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How Did You Find a Political Stance?
Just wondering how some of the more political members of the forum came to the conclusions they did when it came to their place in the political spectrum. I found that some just go along with whatever their families are or base it on their outlook on life due to their conditions of living. In short, I'm just curious today.
Post edited by Viga on
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Believe me, we abused the shit out of the massive amount of power that we had amassed for ourselves.
After I retired from two terms of presidency and was sitting on a massive mountain of imaginary money, I realized that people should not be able to actually do the shit we pulled in real life (seriously, we had nuclear waste from power plants that we had to get rid of, so we made a dirty bomb out of it and launched it at one of the other periods and blamed it (successfully) on another class who tried to take over all of the periods).
And that is how I got into politics.
In middle school I read Hagakure, a biography of Musashi, and Starship Troopers all in a very short amount of time. I've always been pretty outspoken, but got really caught up in the "service guarantees citizenship" idea. I used to give impassioned political speeches in the lunchroom, and my friends and I sort of took over the neighborhood and created a series of fiefdoms, all under a constitutional monarchy. I think I might still have a few drafts of the constitution (and a few laws that we wrote) somewhere in my mom's house. We would spend our days after school warring with the other kids for control of the neighborhood (and the woods beyond), spending hours finding the best fighting sticks and building shoddy bows. I'm surprised none of us got seriously injured; it was pretty brutal.
When 9/11 happened, I saw the panic and snap judgements made by the politicians in charge, and realized exactly how incompetent the "authorities" were at clear-headed decision-making. I started speaking out against the war in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and people started labeling me as a "liberal."
In the first year of high school, I moved to California, land of sunshine and happy people. And I realized that I had probably been depressed for most of my life previous to that (I had gone to a string of school counselors, but I moved around too much for any kind of stable relationship, and I think my files eventually got lost or something). My freshman English teacher was basically a slightly younger Kurt Vonnegut, and he recommended I read "Stranger in a Strange Land." I did, and realized I had been caring about a bunch of silly, inconsequential stuff (I was basically a left-leaning, militarist totalitarian by that point) and that many of the "great issues of the day" amounted to little more than bitter old-fashioned people trying to prevent others from doing things that harmed no one.
I learned more and more about history, and began to see civilization as a march toward greater and greater cooperation between groups of people, where scarce resources could be shared and brutal wars could be prevented. I learned about the wondrous advancements in science and technology that made our current society possible, and the many failed experiments we've had along the way (free market capitalism, totalitarian communism, Italian fascism, etc).
Throughout all this, speculative fiction has been keeping up with the times, and certain things that seemed completely far-fetched now appear to be almost within our grasp (within at least 100 years from now). Neuroscience is shedding light into the last bastion of the superstitious, and medicine is advancing at a blinding pace. Nanotech and personal fabrication has the possibility of becoming a reality, and serious men and women are already contemplating the repercussions of a post-scarcity economy.
In light of all of this, misogynistic, homophobic, Objectivist, and nationalistic ideas seem not just quaint but dangerously barbaric. Flat tax proponents seem like they should be donning robes and sandals, for their ideas belong in pre-Diocletian Rome. Warmongers and chickenhawks sound like petulant children, who should let clear-headed adults conduct the business of government. A government based on evidence and rational analysis, that looks to the mistakes of history and tries not to repeat them.
I'm far to the left of most American politicians, and far more scientifically-minded than the fringe radicals. There are very few politicians I would even trust to run a country, much less agree with their policies and stances. I am completely disenfranchised in this country's political system.
The funny thing about traveling left or right on the spectrum is that Authoritarianism crops up on either end.
I'm almost on the same page with Lou. Though I didn't grow up Catholic, I was part of a christian community for a while whose key message was to be a "servant of all," especially the poorest, most disenfranchised people. Which in action not only included feeding people, but taking political action on behalf of those communities whenever and however they could, in a very simple, realistic way. Though I'm not religious anymore I still try to volunteer and join causes when appropriate, and I think that's important.
My parents weren't opinionated at all when it came to politics, so I think my views also came from a process of just trying to uncover the truth on my own - a lot of reading and listening and little activism and just paying attention, and from not sticking to one source and, most importantly, questioning everything.
Once a person has the truth in hand I think it's then really up to them to decide what the political action should be, and that action should ultimately be what shapes a person's views, because succeed or fail they'll learn from it, for the better or for the worse and in spite of whatever they were clinging to beforehand. If they don't learn.. god bless them.
For example, "conservative" means fuck-all these days.
I am a radical techno-progressivist by common ideology, but have specific stances on all practical issues.
Not caring leads at best to a government like Japan's: reasonably capable, but unmoving and static, unable to address modern concerns. At worst, it leads to disaster. Why set the bar so low? Why sit idle knowing that the best possible outcome is mediocrity?