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A caveat-shaped thing.
This is a rant. It may or may not always be coherent. It certainly is not always polite.
No matter what your political positions are, I have, in the following rant, almost certainly declared that at least one of them is completely idiotic. I am certain that you out there who read this will be convinced that some subset of my positions can only be held by the brain-damaged.
My political sense of self-identification is deeply blurry, because I do not share vocabulary on the subject with others. (Among many other things, I think "liberal" and "conservative" are on orthogonal axes if they're meaningful terms at all, not opposite ends of the same one, and I am both. An old meander about my thoughts about political divisions that actually make sense is posted here on rasseff.)
Most people would probably file me as a leftist on the basis of my positions; if it makes them happy, that's good for them. I'm arguably some flavor of socialist. I have very strangely anarchistic tendencies that I suspect are completely invisible in my positions and only manifest in their upshot.
If reading something with these caveats is liable to be upsetting to you, don't bother.
I don't like most political campaigning stuff. Largely because I don't care if the candidate is ugly, dumb, or dressed funny by its parents in the morning; I want to know what positions the person (and their suite of advisors) puts forth, which way they're likely to go if they have to change positions, whether they're capable of considering new evidence and changing to more appropriate positions later, whether they're capable of nuance. I want to hear what people have to say about the issues, and issues are hard to come by when all the rhetoric is Character (which mostly seems to mean insulting the other guy).
If someone's doing the 'insult the other guy' sort of campaign, I wind up wondering if they actually have merits of their own to present, if they have ideas, or whether they're just doing the whole "may the least mud-spattered guy win" sort of thing. If you gotta talk about your opponent, people, talk about the guy's failings on policy, not the nefarious things that he's been rumoured to do with puppies. Especially with name games.
I mean, if the position can't be argued without pulling out something like "Republicrats", "Femmocrats", or "Repuglicans", it can't be an awfully strong position, can it? Name humor is . . . hard to pull off successfully, and hardly anyone can do it; its failure state is pretty severe. At least for me, with a religious perspective on the value of respect for names.
And while I'm on names, I want to know: Has the nation collectively lost leave of its grammatical senses? What the fuck is with this "Democrat party" and "Democrat candidate"? Has everyone suddenly acquired ears made of cheap tin? Democrat is a noun, like every other word ending in -crat. The adjective form -- used for modifying other nouns, people, in case you forgot third grade English -- is "Democratic". I know "Republican" is both a noun and an adjective, but I'm sure folks are bright enough to recognise that just because one party is the same in noun and adjectival form doesn't mean that it's a trendsetter or a dark power capable of overwhelming the forces of proper grammar.
I'm not interested in condemnations of "liberals". I'm not interested in condemnations of "conservatives". I consider these things no better than hysteria about commies. Further, I have a habit of considering anyone who isn't capable of anything other than ranting about how stereotyped-broad-brush-group is baaaaaad too dumb to have a political opinion worth listening to. (And I've been reading too many stupid political Pit threads on the SDMB, and it's showing.) I am to the point that if I hear another snide comment about lawyers I may pull out the speaker's intestines and throttle them with their own guts, but the law is an old flame of mine and we've still got a lovely casual relationship. (Also, the intestines thing has a poetry to it that I find quite satisfying in the current political climate.)
I came to political awareness in 1986. This means that the seminal political memories of my childhood are the growing budget deficit and the Iran-Contra hearings. (It was an interesting year.) My first political thought was wanting to get my hands on a copy of the Federal budget and go through it, because I was sure that the grownups had to be doing something wrong and that I could fix it. (Yes, I was a terrifyingly earnest eight-year-old. I have since grown a small sense of humor.)
I am not going to talk about how one candidate is great and how another candidate sucks and the one over there, enh, he's okay on some issues. It's not relevant. I'm trying to formulate my own positions, not tell people whose bubble I'm gonna fill in at Ahabat Sholom.
I may wind up making references to the policies or histories of one candidate or another; I don't know yet, I haven't written that far. I can think of a few things that may be worth pointing to, though.
This means, among other things, that I will not be talking about Vietnam, which I'm sick of hearing about. I'm more or less with Scalzi on the subject; go read what he says and insert most of it back here if you want to have some meat on that.
I am going to try to rummage through and pull up all the hot-button issues that I can find and do at least a little commentary on each of them. I may miss a few; such is life.
Legitimising authority by the demonstrated good of the governed is an old, old tradition:
"All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children, but I did not allow anyone to die of hunger in this nome." --Ankhtifi's tomb bio.
"In regnal year 19 did he appoint me as count of Menat-Khufu. Then I caused it to be prosperous, its wealth consisting of everything. I caused the name of my forefathers to endure, I having caused to be efficient the mortuary chapels thereof. I brought statues to the temple." --Khnumhotep's tomb bio.
I'm of similar feeling: a government's purpose is to address the needs of the people -- as the Preamble might be paraphrased to suggest, needs for safety, for justice, for liberty, for basic human needs. Where this breaks down, of course, is addressing questions of "What promotes justice?" "What is the common welfare, anyway?" and "What will help us to be safe?"
I have thoughts that go beyond this thing I think of as fundamental, but they don't go in purpose; they're more of a bonus.
Federal Budget
First big-ass deal for me: this deficit spending has got to get under control. I know I can't balance a fucking checkbook or handle a credit card sanely; this is why I am not in charge of the finances and why I won't accept a status where I have to have a head for budgets. Yes, I have been grumpy about this issue for nearly twenty years now, I've got momentum, damnit.
We've had recent evidence that it's possible to get to a budget that is paying down the deficit. I don't support some sort of Constitutional amendment mandating this, because there are times (disaster relief, say) when it's important to be able to take out that emergency loan without going through major hassle, and because if we-collectively need a big nanny standing around to whack our knuckles for incapacity to add, we're sunk. (Besides, money gets spent that doesn't count in 'the budget', and I have no interest in encouraging even more of that sort of accounting.)
Okay, another budget thing: unfunded mandates. On the one hand, I don't think the Federal government has any call mandating that the States do a particular thing if it's not going to back that up with the cash required to do it. On the other hand, that opens the doors for the States, say, slashing their education budgets after a Federal mandate and the national government being required to pick up the slack. Unfunded mandates irritate me, but I see problems in just refusing to allow them.
And while I'm on the subject of things that irritate me: riders on bills that have nothing to do with the subject of the bill. This I want to see stop. If it can't get passed openly, I don't want it to be law. I don't especially care if this means that some things that I would like to have passed can't get slipped in sneakily.
On Not Looking Dumb: The War On Abstraction
The War On Drugs. The War On Poverty. The War On Terrorism. The War On Fat.
How about Rhetorical Dumbassery? Can I "declare war" on that? I'm sure I can get an army together if you give me time, and maybe we'll figure out what I mean, what territory to claim, and who to shoot by the next century. And how to get out of that "state of war" by the millenium after.
Unlike an actual, y'know, war, a "war" on a concept has no logical start and end points, no meaningfully defined goals, no clear conclusion. It's a creation that will last in perpetuity or until people get sick of the meme and develop an immunity.
The way to eliminate an abstraction is, first of all, to not harp on the concept; repeating the concept will continue to promote the abstraction. Even if it makes a good sound bite. (This point requires a certain amount of logical thought, which is sorely lacking in political propagandizing.)
But abstractions aren't things that can be defeated in combat, with military might; they have to be dealt with at the conceptual level, the ideas; the roots of things of which these are emergent properties have to be addressed, and that's not something that can be done with force, either.
Some things that 'war' has been declared on are tools; setting up a militaristic response to the use of those tools doesn't help reduce or eliminate that tool usage. Knowing why those are the available tools to people, why people prefer those tools to other things, and addressing those circumstances is what will make a difference, not doing the big showy War On thing and there-they-go-now-marching-off-to-war-again.
Some things that 'war' has been declared on are poorly defined; what is being targeted is muddy at best. Sometimes, the good gets attacked as well as the bad, completely setting aside the vast span of the neutral and ambiguous. If you don't know what the hell you're fighting or even if "fighting" is the appropriate action to take, you are not at war.
