Outside the box - 5 Revelations Revealed

So I took this political stance test that tells you what end you are on the political spectrum. It told me that I'm pretty central on economic stuff, but on social issues, I'm liberal. I was disturbed a little at first, but then I realized: It never occurred to me that government had any business interfereing in a person's private life.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for "Don't kill people" and "Don't marinade your cats in your car trunk." (there was a guy in Buffalo, NY that actually did this.) but that's where it ends. In this bit, I might actually be anarchistic.

Government and people's concept of it has the power to regulate people's personal lives, a lot of which involved irrational prejudices. Here are a few of my stances.

1. Gay Marriage
Government, it's none of your god damn business. I'm not gay. It's not really even my own business to tell a gay person whether or not they can marry a person of the same sex. If it doesn't hurt me in any way, why should I care? (rebuttals in quotes) "But they would receive the same benefits as a normal married couple!" Shouldn't they? I mean they're declared, committed couples who conduct themselves just like any heterosexual couple, why do we need to treat them differently? "It would cost tax money!" So you're against people having human rights because you don't want slightly higher taxes? "But marriage is a holy union between a man and a woman!" No, it's a union of two people that declare their partnership and loyalty to each other. If you don't want your religion's version of a union to include gay marriage, that's up to your religious leaders. Legally, in the government, and socially, marriage is not owned by you or your religion. It is a union, and people should be able to unite with whomever they want.

2. Abortion.
This is sticky. Honestly, I think it should be available up until the second half of the third trimester. Where does life begin? That's not for the church to decide, it's for the woman. It's not like it's an easy decision for her. People should stop thinking about it as something as mundane as choosing whether or not to eat spaghetti for dinner. It is a tough, life altering decision. And it's not yours to make, it's theirs. On the other end, I am pro-condoms. If you don't want a kid, use them. You can find them at any Planned Parenthood for free. Abortion should be a last resort not a first line of defense. As cruel as some people believe abortion to be, it would be just as cruel if not more to bring a child into a home that can't provide for them, can't love them, can't nurture them, or worse, have them spend their childhood in adoption or foster care. I'm not saying that foster care is bad, I'm saying it shouldn't be used as a place to dispose of your child.

3. Immigration
Every single one of us that isn't full blooded Native American has an ancestor that immigrated here within the past 300 years. We were all descended from immigrants. All an immigrant wants to do is be a part of our society and to make a life for themselves and their family. Are we so selfish that we honestly believe that we are so special here that nobody else is worthy of joining us? America would be nothing without immigrants, and we shouldn't treat it as a bad thing. I'm not even going to start in on the economic benefits. (well maybe shortly, more people = more demand for goods = more internal activity = companies prospering = better internal economy = better exports = a slight impact on the national GDP = help with the trade defect. that's right long term immigrants HELP our economy... who could have guessed?) We should treat people as equals instead of maintaining this ethnocentric superiority complex.

4. Affirmative Action/ Racial issues.
As far as I'm concerned, slavery reparations are a joke. It was wrong, yes. Can we change it? No. Current people getting slavery reparations would be tantamount to me suing a company for discriminating against my great great uncle in 1852. It's done, it's over. Get over it. Why should I benefit from something that happened 160 years ago?
On racial and sexual discrimination: it's everywhere and we all know it. We try to stem the flow with regulations but the truth is that we are still very far from equality. We're doing our best though, and there's not really anything else we can do about it. We can't undo thousands of years of separation in a few decades, but how far we've come is pretty miraculous.
My last word on this subject though is that prejudice is everywhere, and we (society as a whole) shouldn't pretend that minorities aren't just as guilty of it. We should try to be rational about it, and try to treat each other equally.

5. Patriot Act/ Privacy
Private phone lines, private e-mails, and private conversation should be a hands off area for the government. however, if the statements are in a public forum: internet forum, a blog, somewhere that's accessible to the public, then it is public information and the privacy is negated. In short, private stuff is private, and should remain so, but if you are careless enough to leave information where anyone can get to it, then it is public information and can and will be used by anyone including the government.

