Me.

Okay, I have yet again had "this country was intended to function like X and we need to put it back like that" thrown at me, this time by a Ron Paul supporter but eh. It's too pervasive for me to just point at them and say it's their argument, though I'll get to him when I've picked apart that little highly-polished ball of shit.

Here's my feeling.

I am a lot less reverent of "the way things were intended to be" than I am "how things would need to be so that privileged and currently-marginalized people can have equality of opportunity."

The country we create means a lot more to me than the degree to which it matches someone else's idea of sufficient faithfulness to the ideological orthodoxy of a group of social contract theorists two centuries ago who had no more experience with the kind of culture I want to live in now than anybody else did at the time.

So rather than spending the rest of my life building a political theory around slavish obedience to the ideals of men who owned black people and mostly didn't think women were qualified to vote, I'm going to look at politics and government as a problem-solving exercise, not a test of my loyalty to "the founders."

Some of the same people who'd never argue that we should do whatever the Bible says (or seems to say) because it's a book written by people will nonetheless kill and die to demonstrate their unwillingness to depart from centuries-old ideas about what America should be like. I don't get it.

I don't think "the founders" were necessarily any wiser men than we have today. They had great ideas (though a lot of that was just them having the sense to identify ideas worth copying from other cultures), but they gave us a starting point. The Constitution they wrote is a great place to start, but it's not perfect enough as a place to finish.

That's why I can't join the libertarian party's devotional cult dedicated to "the founders" or their ideals. I am fairly familiar with what they wanted, where they differed with one another, and with whom I'd likely have agreed if I'd been around then.

Fact remains, though, that we're further along in this experiment than they were. We know things now that they didn't then, and if we're more concerned about orthodoxy than which policies will actually create a nation of equal opportunity... then I feel like that's way more of a betrayal of their legacy than anything I'm arguing for.

( Read more... )

I am going to give very little context for most of these, so... yeah. If you want context or explanation, I can give it and maybe I'm wrong and you can tell me why. But right now I just feel like spitting out a lot of random shit off the cuff. There are a couple of you who sometimes comment on my LJ because you think I'm missing some perspective that I need to be considering (and actually intend to offer it for my benefit), and I love you guys. There are some of you who agree with these things but don't really say so, and.... yeah, you're all right. And there are some of you who press these buttons repeatedly. Comment if you want, but I might ignore you.

1. I love abortion. My mother could have aborted me, and while the circumstances of my conception are none of your goddamned business, most of you would agree if I explained why I think she had the right. I'm glad she didn't, but it causes me no anxiety to know that I was only born because she wanted me.
2. I love divorce. Divorce has been a major source of freedom in my family. I don't want one but the instant I do, the option had better be there.
3. I think Libertarians, by and large, should just come out of the anarchist closet and get it the fuck over with.
4. American Conservatives place more faith in the mythical "free market invisible hand" than they do in Jesus (the only practical difference being that Jesus fed the poor and the "invisible hand" doesn't).
5. I would like to hear a strong anti-immigration stance that did not eventually boil down to "White Americans Good; Colored Foreigners Bad."
6. I love religions, but seldom do I love "religious people," because as Stephen Prothero put it (and you can see this on my blog sidebar), being "religious" generally just means you think you have the right to all sorts of opinions on other people's sexual habits.
7. The internet is not different from "real life." It's real, all right, even if it's not proximal.
8. I think lists are fun, but often overused. Like this. This is terrible.
9. I didn't choose to be straight, but I wasn't born with a sexual orientation either. Tidy glib little answers like those probably don't help anyone, so everybody just shut the hell up and stop worrying about how the gays got gay. They're people. It's okay. Get over it.
10. Sexism isn't less sexist if you sometimes also slur genders other than cis women. Racism isn't less racist if you include those who aren't the most common targets. Injustice doesn't become more fair with repetition. Just more comprehensive.
11. Conflict resolution only works with rational people. With people who aren't rational, just dump them as quickly as possible once you learn this about them. If they want life skills, they can either get a therapist or start writing you checks for your time.
12. Rooster Cogburn should have used his real first name. It's perfectly respectable and I like it fine.
13. Men's fitness magazines present just as warped a relationship to food as women's mags.
14. Honoring same-sex marriage (either secular ones or the rites of religions like mine) doesn't infringe on the freedom of American Christians to dehumanize gay couples. Guys, no one can ever make you stop... just... drain you of members until you die a slow death drowning in your own pettiness.
15. Fuck Nascar and the Indy 500. Let me spoil it for you: THEY TURN LEFT.
16. If something here upset you, you probably didn't read this far. If you did, though, I bet you're already preparing how best to punish me for going off half-cocked and smearing my filth all over your friends-list. 

We're not supposed to post these things because they're "flame bait." Well, whatever. I've got a lotta prickly ornery bullshit building in the back of my blackened liberal soul, and I thought I'd post this rather than unleash my semi-coherent thrashing fury on the next person to hit a pet peeve.

If a political philosophy cannot be boiled down to achieving the greatest good for the greatest possible number of people (an imperative so staggeringly vague that it's not actually that restrictive to new ideas), I am not going to trust it. I don't care if a certain choice is correct according to Conservative or Libertarian (which, with its dogmatic worship of the "free market" has become an annoying mimicking little sister to Conservatism) values.

I care if it's going to hurt people. Libertarianism seems to me to be all about reversing ideologically-incorrect policies and plans regardless of why they were put into place and (still more disturbing) regardless of whether they work. I despise that. Be forewarned that this is one of those topics that has attracted much better and smoother analysis than mine; I'm basically just ranting here. If anybody wants to discuss this further I'll probably end up tracking down some of the highly-excellent comments on the subject that've already been written.

The big thing that Libertarianism seems to have going for it is that it's based on "freedom," and the idea that regulations can only restrict freedom (an assertion somewhere along the same lines as "natural selection can only subtract information," and with about as much thought behind it).

( Why Libertarianism reminds me of anarchy. )