Some things that 'war' has been declared on are emergent properties; like tools, one can't just go around and say "That thing bad!" or shoot the abstract concept with abstractions of bullets and have anything happen to it. The stuff that leads to the thing happening has to be broken down and deciphered. This is hard, mucky work, and doesn't go over well in speeches.
You want a war? Give me the bloody Congressional declaration thereof, and have it be an actual war, not a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand designed to make shinies on the evening news. Make sure there's a tangible target, something that isn't a nebulous, stretchy concept that can be warped easily and continue endlessly.
The Commerce Clause and States' Rights
There are a lot of bits of Federal legislation that are justified on the basis of the commerce clause -- many of them dubious.
I believe California is currently in the process of bickering with the Federal government about whether or not it should have the capacity to arrest people for having legal-in-California medical marijuana grown and produced entirely in California. (No interstate commerce, after all.)
The thing about 'States' Rights' is that it's a fraught phrase with a lot of baggage; a lot of the most famous associations with the phrase in national discourse have to do with racism and slavery. It's important, though, to the Federal system, to the concept: the idea that in California, desperately ill people can get relief from marijuana and no other state's issues with pot can stop them; the idea that assisted suicide can be legal in Oregon even if other parts of the nation disapprove; the idea that here in Massachusetts same-sex couples can marry, even if it drives some people up the wall. (And, by the way, if anyone says "activist judges" to me, so help me, I'm going to throttle them. I am sick and fucking tired of the popular lies about the Supreme Judicial Court decision here. The Constitution of Massachusetts forbids the Commonwealth to deny equal treatment under the law on the basis of sex. Period. If I can marry a man here, so can anyone else, no matter what they have in their pants.)
I'm going to be writing here a lot of things, some of which I think are Federal matters, some of which I think are State concern, some of which I think are reasonable things for the Federal government to mandate and support the States in implementing, some things which are local, some things which should be handled by private groups. I'm not always going to specify which is which; I'm not always clear on that myself, often because I can think of a number of different implementations, each of which has different combinations of active participants.
The "War On Some Drugs" and Other Just Plain Idiotic Things
Here's a good solid rant to start off: the concept of 'victimless crimes' makes a mockery of justice, is a despoiler of liberty, and is fucking expensive to boot.
First of all, the logic behind them tends to fall into begging the question fallacies. When the people committing these so-called crimes point out that it's lunatic to punish people when nobody's actually been hurt, they're told that they've been so hurt by their behaviour that they're unable to recognise the damage. Or that actual harm doesn't matter, that the nanny state needs to make sure they follow this particular set of arbitrary rules.
I have serious issues with any logic that takes as axiomatic that any disagreement is evidence that one has been corrupted by the nefarious stuff that the logic is out there to protect us all from. Big-ass question-begging. (I consider that sort of thing in much the same league as "Your belief in the reality of your gods is just evidence that Satan is a master deceiver!")
Let's start out with looking at the history of Prohibition in the United States, as regards alcohol. Reduce crime, poverty, improve the economy, improve quality of life: all worthwhile goals.
One of the immediate responses to the Volstead Act in the United States was a brief reduction in the crime rate, and then a huge increase as smugglers and others started to bring alcohol into the country, move it around, steal it from warehouses, and so on. Homicide rates went from 5.6 per hundred thousand to ten per hundred thousand. Crime rates rose overall, and organised crime organisations basically grew up to feed that demand and were financed by its profits.
Additionally, because it was harder to get fairly mild alcoholic products like beer, the hard liquor usage increased -- it was easier to transport enough stronger stuff to satisfy however many customers. Alcohol usage increased overall. Lack of standards for illegally brewed alcohol led to a quadrupling of the death rate due to alcohol poisoning. Alcohol-related crime, including drunk driving, increased during Prohibition as well.
It lasted 13 years, and is generally considered an abject failure.
So what would I expect from a generalised drug prohibition? Upswing in organised crime at the supplier and distributor levels, such as the support groups for dealers and drug cartels abroad, financed by the profits coming about from Federal and State expenditures. Migration to hard drug usage due to ease of transport and the fact that dealers will be interested in getting people involved in more profitable products. Adulteration of the drugs to up profits leading to more severe side effects; less quality control with the same results due to incompetence rather than profiteering. Extensive smuggling networks. Increased crime rate, especially including violent crime. Reduced levels of responsible use. Perhaps increased usage overall.
There's a bright idea for you. Billions spent for this crap? Because that's what we got, and what we could have figured in advance if we'd paid attention to our own fucking history.
And then there's the "educational" stuff, characterised on rec.arts.sf.fandom as "DARE to lie to your kids about drugs." There's a good way to encourage reasonable drug-related behaviour and respect for authority -- set up a system where anyone who actually believes the spiel is clearly a credulous twit willing to take the word of The Grown-Ups over the facts. (This works particularly well with teenagers!) Call even the true stuff into question by association. Bloody brilliant. I'd rather the drug education program get run by the likes of Erowid, which is at least interested in promoting responsible use and getting sound information out there to give people the ability to make reasonable judgements.
What do I want? (This is actually what I always want on this sort of thing, actually; I'll get to this again later.) Good information, sound information, positives and negatives, clearly presented, easily accessible. No histrionics about how actually giving good information will lead to some people using drugs -- it will. It will also dissuade other people from doing so. This is a wash. The increased levels of responsible usage that come of not only having the information about responsible usage but being trusted with that information are worth it.
And besides, I want decriminalisation of possession and use, extensively. Throwing people in jail for having whatever doesn't do any good, and it costs too much. Further, legalise marijuana (and possibly some other things) under the same legalisation pattern as alcohol -- you can grow your own (up to a certain amount) and give it freely to friends, but you can't sell it without a permit. Sin tax it if it'll make you happy. Age restrictions, whatever. Go house. But stop the stupid.
This is one of my stupidly optimistic things: I want good information to drive out bad. I want good information out there on everything, and I want to thump those people who want to give out bad information because they think that lies are "more appropriate". Building public policy, education, and information on untruths fails, and further, good information leads to developing people who have a personal interest in being responsible, because they're expected to make their own choices rather than be looked after by the nanny government.
Some of 'em that won't work on, and they'll fuck up. Dealing with the fuckups on their own is cheaper, both monetarily and on a social scale, than instituting an official policy of fuckuppery and demanding it of everyone.
Keep the increased levels of penalty for doing bad things while under the influence of whateverage. Responsibility for choices. Those people who just want to get a quiet high at home on the weekend, ain't nobody's business if they do.
And get the people who have an interest in persuading others to break the law -- the dealers -- out of the controlling loop. These people have a business interest in addiction to hard drugs, guys; they're supported by the lumping in of all drugs together as evilnastybadbad.
And that's ignoring the cases of diabetic kids who have had their insulin confiscated or their needles smashed because "Drugs are bad!" Good fucking grief. Would a little nuance kill you? 'Cause a lack of it actually is killing people.
I'd do a similar rant about, like, sodomy laws, but those have already been declared unConstitutional, so I don't hafta.
Death penalty
In theory, I have no objections to death as a possible form of punishment. In practice, I consider the fact that a fair number of people are convicted falsely, including death row inmates who have been proven innocent, to be sufficient reason to oppose the practice.
The fact that a death penalty case costs more than life imprisonment under the current American legal system, and that I don't think it's a good idea to reduce the number of appeals and failsafes in the process given the above, serves as a practical support for this position.
Geneva Conventions
Ever read them? There are a whole bunch of them. They're interesting, overall.
Here's the one that people are on about a lot lately.
We fucked up.
If we're going to call it a "war on terror", ill-advised as that may be, then the prisoners we take are prisoners of war.
If they're not, then it isn't a fucking war, now, is it?
And enough with that "Of course we're following the Geneva Conventions" and the "Except of course in these cases who don't count" thing. This is not world leadership. This is trying to pull a fast one.
