biological weapons into your water supply, and using your tax money to do it, then it becomes a matter of abject stupidity to maintain that position.

The fact is that humans are largely stupid when they are untrained. And when you add modern weapons to the equation, combined with attractive and hostile ideologies, you have a near guarantee of bloodshed and pain in the future.

Leaving these people alone to hate and build an Army doesn’t solve this.

But neither does putting into place a government that you just “trust” to do the right thing for us, and then surrendering our responsibility for our affairs to it.

Government’s Role

The role of government should be to get everyone to a certain level of education and free-thinking ability. Or at least to give them the best possible chance to attain that status. From there the people get to dismantle the government if they are ready to do so. The goal of a government that aims to improve society is to reach a point where it’s no longer needed.

The key to this is transparency and civics. The people must be HEAVILY involved in the government process to avoid the republic-based abstraction that equates to disconnection over time. This is the heart of bureaucracy and waste, as well as the eventual cycle of politicians telling people only what they want to hear while doing something else entirely.

This kind of thing is not possible if the people are highly educated and know their representatives and their dealings. It’s all about transparency, but the people looking through the glass need to know what they’re looking at.

**Transparent Government + Educated Populace = Libertarianism

Opaque Government + Ignorant Populace = Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism**

The Dangers of Too Little Government

Humans are animals. Any time we forget this we get hurt. We’re ambitious, power-hungry, prejudiced, creatures. We cluster into small groups and plot against the “other guy”.

Think about the American Indians.

The Europeans were horrible in their massacre of these people, but look at what they lived like before we got here. Fighting with the Mexicans. Constantly committing massive, bloody atrocities against their fellow tribes. Why? Because that’s what animals do. That’s what we ARE.

Education and reason are counter to us. They are the counterweight against nature. Nature has slavery. Nature has genocide. Nature kills parents in front of their kids. Africa is nature. Darfur is Nature.

Fuck Nature.

And that’s what you get when you downplay a centralized effort to elevate ourselves as humans through reason and compassion. Doing this in a non-centralized fashion works in small pockets, but leaves massive parts of the community/country/world in a state of natural competition.

Question: What’s the libertarian answer to Africa?

Get some churches in there? “They need some personal responsibility.” Fuck that.

They need education. They are children playing in traffic. You don’t let children play in traffic, especially when they’re finding more children to bring with them. Oh, and they’ve all got loaded guns. It’s sickening, and it’s only due to misplaced liberalism that we let such a thing continue.

They need help in the form of saying, “Stop. We’re going to prevent you from doing this. You need to go to school. Yes, we’ll build them for you. Stop having sex if you can’t afford to feed yourself. And no, having sex with a baby won’t cure AIDS. Here, let me show you a science book.”

Sick right? Evil, right? Yes and no. It’s horrible to regulate another human in this fashion, but it’s not nearly as despicable as letting them reproduce uncontrollably only to grow up and kill each other. And we sit around and watch it happen because we’re “above” intervention. Ask yourself what’s worse.

This is libertarianism. This is “letting people find their own way”. No.

An evolved society is fragile and has to be meticulously maintained through population control, resources control, and most of all–education. A failure to properly handle these variables will inevitably lead to suffering.

That’s why the best solution is for the educated and kind in the world to unite and to say to each other, “What is best for the world?” How do we reduce suffering and increase happiness for the entire planet?

That’s the role of government. And that doesn’t mean THEY do it, it means they guide things so that the people can do it for themselves. Again, the most important piece of that equation is education. And as we evolve we’ll simply need government less and less because the people will being doing all of these things for themselves, e.g. regulating conflict and ensuring their own education quality.

Until then, WE (as in the best of ALL of us) will ensure that we don’t produce entire generations of people who will tear the entire thing to the ground, and bring suffering to themselves and everyone around in them in the process.

The Problem With Too Much Government

Fine, so we need government to help. Great. Let’s do it.

The problem there is that some think that the responsibly transfers once you say the government needs to help. It doesn’t. The government isn’t responsible for raising your children. The government isn’t responsible for ensuring you’re educated.

If you don’t take care of your children or get an education it will be the FAILURE of the government (because the government is a representation of society), but it will be YOUR failure first. The key is to not back away from the process. Any time a people creates a government and gives it oversight and power they must maintain full knowledge and transparency of its inner workings. Failure to do so leads to what we have today.

The fundamental problem with too much government comes back to our human weaknesses. Big government without an intensely involved and highly educated electorate leads to a power shift.

Small numbers of people with lots of power.