6: Drugs and other things:
Marijuana should be legal, but harder drugs should be regulated. When it becomes legal to do these things it spreads easier, and it becomes harder to handle it. I don't want the guy messing with my cell phone account to have done a line right before picking up the phone. Which, you can't fire someone for doing something that's legal on their own time. Or maybe you could like with alcohol, but you can't always tell. I've seen someone who was on heroin and I didn't know. Brittain was able to infiltrate china because they started the opium trade. And then there's the inherent risk of overdose, the neurological results, the physiological results. if anything harder than maryjane were legal, it would be so hard to regulate it that it would be a disaster. On the other side though, what a person does to themselves on their own time is their own business, and shouldn't be determined by government. so I'm split on this one. I'm 2/3rds for regulation and 1/3rd for not our business. I would probably be comfortable with selective legalization with strong regulation, and by strong I mean with a higher legal age than alcohol and similar consequences for high driving.

Economics:

Economics is where I'm truly centrist. I believe that the market should be mildly regulated unless the situation proves otherwise. I take a chess player attitude. You don't play chess declaring your third move before you've seen the first few. Reactive, not forceful. You can not force a strategy to work if the situation doesn't call for it.

1. Healthcare:
corporations turning a profit from major illness seems intuitively wrong. But then government can't control anything properly. this is something I could go either way on really, The only real way to test it out is to implement it in small areas and get feedback. Major companies do product tests, why don't we do policy tests?


2. Free Trade Agreement:
we extend free trade to those who agree to extend it to us. No more. If a country taxes our goods so much that it hurts our economy when we don't tax theirs, we should reciprocate. That said, I think worldwide free trade would be wonderful, but we can't have truly free trade without the other side's help. It's a two way street, and we can't allow our side to go unhindered if there are roadblocks on their side.

3. Defense spending:
We should maintain our military, but keep it light until it is needed. I dislike the idea of war, but there come times when action is necessary. In this situation we should be able to militarize quickly. Outside of this situation, we should not flaunt or menace with power. I believe we should take the same approach as the ancient Shaolin monk. We only use our power when we need to. We should not jump on every warpath that comes our way (You know, like GWB.). With that said, we should take care of our troops. They sacrifice so much for us and they get treated so badly. The way to lower spending and at the same time take better care of our troops, is to lower recruitment. The military recruits everyone and anyone. If we slowed intake down to the essential peacetime force, we wouldn't need to spend so much. Then, we could spend more on the troops that need it. The question isn't if we should have a strong military, it's when should we have a strong military.

On that note ...

Military/war/international relations:

1. The existing and future wars:
The actual wars were for a political agenda. The media rationalized the wars as wars against a terrorist organization. Then, as our military dismantled countries and got lodged in the civil strife of each one, they did very little to the actual organization that they used to rationalize the entire action. (Go to urban dictionary and look up "Facepalm") It is our responsibility to give power back to the people of those countries, and get out. We've already done enough damage, we should rebuild what we can and what they need in order to take their country back, then leave. The people will find the government they want, it is not our place to tell them what to do.
In the future, we should only respond to military threats.

That's what I don't like about or society sometimes. We're so ethnocentric that we think we should "police" and even govern other countries. And I wish that a people could revolt, but these days the armies are so technologically advanced that revolutions can't happen anymore. Citizens have guns, they have tanks. I'm not going up against a tank with a 50 cal. Sorry.

2. International relations: We should strive to have a healthy symbiotic relationship with countries that will. With those that won't, we shouldn't bother them, but we should leave the mutually advantageous offer on the table. Like a political barter system. If we have something they need, and they have something we need, there's no reason we can't help each other out.

On another train of thought: Country rights are like human rights. We should not take it upon ourselves to tell another country what to do.

And the UN is a joke.

Maybe I am liberal sometimes, but where it is needed, I can and will intelligently consider other positions. I wish our leadership was that way.