Histrionic Talking Points
Y'know what would help insure my domestic tranquility? People not making up shit to argue about and flag-wave about.
Flag-burning prohibition amendment? Histrionic nothing. The Federal Code for the care of the flag says that a flag which is too soiled or damaged to be properly displayed should be disposed of respectfully, ideally by cremation. Suppose that a protestor considers that the action of, say, the government have rendered the flag too polluted by corrupt behaviour to be properly displayed? Why, you have the origin of flag-burning as a protest, you do! (Unfortunately, because some people are histrionic idiots and don't know their Flag Code, other people have come to the conclusion that burning the flag can get their names in the news, and use it for that purpose. As a direct result, I must add, of people going "OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!" at people engaged in serious protest.)
"Partial-birth abortion"? Histrionic nothing. It's not even a medical term. Fewer than six hundred third-trimester abortions are performed in a year, and the vast, overwhelming majority of those are due to significant medical complications of some sort. (That's six hundred out of something like one and a half million, okay? Not six hundred out of ten thousand.) They made it up as a significant issue so as to have something to shout and get hysterial about.
Medical malpractice driving up health care costs? Histrionic nothing. When they capped noneconomic malpractice rates in Mississippi, doctors' malpractice rates went up by 45%. People who were all set to testify about the horrors of malpractice in Florida suddenly found themselves short on things to say after they were expected to testify under oath. The arguments don't hold up. My conclusion? Tempest in a teapot, designed to distract people from the fact that the American health system is completely horked. Blame the lawyers! It's all the fault of the lawyers! Fucking sheesh.
The draft. Histrionic nothing. The military doesn't want it and wouldn't be able to do anything with these "recruits" if we had it. Gone are the times when effective armies could be made up of a bunch of guys with weapons pointed mostly in the same direction as another similarly constituted mob. A modern recruit is signing up for a skilled job taking significant training, preparation, and monetary investment on the part of their superiors; a bunch of people who don't want to be there and aren't interested in picking up those skills is worse then useless. The draft bill in Congress is shit-stirring. The stop-loss stuff is a real thing to be concerned about, but at least some of it is within the scope of established obligations.
All of this stuff is distraction, waving the red flag in front of the bull so it doesn't notice all the problems with actual sharp pointy bits to them. Can we talk about real stuff now instead of making up fake problems to get hysterical about?
On Long-Term Thinking (Digressing Into a Lengthy Ramble on Sex Education)
One of the things that gets me about the politics I've seen is how short-term it is. There are cases of programs that have serious positive long-term effects, but because they don't fixitnow they can't get funded, and this is insane to me.
There needs to be some sort of balance. Some sort of sense to it. Yes, there needs to be enough whatever to handle the current issues -- enough prisons to handle the number of inmates, to pick the easy question. But that doesn't address how to deal with "the crime problem". Because if that isn't fixed, you just get more people you need to lock up, and faster than the ones you have get out of the prisons. So you build more prisons, and . . .
The things that I see as being most important to this are education and health. Which feed into each other, and support each other. They make a difference to lives now, but they also make a difference on a generational level, which is a level that I think really needs to get into politics, something past the election after the next one, which strikes me as about as far into the future as policy seems to reach.
I'm big on education. Not just public education, not just universal education access, but specific, targeted information to make it possible for people to make informed choices about their lives. Ideally, information without slant, but information itself can be seen as slanted, so that ideal is, practically speaking, unachievable.
This is where the "War on Drugs" things failed most deeply, as far as I'm concerned. Not in the obviously futile attempts to prevent humans from recreational mind-altering, but in the failure of information, the promotion of lies as truth. Not only is this, by my book, immoral, but it's a massive shooting-self-in-foot issue: if someone learns by their own research or experimentation that drug A isn't as bad as the propaganda says, then why the hell should they trust information about drug B? How can they tell good information from bad? How can it be possible to make an informed decision without a culturally exceptional level of interest, research skills, and the like?
There's similar stupidity around sex education. There are people who object to it because they think it promotes the use of genitalia. There are people who object to it because for some reason they think it's insulting to presume that teenagers are having sex. (That one really baffles the hell out of me.) So people insist on not giving kids enough information to handle the care and feeding of the libido responsibly and are shocked when the result is irresponsible care and feeding of the libido. S-M-R-T. Observation of other folks' standards of sex education suggests that comprehensive sex education that starts before puberty makes for more responsible sexual expression, a delayed age of first intercourse, and a lowered teen pregnancy (and thus teen abortion) rate. (These are European figures, mostly.)
(In one of the debates, Bush said something to the effect of, "And I'm sure reasonable people can agree on how to reduce teen abortions", and I muttered, "Yup. Early, comprehensive sex education. Start it before the hormones hit so that kids are used to thinking about it rather than having to work through the endocrine haze".![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teinedreugan smirked at me. He knows that I have an idiosyncratic definition of "reasonable people".)
This is the short term/long term thing to me. We get information out there, we get people thinking and acting from the head rather than just on gut impulses, and we wind up with reduced rate of problem. But this is not good enough, because information is incompatible with ideology. It is doctrine that kids should not be having sex, therefore they must obey the doctrine. Backing it up with stuff that actually has an effect doesn't help. And abstinence programs just mean that when people fall off the wagon (which they do in fairly high numbers) they still don't have the information they need.
And it needs more than information about mechanics and contraception. There needs to be information about being able to judge what one wants and how to ask for it and what one doesn't want and how to say no. This is even more sorely needed, because there's too much go-with-the-crowd and everyone's-doing-it and but-please. And these were the tools I most needed so that I wouldn't be assaulted, and I had no mechanisms for thinking about what I wanted, because all the messages were "You don't want anything. Even if you do want something, you shouldn't. If you go ahead with it anyway, this is what you should do, but you really don't want it." Not useful. Nothing to build the critical thought on there.
jikharra spoke highly of the UU sex education program. I like what I've heard about that.
Okay, that's a mega-tangent. I should do a tangent on the health end of things, and then shut up. I continue thinking in terms of preferring long-term solutions to short, and this is why I'll never get elected.
The thing with health. First of all, the way the education feeds into it is of course that the knowledge of healthy ways of living will percolate out into better health.
But there's also the fact that good nutrition, both prenatal and in early childhood, can make a big differents to both long-term health and mental abilities. And both of those things make it far more likely that someone'll be a productive member of society tee-em than a burden to society tee-em.
I'm big on the whole preventative medical care thing. Catch problems when they're small enough to correct and correct them rather than let them putter along and degenerating into something that's both a time-critical emergency and extremely expensive.
rivka wrote a while back about a program that reduces child abuse (which has long term costs), reduced the pregnancy rate, reduced the crime rate, lowered promiscuity, and other useful effects -- which has trouble getting adequate funding. The hell is wrong with us, huh? This is the sort of thing that we should be doing extensively, everywhere, establishing stuff that makes a long-term difference rather than picking up broken lives and locking up bits of them. Getting prenatal care to people whose lives are fragile makes a big damn difference to whether they break -- information and medical stuff. This is money-efficient, saving more in long-term effects than it costs, and it works.
Why don't we try things that work in the long-term more often? Why do the things we have have to scrabble for funding?
War
I am not pro-war.
I am not anti-war.
Both of these positions are dumb.
War is a tool, a particular tool that is a good, necessary, and correct tool for particular situations. It is a tool with a particular set of benefits and a particular set of drawbacks and very specific application. It is stupid to favor the tool beyond its application; it is stupid to reject the tool when its application is necessary.
The problem with "anti-war" is that, quite often, it fails to whatpapersky described a long time ago as "Those aren't peace activists. Those are stop-fighting activists." And as she said, peace is a complicated, delicate, elegant, active thing, and sometimes fighting is what it takes to get there. The stuff that happens with war is awful, but sometimes not having a war is more awful than even that. Godwin Godwin Godwin, okay?