The incentive of “helping the world” is intellectual. It’s logical. It’s NOTHING when compared to our animal desires. Higher callings fail horribly when up against big yachts, beach homes, and platinum blondes.

So what happens is those people with this power make decisions that will increase their own primal pleasure levels at the expense of the rest of the world. And without an educated and interested population to keep him in check, he will be successful.

It’s the same for bankers or lawyers or whatever. It’s all the same. Stupid animals trying to have sex and feel powerful. Don’t be surprised when it happens. It’s the expected result. Be surprised when it doesn’t.

The purpose of a healthy government is to guide society in a direction that will help everyone nurture their higher, positive selves, while giving them the tools to keep their darker sides in check.

Summary

Ok, that was a hapless ramble.

Main points:

• Reason and compassion
• Reduce suffering and increase happiness
• We need to build a society that’s based on Reciprocal Altruism
• A government that promotes the elevation of the population is the key to eliminating the need for government
• Education is the key to all of the above

In short, Libertarianism is an ideal based on underestimating the weaknesses of humans. Big Brother protectionist government is an opposite but equally deadly direction based on underestimating the abilities of man to use reason and compassion to control its animal nature.

The key is to realize that the system we use to get ourselves out of this primal stage will be a hybrid, and the specific mix will change we as humans change. That’s all for now. ::

Wow.

I just ordered this book, and this post about it is exceedingly interesting. It pretty much crosses all of my interest lines: class, race, religion, and political affiliation.

Go read this post, and seriously consider getting the book as well.

Links

[ Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote The Way They Do | scienceblogs.com ]

I just realized something. Obama doesn’t have long to fix things. He’s going to be given very little time to make things right. If he doesn’t–like immediately–momentum will start building for a revolutionary new conservative in 2012 who can step in and fix what the crazy democrats did.

Someone like Sarah Palin.

Obama better get his shit together and do something tangible. I’m not saying he’s already behind in reality, but perception is everything. I feel our patience is very thin as a country, and that our understanding of how deep of a hole we’re in frequently lapses.

Obama is in a very bad place. It’s like the Onion said, “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”.

The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.

LOLZ.

Our friend Shane pointed me to an interesting piece that gives insight into what we’re probably about to see from the Obama administration. Emmanual, the new Chief of Staff wrote a book a while back called The Plan: Big Ideas for America [Amazon].

Below is some content from this book, and based on the fact that Obama’s been talking like this during his campaign, I’d say we should expect to see type of thing coming from our new President very soon.

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1. A new social contract — universal citizen service, universal college access, universal retirement savings, and universal children’s health care — that makes clear what you can do for your country and what your country can do for you.
2. A return to fiscal responsibility and an end to corporate welfare as we know it.
3. Tax reform to help those who aren’t wealthy build wealth.
4. A new strategy to use all America’s strengths to win the war on terror.
5. A Hybrid Economy that cuts America’s gasoline consumption in half over the next decade.

Universal Citizen Service

If you forget everything else you read in these pages, please remember this: The Plan starts with you. If your leaders aren’t challenging you to do your part, they aren’t doing theirs. We need a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us by establishing, for the first time, an ethic of universal citizen service.

Universal College Access

We must make a college degree as universal as a high school diploma. More than ever, America’s success depends on what we can learn. We have an education system built in the last century, with a school year left over from the century before that. In this new era, college will be the greatest engine of opportunity for our society and our economy. Just as Abraham Lincoln gave land grants to endow our great public universities, we will give the states tuition grants to make college free for those willing to work, serve, and excel.

Universal Retirement Savings

From now on, every job ought to come with a 401(k). An aging society cannot afford to keep saving less and risking more. We need new means to create wealth, based on the needs and responsibilities of twenty-first-century employees and employers. Employers should be required to offer 401(k)s, and workers will be enrolled unless they choose otherwise. If they switch jobs, they can take these accounts with them. When their paycheck goes up, so will their savings. Instead of a work force in which only half the workers have retirement savings plans, every American will have one.

Universal Children’s Health Care . . .

A return to fiscal responsibility and an end to corporate welfare as we know it . . .

Tax reform to help those who aren’t wealthy build wealth . . .

A new strategy to win the war on terror . . .

A hybrid economy that cuts America’s gasoline use in half . . .

Ask what you can do for your country: the premier component of the new social contract.

John Kennedy was right: A nation is defined not by what it does for its citizens but by what it asks of them. If your leaders aren’t challenging you to do your part, they aren’t doing theirs. We need a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us by establishing for the first time an ethic of universal citizen service. All Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 should be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic civil defense training and community service.

