we previously had this thread but it was lost in a sitewide crash. kind of fortuitous, given all the new people!
anyways, i’m interested in how you describe yourself politically but also why you do so, and/or how you came to the beliefs that you did. be as brief or lengthy as you want in answering that.
additionally, as a preface: i would like this to be a generally non-judgemental thread and i think this community is more than capable of that, so please respect that idea.[1] in general, you are not obliged to justify to myself or anyone else why you believe what you do.
exceptions, obviously, go for bigotry or intolerant beliefs that would be otherwise incompatible with the community’s ethos. bluntly if you’re a transphobe or something like that this is not the community for you. ↩︎
In terms of the rest of the world? center-left. In terms of USA? radical left apparently
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American here. If someone asks, I tend to say “independent”. I think folks usually assume that means “somewhere in the current political center”. What it really means is that I’m more left than the current Democratic Party. I would happily embrace a more left political party, but in the last decade I’ve had no other choice but the Democratic Party (with the exception of some local elections). Regardless, it tends to disarm people a bit. It may lead to a better conversation. I’m entirely convinced our two primary political parties completely fail to accurately represent the nuance in Americans’ political beliefs - and I think that’s true for those on the left and the right.
Anyway, I’m probably a Socialist. Sometimes I wonder if I might be a Communist, but I think I need to read more first. I’m willing to accept that maybe the market has its place, but it should be heavily restricted and completely removed from vast swaths of our society. That might make me a SocDem, but I see that as a milestone, not the end. It’s like a temporary compromise so we can take the time to find better ways to handle the industries the market continues to operate in. I’m convinced that capitalism (especially the unfettered, free market variety) is not efficient and its motives are ethically questionable. Here in the U.S. we have decided it’s ok to allow kids to go hungry because it may interfere with profits. We bail out billionaires because they’re too critical for our economy, but it would seem the more efficient solution would be to nationalize their industries.
On social issues, I’m still generally on the left. But sometimes I think virtue-signaling liberals take it a bit too far. I’m also really tired of this obsession over culture wars. Don’t get me wrong, I think LGBTQ+ rights are currently threatened and we should rightfully focus on preserving them. But at the same time, some liberals react much like emotional conservatives do over really petty shit. Sometimes they become the caricatures conservatives claim all liberals/leftists to be.
If you ask me, the most important part of modern politics is economics and the environment. I realize we can “walk and chew bubblegum” at the same time. But I don’t want to keep feeding this culture war bs. At least that’s how I feel, at the moment.
The last thing I’ll say is, I think our arguments around government budgets often miss the point. I spent time in the U.S. military. I know for some leftist circles this will make my opinions less valid. But I can’t change how a younger me saw the world. So, while in, I saw the ways in which we waste tax payer money. I think we could have a strong military while still reducing the budget. We heavily rely way too much on contractors (as in, privatization). That massive budget rarely made its way to my soldiers’ pockets or to the equipment they used on a daily basis, and that continues to piss me off to this day. The training and the facilities occasionally got better.
But man, we always seemed to get more contractors. We always seemed to get screwed by the fact that the military was limited in how it could negotiate prices for things they needed. I’ll never forget about the artificially inflated cost of printer paper. What a waste. Privatization in our government is helping inflate the costs of governing, and I feel it’s not talked about enough when our “representatives” are pretending to bicker about the military budget.
According to the political compass I was -7,-7 which puts me at 75% onto the most libertarian left policies.
Let us start, with the goals and axioms. All arguments must have axioms, all societies should have goals.
Axioms:
- Saving lives is a good thing.
- The importance of a life generally scales with sentience. That is, dolphins are more important than slugs, which outrank trees, and so on.
- Increasing happiness is a good thing.
- The value of happiness again scales with sentience.
- Intent matters, but so do results (you can definitely fiddle with this one to suit your argument)
Goals:
- Increase the total long term happiness in the world
So, what do we do? Well, we start looking for things that make people, animals, and others happy, especially in the long term. We’ve got plenty of data about what is good for doing that, and why. From here on I’ll focus on people, but know that people aren’t actually the only consideration.
Things people usually like:
- Safety
- Community
- Freedom
- Stability
Now, these assertions aren’t all that controversial. The problem arises when these things people like conflict with each other. The problem is when one person’s attempts at happiness and satisfaction interfere with another person’s happiness. At this point, things become very subjective. Whose happiness matters more? Why?
In general, I support the following:
- A high degree of individual freedom.
- A low degree of corporate freedom.
- Simplified laws, wherever possible.
- Strong environmental protections.
- The use of market forces to solve problems, whenever possible. This is not a blind love of free market capitalism, but instead a want to set-up markets to produce desired outcomes. E.G. I’m for a carbon cap and trade market.
- Strong social safety nets which minimize means testing wherever possible, and provide objects instead of cash, wherever possible.