And I see "pro-war" dropped around like it means something. What, you're in favor of death, both of combatants and innocents, destruction of infrastructure, secondary effects of poverty, starvation, and epidemic, generalised chaos, looting, rape, and other increased crime, destruction of social systems? The hell? This is not a good idea. If folks are in favor of some specific war, at least they should bloody well say what it is rather than leaving me with the distinct impression that they're complete sociopaths. It's not a fucking video game.
"Pro-war" and "anti-war" when applied to specific things, okay, but is it that hard to actually say something with content? There are arguably two wars going on that the United States is involved in right now. I am arguably "pro-war" with regard to one of them and arguably "anti-war" with regard to the other. I wouldn't use either term in a normal conversation, because that's a level of obfuscation that I prefer to eschew.
Which brings me to: Afganistan
This is the one I was in favor of. Which is still not, in my opinion, done, despite the recent elections there.
I'm concerned about the warlords; I'm concerned by the possibility that Al Qa'ida forces may still be in the area; I'm bothered by the opium production because it's setting up financing for the country on the back of organised crime.
I hope that the policies that we have there -- which are, as far as I can tell, pretty much the right ones, though not ones I think have been followed through enough -- will help stabilise the region.
I'd like to see a good set of organisations structured along the lines of The Heifer Project getting a foothold in that region and doing good things -- getting people able to take care of themselves, building up from there. I wish I could remember the projects that have helped women start small businesses; I remember that those particular organisations have done well on multiple levels, with economic and social stability, but I can't remember any of their names or the studies that showed their secondary effects.
I'd also like to see someone working on teaching classical Arabic academically, so that more people can actually read their Qur'an.ibnfirnas tells me the traditional way of learning Arabic is recitation of the Qur'an, which doesn't always lead to understanding the language itself. I suspect an American organisation doing this sort of thing would be treated with a lot of skepticism; getting some backing from the more moderate Arabs would probably be vitally necessary. But being able to study the Qur'an on its own would probably help a lot with the people taking various charismatic personalities' word for what it says issues -- not fix it, as observations of other people with scriptural religions will show -- but work on addressing that issue. And it would be at least a potential source of goodwill and a demonstration of respect for the Qur'an, which is, at this point, pretty damned important.
And the other one: Iraq
The thing is, I think there was a time and a place to end Saddam Hussein's rule, and I think that that time was in 1991.
I've read George H. W. Bush's reasonings for not doing so. The thing is, the thing is . . . okay, to start with, the United States's involvement with that particular region is profoundly fucked up. I mean completely.
During the Iran-Iraq War, both sides committed war crimes and a variety of atrocities; Saddam's regime's particular atrocities, including use of chemical weapons, tended to get overlooked. He got military support from both the United States and the Soviet Union (no mean feat) as well as, notably, significant financial support from Kuwait. The world looked the other way and most of the major powers played both sides.
The thing is: we supported the guy. We arguably treated his behaviour in the Iran-Iraq War in such a way that he figured he could get away with (even more) murder. We kept his finances stable by making it possible for him to sell his oil while he was gassing Iranians -- U. S. Navy actions were pretty critical to that.
The coalition that got put together in the Gulf War was good for getting Iraq out of Kuwait. It might not have lasted for direct action against Saddam, especially since the region was already wary after the eight, nine years of the Iran-Iraq War, and Iran was certainly interested in pouncing -- after all, it still is. George H. W. Bush knows his foreign policy certainly a hell of a lot better than I do; he was pretty decent at it, had plenty of experience with it too. He doesn't think it was possible to get rid of Saddam without fracturing the region.
But then was the best chance we were going to get.
He was known to be prone to taking aggressive actions against other nations -- invading Iran, invading Kuwait. The military forces were on the field to stop him from doing that. People knew right then with visceral force that he was a dangerous looney and a threat to his neighbours. Persuading them a little further could have been a big risk -- but that was the time to take it. G. H. W. Bush was a sharp political dealer on that stage; I think he had a chance of pulling it off.
If the United States would have preferred that change in the government come from within, rather than being imposed from an invading force, the allies could have given some support to the Kurdish uprising that was provoked in part by the mass desertions of Saddam's troops in a popular refusal to support him. (Interestingly slanted, that link is, by the way.) I remember reading articles that suggested that the people who were fighting against the Ba'athists thought that the West might support them in their urge to overthrow the standing government; they were, to my recollection, largely ignored, except in a few areas that eventually got flyover zones to try to protect them.
The Kurds suffered. Repeatedly. It's been argued that peace in the region depends on peaceful resolutions for the Kurds; I wouldn't be surprised.
In any case: Saddam Hussein was left in power. He was not dumb, either; he saw that a coalition force had not brought him down because it didn't consider itself stable enough, and he worked to make it unlikely that a similar coalition could be formed in the future. The opportunities for removing him with the minimum amount of quagmire passed.
So enough of should-have-dones.
During the Gulf War, the forces arrayed against Saddam Hussein were there because he had taken aggressive action and invaded another nation without provocation. While this is the standard means of adjusting national boundaries, it does not necessarily make one popular.
For the Iraq War, there were a variety of reasons given for the invasion. Most of them were questioned before the fact by at least some people, many of whom had extensive arguments backing them up. (I found the argument that there was some sort of alliance between bin Laden, a religious fanatic, and Saddam Hussein, a military secularist, particularly implausible, especially since I seem to recall being aware of bin Laden threatening Saddam with death once or twice, and demanding his ouster once or twice.)
Justification for the war in Iraq was not as easy as for the war in Afganistan; in Afganistan there was evidence of significant links to bin Laden -- he did, after all, start his career in terrorism as a CIA-sponsored anti-Soviet "freedom fighter" in those very hills. Without that sort of direct link, however, in my books, invading Iraq was taking aggressive action and invading another nation without provocation.
You know, the thing we got pissy at him about in 1991.
The evidence was not presented; much of what was presented was flawed. As was the implementation.
The idea of going in there to get bin Laden's organisation didn't happen. Actual Al Qaida terrorist targets were ignored in favor of pursuing war with Iraq itself. The Pentagon had plans, specific targets, to get these actual terrorists who were involved with 9/11, and a fucking clue, and the White House shot them down, because, some claim, the war was more important than getting terrorists. (There was an argument that the big guy wasn't in the camp -- that argument was shot down by Tommy Franks.) The guy we didn't get? Still killing people. I've seen figures for between seven hundred and a thousand.
There's a hiring freeze on the department that's supposed to be looking into Al Quaida operations, and they have fewer people than they did in 2001. (There is a link to the full New York Times article on this blog entry; the article itself is in pay-access-only archives, and thus a pain in the ass.) These are the people who are supposed to be dealing with the problem that provoked this 'war against terror' meme.
Meanwhile, Iraq is being economically fucked over by the occupying policies, which, of course, only helps keep things even more unstable. (Partisan. Fascinating. Deeply something-or-other.) The guy we put in charge there says we fucked up through negligence. There is certainly evidence that we didn't actually have a reconstruction plan going in, and that that's costing us. Nuclear materials and explosives may have gone missing in the aftermath.
Meanwhile, the entire region is antagonised by more blatant U. S. mucking about in their politics, and that causes problems both short-term and long.
The man was a monster, and it's partly the United States propping him up that kept him in power. If the United States is going to start going around and undoing its mistakes on the world arena, it should be done in that context, and with open discussion. "I'm bigger than you and so I don't need to show you my justification" is a good way of making lots of enemies, and nobody needs to cultivate enemies. It doesn't matter how big you are if the whole damn world is gunning for you.
Which leads me to . . .
(Cont'd next post)
This is a rant. It may or may not always be coherent. It certainly is not always polite.
No matter what your political positions are, I have, in the following rant, almost certainly declared that at least one of them is completely idiotic. I am certain that you out there who read this will be convinced that some subset of my positions can only be held by the brain-damaged.
My political sense of self-identification is deeply blurry, because I do not share vocabulary on the subject with others. (Among many other things, I think "liberal" and "conservative" are on orthogonal axes if they're meaningful terms at all, not opposite ends of the same one, and I am both. An old meander about my thoughts about political divisions that actually make sense is posted here on rasseff.)