This is not a draft, nor is it military. Young people will be trained not as soldiers, but simply as citizens who understand their responsibilities in the event of a natural disaster, an epidemic or a terrorist attack. Universal citizen service will bring Americans of every background together to make America safer and more united in common purpose.

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So, in showing me this, Shane was asking me, from a libertarian to an Obama supporter, what I thought of this type of program. It’s a good question.

My first reaction is that I both love it and hate it. I pretty much feel like I’m being asked if someone can pump 5 pints of someone else’s blood (life force) into my veins. My initial answer is no, due to my libertarian leanings, but when I realize that I’m in a hospital, and that I’m dying for lack of blood (soul), then I realize it might actually be what I need.

In other words, the fact that this kind of thing might be necessary represents a complete failure of the American system. This kind of soul and sense of civics is supposed to be innate in America, not infused from the outside. That’s the libertarian ideal.

Where the libertarian ideal breaks down is that it fails to recognize the severity of the fact that it DOES NOT exist. We are not the country that feels and does these things innately, and to pretend to be that, and to resist the external help to reinvigorate these things within us, is a grave mistake.

So yes, I do think this can be a good thing if done properly. And more importantly I think something like this is needed right now. I don’t like the idea of a degree being mandatory for people, however; I think that should be degree (or vocational training), i.e. some method of becoming productive. And I wince at hearing a few other bits of the plan, but I’ve been doing a lot of wincing anyway. I am in a hospital bed, after all.

So it goes back to my comments on Socialism, Libertarianism, and ideal government. This type of program is necessary to get to where we need to be, i.e. more libertarian. Libertarian structure requires educated people who respect the rights of others. We don’t have that right now, and we’re not going to get it by letting people fend for themselves. In fact we’ll get the opposite.

This type of social uplifting, to get everyone on a similar and positive wavelength, is the way to grow the sense of individual responsibility and the ability to succeed within our country.

In short, you don’t teach a child to tie shoes as a means of control or in order to remove their ability to do it for themselves. **You do it so that you’ll never have to show them again.**

This touches on the heart of my disagreement with some libertarians. The socialism I’m advocating (and I’m now convinced that “socialism” is the wrong word) is not about transferring responsibility from the individual to the government. It’s about nurturing responsibility, and compassion, and self-sufficiency within individuals through liberal education and social policy.

It’s about promoting intelligent decisions when it comes to reproduction, i.e. not having a bunch of kids that you can’t afford and will annoy you as you try to live your adolescent life. This leads to broken families and grandparents raising their grandchildren. It’s a fucking epidemic in this country.

And every single issue like this comes back to education. The most non-libertarian concept I harbor is the notion that you don’t let your fellow humans fall. You don’t let giant swaths of your neighborhood NOT get educated. You don’t allow it. Allowing it is literally genocidal. You can’t sit and watch because you don’t want to be judgmental (a major liberal problem). That kind of feel-good “I won’t judge another person” garbage kills more kids than anyone would like to discuss, and it’s caused by the cowardly unwillingness to say to failing parents that, “You’re doing it wrong.”

I digress.

The point is that we need to lift the bottom. And it’s not by giving them a bunch of money from the rich. They’ll just go buy lottery tickets and televisions with it. That’s not helping anyone. The solution is to say, “Yes, there is such a thing as raising a kid poorly, and we won’t stand for it in this country.” Get your fucking kids in school. Demand that they learn. Turn off the TV. Turn off the video games. Read a book. Go to the museum. Build something with them.

We’ll know we’ve made progress when you can go into a full bookstore on Saturday, with over a hundred people in it, in a 50% black and 50% white city, and see more than one or two black people per hour. That’s change we can believe in.

This country needs to re-intellectualize. It needs to be cool to read. It needs to be cool to study and learn. And we need to make social pariahs of those who don’t promote such a direction for their children. Don’t prosecute them–ridicule them. Look down on those who have children who don’t like to read, and who aren’t curious, and who don’t enjoy learning. That’s their fault as parents. They are the break in the education chain.

Yes, sometimes it’ll be unfair because ultimately the parent didn’t know any better either, but at some point you have to take responsibility. Now is that time. Call it what you will, but it’s our only way out of this void of intellectual interest, education and personal responsibility. And only once we’re dealing with an educated population can we get where we need to be, which is more libertarian.:

70% of black Californian’s voted to ban gay marriage in their state. It seems kind of weird, doesn’t it? A group that’s been discriminated against for so long, who just had a supreme moral victory, voting to remove the rights of others?

Oh, and over half of hispanics voted the same way. The reason given for these groups voting for Proposition 8? Yep, you guessed it–religion.