- A strong US military (the reasons why get deep into geopolitics, I don’t love war, don’t misread this)
- Free education at all levels
- Strong labor protections
- Strong self-defense rights
- A high degree of subsidies for basic scientific research
- Mostly free healthcare
- You get the idea, we’re starting to get specific here.
Put whatever labels you want on me, I don’t care, I’m primarily dedicated to those axioms and whatever systems and programs are proven to support those axioms through data.
I’m rather fond of this pair of axioms regarding the rule of law:
For a law to bind anyone, it must protect everyone. For a law to protect anyone, it must bind everyone.
I see many of our modern problems as being rooted in laws and systems which neither protect nor bind everyone equally.
I can understand your desire for markets to handle things, but I don’t think the global climate can be handled that way. Cap and trade means businesses get to shift their fossil emissions around while pretending they’re helping. We already see this with companies which buy land that’s already lush with old growth, then pretend like not clear-cutting it represents a reduction in carbon emissions equivalent to having planted all those trees. Giving corporate bad actors any opportunity to scam their way out of responsibility is the wrong approach.
LMAO yeah forest carbon capture offsets are total bullshit. The people who set up that system did not think it through, or at least they knew exactly what they were doing in order to let people game it.
A proper cap and trade system would require that in order to earn excess credits you must actually take carbon from the air and bury it in a non-volatile state at STP. Furthermore, you wouldn’t earn credits at a 1:1 rate, something like 1 ton of credit for every 2 tons you bury would be more appropriate. Things like pumping sewage into an old oil well wouldn’t count because you didn’t pull that carbon out of the air yourself.
Regardless of if it’s a market system or a prescriptive system, you have to make sure it’s actually going to do what you want it to do. The Bush administration mandated E85 corn ethanol become a thing and we still haven’t managed to actually make corn ethanol a fuel source in the aggregate, nevermind a carbon neutral energy source.
Would such a system work for microplastics? Honestly I think I’m more concerned about microplastics than emissions at this point. The shit’s scary.
A cap and trade system? It would be a lot harder to set one up that worked the way you intended. Plastics are incredibly useful, health and environmental concerns aside. So you would have greater incentive to try and write in a bunch of exceptions or tailor things perfectly and it probably wouldn’t work how you intended. My mind is thinking of loads of medical equipment that’s best made with plastics, for just one example.
With carbon dioxide? Well, there’s an easy way to generate credits by buying carbon, so you don’t actually have to ban carbon fuels entirely, meaning planes and helicopters will still have their place. But I would have a tough time coming up with an easy way to filter out and sequester plastic contaminants, so there’s not really a equivalency.
There’s also the problem of trying to properly define just what the fuck a plastic even is. Is natural rubber a plastic? What about epoxy? Wax? The second you come up with a hard definition for plastic every manufacturer is going to look for alternatives that don’t technically meet that definition.
Now, in my version of a carbon cap and trade market, it would focus entirely on what’s underground. You have to buy credits to extract carbon from under ground, and you’re awarded credits for returning it to under ground (at a less than 1:1 rate). The reason you do it that way is because it’s just the easiest point of control. Fewer players involved, obvious locations for auditing
Anyway, this system would have the side-effect of also making plastic products more expensive so manufacturers would look for alternative materials and/or alternative sources of carbon. Probably a bit of both would be going on.
Probably the only thing you could really do is set up a broad definition for what a plastic is, then put in an excise tax on plastic and write in exceptions for things where we really need the material.
It’s just a harder situation because we don’t have good substitutes for most of the applications for plastic, which isn’t true for carbon fuels.
Environmentalist but also against latching onto identities and echo chambers. You’re not special for being a part of an identity or immune to criticism. I think using left-right is fucking stupid in my country, Australia. I will roast you for using it.
i also don’t consider american’s opinions very highly. It’s a third-world nation with a culture of pretenders.
Hey there 👋
While this comment isn’t directly hostile towards anyone, I’d like to remind you of our one and only rule, to be nice. Our side bar has two links talking about what our community is all about if you’re looking for more context or an explanation of our community.
and how is anyone meant to trust mods to follow this rule themselves? from experience on any other website or forum or whatev, it’s usually mods who don’t follow the rules.
I absolutely would want someone to point out to me if I’m not being nice in any way. While me asking for feedback isn’t the same as someone else having the ability to take moderator actions against me, I don’t know of really any system (other than simple trust) to hold me accountable to these principles. If you or anyone else have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
I think the best I can do right now is attempt to be as transparent as possible and continue to interact so you can all get to know me and maybe, in time, I can earn some trust 😊💜
ooo, first to answer!
Ok, I’m a Democratic Socialist. While I strongly support the power and rights of the worker, a system of equality and equity for all people, and everything else that comes with socialism after growing simply disgusted with capitalism and how it exploits people, societies, and everything it can, I strongly support Democracy and a balanced and responsible freedom of the individual.
Well, I’m certainly further left than the U.S. Democratic Party(though that is not saying much). I feel that I need to do more research to find exactly where I sit on the spectrum, I do know that I’m some flavor of anti-authoritarian leftist.