Most people would probably file me as a leftist on the basis of my positions; if it makes them happy, that's good for them. I'm arguably some flavor of socialist. I have very strangely anarchistic tendencies that I suspect are completely invisible in my positions and only manifest in their upshot.
If reading something with these caveats is liable to be upsetting to you, don't bother.
Preamble
I don't like most political campaigning stuff. Largely because I don't care if the candidate is ugly, dumb, or dressed funny by its parents in the morning; I want to know what positions the person (and their suite of advisors) puts forth, which way they're likely to go if they have to change positions, whether they're capable of considering new evidence and changing to more appropriate positions later, whether they're capable of nuance. I want to hear what people have to say about the issues, and issues are hard to come by when all the rhetoric is Character (which mostly seems to mean insulting the other guy).
If someone's doing the 'insult the other guy' sort of campaign, I wind up wondering if they actually have merits of their own to present, if they have ideas, or whether they're just doing the whole "may the least mud-spattered guy win" sort of thing. If you gotta talk about your opponent, people, talk about the guy's failings on policy, not the nefarious things that he's been rumoured to do with puppies. Especially with name games.
I mean, if the position can't be argued without pulling out something like "Republicrats", "Femmocrats", or "Repuglicans", it can't be an awfully strong position, can it? Name humor is . . . hard to pull off successfully, and hardly anyone can do it; its failure state is pretty severe. At least for me, with a religious perspective on the value of respect for names.
And while I'm on names, I want to know: Has the nation collectively lost leave of its grammatical senses? What the fuck is with this "Democrat party" and "Democrat candidate"? Has everyone suddenly acquired ears made of cheap tin? Democrat is a noun, like every other word ending in -crat. The adjective form -- used for modifying other nouns, people, in case you forgot third grade English -- is "Democratic". I know "Republican" is both a noun and an adjective, but I'm sure folks are bright enough to recognise that just because one party is the same in noun and adjectival form doesn't mean that it's a trendsetter or a dark power capable of overwhelming the forces of proper grammar.
I'm not interested in condemnations of "liberals". I'm not interested in condemnations of "conservatives". I consider these things no better than hysteria about commies. Further, I have a habit of considering anyone who isn't capable of anything other than ranting about how stereotyped-broad-brush-group is baaaaaad too dumb to have a political opinion worth listening to. (And I've been reading too many stupid political Pit threads on the SDMB, and it's showing.) I am to the point that if I hear another snide comment about lawyers I may pull out the speaker's intestines and throttle them with their own guts, but the law is an old flame of mine and we've still got a lovely casual relationship. (Also, the intestines thing has a poetry to it that I find quite satisfying in the current political climate.)
I came to political awareness in 1986. This means that the seminal political memories of my childhood are the growing budget deficit and the Iran-Contra hearings. (It was an interesting year.) My first political thought was wanting to get my hands on a copy of the Federal budget and go through it, because I was sure that the grownups had to be doing something wrong and that I could fix it. (Yes, I was a terrifyingly earnest eight-year-old. I have since grown a small sense of humor.)
The Current Campaign
I am not going to talk about how one candidate is great and how another candidate sucks and the one over there, enh, he's okay on some issues. It's not relevant. I'm trying to formulate my own positions, not tell people whose bubble I'm gonna fill in at Ahabat Sholom.
I may wind up making references to the policies or histories of one candidate or another; I don't know yet, I haven't written that far. I can think of a few things that may be worth pointing to, though.
This means, among other things, that I will not be talking about Vietnam, which I'm sick of hearing about. I'm more or less with Scalzi on the subject; go read what he says and insert most of it back here if you want to have some meat on that.
I am going to try to rummage through and pull up all the hot-button issues that I can find and do at least a little commentary on each of them. I may miss a few; such is life.
The Purpose of Government
Legitimising authority by the demonstrated good of the governed is an old, old tradition:
"All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children, but I did not allow anyone to die of hunger in this nome." --Ankhtifi's tomb bio.
"In regnal year 19 did he appoint me as count of Menat-Khufu. Then I caused it to be prosperous, its wealth consisting of everything. I caused the name of my forefathers to endure, I having caused to be efficient the mortuary chapels thereof. I brought statues to the temple." --Khnumhotep's tomb bio.
I'm of similar feeling: a government's purpose is to address the needs of the people -- as the Preamble might be paraphrased to suggest, needs for safety, for justice, for liberty, for basic human needs. Where this breaks down, of course, is addressing questions of "What promotes justice?" "What is the common welfare, anyway?" and "What will help us to be safe?"
I have thoughts that go beyond this thing I think of as fundamental, but they don't go in purpose; they're more of a bonus.
In Order to Form A More Perfect Union
Federal Budget
First big-ass deal for me: this deficit spending has got to get under control. I know I can't balance a fucking checkbook or handle a credit card sanely; this is why I am not in charge of the finances and why I won't accept a status where I have to have a head for budgets. Yes, I have been grumpy about this issue for nearly twenty years now, I've got momentum, damnit.
- "I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816
We've had recent evidence that it's possible to get to a budget that is paying down the deficit. I don't support some sort of Constitutional amendment mandating this, because there are times (disaster relief, say) when it's important to be able to take out that emergency loan without going through major hassle, and because if we-collectively need a big nanny standing around to whack our knuckles for incapacity to add, we're sunk. (Besides, money gets spent that doesn't count in 'the budget', and I have no interest in encouraging even more of that sort of accounting.)
Okay, another budget thing: unfunded mandates. On the one hand, I don't think the Federal government has any call mandating that the States do a particular thing if it's not going to back that up with the cash required to do it. On the other hand, that opens the doors for the States, say, slashing their education budgets after a Federal mandate and the national government being required to pick up the slack. Unfunded mandates irritate me, but I see problems in just refusing to allow them.
And while I'm on the subject of things that irritate me: riders on bills that have nothing to do with the subject of the bill. This I want to see stop. If it can't get passed openly, I don't want it to be law. I don't especially care if this means that some things that I would like to have passed can't get slipped in sneakily.
On Not Looking Dumb: The War On Abstraction
The War On Drugs. The War On Poverty. The War On Terrorism. The War On Fat.
How about Rhetorical Dumbassery? Can I "declare war" on that? I'm sure I can get an army together if you give me time, and maybe we'll figure out what I mean, what territory to claim, and who to shoot by the next century. And how to get out of that "state of war" by the millenium after.
Unlike an actual, y'know, war, a "war" on a concept has no logical start and end points, no meaningfully defined goals, no clear conclusion. It's a creation that will last in perpetuity or until people get sick of the meme and develop an immunity.
The way to eliminate an abstraction is, first of all, to not harp on the concept; repeating the concept will continue to promote the abstraction. Even if it makes a good sound bite. (This point requires a certain amount of logical thought, which is sorely lacking in political propagandizing.)
But abstractions aren't things that can be defeated in combat, with military might; they have to be dealt with at the conceptual level, the ideas; the roots of things of which these are emergent properties have to be addressed, and that's not something that can be done with force, either.
Some things that 'war' has been declared on are tools; setting up a militaristic response to the use of those tools doesn't help reduce or eliminate that tool usage. Knowing why those are the available tools to people, why people prefer those tools to other things, and addressing those circumstances is what will make a difference, not doing the big showy War On thing and there-they-go-now-marching-off-to-war-again.
Some things that 'war' has been declared on are poorly defined; what is being targeted is muddy at best. Sometimes, the good gets attacked as well as the bad, completely setting aside the vast span of the neutral and ambiguous. If you don't know what the hell you're fighting or even if "fighting" is the appropriate action to take, you are not at war.
Some things that 'war' has been declared on are emergent properties; like tools, one can't just go around and say "That thing bad!" or shoot the abstract concept with abstractions of bullets and have anything happen to it. The stuff that leads to the thing happening has to be broken down and deciphered. This is hard, mucky work, and doesn't go over well in speeches.