That’s just wrong–white voters supporting the rights of gays, while the blacks and hispanics team up and remove those rights. On the day the first black president is elected no less…

(shaking head)

Here’s a really good post over at Daily Kos. It’s content from a conservative who breaks down the hypocrisy of the GOP when they talk about being anti-socialism.

[ A Republican Says It Better Than I Ever Could | dailykos.com ]

A summary:

1. She didn’t know Africa was a continent and not a country.
2. She didn’t know the countries that are in NAFTA.

Keep in mind that this is coming from FOX.

Wow. And people almost elected this woman to be in charge (or very close, at least) of the country?

McCain’s speech tonight highlighted for me why I abhor his supporters so much. The crowd was a giant mass of hate. Old, white, bitter, hate. They booed Obama. They chanted like a bunch of lunatic hate crime convicts.

The people voting for McCain/Palin have always wanted a perfect life. They’ve wanted to be the football star or the cheerleader. They want the perfect house and the perfect church, and a world without A-rabs or other funny-looking people who eat weird food. Get in the SUV, take the kids to church and to the soccer field, worship Jesus, and then gossip about who you dislike with your girlfriends (after you smiled in their faces for 45 minutes not an hour ago). It’s all about the possessions. Bigger house. Better cars. They want to be on top. Their lives are built on the foundation of the inferiority complex.

Think about it. They support Palin and McCain (and his platinum blonde millionare-ess wife) because they want their leaders to exemplify their goals. They want their leaders to be pretty, white, and rich because that’s what they want to be. Then, from that position, they can look down at others, which is what brings these people the most pleasure in their lives.

Ah, but how are you going to look up to your president if he and his family is black? Black academics who value community service? Where’s the glamour there? How do you possibly see that lifestyle as an ideal if you don’t even read for fun?

[ Edit: 11.05.08 : I've edited this post because it contained negative language that was the result of emotion. I don't mind when my ideas are offensive, but that type of directly hostile language is beneath me, as many of you have already pointed out. My apologies to anyone who was offended. ]

Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but it seems I’ve taken something of a swing toward the left lately. It’s odd, really.

I’m hesitant to call it permanent, however, as this could just be a reaction to an exceptionally incompetent and maligned GOP campaign. But I don’t think that accounts for all of this.

Libertarianism is Not the Answer

The thing is…even more than anti-Republican I’ve been feeling anti-libertarian, and that’s a big deal to me.

And before we go too far with that, let me highlight a distinction: it’s not that I’ve decided libertarianism is the wrong way to go, it’s that I’ve decided it’s not practical given our current situation, and therefore that it’s the wrong way to go.

Basically, libertarianism is based on what I am starting to believe is a fictional proposition, i.e. that people have the innate ability to make responsible decisions for themselves despite being retarded by their environments or hindered by their natural limitations.

If this is false then the whole concept of libertarianism breaks down, and I think it may be false.

This doesn’t mean libertarianism isn’t ideal. It doesn’t mean it’s not the best way. I think it most definitely is. But it fails to take into account what we are as humans, and as societies.

Most importantly, libertarianism ignores the basic formula of individual = environment x natural limits, and that natural law does not equate to moral law. Those who benefit from advantage in their environment, and those who have natural gifts will rise to the top. And those without one or both will sink. This is nature, but it doesn’t make it right.

Quite simply, libertarianism is a system of government for the evolved, and we’re nowhere near ready. That much freedom requires a whole lot more self-discipline than we currently possess. And that’s where socialism comes in–it’s the training wheels on our growth as humans. As I’ve said before, socialism is the means to libertarianism.

Compensating

So, now that Obama has won I am likely to swing in the opposite direction, as a control on a likely leftist extreme. He’ll handle many things well, and some things great. But after the shock of having someone competent in office wears off his weaknesses (see “disagreements with me”) will become more pronounced. This is especially true because even though he’s intelligent and thoughtful, there are many in the congress who are liberal extremists who don’t temper their compassion with logic.

There are a few of these that I intend to reject outright if I see them. The most important of these is multiculturalism, i.e. the dissolving of a single, American identity and/or the embracing of many that oppose it. Much more on this later, as I feel it’s the single biggest threat to America’s existence.

Anyway, this election has sharpened my desires to be involved politically, and there will be many times in the future when this will be brought to bear in opposition to Obama’s policies. Multiculturalism, education, crime–these are all areas where I am going break strongly from Obama on key points, and I’m more ready than ever to do so.

Forward

That’s the direction for me right now. I welcome and embrace the liberal swing, even as it leans toward socialist concepts, but I continue as a voice against the perilous lack of cold logic that often leads the overly compassionate to cause more harm than good.: