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The Gaia Liberal Manifesto is being retired. Shame, that.
I am hanging up my partisan hat so that I can concentrate on modding.
 Duchess Ilpalazza · Thu Jun 01, 2006 @ 08:40am · 1 Comments |
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Oh, by the way, totally F4U Corsair. RATATATATATAT
SPECIAL NOTE FOR SPECIAL SPECIALNESS: Two of the people on the above picture are people who I like (the ones on the lefthand side). Ironically enough, Kazuma was not one of the figues presented in the above picture, but he thinks he was. This has resulted in much back-alley gigglesnorting and faux-vindication by said party. Hilarious. Sadly, the individual originally portrayed does not have an openly sexual fascination with anthro-mix entities and has not been a catgirl for ages. Likewise, individual with demonic pitchfork hasn't been clutching one since like forever. I'm fascinated with how I created this unintentionally.
More juicy time-wasting as it comes, folks!
Welcome to Duchess Ilpalazza's Liberal Manifesto, Part Deux.
The original Liberal Manifesto is very, very broken. Threads don't age well in Gaia. This one has been retouched!
NEW: Select passages from The Duchess Files, available for viewing.
________________________________________________________
I am a Liberal. Not to be confused with a Democrat, as I don't tow anybody's party line enough to be considered anything but an independant (as far as political parties are concerned, not ideologies). But I'm tired of the term liberal being slung about in hopelessly generalizing and demeaning fashion, so I'm going to show you why I'm a liberal, what it means to me, and give an example as to why it is unfair to use such generalizations when people like me can have such a unique stance.
I am liberal because I believe firmly in the requirments of the government to provide economic regulation and oversight to capatalistic entity, as well as the governments inherent responsibility to provide for all citizens in regards to health or welfare. Beyond this, my positions are mutable. If I say I am a liberal, it does not automatically mean that I agree with a typical 'liberal' sentiment.
Some of my more noted contentions with the Democratic party at large:
- I believe that gun control is counterproductive and inherently worthless, and that gun rights should remain untarnished in all but the most reasonable ways (e.g., no carrying guns into schools, no man portable rocket launchers, etc) otherwise the restrictions disempower legitimate gun owners and give the edge to illicit gun operators. As for those who would suggest that guns should be made illegal in America, realize this: It will be about as effective as gun control was in British cities, maybe worse. Not only is it a profound precedent in the removal of civil liberties in America (What does it say when our government does not trust us with guns anymore?), it wouldn't solve anything in the highly libertarian American social structure.
(added) My thread "Oops, gun control is stupid after all" detailing data that shows a correlation between gun control legislation and INCREASES in crime, violent crime, gun crime, etc.
(added) Daniel D. Polsby's The False Promise of Gun Control
- I believe that Affirmative Action is an inappropriate 'quick-fix' for racial socioeconomic disparity and does nothing to solve the underlying social patterns which cause the disparity in the first place: being meritocratic, I see it as hypocritical and a bad precident to 'solving' racism with racism.
(added) Excr. from Carl Cohen's Naked Racial Preference: The Case Against Affirmative Action
- I believe the Kyoto protocol is poorly formed, and will not do anything to really stem 'America's emissions problems', or emissions problems at all, as it will simply make America less economically and productively competitive while not stopping the real problems - nations such as India, Pakistan, and China, who unremorsefully spew out pollutants with wild abandon - from affecting the biosphere. Workable salvation from global warming will have to incorporate compromise and actionable legislation, include America, and not be kind to China, India, and Pakistan for being 'developing nations'
- I believe that the United Nations is suffering as an international mediator and as an international collaberation of power, and has hastened its potential irrelevance through reprehensible action. We should not depend on it or compromise the ruling of our government to its higher entity in anarchical world politics.
- I do not disagree with unilateral military action, nor do I disagree with proactive military operation. Had I been around for the Khmer Rouge, I would have supported unilateral, proactive military action on the part of the United States to remove Pol Pot. Each military action must be judged in its own light; we cannot be isolationist, we cannot be pacifist.
- I do not think we are spending too much money on our military, as the size of our military is funded by a relatively modest per capita expidenture (less than France or Germany!) that is fueled by our gargantuan GDP. The expidenture is worthwhile, and our military is not an evil entity - it is a vital tool in the defense and presence of our nation.
- The United States has not become an Imperial Empire, nor are we in Iraq 'for the oil'. Whatever the failures of the present administration, we aren't walking out of Iraq with more money than we came in. Look at Halliburton if you want to see the financial winners of this conflict.
Some of my contentions with the Republican party at large:
- The war on Iraq was handled in an arrogant fashion and using terribly incorrect assertations. While Iraq will be better off in the long run for virtue of our sacrifices there, it was handled poorly both in diplomatic circles and tactical circles, most notably by Rumsfeld, that perpetuated our current problems. It could have been done much, much better.
(added) James Fallows 'Blind Into Baghdad' article
- Global warming exists. Anthropogenic global warming exists. The evidence is there. Human industry and presence is having a slow and continual effect in altering the earth's biosphere using radical and heretofore unintroduced particulates and emissions, i.e., how the ozone hole was created by man-made carbon structures causing rampant destabilization of O3 in the ionosphere at the southern pole. Mankind has more of an effect on the environment than is commonly asserted (but we are actually pretty good, environment-wise. The real loser is going to be China - let's just watch it's environment over the next few years).
(added) [PDF] Dr. James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies on anthropogenic climate change and subsequent manifold effects, 'Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb', as published in Scientific American
- Trickle-down economics is a failed long-cycle fiscal experiment that causes unacceptable levels of socioeconomic stratification and money stagnation. Taxation should be relative to one's distance from the objective poverty line (the point at which one's productivity can not equip a person to sustain themselves with the essential needs of food and shelter). Removing taxation from the richest portions of strata results in only minimal economic stimulus, while demand-side economics has immediate effects (as lower-class money is inherently and immediately movable).
- Social welfare is an all but required component of a government, as per Hobbesian Social Contract. It is our government's responsibility and required function to care equally for all persons regardless as to their levels of power or influence over governmental or capatalistic affairs. Reagan-styled assertations that the poor are poor by choice, or that welfare taxes the rich unfairly to compensate for willing nonproductives, are incorrect, and don't let unrepresentative sample bias you. A system is needed that provides for the needy and equips them (mandatorially - no free rides) for productivity where possible, as capatalistic patterns of supply-based economics, as well as the consequences of negative events, will always result in nonproductive fallout that impacts people who had no control over circumstances that led to the loss of their economic productivity - as was the case in the Great Depression. Men and women who wanted to work, who could work, who searched endlessly for work, and could find none, who were trapped in the poverty of the collapse of an overextended fiscal cycle.
- Furthermore, a properly instituted system of governmental welfare can increase national productivity and equity when properly instituted (Example: Sweden will put you on the dole, but in exchange for welfare, if you can work, you have to work when and where they offer it. This supplies the government with productivity and offers incentive for a person to become autonomously productive within capatalistic circles as opposed to socialist. Compare to Switzerland, which offers no such manditory work and thus has a great many freeloaders who depress the economy, or America, which is currently using a failed and privatized 'welfare to work' system which is exploitative and a waste of taxpayer money).
- Social medicine is needed in this country. Period. (Not to be confused with socialized medicine - our privatized hospitals are the best in the world. We need not socialize them and risk the disaster that is the Canadian healthcare system). Not only is it a filled obligation to our citizens, but it can equip our citizens to be able to weather and treat medical emergency or ailment, thus increasing national productivity (In contrast, thousands of working-class americans have their productivity cut or eliminated entirely through the inability to pay for or treat medical conditions; and when a person loses money to medical crisis, it shuts down that person's annual demand-side spending. Bad for economy). Having so many of our people uninsured or dying due to treatable conditions is appaling. BONUS FUN FACT: America loses tons of dollars in worker productivity from medically-related insolvencies! It also spends over five times as much money as a percentage of GDP in comparison with countries that have socialized health care AND a higher average lifespan!
- Giving the federal government the power to over-rule governmental balances OR the power to override immutable, unalienable rights granted to the people in the Constitution (USA PATRIOT Act, etc.) no matter how these specific exclusions of Constitutionality are justified, should never be allowed. Our Constitutional rights should always be rock-solid and undilutable.
(added) [PDF]
Bill Of Rights Defense Committee, A guide to Provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and Federal Executive Orders that threaten civil liberties
CBS/AP: Patriot Act Abuses seen
Law.com: High Court Hears Challenge to Guantanamo Detentions, in hallmark case of 'federal jurisdiction' to an executive 'lawless enclave'
- School vouchers will not work. Per-student spending by region is gimped and stratified in it's pre-existant state, and leeching money from public school systems will only result in an implosion of the school systems followed by diminishing and continually reduced voucher or charter returns due to lack of electable accountability for taxpayer monies. Plus, charter schools are unconstitutional.
- The Christians themselves, in breach of the seperation of church and state, made the grievous error of making Marriage a legal entity. Now LAW defines what marriage is, not the church, not religion. This is unfortunate, and should have never happened. Given the provisions that marriage was legally endowed with, the institution cannot discriminate based on sexual alignment.
- Economic regulation is required. Good business does not require good ethics. Corporations serve their own interests and the interests of their shareholders first and foremost, while it is the government's responsibility to serve the interests of all citizens equally. Concessions and handouts to capatalistic entity are counterproductive. Trade protectionism and labor protectionism exist for a reason: to prevent the kind of exploitative capatalistic graft that a laissez-faire fiscal attitude earned the government in the Gilded Age. We need not revisit these times, and we are constantly reminded about how everyone, - government, citizen, economics, - suffer when a corporation or business caters greviously to its own interests. The executives at Enron and Global Crossing realized that they could use their position to liquidate the invested assets of shareholders and company holdings to walk away with all of the money in their pockets. All such white-collar crime must be prevented for the good of the country and the vitality of the economy, not just these watershed cases.