You want a war? Give me the bloody Congressional declaration thereof, and have it be an actual war, not a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand designed to make shinies on the evening news. Make sure there's a tangible target, something that isn't a nebulous, stretchy concept that can be warped easily and continue endlessly.
The Commerce Clause and States' Rights
There are a lot of bits of Federal legislation that are justified on the basis of the commerce clause -- many of them dubious.
I believe California is currently in the process of bickering with the Federal government about whether or not it should have the capacity to arrest people for having legal-in-California medical marijuana grown and produced entirely in California. (No interstate commerce, after all.)
The thing about 'States' Rights' is that it's a fraught phrase with a lot of baggage; a lot of the most famous associations with the phrase in national discourse have to do with racism and slavery. It's important, though, to the Federal system, to the concept: the idea that in California, desperately ill people can get relief from marijuana and no other state's issues with pot can stop them; the idea that assisted suicide can be legal in Oregon even if other parts of the nation disapprove; the idea that here in Massachusetts same-sex couples can marry, even if it drives some people up the wall. (And, by the way, if anyone says "activist judges" to me, so help me, I'm going to throttle them. I am sick and fucking tired of the popular lies about the Supreme Judicial Court decision here. The Constitution of Massachusetts forbids the Commonwealth to deny equal treatment under the law on the basis of sex. Period. If I can marry a man here, so can anyone else, no matter what they have in their pants.)
I'm going to be writing here a lot of things, some of which I think are Federal matters, some of which I think are State concern, some of which I think are reasonable things for the Federal government to mandate and support the States in implementing, some things which are local, some things which should be handled by private groups. I'm not always going to specify which is which; I'm not always clear on that myself, often because I can think of a number of different implementations, each of which has different combinations of active participants.
Establish Justice
The "War On Some Drugs" and Other Just Plain Idiotic Things
Here's a good solid rant to start off: the concept of 'victimless crimes' makes a mockery of justice, is a despoiler of liberty, and is fucking expensive to boot.
First of all, the logic behind them tends to fall into begging the question fallacies. When the people committing these so-called crimes point out that it's lunatic to punish people when nobody's actually been hurt, they're told that they've been so hurt by their behaviour that they're unable to recognise the damage. Or that actual harm doesn't matter, that the nanny state needs to make sure they follow this particular set of arbitrary rules.
I have serious issues with any logic that takes as axiomatic that any disagreement is evidence that one has been corrupted by the nefarious stuff that the logic is out there to protect us all from. Big-ass question-begging. (I consider that sort of thing in much the same league as "Your belief in the reality of your gods is just evidence that Satan is a master deceiver!")
Let's start out with looking at the history of Prohibition in the United States, as regards alcohol. Reduce crime, poverty, improve the economy, improve quality of life: all worthwhile goals.
One of the immediate responses to the Volstead Act in the United States was a brief reduction in the crime rate, and then a huge increase as smugglers and others started to bring alcohol into the country, move it around, steal it from warehouses, and so on. Homicide rates went from 5.6 per hundred thousand to ten per hundred thousand. Crime rates rose overall, and organised crime organisations basically grew up to feed that demand and were financed by its profits.
Additionally, because it was harder to get fairly mild alcoholic products like beer, the hard liquor usage increased -- it was easier to transport enough stronger stuff to satisfy however many customers. Alcohol usage increased overall. Lack of standards for illegally brewed alcohol led to a quadrupling of the death rate due to alcohol poisoning. Alcohol-related crime, including drunk driving, increased during Prohibition as well.
It lasted 13 years, and is generally considered an abject failure.
So what would I expect from a generalised drug prohibition? Upswing in organised crime at the supplier and distributor levels, such as the support groups for dealers and drug cartels abroad, financed by the profits coming about from Federal and State expenditures. Migration to hard drug usage due to ease of transport and the fact that dealers will be interested in getting people involved in more profitable products. Adulteration of the drugs to up profits leading to more severe side effects; less quality control with the same results due to incompetence rather than profiteering. Extensive smuggling networks. Increased crime rate, especially including violent crime. Reduced levels of responsible use. Perhaps increased usage overall.
There's a bright idea for you. Billions spent for this crap? Because that's what we got, and what we could have figured in advance if we'd paid attention to our own fucking history.
And then there's the "educational" stuff, characterised on rec.arts.sf.fandom as "DARE to lie to your kids about drugs." There's a good way to encourage reasonable drug-related behaviour and respect for authority -- set up a system where anyone who actually believes the spiel is clearly a credulous twit willing to take the word of The Grown-Ups over the facts. (This works particularly well with teenagers!) Call even the true stuff into question by association. Bloody brilliant. I'd rather the drug education program get run by the likes of Erowid, which is at least interested in promoting responsible use and getting sound information out there to give people the ability to make reasonable judgements.
What do I want? (This is actually what I always want on this sort of thing, actually; I'll get to this again later.) Good information, sound information, positives and negatives, clearly presented, easily accessible. No histrionics about how actually giving good information will lead to some people using drugs -- it will. It will also dissuade other people from doing so. This is a wash. The increased levels of responsible usage that come of not only having the information about responsible usage but being trusted with that information are worth it.
And besides, I want decriminalisation of possession and use, extensively. Throwing people in jail for having whatever doesn't do any good, and it costs too much. Further, legalise marijuana (and possibly some other things) under the same legalisation pattern as alcohol -- you can grow your own (up to a certain amount) and give it freely to friends, but you can't sell it without a permit. Sin tax it if it'll make you happy. Age restrictions, whatever. Go house. But stop the stupid.
This is one of my stupidly optimistic things: I want good information to drive out bad. I want good information out there on everything, and I want to thump those people who want to give out bad information because they think that lies are "more appropriate". Building public policy, education, and information on untruths fails, and further, good information leads to developing people who have a personal interest in being responsible, because they're expected to make their own choices rather than be looked after by the nanny government.
Some of 'em that won't work on, and they'll fuck up. Dealing with the fuckups on their own is cheaper, both monetarily and on a social scale, than instituting an official policy of fuckuppery and demanding it of everyone.
Keep the increased levels of penalty for doing bad things while under the influence of whateverage. Responsibility for choices. Those people who just want to get a quiet high at home on the weekend, ain't nobody's business if they do.
And get the people who have an interest in persuading others to break the law -- the dealers -- out of the controlling loop. These people have a business interest in addiction to hard drugs, guys; they're supported by the lumping in of all drugs together as evilnastybadbad.
And that's ignoring the cases of diabetic kids who have had their insulin confiscated or their needles smashed because "Drugs are bad!" Good fucking grief. Would a little nuance kill you? 'Cause a lack of it actually is killing people.
I'd do a similar rant about, like, sodomy laws, but those have already been declared unConstitutional, so I don't hafta.
Death penalty
In theory, I have no objections to death as a possible form of punishment. In practice, I consider the fact that a fair number of people are convicted falsely, including death row inmates who have been proven innocent, to be sufficient reason to oppose the practice.
The fact that a death penalty case costs more than life imprisonment under the current American legal system, and that I don't think it's a good idea to reduce the number of appeals and failsafes in the process given the above, serves as a practical support for this position.
Geneva Conventions
Ever read them? There are a whole bunch of them. They're interesting, overall.
Here's the one that people are on about a lot lately.
We fucked up.
If we're going to call it a "war on terror", ill-advised as that may be, then the prisoners we take are prisoners of war.
If they're not, then it isn't a fucking war, now, is it?
And enough with that "Of course we're following the Geneva Conventions" and the "Except of course in these cases who don't count" thing. This is not world leadership. This is trying to pull a fast one.
- The thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights. --Sen. John McCain
Insure Domestic Tranquility
Histrionic Talking Points
Y'know what would help insure my domestic tranquility? People not making up shit to argue about and flag-wave about.
