US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8126

I'm certainly not in favour of equalization of outcomes and I very strongly disagree with shit like preventing conservative speakers from promoting their ideas. The idea that someone with a very limited idea of the ideology a book or speaker espouses, based entirely from a facebook post they saw, believes they have the right to decide which ideas I should and should not choose to expose myself to rankles me immensely. With that in mind I'm certainly not a member of some of the further left groups.

I'm strongly secular so that eliminates me from a lot of the American right and once you add in that I not only believe discrimination exists but also that it's a bad thing that excludes me from the rest of it. To compound my sins, I think the free market is a fantastic tool for getting things that people want to people that want them but it's not a divine entity, and certainly not a benevolent one. The main problem I have with the free market is that it completely fails to recognize externalities, a cost that doesn't appear on the financial statements is a cost that doesn't exist as far as the free market is concerned. The job of government regarding the free market should be to make it more closely reflect reality. A good example of this is environmental cleanup costs. Originally companies just left fucked up bits of land behind them for the state to clean up. That's effectively theft by the shareholders of the company from the community as a whole. Then the government mandated that companies pay up and they started declaring bankruptcy and leaving the government with the bill anyway. Now they're mandated to pay into a reserved fund for cleanup as they fuck shit up so the cost is immediately and directly tied to the production. This is one of the job killing regulations people talk about but I have absolutely no problem with the industries that cost more than they product being killed, they existed only as a product of bad accounting and that accounting failure has been fixed.

I dislike a lot of the social welfare systems, such as Social Security, but also recognize them as a necessity. I believe pretty strongly in personal responsibility but I also accept that an awful lot of people will immediately shirk any responsibility you give them and then expect you to bail them out later on. If we're not willing to let people live or die based on the consequences of their own decisions then at a certain point we need to limit how badly they can fuck themselves up based on those decisions. We're not willing to let the old die so we must be willing to force the young to save some money for when they're old.

I like the idea of merit dictating your outcomes a lot which means that I think the birth lottery should be leveled out somewhat. That puts me ideologically in favour of socialized provision of healthcare, education, housing etc. What form that comes in (state run, state funded privately run ie voucher system etc) doesn't matter so much to me but people shouldn't be fucked by things outside of their control. The flipside of that is that I also don't really mind when people who make unhealthy choices get screwed by public healthcare. Under the utilitarian rulings of the NHS if you're obese and need a knee replacement you're going to be pushed back in the waitlist behind the people who didn't fuck up their own knees with bad choices (you of course do have the option to go private though).

Guns, don't really give a fuck. People probably shouldn't have the ability to kill a bunch of people really quickly in case they go ahead and do that but it's a little late to stop that from happening now.

Gays etc, humans should have human rights because, you know, they're humans. Discrimination is bad, if you offer something to the public then you should offer it to all the public.

Religious freedom, fine with it, should probably be extended to any strongly held conviction though. It's weird that in America if I say an invisible man said I wasn't allowed to eat meat then that's respected but if I have ethical problems with industrial meat production then that's a choice.

Immigration, process is a clusterfuck, I know that first hand. Migrant labour is a thing that exists, it should be formalized and run as such, keeping all the economic incentives that make it happen while fighting it at the top is insane. Highly skilled individuals coming to the US is awesome, we should let more in and make it much easier for them to stay. Hordes of low skilled individuals coming for benefits obviously not ideal but also not really happening. Either way, it'll be much easier to manage if we accept the reality that migrant labourers exist and start documenting them. A lot of them don't really want to live in America year round but just want some assurance that they'll be able to come back and work next season.

Black lives matters. Police do seem to kill a lot of black people in situations where a white dude would live. I can certainly see why people who are black might be upset about that. We should probably look into it. Have a report, have some findings, discuss the findings with criminologists, leading members of the black community, police representatives etc and come up with some kind of broad new social contract for how policing should work.

Islam. Most Muslims are fine. The ones that are fascists probably shouldn't be let in, but nor should any other fascists. About half of the people I work with are Muslims of varying degrees of strictness and I see no reason why America shouldn't want them here. Given their proficiency with nuclear engineering we probably don't want to send them back to Pakistan anyway.

Foreverwars around the world. Case by case basis. Pax Americana is a thing and the last 70 years of peace have been amazing. I'm not too stupid to see that America derives benefits from her military spending from a stable world and the America based trade. Equally I'm not sure that every conflict around the world needs American intervention. Somewhere between "America should invade Iran" and "America shouldn't have bases in Japan".

Progressive tax system = good. Death taxes = good. Sin taxes = good. Flat taxes = bad. Lower taxes = better, where practical. Government spending = sometimes good, depends what was bought. Deficit = more complicated than a metaphor involving a household and a credit card balance.

Net neutrality = good.

Climate change = happening.

North Korea = invent a time machine and regime change with Chinese help in the 90s.

Iran = basically fine.

Russian hacking = to be expected.

Trump working with the Russian hackers = not fine.

Alt-right = weirdly fascist.

Feminism = basically just turning a critical eye to social constructs and asking why they exist, what they do and how that manifests. I have no problem with that.

Probably missing a lot here but whatever.