- The WTO is a bad entity which is superseding American autonomy. It has similar self-serving interests, and is controlled by the very business powers which have the capacity to benefit from its trade mandate. We must disempower it and not allow it to further 'overrule' American defense of our own labor and environmental policy.
Issues I have with both parties:
- You aren't spending enough money or giving enough oversight to the issue of our educational system. Neither of you are. Not only that, but the No Child Left Behind act was a complete failure. We need a bipartisan effort to save our schools from freefall. Schools need federal-level redistricting to avoid regional stratification, oversight and restructuring to remove inefficient or wasteful systems, a purge of the unions and tenure which is keeping corpses behind the teacher's desks, and an influx of funds to replace the aging buildings and equipment used to house our students. And, by the way, no advertising or promotional contract in schools. Period.
(added)
Supplement to the complete and utter failure of the No Child Left Behind Act:
Education Policy Studies Laboratory collection of NCLB critical essays, including [DOC] Excellence Fails to Impress Feds by Kevin Welner and Jonathan Dings
- We are self-perpetuating illegal immigration by turning a blind eye to companies who willingly take advantage of a sub-class of citizenry who work for less money. We need to change our immigrational paradigm to solve the issue sufficiently. Sure, the cheap labor floats our economy, but it devalues our labor and exploits immigrant labor. It's no good, not for anyone but the companies involved with said exploitation.
- The amount of lobby in our government has become ridiculous. Quit taking handouts, you punks! Stop being so self serving! You are agents of the State and representatives of the people, not the orginizations that buy your lunches, your cars, your parks, your golf clubs, your private jets, your houses, and your time. The time that they get out of you in order to gladhand and compel you is better spent doing what you were elected to do - serve your constituency.
- Fix sexual education in schools, and remove Abstinence-Only education programs. They are worthless. Studies show that those educated in Abstinence-Only programs had the same rates of STD transmission and unwanted teenage pregnancy as equivilant control groups who received no sex education at all.
(added) Scientific Knowledge on Abstinence-only Education Distorted, excerpt from the 2004 UCS report Scientific Integrity in Policymaking
- Quit Gerrymandering, you vote-distorting state congress punks. No, I'm serious. Quit it. Gerrymandering is terribly bad for our democracy.
Other:
- Communism does not work.
- Political anarchism totally does not work.
- Libertarianism means well and makes important points involving civil liberties, but has two critical problems:
1. Libertarian ethics are highly axiomatic, and
2. Libertarian policy neuters government and empowers anarcho-capatalistic entity to take prominence
- Faschism sort of works but all it takes is one bad leader to dork the entire thing, so it has limited staying power
- Socialism works, but not as well as the system we have now can work.
- (altered, added) The EC should be dissolved for a more meritocratic and equally representative system. What we have now sort of works, though.
Quote: Every United States Citizen should have a vote no more or less important than any other citizen of the United States. Period. We should not weight the votes of persons in sparsely populated or smaller states, creating a disparity that removes direct public opinion from being the measure of official accountability. My being a resident of RI should not make my vote more important than the vote of a resident of CA (At something close to a 2:1 ratio, no less). There is no reason why the EC should state in practice that some civilians' votes are less important than other civilians' vote. We need equal representation. There's really no reason why not. Sure, the EC works in a manageable way. But a popular vote would work better, and an IRV popular vote would work even better than that. Where the EC and the state-based vote tally result in a crude and disproportional tally of the public will, direct populous vote is inarguably a better representation of popular will. We will probably keep the EC for some time, however, as two prominent political groups want to keep it, as it empowers them. - The GOP has a large amount of its power consolidated in the populations of rural areas, which, due to the population density disparity, empowers the Republican party with disproportional representation. - The smaller states, such as the Northeastern New England colony states (Delaware, Massachussets, Rhode Island, Maryland, etc) get intensely disproportional representation in federal elections this way, much like they get vastly disproportional representation in the Senate.
- We should replace the present election system with IRV (Instant Runoff Voting) but it likely won't happen on a federal level for quite some time. That way, third parties won't be the joke that they are now.
- President Bush is not stupid. He's also not evil.
(added) Atlantic Monthly's story of the mind of George W. Bush
- Senator Kerry is a war hero. He didn't do anything wrong in Vietnam.
(added) Atlantic Monthly's story of Kerry's experiences in Vietnam
(added) Snopes.com Urban Legends Reference Pages on the legitimacy of Kerry's war medals
- All legislators and representatives flip-flop, Bush included, so I want to discourage the 'waffling' thing as much as possible. It is merely the result of a brilliantly engineered negative campaign that Kerry is 'tarnished' with the image. I'd actually trust him less if he never changed his stance on any issue - the same holds true for any representative.
- No, Bush isn't senselessly murdering civilians in Iraq. And the Iraq prison abuse scandal was most likely not the doing of anyone in the upper administration. Nothing that stupid would be.
Duchess Ilpalazza · Sat Jul 16, 2005 @ 06:20am · 0 Comments |
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And the dead horse you rode in on |
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