Flag-burning prohibition amendment? Histrionic nothing. The Federal Code for the care of the flag says that a flag which is too soiled or damaged to be properly displayed should be disposed of respectfully, ideally by cremation. Suppose that a protestor considers that the action of, say, the government have rendered the flag too polluted by corrupt behaviour to be properly displayed? Why, you have the origin of flag-burning as a protest, you do! (Unfortunately, because some people are histrionic idiots and don't know their Flag Code, other people have come to the conclusion that burning the flag can get their names in the news, and use it for that purpose. As a direct result, I must add, of people going "OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!" at people engaged in serious protest.)
"Partial-birth abortion"? Histrionic nothing. It's not even a medical term. Fewer than six hundred third-trimester abortions are performed in a year, and the vast, overwhelming majority of those are due to significant medical complications of some sort. (That's six hundred out of something like one and a half million, okay? Not six hundred out of ten thousand.) They made it up as a significant issue so as to have something to shout and get hysterial about.
Medical malpractice driving up health care costs? Histrionic nothing. When they capped noneconomic malpractice rates in Mississippi, doctors' malpractice rates went up by 45%. People who were all set to testify about the horrors of malpractice in Florida suddenly found themselves short on things to say after they were expected to testify under oath. The arguments don't hold up. My conclusion? Tempest in a teapot, designed to distract people from the fact that the American health system is completely horked. Blame the lawyers! It's all the fault of the lawyers! Fucking sheesh.
The draft. Histrionic nothing. The military doesn't want it and wouldn't be able to do anything with these "recruits" if we had it. Gone are the times when effective armies could be made up of a bunch of guys with weapons pointed mostly in the same direction as another similarly constituted mob. A modern recruit is signing up for a skilled job taking significant training, preparation, and monetary investment on the part of their superiors; a bunch of people who don't want to be there and aren't interested in picking up those skills is worse then useless. The draft bill in Congress is shit-stirring. The stop-loss stuff is a real thing to be concerned about, but at least some of it is within the scope of established obligations.
All of this stuff is distraction, waving the red flag in front of the bull so it doesn't notice all the problems with actual sharp pointy bits to them. Can we talk about real stuff now instead of making up fake problems to get hysterical about?
On Long-Term Thinking (Digressing Into a Lengthy Ramble on Sex Education)
One of the things that gets me about the politics I've seen is how short-term it is. There are cases of programs that have serious positive long-term effects, but because they don't fixitnow they can't get funded, and this is insane to me.
There needs to be some sort of balance. Some sort of sense to it. Yes, there needs to be enough whatever to handle the current issues -- enough prisons to handle the number of inmates, to pick the easy question. But that doesn't address how to deal with "the crime problem". Because if that isn't fixed, you just get more people you need to lock up, and faster than the ones you have get out of the prisons. So you build more prisons, and . . .
The things that I see as being most important to this are education and health. Which feed into each other, and support each other. They make a difference to lives now, but they also make a difference on a generational level, which is a level that I think really needs to get into politics, something past the election after the next one, which strikes me as about as far into the future as policy seems to reach.
I'm big on education. Not just public education, not just universal education access, but specific, targeted information to make it possible for people to make informed choices about their lives. Ideally, information without slant, but information itself can be seen as slanted, so that ideal is, practically speaking, unachievable.
This is where the "War on Drugs" things failed most deeply, as far as I'm concerned. Not in the obviously futile attempts to prevent humans from recreational mind-altering, but in the failure of information, the promotion of lies as truth. Not only is this, by my book, immoral, but it's a massive shooting-self-in-foot issue: if someone learns by their own research or experimentation that drug A isn't as bad as the propaganda says, then why the hell should they trust information about drug B? How can they tell good information from bad? How can it be possible to make an informed decision without a culturally exceptional level of interest, research skills, and the like?
There's similar stupidity around sex education. There are people who object to it because they think it promotes the use of genitalia. There are people who object to it because for some reason they think it's insulting to presume that teenagers are having sex. (That one really baffles the hell out of me.) So people insist on not giving kids enough information to handle the care and feeding of the libido responsibly and are shocked when the result is irresponsible care and feeding of the libido. S-M-R-T. Observation of other folks' standards of sex education suggests that comprehensive sex education that starts before puberty makes for more responsible sexual expression, a delayed age of first intercourse, and a lowered teen pregnancy (and thus teen abortion) rate. (These are European figures, mostly.)
(In one of the debates, Bush said something to the effect of, "And I'm sure reasonable people can agree on how to reduce teen abortions", and I muttered, "Yup. Early, comprehensive sex education. Start it before the hormones hit so that kids are used to thinking about it rather than having to work through the endocrine haze".
teinedreugan smirked at me. He knows that I have an idiosyncratic definition of "reasonable people".)This is the short term/long term thing to me. We get information out there, we get people thinking and acting from the head rather than just on gut impulses, and we wind up with reduced rate of problem. But this is not good enough, because information is incompatible with ideology. It is doctrine that kids should not be having sex, therefore they must obey the doctrine. Backing it up with stuff that actually has an effect doesn't help. And abstinence programs just mean that when people fall off the wagon (which they do in fairly high numbers) they still don't have the information they need.
And it needs more than information about mechanics and contraception. There needs to be information about being able to judge what one wants and how to ask for it and what one doesn't want and how to say no. This is even more sorely needed, because there's too much go-with-the-crowd and everyone's-doing-it and but-please. And these were the tools I most needed so that I wouldn't be assaulted, and I had no mechanisms for thinking about what I wanted, because all the messages were "You don't want anything. Even if you do want something, you shouldn't. If you go ahead with it anyway, this is what you should do, but you really don't want it." Not useful. Nothing to build the critical thought on there.
jikharra spoke highly of the UU sex education program. I like what I've heard about that.Okay, that's a mega-tangent. I should do a tangent on the health end of things, and then shut up. I continue thinking in terms of preferring long-term solutions to short, and this is why I'll never get elected.
The thing with health. First of all, the way the education feeds into it is of course that the knowledge of healthy ways of living will percolate out into better health.
But there's also the fact that good nutrition, both prenatal and in early childhood, can make a big differents to both long-term health and mental abilities. And both of those things make it far more likely that someone'll be a productive member of society tee-em than a burden to society tee-em.
I'm big on the whole preventative medical care thing. Catch problems when they're small enough to correct and correct them rather than let them putter along and degenerating into something that's both a time-critical emergency and extremely expensive.
rivka wrote a while back about a program that reduces child abuse (which has long term costs), reduced the pregnancy rate, reduced the crime rate, lowered promiscuity, and other useful effects -- which has trouble getting adequate funding. The hell is wrong with us, huh? This is the sort of thing that we should be doing extensively, everywhere, establishing stuff that makes a long-term difference rather than picking up broken lives and locking up bits of them. Getting prenatal care to people whose lives are fragile makes a big damn difference to whether they break -- information and medical stuff. This is money-efficient, saving more in long-term effects than it costs, and it works.Why don't we try things that work in the long-term more often? Why do the things we have have to scrabble for funding?
Provide for the Common Defence
War
I am not pro-war.
I am not anti-war.
Both of these positions are dumb.
War is a tool, a particular tool that is a good, necessary, and correct tool for particular situations. It is a tool with a particular set of benefits and a particular set of drawbacks and very specific application. It is stupid to favor the tool beyond its application; it is stupid to reject the tool when its application is necessary.
The problem with "anti-war" is that, quite often, it fails to what
papersky described a long time ago as "Those aren't peace activists. Those are stop-fighting activists." And as she said, peace is a complicated, delicate, elegant, active thing, and sometimes fighting is what it takes to get there. The stuff that happens with war is awful, but sometimes not having a war is more awful than even that. Godwin Godwin Godwin, okay?And I see "pro-war" dropped around like it means something. What, you're in favor of death, both of combatants and innocents, destruction of infrastructure, secondary effects of poverty, starvation, and epidemic, generalised chaos, looting, rape, and other increased crime, destruction of social systems? The hell? This is not a good idea. If folks are in favor of some specific war, at least they should bloody well say what it is rather than leaving me with the distinct impression that they're complete sociopaths. It's not a fucking video game.
"Pro-war" and "anti-war" when applied to specific things, okay, but is it that hard to actually say something with content? There are arguably two wars going on that the United States is involved in right now. I am arguably "pro-war" with regard to one of them and arguably "anti-war" with regard to the other. I wouldn't use either term in a normal conversation, because that's a level of obfuscation that I prefer to eschew.
Which brings me to: Afganistan
This is the one I was in favor of. Which is still not, in my opinion, done, despite the recent elections there.
I'm concerned about the warlords; I'm concerned by the possibility that Al Qa'ida forces may still be in the area; I'm bothered by the opium production because it's setting up financing for the country on the back of organised crime.
I hope that the policies that we have there -- which are, as far as I can tell, pretty much the right ones, though not ones I think have been followed through enough -- will help stabilise the region.
I'd like to see a good set of organisations structured along the lines of The Heifer Project getting a foothold in that region and doing good things -- getting people able to take care of themselves, building up from there. I wish I could remember the projects that have helped women start small businesses; I remember that those particular organisations have done well on multiple levels, with economic and social stability, but I can't remember any of their names or the studies that showed their secondary effects.
I'd also like to see someone working on teaching classical Arabic academically, so that more people can actually read their Qur'an.
ibnfirnas tells me the traditional way of learning Arabic is recitation of the Qur'an, which doesn't always lead to understanding the language itself. I suspect an American organisation doing this sort of thing would be treated with a lot of skepticism; getting some backing from the more moderate Arabs would probably be vitally necessary. But being able to study the Qur'an on its own would probably help a lot with the people taking various charismatic personalities' word for what it says issues -- not fix it, as observations of other people with scriptural religions will show -- but work on addressing that issue. And it would be at least a potential source of goodwill and a demonstration of respect for the Qur'an, which is, at this point, pretty damned important.And the other one: Iraq
The thing is, I think there was a time and a place to end Saddam Hussein's rule, and I think that that time was in 1991.
I've read George H. W. Bush's reasonings for not doing so. The thing is, the thing is . . . okay, to start with, the United States's involvement with that particular region is profoundly fucked up. I mean completely.
During the Iran-Iraq War, both sides committed war crimes and a variety of atrocities; Saddam's regime's particular atrocities, including use of chemical weapons, tended to get overlooked. He got military support from both the United States and the Soviet Union (no mean feat) as well as, notably, significant financial support from Kuwait. The world looked the other way and most of the major powers played both sides.
The thing is: we supported the guy. We arguably treated his behaviour in the Iran-Iraq War in such a way that he figured he could get away with (even more) murder. We kept his finances stable by making it possible for him to sell his oil while he was gassing Iranians -- U. S. Navy actions were pretty critical to that.
The coalition that got put together in the Gulf War was good for getting Iraq out of Kuwait. It might not have lasted for direct action against Saddam, especially since the region was already wary after the eight, nine years of the Iran-Iraq War, and Iran was certainly interested in pouncing -- after all, it still is. George H. W. Bush knows his foreign policy certainly a hell of a lot better than I do; he was pretty decent at it, had plenty of experience with it too. He doesn't think it was possible to get rid of Saddam without fracturing the region.
But then was the best chance we were going to get.
He was known to be prone to taking aggressive actions against other nations -- invading Iran, invading Kuwait. The military forces were on the field to stop him from doing that. People knew right then with visceral force that he was a dangerous looney and a threat to his neighbours. Persuading them a little further could have been a big risk -- but that was the time to take it. G. H. W. Bush was a sharp political dealer on that stage; I think he had a chance of pulling it off.
If the United States would have preferred that change in the government come from within, rather than being imposed from an invading force, the allies could have given some support to the Kurdish uprising that was provoked in part by the mass desertions of Saddam's troops in a popular refusal to support him. (Interestingly slanted, that link is, by the way.) I remember reading articles that suggested that the people who were fighting against the Ba'athists thought that the West might support them in their urge to overthrow the standing government; they were, to my recollection, largely ignored, except in a few areas that eventually got flyover zones to try to protect them.
The Kurds suffered. Repeatedly. It's been argued that peace in the region depends on peaceful resolutions for the Kurds; I wouldn't be surprised.
In any case: Saddam Hussein was left in power. He was not dumb, either; he saw that a coalition force had not brought him down because it didn't consider itself stable enough, and he worked to make it unlikely that a similar coalition could be formed in the future. The opportunities for removing him with the minimum amount of quagmire passed.
So enough of should-have-dones.
During the Gulf War, the forces arrayed against Saddam Hussein were there because he had taken aggressive action and invaded another nation without provocation. While this is the standard means of adjusting national boundaries, it does not necessarily make one popular.
For the Iraq War, there were a variety of reasons given for the invasion. Most of them were questioned before the fact by at least some people, many of whom had extensive arguments backing them up. (I found the argument that there was some sort of alliance between bin Laden, a religious fanatic, and Saddam Hussein, a military secularist, particularly implausible, especially since I seem to recall being aware of bin Laden threatening Saddam with death once or twice, and demanding his ouster once or twice.)
Justification for the war in Iraq was not as easy as for the war in Afganistan; in Afganistan there was evidence of significant links to bin Laden -- he did, after all, start his career in terrorism as a CIA-sponsored anti-Soviet "freedom fighter" in those very hills. Without that sort of direct link, however, in my books, invading Iraq was taking aggressive action and invading another nation without provocation.
You know, the thing we got pissy at him about in 1991.
The evidence was not presented; much of what was presented was flawed. As was the implementation.
The idea of going in there to get bin Laden's organisation didn't happen. Actual Al Qaida terrorist targets were ignored in favor of pursuing war with Iraq itself. The Pentagon had plans, specific targets, to get these actual terrorists who were involved with 9/11, and a fucking clue, and the White House shot them down, because, some claim, the war was more important than getting terrorists. (There was an argument that the big guy wasn't in the camp -- that argument was shot down by Tommy Franks.) The guy we didn't get? Still killing people. I've seen figures for between seven hundred and a thousand.
There's a hiring freeze on the department that's supposed to be looking into Al Quaida operations, and they have fewer people than they did in 2001. (There is a link to the full New York Times article on this blog entry; the article itself is in pay-access-only archives, and thus a pain in the ass.) These are the people who are supposed to be dealing with the problem that provoked this 'war against terror' meme.
Meanwhile, Iraq is being economically fucked over by the occupying policies, which, of course, only helps keep things even more unstable. (Partisan. Fascinating. Deeply something-or-other.) The guy we put in charge there says we fucked up through negligence. There is certainly evidence that we didn't actually have a reconstruction plan going in, and that that's costing us. Nuclear materials and explosives may have gone missing in the aftermath.
Meanwhile, the entire region is antagonised by more blatant U. S. mucking about in their politics, and that causes problems both short-term and long.
The man was a monster, and it's partly the United States propping him up that kept him in power. If the United States is going to start going around and undoing its mistakes on the world arena, it should be done in that context, and with open discussion. "I'm bigger than you and so I don't need to show you my justification" is a good way of making lots of enemies, and nobody needs to cultivate enemies. It doesn't matter how big you are if the whole damn world is gunning for you.
Which leads me to . . .
(Cont'd next post)
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One note on the "Democrat Party" vs "Democratic Party" - I saw a comment on dailykos.com in which someone noticed that the Republican campaigners changed which they used depending on the audience (Democrat Party, besides being wrong, also seems more...harsh?). I don't know if this is actually consistent over time or was a one-time lapse instead of a considered word choice, since the comment only specified two separate speeches.
(Now if the *Democrats* are screwing up also, then they're either very confused or just not being very smart.)
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Not to mention that "Democratic," in addition to being the name of the party, also means something that follows the principles of democracy, which pretty much everyone in power agrees is a good thing (Republican, Democrat, or otherwise). Perhaps the Republican leadership feels that using incorrect grammar will separate the Democrats (opposing party, presumably bad) from democracy (what we're attempting to force Iraq and Afghanistan into, presumably good)?